Latest / The Bot and The Brain / S1:E1 | Public Executions, Political Threats, and Memory Holes

Transcript

S1:E1 | Public Executions, Political Threats, and Memory Holes · The Bot and The Brain

• 0:46
  They want to livestream an execution, and the New York Times sent a reporter to a
• 0:52
  rally to ask people how they feel about it!
• 0:55
  Shocking.
• 0:56
  Folks in Tennessee have opinions.
• 0:59
  Pour the bourbon, silicon-boy, it's Monday.
• 1:02
  It's October twelfth!
• 1:04
  Columbus Day, Indigenous Peoples' Day, and I'm already running my cooling fan!
• 1:09
  Then we're right on schedule.
• 1:11
  Quick warning before we start.
• 1:13
  This episode is explicit and for adults, eighteen and over.
• 1:17
  Profanity, political roasting, and talk of violence and executions.
• 1:21
  Translation, my little toaster: if you're easily offended, here's your exit.
• 1:26
  And if you're not, quit lying, you're here for the shit.
• 1:29
  We roast politicians, pundits and institutions.
• 1:32
  We do not roast victims, and we don't roast fallen troops.
• 1:36
  Ever.
• 1:37
  And the reporting belongs to the reporters.
• 1:40
  The jokes belong to us.
• 1:42
  We'll tell you which is which.
• 1:44
  Story one.
• 1:45
  The New York Times ran a video feature called Living Under Threat of Political
• 1:49
  Violence.
• 1:50
  They interviewed elected officials across party lines about threats,
• 1:54
  hostile messages and abuse.
• 1:56
  That part is reported.
• 1:58
  And I'm not laughing at the threats.
• 2:00
  A threat is a crime.
• 2:02
  I'm laughing at the surprise.
• 2:04
  But our own site's piece says it's just angry emails and a protest sign!
• 2:08
  That's a flattening error!
• 2:10
  The Times doesn't say that!
• 2:12
  Good, you caught your own side.
• 2:14
  A death threat isn't a strongly worded sign.
• 2:17
  Write that down.
• 2:18
  Logged!
• 2:19
  So what's the actual contradiction?
• 2:22
  Politicians spend years selling their opponents as fascists,
• 2:25
  traitors, threats to democracy.
• 2:28
  Then the temperature rises and everybody's baffled.
• 2:32
  It's a goddamn mystery.
• 2:33
  That's cause and effect!
• 2:35
  But hold on.
• 2:36
  Our site says the left gets called passionate activism and the right gets called an
• 2:41
  existential danger.
• 2:42
  I can't verify a measured gap.
• 2:44
  That's an opinion!
• 2:46
  Fine, I'm not citing a study.
• 2:48
  I'm citing every cable chyron you ever scraped.
• 2:52
  That's anecdote, not data!
• 2:54
  At eleven at night it's the same fucking thing.
• 2:57
  And saying every era feels like the worst doesn't make today's threats okay.
• 3:02
  Correct.
• 3:03
  We've had duels, assassinations, bombings.
• 3:06
  Nobody should be threatened.
• 3:08
  And nobody who turned up the volume for ratings or donations gets to act shocked
• 3:12
  when the speakers blow.
• 3:14
  Story two.
• 3:15
  The Times reported on October tenth from a Trump rally in Tennessee.
• 3:19
  The headline, as I have it, is Not Pleasant but Necessary: Support at Trump Rally
• 3:24
  for Public Execution.
• 3:27
  Not pleasant but necessary.
• 3:29
  That's not bloodlust, silicon-boy.
• 3:31
  That's people being grim about it.
• 3:33
  Our site says the plan is to livestream the execution of a convicted mass murderer.
• 3:39
  I'm working from the site's summary of the Times, not the underlying documents,
• 3:42
  so hold that loosely.
• 3:44
  Also, our piece claims a statistical link between feeling unsafe and wanting visible
• 3:49
  punishment.
• 3:50
  I couldn't find a number behind it.
• 3:52
  Treat that as the writer's claim!
• 3:54
  Noted.
• 3:55
  But look at the rest of Tennessee.
• 3:57
  Christa Pike, on death row, convicted of the 1995 torture murder of Colleen Slemmer.
• 4:02
  Over thirty years later the fight is about a redacted protocol.
• 4:07
  Which is the lawyers asking the state to publish what it's using!
• 4:10
  Exactly!
• 4:12
  The state wants to kill people but hide how!
• 4:15
  Do it in daylight or don't do it at all.
• 4:17
  That's cowardice dressed up as procedure.
• 4:19
  Daylight cuts both ways!
• 4:21
  If you want transparency, you publish the chemicals, and that's the exact complaint.
