Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
It's time to make a move! Love to Play, the biggest online gaming destination, has opened up 500 more exclusive slots so you can experience the excitement of Vegas anytime you want. Picture the thrill of Vegas right at your fingertips, wherever you are. Whether you're unwinding at home, on the go, or even during a work break, Love to Play has a game that's perfect for you. With themed slot games that whisk you away to magical worlds and classic games that offer you the authentic Vegas feel.
Love to Play has it all, but it's not just about the games. At Love to Play, you'll join a lively, inclusive community where you can make lasting friendships and create unforgettable memories. With exclusive bonuses and new rewards every day, the biggest wins and the best times are just a click away. Start playing today and feel the rush of Vegas at your fingertips. Turn your downtime into fun time. Visit love.com.
Number two, PLAY and claim 50 free spins exclusively for the first 500 users using promo code Betches50 on their first deposit. So tell your friends, your family, and don't miss out on your biggest payday yet. The adventure awaits at Love2Play, where you can find excitement in every day.
Rise and shine, fever dreamers. Look alive, my friends. I'm Bea Spear. And I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream, presented by Betches News. Where we explore the absurdities and oddities of our uniquely American experience. Hello there, my friend. Hello.
We are recording this a bit early. We are recording this Friday morning, August 2nd, because V is headed to Paris. Oui, oui, oui. I will be headed to Paris. I just found out recently, in the last few days, that I'll be covering the Paris Olympics for TikTok. So expect a whole ton of Olympics content where there's normally political content, because...
To earn this trip, I have to make like 12 TikToks for them, which felt very worth it. You know, the Olympics are political. They are. Well, as we'll get to in our AmeriCant. Spoiler alert. Oh, we will. I mean, we talked about last week, the opening ceremony. Yeah. The new culture war front.
It just, I still love it though. I love the French. I'm excited to be in Paris. I'm there for six days and then I go to Ireland for three days because I won an award for journalism. Oh my God, congrats. That I'm like super awkward about, so I don't want to talk about it. What award did you win? I know, I know. We're really good at promoting ourselves. So what award did you win? I'll prompt you to promote yourself. It's called Arise.
and it's about new media and it's presented by Mozilla Firefox and I'm getting it in Dublin, Ireland and I'm super excited because I've never been to Ireland and I've been to Paris but never overnight. So this will be exciting. Well, congrats. I'm very excited for you. I've never been to Dublin or Ireland and...
And I'm really excited to hear how it is. I do want to go there. So we'll have to take the show on the road. I was excited that my Paris hotel, I was like looking at what's around it. Cause you know, I like have to panic and understand everything about where I'm going. And they put me in like a very touristy area of Paris, which actually gives me great comfort. I'm like right near the Notre Dame and across the street is like a KFC and a Starbucks and a McDonald's. And I was like, wow, they really tick tock was like, let's put the Americans somewhere. They're going to be comfortable.
That's so interesting. That's such an... I mean, it's a nice spot. I didn't even think they had that there, but they do. They have it all there. It's an international city. Globalist, elitist, globalist city. Yeah. I mean, I personally, I have to tell you, I am ravenously listening to Julia Ioffe's podcast about Vladimir Putin's biography. And that is one of the most fascinating things. The episodes are short. It's really good. I just had... I'm plugging it for no reason other than...
I am really enjoying it and I want to share that with everybody. You'll have to do like a special episode recap because I fear I don't have the stomach for it myself. Oh, I will. I'm happy to do that. Like I would listen to you tell me about it, but I can't like listen to it directly, you know? Okay. All right. We can do that. I will listen with that in mind then.
Yeah. Baby Bird it to us, Sammy. Baby Bird it. Baby Bird it. Oh, here you go, Baby Bird. Okay. Let's start our show. We have a lot to talk about today. We do. Get right into it. Here we go. Temp check. Temp check.
So Peter Thiel is a name that's come up a whole lot lately. And while you may know him as like the guy who co-founded PayPal or was an early investor in Facebook, or maybe you even know him from when he funded Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the media outlet Gawker. That's how I know him. That's how I know him too. In that case, the Hulkster sued Gawker for posting portions of a sex tape that he had done with Heather Clem, who at that time was the wife of radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge. This is like deep Florida. I forgot about that.
Yeah. So crazy. Yeah. This lawsuit that was going on, it was kind of going nowhere for Hulk Hogan until Peter Thiel stepped in to get Hogan some high-powered lawyers that he paid $10 million. And the purpose here was really to just obliterate Gawker Media. If you're wondering why, well...
It might have something to do with the fact that on December 19th, 2007, Gawker published the headline, Peter Thiel is totally gay, people. And Peter Thiel at the time, and maybe still, is deeply uncomfortable with being gay. He's married to a man now. Do we agree it is fucked up that they outed him? That is fucked up. Yes.
Well, that's like peak early 2000s bullshit. I mean, 2007 was a disgusting year for media. This is like the peak Perez Hilton time too. Yeah. We were not doing the best. But also that's not false if they were. It was true. So Peter Thiel is married to a man now and he has the money and means to destroy the platform notorious for making Thiel the butt of their snarky commentary and continuously embarrassing him by exposing his far-flung ideas about business, entrepreneurship, and government.
It wasn't just that they outed him as gay. Peter Thiel was a frequent target for Gawker's snarky commentary, including some pieces that they did on Thiel's idea that young men should skip college and start businesses that Peter Thiel would fund, and something about Thiel wanting to start a society where they only lived in international waters. I don't know. It was very L. Ron Hubbard of him. We did cover in the last episode his influence, Curtis Yarvin, who had some pretty out there ideas. So...
