All right, welcome to the first day of winter.
It's the shortest and darkest day of the year.
We got some dark stuff to talk about today.
By a four to three vote, Democrat dominated Colorado Supreme Court, removed Donald Trump from the ballot in that state for being guilty of quote unquote insurrection against the United States.
This is the first time a clause of the 14th Amendment, which was intended to keep former Confederate authorities from taking office in the United States, has ever been applied to a presidential candidate.
It may be applied ever.
Is this warranted?
And it's just the start.
The California Secretary of State is investigating doing the same, and rumors are that Michigan, a genuine swing state, might follow.
We will also discuss the blockbuster poll that Heartland released last week about voter fraud with mail-in ballots in the 2020 election that also covered what punishment Trump deserves for not accepting the results of that election.
Our poll caused an earthquake, at least in the conservative media across the country.
And the results are so very relevant to what's happening this week.
We will talk about all of this and more on episode 428 of the In the Tank podcast.
Right.
My name is Jim Lakely.
I am the vice president of the Heartland Institute and usually a guest and not the host of our In the Tank podcast.
Donnie Kendall, our usual host, is sick.
In fact, his whole family is sick.
They might have COVID.
Things are going around.
So as Christmas approaches, stay healthy so that your holiday isn't.
Ruined.
And before we get into the meat of our discussion today, I want to ask everybody watching this on YouTube and Rumble or even X and on Facebook and listening to this podcast, the audio version, which you can get anywhere you can get your podcast to do us a big favor.
And that is to like this, to share it, to leave comments, to give us reviews for the podcast, because let's just say YouTube, Google, YouTube alphabet.
all that stuff, does not like this podcast.
They do not like what we talk about.
And they crush us in the algorithms so that it becomes harder to find and listen to what I think are pretty important programs.
So if you do things like like, share, and subscribe, and also leave lots of comments, and we have people in the chat today, as we always do, that also helps with the algorithm, kind of helps us, just kind of helps them understand
make it harder for them to avoid us.
But those sorts of things are very important.
They're easy to do, and we hope that you will be able to support the program by doing that.
Let's just get into it.
Today is December 21st, 2023.
It is winter solstice, if you are a pagan.
It is also just four days before Christmas, if you are a Christian, in this holiday week.
And so we have a bit of a skeleton crew today.
With us, as usual, is the editorial director of the Heartland Institute, that being Chris Talgo.
Chris, how are you doing today?
Doing good.
You're right.
It's very, very dark here in Chicago today.
It just seems like it's winter solstice day.
So I don't know.
It's just, you know, just kind of...
Just feels like a dark, depressing day.
But I think we're going to cheer everybody up, at least to the best of our abilities, Jim.
That's what this show is very famous for, is cheering people up when it comes to the news of the day.
That is for sure.
And the good thing about it being the shortest day of the year, as far as sunlight is concerned, it means you can put on your Christmas lights a little earlier.
The longest time for your Christmas lights to be on all day.
So that's at least a little bit of fun at my house.
And also with us is somebody from our Socialism Research Center here at the Heartland Institute.
That's research fellow Jack McFerrin.
Jack, welcome to the podcast today, buddy.
Thanks, Jim.
Good to be here.
Yeah, I mean, in terms of what Chris said, I don't know how much cheering up we're going to be able to do.
It seems like there's very little to be optimistic about these days, especially with what just happened in Colorado.
But I guess we'll do our best.
Yeah.
Well, before we get into it, let's try to lighten it up a little bit.
Chris, you are notoriously a late Christmas shopper.
Every time I ask you, you say you're not done yet.
Have you even started?
I have gotten two presents so far.
Yes.
I'm going to do most of my shopping, I think, this weekend.
To be brutally honest, I mostly buy gift cards because I am...
through trying to guess what people want.
Most of the people on my list, my family, are adults.
So it makes a lot more sense for me to just go give them a gift card and let them actually get what they want.
So that's basically my strategy for Christmas shopping 2023.
All right.
And I know it's lame.
I'm sorry.
Super lame.
Jack, tell me you've got a better story than that.
I really don't, Jim.
I mean, I did all of my Christmas shopping on Amazon Prime yesterday and just did it all in about one hour.
I kind of hate that I used Amazon Prime for all of my Christmas shopping and didn't support, you know, actual local businesses, but the convenience is just too hard to beat.
All right.
Both of you are super lame.
I hope Donnie, I'm sure Donnie didn't buy Amazon cards for his two tiny boys at his wife.
So everybody's not here to talk about that, but all right.
Well, we might as well just get onto it.
Let's get onto the process of blowing up our channel again, burying it beneath the earth by talking about the shocking news this week.
And I'm trying to not get too depressed about it.
Since I'm hosting, I may not be able to do three Jim rants in this podcast as I often do, but let's just get right into it and describe what happened.
I'm sure most of our listeners are aware of it.
I'm gonna be reading from the Washington Free Beacon.
Colorado Supreme Court disqualifies Trump from the state's 2024 ballot.
Former President Donald Trump cannot appear on the ballot in Colorado next year's presidential election.
Due to his role in the January 6th, 2021 attack on the U.S.
Capitol by his supporters, the state's top court ruled Tuesday in a historic judgment that is likely to find its way to the Supreme Court, United States Supreme Court, that is.
In a 4-3 ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court, by the way, they were all Democrats, so three Democrats of the seven said that this was a step too far, but four of them said, yes, it's fine to throw the leading Republican nominee and a former president of the United States off the ballot in the state of Colorado.
