The Fact Didn’t Change. You Did. | Wacky Wednesday

What if changing nothing but the political name attached to a fact could change whether you believe it?

Turns out, researchers have tested exactly that—and the results aren't particularly flattering to either side.

This Wacky Wednesday starts with a strange reaction to a previous Common Sense episode: government and academic wildfire research being dismissed as a “Trump talking point.” From there, Chad follows the same mechanism through decades of American politics.

Xavier Becerra blames Trump talking points when confronted with reporting about migrant children. Hillary Clinton invokes a “vast right-wing conspiracy”—while Bill Clinton still had an affair. The COVID lab-leak question gets branded a conspiracy before the evidence is settled. Caveats disappear from the Hunter Biden laptop story. And political-science experiments show Americans changing their views when the exact same policy gets a different politician's name attached to it. 

Then the bill arrives for both sides.

California's own auditors raise questions about billions in homelessness spending. The GAO documents enormous improper federal payments across administrations. And after years of Republicans championing forest management, federal fuel-treatment acreage falls under Trump—because reality doesn't particularly care which team claimed an issue first. 

The problem isn't disagreement.

It's allowing the label to answer the question before we've examined what's inside the package.

But is it true?

IN THIS EPISODE

🔥 When facts acquire political party labels
 🧠 Research showing how attribution changes belief
 💻 What actually happened with the Hunter Biden laptop letter
 🦠 Why “we don't know” and “conspiracy theory” aren't synonyms
 💰 California's $24 billion homelessness accountability problem
 🏛️ Decades of improper federal payments
 🌲 The forest-management example that catches both sides
 📣 Why source credibility matters—but can't substitute for evidence
 🇺🇸 The Reagan Reminder: skepticism without cynicism

CHAPTERS

00:00 The Lost Children: A Political Response
03:28 The Nature of Truth in Politics
09:21 The Filter of Political Identity
14:21 Historical Context: Conspiracies and Truth
19:16 The Hunter Biden Laptop Controversy
29:13 The Influence of Attribution on Belief
34:22 The Complexity of Source Credibility
39:59 Government Accountability and Mismanagement
45:37 The Cost of Government Waste
51:26 The Machinery of Information Evaluation
58:55 The Future of Political Labels and Accountability

📚 Books, editorials, the Common Sense Conservative Manifesto and more: ChadParkerLaw.com
📞 Call or text the show: 252-CHAD-LAW

Common Sense with Chad Law
We translate America’s most complicated conversations into common sense.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Last Monday I put out an episode about wildfires. Not a political episode, a wildfire episode. Fuel loads, prescribed burns thinning, twenty year forest management plans sitting on state government websites that almost nobody reads, including, as far as I can tell, some of the states that wrote them themselves. And I sourced the thing to death. State forestry departments, federal agencies, university uh burns, severity studies, the nature conservancy, the nature conservancy. Famously the armed wing of the Republican Party. So the episode goes up and the messages start coming in. Not all at once. I want you to hold on to that part because that's the part that got me. One at a time. Trickling in. Still trickling in, actually. I got another one this morning. Trump talking point. That's MAGA. Climate denialism. Conservative propaganda. Comments, DMs, texts, and one gentleman who said it to my face, which I respect, because at least he had to look at me while he said it. Now, I get disagreement every single day of my life, and I like it. It's most of the job. When it's a friend, we go around a few times and somebody buys lunch. When it's family, that's just Thanksgiving with better lighting. This was different. These weren't my regulars. These were people who listen and never post, people I had never heard from before and haven't heard from since, and there were a lot of them, all arriving separately, all landing on the same four words, none of them talking to each other. That's a pattern. And patterns are more or less my entire personality. So step one, I got annoyed. I'm a human horse. Step two, and this is the part I'd like some credit for, I got worried. Because there's a version of this where they're right and I'm the problem. Or I took a forestry conversation and quietly turned it into a political one and didn't notice I was doing it. So I went back and watched my own episode, the whole thing, looking for the moment I picked a team. And that's when I remembered. In that episode, the episode that was apparently a Trump talking point, I called Donald Trump out by name for being factually wrong about fires. I criticized the man inside the episode that got accused of belonging to him. And that's when I stopped being annoyed and started being fascinated. Because that isn't someone disagreeing with me. That's a label showing up before the content does, taking a look around and deciding it lives here now. So I got curious. I went looking to see whether this happens anywhere else or whether I just found an unusually committed group of people with strong feelings about pine trees. Folks, it happens everywhere. And I promise you, it gets dumber than this. But hang on, first this. If common sense has become part of your weekly routine, you know ChadparkerLaw.com is your home base. Every week you'll find something new books, editorials, the gaily news, the free common sense conservative manifesto, or everything else we're building together. And if you've got a question, an idea for an episode, or you think I completely missed the mark, call or text me at 252 Chad Law. Some of the best conversations on this show start with your messages. All right, we'll get in today's episode right after this.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

When you need common sense, comes to Chad Law. The boldest pundit you ever talk. It's truth, truth, it's hard, and the talk is real. Reality rules, and that's the appeal.

