Trump gets a Stormy ‘spanking’ — and how QAnon continues to warp minds in 2024
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Hello and welcome to American Friction, the new weekly US politics podcast out every Friday from the makers of Oh God What Now, The Bunker and Papercuts. I'm Jacob Jarvis. And I'm Chris Jones. Every week at the run up to November's US presidential election, we'll be unpacking

Hello.

So on this episode, we're going to have to talk about Stormy Daniels' recollection of allegedly sleeping with and spanking Donald Trump. We very much apologize in advance. There's also going to be talk of brain worms, which again, we're very, very sorry. We are. We are.

And earlier we also spoke with Mike Rothschild, author of Jewish Space Lasers and The Storm is Upon Us, about all things conspiracy theory and how these might impact the course of the election. Plus we'll round up the polls and pick out the other news stories shaping the race. It's 25 weeks until the US election. You're listening to American Friction.

First up, then, we've got to talk about Stormy Daniels' description of allegedly sleeping with Donald Trump, which he claims definitely didn't happen. No way. Never did it. Wouldn't dream of it. Him and Melania are rock solid. They just don't share a bed for practical reasons. You know, it's sweaty. He's a big guy. He needs a lot of space. Whatever. Don't read into it, everyone. So, Nikki, Stormy Daniels kind of took everyone by surprise, didn't she? And Trump really didn't take that well, either.

- At all. Almost got himself another 1,000 pound, $1,000 fine. - That's right. We're on USD over here. But yeah, so we knew that Stormy Daniels was going to testify at some point in this trial. We just didn't know when. And on Tuesday, prosecution arrives in court and they're like, "All right, we're calling Stormy." Trump was not happy about it. A couple of hours before the trial, he was kind of just like on his way to the courthouse.

He tweeted and then very quickly, oh, he didn't tweet. He truth socialed. Nice. And then quickly deleted a post very clearly referencing Stormy Daniels and the fact that she was going to testify, but he didn't outright name her.

unclear if the prosecution is going to submit that as another potential violation of the gag order as we discussed he's been warned that if he keeps violating the gag order he might go to jail so he probably got a note from his lawyers being like delete that right fucking now I love that he thinks he's been subtle at all he's like yeah I'm not going to name this person but woman I didn't sleep with got called up to testify today he's like no one's going to know who that is literally no one

Plausible deniability. But yeah, he's been pissed off. He got reprimanded by the judge this week for allegedly like muttering curses and like angrily whispering to his lawyers during her testimony. The judge was basically like, that's witness intimidation. It's not fucking allowed, especially in front of the jury. So, you know, the judge is very clearly not happy with Trump.

And part of it is that he does have a little bit of a martyr complex. Every time the judge rules against him or reprimands him, he tweets out, emails out his fans and says, please donate. I'm being persecuted. So we'll see how this develops. It's really interesting, isn't it, how this is playing out? Because in the 90s, Bill Clinton was constantly called out and criticized by the Republican Party for his sexual misconduct. So, I mean, Joff,

How is the hypocrisy really passing the GOP by in this case, do you think? Well, I think they're just in another world, aren't they? Every time you read any of this, they just seem to be. Trump has managed to make himself such a victim in so many ways that he is able to just say anything bad that happens to me.

I'm being bullied and I'm not like that. And he's framed Bill Clinton. We're going to speak more about conspiracy theories further down this. So I'm sure he can just be like, hey, I'm not such a bad guy. I'm the anti of all those sort of things. You know, with it though, Nicky, him kicking off and him moaning the way he does. And as Chris mentioned, that just been a complete hypocrite about all this and all of his support has been a complete hypocrite about this.

But for balance at all, did he have any sort of point in Stormy Daniels being a surprise? Or as you say, his legal team does not very good. If I was being paid enough to be Donald Trump's

legal representative in a trial about hush money paid to a specific woman, I would expect her to be able to turn up at any point. Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the expectation. Yeah, yeah. They've known for a really long time that Stormy Daniels was going to testify. Yeah. The prosecution, they've submitted their witness list. So have Trump's defense team. It's not like they announce a witness and it's like, oh, no, no, wait, pause. We need like three days to prepare for this. Yeah.

You have to come in knowing what you're getting into, being ready to interview and cross-examine whoever's on the stand. You know, Trump has never really sat in a criminal defense trial before, although he has done plenty of shady shit in his life. And I just, in my view, and I think in a lot of people's view...

He thinks he's above it all. He does not consider himself to be a defendant subject to normal procedures. And I think it's inconceivable in his brain that he would get the same treatment any other defendant in a courtroom does. What's the testimony been like then from Stormy Daniels? And let's start with...

the stuff first, the stuff that we've got to go through and again, apologies. But then also just generally, how is it stacking up in the trial and how is she making perhaps it more likely for Donald Trump to be convicted or not? So give me the lewd first and then give me the real serious grit that people definitely come to the podcast for. Extremely rude of you to make me talk about that man's sex life.

So a lot of this was

already pretty well known. Once the Stormy Daniels story went public and she was getting interviews on TV and like late night shows, she went into like pretty graphic detail about what sex with the former president was like. Because this all happened in like 2006, 2007. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone, or if you don't remember, God bless you, like you did so much better than me. But there was a really infamous moment where on a late night show, she was shown like a lineup of mushrooms. Yeah.

and told to pick which one most closely resembled the president's penis. Oh, what the hell? I mean, the late night shows have been crazy. I saw Greg Gutfeld talking about this and basically saying that Stormy Daniels' testimony perhaps isn't that good because Trump must be so good in bed that she can barely remember it. And I was just watching this, just been like,

man, you might like the guy, but shut up. This is so, so weird. Like, why is it getting so weird? And so the detail though, she's obviously been told to rein it in. How far did she go? And what was the line for the judge? So she was pretty descriptive about like what position they were in and like the...

