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2020 Election Special Part 2
23 Plays4 years ago
Josh and M discuss the US election. Nothing is made clear.
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Kidnapping Allegations by Republicans
00:00:17
Speaker
I woke with a start after having been unceremoniously conked on the old thinking meet case. Morrissey, what has happened? We've been kidnapped, Pluddles, by Republicans. They claim an election has been stolen and we must count the votes, or stop the votes from being counted, or something. I'm beginning to think they're clutching at straws. Rum, Morrissey. Rum. No, Pluddles. Whiskey. Uh, whiskey?
00:00:46
Speaker
Good snuffbox reference there. Indeed.
Introduction to Conspiracy Theories
00:00:57
Speaker
The podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Indented.
00:01:08
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. Hello. He's seen before you one Josh Edison and another Dr Emdenteth. So. Yeah.
Uncertainty in US Election Results
00:01:20
Speaker
We had planned to do a post US election special on the notion that maybe, maybe the election would be over and done with. Or at least.
00:01:33
Speaker
in some way kind of settled. But for the last 24 hours, nothing really has changed. So at this point in time, which is Saturday afternoon NZ Standard Time, it looks like Biden is going to win and that he's going to take Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and there's a recount going on in Georgia, but currently the count indicates that Biden has won.
00:02:02
Speaker
And thus, Joe Biden will be the next US president. We think. Probably. Perhaps. Maybe. Maybe. Of course, as soon as we finish recording this episode, there's going to be new information which makes everything we're about to say completely irrelevant, including possibly Donald Trump deciding that maybe not launching the nukes would be a good idea after all. We don't know. So we're in this kind of weird interstitial space of we think we know who's won the election.
00:02:32
Speaker
That doesn't mean that the person who's lost the election is going to accept that debate, although I don't think there's much they can do about it if... When it comes down to it, I don't know. No. I mean, I mean, civil war, possibly. Who knows? Who knows? Yes. But we think Joe Biden's won. Probably. Probably. But we're willing to admit that by the time this goes out.
00:02:55
Speaker
could be a completely different story.
Election Fraud Conspiracy Theories
00:02:56
Speaker
And I mean, as you say, we're doing it late, right? Normally we record on a Thursday, which is sort of Wednesday, American time. So that would have been like one day after the actual voting day. And things looked a lot dicier there. Yeah. And then, and I was, I was busy on Thursday. Yes, I believe you were counting votes for Al Gore. But not quite, no. I was at the local horror movie film festival where we saw a showing of Psycho Goreman.
00:03:23
Speaker
Ah, was that Al Gore's potential running mate? It might have been. I know, possibly Al Gore after a really bad day. Well you know.
00:03:32
Speaker
but a delightfully silly film, which I thoroughly recommend, but that means that we couldn't record Thursday, Friday was also out, so we ended up getting delayed until Saturday and thought, well, that's actually kind of lucky, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, it'll be done by then. By the time we, yeah, but no. So anyway, so we're still gonna be talking about the US election today because there still has been a bunch of stuff that definitely has been said and claims that have definitely been made of a conspiratorial nature.
New Zealand Elections: Labour's Victory
00:03:55
Speaker
So we do have things to talk about, but actually, actually, no.
00:04:01
Speaker
There was another election. Do you remember all the way back in like two weeks ago? There was another national election for a different country. I'll give you a clue. It's the country we live in and are sitting in right now.
00:04:14
Speaker
I'm not remembering a single thing about this at all. No. Well, allow me to refresh your memory. There was a general election here in New Zealand. Really? The Labour Party got an astounding majority unprecedented under a mixed member proportional system. Now I know you're making things up. The whole point of MMP is you're not meant to have majority.
00:04:31
Speaker
Indeed, that's what happened. But so that was decided basically on the day. But there was still the counting of special votes and what have you, which are votes that basically when you vote somewhere other than your own electorate, which can be from overseas or it can simply be from another part of the country.
00:04:51
Speaker
So those take a little while longer to count. But the counting of the special votes has finally been done. And as in the States, special votes tend to skew leftwards. Because of the overseas vote, not the people not being in their electorate vote. Most people overseas tend to be going, well, the reason why I left the country
00:05:10
Speaker
is due to structural inequalities that make it very hard for me to be successful here. I'm going to go overseas. I'm going to vote for governments that are going to fix the problems back home. And so once the final count, special votes and everything came in, there were a few little changes. Labour actually hasn't even more of a majority now. They gained a seat.
