Hold My Beer: Trump’s Insurrectionist Slush Fund Makes Old-School Political Corruption Look Quaint

[0:00] Of course, there is corruption in U.S. politics. Some call it campaign contributions.

[0:06] The President Trump and family have said, hold our beer, with just the latest being a slush fund to pay off people who attacked the Capitol in 2021. Then we hear about Ohio Republicans stopping a child marriage ban and putting up an election photo ID amendment to the Ohio Constitution to mask the lack of reasons to vote for them in November. This is Secular Left with Doug Berger, an independent, religion-free, progressive viewpoint on topics of the day.

[1:00] One of the mantras that we hear constantly from the Republican Party all the time is we got to protect the children. We got to do something to protect the children, whether it’s getting rid of critical race theory, which doesn’t exist, or stopping DEI or whitewashing history so that white kids don’t have to be embarrassed that their ancestors had slaves. It’s also one of the impetuses of the reason why they attack the LGBTQ community. And another reason why they try to stop women from having abortions is to protect the kids. So imagine my surprise when a bill that would ban child marriage in Ohio was pulled from the committee agenda when it was due for a vote. And this we’re talking about here, talking about Senate Bill 341. It was in the Judiciary Committee.

[2:05] And basically, the bill would set the marriage, the minimum marriage age for women and men in Ohio to 18 and older. You have to be 18 and older, period, in order to get married.

[2:24] And the reason why this bill was important was, was that it says, under current state law enacted in 2019, a 17-year-old may marry if a juvenile court finds a minor has completed marriage counseling. A 14-day waiting period was passed and the spouse is no more than four years older. Parental consent was not required. In 2019, it came about because the Dayton Daily News documented 4,443 marriages. Involving girls 17 and under between 2000 and 2015. 59 of those involved girls 15 or younger.

[3:08] The newspaper identified three marriages involving 14-year-old girls, including a pregnant 14-year-old who wed a 48-year-old man in Gallia County in 2002. And Unchained at Last, which is a national Advocacy Against Child Marriage said that Ohio recorded 5,062 marriages involving minors between 2000 and 2024, and that 53 of those occurred under the revised 2019 law. And so the reason why this is a problem is because in most cases, it was an older man and a young girl that were the marriage people that were getting married.

[3:54] Child marriage can also be a vector in human trafficking because you could have an older man get married to a young girl in order to get her and to transport her into the country from somewhere else.

[4:11] Because usually authorities don’t question if it’s a husband and wife, even if the husband is, you know, in his 40s and the wife is a teenager. The other thing, too, that really sparked my interest in this bill was that young girls that are 17 and younger that get married don’t have any of the usual rights a married woman would have if they waited until they were 18 because they’re minors. And so either the parents would have to advocate for them or the husband would have to advocate. So if they wanted to get a divorce, the parents would have to do it for them. They couldn’t do it themselves because they were under 18. And so that you just have a power dynamic that is just totally out of balance.

[5:08] And so they had this bill, unchained at last, worked on getting it introduced. And it had had four up to this point that it got pulled off the schedule. It had four committee hearings. And there was no public opposition to the bill from anybody that we know of. They had the testimony. They had proponent testimony. I gave a proponent testimony. At the time, there was probably a couple of dozen people that submitted written testimony, and there was three or four people that actually testified in person. There was nobody that wrote opposing testimony, nobody that showed up in person to oppose it. And so last week it was due to be voted on. So they had the fourth hearing where it was open to interested parties. That means you could be a proponent or an opponent, an interested party as somebody who doesn’t mind it being passed but would like to see some changes, that sort of thing.

[6:18] And I was watching it on the Ohio channel, which is the legislature TV channel that you can watch online. And they, and they said, is there anybody that’s here to testify? And it said, oh, there’s no, no. Okay. Then we’ll move on to the next bill. And I’m like, what?

