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Episode One Hundred Twenty One: The Reformation Of Glenn Beck · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and twenty one of the Death of Journalism podcasts.
• 0:04
  My name is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show. Ron
• 0:07
  de Sanders ends his campaign and we are officially stocked with a nightmare general election.
• 0:13
  Glenn Beck finally goes too far and I take a deep dive into the
• 0:16
  past to reveal what really happened. I have a Steve Cortes update. The
• 0:21
  legacy media keeps collapsing at an alarming rate, and the NFL has a massive
• 0:26
  conflict of interest in this weekend's AFC Championship game. I'm known as the Dutch
• 0:32
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  The website is the much Digital Marketingman dot com. If you want to
• 1:03
  grow your business, Peter can help. That's the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com
• 1:07
  and hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. Well, we were officially winding
• 1:12
  down the Death of Journalism podcast barring a huge black Swan event. We now
• 1:19
  only have eight episodes left at best before I disappear for good. That includes
• 1:25
  this particular episode of the podcast, and one significant chance, if there was
• 1:30
  one at a black Swan event has officially not happened, as Ron DeSantis has
• 1:38
  dropped out of the Republican race for president now obviously having been a DeSantis supporter
• 1:46
  since the beginning with somebody who started to believe that he had very little,
• 1:51
  no real chance of being the nominee as long as nine months ago, when
• 1:55
  I started talking about that on this podcast and officially declared his chances over and
• 2:00
  Trump de nominee back in September of last year. And unfortunately, everything has
• 2:05
  turned out exactly as I said, maybe even slightly even more pessimistically than I
• 2:10
  predicted, because in general I try to stay as optimistic as possible, if
• 2:15
  only for my own very fragile mental health. But it has turned out horribly.
• 2:21
  And I have said many times that the best scenario and said this for
• 2:25
  months now, the best scenario for Desandas was to salvage some semblance of face
• 2:30
  in Iowa and then get the hell out of the race, because I have
• 2:35
  also said for many, many months he has no chance of doing anything but
• 2:39
  humiliating himself in New Hampshire for a lot of reasons. And I think that's
• 2:45
  finally what DeSantis in the campaign decided was the best option. So, you
• 2:50
  know, while it was incredibly depressing and heartbreaking and soul sucking and all of
• 2:53
  that, to actually see what I've been predicting happen, or to sandus to
• 3:00
  get out even before there's a New Hampshire primary, I think it was the
• 3:05
  best decision that the Santas could have made under very very difficult circumstances. Basically,
• 3:12
  what happened. I have no idea how much of this was strategic,
• 3:15
  how much of this just kind of happened by accident. Who knows, We'll
• 3:20
  probably never know, but by and large, here's what occurred. He did
• 3:23
  slightly better than expected in Iowa, got over twenty percent, got second place.
• 3:30
  Let that narrative get become entrenched. People understood that, Okay, the
• 3:35
  Sandas didn't humiliate himself in Iowa. Yes, he lost by thirty points,
• 3:38
  but you know, it wasn't a complete and total humiliation, and then you
• 3:45
  let there at least be the chance of a miracle to start to occur in
• 3:51
  New Hampshire, because stranger things have happened in New Hampshire. In New Hampshire
• 3:54
  historically, you know, does like people who do surprisingly well in Iowa but
• 4:00
  don't win Iowa. They don't like to shut down the process. So there
• 4:05
  was at least a theoretical chance, especially when a state has a motto,
• 4:10
  you know, live free or die, which really is not relevant to modern
• 4:14
  New Hampshire anymore. Unfortunately, that's not irrelevant to any part in the country
• 4:17
  really anymore, live for or die. The Santas even wrote a op ed
• 4:21
  in the New Hampshire newspaper a couple of days before he withdrew, playing on
• 4:27
  the state motto live free or die, which, you know, given what
• 4:30
  he did in Florida during COVID, I think was absolutely the right narrative,
• 4:35
  But it doesn't play there anymore, especially when Trump is in the game.
• 4:40
  But I think what they did was they basically did CPR on a dead patient
• 4:45
  and said, well, maybe we can get a heartbeat, maybe we can
• 4:47
  find a pulse. If we find a pulse in New Hampshire, any semblance
• 4:53
  of a resurgence, then we'll stay in in New Hampshire and then maybe,
• 4:57
  you know, Haley is forced to get out. There's even rumors on Sunday
• 5:01
  on Twitter that the campaign had put out a message that we're in through South
• 5:05
  Carolina, that Haley will be forced to get out then then it's just Trump
• 5:11
  versus DeSantis. And I reacted like that makes no sense whatsoever. There's no
• 5:15
  scenario where that works, because now you're going to get beat eighty twenty or
• 5:19
  worse in every single primary that goes on, including probably your own state of
• 5:25
  Florida. It might be seventy thirty and in Florida, and that's just the
• 5:29
  worst humiliation you can possibly endure. And so they never really got a pulse
• 5:34
  in New Hampshire at all. I think that if Desantas had gone through and
• 5:43
  stayed on in the race through New Hampshire, he might have gotten ten percent.
• 5:47
  He might not have. That would have been the embarrassment zone right there
• 5:53
  when you're in single digits. But he was clearly not making any headway,
• 5:58
  and so now he avoids that embarrassment. And the other thing he does is
• 6:04
  because he got out before New Hampshire and he endorsed Trump, which a lot
• 6:10
  of the Sanders supporters were not happy with. But I didn't have a big
• 6:14
  issue with it because, frankly, his endorsement of Trump was really just checking
• 6:19
  a box. You know, I've made a pledge to support the nominee.
• 6:23
  Trump's going to be the nominee. Some people were upset that he was discounting
• 6:27
  Haley's chances, but Haley has no chance. Haley has no path. And
• 6:31
  you know, if you're somebody who's supportive of Haley, I'm sorry Haley loses
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  whatever right she might have to have DeSantis not throw her under the bus when
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  she creates the DeSantis Lies website and mentiones it twenty five times in their head
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  to head debate on CNN. I'm sorry. I have no sympathy for that.
• 6:56
  If you want to saydess to play nice and give you every chance to
• 7:00
  beat Trump, then don't createdisantuslize dot com, and don't harpought it every fricking
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  second of that CNN debate. I'm sorry you lose that that writer or that
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  privilege, whatever you want to call it, you don't have any claim to
• 7:15
  that anymore if you're nicky Haley. So I had no problem at all,
• 7:19
  because it's true with the Sandas declaring the race over and his endorsement oft Trump
• 7:25
  was about as weak as it could possibly be. I mean, it was
• 7:30
  almost literally checking a box. He specifically cited his COVID slash Fauci reservations about
• 7:38
  Trump, which I thought was one hundred percent dead on and keeping with his
• 7:43
  campaign and keeping who he is. But he cannot be accused of not endorsing
• 7:48
  Trump. And I think by virtue of him getting out and the fact that
• 7:54
  the vast majority of his voters, not all, but the vast majority of
• 7:57
  his voters will vote for Trump, it will actually, I think, increase
• 8:03
  Trump's victory margin on Tuesday, and it will create a perception with some reality
• 8:11
  that you know, DeSantis helped Trump and he ended the dominating process with a
• 8:16
  big victory in New Hampshire. And so you know, when you don't have
• 8:20
  a lot of options, this is really the best choice you have. And
• 8:24
  so DeSantis gets out, he avoids embarrassment, he endorses Trump. My guess
• 8:31
  is we're not going to see the Santa's actively doing anything nationally for quite a
• 8:37
  while. And will he eventually get on the campaign trail for Trump? Maybe,
• 8:43
  but I don't think he's going to be doing it anytime soon, and
• 8:46
  certainly not actively. This felt like a check the box. I did what
• 8:50
  I had to do. Good luck to you for all intents and purposes,
• 8:56
  let's hope for the best for the country type of situation. So, based
• 8:58
  upon what options Desandas had at his disposal, I thought he did the right
• 9:05
  thing. And you know, and frankly, it was a lot like what
• 9:07
  Chris Christie did. I was screaming and yelling on this podcast that Chris Christy
• 9:11
  needed to get out if he was a man of his word and wasn't a
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  fraud, and didn't think he actually would, but he did almost exactly as
• 9:20
  I was recording that particular podcast, And at least it gave Haley a chance.
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  But there was never a real opportunity for Haley to be the nominee,
• 9:31
  and she's not going to be the nominee barring you know, Trump dying or
• 9:35
  something along those lines. And so from a Dessanda standpoint, you know,
• 9:41
  I can't complain. This is what I have been suggesting for months. Save
• 9:46
  face and iowa get out before New Hampshire, and you know, that's the
• 9:50
  best you can do to try to salvage some semblance of a future. Now
• 9:54
  there's a big argument over whether or not there really is a future for the
• 9:58
  same and frankly, I'm not optimistic about that, but I tend not to
• 10:03
  be optimistic about anything these days. I mean, in my view, the
• 10:07
  only way Desantas can ever be the Republican presidential nominee is if Trump dies out
• 10:13
  of office in the next couple of years. That's really the only path because
• 10:20
  if you think about it, all right, if Trump wins, then his
• 10:24
  vice presidential nominee, which we're gonna talk a lot about in a few moments,
• 10:28
  his vice presidential nominee will clearly be the heir apparent and will win the
• 10:33
  nomination for the Republican Party in twenty twenty eight. That's clear. If Trump
• 10:37
  loses and he doesn't die and he's still in decent health, he's gonna run
• 10:43
  again in twenty twenty eight. I mean, it's almost a certainty unless he's
• 10:48
  in prison for an extended period of time, and even then he might still
• 10:50
  run. And based upon this the way this campaign went, he may still
• 10:54
  win. So he's still blocked. You know, he's still a very young
• 11:01
  man. We could talking twenty thirty two whatever, But then he's a he's
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  old, old, old news by then, and hopefully COVID is a very
• 11:11
  very distant memory at that point. So it's really not obvious what the path
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  forward is. But at least he could remain viable within this modern Republican party
• 11:22
  because he did what he said he was going to do. He ran a
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  you know, really a frankly very classy race hardly ever went after Trump endorsed
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  Trump before the race was even technically over, and put him over the fifty
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  percent threshold in New Hampshire before the Santa's got out. There was a chance
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  Trump wasn't going to get over fifty percent in New Hampshire, but I believe
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  that he will. I'll get to that prediction in a second, but just
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  to finish off for now with DeSantis, I mean, it's it's weird for
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  me because one, I've been predicting this for a long time, and therefore
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  psychologically I've kind of gone through the grieving process a lot more quickly and sooner
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  than most people have, and so I'm not nearly as emotional about this as
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  I would be, and as I'm sure a lot of the Santa supporters are,
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  But I do think it's important to point out the significance of Rhonda Santis
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  officially dropping out. I mean, for one hundred percent certainty, now one
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  hundred percent certainty, there will never ever, ever, ever be in a
• 12:33
  real COVID accountability on any level. And that is beyond frustrating and incredibly dangerous
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  and has set a precedent that I believe will haunt this country for at least
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  a generation, because now those in authority know exactly what they can get away
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  with in this realm, and you know, to do it with climate change,
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  just like they did it with COVID, and there will be no punishment,
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  and this will pervade every aspect of society. The nanny state can do
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  whatever they want under the guise of if it only saves one life, and
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  even if they're totally wrong and proven to be totally wrong, and even if
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  lives are destroyed because they were totally wrong, there will be no real punishment.
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  And God help us all, God help us all. That's the worst
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  thing that has happened with regard to the failure of the Rhonda Santis campaign.
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  Then, of course there's the reality that we now have to face a general
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  election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a general election nobody wants. The
• 13:43
  polls are overwhelming, nobody wants this, and yet this is what we're going
• 13:46
  to get, and there's no good option there. Now. In later episodes
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  of the podcast, before I end it and go away and hide for hopefully
• 13:56
  the rest of my life, I will be going into greater details well in
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  to the how I see the Trump Biden matchup going and why I see no
• 14:05
  good path there. But I just want to state clearly now for the record
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  that that's where what we're going to get. We're going to get Trump Biden,
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  as I've been predicting for many, many months, and that there's no
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  good path there. There's also no off ramp for the GOP from Donald Trump,
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  which I've already articulated with regard to the options going forward, barring Trump
• 14:28
  dying out of office in the next couple of years. That's what the Republican
• 14:31
  Party is at the mercy of now. There's no other option. Trump has
• 14:37
  to die in order for there to be an off ramp, and he has
• 14:39
  to die out of office because his vice presidential pick, you know, should
• 14:45
  he be elected again somehow, which is theoretically possible, but nowhere near as
• 14:50
  likely as Trump fans would like to believe. Takes too liberal polling outlets which
• 14:56
  they never used to put any credibility into. But now they suddenly think our
• 15:00
  gospel that Trump's gonna win because he's winning by one or two points in some
• 15:05
  liberal polling outlets. It's just absolutely insane. But this is where we are.
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  And you know, the reality is that whoever Trump picks as his VP
• 15:16
  will be the air and parent or Trump himself will run again in twenty twenty
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  eight. And there's another aspect to the demise of the De Santas campaign that
• 15:28
  I think is really significant. And I tweeted about this and it appeared to
• 15:31
  drive the Trump fans absolutely bananas. This was, by my standards, an
• 15:37
  extremely popular tweet, and it read as follows Now that Rhonda Santis has been
• 15:43
  officially disposed of and Trump is the nominee. Congratulations to the big winners,
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  right, so who won? Who won? Because ron De Santis lost and
• 15:56
  never even got into New Hampshire. Who were the winners here? Because I
• 16:00
  think this is very very telling about the significance of the demise of the DeSantis
• 16:03
  campaign. So here was the list of winners that I tweeted. COVID tyrants
• 16:10
  won, specifically Gavin Newsome. I'm sure he was absolutely thrilled that couldn't even
• 16:15
  bear to look at his Twitter feed and see what he did. I don't
• 16:18
  even know for sure if he did anything, but I just knowing him and
• 16:22
  what a classless asshole he is, I'm sure that he's going to take a
• 16:25
  victory lap, even though he got his butt kicked by DeSantis in that Fox
• 16:27
  News debate, which did DeSantis shockingly no good whatsoever in the Republican polls.
• 16:34
  So COVID tyrants won for reasons I've already stated, and that we're going to
• 16:38
  be haunted by for a very long time the right wing media, meaning you
• 16:44
  know, the Trump sycophants and the grifters. They won because they're going to
• 16:49
  get their Trump general election and they don't have to lose any of their audience
• 16:56
  going through a primary campaign. And this is how upside down things are,
• 17:00
  folks. You know, we used to live wasn't that long ago. We
• 17:03
  used to live in a world where the media thirsted survived on things like presidential
• 17:12
  debates, presidential primary nights, because these are built in ratings grabbers, built
• 17:21
  in content, built in drama. I mean literally every four years, the
• 17:26
  media live for this. Left wing, right wing mainstream media, they all
• 17:33
  live for this, and especially on the right wing. That's how important Trump
• 17:38
  is to them. They were willing to abandon debates, allow him to dodge
• 17:44
  the debates, greatly, diminishing the ratings significance and the content significance of those
• 17:51
  events, and to basically have them wither and die on the vine. And
• 17:56
  there wasn't even a debate for the New Hampshire primary. There was barely debate
• 18:00
  for the Iowa caucus. They gave all that up for Trump. And by
• 18:06
  the way, there's not going to be any general election debates in my opinion.
• 18:10
  So the mainstream media, the left wing media have also abandoned this.
• 18:14
  The left wing media has abandoned this. On the Democratic side, they drove
• 18:18
  out Robert Kennedy Junior, no debates, he just dropped out of the race.
• 18:22
  Now see theoretically is gonna run as an independent, so they could have
• 18:26
  had a race on the Democratic side. No media pressure for that at all.
• 18:30
  That's just how much they all desire Trump for various reasons. They're willing
• 18:34
  to give up everything for him. So but the right wing media grifters won.
• 18:40
  The left wing media won because they wanted Trump Biden. They want Biden
• 18:44
  to win, and they believe that Trump is the most easily defeated candidate,
• 18:48
  and they love having Trump around for ratings and content too. Absolutely, the
• 18:53
  Democratic Party won, especially when it comes to the House and Senate races.
