Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode One Hundred Twenty Three: Garbage In, Garbage Out

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Episode One Hundred Twenty Three: Garbage In, Garbage Out · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and twenty three of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 0:05
  My name is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show, Why
• 0:08
  the huge defamation judgment against Donald Trump is a farce? The legacy media is
• 0:14
  in panic over their business model collapsing. I was right about the Chiefs and
• 0:19
  Taylor Swift making it to the Super Bowl and some things you will not hear
• 0:23
  anywhere else about how coaching football is radically changing right before our eyes. I'm
• 0:29
  known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man. I'm a digital advertising SEO and email
• 0:35
  marketing specialist that also happens to be a big fan of John Ziegler and the
• 0:39
  Death of Journalism. Do you need help reaching your target audience? Let me
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  help you develop the right messaging and confated messages in the best channels for your
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  business. Please visit my website, the Dutchdigitalmarketingman dot com and let me help
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  you tell your story. The website is the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot com.
• 1:00
  If you want to grow your business, Peter can help. That's the
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  Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show.
• 1:08
  I want to begin this episode of the podcast with a subject that is being
• 1:12
  systematically ignored, almost censored by the mainstream news media, specifically by the New
• 1:19
  York Times in the Washington Post. I'm referring to the massive and dramatic border
• 1:26
  showdown that got ignited first by this massive invasion through our southern border of illegal
• 1:33
  immigrants, and then when the Supreme Court of the United States, led by
• 1:38
  allegedly conservative Justices Roberts and Barrett. Barrett, of course was appointed by Donald
• 1:44
  Trump, sided with the Biden administration over the State of Texas on what they
• 1:49
  were allowed to do in an effort to try to combat or defend against this
• 1:55
  invasion of illegal aliens. There was a remarkable thing that occurred. Almost every
• 2:02
  single state that has a Republican governor, even some weak Republican governors like Mike
• 2:08
  DeWine in Ohio, publicly backed Texas in their battle here. And I think
• 2:17
  this is significant way beyond just this issue of the current invasion of our southern
• 2:24
  border and making people pick sides on whether or not they're in favor of enforcing
• 2:31
  the border or not. When you look at a map of the states that
• 2:37
  have sided with Texas in this showdown, it's really very telling. On a
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  lot of different levels. I have been one of those who have been strongly
• 2:46
  suggesting for quite a while that eventually the United States is headed for some sort
• 2:52
  of breakup. I don't know exactly when, I don't know exactly how,
• 2:55
  I don't know exactly how it's going to look. But this situation really does
• 3:01
  expose one that that breakup is in some ways inevitable and may not be able
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  to be avoided because our cultural values are just so completely different in the so
• 3:15
  called Red States as opposed to the Blue States. But also looking at that
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  map, the geography of how this is all going to eventually play out becomes
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  abundantly clear, because you can draw a line really pretty much from the southeast
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  of the United States to the upper Midwest and the states surrounding that line,
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  and that's going to be its own nation, and then you're going to have
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  two other nations, the Midwest and the Northeast and then the far West that
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  are going to be Those are the blue states. Those are the states that
• 3:53
  are doing everything they can to pretend that this situation is not happening. And
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  you know, when you look at that map, that's the future of what
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  is going to happen to the United States. I've often joked that it's going
• 4:09
  to break up like the old college football conference. Is that analogy or that
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  metaphor that joke doesn't work anymore because even the college football conferences are completely screwed
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  up thanks to realignment. But when you look at that map, what's you
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  know from a sports perspective, what's really most interesting is that there are three
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  states that ought to be supporting Texas that are currently not. They're very conservative
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  states that happen to have democratic governors, and those are Kansas, Kentucky,
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  and North Carolina. And as a sports fan, I thought, isn't that
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  interesting? I never thought about this before. But you have the three states
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  that, you know, if you put them on that map and this showdown
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  with Texas and you made them red instead of blue or white or whatever color
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  you're using in the situation, as they should be because politically they're very conservative
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  and the populations would clearly, by all indications, side with Texas in this
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  showdown, but because they have democratic governors, they're not. It's interesting to
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  note that those are three states that are considered basketball states and not football states,
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  Kansas, Kentucky and North Carolina famously Basketball states. I do think there's
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  something to this. I don't know exactly what to make of it, but
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  I don't think that's coincidental that you have a bizarre situation. And I know,
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  having lived in North Carolina and in Kentucky, that you do have a
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  weird kind of political situation there, especially in Kentucky. It might be one
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  of the last places, other than West Virginia, where you actually have these
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  things called conservative Democrats. And you know, in Kentucky, Republicans dominate the
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  state legislature and have all but one of the congressional seats, but they have
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  a fairly liberal although he looks like a conservative I think that helps him,
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  but a fairly liberal, especially during COVID governor. But you have here this
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  Kansas, Kentucky, North Carolina situation where they're really the only states that have
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  not supported Texas that absolutely, positively politically should be doing so. And I
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  think eventually, in this civil war scenario, or maybe to avoid a civil
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  war scenario, you would see Kansas, Kentucky, and North Carolina probably side
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  with the so called Red States. Obviously, this is all, you know,
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  massive conjecture at this point, because I don't even know when this would
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  happen. The demographics may shift enough by the time this actually occurs that the
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  map could shift, or red states or the you know, red state contingent
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  may shrink, especially you know, once this Trump era makes its way hopefully
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  to its end eventually, who knows by twenty thirty two or whatever. But
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  I really, more seriously, I really do believe that this is where we're
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  heading in some way, shape or form. This is not sustainable. It's
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  not sustainable what's happening on the border, and it's not sustainable the massive fractions
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  and fractures in the United States. Literally that's our name, the United States
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  of America. And I really do believe it's not hyperbole that you can make
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  a strong argument that we are less united and more divided than we have been
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  since the actual Civil War. Do I believe that we would head for an
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  actual war. I doubt it. There could be skirmishes, but I do
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  think we're headed for a breakup, and I don't think there's any way to
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  avoid that. You cannot have a country that the likes of which we were
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  created to be where you have such dramatic differences in the way that the populations
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  and the states view our principles, our beliefs, our foundational values. You
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  just can't do it. And it's really emblematic on this issue that is exposing
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  this divide the issue of illegal immigration. What kind of a country do you
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  think we live in? Do our borders matter or not? Now, to
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  the mainstream news media, they they don't want any part of this because they're
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  very pro illegal immigration, because they think it's good for creating liberalism and socialism.
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  And they've been trained, they've trained themselves to believe that inherently anybody with
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  pigmentation in their skin who's poor is inherently good. They inherently need of their
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  defense and protection. I mean, that's not an exaggeration. That's the way
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  the news media literally looks at most stories. If we've got poor people with
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  a lot of pigmentation in their skin and white people are pissed, then inherently,
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  instinctively they're going to defend the poor people with pigmentation in their skin,
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  i e. The illegal immigrants coming into this country. And you know,
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  even John Fetterman, suddenly fairly conservative Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, has made it
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  clear that what's happening on the southern border is beyond outrageous, absurd, and
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  unacceptable, and there are efforts in the Congress to try to do something about
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  this. And I find this hilarious and very very telling. I mean,
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  normally, I'm a Mitt Romney guy, not because I like Mitt Romney's politics.
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  I like his character, and I like a lot of what he's done
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  with regard to standing up to Trump and his two votes in the impeachment trial
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  to convict Trump, I thought were act acts of courage and character and deserved
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  to the at least acknowledged and complimented, if not rewarded. Instead. Of
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  course, his career has been destroyed politically, and he's not even running for
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  reelection for the Senate in Utah. But Romney was, of course one of
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  the people who was leading the charge for a bipartisan immigration deal which fell apart,
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  and then he blamed Donald Trump for this, and of course Trump,
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  and typical Trump in fashion, said yeah, go ahead, please blame me.
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  I want the blame because this is a bad deal. I gotta say
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  to Romney, gee, if only it was already illegal for people to come
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  into this country illegally, and if only the Biden administration already had the legal
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  authority to stop this invasion and deport people who shouldn't be here. There's nothing
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  that needs to be done. There's nothing that needs to be done legally,
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  and to pretend that that's not the case is a joke. It's an absolute
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  joke. But yet even Mitt Romney buys into this idea. Well, you
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  know, we have to negotiate with the Biden administration to force them to enforce
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  the law, and Biden's claiming, well, this deal passes, I'd be
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  happy to enforce the law. Well why why Because you need to be coerced,
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  you need to be bribed, We need to give you a certain number
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  of future Democratic voters for all intents and purposes for you to enforce the law.
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  That would be absurd under any circumstances, but particularly when poll after poll
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  shows that even among Democrats, this is a losing issue in most ways,
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  in most places of the country for Democrats, and so there's not even any
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  political leverage here. It's so Romney, in my view, is wrong.
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  Unfortunately, I have to say Trump is mostly right, even though I'm sure
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  that you know he's screwing it up in specifically in the specifics of it,
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  And as I said in my interview with Steve Cortez, which I'm sure shocked
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  the hell out of Steve in episode number one twenty two, I'm in a
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  very very small group of maybe one person in the entire country that's ardently anti
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  illegal immigration, living here in southern California, but who also hates Trump,
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  partially because I think he needs to be given a lot of blame for what's
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  happening currently. And this is I feel very strongly about this. I fully
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  acknowledge no one has any incentive to agree with me on this. Number One,
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  Trump didn't build his great wall that he promised every fricking day of the
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  twenty sixteen presidential election, even though he had a Republican House and a Republican
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  Senate. After his fluke victory in twenty sixteen, he did nothing. He
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  didn't build hardly any of the wall. He was given that opportunity, that
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  option, and he passed on it. That's number one. Number Two,
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  he has to take responsibility for losing the twenty twenty election. Of course,
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  he claims he didn't lose the twenty twenty election. He did. And in
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  losing that election, you know it's supposed to be a layup. I realize
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  COVID changed everything. I get that, but he crapped the bed during COVID
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  and he lost. He provoked eighty one million or thereabouts record number of people
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  to vote, mostly against him, not for Biden. If he hadn't been
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  so freaking hated, Biden wouldn't have the opportunity to leave the door wide open
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  and welcome people into this country illegally. So Biden only has the power to
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  do what he's doing currently or not do what he's not doing currently because Trump
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  gave it to him. It's amazing to me that Trump gets no blame for
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  that. And even the Desantas campaign meekly tried to make this an issue while
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  they were still running against him in the primary, but it never went anywhere
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  again, partially because the right wing media didn't set the foundation. The right
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  right wing media should have been setting the foundation on this for a very long
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  time. They never did that for a variety of reasons. But Trump deserves
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  absolute blame, not obviously total blame. Biden should be enforcing the border.
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  And you know, the Supreme Court decision was beyond ridiculous, especially coming from
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  two allegedly conservative justices, and I support Texas for what they're doing and standing
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  up for their for their own rights and to try to in some way,
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  shape or form, do what they can to stop or slow this invasion.
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  But this whole story is remarkable and very telling about we're heading where we are
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  heading in this country, and the main street news media is just pretending that
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  this isn't happening because there's no good outcome for them here none, and I
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  think they know that, and so I think they will probably continue to try
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  to avoid covering this in any significant way as long as they possibly can.
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  Now, as is always the case, I am extremely objective, extremely fair,
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  even when it comes to Donald Trump, whom I loathe, and I
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  have to say that the story that's happened over the last few days about which
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  I am most passionate and frankly angered, deals with a situation where Donald Trump
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  deserves to be defended, and that is over this eighty three point three million
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  dollar defamation judgment in the case brought against him by E. Gene Carroll.
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  Now, normally I don't pile on because I know I'm sure that every other
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  conservative commentator is probably saying very similar things to what I'm going to say,
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  but I got to say it anyway, because this really pisses me off on
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  so many different levels. This judgment is a farce. This entire case against
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  Donald Trump is a joke. And there's been a lot of commentary over the
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  last few days that Trump and his Barbie lawyer didn't understand this part of the
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  process because they were still arguing the first part of the process when a civil
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  jury determined one that Trump had been actually libel for sex abuse and for defaming
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  E. Gen Carroll, and that this part of the process was more about
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  how much money was he was going to be forced to pay. Well,
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  I'm sorry. This is a classic situation of garbage in, garbage out,
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  and especially when you are a politician, not just a politician, but a
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  president of the United States now a former president of the United States running for
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  president again. I'm sorry. You have an inherent ability in a country that
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  allegedly has a First Amendment to defending your free speech rights to defend yourself against
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  charges that you believe to be false, and his belief is a huge part
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  of this equation. Now, this, in some ways, this story is
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  complex. In in other ways it's very simple. And I'm going to try
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  to break this down as well as I possibly can in a fairly short period
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  of time here. So because I've been sued for defamation myself, I'm going
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  to get to that momentarily because it's an amazing story that eventually I'm gonna tell,
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  hopefully before this podcast ends in its entirety, because it ought to be
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  a movie. But I think it gives me some pretty unique insight into what
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  happened here with Trump. First, let's deal with the initial allegation. The
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  initial core allegation of this is that Trump sexually assaulted or raped E. G.
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  And Carroll back in the night nineties in a year. She doesn't even
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  know what it was. She does not even know what year this happened.
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  And if you know, I think about my work, especially in the Penn
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  State Joe Perterno, Jerry Sudowsky case, you know, I'm really big into
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  Okay, when did something happen? That's the first thing we ought to know.
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  When did it happen? She doesn't know, She doesn't know. That's
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  that's a massive red flag right there. There's never been a criminal charge or
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  a criminal complaint even in this case, and that is huge to me,
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  especially when it comes to the news media coverage of this, because the news
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  media has pretended that a civil proceeding is even something remotely close to a search
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  for the truth or a reliable way to determine what actually happened, or something
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  even remotely to a criminal case. And we're seeing this more and more and
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  more after this case. I think we're going to see it even more often,
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  where we're seeing civil lawsuits before and or without there ever being a criminal
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  case. This is totally past awkwards. If someone commits a crime, if
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  someone rapes you in a public place, a massive celebrity rapes you in a
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  public place, and you're a fairly prominent person yourself, that's a crime and
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  a crime that ought to be known, And yet the authorities were never alerted
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  to this. This this is the nineteen nineties. This isn't like nineteen fifty
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  five or something where there was this unspoken thing where you don't you don't say
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  anything about powerful men when they sexually abuse you. It's that is the time
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  warp element of this is just one of the many, many aspects that drive
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  me crazy. We pretend now that the nineteen nineties were a century ago,
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  like at a time of slavery or something. It's just utterly ridiculous, and
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  so there's no criminal complaint. The only quote unquote advidence she has is she
• 20:22
  allegedly told two of her friends. But again that isn't very reliable because we
• 20:29
  don't even know what year this happened in. And the inherently political element of
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  this this the media just completely refuses to even contemplate this part of this.
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  You're dealing with a uniquely political individual. Ejen Carol is a super liberal.
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  She was on television just this morning saying she'll do anything she can to help
• 20:52
  defeat Trump. In twenty twenty four, her lawsuit was funded by Democrats donors.
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  The only reason why this thing went as far as it did was because
• 21:03
  a Democratic governor in New York essentially eliminated the statute limitations on these kinds of
• 21:11
  cases. So the fact that Trump is this hated by the left, especially
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  in in elite New York circles, makes any corroboration of Eagen Carroll's story inherently
• 21:30
  dubious because people have an incentive to lie. That doesn't mean they lied,
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  I want to make that clear. They may not have lied, but they
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  have an inherent incentive to do so, at a unique incentive to do so
• 21:44
  because of who Trump is. And that doesn't even get into the whole element
• 21:48
  of how much money is at stake here, because Trump's allegedly a billionaire.
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  And then you have other elements of her story that are very problematic. You
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  not only don't have a year, but the exact same allegation was used in
• 22:03
  an episode of the TV show Law and Order in a time frame that was
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  consistent with her getting that story from the TV show. Again, does that
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  prove it didn't happen. No, but that's incredibly dubious. That's very suspicious,
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  And there are problems with what she said she wore at the time,
• 22:23
  which may not have actually even been in existence. Yet, she's a nut.
