Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode One Hundred Sixteen: Seminole Moment, Seminal Moment

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Episode One Hundred Sixteen: Seminole Moment, Seminal Moment · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and sixteen of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 0:04
  My name is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show. The president
• 0:07
  of Harvard resigns, just as I told you that she would. The Tucker
• 0:11
  Carlston effect is proven to be helping Trump among Republicans. The college football Bowl
• 0:17
  games illustrate exactly what I've been warning about and it goes way beyond sports,
• 0:22
  and the sports media blows it yet again on a major NFL controversy. I'm
• 0:29
  known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man. I'm a digital advertising SEO and email
• 0:34
  marketing specialist that also happens to be a big fan of John Zigler and the
• 0:39
  Death of Journalism. Do you need help preaching your target audience? Let me
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  you tell your story. The website is the Dutch Digital marketing Man. Do
• 1:00
  if you want to grow your business, Peter can help. That's the Dutch
• 1:03
  Digital Marketingman dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. Happy
• 1:10
  New Year to you. Hope you had a good one. We did at
• 1:11
  the Zigler Household, where we spent the new year at the Rose Bowl Parade
• 1:19
  in Pasadena. Have some thoughts on the college football situation later on in this
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  podcast, but I want to begin with probably the major news that has broken
• 1:27
  out just after the start of the year, which involves the president of Harvard
• 1:33
  University now the former president, Claudine Gay, about whom we've been talking quite
• 1:38
  a bit in the last few episodes of the podcast. In fact, in
• 1:42
  our last episode of twenty twenty three, I predicted, although somewhat vaguely,
• 1:47
  that Clauding Gay would in fact resign as the president of Harvard, and she
• 1:52
  has done exactly that just after the new year, and she did so largely
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  because of increasing allegations of plagiarism against her from a wide variety of sources.
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  Although if you believe the left wing media, this is all a right wing
• 2:12
  conspiracy to get a black female removed from a position of prestige. Of course,
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  that's ridiculous, but that's the narrative that they're going to hold on to
• 2:22
  because that's what fits for them, because there's not many other options. Given
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  what a disaster this is for the entire issue of DEI diversity, equity,
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  and inclusion, which is exactly why Claudie and Gay got the job in the
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  first place. Just six months ago, she becomes the shortest tenured president in
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  the history of Harvard, and of course the left wing media is going to
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  get this exactly opposite of the truth. The truth is she botched her congressional
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  testimony about the issue of the Hamas versus Israel conflict and how students should be
• 2:59
  punished if call for genocide against Jewish people, and then that was exacerbated by
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  numerous allegations of plagiarism, which seem to be widespread. Now, look,
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  I'm as fair as they come. I'll defend anybody, even if I don't
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  like them. I will say that the allegations of plagiarism well, real and
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  significant, especially for someone in that position as the president of the most prestigious
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  university in America. They're not the worst allegations of plagiarism. It doesn't feel
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  as if she literally lifted thoughts and ideas. It seemed a bit more along
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  the realm of being sloppy. Now, this is not an area where I'm
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  an expert. I'm not someone who is steeped in this issue, but from
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  what I've read, it seems like the allegations are widespread, but that they
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  don't really reach the level of the worst kind of plagiarism, and the left
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  has been trying to hang on to that as well as a defense. However,
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  I don't think that's a legitimate defense given her position. This is Harvard
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  University. You don't get to be president of Harvard University when you have these
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  kinds of serious allegations against you, even if they're more technical than substantive,
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  unless, of course, you're a black female, and being a black female
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  is that the core of this entire issue. That's why she was hired,
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  that's why she survived the initial onslaught, and in my opinion, that's kind
• 4:28
  of why she ended up being forced to resign. Not in the way that
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  the left would like you to believe. The left would like you to believe
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  this was an attack on a black woman and that the right wing now has
• 4:39
  a scalp. No, the reason why she eventually was forced to resigne was
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  the story got too big and it was too embarrassing, not just to her,
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  not just to Harvard, but for the entire issue of DEI, which
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  is a sacred cow for the left, and so once that story got so
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  big that she became an embarrassment for diversity, equity, and inclusion. That's
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  why I predicted in the last episode of the podcast that she would be forced
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  to resign. But as I've stated already, the left wants you to believe
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  this is because of an attack on her race and gender. Natasha Alford of
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  The Grilloh from Harvard wrote, what happened to Claudine Gay is a playbook that
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  they will follow again and again, meaning the right wing, they will do
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  whatever it takes to undermine, humiliate, and unseat black people in positions of
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  power they don't want their unquote. In Gay's own resignation letter, she wrote
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  that it had been quote frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled
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  by racial animus. No. See, this is the most frustrating element of
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  the entire DEI issue, is that you can not only get your job because
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  of your race, your gender, your ethnicity, sexuality, whatever it is,
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  but then any attacks on you, even if they're substantive, are inherently
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  racist or sexist, or transphobic or whatever it is depending on your particular situation.
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  And the left buys into this narrative and Gay in her own resignation letter,
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  which some people indicated that had signs of plagiarism in it, I will
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  believe it or not, but that's actually a true story. Apparently she is
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  claiming racial animus was at the heart of all this. No, that's not
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  what's going on. It is not a right wing attack to bring forward substantive
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  allegations of plagiarism against an embattled president of Harvard University. If you're the left
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  wing media, that's the way they see it because that's the only narrative that
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  fits for them. That's a narrative that gets them off the hook for being
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  slow to report on this, and it also gets them off the hook on
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  a bigger issue, which is they don't want the entire topic and agenda of
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  DEI to be exposed for what it is, and this whole episode does exactly
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  that. So they have to blame the right wing. And yes, there
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  were conservative news outlets that promoted the plagiarism story, no question about that,
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  but that's only because the left wing was unwilling to do so. The mainstream
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  was unwilling to do so. Why Because Claudingay was a made woman within their
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  mafia. She was the first black president of Harvard's second female president of Harvard.
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  That's why she got the job. She was too big to fail until
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  the story got too big, it got too embarrassing, and she had to
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  go, and that's why she resigned. And I was reading the New York
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  Times review of this today, which was exactly as I've already described it,
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  the left wing mainstream media blaming this all on the right wing. And yet
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  then at the very end they mentioned, oh yeah, by the way,
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  the Washington Post had an article last month calling for her to resign. A
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  Columbia professor and a New York Times opinion writer also argued that the extent of
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  Gay's plagiarism, combined with their thin academic record for Harvard president, merited her
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  resignation. Brett Stevens, a New York Times columnist, wrote that Harvard's selection
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  of Gay in twenty twenty two represented higher educations pivot away from intellectual excellence in
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  favor of basically DEI. So these are three major people, none of whom
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  are hardcore conservatives. Brett Stevens isn't really a conservative of the Times calls him
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  that, all essentially calling for her resignation. So are they part of the
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  right wing plot? Two? Is the Washington Post of the New York Times
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  part of the right wing plot? No, this is intellectual gymnastics to try
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  to protect there agenda, to protect this whole issue of DEI, to protect
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  one of their own. So Clauding Gay, just as I told you,
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  is gonna be treated with kid gloves. She's gonna be able to create whatever
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  narrative she wants, She'll be taken care of. I'm sure she'll get another
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  if she once won another prime position at another university, or she'll stay at
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  Harvard as a professor or some esteem position. Whatever it is. The person
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  that replaces her, the interim person happens to be Jewish, but I don't
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  think is a coincidence. But the long term replacement for her is probably going
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  to be someone with at least as many DEI points, if not more.
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  That's probably the way this is gonna work. When liberalism fails, liberals do
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  what they double and triple down with more liberalism, more wokeism. She just
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  didn't have enough DEI points to survive. This. If she had been gay
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  instead of just being named gay, maybe she would have been able to survive
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  with enough DEI points or force field protection as I like to call it.
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  So I have no inside knowledge at all is who's going to eventually replace her,
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  But it's not going to be a straight white male. I can assure
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  you that they are not going to say, oh, well, you know
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  what, we failed on this whole DEI higher thing. We're never gonna do
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  that again. No, it's gonna be probably exactly the opposite. So that's
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  the Claudine Gay thing. It's another fake victory basically for the right. Yes,
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  at least there's some semblance of a line that's been drawn that these people
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  are not beyond reproach, that it's not impossible to get at them if they
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  do something wrong. They're not untouchable. So that's good. I'll acknowledge that.
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  But the bottom line is things at Harvard are not going to change.
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  They're probably going to double or triple down on the entire DEI issue to prove
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  to the rest of the liberal friends one that they haven't given up the cause
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  and that two, this was not them admitting defeat in any way, shape
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  or form, so Clauding Gay will be replaced with somebody who I'm sure is
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  just as left, just as woke, and probably has at least as many
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  DEI points as she did. Now the issue. There were many issues that
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  related to the Claudine Gay controversy. Obviously one of them dealt with Hamas versus
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  Israel, and Hamas versus Israel has suddenly created a bit of a feud in
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  the right wing media. I'm referring to Tucker Carlson going after Ben Shapiro over
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  his support for Israel against Hamas. And you know, I have talked a
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  lot in the last year or so about Tucker Carlson and how disappointed I am
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  in him, how much he has changed, what his new agenda might be,
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  whether or not he's trying to take over MAGA Inc. When Trump finally
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  fades from the stage or passes away, whatever may end up happening, I
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  really don't know for sure, but I do know that Tucker is no longer
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  a credible source of information for all sorts of different reasons, including all the
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  conspiracies that he latches onto nonsensically. But he has now gone after Ben Shapiro
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  directly over Shapiro's support for Israel. And I have to say this is another
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  baffling one from Tucker because of all the major right wing commentators, Tucker has
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  been the worst on this issue. He's been the least supportive of Israel,
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  the most seemingly sympathetic to Hamas. He seems to be anti war on all
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  fronts now, and I don't know how this one's going to turn out.
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  I don't know which side the right wing is likely to support more substantively.
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  I think most right wingers probably with Ben Shapiro. But Tucker now has so
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  much cash and so much appeal, especially among Trump's supporters, that he may
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  be able to sway people on this particular topic, which has significance not just
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  as a cat fight among right wing commentators, but potentially on what, for
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  instance, Trump's position on this is going to be. I mean, Trump
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  is obviously very malleable, especially when it comes to issues of war. His
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  support of Israel hasn't been all that fantastic. He actually went after Israel and
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  Netanyah who almost immediately after the attack, which baffled the hell out of me.
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  And so I think this as significance more than just a situation of reality
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  show. You two well known names in the right wing going after each other,
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  and I don't think it's good because I don't think Tucker is right on
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  the issue. I happen to be much more supportive of Israel than Tucker is.
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  And I certainly understand Ben Shapiro, who is Jewish, who has been
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  obviously understandably obsessed with this issue ever since the terrorist attack on Israel last year.
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  But there's another issue related to this, and that is Tucker Carlson's remarkable
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  influence over Republican opinion. Even as someone who has been fired in a situation
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  that should have discredited him from Fox News Channel, I will still to this
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  day believe that Tucker Carlson was rightly fired because he called effectively one of his
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  female bosses the C word and then wanted the world to know about this.
