Welcome back, everyone to a new episode of You're Wrong with Molly Hemingway and
David Harsani. Just a reminder, if you would like to email the show,
please do so at radio at the Federalist dot com. We'd love to
hear from you. Mally, How are you doing, I'm doing great.
How are you doing? I'm doing well? Usually and typically this podcast,
will you know, you and I just have discussion reacting to whatever's going on
in the news, and I think that's a fine thing to do. I
think people enjoy it. But we're going to take this podcast and I think
a just have a broader conversation on what our expectation should be for the twenty
twenty four election. How is it going to play out, What should listeners
be looking for, you know, and what issues might pop up that they
haven't even thought about, or maybe issues are going to pop up again that
we've already had to deal with in the past. So I'd like to start
by talking about election integrity, right, So, just a broad question.
Have things gotten better? Have states most states like tightened up this thing?
Or are we going to have the same exact thing happen again. It's a
complicated question. It's one that doesn't have like a yes or no answer,
because each state, according to the Constitution, handles its own elections its own
way, and so a lot of the places that were concerned about what happened
in twenty twenty were red states. So in red states you have had some
improvements in different ways, whether you know, tightening up of election security and
integrity, and then in some places it's gotten worse. And I think each
one of those things we can talk about a little bit in detail, but
can I just kind of take a step back and paint like a really big
picture that I think is important for people to understand. So for a long
period of time, elections in this country were really built around the idea of
an election day, that you would go through a campaign together as a country,
and then you would all go vote on the same day, and then
later that night or soon thereafter, you would find out who had won each
state and who had won the election. And when you were doing elections that
way, it was like a very shared cultural experience. You were talking about
issues together. You were also really requiring a certain amount of enthusiasm to be
in play to affect the outcome of the vote, and so if you had
people who were generally one side or the other, but one side wasn't super
jazzed about things, but the other side was super jazzed about something, you
know, you could kind of affect elections that way. It would determine the
winner. And we really do not have that anymore. When we were under
the old system, there used to be concern about certain municipalities, you know,
a Philadelphia, a Detroit, a Chicago, where they had machines and
I don't mean by that actual you know, clickity clack machines, I mean
like operations to drive up the votes in a particular area, to affect statewide
elections or local elections as well. And so you might see union operatives or
mobsters or other people who were involved in like literally driving around and getting people
into the voting booth, maybe paying them, maybe incentivizing them, you know,
through threats or incentives, making sure that they actually showed up to vote.
And the way that we do elections now has turned that machine system into
a nationwide prospect or more accurately, has allowed machines to operate when and where
needed, and not to just do it with the physical limitations of a single
location on election day, but to do it without geographical limitations, without time
restrictions, for weeks and in some cases months ahead of election day. I
have more to say, but I don't want to just drown on here.
No, I mean, so let me ask you before you go on.
Actually, so let me ask you this. So we used to have an
election day, Now we have an election season. I would say, is
it worth trying to fight to bring back that election day? Or should Republicans
for the most part, simply give up on that notion and fight and change
the way that they're looking at this? Like Donald Trump always is kind of
hoopooing mail ballots, let's say, and that kind of undermines himself because you're
going to need people to be mailing in those ballots themselves, because sometimes on
election day it's raining, or people get lazy or whatever it is. It's
much, you know, so you lose votes that way. Just making that
up, but that's just what I believe is true, you know, is
probably happened. So should Republicans change the way they look at elections or should
Republicans be fighting to bring back how it was? So my personal views are
kind of at odds with the political views. So if I can just say,
first up, I think it's very bad for a country to have an
election season without a lot of I think it's just bad. It's just unhealthy.
You can be spending, you can be having millions of votes coming in
weeks ahead of a debate. It's just it's not a good way to make
decisions. You want an informed populace. You don't want it to just be
like whoever has the most money to harvest ballots wins. And I keep thinking
of something that former Attorney General Barr told me when I was writing the book
Rigged, about how telling people they can decide on who they're going to vote
for at any point in the election season, as opposed to at the end
of the election season is like telling a jury that they can come to a
verdict at any point in a trial. It's just not a good It's just
there's no good order to it. So, while all sorts of things that
affect the integrity of an election actually pull really well with Americans, things like
should you show that you really are who you are before you vote? That
polls very well. Despite Joe Biden saying that means you support Jim Crow,
the vast majority of everybody believes in ID to vote or other types of you
know, should you if someone is mail in balloting, should you check their
signature? You know, things like that. They're all very popular. However,
mail in balloting itself is also very popular, so my views are at
odds with most Americans. Americans really like to have unsupervised mail out ballots with
like with all the chaos that it brings, And I would just say,
if you're going to do it, you should do it more along the lines
of Florida than in New York. You know, there are certain states that
do it better with more integrity than others. And so one of the problems
with twenty twenty was the mad rush to mail in balloting where people weren't able
to, like really do it in a thoughtful, slow way. But you
are absolutely correct that if you don't play the game according to the rules as
they are currently written, you'll just never win elections. So Republicans, I
could not understand better the dislike of mail in balloting. I personally don't support
it, and I don't do it myself. But you have to bank ballots
well ahead of election day if you want to be competitive So just to quick
aside, we see polls right and they've barely like, no matter what happens
with Donald Trump in court, whatever they're not, they don't move that much.