• 19:00
  Trump at the top of the ticket is going to be a very good thing
• 19:03
  for the Democratic Party. How good, we don't know. A lot of
• 19:07
  it depends on Trump's legal situations, but there is no scenario where having Trump
• 19:14
  on the ticket is bad for the Democratic Party when it comes to the House
• 19:18
  and Senate races, And you could argue is the only scenario where Joe Biden
• 19:23
  ends up being re elected. The teachers' unions absolutely win because Ron de Santis
• 19:30
  flamed out. The Disney Corporation absolutely wins. The child transgenderism activists absolutely win,
• 19:38
  especially given Trump's view. By the way, Trump's view on all of
• 19:42
  those things. The teachers' unions where he was useless during COVID fighting against them,
• 19:48
  Disney he supported in the battle with the Ron De Santis because he thought
• 19:52
  it was good for him politically. He's very weak on transgender issues, is
• 19:57
  Trump. So all those entities won because Ron de Santis lost. There was
• 20:03
  one other major group that I should have put on the list, although they
• 20:07
  clearly could be described as left wing media or the Democratic Party, but I'll
• 20:12
  mention them here, and that's the Lincoln Project assholes, one of which we
• 20:18
  had on this podcast a few months ago, Stuart Stevens that an interview that
• 20:23
  kind of went haywire. You and I used to have some respect for each
• 20:27
  other. Now we hate each other's guts. But I despise the Lincoln Project
• 20:32
  people, some of whom used to be friends of mine, more than probably
• 20:36
  any other group, because these are people who claim to be principled conservatives who
• 20:42
  have become nothing but tools of the left wing media and the Democratic Party,
• 20:49
  grifting, making money off of selling out their past principles, all because somehow
• 21:00
  everything about the Republican Party, everything about conservatism, is terrible now that Donald
• 21:06
  Trump is the leader. And they also went out of their way to make
• 21:10
  sure that Trump couldn't be replaced as the head of the Republican Party because they
• 21:15
  went after the Santus as much as they went after Trump. They're thrilled.
• 21:19
  A bunch of fucking hypocrites. They are thrilled that Trump is the nominee because
• 21:25
  they remain relevant. If Trump had ceased to be the head of the Republican
• 21:30
  Party, no one gives us shit about the Lincoln Project anymore. So these
• 21:33
  people, their entire existence is we hate Trump. Trump is a threat to
• 21:37
  democracy and the republic, and we will stand on principle to do everything we
• 21:42
  can to defeat Trump. But thank god he got the nomination, and thank
• 21:45
  god he's a fifty to fifty shot to win the presidency, because that means
• 21:51
  we stay somewhat relevant. What a bunch of jackasses these people are. So
• 21:56
  those are the people, the entities groups who won because the Santas lost.
• 22:03
  And as I said at the end of the tweet, enjoy the win,
• 22:04
  MAGA, because those are the people that are celebrating with you. How does
• 22:10
  that make you feel? And apparently a lot of people were pretty pissed off
• 22:14
  by that, because I'm sure not that MAGA fans tend to be very rational,
• 22:18
  but at some level that has to be bothersome they wait a minute,
• 22:23
  Wait a minute. If my enemies are celebrating this, then maybe this wasn't
• 22:27
  as great a thing as I thought it was, because, of course,
• 22:30
  the Trump fans have been celebrating the demise of the Santas for months now,
• 22:34
  and of course the big winner in all of this is Donald Trump, and
• 22:38
  Donald Trump wins not just because he'll be the Republican nominee, but also because
• 22:42
  I believe his legal battles are going to be a lot more easily fought than
• 22:48
  they would have been if he had never run for president or if he had
• 22:52
  lost. My god, if he had lost the Republican race, I think
• 22:56
  his legal fight would have been in grave jeopardy because I have said many many
• 23:00
  times that whether it's appellate judges, including the Supreme Court, or jurors in
• 23:08
  these various cases, people will look at him and his case completely differently because
• 23:17
  he is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, both from a legal perspective as well
• 23:23
  as a practical one, and jurors are far far more like now, there'll
• 23:29
  be some jurors depending on the jurisdiction. Assuming this, these things ever get
• 23:33
  the trial before the November election, which I'm not convinced of. But in
• 23:37
  a pretend world where that happens, there'll be some jurors which will show just
• 23:41
  the absurdity of this process that will be even more dead set against him because
• 23:45
  he is the Republican presidential nominee. But that's not what Trump really cares about.
• 23:51
  Trump really only cares about a hung jury. I don't even think he
• 23:56
  really cares that. I mean, obviously he love an acquittal, but you
• 24:00
  know, a not guilty verdict, you know, or a hung jury is
• 24:03
  all he really is looking for. I mean, you know, a hung
• 24:06
  jury on for ins intensive purposes is a victory. And to get a hung
• 24:11
  jury, all you need is two or three I've always say two or three
• 24:15
  because you need somebody to hold the other juror's hands to say no, we're
• 24:19
  not going to do this. And that's why there's no chance that Trump ever
• 24:23
  gets convicted under these circumstances in the Florida Document's case because of the nature of
• 24:30
  the jury pool. And I'm not convinced that he would get convicted in any
• 24:33
  of these jury pools. And all these cases have major both substantive as well
• 24:40
  as technical problems and time line problems that I'm not convinced any of them are
• 24:45
  going to be adjudicated in a way that could lead to Trump's conviction before November.
• 24:51
  But that's a big part, a big part of why Trump wanted to
• 24:55
  be the Republican nominee, because he knew he could be in a far stronger
• 24:57
  position and battling all these legal cases. Maybe the most remarkable thing and maybe
• 25:04
  the most depressing thing about Trump winning so easily is that he was able to
• 25:10
  do this without even a real fight or even running a real campaign. I
• 25:15
  mean, his entire campaign consisted of lying about Rohndi Santis, blatantly lying about
• 25:26
  Rohndi Santis, calling him stupid names like Rhonda sanctimonious, getting indicted, you
• 25:33
  know, rage, tweeting on true social It didn't come up with any new
• 25:38
  ideas or any new arguments, or any explanation for how he's going to improve
• 25:45
  in his second term. He never had to answer any questions about who the
• 25:48
  hell's going to work for him in a second term. I mean, this
• 25:52
  is the most remarkable element of this whole thing, most really scariest part of
• 25:57
  this whole thing is nobody, nobody is even considering who the hell is gonna
• 26:03
  work for Donald Trump should he win in a second term. The first time
• 26:07
  around, part of the reason why he got through that was because there was
• 26:12
  a rallying around Trump by people who were credible, who thought, Okay,
• 26:17
  for the good of the country, I need to take one on the chin
• 26:19
  here, and I need to be as close as I can to Trump.
• 26:23
  Now, these people weren't all altruistic. They were pursuing power themselves and attention
• 26:29
  and prestige and all that. I get that, but there was at least
• 26:32
  an element where people were like, for the country's sake, I need to
• 26:37
  be there because this could go off the rails. None of those people are
• 26:41
  coming back, none of them. And the people who would end up working
• 26:45
  for Trump on a second term, we're not talking about the B list or
• 26:48
  the C list or even the D list. We're talking about the F list.
• 26:52
  We're talking about complete whack jobs, people who are not remotely credible or
• 26:57
  qualified. And Trump won the nomination without ever having to deal with that issue.
• 27:04
  I mean, he also never had to deal with debates. He didn't
• 27:08
  show up for one debate, didn't get held accountable for that at all.
• 27:14
  I mean, it's just astonishing that he could ride indictments, indictments to an
• 27:21
  easy victory, never even really had to sweat in winning the Republican nomination.
• 27:27
  And he will clinch shit on Tuesday night when he wins the New Hampshire primary
• 27:33
  in significant fashion. I'll have my prediction on that in just a second.
• 27:38
  By the way, another element, one of the many issues at the right
• 27:41
  wing media has completely ignored when it comes to Trump and this race against Biden.
• 27:48
  You know, we talk a lot about Biden losing his mind and being
• 27:52
  on the verge of dementia and being any one years old, and I completely
• 27:56
  agree with all that. Just this past weekend, you know who called Nancy
• 28:00
  Pelosi nicky Haley four times in one public appearance, four times, Donald Trump?
• 28:12
  Donald Trump. It wasn't even an issue relevant. It was talking about
• 28:17
  January sixth. He was ranting about January sixth, and Donald Trump was talking
• 28:22
  clearly about Nancy Pelosi and called her nicky Haley four times, four times.
• 28:32
  And this is a guy in his late seventies, not in great physical shape.
• 28:36
  If he were to be president, he would be in his eighties two
• 28:40
  and no one seems to care about this. No one on the right seems
• 28:44
  to think that this is an issue, and I mean, it's just all
• 28:48
  unbelievable. It's absolutely unbelievable. And as far as how we got to hear
• 28:52
  it, I'm not going to go into an autopsy right now, because I
• 28:56
  did so in episode number one hundred and twenty. If you happen to have
• 29:00
  missed that, I highly recommend you check that out because I think I did
• 29:03
  a heck of a job in giving the dysantas autopsy. One of the reasons
• 29:07
  I was able to do that sooner and more comprehensively than anybody else's that I've
• 29:11
  been thinking about this for nine months, because I've been preparing for this for
• 29:15
  nine months, because I knew this is what was going to happen, and
• 29:18
  I've been looking for the signs of what was going to go down, how
• 29:22
  it was going to happen, and I think I'm better able to explain how
• 29:26
  it actually happened. So the Dessandas autopsy is in our previous episode, but
• 29:30
  I do want to at least mention when it comes to the Santas autopsies.
• 29:33
  It really drives me nuts when I see things like NBC and this was put
• 29:40
  out just hours before the Santas officially announced that he was withdrawing from the race.
• 29:45
  NBC put out their autopsy of the Deysantis campaign called a total failure to
• 29:52
  launch. That's what they said it was. The Desanta's campaign was a total
• 29:56
  failure to launch. Now, nobody was more critical of the launching of the
• 30:00
  Desandas campaign than me. I immediately went apoplectic on Elon Musk and what he
• 30:07
  basically put Ron De Santis through during that entire botched Twitter announcement, and that
• 30:14
  was a factor. But that's not what really happened here, you know.
• 30:18
  And the idea that NBC NBC gets to do an autopsy on Ron DeSantis is
• 30:26
  just mind blowing. I mean, this is like letting Oj Simpson do an
• 30:30
  autopsy on how his wife and her friend got murdered. I mean, they
• 30:36
  played a significant role in this. They didn't air Ron de Sanders's twenty twenty
• 30:41
  two midterm victory speech on NBC or on MSNBC. They never set the record
• 30:45
  straight on who was the governor who did the best job on COVID when it
• 30:51
  was clearly Ron de Santis. They never did that because they'd have to admit
• 30:53
  that they themselves were wrong. They were the ones that promoted all sorts of
• 30:59
  lies about ron DeSantis, you know, don't say gay, and the whole
• 31:03
  Disney thing and banning books and all those bullshit narratives. NBC was among the
• 31:10
  worst perpetrators of that. And so you know, the idea that NBC gets
• 31:17
  to do an autopsy is ridiculous. It's a massive conflict of interest. They
• 31:22
  were part of the problem. They were a huge part of the problem.
• 31:26
  And also, by the way, I should point out, NBC, along
• 31:29
  with all the other major networks, way overplayed their Trump hatred, way overplayed
• 31:34
  the indictments, I mean to an absolutely comical degree, and that effectively changed
• 31:41
  the entire framework of the nominating process. And I'm a big believer in the
• 31:47
  framework. Okay, I don't you know. The way the media worked in
• 31:52
  this process was on both the right wing and the left wing. They created
• 31:57
  a framework that made it basically impossible for Trump to lose. You know,
• 32:04
  a lot of people on the right they said nice things about Ronda Santis,
• 32:07
  so they could not have blood on their hands. But they were buying into
• 32:12
  and promoting a framework, a narrative, a prism through which people to view
• 32:17
  what was happening that basically made it impossible for Trump to lose. And so
• 32:22
  you know, I got into a lot of that in my version of the
• 32:25
  Autopsy, which again you can listen to an episode number one hundred and twenty.
• 32:30
  As far as where what's left of the race currently stands, I mean,
• 32:35
  I was correct. Once again. Sorry to keep saying this. I
• 32:38
  mean, I really am sorry to keep saying this because I didn't want any
• 32:40
  of this to happen. But I was correct when I said months ago that
• 32:45
  in the end, it would be Nicky Haley who would be the last person
• 32:47
  standing against Trump, and who would finish second, and who would get more
• 32:52
  votes in the end than Ronda Santis. And I'm sure a lot of people
• 32:55
  thought that was crazy when I started saying it, but that's exactly how this
• 33:00
  has all turned out. But she's not gonna win. She's not going to
• 33:02
  win New Hampshire. My New Hampshire prediction is that Trump will get sixty two
• 33:09
  percent of the vote, which is way more than the last polling indicated.
• 33:15
  And I think this might have been part of the timing of the DeSantis campaign.
• 33:20
  It's hard to know again, what was strategic, what was coincidence,
• 33:23
  but you know, to do this before, you know, after all the
• 33:28
  last polls have basically been published, but you know, a day and a
• 33:30
  half before, actually two days before there's actual voting. I think we'll give
• 33:37
  DeSantis at least some credit for his endorsement, putting Trump over the top and
• 33:44
  taking a race that was at least somewhat competitive, and it was somewhat competitive,
• 33:49
  and now putting into the realm of essentially a blowout. And I think
• 33:52
  that Trump will win New Hampshire effectively in a blowout. I think it'll be
• 33:58
  sixty two for Trump, thirty six for Haley. I think the most Haley
• 34:02
  can get is forty percent. And I just it's my gut that there's going
• 34:07
  to be a rallying around Trump and that almost all of those in Santa supporters
• 34:14
  either will stay home or they will vote for Trump. I think that two
• 34:17
  percent will And that's just a guess on my part, because I'm not one
• 34:21
  hundred percent sure how they're going to do the counting. But you know,
• 34:23
  there's still going to be other people on the ballot. It's different than the
• 34:27
  Iowa caucuses, and so there's probably going to be two percent of people who
• 34:32
  still vote for Christie or DeSantis or whatever. That's why sixty two and thirty
• 34:37
  six don't add up to one hundred. So that's my prediction for the New
• 34:42
  Hampshire primary. And at that point it really is over. And if I'm
• 34:45
  Haley, I get the hell out because there is no path if anything close
• 34:50
  to what I'm predicting happens, and you're facing, you know, embarrassment in
• 34:54
  your home home state of South Carolina, where Trump is trouncing her already in
• 34:59
  the polls, and without a victory or a close second in New Hampshire,
• 35:02
  there's really no way to turn that around. And the right wing media has
• 35:07
  already made it very clear. We're closing up shop against their own self interest.
• 35:10
  I mean again, imagine all the content that the right wing media has
• 35:15
  just decided, eh, screw it. You know, normally we'd have content
• 35:21
  February, March, even in April May maybe if it's really close, we're
• 35:25
  just gonna we're gonna cancel all that content because we are perfectly fine with Donald
• 35:32
  Trump being the nominee going up against Joe Biden. Now I've mentioned that one
• 35:39
  of the most amazing elements of Trump being the nominee without even having to sweat
• 35:44
  is of all the things that he has not done, he has never stated
• 35:47
  yet who his vice presidential nomination nominee is gonna be. And I am a
• 35:53
  big believer that you could strongly argue that Trump's decision as to who is vice
• 36:00
  presidential nominee is going to be is the biggest, at least in the modern
• 36:04
  history of the Republican Party and maybe in the modern history of the country when
• 36:07
  it comes to these kind of choices, because it's a very unique situation.
• 36:12
  We've never had a circumstance where there was a cult leader who is in his
• 36:16
  late seventies, who can only serve one term, and so his choice for
• 36:22
  vice president is critical. It's critical in so many ways, but it's critical
• 36:29
  for in theory who could actually be president because let's pretend he wins, which
• 36:34
  is certainly a plausible scenario at this point. I'm not predicting it, but
• 36:37
  it is certainly more than possible. It's you know, some people think it's
• 36:43
  a fifty to fifty right now. I probably put it the thirty five percent
• 36:46
  chance of happening. That's a significant percentage when the republic is on the line.
• 36:51
  So there you've got Trump into his early eighties as president United States.
• 36:58
  You know, he could die in office, he could be forced to resign
• 37:01
  because of health reasons, or obviously, you know, the most likely scenario
• 37:07
  is he runs out his first term and he's term limited, and his vice
• 37:12
  president is obviously going to be the heir apparent in the Republican nominee even if
• 37:16
  Trump loses. If Trump were to die in the next couple of years,
• 37:22
  whoever Trump picks as his vice president is depending on the person is likely going
• 37:28
  to be the heir apparent to the MAGA political movement and maybe MAGA inc.