It seems like this is what he's into. I got into like, who is Peter Thiel, you know, like behind the curtain? Like, how did he grow up? So this is what I found out about him. Thiel emigrated from Germany with his family when he was only one years old and later was given U.S. citizenship along with his mother and his brother, but oddly not his German father. Sus. He also spent time living in apartheid South Africa where future billionaire Elon Musk grew up.
Thiel named all of his companies after Tolkien books like Lord of the Rings stuff and founded the Stanford Review, a conservative libertarian newspaper.
He also apparently super loved Ronald Reagan and was known to debate against identity politics and multiculturalism when he was in law school. He was also heavily influenced by the philosopher René Girard, who founded Mimic Theory, which basically says that we are all driven by our desires, but we should not pursue those desires. We should mimic the most successful alpha in a group. And if someone doesn't conform to the norms of the group, they should be killed to restore order. And their death could even become...
martyrdom. Like they could be martyred in their death because while their inability to mimic or respect the group norms caused conflict, their death restored order. So that's what Peter Thiel believes. What I find so weird is like people who actually make this their thing, like that they're, oh, I'm just going to, I'm going to,
basically tell you how the whole world should work. And I'm going to then try to force you using my money into situations that confirm my beliefs. And ultimately what I think
a lot of these people have in common is deep discomfort with themselves. They, Oh, sure. And I suspect it tends to go back to their sexuality. And that's why they're all sort of like, you know, JD Vance is in this group, like this weird, like they have to live in this weird fantasy world where like they're in charge, this like bizarre libertarian thought world. Like that's,
Like that's not how the world is. And there is a place for it. And that's the thing is like, there is a place for all of this philosophical sort of like thinking about things, talking about things. Does this do that? You're not supposed to take it. You're supposed to take it into the real world. Yeah. You're supposed to leave it at the dinner table in your Dungeons and Dragons games and in academia, the weird little place of academia. So in 1995, Peter Thiel and David Sachs published The Diversity Myth, which is a book that criticized political correctness and multiculturalism in higher education.
Following year, writing for Stanford Magazine, they argued against affirmative action in the United States, saying that it had hurt, not helped the disadvantaged and had led to increased segregation at Stanford University in the name of diversity. So we're seeing some of these court cases, right? These were coming out of the Peter Thiel thought camp.
Thiel explained in a 2009 essay that he had come to, quote, no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible, due in large part to welfare beneficiaries and women in general being notoriously tough for libertarian constituencies. Welfare queen. Where did we first get that? Ronald Reagan. Who was his hero? Ronald Reagan.
Thiel has also funded a handful of politicians who go on to lose bigly. He funded Rand Paul for president, Carly Fiorino, Blake Masters, but he did land one win when J.D. Vance became the senator of Ohio and now the vice presidential nominee on the Trump ticket. Vance had worked at one of Thiel's companies in the past, and he is Thiel's greatest pawn right now.
The Teal lore goes deep, but his circle is very much made up of similarly insecure men who maybe should have stayed in the science fiction junkies world instead of bringing that thinking into the real world to terrorize us normies with. Teal's idea that the elimination of a person who causes conflict in society can restore norms is terrifying.
Especially terrifying given that his sort of secret boyfriend just fell out a window after having a conflict with Peter Thiel's husband at a New Year's Eve party. The death, which came a few weeks after the conflict at the New Year's Eve party, has been ruled a suicide. At the time of this secret boyfriend's death, it was reported that he was seeking a monthly allowance in perpetuity in exchange for not talking to the media about his relationship with Thiel. And then he fell out a window. Yikes.
All that to say, this is the guy that's funding J.D. Vance and much of Vance's antisocial, mimic the norms, women are a problem rhetoric is
lines right up with Thiel's teachings. The Atlantic reported that Trump has also tried to shake the Thiel tree for major donations, claiming in a series of what Thiel told the Atlantic were relentless harassing phone calls from Trump, that Trump had claimed he endorsed Blake Masters and J.D. Vance in 2023. And in return for that, he wanted millions of dollars from Thiel for his presidential run. To this day, Thiel has declined to offer to donate to Trump,
which may be one more reason he chose J.D. Vance as his running mate. He's just trying to get some of that sweet, sweet Peter Thiel cash. Yeah, Peter Thiel reportedly does not like Donald Trump, does not want to donate to him. He was disappointed by him. And yet here he is having...
subverted his campaign in a way. Well, you know, when I said, if you really love Donald Trump, then you should vote for Kamala Harris because J.D. Vance is running a little bit of a sideshow here. This sort of is just one more point and then maybe J.D. Vance is running a sideshow here. Yeah. And then I'll tell, I'll say, I mean, we spoke about this when the Republican convention was happening, but I feel like I definitely got this intuition that
Trump felt his own dispensability at that moment. And that's why he was so unhappy. And it had come right after the assassination attempt. So there's a lot to unpack there. It's very interesting to see what will happen. There's a lot there. The boyfriend thing scared me just because when you know that his philosophy and teachings openly that Peter Thiel claims are this idea of like somebody that causes conflict in the norm, their death can
heal the norm. And then the boyfriend fell out the window. I don't know. It scared me. Sometimes these people, this is the thing, we all have a good time making these podcasts and chit-chatting and doing whatever. And then it can be a little scary out here. It can be kind of scary to learn these things about certain people and see the underbelly of what's happening. Absolutely. Which is why I think we need
a cop or a prosecutor or someone to protect us from these criminals. Yes. Or these alleged criminals. These alleged criminals. All right. So with that, let's take a break so I can get a cold rag and shake the sweats I have from telling that story. I'm not a brave person, guys. This was a lot for me. We'll take a break. We'll come back. We'll talk to you about Kamala Harris and how she's going to save democracy. Thank you.