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  That's another element of this whole situation. She's been on CNN talking about
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  rape being sexy. In her many social media posts about sexual issues are bizarre
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  at best and very problematic giving her allegations against Trump, the jury was not
• 22:48
  allowed to see those, and so I do not believe that this actually happened.
• 22:56
  I've criticized Trump for his testimony in this case because he's stupidly misidentified Egen
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  Carroll as his second wife Marlon Maples, when his first wife was in the
• 23:07
  photo with her. He was added a photo, you know, because he
• 23:11
  had said that he had never met Egene Carroll and he you know, Egen
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  Carroll's right in front of him, by the way, beaming. No one
• 23:19
  ever mentions this in the media. The only record we have of them ever
• 23:23
  meeting. She's beaming at him. She's almost literally slobbering all over Trump.
• 23:30
  And somehow this because of Trump being a dufist and a moron and not being
• 23:34
  fully aware of what he's being asked or or not being fully prepped in his
• 23:40
  deposition, he stepped in and I think it's a major part of why he
• 23:44
  lost this case was because he said he never met Egene Carroll. He said
• 23:48
  Egen Carroll's not my type, and then he misidentified her as his second wife,
• 23:52
  which was really dumb, and especially when, as I said, his
• 23:57
  first wife was in the photo with him. My guess is he was just
• 24:00
  confused, and you know, it ended up costing him this case. But
• 24:07
  that's another element that the media completely bought. Botches here. Butchers not just
• 24:12
  botches, they butcher this. They never fully informed people that the standard in
• 24:18
  a civil case is only essentially fifty one percent a preponderance of the evidence.
• 24:26
  In other words, a juror just has to believe it's slightly more likely than
• 24:32
  not that this happened. And oh, by the way, the verdict doesn't
• 24:34
  have to be unanimous for all intents and purposes, it's meaningless from the standpoint
• 24:42
  of what the truth is. I mean, how we get criminal verdicts wrong
• 24:48
  all the time, and that's beyond a reasonable doubt and it has to be
• 24:52
  unanimous in the vast majority of cases. This has neither elements of a criminal
• 24:57
  case. Plus you have the inherent incentive of money. I mean that that
• 25:03
  blows my mind throughout the entire issue of sexual abuse. When when the media
• 25:10
  is involved, the media just pretends that monetary incentives do not impact behavior or
• 25:15
  do not influence people in their willingness to tell on truths. It's just just
• 25:22
  comical. It's bizarre. It's like living in an alternative universe. That's how
• 25:29
  I felt watching CNN and Anderson Cooper react to this verdict, which the you
• 25:34
  know, theft left wing mainstream media was absolutely thrilled about this verdict. They
• 25:40
  were giddy over the amounts of money and what this might do to Trump's fortune
• 25:45
  and what it might do to his ability to campaign for president. But you
• 25:49
  know, CNN didn't even like five people on their panel, including Cooper Anderson,
• 25:56
  Cooper and nobody, nobody was even only giving Trump's side of this situation.
• 26:03
  Forget about Trump's side. I mean again, I hate Donald Trump.
• 26:07
  I think he's a large part of why we're gonna lose the country. But
• 26:11
  as you can tell, I am enraged by this whole situation. I think
• 26:18
  it has far reaching implications and as far as the money itself is concerned.
• 26:23
  So the verdict was bogus in my view, at best at best, and
• 26:30
  to be clear, they rejected. There's been some controversy about this. The
• 26:34
  original jury rejected the rape allegation and found him libel for sex abuse. So
• 26:41
  it's on that basis that the media is calling E. Gen Carroll a sex
• 26:45
  abuse victim, which is ridiculous from a media standpoint, utterly ridiculous. There
• 26:55
  is no basis for that whatsoever. And let you, I'll give you the
• 26:57
  proof of this. You don't call O. J. Simpson a murderer.
• 27:02
  The mainstream news media at best, they say he was found libel for murdering
• 27:07
  two people because he was acquitted ridiculously in his criminal trial, for which there
• 27:12
  was a mountain of evidence, unlike in the Donald Trump case, where there
• 27:18
  was so little evans there never even was a criminal charge. So Ojay got
• 27:23
  you know, arrested, he got charged, he got put on trial.
• 27:26
  There was a massive amount of evidence there was during nullification. He then had
• 27:30
  a civil trial overwhelmingly unanimously, they found yep, he killed those two people.
• 27:36
  They don't call him a murderer because they understand that a civil verdict,
• 27:41
  while interesting, is not determinative. It's not declarative. It's not the way
• 27:47
  the system is set up. It's frankly a joke, especially given the modern
• 27:52
  nature of jurys, especially when it comes to giving away awards. My god,
• 27:59
  the award in inflation is gone off the charts, and we all pay
• 28:03
  for this, not just in cases like with Trump, but in all sorts
• 28:06
  of different case. I have no idea how companies are able to pay insurance
• 28:11
  rates in this day and age where juries are willy nilly giving away tens or
• 28:15
  not hundreds of millions of dollars because they think it's all free money. They
• 28:19
  think it's all monopoly money. But a civil verdict in this case is in
• 28:26
  no way, shape or form, especially given the jurisdiction of New York,
• 28:30
  especially given the defendant, especially given the nature of the judge and the jury
• 28:37
  pool and all that. It's basically irrelevant from the standpoint of determining what actually
• 28:44
  happened. And if you look at the facts of the matter, there is
• 28:48
  absolutely no way to say, yeah, Trump sexually abused d Jane Carroll.
• 28:52
  There's no way. Is it possible it happened. Sure, but that's not
• 28:56
  the way this works, or not the way it's supposed to work. You
• 28:59
  don't work in way that's possibly the case, especially if you're going to call
• 29:02
  her a sex abuse victim, and that the perpetrator is somebody who is effectively
• 29:08
  the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. And remember, all this happened when he was
• 29:15
  president. First came about when he was running for re election. One of
• 29:19
  the worst elements of Egene Carroll's case is that she never said anything about this
• 29:23
  publicly when he was running for president the first time, even after the whole
• 29:29
  Access Hollywood grab him by the pussy video came out. That would have been
• 29:33
  the time, especially given the nature of their allegation. Didn't happen, then,
• 29:40
  why not, Well, because there wasn't a perfect storm of self interest,
• 29:45
  and Democratic donors hadn't gotten a hold of her yet, and the Governor
• 29:51
  of New York hadn't opened up the floodgates by eliminating the statute limitations. So
• 29:56
  I mean, if this was an alley against Joe Biden or a Democrat that
• 30:03
  the media liked, there is no chance they would be giving e Gen Carroll
• 30:07
  this kind of credibility. Of course, there's no chance that we would have
• 30:12
  gotten the verdicts that we would have gotten, because there's no jurisdiction, especially
• 30:18
  not in New York, that would be so hell bent against a particular politician
• 30:23
  that they would purposely railroad them one with the initial judgment and then with the
• 30:29
  monetary result. This eighty three million dollars is completely farcical. Now there are
• 30:36
  those in the media defending and said, well, the ratio of the punitive
• 30:40
  damages is actually well with the norm of the you know, the compensatory damages.
• 30:45
  Well, hold on a second, the compensatory damages are a complete joke.
• 30:52
  Nobody's reputation especially not an old lady who before this very few people had
• 30:57
  ever heard of and is getting nothing but glowing media attention in response to all
• 31:03
  this. Nobody's reputation is worth that much, given her the circumstances of her
• 31:07
  life and age. So they've completely completely blown it on purpose. When it
• 31:15
  came to the value of her reputation and the damage that was actually done to
• 31:21
  her reputation, I don't think you could argue that her reputation has been damaged.
• 31:26
  She's been given all sorts of praise in the news media. She's a
• 31:30
  heroine to millions of people. Now she's a somebody. I mean, I
• 31:37
  don't even know how you could argue in a rational world that she's been damaged.
• 31:41
  The only remotely sensible thing I've heard is, well, she's gotten death
• 31:47
  threats from Trump supporters because of Trump's alleged defamation of her. Okay, fine,
• 31:56
  but everybody gets death threats. Ninety nine point nine nine nine percent of
• 32:00
  them are nothing remotely credible. Fine, that's some damage. Is that worth
• 32:07
  eleven million dollars or whatever it is that this this jury specifically gave for the
• 32:14
  damage to her reputation. No, I mean, before we had massive jury,
• 32:22
  civil trial, judgment, inflation, wrongful death. Wrongful death was only
• 32:30
  considered to be worth a million or two depending on your age and your circumstances.
• 32:35
  The average nine to eleven victim who died on nine to eleven was only
• 32:39
  paid about two million dollars by the government. Man. This is something I
• 32:45
  know a bit about because my mother was killed in a car accident that was
• 32:49
  caused by a trucking company, and we sued the trucking company, and my
• 32:54
  mother, who was fifty one years old at the time, still had a
• 32:58
  lot to live for it. Never got to see any of her kids get
• 33:00
  married, never got to see any grandkids. But because she didn't have a
• 33:05
  full time job, her life was I don't even think. I don't remember
• 33:08
  the exact value, but it was probably less than a million dollars that it
• 33:14
  was eventually settled for with regard to what her life would be valued at given
• 33:20
  the nature of the court system. Now, that was back in the nineteen
• 33:22
  nineties, and there's been a lot of inflation since then, But why God,
• 33:27
  reputation is now creating a situation where you can get eighty three point three
• 33:32
  million dollars largely because of punitive damages, and the punitive damages are where the
• 33:38
  political element of this whole situation really get exposed, because there's no bones about
• 33:45
  it. They decided to stick at the Trump one because they think he's rich,
• 33:51
  and two because they don't like him and they think that they got to
• 33:54
  do this to make sure he doesn't do it again. Well, that's not
• 33:59
  the way this legal system was supposed to be set up. That that is
• 34:01
  a bastardization of the way this whole system was originally designed. And the idea
• 34:08
  that somehow, you know, you can get eighty three point three million dollars,
• 34:14
  which she may or may not get. I mean, there's been different
• 34:16
  views of how she's going to get it, when she's going to get it,
• 34:20
  how much she would get, you know, pending the appeal that Trump
• 34:22
  is filing. I don't I'm not an expert in this area. I don't
• 34:25
  know. But that's currently what Trump owes. I guess his given Trump's history,
• 34:31
  he won't pay anywhere near probably tried to delay until he dies before he
• 34:37
  pays her anything. But that's what she's currently owed. And that's ridiculous.
• 34:42
  That's a joke. She should not be paid that much. Money even if
• 34:47
  this actually happened, and again I don't think there's any evidence that it actually
• 34:52
  happened, and the civil situation here does not prove that it actually happened.
• 35:00
  It just does not. But maybe the most outrageous element of this entire case,
• 35:06
  and the one that is most dangerous with regard to the precedent that it
• 35:10
  kind of sets for the rest of society, is the idea that not even
• 35:16
  a president and a presidential candidate has the ultimate authority or right to defend themselves
• 35:27
  against an allegation they believe to be false. It shouldn't even matter really whether
• 35:35
  or not Trump actually did this. I mean, clearly that would matter from
• 35:39
  a moral standboid, but legally, in a civil trial with regard to the
• 35:45
  defamation element of this, they have to prove that Trump knew he was lying
• 35:52
  when he said he didn't do this, he didn't know this woman, and
• 35:58
  that she's lied because you know, for the purposes of this case, she's
• 36:04
  a public figure. She's current clearly a public figure. Now I would argue
• 36:07
  she has always been, under the law a public figure, and that changes
• 36:14
  everything from a defamation law perspective. Because she's a public figure. They have
• 36:20
  to prove to prove defamation, because we have this thing called the First Amendment,
• 36:23
  that the standard is very high that Trump knew what he was saying was
• 36:30
  false, and that what he said about her was done with malice and caused
• 36:37
  real monetary damage. I don't think they came close to proving any of that,
• 36:44
  because there's a scenario here, Given especially the incredible twenty five year plus
• 36:51
  lag between this when this allegedly occurred and when Trump was asked about it under
• 36:57
  oath in a deposition, it's quite possible that Trump forgot about it, that
• 37:02
  Trump doesn't even remember this, that I probably engaged in somewhat similar behavior that
• 37:07
  he may have thought was consensual so many times, that he honestly didn't think
• 37:13
  that he did this, and that he honestly didn't think he had ever met
• 37:15
  this woman. That is more than reasonable and possible, especially given who Trump
• 37:22
  is and the nature of his celebrity. Well, if that's the case,
• 37:27
  you can't find him liable for defamation under the law, because it's what's in
• 37:35
  his state of mind. He has to know, because she's a public figure,
• 37:39
  he has to know it was false. And it's just comical to see
• 37:45
  outlets like CNN and MSNBC constantly showing clips of Trump after the first verdict,
• 37:53
  saying I don't even know this woman. She's lying. I don't even know
• 37:57
  this woman. She's lying, as if somehow that's defamation. This is a
• 38:01
  guy who is running for president. He has the right to defend himself.
• 38:10
  Anybody should have the right to defend themselves. But if you're when you're running
• 38:15
  for president, and you're a leading candidate, you're a former president, then
• 38:20
  my god, you should have a higher threshold for free speech than anybody else.
• 38:24
  That is why I'm so outraged by these gag orders against Trump in the
• 38:30
  various cases against him. It's they're absurd on their face, but especially given
• 38:35
  the fact that these are political cases and he's running for president. Now,
• 38:39
  I don't think that somebody ought to get extra privileges because they decide I'm running
• 38:44
  for president. But in Trump's case, he's a former president and he's now
• 38:47
  the presumptive Republican presidential No many that changes things, or at least should change
• 38:52
  things. And if it's if he doesn't have free speech, how the hell
• 38:55
  do any of us have free speech and the ability to defend themselves. Ourselves
• 39:00
  against false allegations, or at least allegations we believe to be false, because
• 39:07
  again we're dealing with a massive time lapse here, which I think goes to
• 39:12
  the lack of credibility of the case to begin with. But none of these
• 39:15
  issues, none of these issues are being talked about in a substantive, credible
• 39:22
  fashion in the mainstream news media. None partially because I don't think these people
• 39:29
  fully even understand the law or the implications of this, but mostly because they
• 39:34
  hate Trump. Their audience hates Trump, and they don't want to be bothered
• 39:38
  with the facts. Those are just too inconvenient the reality of this. They
• 39:44
  don't want to have anything go against because they love this narrative. And of
• 39:49
  course, on the entire issue of sex abuse to begin with, they're already
• 39:53
  dealing with a view of reality that is nonsensical. I mean, I deal
• 39:59
  with this in every sex abuse case that I've ever investigated, where the media
• 40:02
  views all of this, especially post me too, but definitely when it came
• 40:08
  to the Penn State Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky case, they see it through a
• 40:12
  prism of every allegation is to be believed, regardless of the facts, regardless
• 40:19
  of the evidence or lack thereof, regardless of the perverse incentives like, for
• 40:23
  instance, money. I mean, it's just we're just supposed to pretend that
• 40:28
  people aren't motivated by eighty three point three million dollars, or that Ejing Carroll's
• 40:32
  politics doesn't play a role in all this. It's it's really as comical if
• 40:37
  it wasn't so serious. And I mean, if this is so outrageous,
• 40:42
  it actually gets me to sympathize or empathize with Donald Trump, which I hate.
• 40:47
  I hate that, but that's the reality of this. And I referenced
• 40:52
  that part of why I feel so strongly about this is that I have gone
• 40:54
  through a very similar situation myself about twenty years ago. Now. I have
• 41:00
  thought long and hard back all weekend. I've been thinking about this about Okay,
• 41:07
  do I tell my full defamation trial story? I've been wanting to tell
• 41:10
  it? Am I going to? Ever? Possibly in the very short time
• 41:15
  we have left of this podcast, probably only five more episodes barring some massive
• 41:20
  black Swan event, before I end the podcast and go away and leave public
• 41:23
  life likely forever, do I finally tell for the first time this incredible story
• 41:30
  of what happened to me in Louisville, Kentucky, where I was fired and
• 41:36
  then sued over a situation that alleged defamation. And boy, I'm telling you,
• 41:44
  folks, it's probably my best story in its totality, and I've never
• 41:49
  fully told it, partially because to fully tell it takes an enormous amount of
• 41:54
  time. There's basically three ways to tell this story. The three minute version,
• 42:00
  thirty minute version, and the three hour version. And I'm telling you
• 42:02
  the three hour version, maybe the two hour and thirty minute version that they
• 42:07
  cut it down would make a hell of a movie. If I ever became
• 42:10
  famous, which is not gonna happen, this would be the first movie that
• 42:14
  was made because it was an absolutely amazing story on so many different levels.