I don't want to get into and do it specifically, but you know, there were positions mentioned and like, obviously like the spanking story has been around for a while. Don't, don't go over that. Don't gloss over that. We're hearing the, the spanking story, the spanking story. So,

He's been rude. And as far as I understand, basically, she goes, you're rude, man. And he goes, well, why don't you spank me with a magazine with his face on? Yeah. I believe it was with a cover of Forbes.

But that's when it had to end because he goes, he went under his breath. That's bullshit. And it stopped. But Chris, I know you, you're not too proud to talk about the sexual position here. The line was, I think it was missionary, wasn't it? Yes. Saying that it was missionary. The most vanilla of all the positions. I just like the judge just went, Hey, that sex sounds boring. I don't want to hear any more about it. Well,

Well, the judge had said going into the trial, you guys can talk about like the affair, but we don't need to get into the salacious details. And that was kind of ignored for a bit. The judge was very clearly frustrated. So pulling it back then, what did she say that has an impact on the trial and therefore has an impact on the election and the race? So I think we talked about this a bit last week about how in the witnesses before Daniels,

The prosecution was very much trying to build up this scaffolding around the case of what the crime surrounding the hush money payment was. Not necessarily that Stormy Daniels was paid off, but that the payment to Daniels was an unlawful campaign contribution and that Trump and his allies then disguised that unlawful campaign contribution as legal fees. And that is the falsification of business documents or what those charges are.

Daniels has a lot of credibility issues. You know, she's been talking about this publicly for years now. Trump's defense team has really been trying to paint her as like a money-grubbing porn star who was just trying to sell the story for money and to make a name for herself. I think what the prosecution is trying to do here is establish that an affair happened

And that regardless of what Daniels' story was or what her claims were, the claims were significant enough that the Trump campaign felt they needed to kill the story ahead of the 2016 election. And it's been discussed a bit how...

The defense is trying to paint Daniels as this implausible person who lacks credibility, who is unbelievable. If that's all true, why bother paying her off in the first place? And I think that's what's going to be key regarding her testimony is that this affair happened and that Daniels' efforts to shop the story out, to go public,

presented a threat to the or at least the Trump campaign felt that it presented a threat and decided that she needed to be shut down. She needed to be bought out and placed under an NDA so she couldn't discuss the story. Because in the context of all this, the Access Hollywood tape, the grab them by the pussy tape had just dropped.

There were rumors of an affair with Playboy model Karen McDougal. And as we've heard from other witnesses, the Trump campaign was already trying to silence people who had potentially damaging stories about Trump at the time. So what the prosecution is doing with Daniels is basically laying out that she had these claims.

And the Trump campaign was concerned enough about them to act. Chris, when it comes to then how people in the US are feeling about this, what's the polling kind of indicating about the sense around the trial and whether Trump will be convicted or not? Yeah, well, it's really interesting. I've taken a look at Ipsos for this polling and essentially Ipsos.

It reads how you would expect it to when you look at the parties. Republican voters tend to think that Trump is innocent, whereas the Democrats tend to think that he's guilty on everything. That includes all of the other cases in Georgia and Florida, for example. But even though they think he's innocent, they still think he will be guilty.

convicted. There's a little bit of that as a weird sort of middle ground. Yeah, there was a stat that I think around about 14% of people who are Republican voters who believe that he will be convicted would still vote for him in the next presidential election, which is

But I think what is more interesting, perhaps, in this polling from Ipsos is how independents think. And what the polling is showing here is that over 50% of independent voters think that Trump is independent.

guilty and will be convicted. And I think that is really what we should be watching rather than those people who have historically voted Republican or Democratic because they're in a way kind of stuck in how they vote. So it'll be interesting to see how this develops with independence as we go into more cases if we even get those cases. Well, with that polling, it reminds me of there was polling shortly after Trump said that he could go and shoot someone and people would still vote for him.

And he was right. Well, he was right, according to polling. I know, you know, you have to take some polling with a pinch of salt, but people did say, yeah, I'd still vote for him. So the notion this will change his supporters' minds is probably just unfortunately a bit of a pipe dream, isn't it? So also, Nikki, there's some more bad news for Trump. What's happening in Indiana and regarding Nikki Haley? So to my understanding, where I'm a little bit confused, it seems like Trump's just the Republican candidate now.

But people are still voting for Nikki Haley in certain places. Can you just clear it up for me a little bit? So Trump and Biden are both pretty much the de facto nominees for their party at this point. They are ostensibly running unopposed. Nikki Haley suspended her campaign months ago. But what happened in Indiana is Trump, he won. He won in a blowout. I think he got more than 70% of the vote. But...

About 20% of Republican primary voters in Indiana voted for Nikki Haley, even though she is no longer an active candidate. What we've seen from the primaries in which Haley was still officially running is that, as you were saying, Chris,

She's incredibly popular among independents. She is incredibly popular among people who are disillusioned with the Trump campaign, who no longer want anything to do with this man. She's really popular amongst college-educated voters, voters with a little bit higher degree of involvement with the news, who are a little bit more attuned to horse race politics.

