Speaker 1: All right, welcome everybody to November, it's a new week, we're going to start
with something really instructive today. Last week, the week before, I talked about sort of the
inherent difficulty of confronting these conspiracy theorists or conspiracy delusion
ists with the idea of I'm just going to show them how each one of their claims is wrong and that
it's really difficult to do this in real time. I talked about a recent Sam Harris podcast episode
where he outlines this very well. When he's asked, What about having someone like Bret Weinstein on
and arguing with him about each one of his points related to vaccines and ivermectin,
etc. and Sam Harris very astutely pointed out it's really easy to start 10 small fires. And
if you can only put out eight or nine of them, it kind of ends up looking like you
didn't really address this elephant in the room. There was a really good post on our subreddit
which mentioned this and has a link to an interview that happened on Friday where Bill
Maher interviews Sean Spicer, and this user reflex point actually says Bill Maher versus Sean Spicer,
and why fact-checking conspiracy theorists in Real Time is a problem. David was recently mentioning
Sam Harris's statement about why it can be dangerous to argue with conspiracy theorists
in a live format because if they just start galloping a bunch of nonsense in real time,
it can be difficult to come out of it looking like you won. And Sean Spicer does a perfect example of
that. When giving his reasons to question election integrity, he'll point to some obscure rule that
changed in some battleground state and then claim it's suspect and Bill is supposed to know about
it. And if he doesn't, then Bill must be wrong and having confidence in the election results. So
let's take a look. I'm going to play this two and a half minutes uninterrupted. See if you
can keep track of all the different assertions that Sean Spicer makes. I'm keeping track, and
then we're going to go through them in a moment. Speaker 2: What about what about the election was
rigged and Trump really won it? I think there are some serious problems with the election.
Here we go. No time out. Hold on. Name. When you look at Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada,
this idea that we changed rules running up to an election in terms of how it was did when it was
county, do you think Pennsylvania, the law signed by Democratic governor, did Trump 19 x seventy
seven, signed by Gov. Wolf, said that all ballots had to be in there. There was, yeah,
there was a pandemic. That's why they changed the law. They OK. There was no time to do that. Never.
So you just never. Well, you know, there wasn't there wasn't of time to pass legislation
in all of these. This is a rabbit hole you want to go down to avoid the question. Did Trump win
or lose the election? I don't know. Well, there you go, because it's the world, if you know the
first. Now I tell me how many votes they got cast illegally and not according to the system.
This was litigated in every courts. Even Republicans who were in charge of the vote
came down. On the side of this election was fairly adjudicate, you yourself said right after
the election. They asked you about fraud. If you have said, I have seen no evidence that I haven't,
but what I have seen is a state where there's a different imaginary. No, no, no. There is a
difference. What Pennsylvania's Supreme Court did. What Wisconsin's clerks did. They let
people. Wisconsin does not have a provision in their law to let people vote early in person.
It has an absentee ballot provision. People set up tables in parks in Madison, Wisconsin, and allowed
people to come without ID in Pennsylvania. They were allowed to vote without ID, no postmark on
the ballot in violation of Act 77 signed by a Democratic governor in twenty nineteen. And the
answer is Well, then don't worry about it because it was a pandemic. Well, what's the next thing
that you can just blow away? A law is a law until it's changed. You don't get to pick what you want
to follow. Depending on what's happening outside. OK. This again, this was looked at exhaustively.
It's not so long ago what was looked at. For example, in Wisconsin, the court ruled four
two three. Shawn, I get it. You know what you're like? You accuse me nothing. You said your piece.
You said your piece. I haven't looked at this like that kid in school who? Who's right? No. You
know, who who has to do has to answer about the book reports or reads one page very carefully
that nobody else read and then does a thing on that and then we don't know what you're talking
about. But we know that what I do know? OK, so Speaker 1: so that's a lot. So think about
all of the different things that Bill Maher in principle or in theory had to be ready to refute
and how difficult it is now. We've done it after the fact, but just look at how much time this is
going to take me. So Sean Spicer mentioned mentions Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada
and says they changed rules leading up to an election. He mentions a 2019 Pennsylvania law
signed by Governor Governor Wolf that says ballots have to be in by eight p.m. on Election Day. He's
asked, Did Trump win or lose? He doesn't know because he doesn't know the results in different
states. He asks how many votes were illegally cast. He says the Pennsylvania Supreme Court
and the Wisconsin clerks changed rules, and Wisconsin has no provision to let people vote
early, in-person only absentee, and that there were parks just letting people vote with no ID.