• 42:21
  And I had originally thought, you know what, maybe this is the opportunity
• 42:24
  to tell the thirty minute version of the story. And I'm not going to
• 42:29
  do that in this episode because there's just too many other things I need to
• 42:31
  get to and my head isn't quite one hundred percent straight and it's a very
• 42:37
  difficult story to tell, so I need to really map it out to be
• 42:42
  able to do it properly. I may do that I don't want to make
• 42:45
  promises I can't keep. I may do that in the next episode of the
• 42:49
  podcast. If nothing dramatic happens in the next couple of days, I will
• 42:52
  do everything I can to tell the thirty maybe forty minute version of this remarkable
• 43:00
  situation that occurred where I was sued for defamation. However, I will give
• 43:05
  you the three minute or thereabouts version, and that is this. When I
• 43:09
  was a radio host in Louisville, Kentucky, I was very successful for a
• 43:14
  short period of time. I was fired because I had made some statements about
• 43:19
  a woman I used to date who was a Fox morning show host in Louisville.
• 43:23
  And I want to make something exceedingly clear. While there are a lot
• 43:25
  of similarities between what happened in my situation and what happened with Trump, there
• 43:30
  was never, ever, ever any semblance of an allegation of sexual abuse.
• 43:36
  This was a consensual and for a short period of time, a mutually enjoyable
• 43:42
  romantic relationship I had with this woman. We eventually broke up, and when
• 43:45
  she got fired, I got asked a couple of questions on a segment called
• 43:49
  Ask John Anything about her questions that I answered in ways that I thought were
• 43:53
  actually very complimentary to this day. That was my intent. I believe that
• 44:00
  was the net effect. I complimented her in answer questions that I probably should
• 44:06
  never have answered because they were questions of an intimate nature on a radio station
• 44:09
  that's an AM heritage station twenty years ago in Louisville, Kentucky, where that
• 44:15
  was not really something that was thought to be acceptable or normal. You know.
• 44:20
  I thought I was pushing the edge because that was what was my show
• 44:23
  was supposed to be all about, and I was getting these amazing ratings,
• 44:28
  and I thought I had some protection. In fact, I think it actually
• 44:30
  worked against me. I think I had gotten too big and I was actually
• 44:35
  in far more danger than I realized at the time, both from a political
• 44:39
  perspective literally, I think Mitch McConnell may have had something to do with my
• 44:45
  demise, but also internally within the station. I mean, there's all sorts
• 44:47
  of different layers to this onion, which is why it's a very long story.
• 44:52
  But after I gotten fired, I got rehired by the same company in
• 44:54
  Los Angeles, California to work at KFI, and then I got sued for
• 45:00
  defamation by this woman for like two million dollars, something just short of two
• 45:05
  million dollars. I had to go back to Louisville, Kentucky, and I
• 45:07
  thought, this is never going to actually be a trial. I honestly thought
• 45:10
  there will never be a trial here because the law is clear cut. She's
• 45:15
  a public figure. I had to know what I said was false. And
• 45:21
  not only did I not know it was false, I knew it was true.
• 45:23
  I had intimate knowledge that what I had said was true. And we
• 45:28
  had her under oath admitting what I said was true. Game set match,
• 45:31
  There's no trial. But this didn't have anything to do with the law.
• 45:35
  This became a situation that was all about media coverage and all about a judge
• 45:39
  that was enamored with that media coverage and the fact that this all occurred just
• 45:45
  after the Kentucky Derby and Louisville, Kentucky and the media had nothing else to
• 45:47
  do for the rest of May after the derby is over. And I was
• 45:52
  incredibly naive, and I walked into this buzzsaw of a trial, and everyone
• 45:57
  thought we were going to lose. And you know, the jury was mostly
• 46:00
  female. Our jury consultants said we had no chance, and there was all
• 46:06
  sorts of dramatic things that happened both in the courtroom and out of the courtroom,
• 46:10
  and eventually the jury sided with me unanimously, I think mainly because they
• 46:17
  hated both me and the woman involved, the woman by the name of Darcy
• 46:21
  da Vita, but they probably hated her more than me and had nothing to
• 46:25
  do with the law. That was what was maybe the most dramatic lesson of
• 46:31
  this whole situation. I'm like, oh my God, because I had never
• 46:36
  been through a court case before, and this was nowhere near as high profile
• 46:39
  obviously as Trump's case, but it was for Louisville, Kentucky. This was
• 46:44
  super high profile, like massive media coverage, way more than it deserved.
• 46:50
  I was a way bigger deal coming back to be sued than ever was when
• 46:53
  I was a radio host in TV host in Louisville, Kentucky. But it
• 46:59
  was a real eye opening experience through maybe one of the most important things that
• 47:06
  ever happened in my life. One from the standpoint of learning about the legal
• 47:09
  system and how broken it is, and our media and how broken it is.
• 47:13
  It also had a massive influence on how my life turned out, because
• 47:16
  without all that, I never come to Los Angeles. I never meet my
• 47:20
  wife, I never had my two kids, so everything about my life is
• 47:23
  completely different if this disastrous circumstance doesn't occur. But I have a very very
• 47:34
  strong recollection after that whole thing went down, thinking, my god, the
• 47:39
  whole system is barely holding together. Justice barely prevailed here. And that was
• 47:47
  twenty years ago, almost twenty years ago when the trial occurred, nineteen almost
• 47:53
  exactly years ago when the trial actually occurred here. And I'm thinking, my
• 48:00
  goodness, now that almost twenty years has passed, and seeing what happened with
• 48:04
  Trump, there is no chance in today's world this all goes down the way
• 48:10
  that it did back then. First of all, I doubt that the same
• 48:15
  company rehires me with a potential lawsuit hanging over their head because the media business
• 48:21
  has completely changed. I mean, clear Channel, which was the company involved
• 48:24
  at the time, honestly thought that it was in their strong self interest to
• 48:30
  fight this with everything they possibly had, and they did so. Today they
• 48:35
  probably just cave and settle out of fear of a insane jury judgment situation like
• 48:42
  what happened with Trump. You know, I probably wouldn't have been hired to
• 48:46
  begin with. You know, my career would have gone in a completely different
• 48:51
  and probably far worse direction than even that it did. And certainly, even
• 48:57
  if all that had occurred, I have no doubt that the jury would have
• 49:02
  come back with a different verdict that we would have been held libel. I
• 49:07
  would have been held libel, the company would have been held liable. There
• 49:10
  would have been some sort of massive judgment because the perceptions of the jury pool
• 49:16
  about what's right and wrong and what the rules of society are have completely changed.
• 49:22
  The law hasn't changed, although the judge of my case tried to make
• 49:25
  a change. But the law has not changed, but the perceptions have,
• 49:32
  and the law means very little in these kind of cases. That's why I
• 49:36
  keep saying it's absurd for the media to claim that the facts actually matter when
• 49:42
  it comes to Trump's criminal cases. The facts aren't going to matter a damn
• 49:46
  bit, not a damn bit when it comes to those cases, because it's
• 49:51
  Trump. It's all about the jury pool, the jury selection, and their
• 49:55
  perceptions of him. That's the only thing that has gone matter. I know
• 50:00
  that from my own experience in a similar but obviously much smaller situation than what
• 50:07
  he's going through and so to me, that whole experience really told me how
• 50:15
  broken everything is. And that was twenty years ago, and today it would
• 50:19
  be very, very different. And this has a chilling effect. The media
• 50:23
  won't accept this as reality because they're so anti Trump. This will have a
• 50:28
  chilling effect on all sorts of speech. When even a presidential candidate can't defend
• 50:35
  themselves against allegation that they that they feel and probably are false, then we
• 50:43
  really don't have a first Amendment. We really don't, at least not in
• 50:46
  situations where people will consider it to be in their political and financial self interest
• 50:52
  to make an allegation, and where the media decides they're going to give it
• 50:57
  lots of oxygen and fuel. So obviously, I am very outraged by what
• 51:02
  happened with Trump, very troubled with it. I mean, it's not going
• 51:07
  to help or hurt him in the Republican nominating process. He's already won the
• 51:12
  nomination, that's clear. I don't think it's going to help him in the
• 51:15
  general election. Bizarrely, he's still perceived as the favorite in the betting markets
• 51:20
  to beat Biden in November. I am not in that camp. I am
• 51:24
  almost on a daily basis, more and more convinced that Trump, barring a
• 51:29
  major medical event with regard to Joe Biden, which is certainly possible, that
• 51:36
  Trump will not beat Biden in the presidential election. Is it still possible,
• 51:39
  Yes, But I do not think he is in any way, shape or
• 51:43
  form the favorite to be the next president of the United States. He's got
• 51:49
  all sorts of money problems. Any day now, we're going to get another
• 51:53
  verdict in the civil business fraud case, which also has problems related to it,
• 52:00
  but he may be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars there.
• 52:04
  He claimed in the Eging Carol case there is four hundred million dollars in
• 52:08
  cash, and there are people that believe that that was a lie, which
• 52:12
  I have no problem believing. Its probably is a lie. But even if
• 52:14
  you accept that is true, he's going to need cash, I mean,
• 52:19
  in some way, shape or form, whether it's to pay off this judgment
• 52:22
  or the civil business fraud judgment. And mean, he's going to have hundreds
• 52:27
  of millions of dollars of judgments against him. By the way, with regard
• 52:30
  to his financial situation, I do think this brings back up the live golf
• 52:37
  issue. I really do believe that it increases its significance. I've always believed
• 52:44
  that Trump being paid underneath the table and undisclosed amounts of money directly by the
• 52:49
  Saudi royal family through the use of his golf courses for the live golf tour
• 52:54
  is outrageous and a massive conflict for a presidential candidate. But a lot of
• 53:00
  people have always said, well, you know, John, how much can
• 53:01
  he really be being paid a few million dollars under the table. I'm sure
• 53:05
  he's you know, being paid way over market prices, but what difference does
• 53:08
  that really make. He's a you know, multi billionaire allegedly. Well,
• 53:12
  I've always felt he's not a multi billionaire, and he's also not particularly rich
• 53:16
  from a cash perspective. And you know, whether how many millions it is,
• 53:21
  I don't know. I mean, the Saudis don't care about the actual
• 53:25
  number on the check. The use of his golf courses is like a classic
• 53:30
  money laundering opportunity because it's not disclosed and it's got plausible deniability all over it.
• 53:37
  Well, you know, if we see yet another live event at a
• 53:42
  Trump golf course schedule for twenty twenty four, I think this ought to raise
• 53:46
  some more questions because the saudis maybe giving Trump a lifeline when it comes to
• 53:52
  cash that he desperately is going to need for a lot of reasons. And
• 53:59
  of course there are people believe that, at least indirectly, some of the
• 54:01
  money that's going to his political action committee or his campaign or are actually being
• 54:07
  used in some way, shape or form to fund his defenses. And this
• 54:10
  all gets very cloudy. There's all sorts of issues that ought to be important
• 54:15
  to Republican voters that for some reason didn't resonate at all. But the fact
• 54:20
  that you're part of why you love this guy is he's a multi billionaire and
• 54:23
  he's under an unprecedented financial attack and will not have the resources, if needed,
• 54:30
  to fund his own campaign. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is in dire
• 54:36
  straits financially all over the country, at least indirectly because of Donald Trump,
• 54:42
  especially in comparison to the Democratic Party. That's going to be a big problem
• 54:46
  you've got. You know, technically he's not even allowed on the ballot in
• 54:50
  a couple of states already Maine, in Colorado. I believe the Supreme Court
• 54:54
  will fix that problem, but we don't know that for sure. So Trump
• 54:59
  is all already the presumptive nominee when you know he's under financial attack. We're
• 55:05
  not sure he's going to have one hundred percent ballot access. He could be
• 55:07
  a convicted felon by the time November comes around. No one seems to care
• 55:13
  about that. And then there's the Taylor Swift issue, which I have talked
• 55:17
  a lot about, and it's you know, it's funny because I have been
• 55:22
  recent days and weeks, I've seen a lot of people saying, wow,
• 55:25
  Zig, you know, I did not believe you when you said many months
• 55:29
  ago that Taylor Swift was going to become a major issue in the presidential campaign.
• 55:35
  But now a lot of people are are starting to see it, and
• 55:39
  even the New York Times is now reporting about it. The New York Times
• 55:45
  had a headline out just today about the Biden plan for taking on Trump and
• 55:51
  how Taylor Swift is involved in this, and you know, the idea that
• 55:57
  the Biden people are looking for a Taylor Swift endorsement to try to save their
• 56:01
  bacon. And there's a new poll out just this weekend that seems to back
• 56:07
  up this entire idea of this theory that I've been talking about for many months
• 56:13
  that hey, folks, if you're in the Trump camp, you should at
• 56:16
  least be calculating this. There's a big problem here. Taylor Swift has a
• 56:22
  cult, a cult of voters that normally don't vote young females, a cult
• 56:27
  of voters who are very, very very prone to voting Democratic of only because
• 56:32
  of the abortion issue. She doesn't even really have to make an endorsement.
• 56:37
  This is part of what everyone's missing why it's such a dangerous situation if you're
• 56:43
  on the Republican side or in the Trump campaign when it comes to Taylor Swift's
• 56:46
  influence, you know, if it wasn't Donald Trump on the ballot, someone
• 56:52
  who's that toxic, I don't think Swift would even consider making an overt endorsement
• 56:58
  or anti endorsement. With Trump. She can do whatever she wants because there's
• 57:01
  not going to be any real political blowback. The media will praise her for
• 57:07
  it, and the vast majority of her customer base will stay with her and
• 57:12
  maybe even praiser for it. If it was a different candidate, it wouldn't
• 57:15
  be nearly that easy. But what I would suggest is the real danger is
• 57:20
  she doesn't even have to make an endorsement. All she has to do is
• 57:24
  tell her core demo to go vote, that it's urgent to vote, which
• 57:31
  everyone will just you know, oh oh, yes, everyone go vote.
• 57:36
  The media, that's the biggest farce there is in campaign coverage that somehow promoting
• 57:40
  people to vote is a non political act. That's bullshit. It's incredibly overtly
• 57:46
  political act, especially when you have to urge people to vote. Generally,
• 57:50
  you're going to talk about people who are not very motivated, not very educated
• 57:53
  voters. So that is a massive political implication. But in this case it's
• 57:59
  even more dramatic because we already know which party her demographic is more likely to
• 58:07
  vote for. I mean, we see this with regard to get out the
• 58:10
  vote campaigns in the black community all the time. Gee. I wonder who
• 58:15
  that benefits when more black people vote, given the history of black people voting
• 58:21
  eighty five to ninety percent democratic for the last couple of generations. Gee,
• 58:25
  it's a real mystery. Well, it's almost as dramatic when it comes to
• 58:30
  young females, maybe as dramatic in certain circumstances. So all she has to
• 58:36
  do, and she's already done this she put out on Instagram a link for
• 58:39
  people to register to vote. That was the first sign that this was the
• 58:44
  path she was going to go down. She can't be criticized for that.
