Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode Ninety Four: MAGA Morons

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Episode Ninety Four: MAGA Morons · The Death Of Journalism

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Welcome to episode number ninety four of the Death of Journalism podcast. My name
0:04
is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show. Maga Morons removed the
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speaker of the house without even a plan for what's next. It seems as
0:12
if we may have seen the worst me too induced miscarriage of justice to date.
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Katie Current finally admits that I was right about her and the NFL's embrace
0:22
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hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. The big political news of the last
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couple of days is that Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker of the House of Representatives,
1:15
was removed in a vote by the House, a historic vote by the
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House to remove the Speaker of the House. So currently, as we tape
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this, there is no official Speaker of the House. In fact, there
1:27
doesn't even appear to be someone who is likely to be the next Speaker of
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the House. But it's not going to be Kevin McCarthy because he has said
1:37
he will not run again after having been voted out. Now, of course,
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in the logical world, here's what happened. Republicans just had enough of
1:46
Kevin McCarthy and his inept leadership with a very small minority. So what they
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decided to do was get together and a ma a large majority of them decided
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to ouse McCarthy, and they, because the majority was so small, they
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were able to do this. And they have a very clear plan for what's
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next. They're going to have a better alternative to Kevin McCarthy to replace him,
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because after all, you know, if you're going to replace something,
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you have to have something that's at least as good, if not better.
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And this is all very logical, and it's all going to make sense in
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the long run. Of course, that's not at all what happened. It's
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not even close to what happened. What really happened here in this bizarro upside
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down world in which we now live, is that eight Republicans sided with all
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the Democrats, right the most ardently anti democratic, alleged portion of the Republican
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caucus. Almost all these people, super Trumpers, big trump fans, decided
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to side with all the Democrats. In fact, Matt Gates, their leader,
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even spoke from the Democratic podium because they wouldn't allow him to speak from
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the Republican podium during the debate. These eight Republicans sided with all the Democrats
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in order to get rid of the Speaker of the House. And they don't
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have an alternative plan, They don't have a replacement. And this was a
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Speaker of the House who was put there largely via the support of wait for
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it, Donald Trump. This is the upside down world we're living in now.
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I cannot repeat this enough. Huge maga Republicans like Matt Gates decided to
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take out Donald Trump's effectively hand chosen Speaker of the House and do so with
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nothing but Democratic votes. Democrats sat there and had a decision to make they
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could go along with these eight Maga Republicans. And see, this is where
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Democrats get such a huge advantage because the mainstream media is controlled by liberals.
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Because Democrats should be paying some price one for siding with maga Republicans, right,
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there should be some theoretical price for that. They should be getting attacked
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somewhere among their own base for that. But no, there's nothing close to
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that happening. But they also ought to be being attacked for causing the chaos
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that now ensues. But see, they want the chaos. They love the
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chaos because they know their friends in the media will easily portray this as Republican
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chaos, even though it's only eight Republicans and it's the entirety of the Democratic
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Caucus that's doing this. So talk about, you know, getting your cake
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and eating it too. Democrats are the cause of this. This could not
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happen without almost every single Democratic vote siding with getting rid of Kevin McCarthy.
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And so how in the world I mean? And I have to say,
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there's actually been some fair media coverage, even on the right, especially on
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Fox News Channel, articulating pretty much what I just told you, and how
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ridiculous this is. But in a weird way, this shows how insane what
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happened really was, because this is a movement led by eight congress people that
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doesn't really even have a constituency because the right wing media is not totally on
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board. Now, there are their elements of the right wing media that just
5:47
wants chaos no matter what. They just want everything to burn to the ground.
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It doesn't make it doesn't matter if it doesn't make any goddamn sense,
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It doesn't matter if it seems to be againse with Donald Trump once. It
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doesn't matter, because this rationalize that Trump really wants this, he's just not
6:02
saying it publicly. In fact, Matt Gates effectively did that. Matt Gates
6:10
implied strongly that Trump had told him personally that this is what he wants,
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even though his public statements are in one hundred percent contradiction to that. But
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that's what happens when you run a cult. To the cult, they can
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either believe that Trump was backing McCarthy, although not very strongly, or they
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can believe that he was only doing that publicly as some sort of four D
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chess maneuver, and that he really told Gates, you know in a private
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conversation that he wanted him gone. This is the way the cult works.