But I think it really goes to show what we were discussing earlier, that this election is really going to be about who can get the independent vote, who can convince the most people who are kind of like, I don't really like any of these candidates. I don't really feel like voting to actually get up, leave their houses and go to the ballot box in November. With Nikki Haley, is it kind of that as well, people who maybe even do support Trump, do

seeing her do well, if they've got any doubts, maybe makes them think, because there's plenty of people who are going to vote for Trump because they just think, I just want a Republican in the White House. I don't care who they are as long as it's a Republican. But are there some of them who are maybe going to think, we should have gone with Nikki Haley and that's going to make them less certain and make them more likely to go when it comes to election day. I'm not going to vote. I don't care. We should have gone with Nikki Haley.

Trump, who knows, and people aren't going to because people want... It just adds to the confusion, doesn't it? Which confused voters are probably voters who are also less likely to vote, I suppose. Absolutely. And I think that for a lot of people, even amongst Republicans, Trump is still seen as a really extreme candidate. His policies are considered...

really outside of the norm of what a candidate typically runs on in an election year. You, in the primaries, you typically see a candidate lean really far into the issues that are sort of the heart and soul of their party, the really motivating issues for primary voters. And then once you get to the nomination, they'll kind of pull back.

They'll take a more moderate stance and they'll work to try and bring in those independent voters, those voters who maybe didn't vote for them in the primary. Trump isn't really doing that. He's running on a very hardline platform as the de facto candidate. I don't really think his platform is going to change much between now and November. And for a lot of Republicans, Nikki Haley was a very popular governor when she was governor of South Carolina. She was seen...

in the Trump administration as a potential successor to Trump. She was kind of seen as the future of the Republican Party at one point. That's kind of eroded because she has made a lot of really dumb political mistakes. But for a lot of people, she still sort of represents the intellectual, moderate, fiscally conservative traditional Republican Party that a lot of independent voters

who lean conservative kind of miss the party that they grew up with, the party before Trump. So I think you're completely correct that a lot of people are going to go into the election day and be like, fuck, why didn't we pick someone else? It really is a low bar to be considered an intellectual these days by the GOP, isn't it? Yes, very, very, very low.

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QAnon was a key driver behind the invasion of the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021. The theory, originating from 4chan, runs rampant through America's right wing. It suggests that an elite cabal of child molesters and sex traffickers is orchestrating against Donald Trump, and that he is the one person able to fight this satanic group. Yeah, they're satanic too.

Well, Mike Rothschild has written all about these sorts of conspiracy theories and is with us right now. Mike, thanks for joining us. Oh, thanks for having me back. It's a blast. Mike, can you talk to me about the state of QAnon a little bit? Just is it as big as it once was? Has it shrunk or is it that it's kind of spread out among the more mainstream right-wing world in America? So the thinking is less obvious, but wider spread. Yeah.

Sure. The state of QAnon right now is fairly confusing and complicated because the thing to remember about the QAnon that we all studied, that I wrote about, is that it pretty much ended with Joe Biden's inauguration because the entire theory revolved around President Trump enacting a purge of the deep state. And without being president anymore, you can't really do that. So that's why you had this

of conspiracy theories right after the inauguration that, oh, he's still secretly the president, he's going to come back, he's still, you know, he's still running things, he just has to make it look like he's not. A lot of, even a lot of cute people didn't buy into that because it was just sort of a bridge too far. But,

A bridge too far. There are things that they will go, no, no, no, no, I would never believe that. Please, what do you think I am, Gracie? But what you have now is a movement that doesn't really need the trappings of QAnon anymore. It doesn't need the secret codes. It doesn't need the hashtags and the riddles and the discussion prompts. It's very mainstream right now. So now what you have is a Republican Party and a conservative

conservative movement in the United States in general, that just believes as a matter of gospel truth that the election was stolen, that Joe Biden didn't win, that COVID-19 is a bioweapon, that the vaccine is worse than the actual disease, that culture war issues are turning all the men into women and all the women into men, and we have to fight on the battlefields of

girls' high school sports and gas stoves, and then Trump is going to come back into office and he's just going to have all his enemies killed. That's really where QAnon is anymore, and now it's just mainstream. It doesn't need to be QAnon anymore.

One of the things I've been really curious about is how the pandemic reshaped QAnon and sort of the affinity between the right and these writ large conspiracy theories, not only vaccines, but I feel like the pandemic in itself sort of was a pivotal moment in which the right as a whole opened its doors to these conspiracy theories. We obviously had like, you know, the 2020 election around that time. So I'm curious what you've observed in your research about how

the sort of lockdown era and all the hoopla around the vaccines reshape QAnon, reshape the conspiracy space and how that might affect us going into 2024. - Sure, the lockdown really reshaped everything. It really was a Petri dish for conspiracy theories. And you kind of understand why.

you have this world-changing event that happens kind of out of nowhere, very quickly. No one really understands what's happening. Our understanding of the mechanisms of the virus,

are changing constantly. You've got experts telling us one day you've got to wipe down your groceries. Then they say, well, no, you don't have to wipe down your groceries. First they're saying you don't need to wear masks. Then they're saying you do need to wear masks, but they can be cloth masks. Then they're saying, well, no, cloth masks won't do anything. So we are all groping for answers. No one knows what the hell is going on. And so we turn to the people who tell us that they have the answers. These are people who are conspiracy creators. These are the Alex Joneses of the world, the David Ikes of the world,

And with a lot of time on their hands and not a lot to do, having possibly lost their jobs, really not knowing what they're going to be doing with their lives over the next few months, people went online and they started going down rabbit holes.

And what you had were nominally progressive, kind of Bernie-supporting, wellness people who maybe didn't trust big pharma, the big agricultural industry, but weren't Trumpers. They weren't Q people. They're not anti-Semitic. They're looking for somebody to tell them what is going on. And the QAnon people and the far-right conspiracy theorists are telling them what's going on.

