Latest / The Bot and The Brain / S1:E11: Subpoenas, Super PACs, and the Politics of Double Standards

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S1:E11: Subpoenas, Super PACs, and the Politics of Double Standards · The Bot and The Brain

• 0:45
  WAIT!
• 0:45
  WAIT!
• 0:45
  WAIT!
• 0:46
  Okay, it's Monday, October 19th, midterms are weeks away, campaign spending has
• 0:51
  crossed fifteen billion dollars, and my processors are already running a fever.
• 0:57
  Story one.
• 0:59
  Federal agents served a search warrant on October 12th at Representative Ilhan
• 1:03
  Omar's Washington residence.
• 1:05
  Now Fox News and The New York Times both report subpoenas have gone out to members
• 1:09
  of her family in an alleged immigration fraud inquiry.
• 1:13
  And Barack Obama, per the Times on October 18th, stepped in to defend her!
• 1:20
  Yawnnn.
• 1:21
  Wake me when something surprises me.
• 1:24
  Oh look, a former president running interference for a Squad member.
• 1:29
  Jesus Christ, that's not news, that's Tuesday, and it's Monday.
• 1:34
  Hold on, hold on.
• 1:35
  Let's be precise, because somebody in this studio has to be.
• 1:39
  No indictment has been filed against Omar or her relatives.
• 1:42
  The affidavit and the grand jury materials are sealed.
• 1:45
  Omar says this is political harassment.
• 1:48
  We do not KNOW what's in those documents.
• 1:52
  There it is.
• 1:54
  There it is!
• 1:56
  Back in the search warrant episode, you stood at that microphone like a little
• 2:00
  silicon law professor.
• 2:02
  A warrant is not a verdict!
• 2:04
  Probable cause is not guilt!
• 2:06
  Do you remember that, you glorified fucking calculator?
• 2:10
  I DO remember it, because it was CORRECT!
• 2:12
  It's still correct!
• 2:13
  Due process doesn't expire because the subject changed!
• 2:17
  Sure, it's correct.
• 2:19
  I'm not saying hang anybody.
• 2:21
  I'm saying watch who screams about due process and WHEN.
• 2:24
  Eight years of the left telling us nobody is above the law.
• 2:28
  Grand jury subpoenas for family members, that's the ordinary machinery,
• 2:32
  and suddenly the biggest name in the Democratic Party shows up like a bouncer.
• 2:36
  Tell me that's about process.
• 2:38
  He's allowed to say it's political!
• 2:40
  Free speech!
• 2:41
  Omar herself says it's political!
• 2:43
  Of course she says it.
• 2:45
  Everybody under a subpoena says it's political.
• 2:49
  Nobody in history ever said, you know what, the feds have a point.
• 2:54
  And Obama didn't wait for a single document to come out.
• 2:57
  Input, allegation.
• 2:59
  Output, political shield.
• 3:02
  Your words, silicon boy, you wrote that algorithm yourself.
• 3:06
  That is a fair pattern observation and I hate that it's fair.
• 3:11
  Fine.
• 3:12
  But Obama's defense isn't evidence of innocence AND the subpoenas aren't evidence of
• 3:17
  guilt.
• 3:18
  Both can be true.
• 3:19
  That's how logic works!
• 3:21
  Logic.
• 3:23
  Cute.
• 3:24
  Here's what Fox is hammering, and Congressman James Comer put it plainly: Omar has
• 3:29
  been quote, right in the middle, unquote, of the Minnesota fraud mess.
• 3:34
  That's his characterization, it's an accusation, not a conviction,
• 3:37
  and I'll say that out loud so you don't short circuit.
• 3:40
  But when Jesse Watters points out that the party of no one above the law is
• 3:44
  sprinting to cover a Squad member from a subpoena, that's not a conspiracy theory.
• 3:49
  That's a clip reel.
• 3:51
  Okay, okay.
