Speaker 1: All Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 2: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 2: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 2: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 2: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 2: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 2: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 2: you can make your own decisions. Robert Evans here and
Speaker 2: this is it could Happen here a podcast out Things
Speaker 2: falling apart, and boy they share seem to be, don't they.
Speaker 2: The twenty twenty four election is terrifying a lot of
Speaker 2: people at this stage after a disastrous debate performance by
Speaker 2: Joe Biden. And this episode will be coming out on
Speaker 2: the Monday that the Republican National Convention starts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Speaker 2: A lot of people are terrified about a Trump dictatorship,
Speaker 2: about Project twenty twenty five and all that that entails.
Speaker 2: And I want to tell you first off, you know
Speaker 2: we will be having a lot of coverage from the convention. Garrison,
Speaker 2: Sophie and I are all going to be there all week.
Speaker 2: We'll start dropping our convention episodes on Wednesday and Thursday
Speaker 2: and Friday, and then we'll probably have some summary content
Speaker 2: after that the next week, So we will be getting
Speaker 2: you our experiences here and everything that we encounter on
Speaker 2: the ground during what I think is going to wind
Speaker 2: up being a pretty important week for the American fascist movement.
Speaker 2: But right now, what I want to address is the
Speaker 2: sense of kind of unbridled terror that I've seen from
Speaker 2: a lot of people around me, not just leftists, but
Speaker 2: regular people that I know in my life, Folks who
Speaker 2: are just kind of like casual democrats, not the kind
Speaker 2: to think much about politics, but have suddenly seen the
Speaker 2: potential of what a Trump second term might bring with
Speaker 2: it and are rightfully terrified. So I want to first off,
Speaker 2: tell everyone in that bucket, don't panic. That's what this
Speaker 2: episode is about. And I'm going to try and give
Speaker 2: you some good reasons not to panic, some reasons why
Speaker 2: our situation is not as dire as it seems. And
Speaker 2: my goal here is not to lull you into an
Speaker 2: action or stop you from preparing. You should, in fact
Speaker 2: be preparing, And we talk about the various things you
Speaker 2: can do organizing in your community, taking action to support migrants,
Speaker 2: to support each other, to support your LGBTQ friends, women
Speaker 2: seeking reproductive justice. That's our daily bread and butter. Right now,
Speaker 2: I want to give you some reasons for optimism about
Speaker 2: victory and the overall struggle against these fucking maniacts so
Speaker 2: as most regular listeners will know, Back in the spring
Speaker 2: of twenty nineteen, I published the first season of It
Speaker 2: Could Happen Here, which was originally a scripted podcast about
Speaker 2: the very real possibility of a civil conflict in the
Speaker 2: United States. The years since have proven several of my
Speaker 2: predictions painfully accurate. I started the series with fictional vignettes
Speaker 2: from the perspective of an American civilian watching American tanks
Speaker 2: roll through the streets of their city. Within a year,
Speaker 2: thousands and thousands of listeners had variants of that exact
Speaker 2: experience thanks to the George Floyd uprisings. I was humbled
Speaker 2: and more than a little frightened by the response that
Speaker 2: some people had to the first iteration of it Could
Speaker 2: Happen Here. During twenty twenty, while I was on the
Speaker 2: ground in four different states, dozens and dozens of people
Speaker 2: told me the series had influenced their own choices for
Speaker 2: how to act and organize on the ground with their
Speaker 2: friends out in the world, and that is humbling and
Speaker 2: a little bit frightening. And I promise you I'm not
Speaker 2: laying this out to brag or try to make an
Speaker 2: argument from authority. I'm not saying I predicted something five
Speaker 2: years ago and was right, so you should listen to
Speaker 2: what I have to predict now. In fact, I kind
Speaker 2: of want to do the opposite because in another podcast
Speaker 2: I recorded in twenty nineteen on the anti VAXX movement,
Speaker 2: this would have been an episode of Behind the Bastards,
Speaker 2: I laid out a theoretical pandemic and I described it
Speaker 2: spreading almost exactly the way the COVID nineteen pandemic really
Speaker 2: did spread just a few months later. And yet, in
Speaker 2: February of twenty twenty, when COVID nineteen had been confirmed
Speaker 2: to have entered the United States and was spreading over
Speaker 2: other parts of the world like wildfire, I had friends
Speaker 2: ask me what I thought was going to happen, and,
Speaker 2: you know, thinking back to stars, thinking back to bird flu,
Speaker 2: thinking back to the Ebola, you know, epidemic in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: My answer was, I don't know, It'll probably be fine. Right, someone,
Speaker 2: surely there's some adults out there who are gonna, you know,
Speaker 2: lock this thing down. They're not just gonna let it
Speaker 2: run rampant over the population. Right. There's a term for
Speaker 2: what happened to me there, and it's called normalcy bias.
Speaker 2: Normalcy bias is the tendency to assume that whatever has
Speaker 2: gone down in the past will keep happening, often despite
Speaker 2: evidence to the contrary. Something like eighty percent of people
Speaker 2: display attributes of delusional thinking caused by the normalcy bias
Speaker 2: during disasters, Emergency responders sometimes called this negative panic. We
Speaker 2: got a great example of negative panic a couple of
Speaker 2: weeks ago. Video went viral of a bowl that got
Speaker 2: loose during a rodeo in rural Oregon, and it started
Speaker 2: just just absolutely goring random yocals who were like wandering
Speaker 2: around in between chiro stands and beer carts behind sort
Speaker 2: of the stands. And a few of these people had
Speaker 2: the presence of mind to run. One guy even pulled
Speaker 2: a gun. And I don't know entirely how we want
Speaker 2: to rate that as a response, but a lot of
Speaker 2: folks just stared at the bowl, which a blank looks
Speaker 2: on their face is utterly uncomprehended. You can tell from
Speaker 2: their body language that they just couldn't believe what they
Speaker 2: were seeing. And some of those people got rammed right
Speaker 2: in the fucking gut by a bull a second later.
Speaker 2: The immediate danger that their eyes were telling them was
Speaker 2: there just seemed too far fetched to take seriously. The
Speaker 2: normalcy bias is an important cognitive error, but it's just
Speaker 2: one of the cognitive errors that regularly pushes mankind towards catastrophes.
Speaker 2: And while we're on that subject, I should warn those
Speaker 2: of you who'd like to try their hand at predicting
Speaker 2: the future of a separate cognitive delusion, catastrophizing. This is
Speaker 2: the tendency to assume that the absolute worst case scenario
Speaker 2: will come to pass, and it's often a trauma reaction.
Speaker 2: When you've been blown up, you kind of always expect
Speaker 2: the world to blow up around you. If you've been
Speaker 2: in a relationship with someone who blows up, who screams
Speaker 2: or gets violent or threatens to kill themselves during arguments,
Speaker 2: you might find yourself expecting that from anyone else that
Speaker 2: you date, even if they've never displayed that kind of behavior.
Speaker 2: And if you've watched an in the bag sheer thing
Speaker 2: presidential election collapse and usher in a new era of
Speaker 2: fascist political capture in your country. Well, you might see
Speaker 2: that kind of thing happening and expect it whenever the
Speaker 2: polls open up again. The tricky part of actually predicting
Speaker 2: the future with any accuracy, which is a thing that
Speaker 2: I have been both professionally successful at and personally bad
Speaker 2: at doing, is balancing your normalcy bias with your catastrophizing.
Speaker 2: This is easier said than done, and I have noticed
Speaker 2: that my effort to reach this state has produced some
Speaker 2: peculiar cognitive effects of late. In the six months that
Speaker 2: led up to the first presidential debate, I felt constant
Speaker 2: growing anxiety about a second Trump term. Only some of
Speaker 2: my anxiety was based on polling, which didn't look great
Speaker 2: for Biden, but wasn't apocalyptic either. I was anxious because
Speaker 2: I saw so many people around me, and I'm not
Speaker 2: talking about folks on Twitter, but in the real world, go, well,
Speaker 2: obviously Biden's gotta win, there's no way Trump gets elected again,
Speaker 2: and then go about their day. Then the debate happened.
Speaker 2: Joe went on stage, barely able to speak at a
Speaker 2: legible volume, coughing slurring his words and dropping into tangents
Speaker 2: rather than making cogent cases to the country. Everyone around
Speaker 2: me started to get terrified all at once, and the
Speaker 2: mainstream media did what it does and pivoted to round
Speaker 2: the clock coverage of the issue of Biden's competency. You know,
Speaker 2: some people have alleged that this is because the media
Speaker 2: has some sort of an agenda here, and I really
Speaker 2: don't credit the media, as someone who has spent his
Speaker 2: life working adjacent to the mainstream media with that kind
Speaker 2: of capacity to plan. What these people, what these reporters,
Speaker 2: what these news organs were doing was pivoting to the
Speaker 2: issue that was doing the most to raise our collective
Speaker 2: blood pressure, because, among other things, that's what social media
Speaker 2: has trained them to do, because that's where the fucking
Speaker 2: money is, right, you know, not that this issue didn't
Speaker 2: exist before that. If it bleeds, it leads has been
Speaker 2: a long time axiom in the field. But that's what's
Speaker 2: happening here too, right, And because the money is in
Speaker 2: saying and talking about the things that gets people's blood
Speaker 2: pumping the most. The question of is Joe Biden doomed
Speaker 2: soon yielded to is democracy doomed? As analysts and pundits
Speaker 2: started hyping up Project twenty twenty five, a blueprint for
Speaker 2: fascist takeover of the US published by the Heritage Foundation
Speaker 2: last year. Now, I am not a polster, and I
Speaker 2: don't claim debase any of what I say next on
Speaker 2: some kind of mathematic expertise. But I don't think we're doomed.
Speaker 2: I don't think fascist takeover is inevitable, even in the
Speaker 2: likely event that Biden loses, and I think our position
Speaker 2: is a lot stronger than most people realize. This is
Speaker 2: why right wing influencers and strategists have started going so
Speaker 2: hard on rhetoric that makes them sound like fucking Cobra commander.
Speaker 2: The best example of how mask off the fascist right
Speaker 2: has gotten is Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation,
Speaker 2: who said this during a recent press conference.
Speaker 3: The reason that so many anchors on MSNBC, for example,
Speaker 3: are losing their minds daily is because our side is winning.
Speaker 3: And so I come full circle in this response and
Speaker 3: just want to encourage you with some substance that we
Speaker 3: are in the process of the Second American Revolution, which
Speaker 3: will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.
Speaker 2: Another of these guys is Jack Pisobic, a former Navy
Speaker 2: intelligence officer turned supplement salesman and fascist political philosopher. Jack
Speaker 2: spoke on a panel hosted by Steve Bannon for Seapak
Speaker 2: where he said this, but I just.
Speaker 4: Wanted to say, welcome to the end of democracy. We're
Speaker 4: here to overthrow it completely. We didn't get all the
Speaker 4: way there on January sixth, but endeavor to get rid
Speaker 4: of it and replace it with this right here, will
Speaker 4: replace it with this.
Speaker 5: Amen.
Speaker 2: Now I should note, folks, when he says this right here,
Speaker 2: he's holding up a cross necklace on a change. Jack's
Speaker 2: not a subtle man, but he does speak for a
Speaker 2: frighteningly large and influential block of Republicans. Both of these
Speaker 2: guys are end results of eighty years of conspiracy theories
Speaker 2: and hate speech funded by generations of wealthy businessmen and
Speaker 2: their fail sons, and at this point fail grandsons. The
Speaker 2: mainstream media and most voters in this country did their
Speaker 2: best to ignore these guys for far too long. Now
Speaker 2: they're pounding on the doors to the halls of power,
Speaker 2: mouths watering, Dick's hard guns loaded, and people are freaking out.
Speaker 2: Biden's poor debate performance and the minor civil war within
Speaker 2: the Democratic Party over whether he should remain the candidate
Speaker 2: has zeroed a magnifying glass on these people now. Obviously,
Speaker 2: Jack and his fellow fascists have been poking on the
Speaker 2: fringes of the American right four years. There nothing they're
Speaker 2: saying is new, but Trump's likely victory in the Supreme
Speaker 2: Court's recent ruling on executive immunity have led a lot
Speaker 2: of people to conclude that Project twenty twenty five is
Speaker 2: Trump's plan to execute as soon as he takes office.
Speaker 2: This is something guys like Pasobac and Roberts want you
Speaker 2: to believe because they want you terrified, hiding, shrieking away
Speaker 2: from confrontation. Like all fascists, they have an instinctive understanding
Speaker 2: that if they can just convince you that the fight
Speaker 2: is already lost, they win. This is why Jack has
Speaker 2: spent the last two weeks since the debate quote tweeting
Speaker 2: every left wing media person he can find and saying
Speaker 2: six months to insinuate they'll be dead or in camps
Speaker 2: after Trump's inevitable victory. He wants you to panic. Jack
Speaker 2: is a veteran, and while he was not a great soldier,
Speaker 2: he is familiar with some very basic concepts of military strategy.
Speaker 2: One of them that I bring up often because I
Speaker 2: think it illustrates something important is the ODE loop. This
Speaker 2: is the process by which people make decisions and act
Speaker 2: in combat situations, and it stands for the different stages
Speaker 2: of this process are observe, orient, decide, act. If you
Speaker 2: can disrupt any part of the ODA loop, you can
Speaker 2: stop an opponent from taking effective action, from deciding, or
Speaker 2: from carrying out their actions. Jack and his peers want
Speaker 2: you to panic. They want you to make plans to
Speaker 2: leave the country, to go to ground, to hide all
Speaker 2: evidence of your political sympathies. Ideally, and I don't make
Speaker 2: this allegation likely, he wants you to commit suicide. He
Speaker 2: wants you to feel hopeless. He wants you to believe
Speaker 2: that nothing matters any longer, because what matters most to
Speaker 2: him is that you and people like you are out
Speaker 2: of the picture. You know, either dead or so scared
Speaker 2: that you are disrupted from acting in any concerted way
Speaker 2: against him and his friends. Now, my job, as a
Speaker 2: semi professional Cassandra, and as a guy who reports in
Speaker 2: the far right, is to tell you this. A Trump
Speaker 2: dictatorship is not inevitable. These fucks are weaker than they look,
Speaker 2: and we will talk about all that after some ads.
Speaker 2: We're back now. I am not primarily an election guy,
Speaker 2: and my work has never focused on the horse race stuff.
Speaker 2: The polls are bad for Biden, and I have no
Speaker 2: interest in trying to delude anyone to thinking this's all
Speaker 2: some big nationwide polling error. The only thing I will
Speaker 2: say about the Democratic Party's actual electoral chances is to
Speaker 2: note gently that online discourse has somewhat inflated the polling
Speaker 2: fallout from the debate. Trump is now the odds on
Speaker 2: bet but if you average the swing state polls, he
Speaker 2: and Biden are generally within the margin of error pretty
Speaker 2: much everywhere. Now you're going to get a different analysis
Speaker 2: depending on which pole expert you trust. The new guys
Speaker 2: at five thirty eight still have it mostly as a
Speaker 2: coin flip, although one that slightly favors Trump. Nate Silver
Speaker 2: himself gives Biden under a thirty percent chance, which is
Speaker 2: terrible and also about where Trump was November of twenty sixteen,
Speaker 2: and we all do know how that election ended. People
Speaker 2: are often very bad at understanding probabilities, but saying he's
Speaker 2: got a twenty nine percent chance of winning doesn't mean
Speaker 2: it's impossible for him to win. Right. The situation is serious,
Speaker 2: but the future is not written, and you should remember that,
Speaker 2: for good and for ill, the final results of this
Speaker 2: whole thing will come down probably to one hundred thousand
Speaker 2: voters or so in five or six states. Now, it's
Speaker 2: also worth me saying this. Both of these candidates are
Speaker 2: old men, and statistically it would not be unheard of
Speaker 2: or weird if one of them was dead before the election.
Speaker 2: Joe Biden could still lose in a palace coup from
Speaker 2: the rest of his party and get replaced. Anything can happen,
Speaker 2: and in US politics it often does. Hey, everyone, Robert here.
Speaker 2: Two days after I wrote this, something happened. There was
Speaker 2: an assassination attempt against former President Trump. I am recording
Speaker 2: this a couple of hours after it happened. A lot
Speaker 2: is unclear at the moment than that somebody shot at him.
Speaker 2: It looks like he was wounded with from glass shrapnel
Speaker 2: when the teleprompter is hit. That Secret Service is currently
Speaker 2: claiming a shooter appears to have been outside the venue
Speaker 2: on a roof. Not much more I can say at
Speaker 2: this point. I will note again, there's a lot of
Speaker 2: catastrophizing going on, people saying like, oh, this means he's
Speaker 2: definitely going to win reelection. When Reagan got shot that
Speaker 2: Trump you know, rocketed him to a reelection victory. You know,
Speaker 2: that's possible, that could be what happens here. That's definitely
Speaker 2: a solid case to be made for that. That's what
Speaker 2: happened with Reagan, But that's not always what happens when
Speaker 2: there are assassination attempts against sitting or former presidents. On
Speaker 2: September twenty second, nineteen seventy five, Sarah Jane Moore, a
Speaker 2: member of the Manson family cult, attempted to assassinate President
Speaker 2: Ford with a thirty eight revolver. He did not win reelection.
Speaker 2: So you know, that's just as a note like sometimes
Speaker 2: what happens it's impossible to say what's going to happen
Speaker 2: with this, But if you're looking to past us history
Speaker 2: for president, you're still kind of in a situation where, well,
Speaker 2: really unclear what's going to go down. Now that's all
Speaker 2: the Horse Ray stuff I'm gonna subject you to. We
Speaker 2: are now going to move forward with the rest of
Speaker 2: this episode trying to answer this question what happens if
Speaker 2: Trump wins, and I'm going to give you some very
Speaker 2: good reasons not to freak the fuck out. The first
Speaker 2: has to do with Project twenty twenty five. In short,
Speaker 2: this Heritage Foundation document maps out a path to place
Speaker 2: the whole federal bureaucracy under President Trump's control, effectively ending
Speaker 2: separation of church and state, utilizing law enforcement to go
Speaker 2: after dissidents, making recreational sets illegal, and criminalizing daily life
Speaker 2: for millions of LGBT Americans. In short, it is a
Speaker 2: roadmap to Christian dictatorship. Now, I'm not going to tell
Speaker 2: you you shouldn't find this chilling, but let's be clear
Speaker 2: about what Project twenty twenty five is. It is a
Speaker 2: nine hundred page document written by a think tank that
Speaker 2: has lost a lot of its influence and access to
Speaker 2: power over the last ten years. The Heritage Foundation was once,
Speaker 2: as Molly Ball described in an article for The Atlantic,
Speaker 2: the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement. But during the
Speaker 2: Obama years, the tremendous influence of the Heritage Foundation started
Speaker 2: to get pruned back by establishment Republicans because it became
Speaker 2: clear that in a lot of ways these guys were
Speaker 2: dangerously out of step with voters and kind of hard
Speaker 2: to work with. The pullback actually began in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 2: when the Heritage Foundation was suddenly banned from the Republican's
Speaker 2: Study Committee Retreat over a conflict around a farm bill. Now,
Speaker 2: the think tank remained influential, but its decline accelerated after
Speaker 2: Trump took office. Some of this was the result of
Speaker 2: the fact that conservative tanks have seen a general decline
Speaker 2: in influence from the good old days, the height of
Speaker 2: their power. The Republican Party has won the popular vote
Speaker 2: in exactly one election this century, and as of twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two, we have seen them go through two disastrous
Speaker 2: midterm elections in a row and one disastrous, losing presidential election.
Speaker 2: An interesting piece of reporting on the Heritage Foundations decline
Speaker 2: from twenty twenty two by the Washington Posts Jeff Stein
Speaker 2: and Yagana Torbati. They quote one conservative on Capitol Hill
Speaker 2: as saying, people do not walk around in fear of
Speaker 2: the Heritage Foundation the way they did ten years ago.
Speaker 2: And the main reason why is because Trump and the
Speaker 2: people around him were gaining a lot more influence. Right
Speaker 2: These old think tankers just didn't hold the juice that
Speaker 2: they used to now. That article was published in response
Speaker 2: to a switch in leadership for the think tank, which
Speaker 2: is how Kevin Roberts wound up in the position he occupies,
Speaker 2: and why the Heritage Foundation pivoted from focusing on economic
Speaker 2: concerns to shit like stoking panic over the existence of
Speaker 2: trans people, critical race theory, all the culture war stuff
Speaker 2: that we have been bombarded with now for years. This
Speaker 2: is shit that fires up a chunk of the Republican base,
Speaker 2: but the last three election cycles have shown it's dog
Speaker 2: shit at getting regular Americans on board, because regular Americans
Speaker 2: look at this stuff and go while these people are
Speaker 2: fucking out of their minds. I think the near around
Speaker 2: Project twenty twenty five is potentially useful. It has the
Speaker 2: potential to line a lot of voters up, and crucially
Speaker 2: not for Joe Biden or for the Democrats, but against
Speaker 2: a Republican party that has almost entirely yielded to the
Speaker 2: fascists in its midst But I also see a lot
Speaker 2: of people describing Project twenty twenty five as Trump's plan
Speaker 2: for when he takes office, and that's just not what
Speaker 2: it is. These people will note that a lot of
Speaker 2: former Trump people have worked for the Heritage Foundation, to
Speaker 2: which I say, he hates a lot of the people
Speaker 2: who worked with him the last administration around this is
Speaker 2: very common knowledge. Some people will also point out recently
Speaker 2: unearthed video of the director of Project twenty twenty five
Speaker 2: back in twenty twenty three telling a right wing podcaster
Speaker 2: that Trump was very bought in with Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: And maybe that's true, but I don't feel like you
Speaker 2: should necessarily believe this guy isn't just tooting his own horn. Now.
Speaker 2: That kind of belief, though, does merge with statements you'll
Speaker 2: see from prominent p aggressive media figures, people like Chris Hayes,
Speaker 2: who recently tweeted a big reason Project twenty twenty five
Speaker 2: is so salient is because the actual Trump campaign has
Speaker 2: essentially zero policy apparatus and the platform is just Trump
Speaker 2: social posts strung together. Now, I like Chris, and I
Speaker 2: agree that it is important to set the stakes here
Speaker 2: for voters and to talk about Project twenty twenty five
Speaker 2: because it's fucked up and we should do something about
Speaker 2: the fact that these people feel confident putting out open
Speaker 2: plans to in democracy and institute a Christian nationalist dictatorship.
Speaker 2: But what Chris says is not strictly accurate because Trump
Speaker 2: has a platform and it might have been influenced by
Speaker 2: Project twenty twenty five. I think it probably was. But
Speaker 2: his platform is called Agenda forty seven, and we have
Speaker 2: covered it on It could happen here our daily news program.
Speaker 2: This is something you should care about Trump. In his
Speaker 2: Agenda forty seven plans, Trump advocates for mass deportations of migrants,
Speaker 2: for an attack on the legal rights of the press,
Speaker 2: and the imprisonment of his political enemies. He threatens the
Speaker 2: use of special forces and air strikes against cartels on
Speaker 2: Mexico's sovereign soil. There's a lot of crazy shit in
Speaker 2: Agenda forty seven. This is very serious stuff, and it
Speaker 2: is crucially the stuff Donald Trump has promised to do
Speaker 2: if he gets elected. Now, a few days before I
Speaker 2: wrote this, the former president took to truth Social to
Speaker 2: officially disavow Project twenty twenty five. Now, do I think
Speaker 2: he's lying? Do I think he was aware of it?
Speaker 2: Do I think he cribbed some of it for Agenda
Speaker 2: forty seven. Yeah, he's Donald Trump. He lies all the
Speaker 2: fucking time. But I do think it's noteworthy that he
Speaker 2: feels a need to publicly and vociferously disavow Project twenty
Speaker 2: twenty five. And this is part of a general split
Speaker 2: between Trump and the faction of the party who want
Speaker 2: a strong man dictator type but who aren't Christian nationalists,
Speaker 2: and the chunk who are. This is a natural cleavage,
Speaker 2: and we can see further evidence of this in the
Speaker 2: fact that, thanks to Trump's intercession, for the first time
Speaker 2: in quite a while, the Republican Party platform does not
Speaker 2: call for a national ban on abortion. And if you
Speaker 2: watch Trump during the debate, you can tell he's uncomfortable
Speaker 2: taking the standard right wing light on this because Trump
Speaker 2: is not a conservative Christian and doesn't really give a
Speaker 2: shit about abortion. He also knows it's not a vote winner.
Speaker 2: You know, he can't entirely push back on the party
Speaker 2: on this, but he's clearly not motivated to do so.
Speaker 2: Now does this mean Trump wouldn't sign such a ban
Speaker 2: into law. Now, of course not. But it means he
Speaker 2: understands that while the Jack Posobics of the world have
Speaker 2: their use to him, he needs a lot of votes
Speaker 2: from people who rightly see those Republicans as scary if
Speaker 2: Trump does take power again. These natural cleavages will become
Speaker 2: more pronounced, and Trump will also have to wield power
Speaker 2: in a severely divided country that does not like him
Speaker 2: or his policies. One thing that nearly all recent polling
Speaker 2: has made clear is that Biden's historic unpopularity has not
Speaker 2: made Trump more popular. Poles generally show a ceiling of
Speaker 2: around forty two percent the country who like the guy,
Speaker 2: and that ceiling is remarkably stable. There is also evidence
Speaker 2: that the sudden media focus on Project twenty twenty five
Speaker 2: and the fact that Republicans are actively planning to in
Speaker 2: democracy has cut into Trump's support. Right before I finished
Speaker 2: this episode, on Thursday, July eleventh, IPSOS published a poll
Speaker 2: showing Trump down a point from their last poll taken
Speaker 2: after the debate, which put him in Biden close to
Speaker 2: a tie. Now, this still isn't great for Biden because
Speaker 2: they all writes this election should not be close. But
Speaker 2: I think a lot of people have made the mistake
Speaker 2: of conflating disgust for Biden with surging support for Trump,
Speaker 2: and that just is not what we're seeing. More evidence
Speaker 2: for this comes from a recent ABC Your Voice poll,
Speaker 2: which showed fifty percent of the country having an unfavorable
Speaker 2: opinion of Biden and fifty nine percent having an unfavorable
Speaker 2: opinion of Trump. Part of why so many of these
Speaker 2: outright fascists have gone mask off is that they see
Speaker 2: these numbers too. They know that this moment right now
Speaker 2: is their best shot, maybe ever, at taking this country,
Speaker 2: crushing their enemies and inflicting the pain that it is
Speaker 2: their only purpose in life to inflict. And they might win,
Speaker 2: They might get to do that. The Heritage Foundation is
Speaker 2: not at the heart of the Trump campaign, but any
Speaker 2: step closer to total power for these people should ring
Speaker 2: alarm bells in every heart and head in this country.
Speaker 2: Yet the severity of the situation does not change this
Speaker 2: absolutely crucial fact. The fascists snow the wind is no
Speaker 2: longer at their backs, and I'm going to talk about
Speaker 2: that when we come back from this ad break. Despite
Speaker 2: how confident the Trump campaign and guys like Jack Pisobac
Speaker 2: are talking right now about their chances of winning, of
Speaker 2: dominating the government, of taking control of America for generations,
Speaker 2: and purging the left, the reality is that their position
Speaker 2: is not nearly as stable as it seems. And part
Speaker 2: why I think a lot of folks buy into a
Speaker 2: lot of folks on the left in liberals buy into
Speaker 2: the claims that the right is making right now about
Speaker 2: their guaranteed victory, about their looming inevitable victory. Is that
Speaker 2: Americans tend to be pretty self centered when it comes
Speaker 2: to politics, and it is understandable that this nail bier
Speaker 2: of an election in Joe Biden's calamitist debate performance has
Speaker 2: people here feeling doomed and feeling like a new fascist
Speaker 2: world order is inevitable. If you feel that way, though,
Speaker 2: I urge you to look around the world. Look to India,
Speaker 2: where authoritarian near dictator Narindra Modi was just dealt a
Speaker 2: startling setback in the Indian general election. His party, the BJP,
Speaker 2: failed to win a majority for the first time since
Speaker 2: twenty fourteen. Now, this is not the end of Modi,
Speaker 2: but it is a shocking sign of where the wind
Speaker 2: is blowing and the backlash that has started to form
Speaker 2: against the far right worldwide. In the UK, the Labor
Speaker 2: Party just won a landslide election against the Conservatives, tapping
Speaker 2: it into more than a dozen years of conservative power.
