The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you.  There's a great article about David Korn's daughter cornering Kellyanne Conway when Kellyanne appeared last month at her high school. In David Korn, he writes for the Mother Jones magazine, his daughter asked Kellyanne about the sexual assault that Donald Trump has been accused of. When Kellyanne Conway angrily lectured this high school student, a woman, a female, telling her to get over it, to get over sexual assault, the American people don't care about sexual assault.  Kellyanne Conway is a piece of s***. One time, some day in the not too distant future, Kellyanne Conway will write a confessional about how demoralizing it was working for Donald and she'll ask that all of us, especially women, really really try to understand how challenging it was to survive inside Trump Tower's boys club. She'll tell us about her crippling anxiety attacks, the eating disorder, the abuse her father's abuse that made her gravitate to somebody like Trump. Of course, Kellyanne will defend the work she did for Trump, insisting she's proud of the campaign and that like most people, she really really thought Trump cared about the working class. She's going to say she was a true believer, but like everybody else, she was deceived. Sniff sniff. Anderson Cooper will not so much interview as comfort her because this book tour that she's on will be about her pain, not the pain she inflicted on America by spewing a fire hose of lies to get Donald Trump elected president. Yeah, Anderson won't ask any tough questions because that would be rude to ask Kellyanne about the ruination she wrought because there's a time and a place for questions like those. And a guest trying to make millions selling her book is not the time to ask about the lives she's ruined. Kellyanne Conway will sell lots and lots of books playing the victim and distancing herself from Donald Trump. It will be a New York Times bestseller and that will be blazing to cross her book jacket. New York Times bestseller, even though she spent an entire campaign convincing us that the New York Times can't be trusted, we're supposed to believe that the New York Times did an accurate count of how many of her books were being sold.  Probably something about knowing when to lean in and knowing when it's time to lean out. Some horseshit like that. Right now Kellyanne Conway is staying put. No book yet. Nope. No book. Kellyanne's going to quit.  But right now Kellyanne wouldn't dare walk away just because Donald Trump did something like incite hatred for Muslims, Arabs, Mexicans and women. No. She'll walk away after Trump does something far, far worse when he humiliates Kellyanne Conway. When he gives the job she wants to a man. When he instead offers her a demeaning job that she believes is beneath her. That's when and only when Kellyanne Conway will feel let down and disappointed by Donald Trump. That's when she'll leave to write her book and suddenly remember that she's a woman and that women get raped. And she'll remember that it's not right for women to provide cover to misogynists the way Kellyanne is doing right now for Donald Trump. I voted for Hillary. I don't know what Kellyanne's father did to her. Maybe it was a couple of different men. But whatever he did or the other men did, you don't have to become your abuser Kellyanne. You can find it in your heart to forgive your father or those men. The same way after Kellyanne quits the Trump administration and writes her manipulative confessional, we will forgive her. That's right. We're going to forgive her. And some of us will even read her book.  But never forget they're dangerous. Welcome to the broadcast. I'm David Feldman, DavidFeldmanshow.com. Please friend me on Facebook. Follow me on Twitter. Do all your Amazon shopping via the David Feldman Show website. There's an Amazon banner. We're lousy with them.  And it doesn't cost you more. It really doesn't. It just takes you to the Amazon site, shop away. And then when you check out, somehow they miraculously send us a small percentage of what you've purchased. Well, on today's show, we talk to one of my favorite guests, Pat Dixon. He's the host of the New York Crime Report. And he's a very funny stand-up comic. Along with David Cyrus, he's a comedy writer, recently nominated for an Emmy and a couple of Writers Guild Awards. He's written on Saturday Night Live and Triumphian Cell Comic Dog, very funny, opinionated comedy writer. Then we go to Chicago to talk to Professor David Farris, who wrote a piece in the week, an opinion piece in the week that is really irritating conservatives. The name of the piece is entitled, where is it? Entitled, Time for Democrats to Fight Dirty. I could not agree with him more, and that's why I asked him to come on the show to talk about why the Democratic Party needs to take a page from the GOP playbook and just get in the gutter and say no. Just fight, fight, fight Donald Trump and the Republicans every step of the way, every step of the way. And then we talk to a very funny man named John Egan. He's the publisher of the Burrard Street Journal out of Vancouver. He is a purveyor of fake news. It's a parody site. You should go there, the Burrard Street Journal. Very funny website that conservatives think is real. And he's gotten a lot of traffic to his website during this election because Republicans, and we'll talk about this, Republican websites, conservatives keep linking to his very funny website because they read these stories and they think they're true. Buzzfeed has been covering this. They did a survey, 75%, this just came out this week, 75% of Americans, according to Buzzfeed, who learned about fake news headlines, view them as accurate. And that's both conservative and Democrat. 75% of American adults who knew about fake news headlines, 75% thought they were accurate. I'm gonna read you a couple of headlines and you can play along. Are these real or are these fake? Okay. This is a headline. You tell me if it's fake or true. These are actual headlines that have been out along the internet linked to mostly on Facebook. They're always spread on Facebook. FBI agents suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in an apparent murder suicide. Okay. 72% of those surveyed thought it was accurate. 72% of those surveyed thought it was accurate. Right then, is it fake or is it real? Do you think that's fake or is it real? 90% of Americans think this is true. Donald Trump on refusing presidential salary, I'm not taking it. Is that true or is that false? 90% of Americans believe that headline is true. 79% of Americans think this headline is true. Donald Trump protester speaks out, I was paid $3,500 to protest Trump's rally. Write that down, is it true or is it false? 79% of Americans think that is true. Next headline, Donald Trump says he'd absolutely require Muslims to register. 80% of Americans surveyed think that's true. Do you think that's true or do you think it's false? 64% of Americans think the following headline is true. Pope Francis shocks the world, endorses Donald Trump for president, releases statement. Is that true or false? That is a headline that has been spread throughout the internet. 64% of Americans think that's true. Next headline, 73% of Americans think the following headline is true. Trump, I will protect our LGBTQ citizens. 73% of those surveyed say they think that is a true story. Next headline, 84% of Americans believe this to be true. Donald Trump sent his own plane to transport 200 stranded Marines, okay? 84% of Americans think that headline is true. 82% of Americans think the following headline is true. Barbara Bush, I don't know how women can vote for Trump. That's an actual headline being spread around Facebook and the internet. 82% of Americans think that's true. Is it true? 81% of Americans think the following headline is true. FBI Director Comey just put a Trump sign on his front lawn. 81% of Americans think that headline is a true story. 83% of Americans think this headline is a true story. Melania Trump's girl on girl photos from Racy's shoot revealed. 83% believe that story is true. And finally, this headline, 90% of Americans think this is true. I ran the CIA, now I'm endorsing Hillary Clinton. 90% of people who saw that headline think it is true. So those are headlines that got spread throughout the internet in the run-up to the election and they link to stories. Some of them were true stories. Some of them were just fake news. Let's see if you correctly figured out what was real and what was fake. Okay, these are the fake headlines. 72% of Americans believe this headline. FBI agents suspected in Hillary email leaks found dead in an apparent murder or suicide. 72% of Americans thought that story was real. It was fake. Headline and story. Donald Trump protester speaks out I was paid 3,500 to protest Trump's rally. 79% of Americans thought that was a true story. It was fake. Headline, Pope Francis Shocks World endorses Donald Trump for president, releases statement. 64% of Americans thought that was a real story. When they read it, it was fake. Donald Trump sent his own plane to transport 200 stranded Marines. 84% of Americans surveyed thought that was a real story. It was fake. Headline, FBI director Comey just put a Trump sign on his front lawn. 81% of Americans thought that was an actual true story. It was fake. These are the true stories that were true. Headline, Donald Trump on refusing presidential salary. I'm not taking it. 90% thought that was true. It's true. Headline, Donald Trump said he'd absolutely require Muslims to register 80% of Americans believe that story. It is a true story. Headline, Trump, I will protect our LGBTQ citizens. 73% of Americans believe that to be a true story. It is a true story. Barbara Bush, I don't know how women, Barbara Bush, I don't know how women can vote for Trump. 82% of Americans believe that to be a true story. It was a true story. Headline, Melania Trump's girl on girl photos from Racy Shoot revealed 83% of Americans thought that was a true story. It is a true story. And finally, I ran the CIA now endorsing Hillary Clinton. 90% of Americans thought that was a real story. It was a real story. Interesting, fake news. We have a serious problem with fake news in this country and in the world. And we talk about that with John Egan, a purveyor of fake news, unwittingly a purveyor of fake news, he's the publisher of the Burrard Street Journal. Stay with us, we have a great show. Well, this is gonna be a fun show, but we don't have enough time. We have to keep it quick because somebody has to go away. Somebody has a date. I don't know, you're going somewhere so we have to keep this at an hour, fellas. I think you're just saying that. No, he's gotta go. So Dave Cyrus is here. I'm back. Love having Dave Cyrus here, terrific comedy writer. Undefeated champion, Rose Butler. Yes, and champions loose, but yes, undefeated. What are you? Just three and O. Three and O. And Pat Dixon, are you four and O? I'm four and O. But the last guy I beat was four and O. That's why I get the title. Okay, that's David, by the way. That's not it. It's funny because we sound not too dissimilar. Okay, I'm Pat Dixon. Pat Dixon, crimereport.nyc. Yes. Where you take actual news items. Yes. And talk about them and they're always funny. And I'm supposed to go up against you in a roast battle. Yeah, supposed to. Are you gonna show up? This will be great. We'll have fun. Yeah. I think it's a, you know what? I don't roast battle anybody I don't like. I can't. I will turn it down. You know what I mean? If you turn a roast battle somebody that you don't like, it's like it doesn't go well. I've never seen a roast battle. I've never been in roast battle. So I've written for roast. I know. Is it, maybe my tongue should be registered as a weapon. As a weapon, yeah. Well, I like to, when I think of like a guy who wrote. Be sure to put that on your match profile, by the way. Yeah. Well, it's like that movie Best of the Best, where the Olympic, Best of the Best 2 is where the Olympic karate athletes go into underground street fighting because they assume they're gonna have an unfair advantage, which is how I see it when someone who wrote professionally for roasts or for someone like Tribe that's just insult comedy goes into roast battle. Now, of course, Best of the Best 2 is the movie where Chris Penn dies because he thought that that was how it would go. But you know, this could go better. Well, we'll see. It'll be interesting. I'm looking forward to it. So, Pat Dix, and you're married to Mandy's, how do you pronounce it?  Stat Miller. Is that why she didn't show up today? No, no, she's, how do you guys, here's what happened, and this happens sometimes, you know. You said, I got a nice invitation, would you like to appear on the show? Like, boy, would I, you know what you're saying? Would you like to get out of the house a little while on Saturday? Maybe get away from your wife for a little while? Sure.  I said, well, I'm only here because she's not. Yeah. We live in a place, this room we're in right now is twice the size of our apartment. Tell us who your brilliant wife is. She's a writer for the cut.  