The Darrell McClain show
The Complex Web of U.S. Foreign Aid, Free Speech Wars, and Trump's Legal Maze – Unraveling Today's Political Conundrums
When the U.S. funds military actions abroad, should we ignore the resulting humanitarian crises? This episode of the Darrell Mcclain Show takes a hard look at the dichotomy of American politics concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict, especially in light of the recent Israeli ground invasion of Rafah. I peel back the layers of U.S. political rhetoric that often contradicts actions, examining the flow of military aid and its implications. Moreover, the episode celebrates the spirit of student activism, comparing today's university protests to historical movements, and applauding the restraint shown by certain institutions in handling these demonstrations.
The battlefield of digital discourse is no less contentious than physical conflict zones. I dissect the First Amendment battles waged by TikTok, a platform challenging recent legislation amid accusations of foreign influence. Navigating the complexities of modern free speech, Section 230, and the nuances of online expression, this episode scrutinizes the fine line between genuine discourse and propaganda. It's a deep dive into the media narratives that shape public perception of the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, urging listeners to critically assess the concept of allyship and the true cost of American foreign aid.
And on the home front, the legal tangles of former President Trump can't be overlooked. With the precision of a seasoned legal analyst, I unpack the ethical obligations of prosecutors in high-profile trials, questioning credibility and personal biases. From the handling of classified documents under CIPA procedures to the spectacle of courtroom drama, the episode provides a candid examination of Trump's navigation through legal challenges. Join me for an episode that promises not just to inform but to provoke thought and inspire action on some of today's most pressing issues.
A podcast about talking, etymology, frustrating topics, current events, and more.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
When the U.S. funds military actions abroad, should we ignore the resulting humanitarian crises? This episode of the Darrell Mcclain Show takes a hard look at the dichotomy of American politics concerning the Israel-Palestine conflict, especially in light of the recent Israeli ground invasion of Rafah. I peel back the layers of U.S. political rhetoric that often contradicts actions, examining the flow of military aid and its implications. Moreover, the episode celebrates the spirit of student activism, comparing today's university protests to historical movements, and applauding the restraint shown by certain institutions in handling these demonstrations.
The battlefield of digital discourse is no less contentious than physical conflict zones. I dissect the First Amendment battles waged by TikTok, a platform challenging recent legislation amid accusations of foreign influence. Navigating the complexities of modern free speech, Section 230, and the nuances of online expression, this episode scrutinizes the fine line between genuine discourse and propaganda. It's a deep dive into the media narratives that shape public perception of the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, urging listeners to critically assess the concept of allyship and the true cost of American foreign aid.
And on the home front, the legal tangles of former President Trump can't be overlooked. With the precision of a seasoned legal analyst, I unpack the ethical obligations of prosecutors in high-profile trials, questioning credibility and personal biases. From the handling of classified documents under CIPA procedures to the spectacle of courtroom drama, the episode provides a candid examination of Trump's navigation through legal challenges. Join me for an episode that promises not just to inform but to provoke thought and inspire action on some of today's most pressing issues.
A podcast about talking, etymology, frustrating topics, current events, and more.
Listen on: Apple Podcasts Spotify
Welcome to the Jerome McLean Show. I'm your host, jerome McLean. Today is 5-9 of 2024. You're listening to episode 405 and let's get into our show. So, before I get into some very important US domestic news, I want to get into something that I thought was very good, that was done, which is very rare on cable news. I'll just put it at that. And this is in the context of Israel and and Palestine and the college student protests that we talked about on the touched on in the last episode. Now I just want to make a bit of a statement before I get into that, which is this Israel has gone into Rafah, which we'll discuss on a whole other episode I'm going to do about this and if this is good, et cetera, but I'll just say this While we were debating whether I'll just say it this way, while we were demonizing ferociously 19-year-old college kids as flaming anti-Semites, israel has now started to ravage the last remaining part of the Gaza Strip, where it had previously told all those people to flee.
Speaker 1:All those people to flee. Now, it's no coincidence that immediately after our government sent the Israel regime over 14 billion with absolutely no conditions on upholding human rights, netanyahu began a ground invasion of Rafah to continue the genocide of the Palestinian people with ammunition and bombs paid for by our tax dollars. 600,000 children are trapped in Rafah, living in makeshift tents, without food, clean water, sanitation, medicine or any other form of shelter. Israeli forces have already killed over 35,000 Palestinians, and families displaced in Rafah will now face even more unimaginable human suffering in Rafah will now face even more unimaginable human suffering. Many people in the US Senate etc. Are going to express horror and concerns at the crimes against humanity that are about to unfold, even though they all voted to send Netanyahu billions of dollars in weapons. Do not be misled. They gave their consistent and consent for these actions and atrocities and our country is actively participating in this slow genocide.
