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Episode One Hundred Six: Sidelines and Sex Tapes · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and six of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 0:04
  My name is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show. Elon Musk
• 0:08
  is under attack again, Ben Shapiro and Candae Owens go out it over Hamas
• 0:15
  and israel sportscaster Carissa Thompson finally gets in trouble that she actually deserves, and
• 0:21
  The New York Times finally admits the closing schools during COVID caused the catastrophe.
• 0:28
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• 0:38
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  Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show.
• 1:07
  There's probably no public figure about whom I speak regularly on this podcast about whom
• 1:14
  I'm more conflicted than Elon Musk. I've talked about this before. I think
• 1:19
  Elon Musk is a person that deserves a lot of respect for what he has
• 1:23
  done in the realm of free speech. Buying Twitter, especially post COVID,
• 1:29
  I think was a hugely positive move in general for the entire issue of free
• 1:34
  speech and free expression and media fairness and getting rid of censorship. There are
• 1:41
  things that he says that I think are brilliant, especially his evaluation of the
• 1:46
  left. There are other things, though, that make me not trust him,
• 1:49
  mainly because he's so damn busy, he's so damn powerful. He seems
• 1:53
  rather reckless in his decision making. There's no one around him to tell him
• 1:57
  no. He makes a lot of mistakes that he doesn't even seem to think
• 2:00
  are that big of a deal, like, for instance, watching Ron DeSantis's
• 2:05
  campaign announcement, which I think was very, very critical and to this day
• 2:09
  is underrated as far as how that dictated how that the Santas campaign was going
• 2:15
  to be perceived and helping Donald Trump be the nominee. There's other things that
• 2:21
  Musk has done to help Trump become the presumptive I guess at this point Republican
• 2:27
  presidential nominee, including his embrace of Tucker Carlson and the occasional conspiracy theory that
• 2:32
  Elon Musk has jumped on. For instance, the whole Paul Pelosi was attacked
• 2:38
  because of a gay tryst gone wrong theory, which Musk through gasoline on that
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  fire. By the way, that court case has now been adjudicated, and
• 2:51
  to pay essentially pled guilty to what actually happened. There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever,
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  As I told you from the beginning that that's what happened here. I
• 3:00
  knew Paul Pelosi wasn't gay from my father's and my father's best friend's experiences with
• 3:07
  him all the way back to Georgetown University when they went on double and triple
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  dates with Nancy Pelosi. And I mean, that was this theory that was
• 3:14
  insane from the beginning, And I've got in so many fights with fellow conservative
• 3:19
  media members who wanted to buy into that ridiculous theory. Well, Elon Musk
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  was a big part of the reason why so many people took that absurdity fairly
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  seriously. Plus there's the whole electric car situation, which I think is a
• 3:32
  scam and a boondoggle, and that's essentially how Musk has made his massive fortune
• 3:37
  through Tesla. So I'm very conflicted about Elon Musk. And Elon Musk is
• 3:42
  now currently under attack on multiple fronts in a rather ironic and I think telling
• 3:49
  way. He's had this feud with the Anti Defamation League, which pretends to
• 3:54
  be this organization that defends Jewish people against anti Semitism, but essentially has become
• 4:01
  a left wing organization that uses that issue as a shield to do its political
• 4:09
  bidding and to attack people that they don't like politically, and Musk has called
• 4:15
  them out. And once you become a target, and let's be clear,
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  I mean I've used the analogy of the mob previously when it comes to the
• 4:24
  media. You know, Lelon Musk used to be a made man in the
• 4:27
  left wing media largely because of the electric car and Tesla. Now he's been
• 4:31
  completely kicked out of the club and he's a full on target and Media Matters
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  went after him, and Musk is claiming that he's going to be suing Media
• 4:42
  Matters over the way that they have handled a series of issues related to him
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  recently. And Musk may have given his enemies some ammunition because on Twitter a
• 4:54
  few days ago, he responded to a tweet in a way that was clumsy,
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  and he later clarified it it sounded like he was agreeing with a tweet
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  that could easily be interpreted as anti Semitic. He then made it very clear
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  he was referring to the Anti Defamation League, and I thought his clarification was
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  fine. Ben Shapiro, who's obviously Jewish and very pro israel leapt to Elon
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  Musk's defense. And by the way, this also goes to another element of
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  Musk that I've talked about in the podcast previously, where in buying Twitter,
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  he has also bought himself. Even though he was way, way, way
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  overpaid for Twitter, he's buying himself inherently some positive media coverage and defense whenever
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  he's attacked because and I'm not suggesting Ben Shapiro did this for this reason,
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  but Ben Shapiro did a pretty good commentary breaking down the controversy and defending Elon
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  Musk. Well, Elon Musk tweeted that out, and as a last check,
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  that video from Ben Shapiro has thirty million views. So gee, I
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  wonder if Ben Shapiro benefited from defending Elon Musk. Of course he did.
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  And I've used the analogy previously of Elon Musk being the new Matt Drudge,
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  where he has created a market for positive Elon Musk stories, because anyone who
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  does it, a positive Elon Musk story or commentary has the great potential of
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  being very much rewarded when it comes to traffic and revenue, as Ben Shapiro
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  was here. And so I am someone who is a free speech absolutist,
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  which Musk claims to be, although I don't think he really is, and
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  so I am on Musk's side in this. I also think it's rather bizarre
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  and rather telling that the left is trying to claim that Elon Musk is somehow
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  anti Semitic when they're the ones that are very tepid in their support of Israel
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  in this most recent war with Amas and the terrorist attack that Israel endured here.
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  I think that's actually deflection on the left part. But they're going after
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  him with everything they have. They're now pulling advertisers again on Twitter. We'll
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  see if that lasts. Wikipedia, which is a left wing organization that I
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  despise. At last check had changed Elon Musk's profile to describe him as a
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  right wing conspiracy theorist. I mean, it's just absurd, But this is
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  what happens when you actually become a target of the left, which is why
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  nobody was something to lose dares to do that, because you're gonna lose all
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  sorts of privileges and you might end up getting canceled. Now Musk is in
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  the very rare position of having enough money where he can endure a lot of
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  this. He has obviously unprecedented and he doesn't seem to care that much,
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  which I think is fantastic. I respect that, But then we get back
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  to this conflict issue where everything that's good about Elon Musk there's a negative and
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  I don't really fully understand why he's doing this. I guess from a political
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  standpoint it makes sense, but he's also while fighting for free speech, he's
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  also making these rules on Twitter that seem rather vague to me related to the
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  issue of anti semitism as to what is defined as anti semitism and what will
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  not be allowed to be said on the platform for all intentsive purposes. For
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  instance, the word decolonization apparently is now effectively been banned or as verboten on
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  Twitter. This is a word I never was familiar with with regard to the
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  issue of anti semitism. I'll take his word for it that this is a
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  buzzword. But to me, this is very dangerous territory. Whenever you leave,
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  whenever you leave free speech absolutism, it's an inherent slippery slope because the
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  moment you say, well, you know, the old fire in a theater,
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  you can't yell fire in a theater thing. Okay, that's a that's
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  a loophole, but we got to be very very careful that we don't go
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  beyond that. Well, when you go into the realm of well, this
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  is a word, that's bad because it means something that we're not sure one
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  hundred percent that that's what the person meant. That it's a buzzword, Well,
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  that's very dangerous territory, especially when you know who's making that decision.
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  That's a judgment call, and judgment calls are inherently dangerous because the person making
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  the judgment is not someone who's in favor of free speech, and it is
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  using it for political weaponry purposes. The slippery slope become very, very obvious,
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  and you know, again, I guess the theme of the beginning of
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  this episode of the podcast is zig being conflicted because this whole issue of anti
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  Semitism, I think is ripe for the slippery slope, and I am a
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  big defender of Israel. I do think that there's anti Semitism out there that's
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  real, far more by the way, in this country than there is racism
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  against black people, which gets obviously a huge megaphone in the news media that
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  we pretend that we're still living in the early nineteen sixties, And while I'm
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  sure racism still exists, it does not anywhere shape or form exist anything close
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  to what it was, and in many cases we have I believe white people
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  being the victims of actual systematic racism more than black people are. But I'm
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  not naive. I realize that racism exists. It clearly exists against Jewish people,
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  whether you want to all that are. You know, one of the
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  confusing elements of this story, and complicated elements of the story, is that
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  Judaism is a lot of things. It's a religion, it's an ethnicity,
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  it's a You could argue it's a race. I guess you could argue that
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  it's a state. When you talk about Israel, it's a culture. It's
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  a lot of different things, and it's not all the same. It's it's
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  very complex. And so I have been stunned, I think a lot of
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  people be stunned, and the reaction to the terrorist attack against Israel as to
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  just how much quote unquote anti Semitism actually exists, especially on our college campuses
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  and among left wing elite organizations, it's been stunning. And it's seeped absolutely
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  into the news media coverage of the war against Hamas by Israel or the counter
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  attack against Hamas by Israel, and and so that's been stunning. And so
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  it obviously exists, and it's obviously a problem, and something ought to be
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  done about it. And I get I get the inclination to want to ban
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  speech that is deemed to be anti Semitic. But this is where it also
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  becomes dangerous, because you know, how do you define it. For instance,
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  in many parts of Europe, I don't remember exactly how many countries and
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  jurisdictions, but in parts of Europe it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.
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  Right now, I realized that this is not an issue that I should have
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  any standing on because my name is Ziggler. I was born in Germany on
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  a US military base. My grandfather was a rocket scientist technically working for the
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  Nazi regime before he came to America, and Operation paper Clip with Von Brown
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  ended up getting the US Army's highest civilian honor. So, I mean,
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  I'm not somebody that should be speaking about anything really related to the Holocaust because
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  no one's interested. But I care about free speech, and obviously, the
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  Holocaust happened. Obviously it was beyond horrendous, one of the worst things in
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  the history of humanity. Anyone that denies that is insane. However, I'm
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  a believer that people ought to be able to say insane things because how do
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  you define where that line is. That's inherently subjective and inherently dangerous and inherently
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  political. And I'll give you an example within this whole the Holocaust denial thing.
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  I've even been called a Holocaust denial, which is an absolutely absurd,
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  ridiculous but telling And that's why I'm going to share the story here. Many
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  years ago, I don't remember how many years ago it was I don't know.
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  Six seven years ago, there was a college professor who was being attacked
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  because they they didn't deny, They were not denying the Holocaust. They questioned
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  the number of six million Jewish people who were killed in the Holocaust. I
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  can't I think they thought it might have been closer to three or four million.
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  I don't remember. But they were being attacked publicly because they were doing
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  what they what seemed to be an academic discussion of our okay, how many
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  people actually died Jewish people died in the Holocaust. And I defended the professor
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  online on Twitter. I said, this is ridiculous that this person is being
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  attacked for trying to figure out what the truth of the matter was. And
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  I got contacted by CNN's Jake Tapper via a direct message. Now, Jake
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  and I both you know, basically came from Philadelphia, and I used to
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  consider him before COVID to be a pretty sensible and decent broadcaster. We had
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  had a rapport, we had some communication, we'd share each other's tweat from
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  time to time, and he basically wanted to know, what the hell's the
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  deal here are you? Are you a Holocaust DENI or I don't know if
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  those were his exact words. I'm like, no, that's ridiculous. I'm
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  simply defending free speech from a college professor who ought to have by far them.
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  You know, if you believe in academic freedom, the most free speech
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  that anyone should have, that doesn't exist anymore, or unless you're on the
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  left on most college campuses. I just think that if we care about free
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  speech and we care about the truth, people ought to be able to vigorously
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  find out what happened. Not that it's that big of a deal how many
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  millions of people died in the Holocaust. I mean, to me, inherently,
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  that six million number is weird because you're rounding off to a million.
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  That's what I told the Jake. I said, Jake, how can we
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  take a sacred a number that you're rounding off to a million? I mean,
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  so it just that I get. This is where me being a free
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  speech absolutist, I guess gets me in trouble from time to time, because
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  I think people have the right in this country should have the right to be
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  wrong, because that right enables people to go down paths intellectually that sometimes are
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  going to find truth that you wouldn't get otherwise, And I guess I'm particularly
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  sensitive to that when it comes to the whole Penn State Joe paternal Jerry Sandusky
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  situation. I want to live in a world where somebody says, you know
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  what, everyone says, Jerry Sindusky's guilty, but maybe he's not, and
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  they can go and vigorously pursue that topic without fear of being destroyed like I
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  essentially was for finding out the truth of that matter. We ought to live
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  in a world where that intellectual curiosity is protected instead of destroyed. Because yes,
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  yes we have to live with a lot of crazy people say insane things,
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  but occasionally you're going to find out important truth that you wouldn't find out
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  otherwise. And I think we would have learned that during COVID. The same
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  concept in COVID, you know, the whole idea that you're not allowed to
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  take on third rail topics or the conventional wisdom can ever be wrong, or
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  there's certain things you're just not allowed to say, which happened a lot during
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  COVID. Turned out a lot of those things that were being said you weren't
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  allowed to question were actually false, And so I support Elon Musk in this,
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  but I also think that he's a little bit of a hypocrite when it
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  comes to this issue of free speech absolutism. But by and large, I
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  think that he has done many, many positive things in this realm, and
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  I still support him because of that. Now, related to this entire issue
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  is a dust up that has broken out at the Daily Wire, conservative media
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  outlet between Ben Shapiro, the founder of the Daily Wire, who I've already
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  referenced with regard to Elon Musk, and Candace Owens, who is one of
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  the stars of the Daily Wire. Now, Candie Owens is an interesting figure.