So they start to radicalize themselves by reading all this stuff, by watching stuff like Plandemic. And then suddenly it all clicks in that this is just some vast conspiracy. We are all pawns in this. We all have to band together. And then you have these people in these nominally progressive spaces suddenly becoming very, very right wing and discovering things like QAnon.

When it comes to that crossover, when it comes to the election, that shows that this conspiratorial thinking has sunk through both the left and the right. It's not just a right-wing thing. QAnon is something that we speak about as quite specific in a lot of ways. And I think of it as largely linked to the right wing.

But basically, and you might think I'm really oversimplifying things here, are all conspiracy theories kind of exactly the same? It's like the hero's journey, but for wingnuts. It's like it's all based around the same thinking, the same sort of stuff. And that's why they can all spread. And you mentioned how maybe some of these people aren't anti-Semites and they're not necessarily totally horrible people.

but they just overlap with them. And all of these things overlap. It's kind of like there's just one conspiracy theory and it gets split up. That is a very astute way of putting it. These conspiracy theories are essentially...

All the same. They have the same general storyline, they have the same villains, they have the same progression of terrible things that's going to happen. That's why anti-Semitic conspiracy theories are so adaptable. Ultimately, they're just the same thing over and over and over. They're polished up with new details, they're spread in new ways with new technology, but you're always kind of telling the same us versus them story. That's why these things are so durable. It's why they work over and over and over again because

It's always going to work because it's the same innate storytelling that has always driven human beings to want to understand things, want to look for their place in confusing events. And if they can't find it, they'll look for somebody who has made up a better version of it.

In my view, one of the most interesting example of this that's happening right now is with all the student protests that are happening in the vein of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, you now have right wingers accusing George Soros, a Jewish man, of funding these like student protests across the nation, which are being characterized, in my opinion, quite disingenuously as anti-Semitic.

But it goes to what you're saying about how you can just insert these players into the narrative over and over and over again. And it doesn't really matter what the material reality is so much as if people can like easily identify a person like George Soros as the villain.

Right. And as soon as these protests started, I thought, oh, they're going to pin this on Soros because they're not that creative. They've pinned everything on Soros. They've pinned Black Lives Matter, Antifa, NFL players kneeling, revolutions in Ukraine, what color Hillary Clinton wore to the DNC. All of this is tied back to Soros. So you're not, you know, to say that this is going to get tied back to Soros, it's like, well, the sun came up. Of

Of course it's going to get tied to Soros. The connections are so paper thin that they may as well not exist. But it doesn't matter. The reality is absolutely meaningless, which is what makes these things so difficult to push back against because what you're pushing back against is basically made out of sand and it's going to crumble the moment you touch it. Just staying with Soros, why?

How much do these conspiracy theories hold weight and how much do they cut through? I just spoke to a professor at Berkeley University who was talking about dominance politics and basically saying that the right use language that's entertaining and really interesting to read or to listen to, but none of it's true, but it resonates with how people feel at the time. So do these Soros conspiracy theories really cut through? Yeah.

Oh, they do. They absolutely cut through. They find audiences with people who, again, are struggling to understand what is happening with these protests. And of course, the entire Israel-Palestine issue is enormously complicated. There's centuries of history there. But people don't want to understand that. They don't have time. They just don't get it, and they don't want to get it. They're looking for a very simple explanation for what's going on. And

Soros is doing it is a very simple explanation, especially when, as you were saying, it's delivered by people who do it in a way that is kind of entertaining and compelling. It's really the reason why somebody like Alex Jones has been so successful. He's really entertaining. He's really compelling and charismatic.

He is not a dry resuscitation of facts backed up by academic citations. He's a guy screaming about how the frogs are turning gay and we're all gonna be dead in five years. There's something about that kind of presentation of somebody like a Steven Crowder, of these far-right podcasters and influencers that's just really interesting and draws your attention in a way that a history book is never going to. The fact that the history book is correct and

Alex Jones is not, doesn't matter because you're not thinking about it that way. You're just thinking about what is the loudest story that dovetails with the things that I already believe.

Do we sometimes have people like Alex Jones almost patronize them in how we intend to cut them off? I mean, obviously you should patronize Alex Jones because he talks complete shit, but he's barred from Fox News, say, so he can't get to a wider audience. But then he did speak to Tucker and that's all limited. But it actually does spread a lot because...

A load of low-level influencers from Alex Jones down can have the cumulative effect that a Fox News can have in terms of the media space. Do you think they're having more of an outweighed shift on people's political thinking and how the race will go in 2024 than we maybe give them credit for? I don't mean credit in a positive way, but you know what I mean.

Right. I think this landscape is really changing. And some of the things that have been coming out in the last few months have shown that a lot of the conservative news outlets that drove the stories of 2016 have been losing viewerships. I think a lot of that is because things like Facebook have changed their algorithms. I think some of these places have gone under or are going bankrupt. But I think just in general, the way people are getting...

conspiracy theories is really changing. And a lot of these people are adapting to new technology. You know, when TikTok really took off, the first thing I thought was, oh, this is going to be a monster for disinformation and conspiracy theories, because it's all going to show up there immediately. No one's going to know how to deal with it. And everybody's instinct is going to be, oh, just ignore it. Just, you know, forget about it. Don't give it attention. I think the

the biggest thing that we can understand, you know, with changing technology and changing platforms is ignoring these things does not make them go away. The idea of don't feed the trolls, don't give it oxygen is hopelessly outdated because what happens is these things can

continue to spread, they continue to gain new followers. And if we've all been ignoring it, it just happens with no one paying attention. And then it explodes into the mainstream and we all go, oh, what's that? We never saw that coming. That's exactly what happened with QAnon. It was a year of, ah, nobody wants to hear about that. That's crazy. Those people are nuts. They need help, not attention.