She currently has a column on the cut, New York Magazine, the cut, and she writes about our relationship.  She's very good. And yeah, she's a brilliant woman, man.  Obviously, I'm married to her. The woman I was with before, three years, three and a half years, and I was like, I'm never getting married. And with her, first date in February, married by November. Wow. Yeah, that's right. World-end romance for a couple of 40-something. She, well, see, I think what it was, is she was also, I met her, you know, prior to that, only once. I saw her only once, and she was like in a bar. She was doing a little bit of comedy at that time. I think I was there for a bar show, and I was like, she's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. And I, you know, I asked somebody, I was like, who is that? It's Mandy Semmelway. And I couldn't even talk to her, and then didn't see her again, but I knew she was around, and then like, I'd have her under seven years later. Seven years later, and she was a little more, you know, she was kind of beat, you know what I mean? I think I got a shot at this. You couldn't talk to her seven years ago. Would a relationship last longer if you couldn't talk to her? Well, I think the point, I think the answer right there in the question, isn't it? Or as a social experiment, would it be worth trying just to see, you know, as somebody who's wrapping up a divorce to get into a relationship with a woman where we agree, no conversation? Would that? It's sort of like, yeah, it would, it would last a long time in the sense that like, you know, a pop tart that's still in the wrapper and lasts a long time. But it doesn't taste all that good, you know, that's the problem. So in the end, you do have to talk in order for the relationship to be satisfied. I have to talk a lot, you know what I mean? And yeah, I have to talk just to, look, I mean, everybody has different things they need or whatever, you ever talk to somebody, a woman, and they, and they won't look up from the computer, you know what I mean? And they go, uh-huh, uh-huh, like that, that makes me nuts. And so I guess it's part of it, I don't know, talking. So men- Sort of like what's going on in this room right now. Yeah, there's no women here. So we can do locker room talk. We can grab things. By the way, Mike Lawrence has the best joke. And I don't even know if I can give him credit for it, because- Because he probably stole it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.  No, no, no, no, no. He said about when Donald Trump was accused of rape by 15 women. 13. I think it was 100 women, and it wasn't just accused, it was proven. There were photos and stuff. Michael Lawrence said it was only locker room rape, which is such a great joke. It's pretty good. You don't think that's great? It's pretty good. I mean, that's the way you appreciate a joke for your professional comedian, right? Yes, I see it. That's a great joke. That's well done. What women and men, is it, can we tease women now? Are we allowed to joke with women, or is, what are the rules of engagement?  They're walking around with thoughts, and they want to say things, and I think to whatever degree you know somebody, I think it doesn't all depend on relationships. Is it really about men and women, or is it about status and context? So in other words, if you're more powerful in the relationship, you have to check your privilege. No, no, no. If you're more powerful, you get to do whatever you want. I mean, there's no, and I don't know what it means. To me, to check my privilege sounds like defer to everybody, you know, and the thing is, I've never really felt all that powerful, you know what I mean? Like, things have not only gone that well for me, I'm a three times divorced, not exactly flat broke, 46 year old man. Where's all my prestige and all that?  They don't even get the opportunity to get divorced up until a few years ago. So who's being privileged? I was in the shower today, thinking about my divorce. And I am now utterly convinced that divorce attorneys are the reason gays are allowed to get married, that fewer and fewer heterosexuals are getting married and these snakes, these divorce attorneys, you know, there's a $50 billion industry. I thought it was all those screaming, Jesus.   Well, I know, but I think that... A few of them are definitely lawyers. I think a few, yeah.  And so how did they make this happen?  Well, I don't know if they created an outrage. I think that the Supreme Court is run by lawyers and lawyers take care of their own. I'm just thinking out loud. Okay, so I mean, I saw people outraged that they were not, that being married was not allowed.  I mean, only eating fish on Friday if you're Catholic. How like they were the ones that said, don't eat meat on Friday because we need to sell more fish?  Right. I'm still thinking about your term fishmonger. Yeah, it's a seldom used word. If I could use monger in any way, I will. What does monger mean? Just a guy who hoards things, right? And fishmonger was the term for the big fish salesman. You can really only use the word for like fish and hate, right? And people want to get married, why? Like you met this beautiful woman. Yes. And you wanted to marry her. Yes, because I'm 46 and till death us do part. It's not that long really. And so there's not that great sense of risk anymore. You know, if you're sitting at the table. How many times have you been married? Twice before. This is my third. Why would you want to get married again? Well, I consider it my first marriage in a way because like I don't think you can make an informed decision on marriage until you're, you know, 40. But explain to me heterosexual marriage. Okay. What is the lure at?  And she was, well, she's 40 years old or whatever. So she was ready to get married, but it wasn't her.  The truth of it is I wanted to get married. We both wanted to get married and I'll tell you, it's because, you know, we're sitting here pretending that everything's okay. That's a great thing we do in life, right? Is that yeah, we all of us, everybody here, Alex, everybody in the building in the room in New York City is that we're pretending that we're not, that in 20, 30, 40 years, you know, at best, like me, mom, you know, and we're all going to be dead and things are not going to be good. You know what I mean? But you see, it occurred to me that I don't want to be doing that by myself. I want somebody who's legally obligated to be there. You know what I mean? She's a stout woman. She's strong.  And, you know. Oh, so let's discuss this for a second. It's like me using the state to make a bet with the person you're with that you're going to be the one to leave me.  Yeah. So it doesn't really work out. Are both your parents alive? Yeah. Are both your parents alive? No, my mom is deceased. And my father's been gone almost 20 years. So the idea that my mother's still alive, I'm saying. I know. I mean, okay. So the idea that you get married and you'll never be alone is kind of erroneous, right? Erroneous, yes. Of course. I mean, it doesn't mean that you... It means your dad won. Nothing bad's going to happen to you. It means your dad won. He got to not die alone.  But we do die alone. It's trade off. You do it a lot sooner.  Everybody dies alone. Well, yeah, but there's, you know, degrees of alone.  You know, because they beat him to death. But he wasn't alone. Why would they beat him to death? Oh, that's a whole other show. He was a fishmonger. And so you still believe in an institution called marriage? Well, obviously I do, yeah. Three times. And Dave Cyrus, have you ever been married? No, no. Are you going to get married? Probably not. Have you been in love? Yes. And has that person been in love with you? Oh, yeah. Too much. And what do you fear about marriage? Oh, well, every time I picture it, it is like I'm picturing being buried alive. Yes, it's exactly like that. To be perfectly honest. And I'm not against the concept of it. I've just never been comfortable with the idea of it. Every time I've thought of it, I can't breathe. But it's also because, you know, maybe I just haven't been in the right mindset. Maybe someday I will. I don't know. Maybe I just haven't dated the right people. I can't tell you, but I've never even come close to even considering marrying someone. Are you wondering his age like I am held to you? 38. Just 38? Yes, it's. I'm so sorry for condescending to you all this time. No, no, it's pretty. Yeah. I mean, it was inward, but you know. No, yeah, no, I'm a lucky guy in that way. Yeah, I look a little. And do you fear dying alone? No, I don't.  I mean, I sort of feel like, you know, I have thoughts where I'm just like, well, I hope my sister has kids I could have like Thanksgiving with when I'm really old. But that's like about as far as it goes for me. I'm always just thinking there's just no way that the amount of money I'm going to spend is going to be made up for in the needs of when I'm old. You know what I mean? Like I feel like if I, every man in my family agrees, if I didn't have kids, I'd be better off. Like one Thanksgiving, they said, what are you thankful for? And I said to be the oldest unmarried man in this family.  That's a terrible thing to say. Every married man, besides the gay uncle, every married man started clapping. Hmm. Do you know anybody who's happily married? Yes. Yeah, I have friends. I have friends who, they seem to be very happy. They have married, they have kids. But there are also guys I knew who were the marrying types, guys who always needed to be in relationships to be happy, to an extent. So I think that's part of it. I'm going to my high school reunion. Really? 40th. It's about that. Tonight? Yes. How about that? Are you looking forward to it? Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I thought of hiring John Fugel saying to go as me, like where the David Feldman name tag. Wow. And then I thought of Tony from the triumph show, the fake Roger Ailes. Oh yeah. Yeah. I thought of hiring him to go as me. Because, right, because if he's fat and bald enough, they can believe it too. Yeah. Guys, fallen apart enough, he could have been anyone once. Right. I actually thought of doing both. I have an idea for a movie. It's Crazy Love Meets Cyrano. You ever see the documentary, Crazy Love? Crazy Love, no, I don't think so. Come on, New York City Crime Report. Crime Report, New York City. The guy who was in love with a woman. This isn't from the 60s. And he was in love with this woman and she wouldn't. Oh yes, and he set her on fire. It was like an, I got it, like he beat her up or something like that. He was in jail for a long time. What's a beautiful love story? You are correct in that it's a beautiful love story. Oh, I guess I had it wrong.  So she would be blinded. It's a great documentary. I do need to see that. You're right, I've heard about that. Oh, you love it. So how does it meet Cyrano? Well, hang on. And what happens is, he goes to prison. He was a lawyer and he threw lie in her face. I think they're Jewish, which makes it really funny. And she's blind. And when he gets out of prison, they marry. Wow. And she just has a happy ending. Well, and they interview them and they're like, you know, as far as marriages go, it's no worse than the other. You know, yes, I was so in love with you. I didn't want anybody else to have you. So I hired somebody to blind you. I went to prison. And she's blind and scarred? Yeah. Wow. Well, long game is what this guy's doing. Well, I mean, if you're going to try negging, what you might as well go all the way. Right. If a plan works, it works. Right. Half measures don't do anything. So here's my idea for a movie. So my friends are, I went to Dwight Morrow High School in Angle of New Jersey. And my friends are arranging this reunion. And I said, my first idea was to hire a male model and stay home and bang them. No, my first, why don't I get a male model or like John Fugl saying who's incredibly good looking to show up with David Feldman nametag. And I started playing this out. Well, what's the benefit to having a good looking guy hit on all the women I spanked it to? And then I started going, well, Sirono meets crazy love. So then what happens is he hits on the beautiful girls and then one of them goes blind and curiously goes blind, curiously goes blind. Okay. And I move in cause she thinks I look like Fugl saying now. And I'm plausible plausible.  And I'm torn because if she can see, then she realizes who she's sharing a bed with. And Fugl saying is getting tired of showing up and just pretending to be like talking and stuff like that, right? Cause they'll start to stand behind him. And I mean, it's his voice she's become accustomed to. I guess that's, we're going to smooth over that little part where I'm looking. Yeah, I haven't quite figured that out. But I am going to my reunion tonight. You could murder Fugl saying. Yes. Use his skin. Yes. Just like skin him and then wear his skin. Well, you know, I could do that. I wouldn't even want to bang one of these girls from my school. That just sounds like a fun thing to do.  