• 58:47
  We've already set that rule. Getting people to vote is inherently good. I
• 58:52
  don't think it is, but that's the perception that's been created. It's part
• 58:57
  of why we're completely screwed as a country. I frankly think voting should be
• 59:01
  more difficult. I think it should be an obstacle course to get to the
• 59:05
  voting both. I think you ought to have to do it in person because
• 59:07
  I don't believe that mail in voting is particularly trustworthy. So I mean,
• 59:14
  all she has to do, and she's gonna do this is urge her cult
• 59:20
  to vote. The rest is going to take care of itself. And this
• 59:22
  is a demo that generally has the worst voter turnout performance of any demo young
• 59:30
  women. And if she can turn that reality into a positive for Democrats,
• 59:38
  it could turn the election. Because we're talking about now we're not talking about
• 59:44
  the largest demographic out there, but it's a significant one. But we're talking
• 59:47
  about votes that normally would not be reliably cast, and with her. I
• 59:57
  think that voter percent turnout percentage is theoretically going to increase dramatically because her fans
• 1:00:07
  are cult members. They're more of a cult than even the Trump cult.
• 1:00:15
  And all she has to do is say get out and vote. It's really
• 1:00:17
  urgent that you do so. And I think you're going to see a significant
• 1:00:22
  change in the results Visivie what the polls currently indicate would be the expected results,
• 1:00:30
  because they're going by these polls that show Trump winning by one or two
• 1:00:35
  points, are using traditional turnout models. They're not modeling for an election where
• 1:00:44
  all of a sudden, young women come out in unprecedented numbers because Taylor Swift
• 1:00:50
  is telling them to do so. And this poll that came out over the
• 1:00:52
  weekend that a lot of people sent me, Oh my god, Ziggi're right
• 1:00:55
  again, frankly asked the wrong question. I think they were going for the
• 1:01:00
  clickbait. And whenever there's a story involving Taylor Swift, you have to be
• 1:01:05
  wary for the clickbait. And I think this poll was largely clickbait. But
• 1:01:09
  the core result that got a lot of attention was, according to one poll,
• 1:01:15
  eighteen percent of voters would be more likely either slightly or a lot more
• 1:01:21
  likely to vote for Taylor for a candidate the Taylor Swift had endorsed, that
• 1:01:25
  was basically the question. Now, eighteen percent sounds like a incredibly high number,
• 1:01:31
  and even I am skeptical of that number, But that's the wrong question
• 1:01:37
  because in theory of that eighteen percent, right, who said they would be
• 1:01:42
  more likely to vote for a candidate if they were endorsed by Taylor Swift.
• 1:01:46
  It's possible that almost one hundred percent of those were already Democratic voters. That's
• 1:01:53
  more than reasonable. At least a very high percentage of them were already Biden
• 1:01:59
  voters. So that's the wrong question. The correct question should have been,
• 1:02:05
  and eventually somebody, hopefully is going to ask this question is very simple.
• 1:02:10
  All you gotta do is take women under the age of thirty five or forty,
• 1:02:15
  whatever number you want to pick, and say, are you more likely
• 1:02:21
  to vote if Taylor Swift tells you to do so? And then you could
• 1:02:27
  also ask are you more likely to show up and vote for a particular candidate
• 1:02:32
  the Swift endorses or against the candidate the Swift unindorses or anti endorses. That's
• 1:02:39
  the way you ask this you should ask the question pulling out lets, should
• 1:02:44
  be asking the question to try to gauge whether or not my theory is correct
• 1:02:49
  that she's gonna get young women to turn out in much larger numbers than they
• 1:02:54
  would ordinarily. That's the key. It's not a matter of how many people
• 1:03:00
  might be slightly influenced by a Taylor Swift endorsement to vote for a particular candidate.
• 1:03:05
  Again, I think eighteen percent is way too high, but that doesn't
• 1:03:09
  need to be the case for her to have an influence. We're talking about
• 1:03:14
  a razor's edge election if you believe the current polling. And by the way,
• 1:03:19
  I also believe that a lot of the weather is going to go in
• 1:03:22
  Biden's direction between now and November. Even if Taylor Swift somehow is not directly
• 1:03:29
  involved in this. You got the Trump court cases. I think the perception
• 1:03:32
  of the economy, largely because the media is going to do everything they possibly
• 1:03:37
  can to create this perception, is going to improve. It's clear we're not
• 1:03:42
  headed, at least between now and November for a real recession, and so
• 1:03:46
  I think that's going to matter. Now. You know, there's a lot
• 1:03:50
  of understandable economic angst in this country. But there's still a significant amount of
• 1:03:54
  time for perceptions to be altered, and they don't have to be altered much
• 1:04:00
  at all. They don't have to be altered much at all, only a
• 1:04:04
  couple percentage points, and it could drag Biden across the finishing line. We're
• 1:04:10
  also going to see a massive amount of media coverage about, you know,
• 1:04:15
  former Trump cabinet officials or people that worked in his administration who now are vehemently
• 1:04:21
  against him and anti endorsing him. And I really do believe the whole issue
• 1:04:27
  of okay, who would work for a second Trump administration is going to become
• 1:04:30
  a bigger and bigger deal. That's not going to influence Trump fans, but
• 1:04:35
  it may influence some independent voters that are currently upset with Joe Biden. And
• 1:04:41
  then there's the issue of the black vote or the Hispanic vote. Some of
• 1:04:45
  these numbers that currently Trump is enjoying I just don't think are sustainable when it
• 1:04:49
  actually comes to the to the actual election, when the rubber meets the road,
• 1:04:55
  when people actually have to cast a ballot in favor of Di Trump.
• 1:05:00
  I mean there could be some of that. I mean, Snoop Dogg of
• 1:05:02
  all people kind of came out in favor of Trump over the weekend. You
• 1:05:06
  know, So, is Trump going to get a better percentage of the black
• 1:05:10
  vote than he has previously? I think he probably will, But some of
• 1:05:13
  these polls have numbers that are just fantasy land as far as I can tell.
• 1:05:17
  I mean, there's no there's no hardcore evidence that this is actually going
• 1:05:21
  to hold up. And so you have if all this is going to happen
• 1:05:26
  during this year, and I'm sorry, barring this is a big if,
• 1:05:30
  barring a major medical situation involving Joe Biden, I still think they're going to
• 1:05:36
  be able to drag him over the finish line because Trump is that unpopular,
• 1:05:41
  he's that toxic, and he has that many problems, many of which I've
• 1:05:46
  already outlined, and I will continue to do so in the remaining episodes of
• 1:05:51
  this podcast before I finally I'll probably give a final prediction in the last episode
• 1:05:58
  of the podcast, of course, predict think this election is going to be
• 1:06:00
  probably the most difficult, at least in the modern history of the country,
• 1:06:04
  because there's so many unknown variables, and we're comparing it to an election that
• 1:06:10
  already happened in twenty twenty that happened under unprecedented circumstances with the COVID panic and
• 1:06:16
  all the different voting rules and everything that happened. So it's really going to
• 1:06:20
  be very, very very difficult to pinpoint what's going to happen in the November
• 1:06:26
  election. But I just think my major point right now is people, especially
• 1:06:30
  Trump fans, are not seeing the bigger picture and how this is all likely
• 1:06:35
  to turn out. And yes, Taylor Swift is part of that equation,
• 1:06:41
  and the media, both the right and the left wing media, is finally
• 1:06:44
  starting to figure that out now. When it comes to Trump and the media,
• 1:06:47
  I talk a lot about how the right wing media handled this primary process
• 1:06:53
  and exactly the way that I predicted that unfortunately they would, And one of
• 1:07:00
  the points that I have been consistently making is that even people who should have
• 1:07:04
  been very much pro Rondi Santis and anti Donald Trump were to at least some
• 1:07:14
  extent hedging their bets. Nobody really went balls to the wall, Nobody really
• 1:07:21
  went to the mat because nobody wanted to end up. As I've said previously,
• 1:07:27
  like Glenn back in twenty sixteen, that the ghost of Glenn back twenty
• 1:07:30
  sixteen hung over the entire right wing media, and there were some really profound
• 1:07:38
  examples of this, several of which came from The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro's
• 1:07:44
  outlet. I think Shapiro in some ways belongs in that particular category. He
• 1:07:48
  deserves credit for being pro DeSantis and being critical of Trump, but he never
• 1:07:54
  goes nearly as far as he should, and nor did Matt Walsh, who
• 1:08:00
  works at the Daily Wire. He's not nearly as big a deal as Shapiro
• 1:08:03
  as, but Matt Walsh has become very well known, largely for two things,
• 1:08:08
  one transgender issues in two being against the COVID tyranny and the COVID panic,
• 1:08:15
  and so he has a large following. And he was obviously at the
• 1:08:19
  Santas supporter and obviously critical of Trump, but it was always muted. It
• 1:08:25
  was never nearly as strong as it should because I think hedging his bets seeing
• 1:08:30
  what happened in twenty sixteen, not wanting to be Glenn Beck. This was
• 1:08:34
  a phenomenon that I anticipated, I worried about, and I predicted it,
• 1:08:40
  and unfortunately it turned out exactly as I said that it would, And it
• 1:08:44
  was that determinative of what happened with the Desantas campaign. No, but it
• 1:08:49
  was an important factor. Well, there was an interesting moment that occurred over
• 1:08:54
  the weekend with Matt Walsh on Twitter which really exposed almost better than I could
• 1:09:00
  possibly do myself, the reality of this phenomenon. So whilst tweeted out,
• 1:09:06
  because I've always said, you know, there's gonna be a lot of guilt
• 1:09:10
  on the part of some people who didn't either didn't support the Santas as much
• 1:09:14
  as they should have or completely sold out for Trump, and they're gonna have
• 1:09:18
  to come up with some rationalizations or explanations. But there's also going to be
• 1:09:24
  some relief. There's gonna be a relief on the part of the people that
• 1:09:28
  were putting their toe in the the Santa's pond that this process ended quickly and
• 1:09:33
  now they can spend the rest of the year pretending to like Trump and not
• 1:09:40
  offending their core audience. So in that context, here's what Matt Walls tweeted.
• 1:09:45
  It's unfortunate that the de Santas campaign didn't work out, But to be
• 1:09:53
  honest, I'm very glad the Republican primary is effectively over. I've lost my
• 1:10:00
  taste for conservative in fighting in my old age hate when we're at each other's
• 1:10:09
  throats. It will be nice to be fighting the same enemy again. Wow.
• 1:10:17
  Okay, that is telling. I mean, that's the quiet part out
• 1:10:21
  loud when you properly interpret it, that's saying, thank god, I got
• 1:10:28
  through this without offending too many members of my core audience. And now I
• 1:10:32
  don't have to worry about this. I can be done with the guilt.
• 1:10:36
  DeSantis is gone. It's unfortunate, unfortunate. This is a guy. His
• 1:10:43
  two major issues are transgenderism and COVID tyranny, on which DeSantis was great,
• 1:10:49
  and Trump is beyond horrible. Trump is epically bad on his two core issues.
• 1:10:59
  And it's just it. But thank goodness, I'm actually glad this is
• 1:11:02
  what's happened. Why because it's a business. That's my interpretation. It's a
• 1:11:08
  business. It's not a cause. I mean, this guy's causes are again
• 1:11:15
  transgenderism and COVID panic. The sand is great, Trump awful, and he's
• 1:11:20
  relieved and glad that the process is over because now we won't be at each
• 1:11:30
  other's throat. So it'll be nice to be fighting the same enemy again.
• 1:11:32
  Wait a minute, the enemy when it comes to transgenderism in the COVID panic
• 1:11:36
  was battled Trump, but he's talking about this, at least subconsciously from a
• 1:11:44
  business perspective. And then he got confronted about this by a Twitter user by
• 1:11:49
  the name of Defiant Baptist, who's a fan of this show and I'm a
• 1:11:53
  fan of his. He does a great job on Twitter. He really confronted
• 1:11:57
  Walsh about it and got under Walsh's skin. And of course Walsh's reaction was
• 1:12:01
  to have a temper tantrum against the De Santus people, and you know,
• 1:12:05
  to claim that people like Defiant Baptist don't have any skin in the game.
• 1:12:13
  That's what he literally said. That was a quote. You know, you
• 1:12:15
  don't understand this fight, I'm faaraphrasing, because you don't have any skin in
• 1:12:19
  the game. Skin in the game means financial and business risk. That's what
• 1:12:26
  that means. That's what the skin is. It's not the future of the
• 1:12:30
  country or the future of the cause or what's right. It's about I have
• 1:12:33
  to protect my skin in the game. And this, to me, this
• 1:12:38
  whole episode really exposed what I've been talking about for a very long time,
• 1:12:42
  which is that this all is a business disguised as a cause. I even
• 1:12:46
  had a book proposal several years ago that my book agent thought was going to
• 1:12:50
  sell and did not because I was not a celebrity called a business, not
• 1:12:55
  a cause, about the conservative media and how they sold out all their principles
• 1:13:00
  for Donald Trump. I think they've sold it out before Donald Trump, but
• 1:13:05
  that was the most dramatic example of the whole situation, and we saw it
• 1:13:10
  come to fruition in twenty sixteen, and it's just disgusting, but it ought
• 1:13:15
  to be at least called out, and nobody has a sound of interest to
• 1:13:18
  do so except for me, because I'm basically the last standing true conservative who
• 1:13:25
  never sold out to Donald Trump, and now I'm about to disappear forever in
• 1:13:30
  the next couple of weeks of the peers as far as the bigger picture of
• 1:13:35
  the media, and of course Whi's driving all of us, which drives you
• 1:13:40
  know, the Matt Walsh's of the world. Not being able to go all
• 1:13:43
  out for Ronda Santis is because the business model is broken. Everywhere, the
• 1:13:48
  leverage is gone. You know, the audience runs the show, they drive
• 1:13:55
  the bus. The Trump proved that, especially in the right wing media and
• 1:14:00
  They then someone on the left wing media too. The audience drives the bus.
• 1:14:03
  The hosts, even in the opinion realm, are simply following the audience.
• 1:14:09
  They don't want to get ahead of the audience. They don't want to
• 1:14:11
  contradict or cross the audience, because if the audience leaves you, you're Glenn
• 1:14:15
  back in twenty sixteen and your career is engrave jeopardy and there are no good
• 1:14:20
  gigs anymore because the entire news media business is collapsing at an alarming rate.
• 1:14:30
  I mean, obviously this is called the Death of Journalism podcast, and we've
• 1:14:33
  discussed as many times before, but there been a couple of articles in just
• 1:14:38
  the last few days really delineating just how dramatic this is. This one from
• 1:14:45
  Politico. The news business really is cratering. The state of the industry is
• 1:14:50
  more dire than ever. And then they talk about what's happened at the Los
• 1:14:56
  Angeles Times, laying off twenty percent over one hundred people out of the newsroom.
• 1:15:00
  Time Magazine having a similar situation. Fifteen percent of their editorial employees are
• 1:15:08
  gone. We've had Sports Illustrated collapsing. We've talked about that Business Insider with
• 1:15:15
  whom I've had some interesting interactions over the Penn State, Joe Paterno, Jerry
• 1:15:18
  Sandusky case. We interviewed a former Business Insider reporter who would have been investigating
• 1:15:26
  the Jerry Sandusky case and ended up getting fired. But they've had a whole
• 1:15:29
  bunch of layoffs at Business Insider. We've had similar situations at Forbes, the
• 1:15:33
  New York Daily News and other places. And you know, the Washington Post,
• 1:15:40
  MPR, Vice, Vox, NBC, the Texas Tribune, Barstool Sports.
• 1:15:45
  These are all listed in this Politico article. Newsroom employment, they report
• 1:15:49
  is down more than twenty six percent since two thousand and eight, when the
• 1:15:55
  media effectively elected Barack Obama president, which provoked needed to make my documentary Medium
• 1:16:00
  Malpractice Hell Obama got elected. The magazine business is atrophied too, as news
• 1:16:06
  DAN revenues have fallen from six point eight billion dollars in two thousand and six
• 1:16:12
  to just one billion dollars in twenty twenty two. I mean, that is
• 1:16:15
  a complete and total collapse. And we're seeing this everywhere in the news business,
• 1:16:21
  and it's mostly and the conservatives will try to tell you that it's because
• 1:16:28
  of you know, go woke go broke, but it's way bigger than that,
• 1:16:33
  and the intelligence are also picked up on this New New York magazine.