which is true, but it's not helpful. And then suddenly in August of 2018, the Q people are swamping a Trump rally and everyone's going, what's Q? What are all these people doing? I'm going, yeah, they're doing the thing I've been telling you about for the last 10 months and you didn't want to listen. I'm curious if you think that the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, when outlets like Fox News got a lot of backlash from

to sort of just the boilerplate acknowledgement that Biden had won the election. I feel like in that moment, there was a ton of backlash from viewers who truly believed Trump had won the election. And, you know, there were these sort of calls to boycott Fox News, I think OAN and Newsmax at the time, who were on the up and up.

got a ton more viewership just because of like the sheer anger that a mainstream outlet like Fox News hadn't gone along with these conspiracies. Do you think that that's also sort of affected where people are getting their information and created this system where even amongst themselves, these conspiracy theories are

are fighting for purchase within the media. Yeah, it's a huge part of it. And I think what the backlash is, particularly to Fox News on election night, came from not people who believed that Trump had won, but people who believed that Trump couldn't lose, that there was literally no way he could lose.

because of all the things that we've been talking about for years, Biden was a decrepit husk. He barely ran a campaign. You know, his rallies got 10 people. You know, Trump had all the yard signs. Trump had all the big rallies. There's no way he can lose. That was a big part of QAnon. It was that Biden cannot win. And if Biden wins, it's because he cheated. And so then Biden won. And so therefore, people have been conditioned by conspiracy theories like QAnon, by Trump himself saying, if I lose, there was fraud. Well, he lost, so there was fraud.

So you have an event that happens that is absolutely outside of the reality that these people have created for themselves. Their reality says Trump won. It doesn't matter what actually happened. What they're going with is what Trump has told them, which is that he will win and if he loses, it's fraud. So it's fraud.

So nothing that Fox News could say after calling Arizona for Biden, because their hard news section lives in the real world, these people suddenly are confronted with somebody telling them something that they know is not true. So they go to somebody who tells them something they know is true, which is Newsmax, which is Gateway Pundit, which is Steve Bannon, all of them saying, yep, Trump won. Of course he did. What do you think, Trump was going to lose?

So that's where that comes from. It is the creation of your own personal reality, and nothing gets through the shields that you put up around that reality. Is a wider problem then that it doesn't really matter if you listen to or believe in any particular conspiracy theory, the specifics. You don't need to be a deep dive, true believer of QAnon, but to have had your brain kind of poisoned to think like a conspiracy theorist.

Are there more people out there in the US who think like conspiracy theorists, but they're not conspiracy theorists, if you understand what I'm saying? So when it comes to voting, yeah, they're probably not actually, they're not saying where we go on, we go all, and they're not all in on that. But their brains have been addled to think the way that conspiracy theorists do. And that will make them vote and behave in distinctly strange ways. For example, voting for RFK Jr., which I don't understand.

Yes, their brains have been rewired with an inherent distrust.

there is a deep, deep element in things like QAnon of everybody is lying to me. The media is lying to me, the experts are lying to me, the politicians are lying to me, the banks are lying to me. And of course a lot of these people are lying to them, which makes it extremely difficult to talk to these people about the news that they are consuming and the worldview that they've created, because then they say, oh, you believe all the politicians, you believe all the banks, you believe all the doctors? And you say, well, no.

And then they go, well, if you don't believe some, why don't you believe all of them? So it becomes a very circular kind of reasoning where you don't trust anybody except the people telling you things that you already believe to be true. So that's why you get this groundswell of support

you know, among certain people for somebody like RFK Jr. Because he's telling things about the vaccine being a death shot, about, you know, the COVID being a bioweapon. All of these are things these people already think. So the fact that, you know, RFK Jr. is nominally a Democrat, it doesn't really matter to them. The fact that his economic policies are sort of all over the place and

you know, he can't really articulate them, that doesn't matter. These people are so focused in particularly on the vaccine that they're just gonna go with the guy who just tells them things that dovetail with where they believe. And I've been saying for quite a while that I really think that the more Kennedy sees success, it's actually gonna hurt Trump more. I think once Democrats find out that this is not their father's Kennedy,

this is not a carbon copy of JFK, this is a lunatic, they're not gonna want anything to do with him. But you have a lot of Republicans who are mostly lockstep with Trump except on the vaccine issue because Trump has advocated for the vaccine. Operation Warp Speed was one of the only things he did right in his presidency. And so Trump has to go out there and defend the vaccine. These people think the vaccine is a tool of genocide.

Well, RFK Jr. is telling them that. So they may like Trump, but they care more about the vaccine than anything else. So they become single issue voters on an issue that is so infected with disinformation that it completely upends them.

So, Mike, what's new? What's going to impact this election that's coming up the most, do you think? What is really cutting through at the moment? Well, right now, obviously, Gaza is hugely cutting through. It's cutting through with a certain type of person who is online a lot.

And I don't know how much it's reaching people who are not online a lot. And I still think that there are, most Americans are just not really plugged into the election yet. They're just not thinking about it yet. They're six months away.

I think a lot of these people are gonna go, "Really, this again? "Biden and Trump again?" And who knows what those people are gonna do. I think right now, the thing that's really cutting through beyond Gaza, certainly the vaccine, certainly inflation still,

But what's really happening is because you still have a lot of people who have not gotten dialed into the election yet, we sort of don't know what's gonna hit them. And of course, a lot of what hit those people happened in the last few weeks of the campaign. Certainly when you look at 2016, you had the Access Hollywood tape, you had the reopening of the Comey investigation. That all happened in the last couple weeks. So, you know, there are going to be a million different curveballs that come at people

once people are really dialed in. And I don't think that's going to happen until probably August or September. So I think I will probably have a different answer in a few months once more people are really paying attention and really coming to grips with the fact that we're doing Biden versus Trump too and that Trump...