So elections have basically come down to I think you are you know you've
said this or you've argued about this, that they basically come down to who.
It's not convincing people to vote for you, it's how many people who
already support you can you get out to vote? Right? So largely so
are Republicans prepared for that in twenty twenty four? Do you think that they've
come to terms without reality or not? Okay, so it's a state by
state question there, But I just also want to, you know, just
take a little step back. When you and I were younger, do you
remember how concerned people were about low information voters. It used to be a
bipartisan concern that people were voting for this candidate or another, this policy or
another without really knowing who they were voting for what they were voting for.
That has gone completely away because now you just have massive ballot trafficking operations that
are financed by left wing billionaires mostly but now also by your taxpayer dollars that
are focused on getting Democrat constituents see ballots into the ballot box. And this
means people who may or may not know that there is an election, They
may or may not know who is running, they may not know anything about
the issues in play. The new thing is just to make sure that if
that person has ever been registered at that address, or if someone can be
said to have registered at that address and can be said to have a pulse
or whatever, you get a ballot associated with that person into the ballot box.
And it's the nature of the demographic differences in between Democrats and Republicans that
it's a much easier thing for Democrats to do than Republicans. So Democrats can
go to you know, inside a city, an apartment building that houses you
know, like a certain number of people and just kind of like go floor
to floor, whereas with Republicans they are, you know, having to figure
out how to harvest ballots, you know, in the over the hills and
through the dales, and so it's like a less there's some challenges built into
it. They're best conquered on a state by state basis. Some states are
actually doing a good job with it. You have some efforts in Pennsylvania and
a lot of you know, I think money, energy, and effort to
work on a ballot harvesting operation there for Republicans. You've seen some in Arizona,
a lot of money and energy being deployed there, but it really needs
to happen in a comprehensive way. I'm a little bit nervous that like the
RNC isn't aware of it. They did recently start a Swamp your Vote initiative
a couple of weeks ago that is supposed to address some of this, but
I'm just I'm a little nervous just to go back to something you said,
if you really want to have people yell at you tell them that people that
voters have a c that citizens have a civic duty not to vote if they
don't know what's going on. Like voting has become this right ri of democracy
where we have convinced everyone that the voting is the most important thing they can
do to be a good citizen, when it's not true. The most important
thing they can do to be a good citizen is be aware and educate themselves
on what's going on and then vote right. And by the way, there
are many, many highly educated people who vote like they don't know what they're
talking about either. So I'm not saying like you have to have an IVY
Lead degree to be voting. It's not a class thing. But I think
that you have to have some recognition and understanding of what's going on before you're
going out there. But we've created this society, we're voting itself without any
of the responsibilities to go along with it is like the driving force of a
healthy democracy, which is not true. So in any event, so I
feel you on that ground. And when we just mail people ballots, like
people who maybe don't even really want to vote or have no interest in it,
they'll just pick it up and do it because it's right in front of
them. I don't think that's speaks to a healthy democratic or republic, you
know what I mean. And places like I believe, does Colorado have an
all mail in ballot election? They might believe so an organ I mean that
does that is insane. I mean, I just think that that is a
way to really undermine what your civic you know, the civic duty of you
know that you have in society, and you know, I don't know if
people realize like ten percent of the country moves each year, and some places
have automatic voter registration or major efforts to get people registered with populous, with
the populace that at least that many are moving in there out each year.
And so you take a place like Nevada, where you have a very trangent
population moving in moving out automatically registered, you will see with their automatic mail
in voting. You know, you'll see doors with just dozens of ballots in
front of them because they are in apartment buildings where people are known for moving
in and out of quite regularly. How do they auto register you? Is
it with your driver's license usually or something. Different states have different rules.
Yeah, so maybe when you interact with the government, you get registered at
that moment. So that's a big thing that we talked, you know,
previously on the show about zucker Bucks, which was something that my book Rigged
dealt with a lot. And this was the effort by Mark Zuckerberg where he
gave hundreds of millions of dollars to two left wing organizations staffed by Democrat operatives,
who then funneled money into the primarily into the blue areas of swing states.