• 37:34
  And so it's a huge decision. And not only has the right wing media
• 37:37
  been terrible about forcing Trump to even show up for debates, they've been terrible
• 37:43
  when it comes to forcing Trump to give any real clue as to who is
• 37:49
  vice presidential nominee is going to be. And there's no excuse at this point
• 37:52
  for him not to say who it's going to be. And you know,
• 37:58
  there's been a lot of there's been a lot of commentary about who it might
• 38:00
  be. One of those that really drove me up a wall on this issue
• 38:05
  is Megan Kelly, who I'm always conflicted about because I think she's smart,
• 38:08
  and I think on some things she's fantastic, and obviously, you know,
• 38:12
  she's beautiful, which for a lot of men is like kryptonite and it definitely
• 38:16
  influences your perception of things. But you know, I also have a huge
• 38:21
  problems with the way that she has handled Trump in this whole situation. And
• 38:23
  she is theorized that Trump is gonna pick Nikki Haley, which, by the
• 38:29
  way, you know, I don't think is an illogical decision if your goal
• 38:32
  is to win. But the part of this that drove me up a wall
• 38:35
  is that she openly said the reason why Trump will pick Haley is that his
• 38:39
  primary motivation is to stay out of prison, and he knows that if he
• 38:45
  picks Haley, he has a better chance of winning and therefore staying out of
• 38:51
  prison. That's a direct quote. And I'm like, and you're okay with
• 38:54
  that? You're okay when you have other better options with that being the primary
• 39:01
  motivation of the biggest decision he's gonna make as the presidential nominee, who is
• 39:07
  VP is gonna be? You're fine with that? I mean, you might
• 39:09
  be right, but that should create all sorts of concerns and questions if this
• 39:17
  is what is motivating him, because it's if that is what's motivating him,
• 39:22
  which I think it probably is, it's going to influence all sorts of other
• 39:24
  decisions, not to mention it's absurd on its face when you have other better
• 39:30
  options. Still, and so you know, if I was asked who he
• 39:35
  should pick to win the election, I think it should be Nicki Haley.
• 39:38
  I really do. I think Nikki Haley, although I don't think that's likely
• 39:43
  given some of the very disparaging statements that he has made about her, in
• 39:46
  the fact that he's misidentifying her as Nancy Pelosi, if that says anything about
• 39:52
  his subconscious it's hard for me to believe that his ego is going to let
• 39:57
  him choose Nikki Haley. But Nikki Haley would be the right choice if he
• 40:00
  simply wanted to win the election. Now it's not going to be Ran DeSantis.
• 40:07
  And I've had a lot of people online and even people in my personal
• 40:09
  life say, well, what what about de santisig Why why can't the Santas
• 40:14
  be the VP. There's a lot of reasons why that's not gonna happen.
• 40:17
  First, there's just the plain ego situation. Trump is terrified of the Santas.
• 40:23
  Trump knows that the Santas is smarter than him, that his balls are
• 40:27
  bigger than him, that he outdid and when it came to COVID, which
• 40:30
  is why he lies his ass off about the Sandas with COVID, he can't
• 40:34
  control the Santus quite as much as he can control other people. There's just
• 40:39
  no way that he's gonna pick Ron Santis and DeSantis. I don't think should
• 40:45
  would even consider it. I mean, he might consider it, given you
• 40:47
  know how much uh, you know, embarrassment he has suffered because of his
• 40:52
  failed presidential campaign, and it would certainly help his future, But he's the
• 40:55
  governor of Florida. You know, he's already run for and failed, and
• 41:00
  now he's going to spend the rest of the year running for vice president,
• 41:05
  kissing Trump's ass and then if he you know what happens if Trump loses,
• 41:10
  and I think he'd still be able to remain governor of Florida because they changed
• 41:15
  the law there, but his standing in Florida would be greatly diminished. Was
• 41:21
  still two years left to server if he won vice president, he had to
• 41:24
  abandon the last two years as Florida governor in order to do nothing but sit
• 41:30
  around and kiss Trump's ass in the White House. And then there's also the
• 41:35
  Twelfth Amendment issue, which I'm sure could be gotten around, but technically you're
• 41:38
  not allowed to have two people on the ballot who are of the same state
• 41:44
  of residence. Both are obviously Florida residents. Trump could change that, but
• 41:49
  the reason why that's relevant is because it provides both Trump and DeSantis with all
• 41:54
  sorts of plausible deniability about why that scenario never be considered. So it's not
• 42:00
  gonna be DeSantis. Now, who it's going to be, I don't know.
• 42:06
  I've seen some MAGA influencers claim that they know who it's gonna be,
• 42:09
  and that it's gonna be a male, and it is not going to be
• 42:14
  somebody who is a DEI selection like Kamala Harris. I don't believe these people
• 42:19
  inherently, but they they you know, they seem to be pretty confident.
• 42:24
  But I don't know who it's gonna be. I mean, you know,
• 42:27
  you would think it would be a woman. There's been there's been some talk
• 42:30
  about Christy Nome, the governor of South Dakota, which is really weird because
• 42:36
  it seems pretty obvious that she's been having an affair with Corey Lewandowski, Trump's
• 42:40
  original or one of his original campaign managers from twenty sixteen, and that would
• 42:45
  create all sorts of questions. In the old world, that would have been
• 42:49
  an absolute no way that can happen, even based upon the rumors, whether
• 42:54
  they're true or not. But I honestly don't know. I'm just telling you
• 43:00
  who I think he should pick if he wants to win, and that would
• 43:02
  be Nicky Haley. But then Glen Beck, person who I was once pretty
• 43:08
  close to, used to have a lot of respect for, I've had a
• 43:14
  very interesting history with. He went on somebody else's show. I don't think
• 43:20
  this is on his own show. He was being interviewed and he claimed that
• 43:24
  Trump called him and asked for his advice on the vice presidential selection. Now
• 43:31
  I don't think Beck is completely lying here, but the fact that this even
• 43:36
  happened is just startling on so many different levels, which would become clear as
• 43:42
  to why it's mind blowing to me as I go through a rather deep dive
• 43:46
  into Glen Beck, my relationship with him and his view of Trump. But
• 43:51
  I'm gonna put that aside for just a second because I'm gonna play this clip
• 43:54
  for you because Beck tells the story of what he told Trump, which was
• 44:00
  that he thinks that Trump ought to pick for fake Obama Swamy. Now,
• 44:06
  obviously, you know, he referred to him as vague Ramaswamy, not for
• 44:09
  fake Obama Swamy, as I do. And then he laid out exactly why
• 44:15
  he thinks for fake Obama Swamy ought to be Trump's VP. He even references
• 44:20
  that the timing was weird because Trump had just bashed This happened very recently.
• 44:23
  Apparently Trump had just bashed Obama Swamy saying that he's not really maga. It
• 44:30
  was my view, which I've expressed in this podcast previously, that basically what
• 44:36
  happened was that that you know, Trump decided that he wanted his full election
• 44:40
  erection and that Ramaswami was taking too many of his votes, and so he
• 44:46
  went him out of the race. And so seconds after the Iowa Coccus's,
• 44:51
  Trump's surrogate dutifully dropped out of the race, endorsed Trump and started campaigning with
• 44:57
  him. Because, as I said from the beginning, Bamba Swami is not
• 45:00
  a real candidate. He's not qualified, he has no qualifications. We don't
• 45:04
  know if he's really conservative, and all he is is a Trump surrogate,
• 45:07
  which I have been proven to be right with one thousand percent certitude based upon
• 45:14
  the way things all turned out. But here was Glenn Back describing this phone
• 45:19
  call between him and Donald Trump and the issue of Trump's vice presidential pick.
• 45:23
  Donald Trump called me and he said, any advice on who I should pick
• 45:30
  for vice president? Who do you think? Not that he I mean,
• 45:31
  he's probably calling everyone on that list. So he said, who do you
• 45:37
  think? And I said, I don't know how you're going to feel about
• 45:40
  it, but this is the day. I think it was the day he
• 45:44
  trashed the Vike And I said the Vike And he said, why do you
• 45:49
  say that? He said, that's the number one response from everybody I've asked
• 45:52
  that question. And he said why do you say that? And I said,
• 45:55
  A he can defend you. He's right in your pocket, and while
• 46:01
  you're defending this, he's watching your back defending this. I said, Also,
• 46:08
  I think he's some of his ideas are really really good. He connects
• 46:14
  with the youth, which now the latest of eighteen to twenty four year olds
• 46:19
  that voted for Biden, they're not voting for Biden, but they won't vote
• 46:23
  for Donald Trump yet, So you get that lower vote, the people that
• 46:28
  are excited about, Hey, something fresh and different. And then in twenty
• 46:34
  twenty eight, when you can no longer run, you continue for another eight
• 46:40
  years and you get the credit for bringing this new fresh face in. I
• 46:47
  just think you become legendary. And what did he say to that, Well,
• 46:52
  we'll see. Yeah, I actually more now when I saw that.
• 46:57
  I mean, it's really hard at this point for me to have a dramatic
• 47:00
  reaction to anything when it comes to the right wing media and Trump, but
• 47:05
  it hit home in a particularly deep way because I have a very remarkable and
• 47:12
  unique history on this topic when it comes to Glenn Beck. And I'm going
• 47:17
  to talk about this for quite a while here because not because I'm important or
• 47:22
  even Beck is that important, but because I think this story is representative of
• 47:28
  an emblematic of a much larger reality. In fact, I think that one
• 47:34
  of the clips of about the Play for You, from an old interview that
• 47:38
  Beck did with me, belong in a museum, a museum of Trump and
• 47:45
  the media. I really truly believe that. I think you'll agree if you
• 47:51
  hang in there with me and listen to what I have to say on this
• 47:53
  subject. But first I want to just quickly address the substance of the fac
• 47:59
  Obama being Trump's VP, and the idea that anybody, specifically Glenn Beck,
• 48:06
  could suggest that is just totally absurd. We have no idea who Obama Swami
• 48:14
  really is. He has no accomplishments. He won't even tell you how he
• 48:19
  got his money because from my understanding of it is he basically scammed people and
• 48:24
  pulled a fast one, which I'm sure you know Trump probably respects. But
• 48:30
  he he didn't come up with any great idea or you know, do anything
• 48:34
  spectacular to get whatever money he has. He is clearly a grifter. He
• 48:39
  is a very good talker, outstanding and I agree with a lot of what
• 48:45
  Obama Swamy says, but I don't believe it to be sincere. I don't
• 48:49
  believe it to be reliable. We have no track record with this guy,
• 48:53
  and Glenn Beck wants him to be a seventy eight year old man's heart beat
• 49:00
  away from being president in the United States and the heir to Maga Inc.
• 49:07
  And the Maga political movement and to be the clear next president of the United
• 49:14
  States. Because even outline that, he said, well, you know,
• 49:16
  you could run for your term and then then Obama Swamy could run for president
• 49:21
  for eight more years, which is just fucking delusion. There is no chance
• 49:27
  Donald Trump is going to win, serve out a term and then Obama Swami
• 49:32
  will be president for eight years after that. That is not the country we
• 49:37
  currently live in. And that's assuming that Obama Swamy is is way better than
• 49:42
  I am perceiving him to be. I don't know who Obama Swami really is.
• 49:45
  That's why I call him Obama Swamy. We didn't know who Obama was
• 49:50
  in two thousand and eight, and he plagiarizes Obama's rhetoric all the time.
• 49:55
  There are videos online about this, which is another reason why call him Obama
• 50:00
  Swamy. And for Beck, of all people to jump on this bandwagon,
• 50:05
  I mean, the way I perceived it is that Beck, you know,
• 50:07
  is now so insecure about his past opposition to Trump that he is going overboard
• 50:14
  to prove just how trumpy he is. And that's kind of like a badge
• 50:19
  of honor. I'm not just for Trump, but I'm for his surrogant,
• 50:22
  Obama Swamy to be his vice presidential nominee. So I was basically like,
• 50:29
  what the hell is going on here? This is this is too much.
• 50:31
  I have given Glenn Beck an enormous amount of slack over the years, and
• 50:37
  in a very short, you know, history of our relationship, it's quite
• 50:42
  interesting. Frankly, I did not like Glenn Beck many many years ago,
• 50:47
  like in the early two thousands, I thought he was an actor because he
• 50:52
  was so good. He's so good on air, and knowing how this game
• 50:58
  works and having done it myself at the levels I think I can tell what's
• 51:02
  sincere and what's not, and it felt like, wow, he couldn't be
• 51:07
  this good a performer and be totally sincere. But I had a newsperson slash
• 51:12
  co co host working with me at KFI Radio in Los Angeles name Leah Brandon
• 51:16
  who was a huge, huge Glenn Beck fan, and she kept trying to
• 51:22
  change my mind about Glen Beck. And I'm like, Okay, let me
• 51:27
  revisit this. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe he really is the real thing.
• 51:31
  And in two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine, when I did
• 51:36
  my movie mediam malpractice, a Obama got elected and Pale was targeted. I
• 51:39
  did all the conservative media rounds. I did a lot of the mainstream media
• 51:44
  rounds, including the Today Show, in the View and what have you.
• 51:46
  But I did all the conservative big media shows. And Glen Beck was on
• 51:51
  Fox News Channel at that time, and I thought I had a good appearance
• 51:55
  with him, and he had made some promises to me off the air,
• 52:00
  and I never knew exactly what happened. But you know, obviously none of
• 52:06
  it ever turned out the way that I had been told or maybe had hoped,
• 52:10
  And I even kind of got a suspicion that maybe he had sabotaged me.
• 52:15
  But maybe I was being paranoid, but I laughed, being even more
• 52:21
  suspicious of Glenn Beck. And still Leah Brandon, who ended up doing a
• 52:28
  weekend Sunday night syndicated radio show with through the twenty sixteen election, she was
• 52:35
  still trying to convince me that Glenn Beck was the real deal. And because
• 52:40
  Glenn Beck was the last conservative media, major conservative media figure standing when it
• 52:47
  came to being opposed to Trump, I started to think, well, maybe
• 52:52
  I'm wrong, maybe Lee is right. I'm more than willing to admit that
• 52:57
  I'm wrong, and you know, I look, could you know your actions
• 53:01
  are more important to me than your words. And when you're actually sacrificing your
• 53:07
  your own position and your own financial stability and your own future for what you
• 53:14
  think is right, and I happen to agree with you on the principal stand
• 53:19
  then I have a lot of respect for you. So I thought that was
• 53:23
  fantastic what Glenn Beck did, and I gave him an enormous amount of respect
• 53:30
  and a lot of slack as the years went on, because one, you
• 53:37
  know, I felt like I got to know Glenn a bit. You're about
• 53:40
  to hear an interview that we did together in early twenty seventeen, just after
• 53:45
  Trump had taken office, because I had gone down to Dallas to do an
• 53:50
  entire day's worth of interviews about the Penn State Joe Paternal Jerry Sandusky case,
• 53:57
  and at the very end of a very long day, he asked me to
• 54:00
  be his guest for an hour long TV show that he used to do.
• 54:04
  I don't know how often he did it. I think it was about once
• 54:06
  a week on on Blaze TV. And after that, And I'm going to
• 54:12
  get to the context of that interview in a second. But after that,
• 54:16
  you know, Glenn slowly but surely started to go soft on Trump. And
• 54:23
  I have always given him slack because one, I understood his situation better than
• 54:30
  anybody, having gone through it in a much smaller way in my own experience,
• 54:34
  in my own career. But also because I saw firsthand what his opposition
• 54:39
  to Trump was doing to the Blaze, and that other people's jobs were greatly
• 54:45
  in jeopardy. And therefore I put Glenn, because he was running the Blaze
• 54:51
  or owned the Blaze at that time, in a different category, because it
• 54:54
  wasn't just about him. He had to worry about other people and their livelihoods.
• 55:01
  And so I was far more forgiving of back doing what he had to
• 55:07
  do to maintain some semblance of business slash financial viability than I would anybody else.
• 55:15
  One because he made the stance in twenty sixteen, two because I had
• 55:19
  gotten to know him pretty well and we'd commiserated together both on and off the
• 55:24
  air about this. And three because he had a greater obligation. I didn't
• 55:30
  have anyone working for me. You know, the only thing I had to
• 55:32
  worry about was my wife, which was a problem, but you know,
• 55:36
  a problem I can take responsibility for, but he had to worry about a
• 55:40
  lot of other people. And so for all these years, the Glenn has
• 55:45
  slowly, but surely, sometimes not that slowly, been becoming a leader of
• 55:51
  the MAGA movement and being very much on the Trump train. I have basically,
• 55:59
  you know, I've mentioned it, but I've never really been that angry
• 56:02
  about it. I've never really called him out very dramatically. You know,
• 56:07
  he would occasionally have me on his radio show, and I'm you know,
• 56:12
  look, I'm very honest about this. I fully acknowledge that I have put
• 56:19
  Glenn in a completely different category because of some unique circumstances which I've just described.