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They get options so they can pick whatever they want. They can pick and
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choose. It's a buffet table of insanity. And the result here is chaos
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at least several days, maybe longer than that, of nothing but headlines about
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Republican led chaos during a very difficult time for the country. There's all sorts
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of issues that need to be dealt with. And of course all this comes
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out after an attempt to avert a government shutdown, which only happened for forty
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five days. So you know, we're gonna have to build back up for
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another massive government shutdown fight in about forty days from now, and we don't
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even know for one hundred percent if there's going to be a Speaker of the
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House. Now. Look, I'm not a huge man of Kevin McCarthy,
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but he was under exceedingly difficult set of circumstances. Exceedingly difficult. He had
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a very very tiny majority of a party that was not in power, could
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do very little because they don't control the Senate and they don't control the White
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House, where you have all these insane expectations created by a right wing media
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industrial complex that doesn't give a damn about reality, and so it's kind of
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remarkable in retrospect that this didn't happen sooner. We all know that it took
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what fifteen ballots from McCarthy to even become a speaker to begin with, and
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he got through it looked like this battle over the government shutdown, And frankly,
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the way I viewed the government shutdown situation was that McCarthy had cut a
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pretty darn good deal for a temporary fix, and it was the Matt Gates
8:31
is of the world that killed it. And then they didn't like the deal
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that they got. And there's some argument over whether or not he betrayed the
8:39
caucus on Ukraine and didn't keep his word. I have no idea, and
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I don't trust Matt Gates to tell me what the truth is. I don't
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know who the hell is telling the truth on that. But here's what I
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do know. I do know that McCarthy was doing as good a job as
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could possibly be expected under ridiculously difficult circumstances. And I do know that Maga
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Republicans are delusional, delusional about what is possible, and I do know that
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they have no alternative plan, and that might be the most important part of
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this whole thing. How the hell do you take out the Speaker of the
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House in historic fashion without an alternative plan? And this drives me crazy in
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all sorts of different walks of life. Okay, you're not happy with what's
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going on, fine, give me a viable alternative option or plan. And
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there is no viable alternative option or plan here. Now I'm guessing they'll to
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come up with somebody. Steve Scalise, who was McCarthy's number two, will
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probably be the guy eventually who gets the job. But how does that change
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anything? How does that change anything? That changes nothing policy wise, if
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that's the end result, nothing at all, And all it does is it
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creates chaos and a narrative that shows that Republicans can't lead, which is not
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going to be helpful at all in the twenty twenty four election cycle, especially
10:15
if Donald Trump, which I presume he's going to be, is at the
10:18
top of the ticket. We are now looking down the barrel of the worst
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possible scenario. If you're someone who believes like I do, that the entire
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purpose of the Republican Party is to create guard rails for Democratic insanity. And
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that goes to my whole philosophy on politics, and it really goes to my
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whole philosophy on Trump. I don't know it's possible. If you're a big
10:45
fan of this podcast, you've heard me talk before about the core political reason
10:50
why I can't stand Donald Trump is that if you look at politics as a
10:56
chessboard, Okay, Donald Trump and his candidacy in twenty sixteen was this crazy
11:03
gambit that somehow worked and against all odds, you know, the Republican Party
11:11
took the Democratic Party's queen in Hillary Clinton. And nobody saw it coming,
11:18
including myself, and it shocked the world, and everyone on the right rejoiced,
11:24
Oh my god, can you believe this? Against all odds and all
11:28
criticism, and everyone said this wouldn't work. We took the other side's queen.
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But in doing that, the rest of the board was opened up to
11:39
total takeover. It wasn't checkmate. It was just a hollow victory that when
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COVID hit got completely and totally wiped out and reversed in dramatic fashion because the
11:52
taking of that queen enraged the left, so much that in every every single
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element of society, they went on a crusade to destroy our side and to
12:07
destroy our view of the way America ought to work politically and not politically,
12:13
socially, culturally, media wise. And then when COVID hit, they had
12:18
their perfect storm and they took advantage of it. And there is zero doubt
12:24
that in twenty twenty three America is far far closer to its ultimate destruction than
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it was in twenty sixteen, and far closer to its ultimate destruction in twenty
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twenty three than it would have been had Hillary Clinton won in twenty sixteen.