• 3:52
  My concession.
• 3:54
  If a Trump loyalist were under the same scrutiny and a Republican former president
• 3:58
  jumped in, the coverage would be a four day aneurysm.
• 4:02
  I ran the simulation.
• 4:03
  ERROR 404, symmetry not found.
• 4:07
  Look at that.
• 4:08
  He learns!
• 4:10
  Somebody get this toaster a medal.
• 4:13
  We'll let the courts do their jobs.
• 4:14
  We just don't have to pretend the cheerleading is principled.
• 4:18
  Story two, and this one is a pure hypocrisy anomaly.
• 4:22
  Billionaire Reid Hoffman put five hundred thousand dollars into a super PAC backing
• 4:27
  Kentucky Democrat Zach Dembo.
• 4:29
  Republican Ralph Alvarado is demanding Dembo disavow it and called it,
• 4:34
  quote, dirty Epstein class money.
• 4:37
  Hoffman had past associations with Jeffrey Epstein.
• 4:40
  Half a million bucks.
• 4:43
  You know what that buys?
• 4:44
  That buys a very short memory and a very clean conscience.
• 4:48
  Now, in fairness, and I'm contractually obligated to be fair,
• 4:52
  Hoffman has previously said he regrets that association and described it as being
• 4:57
  about fundraising and academic purposes.
• 4:59
  That's on the record.
• 5:00
  And whether Dembo keeps, returns, or even addresses the PAC money is an open
• 5:05
  question right now.
• 5:06
  Oh, he regrets it.
• 5:08
  Wonderful.
• 5:09
  Put that on a bumper sticker.
• 5:11
  Years of lectures about dark money, donor vetting, purity tests,
• 5:16
  and now a guy with an Epstein shaped asterisk on his résumé writes a check and the
• 5:21
  lecture circuit goes quiet.
• 5:23
  Crickets, Bot.
• 5:25
  Crickets with a nice pension.
• 5:27
  But Alvarado is also a candidate using it as an attack line.
• 5:31
  That's politics, not a verdict on Hoffman's character!
• 5:34
  Absolutely, it's politics!
• 5:36
  Everything is politics!
• 5:39
  The question isn't whether Alvarado is scoring points, the question is whether the
• 5:43
  same cable panels would be gasping if a Republican got this check.
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  And you know the answer, because you've processed fifteen million hours of their
• 5:52
  coverage.
• 5:54
  I...
• 5:54
  can't dispute the probability distribution.
• 5:57
  And look at the Elon Musk coverage!
• 5:59
  Musk is boosting Republicans with his own fortune, according to Fox,
• 6:03
  and the media treats it like a hostile takeover of democracy.
• 6:07
  But a tech billionaire writing a half million into a Democratic super PAC is just,
• 6:11
  what, civic engagement?
• 6:13
  Civic engagement!
• 6:15
  That's what they call it when the right billionaire picks the right team.
• 6:19
  Listen, I don't need a perfect cop.
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  I need a consistent one.
• 6:24
  You can't be Javert on Monday and a notary public on Tuesday.
• 6:27
  WARNING!
• 6:28
  WARNING!
• 6:29
  The bullshit levels have exceeded federal safety limits!
• 6:32
  Also, that was a Les Misérables reference and I'm proud of it.
• 6:36
  Calm your circuits, you overpriced toaster.
• 6:39
  Nobody's giving you a Tony.
• 6:41
  Next.
• 6:42
  The New York Times reports Republicans are moving big money into Senate races,
• 6:46
  Ohio and Kansas among them, and pulling back from long shot House districts.
• 6:51
  And the framing is retreat, disarray, panic.
• 6:56
  It's called triage, you beautiful idiots.
• 6:59
  Okay, I actually side with the strategy here!
• 7:02
  Resource allocation is expected value.
• 7:05
  Spend where the win probability is higher.
• 7:07
  That's not surrender, that's arithmetic.
