Tim Fullerton
Appearances
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Hi, everybody, and welcome to the first episode of the Find Out podcast. My name is Tim Fullerton, and I'm going to try to be the wrangler of my other five co-hosts here. You've heard us talk a lot about needing to create a space for people to organize and get together, in particular men on the Democratic side.
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He did tremendous things to get us out of covid. The economy was roaring no matter what those guys on the conservative side say, which is factually incorrect. But we have been losing the messaging war partially because we don't have a network of liberals or liberals, Democrats, whatever you are, progressives, what you want to call yourself.
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where you can find content no matter what you're interested in and i think that's part of what this is all about is like look like we're going to talk about some really bad but we're also going to joke around like you know we have to get through this and i think trying to emulate some of what they have done on the right not the content for sure but the structures like a lot of their stuff is enter if you like their politics their stuff's entertaining
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You know, and we are bad at that. We want to describe policies and like that's important. But like we're losing hearts and minds. And I think that is the biggest issue. And I think that's why, you know, I think between all of us on TikTok, there's like two point five to almost three million followers. And that's pointing to.
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A need to service a community that isn't getting stuff from, I think, the traditional Democratic Party or cable news or or media at this point. And that's part of the reason that we are we are doing this, because no one is talking to this large swath of people who do not like Donald Trump, but also like maybe they they.
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consume a lot of conservative media so they have some um you know some some thoughts about us that are just simply not correct and so i think that's another mission here is to just be like we're just regular dudes i'm the only one really that has worked in what you would call uh the establishment or as joe as uh vick likes to give me shit on the inside um which i have not done in many years but i think like you know it's one thing for me
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Oh, you worked for this person and that person, so clearly you have a bias towards the Democratic Party. But look at these other five guys in this group, too. They're all across the country. I think, Vic, you've had a little dose of politics, but everybody else is like, you know, Chris is hunting Nazis. I'm a former Republican. Oh, I didn't even realize you were a Republican.
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And for a little more background, before I kick it to the other guys, like we all were part of something called White Dudes for Harris, which you may have heard about in the summer last year. I was one of the organizers of that group.
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And one of the tasks that I was given as part of that group was to find white men TikTok influencers to help carry our message and also to get people together, because as Zach said, there isn't really anything on the side and Democrats tend to be rather splintered from a lot of the time. And so we all met each other there.
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But here's the but here's the and I'm going to beat a dead horse on this. But like.
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they don't see that though because they are in a they are in an echo chamber they're indoctrinated fox news podcasts uh influencers uh some media outlets where they don't hear any of what we're saying like i so many trump voters have come to me and said aren't you glad that the border is now closed i'm like the border's not closed what are you talking about and in fact border crossings at the end of joe biden's term
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were lower than they were during the final months of the Trump administration. So I'm not saying that there are not problems at the border. Like, frankly, the Biden-Harris administration agreed with that, too, because they had a bill to put 1,500 more border agents on the border.
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But Donald Trump basically poisoned that and went and said, you're going to hurt my chances at winning if you pass this bill. But, like, they don't hear any of this. And this is why this stuff –
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And that's part of the reason why you are not seeing any female co-hosts here. That doesn't mean we won't have female guests and things, but We were this was born out of a project where we understood that men are the toughest demographic for for Democrats. And so we need to create places where guys can come and talk about politics the way they the way they normally do about anything.
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I think it's a really good point, and I think that as we try to understand that, say, 35 percent of the Republican vote that is Trump, I think when we're trying to figure out why these people are for him, I think honestly it is very, very simple. He doesn't blame them for anything, and he makes it seem like that they are –
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America, and no one else has been helping these these folks, or at least they're not getting the information about things that could help them. And so they see him waving the flag. I mean, today he posted a video of like bombing some ISIS leader. And like it seems kind of silly, but it's also just like he projects. I mean it's false, but like he projects like American strength.
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Look, I'm killing this ISIS person. Winning. Exactly. Just like Schumer. Yeah. Right. Well, we'll get to that in a minute and that will be definitely a contentious one. But I think one of the things that I think Democrats need to – and we were learning with the White Dudes for Harris stuff about the deficit that we face is like –
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as as rich as you said we have to start talking to people and not talking at people with them talking with them and not at them and i think it is a long process but i think epic podcasts like this like we've got you know a wide age range it's all men some veterans some peop you know some people who are in the political world some not and like
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it's kind of a representation of, of men across the country and just be like, it doesn't all have to be some, some far leftist, like telling you that you're wrong and an idiot. Like, I think, you know, this is why this is so important, but we have to reframe, I think our conversations with them. Otherwise we'll just like, we'll never get any of them.