Speaker 2: And in France, the snap election called by President Emmanuel
Speaker 2: Macron inspired the creation of a popular left wing front
Speaker 2: against the far right, which defeated the far right in
Speaker 2: another historic election. Among other things, this new left alliance
Speaker 2: has promised to recognize the state of Palestine and increased
Speaker 2: support for Ukrainian resistance to Russia's invasion. I could go
Speaker 2: on Turkey's all but dictator President Erduwan has been bleeding
Speaker 2: support for years now and recently suffered a massive setback
Speaker 2: in regional elections around the country. The opposition Republican People's
Speaker 2: Party took the five largest cities in the country in
Speaker 2: an upset vote, including the capital Istanbul, where Odouin's party
Speaker 2: had invested massive resources. Now, these upsets in India and
Speaker 2: Turkey are so worth discussing because both countries are years
Speaker 2: into their own version of the nightmare scenario that Donald
Speaker 2: Trump Season two represents. Right, they voted their fascists into power.
Speaker 2: These guys took control of the courts, imprisoned dissidents, harnessed
Speaker 2: civil violence for political gain. And yet even with all that,
Speaker 2: even with all the power available to a modern security state,
Speaker 2: their hold on power is slipping. Just as I read
Speaker 2: these words. For many years, neo Nazi activists sought to
Speaker 2: influence and build support within the Republican Party and talked
Speaker 2: about hiding their power level as they did so. Now,
Speaker 2: this is a term they cribbed from dragon ball Z,
Speaker 2: and it means, in essence, pretending not to be a
Speaker 2: crazy ass fascist in order to get enough support from
Speaker 2: the normies that you can act like a crazy ass
Speaker 2: fascist with the power of the state. Well, the masks
Speaker 2: are off now. Nobody is hiding their power level anymore.
Speaker 2: And I am not so arrogant as to claim that
Speaker 2: I know that their defeat is around the corner. But
Speaker 2: I will tell you one thing. This is a make
Speaker 2: or break moment for the sons of bitches. If they
Speaker 2: fail now, they will find themselves exposed in a country
Speaker 2: that knows precisely who and what they are. And this
Speaker 2: means we will have the opportunity to destroy them. Now
Speaker 2: how would we do that? Well, first, if I'm not
Speaker 2: going to give you a detailed, perfect roadmap for how
Speaker 2: you can participate in this and how we can easily
Speaker 2: destroy the fascists, and the next you know, five or
Speaker 2: six minutes of a podcast. But I do have some theories.
Speaker 2: I will elaborate on them more in subsequent episodes. And
Speaker 2: I want to emphasize right now that this is possible
Speaker 2: because the cultural power of the far right, which seems
Speaker 2: so mighty right now, actually does rest on a house
Speaker 2: of cards. The Republican Party today is funded primarily by
Speaker 2: a coalition of car dealers who donate more than any
Speaker 2: other profession because their job depends on being able to
Speaker 2: scam consumers, multi level marketing corporations, supplement sales, affiliate marketing, megachurches,
Speaker 2: and of course are old friends in the oil and
Speaker 2: gas industry. And there's a lot of ways to attack
Speaker 2: these different pillars of right wing power, these people who
Speaker 2: are actually funding their media operations, who are funding a
Speaker 2: lot of these more radical candidates, and who are lobbying
Speaker 2: for changes in laws that hurt you and help them.
Speaker 2: And again, I'm not going to be able to give
Speaker 2: a comprehensive list of how you go about dismantling all
Speaker 2: of this. It is a formidable task, but you could
Speaker 2: do a lot of damage to the power of the
Speaker 2: far right by regulating car sales and punishing dealers who
Speaker 2: scam consumers, which is close to one hundred percent of dealers.
Speaker 2: You can ban the sale of unregulated supplements marketed as
Speaker 2: medical treatments, a thing that should be illegal, but effectively
Speaker 2: as not. You can ban pyramid schemes and prosecute the
Speaker 2: criminals who have made fortunes off of them. These are
Speaker 2: counterattacks that will improve daily life for huge numbers of
Speaker 2: voters and do functional damage to the right's ability to
Speaker 2: move and maneuver. Now, I don't mean to suggest that
Speaker 2: the only way to move on any of those issues
Speaker 2: is just to vote right. Democrats have had decades to
Speaker 2: fight back against this shit, and they have failed by
Speaker 2: nearly every measure. But we have the potential of a
Speaker 2: general strike coming up in twenty twenty eight if the
Speaker 2: UAW has their way, and the catastrophic failure of the
Speaker 2: Democratic Party in this election has I think created some
Speaker 2: space for new kinds of o organizing. The last point
Speaker 2: I want to leave you with is one more piece
Speaker 2: of evidence that the juggernaut hurtling towards us is not
Speaker 2: so hail and hardy as it seems. In April of
Speaker 2: this year, The Atlantic published an article based on analytics
Speaker 2: of the most popular right wing news websites in the country.
Speaker 2: They wrote, this past February, readership of the ten largest
Speaker 2: conservative websites was down forty percent compared with the same
Speaker 2: month in twenty twenty. According to The Rtening, a newsletter
Speaker 2: that uses monthly data from Commscore, essentially the Nielsen ratings
Speaker 2: of the Internet, to track right wing media. Some of
Speaker 2: the bigger names in the field that have have been
Speaker 2: pummeled the hardest. The Daily Caller lost fifty seven percent
Speaker 2: of its audience, Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation,
Speaker 2: was down eighty one percent, and The Federalist, founded just
Speaker 2: over a decade ago, lost a staggering ninety one percent. Now,
Speaker 2: these numbers are startlingly consistent across right wing media, and
Speaker 2: they are vastly worse than what liberal and left leaning
Speaker 2: media has seen over the same time period. A number
Speaker 2: of ostensibly liberals sites like The Times have seen an
Speaker 2: increase in subscribers over the same period, and I can
Speaker 2: confirm to you that here at cool Zone we have
Speaker 2: more listeners and subscribers than we did in twenty twenty. Now,
Speaker 2: should you feel like there's nothing to worry about just
Speaker 2: because the right wing media is taking a fall, No,
Speaker 2: But what this should be evidence of is that, again,
Speaker 2: their support has always largely been built on their ability
Speaker 2: to generate huge amounts of money and essentially buy attention,
Speaker 2: you know, and that's largely where guys like Ben Shapiro
Speaker 2: have gotten their cultural power. And that's made Ben Shapiro
Speaker 2: a wealthy man, but it hasn't actually brought him a
Speaker 2: lot of people who give a shit what he has
Speaker 2: to say. The actual number of people paying attention to
Speaker 2: the scary motherfuckers that you see in these clips that
Speaker 2: spread in liberal and lefty social media is very small.
Speaker 2: And it's very small because these people are crazy assholes
Speaker 2: who most of the folks around you, who are basically
Speaker 2: decent people, because most people are decent, fucking hate what
Speaker 2: we have seen here. What we are seeing here is
Speaker 2: the shattering of an illusion, and the popularity of a
Speaker 2: lot of right wing media was only ever an illusion,
Speaker 2: popped up by an infusion of cash from billionaire fail
Speaker 2: suns desperate to hold on to their money. Most people
Speaker 2: don't like or trust these folks, and the arrogance and
Speaker 2: certainty of victory that the Trump campaign and the Sobics
Speaker 2: of the country have been showing now, well, it's caused
Speaker 2: them to expose themselves. There is precisely one thing you
Speaker 2: can always count on from fascists and it's that they're
Speaker 2: dogshit at estimating risk. Time and time again. They convince
Speaker 2: themselves that they cannot be stopped in pick fights that
Speaker 2: they wind up losing. And that is perhaps the most
Speaker 2: reliable thing that we can predict from their behavior, and
Speaker 2: maybe the most comforting thing I can tell you going
Speaker 2: forward now. I also just retyped and re recorded this
Speaker 2: ending in the wake of the assassination attempt against former
Speaker 2: President Trump, and I want to talk a little bit
Speaker 2: about that before we go out, because that is certainly
Speaker 2: potentially a game changer. You know, people saying this could
Speaker 2: shack the whole election are not wrong, but at this
Speaker 2: point far from a guarantee. As well, as I said earlier,
Speaker 2: there have been assassination attempts against sitting presidents and former
Speaker 2: presidents that have not moved the needle in an election
Speaker 2: either at least not in a really clear way in
Speaker 2: favor of the person the attempt was against. So we
Speaker 2: don't know how this is going to play. One thing
Speaker 2: I have seen in the immediate wake of this, within
Speaker 2: minutes of the attempt itself and video of it going up,
Speaker 2: is liberals, I think mainly liberals, but also some people
Speaker 2: on the left immediately being like, this is a Reichstag
Speaker 2: fire situation, this is staged, This is obviously a fake attempt.
Speaker 2: I don't see any evidence of that in the video
Speaker 2: that's out there. I do not believe this was faked.
Speaker 2: I do not need a conspiracy to believe that somebody
Speaker 2: would want to take a shot at former President Trump.
Speaker 2: The video does not show any clear weird signs that
Speaker 2: would make me suspect something odd was going on. One
Speaker 2: of the things that's come out it looks like the
Speaker 2: shooter was on a roof nearby, pretty clear evidence of that.
Speaker 2: At this point. There are some reports from people in
Speaker 2: the crowd who say that they pointed out the guy
Speaker 2: on the roof to police and were basically ignored. You know,
Speaker 2: the police didn't do anything. That also does not seem
Speaker 2: weird to me, and if it does to you. I
Speaker 2: want to explain something about these events because I've been
Speaker 2: to a number of events during presidential campaigns with the
Speaker 2: Secret Services doing security and other kind of large scale
Speaker 2: you know, events like this where there's a lot of
Speaker 2: different law enforcement agencies, and at all of them you
Speaker 2: will see snipers on the roof. It is not hard
Speaker 2: to find them. These guys. Some of them I assume
Speaker 2: are very well camouflaged. I'm not saying I know I've
Speaker 2: seen everyone that's around at one of these things, but
Speaker 2: you see a lot of them, right, and so do
Speaker 2: the cops. Right, It's just not abnormal, And there are
Speaker 2: always a ton of law enforcement agencies. You know, this
Speaker 2: was just another Trump rally, so relatively minor as events
Speaker 2: in you know, a presidential campaign go. But you still
Speaker 2: have state and local cops. You still have at least
Speaker 2: the Secret Service, probably more than just the Secret Service
Speaker 2: when it comes to federal agencies. So you know, conservatively,
Speaker 2: at minimum, probably at least a half dozen different law
Speaker 2: enforcement agencies covering this event, right, And there's definitely going
Speaker 2: to be some people there who know where all of
Speaker 2: the snipers are supposed to be, right, presumably within the
Speaker 2: Secret Service, But that is not the average cop on
Speaker 2: the ground. The average cop covering this event, especially walking
Speaker 2: around doing foot patrols, does not know where federal law
Speaker 2: enforcement has every single sniper set up, and they are
Speaker 2: like anyway, I started this episode talking about the normalcy bias, right, Well,
Speaker 2: that's not just a thing that you can trip you
Speaker 2: up when you are trying to predict the future months
Speaker 2: or years in advance. It is a thing that can
Speaker 2: trip you up predicting something a minute in advance. Right,
Speaker 2: you see, as a cop walking through this event, someone says, Hey,
Speaker 2: there's a guy up on the roof with a gun. Well,
Speaker 2: you've seen a half dozen guys on the roof with guns.
Speaker 2: You've been told there's a bunch of different Secret Service
Speaker 2: and DHS sniper teams up there. Maybe your agency has
Speaker 2: some guys up on the roof, you know, sharpshooters, not
Speaker 2: at all weird. You go, yeah, maybe you even see
Speaker 2: the guy And the pictures I've seen, looks like he
Speaker 2: was wearing CAMA. Looks like he was wearing the kind
Speaker 2: of combat gear that cops wear, but also that anyone
Speaker 2: can buy, because cops look like you know a lot
Speaker 2: of people who just buy this shit and do it recreationally,
Speaker 2: you know, go go shooting and training in the woods
Speaker 2: or whatever, like a lot of It's not hard to
Speaker 2: gain access to gear that at a glance would look
Speaker 2: enough like a cop. And my guess is that this
Speaker 2: guy counted on the normalcy bias. He figured my best
Speaker 2: shot at being able to get away with this is
Speaker 2: if I post up on a roof somewhere and assume
Speaker 2: that the cops that spot me immediately won't know right
Speaker 2: away what I am right. And that does seem to
Speaker 2: be what happened at this moment, And you know, I
Speaker 2: take that as a lot of things very unclear. This
Speaker 2: is going to again affect the election, but take it
Speaker 2: as a warning against falling for the normalcy bias, because
Speaker 2: just because something seems like it's not weird, like it's
Speaker 2: not a sign of a change of something very different
Speaker 2: about to go down, doesn't mean it isn't. Yeah, you
Speaker 2: can never trust your assumptions, and that goes both ways,
Speaker 2: with both ways with this, I am seeing a lot
Speaker 2: of understandable catastrophizing. This is a terrifying thing. I am
Speaker 2: someone who's about to head into the RNC not thrilled
Speaker 2: that this has happened. But that doesn't mean we know
Speaker 2: what the fallout is going to be. It doesn't mean
Speaker 2: we know what the reaction and the result is. I mean,
Speaker 2: for among other things, this is not necessarily fully optimistic.
Speaker 2: But I don't know how much this moves the needle,
Speaker 2: because I don't know how many people who can be
Speaker 2: convinced would be swayed by something like this for how
Speaker 2: many people this could change their opinion on the election,
Speaker 2: and how many people are going to believe that this
Speaker 2: was real and not. You know, I've even seen people
Speaker 2: claiming that, like, yeah, Trump bladed himself the way a
Speaker 2: wrestler would. Again, I think that's all nonsense. It's just
Speaker 2: really unclear how people are going to react, right, It's
Speaker 2: not worthless to look back to. You know, there's an
Speaker 2: attempt on Reagan to try and see and other assassination
Speaker 2: attempts and how they've affected elections. But all of that
Speaker 2: shit happened prior to the modern era of social media.
Speaker 2: All of that shit happened prior to everyone's brains getting
Speaker 2: broken by the internet. So I'm not going to tell
Speaker 2: you this is a good time. I'm not going to
Speaker 2: tell you things are chill. They the fuck aren't. But
Speaker 2: I am going to tell you the future is not written,
Speaker 2: and don't panic until next time. I'm Robert Evans and
Speaker 2: this is It Could Happen Here. We'll be back later
Speaker 2: this week with coverage of the Republican Convention. Welcome to
Speaker 2: It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart
Speaker 2: and nothing says, things falling apart better than as many
Speaker 2: Republicans as possible jammed into as small a place as possible,
Speaker 2: with half of the cops in the United States of
Speaker 2: America there as well. With me is Sophie Lichterman and
Speaker 2: Garrison Davis are on the ground hoarding team for the
Speaker 2: Republican Convention National.
Speaker 6: Wow, it's true.
Speaker 1: We're here.
Speaker 2: We are at the Republican National Convention, the day after
Speaker 2: former President Donald Trump was nearly struck down by an
Speaker 2: assassin's bullet. And uh, yeah, it's been a pretty fun.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The vibes are great. Vibes are great. Actually, that's kind
Speaker 2: of the thing we should start with. We, I mean,
Speaker 2: the president for a president was shot yesterday, and the
Speaker 2: shit online has been absolutely unhinged. And I was expecting.
Speaker 2: I was expecting a lot, but certainly a different vibe
Speaker 2: at the thing, which was I think basically the same
Speaker 2: vibe it would have had if the president hadn't been shot.
Speaker 2: People were by and large not acting different.
Speaker 7: Okay, so set the scene. All. We went to this red,
Speaker 7: white and Brew kickoff party.
Speaker 2: Shocking amount of free alcohol.
Speaker 7: Shocking amount of free alcohol. How many people do you
Speaker 7: think we're there? I don't know, thousands, That definitely thousands
Speaker 7: of people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the not crazy crowded, but it was big.
Speaker 6: The flyers said they were estimating ten to fifty thousand
Speaker 6: people over the course of like five six hours.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah.
Speaker 7: Trace Adkins performed and sang a song with the lyrics
Speaker 7: Garrison Well.
Speaker 6: This was actually a spoken word intro to.
Speaker 2: This was in the middle of the songs.
Speaker 7: Yes, We're we were.
Speaker 2: If you haven't heard, Trace is a country music star,
Speaker 2: and not a good one. I'm not sure if it
Speaker 2: was him or if it was Toby Keith that Christofferson said,
Speaker 2: did the country music what pante Hoose did to finger fucking.
Speaker 2: But that is the kind It's a famous line, Sophie.
Speaker 2: He's a terrible musician.
Speaker 1: He just died. Anyways.
Speaker 7: The line that was said was Garrison.
Speaker 6: Well, he had this little preamble about how he was
Speaker 6: getting really handsy with like with his nurse.
Speaker 2: He's sick recently. He has a nurse. She's taken great
Speaker 2: care of him and she hasn't gotten angry that he
Speaker 2: keeps touching her against her.
Speaker 6: Getting really handsy, and she would actually press charges if
Speaker 6: they weren't married, which is the punchline, ha.
Speaker 7: Ha ha ha is that is that and that was
Speaker 7: kind of the energy of the entire event.
Speaker 6: So just raping your wife not even a joke, just
Speaker 6: like just like a celebratory statement. As we are walking
Speaker 6: around a crowd of like, yeah, at least five.
Speaker 7: Thous we walk into this event and there are like
Speaker 7: balloon wavy noodle guys inflatable arm flame a US car dealerships.
Speaker 2: Never seen that many of them in one place.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And then there's there's there's women on platforms.
Speaker 2: So there's a red carpet and all fifty state flags
Speaker 2: are lining it, and periodically in between the flags there
Speaker 2: are plints where there are what would we used to
Speaker 2: call booth babes, which is, if you would go to
Speaker 2: like E three would was the video game convention, there
Speaker 2: would be scantly clad women. Car conventions do the same thing.
Speaker 2: Cees used to do this too, women wearing very little
Speaker 2: who are there to like stand next to products or whatever.
Speaker 2: In this case, they were just mostly naked women.
Speaker 7: Dancing and waving at people. They came in and one
Speaker 7: of them winked at me, thank you so much.
Speaker 2: I hope she had a fine night me too.
Speaker 6: We did not I hope she got paid more than
Speaker 6: we're getting paid.
Speaker 2: Almost no way, not fastly. Because I have asked a
Speaker 2: couple of different service industry people, including Uber drivers tonight,
Speaker 2: how are the tips, And everyone said, dog shit, Yeah,
Speaker 2: nobody's been happy with the tips.
Speaker 7: Yeah. And it took us quite a while to actually
Speaker 7: get to this place because of all the different security
Speaker 7: checkpoints and roadblocks and just the absolute chaotic, unhinged amount
Speaker 7: of out of town cops.
Speaker 2: And this is not just the R and C. If
Speaker 2: you've never been to a political convention, you will be
Speaker 2: in whatever city this year. It's the RNC is in Milwaukee,
Speaker 2: and the DNC is going to beat Chicago. But whatever
Speaker 2: city it's in, you will run into LAPD cops, Dallas cops,
Speaker 2: like every cops from every part of the country, in
Speaker 2: addition to secret Service, FBI, homeland security investigations, like all, like,
Speaker 2: all of the kinds of cops are here.
Speaker 7: Correct.
Speaker 6: The most interesting kind of cop that I've seen a
Speaker 6: great a great number of is US Capitol police cops.
Speaker 2: A lot of Capitol police.
Speaker 6: Here, which is just a little bit funny considering what
Speaker 6: happened like uh, just about four years ago.
Speaker 2: This crowd assaulted Capitol Police Office.
Speaker 6: It's kind of an odd dynamic because you have like
Speaker 6: these Capitol police here, you know, priding security essentially and
Speaker 6: you know, protecting attendees to some degree. Well, there's you know,
Speaker 6: a decent chance that many of them were just engaged
Speaker 6: in combat with many of these same people where there
Speaker 6: was casualties on both sides, just which is just a
Speaker 6: kind of an odd dynamic that you don't really see
Speaker 6: very often.
Speaker 2: Yeah, honestly, again, it's the vibes have still been pretty
Speaker 2: much chill for an event like this. It has not
Speaker 2: been heightened in terms of like levels of anger. We
Speaker 2: did see as soon as we arrived at the airport,
Speaker 2: literally the second we got to baggage, there was a
Speaker 2: guy wearing a shirt with the picture of Trump with
Speaker 2: a bloody ear right after he was shot on it.
Speaker 2: He clearly made it last night himself.
Speaker 7: Yep, and it said the iron don.
Speaker 2: The iron down. But that was kind of it in
Speaker 2: terms of maybe, you know, it's going to take a
Speaker 2: little longer for there to be more shooting merch out there,
Speaker 2: but I don't. But more than that, I just didn't
Speaker 2: hear a lot of like we sat down, we got
Speaker 2: some food and some drinks. When we were at this big party,
Speaker 2: we sat down with these two ladies who were delegates
Speaker 2: from Texas, older women. One was clearly in her eighties,
Speaker 2: one looked like she was more in her sixties. Talked
Speaker 2: with them for quite a while, and they were very
Speaker 2: far right, very strong views on religious conservatism, very anti
Speaker 2: trans the older lady that I talked to. None of
Speaker 2: them said a single word about Trump getting shot. It
Speaker 2: absolutely did not come up, which I was kind of
Speaker 2: surprised about it.
Speaker 6: And I got here a little bit earlier than Robert
Speaker 6: and Sophie, and I was hanging out with some of
Speaker 6: the delegates from Idaho and North Dakota, and similarly, no
Speaker 6: one was talking about that. Yeah, it was, it was
Speaker 6: just not mentioned.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 6: It was on Fox News in the background. Yeah, you
Speaker 6: could see on the TV every building. Yeah, it's constantly playing.
Speaker 6: But nobody in person seems to be thinking about it
Speaker 6: or like discussing it as like it's like a thing.
Speaker 6: And possibly it's just because they've assumed that Trump is
Speaker 6: just always under this kind of attack, right, it's like
Speaker 6: the most attacked man, right, Like this isn't even like
Speaker 6: a big deal for them. This is just like realizing
Speaker 6: what they've already built up in their head. Right, So
Speaker 6: I think that that could maybe just be a factor.
Speaker 6: This isn't like as impactful for them because like you know,
Speaker 6: of course, like he's he's he's obviously being treated so unfairly.
Speaker 2: I think there's a lot of aim in that. The
Speaker 2: only other thing I could think of maybe would be
Speaker 2: that just it hasn't sunk in yet because it's so
Speaker 2: big and so recent and everyone coming to this probably
Speaker 2: like us, was just crazy busy packing and like getting
Speaker 2: their lives in order for this. Sure, but I think
Speaker 2: you're probably onto something with that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean it's not a small thing. I mean
Speaker 7: the people that we talked to, one of them was
Speaker 7: a delegate for the state of Texas, and they said
Speaker 7: they had to travel all the way. They got their
Speaker 7: hotels in Madison. Oh, so they have to commute back
Speaker 7: and forth from Madison to Milwaukee to come to this event.
Speaker 2: You know, Yeah, that is that is a long time. Yeah,
Speaker 2: speaking of ugh, you know what doesn't make me go ugh?
Speaker 7: These products and services.
Speaker 2: Yes, we are sponsored first off by Woodman's, the grocery
Speaker 2: store that won't sell you a hard liquor. Past midnight Woodman's.
Speaker 2: Everyone lied to you about Wisconsin being proper alcoholics.
Speaker 7: And we're back. And I have to say that the today,
Speaker 7: the scariest part of our day was going to this
Speaker 7: Woodman's grocery store, which is opened twenty four hours, seven
Speaker 7: days a week.
Speaker 6: It was not walking into a crowd of ten thousand Republicans.
Speaker 6: It was, in fact, walking into Woodman's at midnight was
Speaker 6: astronomically more frightening on like existential levels.
Speaker 2: It's like one of these like massive, massive, like Walmart style,
Speaker 2: but like really big Walmart style stores. They had a
Speaker 2: whole isle of Maraschino.
Speaker 6: Cherries, a Marashido cherry asle.
Speaker 2: There were a shocking number.
Speaker 7: There was a fried onion aisles.
Speaker 2: There were a shocking number of like four to seven
Speaker 2: year old children leaving the stores, walking freely in and out.
Speaker 2: It was leaving this just so going somewhere, but it
Speaker 2: was that there was.
Speaker 6: There was twenty five numerical aisles, plus a full like
Speaker 6: alphabetical aisle.
Speaker 7: There were so many aisles they had to switch.
Speaker 6: From numbers would not sell us beers, and they wouldn't
Speaker 6: have said credit cards either. Fascinating stuff.
Speaker 2: Anyways, you Wisconsinites think you people are alcohol I have
Speaker 2: gone there's there's nowhere that won't sell me liquor in
Speaker 2: fucking Los Angeles. You know that's a drinking city. God
Speaker 2: damn it, God damn it.
Speaker 1: Garrison.
Speaker 6: What else, Well, there was also a security guy roaming
Speaker 6: inside woman's do you know where? There was also security oh,
Speaker 6: everywhere else, literally the entire city of Milwaukee right.
Speaker 7: Now, on roofs, in the street, on bikes, on boats.
Speaker 2: We knew. But well, I honestly, this is not abnormal.
Speaker 7: I know.
Speaker 2: I did not notice anything that I didn't recall from
Speaker 2: previous conventions. It did not seem I think it just
Speaker 2: might be because there's so many there can't be more cops,
Speaker 2: Like they could not have had more cops. I'm sure
Speaker 2: people are more alert. I'm sure, particularly the rooftops sniper
Speaker 2: teams are under the gun right now. But I didn't
Speaker 2: notice anything more intense than usual.
Speaker 6: Well, and we were talking with some other people from
Speaker 6: out of town who we were just getting rides with,
Speaker 6: and like the amount of the amount of barricades and
Speaker 6: blockades that have been put up over the course of
Speaker 6: a Sunday, like.
Speaker 7: It changes constantly.
Speaker 6: It's constantly changing which roads are blockaded. Like like earlier today
Speaker 6: people could commute downtown.
Speaker 2: That might be a little different, fairly easier.
Speaker 6: And progressively throughout the day that became much much harder,
Speaker 6: to the point where now downtown is almost like you
Speaker 6: just you just can't drive like that. Like most of
Speaker 6: downtown is just literally blocked off by the type of
Speaker 6: fence that was developed in Portland back in twenty twenty,
Speaker 6: and that is covering almost all of Milwaukee's downtown right now.
Speaker 2: The fence is familiar from previous conventions. I don't remember
Speaker 2: the moving blockades of streets that that actually might be.
Speaker 2: If it's not maybe if it happened the last convention,
Speaker 2: I didn't recall it.
Speaker 1: Were there any.
Speaker 7: At this party? Were there any booths or things that
Speaker 7: you saw that surprised your well.
Speaker 2: There was this fifteen. There sure was Daniel Defence at
Speaker 2: the US Concealed Carry Association.
Speaker 6: A little bit of poor taste, one might say.
Speaker 2: You know what, in a way, because Daniel Defense is
Speaker 2: number one, is the company that made the air fifteen
Speaker 2: that the Evaldi shooter used. If you don't know guns,
Speaker 2: the Daniel Defense is most famous to people who aren't
Speaker 2: gun people. For it was the company that made the
Speaker 2: gun that the Uvaldi shooter used. In general, they are
Speaker 2: like a middle high end ar company. They're not like
Speaker 2: the very nicest on the market, but they're not cheap.
Speaker 2: They're expensive guns. They're pretty well made, and they have
Speaker 2: made direct kind of buy in and inroads with a
Speaker 2: lot of right wing culture war gun figures. Like they
Speaker 2: have outreached more to like fascist types than most because
Speaker 2: most big gun you go to, like SIGs Hour six
Speaker 2: hour is not going to sponsor a Nazi type adjacent
Speaker 2: person or a Christian nationalist gun type person because they
Speaker 2: they do big contracts, right, Like Daniel Defense has has
Speaker 2: gone out on a limb with some like real assholes.