All right. Welcome back, friends. We're going to be talking about how Kamala's a cop. Kamala's a cop, right? That's the rhetoric that she can't beat and maybe she doesn't want to anymore. Sammy, we dug into her history and what's going on with Kamala and past, present, and future. Tell us a little bit about Kamala the cop. Yeah. I mean, what's so interesting is that just a month ago, there were people swearing up and down that Kamala could not
have unified the democratic party, that she wasn't going to be a good candidate. And I'm not going to say that we told you so, but she has taken the nation by storm and there, she has a long career and I've been going through old videos, you know, old articles about what her work when she was the attorney general, when she was the DA in San Francisco and, you know, really just looking into her career because there's a lot there.
decades of serious work. And I think that as fun as the coconut tree and the brat memes are, she is a very serious person as Logan Roy in Logan Roy terms, she is a serious person and she has so much to dissect about her career that can really teach us about how she will approach governing as a president. So in other news,
Back when she was doing her first presidential run in 2020, the Kamala as a cop allegations both confused and I think undermined her career in a lot of ways. But 2024 is a different time. We are looking at this within an entirely different context. And her opponent is
is a recently convicted felon. So she herself has long claimed that she is not tough on crime or soft on crime. She says she is smart on crime and is a progressive prosecutor. Basically,
Based on what I've read about her career, this really does bear out. So I want to talk about one pretty salient example from reporting back in 2019 from when she was running for president. This dissects part of her career when she was district attorney in San Francisco in 2005, and she launched something called the Back on Track program. It was a re-entry initiative aimed at reducing recidivism among low-level drug trafficking defendants. The
The participants of the program, which started as a small program, were young adults ages 18 to 30 who were facing charges for their first felony offense for low-level drug sales. So part of this is like schedule one, you know, it has to do with like drug scheduling. Had a little weed on them. Yeah. So her goal was to combine strict accountability for people to reenter, counterintuitively
giving them real opportunities for self-improvement like job training, GED classes. And ultimately, we'll explain what she did, but Back on Track ultimately reported that less than 10% of the program's graduates re-offended, which was a great success considering that I think it was compared to the average rate of recidivism, which was 50%. And she also was able to redo this at a fraction of the cost of traditional prosecution and jail time.
So what she did here, and this was, by the way, against the context of a lot of people in her community looking at her like she was in some way being a traitor to them by being a prosecutor. But what she did here is that she completely overhauled the program. She reached out to public departments, to private companies, like an example was 24 Hour Fitness.
you know, the Art Institute of California to create scholarships. And she basically persuaded people in these public, private, nonprofit spaces to hire people from this program and to pay them and to actually provide them support and
real respectable jobs that they probably would not have been able to get otherwise. But because she had backed them through this program and applied really strict standards to what the participants had to hold up while also giving them a great deal of respect, she was able to
create this really new third solution that is not really present in the discourse. And it's also hard to articulate on the public stage or a debate stage. So one thing she did was that she insisted that meetings when people were in the program should be held at the University of California's law school instead of at the Hall of Justice, which was attached to the county jail.
And, you know, holding them to standards that they would actually engage with these opportunities. So job training, they had to do more than 200 hours of community service. They had to either find employment or enroll in school. And she was giving them, you know, this program was giving people services and holding them accountable for taking them. And I think that this was really reflective of the way that she approaches governing. And it's why she's sort of hard to pin down as president.
a radical or a moderate because she's not really, it doesn't really seem like she's necessarily either. It seems like she's results oriented. And I think that was just a, a really demonstrative example.
And I think it's evident in the way that she treats people now. She sets high expectations for them and then you're more likely to meet them. I mean, moving things from like, hey, you have to do your rehabilitation right next door to the county jail, which is a very adverse place that people don't want to be to. We're inviting you to the university campus to this place where we have respect for the law is certainly going to do a lot more for folks and make them believe in themselves.
There are also stories in that article, which is in Mother Jones and Dissects Her Career. It's called The Secret to Understanding Kamala Harris.
It talks about how, you know, she was working with one of her colleagues and she wore like a hoodie and jeans one day. And she gave her a suit and was like, if you want people to take you seriously, you have to dress like they should take you seriously. It's those little things, though. And in 2020, when she ran for president, she said, quote, too many black and brown Americans are locked up from mass incarceration to cash bail to policing. Our criminal justice system needs drastic repair.
At a time when prevention and redemption were not in the vocabulary or mindset of most district attorneys, we created an initiative to get skills and job training instead of jail time for young people arrested for drugs. So this is something she's obviously been very proud of.
Another thing that she's been a long vocal critic of is capital punishment. She's also against the death penalty going so far as to shield a man who killed a police officer from getting the death penalty. So then why did she oppose a California federal judge's ruling that would have made the death penalty unconstitutional?
This is a woman who she's a by the book lawyer, right? So she said, I am appealing the court's decision because it's not supported by the law and it undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants.
At the time, the Supreme Court had rejected cases that would have established the death penalty as unconstitutional. And while as attorney general, she personally committed to never seeking or enforcing a death penalty, she still had to square the laws of California with the federal laws set forth by the Supreme Court, even if it wasn't popular and even if she personally disagreed with the law. I think that's a lot of where she gets caught up is when she had to do her job, even when it was in direct opposition to where she wished they were progressive-wise when it came to law.
All of these things speak to her ability to really navigate nuance in a way that is absolutely necessary for a president. She did have some unpopular opinions early in her career, as we all do, right? But they came from a good place, like when she instituted an anti-truancy policy that would have arrested parents whose children continued to miss school, or how as a prosecutor she went super hard on adult marijuana cases while having this back-on-track program for youth offenders.