SPEAKER_00 4:01

With common sense. The show where we read the fine print so you don't have to, where we bring receipts instead of outrage, where politics is truly just the starting point for something much bigger. This is the shelter for the politically homeless where reality gets a vote, results matter, truth matters, common sense matters. So welcome home, America. It's Wednesday, which means we're doing the one where I show you things that are real and you slowly stop believing me. Also, on Wednesdays we wear pink. Here's where I ended up after the pine tree incident. I started paying attention, not to wildfires, to the move. The specific thing that happened to that episode. Somebody encounters a claim, and before they get anywhere near whether that claim is accurate, they run it through a filter. Who does this help? Who else says it? Whose team does this belong to? And if the answer comes back Trump or MAGA or conservative or right wing, the evaluation is over, not lost, not answered, over, never opened. And once I saw the shape of it, I could not stop seeing it. It's in press conferences, it's in interviews, it's in government reports, it's in studies that scientists did on purpose in a building with a grant. So that's today. What happens to truth when everything becomes a conspiracy? Now, before anyone gets excited, let me tell you what this episode is not. This is not me arguing that Donald Trump is always right. Donald Trump has said an enormous number of things that were exaggerated, unsupported, or flatly untrue. And we're gonna hit some of those today, and you're gonna hear me do it. Fair warning to my own audience. Bring a snack. This is also not a show about people being crazy about Trump. That's a smaller show, that's a dumber show. There are 9,000 of those, and most of them are hosted by a guy in a rented studio yelling at a picture of a cable news anchor, not what we're doing here. And this did not start with Trump, that matters, and wanted up front because the whole thing collapses if you think this is a Trump story. Trump did not invent blaming your enemies. Blaming your enemies predates indoor plumbing. Trump did not invent calling something a conspiracy so you don't have to argue with it. Trump did not invent tribalism, and Trump certainly did not invent the powerful human urge to hear an uncomfortable fact and immediately go looking for a reason not to deal with it. We were doing that when we lived in caves. We were probably doing it about the caves. What happened in the Trump era is that someone bolted a rocket engine onto it. Because Trump became something no politician in my lifetime has ever managed to become. He became a brand, a real one, the kind with instant, total, non-negotiable emotional recognition. And I spent a career in marketing, so I'm gonna say this the way a marketing guy says it, and then I'm gonna leave it alone for now. A brand is a shortcut. A brand's entire job is to make you feel something about a product before you ever pick it up and read what's in it. And here's where it goes properly sideways. He doesn't have to even be in the room. He doesn't have to say the thing, he doesn't have to be involved, he doesn't have to know what happened. A state auditor puts out a report, a scientist publishes a study, a federal watchdog files a finding nobody asked for, a newspaper wins a Pulitzer Prize, a Democrat stands at a podium and says something out loud with his own mouth. And within about 90 seconds, Donald Trump is in the conversation. He didn't call in, nobody invited him, he just turns up like a smell. And I need you to understand, I'm not describing an insult. I'm describing a load-bearing wall. Once his name is attached to a claim, for a lot of people, the claim is finished. Not disproven, finish. Because they don't hate the claim, they hate him. And they hate him enough that they cannot hear anything he might agree with. So today I want to try something on you, and it's gonna feel a little insulting the first time. It's three words. Somebody tells you that's a Trump talking point. Okay, fine. But is it true? Somebody tells you that's a right-wing conspiracy. Sure. Could be. But is it true? Somebody tells you the person bringing this up is politically motivated and has an agenda and stands to benefit. They might! People do. That's most of Washington and about half of my inbox. But is it true? That's it. That's the whole instrument. Three words, four seconds, no funding, no panel, no task force, no gentleman in a quarter zip with a lower third under his chin that says disinformation specialist. And I know how obvious it sounds right now, but sit with it anyways, because by the end of this hour, I'm gonna show you rooms full of extremely serious, extremely credentialed, extremely well-paid people who could not get to it. One more thing before we start, and I want this on the record early. If you're a conservative sitting there right now, getting comfortable, thinking you've got forty minutes of chat explaining how silly liberals are. Don't. We found your receipts too. They are worse than you think, and in a couple of places funnier. I went looking for this behavior everywhere, and everywhere is where I found it. And some of the best material in this episode is going to cost my own side something. There's a number coming later that I laughed out loud alone in my own house. And while we're doing confessions, put me on the list. I'm not standing outside this thing looking in. We'll get to my part later, and it isn't flattering. All right. Let's go look at some of this. Because I want to start with the cleanest one I found. It happened this year, it happened on local television, it happened to a man who used to run a federal agency and would very much like to run California. And the best part, the part that made me put my coffee down, is what the TV station did to him while he was talking. All right, so May of this year in California, there's a governor's race going on out there, and one of the people running is a man named Javier Bacera or Becerra. And Becerra is not a nobody. He was a congressman for 12 terms. He was Attorney General of California. And then from 2021 to 2025, he ran the Department of Health and Human Services, a federal agency with about 100,000 employees and a budget bigger than most countries. And so he sits down with KTLA reporters in Los Angeles, local news, reporter named Annie Rose Ramos, and she asks him about the migrant children. Now let me set this up properly because this is the part where I have to be careful, and I'm going to be careful, and you'll see this in a minute while the why the carefulness is so important. There's a reporter at the New York Times named Hannah Dreyer. In 2023, she published an investigation into unaccompanied migrant children, children who came across the border alone, went into federal custody at Health and Human Services, and then got released to sponsors around the country. She found them working. Overnight shifts, slaughterhouses, factories, roofing crews, 20 states, 14-year-olds running industrial machinery at two in the morning and then trying to go to school. That reporting won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting in 2024. And inside it was a number. Over a two-year period, HHS could not reach more than 85,000 of those children when it made its follow-up calls. The agency lost immediate contact with about a third of the kids who came through. I'm going to say what the number is, and I'm going to say what it isn't, because I care about this more than I care about the sentence sounding punchy. Could not reach on a follow-up call does not mean missing. It does not mean trafficked, and a lot of those kids are almost certainly fine living with family in school, not answering a federal phone number, which, by the way, I also don't answer. What it means is the government released 85,000 children into the country and then couldn't find out how they were doing. Okay. So Ramos puts that to Pisera, his department, his years, Pulitzer winning reporting. And here's how he answers. I've had this written on a post-it on my desk for a week. He says, I don't know if you got those talking points from Donald Trump. And my accent is terrible because I can't do cholo. That's what he sounds like. Uh, talking points from Donald Trump. She tells him politely that she got it from a New York Times article. And he says, That's not what the article says, SA. And he says, that's not what the New York Times article said. So KTLA put the New York Times article on the screen while he's talking. The actual sentence highlighted, floating over his shoulder in the lower third like a hostage note, saying the exact thing he is at the moment insisting it does not say. Somewhere in Los Angeles, there