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  I don't think I've talked much about her on this podcast. I've never
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  met her. She's blocked me on Twitter for some reason I don't even know
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  why. I actually think she's very very smart, very articulate, and she's
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  right about a lot of things. She is being perceived, at least by
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  Ben Shapiro, as being very very soft in her support of Israel, and
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  I think this is more of an issue of things that she's not said than
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  things that she has said, at least from what I can tell. When
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  it comes to Hamas and the lack of condemnation of Hamas. But Ben Shapiro
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  has been very, very publicly critical of his colleague at Daily Wire, Candace
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  Owens. And Candace Owens did an interview with Tucker Carlson, who's also been
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  probably of all the major right wing media figures, the softest in this support
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  of Israel and the most suspicious in his lack of condemnation of Hamas. And
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  I don't even really understand what Tucker's play is here, But I've been very
• 19:25
  critical of Tucker this year. I used to be friendly with him, used
• 19:29
  to work for him very briefly many years ago, used to have a lot
• 19:30
  of respect for him, and I'm now consider him to be Donald Trump's MVP
• 19:34
  in this campaign, and I think I've been vindicated in that in virtually every
• 19:38
  way. But Tucker did a very supportive interview with Candace Owens about this.
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  As of this taping, she's still at the Daily Wire, although Ben Shapiro,
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  from what Candae Owens says, may not even have the authority to fire
• 19:53
  her. He did suggest that she quit on Twitter. Ben Shapiro did to
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  Candas Owen that to my knowledgies of this tabling has not happened. Here's where
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  I stand on Candis Owans. Look, she should have the right if this
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  is really what she believes to express her opinions. I'm all in favor of
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  free expression, free thought, free speech. However, I don't trust Candace
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  Owans. And the main reason I don't trust Candie Owans is that she is
• 20:23
  a conspiracy theorist. And most prominently among the conspiracies that she has publicly stated
• 20:30
  she believes is that she believes that the moon landing was faked. And I'm
• 20:37
  not making this up and I'm not exaggerating this, she has said publicly.
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  Now, she's a younger person, so she clearly wasn't even close to being
• 20:45
  alive when the moonlanding actually happened. So you might be able to give her
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  a slight pass on that, But I'm sorry. If you are an adult
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  who is a political commentator and your word is supposed to mean anything, and
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  you publicly, on multiple occasions state with great confidence, not even just asking
• 21:08
  questions, which is often a canard, but with great confidence, state that
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  you believe that the moon landing is fake, then I'm sorry. I can't
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  take anything you say all that seriously because you're a joke. You're either an
• 21:22
  idiot or you're lying. You know, I don't even know what the other
• 21:27
  options would be. Or maybe you just don't understand the way the world is
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  actually works, or maybe you didn't even study the issue. But there's no
• 21:36
  good scenario there that's a other than that, Missus Kennedy, How was the
• 21:41
  trip to Dallas Since we're on the sixtieth anniversary of the JFK assassination, which
• 21:48
  you'll have a thought about later on in this episode. So that's a game
• 21:52
  set match for me. I can't get beyond you think the moon landing was
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  faked and take you seriously. But that's the state of the right wing media.
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  I mean, she's talking to Tucker Carlson, who believes Kennedy was killed
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  by the CIA, and he's very clear about it, even there's no evidence
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  of that. He believes in all sorts of other wackadoodle conspiracy theories. Now,
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  and this is what the right wing media has become in large part that
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  it's not a disqualifier anymore. It's a qualification for being a right wing media
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  star to believe in the right wack adoodle conspiracy theory. So I'm with Ben
• 22:30
  Shapiro on this one when it comes to the feud with Candae Owens, another
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  issue with regard to free speech. I have supported Donald Trump in his legal
• 22:42
  battles when it comes to gag orders, and one gag order has been lifted
• 22:49
  on Donald Trump in the New York fraud case that he is currently enduring with
• 22:56
  his business empire being basically called a fraud because of the valuations of properties.
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  That gag order was lifted by a New York judge. And as we speak,
• 23:10
  as we tape this, Trump's lawyers are contesting a gag order in the
• 23:15
  federal election fraud case. I guess you would call it. And so I
• 23:21
  am very supportive of these gag orders being lifted because he is running for president.
• 23:26
  He is the leader to be the Republican nominee and probably the presumptive at
• 23:32
  this point nominee for president. Therefore, any thing that happens in his public
• 23:38
  life is inherently political, and it is absurd in a nation that has the
• 23:45
  First Amendment for the government to be gagging his ability, preventing him, censoring
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  him from it doesn't matter to me if he's lying. He should be allowed
• 23:59
  to say what he wants it's inherently political. So the idea that you have
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  a pres major presidential candidate being gagged in political in cases that are inherently political,
• 24:11
  both in their content as well as their effect. Obviously, whether it's
• 24:17
  the fraud case, of the four criminal cases against him, those are inherently
• 24:22
  political at least in their effect, and in most of them, three of
• 24:26
  them at least, there's a clear political element to the content of the case
• 24:32
  against them. In fact, you could argue in all four there's content that
• 24:37
  is political. So it is obvious to me that these gag orders are completely
• 24:42
  wrong against the First Amendment and ought to be lifted. And I hope the
• 24:47
  one in the federal case is for no other reason, one to protect the
• 24:51
  First Amendment and two to prevent Trump from whining about the gag order against him.
• 25:00
  Now, obviously one of the criminal cases against Donald Trump is related to
• 25:04
  January sixth and the so called insurrection. There's been a whole lot of footage
• 25:10
  that has now been released in the last few days because the new Speaker of
• 25:14
  the House has allowed that to happen. And of course this is more fuel
• 25:19
  for the conspiracy theorists who want to believe because they don't want to think that
• 25:23
  this was as bad as perceived at first, that this was all an inside
• 25:27
  job, and all sorts of snippets of clips have been used to say,
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  see, this is proof that it was an inside job along and this really
• 25:38
  wasn't a thing and Trump supporters were set up. I don't believe that it
• 25:45
  makes no sense. It's a nonsensical theory that has no one blowing the whistle
• 25:49
  on that. I mean, so, I mean, there's all sorts of
• 25:52
  reasons why this theory makes no sense. One I don't even know understand the
• 25:56
  motivation. Trump had already lost at this point. All these people, not
• 26:00
  a Trump supporter among them, in this conspiracy, all these law enforcement people
• 26:06
  are gonna do all this, risk their livelihoods, their freedom, to set
• 26:12
  up Trump supporters, to make them look bad, to put people in danger
• 26:19
  after Trump has already lost the election. I don't get that now. On
• 26:26
  the other hand, I do think that it's becoming more and more obvious that
• 26:30
  many of the people who were convicted and sentenced in the January sixth uprising,
• 26:37
  or what we want to call it, were not treated fairly by the legal
• 26:41
  system, that they got too much punishment I will absolutely agree with that in
• 26:45
  general, and I've also stated many, many times that the media has completely
• 26:51
  overplayed their hand here. The Democrats completely overplaid their hand here. You know,
• 26:56
  the use of the deaths of police officers that were not for vod on
• 27:00
  that day by protesters has been outrageous. The basically the censorship of the murder
• 27:07
  of Ashley babbittt, a white woman, by a black police officer, has
• 27:11
  been outrageous. She was the only one that was murdered that day, and
• 27:17
  every American ought to know her name, and that's not even close to the
• 27:19
  case because of the horrible media coverage of January sixth, and so I think
• 27:25
  basically everybody's wrong here. I think that the protesters were wrong for what they
• 27:30
  did in breaching the capitol. I think that the media was wrong. I
• 27:33
  think the Democrats are wrong. I think Trump was wrong. Everybody was wrong
• 27:40
  here. It was a horrible thing that happened. It was way exaggerated by
• 27:45
  the left, by the media, by the Democratic Party for pure political purposes.
• 27:49
  But I think now we're reaching the point where this is a huge part
• 27:53
  of why Trump's going to be the nominee. You can go back and look,
• 27:59
  and I stated this at the time on this podcast, everything turned in
• 28:03
  the Republican nominating process when Tucker Carlson released that first batch of video from January
• 28:11
  sixth, and that on the right, on the far right, started to
• 28:15
  change the narrative of January sixth, and instead of it being a negative towards
• 28:19
  Trump, it actually somehow became a positive, much like these criminal indictments were.
• 28:26
  And you know, look, I think this has an impact not just
• 28:30
  on the what's left of the Republican nominating process, but you know, two
• 28:34
  of the criminal cases against Trump, one in Georgia, one in federal court
• 28:38
  in DC, are very much related to this, and they're the ones where
• 28:42
  he's probably the most vulnerable because of the nature of the jury pool. One
• 28:48
  in d C. And one in Georgia in the Atlanta area, those are
• 28:52
  not good jury pools for Donald Trump. And I don't know how how much
• 28:56
  the news surrounding these videotapes is seeping into those jury polls, but it's going
• 29:03
  to come into the jury pool in the court case because I guarantee you Trump's
• 29:07
  going to use all that video and I think it's going to help him.
• 29:11
  And all he needs is one or two of those jurors to hang on for
• 29:17
  a hung jury and he's not going to be convicted, and he'll be able
• 29:19
  to claim some semblance of a victory there. So, once again, everything
• 29:25
  seems to work out, at least on the Republican side, in the favor
• 29:29
  of Donald Trump, although you could argue that at least in perception, it's
• 29:33
  it's working out in Trump's favor. On the general election side as well,
• 29:38
  Poles continue to show that by very very small margins, Trump is beating Joe
• 29:45
  Biden, but it's not because of anything great about Donald Trump. In fact,
• 29:49
  his percentage of the vote never moves. And this is the part where
• 29:53
  you know, if I if I'm not that anyone's listening to me, unfortunately,
• 29:57
  but I advise Republicans this, this whole thing about Trump's gonna win,
• 30:06
  I think is very overrated because it's not. These poll results are not as
• 30:10
  a result of people changing their minds about Trump. He's still never getting over
• 30:15
  forty six percent of the vote, and any of these polls, it's that
• 30:18
  Biden is so unbelievably weak that now Trump's forty five forty six percent is enough
• 30:25
  to beat Biden's forty two forty three percent. Now, is that really what's
• 30:30
  gonna happen a year from now? I have no way of knowing, but
• 30:33
  it feels to me. This feels to me, this lack of support for
• 30:37
  Biden among people who are not Trump fans, feels like people saying, you
• 30:44
  know what, I'm so angry about my job situation, I'm gonna quit my
• 30:48
  job. Damn it, I'm gonna quit my job. This is this sucks.
• 30:52
  Well, how many people actually do that when the rubber meets the road.
• 30:57
  Well, it's seen to me logically similar that you might tell a polster.
• 31:02
  Right now, boy Biden looks old. I can't stand this inflation,
• 31:07
  and we just everything's going in the wrong direction in this country. You know
• 31:11
  what, you know, I'll vote for Trump or I'm not going to vote
• 31:14
  for Biden. And the undecided, I mean, when you think about it,
• 31:17
  the undecided vote in these polls, and the way the third party candidates
• 31:21
  do RFK Junior and others that they throw into these polls are all an indication
• 31:26
  considering the name recognition of Biden and Trump are all an indication that there are
• 31:30
  a lot of people who don't want to vote for either candidate. And are
• 31:36
  those people in the end going to vote for somebody other than Trump or Biden,
• 31:42
  or are they just going to bite the vote and vote for Biden to
• 31:45
  prevent Trump from being a president again, and you know, the whole retribution
• 31:52
  campaign against the nation. I think that Trump's chances are being overrated right now.
• 31:57
  That doesn't mean they don't exist. They're better than I expected at this
• 32:01
  point, that's for sure. I mean, he's doing way better now than
• 32:06
  he was at this point in the twenty twenty election. Although you obviously COVID
• 32:12
  screwed all that up, so it's not a really fair comparison. But the
• 32:15
  point is Trump is doing on paper much better than I would have expected at
• 32:21
  this point, and most people would. And HBO's Bill Maher even predicted that
• 32:27
  Biden's not gonna win now, he didn't really predict that Trump's gonna win.
• 32:30
  See, that's the problem here, is that Trump's gonna be the nominee.
• 32:37
  I get why you're saying Biden's not gonna win because he's eighty one years old
• 32:39
  now and looks incredibly weak and politically very very unpopular, especially with Independence.
• 32:45
  But you gotta have someone who's gonna beat him. And especially if Trump is
• 32:52
  convicted of a felony by that point, then all bets are off because we've
• 32:57
  never experienced anything close to this before, and so you know, I am
• 33:04
  not ready to make a bill maher prediction that Biden's not gonna win. I
• 33:07
  still think, gun to my head, Biden will be the nominee. Biden
• 33:10
  will beat Trump because I think that a year for now things will be.