I would have no problem with a reunion. Yeah, man. He could bang anything at a 40th at anybody's 40th reunion. I would have no problem at that point. John Fugl saying, like John Fugl saying is wasted on John Fugl saying he's married, he's got a kid. He's wholesome. I look at him. I go, if I were you, I would not be me. Well, sort of like you saw that documentary the way that like some people see World War II movies and they're just like, Oh God, if I'm ever back in the 40s, I'm going to tell Hitler exactly what he did wrong. Cause this guy was this guy almost at it.  On and off.  I mean, not, not steady. Oh, okay. He's a great comedy writer. Obviously. And I've seen him roast and he was saying, he was like just a grand slam after grand slam, you know, what it was hard to do. He was slamming breakfasts at Denny's while you're supposed to be roasting. You need a single, a couple, you know what I mean? So both of the bases gotta get loaded and stuff like that. He's just like, it's weird. It's like four points every four points, I say. In baseball, they keep it in points. Listen, Fugles thing likes my wife. Big fan of Mandy. Who isn't? Has her on the show all the time. I wanted her on the show. That's the only reason I get to do the show. All right. Maybe she could come alone. She'd come by herself. Oh, that's all right. And she talks about the marriage and what it's like. She does do that, yeah. That's also what David tells every female guest. What? Come alone. Here's another thing you can do. It is like, I think this now and you asked me, what's the benefit of being married, right? I think because when you're married, you can complain. If you have a girlfriend, you shouldn't be complaining about her. First of all, nobody cares.   Because when someone's complaining with their girlfriend, they're asking you to do some complicated math here. You know what I mean?   And then that'll give them to stop complaining. If you're married, complain away because you're complaining about an institution, a life, a whole cage that you're locked into, this whole system. Well, it's also because when you get married, that's the moment when your friend stops seeing your girlfriend as a potential someone to fuck. Yeah. That's what it takes. That's when they actually start treating your girlfriend like a real person. And yeah, and this is, you're right about that. And that's something that like people really don't, I don't think take into account. I don't think people really do. You know what I mean? I really don't think people just, it's not something you talk about, but it's true. You're right.    So if you're not married to a woman, a friend will move in on her. Often. Yeah. He doesn't move in necessarily, but it's like water. It seeps into any crack that's there. Yeah.  Or whatever, she's one of those kind of girls. A lot of women need a lot of attention and a lot of reinforcement and a lot of being told that there's something.  I want to find out about women, so I'm so glad we don't have any here. So you can't learn anything with women around. But also, if it's your friend, I believe they'd be ruining it.  So I think a lot of guys see that, like, well, I already know this girl. The hardest part's gone. I'm not some rapist on the street. Yeah, you're right. The whole time that you're friends with that guy and that girl, it's like a big, long first date. Yeah. Like, okay, seems all right. Now, she will sleep with you. You're the friend, right? Yeah. And she's in a relationship with your friend. Yeah, okay. And she sleeps with you, not for pleasure, other than humiliating her boyfriend.  And that just naturally is gonna happen when you're around. Well, and usually the relationship has been going bad for a while. It's been rotting on the vine. You know, the guy's been waiting for that low-hanging fruit to just drop.  But I'm assuming that the woman is, it's us, right? So we're not like great-looking guys. She's sleeping with the friend, not for the thrill of the orgasm, but for the thrill of humiliating the guy who she feels has been... But that's what I'm saying, there is some. I don't think it's all that.   Yeah.   You know what I mean? Because think about it, who wouldn't you fuck? I mean, what are your standards?   Not 10 out of 10. And you know, so that being the case when you forgive that in yourself, well, you're no different. But women don't want to have as much sex as men do. Yeah, but there's standards of what I'm talking about, who they would or wouldn't.  Of course they do. Yeah, they want sex. No, they don't want sex. They just have slightly more control over themselves than we do. So by our standards, they don't.   But women know the consequences of sex. So they really don't want to have sex. Well, they are built in, I think it's a biological thing. They have that risk of getting pregnant and having to deal with that forever. Right, they don't have the choice. They have to be more discerning.  And so they're not, and I'm so glad there are no women here, so we can discuss this. They're not walking around thinking about sex every 10 seconds. I don't know what goes on in a woman's head. It's really hard to say. It's really hard to say. I know women like that. Who are just constantly thinking about sex. Yeah. As much as we do, yeah.  We go hours at a time with other things interesting us. But I mean, I knew women who said that they would. The only time I don't think about sex is when I'm looking at porn. Yeah, it's funny, right?  I know girls who said in high school they had to take two, three breaks over the course of a day to go to the bathroom and rub one out. Wow, who are these women? Yeah, that was my ex. Where's this bathroom? The crazy ex, right? Yeah. Yeah, you had a nightmare ex who was crazy. Loved you too much. But aren't they saying that just to... No, no, this one was real. This girl definitely meant it. I've had girls where like, especially when I was younger and I wasn't like, you know, I wasn't like completely a man yet where I would be intimidated because girls would just have things where they, you know, like when you just lost your virginity and they're just like, hey, meet my dorm at four.  We got to be at the door by five for this dinner. Like when I was a kid, that was scary. I mean, now as a guy, you're like, that's ideal, but... Oh, I wouldn't show up for that. Really? Yeah, say what? Oh, you're telling me? No, I don't know if I can make that. Find somebody else. I think, is it fair to say women enjoy sex? They love it the way they love a really expensive meal. You can't have it all the time. That's interesting. They like quality rather than quantity. I don't know. We're all only, the only reason anybody has sex is money, right? Okay, go on.  That's what they were looking around. You know what I mean? The providers, right? Because in the old days, it was strength, physical strength. That was what equated with protection and strength. Now a guy like you, arguably not as strong as your average caveman, I think that you might not be roided out at the moment. You know what I mean? I don't know if you are. Kickboxing expires the Roids? Yes. Do you have Roids? Are you telling me? Steroids. Oh, steroids. But a woman could look at you and go, well, that guy clearly, you know, has money. You know what I mean? He has some power. He has some status. He has some success. I don't have money. Yeah, but they could look at you with that false choice, you know what I mean? They could, one could assume that about you. Is it the hair plugs? They figure he had the money for the hair plugs. The Jew thing. The Jew thing. You have status. And yeah, you have status. You're well-dressed. You're, you know, but what I'm saying is, a woman could conceivably be attracted to you, conceivably, based on the fact that she thinks. What about my face, though? It doesn't matter. It's all, well, your face, does it project confidence? Does it project like, I own this room a little bit.  Crowsfeeds and feats? None of that matters. Crowsfeeds, that's because it's been working so hard to get all that money. So women see you as a mate for that reason, let's say that.  And so they're selective. They're going like, who has money, status, power, and that's who they want to have sex with.  That's like. That's how their instinct interprets power. Different people interpret power different ways. So for some women, it still is the big strong guy. For some women, it's the guy who knows how to use his mind. And for some women, it's both.  So let me get this. Yeah. Let me, let me, hang on. I'm not as smart as you on this. So if you're, don't have any money, you say I'm broke, but I can fist you in this. Or. It's the fact that you're willing to that makes them impressed. And are you sitting on a Harley at the moment? That matters too. I can't afford a Harley, but I will fist you in this. The perfect example of this is why are women attracted to serial killers? It's because those women misinterpreted their natural instinct to be attracted to power. And to some women, the willingness to just murder people is what power is. Well, yeah. It's a minority, but it's the same principle. That's a power and charisma, a power and charm. Slow down. I am not as insightful. I don't understand women the way you do. Okay. Of course you don't. My whole point is that like everybody has sex in order to just do the next thing. Right? Because like, there's some reward inherent in it. It isn't just like, I want to be. What about the orgasm?  Yeah. It's, it isn't, it isn't about that. It isn't about that at all. That's not about the orgasm. That's why women don't always care if they come. Well, women don't always care. Sometimes, sometimes women don't care. If sex was always about the orgasm, why have I regretted every single time I've come? I've never been happy with myself for when I came. Like every time I've ever come with a girl, I'm always apologizing right afterward and thinking, oh, that wasn't the right, that wasn't the right moment to do that. Yeah. Really? Yeah. Sometimes even wakes her up to tell her.  This is why people of your age, in my age, I'm older than you. A little older. I'm 58.  We're practically not even in the same generation. Yeah. I'm so old when I was looking for tail, the women actually had tails. All right, boy, that's another era. Let me tell you what. Like you said, you're so old that you remember when Beaver made sense as the word for vagina. I remember the one that was a lot of hair on the pussy. Yeah, exactly. Do you remember that at all? I've known girls like that. We're each like about 10 years apart almost. I'm not 10 years older than you. But a little bit older. I've known individual girls who were like that because they were more, you know, you'd say bohemian type women who didn't feel the need to groom themselves. And I appreciate that. What are we talking about? They're trying to make a point. What are we talking about here?  No, we're talking about hair on the beat.  Right, and I want to make a joke and I don't know how to do it. We're implying that none of the women I've ever seen have pubic hair, but it's because of the hair. Because of the hair. I'm trying to tell it. That was worth the journey. I gotta say.  That was worth the journey, dude. What? I know, and I'm saying, how can I, like I'm not even listening to you guys. How can I delicately imply that it's under, okay, so go ahead, I'm sorry. Well, I mean, there's really nothing more to say except that like, there's so much misunderstanding.  Guys need to get that to their head. Yes. You know what I mean? Rape is not okay. Rape is not even a strong enough word for how bad that is. It's theft. It's stealing.  It doesn't belong to you. It belongs to her husband. It belongs to her, and if she's not married, it belongs to her dad. Her father, that's in the Bible. And if it's not to him, it's a paternal uncle, and then I think it goes to the banks after that. The Jews get all the pussy if no one claims it. That's how they got you. But Rape is not okay. That's why they call us fishmongers. Yes, I do, I do agree with the fake premise. We do need to have a little bit more of consensual culture. The New York City. CrimeReport.nyc, I hope the fans will go there. You'll come back and you're the guy in the cage who I want to study. Oh, you should study everything that I say. When will you come do my show? I will come and do it, and we're gonna wrap it up. Let me just say something. This is a podcast, and I find it interesting to hear what they're thinking. There are things that I'm in a bubble, and I don't get to hear this. I love how you have to apologize for having me on every time I'm here. I'm gonna get a lot of complaints. Why? I get it, I get it. Because it's radio. I'm gonna get complaints because I'm giving voice.  But I think the refutation is actually implied. So I think that give Dave the credit that he's sitting here smirking at me and trust me, I don't believe that he agrees with anything I say.  