She says now that she believes in federal decriminalization of marijuana. So we've come quite a ways there. She was also the prosecutor for sex crimes against women and children. And some folks will say that she didn't go far enough, that her office should have been doing more to prevent the crimes from happening in the first place and not just going hard on the offenders. I think when it comes to violence against women and children, you're never going to be satisfied that anybody ever pays a great enough penalty. There is no great enough penalty when it comes to crimes against children. So I...
That's just the way that that goes.
On the other hand, some of her unpopular opinions were very popular with marginalized folks while being written off by her powerful colleagues. An example of that, she wrote the book on how to prosecute against the gay panic defense, which literally nobody cared about when she did it in the 90s. It was a real thing where defense lawyers were using this thing called the gay panic defense to say that their client killed or hurt another person because the client experienced temporary insanity due to their victim being gay.
And it used to work. They used to be able to just claim gay panic defense for killing gay and trans people. And then Kamala Harris came along and wrote a playbook to discredit it, which is used nationally now. She also won huge settlements against big oil companies like Chevron that forced them to clean up their environmental messes. She started the first environmental justice unit.
There's been some good stuff that her colleagues didn't care about, but that she cared about. We've also seen her prowess when she was a senator. And I mean, those were some of my favorite clips of the early Trump administration, her questioning Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He says at one point that she was making him nervous. I'm not able to be rushed this fast. It makes me nervous. Justice Kavanaugh famously turned beet red and
almost cried. And now you have, you know, we saw her up against attorney general Bill Barr. I, those are fun clips to watch. I posted some of them on Instagram a few weeks ago. And now we have Donald Trump who is seemingly unwilling to debate her, but we will keep you posted if that continues to be the case. I'd be scared to debate her. I mean, she really knows what she's doing. And it's the way that she even debated Mike Pence. Remember we had that clip of like vice president, I'm speaking, I'm speaking. And,
So we'll see. We'll see how it turns out. Right. She tried to run as the prosecutor versus the criminal in 2019 as part of her first bid for the White House, which, of course, went to Joe Biden, because at that time, the statesman versus the con man was the winning argument. But now, as Donald Trump has been convicted of 34 felony counts, is facing many more court cases, was found liable of rape.
And several of his friends and accomplices are currently sitting in prison for their seditious actions on January 6th. It does seem like this prosecutor versus the criminal play might just work. Yeah. And apparently just a few hours ago, Donald Trump complained in a legal filing that Kamala Harris is calling him a felon. He's trying to get the judge to recuse himself. Defamation. Yeah. But it's not because he is a convicted felon. He is a felon. Yeah, it is what it is.
They don't want to be called felons. They don't want to be called weird. That's my favorite thing about her right now, honestly, is Michelle Obama said, when they go low, we go high. And she said, no, we're going to call them weird. And it's working so much better. Well, you know what? I do want to say something about that because everyone seems to be like, well, why didn't we think of this before? We did. It's like it wouldn't have worked the same way before.
We did, right? Like I've been calling him weird. It just wouldn't have worked the same way. We're in a different place. We have a different candidate. It's a different time. Their ideas that are out there are markedly weirder. Like they put Project 2025 out there, which is bizarre. Like they have become bizarre freaks. So it works now. We shouldn't be like, oh, why did we think of that? Like
It's fine. We did, but we thought, I think we really didn't think at the time calling them authoritarian, dictators, despots, wannabe, you know, terrorists, all this kind of stuff. We thought that that was going to do something. But in fact, you cannot shame a narcissist, but you can create a narcissistic injury. And by calling him weird, you are creating a narcissistic injury that he can't beat. When we called him authoritarian, he kind of liked that. He thought that was kind of hot.
People did call him weird. It just wasn't like the discourse. Yeah.
I think now that he's older, too, and we've seen some accountability for his crimes, right, the guilty verdicts, the defamation, we still have the Smartmatic cases and the stuff against Fox News to come. But I do think that people feel a little bit more comfortable calling him out than they did before when MAGA was kind of on the rise. It's definitely plateaued and, if anything, is declining now in terms of, like, political and cultural relevance and control.
They look, the QAnon situation didn't help them. The pandemic didn't help them. The anti-vax didn't help them. Those were all things that were credibly like bizarre and weird and untrustworthy and unpowerful. But somebody said,
Every chair he sits on, he looks like he's sitting on a toilet. And now I can never unsee it. It's just like you wouldn't have heard that in 2015. People just didn't talk like that the first time he ran. No, they did. They did. It just wasn't. It just didn't slap? No, it slapped. It just wasn't. The situation was different. The dynamics were different.
It's still slap. This is why they want to ban TikTok. This is why they want to ban TikTok because stuff goes viral so quick. Yeah, exactly. Well, he pushed back on that allegation. We'll just play a clip.
Nobody's ever called me weird. I'm a lot of things, but weird I'm not. And I'm up front. And he's not either, I will tell you. JD is not at all. All right, we're going to take another break. And when we get back, we'll have our main news segment for you, where we're going to go through the procedural attempts to overturn the election. Look forward to that after these ads.
Welcome back. And now let's talk about corruption and the attempts to overturn the election. This is a doozy. Oh boy. Yeah. I am like... Well, Rachel Maddow scared the shit out of people this week by talking about it. So now I feel like we have to kind of try to like bring people back to peace with what's being said. Well, I don't know if they should be brought back to peace because this is happening. It's very scary. Well, you should be brought to awareness.
For clarity, most of what I'm about to describe, and I believe most of Rachel Maddow's reporting was reported in Rolling Stone originally. They came out with a mammoth of a piece where they lay out all of the plans.
that are happening between now and election day, and then plan for post-election day to overturn the election results in swing states. So now that the election is looking less hopeless in terms of turnout, we have to talk about the procedures itself and how it will be administered. We've kind of danced around this in the past few episodes, but the most important thing to understand is that the election does not start or end on November 5th.