This makes the first presidential candidate in history to be deemed ineligible for the White House under a rarely used provision of the U.S.
Constitution that bars officials who have engaged in, quote, insurrection or rebellion
holding office.
The court concluded that the U.S.
Constitution bars Trump from the Republican nomination in 2024 for appearing on the ballot because of his role in, this is not in quotes, but it should be, instigating violence against the U.S.
government.
And justices wrote, quote, we do not reach these conclusions lightly.
We are mindful of the magnitude and the weight of the questions now before us.
We are likewise mindful of our solemn duty to apply the law without fear or favor and without being swayed by public reaction to the decisions that the law mandates we reach.
We are also cognizant that we travel in uncharted territory and that this case presents several issues of first impression.
And the court has stayed its ruling, meaning it's delayed its implementation until January 4th, 2024, to allow for appeals because and that's they've stayed it until then, because on January 5th, that is the deadline for the secretary of state of the of Colorado.
to certify and finalize the official ballots that will be used in the primary election and then, of course, in the general election.
And if Trump is taken off the primary ballot, there is no conceivable way he would be allowed on the general election ballot.
So some other news that has come from this is that Vivek Ramaswamy has said that he is going to ask his name be removed
from the ballot in Colorado.
Ron DeSantis, for his part, did not do that.
You take that as you were.
And then there was a lower court ruling in Colorado that, see, this was a civil case.
And so a lower court in Colorado said that they could not remove Trump from the
from the ballot, but they found that he was quote unquote guilty of insurrection.
And so they left it, they basically left the Supreme Court of Colorado to grab the rebound and put it in there, put it in the basket and take Donald Trump off the ballot.
And of course the Colorado,
Supreme Court expects the United States Supreme Court to have to take up this case.
Nice of them to give them two weeks to do so in such an important case.
They got two weeks over the holidays, great, over Christmas to decide whether or not to basically save democracy and restore the rule of law in the United States.
Just some observations before I throw it to you guys.
I mean, first of all, so they want him taken off the ballot because they say that he has, that Trump that is, violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, specifically Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
I am sure I am like millions of people across America who for the first time Googled 14th Amendment to find out exactly what was in it.
Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was, again, this was enacted after the Civil War to restore the civil rights of slaves or establish the civil rights of former slaves, I should say.
Section 3 says, quote, no person shall be a senator or representative in Congress or elector of president and vice president or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States or under any state
who having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress or as an officer of the United States or as a member of any state legislature or as executive or judicial officer of any state to support the constitution of the United States shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same or given aid and comfort to the enemies thereof.
so it was under that clause of the 14th Amendment that the Supreme Court of the state of Colorado is kicking Donald Trump off the ballot and not allowing the people of Colorado, either in the primary or in the general election, to vote for him at all.
Now, Chris, there's more details here to get into, and we'll get into that, but I want to get your take on this initially, but I think we've seen this coming for a long time, and part of the reason why I'm kind of
depressed as I thought, you think to yourself, they're not going to really do this, are they?
They're not really going to take him off the ballot in states under this insurrection BS.
And here, Colorado has gone and done it.
California's Secretary of State yesterday said, huh, that's a nice idea.
I think I'm going to officially explore doing that in the state of California.
And there are rumors that there are other states considering the same.
So
uh were you surprised that this news came down were you shocked or you were just simply angry combination of all of all those jim so this has been uh floated by uh some you know far left uh constitutional scholars for the past couple months i just want to you know say a couple things right after the ruling came down i was watching the news like i usually do and uh i flipped on to cnn and msnbc and i can just
can tell you that they were absolutely giddy with this news so you know usually msnbc and cnn uh speaking of like you know darkness they i have a pretty dark you know dour uh coverage these days however on this one they actually smiled for the first time in several months so i was kind of you know like it really like threw me for a loop but um i just want to um hone in on uh
the clause that you just cited jim and there's a very very specific uh set of words that i want to focus on in the 14th amendment clause 3 also known as the disqualification clause like you said jim this was passed in 1868 and this was supposedly
meant to prevent former Confederate soldiers and officials from attaining high seats of power in the newly reconstructed U.S.
federal government.
OK, it was never intended for what it's currently being used for.
But here's here's the to me one of the most important things here.
And this kind of gets into some like, you know, like legal
jargon, but I think it's very important.
So in the clause that you just stated, it says shall have engaged in interaction.
Under legal parlance, shall is actually interchangeable with the term must.
He must have engaged.
to this day donald trump has not been charged with insurrection jack smith has not charged him with insurrection jack smith has touched him with some other kind of strange crimes like uh corruption of a federal proceeding some other weird stuff but he has not been charged with insurrection in fact
More than 1,100 people who engaged in riotous behavior on January 6th, not a single one has been charged with an insurrection.
Not one.
A bunch have been charged with government property destruction and kind of just stupid stuff like that.
But not one person who participated in January 6th has been charged with insurrection.
So the only time that President Trump...
has been quote unquote charged with insurrection was in the impeachment the second impeachment but guess what happened there the senate found him not guilty now i understand that that is a political proceeding it's not an actual legal proceeding so that doesn't carry you know like water in this case however
The fact that the clause specifically states shall have, meaning must have engaged in insurrection, and that Donald Trump has not even been charged with that crime.
How did the Colorado State Supreme Court make the leap to saying, well, we've determined he has engaged in an insurrection?
We don't want to we don't want to go down this road.
This is a very, very dark.
Speaking of dark.
Wow.
It's just caught in my head right now.