• 1:16:38
  They're talking a lot about the broken business model when it comes to the news
• 1:16:43
  media. That's really the core issue. The going woke did not help.
• 1:16:47
  You know, most of these outlets tend to be liberal, and there's no
• 1:16:51
  question they lost the trust of anybody who was remotely conservative. And when you
• 1:16:57
  completely disregard at least forty percent of the audience, that's a problem. I
• 1:17:02
  mean, broadcasting in television terms, but also in print terms, has been
• 1:17:08
  dead for a long time. We basically went from broadcasting to narrow casting,
• 1:17:12
  to cult casting to micro cult casting. Well, micro cult casting doesn't really
• 1:17:17
  work even in the modern era, especially if you're trying to be a mainstream
• 1:17:23
  media organization that's used to a certain amount of revenue, because those revenue streams
• 1:17:29
  have dried up because the advertising model doesn't work anymore, which is why you've
• 1:17:33
  seen so many of these outlets try to go to subscription bases. And I've
• 1:17:39
  already talked about the inherent problems with subscriptions in the modern Internet era, because
• 1:17:45
  then the subscribers are in charge of your content. Because you can see every
• 1:17:50
  day how easy it is in the Internet era for people to unsubscribe if they
• 1:17:57
  don't like something that you wrote. You know, you change your headlines that
• 1:18:00
  offend people on masks, even though it's telling the truth. That's just one
• 1:18:04
  of many, many, many examples in the New York Times. The New
• 1:18:09
  York Times routinely now changes headlines based upon subscribers being too upset about something that
• 1:18:16
  offended them almost entirely, usually because it's the truth. And so the model
• 1:18:21
  is just broken. It's not working, and this has a massive influence over
• 1:18:29
  content. Massive The subscriber model, I think drives outlets both on the left
• 1:18:34
  and the right to be more and more partisan because you're having to appeal to
• 1:18:41
  your subscriber base, and there's no risk reward benefit for trying to tell the
• 1:18:45
  other side. All you're gonna do is lose subscribers. So that's number one,
• 1:18:49
  but number two, because you are so desperate for revenue, and because
• 1:18:57
  those who are employed after all these layoffs have so little leverage, this is
• 1:19:03
  so important. It's maybe the most significant thing that no one ever talks about
• 1:19:08
  when it comes to the news media. In order to do legitimate journalism,
• 1:19:13
  journalists have to feel as if they have some semblance of job security and back
• 1:19:21
  up from their bosses. That must exist. They have to have resources which
• 1:19:28
  have gone away because no one wants to waste money on anything that's not a
• 1:19:31
  sure bet. And they have to feel as if they're not going to get
• 1:19:35
  fired if they come up with a truth that's uncomfortable or inconvenient, especially for
• 1:19:44
  their ownership. Now, in the olden days, you know, the Woodwood
• 1:19:47
  and Bernstein glory days of the media, which was never perfect, but in
• 1:19:53
  the media's mind, those were the glory days. What was true about that
• 1:19:57
  era was that reporters we had actual power and leverage and job security, and
• 1:20:02
  if they happen to lose a gig, there were plenty of other gigs to
• 1:20:06
  get because the business model wasn't broken and there were lots of people employed in
• 1:20:13
  the industry. Now that everybody in the industry knows that jobs are impossible to
• 1:20:17
  come by, that layoffs are happening routinely, massive layoffs hitting to the bone
• 1:20:25
  at major legacy media outlets. That means every single media person, every journalist,
• 1:20:31
  is scared shitless. They have no balls. They will do nothing that
• 1:20:39
  risks the gig nothing, and we saw this happen in what seems like a
• 1:20:45
  small situation. But I think it's I think it's significant, and I think
• 1:20:49
  it's telling about where we are in the media business with something that occurred at
• 1:20:55
  the La Times actually did not occur at the La Times over the last couple
• 1:21:00
  of months. So the Alley Times has laid off over one hundred people from
• 1:21:05
  their newsroom. I don't even know how they could possibly find over one hundred
• 1:21:09
  jobs because they've already shrunk considerably in recent years. But they have an owner
• 1:21:15
  who clearly doesn't give a crap about journalism. It's an ego move. Maybe
• 1:21:21
  naively thought it was a good financial decision. Totally overpaid for the newspaper.
• 1:21:28
  So it seems as if, based upon a story that came out over the
• 1:21:31
  last couple of days, they think they have the authority to tell their newsroom
• 1:21:36
  what they can and cannot print. And this came to be a news story
• 1:21:43
  because this guy who is the owner of The Alley Times is a doctor,
• 1:21:47
  and you know, he had some sort of invention that made him billions of
• 1:21:50
  dollars and one of his fellow doctor friends in Los Angeles who's also super rich,
• 1:21:58
  had become the subject of in La Times investigation. Well, the owner
• 1:22:02
  found out about this and tried to essentially put the kabash on the story.
• 1:22:09
  Now, of course, when confronted about this, the owner claimed, well,
• 1:22:13
  no, the owner was just asking for fair coverage of his friend,
• 1:22:18
  this other doctor who the newspaper was investigating. Of course, that's what they're
• 1:22:23
  going to say. And by the way, that might even be true,
• 1:22:26
  but that's not how it's going to be interpreted by your journalists, who are
• 1:22:30
  scared shitless for their jobs. That's code for don't do this story. But
• 1:22:36
  I'm not even I don't even believe that's what really happened. I believe the
• 1:22:41
  version of the story that got put out there, which was essentially they were
• 1:22:45
  told knock it off, don't do this story. And it may not have
• 1:22:49
  been those words, but I think that message was clear. And shockingly,
• 1:22:55
  the La Times never did do a story on this doctor. So the proof
• 1:23:00
  is in the pudding. There never was a story about this doctor friend of
• 1:23:04
  the owner of the La Times. Now does this end the world? No,
• 1:23:10
  it doesn't even seem like the investigation was that big of a deal.
• 1:23:14
  The point of this is. This is an indication of the way things now
• 1:23:17
  work or don't work in the news media business and why journalism is dead and
• 1:23:25
  it's only gonna get worse. Folks. I'm telling you, ten years ago,
• 1:23:30
  there is no chance that the La Times writers would have put up with
• 1:23:35
  the owner telling them to kill an investigation of one of his friends. Had
• 1:23:41
  that occurred, there would have been a revolt. There would have been a
• 1:23:45
  riot, there would have been a walkout, There would have been an effort
• 1:23:49
  to have all sorts of other news organizations support the La Times on this principle.
• 1:23:57
  But now the rules have changed enough where an owner thinks, oh,
• 1:24:01
  I own this thing. It's losing me money. The least I can do
• 1:24:04
  is not have them shit on a friend. So I'm gonna kill a story,
• 1:24:10
  and they get their way because all the journalists are terrified. And by
• 1:24:14
  the way, the editor, this is the ultimate proof in the pudding.
• 1:24:16
  The editor recently resigned. The editor who was involved in that situation recently resigned.
• 1:24:24
  So you never had a story about the friend, and you had the
• 1:24:26
  editor resigning. So you do the math. We know what happened, and
• 1:24:30
  so, like I said, ten years ago, this would never have been
• 1:24:33
  allowed to happen ten years from now, maybe five years from now. The
• 1:24:36
  way things are going, this will be normal procedure, normal procedure. Now.
• 1:24:45
  I'm not naive. Stuff like this has always happened. The stories are
• 1:24:49
  legendary about you know, Randolph Hurst, the Hurst Corporation, and how he
• 1:24:54
  would use his newspapers back in the olden days. I get it. There's
• 1:25:00
  always been an evolution of these kind of things. You know, there was,
• 1:25:03
  If there was a golden age, it was a pretty short period of
• 1:25:06
  time. You know, from maybe the I don't know, the sixties through
• 1:25:10
  the eighties somewhere in there would have been the golden age of journalism, which
• 1:25:15
  was still very liberally biased, but at least was substantive and at least was
• 1:25:20
  had some semblance of principles behind it. And the ownership was not going to
• 1:25:27
  get involved because that was forbidden. That was for boten that you just did
• 1:25:32
  not do that. Owners understood that there had to be a firewall between ownership
• 1:25:40
  and the editorial portions of a of a newspaper or a magazine, or a
• 1:25:45
  television station or a radio station. That's long gone. That firewall is completely
• 1:25:50
  doused. That does not exist and five years from now, this will happen
• 1:25:57
  at the LA Times and other places and it won't even make a story,
• 1:26:00
  and it will just be accepted that by the reporters of Okay, the boss
• 1:26:05
  says he doesn't want that story. It's done, that's it. Oh well,
• 1:26:11
  that will be it. And so that you know, journalism is already
• 1:26:15
  dead, as the title of this podcast suggests, but you know that'll be
• 1:26:21
  when it's beyond buried. And it's not good for society. You might be
• 1:26:27
  happy that a lot of these woke media outlets are in big trouble, but
• 1:26:31
  it's not good for society. The amount of corruption that will be allowed to
• 1:26:35
  happen because of the death of especially local news outlets, is beyond comprehension,
• 1:26:41
  and it's not good for the country. Now, turning to football and to
• 1:26:46
  the two NFL Conference championship games that were played over the weekend, I guess
• 1:26:51
  I was correct in my prediction for many months ago that the Kansas City Chiefs,
• 1:26:57
  fueled by the momentum created surrounding the entire Taylor Swift Travis Kelce relationship,
• 1:27:02
  which as I told you from the beginning, is now clearly and obviously real
• 1:27:06
  given the number of games that she's gone to, and her reaction on the
• 1:27:11
  field after the Chiefs beat the Ravens over the weekend was very obvious. It's
• 1:27:15
  obvious this relationship is real. It's obvious this relationship is good for the two
• 1:27:19
  of them, at least right now. You could even argue, and I'm
• 1:27:23
  seeing some conservatives starting to come to this belief. You could even argue that
• 1:27:27
  this relationship is good for the country. It may be teaching an entire generation.
• 1:27:31
  I mean, I've talked a lot about the negative impact that Taylor Swift
• 1:27:35
  may have on the presidential election. I do think it's worthy of note that,
• 1:27:41
  considering the crisis that we're having in our younger generation about gender and sexuality,
• 1:27:47
  that that generation seeing a very high profile courting of a high profile heterosexual
• 1:27:56
  female with a high profile heterosexual male getting this much attention and you know,
• 1:28:04
  you know, capturing the imagination of so many young women. I don't think
• 1:28:09
  that's harmful. I mean, would be normal ten twenty years ago, but
• 1:28:13
  in this day and age, you know, anything that's remotely normal you kind
• 1:28:15
  of say, okay, cool, that's great. So I'm actually not against
• 1:28:20
  at all the Taylor Swift Travis Kelce relationship, and I think the Kelsey brothers
• 1:28:26
  are awesome together. I don't like the fact that Travis Kelce endorses liberal products
• 1:28:30
  like Pfizer and bud Light, but I think he's generally a good guy,
• 1:28:33
  and so I got no problem with the relationship. But the relationship I always
• 1:28:39
  felt was going to create an enormous positive momentum for the Chiefs, and for
• 1:28:44
  a while I kind of I didn't really back off my prediction that the Chiefs
• 1:28:48
  would make the Super Bowl, but I had basically said, it doesn't look
• 1:28:51
  like it's going to happen because the Chiefs for a while were in crisis,
• 1:28:56
  they lost the home field advantage. Well, they won two road games,
• 1:29:00
  they beat the Ravens on the road, and now they're going to the Super
• 1:29:01
  Bowl, and the NFL could not be more thrilled. I mean, this
• 1:29:06
  is tremendous for the National Football League, tremendous for their sponsors, tremendous for
• 1:29:12
  everybody who bought advertising for the Super Bowl. I mean, it's this is
• 1:29:16
  going to be the biggest Super Bowl event maybe ever. In my view,
• 1:29:20
  there will probably be more eyeballs on at least part of this football game than
• 1:29:26
  any sporting event in the history of the country. We don't know that yet,
• 1:29:30
  but that's my guess. I don't know if it'll be the biggest rating
• 1:29:33
  because that's based upon population, but from an eyeball perspective, I mean,
• 1:29:39
  this is going to be off the charts. You have the defending champs going
• 1:29:44
  against the San Francisco forty nine ers, and they got a good story with
• 1:29:47
  their mister irrelevant quarterback, brock Party. It should be pointed out. I
• 1:29:51
  tweeted this brock Party it's going to be the starting quarterback for the San Francisco
• 1:29:56
  forty nine ers. Will make less money in this season, at least salary.
• 1:30:00
  Less salary this season because of the contract he had to sign as the
• 1:30:05
  last draft pick a couple of years ago. He'll make less money this season.
• 1:30:11
  Then Taylor Swift probably makes in her sleep on a nightly basis. I
• 1:30:15
  mean, there's no way to know that for sure, but that's a pretty
• 1:30:16
  good guess. And here you know, that's the girlfriend of the Chiefs tight
• 1:30:24
  end. And as far as the Swift influence over how and why the Chiefs
• 1:30:29
  got to the Super Bowl, I want to make clear I have never believed
• 1:30:31
  it was a conspiracy. I don't believe in conspiracies. I'm an ardent anti
• 1:30:35
  conspiracy person, but I do believe that it creates a conscious and unconscious momentum
• 1:30:45
  involving everybody around the team, and I think that absolutely helped the Chiefs.
• 1:30:49
  There are those people who will believe that the officials were in the tank for
• 1:30:55
  the Chiefs. As I predicted. It was only a seven point game point
• 1:31:00
  game. You know, you can always look back and go, what if
• 1:31:02
  the officials had done this or not done that, And there's always gonna be
• 1:31:05
  some questionable calls. There are some people who are claiming that this was an
• 1:31:11
  indication that the fix was in. This was all about the so called NFL
• 1:31:15
  script writers. Boy, those script writers, by the way, they deserve
• 1:31:17
  a major race getting the whole tawn or Swift, Travis Kelcey thing going,
• 1:31:24
  getting the Chiefs into the super Bowl against the team that they played in the
• 1:31:29
  Super Bowl four years ago. By the way, this is a sports analysis
• 1:31:34
  element that you're not going to probably hear anywhere else. I'm going to say
• 1:31:39
  a few things in the next bid here that you're probably not gonna hear anywhere
• 1:31:42
  else. I was stunned to see that of the players that played in that
• 1:31:45
  Super Bowl four years ago when the forty nine Ers played the Chiefs, that
• 1:31:49
  there are only seventeen players combined who are still playing for the forty nine Ers
• 1:31:58
  and the Chiefs nine nine ers, eight on the Chiefs, seventeen combined for
• 1:32:05
  a game that was only four years ago. That means like about eighty five
• 1:32:13
  percent of those rosters are gone either cut, retired, traded free agents.
• 1:32:19
  What have you eighty five percent in four years. I just don't understand.
• 1:32:27
  I really don't understand how it is that the connection between the fan and team
• 1:32:34
  still as as strong as it appears to be in the National Football League in
• 1:32:40
  twenty twenty four, because there is no ability to make a connection with the
• 1:32:45
  players or a group of players that you fall in love with as your team
• 1:32:49
  goes from being not that great to getting better, to making a championship game,
• 1:32:54
  maybe making the Super Bowl, winning a Super Bowl, winning multiple Super
• 1:32:57
  Bowls. I mean that to me is how a connection between the fan and
• 1:33:03
  a city gets made in an era where these professionals are making ridiculous amounts of
• 1:33:09
  money and have no loyalty to the team, and the team has no loyalty
• 1:33:13
  to them. I just don't understand it, especially in the fantasy football era,
• 1:33:18
  where people's loyalties are to individuals regardless of their team. So yet,
• 1:33:25
  you know, a lot of this is still based upon the idea that there
• 1:33:28
  is a connection between a city and its team that has to be strong enough
• 1:33:31
  to fill the stadium every single week with ridiculously high prices. I just don't
• 1:33:39
  get it. I don't see how it continues. But it's still going on
• 1:33:42
  despite the fact that even you have two very successful teams and eighty five percent
• 1:33:47
  of their rosters has gone from four years ago. As a point of comparison,
• 1:33:51
  I realized this is a completely different error. This is back when football
• 1:33:56
  was still somewhat of a sport and it wasn't just a business. But for
• 1:34:00
  people of my age and older, the ultimate first Super Bowl era dynasty of
• 1:34:04
  the National Football League was the Pittsburgh Steelers during the nineteen seventies. My friend
• 1:34:10
  Frank o'harris was a big part of that. The late great Frank o'harris well,
• 1:34:14
  the Pittsburgh Steelers. They won four Super Bowls in six years, so
• 1:34:17
  six years, six years from the first Super Bowl win to the last Super
• 1:34:21
  Bowl win. In the nineteen seventies, they had ten guys play on all
• 1:34:29
  four of those Super Bowl teams who were Hall of Famers, not just ten
• 1:34:34
  guys, ten Hall of famers over six years, more than either the forty
• 1:34:42
  nine Ers or the Chiefs have still in the team from four years ago.