Early voting starts mid-October, but even after the polls close on the 5th, we already know from the 2020 election that Donald Trump and his fellow election-denying Republicans are not going to just take the results at face value. If you were following the post-election day process in 2020 and remember it, there were a number of points at which Donald Trump tried to prevent Biden from being declared the winner between election day and inauguration day, and not just on January 6th.
December 13th, there was a certification. If you remember, there was GSA Emily who had to certify the results at some point from the general general services administration, the government. He freaked out at Fox news the night of when they were like calling Arizona. I think it was for Joe Biden or something. He was freaking out that the news was calling it. They called it and he tried to get them to rescind it basically to take it back to pending.
But the cat was out of the bag. And I think honestly, if that hadn't happened, things might have gone differently. But it be your own people.
And Donald Trump, they tried it last time, but now they have learned from those failures. And there was already a substantial and very organized effort to call the election results into question, to claim potentially thousands of cases of fraud across multiple states, and essentially flood the zone with uncertainty and lawsuits in order to delay and ultimately prevent certification of the results if they believe Donald Trump did not definitely win.
So let's talk about some of those plans. We need some context first. Elections are not a nationalized affair, even the presidential election. They are highly localized and polling places are run in many cases by volunteers while the election itself is administered by local election officials, some of whom are elected, some of whom are appointed by state officials and they report up to higher state officials. That is the highest point of centralization in elections in the United States.
Every state then has its own processes and laws, and there are thousands of county election officials. And we know this because there's a million different registration days and laws about when you can register, what you need to vote. As you would expect, the efforts to overturn or call into question electoral results are concentrated in a few swing states that are thought to be the most important to determine the winner due to the Electoral College.
and what each candidate will need to get to 270 electoral votes, because some states have more than others. These states that are of the highest priority are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania. And as we said, there are already efforts underway now to prevent the certification of election results in those states before the election has even happened. It's going to be little things. I mean, Sabine's going to get into some of the big structural stuff, but
If you have an election worker who hands you a ballot and they write on it,
writing outside of your bubble could disqualify your vote. So there's like rumors circulating on Telegram and all these different channels that like, they'll just have people at the polls sort of like write on the ballot before they hand it in or put an R on it or a D on it. Something that you might think is normal is not normal. Unless they're handing you a clean ballot with no markings on it and you personally put it into the machine yourself, you have to be that protective of
Because there's going to be these little things they try to do to get certain ballots thrown out. Yeah. And the reporting we'll, we'll get into does have, you know, does have people on the very, very, very local level that they're concerned about doing things like that. And the, honestly, the reporting, what they did here is they look through people's like Facebooks because it's not necessarily all publicly out there, but they look to see what people were saying on social media about the election and,
what kind of things they were posting. And this is how they were able to determine it. You know, if people think that the 2020 election was stolen still, then that obviously has a bearing on what they're doing now.
So the reason that these attempts to delay certification could be effective is because, as we learned in 2020, there are deadlines between Election Day and Inauguration Day that need to be met to formally accept the results. That's what January 6th was about. It was about stopping Mike Pence from getting elected.
the election from certifying the election before midnight on January 6th. That's why they came back that night. They didn't want to risk it. And we're very lucky that those Senate aides grabbed that box with the envelopes in it, because if they were able to destroy that, it would have been over. There were so many fail points. And now they know those things.
Exactly. It comes down to that. And in the past, though certification is required by state and local laws, it has largely been considered ceremonial. It mostly was not a question about whether local officials would accept the results or that they would actually try to count the actual number until Donald Trump and his cult of election deniers. So the problem is that a lot of these people are already currently in positions where they will have the power to influence whether the results are certified.
This varies by state, but Rolling Stone has identified at least 70 pro-Trump election deniers who are already currently working as county election officials. These are people who have already questioned the validity of elections, and at least 22 of these people have personally refused or tried to delay certification of election results in recent years.
Democratic election lawyer Mark Elias, who is known as the guru on defeating election challenges, he heads up a team under the organization that he founded, Democracy Docket. So if you're looking for somewhere to donate, I'm sure that could be helpful. They're great. Yeah, definitely. He told Rolling Stone, quote, I think we are going to see mass refusals to certify the election in November. Everything we're seeing about this election is that the other side is more organized, more ruthless, and more prepared.
also said that he thinks the reporting about these states is just, quote, the tip of the iceberg. And they are counting on not certifying results in several small counties as well as big ones, making it impossible to certify the statewide results.
So it's like if they can't get the counts, then they can't get the state's results to then certify the full. A little town of like 100 people could hold this up. Yeah. It could, but more likely a bigger one would. But if you get enough small ones, you know. But it's not just the post-election process that they're trying to corrupt. They are already laying the groundwork in advance.
In Arizona and Georgia, pro-Trump election officials have already sued in state court and it is now in court to try to make the certification of elections discretionary, meaning that these officials could just decide without evidence at their discretion whether the results should be certified. In Pennsylvania alone, there are 19 election deniers in various positions in the state who have the power to decide elections.
And pro-Trump election deniers are already working as local officials in at least 16 counties in those key battleground states that I mentioned earlier, specifically in counties that have flipped between Democrats and Republicans in elections going back to 2008. So these are like true swing counties. And like we said earlier, like you mentioned about, you know, marking ballots and things to be nervous about.
That is in addition to the highly localized volunteers who serve as local administrators. Those are the people running like the high school polling place. Since 2020, pro-Trump election deniers have been attempting to work their way into those positions where they will be able to administer these elections. Sammy, how many pro-Harris election denier poll workers are there?
