The Fifth Column (A Podcast)
The Fifth Column
#410 - The Tightening Noose
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Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:45:36
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#410 - The Tightening Noose

Matt, Moynihan, and Kmele assemble in Chinatown to mull over another Trump indictment. No need for bullet points for this one because beside the predictable digressions into muscle-bound gay birders and homophobic Blue Jays, it’s a lotta Donald. So without further ado…

And don’t forget: for the price of one very large coffee, you can help feed the children. Specifically our children. Who are very sad. And very malnourished. And very disappointed in your cheapskatery. For shame.

Discussion about this podcast

Hey all -- I will put this in the weekend links in a few hours, but: No Second Sunday today, because the boys are out West on business trips having meetings all day. We will -- God help us -- do a Third Sunday on Father's Day next week.

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The big question is...will this one be released??? 😀

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This might make it into the Working for the Weekend post, but just in case it doesn't - a great discussion about the Jordan Neely case on this week's Honestly (with a fully Fifth approved roster of guests)

https://open.substack.com/pub/bariweiss/p/daniel-penny-the-killing-of-jordan-neely?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1fgz13

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Yes, it was excellent.

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You guys have by far the best shtick when asking for subs. You finally got my cheapskate a**.

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The "starving kids" are flying premium economy to Forte dei Marmi this summer. Oh sure they may pass through Calabria long enough to hear the pidgin language of the region (Italian mixed with Albanian) & wave at some long lost relatives but I am fairly certain the nonna's won't be serving red-cross MRE's .

Welcome to business class. In 1st class, Kmele shows you his telescope, Matt plays his guitar & Moynihan solicits email pics, all on a Toobin-time Zoom call. That may just all be rumor & innuendo, based on the lost Mother-day's episode, but one never knows.

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My god what a post. Are you single?

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Welcome to 1st class. You won’t be disappointed.

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They wear you down.

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Spoiling us with so much Fifth Column content right now, and I can't be the only one looking forward to the Ted Kaczynski memorial episode before the weekend is out.

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Amazing. The Unabomber complaining about unwanted mail.

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I love this, but do you guys sleep? Don't forget that you need to test your cocaine for fentanyl these days.

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And for manganese.

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Another link here related to Pride Season! Two genuine gay icons talking sense:

https://youtu.be/YysgbnBohhc

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I'm bi, but I now love the phrase "bi now, gay later"

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Great recommendation.

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I think they referenced kids/young adults not buying into the hyper trans/gender push in the podcast. Does anyone have any references to studies or articles?

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This doesn't speak to that, but is a great article by Jean Twenge.

https://time.com/6275663/generation-z-gender-identity/

This passage in particular stood out to me:

There’s another key difference among the generations when it comes to transgender or nonbinary identity. Most Boomer and Gen X people who identify as transgender were assigned male at birth. Among Gen Z, however, most transgender people were instead assigned female at birth.

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When you're raised by a single mom all you know is Secret

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#secretpridemonth

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Spoiling us! 🙌🏼

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One of the 1st projects I was part of when I moved to LA was "Mr Show with Bob and David" and one of this weeks topic of arrested jan 6er's mentioned Jay Johnson who was a regular cast member brought me back to this skit where (at 3:56 of this 7 minute skit) Jay yells "I Fucked Up"... made me laugh....( I am too lazy to just rip that segment out of the skit). https://youtu.be/e5i6BHBuqxE.

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I love that show! Thank you for being a part of it ❤️ the "we have to blow up the moon" skit and the "Worthington's Law" skit still get frequent play in my household

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To be fair, Trump probably writes his own name in bold and all caps

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I can’t tell what I’m more mad about, the fact that a sitting president is using his administration to prosecute a political adversary during an election; or the stupid and likely illegal dumb shit that Trump keeps doing that makes him so eminently prosecutable. I hate Trump but it seems like we are opening a very dark Pandora’s box here...

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Trump is the Aileen Wuornos of politicos.

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Ok that’s just funny. And sadly on the nose…😂

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Early 2000s Florida woman, so ahead of her time.