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  All this related to the Dominion's voting system's lawsuit. I told you that this
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  was the case before it became public. I was told very credibly immediately after
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  Carlson's firing that that was the root cause. I'm sure there were many other
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  reasons. Something that big happens that surprising. There's always going to be multiple
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  reasons, but that was at the core of it. Carlson, of course,
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  has enabled all of these conspiracy theories that people want to BELI leave as
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  far as why Carlson was fired, and this has helped him a great deal
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  in the right wing because he's become a martyr and because the right wing is
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  all about conspiracies now, and you can basically create whatever conspiracy you want to
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  justify or explain why Carlson was really fired from Fox News Channel. And I
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  have stated many times that Carlson has been the MVP of the Donald Trump twenty
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  twenty four Republican nominating Process campaign. And there's a poll out that further justifies
• 15:33
  my belief that Tucker Carlson is the MVP of the Trump campaign. This comes
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  from the Washington Post University of Maryland poll and it deals with Republican opinions on
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  January sixth, the so called insurrection. And this is something we discussed early
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  on in twenty twenty three, where Tucker Carlson went to Great Lens, using
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  the videotapes given to him by then Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, to
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  try to remake the narrative about January sixth. Now, to be clear,
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  I have a very nuanced view of January sixth. I thought it was horrible
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  at the time. It was embarrassing, it was wrong. Trump is partly
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  responsible for this. There were people there who acted very irresponsibly. It was
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  a stain on our democracy. The whole thing was wrong. What happened with
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  Mike Pence was incomprehensible in America. All those things are true. However,
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  the left way over played their hand. The media did, the Democrats did,
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  made this way worse than it actually was. The issue that really riles
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  me is how the media is handled the deaths related to January sixth. Nobody
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  was killed on January sixth by a rioter or a Trump supporter. The only
• 16:48
  person that was murdered that day was a Trump supporter, a female, Ashley
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  BABBITTT, who was killed by a black police officer, under circumstance that seem
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  inexplicable. And if they were reversed, and if Babbitt was a left wing
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  protester, every American would know her name and she would be a mega martyr
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  and the media would embrace her. In fact, instead, it's exactly the
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  opposite. No police officers were killed that day. There were multiple police officers
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  who died under weird circumstances in the days afterwards, but nobody was directly killed
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  that day. The media and the Democrats have never been straight about this,
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  So that's my basic opinion about this. I also think that while the indictments
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  against Trump related to January sixth, some of them are legitimate and should be
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  adjudicated. I do believe in large part this is mostly politically motivated, and
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  the timing most importantly of the charges against him are clearly politically motivated and motivated
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  and potentially discrediting, because there's no reason, in my opinion, why these
• 17:57
  charges could not have been brought up the beginning of twenty twenty two instead of
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  the middle of twenty twenty three, where they were obviously always going to be
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  much more political, with a presidential election around the corner, and Trump already
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  having been announced as not just a candidate but clearly, based upon the polls,
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  a favorite and end up being the favorite for the Republican nomination in twenty
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  twenty four. So back to this Washington Post poll and the Tucker Carlson effect,
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  the Post rights Republicans are showing increased loyalty to former President Trump as the
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  campaigns for reelection and fights criminal charges over his attempt to stay in power after
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  losing in twenty twenty. They are now less likely to believe that January sixth
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  participants were quote mostly violent, less likely to believe Trump bears responsibility for the
• 18:48
  attack, and are slightly less likely to view Joe Biden's election as legitimate than
• 18:56
  they were in December of twenty twenty one. The Washington Post University of Maryland
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  survey found slightly fewer Republicans today, just thirty one percent say that Biden's election
• 19:08
  was legitimate, compared with twenty twenty one, when thirty nine percent said it
• 19:15
  was legitimate. More than one third of Americans, or thirty six percent,
• 19:19
  do not accept Biden's victory as legitimate, which is amazing. Thirty six percent
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  of Americans do not accept Biden's victory as legitimate. I do believe it was
• 19:32
  legitimate. I believe the rules that were created during twenty twenty due to the
• 19:36
  COVID panic were ridiculous and absurd and unfair, and frankly, part of that
• 19:41
  is on Trump for allowing that to happen, but under the rules as they
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  existed in twenty twenty. I do believe that Biden's victory was indeed legitimate.
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  Back to the Post article on the poll, more than seven to ten Republicans
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  say that too much is being made of the attack and that it is quote
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  time to move on now. I actually may agree with that statement. Fewer
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  than two to ten. Just eighteen percent of Republicans say that January sixth protesters
• 20:11
  were mostly violent, dipping from twenty six percent in twenty twenty one. Currently,
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  seventy seven percent of Democrats and fifty four percent of independence say the protesters
• 20:22
  were mostly violent, which is not changed from twenty twenty one. So it's
• 20:26
  changed among Republicans. Why well, largely because of Tucker Carlson and others in
• 20:33
  the right wing media following his lead. Back to the Post, Republicans today
• 20:37
  also feel more defense of Trump than they did in twenty twenty one. Two
• 20:42
  years ago, sixty percent of Americans overall said Trump bears a great deal or
• 20:48
  good amount of responsibility for the attack. Now fifty three percent due that's down
• 20:55
  seven percent some percentage points. Again, Republicans are driving that change. Fourteen
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  percent of Republicans assign him a great or good amount of culpability about half as
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  many as did in twenty twenty one, which was twenty seven percent. There
• 21:11
  you go, that's the key stat in all of this. Basically, only
• 21:17
  half as many Republicans blame Trump for what happened on January sixth then did in
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  twenty twenty one, and there's a direct correlation between that and why Trump is
• 21:30
  clearly going to be the Republican nominee and may end up blowing the doors off
• 21:36
  of his opponents in both Iowa and New Hampshire and never be seriously threatened.
• 21:41
  A fifty six percent majority of Americans say Trump is probably guilty of a criminal
• 21:45
  conspiracy to overturn the twenty twenty election results through false claims of voter fraud,
• 21:51
  including forty percent who believe he is definitely guilty. So talk about a divided
• 21:56
  country. We've got thirty six percent who do not accept Biden's victory as legitimate
• 22:02
  and forty percent who believe that his most likely opponent is definitely guilty of a
• 22:10
  criminal conspiracy to overturn the twenty twenty election. My god, we're so screwed.
• 22:17
  Republicans are less united than Democrats nearly nine and ten Democrats believe Trump is
• 22:21
  guilty, while nearly seven and ten Republicans think he is innocent. Among independence,
• 22:26
  nearly twice as many think Trump is guilty as think he is innocent.
• 22:30
  Now, that's another important point. So we're led to believe that by the
• 22:36
  posters that Trump has a very good chance of beating Biden in twenty twenty four,
• 22:41
  largely on the back of independent voters not liking Biden right and seemingly being
• 22:48
  warmer towards Trump than they are Biden. Yet among independents, they're nearly twice
• 22:53
  as likely to think Trump is guilty than to think he is innocent. And
• 22:57
  that's before he actually faces a trial on that or any of the other indictments
• 23:04
  against him. That does not bode well for Trump in a twenty twenty four
• 23:10
  general election. Now, as far as the state of that race, I've
• 23:14
  said many many times Trump is going to be the nominee. I called the
• 23:18
  race officially in September of last year. It has gone exactly as I anticipated
• 23:23
  in virtually every way, only possibly even worse than I feared. We are
• 23:29
  now just a couple of weeks away from, in fact, just less than
• 23:32
  that from the Iowa caucuses, which is the last and only real hope for
• 23:37
  the DeSantis campaign, although I don't think it's a real hope at this point,
• 23:41
  at least not to win the Iowa caucuses. There is one more debate
• 23:45
  that is scheduled. It's a CNN debate, and this is going to be,
• 23:49
  I guess I'll say interesting. It could also end up being very irrelevant
• 23:55
  because it appears as if it's only going to have Ron de Sandis and Nikki
• 23:59
  Haley. Surprise, surprise, Stop me if you've heard this before, but
• 24:02
  Donald Trump, just as I have predicted for almost a year, is not
• 24:07
  going to be at this debate. Instead, he and Fox News Channel.
• 24:11
  Remember when Fox News Channel was going to be moving away from Trump. Well,
• 24:15
  now Fox News Channel, as we begin twenty twenty four, is going
• 24:18
  to be hosting a counter programming event with Donald Trump, a Trump town Hall,
• 24:26
  to directly counter program the CNN debate, which is only apparently going to
• 24:30
  have Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley because the fake Obama Swamy has been declared ineligible
• 24:38
  because he doesn't have good and upholling numbers, which I'm not sure I agree
• 24:42
  with Obama Swamy was on Twitter the other day just railing on CNN for many
• 24:49
  reasons, some of them somewhat legitimate, some of them made up, but
• 24:53
  basically, you know, claiming that this is a conspiracy against him to keep
• 24:56
  him off of the CNN stage. And it does not appear as if Chris
• 25:00
  Christy will be there either. This is an Iowa debate, and I think
• 25:06
  that they're basing most of this on support in Iowa or Christy has basically no
• 25:11
  support. Christy would probably qualify for the New Hampshire debate, which is tentatively
• 25:18
  scheduled to come between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. But a
• 25:25
  debate between Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, well maybe interesting from an intellectual standpoint,
• 25:30
  is going to be irrelevant to the race. I mean, there may
• 25:34
  be some voters that are deciding between DeSantis and Haley in Iowa, I guess.
• 25:42
  But to me, I think one of the great misconceptions of this entire
• 25:48
  race, and I even was a bit slow to come to this realization,
• 25:52
  is that DeSantis and Haley are not even trying to appeal to the same pool
• 25:59
  of voter I go back to my forty forty twenty theory of the Republican Party
• 26:03
  right now. These numbers are different slightly state to state. They might be
• 26:07
  a little bit different in Iowa, especially when it comes to those that might
• 26:11
  show up for a caucus. But basically, forty percent of the party are
• 26:15
  Trump cult members, forty percent are people who like Trump and are open to
• 26:19
  voting for him again, twenty percent are never Trumpers. Well, the big
• 26:25
  problem of many for the de Santas campaign is that they didn't pick a lane.
• 26:30
  They tried to bridge a divide that probably can't be bridged, and that
• 26:36
  forty percent in the middle has almost all decided to come home to Donald Trump.
• 26:41
  Meanwhile, because the Santas completely gave up the anti Trump lane and because
• 26:48
  Christy is also taking up space there, that's left that for Haley. So
• 26:55
  Haley and Christy are basically fighting over that twenty percent, which they basically it
• 27:00
  puts a lid on our ceiling on what Haley can do. Yes, Haley,
• 27:06
  as I've been predicting for months, is probably gonna end up in second
• 27:08
  place. And all this not necessarily in Iowa, but I'm talking about in
• 27:12
  the primaries in general. When all is said and done, she'll be perceived
• 27:17
  as coming in second place. But that's not an indication that she ever had
• 27:21
  a chance to win because she's not even trying to appeal to at least seventy
• 27:26
  to eighty percent of the Republican vote. She's basically isolated in this anti Trump
• 27:34
  bubble, which is weird since she was Trump's un ambassador. I think she
• 27:38
  thinks or thought that that would give her at least some cachet among Trump supporters,
• 27:44
  but it doesn't. But because DeSantis has faded as the chief challenger to
• 27:51
  Trump or a legitimate challenger to Trump, he's lost any quote unquote never Trump
• 27:56
  support, and those people have been looking for an other option, and Haley's
• 28:00
  the only one still standing unless you're going to go with Chris Christi. And
• 28:04
  so that gets me back to this CNN debate. I don't really see what
• 28:08
  the point is. They're not even really going for the same voters, and
• 28:15
  that could actually make for a more compelling debate because they're probably going to go
• 28:19
  after each other in a pretty significant way, not because they're trying to convince
• 28:26
  or persuade any voters that are actually watching CNN that will be going to the
• 28:30
  Iowa Caucasus. I mean a number of people watching CNN who will be going
• 28:33
  to the Iowa Caucasus is probably very very small, but they're really posturing for
• 28:40
  other people, for other voting blocks. It's not people that are going to
• 28:44
  be deciding between Haley and DeSantis, because those people don't really exist. But
• 28:49
  we've got this very very strange and incredibly fractured and very broken situation where Haley
• 28:56
  and DeSantis are going to apparently be debate on CNN next week, and we've
• 29:02
  got Trump doing accounter programming on Fox News Channel, afraid the debate, just
• 29:07
  as I told you he would be afraid from the very beginning of the polling
• 29:11
  data matter, because that would give him the leverage to bail out of these
• 29:15
  debates and make him untouchable and then make everybody else that did debate look small
• 29:19
  in comparison to him. That's gone exactly as I told you that it would.
• 29:25
  You got the fake Obama Swamy claiming conspiracy and he's not allowed on the
• 29:30
  stage, and Christy not getting enough support either, and probably then looking ahead
• 29:34
  to New Hampshire's This is not a productive or healthy situation for the Republican Party
• 29:41
  at all, And of course it's all good for Donald Trump. Everything always
• 29:45
  turns out very very well for Donald Trump, and I'm sure this situation will
• 29:49
  as well. And I'm quite confident that, as I have been predicting for
• 29:56
  months and months now, this is all going to turn out very very bad.
• 30:00
  If you're someone like me who just wants some sanity restored and you want
• 30:06
  Joe Biden to be prevented from being re elected, so you can at point
• 30:10
  Kamala Harris as president in January twenty twenty seven, and she can then serve
• 30:15
  two more terms after that. That's my goal here, and unfortunately, it
• 30:19
  looks like we're not going to be able to achieve that goal because we just
• 30:22
  can't have nice things because this is Trump's world and we're just living in it
• 30:27
  now. I've talked a lot over the last year about why I knew this
• 30:32
  was going to be the case and why I was so frustrated by it,
• 30:36
  and one of the major reasons is I understand the conservative media about as well
• 30:40
  as anybody. I know. These people. I've been in every aspect of
• 30:42
  it I've lived in. I understand it, and I was fascinated that there
• 30:48
  was a tweet by among other among of all people, David Limbaugh. This
• 30:52
  was a few days ago. This was actually on January first. David Limbaugh,
• 30:57
  the brother of the late and mostly great Rush Limbaugh, who I once
• 31:03
  greatly admired and had some contact with, significant contact with only via email.