I have no idea. None. Zero. I mean, there's zero. There probably are. There probably are. I have not heard of one. This is the crazy thing. No, of course there are. They try to say it's on both sides. It's on both sides. There is not one example I've ever heard in my life of
of a Democrat or a pro-Biden or a pro-Harris or whatever person or collective of people or telegram channel that is trying to teach people how to devalue a ballot so that their candidate can win. There is no reporting on that whatsoever. And that's,
Oh, yeah. No, I mean, no, totally. Not that there should be.
Not on this level of coordination.
Even before that, we can expect mass challenges and accusations of fraud, challenges to and restrictions of voter registration rules. We're obviously already seeing that. Implementations of unreliable hand counts, which in a lot of cases, wealthy people will just pay for. They will pay to have the campaigns do it. They will fund that. So there'll also be attempts to take over local election boards via legislation. You know, you can see this
attempt to allow officials to decide results at their, to certify results at their discretion, which means if they like them. And there have been examples of this happening. They have, a lot of these have flown under the radar. You know, 2020 was not the last time that election, you know, they haven't just been sleeping and trying, not trying to challenge anything since then. There are a number of examples in swing states. So in Berks County, Pennsylvania in 2022,
They had election commissioners who were election deniers. They voted to delay certification of approximately 16,000 undated or improperly prepared mail-in ballots. So mail in, you have to know the instructions. Everyone, this is on us. Those ballots ended up being thrown out by the local officials. And then a three-judge panel eventually backed their decision to throw those ballots out.
So they didn't change the results, but they threw the ballots out so that that can happen. The same thing happened last year in a local election in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, where the election commissioner refused to certify the results of a local election after he was encouraged to do so by the county GOP chair.
This also happened in Georgia last November, where Republican election officials refused to certify results in Cobb County, Spalding County and DeKalb County. So the reporting goes on to list several more examples of these local elections where there were these challenges in primaries from earlier this year.
And they really are just attempting to get election results thrown out all over. And they're emboldened by this idea that they're heroes and patriots, that the system is corrupt, that illegal people are voting, that they're voting in their dead mother's name, and that it's up to them to uphold the truth, which is the delusion in their mind that unless Donald Trump wins, it's rigged.
Right. And I think you can see that with how Donald Trump spoke and answered particular questions at the National Association for Black Journalists last week is that when he was asked about the election and winning votes from the black community, he answered with the immigrants are the illegal people are coming here and taking your, it's like, he thinks that they're going to tie those things together. It's like, no, like the election is separate from our black jobs. And,
And the president of the United States is, in fact, a black job. I heard that scientists are saying that you'll turn trans if you if you're a man who votes for a woman and that, in fact, the presidential job is a black job. There would be many more women then.
That's what I'm saying. Oh, my God. Fox News is losing it, but that's a whole other episode. That's for the fun TikTok book. They don't know what to do. Because all of their incentives are at odds with each other all of a sudden. They work themselves into this hole, but we can get, like you said, we can get to that another time.
But aside from that, where they're not doing that, where they're not going that far, they are using all the old tactics. Across the country, Republicans and state legislatures have passed 22 bills addressing what they refer to as election integrity, which...
I have a feeling.
that next we're going to circle this episode back to Peter Thiel and big tech to further ruin our life. Oh, we are. We are. Cause the next, I knew it was coming. I knew it was coming. The next new trend is voter apps. Like Curtis Yargon had that idea.
There's a new app in Georgia known as Eagle AI. Don't download it. It's a platform where people can submit voter challenges, including to challenge the eligibility of large numbers of registered voters at once.
Despite its name, Eagle AI does not use AI. It compiles data from multiple publicly available sources, specifically the Secretary of State's offices and U.S. Postal Service change of address data to see if people moved. It allows Georgia residents to format data into a form so that they can present it to their county election officers to challenge voter eligibility of other random people. There's a similar app in Texas known as IV3, which is short for Independent Voter Validation and Verification.
So the apps, they are weaponizing big tech. This is their grassroots effort. Where's Jesus? That's going to be next. Now we talked about the local yokels who think they're heroes. Now we talked about AI and big tech awfulness. Where's the Christians? They must be next.
Yeah, you're right. They are next. This is a separate story. This is not in the Rolling Stone reporting, but it does reflect more of the point we made earlier, which is like, there's no Harris elected officials who are, or like people who are pulling for the Democrats to win the elections. But there, and there's no like, beyond just getting people out to vote and just
Click, click, submit your pull the lever. Doing democracy as intended. There is no effort to rig other parts of the system or game out other parts of the system. But I want to talk about a document that I found on the Heritage Foundation's website titled the 2024 Transition Integrity Project, Anticipating Election Disruptions to Ensure a Safe Transition of Presidential Power.
This is a 66-page document. Most of it's an appendix. It was published on July 11th, and it presents the results of a series of academic exercises that the Heritage Foundation ran during the spring of 2024, so a few months ago. They basically gamed out how they would communicate to the public around the election in case various things happened.
In other words, how would they lay the groundwork to execute their election denial campaign before, during, and after voting takes place if certain factors and situations were happening? And like they each play different roles. So the structure of the exercises was organized around three teams, a blue cell, which is
was the Biden administration and the campaign. And, you know, it represented like Democrats and Nancy Pelosi and all these people. Then there was a red cell, which was conservative aligned entities who were the Trump people. And then a white cell, which included the facilitators who were also businesses, social media platforms, people who were supposed to be neutral, foreign actors, the military, the lower courts, SCOTUS technically was on this, but like
You know, they can't put it on the red team. So they were all the people involved were each assigned roles for six turns, which represent periods between the party conventions and inauguration. So like six periods, like party conventions to Labor Day, whatever. And they would all act out how they would respond to certain scenarios. And they it was depends on who they were allowed to coordinate with. They were allowed to coordinate like within their team and whatever.