So they did the entire get out the vote operation, again mostly in
the blue areas of swing states, and it had a profound effect on the
elections. You get super super turnout in a blue area of a swing state
and you can control the presidency. You know. And after that happened,
it became quite controversial, but Joe Biden understood that's how he was elected.
Shortly after he got into office, he issued an executive order for Biden Bucks
and this is where every single federal agency in the under his control had to
come up with a plan for how they could help target government benefit groups for
registration and get out the vote efforts, and they kept they have kept those
plans secret. To a large degree. A broad coalition of reporters has been
doing really good work trying to figure out exactly how this is working. You
got like an unlimited federal budget where people say, you know, for instance,
it used to be that you were not supposed to take beneficiaries of federal
programs in college and use those for politicking or any kind of election related activity.
And under Biden's watch, that's been flipped on its head, and in
fact, you're supposed to use it to register people on college campuses, which
of course are like one thousand percent Democrat, or you know, you take
offices that hand out welfare benefits and say would you like to keep these going
by registering to vote right now for the party that you know we want you
to vote for. And so it's like all sorts of ethical problems related to
this. And I also I'm not sure Republicans have I mean, it's just
one of these like frustrations. We first reported this at the Federalists years ago,
and Congress there is a committee in Congress that has looked into it.
But just like the general lase fair attitude that a lot of these Republicans in
Congress have toward this corruption of our election system with taxpayer dollars is a little
disappointing. These jobs reports are just a movie trailer for a bad movie.
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you get your podcasts. Well, can I ask you a question about Biden
bucks? So I'm assuming these are federal dollars. I don't know where they've
been procured from. Sound like Biden should be able to do this, you
know, latterly. But yeah, elections are run by the state, So
does how does it work? Did they go to a school that gets federal
money or like how is it dispersed? So it's interesting you're you're doing.
You know, it's federal funds that just go to get out the vote efforts,
which can include voter registration and other get out to vote efforts. So
the elections themselves are run by the states. But you know, you can
set up your student aid office to register people to vote and then that can
get Then also then you can say, well, we're not doing it in
partisan way. We're just also driving people where like we're picking up their ballots
and we're taking them in. When you do it in when you do it
with one population and not with another, it's election interference. You know,
if it's not like the same benefit is given to everybody, then I really
target it. Yeah, so it's not given to private get out the vote
groups. It's given to government entities that are trying that are supposedly asked,
you know, trying to get out the vote. And as you say,
if it's not dispersed evenly to all kinds of populations, then you can just
target the voters that you want. And it sounds like Tamony Hall or something
like that. And even like you know, state Department is making sure to
register people who don't live in the country who are American citizens, which is
like, okay, fine, also overwhelmingly Democrat. It just happens to be
that all of the people that Biden is, all the constituents sees that the
Biden bucks are going to are just overwhelmingly Democrat constituencies. And this does you
know, we're in very tight elections in this country. The twenty twenty election
came down to forty three thousand votes across three states. Like a little bit
here and a little bit there matters a lot, and we are talking massive
federal interference. Oh but I was going to mention some state based officials have
taken action against these Biden Bucks programs, saying that it's an inappropriate infiltration of
the federal government into state administration of elections, including like when you're registering people
to vote as a federal entity, that's in violation of our state law.
So it depends on what your state laws are in different places, but people
have taken action. It sounds to me like this. You know, red
states will be like this is unfair. We have to stop these programs,
all these programs, but blue states aren't going to say that. So in
essence, you're almost you know, you limit it within your own state,
but the other state is probably expanding this kind of thing. Am I wrong?