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I don't think we'll get the majority, but even if we sliced off 5%, the dynamic changes completely.
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And, you know. Make it a welcome place for people who are maybe didn't vote this time or are moderates or even disillusioned with Donald Trump and are looking for a place to come. So that's really where we came from. And then we've got three other four other guys here who haven't haven't spoken yet. I don't know if somebody wants to chime in about why they're here. I'm going to look at Chris.
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Well, the 2008 thing is really interesting, too, because, you know, that was actually a landslide victory that Barack Obama had. I mean, we won Indiana, North Carolina, two that we have not won since. Indiana is not even in the conversation anymore. And Indiana a little bit because Barack was from Chicago. And like I think there were reasons for that.
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But I think there's a lot for us to learn from what Republicans did after that, right? Like that's when the Tea Party sprung up. All of a sudden they cared about spending. They didn't care about the $2 trillion war or the $2 trillion tax cuts that primarily went to wealthy people and did nothing to grow the economy.
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So we all know it was really about the black president with the with the funny middle name. Right. But they create. But but but the reality is they created a movement. They had media apparatus with them and they became a force. I mean, like we you know, I was I was at a nonprofit when the we were they were both doing the ACA and the climate bill.
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So we are very excited after a 40-minute delay as all of us were trying to get our shit together. And talk to you guys today and tell you a little bit about what we are doing here, what you can expect from us, and also how we all can work together to make sure that the next election turns out much differently than the one we just had in November.
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And at first we were like, oh, we're going to get both of these things because Barack Obama's polling at 60 percent. We're going to be able to bulldoze right through this. No, like we got healthcare and then healthcare, while it was still worth it, I would go back and do it again, like killed us in the midterms and we got wiped out.
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And that's because they've got, they know how to organize their people. And, you know, that rage machine that they have built, like they're always, we were talking about, they're always mad about something. It's because they're fed that, you know, like, oh my God, there are, but yeah, I mean, it's like, oh my God, kids are like using litter boxes in schools, which never, Never fucking happened.
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It never happened. I know. And I have friends that aren't that rabid Republican who mentioned it to me. And I'm like, can you go online and find one one specific moment of fact that that happened? And no one can do it. Right. But they have an apparatus. And this is why I keep harping on it, because like.
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With the shutdown stuff, which we can get to in a second here, but like, yeah, Democrats were saying things, but nobody, nobody heard it. Well, here's the thing, you know, like, yeah, go ahead.
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So I – for those who don't know, I worked in the Obama administration for five years, and I will push back on the healthcare part of it. And the reason is – and I'm sorry to go inside baseball, but we had – 10 to 15 senators at that point who were almost Republicans. I think even if you had them today, they probably would not be part of the Democratic Party. Ben Nelson in Nebraska is one of them.
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Joe Lieberman in Connecticut is another one. And yes, we had 60 or 59 or whatever it was. But the reality was in the – yeah, definitely in quotes. The reality was like – Many Democrats at that point were dead set against Medicare for all and even a public option.
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Why are you here, Vic? What are we doing? He's a weather forecaster.
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And there was a public option in the House bill and it got taken out because Joe Lieberman and Max Baucus from Montana, Ben Nelson from Nebraska all went, hell no. And we needed we couldn't actually lose a voter. So he did, you know, to defend the president a little bit. He he was faced with a choice.
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Go all in with Medicare for all and fail or get health care coverage for 20 million Americans, which is what we ended up doing. But now we're still fighting that fight. But like – and the other thing – and I know this is going on a little bit. The thing I will critique the president on is that we had built – because I was on the campaign too. We had built a digital force of donors and activists.
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And the decision was made after the election that all of that would get rolled into the DNC. There were some of us who thought that that should be an outside entity that would have been used to get electeds to pass the president's agenda. And instead, it got rolled into the DNC and essentially destroyed. Right.
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And that is part of the reason why he couldn't – he didn't actually have a muscle to get some of those voters because it had been swallowed up by this bureaucracy. And this is what the – this is what the DC consultant class does. Well, yeah. I know because I was in it. That's the problem. And they didn't want an outside source. And we are still –
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Dealing with that, what is this, 16, 17 years later?
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Has he ever apologized for anything? No, never. Didn't he apologize for the Hollywood tape?
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He did, yeah. I think he read. It was a statement. He didn't say it. Yeah.
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Yeah. Well, let's, let's, Let's go to the CR because we do have – this is – first of all, this happened yesterday recording on Saturday that 10 Democrats went along with the entire Republican caucus to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open. And we're going to dive into this because there's differing opinions here.