• 33:15
  They only have to be slightly more in the pro Biden anti Trump direction to
• 33:22
  get Biden across the finish line. But right now, if the election were
• 33:27
  today, I think you could probably make an argument that Trump would be the
• 33:30
  favorite to win. Now, that's not the way it's going to be a
• 33:35
  year from now, but you know, it's certainly more than the realm of
• 33:38
  possibility that Donald Trump will beat Joe Biden, and perception being reality, this
• 33:45
  is really the ultimate reason why Trump is going to be the nominee, because
• 33:51
  the perception has now been created that Trump will beat Biden, even though the
• 33:55
  data doesn't really support that, the logic doesn't really support that. It doesn't
• 34:00
  matter to people who like Trump, and they don't usually believe poles, even
• 34:05
  election date polls, but they believe poles that they like. In their minds,
• 34:08
  this thing is a done deal. No one can possibly vote for Biden
• 34:13
  for reelection. Trump is going to surge back into the White House and America
• 34:19
  is going to be made great again. That's what they believe, and so
• 34:22
  therefore, convincing them not to vote for Trump and in the Republican primary is
• 34:27
  going to be basically impossible. So Trump is going to be in a rock
• 34:30
  solid at worst forty percent, and in a multi candidate race, you can't
• 34:36
  beat that, which I've gone through numerous times before. Now there's another data
• 34:40
  point that it's going to even further crew for promote, further promote the perception
• 34:47
  that Trump is inevitable. And it comes oddly enough from Argentina. Argentina just
• 34:53
  had an election for president and the guy who won, a guy of Javier
• 35:00
  Milai, I think that's how you say it, close enough, is perceived
• 35:07
  as a Trump like figure. In fact, he actually makes Donald Trump seem
• 35:10
  sane. Now, politically, I think I agree with most of what this
• 35:17
  guy is saying, but his demeanor is even wackier than Trump's. He is
• 35:22
  perceived as a libertarian. I don't know if that's really true or not,
• 35:28
  but Argentina has basically gone completely socialist. Their economy is a catastrophe, and
• 35:35
  so therefore the people of Argentina seem to be much more open to somebody who's
• 35:39
  just going to come in and blow up the boxes. And literally that's his
• 35:44
  campaign is I'm going to get rid of everything. He's very anti woke,
• 35:47
  very anti socialism, doesn't believe in climate change, global warming. I mean,
• 35:54
  on paper, he seems like a great candidate, but he all so
• 36:00
  it seems like a nut job. In fact, you know, he's been
• 36:01
  perceived as a complete nut job prior to winning the presidency of Argentina. Now,
• 36:07
  I'm not one that is strongly in the belief that you can extrapolate results
• 36:14
  from other countries and make it work in the United States. I think,
• 36:19
  maybe, you know, something happens in Great Britain, there's some symbiotic relationship
• 36:25
  there, But I don't think there are many countries. Maybe Canada, but
• 36:31
  there are not many countries where you can say, if something happens there,
• 36:36
  then that's the mood of the world, and that's what's going to happen in
• 36:39
  America. So I'm not someone who's putting a lot of stock in this,
• 36:45
  but I do find it interesting, you know, and it's certainly going to
• 36:49
  help create the perception that Trump is inevitable among Trump bands because they look at
• 36:54
  what happened in Argentina and they go see, see, this is what's going
• 36:59
  to happen in America. Now, I want to shift gears slightly, although
• 37:06
  this certainly is in the realm of terrorism and free speech in the media.
• 37:12
  But something happened a few days ago on TikTok that I got to talk about,
• 37:16
  and that is that, bizarrely and out of nowhere, there became a
• 37:24
  viral campaign to promote Osama bin Laden on TikTok by young people, seemingly in
• 37:36
  America. And this all began because there were a series of TikTokers who,
• 37:44
  in a very suspicious fashion, were citing Osama bin Laden this two thousand and
• 37:51
  two letter to America post nine to eleven, where he tries to make his
• 37:55
  case for why he attacked America. And this was really it was stunning in
• 38:06
  a way. But I'm also somebody who does not really buy the narrative of
• 38:13
  what supposedly happened here now the way it was treated in the media, and
• 38:16
  there was a lot of outrage about this, especially on the right, is
• 38:21
  that all of a sudden, there were a series of pro Osama Bin laden
• 38:27
  videos that went viral on TikTok, and it went so viral that the actual
• 38:34
  letter to America, which had been hosted on a news website, was taken
• 38:39
  down. And TikTok eventually cracked down on this trend because it got so much
• 38:47
  negative attention. Now, this is not an area I'm an expert, Although
• 38:52
  I spend a lot of time on TikTok. I find TikTok to be both
• 38:57
  in fear. It's a lot like elon Musk. I'm very conflicted about.
• 39:00
  There's a lot of I don't like about TikTok, and there's a lot of
• 39:02
  great things about TikTok. You can find a lot of very interesting stuff on
• 39:06
  TikTok. You can learn a lot of things from TikTok if you use it
• 39:09
  properly, and I find it to be a decent resource for preparing for this
• 39:14
  show. But one of the things about TikTok is that you get a lot
• 39:19
  of stuff that is fake and contrived that ends up going viral. And there
• 39:27
  were about, I don't know a dozen or so of these videos that began
• 39:31
  this trend, all of a sudden, all the same time saying almost exactly
• 39:37
  the same things. And these people they seemed like actors to me. They
• 39:45
  seem like out of central casting for somebody who might have been trying to contrive
• 39:52
  a TikTok trend. Now. I have no idea why someone would want to
• 39:55
  do this, what the motivation would be, where the re the sources would
• 40:00
  come to motivate people to do this, I don't know, but this all
• 40:04
  felt very, very suspicious to me, the initial movement, the astroturfing of
• 40:10
  this trend, I have absolutely no problem believing. Though I don't know what
• 40:15
  the motivation was really or who would be behind it, I have no problem
• 40:22
  believing that this was completely contrived at the beginning, especially given the fact that
• 40:28
  the content was almost exactly the same by all these TikTokers, almost exactly the
• 40:34
  same, and so it was like they were reading from a script or something.
• 40:38
  But here's the part that's I think it's significant that's somebody was behind doing
• 40:44
  that. If my suspicions are right, that's significant number one. But number
• 40:49
  two, there's no getting around the fact that this effort to make Osama bin
• 40:54
  Lauden's letter to America go viral was highly successful. Now what does that mean.
• 41:00
  That means that because you can't fake that. I mean, unless it's
• 41:06
  a really massive conspiracy, you can't fake that. So that means that there
• 41:10
  are lots of young people seemingly in America who were on TikTok, who were
• 41:17
  not born really or not, you know, having a clue what was going
• 41:22
  on in the world that they were born when nine to eleven actually happened,
• 41:25
  who are so vulnerable to being duped that they go ahead and publicly share and
• 41:32
  positively comment on videos that are praising Osama bin Laden. That part of this
• 41:40
  thing was real, and that's very, very concerning, But it's really not
• 41:47
  that shocking now. I mean, look, we're living in a world where
• 41:52
  there are all sorts of things that are happening that would have been shocking just
• 41:54
  a few years ago. So I'm not going to pretend that this isn't something
• 42:00
  that's a surprise to me. But this has been a topic that I've felt
• 42:02
  passionately about ever since literally the fifth anniversary of nine to eleven. A huge
• 42:08
  part of my life, huge part of my life has been dictated by my
• 42:14
  efforts and my concerns about the fact that kids were not going to be taught
• 42:19
  properly about what happened with regard to nine to eleven. And this is the
• 42:23
  ultimate proof that those fears have come to fruition in spades, because we don't
• 42:30
  teach nine to eleven properly, if at all, in schools. And a
• 42:34
  large part of what happened there was because of what occurred in the fifth anniversary
• 42:39
  of nine to eleven. The fifth anniversary of nine to eleven had ABC airing
• 42:46
  a docu drama two parts mini series called The Path to nine to eleven,
• 42:52
  the best movie ever made about the real story behind how nine to eleven happened,
• 42:59
  how and why it occurred. And it got censored in large part because
• 43:05
  Bill Clinton went to his buddies at Disney ABC. He did not like parts
• 43:10
  of the miniseries and he got it cut out and the series was discredited.
• 43:16
  In the minds of the media, it was censored, it was castrated,
• 43:22
  And I was right at the heart of that controversy because I was covering it
• 43:27
  as a talk show host to KFI in Los Angeles, and I became very,
• 43:30
  very close to the writer of The Path to nine to eleven. Cyrus
• 43:34
  n Rosta is his name to this day, he's probably my best friend.
• 43:37
  Now. I did a documentary film about the censorship of the Path nine to
• 43:42
  eleven called Blocking the Path to nine to eleven. I did that for Citizens
• 43:46
  United. Dave Bossi, the guy who founded Citizens United, called it the
• 43:51
  best movie that Citizens Unit had ever made, and I agree with that.
• 43:55
  And Cyrus completely got screwed there. I told told him he was going to
• 44:00
  get screw I will never forget I was. I was watching a preview of
• 44:07
  the Past nine to eleven before it had ever been public. And this was
• 44:12
  a couple of weeks before, you know, the fifth anniversary of nine to
• 44:15
  eleven, and they were getting ready for the pr campaign. And I watched
• 44:22
  it and I'm like, oh my god, this movie is going to get
• 44:25
  destroyed by the left because it pulled no punches when it came to the issue
• 44:30
  of Bill Clinton passing on opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden. And I walked
• 44:37
  out of that preview and I found the guy who was the producer of this,
• 44:45
  a guy name of Quinn, who happened to be gay, by the
• 44:50
  way, a liberal gay man so he was the mastermind behind this. Didn't
• 44:54
  he didn't actually write it. Cyrus wrote it, but it was Quinn's idea.
• 45:00
  Uh. And I said to him, I hope you guys know you're
• 45:04
  going to get destroyed over this. And he was completely stunned, completely stunned.
• 45:13
  I had no idea. He thought. He thought I was nuts,
• 45:16
  he really thought. He basically patted me on the head and said, Okay,
• 45:21
  gee, thanks, I appreciate that. The thought, at least that's
• 45:23
  my recollection of what happened. And of course that's exactly what happened. The
• 45:30
  Clinton machine went bersark. And one of the things that was supposed to happen
• 45:37
  with that movie was that Scholastic, an educational organization puts out educational materials into
• 45:45
  schools. They had an entire program based upon the docu drama The Path to
• 45:52
  nine to eleven. It was going to be used in schools to teach the
• 45:55
  history of nine to eleven. Because of fear of the Clinton Scholastic pulled that.
• 46:01
  That was pulled from schools, and the rest is history. There's been
• 46:08
  no formalized teaching of nine to eleven that I'm aware of in our public school
• 46:15
  system. And I know that it's not taught at all, because my wife's
• 46:21
  a teacher, and I have lots of teachers in my extended family, and
• 46:25
  to my knowledge, this is not something that is part of any curriculum.
• 46:30
  It's just ignored, and so over time, when there's a vacuum, you're
• 46:37
  gonna have young people who are easily manipulated by a TikTok video that makes Osama
• 46:44
  bin Laden somehow into the hero. By the way, as coincidence would have
• 46:49
  it, also on that fifth anniversary of nine to eleven, I put out
• 46:52
  a call to my listeners at KFI for teachers who were teaching nine to eleven
• 47:00
  because this was such a huge issue in my brain, I saw this coming
• 47:06
  that if we don't teach this properly, eventually we're going to have a major
• 47:08
  problem. Well the teacher, because I wanted to have a teacher on my
• 47:13
  show to talk about how they teach nine to eleven. Well, the teacher
• 47:15
  that we chose to come into the studio and talk about how they teach nine
• 47:22
  to eleven and how little their kids know about it even five years later,
• 47:28
  happened to be the woman who would eventually become my wife. And it was
• 47:31
  not a coincidence, because the moment that she left the studio, my newsperson
• 47:37
  co host of the time, Leah Brandon, got on the intercom and said,
• 47:42
  you should date her, and now the rest is history. And we
• 47:45
  have been married for many years and have two kids. So this is an
• 47:50
  issue that is very very close to my heart and to my literal existence,
• 47:55
  with my best friend and my wife being intertwined in this topic. And I
• 48:00
  do not think it's remotely coincidental that here we are now in twenty twenty three
• 48:07
  and we can have hundreds of thousands of young people promoting the idea that Osama
• 48:13
  bin Laden was the hero and America was the villain in nine to eleven,
• 48:19
  and we're just going to just pretend that this isn't a massive problem. We're
• 48:22
  just going to brush this off as just an oddity, nothing to see here,
• 48:28
  Let's move along. This is not a one off. This is going
• 48:30
  to happen again and again as we get further and further away, not just
• 48:36
  from nine to eleven, but when it comes to all sorts of different things
• 48:38
  that are either not being taught, we're not being taught properly in our schools,
• 48:45
  and of course In all of this, we have a president who's now
• 48:47
  eighty one years old, Joe Biden, and boy Joe Biden. I've,
• 48:53
  like many people, been documenting his mental decline and how he has no business
• 49:00
  being president of the United States, and there's absolutely positively no way he's going
• 49:05
  to be capable of doing the job five years from now, which is what
• 49:08
  would have to be the case in theory if he won reelection. Of course,
• 49:13
  I'm very sure that if he does win reelection, he will not be
• 49:15
  serving that full second term, that he will resign at the appropriate time so
• 49:21
  that Kamala Harris can be handed the reins and still be able to run for
• 49:24
  two terms consecutively after that. But I want to play one clip because it
• 49:30
  shows the mental decline of Joe Biden as well as the moral decline. When
• 49:36
  it comes to if he's not in mental decline, he's just a flat out
• 49:39
  liar. You never know for sure is he this much of a liar or
• 49:45
  is he just this out of it mentally, And Biden was speaking at an
• 49:50
  event, and this is going to seem like a small lie. But it's
• 49:52
  just so easily documented that I wanted to play it. And it also fits
• 49:58
  with where I want to go next in this episode of the podcast. So
• 50:00
  we're going to play this clip from Joe Biden, and he's talking about something
• 50:05
  he's referred to previously where he's always greatly exaggerating or fabricating his history, and
• 50:13
  here he's fabricating his history when it comes to his college choice, and he's
• 50:19
  claiming without evidence that he although if you listen carefully, he stops himself,
• 50:22
  which indicates to me he even realizes he's not telling the truth. But he
• 50:27
  implies that he had gotten a commission to the Naval Academy, which is a
• 50:30
  very very difficult thing to do and not something you would forget if it actually
• 50:35
  happened, but that he decided not to go to the Naval Academy because he
• 50:39
  wanted to play football and it was at the Naval Academy at that time,
• 50:45
  and in his recollection or his telling that the Naval Academy, which was a
• 50:50
  very very different error in college football, Navy was one of the top teams
• 50:54
  in the early nineteen sixties, and he decided not to go to Navy and
• 50:59
  instead, I'd go to Delaware. When he found out that Joe Bellino and
• 51:04
  Roger Staubach were in the backfield at Navy. Now, for those that don't
• 51:09
  remember aren't college football fans, Joe Bellino and Roger Staubach were the last two
• 51:15
  Heisman Trophy winners for the Naval Academy. But there's a problem, as you
• 51:20
  might expect with the dates. But here here's Joe Biden telling his version of
• 51:24
  his personal story that doesn't make any sense, doesn't fit with the facts,
• 51:30
  There's no evidence for it, but just shows both his mental decline and his
• 51:37
  overwillingness to tell flat out lies. You know, by the way, I'm
• 51:43
  all Navy, but I was appointed in that I was going to go play
• 51:46
  at the Naval Academy until I found out the other guys in the backfield were
• 51:51
  a guy named Roger Stallback and Joe Bellino. So I decided to go to
• 51:55
  Delaware. But our son, so I I was used to brooch for Navy.