Speaker 1:For months, netanyahu made his intent to invade Rafah clear, yet the majority of people in the Democratic Party and the Republican Party and President Biden sent more weapons to enable the massacre. There is nowhere safe in Gaza. Nearly 80% of the civilian infrastructure has been destroyed. There is no feasible evacuation plan and the Israeli government is only trying to provide a false pretense of safety to try to maintain legal cover at the International Court of Justice cover at the International Court of Justice.
Speaker 1:Netanyahu knows that he will only stay in power as long as the fighting continues. It is now more apparent than ever that we must end the US military funding of the Israeli regime and demand that President Biden facilitate an immediate and demand that President Biden facilitate an immediate, permanent ceasefire that includes a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and the release of all hostages and the arbitrarily detained Palestinians. I also urge the ICC to swiftly issueue arrest warrants for every official that held these views and forced this on the people, so that they can be held accountable, as this is obviously warranted by all those well-documented violations of the Genocide Convention under international law. So that's the statement that I'm going to say on this, and I'm going to go to something, like I said before, that was surprisingly well done.
Speaker 4:Like I said before, that was surprisingly well done. This is going to be from Chris Hayes, just about some of the perspective when it came to some of those college protests that we saw. Spring of 1969, a group of students at Morehouse College historically backed college in Atlanta were frustrated by what they said was the school's slow progress on civil rights and they protested They'd been rebuffed. So they locked the college trustees in their office for two days and essentially held them hostage. Now one of the trustees was Martin Luther King Sr, father of the recently slain civil rights leader. He began having chest pains and one of the students later said we let him out of there so he wouldn't be accused of murder. That student and his classmates eventually gave up under a prominence of amnesty from the college. The college reneged and he was expelled. It would be years before he was rehabilitated, decades before he became known the world over as actor Samuel L Jackson.
Speaker 4:Now I tell this story for two reasons. One to remind us that college activism has long been a part of college education. By the way, that's a wild story. I did not know those specifics. I knew Samuel L Jackson was involved in a protest. I did not know it was that that's wild bro.
Speaker 4:Florida, so many others where cops or, in some cases, mobs, took down pro-Palestinian student encampments and protests, as well as professors and journalists and just random bystanders. The cumulative effect of all this coverage, along with some unverified assertions from police and politicians, has been to drive home the idea that student protests are basically a terrorist-level threat, that they have to be neutralized by battalions of cops armed like soldiers with MRAPs and sonic cannons. The reason this seems to me a reaction that's out of proportion to the protests themselves. It seems especially true when you look at some other campuses, like Brown University, where administrators negotiated with student protesters who took down their encampment, and Wesleyan University, whose president said the protesting there was nonviolent and non-disruptive, adding as long as it continues in this way, the university will not attempt to clear the encampment. Now these universities, crucially, have reiterated their important existing rules against anti-Semitic invective and harassment, certainly while also protecting assembly, which seems sensible, also out of step with what you're seeing elsewhere, because ever since October 7th, when Hamas committed its atrocities in Israel, there has been this obsessive media focus on college campuses. And that's true partly because there are genuine issues worth debating, including the degree to which universities are creating spaces that are hostile to pro-Israel Jewish students where they feel under threat, or universities.
Speaker 4:The degree to which they're suppressing pro-Palestinian speech, and those issues really do matter, but the way that so many prominent voices have focused so exclusively on colleges feels honestly a bit decadent to me, like we're doing a paper doll version of a conflict, because the actual reality of what's happening in Gaza is so horrific, unceasing and high stakes. It's more enjoyable to argue about what college kids are doing than to confront the human misery and destruction that's happening in the actual conflict. That is, of course, the source of these protests. What seems most worth debating isn't campus speech, but whether the US government should continue to fund and support an Israeli war in Gaza that has pushed more than a million people to the brink of famine, a war that has damaged half of the buildings in Gaza, a war that has failed to bring home most of the hostages held by Hamas, that has backed and led to the death of some of those hostages, as well as the deaths of an estimated 34,000 Palestinians, including roughly 10,000 women and 13,000 children. Is that ongoing effort morally defensible?
Speaker 1:Is it strategically wise? Are we as a nation doing the right or wrong?