Pennsylvania allowed people to vote without ID and with no postmark on the ballot, and that violates
Act 77. And then he mentions the Wisconsin court ruled four to three. He doesn't say
he doesn't actually say what they ruled or what the case was. So look at all of this different
stuff we now have to deal with in order to simply say, Hey, Trump lost, and that's it.
On Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nevada, he says, well, there were problems and he just lists them,
but he doesn't really explain what the problems were. In 2020, the results were Biden 303 and
Trump 235. If you flip all three of those states, Trump gets the 270 votes he needs. But that's if
you flip all three. Let's say Sean Spicer is right, but about two of those three states
and what he's right about actually means that Trump won two of those three states. Biden still
wins the election in that case, so even at its face, he's throwing out three states as if Trump
probably won them just to demonstrate that in one of those Trump actually won would be a herculean
effort for which there is no evidence. But if you only are able to successfully demonstrate
Trump really won two of those three, Biden still wins that election. So that's a real red herring.
Second, rules changed leading up to the election. Some states did change election procedures without
legislation, but that's no big deal. We've studied this already. I already told you, Rebecca Green,
election law professor at College of William and Mary, said it's often the case that election
statutes have gaps that don't account for particular situations like the pandemic.
So just because a decision was made not from the Legislature, it was made by the governor's
office or a public health board or whatever. That's really not a big deal. Spicer asserts
that it happened as if that's a problem. It's not actually a problem. It's common. Many states also
changed election rules because of the pandemic. Blue states and red states that it states that
Trump won did it and states Biden won did it. And big shocker. These Republicans only ever
talk about the fact that states Biden won did it. North Dakota changed rules due to the pandemic,
not through the Legislature leading up to the election. So did Arkansas, so did Texas. They all
made state changes. In that way, Trump won those. They don't make a peep about those then. Spicer
mentions mentions the 2019 Pennsylvania law signed by Gov. Wolf, which says ballots have to be in by
eight p.m.. It's true that Pennsylvania law did require ballots to be in by eight p.m. on
Election Day. But before the 2020 election, the state Supreme Court of Pennsylvania extended the
deadline. So ballots could be received by mail until five p.m. on the Friday of election week
if they're either postmarked by Election Day or have a missing or illegible postmark. They did a
new deadline. It was dealt with. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court dealt with that. Now, if Sean Spicer
wants to argue the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is illegitimate in so doing, that's a different
argument. But it's been dealt with in a legal way that is accepted as a valid way to change
when absentee ballots can be received. Then Spicer says, well, how many votes were illegally cast.
It's such a vague question. It's meaningless because his definition of illegal might be. It
was received after eight p.m. on Election Day in Pennsylvania, but as I told you, the state Supreme
Court already dealt with that. So what does he really mean by illegal votes? Wisconsin, he says,
had no provision to let people vote early, in-person, only absentee. Well, Wisconsin didn't
used to permit early in-person voting, but then they decided to. In 2021, they can do that,
he says. Well, the clerks decided the clerks have the authority to decide that they decided
it legally and change that rule. It's not actually a red flag the way, he says. And then lastly, he
mentions the Wisconsin court ruled four to three, and he doesn't tell you what they ruled while
I looked into it. The conservative led Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled four to three not to throw out
two hundred and twenty thousand ballots that the Trump campaign wanted thrown out. Spicer mentions
it. Look, the Wisconsin court ruled four to three. Yeah, but what did they rule? It was a it was a
conservative majority Supreme Court which decided you can't just throw out these 100 two hundred and
twenty thousand ballots. So each of these things when you analyze them is really nothing. It's
not a smoking gun, it's not a red flag. But if you watch the two and a half minutes I played for you,
it might seem like Bill Maher didn't really refute everything. And this is exactly the challenge
that Sam Harris has recently talked about when asked, Why aren't you debating more of these
vaccine skeptics or ivermectin advocates or whatever? Because they show up and they go,
Wait a second. You didn't see the Bangladeshi study, which showed what, you know, whatever? No,
I didn't see it. Oof, wow, you and you think you know what's going on? The Bangladeshi study may be
something. It may not be something. A really good example. Glad that it was posted to our subreddit.