Like you know what I mean? I mean, you're not going to
stop in New York from finding new voters, but you are going to stop
it maybe in eras yet stay like Arizona, but maybe like Florida. Well
could you take like a state like Idaho. Let's say where it is a
red state, but it's turning blue with the importation of a lot of Californians,
Oregonians and Washingtonians and it has very liberal campuses. So if a red
state decides there that they don't want that Democrat takeover of their elections that way,
that would not be an unwise thing for them to do. Now,
I do want to say this is one of the interesting things. And the
New York Times has kind of raised the alarm about how they are realizing that
some of the get out the vote efforts that Democrats are doing are registering their
political opponents to vote. It's not just about registration. That's one thing I
wish like Republicans tend to believe like in this self discipline and self government kind
of thing, and it's like, it's your responsibility to register to vote and
go out and vote. And Democrats are like, would you like help care
carrying your ballot from your kitchen table to the threshold of your door. Would
you like help filling this out? Would you like someone to come and explain
the issues to you? Would you like someone, you know, to get
this into the ballot box? Like they're helping you every step of the way
and thereby influencing your vote. You know, Hi, you have not been
ruled sentient by a court of law. Would you like me to fill out
your ballot in this nursing home along with everybody else's you know what I mean,
Like they're really sort of crafty, and it's very difficult to determine problems
conclusively, and so Republicans should be taking advantage of these registrations and doing the
harvesting as well. So I just hate it because I think it should be
harder to vote, and people get mad at that, but I think that
if it really is the sacred thing then they're doing, you should have to
put a minimal amount of effort into wanting to do it. I think,
you know, and you're right, and Republicans, if they want to compete,
they're going to have to kind of do the same thing. So you
were a book called Rigged, which, when you know it took a deep,
super deep dive into a lot of these problems. And one of the
other aspects you speak about in that book that I don't want to spend too
What we don't want to spend too much time on right now because we quite
often is the media. So in your estimation, the election is rigged because
we don't really have a media anymore. That's part of the problem, correct,
So, just objectively speaking, one of the metrics by which international observers
judge the fairness, freeness, and legitimacy of an election is if it takes
place in a non propaganda news environment. And with the demise of corporate media,
you know, ethics in recent years, we really do have a problem
in this country about whether we're outside of a propaganda environment. So one of
the things that you'd seen in polls for the last few months is that all
sorts of demographic groups are overwhelmingly not overwhelmer. They're moving in dramatic and interesting
fashion toward Trump and away from Clinton. There's this one group that is not
and it's seniors. And by the way, that's a very good group to
have. Joe Biden is very blessed to have seniors. They're committed to voting,
they don't need a lot of work to get out and vote, and
they're reliable, and they are kind of sticking with him. And you look
at it and you think, God, shouldn't seniors care more about the direction
of the country than like a millennial. I mean, not that you don't
care as a millennial. That sounded horrible, but you know what I mean,
Like you would kind of assume, if you were being prejudicial here,
that they wouldn't like what he's doing to the country, and yet they're kind
of sticking with him. And I do believe that A big reason why is
some of the only people watching corporate media news shows are seniors, and so
you'll look at something, you know, Joe Biden does something, whether it's
imprisoning his political opponents or trying to imprison his political opponents, or you know,
coming up with the executive orders on the border, and you watch the
media coverage of it and it's just straight one percent propaganda. And combined with
that, you have a regime that has shut down or attempted to shut down
alternate voices in the media and people who say something contrary to what CBS News
says, and that does render an election less secure. Absolutely well. I
will say it's clear that a lot of people aren't watching, or a fewer
and few people watching, you know, establishment media, But I will say
that they still I think, sort of set the agenda the conversation. The
narratives they come up with seep into the national conversation. So I do think
that sometimes they're more important than we maybe would give them credit for in some
ways. But anyway, let's move on. So you mentioned censorship, which
the media was part of. It was worse because I think the media can
concocted all kinds of conspiracies that didn't exist. But so let's talk now about
like tech social media platforms, and that's where most people get or a lot
of people get their news, and a lot of people have their conversations.
There was a ton of sort of concerted censorship, like the Hunter Biden laptop
story, for instance, which wasn't really about Hunter Biden. It was about
Joe Biden, but you know, you had you had the former CIA and
other you know, government officials saying it was Russian propaganda, the media sort
of going along with that, and then tech companies banning mentions of the story.
So do you think that that the DOJ and others kind of worked with
these tech companies to ban speech and political speech, are going to be able
to get away with that again this time? Or are is there just enough
skepticism of what they're doing that they want Oh my goodness, um alarmed that
you even ask the question that was I'm trying to be the interviewer. Here're
okay again, if we can take it back to twenty sixteen, what happened
that election? Cycle was that Donald Trump was able to circumvent corporate media and
take his message directly to the American people, and they liked it, and
they voted and elected him president. And it was a huge wake up call
to Silicon Valley and they were very upset. And there is contemporaneous reporting.
Alan Bacari wrote a really interesting book about some of this stuff too, where
the day after that election, you have people openly saying we will never again
let what happened you know here, happen again. And what they meant by
that was that with corporate media completely becoming propaganda for the Democrat Party, they
also would do that, and so they instituted some draconian algorithmic game playing to
suppress news and information they didn't like, to elevate news and information that they
wanted to, you know, get out there. And they did it across
like every issue that people vote on and every candidate they vote on, and
is so it is so dystopic what we've been living through since twenty sixteen,
and it gets worse and worse, and then the more it's entrenched, the
more difficult it is to go back from any of that. And so yes,
in twenty twenty, we saw how censorship can affect an election with the
horrific situation of with the government help social media companies shutting down discussion of the
Biden family corruption, journalism about the Biden family corruption from the oldest continuously publishing
newspaper in America, I mean amazing First Amendment violations. It wasn't just about
that, which was inarguably the most important campaign story of that cycle, but
also everything you know, COVID and trans issues and race issues and everything.
The censorship from corporate media was ridiculous. You also had it where, you
know, you saw things like on Twitter, which at that time was not
owned by Elon Musk. If you pushed a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was
personally like stealing mailboxes to keep people from mail in voting, that was fine.