• 1:34:45
  And I couldn't figure out for sure what the total number of Steelers were who
• 1:34:49
  played on all six of those teams that won four Super Bowls, but my
• 1:34:55
  guess it was somewhere in the twenty range. It might have been higher than
• 1:34:58
  that. I mean, and that was an era where you could really make
• 1:35:01
  a connection to the guys that were playing on your team, one because they
• 1:35:06
  weren't making bizillions of dollars, but two because they were very likely to play
• 1:35:11
  on your team and in your city for their whole career. And then then
• 1:35:14
  we're going to retire there like Franco did. I mean, I just don't
• 1:35:18
  see how this connection maintains itself in this environment when even successful teams like the
• 1:35:26
  forty nine Ers and the Chiefs are seeing so much turnover. But this is
• 1:35:30
  all a business, and one of the things that I warned about when it
• 1:35:34
  came to the business of the NFL Playoffs was what was going to happen with
• 1:35:39
  regard to NBC and Peacock forcing you to get their streaming app in order to
• 1:35:45
  watch the first Chiefs playoff game. Of course, this was perfect for NBC.
• 1:35:54
  This was the Taylor Swift game, This was a cold weather game.
• 1:35:58
  They had the Dolphins, which is a sexy team, and so people were
• 1:36:02
  very curious about how this would work out. Would people actually buy Peacock streaming
• 1:36:10
  to watch a first round playoff game? Well, the data is in,
• 1:36:15
  and while it's difficult to judge because we don't really have anything to compare it
• 1:36:19
  to, NBC and others who analyze this stuff are declaring this to be a
• 1:36:25
  victory for NBC because it appears as if almost three million people bought new users
• 1:36:33
  bought the Peacock app. Now, there are those who say, well,
• 1:36:39
  that doesn't make any sense financially because they paid over one hundred million dollars for
• 1:36:44
  this game. I don't think that's an accurate way to look at it.
• 1:36:45
  Plus, you don't know how long these three million people are going to be
• 1:36:49
  paying for the Peacock app. There's a presumption that a lot of them will
• 1:36:55
  drop it after the first month. First of all, people forget they haven't
• 1:36:58
  or they don't even know how to drive the app. But not everybody's gonna
• 1:37:01
  drop it, So these might be permanent customers. And that's what NBC wanted.
• 1:37:06
  The Peacock app sucks. It's probably one of the worst major streaming services
• 1:37:12
  as far as the content that it offers, and so they wanted subscribers.
• 1:37:18
  Well, they used the chiefs, the Doleshins and Taylor Swift to get about
• 1:37:25
  three million new subscribers. And perception is reality. This is being perceived as
• 1:37:30
  a success. That means they'll do it again. And I have warned you.
• 1:37:35
  I have said, if this is the success, we're going eventually to
• 1:37:40
  pay per view, and I believe, barring some major turn of events,
• 1:37:45
  within five years, I think every NFL playoff game will be in some way,
• 1:37:50
  shape or form pay per view because that's where the real money is.
• 1:37:56
  That's what they've always wanted to do. They weren't sure they could get away
• 1:38:00
  with it, but this situation with Peacock proved that they can get away with
• 1:38:05
  it, just like the NFL has gotten away with all sorts of other indignities
• 1:38:10
  that they have done to their core fan over the last several decades in all
• 1:38:15
  sorts of ways, and so you've been warned. You've been warned, this
• 1:38:18
  is where we're heading. Pay per view NFL playoffs. They probably won't do
• 1:38:24
  that with the super Bowl because they love that huge number and it's a communal
• 1:38:28
  it's last communal event in America. So my guess is the super Bowl will
• 1:38:31
  be immune from this for hopefully, you know, forever, at least during
• 1:38:35
  my lifetime. But I do think that the playoffs themselves will probably go to
• 1:38:43
  pay per view other than maybe in the actual local markets where the teams are.
• 1:38:48
  They probably would not be able to withstand the outrage of not having local
• 1:38:54
  free television in the markets where those teams are from. So I want to
• 1:38:59
  make that caveat in my prediction, although I probably won't be around in five
• 1:39:02
  years to take any accountability for that prediction, but I think it's a pretty
• 1:39:06
  solid estimate of where we're heading with this situation, and it's not good for
• 1:39:13
  the fan in my opinion. Now, I want to say a few things
• 1:39:15
  about football in a very different way, specifically regarding coaching, and I think
• 1:39:21
  I have some things to say here that you're not going to hear anywhere else,
• 1:39:26
  for better or for worse. And first, when it comes to the
• 1:39:30
  college game and a development that has occurred there over the last several weeks.
• 1:39:34
  We've talked already about Nick Saban retiring from Alabama. I think largely because of
• 1:39:40
  the change in the landscape of college football, nil instant transfers, realignment,
• 1:39:45
  all that. He specifically told ESPN that that's not the case. Tommy Tubarill,
• 1:39:53
  senator from Alabama, who was the head coach at Auburn, Alabama's big
• 1:39:58
  rival for several years, he did an interview on conservative radio where he strongly
• 1:40:02
  suggested that he knew that part of what caused Saban to retire was, in
• 1:40:09
  fact, all those changes in college football. I don't know if I necessarily
• 1:40:13
  believe him, but it's a weird thing for him to lie about, especially
• 1:40:15
  as a US senator, and I think common sense tells you that it had
• 1:40:19
  to at least play some role. So you have Nick Saban retiring when he
• 1:40:24
  still was at the top of his game after Alabama had got into the vaunted
• 1:40:29
  four team playoff. You have Washington's coach leaving Washington after getting to the National
• 1:40:34
  Championship game to take Saban spot at Alabama, and now you have Jim Harball
• 1:40:41
  leaving Michigan after winning the National Championship to take the job in the NFL for
• 1:40:46
  the Los Angeles Chargers, a team that's not particularly good, although they have
• 1:40:50
  a good quarterback, and obviously, you know, La there's some benefits to
• 1:40:54
  living there. But Harball, who was a Michigan alum, played quarterback for
• 1:40:59
  Bo schen Beckler, who made Michigan football what it was in the modern era.
• 1:41:03
  You know, a tremendous connection to the pass there at Michigan, he
• 1:41:08
  leads them to a national championship, and then instantaneously he's gone to the National
• 1:41:14
  Football League. So why do I find this to be significant or interesting?
• 1:41:16
  Well, for a lot of reasons. Number one, we just had this
• 1:41:20
  the last edition of the four team college football Playoff. Three of those four
• 1:41:28
  head coaches are gone from their schools, three out of four. This is
• 1:41:33
  supposed to be the be all, end all, the ultimate achievement in college
• 1:41:38
  football, making the final four, and three of the four teams lost their
• 1:41:44
  coaches, and three of those teams are gonna suffer greatly. Alabama might be
• 1:41:48
  decimated by the loss of Saban Washington is decimated. Michigan might be in a
• 1:41:55
  better position to hold on for dear life, but they're not gonna be helped
• 1:41:59
  to have all sorts of losses. They already lost their quarterback to the NFL
• 1:42:02
  Draft, and I'm sure at least indirectly because Harbaugh was leaving. And so
• 1:42:09
  my question here is, what's the fucking point? I mean, what's the
• 1:42:13
  fucking point If the whole goal is to make the Final four, to win
• 1:42:17
  a national championship, and you finally achieve that and it's all over in a
• 1:42:23
  couple of weeks because your coach leaves to go to the National Football League,
• 1:42:26
  and this is not a fluke because three out of the four coaches that made
• 1:42:29
  the Final four are now gone. What's the point? What is this all
• 1:42:33
  for? I cannot emphasize enough the essence of college football, what made it
• 1:42:42
  great was the connection to the past, the traditions, the legacies. That's
• 1:42:49
  what made it unique. With regard to Michigan being a perfect example, you
• 1:42:55
  have a direct line from Harbaugh to Schembeckler. He backed for Sam Beckler,
• 1:43:01
  he went to Michigan, So every single Michigan player, Michigan fan, anyone
• 1:43:08
  connected to the program for decades, has a connection to Michigan football because Harball
• 1:43:15
  was the coach. Well, now he's being replaced by a guy who went
• 1:43:20
  to Oklahoma. Now he seems to be a great guy. They had to
• 1:43:24
  give him the job because he did a great job as interim coach while Herball
• 1:43:27
  was being suspended, and that may have played a role in why Harball got
• 1:43:30
  the hell out of there. I think he would have been easily able to
• 1:43:32
  survive it, especially after winning a national championship. But I think he also
• 1:43:38
  was influenced by NIL and instant transfers and realignment and everything else and decided to
• 1:43:45
  go back to the National Football League. But you know Michigan now, instantaneously
• 1:43:50
  after their greatest crowning of the moment achievement finally winning a national championship, you
• 1:43:57
  know, guy who was a Michigan man quarterback for both sham Beeckler, all
• 1:44:01
  of a sudden, Now, anybody who has been part of the Michigan program
• 1:44:08
  for two generations, all of a sudden, has no connection to this coach.
• 1:44:13
  Now, there's more things at stake than the connection to the coach,
• 1:44:15
  But the connection to the coach matters. I don't think non athletes understand this.
• 1:44:21
  I mean, I've experienced it myself. My college coach at Georgetown Golf
• 1:44:27
  is still there. We didn't like each other, but we have a connection.
• 1:44:32
  I occasionally talk to him when we have events. I'm much more likely
• 1:44:36
  to go or participate because it was my coach. He has a memory of
• 1:44:43
  me being there, far more positive memory than he should have. He seems
• 1:44:46
  to have forgotten the bad stuff. But that kind of stuff matters, I
• 1:44:51
  see. I don't view coaching, even at the highest level. Georgetown Golf
• 1:44:56
  is not the highest level. But I viewed coaching in college as mostly as
• 1:45:00
  your brand. I don't think, except in rare occasions like maybe Nick Saban,
• 1:45:05
  I don't think the coach really matters that much to winning and losing.
• 1:45:11
  So to me, I would almost never fire a coach unless they were completely
• 1:45:16
  incompetent, or they were involved in a scandal, or you know, the
• 1:45:20
  losing was just completely intolerable because you're losing so much more when you get rid
• 1:45:27
  of your head coach, you're destroying your brand. And that's what Michigan was
• 1:45:32
  forced to do because of all these changes in the game that either directly or
• 1:45:39
  indirectly forced Jim Harbaugh out of it after his crowning achievement, and so now
• 1:45:45
  all of a sudden, you know, anybody connected the Michigan football no longer
• 1:45:49
  The schaen Beckler era is completely over. Now, all those guys when they
• 1:45:54
  come back, there's nobody who remembers them because the coach went to Oklahoma.
• 1:46:00
  Again. This doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but this is
• 1:46:02
  at the essence of what made college football great to begin with, and how
• 1:46:08
  this new system is systematically destroying it. And nobody in the sports media wants
• 1:46:15
  to acknowledge this because they're all so deeply invested in this new system. They
• 1:46:19
  love the content that it creates. ESPN is literally invested in it because they're
• 1:46:25
  the ones that created it, because their corporate bosses think it's going to make
• 1:46:29
  them a boatload of money. And by the way, in the short run,
• 1:46:31
  it might. In the short run, it might. But eventually,
• 1:46:35
  I gotta believe people are gonna catch on to what's going on here. That
• 1:46:40
  the foundation has been beyond cracked. It's crumbling, that the essence of this
• 1:46:46
  thing is falling apart, and that the legacies and the traditions and the connections
• 1:46:54
  are fading away fast in a way that I think have to have grammifications towards
• 1:47:01
  the long term viability of the sport because look, more than any other sport,
• 1:47:08
  college football relies on a studio audience. A studio audience. What I
• 1:47:15
  mean by that is the pageantry, the passion, the you know, the
• 1:47:19
  cheerleaders, the bands, the packed houses, the event itself, the tailgating.
• 1:47:28
  If you don't have that, you've got minor league football, then nobody
• 1:47:32
  gives a shit about. Look what you know, the minor league spring football.
• 1:47:38
  That's gonna happen that no one will care about. There will be nobody
• 1:47:42
  in the stands for that. They'll be television because people are start for football,
• 1:47:45
  but there will be nobody in the stands. There'll be no TV ratings.
• 1:47:48
  Well, as soon as that passion is cut off, that connection is
• 1:47:53
  cut off, eventually you're gonna lose the studio audience. And once you lose
• 1:47:59
  the studio audience, I think this all collapses, kind of like what we're
• 1:48:03
  seeing with the mainstream news media. It takes a long time to get there,
• 1:48:09
  but eventually you're gonna have It's gonna happen, it's gonna collapse. That's
• 1:48:15
  what was happening currently with the mainstream news media, and eventually I think that's
• 1:48:18
  gonna happen with college football. It was unnecessary, It was totally unnecessary,
• 1:48:24
  but we're seeing it happen, and nobody wants to admit to it, and
• 1:48:30
  largely because they've got blood on their hands if they're in the media, because
• 1:48:32
  they either enabled it or they promoted it, and it's it's gonna be horrible,
• 1:48:38
  it really is. I don't know how long it's gonna take. Probably
• 1:48:41
  longer than I expect. Now that takes me to the Pro game, the
• 1:48:45
  NFL and the situation involving coaches there, which has maybe even more significant societal
• 1:48:50
  implications because there's issues related to race and age that are really being highlighted by
• 1:48:59
  what happened or what did not happen with legendary Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who
• 1:49:04
  was effectively fired and replaced by a guy who happens to be black, who
• 1:49:09
  has no head coaching experience and no coordinator experience, and now appears as if
• 1:49:15
  he's not going to get a job at all after having interviewed twice apparently with
• 1:49:20
  the Atlanta Falcons. Now, look this is a somewhat complex situation because Bill
• 1:49:27
  Belichick one is old, he won six Super Bowls with the Patriots, but
• 1:49:31
  you know, he's in his seventies early seventies. But he also is somebody
• 1:49:36
  who is used to almost complete control over football operations where he would be the
• 1:49:43
  general manager and the head coach. And that's generally not the way NFL owners
• 1:49:47
  like to do things, especially with old men. And you can make an
• 1:49:51
  argument from a football perspective, from a purely football standpoint that Belichick you've heard
• 1:49:58
  of too big to fail. Well, Belichick may have been too big to
• 1:50:02
  hire. That could be what has happened here. So I don't want to
• 1:50:08
  pretend that this is a clear cut race issue or age issue and that there
• 1:50:15
  aren't complexities here. Because some in the right wing media, like Clay Travis,
• 1:50:19
  alleged conservative who runs out kick Sports, you know, he has tried
• 1:50:25
  to make this into a purely age and race issue, and I don't think
• 1:50:29
  that it is. However, there's an age and race component, specifically the
• 1:50:34
  age component that I want to discuss right now. The race thing, I
• 1:50:41
  think is it's definitely something that gets people's attention and gets people riled up.