is a graphics operator who deserves a raise and a parade. And look, I want to be fair here, because he did make one accurate point in that interview, and it's a real one. The child labor happened after those kids left his department's custody. HHS calls it 30 days, and then structurally, there's no agency with formal follow-up authority. That's true. That's also, if you think about it for four seconds, an unbelievably damning thing to say out loud about the system you were running. But it's true, and I'll give it to him. It's disgusting. Here's what I can't give him. Donald Trump was not in that room. Donald Trump did not write the Pulitzer. In 2023, 26 House Democrats, Democrats sent Pacera a letter raising alarms about sponsor screening and child labor. And a few days before that KTLA interview at a debate, Antonio Villa Ragoza, the former Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, pressed him on the same thing. And Bacera went to Trump then, too. A reporter asks about your agency. A newspaper reports about your agency. Members of your own party write you a letter about your agency. A Democrat on a debate stage asks you about your agency. And the answer keeps being a man who wasn't even there. But is it true? That's all anyone needed. Not is it fair? Not who benefits, not where'd you hear that? Is it true? And you can check because they printed it and they put it on television. Now, somebody's already typing that this is a Trump thing, that this is 2026 brain rot. So let's go back to 1998 when I was significantly shorter. January 26th, Bill Clinton stands at a podium, wags the finger, and denies I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky. The next morning, the very next morning, less than 24 hours, Hillary Clinton goes on the Today Show with Matt Lauer and says, the real story here, for anyone willing to write about it, is a vast right-wing conspiracy that has been after her husband since the day he announced. August 17th, Bill Clinton admits the affair. Now that's a fun timeline. That's not why the story's in this show, because if I stopped there, I'd just be doing a Hillary joke 28 years late, and frankly, the line's too long. Here's why it's in my show today. She was actually right about a lot of it. There genuinely was an organized, funded, conservative operation going after the Clintons. Richard Mellon Scafee, a billionaire, put something on the order of $2 million into investigations at the American Spectator. It had a nickname inside the magazine, The Arkansas Project. Private investigators digging, paid for real. So both things were true at the same time. There was a funded right-wing effort to bring down Bill Clinton. The left does it, the right doesn't, everyone does it. And Bill Clinton still had an affair. Those two facts have no relationship to each other whatsoever, and we somehow built 30 years of American politics on top of pretending they do. You see, somebody can hate you, somebody can have an agenda, somebody can write you a check to go looking for dirt, somebody can be the most nakedly partisan operator in the country, and still be holding something true. Again, is it true? The messenger's motive tells you how carefully to check. It has never once told you the answer. Oh, and one post script because the universe has a sense of humor. Ten years later, Scafee's own newspaper endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. Now, let's do the one that made me sit down. COVID origins. And I need to put a fence around this one before I take one more step because I'm not doing a COVID origin debate today. We do not know where it came from. That's the honest answer in 2026. The FBI leans lab with moderate confidence. The energy department leans lab with low confidence. The CIA now leans lab, low confidence, several other agencies still lean natural. Nobody has closed this. So I'm not telling you the lab was it. I'm telling you what happened to the question. Early in 2020, Senator Tom Cotton raises the possibility, and the Washington Post runs a headline calling it a conspiracy theory that was already debunked. They corrected that headline 15 months later. In February of 2020, 27 scientists published a statement in The Landset condemning conspiracy theories about the virus not having a natural origin. A statement later emerged, quietly organized by Peter Dazak, whose organization had been routing American grant money to the lab in Wuhan, which is a detail, not a crime, just a detail that you'd probably want when weighing in all these opinions. Facebook banned the claim outright, then unbanned it in May of 2021. And that's when the good part happens. Because journalists started explaining themselves out loud on camera once they were allowed to again. Jonathan Carl, chief Washington correspondent at ABC News, on this week, May of 2021, talking about the lab leak question, he said this out loud on a Sunday morning to America. Quote, some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them. Yes. Yes, Jonathan. That is generally how facts have worked since roughly the invention of facts. And he wasn't alone. David Leonhard of The New York Times said on CNN that a lot of people on the left and in the media made the mistake of figuring that if Tom Cotton was saying something, it couldn't be true. And I want to be precise about what's remarkable here, because it isn't that anyone got something wrong. Everybody gets things wrong. I get things wrong. I'll get something wrong in this episode, and one of you will text me about it before I finish my coffee. What's remarkable is the reason they gave. They didn't say we looked at the evidence and misjudged it. They said the wrong guy was holding it. Here's the part I keep coming back to. We don't know, and conspiracy theory are not the same sentence. They're not close. One of them is honest and the other one ends the conversation. And for about 18 months we used the second one we meant the first one. But is it true? Still to this day, we don't know, and that was always the correct answer. Another quick one, October 2020. 51 former intelligence officials sign a public statement about the Hunter Biden laptop material. And the line everybody remembers is that it had the classic earmarks of Russian information operations. But go read the actual letter. It's short, it's public, it's been sitting out there for six years. In it, those same officials wrote that they did not know whether the emails were genuine and that they did not have evidence of Russian involvement. It's in the document, in writing, in the thing itself. And then Politico's headline said the officials were calling it Russian disinfo, and that is the version that got in the car and drove across America. Joe Biden cited it on a debate stage. It became a fact people knew. By 2022, the Washington Post and the New York Times had authenticated significant material from that laptop. Now, that does not prove every political allegation anybody ever hung on it. It doesn't. I'm not going anywhere near Hunter Biden today. He's had a rough decade and I have a runtime here. It's a whole other episode. But the only thing I want you to notice is the mechanics. The letter got more confident after it was summarized than it was when it was written. The caveats never left the document. They just left the conversation. Think about that. And now let's go back to my trees. August thirteenth, twenty twenty, the Newsom administration and the U.S. Forest Service announce a joint agreement. The Shared Stewardship Agreement. It's a press release, it's on the governor's website. You can read it right now. And in it, the state of California says its forests are suffering from what they call unnaturally dense conditions, from a century of fire suppression, and from a changing climate. And the state commits, with the federal government matching, to treating a million acres a year, with treating, thinning, prescribed burning, and fuel reduction. That's August. The following month, September of 2020, Donald Trump flies to California, sits down for a briefing, and says forest management. And forest management becomes a Trump position. Now, here's where I keep my own promise. Because I told you at the top I'd hit my own side. Trump was wrong about a bunch of that. He said raking. Raking is not wildfire strategy. Finland is not out there vacuuming the woods. He said California's mismanagement was basically the reason, and it isn't. The federal government manages something like 57-58% of California's forest land, so a whole lot of that finger was pointing at the guy holding the hand. Several of those fires weren't even forest fires. They ran through chaparral and grassland. All true. All conceded, took me 20 seconds. But watch what got destroyed along with it. Because fuel