If you said something like we all know that mail in balloting is less
secure than in person voting, which is true for obvious and logical reasons,
you would be censored. Not just censored from that story, but like your
whole publication would be censored, your your whole you know, it wasn't just
that tweet that was censored. Every tweet from you would be downplayed, blacklisted.
It's horrible. The State Department, which the Federalist is suing right now
for its role in the censorship industrial complex, you know, has helped fund
and market many censorship tools to be used against the American people in violation of
our first men rights, and those are like entrenched now in the ecosphere.
And I have thought a lot about election administration, and I genuinely believe all
these problems, like the Biden Bucks and the zuck Bucks and the mail Atbalot,
like all of that is super important and huge and is a tiny fraction
of the problem caused by social media censorship in this country, which I think
affects millions upon millions of votes. I think when you say, like,
how is it possible that the sensible people here are not winning the day on
this issue or that, I think it's I think it's big tech more than
anything. Really, Okay, let me push back on that. I'm not
saying that you're wrong that it is a big deal. It's a big deal
to me because kind of mass censorship of courses is problematic and if you let
it be normalized, it becomes worse and worse. But I just feel like
the Internet is a place where in the end this stuff gets through in some
way anyway. It's very hard to control. When you had three networks,
it was easy to control the message. It's far more difficult now with all
are site or others. Now. I'm not saying it doesn't matter, but
I just don't feel that most people are on Twitter getting their views. I
think people who are politically involved are on Twitter getting their views and they don't
change their mind very much. Am I wrong about that? I feel like
you're just backing me up here though, That's what I'm kind of saying.
Like, but you're saying it's more important that administration of an election. I
don't know, is it. I mean, you know, our male ballots
being just handed out to everyone. Isn't that more dangerous than stopping people from
talking about those stories? But what I meant not about Well, first of
all, I think violations of first moment rights are actually I think that's worse
than election interference, as bad as election interferences, And it's all related to
self government, right, Like, if we don't have the if we don't
have the ability to seek truth and argue for truth and convince other people of
truth, it's the same thing as like election interference, where you don't have
the right to pick your own people to I totally agree. I just want
to just clarify, I mean, how much it has affected the election.
I don't think okay, as far as how much it has affected the election,
I do believe censorship is a much bigger player than all of the other
issues combined. It is so subtle and so entrenched, and it's so every
you know, people don't realize how much you know. Clicking on this story
for us is that you take, for example, you want to learn something
about like what happened to George Floyd, and you search into Google and Google
has blacklisted every single website that will tell you something accurate about it, and
instead it says, here's what the New York Times says about it. Whatever
happened? What was the Russia collusion? What's going on there? You want
to you know, who did a really great job with hard, factual reporting
on every aspect of that, the Federalist Google it and see what comes up.
It will be the places that peddled the Russia collusion hoax that are given
to you on a platter. You remember that old saying about how Osama bin
Lauden was hard to find, and that they finally found him on the second
page of Google results, like the joke being that's that's an impossible place to
find anything. We'll try the twentieth page of Google results, you know,
where the first page is this left wing site and that left wing site,
and you know, everything is like pushing it, and then that becomes what
Wikipedia says, and that's what feeds into the AI system, so that you
know, it's just overwhelming and actually can cause me to despair a little bit,
so we should probably move on. But the way people affects the way
people think about every issue. You know, he takes something like trans issues.
Polling shows that even the vast majority of Democrats are like, no,
I don't believe men should be allowed to play on girls teams. And yet
you watch the media and you do your Google search, and everything will be
like fed to you like you're the crazy person for thinking that men shouldn't be
on girls' sports teams, you know, and then that effects who you vote
for and what you think is normal and et cetera, et cetera. That's
fair enough. But here's the thing. So when I put something into Google.
Yeah, I'll get some left wing site explaining it to me as the
top you know entry, or I'll get Wikipedia, some demented person had gone
in there and given their own explanation for whatever it is. So I totally
agree with that, And I also agree obviously that you have a press that
I don't even like calling it that anymore. You have this media that lies
to you. But what is the solution to that? You can't I mean,
in the end, we can't force a bunch of private entities. And
I'm not even talking about Google, which people will argue, let's say,
is some kind of utility, but I'm talking about CBS or CNN or whatever.
I mean, how are you going to force people to be fairer?