Speaker 4:thing and continuing to support it. Now, whenever that becomes a question, it almost becomes reflexive to challenge the questioner, and I can't help but think of the protests that marked the lead up to the Iraq war, which were both widely attended and widely attacked, and many, many prominent war supporters, including one-time student protester, christopher Hitchens blasted those demonstrations, and he pointed to the fact that some of the people organizing the protests held genuinely odious and fringe views, for instance, the view that North Korea is a worker's paradox in a great place.
Speaker 4:That's a horrible view. There were protest organizers with bad views, lots of them. There were people at the protests with terrible views. There were people who thought 9-11 was an inside job. I would argue with them myself at protests. Did that have anything to do at all with whether the war in Iraq was moral and prudent? No, the war in Iraq, demonstrably, was neither Of that. The protesters were right, which brings us back to Columbia University, where 56 years ago, almost to the day, student protesters took over the same building, hamilton Hall, that was occupied. Earlier this week, they too were forcibly removed and arrested. Many were bloodied and beaten For protesting, among other things, the university's involvement in the Vietnam War. They believed the war was a moral catastrophe and the US should stop waging it.
Speaker 2:They were right, and the fact that there were absolutely genuine extremists among those protesters in 1968, again had no bearing on whether they were right or not about that.
Speaker 4:What I find particularly maddening about our focus on the protesters of the conflict is that it's an invasion. It avoids the difficult task of being universally empathetic to our fellow human beings and truly reckoning with the scale of devastation that is wrought by our country, in our names, with our support.
Speaker 4:In the aftermath of 9-11, we waged a global war on terror for two decades that killed an estimated 430,000 people, many of them children, women, elderly, innocents. In Vietnam, we were estimated to have killed more than a million people, huge swaths of them civilians, women, children, male non-combatants, old people alike. Can you even make sense of those numbers? I can't. No one can. It's hard to think of them, to contend with them, as actual, real human beings, who lived lives before you took them, who were people like you or I, who were loved by the people in their lives. It is much easier to get angry at the spoiled brats on college campuses. Why are they being so disruptive?
Speaker 1:What are they so?
Speaker 4:upset about.
Speaker 1:If you feel that way, which I can understand honestly.
Speaker 4:I felt irritation and anger at protesters many times in my life, even ones I was ostensibly on the same side as, broadly speaking. If you feel that way, just try recapping the question why are all these people so upset that we're helping a government wager brutal war that's killed 13,000 children? The question kind of answers itself. To take seriously the scale of human suffering that's happening in Gaza doesn't mean you must come down the side of the protesters. Certainly there are many people who think the war is a brutal but necessary campaign for Israel's defense. What it does necessitate is that you?
Speaker 4:weigh all the human suffering against the actual endgame of the conflict that is currently being waged and is unarticulated as of now, a conflict the US continues to support Our humanity demands.
Speaker 1:We focus on those questions first and last. I've expressed my view on this subject several times. I did entire segments on the Israel-Palestine conflict, segments on the Israel-Palestine conflict and my view has. I've gained more knowledge on the topic, but my view has become relatively unchanged on most things. I have changed some of my positions and I may discuss that in a further episode, but I will still hold firm to what I think is my ontological starting point, which is a Palestinian has the same value to me as an Israeli, and that is where my a child of God.
Speaker 1:Now, this was very frustrating to me watching all the coverage, watching Fox News and MSNBC and ABC and CNN in uniformity. I watched Dana Bash go and they unhinged, ran about whatever, the college students and the radicalization and yada, yada, yada. And I was reminded of when I was in high school and the country was attacked on 9-11 and how, all of a sudden, the conversation became uniformly about going to war with Iraq and immediately it was pointed to Saddam Hussein and etc. Etc. And now, years later, we know how foolish that was. So when I saw the liberals and the conservatives and the neocons and the neoliberals in alignment on this issue when it came to the college students, I knew that we were being taken for a ride and what we were experiencing was a weapons grade level of gaslighting, because they wanted to constantly deflect from the issue what those students were upset about and make it about everything else Everything that somebody says that may be a little silly. They want to point to the PhD student who's asking for food and all that type of stuff and it's like let's get back to the issue. There's a war going on in our name, with our money. That's. That's the issue. And because the adults in the room have not dealt with this for years, for years, we've been as long since I went, since I have been alive, there has been a skirmish here, a skirmish there, this and this, this and that.