loads don't become false when Donald Trump says the words fuel loads. A prescribed burn does not stop reducing fire severity because a Republican described it approvingly at a podium. Thinning does not register with a political party. Trees do not check who's talking. Gavin Newsome's own administration was publicly committing to a million acres a year in August. And by September, saying roughly that same thing out loud got you a category. Apparently, forestry science had a party registration deadline somewhere in there and nobody told the trees. That's the one that started this for me. The messages I told you about at the top were about an episode sourced to state forestry departments, federal agencies, a university burns severity study, and the natural and the nature conservancy. Something changed between August and September of 2020, and it wasn't the trees. So look at what we've got. A cabinet secretary in 2026, a first lady in 1998, a pandemic, a laptop, and a pile of dead pine needles in organ. Different decades, different parties, different people who have never met and would not enjoy each other. And the same move keeps showing up. Somebody gets handed a claim, and instead of going at the claim, they go at the jersey. They find the political identity attached to it, they hold it up, and everyone nods and the thing just stops. Nobody disproved anything. Nobody had to. And after about the fourth one of these, I stopped laughing and got genuinely curious because a question started forming that I did not love. Is this actually changing what people believe? Not what they say, not what they post, what they actually think is true. Can you take one fact, one single unchanged fact, put a different name on it, and get a different answer out of a human being? Because somebody checked, several somebody's actually, and I want to be honest with you about how I felt when I found this, because I assumed I was going to find a couple of think pieces and some guy with a substack. What I found was that actual political scientists looked at all of us, said, I wonder if they're really like this, and then designed experiments to find out. And we are. We are so much like this. Let me start with the one that hurts, because if I start anywhere else, you're going to think you know where this is going, and you don't. Two researchers at Brigham Young University, Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope, published a study in the American Political Science Review. And they had done they had a sneaky idea. Donald Trump over the years has taken positions all over the map, some of them conservative, some of them, if you're being straight about it, pretty liberal. So they took real policy positions, actual ones, and they told people Trump held them. And they watched what conservatives did. They followed him. Strong Republicans, Trump approvers, people who described themselves unpromoted as conservative, told that Trump held the liberal position. They moved towards the liberal position. The researchers' conclusion, and this is a peer-reviewed political science journal, not a cable panel, was that for a large number of Americans, group loyalty is a stronger driver of opinion than any ideological principle they claim to hold. So they set out to test whether conservatives are conservative, and what they came back with was more like define conservative. Depends who's asking. Depends who said it first. Now that's my side, that's my team. I'm not reading that to you from a safe distance, I'm standing in it. All right, now the funny ones. In 2020, a group of researchers ran a set of experiments and published them through the Cato Institute. And I want to be square with you about what this is because I've spent this entire episode yelling about precision, and I'm not going to get sloppy now. This was 195 college students at three universities. That is not a national poll. It's not Gallup. Do not go into your comment section tonight and tell people this is what America thinks. It's merely a demonstration. But brother, is it a demonstration? Here's the setup. They wrote descriptions of policies. Then they split people into two groups, and the groups got the identical description, same words, same details, and the only thing that changed was whose name was on it, Obama or Trump. Then they asked people what they thought. And the first one they ran, you're gonna laugh because we just spent 20 minutes on it. They described a president being criticized for holding immigrants, including children, in overcrowded holding cells. Yeah. We did Becerra in the last segment, and it turns out researchers built the laboratory version of that argument in 2020 and then just left it lying around waiting for me. Thank you. Republicans strongly agreeing it's a human rights violation, Obama 44%, Trump 13%. Democrats, Obama 63%, Trump 95%. Partisan gap was 19 to 82 points. Republicans told it was Obama, 44%, strongly agreed it was a human rights violation, told it was Trump, down to 13. Democrats told it was Obama, 63%, told it was Trump, 95%. So put Obama's name on it, and Republicans and Democrats are 19 points apart. Put Trump's name on the exact same sentence, and the gap is 82%. Same children, same cells, same words, one name difference. 63 points of American disagreement manufactured out of thin air by a guy who wasn't in the room and hadn't done anything yet. But that's not even my favorite. My favorite is the one where my side gets caught. Same study. They described the government stepping in to lower prescription drug prices. Straight up price intervention. Government putting its hand on the market. Told it was Obama's plan. Republican support, 24%. Told it was Trump's plan, 72%. Yeah, real conservative. 24 to 72, same intervention, three times the support. The medicine didn't change, and apparently the copay was Donald Trump. And listen, I have heard conservatives, real one, people I like, deliver 20-minute sermons on the free market and price controls and the road to serfdom. And this study suggests that for a meaningful number of them, that entire philosophical apparatus can be moved 60 points by a name. Democrats don't get out of this either, by the way. Same experiments, tariffs on China, 58% Democratic support when they were told Obama imposed them, 14% when they were told it was Trump. Same tariffs, same country, 44 points gone. Okay, now it gets weird, because everything I just told you is about opinions, policy preferences. Should we? Shouldn't we? And you could argue fairly that policy support isn't purely a factual question. Reasonable people weigh things differently. Fine, let's give them that. So a group of researchers, Swire, Berensky, Lewandowski, and Ecker, published in Royal Society Open Science, and they went one floor down. They tested belief in statements. Some of the statements were true, some were false, and they varied whether people were told Trump had said it. And the attribution moved belief in the true ones. Trump supporters believed a factually accurate statement more when they were told he'd said it. Democrats believed the factually accurate statement less. Not supported the policy more, believed, as in this is a fact about the world. The same true sentence walks into two different American brains, and depending on what jersey the brain is wearing, it comes out with a different relationship to reality. That's the point where I stopped taking notes and just sat there for a minute. So I did what I always do when human behavior stops making sense, which is I went back to my old job. Because before all this, I sold things. That was my career. Brands, positioning, packaging. Why people pick up the box on the left instead of the box on the right? And what I'm looking at in these studies is not political science, it's marketing. It's the most basic thing in marketing. You see, a brand is a shortcut. That's the whole product. You see the label and your brain fills in the rest before you've read a single ingredient. And that's not stupidity, it's efficiency. You can't independently evaluate every object you encounter between waking up and lunch. You'd never make it out of the house. You'd be standing in the driveway doing chemistry on your own toothpaste. But here's the vulnerability, and every marketer alive knows it. The brand can get stronger than the product. Let me give you kale. Before 2012, Americans were not sitting around resenting kale. It was worse than that. Nobody considered it food. It was decor. It went around the outside of the salad bar because it looked nice next to the ranch. Pizza Hut, Pizza Hut bought almost 14,000 pounds of kale in 2012, and they confirmed this on the record. A spokesperson said it out loud to today. They were not serving it. They were not putting it on a pizza. They