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But the reality is there was a lot of anger on the left that Chuck Schumer, the minority leader from New York –
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basically at one point said i wasn't going to help and then all of a sudden he did and so did the other senator from new york where where chris and i are uh kirsten gillibrand also voted for it so i want to hear from everybody about their takes on this um and i'm going to go to somebody that hasn't spoken very much which is our friend luke uh up at the corner luke what do you think of the cr
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I mean, yeah, I think Democrats have a problem with with seeming weak and people don't like people going back and forth. It's not even the question right about was it the right thing to do, which I don't think it was. But like there is an argument to be made there. But the I think Democrats are just constantly complaining. like going back and forth.
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And like, there's a reason why, I mean, you know, Bernie Sanders, who's kind of a Democrat, kind of not a Democrat. Like there's a reason why he's so popular is he doesn't back down. And he says, so like, I don't understand why Democrats can't learn this. Um, because it just seems like Luke, you're a hundred percent, right?
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Like if we had just said the government is too important and we're going to like, keep it open. I'm, I probably would have disagreed, but I would have at least understood. This just feels weak. Yeah, the messaging sucked.
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Very cool. And Vic, Vic's videos were actually featured a few times, I think, from the Harris campaign and some others, because Vic had a quite an opening and also a look that, you know, from a stereotypical perspective, if you looked at Vic, you might think he is a Republican because he is in a rural conservative area and he's got a 10 gallon. You can hear a little bit of drawl.
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And so the I thought the brilliant opening was the I'm a 56 year old gun on and white guy. And if Kamala Harris thinks of over her, she's right. And but I think like it also showed Democrats that there are different types of Democrats out there. And we do not all look and sound like I do as an East Coast person. And I think that's a really important, important thing to bring front center.
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Vic, I'm going to turn to you because I have a feeling that you have a completely opposite view of this. We're going to go from one end to the other and then we'll come back in the middle. So, Vic, what do you think?
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So I still get the you voted for him crap. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. It's because people just don't know. And we got another person that's from a rural area, and that's, oh, that's Rich. How did you come to be with this motley crew?
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yeah so i was actually in the federal government for a shutdown uh 2013 i believe and it was like 30 something days um and i am against 99.9 of shutdowns they are incredibly damaging and they like it puts people at risk i mean i was at the interior department so like all of a sudden you don't have park rangers in national parks which are wild areas and people get hurt all the time um there's all kinds of reasons why i'm against it i
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I certainly understand both sides of this perspective, and I generally tend to to sit where Zach and Chris are. I think my problem with this one is that it strikes me as lacking any strategy whatsoever. And this is where, like, I think it hurts. Hakeem Jeffries held his conference together minus one Democrat who represents Maine's second district. I'm from Maine, Maine's second district.
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There is one one Democrat that could hold that district. And his name is Jared Golden. So I give him a bit of leeway for some truly terrible votes on that and on guns and other things. But Jeffries went out and like held them together. And then Schumer turns around and just.
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Now, if you had a and he made so that meant Jeffries made some of his members take hard votes, some some districts that are pretty, pretty down 50 50. And I just think it continues the narrative that Democrats don't fight for anything. I agree that shutting down the government is bad and that it potentially would give them something to swing at us.
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But I've also looked at the reactions from Republicans of us capitulating, and most of them seem pretty happy. And so it would strike me as not being the case if like we actually took power away from them. But what I'm hearing and what I've seen this morning so far already is we don't even need to talk to the Democrats anymore because why? Why would we?
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They're not going to do the things that we are willing to do. They were willing to let the debt ceiling lapse, which would have caused an economic collapse. like catastrophe on the likes that we have never seen. It would have made 2008 look like a blip like they're willing to go there. And I just the Democratic brand of being weak and incoherent just seems to have been maximized here and.
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There's no real explanation for it. Like, why did Jeffries do all of that if 10 Democrats, including the minority leader, were just going to fold? And that's that's the problem to me. It's like if you're going to be decisive, be decisive and own your lane and say we're not going to let the Republicans hurt the American people more with this nonsense. But I didn't hear that.
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I heard a lot of like, oh, well, there's bad things in this, but we got to keep the – and if you're explaining, you're losing. And that is where – that's why I – on this one, I would have preferred them to be like, shut it down. They're breaking the government.
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We will open it back up when they stop doing the illegal firings and they stop doing the illegal holding of funds, which is hurting people like meals on wheels. Like these are things that are literally life and death matters. Mm-hmm. And if they're already going to do that, then it's like, well, let's draw a line in the stand and say, stop it. So that's my that's my frustration.
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Go figure. Well, look, this is the perfect time. Oh, sorry, Luke, you want to say one more thing before we wrap?