It's a really dark road to go down, because then this is saying that unelected appointed judges can determine whether crimes have been or have not been committed when they haven't even had a trial by jury or trial by by by judge.
So I think that alone.
just blows this whole thing apart i've got some other things that i you know also uh you know think you know really uh show how how much of a desperate move this is but i think that alone will uh will uh be used by the supreme court to say are you guys just like kidding me right now like give me a break why are you why are you ruining why you're ruining our christmas and our new year's with this you know superfluous you know like a ridiculous ludicrous you know
thing um so i think that the supreme court will see it will um you know hear this case very soon and i think they will decide on it uh well ahead of the january 4th deadline and i think that they're i actually i i do think that there's a uh a pretty decent chance that it's a nine zero decision saying give me a break come on guys like you know better than this
I mean, that's what it has to be, Chris.
It has to be a unanimous 9-0 decision.
I mean, this is so vital for the protection of our democracy.
Now, look, we may use the word democracy and we really mean representative republic, but I'm going to use it in the more colloquial sense.
So please, it kind of makes my teeth hurt sometimes when I hear that other people call us a democracy, but...
The democratic process is at risk here in this case.
This is one of the most risky moves by a left power structure, a leftist Marxist power structure.
This is the boldest move they've ever attempted.
I keep waiting for there to be some sort of limiting principle to the desire to exercise power, to retain and keep their own power, and to keep anybody who questions their power
from getting anywhere near the ability to stop them.
I think the FBI arrested more than a thousand people for, again, as you mentioned, Chris, not for insurrection, but for parading and doing other things without a permit when people were invited into the Capitol.
And then they have their doors knocked down at five in the morning by the FBI in a raid when they were invited into the Capitol by police, or they were not even anywhere near the Capitol at all.
It is dark, it's the darkest day of the year on December 21st, and it's really kind of a dark day for our country when these sorts of, there's just no limiting principle.
Of the seven justices on the Supreme Court in the state of Colorado, three of them, three of the Democrats,
had at least some pause about this.
And in fact, reading the decision, I believe the dissenters who said, no, we can't take him off the ballot, still pretty much accepted the fact that he committed insurrection and that Donald Trump is bad.
And I really wish we could throw him off the ballot, but we really shouldn't do that because that's a step too far.
Well, four of the seven didn't think it was a step too far.
They thought it was completely appropriate.
And again, we have to understand
This is a civil case.
This was a advocacy group on the left sued the state of Colorado to get them taken off the ballot.
And and so the the judge in a civil case or I should say the justices in this civil case just decide to establish as fact.
Donald Trump is guilty of a violation of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, so-called insurrection and rebellion against the United States.
And how and why did they come to this conclusion?
I shared with Andy had up on the screen there briefly the 213 page decision, which is full of wild conspiracy and nonsense and illogic all over it.
The big hook on this is that Donald Trump in his speech at the Ellipse on the National Mall on January 6th, 2021, urged his supporters to fight.
to fight for, or they're not gonna have a country anymore.
And that only once in those 213 pages, and you can do a quick, you can do a quick word search.
I'm sorry, just one, I'll let you jump in here and then we'll let Jack get in here.
But like, it's the idea to fight.
Now, you know,
Is it like a 40 million times a year do Democrats in rallies say that we have to fight for our rights?
You got to fight for this.
You got to fight for that.
And by this, by using that common political rhetorical term of having to fight.
The justices in Colorado said that means he was instructing them to violently overthrow the police at the Capitol and storm in supposedly to take over the government.
It's absurd.
And only once, because listeners to this podcast know this, Donald Trump said that he wanted his supporters to, quote, peacefully and patriotically have their voices heard.
That is mentioned in this 213 page decision one time and only just to just blithely dismiss it.
That's not really what he meant.
What he really meant was an insurrection and a violent takeover of the Capitol.
I mean, Chris, did you want to jump in here or let Jack finally get his thoughts in?
Just want to make one more very quick point, and I'm sure Jack has a lot to say, so let him chime in.
But I just want to say one thing.
What what Trump was doing in his speech on the Ellipse was he was talking about fighting in the general sense by any reasonable interpretation of that statement.
He was not directing them to go and take over the government.
And I also think that this really revolves around the definition of insurrection.
And I wrote a piece about this just this morning, and I did some digging as to the actual definition of insurrection.
And the best definition I found was, and I'm not going to get this right because I'm just going off my memory here.
is that it is a violent overthrow of the government with the means of taking over power.
Can someone please explain to me how a couple of people like, you know, with flags going into the Capitol are going to take over the government?
Like, I mean, just just give me a break.
Like it is just it is so preposterous that that we have.
I hate to say that we have, but that I mean, I guess I'm a little disappointed myself that I haven't fought harder to to, you know, to make sure that the language is not being manipulated because the the term insurrection means you're literally trying to take over the government.
You have to have weapons, you know, especially in the United States government.
I mean, come on, the army.
It's like, just give me a break.
These people were not staging an insurrection.
They were very upset about what happened in the 2020 election, which, hey, just guess what?
Our poll shows they were right.
And I know we'll talk about this later.
And they were just voicing their frustrations.
I'm not saying that what they did was right, but it is such a stretch.
It strains credulity to say that they were literally trying to overthrow the government.
Yeah, I think that any rational human being looks at this ruling and realizes how ridiculous it is.
And I got to think that
There's something more going on here because I think that the activist groups that have pushed for this and the Colorado justices themselves know that there is not a snowball's chance in hell that this thing actually goes through and that the Supreme Court will strike this down.