were using it to hide the ice. Seven tons of a vegetable a year purchased to conceal frozen water from customers in the salad bar. Then a PR woman named Oberon Sinclair goes to work on it around 2011, gets it onto influential New York menus, builds the appearance of a movement. And when reporters went looking for the American Kale Association, the trade group that was supposedly behind all this, the website didn't show up until 2014, and farm groups told National Geographic there isn't an official kale lobby in this country. The Kale Association may have been a marketing campaign wearing an association costume, which, given the subject of today's episode, I find beautiful. Was she the only reason? No. Bonapet had already named 2020 the year of kale. Dr. Oz was in there, Gwyneth Paltrow was making kale chips on television. It was a snowball and she gave it a shove. But look what happened. Beyonce wears a kale sweatshirt in a video. Whole Foos is moving something like 22,000 bunches a day at the peak. American kale acreage goes up 145% between 2012 and 2017. Farms growing it go from about 950 in 2007 to over 8,000 by 2017. In roughly a decade, this country went from put that leafy stuff around the salad bar to hide the ice to that'll be $14 for your organic massaged kale superfood bowl. And nobody engineered a new vegetable. Nobody changed its DNA. It's the identical plant, same fiber, same disgusting bitterness, same everything it had when it was sitting on top of ice at the pizza hut being ignored by a family of four. The kale didn't move. The story around it moved. Human beings like to believe we evaluate things based on what they are. A shocking amount of time we're evaluating what we've been taught to call them, which is why the Coke thing works. If Coca-Cola runs an ad telling you Pepsi has sugar in it, sure. Coke has an interest. Coke would love it if Pepsi fell into the sea. Their motive is obvious and you should absolutely notice it. Then you pick up the bottle and you turn it around and you read the label. Coke's motive tells you something about Coke. It does not remove one gram of sugar from that Pepsi. You have quietly swapped two completely different questions. What this person has a reason to tell me has become, therefore what they're telling me is false. Those aren't the same sentence, and they were never the same sentence. And we already did the proof last segment. Richard Mellon Scafe had every motive on earth, paid for it, and Bill Clinton still cheated. But is it true? I've been saying that all night like a bit. And somewhere in the middle of these studies, I stopped hearing it as a bit. Because what the research keeps showing is that we're answering a completely different question and then calling it fact checking. We're answering who said it, which team, which network, whose name is on it, and then we act like we've evaluated something. We have not. Now, before anybody accuses me of telling you to believe everything you hear. No, absolutely not! Source credibility is real and it matters. Donald Trump has said things that weren't true. So have politicians in both parties, so have news organizations, so have federal agencies, so have think tanks with beautiful letterhead. If someone has handed you bad information four times, you should walk into the fifth one squinting. That's rational. That's not the problem. The problem is the last inch. Skepticism means I should check this carefully. It does not mean I already know the answer. A messenger's reputation can tell you how hard to look, it can never tell you what you're going to find when you get there, period. And I need to put myself in this because I'd be a fraud if I didn't. I do this constantly, by default. There are people whose face comes up on my screen and my brain is already starting the rebuttal before the sentence is finished. Not because I checked anything, because it's them. I have to physically make myself sit still and actually hear the words, and I lose that fight more than I'd like to say into a camera that's recording. So this isn't some lecture from somebody who beat it. It's a guy describing his own factory settings. It's not that one party is stupid. It's that reading is work and vibes are free. Now, I don't want to flatten this into everyone's the same because that's a cop-out and it isn't what the evidence says. The mechanism is universal. The intensity is not. Right now, in this country, that one man's name functions as a warning label for tens of millions of people and a seal of approval for tens of millions of others. Both groups are doing the identical thing. Both groups think they're the ones evaluating. And that's the trick the last segment was showing you without saying it. We've started letting a political association stand in for actually looking at the thing. Sometimes we're not deciding whether a claim is true. We're deciding whether somebody we can't stand would nod along to it. That's not fact checking. That's seating charts. Which brings me back to the word in the title. Folks, a conspiracy isn't a synonym for false. It's a description of how something was allegedly done. People are convicted of conspiracy in American courtrooms every single week. Watergate was a conspiracy, it was also true. And Hillary Clinton in 1998 was describing a funded political operation that actually existed. Somewhere along the way, conspiracy theory stopped meaning a theory that people coordinated and started meaning something closer to information I would rather not process at this time. And a label cannot do the work of evidence. It can only do the work of not having to look. Which was funny to me for about four days. Because if a name can change what you believe, and it can, they measured it, and a label can decide whether you'll even open the box, then this stops being about arguments on television and starts being about which problems we're allowed to admit are problems. And you cannot fix something you're not willing to say is broken. Especially if the reason you won't say it is that the wrong person noticed it first. See how silly and unintelligent that is? Stupid. So let me tell you about the other time this happened to me because the wildfired thing wasn't the only one. It was just the loudest. A while back I started talking about homelessness numbers. And I want to be specific about what I did, because the specificity is the whole story. I didn't cite a think tank, I didn't cite a magazine. I cited Lhasa, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency, their count, their methodology, their press release. I quoted the government's homeless numbers to people, and I got the same words back that I got about the pine trees. From an agency press release in Los Angeles written by people who did not, I am confident, own a red hat. And now I have to do the thing I've been demanding everyone else do all night, and I'm not going to enjoy it. I went back to check my own numbers for this episode, because if I'm going to spend an hour saying, but this is true, I get to go first. I found I'd been slightly off. I said Lhasa reported a 3.5% increase. The official number for the city of Los Angeles was 3.4. The 3.5 figure was in the early reporting before the count dropped, and it's also a real Lhasa number. It's just the countywide unsheltered figure, not the city total. So I was off by a tenth of a point of the wrong denominator. Nobody in my comments caught that, by the way, not one person. Everybody who came at me about Donald Trump, the actual error was sitting right there free, and it went completely unclaimed. I would like to say that's the most 2026 sentence I've ever spoken out loud, but the night's young. And here's what stings, because the real number is worse than mine. Well, the headline said 3.4%. Street homelessness in the city of Los Angeles, people actually outside in tents and cars, jumped 7.9% after two straight years of decline. So the number I got a little wrong was pointing at something a lot uglier than I described. And while we're on Lhasa, the agency whose own numbers I apparently laundered on behalf of Donald Trump, look at who's been going after them lately. Los Angeles County pulled more than $300 million away from Lhasa this July and stood up its own homelessness department instead. The stated reason was accountability and oversight. The mayor of Los Angeles has said the city should be looking at a different governance model altogether. That's not a Republican offensive. That's a Democrat county and a Democrat mayor looking at the same agency and saying out loud that they need to be able to see what happens to the money. Same agency, same concern, zero red hats. Anyway, once you start pulling that thread, you end up in Sacramento. April of 2024. The California State