[6:38] Nobody offered a motion or anything. And so I’m like, what’s up with that? And so then we come to find out that the Senate president, Rob McColley, who happens to be running with Vivek Ramaswamy for the governorship, pulled the bill. He’s the one that pulled the bill. He told the Columbus Dispatch that even straightforward issues sometimes warrant more time. And he’s quoted as saying, we’ve still got time left in this legislative session. Now, again, there was nothing wrong with this bill. It just did one thing. It did away with the 2019 changes and just made it 18 and older. Boom. Guys have to be 18 and older. Women have to be 18 and older. Boom. That’s it. Period. That’s all the bill was. Didn’t do anything else.

[7:29] We even got some heat on the left because the Ohio Revised Code that this was going to amend had the same-sex marriage language in it that can’t be enforced at the present time that was passed as a constitutional amendment in, I think it was 2002, in order to get the Republicans to come out and vote that year. And so that language was in there. And so some people on the left were upset that they thought that our bill, well, our bill, Senate Bill 341, put that language in there. And that wasn’t the case. That was already in there. And this Senate Bill 341 wasn’t even going to touch that.

[8:12] They have some people in the LGBT community that is working on an equal rights bill for sexual orientation and other people. They’re working on a constitutional amendment for that. And in that constitutional amendment, they take out that same-sex marriage language. So they’ll deal with it, hopefully, if that ever gets on the ballot. But this Senate Bill 341 had nothing to do with that. So Rob McColley, again, stopped this bill from being voted out of committee with no opposition. It was bipartisan support. Republican and Democrat introduced it.

[9:01] You know, you can’t get it any more bipartisan than that in the Ohio legislature anymore. And the last time it was considered in 2019, when the changes were made, it passed in the legislature. It had, I think, one person opposed it in both the House and the Senate, just one person when they voted on it. So in the last time, too, it also did not have any opposition. So Unchained at Last is going to come and visit and talk to some senators in early June to try to get the bill back on track. I have no idea. I don’t know if it’s a religious thing. I’m thinking it is because one of the background, one of the foundations of child marriage, it can be religious. Some religious sects, that’s one of the things that they want to do, and it could be that they said something to him about it, that this would violate our religious freedom. But as you can tell, as I said, there was no public opposition at all, not even from the regular blowhard evangelicals that complain about anything regarding kids. They didn’t even complain about it.

[10:25] So it was very disappointing. And it really gives Rob McColley a bad look. It really does, especially, you know, because the Republican Party has the Epstein problem. And come to find out that there was a PAC that had given money to the Ramaswamy campaign that was tied to somebody who was a buddy of Jeffrey Epstein. And the PAC said that they would return the money, the donation that they had gotten. And instead, they dissolved the PAC rather than give the money back. So the Republicans have a real problem wanting, you know, they out of one side of the mouth, they talk about protecting the children. And on the other side of the mouth, they don’t. And that should concern everybody. For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[11:44] Here’s another Ohio-centric story. I apologize if you don’t want to hear about Ohio, but we have a massive problem with Republicans and our supermajority and all that stuff. So their shenanigans are quite extensive. And so one of the things that’s been going on is there was a petition drive to eliminate property taxes or reform property. I forget what it was because I didn’t sign the petition, but they wanted to get a ballot measure on the November ballot to change Ohio’s constitution about reforming property taxes. Usually what that means is they want to get rid of it so that it puts all of the tax burden on income tax, which they know that the rich people won’t have to pay. It’ll only be the poor people that can’t afford it. They’ll be the end up footing the bill for it, while the people that own the property won’t have to pay anything. And so they were trying to do that.

[12:52] Ramaswamy, who’s running for governor, he supports reforming. Well, they say reforming, eliminating property taxes. And there’s.