Speaker 1:I was. I discovered how to use the google photos thing and I look, was going through my photos and look back at my photo history of pictures and things I was looking at from November of 2014. And there were all these quotes from Pope Francis and Noam Chomsky and Norman Ficklestein and Nelson Mandela and all these people, and guess what? They were all talking about Israel and Palestine. So from 2014 to 2024, nothing has changed. Nothing has changed the adults in the room have not done the correct thing and now those same adults are yelling at college students because they're not striking the right tone. But when the policymakers had their chance, they all failed. And they failed on purpose, because they are paid to be stupid. They are paid to act like what they know is true is not true. They are paid to spread propaganda. I said on one episode that was why they were going after the tick and the tock, because it's not just because they were afraid of the dancing.
Speaker 1:It's because TikTok and stuff like that was changing the narrative that people were getting, because people were going on those things showing what was happening in real time. And even Mitt Romney let it slip said the quiet part out loud that this was about that. The whole ban on TikTok was about Israeli criticism. I'm going to go to that clip. And Mitt Romney says oh, they have lost it. Israel has lost the PR war. They didn't lose a PR war, they lost the moral high ground because people could see what was going on. And it doesn't matter what rhetoric or what amount of gaslighting you do, people's eyes cannot unsee what happened. And so Mitt Romney admits, when you know in this little thing he was doing off, you know, speaking off the cuff, that that's what the TikTok ban was about too much pro-Palestinian content and the Congress got afraid of it. In a country that is supposed to be about free speech, we are trying to dictate to the American public what they're allowed to view and the opinions they're allowed to hold. This is dark stuff, dark stuff. So I'm going to go ahead to that. You know, romney admitting the TikTok ban was about Israel and Palestinian criticism.
Speaker 1:And we have to wrestle with what type of country will this be? We keep yelling about how Israel is our ally and all this stuff, and that may be, you know, on paper, true? I want you to go look up for your own records how much money Israel spent helping America in Afghanistan. I want you to go look up how much money Israel spent helping us in Iraq. I want you to go look up how much money Israel spit helping us in Iraq. I want you to go look up how much money they spit helping us in Vietnam. I want you to go look up how many lives the Israelis sacrifice in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. You're going to be shocked. Don't take my word for it. Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero.
Speaker 1:They're not our ally as much as they are our welfare queen that comes and demands that we give them money and tries to blackmail us when we try to put conditions on it. That's what Israel is, and we don't even. We give them more deference here than they even give them in the press in Israel. They're more critical of them there than we are here, and we're the ones funding all this stuff. That's what makes it so frustrating. We have given up a lot and what have we gotten for it? What have we gotten for? Billions and billions of dollars and years and years and years of aid and no, no, no truce, no ceasefire, no two-state solution, no one-state solution. What have we got out of all this money? Look under your seat. If there's nothing under there, that's what you get this.
Speaker 3:This is unraveling in a crazy direction and you have some audio. Actually.
Speaker 5:Yes, and so it backs up this crazy exchange between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Mitt Romney over the weekend, in which apparently they forgot that they were speaking in front of a live audience and were being recorded and just got super honest. So now that the audio that we have, you can excuse them a little bit, because they did not think that they were not in front of a public audience, but somebody leaked it to us. We'll play that in a moment.
Speaker 6:But first here's Romney and Blinken. Why has the PR been so awful? I know that's not your area of expertise, but you have to have some thoughts on that, which is, I mean, as you said, why has Hamas disappeared in terms of public perception? An offer is on the table to have a ceasefire and yet the world is screaming about Israel. It's like why aren't they screaming about Hamas? Accept the ceasefire, bring home the hostages. It's like why aren't they screaming about Hamas? Accept the ceasefire, bring home the hostages? It's all the other way around. Typically, the Israelis are good at PR. What's happened here? How have they and we been so ineffective at communicating the realities there and our point of view?
Speaker 7:How this narrative has evolved. Yeah, it's a great question. I don't have a good answer to that. One can speculate about what some of the causes might be. I don't know. I can tell you this we were talking about this a little bit over dinner With Cindy.
Speaker 7:I think in my time in Washington, which is a little bit over 30 years, the single biggest change has been in the information environment. And when I started out in the early 1990s, everyone did the same thing. You woke up in the morning, you opened the door of your apartment, your house, you pick up a hard copy of the New York Times, washington Post, wall Street Journal and then, if you had a television in your office, you turned it on at 6.30 or 7 o'clock and watched the National Network News. Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond and of course the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative millisecond. And of course the way this is played out on social media has dominated the narrative and you have a social media ecosystem, environment in which context, history, facts get lost and the emotion of the impact of images dominates, and we can't discount that. But I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.