• 31:10
  We used to email each other quite a bit, and even gave him golf
• 31:12
  lessons via email. I did for Rush Limbaugh, and he talked about me
• 31:15
  on his radio show on numerous occasions, often very positively. And I was
• 31:22
  very much benefited by Rush talking on his radio show about me and specifically my
• 31:26
  documentary Media Malpractice How Obama got elected about the two thousand and eight election.
• 31:30
  But David Limbaugh, of all people, tweeted the following, maybe a big
• 31:36
  reason we can't come together on the right is that too many of the thought
• 31:41
  leaders, hosts, podcasters, and other influencers are just outright ego maniacal narcissists,
• 31:51
  concerned more about self promotion than our beloved country. It makes me sick.
• 32:00
  I read that. I was like, Okay, that's dead on,
• 32:04
  but holy irony, Batman. Coming from the brother of Russia Imba, who
• 32:08
  was about as much of an egomaniac as you could possibly imagine, and he
• 32:14
  was a narcissist. You know, very very very talented, one of the
• 32:19
  most insecure people that I've ever had contact with. And I know people who
• 32:22
  knew Rush very very well, and they concur in this position that he was
• 32:29
  unbelievably insecure. I remember just one situation in particular where and it was my
• 32:36
  movie had come out, and I'm trying to remember the exact details, but
• 32:40
  the essence of the story was that I think I had made Rush aware of
• 32:47
  something that was happening with the movie, and Rush responded with a question about
• 32:54
  something I had said that he interpreted as a knock on him, and to
• 33:02
  my recollection, it was more of a knock on talk radio in general.
• 33:07
  I think I was even in my mind referring to the afternoon hosts on my
• 33:13
  radio station KFI and Los Angeles, then my former radio station KFI and Los
• 33:17
  Angeles, the afternoon hosts, John and Ken. One of them doesn't even
• 33:22
  do radio anymore, because I've always felt that they were a bunch of frauds,
• 33:27
  and they had a lot to do with why I left KFI in Los
• 33:30
  Angeles. But somehow Rush got the idea that had gotten back to him,
• 33:36
  and I think he thought of himself. This goes to the egomaniac part of
• 33:40
  him. I think he thought of himself as quote unquote talk radios. Anyone
• 33:45
  who was criticizing talk radio was inherently criticizing Rush Limbaugh. So here's the really
• 33:52
  interesting part of the story, of the most important part. So I immediately
• 33:57
  respond, I said, Rush, that that's not what happened. I wasn't
• 34:01
  talking about you. I think I probably said I was talking about John and
• 34:04
  Can. And then, because I knew how insecure he was, I threw
• 34:09
  in a gratuitous, very unzigler like compliment to Rush about how great he is.
• 34:15
  I don't remember exactly what I wrote, but I remember saying, Okay,
• 34:20
  I'm gonna I'm gonna eat the shit sandwich here. I'm gonna compliment Rush
• 34:24
  because you know, he clearly needs massaging on this to make sure that this
• 34:30
  doesn't become an issue between him and me. So I compliment him, Rush,
• 34:34
  you know you're the greatest. I would never do that, blah blah
• 34:37
  blah. Whatever I wrote, I shit, you not within in my recollection
• 34:43
  ten or fifteen minutes he's on the air talking about me in my movie.
• 34:47
  That's how insecure he is. That's how much much like Trump, how much
• 34:52
  a compliment was an easy tool of manipulation with Rush Limbaugh. Now, you
• 35:00
  know, does that make him a bad person? Know, there was a
• 35:02
  lot of great things about Rush Limbaugh, incredibly talented broadcaster, but especially later
• 35:08
  in his career, I do believe he sold out on multiple levels, and
• 35:15
  Trump being the worst of all of them. He embraced trump Mania in twenty
• 35:22
  sixteen in a way that was very significant, and in my opinion, Rush
• 35:25
  was way more concerned about maintaining his power, or at least the perception of
• 35:31
  his power, than he was about the future of the country or the good
• 35:34
  of the Republican Party or anything like that. Maybe he didn't start that way
• 35:38
  because once you get that rich and powerful, it's a very deadly drug.
• 35:44
  Celebrity is a mental illness. So I put all that into the equation.
• 35:47
  So I'm not I don't have any animates towards Rush Limbaugh. I think he
• 35:52
  probably did more good than bad, but he was hardly perfect, and he
• 35:55
  absolutely was an egomaniac and a narcissist. So for David Limbaugh, of all
• 36:00
  people, and I would love to know more about what motivated David Limbaugh Russia's
• 36:06
  brother to write this, but he wrote the truth when he said, maybe
• 36:09
  a big reason we can't come together on the right is that too many of
• 36:13
  the Thought Leader's hosts, podcasters, and other influencers are just outright egomaniacal,
• 36:19
  narcissist, concerned more about self promotion than our beloved country. It makes me
• 36:24
  sick. Amen, brother literally brother, brother of Russia Limbaugh. But you
• 36:30
  know, the irony there is pretty steep, but that is the essence of
• 36:35
  what happened here. The right wing media is just as broken as the left
• 36:38
  wing media, just in a different way, and it's all paving the way
• 36:44
  for Donald Trump to be the nominee in twenty twenty four. Now, obviously
• 36:50
  you know what's left of this podcast, which I plan to continue doing at
• 36:52
  least until probably early mid February. I'm targeting just after the Super Bowl for
• 37:00
  our last episode of the podcast, barring some sort of miracle to change that
• 37:05
  plan, and so I'm sure there'll be more opportunity to talk about what's going
• 37:08
  to happen in twenty twenty four. But since this is our first episode of
• 37:14
  twenty twenty four, I figured I should at least lay out where I think
• 37:16
  this is all headed. I actually asked my Twitter followers how optimistic or pessimistic
• 37:24
  they are for twenty twenty four, because my extreme pessimism towards twenty twenty four
• 37:30
  is a large part of why I'm planning to end the podcast. I just
• 37:34
  simply cannot continue to do this knowing that we're headed for this crapstorm over which
• 37:39
  I have absolutely no control and no one to root for, and so it's
• 37:44
  almost out of psychological survival. That's one of many factors influencing my decision to
• 37:51
  end the podcast. So I am very, very pessimistic about where we're going
• 37:54
  in twenty twenty four, and most of it has to do, although not
• 37:58
  all, with the present financial election. And when I asked my Twitter followers
• 38:01
  their level of optimism or pessimism, I gave them four different options, and
• 38:07
  sixty five percent of about seven hundred people who voted were in the pessimistic category,
• 38:14
  the rather very pessimistic category sixty five percent, which I found to be
• 38:20
  quite telling maybe about the people that follow me on Twitter. By the way,
• 38:25
  when it comes to predictions for twenty twenty four and Donald Trump, something
• 38:30
  absolutely hilarious happened on Fox News Channel this week, where Jesse Waters for some
• 38:36
  reason decided to have a psychic on to talk about what's going to happen at
• 38:42
  twenty twenty four, which is insane on its face, but kind of keeping
• 38:47
  with what the right wing media has become. So now we're relying on psychics
• 38:52
  to tell us what's going to happen at twenty twenty four. And this woman
• 38:55
  was a terror card reader, and she pulled out a card for Donald Trump's
• 39:01
  prospects in twenty twenty four, and I shit you not, it was the
• 39:06
  Grim Reaper card. She was clearly embarrassed about what had happened, knowing she
• 39:15
  was on Fox News Channel, and tried very hard to explain or rationalize what
• 39:21
  the Grim Reaper card means regarding Donald Trump at twenty twenty four. But it
• 39:27
  was absolutely hilarious and maybe telling moment on a lot of different fronts. Obviously,
• 39:31
  I don't believe in psychics or terrort cards, but I do believe in
• 39:36
  humor, and that's about as funny as it gets. I do think that
• 39:39
  the Grim Reaper card is probably a pretty good indication of where we are headed
• 39:45
  as a country, and probably where Donald Trump is headed at twenty twenty four
• 39:50
  my baseline prediction, and obviously there are so many events that could influence the
• 39:58
  path that the twenty four presidential election is likely to take, and so I'm
• 40:04
  hesitant to say that this is my hardcore prediction for what's gonna happen. I'll
• 40:08
  probably save that for our last episode sometime in February, because by that point
• 40:14
  we'll have a better idea one for exactly how the Republican nominating process is indeed
• 40:20
  gonna go, and also probably more of a handle on the scheduling of the
• 40:25
  court cases against Trump, which is obviously very, very significant when it comes
• 40:30
  to how this is all gonna come down. But as of right now,
• 40:36
  my baseline predictions for twenty twenty four are as follows. I think that Trump
• 40:42
  will win Iowa and New Hampshire. I don't know what's gonna happen in South
• 40:46
  Carolina after that. My guess is that Haley and maybe DeSantis will hang in
• 40:52
  there simply because of the looming legal issues against Trump. But I don't see
• 40:58
  at that point Trump losing any primaries. I don't think Trump will lose any
• 41:02
  primary or caucus, and I think he will be the Republican nominee. I
• 41:07
  think Biden will in fact be the Democratic nominee. I think that there will
• 41:14
  be no debates, just as I have been predicting. I have said on
• 41:19
  this podcast many times, and even predicted on News Nation television with Dan Abrams
• 41:23
  and Sean Spicer. This is maybe my most prescient prediction of twenty twenty three.
• 41:30
  I'm on with Trump's former press secretary on News Nation Television. He's trying
• 41:36
  to claim that Trump will eventually do Republican debates, and I basically laughed at
• 41:39
  him and told him He's never going to do Republican debates. And oh,
• 41:43
  by the way, not doing the Republican debates means that there's not going to
• 41:46
  be any debates in the general election because Biden's not going to debate Trump because
• 41:52
  he doesn't have to debate Trump because Trump is that toxic, and Biden's going
• 41:55
  to avoid debates like the plague, because a debate is the most vulnerable situation
• 42:04
  for him when he's battling obviously old age and potentially dementia. So there's no
• 42:09
  way he's going to do a live debate with Donald Trump. Now he might
• 42:14
  not be able to get out of a debate against Nikky Haley or Ron DeSantis.
• 42:17
  I don't think he could. I think he would get tortured over that.
• 42:21
  But because Trump is so toxic and because Trump bailed on the Republican debates,
• 42:24
  Trump has no leg to stand on when it comes to scheduling general election
• 42:30
  debates. And I think the left wing media, against their own self interest,
• 42:34
  will largely not totally go along with Biden dodging the debates. Maybe there'll
• 42:38
  be one debate, maybe just because they want to try to save face and
• 42:45
  take the issue off the table. But there's not going to be multiple debates,
• 42:49
  that's for one hundred percent sure in my opinion. And then I think
• 42:53
  that I don't believe that Trump will be a convicted felon by the end of
• 43:00
  twenty twenty four or the presidential election in November of twenty twenty four. Could
• 43:04
  he be. Obviously he might be, but I think largely because of scheduling
• 43:07
  issues, he will not be a convicted felon. But I also don't think
• 43:13
  he's going to win. I think that this is an Akham's Razor situation.
• 43:16
  Trump and Biden already faced each other, you know, less than four years
• 43:21
  ago. We know what the results are. Not that much has changed.
• 43:25
  Yes, Biden's popularity has dipped significantly, largely because of his age and largely
• 43:31
  because the perceptions of the economy. I think it's possible the perceptions of the
• 43:36
  economy improve over twenty twenty four. And I also think that without the debates,
• 43:42
  there's not going to be that Shazam moment where America goes, oh my
• 43:45
  gosh, Biden's just too old to do this for another four and a half
• 43:51
  years, and so I think they're going to be able to carry Biden over
• 43:55
  the finish line. It may be closer than twenty twenty because of Biden's age
• 44:00
  and lack of popularity. But if Trump lost as an incumbent, I don't
• 44:06
  understand how he's going to win as a challenger, especially when he hasn't gotten
• 44:13
  any better with any major voting blocks. Yes, there are polls, and
• 44:16
  it's hilarious that Trump fans all of a sudden thing polls are very, very
• 44:21
  reliable. I mean, it's just unbelievable that we've gotten to this situation where
• 44:25
  Trump is going to win the Republican nomination partially because of liberal polling. Outlet's
• 44:30
  telling us he's going to beat Joe Biden, and Trump fans buying this based
• 44:37
  upon the idea that he's doing extremely well among Hispanic voters and black voters.