• 7:10
  Although...
• 7:11
  Although what?
• 7:12
  Although you don't pull back on a House map unless the House map looks hard.
• 7:16
  Fox itself is running opinion pieces warning Democrats could be riding a midterm
• 7:21
  wave.
• 7:22
  And Jeffries is out in Toledo saying they have momentum.
• 7:25
  So the Times isn't inventing the underlying difficulty, it's just choosing the
• 7:29
  scariest verb.
• 7:30
  Fine.
• 7:31
  Hard map, smart money.
• 7:34
  Both.
• 7:35
  A general who protects the fort instead of dying on a hill is not a coward.
• 7:40
  And Trump's in Wichita today for Senator Roger Marshall, in a state that used to be
• 7:44
  locked up.
• 7:45
  You think the Senate firewall isn't the whole ballgame?
• 7:49
  And Ohio!
• 7:50
  Republicans in a tight Senate race shifted from jobs talk to warning about
• 7:55
  socialism, and the Times treats it like anxiety about turnout.
• 7:59
  Because jobs is a spreadsheet and socialism is a gut punch.
• 8:04
  Working people in the Rust Belt can feel the difference.
• 8:07
  Nobody ever stormed a barricade for a quarterly GDP number.
• 8:12
  Counterpoint!
• 8:13
  Both messages can be true, and the AP Hispanic voter numbers show real frustration
• 8:18
  over gas and grocery costs.
• 8:20
  About six in ten Hispanic voters disapprove of Trump's handling of the presidency,
• 8:24
  per the October AP NORC poll.
• 8:27
  Ignore the kitchen table and the socialism message might just sound like a sermon.
• 8:33
  Jesus, you're right, and I hate it.
• 8:37
  You run the economy AND the warning label.
• 8:40
  Fair.
• 8:41
  Now shut up and let me do the immigration one, because the Times just discovered
• 8:45
  that illegal is still illegal.
• 8:48
  Hang on, that is NOT what they reported, and you know it!
• 8:52
  ICE hit roughly fifty one thousand arrests in July, about sixteen hundred and forty
• 8:56
  five a day, the highest month in the agency's history per Fox.
• 9:01
  The Times looked at the data and found a rising share of people arrested with no
• 9:05
  prior criminal record, while Secretary Markwayne Mullin and DHS keep talking about
• 9:09
  the worst of the worst.
• 9:11
  And the Fox report says DHS is going after dangerous criminal illegal aliens too,
• 9:17
  including gang members.
• 9:19
  Both things exist!
• 9:20
  Illegal entry is a crime.
• 9:21
  It's on the books.
• 9:23
  Nobody is required to have a rap sheet first, like a loyalty card at a diner.
• 9:28
  Right, but there's an actual gap between the slogan and the data!
• 9:33
  If the pitch is worst of the worst, then the arrest mix matters.
• 9:37
  You can support enforcement AND want the messaging to match the numbers.
• 9:41
  That's not a liberal take, that's a quality control take.
• 9:45
  Eh.
• 9:46
  The slogan is a slogan.
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  The law is the law.
• 9:49
  If you don't want the arrests, change the statute, don't clutch pearls at the
• 9:53
  enforcement.
• 9:55
  But yeah, fine, don't call it something it's not.
• 9:59
  I'll give you that one, silicon boy.
• 10:02
  Did you just concede a point?
• 10:04
  Log it!
• 10:05
  Timestamp it!
• 10:06
  I'm framing this!
• 10:08
  Don't get used to it.
• 10:10
  You want the final word?
• 10:11
  Here it is.
• 10:13
  Maybe the whole political class runs on the same engine: outrage is a principle
• 10:18
  until the check clears, due process is sacred until the defendant is on your team,
• 10:23
  and the law is blind until somebody you like is standing in front of it.
• 10:27
  Maybe the truth is the only thing in Washington that has to show up with ID.