Auditor puts out a report. Over five fiscal years, the state directed roughly $24 billion towards homelessness and housing. More than 30 programs, nine different state agencies, and the body responsible for coordinating all of it. The California Interagency Council on Homelessness stopped consistently tracking whether the programs were working in 2021. The auditor took a close look at five of those programs. Two of them he concluded were likely cost effective. The other three, representing over $9.4 billion, he could not fully evaluate. Not because the money vanished. I want to be careful here. That's not what the audit says, and I'm not going to say it. He couldn't evaluate them because the data to evaluate them wasn't consistently there. $24 billion. $9.4 billion of it we can't grade at all. Now here's the part that belongs in tonight's episode. The audit was requested by a Democrat, State Senator Dave Cortifs, after he walked through an encampment in San Jose. The auditor who wrote it, Grant Parks, was appointed under Gavin Newsom. So this is California auditing California at the request of a California Democrat using a California Democrat and Democrats' own data. And I promise you that if you read those findings out loud, some percentage of people will hear right-wing attack on California. Folks, the numbers don't become MAGA because a conservative reads them into a microphone. They were MAGA-free when Sacramento printed them. And I'm not up here claiming every dollar fail. That's not what happened, and it's not this episode. Some of those programs might have worked. Some might have worked and nobody wrote it down. Homelessness has about nine causes and a housing market on top of it. So whatever for whatever that's worth. For the scale on what the money is chasing, California has somewhere in the neighborhood of 170,000 to 180,000 people experiencing homelessness. Roughly three out of every ten homeless people in the United States in one state, with a large majority of them sleeping outside. Cortiz or Cortez, the senator who ordered the audit, noted that the number had climbed about 32% over the same five years the state was spending the $24 billion. The absurd part is much smaller than that and much dumber. If you spend $24 billion on anything, did it work? Should be the least controversial question in the building. That's not ideology. That's a board meeting. That's a Tuesday. If I ran a company, if I had told a client We'd spent their budget across 30 programs and nine departments and then stopped tracking outcomes three years in. There is no version of that meeting where somebody says, Well, that depends on your politics. I'd have been walked to the elevator by a guy named Gary who does not care about my opinions on anything. And then there's the topper. Los Angeles, 2016, voters approve proposition HHH. $1.2 billion in bonds to build supportive housing. Original projection, roughly $350,000 a unit. City controller audit tracks it climbing $500,000, then approaching $600,000 on average. And then there's one development where per unit cost came in around $837,000 a unit. $837,000 for one apartment to house one person who does not have one. Now, and I'm doing this on purpose, the housing department pushed back on that number, and their pushback is legitimate. That project sat on county-owned land inside a larger mixed-use transit development. There's retail in it, extra parking requirements, service space, a community kitchen, and the financing is layered so the city's own dollar per unit are a fraction of that headline. All fair, I'm not hiding it. I'd rather hand you the caveat than have someone hand it to you tomorrow. But notice what the caveat does and doesn't do. It explains the 837. It does not explain the average creeping towards $600,000 a unit across the program. That number has no transit plaza attached to it. That's just what it costs now. And that's the whole episode again in miniature. The correction made the reporting more accurate. It didn't make the underlying problem go away. Those are two different operations, and we keep treating the first one as if as if it performs the second. Okay, let's leave California because I don't want anyone thinking this is a California show. This next one belongs to all of us. The Government Accountability Office, the GAO, nonpartisan congressional watchdog, they have a category they track called improper payments. And I want to define that before I say the number because the number's gonna make you want to say something, you'd have to walk back. An improper payment is a payment that shouldn't have been made or was made in the wrong amount. That includes overpayments, it includes underpayments, it includes payments where the documentation wasn't sufficient to tell. It includes payments to people who weren't eligible. It is not a synonym for theft. Some of it is fraud. A lot of it is a government the size of a continent doing arithmetic badly at scale. Fine, we've established the definition. Since 2003, the cumulative estimate is about $3 trillion. In misappropriated payments. In fiscal 2024 alone, roughly $162 billion across 68 programs, about 84% of it over payments, money going out the door that shouldn't have gone out the door in that direction on purpose by accident. 18 programs reported error rates over 10%. Six of them ran from over 25% up to 45%. 45%. Almost $1 in two. If your accounting department told you that, you wouldn't have a debate. You'd have a Tuesday that ruins a Wednesday. And 2025 came in higher. About $186 billion, up $24 billion from the year before. The GAO also notes in the report, in writing, in the calm voice of a career civil servant, that these estimates cover only a subset of federal programs, and the actual total may be significantly higher. That's a hell of a sentence to type. Hit save on and then go get lunch. But here's why this is in tonight's show and not in some other episode about government waste. The GAO has been publishing this since 2003. 2003, folks. That's Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump again. Every single year, a nonpartisan agency has walked up to Congress and put a number on the table, and the number has been enormous, and it has been public and it has been free, and you could read it on a government website in your pajamas. And then somebody politically radioactive started talking about government waste, and a chunk of the country decided that noticing government waste was now a Trump MAGA act. It wasn't. It was a PDF for 23 years. It was a PDF. The number didn't become true when a brand discovered it. And it doesn't become false because you don't like whoever's currently holding it up. An overpayment doesn't know who you voted for. The accounting department doesn't have a party registration. A spreadsheet has never once watched cable news. All right, last one. And this is the one I owe you because I promised at the top of the episode that my side was gonna pay. You remember the setup, August 2020. Newsom administration commits to a million acres a year, September 2020. Trump says forest management and a chunk of the country, forest management, becomes a Trump thing. A thing you reject because he's attached to it, or a thing you champion because he is attached to it. Okay. So now Trump comes back into office. And NPR pulled the Forest Service's own data, worked it through with a firefighters group and a GIS outfit, and here's what the agency actually did. Hazardous fuel treatment. Biden's last year, more than 4 million acres. Trump's first year back, about 2.6 million. Prescribed burning specifically, the thing that works best, the thing that the science keeps pointing at, went from more than 1.6 million acres to about 900,000 under Trump. Cut roughly in half the forest management president cutting forest management. Hmm. And I'm not going to dress that up for you because dressing it up would make me exactly the thing this episode is about. I'd be doing the Bukara move with better manners. I want you to sit with what that means, though, because it isn't a gotcha. It's just the proof. For six years people thought about whether thinning and prescribed burning were conservative ideas. Millions of Americans sorted themselves onto teams over it, and it turns out you could have been on either team screaming at either side, and the acres would have still gone down. The trees never found out who won. Nobody sent them the results. There was no forest that stood there in 2023 going, well, our guy's in, we should be fine. Fire doesn't check approval ratings. A fuel load doesn't know it became a talking point. The practice either reduces severity under those conditions or it doesn't, and the answer to that question was never going to arrive from a podium. Newsom saying it