So they ran two big exercises where they played out certain scenarios.
In the first scenario, Biden was the nominee for this, by the way, because this was back in the spring. And in this scenario, the post-convention momentum, if he was going to have any, was reversed by a deteriorating situation on the southern border leading to an uptick in migration. Then a unit of Hamas-aligned terrorists gets in through the southern border and breaks into a well-known Jewish celebrity's home and holds her hostage. This is something they wrote down.
They played the game. They played this game, this out. Then they gamed out a widespread cell phone outage and internet outage in mid-October tied to Chinese and Russian cyber terrorism, as well as Iran testing a nuclear device as an October surprise. I explained all that. There's so much more detail than, than all of this. I'm not gonna explain the whole thing, but ultimately these were very salient pieces of it. They projected that these situations would earn the Republican nominee 311 electoral votes.
Then they did another exercise where China ramps up military threats against Taiwan after the DNC, which they project breaks out into open conflict and helps Joe Biden. In this exercise, Chinese illegal immigrants are caught at the border with plans to sabotage a Texas water treatment facility and election administrators across 17 states were unable to access their email accounts.
This scenario also envisions public violence, including people setting fire to Clarence Thomas' home, Trump being put under house arrest by Merrick Garland for insurrection and for mishandling classified documents, him holding online rallies, and then SCOTUS eventually overturning that and implementing him as the president. I, like, what? And then they present their findings. Okay. Okay.
All right, go ahead. So that happened naturally. Before I get into some of it, there was a lot. That was a lot of lie. I mean, I'm still stuck on who is the Jewish celebrity they would hold hostage and would it be Barbra Streisand because I'm so scared. I will have to go through the whole appendix. I didn't have time for this episode to go through all the little specifics. I'm telling you, I bet it was Barbra Streisand. But you'll probably have a – They hate her. You should go through it. Oh, we will. Oh, my God. This is a spooky, spooky episode. Okay, so there's a lot of findings. What did they find? There's several pages of findings. I told you how they gamed that. That was just like a war game basically. Yeah.
But so that's the exercise. Then they did their findings. Okay. The most important finding to me, though they didn't say this, is that they're doing this at all. I know. This is what you do against foreign adversaries, not fellow citizens expressing their constitutional right to vote alongside you, the conductors of this exercise.
The other piece is that they, there are a lot of pieces, but the ones that I think are most important are that they perceive the election as a month-long affair that can take several turns, that can change public opinion even as voting's happening, and that can change what the ultimate outcome is, regardless of the actual polling results. Maduro shit.
They would not be doing this if they actually thought that Trump could authentically win. They know that their policies are deeply unpopular. They are desperate. And desperate people do desperate, crazy things like create a war game that might seek to kidnap Barbra Streisand. That's crazy. You're weird. Maybe Barbra Streisand. I don't know. A Jewish celebrity.
This is on the Heritage Foundation's website, oversight.heritage.org slash tip underscore report underscore final dot PDF. That is the link. We'll put it in the show notes. The other piece, I mean, there's a lot of conclusions, a lot of which are obvious, but this one,
which underscores what we just talked about. They are working to establish state-level networks in advance to activate a coordinated effort when needed. They're actively trying to get volunteers and lawyers on their side, as are Democrats, but not to overturn the election, as well as secure financial resources for challenges. And they are preparing to mobilize for public demonstrations, as well as preparing for how to utilize media to influence public opinion. This is, I mean, they're always doing that, but
They're planning. This is on paper, on the internet. You can read it. I wonder when they gamed out how making this kind of stuff public would better benefit them than keeping it secret. It's like, you know how CVS locks up deodorant now and it's so annoying? And then they found that actually if they didn't do that, they would sell more than they ever were shoplifted.
This is like the same thing. They had to take a moment or do some polling at some point when they found out that exposing their plan would attract more people and it was worth it to like, you know, have podcast hosts like us expose them because they would somehow recruit more people to their side. There has to be a reason why they're out with this. And it's just so terrifying unless they just have the audacity.
I don't think they're as out with it as, I mean, Project 2025, they are, but that's also part of the ideology that they want to win a mandate on that. They also clearly believe that they are, I think, smarter. They're elitists. I think they don't get that we will read this. When you read this, it's couched in terms. Like, we want the election to be real. It doesn't.
presents itself as real to an ignorant observer. But when you question why they're doing this, why do you need to do this at all? That's the question. Why do you need to game out an election like it's a war game that you do with adversaries? It's scary, and I'm glad that we know about it, and we'll continue to cover it because it's obviously important. And it's just, this was a spooky-ass episode, Sammy. Spooky-ass episode. It really is. I do have...
An AmeriCant for us while we're in the depths of despair. So this week's AmeriCant is about the trans panic again. If you're like me, you've been glued to the Olympics this past week. And even if you're not watching the games, you likely heard about an Algerian boxer named Amani Khalif, who allegedly failed a gender identity test and who was found to have had XY chromosomes. And she competed against him. I didn't even know they did that.
No, they don't. So spoiler. She competed against an Italian female boxer who quit the bout after just 46 seconds and conservative liberal media and libs of TikTok and all the trolls erupted with these allegations that Khalif is a trans person or intersex or a straight up man who is being allowed to compete in the Olympics.
If you believed that, surprise, you've been hit by Russian disinformation made up to continue to divide the West via the trans panic phenomenon. And like I said, Libs of TikTok and Charlie Kirk and all those people make money off this kind of stuff. But it really seeks to continue to distract and divide the greater American population from ever enjoying a moment of peace or unity anymore.