Speaker 6:A small parenthetical point which is some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it's overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. So I know that's of real interest. The president will get the chance to make action in that regard.
Speaker 5:Now, normally after a clip like that, we like to help people read between the lines, because sometimes politicians speak in code, not there, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they tell you exactly what they're thinking. Who was recently in a private meeting with the organization no Labels, which is kind of a pro-corporate group that tried to recruit Joe Manchin and a bunch of other people to run for president? He met with some no Labels donors in a private Zoom with Josh Gottheimer, who's another leader of no Labels, and this was what Mike Lawler had to say about his role and Congress's role in the TikTok ban. This audio was obtained by the Intercept. My colleagues Gail Lacey and Prim Tucker wrote about this. Wrote about his comments also calling for the FBI to investigate all campus protesters, but he also spoke about TikTok, which they mentioned, but I wanted to play this clip here.
Speaker 2:As Josh pointed out, when you have Hamas, iran, china endorsing these protests, it speaks volumes to the absurdity of them. It also highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bills in the foreign supplemental aid package, because you're seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the US.
Speaker 5:And so all of this is relevant because we can put up this third element. Tiktok has now sued, as was expected, to overturn the law on constitutional grounds. First Amendment is very clear. It says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press. We shall make no law, right, I guess? A bunch of the Bill of Rights are confusing and vaguely written. What does it mean that a well-regulated militia allows you to keep them bare-armed? They've been arguing about that for hundreds of years. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press is pretty straightforward and culturally the First Amendment has been upheld by kind of the American people who deeply believe in this idea that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press. So, according to Mitt Romney and Mike Lawler, congress made law to abridge the freedom of the press.
Speaker 3:Well, what's interesting about that is they seem to be talking about TikTok as though it is, and Blinken is especially interesting in this context. He's comparing TikTok directly to newspapers and, as he says, news networks. Now, I would actually disagree with that, and I think Section 230 is one of the big questions here about what constitutes a publication, what constitutes a news outlet? If you're just a platform, do you have the same roles and responsibilities as a newspaper? I think that's genuinely a major question and I think it's heavily implicated in this conversation about the First Amendment and TikTok. The government is going to argue, for example, that you can say whatever you would say on TikTok. Nobody's right to say it. Whatever you were going to say on TikTok, nobody's saying you can't say that. You can just say it in another forum, just not on this forum.
Speaker 3:But that becomes again a pretty serious discussion about what the First Amendment actually means. It is again fascinating as well. We talked about in the Israel block and actually we talked about all of this. We talk about this all the time how, avoiding the issue saying everybody is either a bigot or they've had their brain poisoned by bigots, as you heard Mike Lawler argue in that audio Manipulating the young people.
Speaker 3:Yes, that it's not there. None of these sentiments are legitimate or part of sort of deeper worldviews. That is a huge mistake from Republicans and from some center pro-Israel people to just dismiss this either as bigotry or purely manipulation, and that's exactly what they're doing. I have, like actual serious national security concerns about TikTok. I've had that conversation. We've had that conversation many times, but to be so dismissive is a huge, not just a tactical error, but an ideological one too.
Speaker 5:And at least Lawler's comments are a little bit less reckless than Blinken's and Romney's when it comes to kind of a legislative intent perspective and when it comes to, like giving away the game, because at least he's sticking to this idea that actually it's hamas and iran and china, uh, that are using the platform to manipulate uh, however, uh, the the laws, like the law is specific to, like, china and a couple other countries what he's really talking about.
Speaker 2:the content, yeah, like what.
Speaker 5:what's so clear is that this really is content based, yeah, and that means that means it's a violation of the First Amendment.
Speaker 3:And you remember when the Osama bin Laden letter went viral just a few months ago and there was this panic about how the algorithm may have been tweaked by Beijing to get all of these young Americans to discover the bin Laden letter and post about how it really changed their perception of the US and the negative direction. And I think part of the problem here is that it's entirely possible and entirely problematic. That should be something that legislators are concerned about and they deal with and that is front and center on their minds. But there was some really excellent reporting tracing the arc of virality in that particular place and it looks like it had nothing to do with TikTok, tweaking the algorithm and everything to do with organic sentiment among young people who were discovering the Bin Laden letter for the first time and saying, oh my goodness, you know, was it totally naive? From my perspective, yes, but saying, oh my goodness, this completely, radically changed my perception of the United States, the evidence that it was organic and then maybe it had like a Streisand effect is strong.