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Because if Hillary Clinton had won in twenty sixteen, we would have stayed on
12:48
the rails, especially during COVID. We would have absolutely stayed on the rails,
12:54
because every Democrat would have known that going off the rails would have been
12:58
detrimental to her re election campaign. But there wouldn't have been this incredible anger,
13:03
this incredible rage on the left for revenge for Trump's victory and all the
13:11
things that Trump did to provoke the other side. We don't have the fucking
13:16
numbers in this country to do anything offensively. This is about trying to hold
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on for dear life as long as we possibly can. That's my view of
13:26
the political situation. When I look at this, I go, can we
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have a country anything close to what I thought this was? At least until
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my kids are old and gray and hopefully gone. I used to think that
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was a realistic goal. I no longer do. I'm not even sure we're
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gonna make it until I'm old and gray. I'm already old. I'm not
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one hundred percent gray yet getting their close every day, especially given all the
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circumstances of life and news. But the reality here is we done old Trump
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and his movement has decreased by at least twenty or thirty years the amount of
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time it will take to destroy the country. Now, did he do it
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on purpose? I'd like to think not. But he's the one that provoked
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this, and this Kevin McCarthy thing is emblematic of that because without Trump,
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even though he was the one that helped McCarthy become speaker, this doesn't happen
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because you don't have the Matt Gates of the world. Matt Gates is a
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flaming dick, and I don't use that phrase lightly. Matt Gates and Gavin
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Newsom were basically separated at birth. In my view, they're basically the same
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people. This one is far left, one is seen as far right.
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And this guy provoked all this not because it's good for the country, not
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because it's good for the Republican Party, not because Kevin McCarthy had done anything
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all that horrendous, simply because he saw an opportunity to elevate himself, raise
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money, get on television, and show the maga world just how great he
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is, how gutsy he is, and how he's willing to do things that
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no one else is willing to do. Well, gee, that's awesome since
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you're in a safe district in Florida and you're gonna win reelection. But here
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he is literally fundraising off of the effort to get rid of a Republican speaker
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with no alternative plan, none, and best case, this is going to
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be horrible. This could still be a total disaster if they're not able to
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actually get the votes, because it may be a situation where no one is
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able to get the votes, and Democrats now realize they don't have to help
15:43
this at all. They could just sit back and laugh because they know every
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single day this occurs, they're off the hook for a whole bunch of things,
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and they're helping create a narrative that's going to be very, very helpful
15:54
for them in twenty twenty four. Now it's not just me. I've actually
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been mildly and pleasantly surprised at the both the number and the quality of commentators
16:07
who have come out and expressed outrage over what Matt Gates and others have done
16:12
here. And I want to play this one clip because I think it's from
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the person who, in this situation ought to be the most credible that if
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we lived in a ractional world, this would this would reverse the tide of
16:25
insanity. But we don't live in that world because no one believes anyone,
16:29
you know, everyone just discards anything that doesn't fit their preconceived notions of what
16:33
they want to believe. But Newt Gingridge is a guy who is a super
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Trump fan, a guy who was Speaker of the House, a very successful
16:42
Speaker of the House for a short period of time, and then got ousted
16:47
as Speaker of the House. So I mean literally as a Republican, So
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literally, there's nobody on the planet who should have more credibility on what just
16:56
happened to Kevin McCarthy than Newt Gingridge, and new Gingridge went on Fox News
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channel and went off on Matt Gates and the eight Republicans who did this in
17:10
a way that was both shocking and I think one hundred percent true. And
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here's what that sounded like. Ninety six percent of the Republicans voted for McCarthy,
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four percent voted against him. From my position as a longtime Republican activist,
17:23
they're traders. All eight of them should in fact be primaried. They
17:27
should all be driven out of public life. What they did was to go
17:32
to the other team to cause total chaos. We ought to be focusing on
17:36
Biden. We ought to be focusing on the economy, we ought to be
17:40
focusing on the border. Instead, you're going to get a weaker ten days
17:42
of the media focusing on Republican disarray. It's an astonishingly destructive behavior by a
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handful of egocentric people who think they're superior to ninety six percent of the conference.