So to me, there has to be some other objective to this, and it's not to get Trump off the primary ballot.
And I can think of two things.
One thing is that they do this to sow chaos amongst the public and distract the public from much more important and legitimate issues that we should be focusing upon, such as rampant crime, illegal immigration,
insane amounts of government spending and the terrible state of the economy, corruption within the Biden administration, you name it, we got it.
And so this is just more political theater to draw attention to Trump's quote unquote attacks on democracy.
But ironically, they're trying to tear down our democracy to preserve democracy from Trump in some absurd fashion.
The other potential motive that they have for this that I actually mentioned to Chris yesterday is that I think Democrats
Well, I know that Democrats, many on the left, want to tear down the U.S.
Supreme Court.
They either want to pack it with more justices.
They want to reduce its power over American society because...
As of now, the Supreme Court is pretty much the only thing keeping us as a republic, let's be honest.
Pretty much all of our other political institutions have not done a good job of preserving our republic.
And so what I see happening here is when this goes to the Supreme Court,
and the Supreme Court strikes it down, it'll be used as a way of saying, oh, look, the Supreme Court, you know, yet again is ruling upon an election just like they did in 2020 and they're out of control and we need to rein them in.
And so I think that that's what we're gonna see next.
And I'm very concerned about that because just look at who's president right now and look who's largely in control of the rest of the country right now.
I would not put it past them to try and
hamstring the Supreme court, um, you know, based on, I could, I could totally see them saying, oh, look, the Supreme court actually, uh, supports insurrection.
So they're, they're insurrectionists now too.
Right.
And it sounds ridiculous, but at this point, I mean, anything can happen.
I don't even, I don't even know.
Absolutely.
Anything can happen.
I mean, look, um,
We were laughing, you know, when the farcical January 6th committee, which of course was not a real congressional committee, it was full of partisans who hate Trump, two Republicans who are not really Republicans at all.
Even to call them rhinos is an insult to rhinos who are actually still adhere to a lot of Republican Party policy principles.
So it was a partisan...
rigged kangaroo court to convict or to, you know, basically publicly convict or in the court of public opinion, convict Donald Trump of committing insurrection against the United States.
You guys know we would roll our eyes.
We would let insurrection.
Are you kidding me?
It's the first insurrection in history in which nobody brought weapons.
Nobody brought guns.
They're going to overthrow the government without any guns.
That's interesting.
But I actually looked this up.
I was reading some other pieces today and there was a great piece in the American Thinker
about this that was published yesterday.
And it linked to a Reuters story.
So this is not some right-wing rag.
It's a left-wing rag, which the viewers of CNN and MSNBC should be able to accept.
Reuters, August 20th, from a story, August 20th, 2021.
The lead is this, the FBI has found scant evidence that the January 6th attack on the US Capitol was a result of an organized plot to overturn the presidential election result according to four current and former law enforcement officials.
Despite so that's the FBI saying this wasn't an insurrection.
This wasn't an organized plot to overthrow.
This was as what it was.
It was a rally that turned into a riot.
We can actually we should actually be able to argue who started it.
How did it all happen?
You know, we do remember, right, that Donald Trump offered to have the National Guard out just in case around to protect the Capitol that day.
And Nancy Pelosi said, no, thanks.
In fact, she said, no, thanks, because she wanted this to happen.
I think that's the thing to say.
So but but actually, could you imagine if Donald Trump actually deployed the National Guard to protect the Capitol?
That would have been called an attempted coup anyway.
So like there was no way for him to win.
He did the right thing, which was to make sure that there were enough force in place to keep it from get from to keep a rally from turning into a riot and getting out of hand.
He would have been called, you know.
even worse than he is today.
But anyway, the point being that the FBI itself, the FBI, the corrupt FBI that started trying to remove him from office with bullshit investigations into non-crimes, even they said this was not an insurrection.
But why did the media, the corrupt leftist media and the January 6th committee and the entire Democratic Party, why have they been using the term insurrection for a year or even more?
to get to this day this is exactly why they kept using it even though it was not true so that one day a court would be able to say um donald trump is guilty of insurrection and rebellion against the united states and again this court with no trial with no finding of fact
decided just on their own.
Obviously, Donald Trump is guilty of insurrection.
Hey, how about having a trial?
And as you pointed out, Chris, there was an impeachment when he was already out of office.
He was impeached as an ex-president for insurrection and they found it.
No, he was not guilty of what was one of the charges.
He was not guilty of committing insurrection, no matter how you want to define it.
Instead, the Colorado Supreme Court
pulled the definition of insurrection out of a dictionary and applied it to Donald Trump and said, so that's the fact, that's the finding of fact.
It's absurd.
And when courts can do this, the mania against Donald Trump, and let's be clear, all of the people who support him or at least don't oppose him,
is total and complete.
They are not going to stop these things.
And the reason why this thing, when you look at, I thought about it for a little bit, I had a second thought about this.
Why did the Colorado Supreme Court do what it did?
And they did what they did because they wanted to get to the Supreme Court.
They wanted to go to the Supreme Court.
And as we can hope, it'll be a unanimous decision to throw this out and to keep the states from just kicking Trump off the ballot because they feel like it, because they don't want the American people to actually have a choice, because they're worried that maybe Donald Trump, maybe he could be Joe Biden.
Who knows?
But we got to make sure by keeping him off the ballot.
to save democracy.
We have to stop people from choosing their own leaders to save democracy.
It is Orwellian to the extreme, but the point of making it get all the way to the Supreme Court and as quickly as possible is so that they can now delegitimize the Supreme Court as well.