Speaker 5:Yeah, well, you know what really happened. I think from watching that whole bin Laden letter virality take off. Yashar Ali.
Speaker 3:Remember this.
Speaker 5:He's a power Twitter user who identified this phenomenon. International man of mystery and found like three clips of people doing this on TikTok, and he brought it over to Twitter yes, and shared it with the boomers on Twitter yes, and the boomers had a moral panic. Streisand affected it, yes, and so then, that moral panic is what poured the gasoline on a couple of sparks.
Speaker 3:It's a good Washington Post article on this.
Speaker 5:Yeah, so the idea that China did it is kind of undercut by the fact that we know who did it. It yeah, so the idea that China did it is kind of undercut by the fact that we know who did it. It was Yashar. It's like he's the one that supercharged it, I don't think. Did he respond to that? I'm not sure. I think he said well, look, I was identifying a real phenomenon. It's not my fault that you all panicked and freaked out about it.
Speaker 3:So one thing that people like Lawler will point to is the breakdown in posts that are pro-Palestine versus pro-Israel on TikTok. To the extent that we can actually break that down, it's dramatically different More pro-Palestine posts on TikTok than there are pro-Israel posts on TikTok and that is pointed out and said this is evidence of foreign manipulation. Again, it's entirely possible.
Speaker 3:That is true, but there's significant evidence that shows that breakdown looks a lot like how young people view the breakdown themselves, and there was an interesting poll this week that found that the issue is not rated among the most important for college students. So they're more likely to say the most important issue to them is health care and education financing. And all of that to them is health care and education financing. And all of that doesn't mean that they don't think that the united states and israel are wrong in the conflict, because public opinion polling on that shows they do, and that the tick tock breakdown actually matches the opinion breakdown uh, better than anything else right and it's all relative.
Speaker 5:So for romney to say you know there's more pro palestine stuff on tick tock than there is anywhere else, two things on that people who post all the time about Palestine on TikTok will tell you there is still significant censorship. There's so much censorship on TikTok of pro-Palestinian content that people who were told that the Chinese must be juicing the stats for Hamas are like are you crazy? You go on here and try to promote Palestinian content and see what happens. But it's relative to these American companies that massively put their thumb on the scale. So China kind of just has their thumb on the scale against Palestinians, less than the American and other platforms, which make it very, very difficult to push pro-Palestinian content through without being censored and shadow banned and so on. Setting that all aside, the way that Blinken and Romney frame it is just kind of incredible. Just a PR problem. How did we lose the narrative.
Speaker 3:Should have hired Don Draper.
Speaker 5:It's not the 34,000 plus killed. It's not the more than 13,000, 14,000 children killed. It's not blocking humanitarian aid. It's not deliberately targeting World Central Kitchen staffers. It's none of that. It's the fact that we used to have the New York Times Watch Post, the Wall Street Journal and Evening News and we could then shape the narrative that was being delivered to people. Now they can see for themselves what is going on, that they then follow that up with. Therefore, that's why we banned that and are trying to go back to where we can put things in the bottle is a moment of just such absolute self-unawareness. Is that a word?
Speaker 3:Unself-awareness. Do you remember Obama pining for the position that Xi Jinping was in?
Speaker 5:This is what he and Trump agree on.
Speaker 3:Yes, and this is Blinken pining for the days of John Foster Dulles where he could just call up Time magazine, which he still can.
Speaker 5:You know, he said he can't call up TikTok, but it doesn't have the same.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, it doesn't have the same power. The last time I say it on this is it's also. People are making the mistake of assuming this was the same thing with, like the Russian interference that actually, to the extent that it did happen, was the same thing with, like the russian interference that actually, like, to the extent that it did happen, it was this silly viral means and everything that. What china would want to do is to strictly advance the palestinian cause in the united states as opposed to destabilize public opinion. That's really what russia was trying to do back in 2016 was so discord, you know they were.
Speaker 3:Of the memes, there were some really cheesy, awful pro-right memes and some really cheesy awful pro-BLM, pro-left memes. So even their conception of what might be happening here is just in this sort of box that it's either going to be. China wants us all to be pro-Palestine because China supports the Palestinians. China just wants us at each other's throats. If anything, that looks like the strategy. It looks like the long-term strategy is to weaken Americans' love of America, frankly and to sow discord, which is similar to how Russia has approached it for decades too.
Speaker 5:And how Voice of America approaches it.
