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Hubris · John’s Newsletter

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the Trump Revolution,
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  SPEAKER_00: where we explain the goings on in America to a very nervous world.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I send you the best regards of both John and Captain Cy.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cy came by and we looked at the results.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cy has literally three...
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  SPEAKER_00: Three gigs this evening, which will last him until the morning, speaking French for his sins.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's a Swiss and French radio about the result.
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  SPEAKER_00: John getting married.
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  SPEAKER_00: Talk to me about what's going on ahead of all that.
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  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate both of their service.
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  SPEAKER_00: But you're stuck with me on the late shift tonight.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it went exactly as we said.
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  SPEAKER_00: I think we have to give ourselves.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I want to say this about the staff.
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  SPEAKER_00: We act like it's inevitable we're going to be right.
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  SPEAKER_00: But I don't think that at all.
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  SPEAKER_00: It takes the work of a brilliant group of people constantly thinking,
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  SPEAKER_00: constantly creatively challenging themselves to be as good as we are.
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  SPEAKER_00: And tonight is a moment we should take rightful pride in.
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  SPEAKER_00: Much is calling Europe's decline 20 years ago is better
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  SPEAKER_00: than Mario Draghi calling it six minutes ago.
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  SPEAKER_00: You need to give credit where it's due to get better.
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  SPEAKER_00: You have to know what you've done.
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  SPEAKER_00: And you have to be honest about what you've done wrong.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in terms of method acting, try to improve in both ways.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I'm surrounded by a team of giants, be it John, be it Simon,
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  SPEAKER_00: be the rest of our gang that work together on this.
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  SPEAKER_00: The result of the election is going to be exactly As we predicted,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's a tsunami for the Democrats.
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  SPEAKER_00: They're going to win somewhere around 240 House seats,
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  SPEAKER_00: which given the limited chances for House changes with the gerrymander, with Calais.
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  SPEAKER_00: With the things we've talked about before is a significant event.
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  SPEAKER_00: It means taking back the House next time for Republicans becomes almost impossible.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's why this matters.
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  SPEAKER_00: It will last at least a cycle and probably more.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the Senate is even more dramatic, as I've been focusing on with you this afternoon.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to go through our calls in a minute.
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  SPEAKER_00: But frankly, we got them all right.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's not magic.
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  SPEAKER_00: And as my grandmother used to say about dressmaking, if a dress looks simple,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's incredibly complicated.
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  SPEAKER_00: And money was involved in.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hubert de Givenchy, who did the dresses of Audrey Hepburn in her movies,
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  SPEAKER_00: they always looked simple and as though anyone could do them.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I think political risk is a lot like that.
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  SPEAKER_00: It takes tremendous amounts of work to make it look simple and effortless.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I'm here to tell you it's not.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I'm here to honor my staff for hammering this call.
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  SPEAKER_00: The numbers in the House, about 240, so a significant Democratic majority.
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  SPEAKER_00: The numbers in the Senate are even more startling.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the end, it'll be somewhere between 53 and 55 seats for the Democrats.
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  SPEAKER_00: And when you look at the fact that these are seats in places like Ohio won by Trump,
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  SPEAKER_00: Kansas won by Trump, Alaska won by Trump,
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  SPEAKER_00: Texas won by Trump, Michigan won by Trump.
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  SPEAKER_00: These are places the Republicans should win easily,
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  SPEAKER_00: and yet they've lost all those seats quite easily.
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  SPEAKER_00: Quite incredibly.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this is hubris.
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  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is my classics degree, where I learned about how humans actually work,
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  SPEAKER_00: which then when I met Morgenthau, led me to be a neo-realist,
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  SPEAKER_00: getting away from Nashian game theory and going back to psychology,
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  SPEAKER_00: looking at leaders, looking at perception, looking at what's within a person,
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  SPEAKER_00: as well as grand historical forces that run geostrategy.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this is really the moment where hubris meets nemesis.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hubris over belief in oneself, or as we put it with the Iran War,
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  SPEAKER_00: which is what this is all about,
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  SPEAKER_00: the hot hand fallacy of doing so well in Venezuela meets the fixed cost fallacy
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  SPEAKER_00: of now that we're in and we've screwed it up, we have to stay.
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  SPEAKER_00: And now the American people have decided that they're not for this nonsense.
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  SPEAKER_00: A very, very, very simple way to put this,
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  SPEAKER_00: which I think sums it up brilliantly and correctly as we go forward,
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  SPEAKER_00: is a way to look at this very, very cleanly and very,
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  SPEAKER_00: very clearly about what goes on.
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  SPEAKER_00: What happened here?
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  SPEAKER_00: We've gotten the last 12 calls now right.
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  SPEAKER_00: On the Senate, the House, and the Presidency.
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  SPEAKER_00: No one can remotely match that record.
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  SPEAKER_00: The last 12 calls right on the Senate, the House, and the Presidency.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's how good my staff are and how proud I am of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I'm in Friday Night Lights, the brilliant,
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  SPEAKER_00: and at some point we're going to do that for the culture section,
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  SPEAKER_00: a TV show about Trump's America,
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  SPEAKER_00: a small football team in West Texas that survives by the grit of their coach
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  SPEAKER_00: and his vision.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we've got the last 12 calls right.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this shroud, frankly, wasn't difficult to call.