• 56:24
  But for me, this Obamaswamy thing as VP, that was the straw
• 56:30
  that broke the camel's back. I'm done. I can't, I can't do
• 56:35
  this. I cannot do this anymore. And you know, for a very
• 56:38
  long time I have thought about this remarkable interview from early twenty seventeen March to
• 56:44
  twenty seventeen that I know that I had done with Glenn. At the end
• 56:47
  of this very long day with me mostly being focused on the Penn State,
• 56:52
  Joe paternal Jerysondusky situation, but where he and I had done this hour long
• 56:59
  TV interview with a with a studio audience, although to call this a studio
• 57:01
  audience is a bit of a stretch. I mean, this whole event really
• 57:07
  had the stench of death on it. I mean it was so clear to
• 57:08
  me visiting The Blaze in March or twenty seventeen, that Beck's opposition to Trump
• 57:16
  had completely destroyed their audience, and that you know, they were struggling just
• 57:22
  to get a semblance of a studio audience for this show. And just to
• 57:27
  be clear, Glenn Beck was a major conservative star. I mean he was
• 57:30
  on the cover of Time magazine. I mean, at one time you could
• 57:34
  argue he was he was the Tucker Carlson, maybe even bigger in some ways
• 57:38
  than Tucker Carlson of the conservative media. And to see this firsthand was really
• 57:45
  really startling. And I have not gone back to watch this twenty seventeen interview
• 57:52
  for you know what, seven years now, because I knew when it was
• 57:59
  so fain. I mean, in my memory it was basically a therapy session.
• 58:04
  But I kept it on my DVR. And there's no public record of
• 58:08
  this because you know, the Blaze was at that time still is now I
• 58:13
  think even more so a subscription service, and I think it aired maybe one
• 58:19
  time on The Blaze, and so it's not online anywhere. So I spent
• 58:22
  a significant amount of my weekend going back and recording off of my DVR a
• 58:29
  couple of different segments of this interview that Beck did with me back in March
• 58:35
  of twenty seventeen. And I want to play two large chunks of that interview.
• 58:40
  It's an hour long inter I guess, minus commercials, but you know,
• 58:44
  so it was a forty five whatever minute interview that Beck and I did,
• 58:49
  and this is really an extraordinary, extraordinary, especially in retrospect, extraordinary
• 58:55
  interview. Unfortunately, there's not a damn moment. A lot of this is
• 59:02
  context. A lot of this is how Beck reacts to the things that I'm
• 59:07
  saying. Some of it is the way Beck is, you know, saying
• 59:12
  things himself which are going to be startling in retrospect for somebody who is now
• 59:15
  totally on the Trump train and wearing Maga hats on Fox News Channel and saying
• 59:21
  that Vevey Obama Swami ought to be the vice presidential nominee. I mean it's
• 59:24
  just it's just beyond mind blowing. But so I have to play for context
• 59:32
  two large chunks of this, and I think you're going to, you know,
• 59:37
  understand why it's significant, why I think it belongs in a museum devoted
• 59:43
  to the issue of Trump and the media. So we're going to play two
• 59:45
  clips. This is from that the first segment of this interview that Beck did
• 59:52
  with me, and I first raised the issue of courage and the lack of
• 59:58
  courage when it came to the right wing media opposing Trump except for Beck,
• 1:00:05
  and I guess also me. Although I'm nowhere near even back then as significant
• 1:00:10
  as Glenn Beck was, and I had nowhere near as much to lose as
• 1:00:15
  Glenn Beck did, But in looking back on this, Wow, I mean
• 1:00:19
  this was this was This was difficult psychologically for me to It was almost painful
• 1:00:24
  for me to record this off of my DVR. And as I was thinking
• 1:00:29
  about this, I think I actually must have had at least a sub conscious
• 1:00:35
  game plan with Glenn. I don't want to give myself too much credit,
• 1:00:38
  but I think part of what you're hearing here is me trying to fortify Glenn's
• 1:00:47
  willingness to stick out the fight because I could see firsthand that the temptation to
• 1:00:54
  abandon the fight against Trump was gonna be overwhelming, and and that eventually he
• 1:01:00
  would give it up, give it up, and give in to Trump.
• 1:01:04
  I think that's what my part of my strategy here was, you can side
• 1:01:08
  for yourself. But here is the first of two long clips of an interview
• 1:01:15
  that Glenn Back did of me in March of twenty seventeen, which is quite
• 1:01:20
  startling to look back on now in January of twenty twenty four. The reason
• 1:01:25
  why there's so little courage in the media, and this is I keep going
• 1:01:30
  back to this last election, but to me, this election told us so
• 1:01:32
  much about so many elements of our society, specifically the media. Is the
• 1:01:37
  reason why nobody other than maybe Glenn had any courage in this is that there's
• 1:01:43
  no risk reward ratio because you just want to keep the gig. Most people,
• 1:01:47
  the gig is more important than anything because if you lose your gig in
• 1:01:52
  this business, they're very good ones are really hard to come by, and
• 1:01:57
  for a lot of the people, and this I think is what's set it's
• 1:02:00
  me for better or for words, A lot of people in this business they
• 1:02:02
  have their entire personhood wrapped up in the gig. If they lose the gig,
• 1:02:08
  they cease to become people. I've been you know, with the Churchill
• 1:02:14
  was credit for saying, the greatest exhilaration of the man could have is being
• 1:02:16
  shot without result. I've been shot so many times it doesn't even FaZe me
• 1:02:21
  anymore. My personhood is fine regardless of the gig or lack thereof. My
• 1:02:25
  wife might not be happy about it, but I'm perfectly cool with it,
• 1:02:30
  and in a way, I actually see it as a badge of honor.
• 1:02:32
  But you know, I'm very rare in that circumstance in this business because most
• 1:02:37
  people in this business are inherently insecure. That's why they get into the business
• 1:02:40
  to begin with. They need the affirmation of the audience. Love me,
• 1:02:45
  love me. Look what happened with Rachel Mattout the other day, you know,
• 1:02:49
  with the tax returns. You could actually see her. I mean,
• 1:02:52
  she was glowing with knowing that this audience was going to be huge, and
• 1:02:58
  the fact that she knew she was going to be disa pointing them didn't matter
• 1:03:00
  because in the moment, all that mattered was that was going to be a
• 1:03:04
  big number that night. The fact that her credibility for the next night will
• 1:03:07
  be lesson doesn't matter, because it's all about today. Tomorrow we'll deal with
• 1:03:13
  later. There's something going on now on both sides, and I have talked
• 1:03:21
  to people on both sides who are in my position. Most of them will
• 1:03:30
  talk to me off air. I feel like I felt in two thousand and
• 1:03:35
  seven when I had all the bankers calling me and saying, you're right,
• 1:03:40
  you're right, just keep on going. And I'd say I am. They'd
• 1:03:45
  say yes, will you come on and verify? Oh, good god,
• 1:03:49
  no, but keep going, you're right, And I felt like I was
• 1:03:53
  staying alone. I'm having people now in this industry reach out to me and
• 1:03:58
  say, you're right. I don't know how to do my job. I
• 1:04:04
  don't know how to do it, but you keep going. And all I
• 1:04:11
  keep thinking is all you need is a spine. All you need to do
• 1:04:19
  is care about what your truth is. And I think too many people's truth
• 1:04:27
  is I'm a star. What your truth is? What is the most important
• 1:04:31
  thing to you and and and to me? That is telling the truth as
• 1:04:40
  I understand it. I may get it wrong, but and you're the same
• 1:04:45
  way what you've done on many occasions to your detriment. I mean, you
• 1:04:50
  want to see somebody who has who has taken taken it in the face over
• 1:04:57
  and over and over again. It's this guy because he won't sit down and
• 1:05:01
  tell the audience what they want to hear. That is, but who wants
• 1:05:09
  to be me? In all seriousness, nobody wants to Some people might want
• 1:05:12
  to be you, Glenn. No they don't. You know what, No
• 1:05:15
  they anybody who says that does not know. Okay that what my life is
• 1:05:19
  like, My life is your life. I just saved a little more money
• 1:05:24
  before it happened. Fair enough, he'll run out. I'll be with you,
• 1:05:30
  brother, To be fair, I knew this was coming to and I
• 1:05:32
  saved too, so I'm not gonna go poor anytime soon. But but the
• 1:05:36
  but the reality, the bigger picture, the more important picture of taking get
• 1:05:39
  out of Glenn and John. Here is why the lack of courage. And
• 1:05:44
  to me, this goes way beyond the news media. You know, this
• 1:05:45
  country was founded by people who routinely felt that the definition of sacrifice was to
• 1:05:53
  put one's life on the line. And this was not unusual. This was
• 1:05:57
  this was normal that lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. That
• 1:06:01
  was and that was normal for our founding fathers. Today, in all seriousness,
• 1:06:06
  among the elites, the notion of sacrifice is I might get criticized.
• 1:06:15
  And that's not an exaggeration, because I have dealt in the stories that I
• 1:06:18
  you know, I tend to go after the ones that are not popular,
• 1:06:23
  and I've dealt with someone with some beacons of society, people who are highly
• 1:06:28
  respected, and yet when it when push tom comes to shove, they've got
• 1:06:32
  no guts at all because they have something to lose. Life is too good,
• 1:06:38
  I guess now, because if you're if you're rich, or you're a
• 1:06:41
  celebrity in this country, in this day at age, it is a nice
• 1:06:44
  life, especially if you're if you're not under a lot of stress and uh
• 1:06:47
  and no one wants stay in danger of that. And even being criticized now
• 1:06:51
  is considered a sacrifice. To me, I was brought up differently being being
• 1:06:57
  criticized. I mean, whatever reads sounds can break my mom's words will never
• 1:07:00
  hurt me. I mean, I thought that was fairly routine. But how
• 1:07:03
  do you get there? John? I mean, I just realized recently I've
• 1:07:10
  known for a while that my alcoholism, my crash, my losing everything and
• 1:07:15
  then having to regain it all is what has given me the no fear of
• 1:07:18
  losing it all. I had it, I lost it, I had it,
• 1:07:21
  I could lose it. I'll I have it again. And if I
• 1:07:25
  don't, I don't care. I'm happy either. That's the key for why
• 1:07:27
  you're able to do what you do. I don't think so, no,
• 1:07:30
  I think I think I've known that that gives me the fear that gives me
• 1:07:34
  the cowboy with the twitchy eye, where everybody at the table's like, good
• 1:07:42
  god, he's not afraid to die. Don't draw anything, you know what
• 1:07:45
  I mean. So that gives you that spooky element of sitting across the table
• 1:07:48
  and they'll say we'll destroy you, and you're like, go ahead, and
• 1:07:53
  they're like, oh god. People aren't willing to do that themselves, you
• 1:07:58
  know what I mean? What gives me the strength to do it? Because
• 1:08:06
  I would just check out. I just take my chips and I'd go to
• 1:08:11
  the mountains and I'd go live it up. I just go do podcasts or
• 1:08:14
  do whatever I want and live it up. Courage for me is nothing without
• 1:08:23
  honor, and that comes from for me, God, my responsibility as a
• 1:08:30
  human being born at this time. I was placed here and we all are,
• 1:08:40
  and you must stand or you will be eternally judged. So it makes
• 1:08:45
  it much less fun. That's fascinating to me, because I don't know this
• 1:08:49
  will surprise you or not. Never I grew up in the Catholic tradition.
• 1:08:53
  I went to a Catholic high school of Catholic college at Georgetown University. I
• 1:08:58
  don't happen to consider myself to be a believer quote unquote today, and so
• 1:09:05
  I actually come with this from the opposite perspective. I sure hope there's an
• 1:09:10
  afterlife. Boy, I hope it would be awesome, and I hope that
• 1:09:14
  somehow people who do good here are rewarded and people who do evil or punished.
• 1:09:17
  That would make everything well worth it. But I'm living under the premise
• 1:09:21
  that that's not the case, and then what we have here is it.
• 1:09:26
  And that's why I've devoted my life to if I can fix even the slightest
• 1:09:30
  injustice here, that's my obligation. I'm not worried about I'm not worried about
• 1:09:36
  the punishment or ratification. I'm not worried about burning in hell if I don't
• 1:09:40
  do that. What I'm worried about is or don't worry about what I feel
• 1:09:47
  the responsibility is. Each of us were born with something special about us.
• 1:09:54
  Whether you know it or not, every single person will have the moment in
• 1:09:59
  their life that is their moment. I don't know when it is. I
• 1:10:00
  don't know if I've hit mine already, And the rest of this is gravy
• 1:10:04
  or ridiculous. I have no idea, but all of us hit a moment
• 1:10:09
  where we are to do whatever it is the right thing, and that helps
• 1:10:15
  everybody move forward. And I do not want to spend my life and get
• 1:10:24
  to the end of it and say what would have happened if I would have
• 1:10:29
  stood? What could have changed had I stood and said something? Now,
• 1:10:38
  I hope you appreciated the significance of that particular clip from twenty seventeen. It's
• 1:10:45
  very, very difficult for me to be objective about this because obviously I was
• 1:10:48
  living this in a very dramatic way. You know, our executive producer,
• 1:10:54
  Mike gat Gavino and I have debated as to how to do this, and
• 1:10:59
  this seemed to be the the only viable way without devoting an hour specifically to
• 1:11:04
  this interview. And I don't think the interview is that significant, but I
• 1:11:08
  do think it does show you a lot about how things have changed and why
• 1:11:15
  they have changed, and using Beck as an example of the larger conservative media
• 1:11:20
  industrial complex, and why Trump was able to win the twenty twenty four nominations
• 1:11:27
  so easily, because, as I have said, the ghost of Glenn Beck
• 1:11:31
  from twenty sixteen to early twenty seventeen hung over the twenty twenty four campaign.
• 1:11:39
  In every single aspect, nobody wanted to be Glen Beck two point zero because
• 1:11:44
  he ended up being within an inch of his life and had to crawl back
• 1:11:49
  and to get on the Trump train in order to salvage his own career and
• 1:11:54
  the blaze. And you know, now that he was back on his own
• 1:11:58
  two feet, he was always going to make sure that in twenty twenty four
• 1:12:01
  he didn't repeat history, and he was one hundred percent on the Trump train,
• 1:12:05
  and everybody else went along with that. All not everybody, but most
• 1:12:10
  of the major right wing media figures did the same thing. So that was
• 1:12:14
  the first segment, and of course, you know, it's pretty poignant for
• 1:12:18
  him to say what if I had stood and said something, What if I
• 1:12:24
  had stood and said something. That's the same guy who you know now in
• 1:12:30
  twenty twenty four is one hundred percent on the Trump train and saying that,
• 1:12:34
  but fet Obama Swami ought to be the vice presidential Bobmini, I mean that
• 1:12:40
  I can't illustrate it any more dramatically than that. This is a guy who
• 1:12:44
  was at the top of the mountain, and here he is making it very
• 1:12:47
  clear that he doesn't want to be that guy who doesn't stand on principle,
• 1:12:53
  and he doesn't want to look back on his life and say, what if
• 1:12:56
  I had stood and said something, Well, here we are. Everything's upside
• 1:13:02
  down. Everything's exactly the opposite of the way it should be, or the
• 1:13:06
  way that Glenn Beck in March of twenty seventeen certainly would have said that it
• 1:13:12
  would have been. Now the second clip in this next segment, this is
• 1:13:15
  the second segment of this hour long program. We're basically just going to play
• 1:13:20
  the full segment, and this is where it really turns into a therapy session.
• 1:13:27
  And as I was going through this, I understood it to be essentially
• 1:13:31
  a public therapy session, not just for the small studio audience, but for
• 1:13:36
  whoever was watching on the Blaze, I understood. I understood inherently how unique
• 1:13:43
  this circumstance was as we were going through this interview, and so I actually
• 1:13:48
  embrace the therapy element of it. And I really do believe that part of
• 1:13:56
  my at least subconsciously, my game plan with Glenn to try to fortify him.
• 1:14:01
  And that's why I kept complimenting him to not give this up, because
• 1:14:06
  I knew the temptations were going to be strong for him to do so.
• 1:14:11
  And in looking back on this, and I don't want to give myself too
• 1:14:14
  much credit, but I'm getting flashbacks from the Penn State Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky
• 1:14:19
  case, where I am convinced that at least a few of the guys who
• 1:14:27
  got paid millions of dollars from Penn State in that case got the idea to
• 1:14:31
  make a claim from my work because they realized how easy it was to get
• 1:14:38
  free money. I am completely convinced of at least a couple of those people,
• 1:14:43
  and I know for sure that a couple of people involved in the story,
• 1:14:48
  because they realized it was all of a scam, were able to cash
• 1:14:51
  out because of that, and I don't feel good about that at all.