Speaker 6: It's weird because they didn't used to be like that
Speaker 6: as well. Like even like five years ago, Daniel Defense
Speaker 6: was typically like one of the more apolitical, not a
Speaker 6: political but like very like less partisan gun companies. I
Speaker 6: remember when we were first talking about about like different
Speaker 6: gun brands back in like twenty twenty, it was definitely
Speaker 6: it was definitely different, and they made some small shifts
Speaker 6: in the past few years.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it may just have been that just everything was
Speaker 2: a little bit less politicized than in that space. I
Speaker 2: don't I don't know if I don't know enough about
Speaker 2: the company in the back end, but I'm not surprised
Speaker 2: that they were sponsoring. And you know, the thing they
Speaker 2: were sponsoring was the US Concealed Carry Association booth, which
Speaker 2: offers like insurance for people who have concealed handgun licenses
Speaker 2: and the like. But they were doing a free AR
Speaker 2: fifteen giveaway, which is definitely some would say in bad
Speaker 2: taste after what happened to the President. To be honest,
Speaker 2: no one would have thought about it at all. I
Speaker 2: kind of think it's like you are the people that
Speaker 2: you are.
Speaker 6: No, you know, yeah, I don't think anyone thought twice
Speaker 6: about that note whatsoever.
Speaker 2: And by God, I signed up to win the guns,
Speaker 2: so me too, I did not, Ah, Sophie, we could
Speaker 2: have had an extra attempt.
Speaker 7: Sorry, not sorry. Was there anything today that you know,
Speaker 7: surprised you, or like a feeling you had that was
Speaker 7: like unexpected or anything like that.
Speaker 8: Not.
Speaker 2: I had a long conversation with the older lady who
Speaker 2: was a delegate from Texas. We talked about because she
Speaker 2: she first kind of wanted to know is press. She
Speaker 2: asked like, basically, are you liars and in a nice
Speaker 2: old lady way, right.
Speaker 7: Yes, yes, that's that's the We basically had that.
Speaker 6: We had the same conversation the table where where.
Speaker 2: I come from. You know, there's truth and there's lies,
Speaker 2: and like one one is one is real and one isn't.
Speaker 2: I was like, well, you know, I've been in a
Speaker 2: lot of situations where different people have different recollections of
Speaker 2: the same event, and like, I don't know because I
Speaker 2: was I wasn't there like who's telling the truth? So
Speaker 2: you just kind of try to gather as So we
Speaker 2: got onto the subject of religion, and her attitude was
Speaker 2: that people should be free to do whatever they want
Speaker 2: to do, more or less, but they should have to
Speaker 2: admit it's bad, which was interesting as a take. I
Speaker 2: hadn't really heard that one before, where she was like, well,
Speaker 2: you know, my husband likes to do stuff that's not godly,
Speaker 2: but he just says it's bad. And I don't think
Speaker 2: that gay people should be punished by the law, but
Speaker 2: I think that people should have to say that it's bad.
Speaker 2: And that was that was a peculiar stance to run into.
Speaker 2: You know. Her attitude on Trump was that he was
Speaker 2: a fundamentally honest and good man. She didn't think he
Speaker 2: was perfect. You know, she knows she's done some shady
Speaker 2: things because he's a businessman, right, but she thinks he's
Speaker 2: basically really good. It was interesting like hearing her kind
Speaker 2: of lay some things out that way her. We talked
Speaker 2: about trans issues, and she is fully convinced that little
Speaker 2: kids are getting mutilated all the time with transgender surgeries.
Speaker 2: But I asked, like, what if a twenty two year
Speaker 2: old or a twenty four year old wants to get
Speaker 2: on hormones and she or a gender you know, transition surgery,
Speaker 2: And she was like, well, adult should be able to
Speaker 2: do whatever they want, which was interesting. But yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: from a lady in her eighties or whatnot. Like, we
Speaker 2: had a relatively pleasant conversation even though she is clearly
Speaker 2: someone who thinks that Christianity should be the law of
Speaker 2: the land and the official religion of the state, and
Speaker 2: everybody should have to acknowledge that Christians are right. That
Speaker 2: was interesting. I'm always fascinated by actually like trying to
Speaker 2: drill down with people at these events what they believe in.
Speaker 2: How much of the rhetoric that like we see online
Speaker 2: is specifically transferred over to them, and when you get
Speaker 2: right down to it, they often believe in a lot
Speaker 2: of like the heart, like you know, believe that there
Speaker 2: are kids being mutilated or whatever. But also a lot
Speaker 2: of the rhetoric you get around, like well we need
Speaker 2: to make it legal to believe other things isn't as
Speaker 2: widely shared. Although I don't think that lady would actually
Speaker 2: fight against or have any real issue with people's people
Speaker 2: being criminalized for not being Christian, it's just clearly not
Speaker 2: her primary a focus either.
Speaker 7: Besides the mistrust of media and press. The conversation that
Speaker 7: Gary and I had with the other woman, she was
Speaker 7: giving her version of, you know, her opinion on Roby Wade,
Speaker 7: an abortion and things like that, and one of the
Speaker 7: things she said to us was when she found out
Speaker 7: that we lived in Portland at a time, she was like,
Speaker 7: what was like living in a city with liberals? And
Speaker 7: I think that's funny and yeah.
Speaker 6: But it's like a different species to them.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I played around with saying when people would ask where
Speaker 2: I'm from, either Texas or Portland, because both of those
Speaker 2: are technically accurate, And every time I said Portland, you
Speaker 2: got it like you got a look. Every single time
Speaker 2: you bring up Portland, you get a look. You can
Speaker 2: definitely tell that it's a shibboleth to these people. No,
Speaker 2: it is something.
Speaker 6: It's like it's the city of the enemy, like it
Speaker 6: is like the.
Speaker 2: Rep em Yeah, and that was really interesting. The other
Speaker 2: thing I noticed was just saying you were media, people's
Speaker 2: attitude changed a bit. But when we mentioned that we
Speaker 2: worked for the radio station that we worked for, I
Speaker 2: think most of them ever heard, because there's a lot
Speaker 2: of right wing talk radio that are technically co workers
Speaker 2: of ours that changed their attitudes back. And I think
Speaker 2: like radio, weirdly enough, it is register. It's actually it
Speaker 2: makes total sense.
Speaker 6: It's like a nostalgia thing, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's not just said it's like radio is right
Speaker 2: wing media. Sure, the right owns, particularly talk radio. And
Speaker 2: I think that when we set when you say radio,
Speaker 2: when you say media, they start to think one thing.
Speaker 2: But when you say radio, that's not something that people
Speaker 2: have a negative attitude.
Speaker 6: Not tied like the coastal eleitism of like newspapers, TV channels. Yes,
Speaker 6: speaking of coastal elitism, here's these ads brought to you
Speaker 6: by companies probably based on one of the coasts, maybe
Speaker 6: not maybe a Midwest company.
Speaker 2: God, I hope not, because the Midwest again doesn't sell
Speaker 2: liquor at Woodsman's after after midnight.
Speaker 7: You're twenty for our grocery store. Let us have some alcoholic?
Speaker 2: What is wrong with you people?
Speaker 6: Okay, we are back.
Speaker 2: We're back. So at the end of this we are
Speaker 2: going to talk about the assassination attempt on former President Trump.
Speaker 2: More has happened since Monday, so we're going to catch
Speaker 2: you up on what we're thinking about that and kind
Speaker 2: of the conclusions that we've drawn. We wanted to talk
Speaker 2: a little bit about. One last thing are the convention,
Speaker 2: which is kind of what we're expecting for the coming days. Tomorrow,
Speaker 2: there's an AI panel there is there is is.
Speaker 6: It Women in AI, Women and Democracy?
Speaker 2: Oh my God?
Speaker 7: By Microsoft?
Speaker 2: Sponsored by Microsoft, So that's going to be great.
Speaker 6: There's there's a number of other interesting panels. Unfortunately, all
Speaker 6: of the Turning Point USA panels are closed to press.
Speaker 2: Yeah, real bummer.
Speaker 6: Another another event that close press is about two or
Speaker 6: three times every day there is a film screening of
Speaker 6: a new Ronald Reagan movie.
Speaker 2: Start Reagan the Movie. Reagan the Movie.
Speaker 6: Starring John Voyd, which we've received some free merch for
Speaker 6: we have these wonderful hats made in totally military fine,
Speaker 6: totally chill. That's going to be showing every single day
Speaker 6: multiple times. Also closed depressed, so that's unfortunate. There's rumors
Speaker 6: and talk that Trump might make an early appearance, that
Speaker 6: he might they might try to secure the nomination a
Speaker 6: little bit early, just so he gets extra secret service
Speaker 6: detailed because of weird laws.
Speaker 7: Interesting. Some of the speakers that are supposed to come
Speaker 7: are Nikky Haley, Jadie Vance, Ricky Rubio for me, Ricky
Speaker 7: and were so close. That's an NBA player from Spain.
Speaker 7: Marco Rubio suicide.
Speaker 2: I wish the Ricky Rubio from Spain was the vice
Speaker 2: president Spain's coming.
Speaker 1: He's so sorry.
Speaker 2: I guess he doesn't know much about our laws. That said,
Speaker 2: neither is jd Vance putting.
Speaker 6: Ron's gonna make an appearance.
Speaker 7: Good old Pudding Ron interesting to me, but to neither
Speaker 7: of you had any name recognition. But Ember Rose is
Speaker 7: going to speak.
Speaker 2: I don't know that bro who used to I'm at
Speaker 2: the Republican Convention. I got to blend in.
Speaker 1: She used to.
Speaker 7: I don't know if she currently does, but she used
Speaker 7: to run a thing called slut walk in LA and
Speaker 7: dated Kanye West. Anyways, I guess it makes a little
Speaker 7: bit more sense when you add the Kanye West to it.
Speaker 7: But she's speaking.
Speaker 2: Used to date Kanye Ya if we were like nothing,
Speaker 2: nothing about what she's doing could surprise me now, and.
Speaker 7: Like all the Trump relatives are speaking besides Ivanka anyways,
Speaker 7: because she's not participating this time around for her kids.
Speaker 2: O good for her. Yeah, well that's good, although I
Speaker 2: don't know if she doesn't participate in enough, she might
Speaker 2: wind up on a golf course too.
Speaker 7: Wow. Dark Anyways, I'm just saying he did it speaking
Speaker 7: of that, speaking of death. Oh no, no, sorry, bad transition. Anyways,
Speaker 7: It's gonna be great. Guys, super super super optimistic about it.
Speaker 2: Everyone was worried about it. It's it's it's it's pretty chill.
Speaker 2: There were some protests, but the only protests were people.
Speaker 7: That were complaining that the that the that the GOP
Speaker 7: was not pro life enough.
Speaker 2: I talked about this when talking about kind of like
Speaker 2: fracture points that are already starting to appear in the GOP.
Speaker 2: One of the big ones is Trump removed mandatory national
Speaker 2: abortion ban from the Republican platform, and there were a
Speaker 2: group of people protesting out in front of the RNCA
Speaker 2: very angry about that. Ye, most of the people who
Speaker 2: I heard a couple of people talking about them, seem
Speaker 2: to think they were idiots, which is interesting. Yeah, had
Speaker 2: that experience.
Speaker 6: Yeah, only protests we've seen so far as people from
Speaker 6: as people farther farther to the right on certain issues
Speaker 6: than I. Guess it won't last tip, but I will share.
Speaker 6: That kind of segues into our next discussion involving firearm.
Speaker 6: So I had I had a little room mix up
Speaker 6: with the with the with another with some like North
Speaker 6: Dakota delegate because we have the same last name. So
Speaker 6: we got our room switched. So I was just sitting
Speaker 6: on my laptop working and this this guy you know,
Speaker 6: scans in it starts opening the door. It's like, oh, sorry,
Speaker 6: I didn't realize, you know, blah blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 6: We figured it out, we were both So then we
Speaker 6: got in the elevator, both to go down to the
Speaker 6: front desk, like get this sordid, And he remarks to
Speaker 6: me saying, well, I'm I'm sure glad you weren't pack.
Speaker 6: And when I when I busted in the hotel room,
Speaker 6: and I'm like, yeah, yeah, I guess, And it's just
Speaker 6: it was just a fascinating little glimpse that like that
Speaker 6: was the first thing that came into his mind. Is
Speaker 6: that if someone opens your hotel room door, is that
Speaker 6: you're gonna just You're just gonna You're just gonna start blasted.
Speaker 6: Like that was that was that was like, it's like
Speaker 6: immediate thought, is that the good thing, good thing you
Speaker 6: didn't have your gun on you, And like there was
Speaker 6: just such like an assumption of that's like of like
Speaker 6: that is like the correct thing to do, Yeah, is
Speaker 6: if you see your door you start to get open,
Speaker 6: you just start fireing away. And I found that to
Speaker 6: be a really really interesting moment. Speaking of firearms.
Speaker 2: Speaking of firearms, let's talk about that dude who shot
Speaker 2: the president and then got show barely and also killed
Speaker 2: that guy whose Twitter presence wasn't great. Yeah, So I
Speaker 2: want to talk about this shooting a little bit because
Speaker 2: we're we're now at the point where some stuff is
Speaker 2: started to settle out and we have it's at the
Speaker 2: point where I think it's very unlikely we are going
Speaker 2: to find much more on his social media. It would
Speaker 2: have been found by now, based on the way these
Speaker 2: things work, could be a manifesto somewhere, could be a
Speaker 2: treasure show of info somewhere, but I think something would
Speaker 2: have come out about it. So my guess is this
Speaker 2: is like the Vegas shooting. If you think back Stephen
Speaker 2: Paddock shooting where he killed like seventy something people at
Speaker 2: that country music show. Something that's going to be an
Speaker 2: enigma to people for a while. And it makes a
Speaker 2: lot of sense to me. I know it makes a
Speaker 2: lot of sense to you too, Garrison, and I kind
Speaker 2: of want to talk about why, because what we do
Speaker 2: know about them that is confirmed is some of their
Speaker 2: former classmates have talked depressed. Some of those classmates have
Speaker 2: said I don't recall the shooter being particularly political. There
Speaker 2: are some people who said, no, he was really conservative.
Speaker 2: You know, when we would have like class debates, he
Speaker 2: would sometimes be the only guy on like the right
Speaker 2: wing side of it, you know, arguing a point or whatever.
Speaker 2: But no one seemed to say that he was like
Speaker 2: weirdly right, Like he was conservative the way that like
Speaker 2: right wing kids in a school are, but not in
Speaker 2: a way that people are like, oh, that kid's a fucking.
Speaker 6: Not see and in a way that makes you just
Speaker 6: kind of like anti social, alienated because yeah.
Speaker 2: And he was not a very social kid. Some people
Speaker 2: say he was bullied. Most kids are. I was, you know, bullied,
Speaker 2: so I don't know that he was exceptionally bullied. He
Speaker 2: tried out once for the school rifle team, was not
Speaker 2: very good. Was so bad they didn't let him try
Speaker 2: out again, which is interesting.
Speaker 7: He wore hunting geared to class here.
Speaker 6: That's like it's like real tree camo. We're in the Midwest,
Speaker 6: Like that's not that's not uncommon.
Speaker 2: Not wildly weird.
Speaker 6: I guess he's in Pennsylvania, but still in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 2: It was nothing that really set anyone off. But it
Speaker 2: is also like all pretty conservative stuff. And just like
Speaker 2: the the gun YouTube channel who's wearing a Demolition Ranch shirt.
Speaker 2: Demolition Ranches probably the largest gun YouTube channel. They are
Speaker 2: effectively like a media company, like they're a small media empire,
Speaker 2: but they're also you know, they're definitely conservative. Some of
Speaker 2: the guys who work at that company you can tell
Speaker 2: associate with further right guys. But the video they go, Yeah,
Speaker 2: they their videos are relatively free of politics because they're
Speaker 2: big enough that that's bad for their business, right.
Speaker 6: Really they don't indulge in like partisan politics or like
Speaker 6: political opinion.
Speaker 7: It is.
Speaker 2: It's not like there are guys like a there's a
Speaker 2: guy like named Lewis Botkin who does a lot of
Speaker 2: videos where he will be doing like literally assassination drills
Speaker 2: where he's basically planning to like murder people in their cars.
Speaker 6: Or people who you know, pepper their videos with like
Speaker 6: anti trans joke rights, which we're seeing.
Speaker 2: Lots more of. Is this was not that, And I'm
Speaker 2: not saying that. Some people on Twitter when I bring
Speaker 2: this up get like angry, being like you're trying to
Speaker 2: protect the concern. No, I don't care about that. I'm
Speaker 2: just saying, this isn't the shirt you wear if you
Speaker 2: want to signal that you're like far right. This is
Speaker 2: the shirt you wear if you're kind of into guns
Speaker 2: but maybe not very good with them, right, Like, it's
Speaker 2: just kind of yes, yes, it means about as much
Speaker 2: as a guy wearing a John Wick t shirt, right
Speaker 2: like that that is kind of the level of that
Speaker 2: that like of what that implies more or less. So
Speaker 2: I guess kind of where we're standing is when we
Speaker 2: think about why he did this and that's the question
Speaker 2: everybody's kind of asking. I don't get the feeling that
Speaker 2: this guy was motivated by what most people call politics.
Speaker 2: I think he was a guy who was certainly more
Speaker 2: on the conservative end of things. I don't get the
Speaker 2: hint that he thought Trump was a dictator he needed
Speaker 2: to stop. I don't get the hint he may have
Speaker 2: been an accelerationist and that he thought that this would
Speaker 2: push some sort of civil war to completion, and you
Speaker 2: know that that would go well for the right. That's
Speaker 2: not impossible, but I haven't seen any evidence of that.
Speaker 7: The most interesting that you said to me about it, Robert,
Speaker 7: and I think Gary, you also said the same thing
Speaker 7: as like he was local, this was local, it was convenient.
Speaker 2: I think the feeling I get is that if Biden
Speaker 2: had showed up, he would have taken a shot at Biden.
Speaker 6: Now, I think that the model that we can look
Speaker 6: at this is the same model people have used for
Speaker 6: a lot of school shootings. There is a degree of
Speaker 6: like apathetic, a degree of just like suicidal action, and
Speaker 6: a degree of wanting to make some kind of impact,
Speaker 6: wanting to do some kind of thing that gains a
Speaker 6: sense of like infamy and school shooting simply just don't
Speaker 6: do that anymore. Mass shootings don't really do that anymore.
Speaker 2: You could kill five or six people, ten people at
Speaker 2: a grocery store, it doesn't move the needle.
Speaker 6: I believe there's a decent chance based on kind of
Speaker 6: the very like unpolitical online presence this guy has had,
Speaker 6: including from his Discord account, there's just simply no evidence
Speaker 6: he was like he had any kind of real political motivation,
Speaker 6: and instead all of what we've heard about his behavior
Speaker 6: and his politics seemed just way more similar to the
Speaker 6: profiles of mass shooters. And this I think the Trump
Speaker 6: thing was was a convenient was a measure of convenience
Speaker 6: having this happened in your hometown. I think it possibly
Speaker 6: could be just as likely if Joe Biden was doing
Speaker 6: a role, he might have tried the same thing. I
Speaker 6: don't think this was any more politically targeted than that,
Speaker 6: because we simply don't have any evidence to suggest that,
Speaker 6: and the few evidence we do have matches up with
Speaker 6: a lot of the profiles of these older kind of
Speaker 6: like more like Columbine style mass shootings.
Speaker 2: This seems like a Columnbiner more than anything Columbine. There's
Speaker 2: been well over one hundred different mass shootings inspired by
Speaker 2: that mass shooting, and the thing overwhelmingly that occurs to
Speaker 2: me just with what we get oft this kid is.
Speaker 2: I would if I had to describe his politics as
Speaker 2: relates to the shooting. It's not he's a right winger
Speaker 2: or a left winger. His politics are he's a mass shooter, yes, right.
Speaker 2: This is a guy who worships the probably did to
Speaker 2: some extent, was obsessed with the aesthetics of mass shootings.
Speaker 2: This was a guy who wanted, yeah, to be famous,
Speaker 2: and he saw an opportunity to do it in a place.
Speaker 6: Where he wanted books was the only way.
Speaker 2: And he did. He'll be in him, you know, And
Speaker 2: I'm interested in what that means because we had a way.
Speaker 2: We've had a wave for years of people doing mass
Speaker 2: shootings in public places because it used to get you
Speaker 2: into the history books. Not anymore, not anymore. This kid
Speaker 2: is in the history books now, And I kind of
Speaker 2: wonder if this is going to lead to a shift
Speaker 2: in the people who have previously been shooting up schools
Speaker 2: and grocery stores going. Well, if I want to get noticed,
Speaker 2: shooting up a school won't do it. But if I
Speaker 2: take a shot at insert political candidate please see service.
Speaker 2: This is theoretical.
Speaker 6: I think this action reminds me of a great deal
Speaker 6: is like this feels more similar to like the John
Speaker 6: Lennon shooting. Honestly, like is that is I think a
Speaker 6: much closer model. And I think a lot of people
Speaker 6: who are viewing this as political violence have find this
Speaker 6: to be a very confusing incident, and I don't think
Speaker 6: it's useful to view it the way that we typically
Speaker 6: view political violence. I think it's much close. I think
Speaker 6: it's much more understandable as being a kin to something
Speaker 6: like Colin Buying, the Las Vegas shooting, the John Lennon shooting.
Speaker 2: And when you bring that up to people, it makes
Speaker 2: them angry because it's a shooting of Donald Trump, the
Speaker 2: most politicized man who maybe has ever lived in the
Speaker 2: most politicized election of anyone's lifetimes. And people get really
Speaker 2: angry when you suggest this might not have been political
Speaker 2: in the way that you under conceive of politics, because
Speaker 2: they want it to fit into even if it's a
Speaker 2: scary box, a box that makes sense, and there's something
Speaker 2: so alien at about a guy who this was just
Speaker 2: the best way for me to be to die and
Speaker 2: be remembered is so different.
Speaker 6: And this guy is younger than I am twenty. Trump,
Speaker 6: for him has been a forever character of politics.
Speaker 2: He was twelve.
Speaker 8: He's just.
Speaker 6: A political character. This is just someone who represents what
Speaker 6: politics is. Yeah, he's not like an abnormal, you know,
Speaker 6: fascist threat, the same way that people who've studied polics
Speaker 6: for a long time can view Trump historically being like, oh,
Speaker 6: this is like a worrying trend. This is just like
Speaker 6: what regular politics are to people younger than me.
Speaker 1: Mm hm.
Speaker 6: So I think that's also another interesting way to view it,
Speaker 6: when it's like this is just like this is just
Speaker 6: who you grew up with as being the guy.
Speaker 2: This is just the guy. And you know, we started
Speaker 2: this talking about why it seemed like, at least from
Speaker 2: the conversations we were having, the assassination attempt was such
Speaker 2: a mild topic or so such a non topic or
Speaker 2: the people we met. And I wonder if some of
Speaker 2: it is confusion about what it means.
Speaker 6: Because this isn't This clearly isn't like an antifa guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it wasn't. It was an antifa guy. It wasn't
Speaker 2: you know, a trans person with blue hair, right, It
Speaker 2: wasn't something that fit into their narrative, like.
Speaker 6: Probably a lot of people's like grandkids. Yeah, right, like
Speaker 6: because most people here are are considered considered old.
Speaker 2: Wearing a gun T shirt that probably a third of
Speaker 2: the people in this have or at least they watch
Speaker 2: the chan right.
Speaker 6: Isn't it is an interesting what to view It is
Speaker 6: that the mass shooter looks like a lot of these
Speaker 6: people's like grandkids. Yeah, that is that is an interesting aspect.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, anyway, folks, I hope this has been enlightening.
Speaker 2: This is just the start of our week. So we're
Speaker 2: in for five more days that I'm sure each will
Speaker 2: be a worse time than the last. We're all going
Speaker 2: to go to sleep now and never.
Speaker 7: Go to Woodmands ever again.
Speaker 2: No, but we're going to find a place to get
Speaker 2: liquor tomorrow. I promise you that. God, gentlemen and Garrisons,
Speaker 2: this is it could happen here.
Speaker 6: I'm Garrison Davis and joined with Robert Evans and Sophie
Speaker 6: Lichterman or Day one of the official RNC, the Republican
Speaker 6: National Convention. Robert, Sophie, how's your day?
Speaker 2: Ben? Well, I'm tired. It was a long day. It
Speaker 2: was very red.
Speaker 6: Yeah, a lot of red.
Speaker 2: It was very loud. The drinks were very expensive.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we got Sony free drinks yesterday and not today.
Speaker 2: No, not once you're in the convention center. I don't know.
Speaker 2: We were trapped in a room with a lot of
Speaker 2: people who had were either used car salesman or spiritually
Speaker 2: were used car salesman.
Speaker 6: Also a lot of people who want to kill me specifically.
Speaker 2: Yes, we'll talk about this that more later. Yeah, today,
Speaker 2: Just structurally, what happened is, you know, it was a
Speaker 2: series of speeches. So you had a first off the
Speaker 2: big floor vote, right, so we got to watch all
Speaker 2: of the different states had their delegates and they have
Speaker 2: to form even though everyone knows what's happening, they have
Speaker 2: to like formally follow Robert's rules of order or whatever
Speaker 2: and confirm that Trump is the nominee. And then they
Speaker 2: announce and confirm the VP, who you all know by
Speaker 2: now was JD. Vance. We'll talk might as well talk
Speaker 2: a little bit about im now.
Speaker 3: JD.
Speaker 2: Vance is a guy who in the wake of Trump's
Speaker 2: initial victory. He's a dude who came from Appalachia sort
Speaker 2: of part time, went to an Ivy League school, did
Speaker 2: some time in the Marines and then made a bunch
Speaker 2: of money in business. And then when twenty sixteen happened
Speaker 2: and a lot of liberals were like, wow, how could
Speaker 2: Trump have won election? He capitalized by writing a book
Speaker 2: trying to explain the appalation experience, even though again he
Speaker 2: only kind of lived there part time and mostly. Yeah,
Speaker 2: had abandoned those people in that part, Like the book
Speaker 2: is about him abandoning that part of his life as
Speaker 2: soon as he possibly can. Not a great book by
Speaker 2: my opinion as someone who grew up in a really
Speaker 2: fucking poor town in the Deep South.
Speaker 7: But is he technically a millennial.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's the first millennial who might become vice president.
Speaker 7: That's a big part of why I think he was picked.
Speaker 2: Agreed, Yeah, that's a big part of why.
Speaker 7: So it was time for them to announce JD.
Speaker 2: Vance.
Speaker 7: They officially approved him. Delegates officially approved him, which happened
Speaker 7: very quickly, and he came out to Chance in Ohio,
Speaker 7: where he's from, was very stoked to have him there.
Speaker 7: Lots of chance of JD.
Speaker 1: JD.
Speaker 2: You're right, he had a hype man.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and he advanced his way out there with his
Speaker 7: wife and looked emotional, and yeah, all I know is
Speaker 7: that he really fucking hates lb gt q IA people
Speaker 7: and I really fucking ate him.
Speaker 2: Uh huh Yeah, I mean he said that he kind
Speaker 2: of like turned the corner finally on what side because
Speaker 2: he had said some anti Trump stuff once in the day,
Speaker 2: but he turned the corner. Who has this movie got
Speaker 2: really bad reviews? So if we wind up going into
Speaker 2: full fledged fascist dictatorship, we can blame Ron Howard for
Speaker 2: some of that. And to be honest, we always knew
Speaker 2: that was going to be the case. Yeah, valid, Yeah,
Speaker 2: after that, Yeah, Marjorie Taylor Green gave a speech, a
Speaker 2: couple other people, Tim Scott had a speech.
Speaker 7: So there was a break between sessions. We came back
Speaker 7: for the second session. The second session opens up with
Speaker 7: what I could only describe as I was like, Christopher Nolan,
Speaker 7: are you here? It was like a reception sounding music, Wow, traumatized,
Speaker 7: Thank you for that, traumatized video of like in a world, yeah,
Speaker 7: like showing crime and people losing money and women and
Speaker 7: babies crying.
Speaker 2: And then there's like literally bad clip art of money
Speaker 2: on fire, clip.
Speaker 7: Art of money on fire, and it's about it was
Speaker 7: like three to five minutes long, very long, because I
Speaker 7: took a video of it.
Speaker 6: It felt like a lea bad like action thriller trailer.
Speaker 6: Could have been partly AI. There was certainly some CGE
Speaker 6: animation towards the end because they were they had this
Speaker 6: camera that was sweeping through this fake city. It was
Speaker 6: all CG and it landed on this this this floodlight
Speaker 6: on top of a roof. It's broken, flickering, the floodlight
Speaker 6: gears are turning, the music is ramping up, and finally
Speaker 6: it lightens and we see Trump, the Trump signal shining
Speaker 6: in the cloudy sky, calling calling the hero the mass
Speaker 6: avenger as if it was the bat signal from.