Speaker 2:Radio-free.
Speaker 5:It's not wrong we love to sow dissent also and prop up like civil society organizations that profess to have concerns about human rights.
Speaker 3:And so you know no one was doing anything new. No, not at all.
Speaker 1:We will never escape the cold war so of course you know we always got to give a shout out to the sister shows, overopinionated and Lunsby with T-Bone and Chick Brew. You can check those shows out at the same place where you found this one. So have you ever been told that you were overopinionated? How about this one? You can talk about everything, but don't talk about religion, don't talk about politics, don't even ever bring up anything controversial. My name is Darrell McLean, the host of the Darrell McLean Show, and I want to introduce you to a show called Overopinionated with my friend Josh Scott from Southwest Virginia. Josh has always been told that he was overopinionated. He always tried to hold back his opinions and when he had to say something he backed them up with facts and logic. Since he has grown up in many ways, he'd had to change a lot of his views and his opinions, as a lot of people should. He's not a millionaire from Fox News or CNN, he's just a hard-working blue-collar type of guy. Give Josh Scott and his show Overopinionated a shot, and now you can find him at patreoncom. Slash overopinionated a shot, and now you can find him at patreoncom. Slash overopinionated at 679. You can also check him out at twitter at the r nrv guy underscore seven, nine, over opinionated with josh scott, where he is a soft spoken guy telling you the truth now.
Speaker 1:Now the Derral McLean show has a voicemail for comments on anything you would like to say. That show phone number is 757-310-7303. That is 757-310-7303. So I do have a question or comment. On the show line today via text message and it says Fannie Willis has single handedly given Trump a potential gift of time and Stormy Daniels makes a serious misstep by admitting she hates Trump on the witness stand. Please comment. I'm sitting here just shaking my head. So on the first part I would say I agree, I'm going to talk about this in long form, but let me just get my opinion on this. Let me just get my opinion on this. Fannie Willis should remove herself from the case because now she has become a unneeded distraction for the first time in a criminal case is non-controvertible. You have to be without blemish trial going on in New York, as salacious as it is, and I'll get into all that.
Speaker 1:On, the next segment is about Trump's adultery. No, but that is just a part of it. It is about whether he was trying to hide his adulterous behavior or was he trying to know from his wife? Or was he trying to hide his adulterous behavior from the voters with and and that is the the what this whole that whole conversation is about. If it would have been hiding it from the voters and it would have been a federal charge, it would have been a type of thing that they could have got him with something federal in some type of campaign law, because, as an estate issue, they're getting him on something like falsifying business records, something like that.
Speaker 1:Even though the Georgia case is different than the New York case, voters are going to combine those two cases and they're going to say I can't believe they're convicting Trump or trying to convict Trump for an alleged affair with a porn star and Fannie Willis is having a relationship with the other prosecutor in the case. How is this fair? And I would say, even though one could say well, fannie Willis is not on trial and there is nothing against the law about a prosecutor having sex with another prosecutor or an independent contractor, whatever you want to call her paramour, it creates the image of impropriety and so fannie willis, if she actually cares about this case, there are other uh prosecutors throughout the state and they they have a team of people trying to do this case. Trying to do that case, they she should step away from the trial because, sorry, you are not allowed trial, because, sorry, you are not allowed to go after a sitting president and sit there with all those guilty stains wrapped around yourself that way. The public is not going to allow it, and so we'll talk about that, uh, later.
Speaker 1:I'm going to table that part of it. I disagree when it comes to the Stormy Daniels piece, her saying she doesn't like Donald Trump. I think it speaks to her credibility If she was asked a question on the witness stand and she's told the truth. Imagine if she would have been asked the question and said, oh, I love him from the bottom of my heart. Then they would have been saying, oh, she's nuts's nuts, she's unhinged, you know.
Speaker 1:So on and so forth none of that whether she likes the guy or dislikes the guy, makes the business records true or untrue, and that's the. That's the facts. You none of that. What she says, or that she loves donald trump or does not love donald trump's, goes back and exonerates michael cohen, who spent time in jail for the thing that donald trump is now being accused of. Michael cohen was the one that took the money, you know, and donald trump was trying to say, well, no, he did that of his own, free, whatever. So, yeah, like Mitt Romney said, it's very rare that somebody pays you over a hundred thousand dollars to not have sex with you. So I disagree with the Stormy Daniels thing. She's already been seen as somebody that is going to be unseemly, you know, porn star, etc. And I think her telling the truth that no, I don't like the person on the witness stand instead of trying to lie and pretend like she did means that, yeah, you know, she has the capability of telling the truth. Sometimes the truth is not convenient, but the truth is the truth and the truth is what will set you free. Thank you for the comment. Of course, again, the show phone number is 757-310-7303. That is 757-310-0-3.