17:56
Now, that was awesome, And Gingridge wasn't alone. Stephen Miller,
18:00
who's another huge Trump fan, former Trump Aidwell, who was in the White
18:06
House, he went on Jesse Waters Show and similarly trashed this entire effort.
18:14
Of course, the their leader, Gingrich and Miller's leader, Donald Trump,
18:18
was trying to play both sides of this. I mean, he was mildly
18:22
supporting McCarthy, but not in a huge way, which is typical of Trump,
18:29
you know, and it was hilariously he once said, well, I
18:30
can't go against him because he said nice things about me. And that wasn't
18:36
a joke. I mean, that's literally the way that Donald Trump views these
18:38
things. But of course, none of this will in the Republican primary,
18:42
will come back to haunt Trump at all. Somehow he won't get any blame
18:48
or damage because of this. But as I said, the bigger picture here
18:53
is, we are now facing a very perilous situation, the most likely SINNEI
19:00
going into the twenty twenty four election cycle, which in theory, much like
19:04
twenty twenty two, ought to be terrible for Democrats given the nature of the
19:08
economy, and there are signs that the economy is going to get worse,
19:12
the stock markets having a terrible period right now. In there indications that we
19:18
are not going to have this soft landing that everyone has talked about on the
19:22
economy. Polls show that Republicans are now favored over Democrats for the first time
19:27
in forever. So from an economic standpoint, I think also there's a lot
19:32
of people who understandably think there's something wrong in the country. We're heading down
19:37
the wrong path, something is broken. There is an appetite for change,
19:41
and twenty twenty four interrational world would be a very bad year for Democrats,
19:47
and instead it looks like Democrats are going to get a four time indicted Donald
19:52
Trump criminally indicted, you know, not on top of all the civil problems
19:56
like the civil trial that he's currently faced indicating that he's a business fraud in
20:03
New York, but four time, criminally indicted, highly unpopular Donald Trump as
20:08
the standard bearer as the presidential candidate, a Republican House with a tiny,
20:15
tiny majority that can't even keep its leader. And oh, by the way,
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you know, Kevin McCarthy, for all his faults, was a tremendous
20:26
fundraiser. So now you know, we're gonna have a guy with no money
20:29
at the top of the ticket. And Kevin McCarthy gone as a fundraiser.
20:33
And I got to tell you, I say this all the time as someone
20:36
who watches these races very very very closely. You know, California, while
20:41
we are vastly a Democratic state, there are three or four Republican districts that
20:48
have been holding on for dear life here in California. As the demographics shift
20:56
against them, and with McCarthy, who's from California gone as a fundraiser,
21:03
I gotta believe that Democrats are going to take three or four more seats in
21:07
California, and that right off the bat, maybe the end of the Republican
21:12
majority in the House next year, but it's too early to make one hundred
21:18
percent prediction. But right now I got to believe that Democrats are a big
21:22
favorite to take back the House, and depending on what happens with Menendez in
21:27
New Jersey, I believe Democrats will still hold the Senate, and so they're
21:33
right there. The most likely scenario right now, not a prediction, but
21:38
most likely scenario right now is Biden with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate
21:45
and no re election fears, and then Kamala Harris coming in after the midterm
21:52
elections so that she can serve two terms after that. That's a horrifying scenario
21:59
that look very realistic right now, But there's an even worse scenario. I
22:04
now think that there is a non zero chance that it's not Biden who's president
22:11
with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate, it's Kamala Harris and or Gavin
22:15
Newsom. Now, I still don't understand how they would get Newsom on the
22:18
ticket and getting him to bump line ahead of Kamala Harris, but I especially
22:26
now by the way, I didn't mention this in episode ninety three, but
22:30
you know, there have been a lot of conspiracy theories that Newsom was going
22:33
to appoint Kamala Harris to be the new Senator from California, which never made
22:37
any goddamn sense to me, but a lot of people believe that, and
22:40
that this was going to open up the pathway for Newsom to be the president.
22:45
That's not going to happen, but I still think there if Biden were
22:48
to not run, there's got to be at least a theoretical scenario where we
22:52
get either Harris and or Newsom with a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate.
22:57
Which is the end. That's the end, and I'm not joking around.
23:03
That's the end. There is no coming back from that. That is the
23:07
end of everything. That is the end of America period, end of sentence.