00:05:32
Speaker
I mean, on the election day, they were 49.6 and now they're 50.2. So they literally are a majoritarian government in an NMP system, which is kind of unheard of.
00:05:50
Speaker
The Maori Party also picked up one. They won one electorate. Which electorate did they win? Why are they here? I think so, yeah. So they had one MP in Parliament, but then their share of the electoral vote went up enough that they now have a second, which is nice.
00:06:06
Speaker
And those two seats picked up by Labour and the Maori party came out of Nationals portions, so they have a little bit left. One interesting thing was though that the special counts managed to flip three electorates where it had been closely contested, including Maungakiiki, which is the electorate I'm in. That was national one that on the night, but the
00:06:30
Speaker
Our Labour candidate Priyanka Radhakrishnan, who will now be the first Indian-born MP in New Zealand, which is nice. So there you go. Well, sure he was, because she got it on the party list actually, but now she's also our official electorate MP. And the thing which makes me happy is that as a Green Party supporter, I was actually horrified by the fact that ACT managed to outpole the Greens on the night.
00:06:55
Speaker
and the specials have kind of reversed that now the Greens have out polled Act and that it hasn't actually changed any of the proportionality of the parliament because it doesn't actually increase anyone or decrease anyone's numbers it just makes me happy that there are more green voters in the right Act voters out there. Slightly nicer feeling. Suck it Act!
00:07:15
Speaker
So, I'm not quite sure what moral we should be drawing of this. Is it that it's important to count all of the votes? Or is it that changes and upsets can occur after you do count all the votes?
00:07:30
Speaker
Oh, if only that was somehow salient to a conversation we're about to have. Oh well, no helping it. I guess we'd be just better talk about the US election instead. Yes, do we want to put a chime in or just roll straight in? I think we'd be able to put in a chime just for propriety, you know, just to try things properly. It's tradition and appeals to tradition are always fallacious.
00:07:55
Speaker
Actually, what do we should do? We should actually just check to see whether there has been any last minute change. This could absolutely change the tent. No, it's still, the Associated Press are still saying 264 votes for Biden, 214 votes for Trump, but that Biden is edging towards victory because Biden loves edging. He's always edging. I mean, this is actually probably the longest edging a politician has ever had.
00:08:24
Speaker
and or a polity for that well yes that's true for an entire country it does make you wonder when they get released exactly what's going to happen i shudder to think but i mean you i mean they'll be shuddering oh but okay yet so as we're recording
00:08:41
Speaker
No announcement yet. Biden is in the lead his in the various states where Trump was leading Biden, I think his his caught up and is now leading in those states. Georgia current margin towards Biden 4124 votes. Pennsylvania 17053 votes.
00:09:00
Speaker
Nevada 22,657 votes.
Media Cuts Trump's Unverified Claims
00:09:05
Speaker
Now Georgia might be one of those cases where it's too close to call because they've still got about 50,000 votes to count but Pennsylvania and Nevada those margins are very comfortable. I mean that that would take Biden well over
00:09:23
Speaker
to 70. That takes him into the realm of about 2 million or so, which means that Trump cannot win by these numbers at this point in time. Seems might change. I'll just refresh the page. So it looks like Biden's got it, but still, who knows what's going to happen. Well, we'll be checking in on those numbers at the end of this episode. I think we'd better.
00:09:48
Speaker
But a bunch of stuff has happened anyway over the last few days. Obviously, if you've been paying any attention to the news, you know that Trump's been saying some stuff.
00:09:58
Speaker
Yeah, although it is interesting that the media's response to Trump saying stuff has been too cut away from Trump saying stuff. And that's just not ye ye liberal news media. Even Fox News is going, these lies by the president are getting a little bit hard to stomach.
00:10:19
Speaker
We're going to maybe tell the truth about what's going on? Well, yeah, I mean, people are saying it's good and it is, although I don't know that it actually reflects very well on them, that they've spent four years sort of equivocating and saying, well, Trump says this and other people say that, who's to tell? And only now when it actually looks like he might get the boot, do they finally grow a backbone and are willing to stand up to the person who's about to most likely...
00:10:45
Speaker
Doesn't make you think they're going well, you've lost and we kind of need to that cozy up to the new administration. So suddenly we're all about reporting factual inaccuracies said by the president of the United States of America. But yes, there has been the scenes of Trump start saying something and then the news anchor just cuts over the top and says, well, I'm sorry, we're not going to we're not going to show this. It's we're going to cut them off and we're going to fact check them.
