DMZ America Podcast #157: Biden Drops Out. What’s Next?

Political cartoonists and analysts Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) react to a shocking development in the world of politics: President Joe Biden has finally, after weeks of intrigue and pressure from within the Democratic Party succumbed to concerns about his mental acuity and dropped out of the 2024 presidential campaign weeks before the Democratic National Convention.

What happens next? Scott and Ted conduct a postmortem of what amounts to a coup d’état and call for a serious investigation of who knew what when about Biden’s mental state. They assess Vice President Kamala Harris’ chances of securing the nomination for herself, who she will pick as her own running mate, how she will likely run her campaign and what could amount to a winning strategy against Donald Trump this fall.

 

Watch the Video Version: here.

(Video will be live 7/21/24 9:00 PM EDT)

DMZ America Podcast Ep 156: Trump’s Triumph & Biden’s Final Days

Political cartoonists and analysts Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (on the Right) take on a dramatic week in politics. Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt and emerged looking great from the Republican National Convention. Meanwhile, Democrats continued to call for President Joe Biden to step aside from the presidential race, Kamala Harris began to fend off attacks from the Right and the Left and the beleaguered Biden was forced to quarantine himself after he came down with Covid-19.

Watch the Video Version: here.

The Final Countdown – 7/19/24 – Nation Awaits Biden’s Campaign Fate as More Dem Officials Call for Him to Drop Out 

On this episode of The Final Countdown, host Ted Rall and guest host Steve Gill discuss various topics, including Biden’s campaign fate. 
 
The show begins with the CEO of Heartland Journal Steve Abramowicz weighing in on Trump’s speech at the RNC. 
 
Then, journalist and Youtuber Peter Coffin discusses Biden’s presidential campaign’s fate and also touches on the huge Crowdstrike-linked Microsoft outage. 
Later, political analyst, host of ‘Pasta2Go’ and Co-Host of ‘The Convo Couch’ Craig ‘Pasta’ Jardula shares his analysis on the Venezuelan elections. 
 
The show closes with Senior Research Fellow at the Global Policy Institute Dr. George Szamuely weighing in on Ursula von der Leyen winning a second term as European Commission president. 
 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 7/18/24 – JD Vance Gives First Speech Following Designation 

On this episode of The Final Countdown, host Ted Rall and guest host Steve Gill discuss an array of current events, including JD Vance’s speech at the RNC. 
 
The show begins with Independent journalist and author Dan Lazare weighing in on the internal strife within the Democratic Party amid increasing calls for Biden to drop out of the presidential race. 
 
Then, speaker and author Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro joins the show to discuss Israel’s plans to draft ultra-Orthodox Jews into its army.
 
The show closes with lawyer and retired FBI agent Coleen Rowley sharing her analysis of the ongoing Homeland Security investigation into the assassination attempt of Donald Trump. 
 
 
 
 

Violent Speech Might Not Cause Violent Acts. So What?

          With the exception of those who explain themselves, like John Wilkes Booth and Leon Czolgosz, political assassins tend to take their motives to the grave. Though the real reasons for their acts tend to be personal to the point of quirky—like John Hinckley hoping to impress Jodie Foster—Americans often point the finger at inflammatory rhetoric. Dehumanizing speech, we assume, is bound to prompt some weak-minded weirdo to act out.

            Anti-JFK “wanted for treason” posters distributed in Dallas shortly before the November 1963 assassination were cited as evidence that right-wing extremism had created a toxic atmosphere, implying that the city itself had sort of killed the president. But Dallas didn’t shoot Kennedy; Lee Harvey Oswald did. Though his motives were nebulous, his politics leaned Left.

            After Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot by her constituent in 2011, liberal media outlets took note of a map tweeted by a PAC associated with Sarah Palin released nine months earlier, which displayed targets over districts, including Giffords’, being challenged by GOP candidates. As The Atlantic’s James Fallows put it, the media asked “whether there is a connection between” such “extreme, implicitly violent political rhetoric and imagery” as that published by Palin and “actual outbursts of violence, whatever the motivations of this killer turn out to be?”

            There was no connection. The shooter had never seen Palin’s map. Yet, when Palin sued The New York Times over an editorial that drew a direct line between her map and the murder attempt, she lost—and was ordered to pay the Times’ legal fees.

Correlation does not equal causation. What common sense dictates must be true—what feels true—that violent talk begets real-world violence, trumps what actually is true: mentally disturbed people do crazy things sometimes.

            Still, the toxic-talk-is-dangerous meme persists. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs,” Sen. J.D. Vance tweeted/Xed after the shooting of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. “That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

            “Directly”? There isn’t even evidence of an indirect link.

            The alleged shooter, 20, was a registered Republican who donated $15 to a liberal PAC in 2021. Confusing! He’s dead, no one has found a manifesto, and at this point Vance is just resorting to the usual speculation.

            It seems unlikely that any sturdy peer-reviewed study of political assassins and would-be assassins will emerge any time soon that would settle the question of the relationship, if any, between a culture of violence—dehumanization, intimidation, threats of physical harm and actual killings and assaults—and attempts on the lives of politicians. Even so, an incident like the shooting in Pennsylvania should make Americans ask themselves whether lowering the temperature might not be its own reward.