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I'm not confident the sitting president even knows what day it is.

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Jun 10, 2023
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These are federal charges, so DOJ is a part of Biden’s administration. I’m sure they’ll say they didn’t know it was happening but that kind of strains credulity. And I totally think Trump is guilty! I won’t shed a tear if he is convicted. I mostly blame him for all of this. But I don’t like what all of this is doing to our system, because once you open that door it can’t be closed.

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Jun 12, 2023
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We get the elected officials we deserve, I guess....

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Jun 10, 2023
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Just commenting on a pod thread…..the prosecution makes me deeply uncomfortable, as I don’t believe that Biden was unaware of it and even if he technically was, the right will use it politically to their advantage. And I lament that a guy who would otherwise be just another trashy, corrupt rich person somehow became leader of the free world, making his alleged crimes more tempting to prosecute and therefore taking us into a strange and (in my opinion) dangerous new political world.

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Jun 10, 2023
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Agreed!

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Uh. My eyes?

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The more teenage girls are forced to strip off for gym class in front of the creepiest boy in their grade, the more you’re going to see the youth turn around on the gender thing.

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PRIDE stopped having anything to do with homosexuals a while ago.

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Trump’s use of quotes is channeling Chris Farley’s Bennet Brauer (from SNL)

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So what if I "hoard classified documents" or "copulate with horse-faced prostitutes"?

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Thank the lord, a new ep. It has been a week (for the last several years).

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I should say, thank the lads.

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#AgitatedWhiteFingers

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Kudos to Kmele for watching “What is a women?” All you guys have daughters. Thank God mine are 30 and 28. I worry about my grandchildren. Understandable you guys would want to sit this one out but it’s too important an issue to duck.

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I’m waiting for evidence that Trump urinated on the hard drive to destroy security footage: Pee Tape Part II!

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Okay y'all. I've been around a while. I was Revolutionary Vanguard in the before times on Patreon, and now I'm here. Somehow I have lost track of what the hell "ringoseal" means. Like when Moynihan is doing the "Kmele's mom" voice. Somebody remind me of WTH that is? Thank you!! You're all beautiful human beings.

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Nice. Thanks Matt!

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I think it means in any pack of seals you are the one that gets his tracks re-recorded, but is allowed to sing one song on each album.

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It’s the Jamaican version of “sugar” and “fudgesicles”

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Stop letting that leaker off the hook. He wasn't a "kid," he was a grown ass man.

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I think you are missing the intention for using the word "kid" here. It's not to let the kid off the hook, it's to point out that nobody dillweeds have access to stuff they shouldn't.

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That may be the intention, but it comes across as excusing him as some naif who isn't responsible for his actions. After all, if he's just a kid, how could he be?

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Jun 11, 2023
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It makes sense that in a wide-ranging conversation touching on the handling of classified documents you might mention all sorts of things, including that too much banal stuff is classified, that conversely too much actually sensitive information is too widely available to people such as 22-year-old gamers, that ex-presidents using smuggled/concealed docs to show off or prove a point to uncleared recipients is gross, and so forth. Jumping on one of these strands over and over again to assert intentions that just aren't there strikes me as odd.

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Jun 11, 2023
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The "landing" is an issue with you, not with the people who said the word "kid," which in any case was not me, so I will stop now trying to explain what to me seems obvious.

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Yeah, that annoys me too. I had a clearance at 23 and I knew that *men* my age were platoon leaders in Iraq at that very moment, and were counting on people like me to help in some small way to get them home safe. I could not even conceive of betraying that confidence.

Note that the motivation of 76-year-old Trump and 21-year-old Teixeira was basically the same. And both left bright red flags that would allow any reasonable person to expect this kind of behavior.

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Jun 10, 2023
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Exactly. Calling him a kid just because he's a dipshit makes it sound like it was beyond his control and he couldn't help what he did. Absolute BS. Dude did what he did knowingly and with full knowledge of the consequences. This wasn't some tween playing with matches who burned down the chicken coop, it was a fully functional and informed professional military man who had been read into classified clearances who shared them in an attempt to raise his social status

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We have never said or implied anything like it was beyond his control and he couldn't help what he did. He took the oath, broke the law, acted like a jackass, and is older than plenty of very responsible people who have access to even more responsible stuff. Stay mad about "kid" but leave the ventriloquism out of it, is my counsel.