00:11:10
Speaker
And it's not just the lies, it's also the inconsistency of the messaging. And that Trump wants people to stop counting votes in,
Trump's Vote Counting Stance
00:11:21
Speaker
I was about to say electorates, in states where he appears to be winning, but does want people to continue counting the votes in states where he appears to be losing, Arizona being the really big one. Arizona has been declared for Biden by the Associated Press,
00:11:37
Speaker
There's still vote counting going on in Arizona, and Trump really wants that vote counting to go on in Arizona. Well, so a day ago, where he was still leading in Pennsylvania, Trump was saying, no, we need to stop the vote.
00:11:53
Speaker
which is going to be a problem for his campaign team going forward for any legal challenge and that any lawyer with their salt will go, does seem that you only want to stop or continue counting the votes in cases where it privileges you. So it doesn't seem to be you're worried about electoral fraud per se, you're worried about just appearing to win.
00:12:20
Speaker
But when Trump has said stuff, and it hasn't been every network's cut away, but several of them have, but in some cases it's all gone out. Actually, I suppose we should say the one thing about Fox is that they made themselves very unpopular with the Trump camp when they called Arizona. They called it for Biden.
00:12:38
Speaker
The Trump camp was apparently very unhappy that they did that, and yet they haven't backed down. But Fox nevertheless has, I believe, been broadcasting Trump's whole speeches without cutting them off in the middle, and what speeches they have been. I mean, the gist of it is he's wanting to say that if you count all the quote-unquote legal votes,
00:12:59
Speaker
He's clearly won. He's clearly won. And it's only because there's a bunch of, quote unquote, illegal votes for Biden that are swaying things in his direction. And so it's all a scam. It's all a fraud. It's a complete charade. He truly is the winner. And it's only because of a conspiracy against him that things being rigged that we're in this position. Now, lots of people are saying, OK, you said that. No actual evidence for it, like at all.
00:13:27
Speaker
No, in fact, actually the White House spokesperson was called on this on Fox earlier today where she was going, look, we've got evidence of electoral fraud and we really need an investigation. And the Fox News anchor went, well,
00:13:43
Speaker
I mean, we're seeing these claims, we're not seeing any evidence, could you please give us some evidence? And her response was, you need to give us time to find that evidence, which does appear to be a case of, look, we're saying there's fraud, and we'll find evidence of it eventually, which is why we have to investigate it now and stop this vote counting, because we suspect it's going on, even though we've yet to see any actual evidence of it. And Fox News is going, well,
00:14:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's one thing to allege fraud. It's another thing to actually give a case for investigating it. Just because there could be fraud doesn't mean that we have to investigate cases of suspected fraud. You need some kind of evidence to say, look, fraud is occurring and then you launch an investigation.
00:14:30
Speaker
Now there's been some other stuff, claims of sort of ballot stuffing and the old lots, all these dead people being registered to vote. I even read somewhere that apparently Ruth Bader Ginsburg got a ballot sent out addressed to her or something.
00:14:48
Speaker
I don't know where these numbers are coming from. They also, they only seem to be claiming, here's a bunch of dead people who have been registered to vote, but no evidence that votes were actually cast under these dead people's names. That's one. And then the other thing that's been going on about is the observers.
00:15:07
Speaker
Because obviously when votes are being counted, as I'm pretty sure happens here. Oh yes, we have very strict rules about vote observation in this country. Every party is allowed to send an observer to a calling place.
00:15:23
Speaker
they are not allowed to interact with the public they just stand in the background watching the process so if they spot something they can tap a member of the election team to go you need to check that out but their role is simply to stand there observing things so that parties get a a general feel that the election is going correctly and the US has observers of the same kind but not if you listen to Trump
00:15:50
Speaker
No. No. And indeed, I mean, there have been cases in some polling stations around the US where observers have been asked to leave because there were too many of them there. The Republicans are saying, oh, only Republican observers are being asked to leave. Or the evidence indicates that when people are being asked to leave, it's proportional if they get rid of as many people from both sides of the...