What is the way to do? There is no real way to accomplish that,
is there. I mean, what do we do? How do we
fix this? So some of what's happening with big tech and government to censor
competing news outlets to these left wing media outlets is something that action should be
taken against. That that's an unfair intervention into a free market that artificially sustains
these left wing propaganda outlets. But no, I think like in a free
country, you're allowed to spread lies, or you should be. But what
we've got right now that's very bad is if you are spreading lies about russiaclusion
or COVID response, or Brett Kavanaugh or Justice Salito or like any number of
people, you are allowed and even you benefit from doing that, and if
you speak truth about it you get harmed. That is not sustainable. Yeah,
I'm a weird. I'm a market guy, so I'm always like the
market will correct itself and stuff like that. But I have been dismayed that
like the Washington Post can lose tens of millions of dollars, or a place
like the Atlanta can be dropped up by some rich person frankly to disseminates disinformation
and there's no real correction, Like there's no one. I know that people
the Post got fired recently. But it's not like someone comes in and goes,
hey, you know, maybe we should be fair. They just kind
of like doubled down, okay, and what they've been doing, you're the
one being foolish here. I think a lot of people think these these media
outlets exist to make a profit. Obviously they do not. And the left
has understood this really really well, Jeff Bezos. Yeah, he lost a
lot of money on the Washington Post. Or he has lost a lot of
money on the Washington Post. He also gained a lot of money through the
COVID pandemic that more than made up for it. And in order to make
money he had to spread worldwide hysteria that made Amazon the go to place for
shopping. Yes, a lot of business has failed. His didn't. His
did better than ever before. And yeah, if it took the Washington Post
spreading conspiracy theories and lies like, that's a small price to pay. I
know, but lots of people are losing their job, right, I mean,
go on, well done. Take the Atlantic. I up to hear
Donald Trump making fun of the Atlantic for the money it loses. So I
think it's owned or was owned by Loreen Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs's widow,
and so every time every year it's like, oh, they lost another ten
million dollars, he'll make a joke about it. Right, I'm sorry her
spending ten million dollars a year to control elections is a bargain. The Atlantic
pushed the Russia collusion lie. They did it for years. They pushed various
lies about wars. They invented the ein marn hoax, which low information voters
believed, which was this like unbelievably disputed, not just disputed, but like
proven to be false claim that Donald Trump secretly hated dead American troops. This
story was so made up that John Bolton, who hates Donald Trump, was
like, this is a made up story, as did like two dozen other
people. It was used in debates, it was used in campaign ads.
They're actually using again this cycle for ten million dollars. It's a bargain.
The idiocy is that the right doesn't see that they're in an information war.
They think complaining about the media is sufficient without realizing like, okay, those
people are willing to lose ten hundred million dollars a year on their media organizations.
All you would have to do is give like a fraction of that to
hire real reporters who report real news and inform the public. And they don't
really realize that that's something to do. That's sounded too negative. No,
a good opportunity for people to engage in, like saving the country by supporting
real media and pause for real contact the federalists. I've been on that forever.
Listen. I love think tanks, but most people don't care about your
white papers. They have very little effect. All that money you should be
or a big bigger chunk of that money should be be going towards journalistic efforts
and information efforts. I agree with what you're saying, obviously, but CNN
does have shareholders, like they're part of a bigger company. Like I don't
know how long they can continue to just keep losing money in that way.
And maybe they can do it because they're part of a bigger conglomerate or they're
part of a conglomerate and that kind of those losses don't matter that much.
But I mean, journalists are losing jobs all over the country constantly. At
some point, I think it's going to matter. I do. Like there
are a few big papers, they're fine, they're you know, Post Times,
whatever, but most of journalism has been gutted out, and that's terrible.
That's actually terrible for democracy. Right, So I don't know, maybe
we'll see I mean, I don't know, So I don't know. If
you answered my question, do you think that they can repeat that kind of
censorship again or is it going to be a little more difficult because Elon Musk
owns X And you know, my point was that Nolan can they they are,
They're doing it right now. This is why we are suing the State
Department for its ongoing support of censorship tools. They're doing it. It hurts
horribly, it hurts our elections, it hurts our ability to be governed by
ourselves, and they're doing it on a massive scale. Now, the big
thing, the big like sort of white pill of the whole thing, is
Elon buying Twitter. I do not mean by this that Twitter is perfect,
that it's even good, but it isn't the censorship tool that every other social
media, major social media outlet is at this point at least, and so
you are able to discuss things freely and have conversations without the level of censorship
that we see on other platforms. I mean, I have to say,
since Musk bought it, it, in some sense it's more like a sewer
frankly, like there's just terrible people on there saying terrible things. But I
prefer having that there with the more open and again it's not perfect, I
agree with you, but just a more open conversation and an open news flow
and the ability of people to be contrarian or to challenge. You know,
I really recommend By the Way for you, so Stewart, because I don't
have that experience at all. But I'm also an active blocker. I have
more than one point two million followers, which is to me a stunning number.