• 1:14:56
  I feel like, wow, I mean, what an upside down world we
• 1:14:59
  live in. But the reason why that's relevant to this is I do wonder
• 1:15:04
  whether my plan backfired and that in a way I might have planted the seeds
• 1:15:11
  and Glance's mind for him to realize how feudal this effort was, and that
• 1:15:16
  how he had to follow everybody else in selling out the Trump. I have
• 1:15:20
  no way of knowing this, but it absolutely crossed my mind as I was
• 1:15:26
  watching this very painful flashback to March of twenty seventeen. But in this clip,
• 1:15:32
  I more directly start talking about Trump and my opposition to Trump, and
• 1:15:39
  I frankly think that a lot of what I say here stands up extremely well,
• 1:15:44
  I mean extremely well. And how I have concerns about the future,
• 1:15:50
  how long we're going to be paying for Trump, how we're going to be
• 1:15:54
  paying for Trump, how things that we couldn't even imagine are going to happen
• 1:15:59
  because of Trump, like, for instance, COVID, which I could never
• 1:16:02
  have imagined. And so I'm very comfortable with the things that I say in
• 1:16:06
  this part of the interview. But again, the most important part of this
• 1:16:11
  is giving you context for how one of the most dramatic sellouts to Johnald Trump
• 1:16:17
  happened in the form of Glenn Beck. And here's what that sounded like back
• 1:16:21
  in March of twenty seventeen. One of the things that I think has been
• 1:16:25
  missed about Trump is that I think we're going to be paying for this for
• 1:16:30
  a very long time, even if he's a success, which again I hope
• 1:16:34
  that he is to a milor degree, I think if he's I actually think
• 1:16:38
  that another seletar tree is a success, right right. I want the country
• 1:16:41
  to survive this. If Trump was somehow a tremendous success, which I don't
• 1:16:45
  see happening, I think there's dangers in that too, because I think it
• 1:16:47
  changes our entire form of government, yes, to some sort of authoritarian almost
• 1:16:53
  a cater shit. Hang on, let me let me let me clarify that
• 1:16:56
  for anybody who doesn't think that that is a possibility. Yesterday he gave a
• 1:17:00
  glowing speech, in fact, traveled down because he's going to model his his
• 1:17:08
  administration after Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson is is, I believe, and I've
• 1:17:15
  never seen anybody in history, you know of some the you know, history,
• 1:17:18
  professor, make this case. But perhaps before I die, I will.
• 1:17:23
  I believe the Republic ended with the Jackson administration. That if you trace
• 1:17:29
  it back to where the founders would say, so, when did the Republic
• 1:17:32
  actually die? We don't say now, well there's now we're still doing it
• 1:17:36
  and we're like no. But I think they would look back and they would
• 1:17:42
  say, Andrew Jackson. He was a very bad man, thoroughly corrupt.
• 1:17:51
  Was the reason we slaughtered all the Indians. We went from manif, we
• 1:17:56
  went from divine providence to manifest destiny. He was extraordinarily dangerous. And that's
• 1:18:04
  Donald Trump's model. Yeah, and now officially it is. We saw him
• 1:18:09
  salute at his tomb yesterday. But I think the more realistic scenario is that
• 1:18:15
  Trump is somewhere a mediocre or a failed president, but has changed the rules
• 1:18:23
  in a way that has set the foundation for something far worse than Donald Trump.
• 1:18:28
  I don't know what that is, but let's just think about it in
• 1:18:30
  practical terms. Post Donald Trump, how do we ever, as Republicans,
• 1:18:38
  may ever nominate someone based upon electability. Again, that's not going to be
• 1:18:42
  possible because we've now for a generation or more we have been discredited the people
• 1:18:47
  who actually want to care about winning elections because of this fluke that happened in
• 1:18:51
  twenty sixteen. So now, forever and ever, we don't care about electability.
• 1:18:57
  Crowd will always be able to say Donald Trump. Yet Donald Trump will
• 1:19:00
  never be able to be duplicated. He's a celebrity, fall billionaire with magic
• 1:19:06
  that cannot be translated to somebody. Nice time, the right message, the
• 1:19:12
  right time. It was a moment. But he's still lost by three million
• 1:19:15
  popular votes. But it was still a moment, right, I get it.
• 1:19:19
  But he was lucky as heck. Yeah, all the starts a line.
• 1:19:23
  Yeah, but there's other things. On what basis will we as Republicans
• 1:19:28
  ever disqualify another Democratic candidate from a character standpoint? Oh? What is this?
• 1:19:34
  And now we're now living in a world where we, as Republicans,
• 1:19:38
  we can't criticize anyone for even lying. Forget about, you know, issues
• 1:19:43
  of hagatreet, women in fidelity, corruption within your own finances. I mean,
• 1:19:46
  there's literally nothing I can think of that we have any credibility going forward
• 1:19:51
  disqualifying somebody else. Plus we've now established that you need no qualifications for the
• 1:19:58
  job at all. Celebrity itself is a qualification. My gosh. I mean
• 1:20:03
  to me, the Pandora's box that this opens up for the rest of our
• 1:20:10
  lives, having nothing to do inherently with whether Trump is a success or not
• 1:20:15
  is mind blowing. And no one seems to think about this these things or
• 1:20:20
  care about that, because all we care about is, boy, the overnight's
• 1:20:24
  were awesome. You know, this is let's ride this train. This train
• 1:20:29
  is great, and boy, doesn't it feel good. It feels so good
• 1:20:31
  to punch the other side and them out that for eight years of having to
• 1:20:34
  take Obama well, you know what, so does a drug binge feel pretty
• 1:20:39
  good? But most drug binges end up with you face first and the gut
• 1:20:43
  are vomiting. And I wondered why you weren't welcome on talk radio. And
• 1:20:49
  you know, I'm not a drug user, but I you know, most
• 1:20:53
  drug binges don't end up very well. And this feels like a drug binge
• 1:20:56
  to me. The whole thing. It's not based in any trench bullet's not
• 1:21:00
  based in the logic truth by this might be the biggest issue for me,
• 1:21:03
  as you I'm a truth guy. The idea that we now have a president
• 1:21:08
  of the United States. Forget about being a liar. We've had liars in
• 1:21:12
  the job before. To my knowledge, we never had anybody who was separated
• 1:21:16
  from reality. He doesn't even accept reality at times. And now, to
• 1:21:21
  mention talk radio, talk radio is expected to defend that whatever it's like.
• 1:21:27
  He's a monarch. Whatever the king says, whatever the King says, shall
• 1:21:30
  be regardless of whether or not it's true. And they do, oh,
• 1:21:36
  they do, Sure they do, because because you don't tick off the Trump
• 1:21:42
  cult, because the Trump cult is your core talk radio and Fox News Channel
• 1:21:47
  audience. And like any cult, a cult does not like being told something
• 1:21:51
  they don't like to hear. The business model is tell a very enthusiastic sliver
• 1:21:59
  of the overall at is what they want to hear. That's how you succeed
• 1:22:02
  in modern media. And that's what we have seen to the conservative media industbal
• 1:22:06
  complex in the era of Donald Trump, and that's how we won the nomination.
• 1:22:12
  There's zero written extensively immediate about this. There's z I said. I
• 1:22:17
  think I wrote pressionately about this very early on in the process. There was
• 1:22:21
  no doubt that the key players in the movement saw where this was going from
• 1:22:27
  a financial standpoint, saw where the audience was, and that's when the train
• 1:22:31
  left the station and it was all over. And frankly, a lot of
• 1:22:34
  people, Glenn were very slow, even some of the better people in our
• 1:22:39
  business were slow to realize how how late it was. In other words,
• 1:22:43
  I think that the Republican process was basically over when he won New Hampshire.
• 1:22:47
  It was over. It had too much momentum at that point. There are
• 1:22:50
  some people in our business who rationalize I criticized him after that, Well,
• 1:22:57
  great, it was too late. That the rocket ship had already taken off,
• 1:23:01
  and now we're just talking about when when exactly it's going to land,
• 1:23:04
  And sure enough, that's what ended up happening. Now we ended up,
• 1:23:08
  in the short run, getting lucky because he beat Hillary Clinton in a in
• 1:23:11
  what I consider to be a fluke. But are we going to pay for
• 1:23:15
  that eventually? I hope not, but I think so. I mean,
• 1:23:17
  logic dictates eventually we're going to pay for this as a country, not just
• 1:23:21
  as a conservative movement. Let me bring it down to the conservative movement.
• 1:23:32
  I find myself at odds with both the liberals and the conservatives right now,
• 1:23:45
  but I also find more people on the left, and I know it's convenient
• 1:23:55
  for them now, but I find more people on the left at least willing
• 1:24:00
  to say, what what, what does this mean? What does all of
• 1:24:04
  this mean? I don't get that very often from conservatives I have. I
• 1:24:15
  want to stop calling myself a conservative, But what the heck is it?
• 1:24:19
  What? I don't know what I don't want I don't know what it means.
• 1:24:21
  I don't want to call myself a Christian because I don't know what that
• 1:24:25
  means anymore. And I know what it means to me, but I don't
• 1:24:30
  know what it means to the rest of the country and to the rest of
• 1:24:34
  the world. When I go and meet people and they don't know me,
• 1:24:39
  I don't want them to introduce me as a conservative, as a Christian,
• 1:24:44
  a conservative Christian goop guy? What is that? Because I don't think I
• 1:24:49
  have anything really in common with what people think. That is now. So
• 1:24:58
  if we are living in a world where my audience, who I've always had
• 1:25:04
  a great bond with my audience. I love my audience, but my audience
• 1:25:10
  is probably the strongest audience in the conservative world that still is connected to reason.
• 1:25:17
  They may disagree with me, but they'll at least listen to something they
• 1:25:25
  don't. They're still here, so they're not needing a steady diet of affirmation.
• 1:25:30
  But my audience is pushed to the limits, I believe. How do
• 1:25:36
  we have these conversations where we say, Okay, guys, what does it
• 1:25:43
  really mean forget about Donald Trump? What is it going to mean for our
• 1:25:48
  children? What's it going to mean ten years down the road? How do
• 1:25:53
  we reconnect with reason? How do we do that? I wish I had
• 1:25:57
  an answer to that. Glenn's a great question. I think one of the
• 1:26:00
  things we learned in twenty sixteen is that there's not that many people in that
• 1:26:04
  group that you're talking about, not your audience. So let me come back
• 1:26:09
  there and with this, think about this and answered. On the other side,
• 1:26:14
  I think there are I think that they were tired of being hit in
• 1:26:19
  the face and it felt good to have somebody hit them back and make them
• 1:26:27
  shut up. But I think there's going to come a time where that starts
• 1:26:30
  to wear off and you're like, you start to sober up a bit,
• 1:26:34
  and you're like, h that's really dangerous because maybe what wakes them up is
• 1:26:41
  more problems, and they want that bully to protect them more. I don't
• 1:26:45
  know, but what about the idea that they just right now just were tired
• 1:26:51
  and wanted somebody to hit back. Now, what Glenn Beck said there at
• 1:26:55
  the end is to me very interesting because at that moment, when he's still
• 1:27:00
  holding onto the idea that eventually the audience is going to figure this out.
• 1:27:05
  But they never did. The mania never wore off, even with a midterm
• 1:27:13
  election loss in twenty eighteen, even with COVID in twenty twenty, even with
• 1:27:18
  a election loss in twenty twenty, even with an election loss in twenty twenty
• 1:27:23
  two, it never wore off. And that was the fundamental I guess miscalculation
• 1:27:30
  on Glenn Beck's part, And eventually he realized that, oh, so this
• 1:27:36
  is never going to wear off. This is where we are, and so
• 1:27:40
  Beck sold out and now he wants twelve more years with Trump and veveg Obama
• 1:27:45
  Swami, And again, it's just sad. I'm not even that angry about
• 1:27:49
  it, because I've seen it happen with so many different people. I had
• 1:27:55
  hoped that Glenn would be better than that, and Glenn himself is not all
• 1:28:01
  that significant, especially now, but it is I believe very emblematic representative of
• 1:28:09
  symbolic of a much larger reality, which is the reason why Donald Trump is
• 1:28:16
  the Republican nominee in twenty twenty four and why we're getting Trump Biden two point
• 1:28:21
  zero that nobody wants. There are a lot of reasons for it, but
• 1:28:27
  at its core is that the right wing media broke because the business model broke,
• 1:28:31
  as I've said a million different times, and that's how we end up
• 1:28:35
  getting this situation where everyone in the right wing media, almost everyone is afraid
• 1:28:42
  to go after Donald Trump, afraid to hold him accountable for missing debates,
• 1:28:45
  afraid to tell the truth about the indictments, afraid to tell the truth about
• 1:28:48
  COVID and everything else transpires from that. Any chance, any chance to defeat
• 1:28:58
  Trump is lost because the right wing media is completely in the tank. And
• 1:29:02
  Glenn Beck and his history is a big reason for that. I mean it
• 1:29:06
  when I say that the ghost of Glenn Beck twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen hung
• 1:29:12
  over this entire twenty twenty four Republican nominating process. Now you're probably wondering,
• 1:29:18
  so Zick, why don't you ask Glenn to come on the show. And
• 1:29:21
  I've never done that. I've interviewed him on previous podcasts. I don't know
• 1:29:28
  whether he would. He probably wouldn't at this point. He's probably pissed at
• 1:29:31
  me. I don't even though for sure if he knows that I have published
• 1:29:34
  those videos. He's been pissed at me in the past. When I even
• 1:29:40
  liked this was many years ago. I liked a tweet that criticized his sellout
• 1:29:46
  to Trump. I literally liked it. I didn't comment on it, I
• 1:29:50
  didn't repost it or retweet it or whatever. I liked it, and he
• 1:29:56
  emailed me irate, and you know, Stu his co host, and I
• 1:30:02
  had to go through a whole rigmarole of trying to, you know, fix
• 1:30:05
  that problem, and I was like, this is crazy. I just didn't
• 1:30:10
  even share the I like almost every tweet I got said. I mean,
• 1:30:13
  it's like it's like a courtesy. Yeah, I read it. Thanks,
• 1:30:16
  That's that's why I liked the tweet. I tried to explain that to him,
• 1:30:19
  and eventually he got over that. And I did many other appearances on
• 1:30:24
  his program. But in my view, you know, I don't think that
• 1:30:28
  Glenn would come on, and if he did come on, I know exactly
• 1:30:32
  how it would go down. It would all be about his belief in this
• 1:30:39
  massive deep state conspiracy, and you know, it would just go so sidetracked,
• 1:30:45
  and this whole deep state conspiracy thing. Now, look, I can't
• 1:30:50
  stand the institutional aspect of our government at all. Now, you can call
• 1:30:58
  it whatever you want, but you know, in my view, Glenn has
• 1:31:02
  purposely concocted an entire massive deep state conspiracy slash fairy tale in order to justify
• 1:31:13
  his Trump sellout. He's concocted an entire worldview in order to be able to
• 1:31:16
  still think of himself as being principled and just saying, oh, I was
• 1:31:20
  wrong. I underestimated the forces that were against Trump and that Trump is the
• 1:31:25
  only one that can combat them. So we must all rally around Donald Trump.
• 1:31:30
  That's all because Beck knows that financially, that's the only option that will
• 1:31:34
  work. So he's rationalized this entire reality. And so therefore, even if
• 1:31:40
  he came on the podcast, which I doubt he would, especially at this
• 1:31:44
  point, it would be pointless. It would it would just evolve into this
• 1:31:48
  this you know, basically talking about bullshit conspiracy theories involving the deep State.
• 1:31:57
  And it wouldn't it wouldn't be rational, it wouldn't be productive, and frankly,
• 1:32:00
  I don't have the energy for it now. If he contacted me after
• 1:32:05
  somehow hearing about me posting those videos in this podcast and said, you know,
• 1:32:10
  have me on your podcast, sure I would do that, but it's
• 1:32:13
  just not worth the effort, especially given the fact that I don't think it
• 1:32:16
  would happen to begin with. By the way, not dissimilarly from the entire
• 1:32:23
  Glenn Beck ordeal, Steve Cortez a guy who I still consider to be a
• 1:32:28
  friend. Unlike Glenn Beck, who left the Trump camp went to DeSantis and
• 1:32:34
  never back down and then left never back down, and then moments out to
• 1:32:39
  the Iowa caucuses were over posted an article only Trump can save America and has
• 1:32:45
  gone on Fox News Business Channel to pronounce that he is endorsing wholeheartedly Donald Trump,
• 1:32:53
  and who has been a guest on this program and someone I've talked to
• 1:32:56
  many, many times. In the last episode, I didn't know anything of
• 1:33:02
  the full story behind Steve's latest move. I theorized that maybe I've lost another
• 1:33:08
  friend over Trump. I even talked about how my eleven year old daughter Grace
• 1:33:13
  had suggested that I send Steve the elon musk go fuck Yourself meme or Jiff
• 1:33:19
  via text, which I did not do because I wanted to hear Steve's part
• 1:33:25
  of this story, or his side of it. We did speak briefly.