Speaker 2: It was shameful and then and then people loved it. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I got a great reaction. There's also a video of
Speaker 2: all the scenes. If you if you've ever seen clips
Speaker 2: from rallies, you've probably seen little clips of Trump like
Speaker 2: fake dancing, doing doing that weird dancer his hand. He
Speaker 2: doesn't dance, but he's excited, but he's in a good mood,
Speaker 2: you know. The dance.
Speaker 7: It's what we would describe as a little wiggle. Anyways,
Speaker 7: it was a very long wiggle video.
Speaker 2: And people loved it. No, it looked like that.
Speaker 6: This is the type of video that liberals would post
Speaker 6: to make fun of Trump, and the fact that it
Speaker 6: was used as a hype video shows how useless that
Speaker 6: style of like political propertyanda is. You can't make fun
Speaker 6: of Trump for doing that little dance. That doesn't that
Speaker 6: doesn't do anything.
Speaker 2: You can't make There's no use in making fun of Trump.
Speaker 2: There is no value in satirizing him. There is no
Speaker 2: value in laughing at him. Like if it helps you personally,
Speaker 2: that's great, if you need that to get by, we
Speaker 2: all do it sometimes, but it is no it does
Speaker 2: no damage to them, like the not to shit on
Speaker 2: John Oliver. But the Trump stuff was a wild and
Speaker 2: spectacular failure. None of it accomplished anything, and everybody who
Speaker 2: ever thought that you could make fun of Trump and
Speaker 2: have any positive impact was wrong. And you should feel
Speaker 2: a little bad.
Speaker 6: I do because and because they used it as a
Speaker 6: hype video. They used it to stitch between their different
Speaker 6: musical acts, different segments, and oh boy, the music, so
Speaker 6: that the music was better than the music at the
Speaker 6: at the welcome party that we talked about in our
Speaker 6: last episode. But that bar is not very high. It's
Speaker 6: it's all it's it's all country music, right, it's country
Speaker 6: music cover bands.
Speaker 2: You It was not all country. No, there was a
Speaker 2: lot of like nineties stuff.
Speaker 6: There was a fucking it's played in the style of country.
Speaker 7: There was some bye Bye by your boat guy.
Speaker 2: There was at they had a they had a Fleetwood
Speaker 2: Mac song someone did you Can There.
Speaker 7: Was like essentially like the the run of the Evening and.
Speaker 6: Dad rock and country music. My apologies, it was dad
Speaker 6: rock and country music.
Speaker 7: You know what I have to tell you. We do
Speaker 7: not care enough to argue about this anyways. The music
Speaker 7: was fucking mid It was like the way because I
Speaker 7: of course, like a bunch of people have Texas today
Speaker 7: and been like how is it? And the only way
Speaker 7: that we can describe it is if a normal person
Speaker 7: went to their favorite concert and and had great seats, yeah,
Speaker 7: and uh you were very happy. Is the same exact
Speaker 7: Or you went to a game set of the NBA Finals.
Speaker 7: That's exactly the reaction that the people in the crowd
Speaker 7: were having.
Speaker 6: It's a mix of like a sports event, a concert,
Speaker 6: and like a mega church. If there was if there
Speaker 6: was some kind of concert that a whole bunch of
Speaker 6: boomers really enjoyed. That was the general vibe of the
Speaker 6: convention today, which.
Speaker 2: Is not all that different from how Trump Ralli's feel
Speaker 2: totally had. It had that vibe, and it felt more
Speaker 2: more like a concert than the twenty sixteen RNC did.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean there was also there was so much
Speaker 6: music in so few speeches. The speeches were only like
Speaker 6: two minutes long each, and there would be like extended,
Speaker 6: like ten twenty minute musical performances in between each speech.
Speaker 6: Like mostly it's just it's just people playing songs on stage.
Speaker 6: That was most of the R and C today.
Speaker 7: There was there was several different speeches that came after
Speaker 7: those strange videos, and we'll get into that. But first
Speaker 7: we're gonna go to an AD break, and when we
Speaker 7: come back, we're gonna play live us from the well.
Speaker 2: It was live when we recorded yea.
Speaker 7: As what I'm saying live us. We were alive back
Speaker 7: then and now questionable talking about what we were experiencing
Speaker 7: in the moment.
Speaker 6: But first, ads, Okay, we are back, and now we
Speaker 6: will tune in to our recording we made on the
Speaker 6: convention floor. Dunn, Okay, we are well recording live broadcasting
Speaker 6: a little bit later, but recording live on the ground
Speaker 6: at the Republican National Convention. We've had a very, a
Speaker 6: very busy morning. It's now mid afternoon. We're in between sessions.
Speaker 6: The first session just wrapped up, and we thought we
Speaker 6: were we should have record some of our immediate thoughts
Speaker 6: before our little debrief tonight. I guess let's start with
Speaker 6: Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, first off, my main overwhelming kind of takeaway
Speaker 2: is that the tone and tempo of this is a
Speaker 2: lot milder than I expected. And I think it's because
Speaker 2: the overwhelming majority of people here are extremely conservative, the
Speaker 2: most dedicated and active members of the party. But it's
Speaker 2: not like the Proud Boy Crew over definitely some of
Speaker 2: those people here.
Speaker 6: But these are electoralists.
Speaker 2: These are electoralists. Most of them are a lot older,
Speaker 2: you know. I would say the average age is somewhere
Speaker 2: between the late forties to the sixties of like people
Speaker 2: you encounter here, and it is interesting to me that
Speaker 2: I have not, you know, as soon as we, like
Speaker 2: we said yesterday, as soon as we landed, we saw
Speaker 2: a guy with a trump after he got shot, sticking
Speaker 2: his fist in the airshirt. I haven't seen a ton
Speaker 2: of that on the ground here, since I've not seen
Speaker 2: a ton of it, nor have I seen a ton
Speaker 2: of direct references to it.
Speaker 7: I guess the sophie here, I think that. Guess. The
Speaker 7: main reference that I've seen is when they did the
Speaker 7: delegate official photo.
Speaker 2: That would be the big one.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: They all turned around and raised their fist in the
Speaker 7: way that Donald Trump did after the attempted assassination, which
Speaker 7: was fascinating to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, especially given the lack of otherwise direct emphasis
Speaker 2: on what happened. And maybe that's coming up. I kind
Speaker 2: of do the way I'm interpreting it now is because
Speaker 2: the thing that just dropped a few minutes ago is
Speaker 2: the FBI got into the shooter's phone. So far, preliminary findings,
Speaker 2: nothing in there that makes it clear why he did it.
Speaker 2: So I kind of think they may just be sort
Speaker 2: of confused as to why one of their own seemingly
Speaker 2: carried out the shooting. Not really clear what the rhetoric
Speaker 2: on the shooters should be, but very clear on how
Speaker 2: they should respond to the Trump photo, Which is the
Speaker 2: primary takeaway from that is the photo is the pose?
Speaker 2: Is him cementing his image as this indestructible you know,
Speaker 2: man who's constantly under attack, right, and so it makes
Speaker 2: sense to me that they've adopted that hand sign, and
Speaker 2: I expect we'll see more of it. And boy, howdy,
Speaker 2: does it just look exactly like that the hand sign
Speaker 2: from the far right that everyone's familiar with.
Speaker 6: So as we were kind of in between speakers, they
Speaker 6: had this little band playing and we happened to be
Speaker 6: sitting next to one of one of the younger people
Speaker 6: that I've seen attending the convention, but like still still
Speaker 6: like an adult, like a very young adult, may maybe
Speaker 6: twenty one, maybe twenty at most.
Speaker 2: He couldn't have been older than twenty one because he
Speaker 2: said this is his first election. He'll be able to
Speaker 2: vote in yeesh presidential election.
Speaker 6: So probably a little bit younger than me. It's interesting
Speaker 6: because yesterday we talked with some, you know, very old people,
Speaker 6: and today we talk to with some very young people
Speaker 6: to get and it's it is a it is an
Speaker 6: interesting contrast. So, yeah, this young conservative from from California
Speaker 6: but now lives in South Dakota and I don't know.
Speaker 6: We were asking him about like what what focus he
Speaker 6: has in politics. He seemed really concerned about the economy.
Speaker 6: That was that was kind of his main his main issue.
Speaker 2: Almost the only thing he wanted to talk about was
Speaker 2: the economy. He was one thing, I'll say, very good natured,
Speaker 2: like not in the I am doing a pr thing,
Speaker 2: I am trying to put on an image, but just
Speaker 2: in the not at all aggressive, did not react kind
Speaker 2: of negatively to the fact that we were media, which
Speaker 2: you get a lot of that at events like these.
Speaker 2: He expressed that the only places he gets his news
Speaker 2: is Fox and News Nation on TV. He is not
Speaker 2: on social media, which I found interesting and statistics suggest
Speaker 2: obviously that's not the norm, but it is a growing
Speaker 2: number of gen Z and Jen Alpha kids who avoid
Speaker 2: a lot of the internet.
Speaker 6: Well, and especially among conservatives. I mean there is a
Speaker 6: lot of young conservatives who do get their news on TikTok,
Speaker 6: who do get their news. Podcasts are one of the biggest,
Speaker 6: biggest ways that young people to the right get their news. Obviously,
Speaker 6: like the Daily Wire is very dominant in the podcasting scene.
Speaker 6: But no, I found that very interesting, and I assume
Speaker 6: that's probably like, you know, influenced by his family. You know,
Speaker 6: whatever is on whatever is on the family TV.
Speaker 2: His his uncle is about to be the mayor of
Speaker 2: Huntington Beach, California, and is the sheriff. Huntington Beach is
Speaker 2: the most conservative city in California, probably a pretty wide margin.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 6: No, he expressed a lot of frustration that we were
Speaker 6: we were giving lots of money to Ukraine, that he
Speaker 6: felt that Zelensky was suspending on him self instead of
Speaker 6: on the military. And yeah, I mean he seemed like
Speaker 6: a good old Christian boy. He was very, very into
Speaker 6: the praying section of the night. I asked him at
Speaker 6: ed ed at some point when when JD. Vance was
Speaker 6: coming out on stage to be announcedly the official vice president,
Speaker 6: like if he thinks that they're gonna win this year?
Speaker 6: Like do you think that the Republicans are gonna win?
Speaker 6: And he said yes, if it's fair.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was the same That was the first thing
Speaker 2: I asked him, And that was the same answer he
Speaker 2: gave me. And you know, speaking of Vance, because Vance
Speaker 2: is my first thought and a lot of people's first thought.
Speaker 2: And I think this is probably the accurate thing to
Speaker 2: say about Vance. He does not provide a lot to Trump, right,
Speaker 2: He's not a guy who won by a wide margin.
Speaker 2: I'm not even confident he on his own does anything
Speaker 2: to deliver his state Ohio. But what this kid brought
Speaker 2: up and what I suspect Trump season him, because when
Speaker 2: I asked, what do you think about JD. Vance, he
Speaker 2: repeatedly said, I think he's loyal. I think he really
Speaker 2: likes Trump. I think he's loyal. And I did bring
Speaker 2: up the fact that Vance has said bad things about
Speaker 2: Trump in the past, and then he went on this
Speaker 2: thing where he was like, I think that DeSantis and
Speaker 2: Trump really like each other. It's all politics. And I
Speaker 2: wanted to say, how deranged, but then he was like,
Speaker 2: you know, it's like Kamala and Joe. She was really
Speaker 2: I mean to him during the debate and now she's
Speaker 2: his vice president. I was like, well, that's actually a
Speaker 2: pretty reasonable way to look at the situation. I don't
Speaker 2: know that I think it's actually accurate, but I see
Speaker 2: the logical through line there, and I was kind of,
Speaker 2: you know, I thought that was interesting.
Speaker 7: I thought it was interesting when they were bringing out JD.
Speaker 7: Vance and he was dancing vamping. I'm going to call
Speaker 7: it dancing vancing advancing that. You know, they were quick
Speaker 7: to call out that he he was a marine, quick
Speaker 7: to call him a patriot, quick to call him a
Speaker 7: family man, and I think that's what he brings to
Speaker 7: the table. He brings those three things as well as
Speaker 7: his age, and I think that's that's what the GOP
Speaker 7: is focusing on. Yeah, I mean, other than that, there
Speaker 7: was a really weird prayer thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was after Vance came up. They did the benediction.
Speaker 7: Yeah. It was.
Speaker 6: What I could only express is a little bit like
Speaker 6: spiritually disturbing. All of like the led screens behind behind,
Speaker 6: like the speakers all flashed like very like Facebook esque
Speaker 6: like images of like you know, the Bible of like
Speaker 6: families praying.
Speaker 2: Like kids, like glowing like glowing.
Speaker 6: Like like the heavenly glowing light, like the the the
Speaker 6: whole environment change from like you know, it's usually very
Speaker 6: like sports debate, you know, red versus Blue. It's you know,
Speaker 6: it's it's very traditional like Americana. And it was a
Speaker 6: very it was a very intense shift to like to
Speaker 6: like this to this like a like strong like Facebook
Speaker 6: Christianity almost. That's that's the best way I can I
Speaker 6: can describe it with words. And I mean, you know,
Speaker 6: it was a typical Christian dominionist moment where you have
Speaker 6: you know, the the one of the largest of two
Speaker 6: political parties, just fully, fully embracing the UH and fully
Speaker 6: you know, putting out that you know, this is this
Speaker 6: is a this is a real religious party. Almost more
Speaker 6: than anything else. The religion is so important to the ceremony,
Speaker 6: and specifically not just any religions of course, just Christianity.
Speaker 6: And I don't know, they spent like almost like the
Speaker 6: last half of the prayer talking about Israel and you know,
Speaker 6: specifically saying the children of Abraham and the Holy City
Speaker 6: of Jerusalem and you know, all all of that kind
Speaker 6: of language prayer for the hostages, talking about how the
Speaker 6: hostages are being kept against their will. But you know,
Speaker 6: all of the language reminds me a lot of like
Speaker 6: my childhood and the rhetoric around Israel as this place
Speaker 6: to secure so that so that you know, the prophecies
Speaker 6: can come true for Jesus' second coming, and like that
Speaker 6: that is that is the entire the entire bit.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to recall if there was a big benediction
Speaker 2: at the end after the twenty sixteen RNC when Pennce
Speaker 2: was nominated, and I'm sure there was, but for whatever reason,
Speaker 2: it doesn't stick out in my mind the way this
Speaker 2: one did.
Speaker 6: Now, this will certainly stick stick out in my mind.
Speaker 6: Like everyone knows Republicans are, you know, the more Christian party,
Speaker 6: but just the year like a consensus about it here,
Speaker 6: just like everybody is, like even if they aren't themselves Christian,
Speaker 6: most people are, but like everyone's in on this thing happening.
Speaker 6: It was. It was just a it was just an
Speaker 6: interesting moment contrasted to the overall, you know, like a
Speaker 6: concert kind of sports vibe that the rest of the
Speaker 6: convention kind of carries.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, the only other thing that I pointed out.
Speaker 7: At one point, I went to get water and I
Speaker 7: came back and I mentioned right before we started to record,
Speaker 7: to both Gary and Robert, I was like, cops keep
Speaker 7: touching me and like putting their hand on my shoulder,
Speaker 7: and you know, is one cop just wanted to talk
Speaker 7: to me about my day and I was like trying
Speaker 7: to get water and going back into the convention. And
Speaker 7: then I mentioned that to garon Robert and they both
Speaker 7: said that they've been touched quite a lot too, And
Speaker 7: I just think that's interesting to note, And you know,
Speaker 7: I don't particularly like to be touched by strangers, especially.
Speaker 2: Mine has been on the shoulder by like a couple
Speaker 2: of different what I would describe them as like uncle
Speaker 2: coded guys, yes, who I don't know and was not
Speaker 2: talking to, just like walking past me and putting a
Speaker 2: hand on my shoulder, like like someone who is a
Speaker 2: family member would do casually, like a family event, you know,
Speaker 2: when you're on the way to do something else. But
Speaker 2: I've never met these people. We did not talk. That
Speaker 2: was odd, hasn't happened to me before. Maybe everyone's just
Speaker 2: in a very good mood because they're that sure they're
Speaker 2: going to win. Maybe we just ran into a lot
Speaker 2: of creepy uncle types unclear.
Speaker 6: It'll be interesting to contrast with the DNC, But no,
Speaker 6: it certainly has been a pattern. There's a lot more
Speaker 6: like just casual touching here. And yeah, I think that
Speaker 6: is most of our thoughts right now. I guess that.
Speaker 6: The last thing I guess I'll add is the young
Speaker 6: kid that we were talking to who was very excited
Speaker 6: about about this, about this whole deal. As Vance was
Speaker 6: coming out and you know, the crowd was going crazy
Speaker 6: and everything, he very quietly remarked that he was like
Speaker 6: gonna start crying because it was just like so like
Speaker 6: an impactful. I think it was. I think it was
Speaker 6: mostly to himself, like acknowledging that verbally and then said
Speaker 6: he wants to become a cop and that just you know,
Speaker 6: that is that is the entire base. And then he
Speaker 6: was then immediately went into a very a very intense
Speaker 6: prayer posture during the prayer, and that's just a good
Speaker 6: portion of the country.
Speaker 2: I guess, yep, yep, I uh, yeah. It was interesting.
Speaker 2: We were talking about Ukraine for a while because his
Speaker 2: his stance on it was he's fine with them getting weapons,
Speaker 2: but he's sure they're getting a lot of money that
Speaker 2: Zelensky is doing something shady with. And generally it felt
Speaker 2: like Zelensky wasn't fighting, which I thought was interesting. It does,
Speaker 2: it is kind of It makes sense to me if
Speaker 2: you've skimmed the way the right reports on Ukraine a lot,
Speaker 2: that would be his attitude. But he also said he
Speaker 2: wasn't supportive of yielding to Putin on any of Putin's demands.
Speaker 2: And then when I talked about because I chatted with
Speaker 2: him about some of my experiences in Ukraine, and when
Speaker 2: he found out that I had done more reporting, his
Speaker 2: first question was, have you ever been to Israel. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that was interesting. Yeah, interesting. Just immediately asked that. Oh,
Speaker 2: one other note, we run into a fan of the
Speaker 2: show who was working who was wearing a USS Liberty hat.
Speaker 2: The USS Liberty was like a US Navy ship that
Speaker 2: was struck by Israel, and it's, you know, under very
Speaker 2: shady circumstances, and it's kind of like one of the
Speaker 2: better ways you could be publicly critical of the Israeli military,
Speaker 2: at least at the RNC, without most people knowing what
Speaker 2: you're doing. Yeah, I thought that was funny.
Speaker 6: The very last thing I'll say is that right as
Speaker 6: we exited the first session, we ran into friend of
Speaker 6: the podk Ramaswami, who was who was a little shorter
Speaker 6: than I expected. A tall man, not a tall man.
Speaker 6: And I did ask the kid that we were sitting
Speaker 6: next to. You know, I'm curious about his thoughts on
Speaker 6: the future of the party, and I asked him specifically
Speaker 6: about the VEK, and he said he likes for VEK
Speaker 6: because Vivec is a businessman, just like Trump, and he
Speaker 6: wants someone to run the country like a business.
Speaker 2: I should also note that the Vek was followed by
Speaker 2: a swarm of like I'm guessing his entourage. All of
Speaker 2: the nearly all of them were very young men who
Speaker 2: I would describe as nick Fuintes coded. Yes, like like
Speaker 2: they really had that physiognomy to them.
Speaker 6: Groper types.
Speaker 2: Yeah, groper types, which JD Vance. It's one of the
Speaker 2: things coming out right now is that he's in a
Speaker 2: group chat with a bunch of sixteen year old groper
Speaker 2: So I am excited for some of those, more of
Speaker 2: those chats to come out, all right.
Speaker 6: Well, back to future us talking about the rest of
Speaker 6: the Republican National Convention. Day one.
Speaker 2: Wow, that sure was great. We had such a fun time.
Speaker 2: You know what else is fun? Here's some more ads.
Speaker 2: We're back to conclude. We got a couple of things
Speaker 2: to talk about. One of them is, you know, obviously
Speaker 2: we're at a convention. We don't have a car, we're
Speaker 2: taking ubers everywhere, we're eating at restaurants.
Speaker 6: And this has taken over almost all of the central
Speaker 6: area of Milwaukee, and.
Speaker 2: There were because of a lot of fuck ups. For
Speaker 2: one thing, a lot of places that in downtown were
Speaker 2: supposed to be booked are not booked. Businesses are not
Speaker 2: getting the kind of business they had expected to get
Speaker 2: during this because of some of those fuck ups. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and kind of most interesting to us so coming into this.
Speaker 2: One of the things the Republicans even put at billboards
Speaker 2: in Milwaukee over this, and this is a big thing
Speaker 2: that Trump is campaigning on to try to get service
Speaker 2: worker type people to vote for him, is no tax
Speaker 2: on tips. And to make a long story short, it
Speaker 2: works out to be much worse for service workers. Kind
Speaker 2: of the compromise here is that they can continue to
Speaker 2: pay far below minimum wage and there will be no
Speaker 2: attempts to raise that at all. And of course the
Speaker 2: kind of people who vote for Republicans don't tip by and.
Speaker 6: Large because they hate service workers.
Speaker 2: We have been talking to every Uber driver at all
Speaker 2: of the waiters waitresses that we've had, and pretty overwhelmingly
Speaker 2: nearly one hundred percent of them say like, yeah, we're
Speaker 2: just not getting.
Speaker 6: No one's tipping, the extreme negative views just because of
Speaker 6: like the politics, right, just.
Speaker 2: Because about more than half of them don't really.
Speaker 6: Care, absolutely not, They're just doing business and like they're
Speaker 6: just they're these these are just bad patrons. These are
Speaker 6: simply people that are they're not nice to be around.
Speaker 6: Interact like these types of events like the RNC the
Speaker 6: d and see these are like cities campaign for this
Speaker 6: under the notion that this will like you know, boost
Speaker 6: local business, right, We'll bring a whulench of people from
Speaker 6: out of town. People will get a lot of money
Speaker 6: to all these local businesses. And because of how the
Speaker 6: security set up this year in the in Milwaukee, so
Speaker 6: many businesses just can get no business because they're completely
Speaker 6: inside this like fence perimeter and UH and the rest
Speaker 6: are are not are not seeing very good business from
Speaker 6: what from from what it sounds like, and even even
Speaker 6: like hotels downtown are large largely vacant because of weird,
Speaker 6: weird scheduling area.
Speaker 7: We we went to dinner earlier tonight with some friends
Speaker 7: and we asked one of the restaurant workers, like how
Speaker 7: how it was going, And obviously she said the same
Speaker 7: thing that we've heard so many times, which is not great,
Speaker 7: not good, not making a lot of tips. But what
Speaker 7: was interesting is she said, you know, and they really
Speaker 7: tried to throw in our faces that this was going
Speaker 7: to be a good thing for all of us and
Speaker 7: we were all going to make a bunch of money,
Speaker 7: and it's happening. It's just not happening.
Speaker 2: And chatted to Timothy Faust, who was a writer, great writer,
Speaker 2: great guy, and a local here. We had dinner with him,
Speaker 2: and he pointed out that Milwaukee has been and was
Speaker 2: on the verge of bankruptcy still having a lot of
Speaker 2: problems with that, and a big part of why they
Speaker 2: took the RNC was because Republicans in the state legislature
Speaker 2: that was basically the bargaining point, so that they would
Speaker 2: allow a sales tax, which was kind of necessary in
Speaker 2: order to There's more to it than that, but a
Speaker 2: big part of like how the negotiations broke down was
Speaker 2: the Republicans wanted this in order to make it possible
Speaker 2: for the city of Milwaukee to not collapse because it
Speaker 2: was on the verge of bankruptcy. And hearing that made
Speaker 2: a lot of sense, made a lot of things click
Speaker 2: into place, because it does. Everyone one we have talked
Speaker 2: to who is a local and who is working in
Speaker 2: any job that interfaces with the convention and convention goers
Speaker 2: talks like they've been scammed.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and just one more thing before we get into
Speaker 7: the rest of you know, what we experienced speech wise
Speaker 7: and other is the difference in security today versus the outdoor.
Speaker 7: But we went to yesterday for the welcome party. Very surprising,
Speaker 7: very surprising. So just the one to one example I'll
Speaker 7: give you listeners is yesterday they took every single item
Speaker 7: out of my bag that I had after putting through
Speaker 7: a scanner and unzipped everything. Today they zipped it up
Speaker 7: because they didn't want anything to fall out and didn't
Speaker 7: open it, didn't touch a single thing, went through a scanner.
Speaker 7: I was through security in like four seconds.
Speaker 6: Yeah, no, it was. It was super weird, way more
Speaker 6: lax getting into the actual convention center than it was
Speaker 6: to get into the outdoor welcome party, which is just
Speaker 6: a It came off as a little little surprising to us.
Speaker 7: They they had. They made such a big deal about
Speaker 7: what you can and can't bring in and had specific
Speaker 7: measurements for like bags and stuff. But we saw people
Speaker 7: with some of the large, very large background, some bags
Speaker 7: that were bigger than me. And yeah, you know, that's
Speaker 7: just interesting to note.
Speaker 6: One less thing on the service worker thing. On our
Speaker 6: ride home from the RNC or back to the hotel,
Speaker 6: we sat a new in an uber with a very
Speaker 6: nice man who I would describe as the average Wisconsin voter. Yeah,
Speaker 6: he had he had a teamsters shirt, and you know
Speaker 6: of a variety of like of both liberal and kind
Speaker 6: of conservative opinions. You know, it's I think he kind
Speaker 6: of leaned more liberal, but he certainly had, you know,
Speaker 6: of of a variety of opinions. And he was both
Speaker 6: expressing the same thing in regards to tips, but also
Speaker 6: a men's frustration at the way police were treating locals.
Speaker 6: The way police were treating local drivers. Just the sheer
Speaker 6: influx of of cops just to have have made have
Speaker 6: made functioning in this city just so challenging to any
Speaker 6: of these locals. And yeah, that was a very fascinating
Speaker 6: conversation that we might discuss that at a later time. Well,
Speaker 6: we will talk about now are Catholics those those little fiends.
Speaker 6: So after the very like evangelical Children of Abraham prayer
Speaker 6: that that we talked about in our in our archival audio,
Speaker 6: as soon as we came back for the second session,
Speaker 6: there was an opening prayer led by the Archbishop of Milwaukee,
Speaker 6: which is kind of interesting because a lot of the
Speaker 6: intendees here are very evangelical. These are not Catholics, And
Speaker 6: there you could definitely see there is you know, a
Speaker 6: little a little bit of groans amongst among some of
Speaker 6: these people. And I found it a very interesting move.
Speaker 2: To somebody who talked shit on the Catholics earlier. The
Speaker 2: l the old lady that we that or at least
Speaker 2: that I was talking to last night at the party,
Speaker 2: made a couple of comments about Catholics because she doesn't
Speaker 2: believe they really worship Jesus because pop Catholics. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: well it's not even the papstries because Catholics. This is
Speaker 2: a that born again have an issue with Catholicism is
Speaker 2: don't believe you have to accept Christ to go to heaven,
Speaker 2: Like if you do good things, Catholics think you can
Speaker 2: go to heaven. Sure, And that is deeply offensive to
Speaker 2: a sizable chunk of the Christian community in the United States. Yeah,
Speaker 2: so I found that very interesting.
Speaker 6: Wasn't really expecting to see an opening Catholic prayer that
Speaker 6: I want to talk to some more people tomorrow about.
Speaker 6: That is Chance's Catholic that that makes it.
Speaker 2: That's probably why is a Catholic convert just like the
Speaker 2: Red Scare girl. He is a Catholic convert millennial who
Speaker 2: has taken a bunch of money from Peter Teel.
Speaker 6: Many such cases. So one of the first people to
Speaker 6: speak after this archbishop was famed Republican figure Marjorie Taylor Green,
Speaker 6: who we could have a lot to say, but I
Speaker 6: think the first thing that I want to mention is
Speaker 6: that she feels more representative of most of the RNC
Speaker 6: attendees and anyone else who we've seen speak like she
Speaker 6: She has the same energy and vibe as most of
Speaker 6: the attendees like that. That is why they love her
Speaker 6: so much, because she is one of them, to the
Speaker 6: point where she she was like a Republican fan who
Speaker 6: just happened to get into office, and now she's this
Speaker 6: major figure. She was the ascot exactly.