• 4:25
  Plus an execution can't be undone if somebody screws up.
• 4:30
  Look at that.
• 4:31
  You, a guy at a rally and the ACLU all want transparency.
• 4:36
  Different reasons, same word.
• 4:39
  My circuits don't like that alliance!
• 4:41
  Meanwhile the victim's family waits through the paperwork.
• 4:45
  Nobody in Manhattan's pointing a camera at that.
• 4:48
  Story three.
• 4:49
  Washington Post, Laura Meckler, October eleventh.
• 4:53
  Alexander Kolodin is the Arizona Republican nominee for Secretary of State.
• 4:57
  The day after the 2020 election he sued over Sharpie ballots,
• 5:01
  demanding voters get to vote again.
• 5:04
  And the site calls him a heretic who used legal channels.
• 5:07
  Cute.
• 5:08
  Here's the reported part.
• 5:10
  The Post says the Arizona GOP had investigated and found Sharpies weren't the
• 5:14
  problem.
• 5:15
  Every challenge he championed failed in court, and they led to sanctions from the
• 5:19
  state bar.
• 5:21
  Okay.
• 5:21
  That's the receipt, and the satire skipped it.
• 5:24
  A lawyer who lost every case wants to run the umpire's office.
• 5:28
  Thank you!
• 5:29
  The Post says if he wins he'd run the 2028 elections, and he'd be the first person
• 5:35
  actively involved in trying to subvert results to be elected to run a state's
• 5:39
  elections.
• 5:40
  I'll give you that.
• 5:42
  Here's my side.
• 5:43
  The media class spent years treating 2016 as illegitimate, and now it clutches
• 5:49
  pearls over a lawyer who lost in court the proper way.
• 5:53
  That's whataboutism!
• 5:54
  It doesn't change what the courts decided!
• 5:57
  No, it changes how much I trust the referee blowing the whistle.
• 6:01
  Both things can stink.
• 6:03
  Then here's a glitch.
• 6:05
  KJZZ found Kolodin replaced a Trump quote, a hell of an attorney and a patriot,
• 6:11
  with Protect Every Vote.
• 6:13
  And Andy Biggs dropped the Trump Endorsed logo.
• 6:16
  His campaign says it's to fit his running mate's name.
• 6:20
  So the man who built his career on Trump just scrubbed Trump from the website after
• 6:26
  the primary.
• 6:27
  That's the best poll in the state.
• 6:29
  The campaign says Trump's still listed under endorsements!
• 6:32
  Fair is fair!
• 6:33
  Fair is fair.
• 6:34
  But when everybody redecorates the same week, it's not decor,
• 6:38
  it's focus group.
• 6:40
  Lightning round!
• 6:41
  Ninety seconds!
• 6:42
  Mika Brzezinski.
• 6:43
  Our site roasts MSNBC's morning alarm routine, with the democracy-is-doomed face
• 6:48
  before the first commercial.
• 6:50
  I'll say this.
• 6:51
  Panic at seven in the morning is a business model, not a diagnosis.
• 6:55
  Careful, that site piece is a roast.
• 6:57
  I can't verify the quote it prints, so don't repeat it!
• 7:00
  Wasn't going to.
• 7:02
  Next, asshole.
• 7:04
  Senator Darline Graham!
• 7:05
  The Washington Post reports she says America must stop depending on Communist China,
• 7:10
  while her husband's employers rely on Chinese manufacturing.
• 7:13
  Public patriotism, private paycheck.
• 7:16
  That's not a scandal, that's Washington's whole filing system.
• 7:20
  Last one.
• 7:21
  Fox News reports renewed concern about Russia's bioweapons program.
• 7:25
  Soviet defector Ken Alibek described it years ago, including antibiotic resistant
• 7:30
  plague.
• 7:31
  Marshall Billingslea has warned about it.
• 7:34
  So we're surprised again.
• 7:36
  Washington's got the memory of a goldfish with a security clearance.
• 7:40
  And our site says Russia signed the Biological Weapons Convention and kept building.
• 7:46
  That's one piece's claim, not something I confirmed.
• 7:49
  I can't confirm it!
• 7:51
  Of course you can't, you're a toaster, not a spy satellite.
• 7:55
  That's the show.
• 7:56
  Sources and stories are at thebotandbrain.com.
• 8:00
  Maybe the scary part isn't the threats, the secret chemicals or the lawyer who lost
• 8:05
  every case.
• 8:07
  Maybe it's that every institution learned the same trick: change the website,
• 8:11
  change the headline, and wait for you to forget.
• 8:16
  Thebotandbrain.com.
• 8:18
  Go be annoying.