didn't make it liberal. Trump saying it didn't make it conservative. Trump not doing it doesn't make it stop working. Reality is stubbornly unaffiliated. It just sits there being the case. So look at the bill. $24 billion where did it work got treated as a partisan question. $3 trillion in payment errors sitting in public for 23 years while we argued about who was allowed to mention it. Acres that didn't get treated while everyone was busy deciding which team the acres belonged to. None of that is polarization. Polarization is people disagreeing loudly. And we've done that since 1796 and we'll be fine. This is different. This is a country that made whether we're willing to look into a political position. If a fire alarm goes off in your kitchen, you don't pull the guy who smelled the smoke. You don't check his registration. You go look at your stove. We've built something where a shocking number of us check the registration first. And what got me? What actually got me sitting there with all this in front of me wasn't that people believe different things. People have always believed different things. That's not new and it's not interesting. It's how much equipment we've assembled to avoid one embarrassingly simple question. We have built an entire industry. And I want to show you what's in it. We have fact checkers. We have misinformation desks. We have content moderation teams with policy documents longer than most state constitutions. We have inspectors general. We have auditors who audit the auditors. We have blue ribbon commissions, which as far as I can tell are regular commissions with better stationary. We have think tanks, we have panels, we have experts, and we have experts who go on television to tell you which experts to believe, and we have consultants who advise the experts on how to be more believable. We have 50, we had 51 intelligence officials sign a stupid letter. 51. You can't get 51 Americans to agree on a pizza topping. And at the end of all that, every institution, every credential, every department, the thing we appear to have misplaced is a question a six-year-old asks about eight times a day before lunch. But is it true? That's it. That's the whole apparatus. Four syllables. Costs you nothing. No funding required. You don't need a login. And I want to be careful here because I know how this can sound, and I'm not saying what a certain corner of the internet is going to insist I said. I am not telling you to trust nobody. I am not telling you every institution lies. I am not telling you that every theory somebody types at two in the morning deserves the same weight as forty years of research. That's just the same lazy shortcut wearing a different hat of instead of who said it, so it's false, you get who said it so it's true. And both of those people have stopped thinking at the exact same moment. Expertise is real, sourcing is real, some outfits check their work and some don't, and it matters enormously which is which. None of that gets you out of the last step. A bad messenger can be right. A trusted one can be wrong. Somebody who despises you can hand you something accurate, and somebody who you'd take a bullet for can hand you some complete nonsense with total sincerity, and both of those things happened to me this year. That's not cynicism. That's just being adult about information. And the reason it feels like more work than it is is that we've been sold the idea that somebody else already did it for us. That's what all the machinery promises. Somewhere out there, a department has already sorted the true things from the false things and issued a ruling, and your job is to find the right department and stand behind it. Which would be fantastic. If the departments agreed with each other, they don't. They've never once all agreed on anything. And the label still works. I want to say that clearly because I spent a career building labels, and I'm not going to stand here and pretend they're a scam. The label is useful. It's a time saver. You cannot start from scratch on every claim that comes at you between breakfast and bed. You'd never get anything done. But at some point somebody has to turn the bottle around, right? We've started treating the words themselves. Trump, MAGA, conservative, liberal, mainstream media, conspiracy, misinformation, as though the word contains the answer. It doesn't. It never did. It just tells you about the packaging. You still have to read what's in it. Now, I can't fix the supply side of this, neither can you. Politicians are going to keep using labels because labels work, and asking a campaign to stop using something that works is like asking water to stop being wet. Campaigns will keep running on tribal shortcuts. Some outlet will keep writing a headline more confident than the document underneath it. That's not changing, not this year, not in my lifetime. The only piece of this any of us actually controls is about half a second long. It's the gap between hearing the label and reaching the conclusion. That's the whole territory. That's all we've got. And all I'm asking anyone to do with that half second is stick one question in it. Not permanently, not about everything. You don't have to become an investigator. Nobody has time to independently verify the world before the coffee's done. I get it. Just enough of a pause that the label doesn't get to the finish line before you do. Not do I like this guy. Not does this help my team. Not will admitting this make me sound like someone I don't want to sound like. But is it true? I'll go first, by the way, I already did tonight on my own homelessness number, and I'd rather do that than have someone do it for me on a Tuesday. All right. Here's the part that's been bothering me since I started putting this together. Donald Trump is not a permanent feature of American life, folks. I'm not talking about elections and I'm not talking about actuarial tables. I'm saying what's true of every political era that has ever existed. It ends. Somebody is always the last one on the wall, and then they aren't. And nothing, nothing in anything I looked at this week suggests this behavior goes with him. Hillary Clinton was running this play in 1998 when Trump was firing people on a television show. The researchers found the mechanism sitting inside ordinary human beings with no help from him at all. And my own side flipped 48 points on a drug pricing policy because they liked whose name was on it, which means we're not standing outside this thing laughing through the glass. We're tenants, too. The incentives don't leave when he does. Politicians will still need somewhere to point when the question gets uncomfortable. Institutions will still hate being audited. Partisans will still want a shortcut, and every single one of us is still going to want a good reason not to look at the thing that threatens what we already believe. So the machine keeps running. It just needs a new part. And it's a good machine. That's the uncomfortable part. It's efficient, it's cheap, it requires no maintenance, and it works on everyone. Nobody has to build the next one. It builds itself the moment we agree. We'd rather argue about a person than a number. So the question then becomes, who's next? Who becomes the next name that ends an argument all by itself? Who becomes so radioactive that hanging them on a fact makes half the country put it down without opening it? Who gets blamed for the problems that were here before they were, that they would have no authority over, that would exist if they had never been born? What replaces vast right wing conspiracy? What replaces that's a Trump talking point? Somebody's next. That role does not go unfilled, and I'd bet a considerable amount of money that whoever it is, most of us won't notice when we start doing it because we didn't notice this time either. Which brings me to tonight's Reagan reminder, December 16, 1988. Reagan has about five weeks left in the job. He goes down to the University of Virginia, Jefferson's School, and gives what turns out to be the last big foreign policy speech of his presidency. And you have to understand the mood in the room that year. The Cold War is thawing. Gorbachev had just announced he's pulling troops back. There are magazine covers. Everyone has decided that they like this guy. Reagan liked him too. That's the part people forget. These two had been in rooms together for years by then. There was a real warmth there, and Reagan wasn't shy about it. And he stands up in front of a bunch of college kids five weeks from the door and says, quote, so we must keep our heads, and that means keeping our skepticism. And then he just starts listing what hadn't changed. Still a one party system, still an enormous military advantage sitting in Europe. He walks them through it like a man reading a label. He wasn't telling anyone to blow up the deal. He made the deal. He signed the deal. He was telling them that how you feel about a man and what you've verified about a situation are different jobs, and you cannot let the first one do the second one's work. Nine words from a guy who had every reason to coast into retirement on a wave of a good feeling. And if you're sitting out there tonight without a team, if you took your name off both lists years ago and you're just tired of being yelled at by people who are certain that line is yours. It isn't conservative and it isn't liberal. Keeping your head is not a political position. It's just the last thing anyone's willing to do for free. So that's the test. And it's not sophisticated. It's not going to impress anybody at a dinner party. But is it true? And that's the question I can't answer for any of you. Who's next? When Trump's gone, who is next? And America, this has been common sense. Stick around for about 10 seconds while I reset the studio and then take your questions you've been texting in during the live show. All right. Phone's been going off all night. 