That's why the vote on this has to be unanimous.
Do you have any faith that Sonia Sotomayor
And Ketanji Jackson or Brown, Jackson Brown, Brown Jackson, I forget.
Anyway, the new... Don't forget Elena Kagan either.
Yeah, Elena Kagan.
Do you think those appointees are going to vote constitutionally and for the good of this country and say...
You cannot just declare somebody guilty of something and remove them from the ballot.
That cannot be allowed to happen in the United States.
Do you have any faith at all that those justices will do the right thing?
I don't.
And so what you're going to have is you're going to have the left and the media are going to use this to gin up even more anger and division and hate in this country.
And the newest target will be not just Donald Trump and all of his supporters, but also the Supreme Court of the United States, Chris.
I mean, I specifically Clarence Thomas, too.
They're already calling to recuse himself, right?
Yeah, yeah, I do.
I see where you guys are coming from.
And I think that there's obviously a chance that those three could, you know, vote opposite the other six because they have been prone to vote based on political lines and political ideology.
However, I mean, call me an optimist here.
I'm hoping that they understand the enormity of this and say, wait a second, if the shoe was on the other foot, we don't want the other side being able to do this.
So, I mean, I'm hopeful that it will be 9-0.
I mean, I'm not guaranteeing it by any means.
I could see it being 6-3, and then I could see happening what you guys are afraid is going to happen, where then...
calls to pack the court, you know, start ramping up again.
And I think that'd be, you know, the Supreme Court, you know, is one of our most sacred institutions.
It must be that way if, you know, people are not going to,
listen and respect what the Supreme Court says, then what?
I don't want to even fathom that.
In 2000, when the Supreme Court said no more recounts in Florida, we all accepted that.
I was a young guy, but I still remember that the vast majority of Americans accepted that.
Yeah, there were some people who were really, really, really upset about it, but they still accepted the decision.
What if the people are just like, no, we're just not going to listen to the Supreme Court anymore.
Yikes.
I don't know, man.
Yeah, I mean, what I could also see happening is that those three justices that we were just talking about do rule against the Colorado court along with their conservative colleagues or the Republican appointed colleagues.
but sort of hedging their bets by saying, yes, Trump committed insurrection, but he shouldn't be removed from the ballot.
So they grant the insurrection concept legitimacy, but still try to stand up as paragons of the democratic process by saying he should still be allowed on the ballot.
I mean, for example, the dissenting
justices and I think in Colorado, Jim, I think you mentioned this, but they they all basically said, yeah, Trump committed insurrection, but we don't agree because this doesn't go through the proper channels.
A quote from one of the justices, Carlos Samore, he said, even if we are convinced that a candidate committed horrible acts in the past, dare I say, engaged in insurrection.
There must be procedural due process before we can declare that individual disqualified from holding public office.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, I disagree with him on the insurrection idea, but I have a feeling that that's the kind of opinion that we will see from our more liberal activist minded Supreme Court justices.
You know, just add a little more context to the 14th Amendment.
We should we should remember that many of the Confederate soldiers and officials who pledged allegiance to the Confederacy and fought against the United States in an actual insurrection, a very long, bloody insurrection.
terrible insurrection.
Hey, guess what happened?
They were allowed to come back and have seats in Congress years after the fact, because one of the clauses in the 14th Amendment says if two thirds of the House or two thirds of the Senate allow that person to come back, then they can come back.
So this is so it was never meant to be a a you can never come back sort of thing.
It was
basically more of we want to bring the country back together, but we want to make sure that these people who literally fought against us and, you know, 200,000 Americans died in that terrible bloody struggle.
We just want to make sure that they're not going to do this again.
And here we are 150 years after the fact, trying to use it for a guy who made a speech on the ellipse about, Hey, maybe that, maybe that, maybe that past election was not on the up and up.
So it's just, it's mind boggling how they are going into, you know, uh, just, uh,
The way that they are trying to reinterpret something that had nothing to do with what they are trying to apply it for, it's stunning to me.
Well, this also comes during the same week that the reconciliation monument was removed from Arlington National Cemetery, a monument erected to celebrate and to remember the importance of the nation reuniting and coming together after a bloody civil war in which 700,000 Americans and Confederate people, they're all Americans now, died.
The left had that removed.
It's been removed from Arlington National Cemetery because supposedly, I don't know, I guess it celebrates the Confederacy or something.
The idea that after a bloody civil war, you can come together and unite as Americans under the same flag with the same purpose.
That's just seems to be, I guess, a foreign thought to your average leftist.
He just can't imagine
It seems to me that the left today has more hatred for their political opponents than Southerners and Northerners did after the Civil War.
That's mind-blowing to me.
It's 2023, as the kids like to say.
It's current year.
It's like, how are we still doing this now?
It makes me think maybe the left doesn't want any reconciliation with their political opponents.
They don't wanna share power with anybody who disagrees with them.
I mean, I think this is, how many more signs do we have to see of this?
I just keep waiting, as I mentioned on this podcast a lot and did earlier today on this stream, where is the limiting principle?
Where are the people, good Democrats or good liberals,
who are turning to their colleagues and saying, guys, this is a step too far.
You may not like Donald Trump, you may have contempt for his supporters, but we cannot do this and remain America.
Nope, there seems to be nobody anywhere who turns to their colleagues on the left and says, this is a step too far.
Nowhere.
When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, before the calendar turned to 2017 and he would be inaugurated that January, Barack Obama and Joe Biden and others, and James Comey and others, sat around and sicked the FBI
and other powerful federal agencies upon him.