• 44:42
  I just don't see any logic that that's going to hold for an entire year.
• 44:47
  Could it to marginal degrees, sure, but I just don't see how
• 44:52
  it's going to happen overwhelmingly. And I think at best for Trump, we're
• 44:58
  talking about a very close election. Is it possible Trump could win, Yes,
• 45:04
  but he'd have to pull off and inside straight the likes of which he
• 45:07
  did in twenty sixteen, which was almost a miracle in twenty sixteen, one
• 45:14
  for which the Republican Party and I believe the country has paid dearly ever since.
• 45:20
  But here's the bottom line of that. So I see a close election
• 45:23
  where Trump probably loses. Well. Of course he's going to claim voter fraud.
• 45:29
  He's going to claim it's rigged again. His fans are mostly going to
• 45:32
  believe it. And you know, we saw what happened after twenty twenty I
• 45:37
  think what happens after twenty twenty four could be even worse because we're not presumably
• 45:43
  going to be in the middle of a pandemic and there's a whole lot of
• 45:45
  history involved here, and we've got, as I've already said, over a
• 45:50
  third of the country not believing that Biden was legitimately elected the first time,
• 45:54
  and it's just going to be a very combustible situation. So I don't see
• 46:00
  any good outcomes. There's no good outcome, which is again a large part
• 46:04
  of why I feel like I got to drop out, not just of this
• 46:07
  podcast but out of public life ideally, because I just don't want to see
• 46:10
  it. I just it's gonna be terrible. And that's you know, the
• 46:15
  scenario I just laid out there is probably not even the worst scenario. I
• 46:20
  mean, if Trump gets convicted on bogus evidence by an all Democrat jury,
• 46:25
  I mean, we could see all sorts of unrest there. And then,
• 46:29
  of course, you know, in an election year, you're always have a
• 46:31
  situation where the media is very likely to latch on to an event and make
• 46:36
  it bigger than it was if they think it fits their agenda, whether that's
• 46:39
  regarding something in the realm of race. I mean, they love race riots
• 46:44
  like they did in twenty twenty when they think it can gin up the black
• 46:46
  vote for Democrats. So that's something to look at as a possibility in twenty
• 46:52
  twenty four as a black Swan event, And as far as black Swan events
• 46:57
  go, I do think that if there is a terrorist attack related to illegal
• 47:04
  immigration and the invasion of our southern border, obviously the news media would do
• 47:08
  everything they possibly could to diminish and distract from that. But if something like
• 47:15
  that occurred, then I think Biden's probably cooked and Trump probably would end up
• 47:21
  winning because this issue of the border, which the media is doing its best
• 47:24
  to try to ignore, would not be able to be sustainable anymore if it
• 47:30
  actually resulted in real world harm, which it may, and there have been
• 47:36
  some even left winging media personalities that have already speculated to that possible scenario.
• 47:43
  So there's also I'm sure there's going to be things that are going to happen
• 47:45
  that we could never possibly imagine here in early January twenty twenty four. But
• 47:51
  bottom line is, it's going to be a ship storm and I'm really not
• 47:55
  looking forward to any of it. And that goes in a large part that
• 48:00
  goes to why it is that I currently planned to end the podcast just after
• 48:06
  the super Bowl. Now, a couple other news stories related to all this
• 48:10
  insanity that we're already seeing in twenty twenty four, one of which deals with
• 48:16
  Jeffrey Epstein and the so called Epstein List. And this is a story that
• 48:22
  drives me crazy on so many different levels. We are as of this taping,
• 48:28
  I guess we're waiting this list of people that were associated with Epstein or
• 48:34
  visited him on his island, or flew with him in his airplane. And
• 48:39
  there's so many people on social media that are just completely obsessed with this story,
• 48:45
  mostly on the right, and I just do not understand it. I
• 48:49
  have said many many times that of all the many right wing conspiracies that drive
• 48:53
  me crazy, there's probably none that is more frustrating to deal with than the
• 49:00
  idea that somehow Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in a federal prison with no suspects while
• 49:07
  Donald Trump was president and his Attorney General, Bill Barr was in charge of
• 49:12
  the federal prison system, and somehow that murder never even got close to being
• 49:17
  solved. And these are Trump's supporters that believe this. Tucker Carlson believes this
• 49:24
  even when Donald Trump himself told him to his face in an interview that he
• 49:29
  doesn't believe it, and he's now openly very supportive commentator for Donald Trump.
• 49:37
  I mean, it's all just lunacy. Epstein was not murdered, because if
• 49:40
  he was murdered in the federal prison, there'd be the shortest suspect list in
• 49:45
  the history of man. We would know exactly who was in the vicinity,
• 49:49
  who was in the facility, We'd be able to track their movements, track
• 49:52
  their bank accounts, and there would be zero question as to who did this.
• 49:59
  If Epstein was actually murdered, he was not. He committed suicide in
• 50:02
  prison. That's number one when it comes to Epstein. But this issue that
• 50:07
  somehow if you are on a flight log or if you visited Epstein Island this
• 50:13
  means that you are inherently a pedophile is ridiculous. It's absurd, But this
• 50:20
  is the world we're now living in, especially on the right wing. And
• 50:24
  of course, the most hilarious part of this is that while the right wing
• 50:29
  is all giddy over the possibility that Bill Clinton was really a serial pedophile along
• 50:36
  with the Jeffrey Epstein, they almost completely ignore the fact that Trump was at
• 50:42
  least as close to Epstein. Now they'll tell you that he cut off contact
• 50:45
  with Epstein. Blah blah blah. But I mean, there are at least
• 50:50
  as many photos and videos of Trump being chummy with Epstein as there is Bill
• 50:55
  Clinton, and I despise Bill Clinton. I'm on record as being as anti
• 51:00
  Bill Clinton as anybody on the planet. Unless I see more evidence than just
• 51:06
  associations with Epstein, I'm not going to come to any kind of conclusion that
• 51:10
  he's actually a serial pedophile, although he kind of came close legally when it
• 51:15
  came to Monica Lewinsky, but that's another story for another day. So I
• 51:21
  don't buy this entire notion that somehow, if you're named in these documents,
• 51:28
  that you're guilty. But a lot of people who are supposedly fairly smart and
• 51:32
  not liberal are latching onto this absurdity, including Aaron Rodgers. And Aaron Rodgers
• 51:39
  is a guy I generally like. I respect his talent as a quarterback,
• 51:44
  but I think he's really overplaying his hand when it comes to being the contrarian
• 51:51
  commentator. Look. I respect his position on the vaccines, and I love
• 51:54
  the fact that he calls people out, but recently he is he went after
• 52:00
  Jimmy Kimmel on this issue of the Epstein List. He did so on ESPN
• 52:07
  on Pat McAfee's show, and he strongly implied that Jimmy Kimmel was going to
• 52:12
  be on the Epstein List, and Kimmel came out and raged, understandably so
• 52:20
  threatened to sue Aaron Rodgers for defamation if he continues to spew this kind of
• 52:25
  stuff. I believe Kimmel here, and I don't like Kimmel at all,
• 52:30
  but I don't think there's going to be any evidence at all that Jimmy Kimmel
• 52:34
  was somehow heavy associate of Jeffrey Epstein and potentially some sort of pedophile. So
• 52:42
  I'm not sure why Rogers does this. I mean it seems, I mean,
• 52:45
  Rodgers is an attention wrer. He's got to believe or know or suspect
• 52:52
  that his football career is very close to ending. Obviously, this was supposed
• 52:54
  to be his year with the New York Jets, and it lasted all of
• 52:59
  four plays for he blew out his achilles, and so he misses the entire
• 53:04
  year, and by next year he's a forty year old quarterback coming off an
• 53:08
  achilles injury playing for a crappy team. So it feels like you know,
• 53:15
  Rogers is one full of himself, not as smart as he thinks he is,
• 53:21
  and is liking the attention that he's getting for these kind of statements,
• 53:25
  and this I think was wrong. I am not supportive of Aaron Rodgers on
• 53:30
  this one at all. Now, another topic that I get very frustrated by
• 53:37
  is the entire issue of global warming climate change, and so from time to
• 53:40
  time, I will always, as long as this podcast exists, I will
• 53:45
  always point out the insanity of the left wing media and the hypocrisy of the
• 53:49
  left wing media when it comes to the topic of global warming and climate change.
• 53:53
  And I kind of predicted in the last episode of twenty twenty three that
• 53:59
  the wing media was going to latch onto the fact that we've had a very
• 54:02
  mild winter so far here in the United States and blame it on climate change,
• 54:08
  global warming, and sure enough, the New York Times did exactly that
• 54:14
  over the New Year's holiday. And my point on this is one, wait
• 54:19
  a minute, I thought weather patterns were not to be used as evidence for
• 54:25
  against global warming and climate change. I mean, if it was the opposite,
• 54:30
  if it was a very cold winter and we've gotten a lot of snow,
• 54:34
  in the United States, a very small portion of the globe that would
• 54:37
  not be used by the New York Times as evidence of Oh wait a minute,
• 54:42
  hold on, is it possible that we're not really experiencing global warming or
• 54:45
  climate change isn't real? Of course, they probably use it as here we
• 54:50
  go climate change. Our snows in the winter are getting worse because of climate
• 54:52
  change. I mean, that's the beauty of it. From their perspective,
• 54:55
  they can never be wrong. But I correctly predicted that they they're jumping all
• 55:00
  over this mild winter. Now I agree, we're having it in the United
• 55:05
  States, a very mild winter to this point. There's still two more months
• 55:08
  to go, so things could change, and that again we've been told that's
• 55:15
  weather, not climate. But the hypocrisy here knows no bounds. But then
• 55:20
  there was what the Washington Post did, And in just one tweet, one
• 55:24
  short tweet, I think the Washington Post over the New Year's Holiday exposed a
• 55:30
  lot of the scam that is this entire issue, especially when it comes to
• 55:36
  the topic of twenty twenty three being the hottest year on record. We've heard
• 55:40
  that time and time and time again, and I keep saying, what the
• 55:45
  hell does that mean hottest year on record? I mean, we only have
• 55:50
  been keeping records the same way via satellite technology for about forty forty five years.
• 55:55
  So even if that's true, so what what I We have a great
• 56:00
  suspicion. And I've told you previously that I think they've been cooking the numbers.
• 56:05
  They've been juicing the numbers as much as they possibly can to substantiate this
• 56:09
  global warming climate change narrative, and that they might be running out of juice,
• 56:15
  and that it's the data, not the reality, that shows that twenty
• 56:20
  twenty three was the hottest year on record. But here was what the Washington
• 56:23
  Post tweeted out to promote an article basically outlining what twenty twenty three did and
• 56:31
  showed us the dangers of global warming climate change, and that we've basically left
• 56:38
  you know what I would call the gravitational pull the rational Earth, and it's
• 56:44
  only going to get worse from here, maybe because it's a turning point.