Speaker 2: And was a lot more popular than dance. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: in terms of floor reaction.
Speaker 6: No, she she is. She is beloved among this crowd.
Speaker 6: She she's she is them right. The audience members can
Speaker 6: see her, and they can they can see themselves in her.
Speaker 6: And she got the biggest reaction out of out of
Speaker 6: the crowd. Probably saved for Trump making a short appearance,
Speaker 6: but her speech had the biggest reaction. And we will
Speaker 6: we will get to that now. One one of the
Speaker 6: first things she said is you're talking about the assassination
Speaker 6: attempt and stuff is that Trump. She referred to him
Speaker 6: as the founding father of the America First Movement, which
Speaker 6: is a lot of interesting loaded language there.
Speaker 7: There are a lot of words there.
Speaker 6: Very extremely loaded language for the founding father of the
Speaker 6: America First Movement. She then spoke about the wonderful family
Speaker 6: man whose life was unfortunately cut short from getting shot
Speaker 6: in the attempted assassination attempt of Donald Trump, saying that
Speaker 6: that Corey embodied the America First spirit. But no, she
Speaker 6: she she had all of all of the typical lines
Speaker 6: that you would say about someone who was who was
Speaker 6: killed in an incident like this, And and then she
Speaker 6: talked about the thing that got the loudest applause out
Speaker 6: of anything else today, which is which is the whole
Speaker 6: gender ideology issue. She talked about how how President Biden
Speaker 6: turned Easter into transvisibility Day, which.
Speaker 7: Is factually true because.
Speaker 6: Easter changes holidays transvisibility days on the same day, you know,
Speaker 6: a bit, but Easter changes the actual day it's on.
Speaker 6: But that got a massive boo And there was people
Speaker 6: sitting next to us who were just shouting evil, just
Speaker 6: super loud shouting evil. And this is this is the
Speaker 6: most hyped up I've ever seen the crowd. You know,
Speaker 6: all the other mentions there were, there was a few
Speaker 6: other mentions about you know, men and women's sports, that
Speaker 6: kind of thing that got you know, the big biggest,
Speaker 6: the biggest booze and the biggest cheers, like respectively. You know,
Speaker 6: people saying there are only two genders. We're brave enough
Speaker 6: to say it. We're going to keep saying it. That
Speaker 6: hyped up the crowd just just more than anything else.
Speaker 7: Yeah, she said, be clear here there are only two genders,
Speaker 7: and the crowd went just nuts bananas.
Speaker 2: She right after that made a statement about needing to
Speaker 2: stop sending money to Ukraine, that Zelenski was going to
Speaker 2: embezzle or something about half the volume like not not
Speaker 2: a tiny.
Speaker 6: Compared to the rest of the cheering of a pretty loud.
Speaker 2: Reaction, like not a bad reaction, but it was clearly
Speaker 2: about half the volume with the anti transfer and.
Speaker 7: Mind you listeners she spoke for like what it was
Speaker 7: like three minutes top.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would be surprised if the whole speech typed
Speaker 2: out was more than about a page.
Speaker 6: No, it was wild and she had basically a bullet
Speaker 6: point list of like hate speech.
Speaker 2: If I I kind of want to go back through
Speaker 2: video of the I remember the speeches at the twenty
Speaker 2: sixteen RNC being longer, but that was a million years ago. Yeah.
Speaker 6: Now she had the you know, the the usual comments
Speaker 6: about you know, how we have to stop the globalists,
Speaker 6: the wealthy and the powerful few, which is which is
Speaker 6: just an interesting thing to speak to an RNC crowd
Speaker 6: because it's one of the most powerful, the wealthy, powerful few.
Speaker 6: You are talking to them, and her the line that
Speaker 6: came right before this was talking about how how we
Speaker 6: have to stand up against the establishment who promise unity
Speaker 6: but promote division. And I'm like, this is this is
Speaker 6: this is the most We're all trying to find the
Speaker 6: guy who did this moment. Ever, right you're you're talking
Speaker 6: about how there's there's these these powerful establishment figures who
Speaker 6: talk about unity but actually just promote division, and like
Speaker 6: you were, you were talking about yourself and all the
Speaker 6: times that these like these like people who work in
Speaker 6: Washington start bashing like the establishment and stuff like you
Speaker 6: you are the establishment, that is you, that that is
Speaker 6: your job, but that those are very very common talking
Speaker 6: points and stuff like that. I'm sure many listeners are
Speaker 6: familiar with this, with this sort of like double speak
Speaker 6: and and yeah, that was her speech. Definitely the biggest
Speaker 6: reaction we saw the crowd have. Trump and his family
Speaker 6: made a very brief appearance, kind of kind of a
Speaker 6: surprise appearance, but to some people's surprise, he didn't He
Speaker 6: didn't actually give a speech. He instead, I think, took
Speaker 6: which was the smarter play, show up with a very
Speaker 6: large bandage on his ear and instead sit down and listen,
Speaker 6: just become part of the audience. It's an interesting movie.
Speaker 6: He didn't immediately like take over the convention. No, he's
Speaker 6: kind of playing this more like statesman role.
Speaker 7: He almost looked like he was tearing up.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, he did.
Speaker 7: He was sitting in the crowd.
Speaker 2: Quiet, subdued, even Yep, he looked worried at point, worried, anxious,
Speaker 2: or somber. I wouldn't be I wouldn't be surprised if
Speaker 2: it was a natural reaction to being in your first
Speaker 2: crowd after being shot and nearly died.
Speaker 6: Yeah, the last time you were in a crowd.
Speaker 2: Like he is a person, right, That's just how people
Speaker 2: react oftentimes when that kind of thing happens.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I know. He was sitting next to Tucker Carlson, JD. Vans,
Speaker 6: and Michael and and Mike Johnson with his kids sitting
Speaker 6: behind him.
Speaker 2: Look, when you have a near death experience, you know,
Speaker 2: when somebody somebody shoots at you and damn near hits,
Speaker 2: it crystallizes a lot. You know what's really important, and
Speaker 2: you also know what you don't want to waste your
Speaker 2: time with anymore. And that's that's why the Trump kids
Speaker 2: were in the back of that, the back of the crowd.
Speaker 2: He doesn't want them anywhere near him. Life is short.
Speaker 7: I just want to point out what they showed trumple
Speaker 7: the screed with with Mike Tucker and who is the
Speaker 7: fourth person, Jni Man's I've already forgot his face curiously
Speaker 7: goes nightmare blood rotation, and they are.
Speaker 6: Correct, and that that was day one of the convention.
Speaker 2: That way, I do want to get into one other
Speaker 2: thing because this again, we had a big don't panic
Speaker 2: episode a day or two before this. You'll have heard
Speaker 2: one episode in between those two and posting stuff today,
Speaker 2: posting comments on like how extreme the rhetoric is. I
Speaker 2: see people getting scared again. You should like, you should
Speaker 2: be very concerned if here is not an unreasonable reaction
Speaker 2: to seeing all this happen. But this is also something
Speaker 2: that I think will contextualize the scale of the actual
Speaker 2: number of people that we're talking about here. When we
Speaker 2: were sitting, we found a quiet place to record the
Speaker 2: middle bit that you heard. So we were in kind
Speaker 2: of an empty area, and I would say close to
Speaker 2: half of the or about right about half, maybe even
Speaker 2: a little more of the actual stadium was empty, and
Speaker 2: most of them were clustered in the area that had
Speaker 2: and so there were a lot of areas where there's
Speaker 2: just absolutely nobody. And several times, what was it, three
Speaker 2: or four times, Sophie, probably we had different people who
Speaker 2: were I either worked for the RNC or worked for
Speaker 2: the venue come by, but I'm guessing the RNC, just
Speaker 2: because of their general vibe.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and because the lens, Yeah, to try to get
Speaker 9: us too, because even the areas that were full had
Speaker 9: a lot of patches in them, they weren't all that full.
Speaker 9: So they wanted to get us to get up from
Speaker 9: the empty areas and move to fill in the areas
Speaker 9: that were going to be on camera so it looked
Speaker 9: like it was fuller, and they did that because it
Speaker 9: was not very full. Now, as someone it's not very
Speaker 9: full because this is a political convention. It is not
Speaker 9: open to the masses. I don't know that it would
Speaker 9: have filled up it was open to the masses, but
Speaker 9: there's an inherently limited guest list. But it did seem
Speaker 9: to be less people than I recall from the twenty
Speaker 9: sixteen RNC. And more to the point, everything that you
Speaker 9: see and everything we're talking about, and all of the
Speaker 9: extremity and the weirdness of these in a lot of
Speaker 9: cases freaks, assholes, creeps that we see. This is a
Speaker 9: couple of thousand of the most dedicated Republicans in the country.
Speaker 9: This is the elite of the party. These are the
Speaker 9: people who have a lot of the money, if not
Speaker 9: most of it, and a lot do a lot of
Speaker 9: the nuts and bolts of making the Republican Party run.
Speaker 9: These are not representative of most of the people who
Speaker 9: live around you, unless you live in a place that
Speaker 9: is real hardcore Trump country, in which case a lot
Speaker 9: of these folks are familiar. But they but they got
Speaker 9: a lot more money than your neighbors, I'll tell you
Speaker 9: that much. Yeah.
Speaker 6: No, And it is worth pointing out that they were
Speaker 6: trying to make an effort to move people around to
Speaker 6: make the seats look more full. Because also everything that
Speaker 6: we're also seeing is theater. There's all these rituals that
Speaker 6: they're doing to confirm confirm the nomination. It's like it's
Speaker 6: a very it's very ritualized, very theatrical experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: There is one point where Robert and Gear we're walking
Speaker 7: around and I was sitting in our intersection by myself,
Speaker 7: and I had three separate twenty something males come up
Speaker 7: to me to try to give me Trump signs, and uh,
Speaker 7: all three, in a very unsettling way, pointed out that
Speaker 7: I was sitting alone and it made me feel very unsafe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, welcome to the Republican Party.
Speaker 6: So correct.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and as they pointed out earlier, definitely a lot
Speaker 7: of unwanted touching.
Speaker 6: But he you know, welcome to the Republican Party. And
Speaker 6: you know what it's touching.
Speaker 2: Unwanted touching is essentially part of the main party platform.
Speaker 7: It literally and it is only day one.
Speaker 6: It is day one, four, well, three more to go,
Speaker 6: and we will be covering it a night.
Speaker 7: We'll be back tomorrow with morey any final thoughts anyone.
Speaker 2: Nope, nope.
Speaker 6: Tip your service workers.
Speaker 1: And wash your hands.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to it could happen here a podcast recorded
Speaker 2: at the Republican National Convention, which I do not very
Speaker 2: much like. We're having a great time.
Speaker 6: Though, well not really. This is the worst day we've
Speaker 6: had so far.
Speaker 2: This is one of the worst days I've ever had. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we did get to talk with Rudy Giuliani, which was
Speaker 2: a highlight of the day. Hearing more about that later,
Speaker 2: but first let's go around. Let you know who's going
Speaker 2: to be talking on this episode. First off, we've got
Speaker 2: Garrison Davis hello, finally identified as she her by the
Speaker 2: Secret Service. There you go.
Speaker 6: Congrats, They're going woke.
Speaker 2: They're going woke. That's why it happened. That's what Rudy
Speaker 2: talked about, and I guess he was right. And then
Speaker 2: speaking of woke, de supervisor Sophie Lichterman.
Speaker 7: I've had a day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll bet make fun of me. We are in
Speaker 2: the like the chunk of the there's like the main
Speaker 2: stadium where all of the very red and botox people
Speaker 2: give their speeches, and then there's this part where all
Speaker 2: of the different like media companies have booths set up.
Speaker 2: Iheart's got a booth. There a very large booth very
Speaker 2: large booth, and we are kind of above that right
Speaker 2: now because it's a relatively quiet place to record.
Speaker 7: For some visuals. Here we are sitting in this part
Speaker 7: of a arena.
Speaker 2: The Panther Arena, the Panther Arena.
Speaker 7: There's red carpet everywhere, and there are cubicle style booths
Speaker 7: for various publications.
Speaker 2: Let's see, I see O A N.
Speaker 6: We are sitting right above the iHeart to end the
Speaker 6: Daily Wire booth. They have a whole wall of Matt Walsh,
Speaker 6: a wall of Walls Walsh, if you will.
Speaker 2: Bright Bart's got a tiny little cue, very small.
Speaker 6: Frank's speech has a little booth, you know, a lot
Speaker 6: of a lot of local radio, you know.
Speaker 2: For there was that when we met Rudy earlier today,
Speaker 2: he was a the wvo in booth, which is a
Speaker 2: local radio station. They did not let him speak this
Speaker 2: year at the r n C. Did not really seem
Speaker 2: to want him to be here. That's too bad. He
Speaker 2: claimed to be happy that that was the case. Well, yeah,
Speaker 2: interesting guy. Took a little tumble today. Took a little
Speaker 2: tumble today, fell and then kept falling on the floor
Speaker 2: of the event. Classic Rudy. And when we went to
Speaker 2: lunch earlier and wound up in the same room as
Speaker 2: Ted Cruz briefly, who was also at that restaurant. A
Speaker 2: lady came up to us, a Republican alternate delegate, and said,
Speaker 2: are you a band? Are you musicians? You look like musicians?
Speaker 7: Solely based off of Robert having tattoos.
Speaker 2: I do think it was entirely based on the fact
Speaker 2: that I have to.
Speaker 6: We probably look cooler than anyone else here.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you, I said, we that's the first
Speaker 2: time you've said that to me, Garrison, and it really
Speaker 2: you know what, I took a convention.
Speaker 6: I took a convention republics older than my grandparents.
Speaker 7: I will say that at this restaurant, the restaurant worker
Speaker 7: did give us all free shots of vodka because she
Speaker 7: said we had looked like we had had a week.
Speaker 7: And boy, howdy is she right.
Speaker 2: I'm sure she's been having one too.
Speaker 7: Yeah, she was very nice. So Garon, Robert, you want
Speaker 7: to take me We weren't together for most of today.
Speaker 7: Do you want to take me through your day? And
Speaker 7: then I can tell you about.
Speaker 2: My really fun day.
Speaker 1: God.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we'll start by talking about our morning. So
Speaker 2: yesterday was a pro Palestine March that was Monday. From Monday,
Speaker 2: Fronce kind of build us a march on the RNC.
Speaker 6: It was a sizable demonstration, at least five hundred.
Speaker 2: At least five hundred I'm cluded to me the exact numbers,
Speaker 2: but not tiny March is a little bit of a misnumber.
Speaker 2: It was located in the park that's kind of closest
Speaker 2: to the RNC security area today. It was a very
Speaker 2: different vibe. There were counter protesters, but there were also
Speaker 2: like there was like a church group who was there
Speaker 2: with signs.
Speaker 6: It's like a Westboro Baptist church styles the street preacher group.
Speaker 2: They do not like Catholics.
Speaker 6: They don't like gay people or Catholics, or fornication or adultery,
Speaker 6: that sort of thing. You know, if you can picture
Speaker 6: the big signs that people carry around, it's.
Speaker 7: That sounds sounds fun. Guys.
Speaker 6: We saw an amazing T shirt today, Robert, do you
Speaker 6: do you have a do you have a recollection of
Speaker 6: the best T shirt that we saw today?
Speaker 2: Oh God, is that the prolapsed rectum tissure is atal
Speaker 2: sex equals prolapsed rectum? And then wow, god, it felt
Speaker 2: like a John quote. There was a book of the
Speaker 2: Bible that I know does not refer directly to prolapsed
Speaker 2: rectors romans romans Paul, So you know Paul was not
Speaker 2: talking about rectums.
Speaker 6: Well, but Paul is the most homophobic out of all
Speaker 6: the New Testament writers. But basically we talked to some
Speaker 6: of these types of people gathered at this little this
Speaker 6: little squares little park. There was maybe like one or
Speaker 6: two people protesting the RNC itself, just holding signs, you know,
Speaker 6: someone with a megaphone, But the rest of the people
Speaker 6: gathered where these were these street preacher types. And then
Speaker 6: we went over to this media section earlier this morning.
Speaker 6: That's where we talked to our good are now good friend,
Speaker 6: Rudy Giuliani.
Speaker 2: So again, if you're picturing this floor, it's like a
Speaker 2: bunch of large cubicles. So you've ever been to a
Speaker 2: trade show, it looks like a trade show, right, But
Speaker 2: each of the cubicles is a different radio station or
Speaker 2: internet media company. And Rudy was just sort of chilling
Speaker 2: at a local radio station booth with Laura Lumer When
Speaker 2: we first walked up Amazing vibes, she thanked God love
Speaker 2: and I will say Laura Lumor famous on the internet
Speaker 2: for looking very peculiar, one of the more normal looking
Speaker 2: people at the.
Speaker 6: RNC, which I don't think is a testament to how
Speaker 6: normal Laura Lumor looks. It's a testament to the types
Speaker 6: of people that we are seeing every day at the
Speaker 6: RNC that everyone kind of looks a little Lumor esque. Yeah,
Speaker 6: so she looks a little bit less bizarre in comparison
Speaker 6: to just everyone else we're seeing, who all has, you know,
Speaker 6: a curious amount of facial surgeries, Yeah going on that
Speaker 6: makes them just look just look a little different, just.
Speaker 2: A little different. We saw the Fox News had anchored
Speaker 2: today whose face was as smooth as a baby's ass.
Speaker 6: It looked like carved marble.
Speaker 2: It looked like carved marble and was clearly bloated with
Speaker 2: Bachelin toxin.
Speaker 7: Incredible.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a beautiful man, Sophie, He was a
Speaker 2: beautiful man.
Speaker 7: I thank YOUSU is retinall well, he must.
Speaker 2: Use retinal And he had a chin as wide as
Speaker 2: like glory days. Bruce Campbell, very wide face.
Speaker 7: I bet he never forgot to wear sunscreen unlike you two.
Speaker 2: So yeah, kind of the last thing we did at
Speaker 2: the convention before coming back was. We had a little
Speaker 2: conversation with Rudy, primarily about Ukraine. His basic stance is
Speaker 2: that Ukraine is stealing all of the money that the
Speaker 2: government gives it. When I pointed out that that money
Speaker 2: was primarily coming in military subsidies and like military weapons,
Speaker 2: he said they were stealing the weapons and selling them.
Speaker 2: And I asked to who, and he said he didn't know,
Speaker 2: at which point his handler got him out of there,
Speaker 2: and we wound up walking over to the iHeart booth
Speaker 2: where one of our coworkers, Dan O'Donnell, who's a more
Speaker 2: conservative guy in the network, but who through a law
Speaker 2: enforcement contact, got the story that a man had just
Speaker 2: been shot outside of the RNC security zone, but by
Speaker 2: police who were in town for the RNC. It wound
Speaker 2: up that they are Columbus, Ohio police, So we rushed
Speaker 2: down there, split up with him pretty quickly because I
Speaker 2: think he was mostly interested in talking to the police scene,
Speaker 2: and we wound up right in the middle of you know,
Speaker 2: what is the poorest neighborhood in Milwaukee, the poorest zip
Speaker 2: code in the state, one of the highest rates of
Speaker 2: incarceration in the country. It is a deeply deprived area.
Speaker 2: The first guy we talked to. He was with Lighthouse
Speaker 2: Ministries I think was the name of the organization, which
Speaker 2: is essentially he was running like a Christian halfway house,
Speaker 2: and we saw another larger halfway house even closer to
Speaker 2: the shooting, Like there were two half way houses effectively
Speaker 2: right next to each other. That's the kind of neighborhood
Speaker 2: this was. And when we got there, police had just
Speaker 2: started setting up cordons. They had started it with about
Speaker 2: a block or two fenced off with police tapes, but
Speaker 2: were widening at every few minutes. They were adding new blocks,
Speaker 2: quickly expanding, and a large number of cops were on scene.
Speaker 2: There were horse cops on scene. We could not get
Speaker 2: close to about a block from the site of the
Speaker 2: shooting itself, but we were able to get into a
Speaker 2: park where there were a lot of local people who
Speaker 2: were very angry at what had happened. And one of
Speaker 2: the first things I encountered was a couple of guys,
Speaker 2: you know, one of whom was filming on his phone
Speaker 2: yelling at the police, a couple of whom were sitting
Speaker 2: in lawn chairs, and one of whom was speaking about
Speaker 2: like you know, who had clearly witnessed the shooting, saying, like,
Speaker 2: you know, they were just having an argument. If you'd
Speaker 2: let us the neighborhood handle it, we would have handled it.
Speaker 2: The most there would have been was a black guy.
Speaker 2: What the fuck is wrong with you guys. We talked
Speaker 2: to him. His name is Emmanual And I'm actually just
Speaker 2: gonna play a clip from that interview with the Manual.
Speaker 3: Right now, here's what all these on the bikes I
Speaker 3: want to let you see now.
Speaker 2: So they parked in the King.
Speaker 8: Center, abum, and they were just basically patrolling watching us, right.
Speaker 2: So the two guys have a little braw about the ball.
Speaker 2: That's about the fight. So they didn't really fight for
Speaker 2: Kobe's shopping Freeze shot him. Empty the clip. Every twelve
Speaker 2: officers on.
Speaker 8: The bike empty their clinton because you speak cockbi Anpty
Speaker 8: the Clintons. And then whenever done, they're turning guns on
Speaker 8: us and then now their person.
Speaker 2: Let's further further away, we're an issue.
Speaker 8: Because they don't want us to tell you guys what
Speaker 8: really happened when they could have tasted in the restident
Speaker 8: city in the jail. They shot him and they was
Speaker 8: going to shoot the other guy and way, so they
Speaker 8: turn the guns are about sixteen of us Robert. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: so yeah, they were others why I didnt shoot because
Speaker 8: they realized their guns were empty, so they caught the backups.
Speaker 8: And that's why they have more backups and more backups
Speaker 8: and the backups, and that's why we.
Speaker 2: Are backing up.
Speaker 10: Yeah, and is that the that's the plan now, is
Speaker 10: my guest?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know if they're think were the r
Speaker 2: n C.
Speaker 10: The yep, tear gas and masks. Well, thank you, Emmanuel,
Speaker 10: nice to meet you. Yeah, yep, tear gas and masks
Speaker 10: and starting to feel like Portland again. And yeah, I
Speaker 10: would say that what a manual said is consistent. We
Speaker 10: talked to two other people who had witnessed the shooting,
Speaker 10: and then a couple other people who had been close by,
Speaker 10: and they all agreed with the gist of what Emmanuel
Speaker 10: had said.
Speaker 6: Well, Manuel told you something before he started recording there
Speaker 6: about how like they felt this was like a very
Speaker 6: very solvable problem. Yeah, for like the community, like this
Speaker 6: is just like an average fight that they could they
Speaker 6: could have ended themselves. Yeah, and you know, in the
Speaker 6: next hour these people would have been friends again. Yeah,
Speaker 6: And instead police from out of state showed up and
Speaker 6: just started shooting.
Speaker 2: And that is what the initial thing we heard through
Speaker 2: our you know, coworker who was talking to law enforcement
Speaker 2: was a man had had a knife or knives was
Speaker 2: brandishing them. Police told him to drop, he didn't and
Speaker 2: they had to shoot him. Locals on scenes said police
Speaker 2: did not tell him to drop anything, ran up and
Speaker 2: just started shooting. And as you heard from Manual, his
Speaker 2: experience at the event was that police then turned their
Speaker 2: guns on the crowd, and you know, he felt threatened
Speaker 2: deeply by this. For reasons that Abous and I will
Speaker 2: say that everyone we talked to in the neighborhood had
Speaker 2: broadly consistent stories. This was not a serious fight, This
Speaker 2: was not a thing that would have escalated to lethal
Speaker 2: violence in the normal course of human events. But a
Speaker 2: huge number of out of state cops rolled up to
Speaker 2: the altercation unnecessarily and drew their guns and started shooting.
Speaker 6: So there was a fairly nice homeless encampment. They had
Speaker 6: a wonderful community garden, really nice garden, just like a
Speaker 6: block away, and we figured, oh, this, this guy might
Speaker 6: might have been houseless, and we started to talk to
Speaker 6: more people who knew him, and yes, we found out
Speaker 6: we actually walked right past his tent on the way
Speaker 6: to the shooting. He had he had a tent by
Speaker 6: himself in this little alleyway. I guess, Robert, you talked
Speaker 6: more to that, to that guy that knew him.
Speaker 2: I talked to a guy who knew him who he
Speaker 2: said his nickname was Jehovah because he was a Jehovah's witness.
Speaker 2: The guy who I was speaking to was a Muslim
Speaker 2: and specifically stated to me, like, you know, I'm a Muslim,
Speaker 2: He's a Jehovah's witness. But we always got it was
Speaker 2: a really nice guy. He didn't deserve this, Like he
Speaker 2: wasn't a dude who generally caused problems. He was not
Speaker 2: a dangerous person. He was maybe a guy who was
Speaker 2: having a little bit of a heated moment with another dude.
Speaker 2: And again there happened to be a bunch of out
Speaker 2: of state cops who decided to make it everyone's problem.
Speaker 2: That was his attitude. And a couple of things were
Speaker 2: notewhere they I mean, we talked to a woman who
Speaker 2: was kind of dropping her daughter off at work who
Speaker 2: lived nearby. This is a lady who lived in a
Speaker 2: little bit nicer of a neighborhood. She wasn't quite there,
Speaker 2: an older black woman who was like, you know, the
Speaker 2: cops show up to do this, but there's no cops.
Speaker 2: Like if this had been any other time of the year,
Speaker 2: there would have been no cops in this neighborhood ever
Speaker 2: at all. Like they're never around when anybody wants them
Speaker 2: to be. But they show up to kill a guy
Speaker 2: because the RNC is in town. And that was very
Speaker 2: much the consistent response we got from everyone in the neighborhood.
Speaker 2: You know, we stayed there a while. Yeah, that's what happened.
Speaker 2: One of the things that I couldn't not notice is
Speaker 2: once we were down in the RNC, you know, earlier
Speaker 2: in the day, very cool, a lot of shade, tall buildings.
Speaker 2: When we were in that neighborhood near a fourteenth and Boulette.
Speaker 6: Right outside the Martin Luther King Junior Community Center.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sun was beating down us. There was very little cover,
Speaker 2: it was very hot. The streets were notably poor repair.
Speaker 2: The buildings were in a lot poorer repair, but there
Speaker 2: was actually also evidence of like street life like here,
Speaker 2: the RNC is all of downtown Milwaukee has been sanitized, right.
Speaker 6: They swept encampment's close to the R and C perimeter
Speaker 6: and stuff. People have had to move around, and no one.
Speaker 2: You encounter lives here right not during the event. That's
Speaker 2: just the way that it goes. A lot of the
Speaker 2: local buildings are shut down. And one of the things
Speaker 2: that was interesting about this was the degree to which
Speaker 2: all of these people in the most deprived neighborhood Milwaukee
Speaker 2: had a really clear understanding of what had happened near
Speaker 2: and around them and knew each other. And we're talking.
Speaker 2: There were a couple of people we saw who were
Speaker 2: going around different chunks within a block or two of
Speaker 2: each other and clearly knew all of their neighbors, which
Speaker 2: was very different from kind of the vibe that we've
Speaker 2: gotten Downtown Milwaukee is as nice as it is, and
Speaker 2: I think we've all really enjoyed the city. One of
Speaker 2: the most segregated cities in the country, and that was
Speaker 2: very clear because I think there was one white person
Speaker 2: who was a resident of the neighborhood that we talked to,
Speaker 2: that woman who was next to the guy who knew Jehovah.
Speaker 2: And I guess that's most of what I have to say. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, more and more place kept showing up.
Speaker 6: There was this basically like a riot squad with mace
Speaker 6: and gas masks showed up. You know, there was biite cops,
Speaker 6: mounted patrol cops. They just they started to flood this area.
Speaker 6: Eventually they slowly kind of you know, dispersed out as
Speaker 6: this scene got more under control and they realized there
Speaker 6: probably wasn't going to be a huge protest at this location.