• 1:33:30
  We spoke before the last episode of the podcast was released, but after it
• 1:33:33
  was recorded. I don't know whether not Steve actually heard it. But during
• 1:33:39
  that conversation he did apologize and he did explain a little bit his side.
• 1:33:45
  I didn't agree with it still, but again he apologized and he agreed to
• 1:33:49
  come on the next episode of the podcast. So as of this taping,
• 1:33:54
  we are scheduled to interview Steve Cortes in episode number one hundred and twenty too,
• 1:34:00
  which would be interesting. I'm looking forward to it, and I hope
• 1:34:02
  you're looking forward to listening to it. So that's that situation, And of
• 1:34:09
  course, at the core of all of this is the broken business model.
• 1:34:14
  I mean, there's so many different aspects to the death of journalism podcasts,
• 1:34:17
  but the bedrock basis for so much of this is the broken business model.
• 1:34:24
  It's all about the Benjamin's. It's all about the money when all is said
• 1:34:29
  and done, and that's why talk radio broke, and I saw that firsthand
• 1:34:33
  in my talk radio career. I saw where this was going. It's one
• 1:34:38
  of the reasons why I got out of talk radio, not because I was
• 1:34:43
  worried about not making money, but because I could tell I was no longer
• 1:34:45
  going to have the freedom to be who I am and tell the truth as
• 1:34:49
  I see it, because I could see that the audience was starting to drive
• 1:34:55
  the bus. It wasn't the host driving the bus, it was the audience,
• 1:35:00
  and the host was following the audience. And that's what essentially happened with
• 1:35:03
  Glenn Beck. Because the business model broke, the power structure between the audience
• 1:35:10
  and the host dramatically shifted, especially in the era of Donald Trump. But
• 1:35:15
  it's not just the right wing media business model that has broken. The business
• 1:35:20
  model has broken everywhere. Just in the last few days, the La Times
• 1:35:27
  writers decided to go on strike, which was just a colossally stupid thing.
• 1:35:31
  Hey, hey, everybody, let's just show everyone how irrelevant we are and
• 1:35:36
  go on a one day strike. By the way, we're not telling people
• 1:35:40
  to not subscribe. We just don't want people to share internet versions of La
• 1:35:45
  Time stories that get written without us, and they're doing this because as of
• 1:35:50
  this taping, I'm not sure it's happened yet, but it's supposedly imminent that
• 1:35:54
  there's going to be more massive layoffs at the La Times. I don't even
• 1:35:59
  know how that's possible given all the layoffs that have happened in recent years.
• 1:36:02
  I don't even know how you can possibly function as a newspaper with even more
• 1:36:06
  layoffs than have already happened. And the La Times, which was always a
• 1:36:12
  liberal rag or at least in recent times, people forget, by the way,
• 1:36:15
  it's just show true how much California and Los Angeles has dramatically changed,
• 1:36:19
  and why you know, they're the canary and the coal mine for the rest
• 1:36:24
  of the country. California used to be an extremely conservative state, and The
• 1:36:28
  La Times not that long ago, many many decades ago, but within the
• 1:36:33
  lifetimes of many people who still live here, was a conservative newspaper. But
• 1:36:38
  then after numerous ownership changes, it became very very liberal, now absurdly woke
• 1:36:45
  and liberal. And you know, this is more than just a go woke
• 1:36:48
  and go broke scenario. This is about the business model for newspapers being completely
• 1:36:55
  shattered, and these large conglomerates which or mega mega billionaires that own these media
• 1:37:02
  companies. You know, they don't care about journalism, you know, and
• 1:37:10
  so they cut. Instead of trying to save the product, they cut everything
• 1:37:15
  to the bone as much as they can. And you know, the La
• 1:37:19
  Times is already a joke from a journalistic standpoint, and it's only gonna get
• 1:37:24
  worse. And by the way, I'm not somebody who rejoices in this.
• 1:37:29
  As much as I despise the La Times for their extreme liberal bias, which
• 1:37:34
  I used to rail on all the time as a Los Angeles radio host at
• 1:37:39
  KFI AM, then the most listened to radio station in the country. I
• 1:37:45
  hated the La Times. But a local, viable newspaper is critical to having
• 1:37:54
  a functioning government and society because if you do not have a viable journalistic institution
• 1:38:01
  on a local level, then every local official knows they can get away with
• 1:38:09
  bloody murder. I mean, the local corruption that has had to have expanded
• 1:38:15
  exponentially in this country is extraordinary because of the loss of local newspapers. Local
• 1:38:23
  newspapers having power prevented forget about your political ideology, prevented an enormous, an
• 1:38:31
  enormous amount of corruption. And that's gone now, and it's all gone because
• 1:38:40
  of the broken business model. And it's not just the La Times Sports Illustrated.
• 1:38:47
  Now, this was a story that's it's very odd and somewhat convoluted,
• 1:38:53
  and I think it's been misinterpreted a bit, and I may even misinterpreted it
• 1:38:57
  a bit when it all broke. But it it was released last Friday that
• 1:39:01
  Sports Illustrated had fired all of their staff writers. And again without getting into
• 1:39:09
  the nitty gritty, basically, Sports Illustrated doesn't really even exist. It's basically
• 1:39:15
  just a brand. It's a licensing agreement, and the company that had rented
• 1:39:20
  out the licensing agreement from the people that own the name Sports Illustrated had stopped
• 1:39:27
  paying the fee for that licensing, basically the rent. They couldn't make the
• 1:39:32
  rent anymore because the business model was broken, and so they lost the licensing
• 1:39:40
  agreement. They got it taken away from them because they weren't paying their monthly
• 1:39:44
  fee slash rent. Well, since they lost the license, they decided,
• 1:39:47
  well, screw it, we're going to fire all of the Sports Illustrated staff
• 1:39:53
  writers. However, it seems as if the magazine, to what extended some
• 1:39:59
  magazine basically a pamphlet now, and the and the website are still going to
• 1:40:03
  continue on. My guess is that that not everybody who was working there will
• 1:40:10
  will have actually lost their jobs, but it's total chaos. I've I've talked
• 1:40:14
  recently about how I got to know one of the top executives that Sports Illustrated
• 1:40:17
  because his wife became a huge fan of the With the Benefit of Hindsight podcast
• 1:40:23
  about the Penn State Joe Paternal Jerryson Dusky situation, and he and I even
• 1:40:27
  had a long conversation about Sports Illustrated potentially doing something about the counter narrative of
• 1:40:33
  the entire fiasco, which I knew. This guy he even referenced, I
• 1:40:40
  think, to his wife and maybe even me in a text that he could
• 1:40:43
  tell that my entire demeanor changed about thirty minutes through the conversation, because because
• 1:40:48
  I've been through this war so many times, you know, I know what
• 1:40:54
  all the signs are, all the warning signals are, all the red flags,
• 1:40:58
  and I always my m is to always give everybody the benefit of the
• 1:41:02
  doubt. At the beginning. I'm suspicious, I'm skeptical, but I'm open
• 1:41:05
  minded. Okay, let's see where this is gonna go. I've been you
• 1:41:09
  know, this is not my first rodeo on this situation, and I'm very
• 1:41:14
  pessimistic about whether or not anything's ever gonna happen. But as I did the
• 1:41:17
  math, and to me, this is always just a pretty simple math equation,
• 1:41:21
  and I'm pretty good at at being able to figure out what the math
• 1:41:25
  says in very short order. But about thirty minutes through the conversation, I'm
• 1:41:29
  like, this is never gonna happen. The math doesn't add up, and
• 1:41:31
  my demeanor changed rather dramatically, and he picked up on that. And this
• 1:41:35
  is going to shock you. Stop me if you've heard this before, but
• 1:41:38
  I was one hundred percent right. Nothing ever did happen on that, and
• 1:41:43
  he ended up getting fired allegedly over the AI controversial, though in my opinion,
• 1:41:47
  had nothing to do with that. This was a situation where the owner
• 1:41:51
  really had no idea what journalism is about, didn't even buy Sports Illustrated for
• 1:41:58
  journalistic purposes, bought it purely for commercial purposes, thought that they could use
• 1:42:02
  it in a way that was not viable. That's my understanding. And so
• 1:42:10
  it's all a crap show there, and it's chaos, and I don't know
• 1:42:15
  what's going to happen with Sports Illustrated. But Sports Illustrated which used to be
• 1:42:17
  the beacon of sports journalism and played a massive role in the lives of millions
• 1:42:24
  and millions of especially young American males of a certain generation like me, especially
• 1:42:30
  when the swimsuit issue came out every winter. It was talking about major impact
• 1:42:34
  on your life. That certainly had it on me and many others like me,
• 1:42:39
  But it was more than just a swimsuit issue. I mean, that
• 1:42:41
  was the biggest moment of your week, was getting Sports Illustrated in the mail.
• 1:42:45
  I mean you look forward to it, you devoured it, and it
• 1:42:47
  had a major impact on the narrative in the sports world. And part of
• 1:42:54
  the reason why Sports Illustrated could exist and was so powerful was that the new
• 1:43:00
  cycle was literally a week. Now it's a half hour. So you can't
• 1:43:05
  exist, especially with a broken business model, you know, when when the
• 1:43:12
  news cycle is completely anesthetical to the idea of putting out a magazine once a
• 1:43:17
  week, which is dated before it ever even becomes a thing. And I've
• 1:43:20
  told the story previously, so I'm not going to go into it in great
• 1:43:24
  detail again, but I've told the story previously where about a dozen years ago,
• 1:43:29
  I went to an event in Los Angeles that was being hosted by the
• 1:43:32
  head of Sports Illustrated Photography, who was bragging about how awesome the new digital
• 1:43:38
  Sports Illustrated was going to be. And at the event, I went up
• 1:43:42
  to him and I said, you do understand you've just destroyed the magazine,
• 1:43:45
  right And he thought I was crazy. He literally thought I was nuts,
• 1:43:50
  And I told him, you're never You've destroyed the power of the cover.
• 1:43:56
  You're never going to be able to hold on to a photo on the internet
• 1:44:01
  for a week because it's going to be dated in a day, if not
• 1:44:05
  sooner than that, and you're going to feel the pressure to abandon that whole
• 1:44:11
  concept. Because they thought they could just turn the magazine into basically an internet
• 1:44:15
  website and that the cover would still keep its sanctity and its power and it's
• 1:44:21
  glory. They keep that up for a week and then they changed the cover
• 1:44:25
  photo. No, they were never going to do that, and of course
• 1:44:28
  I was right about that as well. So Sports Illustrated, well, I
• 1:44:30
  don't think it's completely dead for all intensive purposes, is never going to be
• 1:44:38
  anything close to what it was, and is no longer relevant, and it's
• 1:44:42
  symbolic of this larger implosion of legacy media that is happening at an absolutely alarming
• 1:44:48
  rate. Now. One of the other things that we talk about a lot
• 1:44:54
  on the Death of Journalism podcast is the issue of race and DEI and equity
• 1:45:01
  and how everything is to talk about broken, completely broken, especially when it
• 1:45:06
  comes to the way the media handles racial issues. And there are two dramatic
• 1:45:13
  examples that have occurred in just the last few days since our last episode of
• 1:45:17
  the podcast. I want to play two clips for you in fairly short order.
• 1:45:21
  The first comes from Congressman Barbara Lee, and she went on CNN and
• 1:45:29
  did an interview with Caitlyn Collins, she's the new female star of CNN,
• 1:45:34
  and she told a story that smacked very much of the whole Jesse Smollette situation.
• 1:45:42
  Remember Jesse Smallllette who made up the story that he was assaulted in the
• 1:45:45
  middle of a very cold night in Chicago by two guys who claimed that this
• 1:45:50
  was Maga country and they put a news surround his neck and it was all
• 1:45:56
  a fraud, in a hoax, and you know, unfortun you know that
• 1:46:00
  should have ended that should have interrational world that should have ended without enormous proof,
• 1:46:08
  all of these alleged race hate crimes being reported blindly by the news media
• 1:46:14
  that should have forever ended it, but it did not, and continually the
• 1:46:18
  news media still reports on these absurd stories of alleged race hate crimes or you
• 1:46:27
  know, situations where there's an allegation of racism. I remember there was a
• 1:46:30
  speaking of a news There was a news found a couple of years ago at
• 1:46:35
  the Obama construction site in Chicago. Speaking of Chicago. No one was ever
• 1:46:41
  found to have done anything that created it made no sense. I'm sure it
• 1:46:45
  was just a freaking news at a construction site. And you know, the
• 1:46:49
  media dutifully reported that at the beginning, but never reported that g even with
• 1:46:55
  all these people around and shirly cameras around, no one ever came up with
• 1:46:59
  any evidence that there was actually a hate crime and that that construction site got
• 1:47:03
  shut down people had to go to sensitivity training or because there was a rope
• 1:47:10
  with a with a hole at the end of it at a construction site.
• 1:47:14
  Imagine same thing with the whole NASCAR controversy with Bubba Wallace, and you know
• 1:47:20
  that whole new situation. I mean so most almost all of these things turned
• 1:47:26
  out to be false. And so she told this story that it wasn't as
• 1:47:32
  dramatic as Jesse small at but she claimed to be a victim of racism while
• 1:47:38
  trying to enter the US Congress with no evidence, no names, no time,
• 1:47:45
  no no evidence that she tried to create accountability or made a formal complaint
• 1:47:49
  or identified who this person, this racist, horrible white guy was. You
• 1:47:55
  know, Caitlyn Collins just sits there and just accepts all this as as gospel
• 1:48:00
  and no follow up questions. But in this clip went viral online. But
• 1:48:04
  when you listen to this, come for for what seems like a fake Justi
• 1:48:11
  Smalllett's story, But stay for how Congress when Barbara Lee completely changes the definition
• 1:48:17
  of equity at the end of this clip, which to me is the most
• 1:48:23
  significant part of this whole fiasco. These are not little kinks. First of
• 1:48:28
  all, racism, institutional racism is in the DNA of this country. When
• 1:48:33
  you look at what has taken place, look at our Native Americans, the
• 1:48:38
  genocide of Native Americans, when you look at what is taking place as it
• 1:48:41
  relates to African Americans. The two hundred and fifty years plus of enslaving African
• 1:48:45
  Americans, and then you look at the disparities now in our community in terms
• 1:48:50
  of health care, unemployment, the wealth gap housing. You can't tell me
• 1:48:56
  that systemic racism does not exist. It's not just a little kink. You
• 1:49:00
  have personal racism, which is hard to address. But I'll give you one
• 1:49:03
  little story that shows you why we need to understand that. I don't think
• 1:49:08
  she really understands racism. I was walking from the house building on Capitol Hill
• 1:49:13
  to the Capitol and a man, a white guy, stopped me and told
• 1:49:16
  me I could not get into the members elevator and you know, we have
• 1:49:19
  pens and I was going to vote, and he blocked me from getting into
• 1:49:24
  the elevator and told me I was not a member of Congress and it was
• 1:49:27
  from members only. I said, sir, I'm a member of Congress.
• 1:49:30
  And I showed him my pen and he said, who's pen did you steal?