[13:02] There’s no, there’s actually no enthusiasm in the state house to do that, to eliminate property taxes, because they know that if property taxes are eliminated, that they probably will get voted out of office the next time people, because people get upset when the fire department doesn’t show up or when the libraries are closed or, or things like that, or the water stops running, things like that, you know, stuff that the property taxes pay for. that everybody uses. So they had this property tax. Now, I think they have a deadline of July the 1st. And one of the articles that I read about it was that they probably are not going to make their signature deadline. The number of signatures, they have to have like 400,000 signatures and they have a convoluted system. You have to have like 10% from each county, blah, blah, blah. It’s very complicated, and they did that. They changed it to make it really complicated so people can’t easily put ballot measures on to change the Ohio Constitution.

[14:13] That’s both good and bad. It’s good because for something like this property tax thing, if they have to play by the same rules, then they’re also subject to not making it on the ballot. They had a marijuana ballot measure that didn’t make it either recently that didn’t get enough signatures.

[14:37] So that would be something the property tax, if eliminating property taxes was on the November ballot as a constitutional amendment, that would be one way of jazzing up the Republican base in Ohio to come to the polls. You know, that’s what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to entice people to come to the polls because, side note, not many people like Vivek Ramaswamy as the candidate.

[15:14] For a number of reasons. One is he is a, his parents were not born here, put it that way. He’s, he’s one of those birthright citizens. You know, he was born in Cincinnati and there’s been a lot of, a lot of feedback from the more, more bigoted sectors of the Republican party that don’t believe that he is a citizen. They believe that he was not born here, even though he was. So they have that problem. The other problem is he’s a tech bro. So he’s all about the technology and the crypto coins. And he’s moved his businesses to Texas. He slighted Ohio workers and said that they were lazy. He got involved with the Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats incident last election season, trying to seem like he was moderating it for whatever reason. He was also friends with Elon Musk, and they worked on that Doge project, but then Ramaswamy was forced out.

[16:31] According to the reports, he was forced out. He claims he left on his own because he wanted to run for governor. So he won the primary. He’s the governor. And so the Republicans, they think that they have a problem. So they’re trying to get something on the ballot that would entice people to come in and vote.

[16:54] And since the property tax initiative probably won’t make the ballot, they’ve decided to go with their other standby, election security. And so they are pushing through. The legislature has a different process for putting through constitutional amendments to the Ohio Constitution. They do joint resolutions, and it has to pass by, I think, three-fifths of majority, which they could probably do it, more than likely, unless they totally mess it up. They’ll probably get passed. So once they’re passed, then they’ll go to the ballot board and the language and everything, and they’ll be on the ballot. A lot simpler. I think that they should have to do the same thing that regular citizens have to do and gather signatures. But that’s for another story for another time. So what they want to do is they want to enshrine requiring photo ID to vote in the Ohio Constitution. Right now, it’s just Ohio revised code that can be changed at any time. And I can tell you that if the Democrats ever get off the stick and are able to either take over, and I think they’re expecting Dr. Acton to win the governorship, they’re hedging their bets.

[18:17] It could get changed. They could change the law and put it back to where it used to be, where you could use a photo ID. We’ve always been able to use a photo ID. That’s the easiest way to do it. But previously to 2023, you could bring a bill, a utility bill, a government-issued letter, like from Social Security or something like that. Again, election fraud is very, very rare. When it does happen, usually it’s because it’s a mistake. We just had one, actually. We just found out that Frank LaRose, the secretary of state, voted provisionally because he’s in the National Guard and he got called up. And so he was voting absentee while he was out of the country. And his absentee ballot didn’t arrive on time. They just recently changed the law now that the absentee ballot has to arrive on election day for it to be counted. You don’t get it used to be a three or four day cushion. So it could arrive up to four days after the election. And they did away with that.

[19:30] So he was back. He was back in in the state on election day. So he went to his polling place. And the way it works is they checked him in. They saw that he had pulled an absentee ballot. And so he had to vote provisionally.

[19:49] So what that meant was that they would have to wait to see if that ballot would show up. I think it was illegal, but anyway, so that’s that that happened to the secretary of state, which we told them when they changed the law, that that’s what was going to happen. So military people in Ohio are getting disenfranchised and unintentionally because they’re they’re trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, election fraud.