00:16:18
Speaker
isle to allow there to be space for people to actually cast their votes, especially because it's a pandemic. I've heard there have also been claims or people talking about being taken to court, the Republican Party winning cases that have been taken to court around the presence of observers and what have you, but the only
00:16:38
Speaker
thing I've actually heard a person actually talk about was somewhere in Kansas, I might be making that up, somewhere there was a court case, they went to court to allow the observers to stand closer, so instead of having to remain 12 feet away they were allowed to go as close as six feet from the people counting the ballots and that was upheld and that as far as I'm aware is the only actual court case that's been found in favour
00:17:03
Speaker
regarding the courtroom observers. Now there have been stories coming out, I've been reading them on Twitter and so on, of implications of Republican observers being obstructive and challenging ballots as they're counted for various means. Including one ballot which is challenged because it looks sticky.
Debunking Sharpie Ballot Rumors
00:17:24
Speaker
And then the claim that has been made was that eventually the call came in and they got the orders from on high to just challenge every ballot, challenge every single one. Which all that does is slow the process down.
00:17:40
Speaker
Now, I mean, this is just one person's anecdote that they put up on Twitter, but that's been the claim. Oh, and then there's Sharpiegate. Oh, I haven't seen Sharpiegate. So Sharpiegate is the claim that people casting ballots have been given Sharpies, which will then invalidate the ballot paper beneath the one they're voting on. Oh, it goes through.
00:18:02
Speaker
And it turns out that A, sharpies are used all the time, but B, the way that the ballot paper is designed when it's teared off the book, it's designed that if there's bleed-through of the ink, it bleeds through to a point on the ballot paper that will not invalidate it. So they've actually quite cleverly designed ballot papers so that if there is bleed-through, it's kind of orientated in such a way that one beneath it will not be affected. Clever. Yeah.
00:18:33
Speaker
But of course, a lot of people are indeed taking Trump at his word, these Trump supporters. And so there's lots of protests. I'm sure you've been seeing those on the news. People shouting stop the count or start the count. Or every vote counts. Every vote counts. No votes count. Only some votes count.
00:18:52
Speaker
miniature American flags for others. I forget how that works. Twirling towards freedom. Yes. And within those within those protests, things have been getting somewhat conspiratorial as well. So there's been one case in Philadelphia where police have broken up an alleged plot to attack the Pennsylvania Convention Center. They sort of picked up a couple of guys in a van who had guns in their van.
00:19:19
Speaker
And it sounded like they were going in to start some trouble. This is all alleged at the time. But there was an interesting, a video that I just saw on Twitter and TikTok this morning of a guy, it was sort of, the video itself was labelled, this is how, you know, what should conspiracy theory start?
00:19:39
Speaker
and watch it actually form in real time, where you had crowds outside a polling place watching media people take stuff out of a media van and start carrying these boxes into the polling place. And for some reason, somebody decided that what they were seeing was boxes full of invalid ballots being taken into the convention center for some good old-fashioned ballot stuffing. And so you had these people all standing behind the fence,
00:20:09
Speaker
look you can see that's them that's the ballots that's the fake ballots and this the guy who is reporting it was sort of you know looking at these people yelling at this this thing going on and then I assumed they were media credentialed or something they were then able to go around and say hello media is it was a fox even it was a fox media van so what is it that you have in the back of your van? We're saying a lot of positive things about
00:20:30
Speaker
Yes, it won't last. So these are my cameras, this is my microphones, this is my GoPro, and quite
Secret Watermarks on Ballots Theory
00:20:38
Speaker
clearly showing the raw boxes full of media equipment coming out of the back of this media van. But one interesting thing I did notice was one guy, while they were shouting all this, it was basically saying don't worry about it because of the watermarking.
00:20:54
Speaker
Oh, yes, the isotopes. The isotopes. Yes. So there's been another story. So I first heard about this thanks to a friend of the show Hayden, who sent me some screenshots that he had seen going around Facebook, where basically the idea is that obviously ballot papers are watermarked because they're official documents. But the idea is that they have that has extra super secret special non-radioactive isotope watermarks on the official ballots.
00:21:21
Speaker
And so I'm actually quite curious to know what they mean by non-radioactive isotopes. Are they... Is the person coming up with a serial... Oh, normally when people talk about isotopes, they're talking about radioactive isotopes. But if we can't put radioactive materials onto a ballot paper, there'll be a health risk. So obviously it's going to be a non-radioactive isotope. You can just say isotope. You can just say isotope.