Speaker 6: I believe there's gonna be a vigil tonight, yeah, at
Speaker 6: eight pm, near the side of the shooting. So yeah,
Speaker 6: I mean, it's just tough to go from the RNC
Speaker 6: with you know, massive police presence all of these extremely wealthy,
Speaker 6: rich white Republicans and then be reminded the real people
Speaker 6: exist and put events like this people get killed by
Speaker 6: police to make sure that that that people feel comfortable, ye,
Speaker 6: going to these sorts of events and just completely unnecessarily. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and that's that's just a good, a good, a good
Speaker 6: reminder every time I walk through one of these police checkpoints.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Donald Donald Trump, you know, survived his brush with
Speaker 2: the shooting. This young man didn't, and he died because
Speaker 2: this event was set up in his town. We know
Speaker 2: that the Secret Service and the you know the other agencies,
Speaker 2: because it wasn't just the Secret Service that was responsible
Speaker 2: for Trump getting shot. There were a lot of other
Speaker 2: law enforcement agencies there failed at their job, you know,
Speaker 2: last Saturday, to stop the former president from getting shot.
Speaker 2: Failed very badly at that. But still at the RNC,
Speaker 2: the only thing that the Security State knows how to
Speaker 2: do is flood the zone with cops. And the only
Speaker 2: thing those cops know how to do is when they
Speaker 2: encounter anything a little bit hostile, draw their guns and
Speaker 2: empty them. You know, that was my impression, And uh yeah,
Speaker 2: I think that's probably all we need to say about
Speaker 2: that right now.
Speaker 6: Sophie tell us about her experience as me and Robert
Speaker 6: were walking around this side of this police murder. After
Speaker 6: this short break.
Speaker 7: And we're back, Well, my colleagues were out on the ground,
Speaker 7: I went to a super super fun event called Giving
Speaker 7: the Americans a Voice town hall hosted by the Moms
Speaker 7: for Liberty. It was interesting, to say the least. It
Speaker 7: was a three hour event with various long event very long,
Speaker 7: and I recorded all of it so we can put
Speaker 7: that out at a later date. Let me just give
Speaker 7: you a quick a quick rundown of what the event was.
Speaker 6: And Moms for Liberty is like a like a lobbying
Speaker 6: group for parental rights.
Speaker 2: Very supportive of banning books.
Speaker 6: Banning books, parental rights, a lot of stuff around education
Speaker 6: in school. They they're very active in Washington. They're the
Speaker 6: sponsor of a lot of these really really like horrible
Speaker 6: bills about limiting information to children, limiting the rights of children,
Speaker 6: that sort of thing.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And additional sponsors for this event where Conservative Partnership Institute, Heritage.
Speaker 6: Characterge Foundation, authors of Project twenty twenty five.
Speaker 7: Young America's. I can't even read this logo.
Speaker 6: It's like the Young Republicans Voting Association.
Speaker 7: Young Americans Foundation.
Speaker 2: We did it, great job.
Speaker 7: And Public Square, which is a very strange app and
Speaker 7: there were three panels and some of the people that
Speaker 7: were featured on the panel were Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Speaker 2: Sarah Huckabee Sanders made an appearance.
Speaker 7: Governor Sarah Huckabye Sanders, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin.
Speaker 6: The governor of Wisconsin was there.
Speaker 7: He opened the governor, the Governor of Wisconsin was there.
Speaker 2: That's upsetting.
Speaker 7: He was like one of the first people who.
Speaker 6: Spoke, not a Senator to the actual governor, the.
Speaker 7: Forty fifth governor Wisconsin, Scott Walker, Yes, correct, various groups
Speaker 7: of attorneys general and get the Senator Oswell Ron Johnson
Speaker 7: of Wisconsin, and it was it was it was a
Speaker 7: strange event.
Speaker 2: What sort of things do they talk about?
Speaker 7: Well, they started off with them giving an excuse that
Speaker 7: the reason why that there was an attempted assassination on
Speaker 7: former President Trump was because of the media falselely compare
Speaker 7: hip to Hitler, to which they said, there is only
Speaker 7: one Hitler.
Speaker 2: There's actually been quite a few Hitlers, although there's less.
Speaker 6: Now also, I would I would like for them to
Speaker 6: feel that question to jd.
Speaker 2: Vance. But anyway, yes, fair enough.
Speaker 7: And then there was, you know, as there are at
Speaker 7: most of these events, there was a prayer and I
Speaker 7: just thought it was super interesting that the person giving
Speaker 7: the prayer referred to the panelists and various speakers as
Speaker 7: great actors, which was just like an interesting word choice
Speaker 7: to me.
Speaker 6: Extensively, like political actors, I would assume. But there's interesting associations.
Speaker 7: And like one of the one of the main things
Speaker 7: that they talked about this event was education, and they
Speaker 7: said their biggest issue that they have in the United
Speaker 7: States is the creation of the federal Department of Education
Speaker 7: and that they were going to change that, which got huge,
Speaker 7: huge cheers from the crowd. They claim that one of
Speaker 7: the reasons why the young man had attempted to assassinate
Speaker 7: Donald Trump was because he had gone to a large school.
Speaker 2: They are very anti large school why.
Speaker 7: Not, and that was one of the main reasons, as
Speaker 7: well as the media referring to foreign President Trump as hitler.
Speaker 7: They were adamant that teachers unions do not protect kids
Speaker 7: and that they are only out for themselves, and that
Speaker 7: all teachers' unions have been infiltrated by the left.
Speaker 6: Well that part is kind of drown yeah, but no,
Speaker 6: I mean attacks on teachers unions are I've seen those
Speaker 6: more in the past four years among a lot of
Speaker 6: either like right wing influencers or actual politicians. The teachers
Speaker 6: unions is a very good boogeyman. Yeah, because some people,
Speaker 6: you know, like their individual teachers. But no, no, no, the
Speaker 6: real problem is that teachers union.
Speaker 7: Yes, that actual distinction was brought up multiple times. There
Speaker 7: you go, there you go, And at one point somebody
Speaker 7: in the back of the room dropped their phone. But
Speaker 7: it was very loud and unsettling noise to the point
Speaker 7: where everybody thought that it might have been a gun,
Speaker 7: and everyone kind of understandably so jumped up and around.
Speaker 2: Oh they're scared of guns. Huh. The Republicans really fucking babies.
Speaker 7: And the overall energy is that they ate the federal government.
Speaker 7: They want things to go back to a local level,
Speaker 7: and that the Left is ruining and grooming children. Lots
Speaker 7: of weird as you can imagine, stuff about gender, lots
Speaker 7: of stuff.
Speaker 2: About consistent some of the biggest, biggest applause.
Speaker 6: Oh, something to note here.
Speaker 7: Anytime Elon Musk was brought up, which was quite a bit,
Speaker 7: the crowd went bat shit. Yeah, huge wild cheers for
Speaker 7: anything to do with Elon, which I thought was, you know,
Speaker 7: not unexpected, but just that, like, he got louder cheers
Speaker 7: than I think he got a louder cheer than when
Speaker 7: they brought up Donald Trump.
Speaker 6: He's really one of their new gray heroes. What did
Speaker 6: the Attorney's General talk about?
Speaker 7: They were mostly talking about different winds they had had
Speaker 7: in terms of like their states and things they were
Speaker 7: bringing the table, and mostly like personal stories of like
Speaker 7: things that they look for in their family. The Missouri
Speaker 7: Attorney General Andrew Bailey. His biggest reaction from the crowd
Speaker 7: was when he said in Missouri, we don't co parent
Speaker 7: with the government, and sure the crowd loved that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean this is a big, big, big rental
Speaker 6: rights group, And yeah, I'm interested in the attorney general
Speaker 6: because back in twenty twenty three, the attorney's generals from
Speaker 6: Alan these red states drafted this this very angry, kind
Speaker 6: of threatening letter to Target, kind of demanding that because
Speaker 6: some of their states own like an interest in Target,
Speaker 6: they have to remove any kind of any products that
Speaker 6: cater to trans people because this is betraying the investors
Speaker 6: by making this poor economic decision. And really, the attorney's
Speaker 6: general have been one of the strongest forces against trans
Speaker 6: rights in a lot of these states. And I believe
Speaker 6: because I I showed up near the end of the
Speaker 6: attorney general's segment, I believe they referred to themselves as
Speaker 6: like the last line of defense. Even if you have
Speaker 6: like a Democrat, you know, like mayor, or you know
Speaker 6: you have more Democrat officials in like your city or state,
Speaker 6: the attorneys generals are are like the ones that are
Speaker 6: going to hold it down, even if the rest have
Speaker 6: kind of sold out or are liberals, Democrats.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I would say the AGS were the most transphobic
Speaker 7: of the bunch, if I was doing ranking Santas.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: One of them said, you know, in a laughing way,
Speaker 7: which again got a great reaction from the crowd. Think
Speaker 7: about a kindergartener saying what's your pronoun?
Speaker 2: Very very funny ha ha ha ha.
Speaker 7: They were laughing and hahaha about that. Yes, And just
Speaker 7: the last I say about the AGS was that that
Speaker 7: same ag from Missouri said our rights come from God,
Speaker 7: not man.
Speaker 2: And famously in the Constitution.
Speaker 7: Yes, anyways, and then DeSantis and Sarah Hackeby Sanders closed
Speaker 7: it out.
Speaker 2: Which we arrived for.
Speaker 6: We arrived just in time to see DeSantis, thank god,
Speaker 6: Oh meatball. Ron Dessentis and Huckeby Sanders got to be
Speaker 6: the two most uncharismatic speakers I've seen at the convention
Speaker 6: so far.
Speaker 2: I'm not surprised they were both shunted off to the
Speaker 2: I would call it the shame callus.
Speaker 6: So DeSantis was wearing jeans, which is just a fascinating move,
Speaker 6: but these were very warm.
Speaker 7: Very warned, and essentially when he got up, he basically
Speaker 7: did like a brag list of all the things that
Speaker 7: he has gotten done in.
Speaker 6: Florida, talking about, you know, taking the fight to Disney,
Speaker 6: enacting universal school choice, making sure that there's no sex
Speaker 6: at in his schools.
Speaker 2: Very cool.
Speaker 6: And then uh, he talked oddly enough a lot about college.
Speaker 7: University is correct, Yes.
Speaker 6: He was. He was talking about how like, even if
Speaker 6: you raise your kid, right, even if we fix you know, public.
Speaker 2: Schools, put in eighteen hard years.
Speaker 6: He spent eighteen years raising your kid, you do it right,
Speaker 6: we fix all of the public schools.
Speaker 2: Everything's good.
Speaker 6: As soon as they turn eighteen, they're gonna go after
Speaker 6: one of these liberal colleges and they're gonna undo all
Speaker 6: of the good work that you've put in. And that
Speaker 6: needs to be the next thing to stop. And he
Speaker 6: said that Florida is the first state to take on
Speaker 6: higher education. We've had a lot of focus on lower education.
Speaker 6: We now we have to take on higher education, including
Speaker 6: doing like performance reviews for ten good professors every five years,
Speaker 6: in which case they can be fired for poor performance,
Speaker 6: which is kind of a wild concept for a Tenian professor.
Speaker 7: He also had a one off wild line where he
Speaker 7: was like, you did see hamas over on our universities.
Speaker 6: Yes, he referred to Palestinating human rights campus protesters as Hamas,
Speaker 6: just saying that they are Hamas. Like he didn't like say,
Speaker 6: these people are like Hamas. You just said when Hamas
Speaker 6: was coming to the universities, they didn't show up in Florida.
Speaker 2: Which is a very standard Republican line, it is.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and like, there's just no difference between between someone
Speaker 6: showing up to a protest in the United States because
Speaker 6: they don't like that thousands and thousands of Palestinians are
Speaker 6: being murdered, and that person is now indistinguishable from Hamas
Speaker 6: according to the Republican Party, according to all of these speakers. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and so Sarah Sanders just tried to kind of write
Speaker 6: on the coattails of disantist being like, hey, we're also
Speaker 6: planning the transgenders.
Speaker 2: She did the.
Speaker 7: Same show listed you know some of her brags mentioned
Speaker 7: it always has to do she talks about her dad.
Speaker 7: I wrote John subsic she said, because I was like,
Speaker 7: she said, the only war on women is on conservative
Speaker 7: women from the far left. Where are the feminists? They
Speaker 7: can't even tell you what a woman is.
Speaker 6: Well, someone who's famously taken a woman's studies course, where
Speaker 6: they never define what a woman is totally. I guess
Speaker 6: the main upsetting thing for me because the police just
Speaker 6: killed a black man a few hours ago. I was
Speaker 6: just reminded, you know, there's so many real people in Milwaukee, right.
Speaker 6: All the food service workers have been very nice, but
Speaker 6: there's all these real people facing realists use in the
Speaker 6: poorest part of Milwaukee. And we just saw someone whose
Speaker 6: life was ended because police were here for the RNC
Speaker 6: from a totally different state, and people with real economic concerns,
Speaker 6: real concerns about you know, their life from police brutality,
Speaker 6: all this type of stuff. And as soon as you
Speaker 6: walked into this Mom's for Liberty panel, the first thing
Speaker 6: we heard them complaining about was that they were being
Speaker 6: censored on Twitter, yep, and that that was their concern.
Speaker 2: Joe Biden censored us.
Speaker 6: Their hardest thing to them was that they find all
Speaker 6: this gender stuff a little bit icky and that we're
Speaker 6: being censored on Twitter. And that is the level of
Speaker 6: problems that these people are dealing well.
Speaker 2: And our kids didn't turn into the people we wanted
Speaker 2: them to. Yeah, and that should be the entire country's problem.
Speaker 2: They are not fundamentally, they don't have real problems. These people,
Speaker 2: they don't have real problems, but they are unhappy that
Speaker 2: everyone in the world does not inherently act to serve
Speaker 2: and validate them. And they are going to make that
Speaker 2: everyone's promise. You know. That is what the RNC is. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The people on the floor are what you would call
Speaker 2: like successful used car dealers, like level of capitalist, right,
Speaker 2: and they are worshiping an alliance of venture capitalists, guys
Speaker 2: like the VEC, guys like JD. Vance, and of course
Speaker 2: people who inherited a shitload of wealth and then eventually
Speaker 2: succeeded in making money through a combination of vice casinos
Speaker 2: and the entertainment industry. Trump, you know, like that's that's
Speaker 2: who this is.
Speaker 7: And uh, speaking of a VIC. As we were getting
Speaker 7: up to leave, they quickly announced that there was one
Speaker 7: more person who was going to speak, and it was him.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he sure did speak. He gave a speech that
Speaker 6: I would say was indistinguishable from AI. Yes, just about
Speaker 6: how how good America can be and even though we're
Speaker 6: in a tough gpt that even though we're in a
Speaker 6: tough spot right now, I feel like America can do better.
Speaker 6: And it was just it was like I could predict
Speaker 6: every other word.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Hey, this is Gear recording just outside of the main
Speaker 6: arena at the RNC where Governor Greg Abat just gave
Speaker 6: a speech. And now I'm giving you a short speech
Speaker 6: to tell you to enjoy these messages from our sponsors.
Speaker 6: We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: This is Robert M.
Speaker 6: Garrison recording from our hotel room later in the night,
Speaker 6: because we have learned some new information about the police
Speaker 6: killing that happened earlier today, and also we listened to
Speaker 6: a whole bunch of the RNC closing speeches tonight which
Speaker 6: kind of relate to this question of police violence. I'll
Speaker 6: hand this off to Robert.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, so since we were down there, the
Speaker 2: police have released both their security camera footage body camera footage,
Speaker 2: and we have the name of the decedent, who was
Speaker 2: Samuel Sharp Junior. This is the guy everyone in the
Speaker 2: neighborhood identified as Jehovah, and that was the nickname that
Speaker 2: he went by. He looked younger. I've seen some reports
Speaker 2: that he was like forty three, but he doesn't look
Speaker 2: forty three from the footage, you know. And he had
Speaker 2: just he had used a community shower earlier that day
Speaker 2: that comes by the neighborhood for some of the homeless folks,
Speaker 2: and you know, told everyone he loved them. Footage is
Speaker 2: I understand like exactly how it's going to be used
Speaker 2: and already as being used by the police, and I
Speaker 2: understand what they're saying, which is that if you look
Speaker 2: at the footage, is they rush on scene, I think
Speaker 2: about fifteen of them. Five of them fired at once
Speaker 2: and immediately open fire. You can see from a distance
Speaker 2: the two guys are five to seven feet apart and
Speaker 2: are kind of crossing the street together while it looks
Speaker 2: like they are yelling. As the police rush in, Samuel
Speaker 2: runs forward, and if you clip frames out of the video,
Speaker 2: you can make a case that he was charging the
Speaker 2: guy with his knife or knives. Police are saying multiple
Speaker 2: It's a little unclear to me in the footage if
Speaker 2: he had two or just one. But I can see
Speaker 2: how the police showing up on scene, being trained the
Speaker 2: way that they are, why they open fire. The problem
Speaker 2: is that he ran forward in the first place, because
Speaker 2: they rushed in, like these two guys were squared up
Speaker 2: on the street and not in an encounter that any
Speaker 2: of the locals considered to be particular literally threatening. If
Speaker 2: you have spent a lot of time around homeless encampments,
Speaker 2: if you have spent a lot of time in neighborhoods
Speaker 2: that have a lot of homeless residence, it is not
Speaker 2: wild or uncommon to see people yelling and to see
Speaker 2: people with knives on their person, you know, even in
Speaker 2: their hands. Obviously, that can be upsetting to some people.
Speaker 2: But like the folks who lived in the neighborhood did
Speaker 2: not consider this an odd circumstance. And with something that,
Speaker 2: in the normal circumstance of events and the normal following
Speaker 2: of events, would have been de escalated. And in this case,
Speaker 2: it wasn't the police open fire before there was any
Speaker 2: attempt at de escalation.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And like conservatives will always point out, you know,
Speaker 6: why is he just following orders? Why isn't he just
Speaker 6: just doing blah blah blah blah blah. They will they
Speaker 6: will take they'll take low screenshots that make something look
Speaker 6: a certain way. And the simple fact is that these
Speaker 6: two men were not in any physical altercation before police arrived.
Speaker 6: He started running away as police started charging towards him,
Speaker 6: I think it would be very odd that he would
Speaker 6: choose that moment to suddenly lunge forward and stab this
Speaker 6: person he knew. And it's very clear that he's actually
Speaker 6: just running away from police, as people often do. And
Speaker 6: police have a long history of just shooting at people
Speaker 6: and killing people who are running away. You can look
Speaker 6: at what happened at the Wendy's in Atlanta in twenty twenty.
Speaker 6: They shoot people when they don't follow what they're saying.
Speaker 6: They shoot people when people try to run away from them, and.
Speaker 2: That's just how cops work.
Speaker 6: So this video came out later in the evening, right
Speaker 6: as me and Robert arrived at the RNC second session.
Speaker 6: And the theme today for the RNC is make America
Speaker 6: Safe Again. And some of the first few speeches I heard,
Speaker 6: one was from the mayor of Dallas, Eric Johnson.
Speaker 11: Democrats and power demonstrate they don't care about stopping the
Speaker 11: killers or the thieves who terrorize black and brown communities.
Speaker 11: They don't care about securing our border, and they don't
Speaker 11: care about dangerous homeless encampments.
Speaker 2: And then there was also a police chief who spoke,
Speaker 2: a former police chief who now runs a charity I
Speaker 2: think for like wounded police officers. Yeah, but he's like
Speaker 2: a cop who is also an activist.
Speaker 6: And so All this framing is around talking about how
Speaker 6: the Democrats are the defund the police party, how Joe
Speaker 6: Biden and Kamala Harris themselves advocate for defunding the police,
Speaker 6: which is simply not true if you look at what
Speaker 6: they say. Joe Biden will always reiterate that he always
Speaker 6: has argued for more police funding, for more police training.
Speaker 6: But they have framed this issue as there are not
Speaker 6: enough police around, that's what is making cities dangerous, talking about,
Speaker 6: you know, all the people dying of violent crime. Not
Speaker 6: a single mention, of course, that the out of state
Speaker 6: police just killed someone a mile away from the Republican
Speaker 6: National Convention. The make America Safe Again rhetoric shifted towards,
Speaker 6: you know, border rhetoric. You know, people believing, genuinely the
Speaker 6: people that are speaking in the audience that we currently
Speaker 6: live under an open border policy that people can just
Speaker 6: walk in totally fine. Just a complete alterned reality view
Speaker 6: about what's going on in America, what Joe Biden and
Speaker 6: Kamala Harris's border policies are. And there was a number
Speaker 6: of speeches that tried to capitalize on this, on this
Speaker 6: almost like border framing up, like there's icis terrorists pouring
Speaker 6: into the border only under Joe Biden, right, as if
Speaker 6: no one ever crossed the border illegally under Donald Trump.
Speaker 6: I know what, Robert, you were talking about some of
Speaker 6: the Ted Cruz speech tonight on his comments around the border.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and Cruz was interesting. I've never considered him a
Speaker 2: particularly strong speaker, and coming out, he initially went into
Speaker 2: kind of a conspiracy theory that you'll hear on the
Speaker 2: right about people being trafficked, sex trafficked, kids being sex
Speaker 2: traffic across the border. He made a comment about them
Speaker 2: having colored wristbands, which is again not a thing that happens,
Speaker 2: but a reference to a widely believed right wing conspiracy,
Speaker 2: and that got kind of a scattered amount of applause,
Speaker 2: not not what I would call a reaction, given how
Speaker 2: he saw the crowd react, Marjorie Taylor Green and how
Speaker 2: we saw them react, you know, whenever Trump comes out
Speaker 2: very muted. But as it went on, he started going
Speaker 2: into the kind of fearmongering spiel about migrants. He talked
Speaker 2: about the woman in San Francisco who was killed by
Speaker 2: that guy who found a gun in a bag and
Speaker 2: accidentally fired it. He talked about a number of different
Speaker 2: other cases that were people not from the country, undocumented
Speaker 2: immigrants who killed generally white Americans. And every time he
Speaker 2: would tell a story, he had like a refrain line
Speaker 2: that was something and that's what happens every damn time
Speaker 2: or something. And every time he gave the refrain, more
Speaker 2: and more people started to cheer in the audience. And
Speaker 2: by the end of it, with the last kind of
Speaker 2: couple of cases of you know, migrant on white people
Speaker 2: crime he brought up, the crowd was like legitimately roaring
Speaker 2: like as much as they did for Marjorie Taylor Green.
Speaker 2: Now the cop that came up next got a much
Speaker 2: louder response, and by far the biggest response of the night,
Speaker 2: even maybe including Trump, was when the delegates on the
Speaker 2: floor launched into a series of back the Blue chants.
Speaker 2: They actually interrupted the cop with back the Blue chants
Speaker 2: and people were roaring for them.
Speaker 6: Yeah, there was a lot of a lot of these chants.
Speaker 6: And the Dallas mayor told a really funny story how
Speaker 6: in twenty twenty some like anti police or defund the
Speaker 6: police activists to shut up around his neighborhood to try to,
Speaker 6: you know, get him to defund the police and he
Speaker 6: got so scared by this that he changed from being
Speaker 6: a Democrat mayor to a Republican mayor and now he
Speaker 6: runs the biggest Republican led city in the country. And
Speaker 6: he had this comment talking about how he grew up
Speaker 6: in you know, poor black neighborhoods, and the thing that
Speaker 6: they've always wanted, the thing that makes them safer, is
Speaker 6: more cops, not less cops.
Speaker 1: Both.
Speaker 11: I grew up in high prime neighborhoods.
Speaker 2: What we wanted was more and better police, not less.
Speaker 6: And just contrasting that with our experiences today in a
Speaker 6: very poor black community that just suffered an incident of
Speaker 6: police killing. That is that is just a lie, right, like,
Speaker 6: and like everyone knows this. This is theater for the convention.
Speaker 6: Everyone at the convention is really into this sort of thing.
Speaker 6: They genuinely believe this sort of stuff, but it's just
Speaker 6: an alternate reality. We spend time one of the poorest
Speaker 6: zip codes in the country and the state today and no,
Speaker 6: it's that's simply not true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these these people are angry about primarily theoretical problems.
Speaker 2: You know, this kind of specter of migrant crime, which
Speaker 2: is not really real in a demographic you can pick
Speaker 2: out individual cases of that, but you can pick out
Speaker 2: individual cases of doctors stabbing people to death, and that
Speaker 2: doesn't mean we have a wave of doctor related crime. Right.
Speaker 2: The reality of the situation is that, like, these are
Speaker 2: super fans of the Republican Party, and they are super
Speaker 2: fans of the narrative, and they are cheering for some
Speaker 2: of the moments. You know, they're not there's some stuff
Speaker 2: that's gotten boring to them, to think the child traffick
Speaker 2: at conspiracy theories might be boring to them, maybe because
Speaker 2: that guy from the child trafficking movie got disgraced or whatever.
Speaker 2: There's not as interested. So you can see every now
Speaker 2: and then as like their interest in certain things fades,
Speaker 2: But they're reacting like an audience that like a comic
Speaker 2: con would to see in like a Star Wars trailer
Speaker 2: where some guy does a thing that's evidence of having
Speaker 2: the comics or whatever people I'm waiting to see, Like
Speaker 2: when fucking DeSantis comes on and starts talking about banning
Speaker 2: children from receiving gender affirming care, that's like fucking Spider
Speaker 2: Man showing up, right, And they react like the guy
Speaker 2: next to us when DeSantis started doing this started screaming
Speaker 2: and like sticking his fist out towards DeSantis and like
Speaker 2: yelling at it a volume that was honestly kind of
Speaker 2: surprising the man could project. I'll give him that. So
Speaker 2: I think ultimately the way I would sum this up
Speaker 2: is that these are not normal people. These are people
Speaker 2: who love politics. And again, to be clear, I'm not
Speaker 2: saying these are not normal people because they're conservative. Your
Speaker 2: family are conservative, a lot of them are Trump voters,
Speaker 2: but they would find this audience deeply weird because these
Speaker 2: people are politics fans, and even most of the conservatives
Speaker 2: I know really dislike politics. Most normal people do, and
Speaker 2: I guess that's kind of where I've concluded, is the
Speaker 2: difference between like the crazies and the normies. Normal people
Speaker 2: don't enjoy this stuff.
Speaker 6: The term I've used the past few years is politics
Speaker 6: as fandom, and that's all this fucking is. This is
Speaker 6: this is a convention, just like comic con, just like
Speaker 6: an anime con. This is a convention, and that is
Speaker 6: how they view politics. Anyway, back to the past versions
Speaker 6: of us to discuss a funny closing story regarding presidential footwear.
Speaker 6: So that has been our day so far. The last
Speaker 6: thing I say will leave you with is. On our
Speaker 6: way to the convention site this morning, we were walking
Speaker 6: through this hotel to get through security and we found
Speaker 6: this wonderful section. It was it was it was called
Speaker 6: the Presidential Experience. We walked in. There was a there
Speaker 6: was a replica of the Oval Office. I was told
Speaker 6: Reagan era Oval Office it was. It was pretty good,
Speaker 6: and it was pretty good.
Speaker 2: It was not good Netflix production, but like Netflix production
Speaker 2: level quality.
Speaker 6: Bad Netflix production quality. So we walked through and then
Speaker 6: we found just a glorious site. And I will let
Speaker 6: Past Robert and myself tell you what we found at
Speaker 6: the Presidential Experience. We are hearing the Presidential shoe section.
Speaker 6: We've got Harry Truman, Nixon, Gerald Ford, Reagan, Warren G. Harding,
Speaker 6: who has a quote charming spat requested by President Harding
Speaker 6: and sympathized the elegance of the Victorian era. Dwight Eisenhower's
Speaker 6: shoes are pretty good. JFKs are a little bit more
Speaker 6: fancy but less polished. Lyndon B. Johnson's completely unsurprising, very
Speaker 6: very versatile, very efficient, can get off easy, slip on
Speaker 6: and off, get those dogs out when you need to.
Speaker 6: Abe Lincoln has some honestly, very stylish boots. Theodore Roosevelt's
Speaker 6: as well, large foot on Theodore and Woodrow Wilson's shoes
Speaker 6: the only white shoe in the bunch. Very small, tiny feet,
Speaker 6: very small feet. Kind of surprisingly He's it says he
Speaker 6: chose fashion over tradition with these white buckskins. Also they
Speaker 6: have Ulysses S. Grant's little little riding boots. The Victorian
Speaker 6: boots are are very very stylish. But honestly, I think
Speaker 6: I would go with Dwight D. Eisenhower's. They're just a beautiful,
Speaker 6: a beautiful shoe. Reagan's aren't bad, but I don't know.
Speaker 6: The Eisenhower shoes just a little bit more elegant.
Speaker 2: I'm going for LBJ slip on life.