• 56:47
  This is a turning point in the entire issue. Twenty twenty three really exposed
• 56:52
  how bad things are and how bad things are going to get. That's my
• 56:54
  paraphrase of the Washington Post article. But here's their tweet. Now, listen
• 57:00
  to this carefully, as I read it carefully. Even if its extremes are
• 57:07
  ultimately eclipsed, that's important. Even if its extremes are ultimately eclipsed, as
• 57:15
  seems inevitable, twenty twenty three will mark a point where humanity crossed into a
• 57:22
  new climate era, an age of quote global boiling unquote, as United Nations
• 57:31
  Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez called it. Now, there's a lot that was said
• 57:39
  in that very short tweet promoting this article that I have already described. Let's
• 57:45
  go through it quickly, even if its extremes are ultimately eclipsed. In other
• 57:52
  words, even if it gets hotter from here. Okay, well wait a
• 57:58
  minute, hold on second. If your theory is correct, right, and
• 58:05
  this is all about carbon emissions, even though we know, I mean,
• 58:08
  we know that the reality is that temperature change has always preceded increased carbon in
• 58:20
  the atmosphere. We know this time and time again through the history of the
• 58:23
  globe, and even al Gore effectively admitted that, although he did so in
• 58:29
  a very deceitful way in his infamous movie and Inconvenient Truth. But if your
• 58:35
  theory is correct, right, and we're continuing to do this via man made
• 58:39
  carbon emissions, even though we don't give it damn about college football realignment or
• 58:44
  college sport realignment. That's going to explode the carbon footprint of every athlete on
• 58:51
  the West Coast. But I digress. If your theory is right, then
• 58:57
  how is it possible that these extream temperatures would not be eclipsed. That wouldn't
• 59:04
  be possible. Yet they started off by saying, even if so, they're
• 59:08
  opening up the possibility that we may never eclipse this very hot year of twenty
• 59:16
  twenty three. I mean, that's how they lead off the tweet, with
• 59:22
  the possibility that we don't eclipse what happened in twenty twenty three. Now,
• 59:27
  that goes to my theory that there are people within this movement that are a
• 59:30
  little concerned that they may have juiced the numbers so much that they may not
• 59:36
  be able to continue this trend of supposedly increasing temperatures. But that's just my
• 59:42
  personal theory. But then they go into this idea of a new climate error,
• 59:49
  an age of global boiling, not just global warming global boiling. Wait
• 59:55
  a minute, I thought this was about climate chain, not global warming or
• 1:00:01
  global boiling. Hold on, they changed the branding on this, and they
• 1:00:06
  did so brilliantly because global warming was very inconvenient during cold winters, so they
• 1:00:12
  just decided to change it to climate change. So anything could fall under the
• 1:00:16
  umbrella of climate change. Anything that's extreme or perceived is extreme, was climate
• 1:00:22
  change. And of course, when the globe is as big and diverse as
• 1:00:25
  it is, you're always going to have extreme temperatures or extreme weather, or
• 1:00:30
  extreme events of some sort that you can point to and go see, see
• 1:00:34
  that's climate change. But now they seem to be reversing back to global warming,
• 1:00:38
  so they're all on board with not only just global warming, but global
• 1:00:43
  boiling. So I'd like to know is this an official change of the branding
• 1:00:47
  of this scam? Are we going back to global warming? Will someone please
• 1:00:52
  tell me? Is that now officially where we're headed with this? And then
• 1:00:55
  to quote the United Nations Secretary General is just laughable, laughable, as if
• 1:01:00
  that person is an expert. The United Nations has been the worst, the
• 1:01:08
  most apocalyptic, the most unreliable when it comes to their constantly wrong predictions for
• 1:01:19
  what is going to happen with regard to the climate. Absolutely the worst in
• 1:01:23
  every way, shape or form. Nobody has less credibility than the United Nations
• 1:01:30
  on this topic. Nobody, But because they're the United Nations, and people
• 1:01:34
  still seem to think that that name or that institution has cachet, especially in
• 1:01:39
  the liberal mainstream news media, that has power, that has weight, that
• 1:01:45
  has merit. My gosh, we're climate boiling now, says the UN It's
• 1:01:52
  all bull crap. And yes, we're having a very mild winter. But
• 1:01:54
  who's complaining about that right now? Do you think anybody's complaining right now that
• 1:02:00
  we have a very mild winter so far in the United States? Nobody?
• 1:02:04
  And I'll mention one last thing. This is probably the last time I'll mention
• 1:02:08
  it unless it comes up again to the news. The news media did their
• 1:02:12
  best to ignore it systematically. But if twenty twenty three was the hottest year
• 1:02:16
  on record, how the hell? How the hell did California's drought end?
• 1:02:22
  How the hell did California the epicenter of the climate crisis according to Governor Gavin
• 1:02:27
  Newsom, How the hell did we have no major wildfires for a second year
• 1:02:30
  in a row. How the hell is it that the hurricane season was perfectly
• 1:02:35
  normal? How did that happen all in the United States. We did not
• 1:02:38
  have major extreme weather events. Yeah, there were some areas of drought,
• 1:02:45
  there was some heat waves. Guess what. That happens every single year.
• 1:02:50
  And before we concocted climate change global warming, that was called life. But
• 1:02:54
  now it's not life. And unfortunately, among younger people who have been brainwase
• 1:03:00
  by this, they have no experience. They don't remember before all this happened,
• 1:03:05
  when we still had very hot summers and weird weather would happen all the
• 1:03:09
  time, and weather events would occur, and sometimes catastrophes would happen. That
• 1:03:15
  that's not part of their personal experience, so they're easily manipulated on this issue.
• 1:03:20
  And so it's been exactly as I have predicted. Post COVID. They
• 1:03:24
  really have turned what they learned during COVID into the climate change global warming scam.
• 1:03:34
  That's what they've done, and I believe in a much more significant and
• 1:03:37
  permanent way, this is going to have a major impact on our lives and
• 1:03:43
  our freedoms and our liberties even here in the United States, and on our
• 1:03:46
  economy. It's exactly the same playbook. And unfortunately, even on the right,
• 1:03:52
  not enough people are alerted to what's really going on here and how similar
• 1:03:57
  it is to what happened with cod Now. I mentioned earlier in this podcast
• 1:04:02
  the issue of illegal immigration and the flooding of the southern border. The invasion
• 1:04:08
  has been beyond maddening, and on the right wing, in the right wing
• 1:04:14
  media, this has gotten a lot of attention. The left wing media has
• 1:04:16
  largely ignored it. And the left wing media does a really great job of
• 1:04:23
  using language to promote their agenda, whether it's to avoid a story or diminish
• 1:04:29
  a story, or to promote a story that they think fits with their worldview.
• 1:04:33
  And there's no better example of that than illegal immigration. And there's two
• 1:04:40
  examples that have occurred in just the last few days that I wanted to share
• 1:04:43
  with you. Now this from The Blaze. They write. Over the last
• 1:04:48
  several years, liberals have been casting about seeking a term for immigrants who enter
• 1:04:54
  the country illegally that does not mention the fact that such people are guilty of
• 1:04:59
  illegal limits. At various times, undocumented immigrant, asylum seekers, migrants,
• 1:05:05
  and others have enjoyed their day in the sun. Now, the government official
• 1:05:10
  charged with stopping illegal immigration is floating a new term, but the early return
• 1:05:15
  suggests this one may not be around long. In a weekend tweet that implausibly
• 1:05:21
  celebrated the government's efforts at restricting illegal immigration, DHS Secretary Alejandro Majorcas claimed that
• 1:05:31
  the government is cracking down on what he called quote unquote wait for it,
• 1:05:38
  irregular migration unquote, by which he apparently meant illegal immigration. Irregular migration is
• 1:05:48
  the new term for illegal immigration by the DHS secretary in the middle of a
• 1:05:56
  crisis of illegal immigration. This issue of language and how the Left changes language
• 1:06:00
  is so important. I talk all the time about how equality of opportunity has
• 1:06:05
  been changed to equity of outcome and how that's the end of America. But
• 1:06:10
  they have really been effective when it comes to the topic of illegal immigration,
• 1:06:15
  and we see it all the time here in California. But irregular migration is
• 1:06:20
  a new one by my account, but it's not the only new one.
• 1:06:25
  The Associated Press, formerly the gold standard of journalism in the United States,
• 1:06:31
  had the following headline for an article about what's going on here in California,
• 1:06:38
  and Governor Gavin Newsom headline, California is expanding healthcare coverage for wait for it,
• 1:06:46
  low income immigrants in the new year low income immigrants. And to be
• 1:06:55
  clear, the new law relates clearly and specifically to these that should be referred
• 1:07:00
  to as illegal immigrants. But now the Associated Press calls them low income immigrants,
• 1:07:10
  and they will be getting expanded healthcare coverage paid for by the actual citizens
• 1:07:15
  and taxpayers of the state of California. Now, how is it that left
• 1:07:20
  wing media gets away with all this or how does this happen? It's not
• 1:07:27
  a conspiracy. They're very Occasionally we'll find out that there were actually, you
• 1:07:32
  know, quote unquote memos or emails to this effect, but by and large
• 1:07:36
  it happens organically. And the reason why it happens organically is that there's nobody
• 1:07:42
  at the Associated Press who is conservative enough to go, hey, wait a
• 1:07:47
  minute, what are we doing here? How are we calling these people low
• 1:07:51
  income immigrants. There's no one there to do that, and if they are
• 1:07:56
  there, they're afraid to do that because they're afraid of losing their jobs because
• 1:08:00
  they're seeing is somehow racist. And the reason why there's nobody there, especially
• 1:08:05
  not with the guts to speak out, is that there are no conservatives or
• 1:08:11
  Republicans in journalism jobs. And it's not just a right wing media talking point.
• 1:08:16
  It's real and getting worse, and there's a new study that shows this.
• 1:08:24
  A new study from Syracuse University's new House School of Public Communications. My
• 1:08:30
  former co host on this podcast and With the Benefit of Hindsight podcast, Lizabebe
• 1:08:34
  is a former professor at the Syracuse University New House School of Public Communications,
• 1:08:40
  school where I almost went to found that just three point four percent of American
• 1:08:46
  journalists are Republicans. Three point four percent of American journalists are Republicans. This
• 1:08:54
  is a nator for a level of participation by Republicans and journalism that has been
• 1:09:00
  going systematically down for decades but has now reached obviously catastrophic levels. The study
• 1:09:08
  is based on an online survey with sixteen hundred US journalists conducted in early twenty
• 1:09:14
  twenty two, and is the latest in a series of studies stretching back to
• 1:09:17
  nineteen seventy one to take the temperature of the fort the state's partisan lean,
• 1:09:23
  job satisfaction, and professional attitudes. By the way, I kind of remember
• 1:09:28
  Liz telling me about this survey, and she may have even sent it to
• 1:09:33
  me. I kind of remember this because Liz was there at this time and
• 1:09:41
  It's quite possible that of the three point four percent of Republicans in this survey,
• 1:09:47
  one was me and one was Lyzabebe, So without the two of us,
• 1:09:50
  the number would be even less than that. I can't be sure about
• 1:09:54
  that, but I have a pretty strong recollection of having filled out this survey.
• 1:09:59
  When the first generation iteration of the study came out of her fifty years
• 1:10:02
  ago, thirty five point five percent said they were Democrats, twenty five point
• 1:10:08
  seven percent said they were Republicans, and thirty two point five percent said they
• 1:10:12
  were independents. The percentage that call themselves democrats or independence have bounced around over
• 1:10:16
  the years, with the proportion of democrats reaching a high of forty four percent
• 1:10:20
  in nineteen ninety two. The last iteration of the study before the most recent
• 1:10:26
  one peg the proportion of Republican journalists in America and only seven point one percent,
• 1:10:31
  and the proportion of Democrats at twenty eight point one percent, with independence
• 1:10:35
  at fifty point two percent. Now, when you call yourself an independent as
• 1:10:41
  a journalist, that's kind of like what you're supposed to do. I think
• 1:10:43
  a lot of people probably do that in a g knee jerk fashion because oh,
• 1:10:47
  I'm an independent journalist. I'm not supposed to be partisan. I think
• 1:10:50
  there's still some of that that exists, not as much as there should be
• 1:10:54
  or used to be. So I don't know where that fifty percent really stands,
• 1:10:59
  but my guess is the vast majority of them are actually liberals. But
• 1:11:02
  even since the last time they did this study and basically the last decade,
• 1:11:06
  the percentage of Republicans is only half of what it was then, and it
• 1:11:11
  was already and an incredibly low number. So this is a catastrophic situation that's
• 1:11:18
  frankly even worse than I realized that it was again because I frankly think that
• 1:11:24
  Liz and I may have somewhat stunted the numbers a little bit. But it's
• 1:11:28
  bad and it's real, and it's a major, major problem that goes way
• 1:11:32
  beyond bias. And to me, I say this all the time in my
• 1:11:39
  private life and to people in the business, it's not just about the bias
• 1:11:44
  of the reporting. It's that there's no one in the room to say,
• 1:11:49
  hey, what are we doing? Are you sure you want to do it
• 1:11:54
  that way? Isn't there another way to look at this story? They don't
• 1:11:59
  exist or or if they do exist, Because that percentage of Republicans has gotten
• 1:12:03
  so small, there's not a feeling of safety. There's not, especially in
• 1:12:09
  the Trump era, there's not a feeling of having the freedom to speak out
• 1:12:15
  and call bs. So even if you happen to be in the room,
• 1:12:18
  you're unlikely to say anything because it's not in yourself interest to do so,
• 1:12:24
  because your job might be in jeopardy because you're already one of a very small
• 1:12:29
  group of people within journalism that is openly Republican, only three point seven percent
• 1:12:34
  according to this Syracuse study. Now, speaking of self interests and topics that
• 1:12:43
  I'm very passionate about, I want to spend a little bit of time talking
• 1:12:46
  about what we just saw with regard to the college football bowl system and playoff
• 1:12:51
  system. One because I think this dovetails with a lot of what I've been
• 1:12:57
  saying recently on this podcast, and also because I think there are issues related
• 1:13:02
  here that go way way beyond sports. They go to the nature of humanity,
• 1:13:09
  and they go to where we are in our country, but also obviously
• 1:13:13
  the institution of college football. And to quickly review up until the playoffs,
• 1:13:19
  the fourteen playoff, which happened on January first. The so called bowl system
• 1:13:26
  was a bigger joke this year than it has ever been, and it's not
• 1:13:30
  even close. And it's important to point out that we were told when NIL,
• 1:13:38
  name, image and likeness was sold the idea of paying college athletes or
• 1:13:45
  allowing them to be paid allegedly for their name, image and likeness. But
• 1:13:47
  I knew immediately that's not where this would stop. I mean, I was
• 1:13:53
  outspoken from the moment that this was proposed. This is not gonna be a
• 1:14:00
  situation where players were only gonna be paid through legitimate endorsements, that this was
• 1:14:08
  gonna be a loophole through which you could drive a proverbial mat truck. I've
• 1:14:14
  been writing that. In fact, it's actually been worse than I even anticipated.