• 52:00
  Not only is there no evidence that Joe Biden was ever accepted into the
• 52:05
  Naval Academy, but just for the record, Joe Bellino won the Heisman Trophy
• 52:10
  in nineteen sixty He graduated from the Naval Academy in nineteen sixty one. That's
• 52:15
  the year Joe Biden graduated from high school, so Joe Bellino was not a
• 52:20
  concern for Joe Biden if, in fact, he ever got the commission to
• 52:25
  the Naval Academy. And Roger Staubach was in the same class as Joe Biden,
• 52:31
  so no one had ever heard of Roger Stallbach when Joe Biden decided allegedly
• 52:37
  not to go to the Naval Academy instead to go to Delaware, where he
• 52:39
  did play freshman football and then never played again. Of course, Delaware is
• 52:45
  especially at that time, was nowhere near the same kind of program as the
• 52:49
  Naval Academy. It should also be pointed out that Joe Bellino and Roger Stallbach
• 52:52
  never played together at the Naval Academy, so this story is obvious bullshit on
• 52:59
  every possible front. However, while Joe Biden shouldn't be president of the United
• 53:05
  States, maybe he could get a gig as a TV sideline reporter for college
• 53:13
  or pro football, because apparently you're allowed to lie now about what you say
• 53:17
  and do in that capacity, and there's no problem with that. The evidence
• 53:22
  for that has now become clear because of a controversy involving Carissa Thompson Now,
• 53:28
  Christa Thompson is someone I briefly discussed on this podcast previously for another reason and
• 53:37
  which I'm gonna get to momentarily. But here's the most recent controversy. So.
• 53:42
  Christa Thompson currently is an anchor person on the Thursday night Amazon broadcasts for
• 53:47
  the National Football League. She's worked for Fox for a long time in the
• 53:52
  NFL. She also worked in college football as a sideline reporter. She's done
• 53:58
  a lot of different things. Very attractive woman, she's actually good on the
• 54:01
  air. But she was doing an interview on a podcast called Pardon My Take.
• 54:07
  Now there's some important context here because, as you'll hear in a moment,
• 54:13
  she references that she has talked about this subject before, and it appears
• 54:19
  as if she's spoken about it with Aaron Andrews, another very attractive sideline reporter
• 54:25
  for the network. So she works for Fox currently. About this issue of
• 54:32
  what happens when you're a sideline reporter and the idea that sometimes you just make
• 54:39
  stuff up, kind of like Joe Biden and Carissa. Thompson talks on this
• 54:45
  podcast about how there were times when she could not get a hold of the
• 54:52
  coach at halftime and so she would just make up a report as if she
• 54:58
  had spoken to the a coach and it was no big deal. And just
• 55:02
  so you know there's no confusion over what was actually said. Here's what that
• 55:07
  sounded like from Carissa Thompson on the Pardon My Take podcast before. So I
• 55:13
  hadn't been fired for saying it, but I'll say it again. I would
• 55:15
  make up the report sometimes because A the coach wouldn't come out at halftime or
• 55:20
  it was too late, and I was like, I didn't want to screw
• 55:22
  up the report. So I was like, I'm just going to make this
• 55:23
  up because first of all, no coach is going to get mad if I
• 55:25
  say, hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves. We needed to be
• 55:30
  better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball quarterback. Yeah
• 55:34
  exactly, and do a better job of getting off the field. Like they're
• 55:37
  not going to correct me on that. I'm like, it's fine, I'll
• 55:38
  make up the report. Now. When I saw that, I thought,
• 55:44
  Wow, that's that's pretty extraordinary. So we've now reached the point where it's
• 55:50
  perfectly acceptable for a network sportsperson to brag, because that's what she's really doing
• 55:55
  there she's bragging about the fact that she would make up reports. Now nobody's
• 56:00
  pretending that this is all that significant. Although sometimes sideline reporters can have a
• 56:09
  significant role in a sporting event, it's one of those situations where ninety eight
• 56:15
  percent of the time it's just nothingness, bs cliched questions with responses that are
• 56:22
  totally meaningless, But two percent of the time something significant might happen, and
• 56:28
  then all of a sudden your job becomes very, very important. So,
• 56:31
  and I'm a big believer obviously in the slippery slope where if you if it's
• 56:37
  okay to lie about this, then when is it not okay to lie?
• 56:42
  Because that's that is a very slippery slope you're making stuff up about. You
• 56:46
  know, I talked to the coach and he said blank, blank and blank,
• 56:51
  and that didn't really happen. Then you know what won't you lie about?
• 56:54
  And over time you become desensitized, and the entire industry becomes desensitized.
• 57:00
  This is just acceptable, and you know, lying becomes normalized. And my
• 57:07
  written initial reaction I tweeted this out was I can't believe that we've really reached
• 57:10
  the point where this is a non issue. Because I did not think it
• 57:15
  was going to become a huge controversy. That was my whole take was,
• 57:20
  Wow, you can brag about this now and no one cares. Well.
• 57:24
  I was rather stunned because it turned out that people did care. And the
• 57:30
  reason why people did care, at least online, was that a lot of
• 57:36
  sideline reporters, mostly female sideline reporters, were very upset by what Thompson said
• 57:43
  because they thought understandably that this made them look bad and they wanted people to
• 57:49
  know that this is not the norm. And so there became this brigade of
• 57:53
  football sideline reporters who essentially attacked Thompson for what she had said said. And
• 58:01
  let's be clear about sideline reporters. I mean, it's not a coincidence that
• 58:06
  the vast majority of them are very attractive females. Some are not the vast
• 58:10
  majority are, and that's very obvious as to why one because men watch football,
• 58:17
  not all men, but I mean, obviously the most of the audience
• 58:21
  is male, and even women like seeing an attractive female. It's human nature.
• 58:27
  And so if you're going to put someone on the screen, especially for
• 58:30
  a job that's not necessarily brain surgery and it's not a matter of life and
• 58:36
  death. In most circumstances, putting a pretty face on there is of an
• 58:42
  obvious benefit, and it's become you know, it's become norm that someone who's
• 58:50
  going to be hired as a signland reporter is almost always an attractive female.
• 58:53
  I mean, I remember this would have been back in the early two thousands.
• 58:59
  I remember going to a Kentucky University of Louisville football game and it was
• 59:06
  on CBS, and I walk into the stadium and the sideline reporter for CBS
• 59:14
  at the time was Jill Arrington. And her blonde hair was so spectacular.
• 59:22
  This is not an exaggeration. Her blonde hair was so spectacular the moment you
• 59:27
  walked into the stadium, that's where your eyes went on the sideline. I
• 59:31
  mean, it was unbelievable. And she was a very, very attractive woman,
• 59:37
  and that's clearly why she got her job. I mean, who else
• 59:42
  is going to get a do a better job of getting males to do an
• 59:45
  interview than an attractive female. You're gonna stop. It's just human nature.
• 59:50
  If you're a man, a coach, a player, or whatever, if
• 59:52
  an attractive female sticks a microphone in your face, You're going to answer the
• 59:58
  questions. It's it's just it is just the nature of humanity. It's the
• 1:00:01
  nature of the news media and the sports media. And you know, this
• 1:00:07
  has always been the way it's been done for the last couple decades, not
• 1:00:09
  entirely, but in large part. And so I was pleasantly surprised that there
• 1:00:19
  was this negative reaction to what Thompson said. She even put out a statement
• 1:00:22
  where she lied about what she said. That's, you know, that's one
• 1:00:27
  of the great tells. It's also a great pr move. You lie about
• 1:00:30
  what you actually said in a written statement where you can't be asked questions or
• 1:00:37
  follow ups, and you'll probably be able to get away with this if if
• 1:00:42
  your employer wants to protect you and doesn't have an incentive to get rid of
• 1:00:47
  you. And one of the reasons why this was a lie was that she
• 1:00:52
  has spoken about this previously. She says there in that beginning of the clip,
• 1:00:58
  she I've talked about this before. She's talked about it with Aaron Andrews,
• 1:01:01
  before she does a podcast with Aaron Andrews. So she's lying about what
• 1:01:07
  really happened. I absolutely believe she was making up reports. Now, how
• 1:01:13
  often that happened, I don't know, because it did feel like she was
• 1:01:15
  bragging in the podcast. That's how low we've gotten now in the media,
• 1:01:21
  where you can actually be in a situation where you feel like you want to
• 1:01:23
  brag about something which is clearly unethical. And you know, I have a
• 1:01:30
  problem with Aaron Andrews too. I mean, Aaron Andrews and CHRISA. Thompson
• 1:01:35
  are basically right out of this mold where I'm not saying that they're dumb,
• 1:01:39
  by the way, sometimes they're actually pretty good on the air, but they
• 1:01:44
  have their jobs because of their physical attractiveness. That's why they were hired.
• 1:01:50
  Yet they try to pretend that that's not the reason why they were hired,
• 1:01:53
  and they try to have it both ways. I mean, Aaron Andrews has
• 1:01:57
  simultaneously, you know, portrayed herself and understandably suck because she was a victim
• 1:02:02
  of a stalker. All right, she was a victim of a stalker,
• 1:02:06
  a horrible situation, but she parlayed that situation where she was videotaped in a
• 1:02:13
  hotel room by a stalker, she parlayed that into her whole career, her
• 1:02:20
  celebrity she went on Dancing with the Stars wearing basically nothing and dancing, you
• 1:02:28
  know, on national television and basically her underwear because of the celebrity that was
• 1:02:34
  created by virtue of her being the victim of this stalking situation. So Thompson
• 1:02:39
  and Andrews, who are very very close, are really birds of a feather
• 1:02:44
  where they want all the benefits of being a hot woman and getting the job
• 1:02:51
  because they're a hot woman without accepting the reality that that's what's going on here.
• 1:02:57
  And with Thompson, the issue is even more dramatic because, as I've
• 1:03:00
  referenced previously on this podcast, something that nobody in the public knows, or
• 1:03:06
  hardly anybody in the public knows, and no one in the media will ever
• 1:03:08
  admit, is that there is a video online It's not difficult to find of
• 1:03:16
  Carissa Thompson in her Fox Sports studio office naked and masturbating in a video created
• 1:03:30
  for her boyfriend. Now, is that a horrible thing? No, by
• 1:03:35
  the way, it's very well done. I have no problem with the video
• 1:03:39
  itself. What I have a problem with is she did it at her place
• 1:03:45
  of work, by the way, the same place of work where she does
• 1:03:49
  commercials for major companies like IBM. She did a commercial from basically the same
• 1:03:54
  place her in the studio where she was masturbating on video. Now that became
• 1:04:02
  public because of a hacking. Is she responsible for the hacking? No,
• 1:04:06
  But I don't understand how we get to this point where if you're a victim
• 1:04:11
  of a hacking, what you did has no meaning. And that's kind of
• 1:04:15
  the canard that the media hides behind and never making this an issue. They
• 1:04:20
  completely whitewash this. They censored this as a news story because in their minds,
• 1:04:27
  this would be somehow facilitating or enabling the hacking. And I get it's
• 1:04:33
  a complex issue where you don't want to do something that benefits the hacker because
• 1:04:41
  then you're enabling bad behavior and illegal behavior. I get that, But it
• 1:04:46
  was Thompson who taped herself in her place of work. Now, she never
• 1:04:56
  intended that to become public. But it's a bit like you know, having
• 1:05:00
  sex with bad birth control, right if you get pregnant. You didn't intend
• 1:05:08
  yourself to get pregnant, but that was certainly in the realm of possibility.
• 1:05:12
  You're a celebrity. This has happened before. People hack into phones, and
• 1:05:17
  videos that were intended to be private become very very public. So you played
• 1:05:24
  with fire and you got burned. And is this a you know, death
• 1:05:29
  penalty offense to tape yourself masturbating in your office. I don't think so.
• 1:05:34
  I mean, Jeffrey Tubin got fired at CNN because he was masturbating, not
• 1:05:40
  taping himself. He thought he was off of a zoom call and he was
• 1:05:44
  not off of a zoom call, and that destroyed his career. But Jeffrey
• 1:05:48
  Tubman is a male who's not attractive. CHRISA. Thompson is a female who's
• 1:05:53
  very attractive, and so there's this massive double standard here. There's also a
• 1:05:58
  massive double standard. This is partly why I feel a bit of passion on
• 1:06:02
  this topic is because you know, my friend Matt lower got fired from the
• 1:06:09
  most lucrative and powerful position in the news media host of the Today Show because
• 1:06:13
  he had consensual sex in his office or in his dressing room. That was
• 1:06:20
  the entire reason and justification for WHYNBC fired Matt Lauer. Forget everything else you've
• 1:06:27
  heard, because it's all bullshit. That's what happened. Mad acknowledged that,
• 1:06:30
  admitted to it. It was a violation of his contract, and he was
• 1:06:34
  instantly fired because we were in the middle of the me too panic post Harvey
• 1:06:39
  Weinstein story, and there's a whole backstory on that. Maybe before I end
• 1:06:43
  the podcast, I'll tell you what really happened there. But Matt Lower never
• 1:06:47
  raped anybody, never getting close to raping anybody, And he had sex with
• 1:06:53
  somebody who didn't work for him, but worked in another part of NBC entirely
• 1:07:00
  on NBC's campus or within their office. That was a violation of his contract.
• 1:07:04
  So what the hell is the difference? I mean, he didn't tape
• 1:07:08
  himself doing it. What the hell is the difference between that and Carissa Thompson
• 1:07:14
  masturbating on video that she's creating from her office, her place of work.