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Actually Kmele, Xenu’s spaceships looked like DC-8s with rockets

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You’d think the SoCal guy woulda caught that....

I actually ended up watching a thing on ArsTechnica earlier this morning on how the Air Force is preparing to fly the JSTARS planes for another decade. Those are 707-based aircraft. Older than the B52.

Dirty secret about DoD acquisitions is that the mundane stuff isn’t getting updated while the sexy things are.

The helos evacuating Kabul are the same as the ones that were evacuating Saigon.....

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At least the AWACS has a proven replacement on the horizon. Those BUFFs are gonna fly for a century.

GWoT got our modernization plans wrecked.

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And the C-130 is still in production, widespread use.

The Navy, too, cancelled the frickin’ railguns.....

But that AFB in SoDak is still open. Florida can handle nuke carriers.

(Expand Congress, already. Take a states’s population, divide by Wyoming’s, and round up to the next whole number. If you ended winner-take-all, and awarded electors like Maine and Nebraska, you’ve also fixed the Electoral College...)

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Tucker Carlson's Just Asking Questions.

AKA JAQing off with Tucker

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I would love for you guys to bring on Jeff Blehar to talk about this Trump stuff.

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Re: UFOs, read Erik Hoel’s piece: https://open.substack.com/pub/erikhoel/p/the-ufo-craze-was-created-by-government?r=1r753&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post

He breaks down how a lot of crackpot and crackpot-adjacent folks became legitimized by government funding given to them by Harry Reid.

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It's a Democrat conspiracy to make us believe in aliens! (But really it kind of is.)

It's kind of funny that this sort of woowoo nonsense used to be province of Democrats. Harry Reid was into aliens, Tom Harkins was into alternative medicine, etc.

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What Is a Woman? is a *very* persuasive film, and it becomes more and more persuasive the longer the question goes unanswered. For a question this simple, it is very clearly a losing tactic to just shut down the conversation and claim it can’t be answered because it’s not being asked in good faith. If I am to accept the guiding principle of trans activists (“trans women are women”) they really need to define “woman” and so far I have not heard a single proponent do so successfully. The entire ideology is crumbling under this one extremely basic question. If more scrutiny is applied it’s just gonna look that much sillier. There is definitely an expiration date of acceptance of most of this nonsense and I think it’s fast approaching

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Fun story - I went to high school with the guy lawyer who threw the Molotov cocktail, and my elite boarding school went out of their way to fundraise for poor Colinford.

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One thing I have always found curious is how much the idea of paradox lurks behind a lot of our ideas and institutions. Trump illustrates one of those paradoxes to a T. That in order to be a successful con man, you have to have a large group of people who will swear on their children and to their dying day that you are not a con man. And the more successful a con man you are, the larger that group will be.

I could totally understand voting for Trump in 2016 because you wanted to drain the swamp, or send a message, or hell even because you thought it would be funny. But the people who support Trump to this day who say it is because he is this fine Christian gentlemen who cares deeply about the average man, and wants to see corruption rooted out of American society? These are people working under an epistemology that is fundamentally unlike ours.

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Can’t forget Anthony Bass is a 35 year old reliever with an ERA approaching 5. Think his release is more about him being an unproductive headache not worth dealing with. He had a different, equally as stupid controversy earlier this season about his wife getting in a fight with a flight attendant. If he was good he’d still be on the team.

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I dunno man. I was at the game where they boo'd the shit out of him... Toronto is religiously progressive... I don't know how you keep running him out to that.

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Hah, Sandy Burglar. When I was a freshman in college, the Cornell Review - the campus's conservative paper that had been founded by Ann Coulter - had an event called the "Sandy Berger Race' in the main campus square (it's called Ho Plaza, please laugh) where you had to run an obstacle course with a pile of documents stuffed in your pants.