They set up a joke of a quote-unquote perjury trap for his incoming national security advisor.
Nobody thought, hey, that's not a good thing to do.
That would be un-American.
That's not right.
That's an abuse of our power.
Nope.
Nobody seems to look around the room and say, guys, this is too far.
We lost
Let's lick our wounds.
Let's work within the system.
Let's have honor and respect for ourselves, our positions, and our fellow Americans.
Never, and this is almost eight years running now, guys, never have any of the leftists in power
said that to themselves had a pang of conscious that paused their absolute roughshod run over all of their political opponents and this is just the latest example and i don't think we're done i don't think we're done where does this stop jack
I don't know where it stops, but I mean, I will say that I have seen some opinions written in some very prominent, you know, leftist establishment media institutions like the Washington Post and like the New York Times.
There are those on the left.
who are, I think, starting to come to the realization that this is totally just a political hit.
And that gives me a little bit of optimism, but at the same time,
I think that a lot of people on the left are ends justify the means types of people, which is of course ironic because they are always coming after people on the right for their immorality or unethical behavior.
Whereas it's really the radicals in charge of our government on the left that are abandoning any sort of respect or moral behavior in order to get what they want.
But in terms of where this goes, this ruling by the Colorado Supreme Court establishes a very concerning precedent, not just in terms of like a legal precedent, but just in terms of we can apply any word that we want and weaponize any sort of weaponized language to completely remove somebody from
the political process and i've already seen people on the right saying okay well if they're going to do this to trump in colorado let's just do this to biden in in our state because biden has let in you know eight million illegal immigrants isn't that aiding and abetting insurrection why don't we do this to kamala harris for uh you know encouraging the uh the george floyd riots that went on for
120 days a few summers ago that caused one to $2 billion in property damage and about 35 people to lose their lives and injuring 1,500 police officers.
What about her?
Isn't that engaging in insurrection?
I don't advise that we go down that path because that can really be a slippery slope.
But it is true.
I mean, that's in essence what Democrats are doing by painting Trump with this insurrection brush.
They're inviting the same thing to happen to them.
And I think that that's going to blow up on their faces.
I got it.
I got to hope so.
But I again, I don't know where this goes.
And I was talking with Chris this morning.
the amount of things that have just happened in the past year, I would have never predicted that anything like this could happen in this country.
We are going to be in for a year of complete and utter chaos in 2024 and to attempt to predict what's going to happen in my opinion is a fool's errand.
We're just going to have to roll with the punches and just laugh when we can and fight when we can't.
Hey, Jack, one correction.
According to CNN, those protests were actually mostly peaceful.
So I don't know where you're getting your facts from, but CNN has told me that they were very peaceful.
You're right.
I retract my statement, Chris.
Thank you.
Come on, man.
As Joe Biden would say.
Jim, you know, after the Civil War, President Lincoln, his initial response to the South was compassion because he knew that if he backed them against the wall and just berated them for what happened, he knew that that would actually just make the problem worse.
Unfortunately, he was assassinated and the radical Republican Congress kind of went the other direction.
But, you know, I still think that we should, you know, try to, you know,
We have a lot of differences.
You know, I have a lot of differences with my liberal friends, but I think there's a lot more common ground and I wish we could find more common ground.
And I also wish that Joe Biden had fulfilled his campaign promise of being a uniter, because I remember on Jan 20th, when he took the oath of office, he talked all about uniting the country and we were too divided and blah, blah, blah.
However, for three years, he's just done the utter opposite, you know, from his his his dark red speech, you know, about, you know, fascists and MAGA supporters to, you know,
All the rhetoric and the hyperbolic, you know, propaganda that he's been spewing about how Republicans, you know, want to, you know, like do away with, you know, with their constitutional rights.
That is not true.
And he knows better than that.
And, you know, I Jim and I, you know, we were talking about this a couple of days ago.
What happened on January 6th, I think, was a response to the frustration of those people thinking, you know, darn it, the system is rigged.
Look what happened in the 2020 election.
Look what happened with COVID-19.
Look at how the other side was allowed to protest and not wear masks and the rules didn't apply to them.
And when you have fundamental unfairness like this where, oh, this guy can't be on the ballot because this court has said he is not going to be on the ballot.
That, I think, is a recipe for another civil war.
And I don't want to see that.
I personally don't want to see that.
Well, it disenfranchises voters.
I mean, like, for example, if if Trump if they do succeed in getting Trump off the ballot and, you know, whether in this case or in the future with him being convicted of other crimes, you know, almost half the country wants to vote for Donald Trump.
And if they're not allowed to do so, think about what that will do just for our
electoral institutions and desire to vote, desire to even engage in the election process, desire to engage in the democratic process.
People are either going to just completely withdraw from it and just be like, you know what, I'm just going to worry about myself, screw the country.
It's not my country anymore.
Or they are going to rise up.
And neither of those options are good ones.
People should be engaged in the democratic process and people should do so, obviously, nonviolently.
But these are the conditions that lead to violent revolt.
And I just, I would hate to see us continue to go down this road because we just,
We continue to become more and more polarized.
And like you said, Chris, I mean, I have a lot of friends who are liberals and I and even family members and I get along with them fine.
And yes, there are certain topics that I, you know, tread lightly around.
But for the most part, we can have rational discussions.
And I I still love all of them.
And I think they love me.
Ideally, they do.
Um, but, uh, you know, I just wish that we could do that on a macro scale as well.
Yeah.
How I don't know how to do that, but I'd, I'd like to see everybody try.