[20:19] So the Republicans in the statehouse, they did this joint resolution in the House and in the Senate where they are going to enshrine Frodo ID into the Constitution. That’s all well and good. People are like, why do we need this? It’s in the law. And I’ll have a link in the show notes so you can see the text, the actual text in the resolution. Basically, the clincher, the twist on this is the last bit that they want to add to the Constitution. It’s going to be letter C, section C, well, section 5, 5C. This is the exact text from the resolution. It’s the same in the Senate and the House version. Nothing in this section requires the General Assembly to pass laws allowing electors to vote in any location or manner other than in person at a polling place on the day of an election.

[21:25] So basically, they’re not only going to want to enshrine voter ID in the Constitution, they also want to make it constitutionally impossible to have early voting because it says that it says nothing in the section requires them to pass laws. So they could pass a law that disallows it and takes it away. And there’s nothing anybody could do because they’re not required to pass a law to allow it. And this is something, this is their end game. This is something that they’ve been wanting to do for a long time. And this is why. Because the main people that vote Republican, the old people that vote for Republicans, mainly vote for Republicans, they always vote on Election Day. Always. I mean, I work as a poll worker on Election Day, and I rarely see anybody, rarely see many people that are less than 40 years old come in to vote on Election Day. Most of the people that are younger than 40, they vote early or they vote absentee. And so this is another way of disenfranchising the youth vote, for one thing, and people that don’t vote Republican.

[22:52] And this is something that they’ve been working on for years. You know, and so if they put it in the Constitution, then they’ll be like, hey, our hands are tied. We can’t, we’re not required to have early voting. So we’re doing away with it.

[23:09] Which I think is wrong. I always think you should make it easier to vote. And so they talk about this election integrity. They talk about people that there was a person recently in the news that got charged with filling out false voter registrations.

[23:33] And when they talk about this, when they talk about people getting caught with false registrations, They never say that those people actually voted. You know, I don’t think it should be illegal to fill out a false registration. What should be illegal is if you try to vote with that false registration. I think if they manage their list and they catch somebody with a false registration, then they should just cancel that registration and that’s it. Because I think the act of voting illegally, when you know that you aren’t eligible to vote, that to me should be the criminal offense. Not filling out a form saying that you’re legal to vote. You know, and that’s what they had. They had David Yost recently left as Ohio Attorney General to go work for one of the Christian nationalist law groups that are screwing around with people with church and state issues. And one of the last cases that his office lost before he left was they were trying a lady that got caught filling out voter registration and she was not eligible to vote. And she voted twice.

[24:58] And her defense was that the people at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles told her that she could vote. So when she filled out the paperwork, she marked on, at least the first time, she marked on that she was a U.S. citizen and she voted twice. And what’s funny about it, what’s funny about the case is not, I mean, it’s actually, it’s not voter fraud. She didn’t intentionally try to vote illegally. She thought that she was told by somebody that she was eligible to vote. And then when she found out she wasn’t, she didn’t vote again.

[25:42] And so that’s what I think it was a judge ruled on the case. And so that was a positive defense for her actions was that an agency of the government told her that she was eligible to vote. And so she filled it out illegally. And so they canceled it. When she got caught, they canceled her registration and she didn’t vote again. And they still wanted to try and convict her and put her in jail. And that’s just one person. See, these are just anecdotal stuff. This is like one or two people. It’s not a mass hysteria. I know the Republicans like to talk about thousands of illegal immigrants voting for Democrats, but that doesn’t happen. There’s no evidence. There’s no data for it. And so this particular constitutional amendment that they want to pass, I equate it to the same-sex marriage amendment that they had back in 2002-2003. At the time, George W. Bush was president.

[26:46] He was having his issues with the economy. They didn’t think he was going to have a tough time in the election. So they made the conservatives made same sex marriage a wedge issue and put it on the ballot and brought out all the bigots to come vote for it. And then they voted for Bush, even though he won by a sizable majority in Ohio. They still put it on the ballot in order to jazz up their base.