            As a leftist who does not support Trump, I was shocked not only at the stream of vitriol that swamped social media after the Pennsylvania shooting, much of it bemoaning the fact that Trump survived, but at the willingness of so many people to express such extreme opinions in public, under their own names, in an instantly searchable medium. Either they are unafraid of social repercussions or, more likely, it never crossed their minds that there might be any.

            It is not hard to imagine why. These opinions are now mainstream.

            Vance is right about one thing. Throughout the current campaign and going back at least to the start of Trump’s first run for the White House in 2016, Democrats and their media allies have characterized Trump and his MAGA movement as an existential threat to democracy.

            Some went further.

            Five days before Trump was shot, First Lady Jill Biden told a gathering of Georgia Democrats: “Does Donald Trump know anything about military families? No. He disparages those who sacrifice for our country. His own chief of staff said he called POWs and those who died in war losers and suckers. He’s evil.” 

            There is no need to regurgitate a litany of overheated hate speech, especially in recent years. We all hear it. Demonization of political opponents, along with the determination that opposing partisans are not merely misguided or ignorant but willfully malign, is as old as politics. It is worth noting, however, that our government has normalized political assassinations overseas in a way that makes it difficult to (pretend to) be shocked when they occur here. President Obama had Osama bin Laden whacked rather than brought to justice, President Trump rubbed out a top Iranian general as casually as smooshing a bug (we’re not even at war with Iran) and even the press parrots official statements that sanitize such state-sanctioned murders with anodyne words like “eliminated,” “got rid of” and “took out.”

            We may never know whether there is a link, direct or otherwise, between a culture that treats killing cavalierly and citizens who resort to violence against our leaders. Assuming that there’s no connection, however, what would be the harm in speaking more gently and civilly to one another? Depersonalizing our politics might open the space to address actual issues, some of which—like the high expense of and difficulty accessing psychiatric care—that really are driving us nuts.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. His latest book, brand-new right now, is the graphic novel 2024: Revisited.)

 

The Final Countdown – 7/16/24 – Trump Kicks Off RNC With VP Pick 

On this episode of The Final Countdown, host Ted Rall and guest host Steve Gill discuss the latest news in the U.S. political arena, including Trump’s VP pick. 
 
The show begins with veteran news anchor and host of Perspective Scottie Nell Hughes discussing Trump’s newly announced VP pick, J.D. Vance, and how the Ohio Senator as a running mate will impact Trump’s campaign. 
 
Then, attorney, broadcaster, and former Congressional staffer, Rory Riley Topping shares her legal expertise on the dismissal of the classified documents case against Trump.
 
The second hour kicks off with Scott Stantis, cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune, to discuss NBC host Lester Holt’s interview with President Biden. 
 
The show closes with Ryan Cristian, the Founder and Editor of The Last American Vagabond, weighing in on the RNC and Biden’s presidential campaign. 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 7/15/24 – Nation Reacts to Trump’s Attempted Assassination

On this episode of The Final Countdown, host Ted Rall and guest host Steve Gill lead a full-show discussion on the aftermath of Trump’s assassination attempt. 
 
Scott Stantis, cartoonist for The Chicago Tribune, kicks off the show-long discussion on the aftermath of Trump’s assassination attempt and the RNC.  


Then, counselor-at-law Tyler Nixon joins a panel with GOP political strategist Woodrow Johnston to continue the conversation on the aftermath of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump.  
 
 
 

DMZ America Podcast #155: Assassin Shoots Trump

Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt yesterday afternoon when a gunman shot at him at a rally in Pennsylvania, grazing the former President’s right ear. He appeared defiant, raising his fist as Secret Service agents spirited him away from the scene. Political cartoonists and analysts Ted Rall (on the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) look into the political and cultural ramifications from the history of political violence in the United States to gun culture to the upcoming Republican National Convention to the question of whether overheated rhetoric, this time by Democrats, contributed to the current volatile situation.

Watch the Video Version: here.

(Video will be live as of 10:45 Eastern time July 14th.)

The Final Countdown – 7/12/24 – New Russiagate Claims Ahead of 2024 Election 

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie discuss various current events including the Democrats launching Russiagate 3.0. 
 
The show begins with Senior Asia Pacific International Relations Policy Expert Sourabh Gupta sharing his perspective on China’s response to the NATO accusations amid the summit. 
 
Then, Craig “Pasta” Jardula, political analyst and podcast host weighs in on the new wave of Russiagate accusations from the Democratic party. 
 
The second hour starts with the chief market strategist of Bubba Trading Todd “Bubba” Horwitz sharing his expertise on the latest inflation numbers. 
 
The show closes with human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik joining the show to discuss the ceasefire negotiations in Egypt. 
 
 

The Final Countdown – 7/11/24 – Americans Brace for Trump’s Long-Awaited VP Pick

On this episode of The Final Countdown, hosts Ted Rall and Angie discuss political developments around the world, including the NATO Summit. 
 
The show begins with the president of the Constitutional Rights PAC Carter Clews sharing his perspective on Biden’s campaign amid ongoing calls for the president to drop out. 
 
Then, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies Andrew Arthur discusses the SAVE Act, a bill seeking to expand proof-of-citizenship voting requirements.  
 
The show closes with International Relations and Security Analyst Mark Sleboda sharing his analysis of the NATO Summit. 
 
 
 
 
 
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