Yeah, I mean, we used to be able to, but if you take away the ability of people to peacefully settle their disagreements about the direction of their country through the ballot box and through an election process that is not corrupt, but can be accepted by the majority of the people,
hopefully a huge majority of the people as legitimate and fair, then you end up with other ways that Americans and people will express their disagreements about the direction of the country.
And it is a very dark and ugly place when you go down that road.
And it seems that the left in this country is eager for it.
I am not.
And I think most Americans are not.
There's a small minority of very powerful ideologues who are in control of almost all of the important institutions in this country.
And they are damn well determined to get their way and to bring us to a future that most people don't want.
And that's why it's important to vote.
That's why it's important that our elections are legitimate and seen as legitimate.
by the majority of the American people, which brings me to the second part of our podcast here, talking about the poll that we released, that Heartland released last week.
I should say on December 12th was the day it was released.
showing that one in five mail-in voters, people who mailed in their ballots in the 2020 election, admitted to at least one kind of voter fraud.
Maybe they did it by accident.
Maybe they did it on purpose.
Maybe they didn't know the law, but they admitted to a pollster themselves that they had committed an act that constitutes voter fraud.
And of course, fraudulent ballots are supposed to be thrown out
The coverage of this poll just absolutely blew up last week.
If you go to heartland.org, you can see I've been putting together a roundup of all the media coverage.
This is a very important story.
People are going to be talking about this through the rest of 2024 leading up to the election.
And I think for many, many years beyond that, wondering whether
And hopefully it will spur action to be taken to make our elections much, much more secure and end this whole idea of mass mail in voting.
Not even France.
You know, liberals love to imitate European countries.
France does not allow mail in voting at all.
And I think even their absentee balloting process is very restrictive.
Yeah.
But, you know, in this country, we just threw all those out in 2020.
And it turns out that one in five committed voter fraud.
Our poll was covered on Jesse Waters' primetime.
The nationally syndicated Mike Gallagher show was all over this.
I think he did five or six segments on it, including having Donnie Kendall from the Heartland Institute on his program to talk about it.
Tim Pool, for you young people out there, or you older people who know young people out there, he's a very popular YouTuber who covers the news.
He was all over this story.
Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Charlie Kirk,
Dinesh D'Souza, you name it, it was all over the place, probably scores.
I know scores of local hosts also covered this.
But, you know, as a reminder, in our poll results, oh, yeah, by the way, Donald Trump noticed it and
Posted about it twice on Truth Social.
Twice on Truth Social.
But you can go to heartland.org right now.
We still have the poll results and the media coverage as our top three features on the top of the homepage at heartland.org.
But 17% of mail-in voters admitted that they voted in a state that they were no longer a permanent resident of.
8% of likely voters said that they were offered pay or reward for voting in 2020.
17% of mail-in voters say they signed a ballot for a friend or family member without his or her permission with or without, I should say, his or her permission.
Those are all acts of fraud and those ballots should be thrown out.
And as a bit of a spoiler alert, we're looking into these numbers a little bit more.
We're gonna have more to say about this next month.
I think the ramifications for what this meant for the 2020 election.
are pretty profound, but that's just a little tease to stay tuned.
The second part of the poll, which I think applies really well to what we were talking about today, is the punishment that one in five Democrats want Donald Trump to be permanently imprisoned, exiled, or executed.
if convicted over the 2020 election fraud claims that he has.
47% of likely voters think he is guilty.
And I guess that includes, obviously, the members of the Supreme Court of the state of Colorado.
72% of Democrats think he's guilty.
Only 20% of Republicans.
77% of Democrat likely voters think Trump should be, quote, banned from running for public office again if he's found guilty.
Apparently the Supreme Court of Colorado thinks he should be banned right now, whether he's found guilty or not.
So, you know, in all the huge amount of media coverage, guys, that our poll garnered, they really focused obviously on the big news about all the voter fraud that was going on with the mail-in ballots.
But it got some attention, but not nearly as much, is the idea that, well, it's reflected in what happened in Colorado, which is that just for, well, they call him guilty of insurrection, Chris.
But I guess it also includes anybody who thinks that the 2020 election was not on the up and up, no matter how gently you may express that.
You're also guilty of crimes and insurrections against the state and must be punished.
You're guilty of wrong think.
Thought crimes are no longer.
are now going to be charged and you will lose your ability to have a platform.
But real quick, going back to the first poll, the first question, or I think it was the second question, I can't remember exactly, was if there was no mail-in voting in the next election, would you still vote?
Guess what?
94% said yes, only 2% said no, which goes to show me that
This whole mail-in voting thing and the Democrats really got it for all they could in the 2020 election on the pandemic.
OK, you know what?
We are well past the pandemic.
Let's go back to normal 2024.
Everyone should vote in person.
Obviously, there are a few exceptions.
If you're deployed overseas or if you're incapacitated, of course, you can vote by mail.
But the vast, overwhelming majority, 9 out of 10 voters, should vote in person.
And in my perfect world, they would do it on Election Day.
Yeah.
Jack, you were involved in the formation and the examination of this poll, and I hinted to a project that you're working on.
You should keep it under your hat.
We'll talk about it later, but you are examining the poll results with a little bit more granular attention.
But yeah, your thoughts on, I guess, our poll results and
What's going on?
Yeah, they speak for themselves.
I mean, the thing is, is that that 20% number that we keep talking about, that is the lowest possible number that we found in our poll.
The true percentage of mail-in voting fraud is probably much higher because
the questions that we asked were not mutually exclusive.