But I also block literally tens of thousands of people. Those are hand
curated, boutique blocks. I block for people being mean to you. I
block for people being mean to Sean Davis or to me. Like, I
just block, not mean. I don't mind mean. I just think when
it's like cartoonishly mean or anti semitic or you know, just like, yeah,
I love blocking. It's not even those Twitter I'm talking abou accounts with
millions of followers that are really gross, you know, and in some sense
though, and I don't want to viewer off into something that we're not talking
about this podcast, but you know, maybe I'm happy that I can just
see what people really think sometimes. I know it's a weird, you know,
it's a weird way to view the world, but I'd rather know that
these people are out there and hate us or whatever it is than not know.
In a way, now, I think it's exaggerated because they're kind of
like clout chasers who just get all these like people to follow them that are
not Can I say, like, if you're anonymous on Twitter, yeah you
might have you might you know, follow this anti semit doesn't mean that you
are that in your daily life or anything like that. So I think those
numbers are exaggerated. But I'm happy to know that people feel comfortable saying some
of the things they are. I don't know how we got onto that,
but anyway, so I'd rather have that than have censorship, because what happens
is then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, we have to
get rid of these anti Semites. We're also going to get rid of the
people say bad things about George Sorows. You know, they always do this.
They kind of try to like make a completely legitimate criticism or flame about
someone be you know, just as bad as the real nuts. You know,
they conflate the two anyway, So you think they will, you think
they are. So that does not bode well for twenty twenty four, I
guess right, Well, if you look at twenty twenty, which was another
one of these elections where Democrats were willing to do whatever it took to keep
Donald Trump from being re elected. They lied, they issued fake news,
they engaged in massive censorship, They rigged, And I choose that word advisedly
because it's about like preordaining changes to ensure a particular outcome the system to have
massive mail in balloting that could then be exploited, you know, through Zuckerbucks
and other things. They still only won by forty three thousand VOTs across three
states. Since then, you have seen Joe Biden's numbers plummet, you know,
and you have people being able to make a side by side comparison of
what they thought about life under Trump versus what they thought about life on and
it's there's no question that the regime is super sad about the threat of Trump,
that they hated his presidency, that they thought it was chaotic, and
that it hurt them personally like the powers. It's also true that the American
people have a very different idea about it. And I'm not saying by that
that you don't have like low favorability for Trump. You do, you much
lower favorability for Biden. You know, he's he's lower than Trump. So
that is not what you saw in twenty twenty, and so when it's coming
down to close elections, I think I would say that while Republicans absolutely need
to be laser focused on get out the vote, ballot harvesting operations in the
places that matter, and they need to fight the censorship, and they need
to fight the media corruption, and they need to like kind of do everything,
you know, really well, that I would not say that they can't
win this election. I mean, if it were a normal, free,
fair election, based on the way we used to do elections, it would
be a blowout. So I think they could win even with the new environment.
I wasn't even yeah, I mean, I wasn't even I didn't even
mean it like that. I just meant, will it be a mess?
You know? Are we going to see the same sort of mess? I'll
just say, I think we've spoken about this recently, but I just don't
see how either side we'll be ready to accept the results of this election.
So do you feel like we're for sure going to have like a crazy postal?
Is the post election going to be crazy lawsuits? Like? How do
you envision that? I know things change quickly, but yeah, I think
that one, you know, one very bad thing that Democrats did for the
health of the country, but very smart and savvy thing that they have done
is criminalize Republican legal work. They've worked to disbar every effective Republican attorney and
with basically no pushback from Republicans, no conservative judicial society has pushed back against
this effort to criminalize Republican election law and to disbar Republican election attorneys. It's
really something to observe, and so you have to not just put together a
ballot harvesting operation, a complete get out the vote operation, which is not
just about registering people to vote, but actually getting the ballots into the boxes.
You also need to do fights against the law fair done by markle Las
who's sort of the guy who cooked up the Russia collusion hoaks and also orchestrated
the twenty twenty mail in balloting issues, and he's working very hard again this
year, and so savver and smarter Democrat attorneys. You have to fight that,
and then you also have to fight after the fact for anything that went
wrong. I am quite anxious to see what the twenty twenty four conspiracy theory
will be about Donald Trump, and I've been trying trying to listen to the
left and get some kind of clue as to what's coming because the Russia collusion
stuff, you could now looking back, you can see that it had been
sort of bubbling. Anyway, I do not look forward to the post the
lessons at all. Yes, I do want to say that already what Democrats
have done with their law fair against Donald Trump does render any outcome or any
Biden victory as kind of illegitimate on its face. And what I'm saying by
that is because of this inappropriate meddling, this attempt to remove Donald Trump from
the ballot, which was an actual effort, coordinated conspiracy across multiple states to
try to actually kill the election. Then you also have all the different cases
and all the different jurisdictions attempts to imprison and bankrupt their political opponent. This
is the thing where if this were another country, we would say already the
legitimacy of this election is in doubt, so in a weird way for the
preservation of the country, like you almost have to like they've already passed the
point where it's going to be very difficult to accept a Biden victory should he
eke that out. Does that make sense. Yeah, I mean it's not
even a secret. Is a conspiracy automatically secret? Now, I mean it's
an open conspiracy because Alvin Bragg said he was going to go after the president.