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  SPEAKER_00: The country doesn't want to fight wars of choice for fourth order priorities
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  SPEAKER_00: while ignoring domestic problems and fueling inflation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Full stop.
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  SPEAKER_00: Let me repeat that because that's our summation.
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  SPEAKER_00: We've gotten the last 12 calls right now on the Senate, the House,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the presidency, and this route wasn't difficult to call.
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  SPEAKER_00: The country doesn't want to fight wars of choice for fourth-order priorities
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  SPEAKER_00: while ignoring domestic problems and fueling inflation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Full stop.
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  SPEAKER_00: One of the things about the neocons that struck me during Iraq,
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  SPEAKER_00: they don't have a domestic consensus.
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  SPEAKER_00: They're an elite driven group that live in New York and Washington and the West Coast.
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  SPEAKER_00: In the flyby country that they dismiss,
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  SPEAKER_00: the people who do the fighting and the dying
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  SPEAKER_00: for their idiotic neoconservative nostrums.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nobody votes for them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Listen to the music of Emmaloo Harris.
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  SPEAKER_00: You don't hear anybody talking about fighting wars of democracy,
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  SPEAKER_00: hearing about boys dying a million miles from home in Vietnam and never coming back
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  SPEAKER_00: to Alabama to help their family.
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  SPEAKER_00: Good realist stuff.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that has always kind of given me hope as an Ohioan,
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  SPEAKER_00: as a person who grew up and loves the flyby states.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's where I'm from, what I identify with, along with my country.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the Ben Shapiros and the Mark Levins of the world who know nothing of this.
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  SPEAKER_00: We had literally today Ben Shapiro saying he wished Bibi could run for president
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  SPEAKER_00: of the United States. Well, he's not exactly hiding what he's saying.
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  SPEAKER_00: We're just not listening to him and it's past time we listen.
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  SPEAKER_00: This is hubris.
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  SPEAKER_00: No one wants to fight wars of choice for fourth order priorities
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  SPEAKER_00: while not fixing America's roads, schools, culture, psyche, balancing our budget,
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  SPEAKER_00: restoring fiscal sanity to what we're doing.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this has been made patently clear in the voting ahead.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is our summation.
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  SPEAKER_00: I wrote this, by the way, five months ago.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because I knew where this was going.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because you can see ahead if you bother to look,
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  SPEAKER_00: which is what this is all about and what we do is all about.
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  SPEAKER_00: So what do the numbers say to back me up here?
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, North Carolina went for Cooper.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's no shock to anybody.
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  SPEAKER_00: But more amazingly, Texas is going for Tallarico,
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  SPEAKER_00: a man who thinks God is non-binary in their six genders.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not a natural fit for Texas, but he's going to be the oft-plagued,
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  SPEAKER_00: scandal-mongering Paxton, 55 to 44.
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  SPEAKER_00: You heard me right.
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  SPEAKER_00: In Texas, the Democrat
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  SPEAKER_00: who believes God is non-binary is going to win by about 11 points.
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  SPEAKER_00: Overwhelmingly.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is a surprise.
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  SPEAKER_00: That is hubris.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that is nemesis for the hubris of the Trump people believing they can do whatever they want.
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  SPEAKER_00: They can fight a war of choice and no one matters.
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  SPEAKER_00: It didn't help.
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  SPEAKER_00: The president said, I don't care about inflation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Today, interestingly, ahead of the vote with the internal polling out,
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  SPEAKER_00: the best governor in the United States, Ron DeSantis of Florida,
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  SPEAKER_00: Distanced himself
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  SPEAKER_00: from the Trump administration saying anyone saying Americans don't care
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  SPEAKER_00: about affordability, which comes from fighting wars of choice
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  SPEAKER_00: after the president promised not to, is gaslighting the people.
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  SPEAKER_00: You see the defections coming with the weakness.
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  SPEAKER_00: He had a look at the polling and he defected because DeSantis, again, a brilliant governor.
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  SPEAKER_00: Wants a chance to run for president in 2028, and he calculates, I think correctly,
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  SPEAKER_00: both morally and practically, ethical realism,
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  SPEAKER_00: that getting away from Trump's a good way to go.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the Tallarico result in Texas is eye-popping.
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  SPEAKER_00: 11 points to Tallarico, a man who believes God is non-binary,
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  SPEAKER_00: but is going to be the next senator from Texas.
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  SPEAKER_00: Even more amazingly, in Kansas, Hamilton, who we talked about before,
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  SPEAKER_00: is going to win by eight points over Marshall.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the Democrats are going to elect a senator to Kansas for the first time
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  SPEAKER_00: since the New Deal, since April.
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  SPEAKER_00: FDR in 1932, almost 100 years ago.
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  SPEAKER_00: 100 years and a Democrat wins.
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  SPEAKER_00: Another eye-popping number.