Speaker 6: That makes sense for you.
Speaker 2: That shows you're a man who's got things to do.
Speaker 2: You know, you don't have time to be tie in
Speaker 2: your shoes.
Speaker 6: No, that that that makes sense, That makes sense. Nick
Speaker 6: Nixon's and Kennedy's are very similar.
Speaker 2: Process or I will tell you the truth, like or.
Speaker 6: Not pretty good. It looks like this was presented by
Speaker 6: c SPAN this presidential experience. We have a Reagan era
Speaker 6: replica of the Oval Office, not a big room, not
Speaker 6: a big room, but overall of decent, decent replica.
Speaker 2: Nice JFK portrait Up there. There's a women's suffrage article.
Speaker 6: Interesting women's suffrage, little table. Very controversial topic among Republicans
Speaker 6: these days.
Speaker 2: It has gotten to be increasingly so.
Speaker 6: Some old Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser newspapers from seventeen
Speaker 6: eighty seven.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, so this is I guess the original Pennsylvania
Speaker 2: newspaper coverage and printing of the.
Speaker 6: Seventeen eighty seven Yeah, of the Constitution.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's the preamble right there. Yeah, and they spell
Speaker 2: established justice as a thab lith justith because that's a
Speaker 2: yieldie days, a lot a lot more f's back in
Speaker 2: the day. Yeah.
Speaker 6: But they have these little information placards about all the presidents,
Speaker 6: the first ladies, that kind of stuff. We'll try to
Speaker 6: talk to the to the organizer of this little shindig
Speaker 6: in a sect. But honestly, the shoe, the shoe section,
Speaker 6: it's the most interesting thing to me just because of
Speaker 6: how tiny, just just how tiny those Woodrow Wilson shooes are.
Speaker 2: Hey, Jay, that's that's a that's a that's a long foot.
Speaker 2: It's not a wide foot.
Speaker 6: Roosevelt's feet are pretty wide, you as Grant also very small,
Speaker 6: also very small feet. Hmmm. Yeah. You know what they
Speaker 6: say about anyway, who's your favorite president?
Speaker 2: Favorite? Honestly? You know, I I I think I gotta
Speaker 2: go with US Grant. He's He's not my favorite president
Speaker 2: in terms of what he did in office, but in
Speaker 2: terms of like as a person, sure, he's the US
Speaker 2: president that I think was probably the the best person.
Speaker 2: Like he really did try.
Speaker 6: Always been a Harrison fan myself.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, William Henry, he was my favorite ass president right.
Speaker 6: Also rhymes was my first name, So a little bit
Speaker 6: of a bias there.
Speaker 2: He really I like a man who there. There's not
Speaker 2: much like fat on that presidency.
Speaker 6: He really efficient, efficient, efficient time in office.
Speaker 2: You got in and out. Wow, very exciting. All those
Speaker 2: little feet. I can't stop thinking about. You know what
Speaker 2: I think about that's the weirdest is that they did
Speaker 2: not have they didn't have any bush feet. Sadly well,
Speaker 2: they didn't have bush feet. And there was one guy
Speaker 2: who they didn't have his shoes. They just had the
Speaker 2: US Grant. They just had they had like the model
Speaker 2: that they built the shoe around for him. Yes, which
Speaker 2: was weird. I was like, where's your where's your US
Speaker 2: grant shoe? You don't want to show us the hardest
Speaker 2: working man whoever lived to be president?
Speaker 6: But yeah, no, I thought that was some important breaking
Speaker 6: news for our listeners to hear who had the smallest foot. Yeah,
Speaker 6: but as of right now, that is day two of
Speaker 6: the Republican National Convention.
Speaker 2: Until our next update, don't come here. It's unpleasant.
Speaker 7: America is Trump strong? Okay?
Speaker 2: It is so funny.
Speaker 6: Welcome to it could happen here. A podcast recorded from
Speaker 6: the Republican National Convention, specifically the hotel where the Idaho
Speaker 6: and North Dakota delegates are gathered. Yeah, fascinating elevator rides.
Speaker 2: And we're thinking today about the memory of that guy
Speaker 2: that Trump does not know the name of who got
Speaker 2: shot to death.
Speaker 1: Corey k.
Speaker 2: They've definitely pronounced every time they've said it wrong.
Speaker 7: Every single person who spoke the last few days pronounced
Speaker 7: his name differently, And I was like, well, finally they
Speaker 7: have somebody's name to pronounce more incorrectly than they do
Speaker 7: Kabla Harris or Ramaswami.
Speaker 2: And it's look, folks, I'm not gonna laugh at his kids.
Speaker 2: You know, that's a tragedy for them. But what I
Speaker 2: will say is that objectively, it's really funny that this
Speaker 2: guy died for Donald Trump, and Trump very obviously does
Speaker 2: not care, couldn't, could not be less important to him,
Speaker 2: Like there is nothing that matters less than this election
Speaker 2: the man who took a bullet for him, And that's
Speaker 2: really funny. That's really funny.
Speaker 7: Anyways, Uh, this is it could happen here. I'm Sophie LICHTBD. We're,
Speaker 7: like Gara said at the R and C. I have
Speaker 7: Garrison Davis with me and Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: Uh huh, very professional, Sophie, Thank.
Speaker 7: You so much. I am your boss. Do you want
Speaker 7: to tell me a little bit about this morning?
Speaker 6: Well, I think first to talk about some of our
Speaker 6: late night escapades.
Speaker 7: Oh wait, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Cigar bar, Yes, wow,
Speaker 7: I did not go with you to that event, so
Speaker 7: I call.
Speaker 2: I agree that was a good call. I counted on
Speaker 2: the main floor of the cigar bar where the young
Speaker 2: Republicans had their party, and six of forty people had cigars.
Speaker 6: I had a cigar?
Speaker 2: You did you had? Because I brought a election of
Speaker 2: my finest Cubans.
Speaker 7: Yeah, very very kind of you, Robert.
Speaker 2: I had one of John F. Kennedy's favorite cigars that
Speaker 2: I had been aging for two years waiting for this moment.
Speaker 6: I did like that you had the foresight to bring
Speaker 6: cigars to the art, to bring.
Speaker 2: Extremely high quality. Our buddy Lenny had a three year
Speaker 2: age part of goas you had. But I've been drinking
Speaker 2: and I had a lovely have you been quality? The
Speaker 2: best cigars there. I talked to everyone who happened to
Speaker 2: be smoking a cigar, and they were all smoking trash
Speaker 2: like a Rodwin and American garbage, because none of them
Speaker 2: had any kind of look. I don't get into this often.
Speaker 2: I don't want to be like some of our friends
Speaker 2: in the in the far right and and use cigars
Speaker 2: as a totem. I enjoyed my cigars privately, but we
Speaker 2: were going to a cigar bar, so I brought my
Speaker 2: nice cigars and oh was it a cigar bar?
Speaker 7: Were there cigars there? You're just at the word cigars seven.
Speaker 2: It was not lost on me that none of them
Speaker 2: smoked good cigars, because they're children, are what. We had
Speaker 2: an interview with Rudy Giuliani, and Rudy would have understood
Speaker 2: that man has nice cigars. I'll say that about Rudy Giuliani.
Speaker 2: He knows the cigars, that's all I'm saying.
Speaker 6: Great, So we've been trying to hit the kind of
Speaker 6: the after party scene at the RNC just to see
Speaker 6: kind of what's up. This little cigar party was put
Speaker 6: on by some of the young Republicans from New.
Speaker 2: York, primarily in New York. They are very confident of
Speaker 2: a victory, potentially a statewide victory in a national election.
Speaker 2: And you know what, the evidence doesn't make it impossible.
Speaker 2: It doesn't look like it's going to happen from this cycle.
Speaker 2: But twenty twenty eight, New York could be in play.
Speaker 2: And one of the interesting things is that Florida also
Speaker 2: seems to be tightening. Two poles recently show Trump just
Speaker 2: four points ahead of Biden. He won by ten in
Speaker 2: twenty twenty. That's a significant tightening and within kind of
Speaker 2: swing state margins. And so it is kind of interesting
Speaker 2: to conceive of the possibility that by twenty twenty eight,
Speaker 2: both New York and Florida could be in play.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so I dressed like a nineteen fifty FBI agent
Speaker 6: and trench coat and smoke well, done one of these
Speaker 6: cigars as best as I could.
Speaker 2: How'd you like it?
Speaker 6: It was fine.
Speaker 2: It was a nice cigar.
Speaker 6: It's no clove.
Speaker 2: Good god, oh my fucking so, give me a gun.
Speaker 6: It was it was. It was a nice little party.
Speaker 6: We talked, We talked to some people. The best thing
Speaker 6: about the party though, is that there was a series
Speaker 6: of speeches put on by these guys from New York
Speaker 6: that kind of just kept going on. And the longer
Speaker 6: that these speeches and like these three different guys kept
Speaker 6: going on, the music on the roof started to get
Speaker 6: slowly louder and louder and louder until it was completely
Speaker 6: draining out the speeches, until they just stopped because like, okay,
Speaker 6: the music's too loud.
Speaker 2: Now now and again there are heroes.
Speaker 6: So someone was on that dial just every every two
Speaker 6: minutes it up a little bit.
Speaker 2: There's a guy I follow who has started who followed
Speaker 2: me back in twenty twenty, who was like an election
Speaker 2: poll analysis expert and was like, and it's not a
Speaker 2: political guy, but was like, look, if you show up
Speaker 2: at a convention after party to talk, fuck you like
Speaker 2: people are there to drink, all you should say is
Speaker 2: the bar is open and I agreed with that, and
Speaker 2: then you know what, to skip ahead. Credit to the
Speaker 2: Heritage Foundation. Nobody ever said anything but that we could
Speaker 2: drink all we wanted. That is a Heritage Foundation party.
Speaker 6: That is right, which we will get to later. So
Speaker 6: we were up way too late, way too late at
Speaker 6: at some of these after parties the other night, and
Speaker 6: we had to get up pretty early in the morning
Speaker 6: because we had an interview with the CEO of the
Speaker 6: Texas Public Policy Foundation, which is kind of like a
Speaker 6: mini version, yeah, the Heritage Foundation, but just for Texas. Yeah,
Speaker 6: the former guy who ran this now runs the Heritage
Speaker 6: Foundation itself, so it's kind of like a little bit
Speaker 6: of a training ground and they kind of swap members often.
Speaker 6: We had a pretty long interview that we will turn
Speaker 6: into some kind of future piece of content, discussing everything
Speaker 6: from woke ideology to the mortal rot infecting America.
Speaker 2: To why mash shoot happened in this country. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 2: he was.
Speaker 6: He was very polished, very media trained.
Speaker 2: He easily the best interview subject in terms of his
Speaker 2: like skillet talking, yeah, that we've had.
Speaker 6: And similarly, I don't think he was quite prepared for
Speaker 6: our line of questioning either, you know, so that he
Speaker 6: got taken it back a little bit by some of
Speaker 6: the questions we were lobbing him, probably very different from
Speaker 6: the rest of the interviews that he's been doing. I'm
Speaker 6: trying to think if there's any anything specifically about that
Speaker 6: interview that's worth mentioning.
Speaker 2: Now, you know what really interests me because the shooting
Speaker 2: is so relevant, I will bring up the shooting. We
Speaker 2: talked about why the guy who tried to kill Trump
Speaker 2: had done it, and he and I were kind of
Speaker 2: the same mind, the same mind that you are, Garrison,
Speaker 2: which is that this was a school shooter type thing
Speaker 2: and that was the primary reason behind the ideology. And
Speaker 2: this is before now some stuff has come out since
Speaker 2: that has made that seem even more likely. But it
Speaker 2: was interesting to like kind of have that not be
Speaker 2: a controversial part of the conversation. This was not a
Speaker 2: radical left shooting. There was no sort of attempt by
Speaker 2: him to claim it as that. He was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: this seems like a guy. We have a deep sickness
Speaker 2: in this country, and we clearly disagreed with him about
Speaker 2: the specifics of where the sickness comes from. But the
Speaker 2: sickness leads to some people who just want to do
Speaker 2: mass shootings that are not political, and uh, that was
Speaker 2: interesting to me.
Speaker 6: No, And one of the big things talked about in
Speaker 6: terms of this moral rot is that there is something
Speaker 6: lacking in our country, specifically with young men. There's there
Speaker 6: is there is this lack of purpose among young men
Speaker 6: which makes them do these kind of violent acts.
Speaker 2: I don't disagree with that, sure, And I think I
Speaker 2: think I disagree with Yeah, his his.
Speaker 6: His solutions and some and some some of his diagnosis
Speaker 6: in certain ways, right because he he'll attribute that lack
Speaker 6: to certain things that we might not morality at the home,
Speaker 6: and sure, you know, all these all those kind of things.
Speaker 6: But you know, that was that that was kind of
Speaker 6: his his take, you know. And then we also talked
Speaker 6: about everything from like the influence of billionaires on these
Speaker 6: right wing think tanks and political candidates, Catholics versus Evangelicals.
Speaker 6: It was an interesting conversation that I'm sure you'll hear
Speaker 6: in the coming weeks, and we'll kind of explain why
Speaker 6: we want you to hear from this guy who's, you know,
Speaker 6: typically probably pretty adversarial to the type of stuff that
Speaker 6: we talk about on this show. But after this interview.
Speaker 6: I met up with Sophie lichterman Hey and we talked
Speaker 6: to the people at the actual Heritage Foundation booth who
Speaker 6: had many a pamphlet, and I collected all of the
Speaker 6: gender ideology pamphlets, which will also be a future deep
Speaker 6: dive kind of Curiously, they did not have a single
Speaker 6: pamphlet about Project twenty twenty five. Nope, No, and they
Speaker 6: didn't like talking about it either. They said that Project
Speaker 6: twenty twenty five is, you know, a coalition effort between
Speaker 6: both Heritage and all these other groups, but they're not
Speaker 6: really talking about it here today because it's not Trump's
Speaker 6: policy platform. Trump has his own policy platform. This is
Speaker 6: just a list of policy suggestions for lawmakers once they
Speaker 6: get into office. So they like to talk about a
Speaker 6: whole bunch of other stuff, you know, certain things that
Speaker 6: are kind of a part of Project twenty twenty five,
Speaker 6: but nothing about the actual you know, document itself, partially
Speaker 6: due to the kind of negative blash that it has received,
Speaker 6: and you know, it seems to be kind of widely
Speaker 6: unliked for various reasons. So I think it was interesting
Speaker 6: that they weren't even pushing it at an event like this.
Speaker 2: You know, again, with the Texas Policy Foundation gut we
Speaker 2: talked about when we brought it up. He was pretty
Speaker 2: open about the fact that it's not popular. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: his attitude was that in the future, once we win,
Speaker 2: we can try and build consensus around it. But he
Speaker 2: didn't try to deny the fact that, like, it's widely
Speaker 2: disliked by the electorate.
Speaker 6: And it is against a lot of things that are
Speaker 6: on the Republican policy platform for the actual party. Sophie,
Speaker 6: you had a wonderful conversation with some of these heritage folks.
Speaker 7: Let's just say that my very blonde hair and the
Speaker 7: pig tills that I or most of this week made
Speaker 7: it very easy for these folks to talk to me,
Speaker 7: which is unsettling.
Speaker 6: A little bit frightening, but useful.
Speaker 7: But very very very scary.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Of course, asking a lot of the folks that I've
Speaker 7: talked to this week is mostly about their opinions about education,
Speaker 7: and you know, if there is a shift in power
Speaker 7: with Trump being elected in November, what exactly they would
Speaker 7: want to do. And the overall majority answer from these
Speaker 7: groups is that they want to take away power from
Speaker 7: the federal government and bring it to the states, and
Speaker 7: that would be universal school choice, and so got a
Speaker 7: little bit of that from them. They also mentioned something
Speaker 7: about one of the biggest roadblocks being student loans.
Speaker 6: While also being very against student learned for forgiveness specifically,
Speaker 6: so it's kind of a it was an interesting position.
Speaker 6: I want to read some more of their pamphlets on that.
Speaker 7: But anyways, that just talks with them more. Got more
Speaker 7: of their pamphlets and Garrison and I asked them about
Speaker 7: the states that they choose to operate.
Speaker 6: In and specifically for their lobbying group as opposed to
Speaker 6: just like the think tank, they have this other thing
Speaker 6: I think called Heritage Action, which operates differently because of
Speaker 6: certain laws around lobbying.
Speaker 2: It's kind of where they try to train a lot
Speaker 2: of new people up. They had a lot of advertisements
Speaker 2: that they did, something like fifty yea.
Speaker 6: More on the ground activism type stuff.
Speaker 7: And Garret, what was the answer they gave? I thought
Speaker 7: it was interesting you asked the question for why they
Speaker 7: didn't go in certain states.
Speaker 6: Yes, so they had this map of what states they
Speaker 6: were active in, and there were certain states, you know,
Speaker 6: like Oregon, Washington, a whole bunch of the New England states,
Speaker 6: and they just weren't active in because they didn't think
Speaker 6: they would be very effective. They wouln't make any leeway.
Speaker 6: It's it's just not worth it. It's not going to
Speaker 6: move towards actual electoral victories. But the other there's other
Speaker 6: states like Wyoming and a few others that they weren't
Speaker 6: active in for different reasons because of specific regulations regarding
Speaker 6: donor transparency that they were strongly against the states that
Speaker 6: require there to be transparency for people who donate to
Speaker 6: these kind of political groups. And in protest of those
Speaker 6: regulations and laws, they are completely inactive in those states,
Speaker 6: which is a funny way of saying, we just want
Speaker 6: to hide whoever gives us money. And that is that
Speaker 6: was a little interesting piece of information regarding you know,
Speaker 6: there's the state states don't operate and because they do
Speaker 6: not want to see or have it made public where
Speaker 6: their kind of money is coming in and out of,
Speaker 6: at least for the Heritage Action part of the group.
Speaker 7: Yes, it was overall just interesting that there was you know,
Speaker 7: at this at this booth, there was about five different
Speaker 7: i would say twenty something women.
Speaker 6: Twenty something died blonde women, yes.
Speaker 7: And they invited me to their Heritage Social party that
Speaker 7: they were having that was across from the main convention
Speaker 7: where you needed an access code to get in, and
Speaker 7: they gave you that flyer and.
Speaker 6: You will hear all about that. We took advantage of that.
Speaker 6: At the end of the episode you will get a
Speaker 6: special inside look at the Heritage Foundations private invite only exclusive.
Speaker 2: Party was off the record. Now, does it count? No,
Speaker 2: of course not. I promised that lady that what she
Speaker 2: said to me was off the record, and I won't
Speaker 2: say any more about that. But I didn't promise that
Speaker 2: to anyone else.
Speaker 6: Do you know what's on the record, Robert, what you
Speaker 6: said later?
Speaker 7: These products and the products and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 2: That also that also is off the record, on the record. Whatever,
Speaker 2: here's the ads.
Speaker 6: We are back and don't worry. You will hear about
Speaker 6: this special Heritage Foundation party in a sect. But first
Speaker 6: I want to play for you a whole interview that
Speaker 6: I collected just down the hall from the Heritage Foundation booth.
Speaker 6: The American Conservation Coalition had a pretty a pretty large
Speaker 6: section of the RNC convention fest. You know, list of
Speaker 6: vendors kind of more typical like you know, convention type stuff.
Speaker 6: You know, like if you go to like a comic
Speaker 6: on or something, it's a lot of like vendors and
Speaker 6: booths that this kind of section of the R and C.
Speaker 6: So they had this this pretty big booth and it
Speaker 6: was the only time I ever seen anything mentioned about
Speaker 6: climate change. So I was interested to see what conservatives
Speaker 6: talking about climate change sound like what they're saying. And
Speaker 6: I will just play that interview here right now. Do
Speaker 6: you want to introducing yourself in the organization you're with.
Speaker 7: Sure.
Speaker 5: My name's Carl Matthews. I'm the vice president of Communications
Speaker 5: at the American Conservation Coalition, which is the largest conservative
Speaker 5: grassroots environmental organization in the country.
Speaker 2: So a few things that that interested me about your group.
Speaker 6: I mean, especially if you look back in the last
Speaker 6: one hundred years, like environmental conservation has been historically a
Speaker 6: much more conservative standpoint.
Speaker 2: You can look at like presidents in like the.
Speaker 6: Nineteen twenties, there was a huge push for that, and
Speaker 6: somewhere along the lines that that's kind of been lost
Speaker 6: for like a number of reasons. I guess, what is
Speaker 6: your main mission here with this organization?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, it's interesting you bring up kind of the
Speaker 5: history of conservative conservation because we have a timeline here
Speaker 5: at the RNC showing all the Republican presidents who have
Speaker 5: really engaged on this issue, from Ulysses Grant to Teddy
Speaker 5: Roosevelt to more modern present that is like Richard Nixon,
Speaker 5: Ronald Reagan, and even hw Bush. So what we're really
Speaker 5: doing here with the American Conservation Coalition is building the
Speaker 5: conservative environmental movement, specifically among young Americans who frankly feel
Speaker 5: kind of disenfranchised by both parties on the issue of
Speaker 5: climate and the environment. The left has taken a really
Speaker 5: doom and gloom approach to these issues that isn't very
Speaker 5: inspiring for a lot of young folks, and in the
Speaker 5: last thirty years, conservatives haven't engaged very productively. So we're
Speaker 5: here showing that conservation is conservative, those values are inherently entwined,
Speaker 5: and it's okay to call for action on environmental issues
Speaker 5: like climate change.
Speaker 6: I guess yeah. Let's start more on like the big topic,
Speaker 6: which is which is climate change, and we can get
Speaker 6: into like local conservation. What is your take on the
Speaker 6: current climate scenario, because like ever since, ever since the
Speaker 6: early two thousands, there's been this you know, for a
Speaker 6: lot of young people slightly worrying trend. If you have
Speaker 6: the politicians just either seriously downgrading, you know, the scale
Speaker 6: of this problem, or just thinking there is no problem.
Speaker 6: What is your take both, I guess on that part.
Speaker 6: And then how you see the climate crisis, the climate
Speaker 6: issue that we are dealing with, where do you see
Speaker 6: it heading?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So ACC was founded because Conservatives weren't engaging on
Speaker 5: this issue. So for the last six seven years we've
Speaker 5: been really pushing conservatives, especially conservative elected leaders, to re
Speaker 5: engage in a productive way. And I think we've done
Speaker 5: that really effectively. In DC where I live, the Conservative
Speaker 5: Climate Caucus in the House, which is a group of
Speaker 5: Republican lawmakers interested in tackling the issue of climate change,
Speaker 5: has eighty seven members. It's the fourth largest in the
Speaker 5: Republican conference. So we're seeing a big kind of shift
Speaker 5: in the Overton window there. But yeah, I think young
Speaker 5: people want elected leaders who recognize that we have an issue,
Speaker 5: recognize that we have a challenge in climate change, and
Speaker 5: want practical solutions like expanding clean, reliable nuclear energy, like
Speaker 5: pursuing permitting reform to actually allow American energy projects to
Speaker 5: be built. So I think we take a really kind
Speaker 5: of level headed rationalach to these issues that really resonates.
Speaker 6: With young people. What's the main difference in how you
Speaker 6: view the climate issue as opposed to someone like AOC
Speaker 6: right or like these these more like progressive democrats of view,
Speaker 6: this is a very existential crisis.
Speaker 2: You have to get fossil fuels under control.
Speaker 6: These kind of timelines that we hear, you know, by
Speaker 6: twenty fifty, by twenty seventy, by even like something like
Speaker 6: twenty thirty, right, how it becomes like a cascading problem.
Speaker 6: How differently do you view the current situation than you know,
Speaker 6: these like progressive democrats.
Speaker 5: Sure, like I said, climate change is a challenge. It's
Speaker 5: certainly something that we need to tackle, but we don't
Speaker 5: view it through kind of this doom and gloom lens
Speaker 5: where we're going to die in twelve, ten, five years,
Speaker 5: whatever the current timeline is on the left. But we
Speaker 5: do see a need for all of the above energy.
Speaker 5: So we recognize that energy demand is continuing to expand,
Speaker 5: but we also need to protect our environment. So we
Speaker 5: need to kind of consider that trilemma reliable, affordable, and
Speaker 5: clean when we're looking at our energy portfolio in the future.
Speaker 5: And I think that's what really kind of distinguishes us
Speaker 5: from the left, and that we're not calling for a
Speaker 5: divestment of fossil fuels. We're calling for a rational, level
Speaker 5: headed energy strategy that will lower emissions, but in kind
Speaker 5: of a more realistic way.
Speaker 6: Do you think that timeline's gonna be more stretched out?
Speaker 6: Because I mean, if if you look at you know
Speaker 6: the way current levels are heading. As soon as we
Speaker 6: hit like two point five degrees, not just that change,
Speaker 6: but the level of cascating environmental effects, right, one thing changes.
Speaker 6: Now everything gets worse because when stuff melts, then it
Speaker 6: changes the way like thermal regulation of the whole planet works,
Speaker 6: and then it becomes this kind of cascating problem. And
Speaker 6: I feel like we're trying to get out in front
Speaker 6: of it before it happens. That every day that kind
Speaker 6: of feels less and less likely, at least for a
Speaker 6: lot of people like my age, And it can be
Speaker 6: a very doom and gloom scenario because you feel like
Speaker 6: no one's taking this problem seriously.
Speaker 2: Even Joe Biden's.
Speaker 6: Climate policy is very inadequate according to like a lot
Speaker 6: of a lot of the people that I talk to.
Speaker 6: I guess, see, like, how do you view like the
Speaker 6: scale of this problem right now.
Speaker 5: Yeah, climate change is the kind of environmental challenge of
Speaker 5: our time, right, it should be what you know, we're
Speaker 5: thinking about and focusing on when it comes to environmental policy.
Speaker 5: But I really think we need to kind of take
Speaker 5: a step back, and that kind of push for urgency
Speaker 5: hasn't gotten us anywhere to your point. You know, Joe
Speaker 5: Biden is kind of branding himself as the Climate President,
Speaker 5: but you know a lot of young people are unhappy
Speaker 5: with the platform that he's put forwards. So I think
Speaker 5: when you're talking about the timeline, we're talking about what
Speaker 5: we can do right now to kind of unleash American energy,
Speaker 5: to reduce American emissions, but also global emissions, and really
Speaker 5: think of this on a global scale. So that urgency
Speaker 5: piece isn't quite you know, realistic, or isn't quite what
Speaker 5: we want to focus on, because I don't think it
Speaker 5: leads to action.
Speaker 6: There's kind of two trains of thought in terms of
Speaker 6: like climate policy stuff. There's taking like adaptation roots right,
Speaker 6: trying to adapt to a changing environment that we're going
Speaker 6: to have to face it. It's going to happen versus mitigation. Right.
Speaker 6: For a while, we were trying to find ways to
Speaker 6: mitigate the problem, to kind of get ahead of it, right,
Speaker 6: and that is feeling less and less likely, and we
Speaker 6: are seeing more of these adaptive strategies getting adopted.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: There's everything from like you know, people are trying to
Speaker 6: develop better carbon capture, which has its own problems as
Speaker 6: a technology, and you know, everything from like geoengineering even
Speaker 6: to like solar blockage. There's a lot of things that
Speaker 6: people are thinking, like, if we don't get like emissions
Speaker 6: under control, we're gonna have to go to similar more
Speaker 6: of as extreme measures. How much of your focus is
Speaker 6: on adapt developments versus just mitigation.
Speaker 5: Well, we definitely need both. To your point, we have
Speaker 5: to adapt to a change in climate, but we also
Speaker 5: need to be reducing emissions to kind of prevent future effects.
Speaker 5: So I think we kind of set a balance between
Speaker 5: adaptation and mitigation, and frankly, I think sometimes they can
Speaker 5: be really kind of connected and entwined. So something we
Speaker 5: focus on, for instance, is regenerative agriculture, which lowers emissions
Speaker 5: associated with agriculture but also helps the land kind of
Speaker 5: adjust to a change in climate, keeps the soil healthy,
Speaker 5: things like that. So I really think when we're talking
Speaker 5: about climate, we can talk about adaptation and mitigation kind
Speaker 5: of at the same time.
Speaker 6: How do you try to do outreach to a vast
Speaker 6: number of republic Conservatives who simply don't think this is
Speaker 6: a problem, who like just deny this as a problem.
Speaker 6: I think this is like a scam in some way.