Others have you know, who are after him, have openly stated that
they want to punish him and put him in jail and like that. So,
I mean, I don't know. I would say, also, it
depends on how. I mean, if it is a very close election,
it's obviously going to be more contested, you know, if someone But I
don't see how it's not going to be a very close election. It's very
difficult for me to see any way that that could happen. But who knows.
I don't know. You know, Joe Biden is one of the most
if not the most unpopular president incumbent in history. So the numbers are well
below what Trump's were at this time four years ago. Yeah, I mean,
the switch in the polls is pretty stunning. It's like double digit from
where he was twenty twenty to now go on. I mentioned this before.
I just don't know, like setting aside everything that you don't like about Trump
or don't like about Biden, just as far as policy goes literally, I
can't think of any part of what's going on in the country or foreign policy
that anyone could legitimately say it's better today than it was, you know,
be covid Trump administration. I just there is no yes. And yet I'd
say, if you talk to people who are in the establishment, they would
say that everything's so much better than it was during the Trump era. So
like New York City, DC, they objectively think that things are great.
They're very happy with the Biden policies. They are They're thrilled, in fact,
and I tell people this when I'm traveling throughout the country, Like DC
loves Joe Biden. They think he's doing a fantastic job. They're so happy
with, for instance, the war in Ukraine. They are thrilled. So
I'm just saying, no, Listen, from their perspective, things are going
exactly as they prefer them to go. Like I don't think we're in the
middle of the Great Depression, but it's clear that, for instance, inflation
has affected so many people. And the more the media tries to tell everyone
that they're crazy, that it's a mirage something, the more I think it
angers them. But anyway, so we have a lot to look forward to,
a lot of exciting, exciting things to look forward to in twenty twenty
four. It sounds like it's going to be a giant mess. Can we
talk about something less depressing? Culture? Yep? What have you been reading
or watching or listening to? Well, I'm about to go to a place
I've never been before, which is Italy. So I have been reading books
on Italy, like art books about different things to see in different museums.
So I was super exciting, super exciting. I've never been. No,
I've never been, and I have always wanted to go. I mean,
obviously I'm just like obsessed with the Roman Empire of course as a middle aged
white man, but just in general, vatic and all that, I just
would love to I want to go to a place less fascistic than my country.
So that's why we chose. They're just kidding. But so I've been
looking through art books, like reading guides, reading an interesting book called The
Tigris of Furley, about Renaissance Italy's most courageous and notorious countess by Liz Love
by the way, and also watching a Stanley Tucci documentary documentary Serious about It
is a show where he's yeah, yeah, yeah, so I picked the
regions. Yeah, so what about you. Gosh, what I'm gonna say
is gonna sound far less exciting. But I've been watching I'm going to uh
now, not going anywhere. I've been watching a show. I would call
this a guilty pleasure. It's a show called Suits. Have you ever watched
the show? Is this the one with the princess? Oh? Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, she's she's I would say, you
know what, she's fine, she's fine in this show. Yeah, I
guess this is an old, an old TV series. It is like,
it's about two lawyers. But I so I have this idea. I have
this theory basically that you know the movie Goodwill Hunting for instance, or this
Suits, there's always a he didn't like it Hunting, Oh my gosh,
I think it's the most overrated awful movie. Okay, So those are superhero
movies. There's a character who's just so far more intelligent than everyone else that
he's a superhero. So that's what this show basically is. It's almost like
it reminds me of like House, but with a lawyer, but it's soap
opera y and stuff. But I started watching it and I kind of liked
it. I do want to say that everyone should immediately purchase this album.
It is so so good. We had a review of it at The Federalist
several weeks back. But it's called Jackpot by Monty Borden and the Dangerous Few,
and it is just like one of my very favorite albums. It's the
only thing I've been listening to NonStop. And you'll love it. So can
you repeat it? Jack Jackpot, Jackpot? And our headline was Jackpot is
the most compelling album of the year. It just it takes all the different
types of like Americana and just makes it. It's in particularly like listen to
it over and over. It's just really really great. So stream it,
buy it whatever, do it now done, It's on my list. It
will be done. Okay, Well, Molly, thanks for giving us an
overview of what to expect next election. I hope you have a nice time
in Italy and we'll be back next week though, So until they'd be Lovers
of Freedom and She's got afraid? Is she go wow wax and hats yet?
But all the boa