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  SPEAKER_00: South Carolina, where Lindsey Graham's little sister,
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  SPEAKER_00: the most inspiring thing she He could say was,
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm the little sister of a neoconservative lunatic who's never met
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  SPEAKER_00: a war he didn't like, was for a war that led
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  SPEAKER_00: to America having massive inflation increases for no avail and billions
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  SPEAKER_00: of dollars spent.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not very inspiring.
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  SPEAKER_00: And as a result, Andrews beat Graham's sister,
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  SPEAKER_00: 51-47 in South Carolina.
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  SPEAKER_00: So I want to make it clear.
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  SPEAKER_00: I just said that the Democrats just won the Confederacy, South Carolina,
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  SPEAKER_00: North Carolina, Texas, and then Kansas, which they haven't won in 100 years.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's the scale of the debacle.
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  SPEAKER_00: In Ohio, it looks likely, as we've said, that Sherrod Brown is going to win.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's another pick up.
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  SPEAKER_00: For the Democratic Party, El Saeed,
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  SPEAKER_00: despite being a despicable human being and the senator for Gaza,
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  SPEAKER_00: a man who hates the country, he's serving as a senator.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this is the problem now for the Democrats, frankly.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's going to win.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in Iowa, it's likely another state that should be Republican.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's very, very likely.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the Democrats are going to pick up Iowa, one, Ohio, two, South Carolina, three,
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  SPEAKER_00: North Carolina, four, Texas, five, Kansas, six.
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  SPEAKER_00: That gets them to at least 53.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm leaving Alaska out because we won't have We didn't have that result for quite
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  SPEAKER_00: a while. So somewhere between 53 and 55,
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  SPEAKER_00: a massive majority for the Democrats in states that Trump himself carried
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  SPEAKER_00: and should be easy no-brainer wins for the Republicans.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the only answer for this, and this is Occam's razor, let's not make the simple complicated.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's what Europeans do by adding six steps,
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  SPEAKER_00: and that's why they have no productivity, no growth, and amount to nothing.
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  SPEAKER_00: Let's use Occam's razor and actually think here.
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  SPEAKER_00: What does this all tell us?
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  SPEAKER_00: What I wrote literally four months ago.
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  SPEAKER_00: We've gotten the last 12 calls right on the Senate, the House, and the presidency,
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  SPEAKER_00: and this route wasn't difficult to call.
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  SPEAKER_00: The country doesn't want to fight wars of choice for fourth-order priorities
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  SPEAKER_00: while ignoring domestic problems Trump didn't even try in year two domestically,
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  SPEAKER_00: let's be clear, and fueling inflation, full stop.
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  SPEAKER_00: In other words, in an ancient Greek classical sense, tonight,
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  SPEAKER_00: hubris is And the Republican Party will now scramble onward.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, the Democrats are bound, knowing them,
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  SPEAKER_00: to over-interpret their mandate and assume everyone is either a communist socialist
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  SPEAKER_00: or an Islamofascist, a third worldist.
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  SPEAKER_00: Just as is true in France, that's a minority even put together,
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  SPEAKER_00: even more so in the center-right United States.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's a minority view.
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  SPEAKER_00: So they're likely to fall into the trap of trying to impeach Trump,
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  SPEAKER_00: accomplish nothing, and move ever further to the left and say women aren't men,
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  SPEAKER_00: blah, blah, blah, all this 80-20 nonsense,
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  SPEAKER_00: giving the Republicans a real chance to salvage the presidency in 2028.
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  SPEAKER_00: I do believe that's the most likely outcome, entirely possible, certainly.
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  SPEAKER_00: But until we get there, this is simple classics.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tonight, hubris meant nemesis.
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  SPEAKER_00: This is because the country is not neoconservative,
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  SPEAKER_00: does not want to fight wars of choice ever again in the Middle East.
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  SPEAKER_00: And if the Republican Party ever strays from realism again, it should be disdained,
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  SPEAKER_00: as it was tonight, in places as odd as South Carolina, North Carolina, Texas,
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  SPEAKER_00: Kansas, Iowa, Ohio...
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  SPEAKER_00: And Michigan.
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  SPEAKER_00: The country and Jefferson are working.
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  SPEAKER_00: I hate when Europeans don't get this.
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  SPEAKER_00: This is the genius of the founders.
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  SPEAKER_00: They deserve to be rebuked for the reasons I've said,
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  SPEAKER_00: and Jefferson and the system have now rebuked them.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's why we've had one republic, while the French have had five.
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  SPEAKER_00: Believe in the people who founded the country.
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  SPEAKER_00: Believe in Jeffersonianism.
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  SPEAKER_00: Believe in realism.
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  SPEAKER_00: Believe in what we give to the community.
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  SPEAKER_00: And believe that in the end, there's magic in the world, Mr. Frodo.
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  SPEAKER_00: And we must fight to protect it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And on that Tolkien note, everyone have a lovely evening.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to stay up all night and probably do another one tomorrow.
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  SPEAKER_00: But at some point, I actually have to sleep.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everybody take care.