[27:17] And don’t get me wrong, I think Democrat-controlled states and municipalities, they also do some things like that similar. But again, when Democrats do it, usually it doesn’t hurt a lot of people, if any. Usually it hurts rich people more so than anybody else. So there is a difference.

[27:42] So that is the Ohio story for today. And be interesting to see if this constitutional amendment gets put on the ballot. And then I want to see what the ballot language is, because Frank LaRose screwed up the anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative last election season. So we’ll see what happens, because the person that introduced it in the Senate is on the ballot board that comes up with the language that goes on the ballot of Senator Gaverone. So it’ll be interesting to see how that turns out. Do you enjoy this podcast? What if I told you there is a companion newsletter available? Secular Left Nuggets has written posts that either compliment a current podcast episode or highlight a topic that may or may not be turned into a future podcast segment. Subscribe to Secular Left Nuggets, secularleft.substack.com. And it is totally free.

[28:46] So, color me shocked when the news came out this week that President Trump was going to create a slush fund of nearly $1.8 billion to hand out to people who were arrested and tried and convicted in the January 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. These are the people that attacked the Capitol to try to prevent the transfer of power, certification of the 2020 election that to this day, Donald still claims that it was stolen from him. And so there was many people, dozens of people, maybe a couple hundred people, were ultimately arrested. They were tried and convicted in court by jury, in many cases by juries, and were put in jail. And so one of the first things that President Trump did was he pardoned them all.

[29:55] And now he’s trying to make it so that they get a payday. And so, like I said, color me shocked that that is happening. Of course, it’s kind of not, well, for Trump, it’s not unusual to be blatant with the bribery and the corruption of his family. He’s made billions of dollars. His family has made billions of dollars. There’s friends, rich friends of his that’s made billions, like Elon Musk, who got some sizable government contracts when the president came, when Trump came on board.

[30:37] But it seems like this slush fund that he’s creating or wants to create is maybe a bridge too far for some of the Republicans that still have a backbone or some semblance of a backbone in Congress. I mean, they haven’t done anything to rein him in since he got in the job. So why are they upset about it now? Now, don’t get me wrong, okay? The corruption is real. It’s bad.

[31:10] He even tried to sue himself for $10 billion for the IRS for leaking his tax information one year. And the employee, the IRS employee that did that was fired. And I believe that they were actually got convicted in court or something like that, criminal charges. But yeah, he wanted a $10 billion payout. Now, when it looked like that a judge wasn’t going to allow it because the president can’t sue himself, legal justification that they used for not agreeing to it, then he pivoted to this slush fund, $1.8 billion slush fund. And so basically you would be eligible if, how do they put it, if you were affected by the Biden administration weaponizing the Justice Department against you, then you could apply for payment from this fund.

[32:17] And it’s not the first time that the government has a fund where they pay victims of crimes or victims of some kind of injury, because it happens all the time in legal areas. But this is just pure grift. It’s pure corruption. And the fact that he’s tried to go through Congress and it looks like that they’re not even going to play ball with him. So he might end up just taking the money from someplace else that he’s not allowed to in order to set it up. So it kind of gives me kind of getting some chuckles, getting a little bit of a chuckle with the reaction, the outrage about it. Because, to tell you the truth, both parties, and I hate doing whataboutisms and doing this both-party bullcrap that you hear when talking about politics, but I’m telling you, both parties are corrupt. They both feed at the trough to the money people. They all depend on this money, and it’s technically not bribery.

[33:35] And the only thing that’s different about President Trump is he just doesn’t give a shit. So, for example, he met with some big tobacco people. They gave him a few million dollars. Calls up his fda guy and says you know uh bring uh roll back the regulations on on flavored vapes or the story that came out a couple weeks ago where his financial report came out and he had thousands of stock stock trades that he had made you know and it generally and it’s not, It is a law, but it’s not a law, okay? Here’s the thing. Here’s what you got to understand. That laws exist, but they don’t mean anything unless they’re enforced, okay? So, for example, you’re driving down the highway and you see a sign that says no U-turns.