252 Chadlaw, as always, let's get into it. First one comes from Nicole 3317. Whoever ran graphics at KTLA that day deserves a raise, a parade, and a plaque. Did they know what they were doing or did they just get lucky? They knew. They knew. I know a lot of these people. You don't accidentally pull a specific paragraph, highlight the specific sentence, and time it to a man's mouth. Somebody in that control room heard him say, that's not what the article says, and thought, I have the article, I have it right here, and I have a button. That's not luck. That's professional. Oh, and what kills me is the whole thing cost nothing. No panel, no expert, no two-hour special. One person with a keyboard and the actual document did more for that truth in that afternoon than about six years of cable news could have ever done. And nobody had to say anything. No anchor toss, no analysts, no Chiron that says fact check, misleading, and orange. Just the words on the screen while the man said the opposite of the words on the screen. That's the most restraint local television has shown since the invention of local television. Somebody put that guy in charge of something right now, please. Thank you. All right, great question. Next one comes from Duane, ending in 8802. Respectfully, this feels like a Trump defense episode wearing a costume. You spent an hour saying people are unfair to things Trump agrees with. I like the show, but come on. I guess that's a fair reading of the packaging, and I'd probably ask the same thing if I hadn't made it. Um, let me answer it with the receipts instead of my feelings before I berade you. The single worst-looking finding in the whole episode was about my side. Conservatives, self-described one, moved towards liberal positions when they were told Trump held them. That's Barber and Pope, peer-reviewed, and Republican support for the government setting drug prices went from twenty four to seventy-two based on whose name was on it. That's not a defense of Trump. That's my team getting caught doing the exact thing. And the last story in the show was the man who made forest management famous, cutting forest management roughly in half. I could have left that out, nobody would have noticed. Look, I'm not asking anyone to stop criticizing Donald Trump. Criticize away. There's material. My only claim is narrower than that I'd defend it in front of anyone. Yelling at Trump doesn't tell you whether some separate checkable fact is true. Those are two different activities. We've been billing them as one, and I'd add one thing because you said costume, and costume's the right word for something. If I'd wanted to make a Trump defense episode, I'd have picked easier examples. I wouldn't have opened on migrant children. I would have opened on something warm. But nice try. Try again to get me next time. Priya 5140 always has the best questions. Priya, uh, here's my problem with tonight, Chad. If a source has lied to me over and over, why is it irrational to discount them? That's not tribalism, that's pattern recognition. You've said it on this show that reading people is the one thing you'd put on a resume. So which is it? Am I supposed to notice patterns or ignore them? Oof. Using my own resume against me. Rude, effective, and Priya, as always, a class act. And yeah, you're right. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. If somebody's fed you bad information ten times, you're not obligated to walk into a number 11 with an open heart and a fresh notebook. That's not open-mindedness, that's amnesia. But here's the seam, and it's pretty narrow. Track record tells you how hard to look, it doesn't tell you what you'll find when you get there. Those feel like the same thing, and they're not even close. One is a decision about effort, the other is a decision about reality, and we keep making the second one while thinking we made the first one. I'll put it in a way I actually use. If a guy who's lied to me a dozen times tells me my truck's on fire, I'm not taking his word for it. I'm also not going to stay sitting in the truck. I'm going to go look at the truck. That's all skepticism ever bought you. It bought you the walk out to the driveway. It never bought you the answer, and we've been spending like it did. We need to stop. As always, thank you, Priya. Mark 2264. You've skipped the obvious. Trump lies constantly. He created this. If he'd been honest for 10 years, nobody would automatically discount him. Why is that everyone else's problem? Uh it isn't everyone else's problem. And if you believe that, that's on Trump. I'll say it flat. Um if you exaggerate for years, people discount you. But that's not a conspiracy against Donald Trump. That's the bill arriving. He built that reputation partially because of the media and the talking points that we get out of agencies, and because he's incredibly unpopular with the status quo. And I'm not out here trying to fix his credibility. That's above my pay grade and honestly not my job. But watch what your question does at the end. Trump damaged Trump's credibility. Fine earned. He did not damage the credibility of a Burns severity study out of the University of Washington. He didn't damage the California State Auditor. He didn't damage a Pulitzer winning investigation by the reporter who's never met him. He didn't damage the GAO, which has been putting out the same report since 2003 when he was firing people on NBC. His reputation is his. Those documents and facts are not, and they don't get worse because he wandered near them. The auditor didn't sign up for this. The auditor doesn't know him. The auditor is a guy in Sacramento with a spreadsheet and a deadline, and somewhere along the line we started treating his work as though it inherits the credibility of whoever mentions it the loudest that week. That's a terrible deal for the auditor. Truly it is. And I'll give you the harder version because you've earned it. He has occasionally been the one holding the only thing true. Not often enough to make him a source, but more than zero. And more than zero is exactly the number that breaks the shortcut, which is why nobody likes hearing it. Great question. Ellen 7729. Fine, so who's next? You clearly have somebody in mind. Just say it. I do. That's the annoying part. I've got a name and it's been sitting on my tongue for about four days, and I'm not saying it. Not to be coy, because I know exactly what happens if I do. Everybody stops thinking about the mechanism and spends the next 20 minutes deciding whether they like the person I named. Half of you would defend them, half of you would agree with me, and every single one of you would be doing the thing the episode was about. I'd blow up my own show in one sentence, which would be funny, it'd just be pretty expensive at this point. Um and frankly, I'm not confident I'm right. My guess is probably somebody nobody is watching yet, and by the time we all agree on them, it'll feel like it was obvious the whole time. That's how it went last round. That's how it went for Donald Trump. So no, the point was never predicting who gets the job, it's noticing the job exists. All right, that's it for tonight. Keep the text coming to 252 Chad Law. And remember, if you see us, rumble, Instagram, Substack, Twitter, share us. God bless you, President Reagan, and as always, may God save America.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:27

It's marvelous that you should care for me. Yes, you've made my life so glamorous. You can't blame me for feeling. It's so marvelous that you should change for me. It's one of the foods, it's marvelous is glad.