• 1:07:21
  So there's a massive double standard here, and part of it's male and female,
• 1:07:26
  and by the way, and a part of it I get. I
• 1:07:30
  mean, you know, it's interesting when it comes to double standards. I
• 1:07:33
  mean, if we were going to acknowledge the inherent differences between men and women
• 1:07:39
  and the way men and women look at things, then I would be,
• 1:07:43
  you know, okay with some of these double standards. But that's not the
• 1:07:45
  world we live. In women seem to want to have it both ways.
• 1:07:50
  They want all the advantages but none of the disadvantages of being treated exactly the
• 1:07:55
  same. And so while I acknowledge that it's different, we're supposed to be
• 1:08:00
  living in a world where we're treating everybody the same, but we don't,
• 1:08:04
  and so we're it's this very weird situation where Thompson, who I don't think
• 1:08:09
  is going to be fired from this, I think she's once again going to
• 1:08:12
  be protected. I don't know what her leverage is because I mean, she's
• 1:08:17
  been around for a while, and you know, she's probably hanging on for
• 1:08:20
  dear life at this point, and it's not like, you know, Thursday
• 1:08:25
  night football is the most important thing in the world. But for whatever reason,
• 1:08:30
  she's protected by the way. You know what I think is partially protecting
• 1:08:31
  her here. I think CHRISA. Thompson is partially protected by the fact that
• 1:08:38
  she and Aaron Andrews are being given credit, rightly or wrongly, for helping
• 1:08:44
  set up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelcey. I mean that sincerely. I think
• 1:08:48
  that that might be the difference between her getting fired and not getting fired,
• 1:08:53
  because I do think if she were to get fired, the Swifties would go
• 1:08:57
  bananas, and that might be the difference. I could be wrong about that,
• 1:09:01
  but you know, CHRISA. Thompson and Aaron Andrews talked openly about wanting
• 1:09:08
  to get Travis Kelcey and Taylor Swift together before it actually allegedly happened, And
• 1:09:13
  so that's the bizarre world we're living in now. But I guess the positive
• 1:09:16
  part of this is at least there was some outrage. I'm a big believer
• 1:09:20
  in if there's outrage, there's hope in fixing whatever societal rule or standard you're
• 1:09:29
  concerned about. And I'm glad that there was some pushback on this idea that
• 1:09:33
  it was okay for Christa Thompson to make up sideline reports, although there were
• 1:09:39
  many people who thought that this was in inane controversy because who cares. As
• 1:09:43
  I've said before, I'm a big believer in the slippery slope, and if
• 1:09:45
  you let this slide, where does it end? Probably never. Now when
• 1:09:50
  it comes to football, I have been very outspoken about how football is in
• 1:09:56
  grave danger and that eventually TAK football is going to be no more, and
• 1:10:01
  that before our eyes systematically, bit by bit piece by piece, drip by
• 1:10:06
  drip, we're seeing football be ended. And the major reason why football is
• 1:10:13
  being ended is because of safety issues in general and the issue of concussions in
• 1:10:18
  particular. And The New York Times a few days ago came out with another
• 1:10:25
  expos which they put a lot of resources into on the entire issue of concussions
• 1:10:30
  and football and how dangerous football is and even implying that football shouldn't even be
• 1:10:39
  around anymore. And this all has to do with the issue of ct which
• 1:10:45
  is the result apparently of either multiple concussions or some issues related to concussions,
• 1:10:54
  where the brains of football players have been shown to be corrupted, sometimes very
• 1:11:01
  badly, and the theory goes it's because of all the concussions that they had.
• 1:11:06
  Now, I have no problem believing that concussions caused CTE and cause all
• 1:11:14
  sorts of ramifications. I have no problem believing that I myself, weirdly,
• 1:11:18
  even though I've never played formalized football, I got a really bad concussion just
• 1:11:24
  out of college playing a very informal game of what I think was supposed to
• 1:11:30
  be nerve touch football, and I ran into a tree, and I mean
• 1:11:34
  it really had an impact on me. It. I mean, I couldn't
• 1:11:38
  remember anything. It was kind of a funny moment because I was with some
• 1:11:42
  friends and I had a doctor who was an uncle in the area who I
• 1:11:48
  wanted to call, and at first I could not remember their name. I
• 1:11:53
  couldn't, I couldn't remember anything. And eventually I told my friends I've met
• 1:12:00
  remembered the name of my uncle. Who's the doctor who lives in the DC
• 1:12:03
  area where we were, And they said, Okay, what's the name.
• 1:12:06
  I said, Joe Smith. And they thought I completely lost it because Joe
• 1:12:13
  Smith. No, that actually was my uncle's name, Joe Smith. But
• 1:12:17
  it was it was a very traumatic experience, and I have to tell you,
• 1:12:23
  I'm not sure that I was ever the same after that. I felt
• 1:12:27
  physically different after that, And you know, it was a couple of years
• 1:12:30
  after that I went into a pretty deep depression. But was that because my
• 1:12:34
  mother was killed in a car accident and because my career was in total disarray
• 1:12:41
  and I was transitioning from sports into political talk and all sorts of other things
• 1:12:45
  were going on in my life. You know, who the heck knows.
• 1:12:47
  Maybe there was a combination of factors. But I've always believed that that concussion
• 1:12:55
  had a huge impact on my brain, not just in the short run,
• 1:13:00
  but had some level of impact in the long run. Also, you know,
• 1:13:04
  I've talked a lot on this podcast about with my about my friendship with
• 1:13:08
  the late great Frank O. Harris. Frank o'harris was very, very involved
• 1:13:14
  in this issue because his Pittsburgh Steelers had a huge problem apparently because of concussions
• 1:13:23
  with players dying early, so much so that they became the subject of a
• 1:13:29
  movie, a Will Smith movie called Concussion. And you know, I have
• 1:13:33
  problems with that movie, partially because Ciril Wecked is one of the star characters.
• 1:13:40
  Ciro Wecked also is one of the biggest conspiracy theorists when it comes to
• 1:13:44
  the jfk assassination. But he was very integral in that movie. His character
• 1:13:50
  was, and I think he's an attention wore, and I also think that
• 1:13:55
  there's problem there's also, by the way, problems with the Will Smith character
• 1:13:58
  from a historical standpoint, but that's normal when it comes to movies. But
• 1:14:01
  I think that there are some concerns about the science behind this, because if
• 1:14:08
  you just look at it from the most basic point of view. Yes,
• 1:14:12
  an incredibly high percentage of the brains of football players who die early which get
• 1:14:18
  tested have some semblance of CTE. Yes, I get that correlation, and
• 1:14:26
  there's logically there's probably some causation, but it's inherently bad science because who whose
• 1:14:34
  brains are being tested? Well, the only reason why you would get tested
• 1:14:41
  is if either you and or your family members highly suspected that you had CTE.
• 1:14:50
  So it's inherently bad science. I mean, you're inherently only testing those
• 1:14:58
  that are most likely to have been afflicted with CTE and have died in very
• 1:15:08
  abnormal ways. But the NFL knows that this whole issue is a grave threat
• 1:15:14
  to their entire business model, that they need parents to feel comfortable letting kids
• 1:15:20
  play football. And so that's why the NFL has gone to such great lens,
• 1:15:27
  and football in general has gone to such great lens to institute flag football
• 1:15:30
  and to you know, make the rules quote unquote as safe as possible and
• 1:15:35
  eliminate all head contact and do all sorts of things that I think have been
• 1:15:44
  on the verge of ruining the sport and the essence of the sport and what
• 1:15:47
  made it great to begin with, and they've done it all based upon this
• 1:15:51
  premise. You know that you only save one life. I mean I've always
• 1:15:56
  felt like way before COVID, that was what was going to destroy the whole.
• 1:16:00
  If it saves one life, it's worth doing. By the way,
• 1:16:03
  speaking of Taylor Swift, she canceled her concert in Brazil over the weekend,
• 1:16:08
  allegedly because of the heat, because one person died of something related to the
• 1:16:13
  heat exhaustion the night before, and so that to me was symbolic of this,
• 1:16:18
  if it saves one person, we cancel an entire concert, which probably
• 1:16:23
  can't be duplicated. All these people traveling from all over the world looking forward
• 1:16:28
  to this one night to go to a Tailor Swift concert, and we cancel
• 1:16:30
  it because one person died. And then COVID of course changed the dynamic for
• 1:16:36
  everything. Society then had the right to dictate your own personal medical risk and
• 1:16:44
  reward decisions, which was to me, the worst thing that happened during COVID.
• 1:16:48
  We lost control of our own medical decisions, our own decisions over what
• 1:16:55
  risks were worth taking. And that's the death now for football. If society
• 1:17:00
  can determine for you what risks you're allowed to take then you can't play real
• 1:17:05
  football. You just cannot do it. And we've seen it time and time
• 1:17:12
  again, and the media just will not let up. Here's some of that
• 1:17:15
  New York Times feature that I talked about. Here's the New York Times doing
• 1:17:19
  this entire story with a lot of resources put into it about how there's this
• 1:17:28
  correlation between young people who die, sometimes killing themselves, and having played football
• 1:17:34
  and maybe having gotten concussions because of football. As if, by the way,
• 1:17:39
  football is the only way you can get concussions. You can get concussions
• 1:17:42
  in all sorts of different ways. But I digress. Here's the New York
• 1:17:45
  Times. Although much about CTE remains unclear, the risks clearly seem to rise
• 1:17:53
  with time spent playing football or another contact sport. Then why are we just
• 1:17:59
  going after football? Oh maybe because it's the most popular sport and because it's
• 1:18:03
  the sport that liberals hate the most, But that's just my theory. For
• 1:18:08
  that reason, many CTE researchers recommend that young children play only touch or flag
• 1:18:15
  football. Some experts believe tackle football should not start until high school, which,
• 1:18:21
  by the way, if you do that, you've just eviscerated football.
• 1:18:27
  You've just castrated the entire sport. Because if it's not until high school the
• 1:18:32
  kids are playing tackle football, then you destroy high school football and you make
• 1:18:39
  it basically impossible for college football to maintain itself. And then by the time
• 1:18:43
  you get the pro football, it's a completely different entity. So you know
• 1:18:47
  that liberals are amazing at being able to figure out ways to destroy something.
• 1:18:53
  If they can't ban it outright, they can't get away with banning it.
• 1:18:57
  They know how to cut the balls off, and this is exactly how to
• 1:19:00
  do it with football. But back to the New York Times, other people,
• 1:19:03
  no doubt, we'll ask why tackle football exists at all. This is
• 1:19:08
  what they really want, folks, This is what they really want. Other
• 1:19:12
  people, no doubt, will ask why tackle football exists at all. It
• 1:19:17
  almost certainly isn't going away. However, NFL games made up eighty two of
• 1:19:23
  the one hundred most watched broadcast in the United States last year. Both college
• 1:19:28
  and high school football are beloved rituals. Several holidays, including Thanksgiving, revolve
• 1:19:34
  partly around football. But if football is the country's leading form of popular culture,
• 1:19:42
  it is also one that kills some of the people who play and love
• 1:19:45
  it. Figuring out how to make it safer remains an urgent matter of public
• 1:19:53
  health. Okay, no one is suggesting that it's a good thing that people
• 1:20:00
  get concussions, or that people may die either directly or indirectly because of those
• 1:20:05
  concussions. I think, as I've already stated that the science is not particularly
• 1:20:11
  good on this, the New York Times itself acknowledges that there's much that is
• 1:20:15
  unknown about CTE and that it is possible that this is overblown. Of course,
• 1:20:20
  we're living in a world where we just saw what happened with COVID and
• 1:20:24
  what I believe is happening with climate change, and this seems to fit those
• 1:20:29
  narratives. Is we create a panic over bad science that happens to fit a
• 1:20:33
  political agenda, And the political agenda here is real Liberals really do hate football
• 1:20:39
  for a lot of reasons. And I think I want to save the whole
• 1:20:45
  why liberals hate football and my defense of football for another episode, because I'm
• 1:20:49
  sure this is going to come up again as we head towards the crescendo a
• 1:20:54
  football season, and I don't want this episode to get overly long. But
• 1:21:00
  you know, I'm somebody who's never played it down of organized football in my
• 1:21:02
  life. I've coached it at the high school level in two different states.
• 1:21:06
  I've spent an entire year with the high school football team in Steubenville, Ohio,
• 1:21:12
  a legendary high school program there. I've covered college and pro football in
• 1:21:16
  the media, and you know, at its essence, well, it's an
• 1:21:20
  imperfect game. I think it's the best team sport, and it really teaches
• 1:21:26
  young men an awful lot of very important lessons, lessons that liberals don't really
• 1:21:31
  like, and they really hate. Liberals do the whole concept of toxic masculinity
• 1:21:38
  being elevated and celebrated, and they hate cheerleaders because it seems to support the
• 1:21:44
  patriarchy. And so there's a whole lot of reasons why there's a political agenda
• 1:21:49
  here. But as far as the safety is concerned, what else can possibly
• 1:21:55
  be done? My god, they've already eviscerated the of the sport and are
• 1:22:00
  continuing to do so. And it's very very clear and more clear to me
• 1:22:04
  every day that whether it's ten years, fifteen years, or twenty years from
• 1:22:09
  now, even at the NFL level, it's not going to actually be tackle
• 1:22:14
  football. It's just not what it's going to look like, what it's going
• 1:22:16
  to be called, I don't know, but it's it is. Remarkably is
• 1:22:23
  a more remarkable thing how fast the evisceration of football has happened without anyone ever
• 1:22:29
  really acknowledging that that's what we're going to do. That's the most amazing part
• 1:22:32
  of this. This has all been done mostly in silence. And the silence
• 1:22:38
  now has even included the commentators this year, which no longer express any outrage.