[34:43] And unless you get caught, you can make as many U-turns as you want. And who cares? Now, if you get caught, then you’re going to face the penalty or you should face the penalty. So that’s what a lot of the stuff that Trump does is it’s stuff that he’s not supposed to do. It is technically illegal, but because he owns the Department of Justice, nobody’s going to stop him. So who’s going to stop him? The Democrats can’t do it. They don’t have any power in Congress right now. So you have to have some of the Republicans that want to do it. And they don’t give a shit either because he’s their guy. You know, they’re going to get to hopefully get their comeuppance come November. But until then, they don’t give a shit what he does. You know, they talk a good game sometimes. They talk about Trump doing this and Trump doing that and getting upset. But at the end of the day, they haven’t done anything. It’s like that Senator, what’s his name, Cassidy. Senator Cassidy in Louisiana, he’s a doctor.

[35:54] He went against Trump. I think he voted for impeachment or something like that. So Trump found a worse incompetent MAGA guy to primary him, and he lost the primary. So he’s going to be out of the Senate. So, Senator Cassidy, before he was primaried out of the Senate, sat on the health committee and doing the confirmation hearings for Robert Kennedy Jr., the head of health and human services. Everybody knew how bad RFK was going to be in the job. He was an anti-vaxxer, a former heroin addict, really passed on a lot of misinformation, believed that vaccines caused autism, that sort of thing. Just not somebody you would put in charge of all your health department parts, like the FDA and the CDC and all that stuff. So Senator Cassidy is a doctor, a medical doctor. He knows RFK is bad news, but he’s kissing Trump’s ass at the time, and he votes to confirming.

[37:13] So now he’s on his way out and now he’s feeling his oats and thinking that he should have done something else. And it’s like, yeah, you should have done something else because he was going to get primaried anyway, because Trump is a vindictive asshole and he just holds a grudge forever and ever and ever. I mean, the guy is still talking about the 2020 election.

[37:41] And that he lost. And he lost it legitimately. And he’s still trying to overturn it. Like, what’s he going to do? You know, they’re going to erase Biden? Well, they probably could. He probably would try that. He would probably say that he actually won it. And then they would erase all traces of Joe Biden. Oh, that’s going to be funny. But anyway, so this slush fund, getting back to the corruptionist stuff. So these people with the money, these lobbyists, they give millions and millions and millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars to these Congress people. And they get the VIP treatment. You know, they make a phone call. They talk to the guy. They show up on Capitol Hill. They want something done. And they get a meeting and the person shows up at their conferences. They get a boondoggle trip like Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice, gets paid trips put to places that he doesn’t have to pay for in private jets and $100,000 RV and stuff like that. And, you know, most people just say, well, that’s just how politics works. That’s corruption. That is corruption because these people with the money that are giving money.

[39:09] You know, large amounts of money to these Congress people and getting what they want is an outsized effect on everyday people. We have to live with the policies and laws that the corporate class gets these Congress critters to pass.

[39:33] To put into law and to pass. And I can tell you right now, these laws and policies are not for you. They’re not for average everyday person. It’s for like Jamie Diamond at Chase Bank. They’re like Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Tim Cook at Apple, Elon Musk at wherever he is hiding, his vampire thing going. It’s all for them. They get everything. They get all the benefits. They get they get the meetings, they get the phone calls, they get to hobnob with the congresspeople. You know, if Tim Cook says, hey, you know, Apple needs this this bill passed and he calls up Mike Johnson. Hey, this is Tim Cook. We want to get this passed. And Mike Johnson says, sure, let me send this over and get this started. You know, that is just not fair to the rest of us. Not fair at all. But that is corruption. It’s bribery. It’s corruption. Now, legally, like I said, a law doesn’t mean anything unless it’s enforced.