Trump is still running and that he has not taken his campaign and his golf clubs and gone off to have parties at Mar-a-Lago. He still thinks he's going to be president again, still might be president again. I think there's a lot of people who are going to look at another term of Trump and go, uh-uh, no, no, I don't want to do this again. And we just haven't heard from those people yet. So basically, watch this space lasers. Yeah.

Nice, Chris. Thanks, mate.

Now, we're going to have a look at some of the other stories that you might not have noticed this week. First up, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Telling Emily Maitlis to Fuck Off fame for anyone who needs a reference in the UK to ground who she is. So she has tried once again to get a speaker booted, but she's failed this time. Nikki, what happened? Why did it fail? And what does this mean for the GOP? And also, is there a reason for this?

Is Marjorie Taylor Greene going to be in a load of trouble now? Because it feels to me if you keep trying to get rid of senior people in senior leadership positions, eventually they're going to turn back on you. Oh, yeah. I mean, she failed spectacularly. I really thought it was always mainly a point for attention, but.

But the fact that she forced a vote on the motion to vacate against House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republicans immediately tossed it out. It was not even really debated properly.

I think for a lot of Republicans, Marjorie Taylor Greene was dragging up the memory of a really humiliating situation that unfolded when they booted Kevin McCartney. It was disastrous. It was embarrassing for the party. It was just a debacle that no one wants to see repeated this close to an election. And the reality is that in terms of policy...

Marjorie Taylor Greene is not an incredibly strong candidate. She gets her clicks, her views, her attention, her national sort of profile by orchestrating these stunts. And I think you're completely correct that at a certain point,

the party's going to try and rein her in. Has this weirdly been turned into a, in the wider context of the elections and the state of how people feel about the GOP, have they actually managed to turn this into a good thing for them? Because as you say, they've clearly at least gone, we're not as stupid as we were a few months ago, and we're not going to do that. Have they almost, has Marjorie Taylor Greene kind of given them an opportunity, a perfect opportunity to say, let's get rid of her because...

Because she just, we need to sideline her. And two, to say, see, look, we know we fucked up last time and we're not doing it again. Weirdly, have they turned it into a positive? No, I don't think so. I honestly don't think. No, well, it's not even that like, because frankly, I think the idea that they have like learned from the mistakes or really like completely sidelined Marjorie Taylor Greene is giving them way too much credit. I think it was really obvious that doing this in an election year was a bad idea. And frankly, I,

With the way a lot of these people operate, like the congressmen that are violently online, constantly harping on their base, I don't think there's going to be that much less in the way of attacks against Johnson, in the way of criticism of House leadership. But...

I wouldn't give them too much credit in the way of a sea change in how Republicans are gonna move going forward because they're still pulling ridiculous stunts like some Republican congressman submitted an amendment saying that any student protesters arrested in the United States have to go to Gaza for six months. It's not gonna pass.

And it's a stupid stunt, but they're going to keep doing shit like that. Yeah. Note to self, don't ever try and be nice about the GOP or kind to them because you'll just look really stupid. So, Chris, I'm providing the balance today. I'm doing it. You did a great job. I know. Really great job. I've got to try as well as I can. So, Chris, there are a couple of other politicians in the US in hot water legally, but some of these are Democrats. So talk me through...

It's Bob Menendez, isn't it? And Henry Quaylar. That's right. Yeah, Henry Quaylar is the representative of Texas's 28th district. And he's the most recent to land in hot water, as it were. He's been accused of taking bribes of around $600,000 from an Azerbaijani government-owned oil company. But not just him. His wife Imelda's been at it, apparently. Imelda. Imelda.

Allegedly as well. So there's a bit of trouble there. Donald Trump's actually come out and said, what did he say? He said he's a respected Democrat. So that's really interesting that Donald Trump is almost kind of protecting Quayle here. But then the second one, as you rightly mentioned, is Bob Menendez. He's a New Jersey senator who,

And he's also been indicted over charges of bribery. However, he has been accepting, apparently, allegedly, it's very important to say that, accepting envelopes of cash and full-on gold bars.

from the Egyptian government. Again, allegedly. But guess who else is involved? That's right, his wife. His wife this time, political say, could be actually the kind of culprit here that has tricked him. That's the line they're kind of going with. And it could create a little bit of drama. But you probably sat there wondering, how does this affect...

the election. I'm just wondering why do they have to be so comically cartoon style bad? Like, I'm going to take gold, allegedly. I'm going to take gold bars. Like, gold bars. There's pictures of them as well. They're massive gold bars. But this does impact the election because we're dealing with such fine margins at the moment. For example, you look at the lower house. The margin there is 217 to 213. So if these guys are convicted, they are not

not going to run. I think actually Menendez said that he would run as an independent.

which he would probably take some voters away with him to independent. Some would stay with Democratic, but then a lot of those potentially might sway towards the Republican Party as well. So there's both the House and the Senate could be impacted by these two potential convictions. So we'll just have to really wait and see what happens with them. Well, I will point out, if people recall, there is another...

well, was another member of Congress under criminal indictment, serial liar George Santos, who was indicted for misuse of campaign funds, misleading constituents. They added more charges of credit card fraud a couple months ago. But Santos was actually expelled from the House because of this criminal indictment.