00:21:43
Speaker
Yes, but at any rate, so now the idea is that this is actually all a super secret galaxy brain fourth level chess plan from Q and Trump and what have you, that there are actually super secret watermarks that the Democrats don't know about, but for some reason randos on the internet do. So all of these ballots that they're stuffing the ballot box with and cheating, they're all going to be found out
00:22:09
Speaker
once it turns out that they don't have the super secret special watermarks on them and not the normal ones. So, right, just let me get this straight. So the Republicans, presumably via the White House, have constructed special ballots which aren't encoded in any kind of rules or legislation.
00:22:31
Speaker
to fool the Democrats when they produce counterfeit ballots without these isotopes in it. But surely that means that the White House created ballots are kind of counterfeit ballots in the first place because of this extra special feature they've put in, which isn't actually part of the standard ballot paper in the first place. I think they're claiming that it is. Then why don't the Democrats know about this? I don't know.
00:23:00
Speaker
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden used to be in the White House as part of the government, and presumably know farewell how their electoral system works. Yes, I assume, but that was before Q, you see. We have to talk about Q now. Well, we're gonna. It's gonna happen, I'm afraid. So, I mean, the tweets, I was shown screenshots of tweets saying things like,
00:23:28
Speaker
Consider, Department of Homeland Security controlled the official ballots production. Democrats print extras not knowing about non-radioactive isotope watermarks on official ballots. Military sting operation. After weeding out all counterfeit ballots, Trump landslide confirmed. And people then gleefully sang, the Democrats have set their own trap trying to cheat the election. Now that was clever. Who thought of that? But when they say who, they say capital W, capital H,
00:24:14
Speaker
So once again, basically, it's sort of the old Q template of don't worry, everything's going to turn out right. There is a secret plan in place that eventually is going to show up the Democrats for the cheating bastards that they are. And once again, I just don't think this works, because if it turns out that I won the election because of a secret feature of ballot papers, we didn't tell the opposition about.
00:24:14
Speaker
Capitol queue.
00:24:41
Speaker
that's surely grounds for legal tap for going well you actually you tampered with the election because you produced ballots which don't adhere to a standard
00:24:52
Speaker
because it adheres to a standard that says it must be open for everyone to know. I don't think they've thought this through. It sounds like the White House has produced counterfeit ballots. Department of Homeland Security, allegedly. Well, to counteract other counterfeit ballots. You can't win an election by going, well, my counterfeit ballots outnumber yours. Look, I will thank you to stop bringing logic and good common sense into discussions of Q Talking Points, please.
00:25:19
Speaker
That's true, but you never bring logic to a cue debate. Apparently the cue folks are getting a little bit worried. Those who haven't managed to come up with a nice story which says that Trump really is winning when it looks like he's not.
00:25:36
Speaker
So some people are like, some people are basically, you know, sticking to the gun, say, have faith in the plan, it's all going to work out, because that's been the theme of QAnon for the last four years or however long, it's all going to turn out, there's a plan, it's all being taken care of, it looks like things are not going Trump's way at all, but that's just because how cunning the plan is. It's a plan, it's a plan, stick to the, and yet other people are actually questioning things and what's going on. And I saw another tweet today,
00:26:02
Speaker
And it was sort of the disclaimer was basically these can't all be real, but even if some of them are, that's kind of glorious. And it was screen grabs from various Reddit and other forums of people who are supposedly in tears because they'd bet their life savings on Trump winning, having been assured 100% guarantee that he was going to win by a QAnon type.
00:26:27
Speaker
Is the Araki Dina thing all over again? Well, maybe. It's some dude saying something on an internet forum, so it could be a total fabrication, but it's not out of the question. And then I saw a thread this morning.
00:26:46
Speaker
Claiming that, and now I don't. Did you keep tabs at all on sort of your 8chan, 8con, Q&A things at all? Not particularly. I mean, I'm aware of it, and I probably should spend more time looking at it, given the research projects I'm involved in, looking at disinformation and the like. But I just don't find it to be a very pleasant experience. No. So unless work requires me to, I try to avoid those particular message boards. Yes. Well, because now it was a...
00:27:16
Speaker
It was a patron bonus episode where we talked about the whole who is Q thing. So in a patron bonus episode we talked about the allegation that Ron Watkins is Q and so this story is actually kind of fascinating because
00:27:33
Speaker
Q started off on 8chan, on roleplaying servers basically, but for some reason this particular anon roleplay QAnon, a high level deep state operative within the American political system, this one seemed to take on a life of its own and became real in the way that the other roleplaying forums never did.