• 1:50:46
  And obviously because of the fact that a young guy who happens to be black
• 1:50:50
  replaced Belichick and another young guy who happens to be black got the job at
• 1:50:56
  the Atlanta Falcons. I get why people are going, We'll wait a minute,
• 1:51:00
  it doesn't this seem like age discrimination and race discrimination. And on the
• 1:51:05
  racial front, there's no question in the National Football League has gone way,
• 1:51:11
  way, way overboard through the Rooney Rule and other sorts of insane liberal policies
• 1:51:18
  to try to get more minority coaches into head coaching positions. And I'll have
• 1:51:24
  some thoughts on how wrongheaded that is in a moment, but specifically with regard
• 1:51:29
  to Belichick, I think there's more of an age situation here than a race
• 1:51:34
  circumstance because the coaches that are now being hired are much younger than ever used
• 1:51:43
  to be the case, much younger than Belichick, and they're of a completely
• 1:51:46
  different generation and a different philosophy. Basically, they're players' coaches. Belichick was
• 1:51:55
  not a player's coach. Almost all the highly successful old school coaches we're not
• 1:52:00
  players coaches. Players coaches are basically coaches where you know they're one of the
• 1:52:03
  team. Yeah, they're very lenient. They're not tough, they don't get
• 1:52:10
  angry at anybody, they don't yell at anybody. It's the modern version of
• 1:52:15
  coaching, which of course the media loves, and it's very PC. Liberals
• 1:52:20
  love this because they don't like anger, they don't like anyone getting yelled at,
• 1:52:25
  they don't like they certainly don't like you touching anybody. And to me,
• 1:52:29
  this has a much larger significance than just coaching at the NFL level.
• 1:52:35
  I think this filters all the way down to teaching, all the way down
• 1:52:39
  to parenting, and we're seeing this in every aspect of society where the tough
• 1:52:45
  mentor is basically disappearing, whether it's in the coach or a parent or a
• 1:52:55
  teacher, whatever it is. You almost can't survive any more being from that
• 1:53:02
  old school of thought. And I think there's something being lost here that is
• 1:53:08
  incredibly significant. One because I don't happen to believe that the players coach really
• 1:53:15
  is that effective. I don't see where we have seen proved, at least
• 1:53:18
  not in football, that this is the way to go. I mean,
• 1:53:21
  Andy Reid, who's the most successful current NFL coach, I think has kind
• 1:53:27
  of been able to bridge that gap where he's both old school, he's an
• 1:53:31
  older guy, but the players love him so but you know, somewhere in
• 1:53:35
  between a hybrid. Okay, I get it. You got to deal with
• 1:53:40
  the modern player, and the modern generation obviously looks at things very, very
• 1:53:44
  differently than people of my age and older, for better for worse. But
• 1:53:48
  this, this movement towards younger guys, even when they don't have real coaching
• 1:53:55
  experience, not head coaching experience, when you're leaving a six times super champion
• 1:54:00
  on the sidelines, is really remarkable, and I think it's symbolic of something
• 1:54:05
  that's happening in our society as a whole, where experience is no longer valued,
• 1:54:13
  that it's youth over everything. That the younger generation thinks they have it
• 1:54:16
  all figured out. You know, the old people screwed everything up. And
• 1:54:21
  this is why I go always go back to when you teach this new generation
• 1:54:26
  that our country is inherently racist or inherently bad, that's gonna have ramifications.
• 1:54:31
  They're gonna think they're the good ones, that everybody over a certain age is
• 1:54:35
  inherently bad. Now, this is not a new phenomenon. There's always been
• 1:54:40
  this kind of generational divide. But to me, it's much more dramatic,
• 1:54:44
  and we've never lived in a situation where young people had so much power for
• 1:54:49
  a lot of different reasons, partially because they've been given the power by their
• 1:54:54
  parents over their teachers, over their coaches. It's part of why it can't
• 1:54:59
  be a quote unquote old school coach anymore. You're gonna get fired because you're
• 1:55:04
  nevertitely gonna piss somebody off, or do something you shouldn't do, or say
• 1:55:09
  something that gets misinterpreted. So almost inherently you have to be a quote unquote
• 1:55:14
  players coach or a woosy coach in my view, in order to maintain your
• 1:55:18
  job. And I think there's something being lost in that, and I think
• 1:55:24
  Belichick is an example of it. My god, look at all the experienced
• 1:55:29
  six Super Bowl Championship rings. And now, of course there's the other issue
• 1:55:32
  of did he do that simply because he had Tom Brady. Well, if
• 1:55:35
  you ask Tom Brady, tom Brady tells you Bill Belichick was the greatest thing
• 1:55:40
  that ever happened to him. So you gotta at least consider that in the
• 1:55:44
  equation that, well, yeah, maybe Brady was great because of Belichick too.
• 1:55:47
  Of course, he did go on to win a Super Bowl without Belichick,
• 1:55:50
  But okay, I fully acknowledge this is not a clear cut situation,
• 1:55:55
  but I think it's symbolic of something larger going on, that there's this mass
• 1:56:00
  of generational divide in this country and that old people are basically being tossed out
• 1:56:04
  with their values and their experience and being replaced by much younger, much more
• 1:56:12
  inexperienced people with a completely different set of values that in my view, has
• 1:56:16
  not been proven in any form, whether it's sports or education or within the
• 1:56:24
  business world, what have you. And I also think from the football perspective,
• 1:56:30
  now this is going to sound conspiratorial. It is not conspiratorial, but
• 1:56:33
  it is convenient for the National Football League, and that is that when you
• 1:56:38
  get rid of the Belichicks of the world, and you know all you have
• 1:56:42
  is these younger guys, these players, coaches, guess what becomes much easier
• 1:56:48
  the movement towards the wussification of the sport and eventually the flag football, Because
• 1:56:54
  it's the old school guys that are going to be the last line of defense
• 1:57:00
  on this and if they're no longer in the game, they no longer have
• 1:57:04
  the influence, they no longer have the ability to stop it from happening.
• 1:57:10
  Then guess what, it's a lot easier. I mean about going back to
• 1:57:14
  college for a second. You know, one of the things I have a
• 1:57:16
  problem with Nick Saban about is Saban had a unique position of authority within the
• 1:57:23
  game to try to stop some of these insane changes NIL, instant transfers,
• 1:57:28
  realignment, what have you. And he was clearly against them, but was
• 1:57:32
  very, very muted in his comments about these circumstances, and I could never
• 1:57:38
  figure out why. My only theory was that he thought that somehow there was
• 1:57:41
  a racial issue involved, that somehow, because NIL had become a de facto
• 1:57:46
  civil rights issue, a fake civil rights issue in my view, that he
• 1:57:49
  hadn't he had too much to lose by being seen as against it, and
• 1:57:55
  also could potentially turn off recruits if it was perceived he was not valuing NIL
• 1:58:01
  money and what have you. I don't know. That's just my theory.
• 1:58:04
  But the point, the point of this is when you get rid of the
• 1:58:10
  Sabans of the world, and Hardball's of the world is no longer in college
• 1:58:13
  football, and you get rid of the Belichicks, of the world in the
• 1:58:16
  NFL, you're gonna lose what I call institutional memory. Institutional memory and journalism
• 1:58:24
  is fading fast, and institutional memory in football is fading fast, faster than
• 1:58:30
  I ever thought imaginable. If Bill Belichick is not hirable after winning six Super
• 1:58:34
  Bowls in the National Football League, and you know, is it possible he
• 1:58:41
  comes back next year? I guess. But you know, to me,
• 1:58:45
  at his age, it becomes very, very difficult to do that. I
• 1:58:48
  mean, his career is remarkably like Vince Lombardi's. If you're a football historian,
• 1:58:54
  I mean, you know, Lombardi coached at West Point and Bill Belichick's
• 1:58:58
  dad coach to the Naval Academy, and effectively, Belichick was the ball boy
• 1:59:02
  for the Naval Academy for several years, and both of them coached as assistants
• 1:59:08
  for the New York Football Giants, and Lombardi won five World Championships and Belichick
• 1:59:15
  won six, and Lombardi retired and then came back after a year and coached
• 1:59:19
  for the Redskins, and then died almost immediately after that, at the age
• 1:59:23
  of fifty seven, which is remarkably young now in retrospect. But you know,
• 1:59:28
  here you got Belichick in his seventies. A is he take a year
• 1:59:31
  off and then come back. I mean, to me, the chances of
• 1:59:33
  that happening seem rather remote. So it feels like this could be the end
• 1:59:40
  for Bill Belichick. And it's just amazing to me how little regard we have
• 1:59:45
  for past achievement and experience. Where Bill Belichick, who's not really in the
• 1:59:50
  mold of a media commentator, I mean, Nick Saban's going to be a
• 1:59:54
  media commentator. I doubt Bill Belichick's going to be able to make that transition.
• 1:59:59
  So this might be the end for Belichick. And I find that to
• 2:00:00
  be just amazing but also very telling from a societal standpoint as far as the
• 2:00:06
  race issue is concerned. You know, we now have nine minority head coaches
• 2:00:13
  in the National Football League right now, at least at least as far as
• 2:00:16
  the way that the media defines them. And I want to say something again,
• 2:00:21
  You're not going to hear anyone else say the sports media does a really,
• 2:00:26
  really, really terrible job on this issue because they're incredibly woke. But
• 2:00:31
  the math that they use when it comes to equity, I mean, equity
• 2:00:34
  is bad in and of itself. But what really drives me crazy is when
• 2:00:40
  you try to insert equity based upon really bad logic and really bad math.
• 2:00:46
  So we now have nine minority head coaches out of thirty two in the National
• 2:00:50
  Football League. I want to give a shout out to the quarterback for the
• 2:00:55
  Seattle Seahawks, Gino Smith, who happens to be black, and he was
• 2:00:59
  apparently asked about this phenomenon of now nine minority head coaches in the National Football
• 2:01:04
  League out of thirty two, and his response, if it's being interpreted properly,
• 2:01:10
  deserves a lot of credit. He said, quote, I don't find
• 2:01:14
  it encouraging at all, because, of course the media asked him, was
• 2:01:16
  this encouraging to have nine minority head coaches out of thirty two? Asking a
• 2:01:21
  black quarterback about this, he said, it's twenty twenty four. Why are
• 2:01:27
  we still talking about minorities? Unquote. Now, again, there's some interpretation
• 2:01:33
  for that quote, but the way I interpreted it and Nail I'm being hopeful
• 2:01:38
  here is that guys, come on, aren't we pass this yet? There's
• 2:01:42
  no real discrimination here. We've been trying really hard to get black head coaches,
• 2:01:47
  and okay, there's nine minority head coaches in the National Football League right
• 2:01:51
  now, which, if you do the math properly, has achieved equity.
• 2:01:59
  Again, can't stand equity. Equity is the equality of outcome, not you
• 2:02:04
  know, equality, which is equal opportunity. I'm a big equality guy.
• 2:02:09
  I hate equity. I say this almost every single episode. But if you're
• 2:02:14
  gonna buy into the equity argument, can we at least define equity properly because
• 2:02:23
  nine out of thirty two is actually, depending on how you define the race
• 2:02:28
  of those nine is actually a higher percentage then, for instance, the general
• 2:02:35
  population, which includes people who are black males. In other words, black
• 2:02:43
  males make up thirteen percent of the population. So now you have nine out
• 2:02:48
  of thirty two NFL coaches who are quote unquote black in some way, shape
• 2:02:54
  or form, that should do it. That more than satisfies equity. But
• 2:03:00
  the problem is the liberals involved here and the liberal sports media are not defining
• 2:03:08
  the numbers and aren't using remotely reasonable logic here because to them, the number
• 2:03:16
  that should be used for equity isn't thirteen percent. It's more like sixty five
• 2:03:23
  or seventy or seventy five percent. Based upon the fact that that's close to
• 2:03:27
  the percentage of overall players in the National Football League who are currently black.
• 2:03:33
  Well, there are all sorts of massive problems with that basis that philosophy,
• 2:03:43
  that the foundation of the argument. It's completely wrong headed. And let me
• 2:03:47
  tell you why. So. In the liberal media's mine, especially the sports
• 2:03:51
  media's mind, they think that we ought to be determining this by the percentage
• 2:03:57
  of players who are currently black. Well. The first problem with that is,
• 2:04:01
  number one, it takes a long time to get the experience, at
• 2:04:06
  least it used to to get the experience needed to be a National Football League
• 2:04:12
  head coach. That used to mean you were in your at least late forties
• 2:04:16
  or early fifties. So now you have to go back twenty five years about
• 2:04:24
  and determine, okay, what was the percentage of black player back then,
• 2:04:29
  in order to come up with some reasonable interpretation of what you might expect to
• 2:04:34
  find when it comes to the racial makeup of black coaches. But no one
• 2:04:40
  in the sports media is smart enough to understand that part. But it's much
• 2:04:44
  deeper than even that. The biggest miscalculation or misconception of this is that somehow
• 2:04:50
  there's remotely a correlation or a causation between being a player and being a coach.
• 2:05:00
  The qualities that make you a player a good player in the National Football
• 2:05:03
  League are completely different than the qualities that make you a coach. Then sports
• 2:05:11
  media never wants to address this, largely because thirty five years ago Jimmy the
• 2:05:15
  Greek got fired. But there are potentially physical reasons why, especially in the
• 2:05:21
  modern game, there are more black people than the average population would indicate would
• 2:05:29
  be likely to happen if everything was all equal. In other words, so
• 2:05:33
  why do black players dominate? Why does thirteen percent of the population dominate the
• 2:05:40
  National Football League? Not quite as much as they do in basketball, but
• 2:05:44
  you know we're getting close to those kind of numbers. Why does that happen?
• 2:05:47
  Well, there are all sorts of potential reasons for this, which have
• 2:05:54
  nothing to do with whether or not the same players would eventually make good coaches,
• 2:06:00
  because the skill set and the qualities that make up a good coach are
• 2:06:05
  completely different. Your forty time has no basis on whether or not you're a
• 2:06:12
  good NFL coach. None. It's everything when it comes to whether or not
• 2:06:16
  you're gonna be able to play in the National Football League. So it's an
• 2:06:19
  absurd comparison on its face. Now, there are those who will claim ludicrously
• 2:06:25
  that somehow this is a racist view of things. It is not a racist
• 2:06:30
  view. It's the opposite of a racist view. I'm just using basic logic
• 2:06:34
  and saying, Okay, if you're going to play this equity game, can
• 2:06:39
  we at least use the right number. But the number is thirteen percent and
• 2:06:44
  not sixty percent or whatever it is you know currently in the National Football League
• 2:06:49
  with regard to the racial makeup. And yet that's the perception of the sports
• 2:06:55
  media. Oh, we're still so far behind. So we're going to really
• 2:06:58
  go for what twenty out of thirty two. We're not gonna gonna stop equity
• 2:07:02
  until we get them around thirty twenty out of thirty two head coaches are non
• 2:07:06
  white. That would be ridiculous. Again, if they're qualified, fantastic.
• 2:07:14
  If these young black coaches succeed, more power to them. I hope they
• 2:07:18
  do well. My concern is if they don't do well, people are automatically
• 2:07:23
  gonna be further suspicious of the entire process and see them as DEI hires,
• 2:07:30
  which doesn't do anybody any good, doesn't do them any good, It doesn't
• 2:07:33
  do the cause of racial equality any good. It's shortsighted, but that's the
• 2:07:39
  way liberals work with this thing. They would rather humiliate black people with the
• 2:07:43
  stupid Rooney rule and put them under inherent suspicion if they get jobs they're not
• 2:07:47
  fully qualified for and don't succeed. They don't care. They're just virtue signaling.
• 2:07:53
  They just, you know, they just don't want to riot. That's
• 2:07:56
  all they're looking for. And this has so so much significance throughout society.
• 2:08:03
  I say this all the time. Sports is so so instrumental in our culture,
• 2:08:09
  so instrumental, and especially the National Football League has so much power.