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Well, with all six of us agreeing, I think that is a perfect time to wrap up. We even got Vic and Zach to agree twice, which I'm going to call a success for the first Find Out podcast episode. For those of you just tuning into us and finding us on various platforms, our main home is on Substack. So please go to findoutpodcast.substack.com.
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We've already got 2,500 of you over there, which is fantastic. I think that is where... We will be doing some written content and engaging with the audience, probably some live streams and live chats and all sorts of stuff. So please go to findoutpodcast.substack.com. But I think this was a pretty good first episode, guys.
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Well, you dropped great news. I mean, we've all said it, but congratulations. And I think five of us have children and then Luke is also our child as well. I'm basically the age of one of your children. Maybe on Vic's side. I don't know about the rest.
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I hear Greenland is pretty nice these days. For those of you listening, that was his passport that he just showed up. But look, I think it's important to talk about this, right, because it shows that like we're not just doing this for ourselves. We're doing this for our kids. Like I'm not a I'm not a girl, dad, but I have a kid.
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And, you know, there are these these things matter and they don't just matter to us. Like, you know, we're not just in this for like, you know, I mean, if we were just in this for tax breaks, we'd be Republicans. Right. But like we care about what's going to happen to this country. after we're gone. And that all begins now. So we hope that you all are with us on that.
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And I think based on what we have all seen from our videos and sub stack posts, that people were desperate for a place to get together and talk about this, but also not just be doom and gloom. Like we're in this together. We're going to build a community of people that do not like what's going on. We don't all have to look the same. We don't all have to talk the same.
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We don't all have to have the same opinions. But the one opinion that we all do have to agree on is that we need to change the leadership in this country. And we welcome everybody, no matter who they are, what walk of life, even MAGA folks who are, let's say,
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uh reasoning curious or logical logical curious kind adjacent kind adjacent uh to to come with us and like and write to us like and also i think we'd all be happy to talk to folks offline too if they have questions so um i just want to thank these guys this has been awesome we've been talking about it for a long time maybe zach someday will share your um your video that oh yeah
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to us um also we had a lot of people helping us behind the scenes uh kyle our editor um i also had a guy andy falsati who runs something called right blogger who helped me point find out podcast uh dot com uh at the right uh url so thank you for that i said i would give a shout out um and you know i'm we're gonna have there's a lot of people we've talked to behind the scenes that are really interested in this so we are glad that you were chris's great job with the graphic
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Oh, yes. Chris, on my team – I have a company called Fuller's Strategies. He did our logo. Chris, my creative director, who definitely deserves kudos because it's a fun play on Isaac Newton's theories, which the modern-day version is fuck around and find out. I think you mean Isaac Neutron, the ancestor of Jimmy Neutron. Yes.
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Thank you. Yes. Thank you. So thank you, everybody. Find us at findoutpodcast.subsect.com and we will see you next week.
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So to kick it off, we are going to kick it off and I'm going to kick it off and give it to Zach, who was the one that actually came up with this idea. So we put him in charge. So if you have any complaints, please send them Zach's way instead of the others. So Zach, tell us a little bit about what we're doing here today.
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Yeah. And I mean, I think that the reaction that we have gotten from this has been overwhelmingly positive. I mean, across because we've all talked about a little bit on our channels and, you know, and I think another thing that, you know, there's a misconception about liberals is that, you know, for example, the majority of our veterans are not.
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And we've actually got two veterans here on this on this Vic who we've just heard from. And also, Chris, who I think you were a sergeant.
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Yeah, it's 100 percent right. And there I don't know if anybody watched this this week. It caused a lot of angst on the left. But the the interview that Gavin Newsom did with Charlie Kirk, I don't agree with platforming people like that. But I will say, you know, listening to the first 20 minutes. Well, first of all, it's very clear that Charlie Kirk is like putting on a show like he is.
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He is smarter than he lets on. And he is. not a dumb guy. And I think like, regardless of what you think politically about it, it was interesting to hear that perspective and be like, Oh, these guys are not just falling all over themselves into success, which sometimes it feels like they are, they, they know what they're doing and they are well-funded Chris, as you said.
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And then you also mentioned the, finding people that are half your age. And it's not quite half, but we have a younger person on this group that is the last person who hasn't spoken yet, which is Luke, who is still a college student. And I would say probably of all of us, the most aggressive with his TikTok content. So Luke, Luke, tell us, tell us why you're here.
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and that's part of the playbook too right like that's the reality is that they are trying to scare people into compliance and i think that it is it has been successful in a lot of cases and they have shaped and shaped the narrative that we are continually fighting against for years now i mean like you know you look at joe biden which i will still say is one he will go down i think as the best one-term president that this country has ever had