00:27:56
Speaker
Now there's a big argy-bargy as to who the original Q was, but it's now widely suspected that the son of 8chan's founder, and the person who's basically now the admin of 8kun, the replacement for 8chan, Ron Watkins, is now playing the role of Q. And this new story indicates that
00:28:21
Speaker
Round about the time of the election, Ron Watkins is no longer active? Yes, well, yeah, I mean, the Patreon bonus episode that we did was based on an episode of the Reply All podcast, which talked to- Very good episode. Very good episode. Not the episode, I don't want to say our Patreon. I mean, our one wasn't bad. Yeah, our Patreon episode was fine, but the Reply All episode is fantastic.
00:28:45
Speaker
Yeah, and actually you talked about Jim Watkins as the founder of 8chan, although of course he wasn't actually the founder, he was the other guy who they kind of took it over from. Who they stole 8chan from. More or less. So there's a bit of that. And yeah, the basic end point of the reply-all episode is that while we can't prove that either Watkins, junior or senior is Q, and is posting as Q, we definitely know they're the only ones
QAnon's Post-Election Silence
00:29:11
Speaker
Who know who Q is. They're the only ones who are in any sort of a position to be able to verify that whoever's posting to Q's account is Q, and the only ones with the means if they wanted to take control of his account and post whatever they want. So supposedly, according to what I've been reading on Twitter today, Q has not posted since Election Day.
00:29:33
Speaker
and people are getting a little bit a little bit nervous about this and then supposedly on election day seven hours after Q's last post Ron Watkins, that's the son of Jim Watkins resigned as admin from Eitkun and so yeah he and he and Jim are the only people who are assumed to know who Q is and
00:29:55
Speaker
are able, whether or not they do, they seem to be the only people who are able to go in and post as Q's account if they wanted to. And so some people are like, so is that it? Is Q gone? And others are like, no, no, no, keep the faith, keep the faith, the usual thing.
00:30:14
Speaker
The person, this was someone called Ben Collins, who I'm afraid I do not know, was putting this on Twitter, username one underscore. He's a very prominent QAnon researcher. Well, there we go. So he does know what he's talking about. So he says, is this the end of QAnon? He's absolutely not. The password, the details to the Q account on 8kun
00:30:39
Speaker
extremely valuable and totally sellable. There's too much money in it now, too many hangers on, too much merch and what have you, so it seems inconceivable that one way or another you won't see any more posts from the Q account.
00:30:57
Speaker
I just thought I'd check in on info wars to see what's happening there because I just thought I haven't actually seen what Alex Jones had to say about this. So breaking news according to info wars, Trump rallies happening tomorrow at state capitals in all 50 states. And that does remind me that there was reports earlier today that Trump himself might be planning a rally to occur tomorrow.
00:31:23
Speaker
because apparently one way to snatch victory from defeat would be to simply hold a rally and tell people I've won. But otherwise there's just a whole lot of claims of election fraud going on and then
00:31:43
Speaker
Angelina Jolie's MI6 interview shows just how connected Hollywood is to the Deep State. Interesting. Okay, so what on earth is that about? Apparently she has given an extraordinary interview in Time magazine where she sat down with the former head of UK's MI6 spy network, Sir Alex Younger. So was interviewed by a former spy, but apparently that now indicates that Angelina Jolie works for MI6.
00:32:11
Speaker
the CIA and other organisations. Interesting. Yeah. That seems a bit of a stretch, but who knows. But back to the US election, what else have we seen? We've seen videos of ballot stuffing going on have been passed around the internet, of people actually walking in with these bags of ballots and stuffing them into ballot boxes. Now, apparently these videos are true. They're just not current.
00:32:36
Speaker
and not of America either. Apparently they are videos of people stuffing boxes in a Russian election from some time ago. Actually, speaking of Russia, now this is not entirely relevant, but I see plans that Putin might be stepping down, allegedly, over worries that he might have Parkinson's or something.
00:32:54
Speaker
Oh dear, I had not heard that. I just saw headlines today, so that might be, I think that might be looking to that for next week's bonus episode or something. Yes, now I've also checked in on davidank.com. The top banner is no, don't count every vote, count every legal vote.
00:33:12
Speaker
Right so he's actually going for the Trump line is he? Yeah. That's a shame. I mean there's a quite interesting question as to how you detect a legal vote from an illegal vote does seem that currently the Republican mantra for that is a vote for the Republicans is a legal vote, a vote for anyone else is not, and actually that then gets us to one of the other interesting things about this election in the US.