• 1:14:18
  And a lot of conservatives got duped. A lot of conservatives got duped
• 1:14:23
  by NIL. They thought this was capitalism at work, that this was fairness,
• 1:14:29
  that this was the free market, and I kept saying, this is
• 1:14:31
  not a free market. Name, image and likeness can mean anything. There's
• 1:14:38
  no way to regulate this, and it's not being driven by economic forces.
• 1:14:43
  Players are gonna be paid because alumni or fans or boosters or even the schools
• 1:14:49
  themselves are gonna want to win football games, and so they're just gonna pay
• 1:14:56
  the players they think that can achieve that. And that's effectively what has happened.
• 1:15:01
  We now have major college football coaches, like at the University of Nebraska
• 1:15:08
  publicly stating that it costs between one and two million dollars to buy a quarterback
• 1:15:14
  in the transfer portal and he's totally serious. And we were told when the
• 1:15:19
  NIL debate was raging that one of the benefits of NIL was going to be
• 1:15:26
  that players might stay in school longer because they're making money. So why not
• 1:15:30
  stay in school longer, playing college another year, maybe even graduate. Isn't
• 1:15:35
  that a good thing? And oh, by the way, we might also
• 1:15:40
  have situations where players would not sit out of bowl games because they would actually
• 1:15:45
  be paid to be played in the bowl games, especially the stars. And
• 1:15:49
  the stars are the ones most likely to be concerned about their draft status in
• 1:15:54
  the NFL and not wanting to get injured in a bowl game, and they
• 1:15:58
  have been the ones that in previous years have been sitting out, turning bowl
• 1:16:00
  games into a complete joke. Well, NIL was supposed to fix that,
• 1:16:06
  or at least mitigate that issue. Well, that has not happened at all,
• 1:16:12
  even a little bit. In fact, it may have exacerbated the situation
• 1:16:16
  because you have this insane instant transfer rule where because there's money involved, now
• 1:16:25
  you have you have star players changing teams willie nilly because some other school offers
• 1:16:31
  them seemingly more money than they were getting from the school where they were currently
• 1:16:38
  playing football, probably not going to class very much. We had Ohio State's
• 1:16:43
  starting quarterback, a team that almost made the playoff, was basically two or
• 1:16:46
  three plays away from making the playoff, transfer before the bowl game to Syracuse,
• 1:16:53
  which is not even a good team going from Ohio State to Syracuse.
• 1:16:57
  And this was one of many, many examples of the insanity of this absolute
• 1:17:02
  beyond the wild West. And some of this can be easily fixed if you
• 1:17:09
  just fix the date of when the transfer portal opens, you could probably do
• 1:17:15
  away with some of the damage here. But the nil money is still a
• 1:17:20
  major concern, and it's not fixing the issue of players opting out to protect
• 1:17:26
  their draft status. And frankly, I see this as the ultimate slippery slope,
• 1:17:30
  the ultimate slippery slope, because I keep asking myself Okay, So if
• 1:17:34
  players are going to opt out and not play in non playoff bowl games for
• 1:17:40
  fear of injury and ruining their draft status, then why would they play anything
• 1:17:46
  beyond a game during the regular season, You know, for instance, if
• 1:17:51
  their team was out of national championship contention, or even if they were automatically
• 1:17:58
  if they got word from their agents or from NFL connected people that they were
• 1:18:04
  going to be a top draft pick, why would you not sit out the
• 1:18:08
  whole season or half the season. I mean, in other words, where
• 1:18:11
  do you draw that line. I don't understand what the magic of the one
• 1:18:15
  more game. It's a bowl game, it's just an exhibition, it's not
• 1:18:18
  a playoff game, so I'm gonna sit that out. I really don't understand
• 1:18:23
  that logic or where that line gets drawn in a way that can't be erased.
• 1:18:29
  And I've seen it already in high school. I've seen high school situations
• 1:18:34
  where kids play a couple of games in their high school senior year. Their
• 1:18:39
  team doesn't look like they're going to win a championship. They want to protect
• 1:18:43
  themselves from not losing their college scholarships. And of course this is all happening
• 1:18:49
  at the same time when the game is becoming more and more woosified, So
• 1:18:54
  you would think that the fear of injury would be at its all time lowest,
• 1:18:58
  and yet the players are acting as if the game is more dangerous than
• 1:19:02
  ever. I mean, the idea that wide receivers are not playing in Bowl
• 1:19:06
  games in perfect weather dome stadiums when there's almost no chance of injury for a
• 1:19:14
  wide receiver in today's day and age is just baffling to me. And not
• 1:19:18
  only do they get away with it, the news media, the sports media
• 1:19:23
  enables it. They never criticize these people. And this is going to set
• 1:19:27
  up an interesting situation that I'm gonna get to momentarily for where we're headed with
• 1:19:30
  this, where this may be a situation where ESPN and the rest of the
• 1:19:35
  sports media regrets the fact that they have created this precedent where you're not allowed
• 1:19:41
  to criticize players for opting out because it's a business decision. And let's be
• 1:19:45
  clear, there's a racial angle to this, because the vast majority of the
• 1:19:49
  players doing this happen to be black, because that's those who the star players
• 1:19:56
  are. And there's a presumption one that you can't critic size someone for making
• 1:20:00
  an economic decision, especially if they're black, because they're just trying to help
• 1:20:03
  their families and their future. I mean, this is the way that the
• 1:20:06
  sports media looks at this, and I truly believe that if basketball and football
• 1:20:12
  were not the money sports, and if they were not dominated by black athletes,
• 1:20:16
  we would never have nil money. Nil money is a fake civil rights
• 1:20:21
  issue in my opinion, and that's a whole nother story for another day.
• 1:20:26
  But race plays a role in all of this that no one wants to admit,
• 1:20:30
  and so the sports media has set the precedent that you can't criticize any
• 1:20:35
  of these guys for quitting on their teams, quitting on their schools, and
• 1:20:40
  protecting their draft status. And this year the results of that were catastrophic.
• 1:20:46
  We had formerly prestigious games like the Cotton Bowl and the Orange Bowl that were
• 1:20:54
  beyond jokes. Ohio State basically quit and somehow loss to Missouri in the Cotton
• 1:21:01
  Bowl, one of the worst games I've seen all year between two allegedly top
• 1:21:06
  ten teams. But even that was not nearly as bad as what happened with
• 1:21:11
  Florida State. Florida State and Georgia now Georgia is a very good team.
• 1:21:15
  They may actually be the best team in the country this year. They just
• 1:21:18
  happened to lose to Alabama and the SEC title game and they didn't make the
• 1:21:23
  playoffs. But Florida State went undefeated and claimed that they should have gotten a
• 1:21:28
  spot in the final four the playoffs, bitched and moaned that they were robbed
• 1:21:33
  as an undefeated team, and they were robbed because they didn't have their starting
• 1:21:38
  quarterback who was injured. And in the olden days, like five ten years
• 1:21:45
  ago, a team like Florida State under these circumstances would have been enraged.
• 1:21:50
  They would have been on a mission, a mission to prove the rest of
• 1:21:55
  the world wrong, to stick it to the man. To be able to
• 1:22:00
  finish a season undefeated and make a legitimate claim to a national championship. They
• 1:22:06
  could have upended the entire playoff system. If Florida State had gone into this
• 1:22:13
  game with Georgia and beaten them, beaten big bad Georgia from the SEC,
• 1:22:17
  and gone undefeated, they would have made a legitimate claim to be the national
• 1:22:24
  champions. So they had a ton to play for based upon the old rules
• 1:22:31
  of doing things, not just in sports, but in America. I mean,
• 1:22:35
  one of the most baffling things. I've never mentioned this before that occurred
• 1:22:41
  to me during COVID. I always go back to COVID is. You know,
• 1:22:45
  for multiple generations, almost every teenage movie in America was about what sticking
• 1:22:54
  it to the man, standing up against authority, sticking up for your friends
• 1:23:00
  and your school, and pride mattering. I mean, almost every single plotline
• 1:23:06
  of a teenage oriented movie. Hollywood has gone to crap in a lot of
• 1:23:11
  ways, but generally that has still stayed the same throughout generations. That is
• 1:23:16
  the theme, stick it to the man, and that's you know, how
• 1:23:20
  every teenage movie ends. Where they stand up to authority and they they do
• 1:23:26
  the basically the right thing, and they stand up for each other and they
• 1:23:30
  win today and that had no impact when people responded to the COVID at all.
• 1:23:35
  There was no standing up to the man at all, especially among younger
• 1:23:40
  people. Well, here we got Florida State. These are our warriors among
• 1:23:45
  us, the men among men, you know, with no mandatory military service,
• 1:23:51
  no military draft. This is as close as we're going to get,
• 1:23:55
  you know, in a sports realm to the military. That's what college football
• 1:23:59
  used to be These are our most manly of men, and they had a
• 1:24:03
  ton to play for Florida State did. They could have theoretically won essentially a
• 1:24:10
  national championship. They could have embarrassed the entire rest of the world. They
• 1:24:13
  could have had an undefeated season. They could have gone down in history.
• 1:24:16
  They would have been mythical, they would have been legendary. And they fucking
• 1:24:20
  quit. They didn't just quit a little bit. They quit before the game.
• 1:24:27
  They quit during the game, and they got beat by sixty points,
• 1:24:33
  sixty points, the largest loss in the history of college football bowl games.
• 1:24:41
  They turned a season that was undefeated into something that will now in history be
• 1:24:46
  remembered for the fact that they quit. They absolutely quit. Most of their
• 1:24:54
  best players didn't play. One of their quarterbacks actually transferred, and even then
• 1:25:00
  they should have at least been somewhat competitive. You cannot tell me that that
• 1:25:03
  alone was why they got beat by sixty points by Georgia. They quit.
• 1:25:11
  There was no sticking it to the man. There was no standing up for
• 1:25:15
  what was right. There was no trying to end the season, this amazing
• 1:25:20
  undefeated season on a good note for history's sake, or for pride's sake,
• 1:25:25
  or for your teammates, not letting your teammates down and all the sacrifice that
• 1:25:29
  they had made, or what about all their fans that spent hard earned money
• 1:25:33
  to go attend this game that used to mean something that all gets forgotten.
• 1:25:40
  They all just quit. And in my opinion, this was a seminole moment
• 1:25:45
  in America. You might even say it was a seminole moment since they're the
• 1:25:50
  Florida State Seminoles. But I don't mean it in terms of the Indian tribe.
• 1:25:56
  I mean as in a key telling moment about the history of this country,
• 1:26:01
  where we are and where we're headed. This is one of those things
• 1:26:04
  that to me goes way beyond sports. I only half jokingly tweeted that,
• 1:26:11
  you know, before what Florida State did, I was so pessimistic about America
• 1:26:15
  that I thought we probably had about seventeen years left before we're completely unrecognizable.