• 1:49:32
  Now, this is an example of what personal racism is and how people
• 1:49:38
  of color constantly have to deal with this each and every day. But systemic
• 1:49:43
  racism is in the policies of this country. And just look at what they're
• 1:49:45
  trying to do in terms of eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion. They're
• 1:49:49
  trying to not allow for an equal and level playing field, and so it's
• 1:49:56
  a very dangerous position that she has. She's clueless. Well, that's a
• 1:50:00
  shame, and I'm sorry that you had to deal with that. Congressman,
• 1:50:03
  thank you for sharing that with us and things. Now, I don't believe
• 1:50:08
  Lee's story. Is it possible that something happened. Sure, I mean one
• 1:50:14
  of the many, many, many horrific elements of how the racial situation in
• 1:50:20
  this country has been broken is that now any indignity, real or perceived,
• 1:50:27
  that is suffered by a black person is automatically blamed on race. Sometimes misunderstandings
• 1:50:35
  happen, sometimes people are rude, has nothing to do with race. I
• 1:50:42
  mean, who knows. There's all sorts of possibilities here. You know,
• 1:50:45
  it could be greatly exaggerated. She could have made it up. That's possible
• 1:50:47
  too. Maybe she was dressed poorly at the time and that's why the person
• 1:50:55
  didn't think that she was a longtime member of Congress. Who knows. But
• 1:51:00
  if to take this story seriously, you would need a lot more information,
• 1:51:03
  which, of course Kitlyn Collins was not interested in finding out about a black
• 1:51:09
  congresswoman is allowed to just make this allegation as nonsensical as it is with no
• 1:51:14
  evidence, and people just go, oh wow, wow, what a horrible
• 1:51:16
  country we live in, all this systemic racism that even a black member of
• 1:51:19
  Congress still suffers. I don't buy any of that, and frankly, there
• 1:51:25
  ought to be an investigation into the story. It reminded me a lot,
• 1:51:29
  by the way of what Tiger Woods said at his Hall of Fame induction speech.
• 1:51:34
  And I'm a huge Tiger Woods fan, huge huge speaking of sports Illustrated.
• 1:51:40
  Sports Illustrated once named my Tiger Woods website, which no longer exists,
• 1:51:46
  as one of the three best things ever written about Tiger Woods. That's a
• 1:51:50
  true story. I mean, Tiger Woods has played a huge role in my
• 1:51:55
  life. But I will never forgive him for what he said at his Hall
• 1:52:00
  of Fame speech, which is he claimed that he was not allowed in clubhouses
• 1:52:06
  as a kid here in southern California when he was playing in junior golf tournaments
• 1:52:13
  because of the color of his skin. That is just complete bullshit, complete
• 1:52:18
  bullshit. The best the best spin I can put on what Tiger said there,
• 1:52:25
  and what happened for him to even tell that story is that junior golf
• 1:52:30
  tournaments are played when they are played at private golf courses, are played on
• 1:52:38
  Mondays. Everybody knows this, and everybody knows that on Mondays at private golf
• 1:52:45
  courses, they'll let you play on the course. But the clubhouse is closed
• 1:52:53
  to everybody, white, Black, Asian, whatever, especially if you're not
• 1:52:58
  a member of the club. The clubhouse is closed. Now. At best,
• 1:53:03
  Tiger had a figment of a memory of wanting to go into the clubhouse
• 1:53:09
  for whatever reason and was told he couldn't, and in retrospect decided, Aha,
• 1:53:14
  there's my civil rights moment. By the way, Tiger also made up
• 1:53:18
  a story about being tied to a tree in kindergarten, which is kindergarten teacher
• 1:53:25
  vehemently denies ever having happened in Orange County, California. But this one's worse
• 1:53:31
  because it happens a little bit later on, and it got a much more
• 1:53:34
  prominent forum at his Hall of Fame speech. The real proof that that didn't
• 1:53:41
  happen with Tiger is if it had had occurred, if anything close to that
• 1:53:45
  had happened, and Tiger was prevented from going into the clubhouses because of his
• 1:53:53
  skin color. By the way, as a celebrity, I mean, Tiger
• 1:53:56
  was a celebrity at two years old because he had been on The Glass Show
• 1:54:00
  with Jimmy Stewart and Bob Hope and been on That's Incredible with fran Tarkington.
• 1:54:05
  I mean, the idea that people didn't know who Tiger Woods was is just
• 1:54:12
  completely absurd. But if anything like that had occurred, his father, Earl,
• 1:54:17
  who was, you know, more than willing to complain, more than
• 1:54:21
  willing to have his voice heard, was you know, an activist on racial
• 1:54:27
  issues, would have been screaming bloody murder. Especially once Tiger became famous.
• 1:54:32
  Earl would have been telling everybody that would listen about the times that Tiger wasn't
• 1:54:38
  allowed to go into clubhouses because of the color of his skin. None of
• 1:54:42
  that happened. And by the way, there's even there's literally video, literally
• 1:54:45
  video voiced by NBC's Mike Tarika, who was black about us at a match
• 1:54:50
  in southern California where Tiger was like six years old playing against you know,
• 1:54:57
  a very good female golfer. The whole country club was out watching and Tarico
• 1:55:02
  literally says that after the match they brought Tiger into the clubhouse to eat birthday
• 1:55:08
  cake because he was a celebrity anyway. So these are the types of things
• 1:55:14
  now that in retrospect gets seen as Aha, it's racism, evidence that we
• 1:55:20
  are in a systemically racist society, and it's all bullshit. But I'm most
• 1:55:25
  offended by what Barbara Lee did at the end there because I have talked many,
• 1:55:30
  many times about the end of America comes with changing equality to equity,
• 1:55:38
  equality of opportunity to equity of outcome, and how I have been consistent in
• 1:55:44
  saying the Left is insidiously changing what we were about from equality to equity.
• 1:55:51
  But here Barbara Lee goes one step further, one step further. She doesn't
• 1:55:58
  just switch out, you know, out equality and insert equity. She changes
• 1:56:04
  the definition of equity to what actually is equality. She says, to level
• 1:56:13
  the playing field. I'm all fine, fine with the playing field being leveled,
• 1:56:18
  but that's not what equity is. Equity is manipulating the scoreboard. We
• 1:56:25
  want the outcome we want to get. That's what equity is all. Because
• 1:56:31
  they think you can't compete, or they can't compete or whatever, group they're
• 1:56:35
  they think they're defending or promoting, can't compete on a level playing field in
• 1:56:41
  a way where the score ends up tied at the end of the game,
• 1:56:44
  where everybody has exactly the same as everybody else, based upon what their percentage
• 1:56:48
  of the population, of course, other than straight white males who are supposed
• 1:56:53
  to get less now, especially if you're Mark Cuban. You know, if
• 1:56:56
  you're a straight white male, the idea that you should get it in close
• 1:56:59
  to what your percentage of the population is is ridiculous because we have to make
• 1:57:03
  up, I guess, for past racism in our society. So that was
• 1:57:06
  the part of the Barbara Lee statement which went super viral on the right that
• 1:57:13
  most people missed. That was the really dangerous part. The just smalllett element
• 1:57:17
  was bad, but the redefining of equity is really really dangerous. Now,
• 1:57:25
  there was a similar situation involving the New England Patriots who just got rid of
• 1:57:30
  Bill Belichick, who still doesn't have a job as of this taping. Now
• 1:57:33
  that the Cowboys and the Eagles look like they're not going to replace their current
• 1:57:36
  coaches despite flaming out in the playoffs, I am not optimistic about how things
• 1:57:41
  are going to work out for Bill Belichick. For instance, if he gets
• 1:57:45
  the Atlanta Falcons job, I think that's going to be a very bad move
• 1:57:48
  on his part. And I'd still love to see him decide to go retire
• 1:57:51
  as the head coach of Navy. As I said a couple episodes of the
• 1:57:55
  podcast ago, but this is really remarkable transpired here. So the Patriots get
• 1:58:01
  rid of Bill Belichick, six time Super Bowl champion, and they replace him
• 1:58:05
  with Gerard Mayo. Now Mayo was a good player, He's never had any
• 1:58:11
  head coaching experience. He's been an assistant coach, minor assistant, by the
• 1:58:15
  way, not even a coordinator, a minor assistant for five years. And
• 1:58:19
  now all of a sudden, he gets not just an NFL head coaching job,
• 1:58:24
  but you know, one of the most famous positions in all of professional
• 1:58:28
  sports, head football coach of the New England Patriots, hired by Robert Kraft,
• 1:58:33
  a guy who has been perceived at least has been somewhat conservative, along
• 1:58:39
  with Belichick and Tom Brady, who are very connected to Donald Trump. Now
• 1:58:45
  you know I have a connection to Robert Kraft because many many many years ago,
• 1:58:48
  back in nineteen eighty eight, he got me an awesome internship at a
• 1:58:54
  television station that he used to own in Boston WNV, which was then the
• 1:58:59
  CBS affiliate in Boston back in the glory days of local television, because he
• 1:59:03
  and my father had done some business at that time. So I have no
• 1:59:06
  animosity towards Robert Kraft, but this seems like a complete total virtue signaling sellout,
• 1:59:14
  not because Mayout is going to be a bad coach, but because of
• 1:59:18
  what Mayow says at his introductory press conference. I mean the audacity of this
• 1:59:26
  guy to get this job with no head coaching experience, taking over for a
• 1:59:31
  six time Super Bowl champion and immediately playing the race card and saying that I
• 1:59:42
  have to see race because then that's the only way you can see racism,
• 1:59:45
  and saying that there is systemic racism in our society and presumably in the National
• 1:59:53
  Football League, which is you know why, I guess we don't have enough
• 1:59:58
  blackhead football coaches despite this insane Rooney rule, which embarrasses black candidates on a
• 2:00:04
  yearly basis, because NFL teams have to be forced to do bogus interviews with
• 2:00:11
  people because of the skin of the color of their skin and then humiliate them
• 2:00:15
  by not actually hiring them because they're not actually qualified for the job. I
• 2:00:18
  mean, the whole thing is just it's really just the personification of liberalism and
• 2:00:25
  why it doesn't work and all the unintended bad consequences to when you try to
• 2:00:30
  create contrived equality or equity. And so Mayow makes this statement at his introductory
• 2:00:39
  press conference, which caused a lot of angst, especially on the right on
• 2:00:45
  social media. And here's what that sounded like. I do see color,
• 2:00:48
  because I believe if you don't see color, you can't see racism. And
• 2:00:53
  whatever happens black, white, disabled person. I've always even someone with disabilities,
• 2:00:59
  I always is you know, for the most part, people are like,
• 2:01:01
  you know, don't you know when they're young, they kind of make
• 2:01:03
  the spot hot. Younger people know what that means. But what I would
• 2:01:08
  say is like, no, I want you to be able to go up
• 2:01:11
  to those people, really understand those people. So it goes back to whatever
• 2:01:15
  it is, black, white, yellow, it really doesn't matter, but
• 2:01:18
  it does matter so we can try to fix the problem that we all know
• 2:01:21
  we have. Now, when I saw that, I thought, my god,
• 2:01:26
  the audacity of this guy who is. Let's face it, he's taking
• 2:01:32
  over. He's a black guy taking over for a white guy who won six
• 2:01:36
  Super Bowls. He basically got the job because a white guy who won six
• 2:01:42
  super Bowls got fired. And he's getting the job with no head coaching experience,
• 2:01:48
  no coordinator experience. Okay, fine, you want to give him a
• 2:01:53
  chance. Maybe he's fantastic. I never I don't know very much about the
• 2:01:56
  guy. He could be great. He may do fantastic in New England.
• 2:02:00
  I have no idea. But on from a paper standpoint, from a resume
• 2:02:04
  perspective, can you imagine if this was reversed, If this was reversed,
• 2:02:10
  can you imagine the uproar if a black sixth time super Bowl winning head coach
• 2:02:17
  had been fired by a white guy and replaced by a white guy with no
• 2:02:21
  head coaching experience and no coordinator experience. And then then that person, the
• 2:02:29
  white guy, starts to, you know, talk about how there is no
• 2:02:31
  you know, revers his whole thing, how there is no racism in the
• 2:02:35
  in the world. People would go bananas. The media would come down like
• 2:02:41
  a ton of bricks on him. Instead, except on the right, there's
• 2:02:46
  no outrage about this and to me, this was extremely tone death, but
• 2:02:53
  it shows the audacity and the level to which the brainwashing had been successful,
• 2:03:01
  where even a football player who takes over for Bill Belichick with no real experience
• 2:03:09
  can somehow still believe he's living in a world where blacks are systemically discriminated against.
• 2:03:16
  It's just insanity. And this is happening with an owner that is not
• 2:03:21
  known for this kind of stuff, Robert Kraft. It's absolutely amazing, But
• 2:03:27
  it's an indication of just how woke the National Football League has become. And
• 2:03:32
  I've been very, very critical of the National Football League on multiple levels,
• 2:03:36
  and most recently one of the things that I railed on the NFL about was
• 2:03:41
  how they handled the entire Buffalo Bills Pittsburgh Steelers playoff game where they postponed that
• 2:03:48
  game because of snow and Buffalo. Now, you could argue was that the
• 2:03:51
  right decision in the moment. Was it easier to play that game on Martin
• 2:03:57
  Luther King Day on a Monday? I fully agnowledge that the game itself was
• 2:04:01
  easier and probably a better football game with that extra day. I do believe
• 2:04:06
  that they could have played that game on Sunday. But one of the things
• 2:04:11
  that I said about that postponement, other than the fact that I hate cancelation
• 2:04:15
  Nation, and how these decisions at the highest levels filtered down to real life,
• 2:04:19
  where you know, even I'm sure that the threshold for canceling school has
• 2:04:27
  been lowered in part over time because of this whole mentality of if it only
• 2:04:31
  saves one life, it's worth doing, especially post COVID, where we've determined
• 2:04:36
  going to schools not that big of a deal, and you know, the
• 2:04:40
  nanny state is in full force, and so I don't like canceling things at
• 2:04:45
  all, especially things that used to be sacred, like NFL playoff games.
• 2:04:47
  But one of the things I said at the time is, you know,
• 2:04:51
  the NFL is creating a scheduling problem here, and had that game been pushed
• 2:04:56
  to Tuesday, which it could have been depending on how the webs went down
• 2:05:00
  in the ensuing time from the Saturday postponement to the you know, the playing
• 2:05:03
  of the game that late on Monday, was that they were creating a situation
• 2:05:08
  the NFL was that could have been an absolute joke. I mean, had
• 2:05:12
  the Steelers won that game, they would have been playing against the number one
• 2:05:16
  seeded Baltimore Ravens with a disparity in rest time that would have been utterly ridiculous
• 2:05:25
  and would have given the Steelers absolutely no chance in the next round of the
• 2:05:29
  playoffs, and so the Bills won the game. The game did not get
• 2:05:33
  pushed the Tuesday had been, which had been rumored that it might be,
• 2:05:39
  and so the Bills advanced. But they played against the Kansas City Chiefs,
• 2:05:42
  and they played against the Chiefs at home, but with two days less rest
• 2:05:48
  and preparation than the Chiefs had. Because the Chiefs had played on Saturday,
• 2:05:54
  the Bills game got moved to late on Monday, and so the Bills were
• 2:05:58
  playing at a significant disadvantage. Now, you know this happens during the regular
• 2:06:03
  season when teams are playing on Thursday night and then they play come back and
• 2:06:06
  play on a Sunday or you know, generally the league tries to avoid that.
• 2:06:12
  But for the playoffs it should be a completely different story. And because
• 2:06:16
  of the Postponeman, there is a two day difference in rest and preparation to
• 2:06:21
  the advantage of the Chiefs, and the Chiefs ended up winning by three points,
• 2:06:26
  the closest you can possibly come realistically in a game could have gone into
• 2:06:30
  overtime if the Bills hadn't missed a last minute field goal. And it's just
• 2:06:35
  amazing to me that nobody that I could see in the major NFL sports media
• 2:06:43
  even mentions that this may have been a major factor in the game. That
• 2:06:46
  when you have a playoff game that is decided by the smallest of margins,
• 2:06:51
  the idea that one team had two extra days to rest and prepare is a
• 2:06:57
  big stinking deal. But no one met it because why Well, because it
• 2:07:00
  will focus attention on the fact that the game got postponed and that there are
• 2:07:05
  repercussions for that. There are ramifications for that. I mean, liberals tend
• 2:07:11
  to look at everything in a vacuum and they don't think about the unintended consequences.
• 2:07:16
  And this is a situation where the Bills and the governor of New York
• 2:07:19
  and the NFL may have ended up being screwed by their own people because that
• 2:07:27
  extra day. You never know. No one knows for sure, but in
• 2:07:30
  a game that close, it ought to at least be talked about that,
• 2:07:34
  hey, you know, this is a potential factor in the game, and
• 2:07:39
  the Chiefs ended up winning. Now there's another element to the Chiefs winning and
• 2:07:43
  now being one game away from the Super Bowl, which I've discussed previously on
• 2:07:46
  this podcast, which is the NFL now has a massive conflict of interest heading
• 2:07:55
  into the AFC Championship game. Now I had predicted back when Taylor Swift and
• 2:08:00
  Travis Kelsey started dating. And by the way, can we finally acknowledge that
• 2:08:05
  this relationship is obviously, as I said, from the beginning, very real.