00:33:35
Speaker
the number of states where Biden has won because the difference between Biden's vote and Trump's vote is entirely explicable by people voting for the Libertarian candidate. Libertarians may well have given Biden the presidency, and this is kind of ironic because typically Libertarians do tend to be right-wing,
00:34:02
Speaker
and thus they're more likely to be people who would be tending to vote for Trump than they would be people who would be likely to vote for Biden. So libertarians actually may well have saved the US. Which is a sentence I never thought I would say and hopefully will never have to say again. I met one the other week actually.
00:34:21
Speaker
Really? At my wife's birthday party, he was on the staff at the bar, at the pub where we were, an American fellow who had been talking to some of the political types there and saying, yep, he's going to vote libertarian because he can't, because of his conscience. He couldn't in good conscience vote for either of the main ones. And his conscience is what matters.
00:34:46
Speaker
Yeah, well, lovely fellow. Really? Yeah, you seem nice enough. So what else have you got? Okay, the only other thing I've seen just pop up in the last, in fact, just this morning. So there's a whole lot of fundraising going on still, because it's no longer fundraising for the various candidates election efforts. It's now fundraising to support the legal challenges that are going to go towards all these election results, apparently, but
00:35:16
Speaker
Supposedly, if you read the fine print when it comes to Trump's recount litigation efforts, you see that in the details, half of the money up to a certain amount that you send in won't actually go towards the recount litigation efforts. It will go towards paying off Trump's campaign debt.
00:35:42
Speaker
So just one might call that a scan, possibly a grift. Yeah, it does seem a little bit grifty. Yeah. So that's going so I mean, that's most of this, at least half of the stuff we've talked about today, I think, is stuff that I saw browsing Twitter and other internet sites this morning. And most of the rest of it came from yesterday, it's just,
00:36:09
Speaker
It's still all on, and it's very much just the same story, just variations of it, which is Trump has won the election, Trump has won the election, Trump has won the election, the election has been stolen.
00:36:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, for our purposes, when it comes to matters conspiratorial, all the conspiracy is basically that there is one by the Democrats to steal the election.
The Persistence of Trumpism
00:36:31
Speaker
Somehow it's happened. We have no evidence. I suppose from a non-conspiracy theory aspect, the thing which is really disturbing about this election is the lack of a landslide victory for the anti-Trump candidate, because the theory was
00:36:50
Speaker
Trump was bad, he was bad news, people didn't actually like him as president and thus the chance to vote him out of office everyone would go towards. Turns out that voter participation in the US is huge. Biden is now, yeah sorry I didn't mean to conditionalise that. Biden does have more votes than any US president
00:37:15
Speaker
ever. Part of that is population size, but also just substantially more than the equivalent voting base in the last election. But Trump has also outperformed his role in the last election as well, which means that he hasn't lost votes, he's gained votes. And indeed, once you start dissecting the voting pattern, it turns out he's gained votes in
00:37:42
Speaker
parts of the voting populace that people thought would be anti-Trump. So he's more popular than he was before, which does kind of indicate that Trumpism is probably here to stay.
00:37:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, so I mean, well, I'm sure we'll be coming back to this for weeks, really, because there's there are going to be years, there are going to be legal challenges, whether, whether or not how far they get. I did see another thing, actually, I noticed just today or yesterday,
00:38:14
Speaker
was an account of one of the court challenges where they were saying, wanting to get the courts to stop some recount somewhere because the Republican observers weren't allowed in and the judge was basically like, are there any Republican observers in there? And the guy said something about there being a non-zero number of them in there. And the judge basically said, I forget the exact wording, but it was on the lines of, you know, as a member of the bar in this state,
00:38:44
Speaker
Are there any Trump's, are there any Republican observers in there right now? Yes. Then why are you here? And basically that was it. Yeah. Yes, it does seem to be a suggestion that as long as we can suggest something untoward is going on, the courts will stop it. And then the courts are going, you can't just say you think something bad is going on. You need to actually state that something bad is going on.
00:39:12
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, one assumes that surely they'll come up with enough legal challenges that they'll get some of them to stick and then we'll have to sit through that. But I mean, it's only like you said earlier, Georgia at the moment is looking to be the only state that's really close. And who know, there was 98% of the vote counted last I saw. So that one might have grounds for a recount, but
00:39:40
Speaker
I believe they've actually said there is going to be a recount because the margin is so small, they're just going to do the recount anyway. Well there you go, but as for the rest of it, I don't know. I think you're quite right, Trumpism's not going anywhere in a hurry, so we'll have to see what that actually means.