And by that, I mean one respondent may have committed fraud by filling out a ballot for a friend or family member, whereas a whole other respondent slash subset of voters may have committed fraud or did commit fraud by voting in a state in which they were no longer a permanent resident.
it's higher than 20%, but just 20% on its own is an astronomical number.
I mean, 20% of all mail-in ballots being fraudulent, that equals something like 14 million fraudulent votes, or maybe like 13.5, somewhere in that range.
And then if you were to apply that to the number of mail-in ballots in the swing states, and I won't give you any more detail than that, because as Jim said, we're working on an analysis that
applies that fraud percentage to the mail-in ballots in the swing states to analyze the 2020 election, it's pretty blatant that a certain side significantly benefited over a different side.
And by that, I mean, of course, Biden over Trump.
But, you know, while the results from that poll are...
While the results of that poll are mind-blowing, I think to bring it back to the second poll, it's really important that we examine that as well, because yes, the numbers on Trump are shocking, but that being said, they're really not that shocking.
I think we kind of knew that
Half the country just wants to clap them in irons, regardless of any sort of due process.
To me, the more eyebrow raising part of the poll was the part that focused on the media.
And so a combined 48% of Democrats believe that if Trump is found guilty, that media members who parroted Trump's assertions about election fraud in 2020, they believe that those media members should receive some sort of a speech ban or prison time, which is just wild to me.
I mean, I would have never thought that
that many people on the left were so blatantly in favor of just completely destroying freedom of the press.
It's just that to me was the biggest takeaway from that poll and the most concerning aspect.
And now, of course, I'm wondering, you know, is Trump being is the Colorado Supreme Court's opinion on on Trump being guilty of insurrection?
Does that count as Trump being found guilty?
Or I mean, I think it probably does for a lot of these people.
They're going to see that result and they're going to be like, OK, you know, he's guilty.
Let's let's do away with them.
They're not going to wait now for for any sort of, you know, resolution to these other trials that Trump is going through to them.
This is validation.
And the more and more states that.
rule in in similar fashions and the more this gets airtime the more validation these people on the left who believe that you know trump is a dictator and he he wants to take over the country and rule us with an iron fist the more that those people are just gonna get set in that way of thinking and it's and any any media member who dares to uh
to cast aspersions upon the 2020 electoral results.
You know what, let's just throw him or her in prison for 20 years and they can reform and then make sure that they only talk about the things that we allow them to talk about moving forward.
I got two quick things, Jim.
First, the 20% of mail-in ballots being fraudulently cast in the 2020 Democrat primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, and several other states
about 20% were thrown out due to lack of signature verification and other things.
However, during the 2020 general election, guess what?
Less than 1% were thrown out.
So either somehow, some way, all these people who didn't know how to properly vote in the primary election just magically did
Or maybe those states went out of their way to make it possible for people to commit fraud.
And we know that that's obviously what happened.
And one other thing.
Gee, last time I checked, after 2016, there were a bunch of people in the media talking about Russia, Russia, Russia, collusion.
Trump was not duly elected.
He's not my president, blah, blah, blah.
How come those rules don't apply to them?
Because they're on the left.
And this is, you know, we have to wrap up here.
I mean, one of the
One of my eternal frustrations is that all the people that lied, abused their powers, committed crimes to try to frame Donald Trump for crimes he didn't commit, not a single one of those people was held to account for what they had done.
None of them.
Yet the FBI sends out a dragnet to pull grandmas and charge them and put them in jail.
There are still people who were at the Capitol on January 6th who are rotting in the D.C.
gulag.
Nothing happens to anybody on the left who...
obviously commits crimes.
But Jim, it's even worse.
He commits crimes in obvious ways.
I know Andy just started to play the rap up because he didn't hear me get going and he took it away.
But none of those people
paid any price they were awarded with uh you know great jobs at cnn and msnbc i mean like remember the lawyer at uh what's his name i can't remember uh who was with lisa page that is the affair he talked about his district yeah peter struck exactly he had his insurance policy remember to make sure that trump doesn't get elected why is that guy in cnn all the time talk talking about how terrible uh trump is for democracy it is uh it's
Well, we know why we know why.
But, you know, the the the thing and I'll just wrap up by saying this for me, the big takeaway from our poll was that from the two polls was that it validated with the admissions of mail in voters themselves what all of us knew in our gut.
We knew that the 2020 election, that there was something wrong with it, that it was something fishy.
When Joe Biden, who campaigned from his basement, got tens of millions of more votes than Barack Obama, the transformative, everybody's in love with him, Barack Obama.
Joe Biden got millions and millions more votes than him.
Joe Biden got millions and millions and millions more votes than Hillary Clinton.
And he didn't even campaign.
And people hardly think of him as some sort of inspiring political figure.
And Donald Trump himself got millions and millions more votes in 2020 than he got in 2016.
More votes than any incumbent president has ever gotten.
and he loses in all of these key states.
So this poll, again, you can have your theories about what happened, but you can't make it go away.
You cannot make it go away when one in five voters admit to some sort of voter fraud through a pollster.
And so we need to keep talking about this.
We will keep talking about this, both on this podcast and future podcasts.
And I think the American people are going to be talking about this all through 2024.
I want to thank everybody here who's been watching our live stream today and listening to this podcast.
And if you subscribe, I thank you.
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My name is Jim Lakely.
I am the vice president of the Heartland Institute.
This is our weekly podcast called In the Tank, which is streamed every Thursday on YouTube and Rumble.
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Bye now.
Thank you.