Speaker 1:So the stormy week here, as we're going to say is where the adult film actor Stormy Daniels' testimony in the former President Trump's testimony trial wrapped up on Thursday after detailing an alleged 2006 sexual encounter with him for the duration of more than six hours across two days Now. Trump's attorney Susan Nichols took aim at Daniel's credibility in a spirited, often salacious back and forth, questioning Daniel's racy profession, her other unusual money-making endeavors and her brash demeanor. The two sparred over whether pornography is a venue for lying and merits of being a paid medium. In some of the most colorful moments, quote you have a lot of experience of making phony stories about sex appear to be real. The attorney said of Daniel's pornography career Wow. Daniel's replied that's not how I would put it. The sex in the film is very much real, just like what happened to me in Trump's hotel room. She shot back back. Now, turning from porn to the paranormal, normal, trump's lawyer asked about daniel's uh, psychic endeavors. You claim to be able to speak with dead relatives. Right, dave replied. I make clear, it's all entertainment.
Speaker 1:Daniels was described as being less than her initial time on the stand on Tuesday. No cameras are allowed in the courtroom. The week started with Judge Juan Merchan threatening to jail former President Donald Trump, over repeated violations of a trial gag order. Monday, trump had been found in violation 10 times during the trial, racking up a combined $10,000 in fines. When Daniel's turn came, tuesday, she described her alleged encounter in Trump's hotel suite during the celebrity golfing tournament near Lake Tahoe in 2006. She was asked multiple times to slow down when asked and slow down when she talked and refrain from unnecessarily salacious details.
Speaker 1:Known at the time as a famous businessman and the host of the NBC Apprentice show called the Celebrity Apprentice, which was a reality TV show, trump is accused of falsifying business documents to cover a $130,000 hush money payment to Daniels during the 2016 presidential election campaign to prevent her from disclosing the alleged sexual encounter. Now the former Trump lawyer, slash fixer, michael Cohen, who handled the transactions but has since become a vocal since has become a vocal uh, since has become a vocal critic to Trump is expected to take the stand in the trial as well. Trump denies having sex with Daniels. Are violating any laws, and so, in the final story for today, uh, teflon Don gets another victory, as the judge that he appointed, judge Cannon, has indefinitely postponed the former president's Mar-a-Lago documents case, and this, this thing that has been done has putting some court dates into late July while declining to set a trial date. July while declining to set a trial date. Now, this happened on Tuesday and the Tuesday order, issued less than two weeks before Trump's trial was still on the books, to kick off on May 20th leaves unclear when the Trump cases will ever come before a actual jury.
Speaker 1:Cannon pinned the delay on the need to resolve numerous issues dealing with how classified information will be handled at a trial, details governed by the Classified Informations Procedures Act, also known as the CIPA. The court also determines that the finalization of a trial date at this juncture, before the resolution of a myriad of interconnected pretrial and CIPA issues remain and forthcoming, would be prudent, imprudent and inconsistent with the court's duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pretrial motions before the court, various pending pre-trial motions before the court. In failing to set a trial date, cannon's move aligns with most of the requests by Trump's legal team to not set a trial date. Now the last minute scuttling of the trial date comes as Cannon has failed to act on a number of motions before her, including numerous efforts by Trump's urging her to actually toss the case. In laying out the new schedule, cannon noted that she still has eight substantial pretrial motions she must rule on.
Speaker 1:The new slate of trial deadlines pushes until July, month of litigation on the CIPA, which will determine how classified information is to be presented in a trial. Now Cannon's earlier Tuesday suspended another CIPA-related deadline in the case after Trump's legal team complained about prosecutors' handling of the documents. Now the special counsel, jack Smith's team's, acknowledges in court findings last week that some boxes of documents may have been preserved in the exact order they were found, but dismissed the significance of the detail in preparing for trial. Sure that no documents were moved from one box to another, but it was not focused on maintaining the secrets of documents within each box, prosecutors wrote in a Friday filing. He also noted that Trump's co-defendant and valet, walt Nuda, failed to raise this with the government with his current issue about the intra-box sequencing until over nine months after the boxes were made available to him. So this is Teflon Don. He seems to be sometimes the luckiest person on the planet, and we will see you on the next episode.