• 2:08:09
  I mean, yes, I'm sure it's being promoted for pr purposes for
• 2:08:15
  both of them, but it was very obvious to me and anybody with any
• 2:08:20
  common sense that this was not a fake relationship. Well, now it's clearly
• 2:08:24
  not a fake relationship. After you know, Kelsey scores a touchdown and puts
• 2:08:30
  his fingers into the heart sign towards the suite where Taylor Swift is watching the
• 2:08:35
  game. And by the way, look, I mean, I understand football
• 2:08:37
  fans are sick and tired of the whole Taylor Swift thing, and I think
• 2:08:41
  it's been overdone, But how could you not enjoy Travis's brother Jason Kelsey sitting
• 2:08:50
  behind Taylor Swift drinking a beer with his shirt off in twenty two degree weather
• 2:08:56
  in the suite there the Buffalo Bill Stadium. I mean, that was pretty
• 2:09:01
  freaking awesome. Regardless of your beliefs about Taylor Swift getting too much attention,
• 2:09:07
  but there's no question that the Taylor Swift Travis Kelsey relationship is real and now
• 2:09:16
  we have a and I predicted to the time that this was going to create
• 2:09:18
  momentum for the Chiefs to make the Super Bowl, not in a conspiratorial way,
• 2:09:24
  just because when everybody wants something, a lot like Trump winning the Republican
• 2:09:30
  nomination. If everybody wants something, if everyone's self interest is aligned the right
• 2:09:35
  wing media, the left wing media, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party,
• 2:09:39
  you know the list of all the people that I went through, all
• 2:09:41
  the entities I went to through earlier on in this episode. If everybody wants
• 2:09:46
  something, it tends to happen. Just like if everybody doesn't want something like
• 2:09:52
  the Santis to be the nominee, there's a good chance it's not gonna happen.
• 2:09:56
  Not in a conspiratorial way, but just in the way that humanity actually
• 2:10:01
  works. There's all sorts of different ways that this comes into action, not
• 2:10:07
  necessarily like oh, the refs are on the take, they're going to make
• 2:10:09
  sure that the Chiefs win because it's so good for the NFL to be riding
• 2:10:15
  this Taylor Swift mania. And a lot of what I'm talking about here doesn't
• 2:10:20
  really have to do with the reality of what happens. It's the perception,
• 2:10:28
  because perception. You know, perceptions really matter a lot. And you know
• 2:10:33
  there there used to be this thing called the appearance of a conflict of interest
• 2:10:39
  being as significant as a real conflict of interest. This is part of why
• 2:10:43
  I rail about Trump and live golf all the time. It's a massive conflict
• 2:10:48
  of interest that's probably even more real than what the NFL has with regard to
• 2:10:52
  Taylor Swift, because there's the direct payment of money from the Saudi royal family
• 2:10:58
  to Donald Trump and a disclosed clearly way way way above market value being paid
• 2:11:05
  to Donald Trump while he's running for president. But that's another story for another
• 2:11:09
  day. Here we have a situation where this weekend the Chiefs will be playing
• 2:11:15
  the Ravens, and the National Football League and the television networks, the sports
• 2:11:22
  media, I mean, everybody involved in this thing other than the Ravens has
• 2:11:26
  a massive self interest in the Chiefs winning this game. The Super Bowl this
• 2:11:31
  year is gonna be big no matter what the NFL has been doing. Baffo
• 2:11:35
  ratings. The Ravens are a decent story, especially with Jim Harball's brother potentially
• 2:11:43
  being going back to the Super Bowl. You gonna have both Harpball brothers winning
• 2:11:46
  Super Bowl winning championships in the same year, which is a great story.
• 2:11:50
  On the other side, you're either gonna have the forty nine Ers or the
• 2:11:54
  Cinderella Detroit Lions. That'll that'll be a good story in either direction. So
• 2:12:00
  it's not as if the Super Bowl is going to be a bad super Bowl
• 2:12:03
  this year. However, there is no argument that if the Chiefs go to
• 2:12:09
  the Super Bowl, the audience for that Super Bowl, because of Taylor Swift,
• 2:12:16
  is going to be the largest in modern history and maybe have the largest
• 2:12:20
  number of people watching in the history of the event. You won't probably have
• 2:12:26
  the highest rating because audience, you know, because obviously population has increased over
• 2:12:31
  time and rating is a percentage of all the televisions. But as far as
• 2:12:37
  the absolute number of people watching, I think you can make a strong argument
• 2:12:43
  that a Tailor Swift Super Bowl will have the largest number of people watching in
• 2:12:48
  the history of the Super Bowl and probably the history of television, and there's
• 2:12:54
  all sorts of monument moneymaking opportunities surrounding a two weeks a preparation for a Tailor
• 2:13:01
  Swift Kansas City Chief Super Bowl. Now does that mean the Chiefs are gonna
• 2:13:07
  win? No, But that's a problem when a you know, because you're
• 2:13:11
  really getting close to pro wrestling situations where you know the you know. And
• 2:13:18
  it's funny to me that the NFL even has commercials joking about the script that
• 2:13:26
  exists for their season. That's because some former player claimed that there's an actual
• 2:13:30
  script, which of course there's not a script. It's ridiculous they even think
• 2:13:33
  that there could be a script for something like this. But the NFL embraces
• 2:13:37
  this joke that there's a script for what's going to happen. Well, having
• 2:13:43
  a tailor Swift Super Bowl that happens to jive with everybody's financial self interest in
• 2:13:50
  a dramatic fashion. You know, that's taking the script to a new level.
• 2:13:56
  And I think you're in a very dangerous territory. So what happens if
• 2:14:01
  it's a close game and there's a call that goes the Chief's way, what's
• 2:14:05
  gonna happen that is. I mean, we're talking about the NFL has this
• 2:14:11
  thing called protect the Shield. Protect the Shield, you know, that's what
• 2:14:16
  they're all about, protect the reputation of the league at all costs. Well,
• 2:14:20
  if something like that happens, there's gonna be a lot of people who
• 2:14:26
  are going to start to think the NFL is rigged or staged or whatever.
• 2:14:31
  And I'm not in any way, shape or form suggesting that it is.
• 2:14:33
  I'm talking about the dangerous situation that exists this weekend because of perception. And
• 2:14:41
  frankly, you know, if you're the NFL and you're not worried about your
• 2:14:43
  economic situation, which of course everyone everyone wants more money, you know,
• 2:14:50
  if you just want to get out of this with your reputation intact, you
• 2:14:52
  probably want the Ravens to win in a blowout. So there's no question about
• 2:14:56
  what really happened. But I don't anticipate that happening. I think it'll probably
• 2:15:01
  be a close game. And this is something to keep an eye out on
• 2:15:03
  because in my recollection, I can never remember a situation where it's more obvious
• 2:15:09
  that almost everybody involved has their financial self interest based in one particular team making
• 2:15:18
  the Super Bowl, and it's all because of the power of Taylor Swift.
• 2:15:22
  Now interestingly talk about the script. Interestingly, another character that we've talked a
• 2:15:28
  lot about on this podcast played a role in this Bill's Chiefs game, and
• 2:15:33
  that is that, bizarrely, at a critical moment late in the game,
• 2:15:37
  the Bills ran a fake punt, and who do they give the ball to?
• 2:15:43
  Damar Hamlin. Damar Hamlin, the guy who little more than a year
• 2:15:48
  ago died on the field on during a Monday night football game because of a
• 2:15:52
  cardiac arrest, a cardiac arrest that has never been even remotely investigated and for
• 2:15:58
  which we still do not have a remotely logical explanation, despite the claims of
• 2:16:03
  Commodio Cordis, which, as I've stated many times and I think proven many
• 2:16:07
  times, makes absolutely positively no sense whatsoever. Hamlin did not close it did
• 2:16:13
  not come close to making the first down on the fake punt. It was
• 2:16:18
  a very strange decision on a number of levels. But the Bills end up
• 2:16:24
  losing the game, ending their season. Would not surprise me if that's the
• 2:16:28
  end of DeMar Hamlin's career, because he was barely on the team this year
• 2:16:33
  and he was kind of almost a mascot figure because of all of the understandable
• 2:16:41
  publicity and sympathy surrounding what happened to him. But to me, from a
• 2:16:46
  journalistic standpoint, what I have always been most interested in and outraged about is
• 2:16:52
  that we can't even get any kind of a sensible explanation for what happened with
• 2:16:58
  Hamlin and his cardiac rest and I don't think we ever will. And my
• 2:17:03
  instincts tell me that because there's been such a horrendous job, like a purposely
• 2:17:09
  horrendous job, when it comes to covering the Hamlin story, and because of
• 2:17:13
  that incredibly suspicious, almost comically suspicious interview that Hamlin did surrounding last year's Super
• 2:17:20
  Bowl with Michael Strahan where he said he didn't want to get into what caused
• 2:17:24
  this and was very very cryptic about it, and then a few months later
• 2:17:28
  suddenly said, oh, yeah, it was Commodi of cords, which no
• 2:17:31
  one logically believes is even possible. I've been forced to come to the conclusion
• 2:17:35
  that this must have something to do with the vaccines. That would be the
• 2:17:41
  only logical explanation. I'll never be able to prove that, but it's the
• 2:17:45
  only scenario that makes any sense to me. Well, in that context,
• 2:17:48
  there was a very strange tweet that was posted, and I've not been able
• 2:17:54
  to get to the bottom of what was really going on here, but I
• 2:17:58
  think there's enough to at least it regarding the coverage of Tamar Hamlin and what
• 2:18:05
  happened just over a year ago with that game between the Bengals and the Bills
• 2:18:11
  basically being canceled and never rescheduled, which played a huge role in how the
• 2:18:16
  playoffs were all set up, could have played an even bigger role if things
• 2:18:20
  had gone differently last year. And I was alerted to this on Twitter mainly
• 2:18:24
  because a former NFL Network reporter by the name of Jim Trotter confirmed this story.
• 2:18:33
  And so I'm not one percent sure what even make of this, but
• 2:18:39
  I want to at least mention it because it deals with the topic that I've
• 2:18:41
  discussed many times before, and Damar Hamlin's career may theoretically be over, and
• 2:18:46
  obviously he was part of the game between the Bills and the Chiefs. So
• 2:18:52
  here is what was reported. I reached out to Trotter, currently a national
• 2:18:58
  columnist at The Athletic, about his time at the NFL Network, and he
• 2:19:03
  told me, quote Van Nada at ESPN. It's Don van Ada, guy
• 2:19:09
  who I've become very, very familiar with because of his coverage of the Penn
• 2:19:13
  State Joe Paternal Jerryson Dusky case, and we talk extensively about him in our
• 2:19:16
  podcast. With the benefit of hindsight, Don Vanada was allowed to write the
• 2:19:22
  story about what really went down when the Damar Hamlin game was canceled. I
• 2:19:30
  was investigating the same story at the same time. Brian McCarthy, one of
• 2:19:35
  the leagues, the NFL's chief PR people, wanted me to drop the story
• 2:19:43
  and threaten to call my boss at the NFL network if I did not drop
• 2:19:48
  it. I told him I was okay with him calling my boss. Not
• 2:19:56
  even ten minutes later, I received a TECH from Todd Sperry, the head
• 2:20:03
  of the newsroom at the National Football League Network, the NFL network, telling
• 2:20:07
  me to quote stand down unquote. I texted back and said, quote,
• 2:20:15
  I thought our job as journalists was to pursue the truth. Has that changed?
• 2:20:24
  He then said I never received a response and he's no longer at the
• 2:20:30
  NFL network now. I tried to find out more context for what was going
• 2:20:35
  down there and was unsuccessful. My guess is that this doesn't have to do
• 2:20:41
  directly with the vaccine issue, that this has more to do with how the
• 2:20:46
  decision went down to one cancel the game and then never replay it, and
• 2:20:52
  how the NFL decided what to do with the playoff situation, which I think
• 2:20:56
  was significant, but not nearly as significant as theoretically if Hamlin had a cardiac
• 2:21:03
  arrest because of his use of the vaccine and then not basically got covered up.
• 2:21:07
  But I do think that it all kind of gets put into the same
• 2:21:13
  situation. It's all part of a combustible mix, but regardless of what was
• 2:21:20
  really going on, what was really being investigated. That is really a smoking
• 2:21:24
  gun for how broken sports journalism is journalism in general, and also these massive
• 2:21:33
  conflicts of interest where you have the NFL network. It's literally in the title
• 2:21:39
  of the network, where they have the authority to tell reporters to quote,
• 2:21:46
  stand down if they start going in a direction they don't like, and the
• 2:21:52
  people at their own network. By the way, for purposes of full disclosure,
• 2:22:00
  I've actually interviewed at the NFL network. It's a long story as to
• 2:22:03
  why I did that. It was several years ago. But you know,
• 2:22:07
  I had a connection to Paul Tagliab who was once the commissioner of the National
• 2:22:11
  Football League, because he went to school at Georgetown with my father. And
• 2:22:15
  you know, I never got a job offer, but I don't. I
• 2:22:16
  have no animus against the NFL network. But this is important because it goes
• 2:22:22
  to so much of what's happening in the corporate media today. Might be slightly
• 2:22:26
  exaggerated in this case because it's the NFL network, But here we have,
• 2:22:33
  you know, talk about, you know, the fox guarding the hen house.
• 2:22:37
  You have a situation where now we don't like that narrative, so stand
• 2:22:43
  down. And what's most troubling there is the reporter Trotter seemingly thought his bosses
• 2:22:50
  would back him up, but they didn't. The league guy immediately contacted Trotter's
• 2:22:58
  bow, and Trotter's boss immediately told him stand down. Didn't even bother to
• 2:23:03
  call him, didn't even bother to respond to, Hey, aren't we supposed
• 2:23:09
  to tell the truth as journalists. So they're not even pretending anymore. It's
• 2:23:15
  all a sham. It's all a game. And this is an important story.
• 2:23:20
  This is a story that had potentially huge implications by the way. I
• 2:23:24
  mean, you could argue, Let's pretend, let's pretend for a second that
• 2:23:30
  DeMar Hamlin had a cardiac arrest because of the the vaccines, not because of
• 2:23:33
  caffeine, because of the vaccines. Let's pretend that he had a cardiac orress
• 2:23:37
  because of the vaccines. Let's pretend that's real. I don't know that it's
• 2:23:41
  real. I suspect that it's real based upon the way this story has gone
• 2:23:43
  down. Let's pretend it's actually real and there was an actual cover up of
• 2:23:50
  that by the National Football League and by the media itself. You could argue,
• 2:23:56
  you could argue that actually had an impact small but an impact, or
• 2:24:01
  could have had an impact on the coming presidential election, given that Trump is
• 2:24:07
  mister vaccine and DeSantis was against it. If that narrative had been in the
• 2:24:13
  sas obviously against the mandates and now believes that the vaccine isn't even safe and
• 2:24:18
  effective anymore, and so if in theory, Hamlin's cardiac arrest and near death
• 2:24:26
  had been associated directly in the public consciousness with the vaccines, it could have
• 2:24:31
  significantly changed the narrative about the vaccines, and it could have theorically had an
• 2:24:37
  influence on the Republican nominating process. I don't think that's a stretch. So
• 2:24:43
  this is not an insignificant story. This was one of the biggest things that
• 2:24:46
  happened. I talked to the end of twenty twenty three that I believe this
• 2:24:50
  was the number one most viewed story on the New York Times, or it
• 2:24:56
  was one of the top ones. I can't remember. It was number one
• 2:24:58
  and number three, but was one of the top stories of the year at
• 2:25:03
  the New York Times. And we never got to the bottom of it.
• 2:25:07
  And this is part of why we never got to the bottom of it.
• 2:25:09
  Again, I don't know whether this had any actual influence over this part of
• 2:25:16
  the story, but we now have proved that there was a cover up of
• 2:25:20
  what really transpired, and that the League was extremely sensitive, over the top,
• 2:25:24
  sensitive about their own entities not going there. Stand down, and right
• 2:25:33
  there, folks, that's the death of journalism. You can't be more clear
• 2:25:37
  about that than you could possibly imagine. It's right there, as obvious as
• 2:25:43
  could possibly be in a way that is really significant and very very ominous for
• 2:25:48
  the future. Now, as far as the future of this podcast, we
• 2:25:50
  still have seven more episodes to go. In the next episode, we will
• 2:25:54
  be hopefully speaking with my still friend Steve Cortes about his flip from the Desandas
• 2:26:01
  campaign back to Donald Trump. That'll be interesting, and I'm sure we'll have
• 2:26:05
  a lot more else to talk about in light of the results of the New
• 2:26:09
  Hampshire primary. Until then, thanks so much for listening. My name is
• 2:26:11
  John Ziglair. This has been the death of journalism podcasts.