Stop listening. No, no, no, keep listening. But look, if you ride a bike, walk it. Yeah, you're good people. Dave Cyrus. Hi. Let's plug some gigs. What's going on? Yeah, whenever I'm doing the comic strip Monday, if this is even out by then, and just look at my Twitter, I'll be posting when and where. Okay. Dave Cyrus, S-I-R-U-S. Pat Dixon? Yes. Gigs? Well, I have the last Tuesday of every month, people should come to New York Comedy Club and see last Tuesday, and most importantly, and Nick Apollo, by the way, that's coming Tuesday after there, whatever, you know? I have to have Nick on the show. I love Nick. From the show Briss Studios in downtown Manhattan, that'll do it for us. Coming up later in the show, John Egan, the publisher of the Berard Street Journal, and I, talk about fake news. Remember to friend me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, do all your Amazon shopping via our website. Now, my conversation with Professor David Ferris on The Democrats Fighting Dirty. I've said since this election that if Donald Trump offers up a $1 trillion moonshot to cure cancer, we tell him to shove it where the sun don't shine. And I'm not talking about Seattle, Washington. Do a recount, fight Trump every step of the way, nip him in the bud before he even swears on the Bible. Stop any person or party that uses racism and xenophobia and misogyny to seize power, really seizing power for the sole purpose of enriching his loyalists, his thuggish loyalists. There's a piece in the week entitled, It's Time for the Democrats to Fight Dirty. It's upsetting a lot of conservatives, including the National Review. The National Review was appalled by what our guest, Professor David Ferris has to say. In Professor Ferris's opinion piece for the week, he says that Democrats must take a page from the GOP playbook and say no to everything. And that means everything. He says that Democrats need to understand that the American voter respects and rewards parties that demonstrate oppositional behavior. That defiance is not what weakens the GOP but makes it stronger, which is why the Republican Party has more power now than at any other time since the Great Depression. Professor David Ferris teaches political science at Roosevelt University. He's the author of Descent and Revolution in a Digital Age, Social Media Blogging and Activism in Egypt. That's the title of the book. Descent and Revolution in a Digital Age, Social Media Blogging and Activism in Egypt. He's a frequent contributor to informed comment and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Wiki joins us today from Chicago. Thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. There's a potential gambit to get Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court if the Democrats displayed a pair of Cajones. Who is Merrick Garland? Why is it outrageous that he's not even being considered for the Supreme Court? And what could the Democrats in the Senate do before Trump gets inaugurated? Merrick Garland, of course, is President Obama's nominee to fill the vacant Supreme Court seats that was left open when Scalia died earlier this year. And before Scalia's body was even cold, the Republicans said that they would not even hold hearings for anyone that Obama nominated. The line was that, you know, we want to make sure that the American people have a chance to choose the next Supreme Court justice. That's a novel reading of a constitutional doctrine. And it's really unprecedented because never before in modern history has a Supreme Court nominee been blocked like this in the sense that the opposition party won't even bother to hold hearings on him. And that was really, I think, an outrageous escalation of the kind of procedural warfare we've been seeing in the Senate and the House of Representatives over the last 20 or 30 years. It was a very serious escalation because what it allowed the Republicans to do is to effectively steal the swing seat on the Supreme Court that is in all likelihood Donald Trump will be able to fill that seat with one of his nominees and they're likely to be kind of an arch-conservative like Scalia was. So it's a tragedy from the perspective of progressive governance, but it's also outrageous. You know, there's no law that says presidents only get X number of Supreme Court nominees per term, right? That's not in the Constitution. And so how many you get to fill is dependent on, you know, how many vacancies there are during your presidency. And Obama was lucky enough to have three and he only got to fill two. If the Democrats took a page from the GOP playbook as you suggest, what could they do before the inauguration? I've read a piece by David Waldman who says before the incoming senators are sworn in on January 3rd, the actual composition of the U.S. Senate, that is the people whose terms have not expired is 67 senators, 34 of them Democrats or 32 of them Democrats and two independents. So what could conceivably be done is that the remaining members of the Senate, the Democratic Senate could gavel in a session on January 3rd before the new senators are sworn in and confirm Merrick Garland's with their 34 seat majority and they would have a quorum. And so that's a pretty, that would also be an escalation of the kind of constitutional hardball we've been seeing. Okay, give me this again. So how does this work? How many, so how many United States senators would there be at the time of this vote? At the time of this vote, there would be 67 U.S. senators because the Senate reelects about a third of its membership every two years. Yeah, it just so happens that the Republicans were defending more seats this year. That's why we thought, that's why we thought we had a very chance of taking the Senate. There are 33 senators missing because there aren't 33 new senators about to be sworn in, are there? No, but even if you're reelected, you have to be re-sworn in, like your term expires and then you have to be sworn in to take your seat in the U.S. Senate. So for instance, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, his term will expire. And so before he's sworn back into the Senate, there's technically nobody in that seat. If that makes sense. Oh, I see, I see. And has this ever been done before? Absolutely not, no. Okay, so this is never gonna happen. And it would in all likelihood, it would probably cause a constitutional crisis of some sort. Obviously this is never gonna happen. Would the Republicans do that though? That's the question. I mean. Who were on the other tiny foot with the Republicans? Yeah, I'm at the point where I'm, you know, I'm not sure that there's anything that the Republican Party would not do to take advantage of some of the procedural quirks of the Constitution to get their way. A larger question maybe for another show would be if it would precipitate a constitutional crisis, maybe that's a good thing, right?  Yeah, there's a lot of things that are deeply wrong with our Constitution. I mean, but the overarching problem to me is that we're using an operating system for a huge complex 320 million person modern society that was designed in the 18th century before the Industrial Revolution. And many of the elements of our Constitution are not spelled out. You know, the Constitution has a set of formal rules. One of them is, of course, that the Senate gets to provide advice and consent on the president's nominees, but it doesn't do anything else to guide us about what are their obligations, just to have to happen in a timely fashion, is it possible for the Senate to just say we will not consider this person? These are normative rules, right? These are expectations rather than obligations. And the fact that so many of the procedures that we use to pass legislation in this country and to appoint people to particular offices, the fact that those are norms rather than rules makes them very vulnerable to exploitation and obstruction, which is precisely the process we've been seeing over the past 30 years. And it's not exclusively a Republican phenomenon. The Democrats did escalate things between 2007 and 2009, but the Republicans took it to just to a completely different level. Yeah, are you optimistic? I have so many questions I wanna ask you, and this is not what I wanted to ask you, but there's a part of me that is optimistic that this creaky old Constitution that doesn't work might actually thwart Donald Trump. Well, there is an extent to which, unless the Republicans are willing to completely eliminate the filibuster in the U.S. Senate, that the Democrats will have some power to obstruct his legislative agenda. The filibuster isn't part of the Constitution, right? No, it's not. The filibuster is just a Senate rule. And Senate rules can be discarded by just the majority. And the filibuster is of course one of those norms that throughout most of the modern history of the United States, the filibuster was used only in very extraordinary circumstances and generally to make a point about some piece of legislation that the senator thought was outrageous or really wanted to draw attention to something. And often the use of the filibuster was often used by people like Strom Thurmond to obstruct progressive goals. And it wasn't until really the 1990s that the filibuster started getting used to obstruct what used to be really routine stuff. And I'm thinking of nominations to the federal judiciary, you know, the district courts. That's the lowest level of the federal court system. And Republicans started holding these nominations up under President Clinton. And of course they've just really escalated that under President Obama. So that processes that used to take a few days now take weeks or months even. The average waiting time for a judicial vacancy under Obama was 120 days. And that's just absurd. Not at all what the framers of the constitution intended. It's not in keeping I think with the functional democratic society to have your legislators holding up nominations for no reason, right? Just the purpose is to slow things down. So with the Senate- It doesn't need any ideological goal. The filibuster only works on certain bills that require 60 or more votes, right? If it's a majority vote, then the filibuster has no power. Well, the filibuster can be used for anything, really. You could threaten a filibuster on a certain bill if that bill only needs a majority in the Senate, that threat has no power. No, I mean, actually the way things have developed is that you no longer need to go out onto the Senate floor and read from war and peace for 15 hours to filibuster. What you do is you notify the Senate leadership in writing through what's called a hold in the Senate that you intend to filibuster a bill. And then it really places the onus on the majority to produce the 60 votes, that is to produce enough votes to invoke cloture rather than on the minority to hold the floor with 41 or more votes. And so this practice has really metastasized in recent years where senators will just place a hold on almost every bill and almost every nomination that goes to the Senate. Somebody puts a hold on it. And that really slows down the business of the Senate, I think, in a deeply unnecessary way. In spite of the article that I wrote, I am deeply in favor generally of getting the leadership of the parties together and really doing some deep reform of how the U.S. Senate works. I just don't want that to be right now. When the Democrats are in charge. Right, or I mean, it's the kind of thing it's like I'd be willing to do really pervasive reform of Senate rules to make things easier for this majority even if there was some kind of compromise candidate through the Supreme Court, right? Absent that I'm in favor of pretty obstructive partisan warfare for at least the next two years. For the next two years, you write, do nothing. You write the Democrats must not give the imprimatur of legitimacy to the hands of the Info Wars acolyte who's about to take the oath of office, not to get some highways built, not to renegotiate NAFTA, not to do anything. So you're saying what I believe, which is no, no, no, no, just nothing. Give them nothing. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it helps to me that I don't think that there's gonna be much of anything worthwhile to say yes to. I think that there was some hope that maybe Trump would put forward some sort of an infrastructure bill that Democrats have wanted for a long time. But stories that have leaked out suggest that any Trump infrastructure bill would be heavily structured around public-private partnerships and the kind that have been so destructive here in my city of Chicago where previous mayors of this town sold off pieces of public infrastructure to private investors. You know, to fill like a one-time hole in the budget, but these things are not generally speaking in the public interest. So I do think that in almost every case, the Democratic obstructionism will in fact be in keeping with the values of the party. Like nobody's gonna be putting a serious progressive or humane immigration bill before Congress right now. So it's not like Democrats are gonna be tempted to work with Trump. I think his cabinet appointments suggest that he is in the process of putting together one of the most right-wing administrations in the history of this country. Yeah, in 2009, President Obama passed a $900 billion stimulus bill. And a lot of those projects had to be shovel-ready and Joe Biden was in charge to make sure there was no corruption. Right. Cylindra, not withstanding. That was a pretty successful stimulus bill, right? There was very little corruption that they were able to prove. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, the Obama administration was very sensitive to the perception of corruption. And I do think that they worked very hard to keep graft to the absolute minimum, I think, that's possible in our system. And I think most economists, most mainstream economists look at the stimulus and they argue that it was one of the factors that prevented us from falling into either an even deeper recession or perhaps another great depression. So I think all things considered that that stimulus bill was very successful. But that's because money was being spent, right? I mean, if the player needs to have private companies investing in infrastructure, you're really just empowering a set of rent seekers who will be profiting off of public money, but over whom we will have very little control over how these things get built and where they get built. And I just think it's the wrong way to go about infrastructure spending. It doesn't keep me up at night. The thought of saying no to that doesn't keep me up at night. We have desperate infrastructure needs in this country, but I don't think that the people running the country as of January are at all interested in making those investments where they really need to be made. They wanna do what George W. Bush did after Katrina, which was reward Halliburton. Absolutely, yeah. And it's particularly troubling because the president-elect of the United States has so many ties into different sectors of the economy. I don't know if you saw this this morning, but he went on a Twitter rant against Boeing of all companies saying that the contract for the next Air Force One set of aircraft was too expensive. And of course, the facts that he used were wrong, but he also affected the stock price of Boeing. And because we don't really have any real insight into Donald Trump's internal financial universe, we have no idea whether he has an interest in other airplane construction companies or if you have a beef with Boeing. And this is the kind of conflict of interest that we're just gonna be dealing with constantly over the next four years. And it's almost impossible for me to see him overseeing an infrastructure bill that doesn't explicitly and purposefully benefit his allies in some way. His nominee for defense sits on the board of directors of General Dynamics. So I would assume General Dynamics will profit from defense spending the same way Halliburton profited from Dick Cheney's eight years as president. Absolutely, absolutely. You know, I think that the next four years are gonna make the Bush years look like a model of clean governance. You know, I think that the problems are about to get so much worse. They're gonna get so much worse. Yeah, they're gonna get so much worse because one of the things we've learned from Clinton was to a paper dump on a Friday. You know, give them everything. If the special prosecutor wants information, give them so much stuff they can't even process. All right, deliver 10,000 cardboard boxes full of files to the office, right? Maybe sort through it. And what Trump is doing right now, and it's just pure evil, is Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon, is now being considered for state. I know, absurd, like through the looking glass stuff, you know. And the fact that the evil genius of that is it just makes our heads spin so much that we can't really pay attention to what he's really doing. That he's just throwing- Yeah, we're all sitting through an episode of The Apprentice right now, you know. And the Secretary of State stuff is just absurd, we're heading towards mid-December here. And I think he's using this process, particularly the state process as a kind of subterfuge to keep us distracted in as many directions as possible. Yeah, I don't think we have institutions anymore that are equipped to deal with this. This is what's so terrifying about it, is you really cannot trust the institutions. The same way you couldn't trust Rince Priebus and the Republican Party to stop Trump. Everybody said, oh, don't worry, don't worry. There are levers controlled in place at the Republican Party to stop Trump. There's no there there. No, absolutely not. And the Republican Party, at least it's elected leaders. They folded like cheap beach chairs, you know, one by one, once it became clear that he was gonna be the nominee. And since he's been elected, of course, even more have come on board. What about Elizabeth Warren? Do you write in your piece that Elizabeth Warren is willing to work with Trump? I found that disappointing. Well, you know, the same thing happens after every election, right? Is that the people who were just elected or the leaders of the parties, they got up and they pay lip service to bipartisanship. I don't even remember Mitch McConnell's speech after 2012, I think it was. And he got up and he gave this beautiful speech about how he was willing to work with the other party and ready to get to work. And of course, none of that was true. And I do think there's an extent to which, you know, Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and this is sort of the institutional leadership of the Democratic Party, they do have to get up in front of the cameras and say like, you know, of course, we're willing to work with President Trump when the opportunity arises. Like I don't think that they can get up and explicitly say that we're gonna sit on our hands for years and do nothing. I don't think that they will sign off. Like I don't think that the party is gonna sign off on a set of really bad bills to make them slightly worse. I think that there is sort of an emerging realization in the party that Republican obstructionism worked under Obama and particularly because Democrats are in the minority in both the Senate and the House, you know, on a lot of stuff, the Republicans aren't gonna need any of our votes to make things happen. So I don't see the, at least while we're in the minority in both chambers, I don't really see the cost of kind of sticking together, offering the American people a very clear alternative and making Trump look as hapless as possible. Of course, he's gonna do a lot of that on his own, but I think that we can do a lot to make him look worse by slowing things down and making it look ugly and imprecise it the way that the Republicans just did us. One of the reasons I called you, this article was just amazing, but this is something that I've never read before and it's something that infuriates me whenever I talk to my liberal friends and that is my liberal friends constantly say, you know, if we give George W. Bush enough rope, he'll hang himself. If we give Trump enough rope, he'll hang himself. And you write that the Democrats have learned the wrong lessons from the government shutdown in 95 and the impeachment of Bill Clinton because that seems to be the Rosetta Stone of give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves. That all my liberal friends point to Newt Gingrich and then the impeachment as an example of what happens when you give the Republicans enough rope, you write that's not what happened. Right, and I think this is the danger of drawing really firm conclusions about American politics from one or two examples. If you look at the government shutdown in 95, there's really absolutely no evidence whatsoever that the voters cared about this at all or that they marched to the polls in 96 a year later to punish the House Republicans for their misbehavior. I think the data suggests, in fact, the opposite that voters were really just endorsing a growing economy under President Clinton. That's the reason that he was popular. That's the reason he won the election by eight and a half points. I don't think voters even remembered. By the time they voted in 96, I very seriously doubt that there was more than a handful of voters in the entire country who got out of bed that day on election day 96 and said, I'm gonna go vote for Bill Clinton to punish Newt Gingrich. I just don't think that that's what happened. If you look at 98, it was unusual in the sense that the President's party did not lose seats that year, in fact, gained a few seats. And the lesson was the voters are punishing the Republicans for impeachment. Well, okay, maybe they were. Then you could say that the impeachment of Clinton was unnecessary, it went too far, it was suicidal because Clinton was popular at the time. But that doesn't say anything about all of the other sort of routine ways that parties can obstruct legislation that's made its way through Congress without actually impeaching the President. And I think if you look at the 2000s, all of this week for the last 16 years, I don't think that you get any confirmation of the idea that voters punish obstruction of behavior in Congress. In fact, the opposite. If you look at the first few years of Bush's presidency, Democrats were very cooperative in the first couple of years of the Bush presidency. Not in the sense that they were endorsing every single thing that was coming down the pike, right? But I think that there was, particularly in the wake of 9-11, more cooperation than usual between the two parties. And the reward that they got for that was they got slammed in the 2002 midterm. And then they lost the 2004 election. And they saw all of these sort of vulnerable Blue Dog Democrats, people like Max Cleland, lose their seats in spite of sort of maintaining the centrist position of being willing to work with the Republicans and so on and so forth. And so once the Democrats really kind of woke up and in my mind and started acting like a parliamentary minority, that is sort of unified opposition to Bush after the 2004 elections, that's when they started to win. That's when they won in 2006. There was no economic crisis in 2006 that could explain the Democrats sweeping into power in Congress. It was the unpopular to the Iraq war, primarily. And the fact that the Democratic caucus in the Senate and the House was able to maintain unity against the war and against Bush's policies, I think is what brought them to power. What role did Dennis Hastert turning a blind eye to Mark Foley's pedophilia in 2006? What role did that play to the Republicans losing the House? I think, you know, I don't think that, I don't think that they lost the election because of Foley. I think that they, I think they lost the election primarily because of the Iraq war. I think that the perceived corruption of the House Republicans at the time was definitely a factor. You know, this was during the Abramoff years. You know, there's all these stories about the various financial scandals from the House majority. And I do think that that caused them. And certainly one of the things the Democrats want to be very careful about as they head to the minority for the foreseeable future is to stay as clean as possible. And then that's easier because they're not running anything. But I think corruption is a different issue than obstruction, right? That is, you can use the procedural quirks of our constitution to slow things down for Trump. You can offer the American people a very clear alternative in terms of the set of policies to pursue. But if you're seen as corrupt, right? That's a different issue. And I do think that the Democrats should be ruthlessly publicizing any instance of perceived corruption either in the president himself or in the ways that the House and Senate majorities are implementing his agenda. That needs to be one of the primary things that they highlight.  