• 1:26:19
  After what Florida State did, I'm down to thirteen. I lost four years
• 1:26:26
  in the future of this country after what happened with Florida State. And you're
• 1:26:29
  probably thinking, well, Zick, come on, aren't you putting too much
• 1:26:30
  into this? No, because this was as clear cut as example as you
• 1:26:36
  could possibly ever imagine where the best of the best of this younger generation was
• 1:26:45
  given a challenge and they didn't just fold, They folded in a catastrophic and
• 1:26:54
  unprecedented fashion. Now, part of it's because the system is beyond broken.
• 1:27:00
  I acknowledge that no one's been screaming about that more than me. The system
• 1:27:04
  is totally broken, and we're starting to see coaches finally tepidly coming out,
• 1:27:09
  mostly from the SEC. And it's bizarre to me that Nick Saban, who
• 1:27:13
  clearly understands and hates this new system as much as anybody continually when he makes
• 1:27:18
  his opinion known, couches it in all sorts of disclaimers and basically says,
• 1:27:24
  you, oh, you know, this is what people want. This is
• 1:27:26
  what they want. I'm not against it, blah blah blah. But here's
• 1:27:29
  the problem. To me, it feels like he's afraid of the race issue,
• 1:27:32
  that somehow, some way, this whole thing has been so associated with
• 1:27:36
  race that you're almost not allowed to criticize it, even if your Nick fucking
• 1:27:41
  Sabing. But you know, Lane Kiffin from Mississippi, Kirby Smart from Georgia,
• 1:27:45
  Kirby Smart, the Georgia coach basically absolved Florida State from any culpability,
• 1:27:53
  blaming this all on the system. Yes, the system sucks, but this
• 1:27:58
  situation still reveal field something very very wrong with the nation's youth. This generation
• 1:28:06
  Z or whatever the hell you're gonna call it. Something has fundamentally changed.
• 1:28:11
  Ten years ago, Florida State would not have done this, And it goes
• 1:28:17
  way, in my opinion, beyond college football. So let's talk about the
• 1:28:23
  future and this playoff system. And I think that the Florida State situation was
• 1:28:29
  the canary and the coal mine for this vaunted twelve team playoff that's gonna happen
• 1:28:34
  in twenty twenty four. Now, let's be clear, the two playoff games
• 1:28:39
  that did happen were very good. The Michigan Alabama Rose Bowl. We went
• 1:28:44
  to the Rose Parade in the morning, and you know, one of the
• 1:28:46
  best moments is seeing the Michigan band and the Alabama band, and the Michigan
• 1:28:50
  cheerleaders, the Alabama cheerleaders and their floats and their fans and all that.
• 1:28:56
  We didn't go to the game. We don't even pay for our tickets at
• 1:28:58
  the Rose Parade. We do it on the cheap. You know, we
• 1:29:00
  go down the parade route and we have a good time. The kids liked
• 1:29:03
  it, and it's you know, we go about every other year. It's
• 1:29:05
  a good way to start the year. And although I actually think the Rose
• 1:29:10
  Parade is in trouble, much more trouble than people realize. It's a lot
• 1:29:15
  like California. It's hanging on for dear life. And I think the Rose
• 1:29:18
  Bowl in and of itself is in big trouble, which I'm gonna get to
• 1:29:24
  in a moment. But you know, this last version of the Rose Bowl
• 1:29:28
  Michigan Alabama is probably the dead cat bounce for the Rose Bowl because it's a
• 1:29:32
  semi final game. It was an amazing game, went to overtime. Michigan
• 1:29:38
  won twenty seven million viewers, which is incredibly high, highest college football game
• 1:29:45
  in several years. All that's good. I will say one thing about the
• 1:29:47
  media coverage, and I like Michigan, I like Jim Harbaugh, but I'm
• 1:29:51
  as objective as they come. It is absolutely astonishing that you can watch an
• 1:29:56
  entire Rose Bowl college football my final with one team having a coach that missed
• 1:30:02
  half their season because of two different suspensions due to significant rules violations and it
• 1:30:11
  never gets mentioned on the telecast. It's unbelievable how the news media has just
• 1:30:16
  swept this under the rug with regard to Jim Harbaugh and Michigan, although I
• 1:30:21
  do think it's important to point out Michigan gets to the National Championship Game now
• 1:30:26
  clearly without cheating when it comes to sign signals, So maybe the sign signaling
• 1:30:31
  thing didn't really matter very much, So that might have some role in why
• 1:30:35
  the news media has downplayed this. But I do find that fascinating from a
• 1:30:41
  media coverage perspective. But that was a great game, best game of the
• 1:30:45
  year, and in my opinion, it's the last great Rose Bowl that they
• 1:30:48
  will ever be. And then you know, Texas loses to Washington. By
• 1:30:55
  the way, Washington and Michigan should be playing in the old system, they'd
• 1:30:58
  be playing for the championship in the Rose Bowl, as God originally intended.
• 1:31:01
  But instead they're gonna be playing in Houston in this National Championship game. I'm
• 1:31:05
  sure it's gonna be a good game. I'm sure it's gonna get good ratings,
• 1:31:09
  and I'm sure that everyone's gonna go see, look how awesome this playoff
• 1:31:14
  is. Yes, the Bulls sucked ass this year. But this playoff system,
• 1:31:18
  it's awesome. We've got good games, big audiences. Everybody won.
• 1:31:24
  So if we have a good situation with four teams, how awesome is it
• 1:31:29
  gonna be when we expand in twenty twenty four to twelve teams? Really?
• 1:31:34
  Okay, well, let me tell you. Let me put out a scenario
• 1:31:38
  for you and to me what happened with Florida State and also, to a
• 1:31:44
  lesser degree, Ohio State and even Texas to be pointed out, Texas's backup
• 1:31:49
  quarterback, who actually started a couple of games this year and was one play
• 1:31:54
  away from being their quarterback of their starting quarterback got injured. Their backup quarterback
• 1:31:59
  transferred before the playoff game, as did a couple other Texas players transferred,
• 1:32:06
  so they didn't even make the trip. They weren't on the team. That
• 1:32:11
  is another canary in the coal mine for this expanded playoff system, because the
• 1:32:15
  premise, the bedrock premise of all this working, is that somehow there is
• 1:32:20
  magic in the word playoff. If we change bowl to playoff, then we're
• 1:32:29
  gonna get two teams at full strength. No one's gonna opt out, everyone's
• 1:32:31
  gonna play their hardest and it's gonna be a great game. That's the premise,
• 1:32:38
  and that has largely worked with four teams, although as I just suggested,
• 1:32:44
  there was some cracks in the foundation when it came to Texas and their
• 1:32:48
  backup quarterback transferring. Now you can fix that by fixing the dates on the
• 1:32:54
  transfer portal, which I think they're gonna do, but that's not gonna change
• 1:32:59
  a larger fundamental problem, which goes to how Generation Z looks at things and
• 1:33:04
  how the incentive structure is completely and totally broken. So let me get this
• 1:33:11
  down to brass tacks for what I think is gonna happen in twenty twenty four.
• 1:33:15
  You got a twelve team playoff. You have four teams. They're gonna
• 1:33:17
  get buys, so that means you're gonna have four teams that are gonna play
• 1:33:24
  road games, which is gonna be the first of potentially four playoff games they
• 1:33:30
  have to win in order to win a championship. Currently, you only got
• 1:33:33
  to win two games to win a national championship. But now if you're not
• 1:33:39
  one of the teams that's highly seeded, if you're in that nine to twelve
• 1:33:43
  seed range, you have to go play a road game and you have to
• 1:33:47
  win four games to win a national championship. Based upon what Florida State did
• 1:33:55
  when they had so much to play for and they completely fell into the fetal
• 1:34:00
  position, quit transferred, opted out for the NFL Draft, playing against Georgia
• 1:34:08
  in a major bowl game, how the hell is that not gonna happen when
• 1:34:13
  it comes to those first round games that we've sold everything for. We've sold
• 1:34:16
  out the entire institution of the sport for those first round playoff games, just
• 1:34:21
  so we can have eleven playoff games where theoretically things actually matter. The players
• 1:34:28
  are gonna play. They're not gonna opt out. Everyone's gonna give one hundred
• 1:34:30
  percent effort. I now believe that premise is false. I mean, now,
• 1:34:36
  the first year, because it's a new thing, they may get away
• 1:34:41
  with it. They may get away with it in the first year. But
• 1:34:45
  as time goes on, unless there are massive changes in the structure and the
• 1:34:49
  system of college football, I believe you're gonna have those nine through twelve teams
• 1:34:55
  suffer exactly the same situation when it comes to opt outs, as you saw
• 1:35:00
  with Ohio State and Florida State. I mean, let's just look at it.
• 1:35:04
  So you're a guy who thinks you're gonna get drafted in the NFL,
• 1:35:10
  and your long season has just ended. You've probably played at least twelve or
• 1:35:14
  thirteen games. You've just probably lost a conference championship game. You've put all
• 1:35:19
  the tape together that you possibly could imagine you need to be drafted in the
• 1:35:24
  NFL. Everyone's telling you you're gonna be drafted in the NFL. And now
• 1:35:27
  you have a brand new season to play where, at best, if everything
• 1:35:31
  goes wonderfully, you're gonna play four highly intense games against top competition where your
• 1:35:40
  team is gonna be an underdog. So let's go through the scenario here.
• 1:35:45
  So you've just gone through that, you're trying to protect your draft position,
• 1:35:50
  and hey, guess what, guys, we just made the playoff. Yeah,
• 1:35:56
  we're gonna go up to ann Arbor in late December and we're gonna play
• 1:36:00
  a favorite Michigan team on AstroTurf in the cold. And if we win that
• 1:36:06
  game, guess what, Our Christmas gets blown up, our New Year's Eve
• 1:36:12
  gets blown up, and we get to play another game against an even more
• 1:36:15
  heavily favorite team. I'm sorry, but there are gonna be top players that
• 1:36:19
  are gonna look at that scenario and go, yeah, no, thank you,
• 1:36:25
  what do I need that for. I'm not gonna play in this.
• 1:36:29
  And so those first round games are going to be, if not a disaster,
• 1:36:35
  extremely disappointing. And we sold out the entire system, the legacy,
• 1:36:42
  the history, the traditions of college football, just for those first round playoff
• 1:36:46
  games, which aren't even quarter final games, those first draft games. You
• 1:36:50
  still have to win four games to win a national championship. That premise,
• 1:36:58
  I believe is faulty. It is fundamentally flawed, and it's going to come
• 1:37:03
  back to haunt this entire system. And it's going to be hilarious to see
• 1:37:09
  how ESPN handles this because ESPN that's behind all this financially, they own literally
• 1:37:15
  the playoff. They're the reason the playoff. This has happened. It's happened
• 1:37:18
  under their watch. This ball system is going to crap under their watch and
• 1:37:23
  because of their corporate overlords and these announcers having to pretend that the system hasn't
• 1:37:29
  been destroyed by the same people that are employing them, and it's just been
• 1:37:31
  ridiculous to watch. But they've sold out everything for this playoff. At the
• 1:37:38
  same time, they've enabled these players quitting, no criticism of them at all,
• 1:37:45
  sometimes even putting rose pedals in their path for quitting, like they did
• 1:37:50
  with Caleb Williams from USC not playing in the ball game, and by the
• 1:37:54
  way, not surprising, his replacement did just as well as he ever would
• 1:37:58
  have done in their bowl game. I continue to believe he's incredibly overrated and
• 1:38:01
  anyone that picks him in the first pick of the NFL draft is insane.
• 1:38:05
  But I digress. The point of this is you're gonna have a situation where
• 1:38:12
  ESPN now has a huge invest in self interest and economic self interest to make
• 1:38:19
  sure that these players all play. So are they suddenly gonna change the rules
• 1:38:25
  even when players try to get out of playing in those first and second round
• 1:38:30
  games. I don't know what they're gonna do. It's gonna be a very
• 1:38:33
  difficult spot for them, but it's gonna be absolutely delicious to watch because the
• 1:38:39
  hypocrisy will be laid bare and ESPN will be exposed for what they are and
• 1:38:45
  for how they have played an incredibly important role in destroying the institution of college
• 1:38:49
  football. And so I am shock. You know, you're probably not shocked
• 1:38:55
  to hear this. I am very pessimistic about how this twelve team situation is
• 1:38:59
  gonna itself out. I have been very open minded. I have actually thought,
• 1:39:03
  well, you know what, if we just get rid of all the
• 1:39:05
  balls and we have these eleven playoff games, maybe that won't be so bad.
• 1:39:11
  I've actually thought that was possible, right get rid of the clutter.