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"'Strong enough for somebody with testicles, but made for somebody that has a uterus' I believe is how you'd phrase it [these days]."

Know these phrases, and you can get the shes AND the she/theys (or the he/theys, depending on your orientation).

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Canada is indeed an unserious country that continuously extends its gross genderwang & may soon rename a province as “Pride Land.”

But the infiltration of that country by Xi’s agents is the biggest problem there.

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Also, the whole "yeah, we could pay for your wheelchair, but we could also help you kill yourself" business.

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Yep.

Medical solutions for a geriatric demographic…

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The Central Park Karen thing is so absurd. The fact that he got a book deal, and with his history! The dishonesty of the NYT and other reporting on that was obsequious to the woke mob and atrociously anti-quality journalism. Very sad. Once they cared about women but no more apparently. The funny thing is: Cooper had the wherewithal to say ‘African American’ in the white hot heat of the moment. That’s worth taking a moment to really think about. Were she truly the grotesque white supremacist the left wants her to be, she’d have said a different word, at minimum ‘Black’ and possibly even The Word Only KA-MEL-EE Can Say.

Just sayin.

Michael Mohr

‘Sincere American Writing’

https://michaelmohr.substack.com/

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Enjoyed the episode and thought the Trump coverage and commentary was mostly fair and spot on.

More Christian Cooper content, eh? Amazing.

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Maybe I'm just an optimist, but it felt like there was a subtle but distinct vibe shift late in this episode on The Topic Nobody Cares About But Somehow Comes Up Every Week.

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The Trump indictment, and the fact that Trump tweeted (sorry, “truthed”) about it before it was announced, *has* to disprove the UFO whistleblower story, doesn’t it? There is simply no way Trump would have been kept quiet about this when he was President.

The same goes for all the other big conspiracy theories, too - the JFK assassination, AIDS being created in a lab, the 1985 NBA draft lottery being rigged…

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Wait, how is this *less* bad than Watergate??

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Because in Watergate the sitting president was using instruments of police power against his political enemies. An ex-president inappropriately/illegally waving a classified doc in front of non-cleared people to make a narrow & private personal point is not as grave.

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When you put it like that... okay, I think I concede. But “hey guys do you want to see some top-secret military plans?” seems like a hard bar to clear.

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You only have to read the Watergate Tapes. It was a deliberate effort, for who knows what reason, to sabotage your enemy. Trump is just a blowhard.

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Did Moynihan just invent the Maddow/Mendoza Line?

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Since UFOs were mentioned...we have to remember Mrs. Rafferty. https://youtu.be/PfPdYYsEfAE

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Great episode. “Emasculating” was the perfect word for the dynamic we see playing out

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The Blue Jays DFAed a guy for sharing the wrong post? Can someone get Emilio Pagan to share something? Twins fans have been waiting for that DFA but his negative win probability and nightmare innings aren’t offensive enough, for some reason.

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FIFTH AVENUE FREEZE OUT!

Just a shameless attempt to leverage R(ip)POTUS recent woes into a pitiful mention on a pathetic podcast. We’ll see if the donald gets hoisted in his 5th Ave petard.

And if you’ve read this far you should probably get a haircut and a real job.

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Kmele I found it so easy to say “wow looks like Trump has really done it this time based on the available information”. Zero comeback from people who say you just love Trump.

In terms of what about Ism, this just proves they are all crap. The entire edifice, left, right, middle, bottom, top, far away, really close, they are all rubbish.

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I’m glad Kmele watch “what is a woman” and had some expectation broken. Matt is calmly giving his interviewees as much rope as they need to hang themselves. Else blind loyalty to the ideology backs them into truly ridiculous positions.

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Jun 10, 2023
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My general statement is that I do not wish jail upon most people, and that we over-incarcerate for crimes that don't involve violence/injury/theft of personal property. This *was* reckless and brazen behavior; I prefer (if he is found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt for it) that he his slapped with a sanction that doesn't involve a septuagenarian deprived of his personal liberty.

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And do any of us really want to see what that Trump hair is going to look like after a month with only jail shampoo and no conditioner?

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