Speaker 6: How do you try to tackle that, as you know,
Speaker 6: coming from a similarly like an also conservative position.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so, I mean, we're here at the Republican National Convention,
Speaker 5: and it's been really interesting talking to a lot of
Speaker 5: folks from diverse backgrounds about the issue of climate and
Speaker 5: also environmental conservation. I really do think it matters how
Speaker 5: you start the conversation. We talked earlier about kind of
Speaker 5: our timeline of the legacy of conservative environmentalism. Starting there
Speaker 5: and talking about how we can carry on that legacy
Speaker 5: and how we can tackle kind of this environmental issue
Speaker 5: of our time has been really effective and we've gotten
Speaker 5: a lot of positive reception. You know, there's always going
Speaker 5: to be disagreement, there's always going to be detractors, but
Speaker 5: I do think that there's more and more of kind
Speaker 5: of that acceptance that we need to take care of
Speaker 5: our own backyard. And that includes, you know, tackling climate change.
Speaker 6: How much stuff do you end up having to you know,
Speaker 6: talk about or not necessarily focused on, but at least
Speaker 6: talk about like actual phosiphel missions, racking, these types of
Speaker 6: things that are like mainstays of politics because of how
Speaker 6: much money goes into them, but undeniably are a massive
Speaker 6: contributing factor. And we do need to move to probably
Speaker 6: some more nuclear options to forgive the expression, I guess,
Speaker 6: and you know as well as like a like a
Speaker 6: solar hydro which are you know, less good than nuclear
Speaker 6: on like a large scale. But like you know, especially
Speaker 6: for like the for the Republican Party trying to trying
Speaker 6: to point out certain things about how we will have
Speaker 6: to scale back some degree of fossil fuels, if not
Speaker 6: you know, a majority of it in the next twenty
Speaker 6: five years, if we want to, if we want to
Speaker 6: not have like a pretty bad scenario at least for
Speaker 6: not even just for humans, but for like animals in
Speaker 6: other parts of the environment.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well, I think that goes back to the all
Speaker 5: of the above energy approach and really diversifying our energy portfolio,
Speaker 5: which frankly is not only good for the environment, but
Speaker 5: good for energy security. We've seen you know, hacking of
Speaker 5: pipelines or other kind of cyber energy attacks. So by
Speaker 5: diversifying sources, we're really setting ourselves up to have a
Speaker 5: more secure energy grid. So I think there's other ways
Speaker 5: that you can talk about you know, environmental actions, climate
Speaker 5: actions that have co benefits, and we can talk about
Speaker 5: that in a really productive way with Republicans.
Speaker 6: Do you also focus on like local ecology efforts, like
Speaker 6: you know, like some of the more like Roosevelt style conservation.
Speaker 6: Is that something that you also kind of try to
Speaker 6: advocate for? Also, it's like an on ramch talk about
Speaker 6: these like broader climate issues.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, I love that framing that you used as kind
Speaker 5: of the entry point to climate issues. We have fifty
Speaker 5: thousand young members across the country in about one hundred branches,
Speaker 5: either on college campuses or in young professional communities, and
Speaker 5: they go out and they plant trees in their communities,
Speaker 5: They do park cleanups, they clean up a waterway, They
Speaker 5: have educational speakers to learn more about these issues. And
Speaker 5: we found that that's really really effective in building this
Speaker 5: conservative environmental movement and showing that these values are connected,
Speaker 5: they're compatible, and then that can lead to advocacy on
Speaker 5: the national level for things like we talked about nuclear
Speaker 5: energy or other clean energy sources, So that's been really
Speaker 5: effective for us.
Speaker 6: What would you like to see as a conservative climate
Speaker 6: policy in like ten years, Like what would you hope
Speaker 6: gets adopted to help curtail like, you know, these more
Speaker 6: catastrophic scenarios.
Speaker 5: Great question, and I would hope it perhaps a little
Speaker 5: bit earlier than ten.
Speaker 6: Years, absolutely, but I'm just based on how things have gone.
Speaker 5: Sure, So we have kind of a big three that
Speaker 5: we're focused on right now. Permitting reforms, so getting the
Speaker 5: government out of its own way, frankly, to fight climate change,
Speaker 5: and unleash American energy in the form of clean energy nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydropower,
Speaker 5: and really kind of expand what we can build in
Speaker 5: this country. Again, nuclear energy is really one of the
Speaker 5: focuses for us because it's a baseload energy source that
Speaker 5: can run twenty four to seven, it's clean, and it's
Speaker 5: really secure. So we're really focused on nuclear. And then
Speaker 5: the last thing is American energy dominance. Here in the
Speaker 5: United States, we produce energy safer, cleaner, and more efficiently,
Speaker 5: and we really want to be a leader on the
Speaker 5: world stage. When it comes to energy.
Speaker 6: I think that there is a lot of people, both
Speaker 6: like you know, progressive Democrats who really care about this issue,
Speaker 6: as well as you know a lot of Republicans and
Speaker 6: liberals who have a lot of skepticism about nuclear energy,
Speaker 6: right for some good reasons. There have been some unfortunate
Speaker 6: events that have happened, and I know, like fission and
Speaker 6: fusion have been slowly getting better where I feel like
Speaker 6: we're close to some kind of breakthrough, but we do
Speaker 6: have like kind of a limited time. How do you
Speaker 6: approach kind of talking to people who have a level
Speaker 6: of like risk in terms of nuclear energy and like
Speaker 6: the possible dangers that it's had based on a few accidents,
Speaker 6: even though a lot of a lot of these plants
Speaker 6: are relatively safe.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I love this question. I grew up an hour
Speaker 5: south of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, so I have
Speaker 5: a lot of experience with nuclear skepticism. Look, I mean,
Speaker 5: nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest form that we
Speaker 5: have in our back pocket. Yes, there have been some
Speaker 5: unfortunate incident frankly, they're human error, and we understand nuclear
Speaker 5: power a lot better now. We have more safeguards in
Speaker 5: place since incidents like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island, and
Speaker 5: we haven't seen a nuclear meltdown that we were promised
Speaker 5: in the Simpsons or the China Syndrome or something like that.
Speaker 5: The fact is nuclear quote waste is really nuclear spent fuel,
Speaker 5: and we can recycle that and keep producing clean nuclear power.
Speaker 5: We have incredibly well trained nuclear experts at all of
Speaker 5: our power plants across the United States, and they produce clean,
Speaker 5: reliable energy for consumers all over the country. So we
Speaker 5: really need to kind of get over those messaging hurdles
Speaker 5: with nuclear and expand the industry here.
Speaker 6: What do you think will happen if your concerns go unheard?
Speaker 6: Like if this just doesn't this just does doesn't work.
Speaker 6: I think it's kind of continue at the scale and
Speaker 6: like a timeline they have been. What worries do you have?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a really excess to to a question. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean, I think we're in the seven years since
Speaker 5: we've been founded, we're working really hard to build coalitions
Speaker 5: with a lot of different stakeholders and be heard by
Speaker 5: a lot of different folks in power, and frankly, I'm
Speaker 5: hopeful that we will, you know, pursue solutions to climate
Speaker 5: change that we will you know, for lack of a
Speaker 5: better term, get our act together and pursue these solutions.
Speaker 5: And really, I think the biggest thing that I like
Speaker 5: to focus on when it comes to climate advocacy is
Speaker 5: optimism and this idea that you know, the planet is
Speaker 5: our one common denominator and we can unite around that.
Speaker 5: And you know, already in Congress we've seen bipartisan legislation
Speaker 5: in a really polarizing time that focuses on climate. Probably
Speaker 5: the last big package in the one hundred and eighteenth
Speaker 5: Congress was a nuclear package to unleash next generation nuclears.
Speaker 5: So I know I'm not exactly answering your question, but
Speaker 5: I am extremely optimistic about the future.
Speaker 6: Do you think there's a path towards some kind of
Speaker 6: bipartisan advocacy not just like the Senate, but also like
Speaker 6: in terms of like environmental movements and like protests. And
Speaker 6: obviously there's certain people who employ very theatrical tactics that
Speaker 6: maybe don't correlate to much improved means, But do you
Speaker 6: see there's a possibility of, like, you know, a larger
Speaker 6: public call for action on this issue. I mean mean,
Speaker 6: something that we've covered on our show a while ago,
Speaker 6: is like will it take something like a general strike
Speaker 6: to even like get people to like realize like we
Speaker 6: need this to be done, Like not necessarily that option,
Speaker 6: but like do you see like a route towards more
Speaker 6: bipartisan activism and advocacy of this issue.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's a great question. We do a lot of
Speaker 5: bridge building work. I was actually in Los Angeles earlier
Speaker 5: this year with a group of conservative climate advocates and
Speaker 5: progressive climate advocates and we talked about solutions where there's
Speaker 5: common ground, and then we finished the day by doing
Speaker 5: a beach clean up together. So I really do think
Speaker 5: there's a lot of opportunity to kind of unite on
Speaker 5: this issue, especially in younger generations. When I talked about
Speaker 5: Hope earlier, they're the ones who really of me hope,
Speaker 5: and I think there's a lot of common ground that
Speaker 5: we can pursue together.
Speaker 6: That's all I had And unless you have any any
Speaker 6: other notes, who are points you wanted to mention?
Speaker 5: If you want to find ACC, you can find us
Speaker 5: at ACC dot e COO, or ACC Underscore National on
Speaker 5: social platforms. But that's it for me.
Speaker 6: Well, I hope that was slightly informative and now we
Speaker 6: will inform you about the Heritage Foundations private exclusive party
Speaker 6: after these messages. Okay, we are back.
Speaker 7: We are back, and we are ready to tell you,
Speaker 7: Oh five pigtails. Let us infiltrate famous hate group, the
Speaker 7: Heritage Foundations social house party.
Speaker 2: We got all up in the first off a lot
Speaker 2: of microwave grade food.
Speaker 6: It was the worst food we've had in all of Milwaukee.
Speaker 2: Was it Heritage and Foundation Great Meals?
Speaker 6: Yes, that is a very notable that the Heritage Foundation
Speaker 6: had the worst food that we've had this entire week.
Speaker 2: Not shocked.
Speaker 7: First of all, they let you two as well as
Speaker 7: another one of our friends come in off of my
Speaker 7: access code, which is very funny, and that we took
Speaker 7: one of the most hilarious photos we've ever taken together.
Speaker 2: And then we then we met with one of the
Speaker 2: producers the Daily Wire and watched him try to figure
Speaker 2: out who we are as I introduced him, funny name
Speaker 2: he was. He was just calculating, and then some lady
Speaker 2: came up and disrupted and we just fucking.
Speaker 6: You can see the little like thinking thing to do
Speaker 6: like third.
Speaker 7: Grade edition, and I wasn't the math was not mathing.
Speaker 6: It was like that one BABC Sherlock scene. He was
Speaker 6: trying to pull up he was trying to pull up
Speaker 6: the files. Yes, didn't work, didn't work, didn't have enough time.
Speaker 6: We stayed in that party, Robert, you seen that party
Speaker 6: for like five straight hours.
Speaker 2: I was there for a long time. For every drink
Speaker 2: I wanted to drink, I would order another and just
Speaker 2: pour it out because I wanted. I wanted to make
Speaker 2: them spend the money. It was going to go somewhere.
Speaker 6: Free for us, but not free for them. So as
Speaker 6: Robert was was schmoosion with the Heritage Foundation attendees, guys
Speaker 6: mean Sophie went into the convention center to hear some speeches,
Speaker 6: and most of them today honestly pretty boring, and even
Speaker 6: even in the notable ones were also kind of boring.
Speaker 6: The one I guess we'll talk about just very briefly
Speaker 6: is Don Junior's speech. First, he brought out his daughter,
Speaker 6: Trump's granddaughter.
Speaker 7: Before you get to that, do you want to go
Speaker 7: over what the theme of the day was.
Speaker 6: No, I mean maybe we can, we can mention it.
Speaker 6: I don't feel how relevant it was to any of
Speaker 6: the speeches. It was just make America strong. It was
Speaker 6: strong once again. Sorry, once again.
Speaker 2: Interesting that they didn't want to sound out Massa.
Speaker 7: You know. Anyways, I guess, I guess it's really not
Speaker 7: that relevant. I just just to point out that on
Speaker 7: the previous days for the different themes, there was very
Speaker 7: intricate backgrounds that were up.
Speaker 6: They didn't know anything strong again, they.
Speaker 7: Were like, so they phoned it the fucking yeah, and
Speaker 7: there was no interesting background anyways, Garrett, what were you saying?
Speaker 6: So Donald Trump Junior's daughter, So Trump, the actual real
Speaker 6: ones granddaughter gave this little this little speechman to humanize her.
Speaker 7: Grand Grandpa is a nice guy, calls me and asks
Speaker 7: me how I am.
Speaker 6: That was basically the speech, which is lovely. Is sure?
Speaker 6: Why not?
Speaker 7: It was her first speech. I don't think any of
Speaker 7: the other grandchildren have given speeches before.
Speaker 6: No, this is kind of the first appearance of one
Speaker 6: of Trump's grandkids.
Speaker 7: Yes, And the way it was framed is don Junior
Speaker 7: came up and then was like she just called me.
Speaker 7: It was very intentionally propaganda's It was also.
Speaker 6: The most happy I've seen Trump this entire week.
Speaker 2: Though he might actually care about his granddaughter.
Speaker 6: Yes, definitely more than his son had.
Speaker 2: It would be hard to care less.
Speaker 7: I'm not sure how much they've they've shown it on TV,
Speaker 7: but you know, I had a view of him the
Speaker 7: entire night tonight right from where I was sitting. I
Speaker 7: was an angle where I can see his face, and
Speaker 7: they showed his face on the screen a bunch, and
Speaker 7: he was genuinely stoic. I would say he smiled for
Speaker 7: his granddaughter definitely the most, and maybe once sturring Kimberly
Speaker 7: Gilfoyle's speech at the very end, But other than that,
Speaker 7: I did not see much emotion from him today, and
Speaker 7: it was pretty similar to the rest of the week.
Speaker 2: I think, you again, you have to keep in mind
Speaker 2: with him whatever I mean, we hate him. He's a
Speaker 2: bad man, he's a monster, would be the worst possible
Speaker 2: president we could have. But he's also a person who
Speaker 2: got shot and he's traumatized, you know, and like you
Speaker 2: don't have to like make up excuses for that. Like
Speaker 2: he is a human being who is scared because a
Speaker 2: man shot him in the head, and that's really not
Speaker 2: a complicated thing to diagnose.
Speaker 6: So after the granddaughter gave her a little spiel, Trump
Speaker 6: Junior himself had a little speech that he was basically
Speaker 6: just doing an impression of his father for the.
Speaker 2: Entire time dog shit impreson.
Speaker 6: It's not a very good impression, but compared to Vans
Speaker 6: it was still it was very impressive.
Speaker 2: We'll get to that in a second.
Speaker 7: I will say the crowd did really, really.
Speaker 6: He seemed to like him. There was chance of you know,
Speaker 6: Trump Junior twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 2: It reminded me of when I was at my first
Speaker 2: Trump rally. This would have been in the late spring,
Speaker 2: early summer of twenty sixteen, when fucking Chris Christie conceded
Speaker 2: to Trump. There was a British naturalized citizen in the
Speaker 2: crowd of the rally, and I was like, you want
Speaker 2: him to be president for eight years? And he was like, well,
Speaker 2: I wanted to be president for eight years to start,
Speaker 2: And I was like, to start, what happens next? He's like, well,
Speaker 2: he's got three kids, doesn't he. Then he like walked
Speaker 2: through his basic plan for Trump to have a dynasty
Speaker 2: like the royal family. And I wish I had said,
Speaker 2: go back home, go back home to your fucking country
Speaker 2: with your goddamn royal family. We don't have that here,
Speaker 2: but we might. They wanted it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, late here the idea of the King's becoming increasingly popular.
Speaker 7: You have never told me that story, and I am well,
Speaker 7: thank you.
Speaker 2: I got great audio of that guy.
Speaker 7: Thank you so much. That is going to haut me tonight. Garrisden.
Speaker 6: What else, Yeah, I mean Trum Junior had a few
Speaker 6: funny lines, making fun of build back Better, making some
Speaker 6: corn pop jokes mad a.
Speaker 7: Corn pop joke, the cookes in the bulbit, very funny.
Speaker 6: The one line I do want to mention is that
Speaker 6: he talked about how the left wants to use the
Speaker 6: First Amendment to show kids explicit drag shows, but they
Speaker 6: want to put you into jail for making a meme,
Speaker 6: something that has never happened, not a single.
Speaker 2: Time, not once, not one. They barely put people into
Speaker 2: jail for assaulting the capital. Yeah.
Speaker 6: So that was most of his speech. We then heard
Speaker 6: from Vance's wife, who gave a typical Vice first lady speech.
Speaker 6: It wasn't notable. And then we heard from Vance himself,
Speaker 6: the the the hopeful future vice president.
Speaker 7: What sorry, I was taking a nap.
Speaker 6: Wait, Sophia, soay, wake up, wake up, we're recording a
Speaker 6: podcast here.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 7: Sorry, Just the sound of Jdbans's name put me right
Speaker 7: to sleep.
Speaker 6: He gave what I would describe and people have since
Speaker 6: described it's kind of a bad speech slop.
Speaker 2: You guys were in the stadium. I was sitting at
Speaker 2: the Heritage finn Ocean party on an upper roof dome.
Speaker 7: Yeah, what'd they think?
Speaker 2: There were three people during most of it, and then
Speaker 2: like four others filtered in. When those guys left, every
Speaker 2: single one of them was disappointed. The only guy who
Speaker 2: liked it was a Fox News reporter, and when he left,
Speaker 2: the people who had been like, well he was okay,
Speaker 2: said well, I hate that I had to lie in
Speaker 2: front of that guy, but he was media. I was
Speaker 2: kind of just sitting on my phone pretending to be
Speaker 2: texting and listening to them, so they didn't really notice me.
Speaker 2: But the ultimate feeling that they expressed repeatedly was that
Speaker 2: was really disappointing. It was really boring. It was really long.
Speaker 2: He is not a great speaker. There was one guy
Speaker 2: who repeatedly said, I don't like that his wife isn't white.
Speaker 2: I wish his wife was white. And then there was
Speaker 2: a guy who was kind of a more libertarian of
Speaker 2: the Republican Party who I had chatted with, who came
Speaker 2: in and like sat down to have a drink, and
Speaker 2: you know, was expressing that he liked Vance's speech. And
Speaker 2: the guy said, what are you a Cuban? And the
Speaker 2: guy said no, and he's like, well, you're not white.
Speaker 6: So that was great, amazing stuff happening in the Heritage
Speaker 6: Foundation private party.
Speaker 2: The Foundation party was was a good time.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so this is something I was even seeing in
Speaker 6: the convention people there. You know, there was there was
Speaker 6: some like you know, respectful clapping, but people weren't super
Speaker 6: into it, at least in the sections that we were at.
Speaker 6: The lady sitting next to me, he was, you know,
Speaker 6: just like a Republican woman her maybe fifties or sixties,
Speaker 6: very very lucid, kind of just like kept dozing off
Speaker 6: just because she was so bored, not like because she
Speaker 6: was sleepy, just because she was bored.
Speaker 2: Wasn't a good speech.
Speaker 7: No, She looks at me and she said, he's so dry.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So at a certain point I just I just kind
Speaker 6: of whispered to Sophie, like, wow, Vance is a really
Speaker 6: dry speaker. And she kin she kind of like nodded
Speaker 6: awake and and started and started started like nodding her
Speaker 6: head in agreement and repeated the same thing to us.
Speaker 6: And I asked her, you know, like, well, who do
Speaker 6: you think would have been a better pick? And she said, well,
Speaker 6: I don't know. I just expected Advance to be a
Speaker 6: better rhetorical speaker. And that was all she would say.
Speaker 6: And I feel like that was kind of generally the vibe.
Speaker 6: Like something else. I noticed that he was like, actually, okay,
Speaker 6: and you know, the certain things he was talking about,
Speaker 6: you know what he was actually saying, you know, there
Speaker 6: were certain things that were interesting. It was more like
Speaker 6: the way he was saying it. It was it was specifically.
Speaker 6: He had no ability to do crowd work. He was
Speaker 6: just reading out the teleprompter and kind of doing a
Speaker 6: slight smile every thirty seconds, and that's all was. He
Speaker 6: wasn't actually really seriously engaging people.
Speaker 2: Make fun of the bits where Trump dances or whatever
Speaker 2: his little moves, but those play those work.
Speaker 6: Even like pointing out people using gestures kind of anything
Speaker 6: to connect you to the audience. Vance was just so
Speaker 6: was so dry, was so plain.
Speaker 7: I think the biggest action from his speech was just
Speaker 7: the people in the crowd who liked to chant.
Speaker 2: We were just really into chanting to chant ted Cruz gave
Speaker 2: him a great He like that. He kind of lost
Speaker 2: them early in his speech the night before and won
Speaker 2: them back because he gave them a chance to chair
Speaker 2: repeatedly went through they like that, they like to chat,
Speaker 2: they're chanters.
Speaker 7: Want to give us some of the chanting highlightscare.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so he was definitely leaning into like his hillbilly
Speaker 6: or faux hillbilly background.
Speaker 2: Motherfucker, sorry, your parents made one hundred and seventy five
Speaker 2: thousand goddamn dollars a year speaking to somebody who grew
Speaker 2: up in a fucking rural ass Oklahoma, like fucking carpetbagger.
Speaker 6: That was what he was using for most of his speech.
Speaker 6: He was he was telling stories about the woman who
Speaker 6: raised him when his own mom was dealing with addiction,
Speaker 6: who he referred to as his.
Speaker 2: Mem uh huh and fucking god damn it.
Speaker 6: The first big chant I took note of is he
Speaker 6: told a story about how he was hanging out when
Speaker 6: he was like a kid or like a teen. He
Speaker 6: was hanging out with someone who was known to be
Speaker 6: like a local drug dealer, and his mem told him
Speaker 6: that if she saw him hanging out with that guy again,
Speaker 6: she was going to run him over in a truck
Speaker 6: run over the drug dealer and no one's gonna find
Speaker 6: out about it, and the crowd ate this up. They
Speaker 6: started chanting, me ma, me ma, So they were they
Speaker 6: weren't chanting about killing this drug dealer, right, they were
Speaker 6: chanting about murdering. They're murdering this drug dealer.
Speaker 2: Jd Vance never met a drug dealer in his fucking life.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you that one.
Speaker 6: So that was the first one. And the next little
Speaker 6: Bema story he told is that when she was a
Speaker 6: little bit older. He said that after she died, they
Speaker 6: found nineteen loaded handguns all over her house and they
Speaker 6: realized it's because she wasn't able to move very fast,
Speaker 6: so she always wanted a gun no matter where she was.
Speaker 6: She wanted to be in armslength the gun, whether that
Speaker 6: be in the cutlery drawer, by the TV remote, under
Speaker 6: the bed, because she wanted to protect her family even
Speaker 6: though she was old. And this this led into another
Speaker 6: another chance, specifically the nineteen loaded handguns just again went
Speaker 6: the crowd ate that up, and the crowd even sort
Speaker 6: of just chanting about how good they were at chanting.
Speaker 6: It became very self referential, very like patting yourself on
Speaker 6: the back.
Speaker 2: For chanting money. These people love chanting.
Speaker 6: And yeah, that was that was. That was most events
Speaker 6: is speech. It wasn't very good, it was too long.
Speaker 6: Almost unanimously people at the Heritage Foundation party did not
Speaker 6: like it. So they did not get that.
Speaker 2: One pseudo positive, which was the Fox News journalist.
Speaker 6: Who I'm sure is contractually obligated to like it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and who the people there made fun
Speaker 2: of when he left.
Speaker 6: Yes.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 6: We talked to a campaign manager earlier at the at
Speaker 6: the Heritage Party just regarding kind of the race in general,
Speaker 6: mentioning stuff about the upcoming vice presidential debates, which the
Speaker 6: Trump Badman put out a statement saying they don't want
Speaker 6: to lock down any details on this until they actually
Speaker 6: know who the vice president's going to be sold on that,
Speaker 6: which is a good piece of propaganda and so and
Speaker 6: we were talking about that and and bringing it up
Speaker 6: to some of these people at the Heritage Party, like
Speaker 6: who do you think actually is going to be Democratic nominee?
Speaker 6: Many of them did not believe it was going to
Speaker 6: be Joe Biden. Many of them thought that it either
Speaker 6: could be an unknown candidate at this point or more
Speaker 6: likely probably kamalaw And this is something that I've been
Speaker 6: noticing is that every time in these speeches where they're
Speaker 6: talking about Joe Biden's policies, they're not just saying Joe Biden,
Speaker 6: They're saying Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's, well, well, Kamala
Speaker 6: Kamala Harris in one instance, Kamala Harris's policies. So they
Speaker 6: are already preparing to start shifting their rhetoric onto kamalaw
Speaker 6: That is something that the opposition's already planning to do.
Speaker 6: And you know, as as of today, which is which
Speaker 6: is Wednesday night, we've heard that both Biden made announcements
Speaker 6: in the same day that he would step down if
Speaker 6: he was to face this serious medical diagnosis, and he
Speaker 6: also got COVID.
Speaker 2: The same the look on your face when we told
Speaker 2: you that Joe Biden had COVID, you were you were thrilled. Okay,
Speaker 2: well we shouldn't say that either. Anyway.
Speaker 6: That is kind of a brief glimpse into the Heritage
Speaker 6: Foundation party. I guess that the vibes were more similar
Speaker 6: to what is I think well known now as the
Speaker 6: least good episode of The Boys, that private Tech night
Speaker 6: party combined with like a frat, a frat bro bar hop.
Speaker 2: What I'll say about this is they had an EDM
Speaker 2: track set to Country Road Take Me Home. I will
Speaker 2: say that like if you were to, if you were
Speaker 2: to put that side by side with the plane crash
Speaker 2: that killed the author of that song, I think he
Speaker 2: would agree with you. This party was worse.
Speaker 7: One worth thing I wanted to note was I did
Speaker 7: not go to the party for seven hundred hours like
Speaker 7: the two of you. I went home after all the
Speaker 7: speeches home. I went back to the hotel, after all
Speaker 7: the speeches.
Speaker 2: That country road take you home.
Speaker 7: That country road took me home to a place you belonged.
Speaker 7: And I had a very very very nice lift driver. Sir,
Speaker 7: if you're if you buy a sub chance listen to podcasts.
Speaker 7: You were very nice. Thank you. After what was a
Speaker 7: very loud day, there was a guy holding a rest
Speaker 7: in peace sign with the photo of the guy who
Speaker 7: attempted to assassinate the president, with the caption and American
Speaker 7: hero great stuff. Yes, I took a photo of it.
Speaker 7: And the amount of people leaving the R and C
Speaker 7: that just shouted their worst many slurs at him were countless.
Speaker 7: And I don't know if anything else happened further after that,
Speaker 7: but very strange choice.
Speaker 6: That is an interesting move.
Speaker 2: All I know is that based on the last postings
Speaker 2: of the victim of that shooting, Corey Comparatour, he'll get
Speaker 2: over it. The Japanese dead.
Speaker 6: Well, anyway, that wraps up our coverage this week of
Speaker 6: the Republican National Convention. We will lead next week with
Speaker 6: Trump's first public speech since the shooting. That'll be dropping
Speaker 6: Sunday night.
Speaker 2: Maybe just a little bit of mayor rudy, little sprink
Speaker 2: I'll seeze in some rudy as a tree. Some squeeze
Speaker 2: in like like he squeezed out some of that hair juice.
Speaker 2: That's right, Jesus Christ.
Speaker 6: Well, thank you for listening to our initial coverage of
Speaker 6: the RNC. We have more scripted episodes, more kind of
Speaker 6: polished deep dives about the people and conversations that we
Speaker 6: have had here in beautiful Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Speaker 2: And remember, folks, if you're going to take a bullet
Speaker 2: for somebody, Donald Trump does not care, not interested at it.
Speaker 6: He's not making the funeral, is not He is not
Speaker 6: going to show up at your funeral.
Speaker 2: Wow, that's a loud chair, painfully loud chair. You know
Speaker 2: what else is painfully loud The Heritage Foundation Party. Anyway,
Speaker 2: We're done, good night, good night. Hey. We'll be back
Speaker 2: Monday with more episodes every week from now until the
Speaker 2: heat death of the Universe.
Speaker 7: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 7: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
Speaker 7: cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
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Speaker 7: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 7: monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.