Republicans' Potential Reaction to Biden's Win
00:40:00
Speaker
Well what it means is we're probably going to have, if Biden really does take the presidency,
00:40:05
Speaker
We're probably going to have four years of Republicans claiming the election was stolen. Yeah, I didn't read it, but I saw a headline of someone had sort of come up with a list of his 200-odd things that Biden could do without needing Senate approval and therefore couldn't be blocked from doing, so we'll see. But yes, I don't know. Bloody Mitch McConnell got back in.
00:40:31
Speaker
I know. I love him. And where is he from? Kentucky. Yeah, buddy. You've bombed Bill and sounding son of a bitch. But anyway. Yeah. Yeah. So actually, that reminds me of one other thing. Some people pointed out, apparently, I've not seen this myself. I think you've voted in American election. But supposedly you vote for the president and where there are Senate Congress races going on.
00:40:57
Speaker
You vote for the President, Senate and Congress all on the same ballot paper.
00:41:03
Speaker
So if they're going to say that these ballots are illegal and invalid, that also means that all the Republicans who've got back into the Senate and Congress and what have you, it's on the same papers. So nobody seems to be too interested in challenging that one. Which probably is why a lot of Senate Republicans are going, you know, we're not going to support this whole voter fraud thing, because actually, I've just won re-election
00:41:34
Speaker
There's no guarantee I might win re-election if we do another run-through. Yeah, so interesting times. We've put this off and put the recording this episode off and still don't really have a clue what we're talking about.
00:41:50
Speaker
and I'm wondering if that's going to stay that way for a wee while. Before we finish, quickly refresh the new sites. No change. Georgia heading for recount while Biden leads in two key states. Although it's update 13 minutes ago, when will we know the US election result? And the answer is days, weeks or even months. Hooray!
00:42:18
Speaker
And I don't know enough about constitutional law to know whether this claim on Twitter is true, but someone was saying that the way the process works, if there's no declared winner by January 20th, the Speaker of the House takes presidency. So Nazi Pelosi. Interesting. I mean, maybe that was the con the entire time.
00:42:42
Speaker
Yeah. Now that's a conspiracy theory I could believe in. Which is a very useful secret. Because our Patreon bonus episode this week is us taking a look at a post on Reddit of conspiracy theories people find plausible. And we're just going to go through that list and talk about some of them. And whether we think they're plausible or not. We're going to judge Reddit.
00:43:06
Speaker
We basically are. We're going to live. It's going to be another reaction video. And it's not on video because we only do videos for the main episode. It's true. And also it's not really much a reaction video when you're just scrolling. Doom scrolling. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh.
00:43:27
Speaker
I'm afraid you might be overselling this episode. But yeah, so if you want to watch us doomscrolling Reddit, well listen to us at least do that, then be a patron and if you are a patron, congratulations. Your work here is done. If you'd like to be a patron, go to patreon.com and look for the podcast's guide to the conspiracy.
00:43:48
Speaker
And I guess maybe we should... We haven't done the whole admin spiel in a while. Yes, there are videos of this on YouTube. There are videos on Em's YouTube channel, which our podcast host Podbean.com just automatically spits out. So that's just the audio with a screen on the top. And then we also do video of these things on a camera, which works sometimes. And put them up on my video channel, which is Monkey Fluids for reasons.
00:44:16
Speaker
So if you actually would like to watch the two of us sitting side by side, if you're overseas and you just want to see a bit of two human beings in close proximity to one another just for the novelty of it. It's true. Breathing in each other's faces as we talk. I could sneeze on him right now and would not feel a pinch of guilt.
00:44:36
Speaker
Actually, nothing about it. Given that there is a kink for everything, we possibly should look at fetish sites to see whether two people sitting side by side in the age of Corona. Yeah, it's the kind of case. Oh, we may have an untapped audience. Oh, yeah. OK, so there you go. Tell all your filthy, pervert friends to get on YouTube and watch the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy for all the close proximity disease not having action you could desire. Yeah.
00:45:05
Speaker
But until then, I think we've come to the end of an episode. So patrons, stick around if you want another one. Everybody else, we'll see you next week when we probably won't have any more of a clue what's going on than we do right now. That possibly less. Possibly less. Goodbye. And remember America, stop edging. Stop edging.
00:45:32
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:46:33
Speaker
And remember, it's just a step to the left.