And the good thing is I think that all three of those things will actually be true. Yes, Jason Chat, I always have a block on pronouncing his name, Jason Chaffetz. He's the chairman of the House Oversight Committee. Right, yeah. And I don't think he's gonna be doing much overseeing of anything over the next couple of years. Chaffetz is really the ringleader in my mind of a group of House Republicans who simply did not take their oversight, roll very seriously after they took the majority in 2010. The obsessive focus on what I think is a very minor tragedy in Benghazi, not to say it wasn't a tragedy, but it certainly did not need to take up four years in counting of House oversight time. They didn't take it seriously. There were things to oversee in the Obama administration, right? I think the drone warfare policy desperately needed to be random or overseen by Congress and they just simply did not wanna do that. They wanted to harp on these quote unquote scandals until such time as they did actual damage to Hillary Clinton and damage to the Democrats reputation. What is the Freedom Caucus? Before Trump's, I guess, his election, if you wanna believe what you're reading, the Freedom Caucus was losing all its power in the lead up to the presidential election. What is the Freedom Caucus and is it gonna have power? The Freedom Caucus is a group of, we're not gonna know how many people exactly are in it until the new Congress takes its seats, but a group of about 40 House Republicans who are sort of extreme hardliners about the budget. The Freedom Caucus was the driving force behind the sort of brinkmanship around the debt ceiling. They were the driving force behind shutting down the federal government in 2011, I'm sorry, 2013. And they seem to be a set of folks who are willing to shoot the hostage. You know what I mean? They got, Bainer pretty much quit show business because of the Freedom Caucus. Right, and there's some irony there, right? I mean, John Bainer was one of the Gingrich radicals and by 2012, he was one of the more moderate people in the House, unbelievably. So it's the Freedom Caucus folks have really outflanked what remains of the moderate wing of the Republican Party. How old is the Freedom Caucus? You know, I don't know that off the top of my head. But it's a new, they're... It's a relatively new phenomenon. It's a now growth of the Tea Party. So that is post 2010. You know, there's a history of more radical groups forming in the House and then eventually attaining leadership. You know, Gingrich was originally part of a small group of sort of more radical Republicans in the House starring Reagan who deeply resented the way that the Republican minority leadership was working with Tip O'Neill and the Democrats and wanted to take the Republican strategy in a different direction, right? Gingrich had, his vision was always that you had to make Congress look as bad as possible in order to get people to turn against their own representatives because there's a kind of a central paradox of American politics, which is, you know, the approval rating of Congress is like, 10%, 9%, 11%, it's been drifting around in the teens for years. That is, you know, those are like stalling levels of approval and yet, and yet incumbents in the House win election at rates exceeding 90%, right?  And Gingrich, who was like really like a dark genius in his time before he became super corrupt, was one of the first people to intuit that if you wanted to sweep some of these people out of power, you had to make Congress look corrupt. You had to turn the American people against it. And then finally, they'd be willing to take a chance on somebody else. And that's, I think, exactly what happened in 94. Growing up, Kissinger to me was, you know, a war criminal, my parents, you couldn't even say the name Kissinger in our house. And yet for Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney, when Kissinger was national security advisor, I think state under Gerald Ford, he was too liberal for Donald Rumsfeld. And then when Reagan took office, there were these neo-conservatives who were Reagan Democrats who felt that Reagan was too liberal. The Republican Party just keeps getting further and further to the right. It gets hijacked each election cycle, it seems. Hijacked by more extreme politicians. And the more extreme they get, the more popular they seem to be. But are they really that popular? I mean, if you look at the votes, but for gerrymandering, there would be a democratic house. Well, I think it's, you know, you're right to a certain extent. I don't think it's just gerrymandering. We do have a huge gerrymandering problem, but we also have a problem called partisan sorting, which is the sort of increasing likelihood that you're gonna live around people who think exactly the same as you do. This is the infamous bubble that we're all getting scolded about right now. But there's some truth to that and the extent that if 80% of the Democrats in Illinois live in Chicago, there's almost no way to draw the district lines in such a way that you'd have partisan balance in each one of those districts. But if you added up the number of Americans who voted for a democratic congressman, there'd be a couple million more votes for a democratic house than a Republican house. Yeah, and they're still counting, but that seems likely to be true this year. It was true in 2012. Is that always true? I mean, do we know going back, is that, does that always seem to be the case that more people prefer a democratic house? But because of gerrymandering, we don't have one. Well, it's not that frequent, no. It's this year, it's 2012. But in fact, in 2014 and 2010, Republican House candidates got far more votes than Democrats. So it's something that happens sometimes, but not always. So are we gonna take the wrong lessons? Is our side, the Democrats are conducting a post-mortem. You say that we shouldn't be talking about identity politics, that that's not what destroyed the Democratic Party. How do you do a post-mortem on a body that's still very much alive? I mean, Hillary has two and a half million more votes than Trump. More people voted for a democratic house than a Republican one. Maybe we did everything right, but we're not pulling the proper, we're not fighting, as you say in your article, dirty enough. Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely, there's a real danger here of over-learning the lessons of this election. Right, right. I mean, I think it's worth pointing out that our presidential candidate got more votes, that our House candidates are gonna end up with more votes, and our Senate candidates are gonna end up with more votes. And one of the reasons that progressives and Democrats have such a challenge in front of them is that many of the institutional features of our Constitution give more power to people in rural areas than they do in cities, and they give more power to small states than they do to big states. Nowhere is that more true than in the US Senate, where the 39 million people of California have the same representation as like the 500,000 people of Nebraska, right? And that's a structural challenge. And I do think it's worthwhile for Democrats to think really hard about how we can get people in places like Nebraska to vote for us. And that doesn't mean, in my mind, abandoning our core commitment to minorities and women and LGBTQ folks, I think it's incredibly important that we maintain our commitment to those groups in order to keep our coalition together. But in my mind, there's nothing preventing us from doing rural outreach and coming up with some economic ideas that might appeal to people in these areas to convince them that a more interventionist state is actually in their interest. But it's a challenge. It's extremely frustrating, as I'm sure you know, to win more votes in an election and to come in second. To me. On the face of the earth that does this. That's why I defend the Electoral College because I think there's something wrong with our side. I think that we've been hijacked by people who truly are out of touch. I think the Hollywood liberals, the Goldman Sachs, Wall Street types have taken over the Democratic Party.  People in Hollywood who vote for Clinton and Barack Obama.  People like Ariana Huffington.  That to me is the genius of the Electoral College because the people in Nebraska know that about our party and our side. You say that identity politics isn't what we need to focus on. I think even though we won, I think maybe it's time to take the lesson from Bernie Sanders. When the Black Lives Matters people took the microphone from him and said you're not concerned about us, they were right but he was right too and maybe more right in that if you wanna win an election you gotta lump all 99% of us together in one basket. That to me is how you win a national election not with the identity politics. I don't disagree with you. I think there can be a question of emphasis. There can be a question of how do we speak to people? I do think that we need to maintain our commitment to say systemic criminal justice reform but there are real questions, a strategy about how you emphasize that to different audiences. I think one thing to keep in mind is that one of the big mysteries of American politics is that we're roughly 85 or 90 million eligible voters who chose not to vote in this election and everybody always says they seem so certain about the composition of the electorate, like there's this many white people and there's this many Latinos. The truth is we don't know who these people are that are not voting. We don't know what kind of message might reach them. Certainly true that Bernie May very well have been right that a politics that's broadly committed to clean governance to a vision of joining together in addressing some of our most deeply rooted economic issues, maybe that would have brought more people out to vote, maybe they would have voted for us. I think he would have won and here's my apocalyptic hellscape that I envisioned for the next four years, that we never see the disaster coming. We think we see it, but we don't understand what causes the end of a republic. I think all of us, including the people who are suffering, don't understand the depths of the despair that 99% of Americans feel. There are people who are in severe debt, who are $500 away from losing everything. And when we look back and we're sitting in a, just as I said, some kind of bleak, post-democratic, post-republic society four years from now, we'll all be saying we never really grasped the desperation of the American people because we were all lying to each other and ourselves about our economic frailty because pride got in the way. Well, I don't think we're gonna be able to deny that much longer.  There's not that many people that have things like long-term care insurance. People who think they're comfortable are not actually comfortable if the parents get sick or they get sick. That is why Trump is so dangerous because we think that there are institutions in place to protect us. We think that there are professors, there are journalists, there are bureaucrats well, everybody is in debt, is in trouble and is looking out for themselves. And when you have a country where everybody is afraid of losing their job, everybody is compliant. Everybody will have faith that somebody else will fix this and will go along and say, well, give it two more years and that's why Trump is so dangerous.   Yeah, yeah, yeah.  That's why this is a very dangerous point in American history. Very dangerous. Absolutely, I agree. And I agree with Andrew Sullivan who called this potentially an extinction level event. I think Americans are very complacent about their democracy. I think there's an assumption that authoritarianism couldn't happen here because our institutions are too robust. And I think that that's a huge mistake to be complacent about the overall health of our democracy. And I think it's why the Democrats really need to use their time in the minority to come up with a set of ideas that really addresses the overarching crisis of our time, which is the inability of ordinary human beings to share in broader economic prosperity that seems to be going only to the top. The kind of uberification of everything. That is, you have the elites in Silicon Valley who are profiting off of technological innovation and then you have these broad swaths of people who seem to be just like unnecessary, right? And what do we have to say to those people? What was the message of our campaign this year to those kind of people? I think we really need to think hard about that. You right. And when this moment finally presents itself, you're talking about the Democratic Party finding its roots. You say in 2022 or 2024, 2028, you say that the Democrats must have an extraordinarily radical agenda ready to roll. You say a massive amnesty. That would be for undocumented workers? Yes, yeah. A new Voting Rights Act, sweeping criminal justice reform, Medicare for all, higher education whose cost is truly nominal, a Marshall Plan for Climate Change, basic income for all Americans. Is that, did Nixon talk about something like that? I do think Nixon kicked the idea around remarkable and retrospect what a liberal Nixon was in comparison to the Republicans who were- What do you mean a basic income for all Americans? What does that mean? A basic income is at this time a fairly radical idea. But the idea is that the state provides a sort of assistance level income to everyone in society as a way of fighting things like homelessness and poverty. It remains radical and it remains largely an untested idea. But there are economists who think it's a good idea and it's about to get a tryout in Finland starting next year. So we should have some evidence about how this will actually work from our friends in Scandinavia who have been pioneers now of so many different kinds of progressive policies. And I think it would be an extraordinarily difficult sell. But I also think people who say that we need to start off with extremely bold proposals before we compromise on them really have a point. I think a basic income is one of those ideas. Something like a Robin Hood tax is also another idea that I think the Democrats really need to get behind and push that's a tax, a tiny little tax on every financial transaction as a way of redistributing wealth away from the sort of Wall Street crowd to ordinary human beings that we can use that money to spend on things like infrastructure. I agree with you on compulsory voting. Why not a draft? Why not everybody has to serve in the military for two years? Yeah, I'm not opposed to some kind of national service. My fear from a draft is I don't personally wanna make the military apparatus in this country any larger. I'd rather see people drafted into, some people drafted into the military and some people have to perform a couple years of service to the country in other capacities after they turn 18. So 18 to 20, you'd either be in the military, you'd be doing some kind of service, like a domestic peace corps or something like that. No, no. With all due respect, Professor, if you wanna make the military smaller and if you wanna stop adventurism overseas, everybody has to serve in the military for two years. Everybody has to see how incompetent our generals are. Everybody has to learn that the military can't keep its promises. Because of World War II, we had an entire generation of men and women who knew how dangerous the people in charge were because they served under them. That's the benefit of a mandatory draft. Well, I can go on and on and I often have. Professor David Ferris has a great article in the week about saying no to everything Donald Trump wants and I agree with you 100%. He's a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and his latest book is Descent and Revolution in a Digital Age, Social Media, Blogging and Activism in Egypt. How can people buy that book? You can just proceed straight to Amazon. There's a paperback version of that book out. It's still obscenely expensive by ordinary standards, but the scholarly publishing industry is what it is. But yeah, it's on Amazon and still available as far as I know. Great, and if people wanna follow you on Twitter. On Twitter yet, I'm at David M. as in Michael, David M. Ferris. Yeah, I encourage everybody to follow me on Twitter. It's either a fun space or the darkest place on the face of the earth. I'm gonna take it. Thank you for it. You were very generous with your time. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me on the show, dude. We'll link to Professor Ferris' story on my website, DavidFeldmanshow.com, where you can do all your Amazon shopping. Please find me on Facebook, follow us on Twitter. Don't forget to give us a good review on iTunes that helps now my conversation with the publisher of the Berard Street Journal, John Egan. In May of 2016, a Facebook employee came forward claiming that the news feed on Facebook was biased against conservative news. Whatever that is. Facebook responded by eliminating its entire news aggregating team, that's the group whose mission was to sort through news and establish what is fake and what is not. After Donald Trump's victory in November, Facebook and Google announced that they would attempt to come up with a policy regarding fake news. They used to have a policy regarding fake news. They had a team of aggregators who would determine what was real and what was fake. But after the election, they rung their hands and said they'll come up with a policy after reports came out indicating that Donald J. Trump was the beneficiary of what was essentially a fire hose of fake news coming out of places like Macedonia or Vancouver, Canada, where our guest, John Egan, the publisher of the Berard Street Journal, joins us. Welcome to our show, John Egan. Thanks very much, David, thanks for having me. I should point out that you are born in Ireland and you moved to Canada six years ago and you run a website called the Berard Street Journal. Let me, you've done some stories that have gotten a lot of attention from the conservatives out there. In September of 2016, the Berard Street Journal wrote that President Obama told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that, quote, in the best interests of our nation, he'll refuse to leave office if Donald Trump is elected president. And that got picked up and spread throughout the internet, retweeted by several news agencies. Who picked up that exclusive article that you wrote? Where was that spread? From what I could see, it was a lot of these, using air quotes, but these news outlets that are not, there's stuff like USA Daily 24-7 News or they always had these kind of vicious sounding names. So I didn't hear of any mainstream media picking that story up. I had a story about Obama moving to Canada that was picked up by some of the mainstream ones. Sean Hannity and The Daily Mail in Great Britain quoted, yeah, they quoted a story that President Obama, this comes from the Berard Street Journal, your publication. You wrote that President Obama has admitted for the first time that he and his family are, quote, seriously considering moving to Canada if Donald Trump is elected the 46th president of the United States. Sean Hannity picked up on that. So did The Daily Mail. When did you publish that? Ah, I don't have it to hand, but I think it was sometime in July. It wasn't picked up for a couple of months. And I think it was in September that I, when The Daily Mail linked to my website that I realized something had happened. I found that that story really interesting from my perspective because I, you know, obviously I'm not involved with media at all, I'm just a guy in Vancouver with a laptop.  And with that one, I noticed that article, particularly when I posted it immediately, people, these conservative kind of news websites, these kind of small blogs that we have later found out were in, you know, in Eastern Europe. They were either reprinting my story as is, but just not mentioning at all that it was a joke or else they were pulling quotes from us. This is more often what I saw. They were pulling quotes from us as if it was a real news article. So I found this really funny at the start because I hate all these fake news websites that kind of just steal content.  Until I realized that everybody was believing us and that suddenly this story had kind of come out of nowhere. When it really picked up was, so when I read The Daily Mail had an article saying that Josh Earnest, the wireless press secretary, had been asked about this story and that he'd refused to deny it. So I obviously thought this was hilarious. You know, why in the name of God would the press secretary deny something I just completely made up about the Obama family moving to Canada? And obviously The Daily Mail, I read that in The Daily Mail and then Sean Hannity picked it up and he started talking about it. But what I've since found out was that that he wasn't asked that question at all. He was actually asked about their plans for staying in Washington DC beyond the election. And the press secretary just refused to deny whether they'd stay in Washington or leave Washington or what they would do. And somewhere from that event happening to have been published, I mean, I first saw The Daily Mail, I don't blame The Daily Mail, but I thought there somewhere between those two events it had changed that he had been asked about moving to Canada and he'd refused to deny that. And obviously Sean Hannity heard that. He picked it up and ran with it and it kind of started the whole thing all over again. So I was just kind of sitting there watching this, just kind of scratching my head wondering what, where this was happening, where it was coming from. Now you understand the internet better than I do.  How long does it take? Cause I'm, you know, I'm an old man. How long does it take to check a source? Seconds. I mean, snoops. Seconds? Yeah, second. Snoops do all of my stories. Any story that I have that's what snoops are, they're just kind of fact-checking. I thought it was Snopes, I thought it was Snopes.com. Oh, sorry, I can't pronounce words. We pronounce it differently. But yeah, maybe it's nope, sorry.  So, and generally because they've quite good authority on their website, quite well-known. So when they publish something, it automatically goes to the top of Google's ranking. Yeah. So all you had to do was copy and paste the headline into Google and there would be right in front of them. Yeah, I mean, America. And then the Daily Mail is the same. Yeah, we're living in a post-truth society. America is. And people in Macedonia, well, I don't know about that. People in Macedonia and people like you in Canada are having fun at our expense.  I'm amused and I'm very curious. And I started Googling the Berard Street Journal. There's a guy named Michael O'Neill from the Saxo Group. Now the Saxo Group is a Canadian organization that gives financial advice. And they look very authoritarian, like authoritative or authoritarian. Michael O'Neill covers financial news for the Saxo Group and he wrote this week, quote, more telling is that as of this writing, Donald Trump hasn't bothered to call, text or even tweet to Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Canada is America's largest trading partner. That could be because, according to the Berard Street Journal, Mr. Trump, who says he follows Canadian politics, called Justin Trudeau, quote, Canada's worst president yet. And then Mr. O'Neill, Mr. O'Neill points out, Canada doesn't have a president. So here we have somebody who gives that financial advice, tells you when to sell, when to buy, how to protect your money in Canada. He read the Berard Street Journal and believed that Mr. Trump called Justin Trudeau your Prime Minister. Canada's worst president yet. Did you know about this? I just, I've forgotten for a second, but yeah, I remember actually reading about this last week. I did Google my website last week just to see what people were getting said and I read that. But I kind of just brushed over it, but yeah, now that you've read about it, it's astonishing really when you think about it. Because the thing as well is, not only do you not have to Google it, just read it.  I make them, by purpose, we make them just completely stupid, particularly the further they go up. The last one that I want to point out to my readers, because they should check you out, the Berard Street Journal. This was in Snopes. This had to be debunked because it was being passed around. But by liberals, here's the thing. This is, liberals are just as gullible as conservatives. And so we need to do a gut check, because I'm a liberal. And this is an article that you wrote in July where Trump he lamented America's decision to give Canada its independence. Donald J. Trump has told Fox and Friends that he believes the US, quote, should never have allowed Canada to gain independence. The Republican candidate for president freely admits to being a little rusty on Canadian history, but feels confident that the United States own Canada at some point and claims giving it back was a major mistake. And then you go on to write, the former reality TV star was responding to a question about Puerto Rico, possibly becoming the 51st of the United States when he made the statement, quote, this is just genius, man. This is just pure genius. It used to be, quote, Trump said, it used to be 51, you know, when we had Canada, Trump said, pointing to an American flag, or 52 if you count Mexico, which I never will, no matter how much they beg.  Yeah, well, yeah, that was kind of the, the kind of the point of that one, yeah. Well, I figured like, you know, I just saw so many things about Trump, especially here in Canada, and in any chance to bash Trump, I mean, almost everybody in Canada is against Trump, regardless of what side you're on. Yeah, anything to do with Trump speaking about Canada, I knew was where things that people would automatically jump on for them. But honestly, when I write these things, I don't think, God, this would be something that people will believe or something. I just write what I think is kind of funny or something I think it might get a reaction out of my audience. Well, I will, yeah, I can't, I'm still shocked that people, it doesn't take too much to read that to realize that these are all jokes. With lightning speed, you can discover that the Burrard Street Journal is a fake news site, that it's a parody site, that it's like the onion. You say that, all it takes is a millisecond to click in the about tab, but nobody bothers. Nobody bothers. There's a giant logo at the bottom of every page of my website that says B.S. Journal, like the logo, but the website is a disclaimer about everything you click on about the website immediately, the first thing we say is it's a joke, that's worse, if it's a parody, that kind of stuff, it's all a total joke. What have you learned in the past six months about the American people versus, say, the Canadian people? Are the Canadians better informed? Do Canadians fall for this? Because I know with Google Analytics, Google Analytics, you can really trace where your clicks are coming from. Who's more gullible, the Canadians or the Americans? Nobody, I think it's everyone. We're all in the same boat. I mean, most of, I'd say that 50 to 60% of my audience is Canadian within Canada. So the vast majority of my audience is Canadian. Most of these stories, most of my most popular stories is that one, or him moving to Canada. Anything to do with Trump and Canada, they have been probably my biggest stories and largely shared by Canadians. Whatever is happening in this false truth world isn't an American problem