• 1:22:45
  I told you with the CARRISA. Thompson thing. As long as there's
• 1:22:47
  outrage, there's hope. Well, that outrage has been completely muted this year
• 1:22:53
  in both college and pro football broadcasts when it comes to highly questionable penalties that
• 1:23:00
  never would have been dreamed of being called previously, and people being being kicked
• 1:23:02
  out of games for doing things that they would have been celebrated for just a
• 1:23:06
  few years ago. And so football is in grave danger as we know it,
• 1:23:12
  and The New York Times further proved that with this expose on the issue
• 1:23:16
  of concussions. By the way, since I've been mentioning football, and I've
• 1:23:21
  referenced Taylor Swift a couple times, I will be fascinated to see what the
• 1:23:27
  raiding for the Monday Night football game last night, as we released this on
• 1:23:31
  Tuesday morning, but I tape this on Monday morning. So tonight's game between
• 1:23:35
  the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs, which is not just a rematch
• 1:23:40
  of the Super Bowl, not just the rematch of the Kelsey Brothers, but
• 1:23:44
  apparently Taylor Swift will be there and we'll be having both sets of parents meet
• 1:23:48
  each other by reports, and so I'll be very, very curious to see
• 1:23:53
  what the rating for that game is, as well as how Monday Night Football
• 1:23:58
  covers the whole Taylor Swift thing, because there's been this battle that we've talked
• 1:24:02
  about previously in the podcast between football fans who were tired of the Taylor Swift
• 1:24:08
  coverage and Swift fans that are tuning in simply for the Taylor Swift coverage.
• 1:24:14
  So it's a very difficult balancing act. But I'm quite certain that the ratings
• 1:24:18
  for the Kansas City chief Philadelphi Eagles games are going to pick Philadelphi Eagle game
• 1:24:23
  is going to be off the charts because of those particular factors. Another football
• 1:24:28
  related issue that I've discussed previously on the podcast relates to the University of Michigan
• 1:24:33
  and their head football coach, Jim Harbaugh, and in the last episode I
• 1:24:40
  said some things that were very positive about how Michigan has responded. I guess
• 1:24:45
  it was two episodes ago where I was happy that Michigan rallied around Jim Harbaugh.
• 1:24:50
  I thought there was a rush to judgment, although there was some hypocrisy
• 1:24:54
  on the part of some Michigan related commentators and media members. Is when it
• 1:25:00
  came to the Joe Paterno Penn State Jerry Sandusky situation. They didn't believe in
• 1:25:04
  in due process. Then they didn't believe in not rushing the judgment. Then
• 1:25:09
  people like Desmond Howard of ESPN. But okay, fine, I'm a big
• 1:25:13
  believer in due process and I don't want I don't like rush to judgments.
• 1:25:17
  And the allegations, while serious, the sign stealing allegations seem to have a
• 1:25:23
  lot of evidence behind them, and they are in fact serious, they're not
• 1:25:27
  cataclysmic. I don't know that it warns the death penalty. There are people
• 1:25:31
  who disagree on that. I think we need to find out more about what
• 1:25:34
  was actually happening and who knew what when. But I had been generally in
• 1:25:41
  defense of Jim Harball, largely because I like Jim Harbaugh. I like the
• 1:25:45
  fact that he played for both Schmbuckler. I like that Michigan cares about its
• 1:25:47
  tradition. I like that they have fought back against this. I like the
• 1:25:53
  fact that they're university president has supported the coach, unlike most academics who cave
• 1:25:58
  in the face of any kind of content. And I like the way they
• 1:26:01
  play football too. And I like the fact that they beat the craft out
• 1:26:04
  of Penn State. So I was generally supportive of Michigan. But since then
• 1:26:09
  a couple of things that have happened that indicate that this is going to be
• 1:26:13
  bad for Michigan when all the facts are out. Number one, they fired
• 1:26:17
  another one of their assistant coaches. And number two, although I think I
• 1:26:20
  have the order of this reversed, they accepted Michigan did Jim Harbaugh's three game
• 1:26:26
  suspension. Now they went awfully quickly from this is outrageous. We're going to
• 1:26:30
  fight this, We're going to go to court to try to get an injunction
• 1:26:34
  to you know what. Never mind, let's take the three game suspension and
• 1:26:39
  We're going to fire our linebackers coach when our defense has been playing fantastically.
• 1:26:44
  So that certainly is consistent with the idea that the fact pattern here is not
• 1:26:49
  going to be good for Michigan when all is said and done, And so
• 1:26:57
  I'm a little bit more hesitant about my support from Michigan at this point.
• 1:27:00
  I'm still kind of rooting for them, kind of as a sticket to the
• 1:27:03
  man kind of thing. But I do want to mention with regard to what's
• 1:27:08
  happening this weekend. As you know, I have disdain for the media in
• 1:27:12
  general, the sports media in particular, and it really pisses me off how
• 1:27:16
  dumb the sports media is when it comes to the changes in college football,
• 1:27:20
  and this weekend's Michigan Ohio State game is a classic example of this. This
• 1:27:28
  game is literally going to be the last great rivalry game in the history of
• 1:27:34
  college football unless somehow the system gets reversed, which it never will because there's
• 1:27:40
  too much money involved. From where it's currently going, we are literally seeing
• 1:27:45
  the end of college football as we know it, and Ohio State Michigan is
• 1:27:50
  a classic example of this. Here you have two hated rivals. You know,
• 1:27:56
  I would say it's the greatest rivalry in all of college football, except
• 1:27:59
  for the fact that they didn't even play in twenty twenty thanks to COVID,
• 1:28:01
  so to me, that's a disqualifier. But okay, if you forget about
• 1:28:06
  COVID. In twenty twenty, Ohio State Michigan greatest rivalry there is in college
• 1:28:12
  football. Both teams are undefeated, you got one team their coaches suspended,
• 1:28:18
  You've got the Big Ten Championship game on the line, you got a spot
• 1:28:21
  in the College Football Playoff on the line. I mean, it doesn't get
• 1:28:27
  bigger than this. It does not get bigger than this last game of the
• 1:28:30
  regular season. However, this is where the sports media is so stupid,
• 1:28:34
  and I doubt you'll see any any mention or coverage of this. But this
• 1:28:40
  is also this game is also the perfect example of how completely and totally broken
• 1:28:45
  this new system starting next year is going to be. Because if the exact
• 1:28:50
  same circumstances occur next year, where Ollio State and Michigan are both undefeated,
• 1:28:58
  they are battling it out to see who gets to play in the Big Ten
• 1:29:01
  Championship game, guess what this game goes this year from being the biggest game
• 1:29:08
  of the year by far, by far to being completely and totally irrelevant,
• 1:29:15
  to the point where I doubt the starters would even play in the game.
• 1:29:19
  And that's because, and it gets a little complicated, a little two inside
• 1:29:23
  sports, but it's because next year there's gonna be no divisions within the Big
• 1:29:30
  Ten Conference because of expansion, which means that if the exact same circumstances occur
• 1:29:35
  next year, Ohio State and Michigan will have already clinched playing each other the
• 1:29:41
  very next week in the Big Ten Championship game. And because the playoffs will
• 1:29:45
  have expanded the twelve teams, they will have already clinched a spot in the
• 1:29:49
  playoffs. So literally, the last game of the regular season would mean nothing.
• 1:29:56
  You wouldn't even want to win that game, because the only game that
• 1:29:59
  would matter would be the next week's game, the Big Ten Championship game,
• 1:30:02
  which would determine your spot in the playoffs, whether you get to buy which
• 1:30:06
  I think is being very over rated, and home field advantage. But the
• 1:30:11
  reality is this new system is going to destroy the essence of the sport.
• 1:30:15
  They're gonna be moments now. It's not gonna happen every year, but it's
• 1:30:20
  gonna happen more than people understand, and Ohio State Michigan is a perfect examples,
• 1:30:25
  by the way, the same thing likely would have happened under last year's
• 1:30:28
  circumstances, where if you put twenty twenty two into twenty twenty four, it's
• 1:30:31
  the same deal. You're creating disincentives for people and teams and coaches and players
• 1:30:40
  to actually play. You've taken away the incentive structure, which is the essence
• 1:30:45
  of competitive sports. That's the number one thing. Are you incentivized to win
• 1:30:51
  well in this particular situation. There would be no incentive to win next year
• 1:30:57
  under these exact same circumstances. So you're taking what's this year gonna be by
• 1:31:03
  far the biggest game of the year. You could argue this is the biggest
• 1:31:08
  game in the modern regular season history of the sport, partially because in my
• 1:31:13
  view, In my view, if Michigan loses this game, not only do
• 1:31:17
  they lose out on the Big Ten title and the College Football Playoff, I
• 1:31:24
  think Jim Harball is no longer their coach next year. That's how big this
• 1:31:28
  game is. I think if they win this game, they go to the
• 1:31:30
  Big Ten championship game. They're gonna crush Iowa. That means they go to
• 1:31:33
  the playoffs, which means Jim Harbaugh will remain their coach next year. If
• 1:31:38
  they lose to Ohio State, they don't make the Big Ten championship game,
• 1:31:42
  they don't make the College Football playoff, And in the interim, all this
• 1:31:45
  negative stuff is going to come out about the sign stealing scandal, and Jim
• 1:31:49
  Harbaugh, I believe, will probably be gone as the head coach at Michigan.
• 1:31:55
  That's how big this game is. And next year exactly the same game,
• 1:31:59
  totally meaningless. Nice job, Nice job everybody. Nice job ESPN,
• 1:32:06
  nice job. Way to go. You just destroyed the greatest thing in all
• 1:32:11
  of sports. Fantastic well done. By the way, speaking of college sports,
• 1:32:15
  I have to at least take a little bit of a victory lap on
• 1:32:19
  my prediction earlier this year on this podcast to Caleb Williams, the Heisman Trophy
• 1:32:24
  winning quarterback at USC is highly overrated. USC lost yet again getting crushed by
• 1:32:30
  UCLA, and ever since I went to that USC game with my high school
• 1:32:36
  friend Dave Petruco and former NBC Todays show host Matt Lower because both of them
• 1:32:41
  have sons that go to USC, and that was a parent's weekend. Ever
• 1:32:45
  since I went to that game, where I could see firsthand that Caleb well
• 1:32:49
  great in many ways, is overrated, USC has been two plays away.
• 1:32:57
  If two plays go the other direction, would have lost seven straight games with
• 1:33:02
  supposedly the best player in college football at the most important position, which is
• 1:33:08
  quarterback, in Caleb Williams. Seven straight games. They are two plays away
• 1:33:13
  from having that happen, not even too dramatic plays, too small, plays
• 1:33:16
  away from losing seven straight games. But the media continues to enable Caleb Williams.
• 1:33:24
  They've already paved his path for not playing in whatever minor bowl game USC
• 1:33:29
  plays, and I predicted long ago Caleb Williams would not play in that bowl
• 1:33:31
  game and would not come back for his senior year. And even in the
• 1:33:34
  NIL era, the news media is still championing, protecting, enabling players not
• 1:33:43
  playing in bowl games and not coming back for their senior year. I was
• 1:33:46
  told, as we all were, that the NIL money was going to fix
• 1:33:50
  that problem. Well, that was all bullshit. That was just a way
• 1:33:54
  to sell paying players, because at least in the Caleb Williams example, there's
• 1:34:00
  no evidence at all that the nil money is even going to get him to
• 1:34:03
  play in the ball game, and the news media is not even going to
• 1:34:08
  criticize him for it. They're already suggesting, oh, this is obviously his
• 1:34:13
  last game, why would he play in the ball game. Well, as
• 1:34:15
  I always say, well, if you're not going to play in the ball
• 1:34:18
  game, then why did you play against UCLA? Why not just quit as
• 1:34:23
  soon as your team loses two conference games and you're out of title contention,
• 1:34:28
  which is already happening by the way, at some high schools. I mean,
• 1:34:31
  it's insane what's happening here in the news media is just going along with
• 1:34:34
  it, mainly because they see it as the core issue here is they see
• 1:34:39
  it as a civil rights issue. The liberal sports media sees it as a
• 1:34:43
  civil rights issue, and so if it's a if a black person is making
• 1:34:46
  money from this, then that's inherently good and therefore cannot be criticized. And
• 1:34:53
  Caleb Williams continues to get kid glove treatment from the news media, and I'll
• 1:34:59
  be curious to see how he turns out as a pro. Again, He's
• 1:35:01
  very talented, great feat but in my mind, vastly overrated. As especially
• 1:35:09
  a pro style quarterback, although the game is changing so much. Maybe he
• 1:35:14
  will if the NFL goes to touch football. I can assure you Caleb Williams
• 1:35:17
  will be an All Star. But they're not quite there yet. Another sports
• 1:35:21
  story that really has nothing to do with sports. This is really remarkable to
• 1:35:26
  me and shows how the base sports fan is really doing themselves a disservice from
• 1:35:33
  a political perspective. But you may recall that a couple of years ago,
• 1:35:38
  Atlanta, Georgia got stripped of the Major League Baseball All Star Game because of
• 1:35:46
  a law that Georgia passed perfectly appropriately to try to secure their elections, and
• 1:35:53
  this was deemed by liberals and Democrats, including by Joe Biden as Jim Crow
• 1:36:00
  all over again, as inherently racist, and because of that, they took
• 1:36:04
  the All Star Game away from Atlanta and put it somewhere else. I can't
• 1:36:09
  even remember where. And if we lived in a remotely logical world, that
• 1:36:15
  should have been the moment when conservative baseball fan said, wait a minute,
• 1:36:20
  hold on, you're now in arm of the Democratic Party. That's what you
• 1:36:26
  are, Major League Baseball. You are doing the bidding of the Democratic Party
• 1:36:30
  based upon a completely false narrative. You're doing their bidding. You're making it
• 1:36:35
  seem as if Georgia is somehow racist for trying to secure their elections, and
• 1:36:43
  by the way, that at a chilling effect on other states. I'm sure,
• 1:36:47
  because we're gonna punish Georgia by taking away the All Star Game, and
• 1:36:53
  other states who might have been wanting to go in the same direction as Georgia
• 1:36:58
  are going to hesitate to do that. It's just human nature, it's just
• 1:37:02
  politics, and Major League Baseball has the right to do that, I guess.