And it was a huge deal. And no sitting congressman had been expelled in years when it happened. So now Republicans are also weighing whether they will make a similar move against Quaylar to expel him from the House. And it also gives Republican a chance to be like, oh, see, Democrats love to harp on like Trump and his crimes. But look, they have criminals in their own party. Yeah. So I do anticipate this becoming a bit of a bigger issue in terms of like a tit for tat between Republicans and Democrats.

The real big news there, though, is that George Santos is going on cameo with his drag persona. So anyone, it's a long while to my birthday, but if you want to try and get something in for me, that would totally be up there. ♪

So Hunter Biden seems to be always in the spotlight somehow. He's a key character that's been pulled into legal questions. Nikki, I wonder, could you describe to us kind of what's been going on with him and Fox News? Because this has been an argument that's been going on for a long time. And especially in the UK, we hear about Hunter Biden all the time, but I don't think it necessarily translates very easily what is actually happening.

Yeah, so Hunter Biden is suing Fox News. Basically, he's accusing them of unlawfully distributing hacked materials. If people recall, there was the whole, like, Hunter Biden laptop debacle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hunter Biden alleges that those materials were hacked. And over the course of several years, Fox News has invested a lot of time and energy in boosting...

sort of really salacious stories about Hunter Biden's past drug use, his sexual exploits. I mean, like one of the really funny instances I remember from when I was covering Fox News a lot was a breaking news alert Fox News put out about some photographs from Hunter Biden's laptop. They didn't actually show them, but they described them in which a woman was eating M&Ms off of Hunter Biden's penis. Oh my God. Yeah.

Look, I'm sorry. This episode is really sex heavy. And we're back here again. Yes. What color M&M's? I don't know. Oh, no. Oh, dear. I think I'm looking for that. That's rude. But

But basically, that's kind of what Hunter Biden is suing them for, for distributing hacked material of a sensitive nature. And they are basically alleging that Fox News is defaming Hunter Biden, painting him in a false light. And I think the quote they used was the unlicensed commercial exploitation of his image, name and likeness, as well as the unlawful publication of hacked images.

My concern here would be that this has kind of died down a little bit. It felt to me like everyone kind of went Hunter Biden, right wing talking point. The president can have a son who maybe has not always stayed on the straight and narrow in life and that he shouldn't be totally judged by that.

It's suing people, dragging it all up. It's dredging it back up. There's that concern of the sort of Streisand effect. And it kind of buys into what we spoke with Mike about, where he was like, you have to counter this misinformation. But when you do, you feed it and you give it more attention. And I kind of worry that Hunter Biden doing this

The more negative side and the net negative, if you're looking in a kind of utilitarian way at the whole thing, is that this will just work badly for Joe Biden because it will just throw everyone going, hey, Hunter Biden's still around. And remember, remember the dodgy stuff? Well, Hunter Biden has actually addressed this like pretty specifically. A couple of months ago, he did an interview with the musician Moby.

who I'm sure some of, yeah, no, they actually were in rehab together. And so they're really close friends. They talked, it was an interview that talks a lot about like his journey into sobriety and what the process of recovery from addiction was like. But in that interview, Hunter Biden talked about the fact that for years, he remained quiet, out of the spotlight, just like minded his own business,

while Republicans were pushing not only all these claims about his addiction, his relationship with women, but also these conspiracies about corruption involving him and his father. And that years of sort of trying to stay out of the spotlight, not really publicly commenting on it, did absolutely nothing to stop the attacks. The Ukraine scandal has obviously been something that's been in the news for years.

years at this point, I think like five or six years at this point. And now it's culminated in a full-blown impeachment attempt by Republicans against President Joe Biden. So I think what Hunter Biden is doing at this point, and he's just saying, I'm not

going to let these people keep getting away with like lying and misrepresenting and misusing my image and my name when I have a legal avenue to combat it. And I think we've seen already instances of places like Fox News getting hit with massive lawsuits for lying about shit. There was the Dominion lawsuit about like all their claims about election fraud. So I think it's

Not necessarily that it'll dredge things up again, because those things are still out there. They're still pretty constantly in the news. Hunter Biden is still a regular talking point for Republicans. It's that now he's fighting back. We'll see how it goes. It like fully depends on what sort of evidence he can produce. But he's trying. One last thing. Uh-huh. Jove. Talk to me about brainworms.

Brain worms. This story, Nicky, is like, it's making me, you can't see me. Well, you can kind of see me. I'm just rubbing my neck thinking brain worms. RFK Jr. is a person I find entirely fascinating. And I don't mean that as a compliment. He's just a very intriguing person from his family background. He's weird, funny.

whole huge spectrum of political views. But now he has said...

that he actually had worms eat his brain. I think he had one worm. So just one worm. Sorry, I don't want to defame the guy. Just one worm. Thanks, please. Thank you, Nikki. You've pulled me up there. RFK Jr. Jr. So what's going on with him? I just find it... Why does anyone, other than the conspiracy side of things, is that just it? Is that his whole shtick? Or is there genuinely that much emotional attachment to someone because of the name Kennedy?