[40:43] And so one of the things that’s been coming out is, especially after the story about Trump’s stock trades. Oh, and I needed to complete that little story, is that he would make these stock trades. And then I believe it was MS Now, Rachel Maddow, actually plotted when he’d do these stock trades. And then very soon after he made a stock trade, he would talk about that company at some speech. Just bring it up. He’d be at a rally or something and just talk. He’d be like, you know, Widgets, it’s a good company. You should buy it. So then his stock goes up. See, it’s called insider trading. It’s illegal. It’s illegal.

[41:28] It’s illegal to be trading stocks, but, you know, people look the other way. So I have an expectation, and I know it won’t happen because, like I said, both parties do this. Both the Democrats and the Republicans do this, all right? But usually when the Democrats do it, it doesn’t hurt as many people, but it still hurts people. And so what I would like to see them have the cojones that should they take the House and the Senate again is start passing bills to make this shit that Trump is doing illegal, like clear as day illegal, you know, stock trade, no stock trading. If you are an elected official, you cannot trade stocks until you leave office. Got to get the money out of the campaigns. Got to undo Citizens United, everything. And I know if there is an election in 2028 and we get a new guy and he happens to be a Democrat, he’s going to probably have to spend probably most of his first term fixing everything. Because it’s going to take a long time to take all that gaudy gold shit off the White House that Trump has put up.

[42:49] But man, there’s a lot of stuff that people have ignored for decades and have looked the other way because people, if they abused it, they would get in trouble. So what they would do is they would do just enough to not get, not to be seen abusing it. The other example I like to, when I talk about this to people is when I was in college, we had these rules. I lived in a dorm. It was a four-person suite, not much space. So we had these house rules that we had to agree to. And one of them was noise. You know, we had to be clear, you know, we couldn’t be noisy after a certain time period or whatever. But we didn’t have a specific rule saying that you had to be considerate of your roommates when it came to noise during the time that there wasn’t a noise restriction. So I had a roommate who liked to listen to his stereo at like level 11 in the afternoon and he would study to that. I couldn’t study to that. So I couldn’t study in my room and I asked him, I said, hey man, could you at least put your headphones on, because that would be considerate. You could still listen to it as loud as you want, but you have your headphone. And he said, no, it messes up my hair.

[44:13] And so I went to the hall director. I said, hall director, you know, he’s not being considerate. So he talked to the guy. He says, you know, you guys don’t have a rule against it, and he’s not going to agree to one. So you’re just going to have to go somewhere else and study. You know, that’s basically how politics works and how laws work, is that they don’t mean anything. They don’t mean anything on the paper that they’re written. You know, the other big thing, too, is the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, when they wrote, all men are created equal. That was a lie. And we know that that was a lie because that’s not what they meant. They wrote it vaguely to try to apply to everybody. But everybody knew it didn’t apply to everybody because it mainly applied to white males who owned property.

[45:10] So, but yeah, so like I said, I wasn’t surprised about this last one. It’s been one corrupt action after another, just totally corruption, corruption, corruption. And the other big thing I would like to see the Democrats do, should they gain power again, is come up with a law, an emollients law, that would claw back any ill-gotten gains that he, that Trump and his family made while he was president. Just based on the assumption that he was not supposed to profit from his presidency. It’d be like a RICO, like a RICO thing, you know, a pattern, a pattern of corrupt activity where you gain a financial advantage or you gain property or money. Well, when you get caught and you go through a court, then you get all that property seized. They seize all their property and then they pay back the people that got money taken and all that. That’s what I would like to see happen to Trump and his family.

[46:18] And we need to really look at this again, this blatant corruption. It’s fine. We need to be outraged about it, but we also need to address the everyday day corruption that happens with just normal day politics.

[47:05] For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us. If you want to support the show, share it with your friends or visit our merch store at secularleft.us.shop. See you next time.