• 1:37:08
  But fans should have revolted. Fans who, especially those that were Republicans,
• 1:37:15
  should have been like, why am I supporting an organization that is now
• 1:37:19
  part of the Democratic Party, an arm of the Democratic Party. I mean,
• 1:37:25
  it's the NFL did the same kind of thing with the Martin Luther King
• 1:37:30
  Holiday taking away the Super Bowl from Arizona. But this was way worse because
• 1:37:34
  the Martin Luther King Holiday, while it has a political aspect to it,
• 1:37:39
  is nowhere near the same thing as how you're going to run your elections.
• 1:37:44
  It doesn't get more political, especially in this day and age, than how
• 1:37:47
  you're going to run your elections. And yet Major League Baseball got away with
• 1:37:51
  that. And then, just to prove the absurdity of the whole thing,
• 1:37:56
  guess who just got awarded the twenty twenty five Major League Baseball All Star Game.
• 1:38:02
  You guessed it, Atlanta, Georgia, with no change, no change
• 1:38:08
  in the law. They re elected the same governor that signed the law in
• 1:38:13
  the first place, Brian Kemp. And yet somehow now it's okay for Atlanta
• 1:38:17
  to get the All Star Game again in twenty twenty five, by the way,
• 1:38:21
  not coincidentally, after the next election. So we did this before the
• 1:38:29
  midterm election, certainly didn't harm Democrats in any way, probably helped Democrats.
• 1:38:35
  And now we're giving Atlanta back the All Star Game before I mean sorry,
• 1:38:42
  after the next presidential election in twenty twenty five. So Major League Baseball has
• 1:38:47
  just exposed themselves as an arm of the Democratic Party. And there's been no
• 1:38:53
  apparently, no apparent ramifications or accountability for that, which is just remarkable speaking
• 1:38:59
  of Georgia, and no media accountability at all. You know Stacy Abrams,
• 1:39:05
  who's a complete fraud, who who you know, has been an election denier
• 1:39:10
  in Georgia forever. She's a black female who lost the race for governor not
• 1:39:15
  once but twice and claimed that it was rigged. And it's basically an,
• 1:39:19
  you know, a religious belief on the left that somehow she actually won her
• 1:39:26
  first attempt at governor in Georgia, and when she lost a close election,
• 1:39:30
  her brother in law, her brother in law, was just arrested for human
• 1:39:35
  trafficking. Now that's not her fault, but I can guarantdamn to you that
• 1:39:40
  if it was reversed and a hero of the right had their brother in law
• 1:39:47
  arrested for human trafficking, this would be a huge story, especially when the
• 1:39:53
  person that they are married to happens to be a woman who was on the
• 1:39:59
  short list for Joe Biden to appoint to the US Supreme Court, a judge
• 1:40:05
  that they appointed to their current position. So this is a guy arrested for
• 1:40:12
  human trafficking who is the brother in law of Stacey Abrams and is married to
• 1:40:17
  a prominent Democratic appointed judge, and somehow this is not a major news story,
• 1:40:24
  which is typical the way the news media works with their massive double standards.
• 1:40:29
  Now, obviously most of what I cover here on the Death of Journalism
• 1:40:31
  podcast is criticism of media coverage but occasionally I do find some story that I
• 1:40:39
  am usually mildly surprised about, where I need to at least partially praise even
• 1:40:45
  the mainstream news media for their coverage. And that is the case when it
• 1:40:49
  comes to the New York Times, of all places, and the issue of
• 1:40:54
  the COVID response specifically to what happened with our schools, which is a topic
• 1:41:00
  very, very very important to me because I have two young daughters who had
• 1:41:05
  their lives and their educations largely destroyed for almost two years thanks mostly to our
• 1:41:14
  King Gavin Newsom otherwise known as Governor Poosum in my house during the beginning of
• 1:41:19
  the COVID pandemic, and one of my mantras about COVID, one of many,
• 1:41:26
  is that we are completely underestimating the damage that was done to an entire
• 1:41:31
  generation, almost an entire generation of kids, because of what we decided to
• 1:41:38
  do in a politically motivated panic and close the schools for far, far too
• 1:41:44
  long, long after we knew for sure that there was no significant threat to
• 1:41:50
  having them open and for learning to go along go on in a normal fashion.
• 1:41:56
  So that did not happen here in California for almost two years and during
• 1:42:00
  that time period, kids were needlessly, pointlessly and vindictively masked because of a
• 1:42:08
  political and religious vendetta by Governor Newsom here in California and other liberal states across
• 1:42:15
  the country. Well, the New York Times Editorial Board, just a couple
• 1:42:19
  of days ago, over the weekend put out a rather amazing piece of journalism,
• 1:42:27
  although I want to put a cave on that because of course they miss
• 1:42:32
  much of the big picture in there. There's no real call for true accountability
• 1:42:36
  here. But they put out an opinion piece and an editorial with the headline
• 1:42:42
  the startling evidence on learning loss is in, and they go on to talk
• 1:42:48
  about the reaction to the pandemic. They don't, of course name any names.
• 1:42:55
  Gavin Newsom's name want to be right at the top here, because he
• 1:42:58
  was the first one to do this, in the last one to stop it,
• 1:43:00
  and it was all because of what he did in shutting down California based
• 1:43:04
  upon a complete and total lie that was obviously politically motivated and for which there's
• 1:43:11
  been no accountability. But the New York Times Editorial Board rights the evidence is
• 1:43:15
  now in and it is startling. The school closures that took fifty million children
• 1:43:23
  out of classrooms at the start of the pandemic may prove to be the most
• 1:43:27
  damaging disruption in the history of American education. It also set student progress in
• 1:43:33
  math and reading back by two decades and widen the achievement gap that separates poor
• 1:43:41
  and wealthy children. These learning losses will remain unaddressed when the federal money runs
• 1:43:47
  out in twenty twenty four. Economists are predicting that this generation was such a
• 1:43:54
  significant educational gap, will experience diminished lifetime earnings and become a significant drag on
• 1:44:01
  the economy. But education administrators and elected officials who should be mobilizing the country
• 1:44:10
  against this threat are not. It will take a multi disciplinary approach, and
• 1:44:16
  at this point all the solution that will all the solutions that will be needed
• 1:44:23
  long term, can't be known. The work of getting kids back on solid
• 1:44:28
  ground is just beginning. But that doesn't mean there shouldn't be immediate action,
• 1:44:33
  all right. So the good part of this is the New York Times editorial
• 1:44:38
  board is acknowledging what is obvious. Although Gavin Newsom does not yet accept this,
• 1:44:44
  maybe he will be forced to in his debate with Rohn de Santis at
• 1:44:48
  the end of this month hosted by Sean Hannity. But I don't want to
• 1:44:51
  get my hopes up. This was always obvious. This was basic common sense,
• 1:44:58
  and this was not startlingly new information. This is not something that should
• 1:45:02
  have been shocking to anybody. I knew it. I say this all the
• 1:45:06
  time. I'm not an expert. I'm just somebody that pays attention and uses
• 1:45:11
  common sense. How did I know that one this was unnecessary, in two
• 1:45:15
  was going to have catastrophic consequences. I wasn't alone, but those who believed
• 1:45:21
  the same thing I did were shouted down and censored, And largely because of
• 1:45:27
  Donald Trump, we were not able to win this battle. And when Donald
• 1:45:30
  Trump, I mean he was actually a negative influence on this. When he
• 1:45:34
  finally came out in favor of schools opening in twenty twenty, the entire academic
• 1:45:42
  and medical establishment reversed course just to go against him because they didn't want to
• 1:45:47
  give him a victory going in to the twenty twenty presidential election. This was
• 1:45:53
  all seen through the prism of politics, and we allowed a generation of kids
• 1:46:00
  to suffer in the short run and be greatly catastrophically damaged in the long run.
• 1:46:08
  But the New York Times. While they acknowledge this, which I applaud,
• 1:46:12
  their solutions, of course, are all about money, and therein that
• 1:46:16
  lying within that editorial really is the seeds of more socialism. Right they talk
• 1:46:23
  about the achievement gap that separates poor and wealthy children. This is going to
• 1:46:29
  be a classic example of where liberals screw something up and then the solution is
• 1:46:32
  going to be more socialism, more communism, more equity. This is going
• 1:46:39
  to be used for at least a generation of excuses for why we have to
• 1:46:44
  give more resources to people of color or poor areas of the country, and
• 1:46:50
  why we have to punish whites and Asians to make up for what we did
• 1:46:55
  during COVID because too many whites and Asians were able to go to school because
• 1:46:59
  they were going to private schools, and so they didn't get they didn't suffer
• 1:47:03
  as much damage, they weren't held back as much. I mean, this
• 1:47:05
  is what's gonna happen here. So it's all about spending more money and creating
• 1:47:11
  more equity, and there's no thought of accountability. There's no names on who
• 1:47:15
  was wrong here, no making people admit that they were wrong. It's just
• 1:47:20
  oops, well gee, look at this. Wow, this was really bad,
• 1:47:27
  worse than we thought, startling evidence, learning losses, catastrophic, a
• 1:47:32
  generation lost. Well, where's the fucking accountability? None? You're not even
• 1:47:39
  gonna name names. So, Yes, while I applaud the New York Times
• 1:47:43
  for at least acknowledging reality in a way that's against their own self interest,
• 1:47:46
  to a certain degree, they're getting the big picture wrong here. This is
• 1:47:51
  not about instilling more socialism. This is about making sure it never happens ever,
• 1:47:56
  ever, ever, ever again, and making sure that those people who
• 1:48:00
  facilitated this are never allowed to do this ever, ever again ever. So
• 1:48:05
  that's where the New York Times is missing the boat here. But at least,
• 1:48:10
  you know, considering my very low standards for news coverage in the New
• 1:48:14
  York Times, at least have to give them some credit for acknowledging reality.
• 1:48:17
  Yes, as I have said for years, one of the worst of many
• 1:48:24
  horrible reactions to the COVID pandemic was shutting down schools. We will be paying
• 1:48:30
  for this for the rest of our lives. Now, I would be remiss
• 1:48:34
  if I didn't mention that here we are now sixty years ago, officially from
• 1:48:41
  the day in which John F. Kennedy was assassinated, I believe by Lee
• 1:48:44
  Harvey Oswald, and this is a topic that I have done multiple episodes of
• 1:48:50
  the podcast on I urge you to listen if you haven't already, to episode
• 1:48:55
  number seventy one of this podcast, where I go into great detail about what
• 1:49:00
  I believe really did and did not happen, and why it is that I
• 1:49:02
  believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but that the logistics of what occurred
• 1:49:08
  were very different than what the Warrant Commission said that they were. That there
• 1:49:14
  was no single magic pristine bullet that went through John F. Kennedy and through
• 1:49:19
  John Connolly and somehow came out so called pristine. I do not believe that
• 1:49:25
  happened, and I believe that I have an alternative explanation that is far more
• 1:49:30
  consistent with the evidence than anybody that I've ever heard talk about this subject matter.
• 1:49:35
  I've believed this for decades. I have tried my best in the very
• 1:49:42
  meager resources that I have to try to spread the word about what I think
• 1:49:45
  really happened. And my great hope for trying to promote this version of events
• 1:49:56
  dealt with the author of the book case closed God by name of Gerald Posner,
• 1:50:00
  who I interviewed in our last episode of the podcast, episode one hundred
• 1:50:04
  and five. Now, unfortunately that episode had an interview with Posner that was
• 1:50:11
  very very short. I was only given a half hour, and at the
• 1:50:15
  time I said the Posner, look, I'll take the burden hand, give
• 1:50:19
  me the half hour, and perhaps we can schedule a part two. And
• 1:50:24
  he said that's fine. And so we did the interview, and there were
• 1:50:28
  a couple of technical problems with it. Somehow the audio just stopped right at
• 1:50:31
  the half hour mark. I still don't know why that happened, and I
• 1:50:36
  was very disappointed with the interview, not just from the standpoint that it was
• 1:50:41
  too short and that there were technical problems, but also gave Posner every opportunity
• 1:50:46
  to try to debunk my theory. And my basic theory is it's actually very
• 1:50:50
  simple that Oswald fired three shots from the sixth floor of the school book Depository
• 1:50:55
  building. The first shot hit Kennedy in the back, but it happened sooner
• 1:51:00
  than what appears to be the case in the Zubruder film because JFK's reaction was
• 1:51:04
  delayed and the JFK's reaction is involuntary. JFK's reaction, where his elbows jut
• 1:51:12
  out and his fists clin. She does not grab his throat in any way,
• 1:51:15
  shape or form, is delayed. It's only delayed by a second or
• 1:51:18
  so. But that's all that it would have taken for the timing of the
• 1:51:23
  Zeebruder film to line up perfectly for Kennedy to fire the first shot. It
• 1:51:27
  hits Kennedy in the back. It's a misfire and undercharged bullet. It barely
• 1:51:31
  goes an inch or two inside of Kennedy's back, and eventually it falls out,
• 1:51:36
  potentially being found there by Secret Service agent Paul Landis, who has a
• 1:51:41
  new book out about this very incident and seemingly backs up my theory one hundred
• 1:51:46
  percent. The second shot then hits Connolly, does all the damage to Connolly
• 1:51:51
  alone, and then the third shot hits Kennedy in the head, killing him.