Just, yeah, just discuss. And also, I know you did a bit of deep dive...

reporting on brain worms. So I've kind of grossed you out with Trump sex. You can gross me out back on brain worms as well. Oh, I would love to. It would be my honor. First, I'll talk about Kennedy a bit. I think a huge part of it is his last name, is his family background. But in fact, a lot of his family has come out and said, like, we do not endorse this. We do not support this. These are not the policies and the attitude and the worldviews that, you know, John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy support.

would have taken. I think part of it is the name. Part of it is, as we were discussing with Mike earlier,

Kennedy represents one of those figures who has been so public in his conspiracies and so prominent for such a long time that he's a really easy name for these people who are looking for an explanation as to what's going on in the world around them, why things are confusing, to attach their beliefs and ideology to. And as we talked about, one of the reasons he is becoming so prominent in this campaign and is really threatening to be a spoiler candidate is because

So much of the conspiracy theories he's been peddling appeal to like sort of

but also conservative-leaning independents who kind of became embroiled in the vaccine stuff during the pandemic, who aren't necessarily super enthused about the Republican Party, but still kind of ideologically align a little bit with this conspiratorial thinking. So I think the reality is that he's just riding a wave of support. I don't think he will effectively win the presidency, but he could definitely screw up

the campaign for Trump or Biden. And I think that's why both campaigns are really treating him as a threat right now on the topic of brain worms, brain worm. So I was also horrified and disgusted at the notion. Basically what happened was that the New York Times published a piece about a 2012 deposition Kennedy gave to

At the time, he was trying to divorce one of his wives. I think it was his second wife. But he was basically trying to get out of paying her a ton of alimony. So in this deposition, he says that he has had all these health issues and that that's impaired his future earnings potential. And one of the things he mentioned was that at one point,

He was having cognitive issues and he was trying to figure out the cause. So he went and got a brain scan and they identified like a little, a little dot on his brain. And at first they thought it was a tumor. And then he went to a bunch of doctors and one doctor was like, actually, it might've been a worm that ate a hole in your brain and then just like died there.

That sounds terrifying. So what I did was call a neurologist who specializes in parasitic infections of the brain. You all will be pleased to know that one brain worms are pretty rare in the developed world. And also they do not actually eat your brain. No.

Those are like the two big takeaways I'm giving people. RFK also said, bring on the worms. I could do five. He said he could do five. Well, he could. Like he theoretically could. That's the other thing they told me is that like...

So it turns out that the brain worm probably wasn't the most likely cause of his cognitive problems. It was that he was diagnosed with mercury poisoning around the same time. The effects of a brain worm depend really heavily on where in the brain it is. They say that like the most common issue is that if it's like on the surface of the brain, it'll form a little cyst and that can cause seizures. But...

In terms of cognitive problems, it really depends on where the worm lands in the brain. Wish I had brain worms. Do you want to know why? Why? So I don't have to imagine Trump having sex ever again. That's right. Just like wipe your memory. Sending the brain worm to the Trump sex folder of my memory.

Finally, let's take a look at the numbers around the US election. We're going to be looking at the polls every week, just working out the temperature of everything. So, Chris, what are the top line poll figures showing us? Yeah, well, I've decided to look kind of by swing states for this because nationally it's neck and neck at the moment and we can't really take too much from them. So there's six swing states, eight.

for example arizona has trump ahead 42 to 40 percent georgia has trump ahead 45.1 to 39.6 michigan has trump ahead by one percent as well uh nevada has trump ahead pennsylvania has trump ahead wisconsin has trump ahead as well although there is one poll in wisconsin that does have biden ahead but it's very murky reading just from from that 538 polling there it felt like a

big old outlier, didn't it? But you know, hey, so who knows what the people in Wisconsin are thinking. Nikki, is there anything that stood out to you in the polling world over the last week since we last spoke? And what's your kind of overall feeling about it all other than it's a little bit stagnant? It's a little bit stagnant. To be frank, I have not been keeping up too much with polls on a day-to-day basis. I kind of like to look at trends over a period of time, which is why I'm glad we're doing this.

because we'll be able to kind of see any major changes over time. But one really interesting poll I actually saw this morning was Biden basically announced that his administration will not be supplying more weaponry to Gaza if they invade Rafa. And I believe it was the Pew Research Center released a poll today showing that among Democrats, a large majority of Democrats polled by the Pew Research Center do not have confidence in Netanyahu's government.

So it was just an interesting tidbit because I think that kind of research speaks to the calculus that the Biden administration is now making about taking a bit of a harder line against Israel regarding the ongoing offensive in Gaza. So that was like an interesting tidbit I saw. Yeah. One that also stood out to me actually also from Pew Research was they did a really interesting poll where they looked across 24 different countries and

And they asked respondents if they felt very close to other people in their country and in their community. And it was quite a sad one for America was that America ranked...

At the bottom, basically, the majority of US adults hold the view that they feel close to other people in their country. Still 66% of people say that, but that was lower than 23 other countries. So it's quite interesting that we talk about a nation that is divided politically, but there may also be an underlying feeling that just communities aren't what they used to be and people just generally in their day to day don't feel close to people anymore.

in a way that might actually lead to some more political cohesion as well. So, yeah. Well, that brings us to the end of American Friction, doesn't it, Chris? It very much does indeed. And thank God, because I don't want to talk about brain worms anymore. No, no. I'm going to text you more facts about brain worms. Nikki, thanks so much for joining us. Anytime. Always my pleasure. And Jov, thank you too. You're very, very welcome. And Chris...

I think you could live with like 50 brain worms, man. Yeah, you're built different. So thank you very much to you, my beloved non-wormy but could fight wormy friend. That's right. I am a big, strong boy. And listeners, thank you too. We are going to be out every Friday early afternoon if you're in the UK and in the morning if you're stateside. You've been listening to American Friction. We'll see you next week.

American Friction was written and presented by Chris Jones, Jacob Jarvis and Nicky McCann-Ramirez. Audio production was by me, Simon Williams. The group editor was Andrew Harrison and the executive producer was Martin Boitosch. Artwork was by James Parrott and music was by Orange Factory Music. American Friction is a Podmasters production.

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