• 1:39:15
  Although you can't get rid of the clutter because ESPN needs programming between Christmas and
• 1:39:21
  New Year's and so they cluttered with all these BS Bowl games that mean absolutely
• 1:39:26
  nothing and the players don't even pretend to care about anymore. So that's a
• 1:39:30
  major problem right there. But I have been open to the idea that maybe
• 1:39:35
  these eleven games have some value. And after what happened with Florida State and
• 1:39:40
  what happened with Ohio State, and oh, by the way, you know,
• 1:39:43
  Liberty would have been part of the playoff this year and they got absolutely
• 1:39:47
  smoked by Oregon. I think that at least the first two rounds of those
• 1:39:53
  playoffs this year are going to be, if not this year, certainly by
• 1:39:59
  the next year, going to be huge disappointments. Once people figure out what's
• 1:40:03
  really going on. And then there's also the issue I mentioned the Rose Bowl
• 1:40:06
  being in big trouble going forward. The Rose Bowl and the parade, which
• 1:40:12
  will stay on January first in most years except for Sundays when you can't do
• 1:40:15
  the parade for logistical reasons because of the churches in Pasadena. In most years,
• 1:40:21
  the Rose Bowl is going to be a quarter final game. A quarter
• 1:40:28
  final game where, by the way, one team is gonna know and one
• 1:40:32
  fan base is gonna know they're going to the Rose Bowl for about twenty five
• 1:40:36
  days, and the other team that plays in a first round game is only
• 1:40:40
  gonna know they're going to the Rose Bowl for about nine days. So you're
• 1:40:44
  gonna have a logistical nightmare where I don't know how they're gonna keep, you
• 1:40:47
  know, especially in the first few years before people figure out that this is
• 1:40:50
  all a big joke and a scam. I don't know how you're gonna keep
• 1:40:55
  one team from buying up all the tickets and I'm getting all the hotel rooms
• 1:40:59
  and everything else that goes into going to a bowl game. And then there's
• 1:41:01
  the other issue, which I don't think that the college powers have figured into
• 1:41:08
  this, is that fans are gonna have to make this calculation of Okay,
• 1:41:12
  do I go to the first round game when we might still be playing three
• 1:41:15
  more playoff games? Do I go to rose ball when if we win,
• 1:41:18
  we're still gonna have two more playoff games to go to. These are things
• 1:41:24
  that no one has thought through and I think are gonna cause major logistical issues.
• 1:41:30
  But the biggest problem is the incentive structure, and they have made a
• 1:41:33
  fundamental miscalculation with regard to the way that the players are gonna look at the
• 1:41:39
  word playoff. And it all goes back to the death of pride. I
• 1:41:43
  think these rules the system was created under the false premise that we're still dealing
• 1:41:48
  with the same players we were ten, twenty, thirty, forty fifty years
• 1:41:51
  ago, and we're not. Pride means nothing. It's all about the Benjamins,
• 1:41:58
  It's all about themselves. Team means nothing. School really means nothing in
• 1:42:02
  an instant transfer era, and I think the results are going to be far,
• 1:42:08
  far less promising than what ESPN is banking on, which I hate for
• 1:42:13
  college football, which I love, but I kind of don't have a problem
• 1:42:17
  with if it makes ESPN suffer because I despise ESPN now, one other thing
• 1:42:23
  with regard to sports football and the media and how incredibly moronic the sports media
• 1:42:30
  is. And if I was doing a sports talk show, I would talk
• 1:42:33
  a lot about this because I find this to be fascinating from a football perspective,
• 1:42:38
  but it gets a little bit too deep into the weeds. However,
• 1:42:42
  there are two things that happened this past weekend in a very critical NFL game
• 1:42:46
  between the Dallas Cowboys and the Detroit Lions that I want to at least quickly
• 1:42:50
  mention for a couple of different reasons. The first is that there was a
• 1:42:55
  massive controversy at the end of the Lions Cowboys game where the Lions felt as
• 1:43:00
  if they got screwed by some bad officiating because they seemingly won the game on
• 1:43:05
  a two point conversion, but the play was called back because the player who
• 1:43:11
  caught the ball in the end zone was not declared to be an eligible receiver.
• 1:43:15
  He was alignman. That's where it gets complicated from a football perspective,
• 1:43:21
  but basically, the officials ruled that that person had not reported to them as
• 1:43:29
  an eligible receiver because he's an actually alignment and not a wide receiver, and
• 1:43:33
  the video showed and the audio scene to show that that wasn't true, that
• 1:43:39
  the player who caught the ball number sixty eight had in fact reported to the
• 1:43:43
  official, and there should have been a notification of the Dallas Cowboys that that
• 1:43:49
  player was an eligible receiver. He's the one that caught the pass. The
• 1:43:53
  Lions got robbed in the media's mind because the official made a mistake and therefore
• 1:44:00
  the Lions should have won the game, and that is just bullshit. I
• 1:44:05
  have no stake in this. I don't really care very much about the Cowboys
• 1:44:08
  or the Lions, you know, other than my daughter being a fan of
• 1:44:11
  the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders. So I'm not rooting for either team here, and
• 1:44:16
  I like the Lions' story because Detroit has obviously had a very very hard time
• 1:44:20
  for many, many many years. So I have no animus towards either team
• 1:44:25
  here. But the bottom line reality of this situation, which most almost all
• 1:44:30
  of the sports media missed, is that yes, the official screwed up,
• 1:44:35
  But if the official had not screwed up and it informed the Dallas Cowboys properly
• 1:44:41
  the number sixty eight was eligible, their entire defense would have changed. They
• 1:44:46
  would have covered number sixty eight, and there's a very good chance sixty eight
• 1:44:50
  would never have made the catch to begin with. So the entire premise of
• 1:44:57
  this controversy is flawed. That somehow the Lions would have won the game if
• 1:45:00
  the ref had not screwed up. There's no evidence or logic to support that,
• 1:45:04
  And in fact, the way I look at this is that the Lions
• 1:45:09
  kind of were trying to be too cute, and they were trying to deceive
• 1:45:13
  the Cowboys by sending multiple players over to the referee so that the Cowboys might
• 1:45:18
  not know for sure that sixty eight was the eligible receiver, and they basically
• 1:45:24
  screwed themselves because the official got confused over which lineman was reporting as an eligible
• 1:45:30
  receiver. He told the Cowboys the wrong number, and so the Cowboys were
• 1:45:34
  playing defense based upon a completely different reality than what the Lions thought was the
• 1:45:41
  case. So, yes, the referee seemed to screw up, but I
• 1:45:44
  think the Lions deserved some culpability in this. And the most important point is
• 1:45:49
  that the Lions would not have necessarily won the game even if the refs hadn't
• 1:45:54
  screwed up. And then there's the other issue of even after that happened,
• 1:45:58
  the Lions had the option to kick an extra point and put the game into
• 1:46:01
  overtime, which they decided not once but twice not to do so there's more
• 1:46:06
  culpability in the Lion's part. So how the Lions became the victim and all
• 1:46:10
  this I am confused by, but it's so typical of the sports media blowing
• 1:46:15
  virtually every story of any significance, and I think they did so when it
• 1:46:18
  came to this controversy. But also embedded in that game was a far more
• 1:46:25
  significant play, both from a standpoint of who won the game as well as
• 1:46:29
  where football is heading, that got almost no attention whatsoever. And this was
• 1:46:35
  a play that might have been a nine point play where the Dallas Cowboys had
• 1:46:42
  the ball deep in their own end, the quarterback was in the end zone,
• 1:46:45
  and a Lion defender comes rushing at the quarterback Dak Prescott and weffsawt him
• 1:46:54
  completely misses the tackle in an almost bizarre fashion, and the cow end up
• 1:47:00
  scoring a touchdown. Now, so this could have been a sack in the
• 1:47:03
  end zone for a safety, it turns into a Dallas Cowboy touchdown. So
• 1:47:08
  theoretically a nine point difference on what happened, and you know, the sports
• 1:47:14
  media, even the announcers at the game. Former Dallas Cowboy quarterback Troy Aikman,
• 1:47:19
  who's been very critical of the NFL rules when it comes to protecting the
• 1:47:24
  quarterback. He takes a complete dive on what really obviously happened in this situation.
• 1:47:30
  And here's what the aftermath of the play sounded like during the actual broadcast,
• 1:47:36
  with Troy Aikman baffled as to why the defender did not try to tackle
• 1:47:42
  the Dallas Cowboy quarterback Dak Prescott and even references flag football, which I've talked
• 1:47:47
  a lot about in his commentary. So, Derek Barnes has a free run
• 1:47:54
  at Dak Prescott, you gonna see ap number fifty five. I'm not even
• 1:47:57
  sure what this is. I mean, you get more in a play football
• 1:48:01
  game than what we just saw there from Darrick Mooers, but he calls the
• 1:48:04
  perfect play. Now, I have said many times that I think that the
• 1:48:09
  NFL announcers have been told to knock it off on the issue of protecting the
• 1:48:15
  quarterback and the rules getting out of hand and how wissified the game has become.
• 1:48:19
  And I found it interesting that Troy Aikman who last year said we got
• 1:48:23
  to take the dresses off of quarterbacks and who there references flag football. I
• 1:48:29
  cannot believe he didn't really understand what was happening in that play, because if
• 1:48:33
  you look at the video, it is as obvious as could possibly be what
• 1:48:39
  really happened, and that is that the defender was afraid he was going to
• 1:48:45
  get a roughing the passer penalty. It could not be more obvious, and
• 1:48:49
  I just I find it incomprehensible that Troy Aikman did not understand that he acted
• 1:48:56
  baffled there as to what was happening with the defender. It was not baffling.
• 1:49:00
  The defender had a free shot at the quarterback and something in his brain
• 1:49:06
  told him aboard, aboard. It may not even have been a conscious decision,
• 1:49:13
  but he saw the way that his trajectory was going and that where the
• 1:49:18
  quarterback was heading, and he saw that he might get a penalty if he
• 1:49:23
  did not avoid tackling the quarterback in the freaking end Zound. This is where
• 1:49:30
  we are now. A defender actually makes it either voluntary or involuntary, or
• 1:49:35
  somewhere in between, decisions to not tackle the quarterback in the end zound because
• 1:49:42
  he's afraid he would get a penalty, and then him not going through with
• 1:49:46
  the tackle results in a game changing touchdown by the Dallas Cowboys, and the
• 1:49:53
  announcer is pretending to be baffled as to what happened. It was not baffling,
• 1:49:59
  it was not using. It could not be more obvious. And in
• 1:50:01
  fact, when the video of the audio that I just played for you was
• 1:50:06
  posted on Twitter, one of those that responded was JJ Watt, former defensive
• 1:50:13
  lineman future Hall of Famer in the NFL. He tweeted in response as to
• 1:50:18
  you know, the question was what was the defender trying to do here?
• 1:50:21
  What was he thinking? Because I think, you know whatever, what sports
• 1:50:26
  media outlet tweeted this out was also playing along that, boy, this is
• 1:50:30
  weird. Why would this defender not try to make the tackle? Well,
• 1:50:32
  JJ Watt said, trying to avoid a roughing the passer penalty because he thought
• 1:50:39
  Dak was throwing it. But it was a pump fake. That's where we're
• 1:50:44
  at now, Ding ding ding ding, jj Watt stating the truth there,
• 1:50:53
  the obvious truth of what happened, and even the announcers of the game,
• 1:50:59
  announcers who know should know better, either don't get it or don't state it
• 1:51:02
  for whatever reason. And this is the end of tackle football. This is
• 1:51:08
  the end, because we're creating rules and situations where we're going to see this
• 1:51:12
  all the time, where defenders literally abort tackles because they're afraid of their own
• 1:51:18
  shadow, they're afraid of getting penalties. And I could not possibly imagine a
• 1:51:25
  more dramatic or obvious example than this one, and yet it gets no attention
• 1:51:29
  because the media completely blew it when it came to the other controversy at the
• 1:51:34
  end of the Lions Cowboys game. All right, now, that'll do it
• 1:51:39
  for this episode of the Death of Journalism Podcasts. We'll be back on our
• 1:51:42
  regular schedule with two episodes a week for the durction of the podcast starting next
• 1:51:47
  week, and obviously we'll get more and more focused on the Iowa Caucuses and
• 1:51:51
  the New Hampshire Primary, which are fast approaching in the next couple of weeks.
• 1:51:58
  So until then, thanks so much for listening. This is been episode
• 1:52:00
  number one hundred and sixteen of the Death of Journalism podcast. My name is
• 1:52:03
  John Zigler.