• 1:51:56
  That scenario, to me, is the simplest and most logical and most
• 1:52:00
  insistent with all the evidence. Now. It includes some very bizarre coincidences like
• 1:52:04
  Kennedy appearing to grab his neck but he does not, or his throat,
• 1:52:09
  and having a small haul in his throat, which is found that Parkland and
• 1:52:13
  is turned and used as a tracheotomy, obliterating really a lot of the evidentiary
• 1:52:18
  value of that whole, that tiny hole in his throat. And I explain
• 1:52:23
  all that in episode number seventy one. And when I interviewed Posner in episode
• 1:52:28
  one hundred and five, I was very disappointed in his response because his response,
• 1:52:33
  and this is going to sound counterintuitive because most people would have been thrilled
• 1:52:35
  with this response because it seems to justify and validate my theory, because his
• 1:52:42
  response was, well, John, I'm with you, except for the first
• 1:52:45
  shot miss. There's a fourth shot then that you're not accounting for. And
• 1:52:49
  I said to Gerald, no, that's not true, because there's no evidence
• 1:52:54
  that first shot miss ever happened. I think it's part of a reverse engineering
• 1:52:58
  effort by Arlen's factor, who was a lawyer on the Warrant Commission would later
• 1:53:01
  become a senator from Pennsylvania who always thought he was the smartest man in the
• 1:53:05
  room, and he really wasn't all that bright. I think he thought he
• 1:53:09
  had a problem with the Zubuter film and thought he figured out this brilliant way
• 1:53:12
  of getting around that problem by concocting this single bullet theory, and then he
• 1:53:15
  made up this first shot miss theory, which has no evidence behind it.
• 1:53:20
  And I explained in episode one hundred and five why the first shot miss theory
• 1:53:25
  makes no goddamn sense and has no evidence behind it. And so I was
• 1:53:30
  disappointed by Posner's lack of substantive response and the fact that the interview was short,
• 1:53:38
  but I was holding out hope that we would have part two of this
• 1:53:41
  interview, and I sent Posner the first part of the interview. He did
• 1:53:45
  not share it on social media, though he liked the post, which I
• 1:53:48
  thought was interesting. And then on at least two occasions, I very politely
• 1:53:56
  said, hey, look, I know you're busy. I'm still hoping we
• 1:53:58
  do part two. Can you tell me when we might be able to do
• 1:54:00
  that, even if it's after the anniversary, I don't care. I mean,
• 1:54:03
  who cares at this point whether it's right on the sixtieth anniversary or not.
• 1:54:09
  And as of this taping, I've received no response from Gerald Posner,
• 1:54:13
  which is not like him. I know he's very busy, it's not like
• 1:54:16
  him. I can see that he has seen the direct message. You can
• 1:54:19
  do that with certain accounts on Twitter, and so it's clear that he has
• 1:54:25
  seen what I have sent him, but he's not responded at all. I
• 1:54:30
  hesitate to interpret too much from that other than for some reason he doesn't want
• 1:54:35
  to do a second interview with me. But I have to tell you that
• 1:54:39
  it's consistent with the idea that he's ducking me at this point, that he
• 1:54:45
  just doesn't want to deal with me, and that maybe, just maybe he
• 1:54:48
  actually is either consciously or subconsciously concerned that he's actually wrong, that he was
• 1:54:56
  not able to come up with a scenario that debunks my theory about what really
• 1:55:01
  happened, and that he and others who have religiously abided by this single bullet
• 1:55:08
  theory, the magic bullet theory, have been wrong all along. And even
• 1:55:12
  though his book doesn't change the greatness of his book case closed, his book
• 1:55:16
  does an amazing job better than any other entity that I've seen, proving that
• 1:55:21
  Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. He just happened to get the logistics wrong,
• 1:55:27
  and it really bothers me, and I'm very disappointed that the guy have a
• 1:55:30
  lot of respect for like Gerald Posner, doesn't seem I could be wrong.
• 1:55:33
  I hope I'm wrong, but this is based upon the information I currently have.
• 1:55:39
  Doesn't seem to have the intellectual courage to fully face head on the idea
• 1:55:44
  that this could be wrong. And the sixtieth anniversary is literally the last chance
• 1:55:48
  to try to correct the record here. And that's why I'm upset and despondent
• 1:55:55
  and passionate about this. I mean, you know, frankly, we're already
• 1:55:59
  on borrowed time. I'm amazed at so much new information, especially regarding Paul
• 1:56:03
  Landis, has come out around the sixtieth anniversary. Generally the fiftieth anniversary of
• 1:56:08
  anything that happens is the last relevant anniversary because everyone's dead at that point.
• 1:56:14
  Well, somehow we got to the sixtieth and we're still getting new information.
• 1:56:18
  And this was a chance to try to correct the record and maybe, if
• 1:56:25
  done properly, quell these conspiracy theories that have permeated both the left and the
• 1:56:32
  right when it comes to the JFK assassination. And this is really why I
• 1:56:38
  feel so passionately about this. I'm sure there are people thinking, well,
• 1:56:41
  John, what difference does it make the order of the bullets? Who cares?
• 1:56:45
  I mean, you know, if Oswald alone of Oswald alone. Well,
• 1:56:48
  the reason why it matters is the number one problem that people see with
• 1:56:56
  the Oswald acted alone theory is the bullet. That's the reason. I mean,
• 1:57:01
  it's the number one reason why people don't buy that Oswald acted alone.
• 1:57:06
  And I can understand it, because it makes no goddamn sense that one bullet
• 1:57:11
  could do all that damage, make all those movements and come out pristine.
• 1:57:17
  That doesn't It doesn't pass the smell test, the laugh test. It defies
• 1:57:23
  common sense. I believe it even defies science. But it's not necessary.
• 1:57:29
  And I said that to Posner in the interview. Our cause of trying to
• 1:57:32
  correct the record about what really happened here in Osweald being the lone gunman is
• 1:57:39
  being harmed unnecessarily, especially post Paul Landis testimony with this idea that where we
• 1:57:46
  somehow have connected the single bullet theory with the only path for Oswald to be
• 1:57:54
  the assassin. That's not the case. I have outlined it again times on
• 1:58:00
  this podcast than elsewhere, that the path to Oswald being the lone gunman is
• 1:58:04
  actually simpler, far simpler. If Landis is right, and I am right
• 1:58:11
  about the order of the shots and the delayed reaction to the first shot,
• 1:58:15
  and I have to say, I'm just very disappointed that as of right now,
• 1:58:19
  I can only conclude that Posner is ducking me. It's not because you
• 1:58:25
  know, we don't like each other. We've interviewed I've interviewed him many times
• 1:58:29
  over the years. We've always had good interaction. He knows what a big
• 1:58:32
  fan I am of his work. I get that he's busy this week doing
• 1:58:35
  a ton of interviews because the media is interested in this surrounding the sixtieth anniversary,
• 1:58:41
  but that doesn't explain not getting back to me. It doesn't explain giving
• 1:58:45
  me another half hour. He knows I know the case better than anybody else
• 1:58:48
  is going to interview him during this entire anniversary period. I can guarantee you
• 1:58:53
  that. And I actually think that that's why he won't come back on,
• 1:58:56
  or seemingly won't come back on, is because he knows I know the case
• 1:59:00
  probably as well as he does, and I may have figured out what actually
• 1:59:02
  happened, when he has either not figured that out or has been unwilling to
• 1:59:06
  accept that the single bullet theory was wrong. So that's all been very disappointing
• 1:59:13
  to me. Typical of my life and my career, that that's the way
• 1:59:15
  these things work out, where I've done some really great work and it doesn't
• 1:59:20
  seem like it's going to actually do any good. But I've kind of gotten
• 1:59:25
  used to that. As far as bigger picture issue on the JFK assassination and
• 1:59:30
  the sixtieth anniversary to me, to me, and especially in the context of
• 1:59:35
  the Death of Journalism podcast, the biggest issue here is how badly the news
• 1:59:40
  media blew this case. And ironically, the news media got it right in
• 1:59:45
  the first twenty four to thirty six hours of this It really wasn't until Jack
• 1:59:50
  Ruby killed lear By Oswald in a fit of rage that was not part of
• 1:59:56
  a conspiracy that things started to go sideways, and you know, the conspiracy
• 2:00:00
  theories started to reign supreme. But as we've gotten further and further away from
• 2:00:06
  the reality of that day, we've gotten further and further into the realm of
• 2:00:12
  nutterery and conspiracy theories for which there's no logic or evidence. I am still
• 2:00:18
  amazed that the next day's version of the Dallas Morning News is one of the
• 2:00:24
  greatest pieces of journalism that I've ever seen ever. I mean, there are
• 2:00:30
  well over one hundred locally created articles about the assassination in less than twenty four
• 2:00:38
  hours after the assassination itself, with no text messaging, no cell phones,
• 2:00:44
  no computers, nothing, and almost all of it, not all of it,
• 2:00:49
  but almost all of it turned out to be extremely accurate. It might
• 2:00:54
  be the best documentation, certainly in real time, of that day that exists.
• 2:01:01
  If you ever get to see a copy of it, I urge you
• 2:01:03
  to check it out. It's amazing and it really does show the death of
• 2:01:06
  journalism. The Kennedy story in particular shows the death of journalism over time,
• 2:01:15
  and it also, you know, it shows just simply from a resources standpoint,
• 2:01:18
  My god, newspapers are completely dead today in comparison to what the Dallas
• 2:01:24
  Morning News was in nineteen sixty three, even though they have far greater technology
• 2:01:28
  than they did then, but they have far less resources and far less expertise,
• 2:01:32
  and their standards for the truth are far less and worse than they were
• 2:01:38
  back then. That newspaper did an extraordinary job. Television did buying large an
• 2:01:44
  extraordinary job. I mean, television news basically came of age on that day,
• 2:01:48
  November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, we basically became a television nation
• 2:01:55
  at that point. That was the beginning of the end, ironically enough,
• 2:01:58
  for newspapers and in the beginning of the television era, and the news media
• 2:02:05
  has allowed and overseen the public having a completely gross misinterpretation of what happened with
• 2:02:14
  the Kennedy assassination. And it's a lot to me like ESPN and college football,
• 2:02:19
  you were overseeing this. ESPN, you oversaw the destruction of the greatest
• 2:02:26
  team sport there is in America. That's partially on you. Well, the
• 2:02:30
  news media oversaw America's perceptions of the Kennedy assassination, and the vast majority of
• 2:02:38
  people believe in some semblance of a conspiracy. That's on you, news media.
• 2:02:44
  You screwed up, you lost trust, and you didn't get this right.
• 2:02:48
  And when you look back at the three biggest cases of the twentieth century,
• 2:02:55
  you might be able to argue what those three were, but in my
• 2:02:57
  mind, it's very clear they were the Limberg baby kidnapping, the jfk assassination,
• 2:03:03
  and the O. J. Simpson murders. All three turned out terribly
• 2:03:08
  in different ways. And the Limberg baby kidnapping has been a story that's always
• 2:03:13
  fascinated me, and I'm positive that the conventional wisdom on that is totally wrong.
• 2:03:17
  And it's possible that an innocent man was sentenced to death. I don't
• 2:03:23
  know that for sure, but I can't figure out with one hundred percent certainty
• 2:03:27
  what really did happen there. But it's a fascinating story, and I know
• 2:03:30
  the media blew that one, and the public's perception of the Kennedy assassination sixty
• 2:03:35
  years ago from sixty years from when it happened is proof that the media blew
• 2:03:41
  it on the Kennedy assassination. And we all know that OJ Simpson somehow got
• 2:03:45
  acquitted for killing two people when he obviously committed those murders, and the media
• 2:03:48
  played a major role in why that was allowed to happen. So the bigger
• 2:03:53
  the story, the more likely it is that the news media is going to
• 2:03:58
  blow it. And finally, my other great passion on this whole Kennedy assassination
• 2:04:02
  issue is the whole issue of right wing conspiracies. You can draw a direct
• 2:04:08
  line, a direct line from right wing people people I used to consider my
• 2:04:14
  friends and allies, believing that the CIA and Tucker Carlson's viewing this bullshit that
• 2:04:18
  the CIA killed Kennedy. There's a direct line between that and believing that there's
• 2:04:24
  a deep state that stole the twenty twenty election from Donald Trump and faked the
• 2:04:30
  January sixth insurrection and killed Jeffrey Epstein in prison. And you know that Paul
• 2:04:38
  Pelosi was somehow involved in a gay tryst gone wrong that almost resulted in his
• 2:04:44
  murder, and all sorts of other crazy conspiracy theories. They all begin in
• 2:04:48
  this generation with jfk If you understand that Lee rv Oswald acted alone killed John
• 2:04:56
  F. Kennedy, then logically you're going to I have a very different view
• 2:05:00
  of the world, and you're going to see a lot of these other crazy
• 2:05:02
  conspiracy theories for what they are nuttery that is damaging. It's damaging not just
• 2:05:10
  because it's not true, but it's damaging because every conspiracy theory that people buy
• 2:05:15
  makes it easier and easier for them to buy more bullshit, and eventually you
• 2:05:18
  get things like Donald Trump getting back into the White House despite all the conspiracy
• 2:05:24
  theories that he believes in. Starting with his political birth, which was the
• 2:05:29
  whole Barack Obama wasn't really born in Hawaii, bullshit, the whole birtheism conspiracy
• 2:05:34
  that should have ended Donald Trump's political career. Instead, it effectively made his
• 2:05:41
  political career by putting him in great position to win the twenty sixteen Republican presidential
• 2:05:47
  nomination, which of course changed our politics probably forever. So all this matters,
• 2:05:53
  and it all goes back to something that is a fallacy. It's a
• 2:05:58
  myth, it's a fraud. It didn't happen. Lee rvy Oswald killed John
• 2:06:03
  F. Kennedy and he acted largely, if not completely alone. That's the
• 2:06:09
  truth. Once again, I urge you to check out episode number seventy one
• 2:06:13
  and episode number one hundred and five of this podcast if you suspect that I'm
• 2:06:16
  not right about that, or if you just want to know more about what
• 2:06:19
  really did and did not happen back sixty years ago this week November twenty second,
• 2:06:25
  nineteen sixty three. So that'll do it for this episode number one hundred
• 2:06:30
  and six of the Death of Journalism podcast. I hope you have a great
• 2:06:31
  Thanksgiving. We will not be doing a Thanksgiving episode, so enjoy your time
• 2:06:38
  on Thanksgiving and howard way you're going to spend it. I will do two
• 2:06:42
  episodes next week, when we'll review whatever happens between now and then. Until
• 2:06:45
  then, I'll be thanksgiving. Thanks for listening. My name is John Zigler
• 2:06:50
  and this is the death of journalism podcasts.