• 2:08:13
  This kind of stuff filters down, both consciously and unconsciously to every single aspect
• 2:08:20
  of life. And I'm not going to suggest it when I'm about to tell
• 2:08:24
  you has anything to do with the National Football League, because my six year
• 2:08:28
  old daughter Diana doesn't care at all about the National Football League. She barely
• 2:08:33
  even cares about Taylor Swift, and so she has no knowledge of anything I've
• 2:08:37
  just told you. In fact, she and I have never, to my
• 2:08:41
  recollection, had anything close to a conversation about racial equity or TEI or affirmative
• 2:08:50
  action. Or anything. I mean, we teach our kids you treat everybody
• 2:08:54
  the same. You don't evaluate people based upon their race, I mean,
• 2:09:00
  one hundred percent. And so I was stunned the other day when my six
• 2:09:05
  year old daughter was telling me about the casting for her class play, which
• 2:09:11
  is Jack and the Beanstalk, and she really wanted the part of the mom
• 2:09:16
  because her big sister, Grace had played the part of the mom in first
• 2:09:20
  grade several years ago and had done a really good job, and Diana had
• 2:09:24
  seen it, and Grace wanted her to do the part of the mom.
• 2:09:28
  And so we're really hoping that Diana was going to get the part of the
• 2:09:31
  mom. Well, she didn't get the part of the mom. I have
• 2:09:35
  no idea why she didn't get the part of the mom. It's probably actually
• 2:09:39
  good for Diana because Diana, Diana's life is too good. She has no
• 2:09:43
  disappointment. She's the golden child. Everyone loves her, so maybe a little
• 2:09:46
  disappointment is good for Diana. So I don't really have a big issue over
• 2:09:50
  the fact that she didn't get the part in the class play that she wanted.
• 2:09:54
  But here was the really interesting and maybe telling part. So again I
• 2:09:58
  didn't leave her at all. We've never had a conversation close to this.
• 2:10:03
  Unprovoked, she happened to mention that the person who got the role as Jack
• 2:10:11
  in Jack and the Beanstalk was a black boy, the only black boy in
• 2:10:18
  the class, which she described as quote sus sus, that's a direct quote
• 2:10:28
  from my six year old first grade daughter. Sus. I said what do
• 2:10:33
  you mean by that? And she said, well, he's the only black
• 2:10:37
  kid in the class and he got the lead part in the play. That's
• 2:10:41
  sus. I said why, and she proceeded to tell me that she had
• 2:10:48
  a suspicion, thus the word sus, that he got the role because he
• 2:10:54
  was black. I said, well, do you think you'll do a good
• 2:10:56
  job? He said, oh yeah, I think you'll do a good job.
• 2:10:58
  He's a good kid. I said, so, what's the problem and
• 2:11:03
  she just said, oh, I thought it was sus. I was completely
• 2:11:07
  floored. I'm like, again, I cannot emphasize enough. We have never
• 2:11:11
  had a conversation about this, to my recollection, in our entire lives anything
• 2:11:18
  close to this, and yet on her own, my six year old daughter
• 2:11:24
  looks at it and goes, well, gee, the lead part in the
• 2:11:28
  role went to the only black kid in the class. That's Sus. And
• 2:11:31
  this is a person who may deserve it, who may do a great job,
• 2:11:37
  who she likes. Imagine the level of Sus that now exists society wide
• 2:11:45
  under situations that are far far more important, far more dramatic, far more
• 2:11:52
  impactful. I'm telling you this is a cultural cancer, this situation of DEI,
• 2:12:00
  because it filters down throughout everything, consciously and subconsciously, even when it
• 2:12:07
  comes to a six year old first grader who has not been taught this in
• 2:12:13
  any way, shape or form. A couple other points that at least indirectly
• 2:12:18
  relate to football that I want to finish up on, I have to mention
• 2:12:22
  that there was a really amazing conversation on Bill Maher's HBO show that involves Stephen
• 2:12:28
  A. Smith from ESPN, who I loathe, and Bill Maher, of
• 2:12:33
  course, you know, the lone liberal who was sensible during COVID. They
• 2:12:37
  had a conversation about Damar Hamlin and what was amazing about this in the most
• 2:12:43
  recent episode of Bill Maher's HBO show is that Bill Maher wanted to know Stephen
• 2:12:50
  A. Smith's opinion about whether or not that Bill's Bengals game from last the
• 2:12:56
  end of last season that was canceled because Hamblin had a cardiac or asked on
• 2:13:00
  the field whether or not that was the right call, And they talked about
• 2:13:05
  this for several minutes, and mar to his credit, seemed to be in
• 2:13:09
  the of the point of view that this was ridiculous that the game should have
• 2:13:13
  been played. You know, he didn't die, and you know we canceled
• 2:13:18
  the game, and you know, Stephen A. Smith was somewhere in the
• 2:13:22
  middle too. But here was the most important part. Even Bill maher COVID
• 2:13:30
  contrarian, who seems to get it when it comes to vax Man dates and
• 2:13:35
  is open minded about the entire COVID hysteria, never even talks to stephen A.
• 2:13:41
  Smith about what the hell actually happened to Hamlin, which we still can't
• 2:13:48
  get a straight answer on, which I believe because we can't get a straight
• 2:13:52
  answer on, has to at least somewhat be theoretically, either directly or indirectly
• 2:13:58
  related to thenes, because it's the only thing that makes any sense when you
• 2:14:03
  understand the way the media narrative went down. But that subject never came up.
• 2:14:07
  And what's really interesting about this to me is that this comes at the
• 2:14:11
  same time when Hamlin has been nominated for an award at the NFL Awards ceremony
• 2:14:20
  at the Super Bowl. You know, they now do these kind of like
• 2:14:22
  a mini Academy Awards for the NFL season, and the category where Hamlin has
• 2:14:30
  been nominated is Comeback Player of the Year. Well, this is humorous and
• 2:14:35
  telling on a couple of different fronts. One, he played only a handful
• 2:14:39
  of plays, had no impact on the Bill's season. In fact, the
• 2:14:43
  only impact he had was when they bizarrely gave him the ball in a fake
• 2:14:48
  punt towards the end of their playoff game against the Chiefs, and he didn't
• 2:14:52
  make the first down, didn't even come close, and it's a big part
• 2:14:54
  of why the Bill's season ended up ending. But Hamlin is nominated among I
• 2:15:01
  think four or five players for Comeback Player of the Year. Now I get
• 2:15:05
  that the guy who effectively dies on the field of cardiac arrest and comes back
• 2:15:11
  and even makes a roster although I have suggested that he's effectively like a mascot,
• 2:15:16
  and he's on the roster mainly because they couldn't do anything with him.
• 2:15:20
  They couldn't possibly cut him. But you know he's still on the team.
• 2:15:26
  You know that that's an achievement. I get that dying on the field is
• 2:15:31
  and then coming back to be on the field the next season, that's a
• 2:15:35
  comeback. But here's where things get sticky and interesting. So this is supposed
• 2:15:43
  to be a great physical comeback from the cardiac arrest. But the narrative and
• 2:15:48
  the conventional wisdom is that he had his cardiac arrest, as he said at
• 2:15:52
  a press conference, because of Commodio Cordis. Well, that's a problem to
• 2:16:00
  the whole comeback player of the Year narrative, because Commodio Cordis does no damage
• 2:16:05
  to the heart. There was an NHL player who collapsed, almost died on
• 2:16:11
  the ice many years ago, hitting the chest with a puck, clear case
• 2:16:16
  of kommodia cordis. They were back playing in two days with no real impact.
• 2:16:24
  So what's he coming back from. If it wasn't great comeback at all,
• 2:16:28
  it was Commodio Cordis, it was his Commodio Cordis. It's a terrible
• 2:16:35
  return to the game because he's not the player he was even last year for
• 2:16:43
  an event that if we're being consistent and we're buying the convention, to wisdom
• 2:16:46
  should not have had any long term impact on his physical ability to play the
• 2:16:52
  game. But that's not what has happened, which is of course inconsistent with
• 2:16:58
  their narrative. But that doesn't stopped them from making him the Comeback Player of
• 2:17:01
  the Year nominee. So I found that to be very very telling. Two
• 2:17:07
  other things, real quick, regarding commercials that I saw during the conference championship
• 2:17:13
  games in the NFL, and I have to say, I am completely stunned
• 2:17:18
  that I didn't even I did not know that this was even a thing.
• 2:17:22
  I had no idea that Peyton Manning was doing commercials for bud Light along with
• 2:17:30
  Emmett Smith. Peyton Manning commercials for bud Light, who has been embroiled in
• 2:17:35
  a massive transgender controversy, lost massive amounts of market share, attacked by the
• 2:17:43
  right wing media relentlessly for their selling out the transgenderism, and now all of
• 2:17:48
  a sudden, they pay Peyton Manning what had to be a boatload of money,
• 2:17:56
  a boatload of money to do a really pretty crappy commercial for bud Light,
• 2:18:01
  and it's obvious what they were doing. They chose a white, straight
• 2:18:07
  male from the Deep South, who's hugely famous, has lots of crossover appeal,
• 2:18:13
  who has never been overtly political, but clearly is liked by a lot
• 2:18:18
  of conservatives as a virtue signal to the right. Hey, Peyton Manning says,
• 2:18:26
  drink bud light, and here's bud lights for everybody in the bar.
• 2:18:31
  And you know they put them together with a black athlete, EMITTT. Smith,
• 2:18:35
  who also happens to be from the South, played college football at Florida
• 2:18:39
  and then became famous with the Dallas Cowboys. But so you know, you
• 2:18:43
  take away the racial angle of this if you combine a white guy and a
• 2:18:48
  black guy, both from the same basic NFL era. And what's really stunning
• 2:18:52
  to me is this has gotten so little attention that I did not even hear
• 2:18:58
  about it until yesterday. I don't pay much attention to the commercials when I
• 2:19:01
  watch football, and I was stunned by the commercial itself, but even more
• 2:19:07
  shocked when I realized that this whole thing has been going on for several weeks,
• 2:19:13
  basically since the playoffs started. How did I miss this? And the
• 2:19:18
  reason I missed this is because I found no in researching it, no evidence
• 2:19:22
  that the right wing media has even made a big deal out of this,
• 2:19:26
  which is astonishing given what a big deal the bud Light story is, how
• 2:19:31
  huge Peyton Manning is when an obvious sellout, this is what an obvious attempt
• 2:19:37
  this is to compromise the straight white, southern conservative male element of society.
• 2:19:46
  Well, you know, we bought off Peyton Manning, so you know we're
• 2:19:50
  all good now. And the fact that Peyton would be willing to be bought
• 2:19:54
  off in such an obviously political maneuver is very disappointing. I'm sure he got
• 2:20:00
  paid kind of like Trump would live golf. I'm sure Peyton Manning got paid
• 2:20:03
  way way over market value because of the fact of the controversy involving transgenderism,
• 2:20:11
  and how uniquely suited Manning is to try to blunt that. Well, okay,
• 2:20:18
  to who much is given? Much as expected? I expected more of
• 2:20:22
  Peyton Manning than that, and to me, he ought to be getting ripped
• 2:20:26
  to shreds in the right wing media. And I mentioned Clay Travis all the
• 2:20:31
  time because I'm very skeptical of him. I think he's a grifter and a
• 2:20:35
  bit of a fraud, even though I agree with a lot of what he
• 2:20:37
  says, can so called conservative talk show host runs out kick Sports. I
• 2:20:43
  researched whether or not he had said anything about Peyton Manning, and I couldn't
• 2:20:48
  find anything, which is particularly interesting because he's a huge Tennessee fan and obviously
• 2:20:52
  Peyton Manning went to Tennessee. So what a fraud that is. I mean,
• 2:20:56
  he's made a huge deal Travis has over the whole bud Light issue and
• 2:21:01
  effectively apparently total silence over Peyton Manning bailing bud Light out by doing these commercials,
• 2:21:09
  and that I thought was very telling, the other telling commercial that I
• 2:21:13
  saw, and I'm sure I'm in a very very small minority of people that
• 2:21:18
  were bothered by this, although I did tweet it out and there were a
• 2:21:20
  lot of people that seem to understand where I was coming from. You know,
• 2:21:24
  we're into late January now and CBS is starting to promote the Masters,
• 2:21:30
  Masters Golf Trim and Augusta National each April, a tradition unlike any other,
• 2:21:35
  and I always use golf and the Masters as an example of any circumstance where
• 2:21:41
  we see societal change and the impact of the slippery slope, because the Masters
• 2:21:48
  is literally the last place where you should see significant change. And if the
• 2:21:54
  slippery slope is working there, and if liberalism is starting to or progressive or
• 2:22:00
  whatever you want to call it, is starting to impact the Masters, then
• 2:22:03
  we really are toast because this is the one thing that is not supposed to
• 2:22:09
  change. It's literally the brand a tradition unlike any other. With the piano
• 2:22:16
  music, all you need is a golf fan, you know, to have
• 2:22:20
  this Pavlovian dog reaction. Oh spring is coming. Here's the piano music for
• 2:22:28
  the theme for the Masters, a tradition unlike any other. Jim Nance Voice,
• 2:22:31
  is it over? We got it, We're ready to go. Well,
• 2:22:35
  CBS with the approval because everything that they do is approved by the August
• 2:22:39
  National Golf Club and the Masters. The CBS put out a promo for this
• 2:22:46
  year's Masters, and there was no a tradition unlike any other. There was
• 2:22:52
  no piano music. There was a song from the eighties called Heaven on Earth
• 2:23:00
  by Belinda Carlisle. Now again, I got nothing against Belinda Carlisle. I
• 2:23:05
  got nothing against eighties music. But this is the fucking Masters, and this,
• 2:23:11
  to me was a classic example of the slippery slope in action, where
• 2:23:18
  we are seeing even the Masters, even with Jim Nantz still at the Helm,
• 2:23:24
  not yet retired, although he's going to retire, you know, in
• 2:23:26
  the next few years. He's retired from NCAA basketball. He still he's going
• 2:23:31
  to be doing the Super Bowl in a couple of weeks. But and he
• 2:23:33
  does obviously the Masters in all of CBS's golf coverage. But we're already seeing
• 2:23:41
  that even a tradition unlike any other is going out the window. And my
• 2:23:46
  god, I mean, then we're seeing rapid change in all elements of society,
• 2:23:52
  all elements of sports. And I've seen it already at AUGUSTA Nationals,
• 2:23:56
  specifically during COVID. I think that they re they crapped the bed as much
• 2:24:01
  as Trump did, because they had the power to really do something during COVID
• 2:24:05
  to stop the madness, and instead they went right along with it. Because
• 2:24:09
  they're now helmed by a younger guy, a guy who I thought was going
• 2:24:13
  to be really good, even though he made a really bad ruling many years
• 2:24:16
  ago involving Tiger Woods that kept him in the tournament when he should have been
• 2:24:20
  disqualified. But he's a guy who has a rich tradition in the amateur game.
• 2:24:24
  Of golf, and this is a guy who should know better, but
• 2:24:26
  he clearly is embracing this whole progressive attitude and a different way of doing things.
• 2:24:35
  That would be fine, and I'm not against change in and of itself,
• 2:24:39
  especially if it's for the better, but change for the sake of change,
• 2:24:43
  even at the fucking masters, that's a problem because, based upon everything
• 2:24:48
  else we've seen in society, once you go down that slippery slope, there's
• 2:24:52
  no stopping. I don't know where it's gonna end, but I'm not gonna
• 2:24:56
  like it. It's kind of the theme of the entire Death of Journalism podcast.
• 2:25:01
  I don't know for sure how it's gonna end, but I'm not gonna
• 2:25:03
  like it. That'll do it. If I do know how this episode is
• 2:25:07
  gonna end, because it's gonna end right now, and I appreciate you listening.
• 2:25:09
  I do hope in the next episode of this podcast to potentially tell the
• 2:25:13
  much longer version of the story of me being sued for defamation and winning in
• 2:25:20
  a way that was very similar, though opposite in the end, to the
• 2:25:22
  Donald Trump case. I can't make any promises, but I will try,
• 2:25:26
  and we will also be doing one last episode of Ask John Anything, So
• 2:25:31
  make sure you think about your questions for Ask John Anything, send them to
• 2:25:35
  me either via Twitter or Facebook or email. I'll have more details on that
• 2:25:39
  in the next episode of the podcast. Until then, thanks again for listening.
• 2:25:43
  My name is John Zigler. This has been the death of journalism podcasts.