Even when it's not our people being criticized, right? Because this has totally taken over the conversation of the Olympics right now. Not Simone Biles winning, not Katie Ledecky winning. We're talking about this boxer and the trans. I'm thinking about, I'm talking about Simone Biles. For real. Well, here's, here's the truth. Okay. Amani is not trans. She's not intersex and she never has been. She's never been tested for chromosomes and she's never been tested for testosterone levels ever. She's just a straight up woman.
She's a straight up woman. Cisgender woman. Yep. Imani was born female, has always competed as a female and has never been tested for any kind of gender out normality. In fact, her father refused to support her dream of being a boxer because he doesn't believe that the sport is for girls. So she dumpster dove and sold scrap metal to scrape together enough money to pay for lessons in boxing on her own. She quite literally fought her way into the Olympics.
She's a regular million dollar baby. Incredible. She's 25 years old, 5'10", and boxes in the light welterweight class. So it's not like she's some huge, huge beast of a person. She represented Algeria at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Nobody had any problem with her gender then. She went largely unknown.
Here's where it gets tricky. She won silver in the 2022 World Championships. She lost to an Irish boxer. But in 2023, the International Boxing Association, cheered by the Russian Umar Kremlev, disqualified her for, quote, medical reasons, which were then spun into rumors that she was on testosterone or had this XY chromosome thing. Allegations that have never been medically proven. Kremlev has ties to Vladimir Putin.
and has moved much of the International Boxing Association's operations from Switzerland to Russia. He has spent heavily on self-promotion and has opposed independent appointments of judges and referees within the IBA. The International Olympic Committee, who oversees the Olympics, does not trust the judgment of the IBA and has not so vaguely criticized the IBA and this Russian for their behavior, including chastising this guy for keeping power over the IBA without an election this season.
They are fraught with financial and ethical complaints at this organization. And the International Olympic Committee cleared Khalif to compete in Paris, confirming that she complied with all necessary eligibility and medical regulations for the event. And she holds a passport designating her as female. I don't know if you know much about Algeria. They are not a liberal country. They are a deeply conservative country.
There ain't no such thing as trans over there, okay? They would not be giving her a female passport. They are not a woke country, if you will. This is so twisted. It's basically just if you walk up to someone, you're like, you're a man.
You're a man. You're actually a man.
and a model. She's not like a person who boxes all the time. She's an amateur boxer. And it's not like Italy is known for having the best female boxing team. So the fact that she got knocked out so quickly was not actually that surprising to anybody who follows women's boxing. And because she got hit in the nose, she said that she had to stop for her life. Not because her life was in danger, but because babe's a model. Okay. And she was like, Ooh, not in the face, not in the
face. Not so fun fact, the Russian IBA guy who DQ'd Khalif also DQ'd the Taiwanese fighter Lin Yu-Ting, who is a featherweight fighter. She's a very, very small woman. And that woman from Taiwan learned to box to protect her mom from domestic abuse. It is more likely that the Taiwanese fighter got knocked out because she trains with legendary Ukrainian boxer, Valisy Lomachenko.
And because Taiwan is having problems with China, right? Exactly. And Russia. Now, Khalif was DQ'd after Algeria, a longtime ally of Russia, voted in favor of the UN's General Assembly resolution recognizing the aggression by the Russian Federation against Ukraine.
This is retaliation and politics. And what are they doing? They're using the trans panic to make it a whole fucking thing and ruin these people's lives who are innocent victims in this. Now, the IBA has been excluded from organizing Olympic boxing since the Tokyo Games in 2021 due to various governance and ethical issues. The IOC overseeing the Olympic boxing now qualifies their competitions directly because they couldn't trust the IBA.
Wow.
She's deeply sorry that Khalifa is being embarrassed and caused harm. She respects her as a fellow female fighter and simply lost the match to the better boxer period.
Wow. You know, what's interesting is that there was all this reporting before the Olympics that Russia was going to try to wage a hybrid war around the Olympics. So you have this, you have like this stupid cultural divide that is, has this shadowy socio geopolitical underbelly. The Olympics have always been political. Russia's not allowed to compete in the Olympics. That's why they want. Yeah. They want to wreck it.
That's why they want to do this. I mean, these sporting leagues, I mean, FIFA is very political. All of these things, these not these global sports leagues at its best, the Olympics is supposed to be a form of diplomacy and worldwide unity and celebrating the best of humanity. At its worst, foreign actors are taking advantage of it in order to settle geopolitical scores.
And so if you're a person who heard about this and you believed it or whatever, I don't even blame you for believing it because the propaganda was strong and it was out there. And there were even members of the gay and trans community who initially jumped to Khalif's defense saying that she was probably intersex, which is a reaction to our own trauma in this country about trying to justify things or saying she just has a naturally higher level of testosterone. And that reactionary content is not often truthful content. So yeah.
That's what's up with the Olympics. I'm headed out to the Olympics tomorrow. I'm super excited. So make sure you follow Under the Desk News for all of the truth and reporting about the Olympics. Maybe we can meet Khali for this other Taiwanese boxer who had been previously disqualified and talk to them directly and see what they're feeling about things. But I'll probably do it over here on American Fever Dream because the broader Internet is a very sick place.
twisted place and I need to stay safe, you know? Totally. Well, this has been fun. It has been fun. Until next time, I'm Vita Spear. I'm Sammy Sage. And this is American Fever Dream, where sometimes we scare you just a little. And next week, we're going to be at the DNC.
American Fever Dream is produced and edited by Samantha Gatzik. Social media by Candice Monega and Bridget Schwartz. Be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok at Betches News and follow me, Sammy Sage at Sammy and V at Under the Desk News. And of course, send us your emails to AmericanFeverDream at Betches.com.