exclusively. We've seen it with Brexit as well, like I'm Irish, I live in Canada, I see the two countries, my two neighboring countries have both, I think, taken giant steps backwards in the last six months and largely based on being completely misinformed. This is a worldwide phenomenon. I think this is something that's starting, it started in the US, started in the UK, but it's gonna spread everywhere. And my fear is that it'll start here because I've seen what my stuff, and there's a fake news website in Canada, I won't give their name, but they've stolen articles from me before and they just write fake news, not funny, it's just no satire involved, it's just fake. They just write as things as close to truth as they possibly can to get reactions out of people. And they have been, these are two kids, they're two high school kids, both of you did an article about them a few months back. Who did? Both of you. Both of you, right? Both of you, Canada. Right. Yeah, there's a guy called Craig, I think it's Craig Shakespeare, this is his last name, but he's been doing it, he's been kind of trying to really kind of, or find out what's going on with this kind of fake news stuff on Facebook. But anyway, these two kids, these two high school kids, they're making, I mean, they were able to, you know, basically they have full-time jobs walking out of high school because they have a number of these websites that just, they just write fake news about Canada, fake news about Trudeau, especially, or Stephen Harper, or the old prime minister. And these stories are everywhere, everywhere, all over Facebook. And any kind of groups, any kind of political groups in Canada, these stories are everywhere. When did this phenomenon start? And except for the fact that I think Donald Trump might have gotten elected, although Zuckerberg says no, that the founder of Facebook says, the fake news just serves as an echo chamber and reinforces what people already believe. When did people discover that they could make money with fake news? Well, I discovered them doing it around July because they always linked to my website.  So in July, I suddenly started getting tons of notifications from these websites. Websites like ending the Fed was one of the big ones.  So in order for them to get to half a million Facebook followers, they have to have had incredibly high traffic for a while now. So I first was aware of it in July, but this has been going on for, I would imagine around the time that Trump decided to run for president, but I'm just completely guessing. Are they writing fake news or they're just aggregating fake news? They're both, they're writing it and they're just taking it. They're mostly just writing it. But from what it seems to me, they even gave up on that. That was a little bit too much effort of them just writing, even coming up with this stuff. So after a while, they realized they could just, because the copyright laws online are just great. So you can pretty much steal anything you want and there's very little someone as a creator that I can do about it. Didn't you enforce some copyright laws on the Macedonians?  I mean, I've just been firing them out into what I thought was just the space and I never heard back from them. Most of the websites, I must have sent off, I'd say at least a hundred DMCA notes that the copyright infringement notes to different websites. And I don't know how many of them actually got shut down. I only ever heard back from maybe four or five in total that I heard were shut down. And then like this guy in Macedonia, I didn't know who he was or where he was. They just, they hide behind, they have these hosting companies that hold their websites and kind of hide their servers so that we never get to know where they're coming from or where they're doing this. The first time I heard about these people in Macedonia was when I read it in the New York Times. According to the New York Times, I believe these kids in Macedonia can make about $6,000 a month. What kind of numbers in terms of audience are we looking at if somebody writes some good fake news? Well, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I'm not obviously making anywhere close to what they're. I don't know how they're getting up to that month. But I mean, they're producing a lot more stuff, I guess. I think they have a lot of fake news on their website. But long story short, or the story, it could give you a great answer It really depends. It can be anywhere from... I mean, I've seen some of my stories that people believed anywhere from half a million to a million with my stuff. A million page views. A million page views, yeah. Well, I would imagine that they are getting far, far, far higher numbers than I am. Because a lot of these guys are using bots on Facebook. I know Facebook say they've clamped down on this, but as soon as Facebook clamped down on something, these guys just come up with something new that they... What is a bot? I don't really know how it worked myself, but I've just thought in that New York Times, and I know the both of you talked about it as well. But basically, they use these fake Facebook accounts. So they'll set up, they'll have...  And then they use that to share, comment, like their stuff. So that pushes it up to the news feed. So if you post something on Facebook tomorrow, and the first 10 people to view that all like it, comment, share, and do stuff, then Facebook knows to show that to more people, to more Victorian. So I think they're using stuff like that to really boost their stuff up so that when you and I log into Facebook, the first thing we see is their news story. That they're fake news story. At the top of this segment, I said that Facebook fired its team that aggregated news. Is that what happened that once that vacuum was created in May when nobody was checking anymore? Is that... The very day. There was a fake news story. I think two or three fake news stories were at the very top. They were trending on Facebook in that little top right corner box, which is absolutely crucial.  When I read about the fake news rising to the top, I immediately thought, oh, I remember back in May, the conservatives complained, so Facebook got rid of the news aggregators. They fired the team that went through the news to determine what was fake and what was real. And that's why now we're seeing all this fake news rising to the top of the Facebook news feed. When I read about the onslaught of fake news in the past six months, nobody mentions that Zuckerberg fired his news aggregating team, correct? No, I don't see that too often. Yeah. So why... To be honest. Yeah. Well, to be honest, this was happening way before then. I mean, the fake news was already there. It was in May when people started becoming aware of it. There's always been fake news. There have always been pranksters, but there was a team at Facebook whose mission was to sort out the truth from the fake. And that's when the stuff exploded exponentially, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. But just to give them their due, what they really do is this is to stop these news stories. Well, their job initially was to stop these, not to stop them being spread to the fake news, but to stop it reaching their trending section, which would put us on every single news feed in the world, right? Or in that area. This is the point I'm trying to make. There's always been fake news, but there was a team at Facebook that prevented the fake news from reaching the top of the trending section. Is that correct? Yeah, exactly. It never made the top of the trending news feed section until Mr. Zuckerberg fired the team assigned to determine what was real and what was fake, correct? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So what the conservatives did back in May is they intimidated Facebook and they said there's a bias at Facebook. Facebook got scared, so they just let the quote unquote, cream rise the top all by itself and fake news roast the top, correct? Yeah, exactly what happened. And yet when you read about this fake news phenomenon, there isn't a single journalist who will blame Facebook for firing the news aggregation team, correct? Yeah, no, I haven't seen that written anywhere. So it takes a citizen journalist like me who has a memory that goes back six months to point that out. I can remember something from six months ago. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty crazy, yeah. So, yeah, no, there's definitely some blame on Facebook here. And then, and Mark Zuckerberg told that to, I don't know what the answer to it is, but I don't know how to solve the predictive problem. As we're talking, I'm thinking, you're really doing mainstream journalism a favor because you're really pointing out that you have to have internet literacy, that you have to go to the New York Times, you have to go to Time Magazine, you have to go to well-established news gathering organizations to determine what is real and what is fake. And yet, my complaint about mainstream journalism is they're so understaffed, they're so frightened, they can't remember anything, they can't think straight, but that's for another discussion. But I think you're doing, I think you're doing a service to the internet. I really do, because I... Thanks for it.   You have to look beyond people nowadays, get their news, not just from Facebook's news feed, but just from the headlines that they come across. Don't even click on the articles half the time. And I do this too, we all do it. I've been taking in those occupied democracies, like they're kind of like the left-wing version of a lot of these conservative things. They post a lot of things that aren't true. Well, they had a thing up there about Trump.  And that's been shared millions upon millions of time. I've come across that quote. I've totally taken in about it. I totally believed it. And then I found out a couple of a day or two before the election that that wasn't true at all, that he never said that. Yeah. But he could have. So there is just... But he could have. Oh yeah, that's the whole, I mean, that's the whole thing about everything you see. But he could say anything. I mean, he literally could... That's why I started writing that there about him because anything I could... He could make up anything and it sounds somewhat believable. You could picture him saying that. Before you go, I have a few quick lightning round questions I want to ask. But I just want to point out one other thing. So Michael O'Neill from the Saxo Group links to your website as though it's true. And this is a man who you trust to advise you financially. The Saxo Group in Canada, they write about the markets and they're smart and they put sentences together. There's a guy named Joe Kernan, CNBC here in America. CNBC is the financial CNN. They cover the stock markets. They cover Washington. Joe Kernan has been on CNBC for decades and he's a climate change denier, right? He says climate change is hogwash. And you're Irish. And there's a famous video circulating where Joe Kernan who has been on CNBC for decades and he's a climate change denier is interviewing somebody from Ireland, one of the top financial analysts from Ireland. And he asks them when they started using the Euro. Yeah. Do you know this one I'm talking about? But yeah, I remember this one, yeah. He didn't know that Ireland wasn't part of Europe. He didn't know that Ireland wasn't part of the United Kingdom. He didn't know that Ireland was a separate country. And he's a journalist on CNBC who uses the authority of CNBC to say that climate change is hogwash. Yeah, it's insane really. That's a story. Whenever someone mistakes Ireland for Britain, that gets used back home. So we all heard about that. Yeah. It was pretty crazy. Very quickly, before you go. The Burrard Street Journal, when did it start? So it was initially, it started in March of 2015 as a soccer satire website. And it was called original12stateonmuch.com just because I happened to own that name. It was just a terrible day. So anyway, I changed it over in February of this year to the Burrard Street Journal. And why Burrard Street? Burrard Street is the financial street here in Vancouver. So Wall Street Journal, Burrard Street Journal. And BS Journal is generally the name that I usually call it or that's what my fans and all that kind of call it. It was a play on that. How do you spell Burrard Street? B-U-R-R-A-R-D. Great. And then Street. Really great work exposing the stupidity, unfortunately on both sides of the aisle. John Egan is the publisher of the Burrard Street Journal. Thank you so much for your time. Oh, thanks very much for having me. That's our show. I want to thank Pat Dixon, Dave Cyrus, Professor David Farris, the publisher of the Burrard Street Journal, John Egan. Please friend me on Facebook. Follow me on Twitter. Do all your Amazon shopping this Christmas via the David Feldman Show website. And give us a good review on iTunes. Tell your friends about this important show. Thank you so much for listening from the Showbiz Studios in downtown Manhattan. That'll do it for us. The David Feldman radio program is made possible by listeners like you.