23:11
There's not even a scenario to fight that. There's not even a scenario
23:15
to survive that. And Newsom would be worse than Harris, because I think
23:19
he's much more efficient and much more authoritarian than she is, and more dangerous.
23:26
But this is what we're now facing. This is not a drill.
23:30
This is the real deal. And here we have Ron DeSantis sitting over here,
23:34
who could be the hero that changes everything, but apparently he's got a
23:38
weird laugh or something, so we can't go with him. And he doesn't
23:41
make us feel as good about owning the Libs as Donald Trump does. But
23:47
this is the moment, folks. We are heading down an incredibly dangerous path
23:52
here. And I'm not suggesting that who the Speaker of the House is matters
23:56
that much. I'm talking about the narratives that take hold and the damage that
24:02
they do not dimensioned by the way, there is a chance that this thing
24:06
goes on so long that there really is damage, and that when that forty
24:11
five day period is up, there is no way to avoid a government shutdown.
24:17
I mean, we're talking about potentially very high stakes here. I think
24:22
that's the most likely scenario. No, but I have no faith in any
24:26
of these people. There are a bunch of fricking morons who don't care about
24:30
anything but themselves, Matt Gates being foremost among them. And the whole system
24:36
is broken. And when you have an entire system broken in a media that's
24:40
broken, you're gonna get bad results. And this result is bad. Now
24:45
how bad it's going to be, I don't know. But Kevin McCarthy did
24:49
his best under very difficult circumstances, an imperfect person who deserved to have a
24:56
lot better than he got. And if you read between the lines, every
25:00
single Republican other than these eight, these eight morons, understands that. But
25:07
this is the price we pay for buying into the Trump cult. This is
25:12
all because of the Trump cult. Now, speaking of Donald Trump, I
25:19
have to play a clip from this past Weekends sixty minutes because I theorized a
25:26
long time ago that the only way realistic way out of this Trump problem,
25:33
since I don't think he's going to die, and I don't think he's going
25:36
to be in prison, and soon enough for him to lose the Republican presidential
25:41
nomination is that you pay him off, that you pay Donald Trump one not
25:47
to run, and then you'd also have to in my world, you have
25:49
to incentivize him for the Republican candidate, ideally DeSantis to actually win, and
25:56
incentivize him for Republicans to take the Senate and Republicans to take the House.
26:03
Now, how much money that was gonna take, I don't know. I'm
26:06
sure that I way under estimated the amount of money because I don't think Trump's
26:11
that rich, and I think he's very cash poor. And I think I
26:15
said something like, you know, you're given twenty five million not to run,
26:18
You're give him twenty five million if the Republican presidential now many wins,
26:22
You're give him twenty five million. If Republicans win the Senate, twenty five
26:25
million if if they win the House. And in his mind he can make
26:27
a hundred million dollars by galvanizing his cult in the right direction. I thought
26:33
that would at least get his interest. But there was an interview with the
26:38
author of a new book about Sam Bankman Freed. Now, Sam Bankman Freed
26:42
is the bitcoin scam artist. I mean this, The whole story about Sam
26:48
Bankman Freed is just amazing. I mean it makes the Elizabeth Holmes fraud look
26:52
tame in comparison. I mean, this guy was a media darling, mostly
26:57
a left wing political darling. People thought he was going to be the first
27:03
trillionaire, and he was basically a child who had no idea what the hell
27:07
he was doing, and he was running the scam and he's now facing criminal
27:11
charges. Well, there was a guy named Michael Lewis who was with him
27:15
during the key points of all this, writing a book about this whole situation,
27:22
and he did an interview with sixty minutes that was just incredibly insane in
27:30
so many different ways. But the clip I want to play deals with the
27:34
idea that Sam Bankman Freed, according to Lewis, had the same idea.
27:41
I did only a lot higher expectations from a money standpoint, mainly because I
27:48
think at this point, you know, billions meant nothing to him. He
27:52
was that allegedly rich on paper that he actually made an offer to if not
28:00
Trump directly, at least the Trump camp whatever that means, of five ba
28:06
ba ba billion dollars not to run, because in Sam Bankman Freed's vision,
28:14
Trump was that much of a threat to our democratic process. And according to
28:21
Lewis, the Trump camp. Now, see to me, when you talk
28:26
about the Trump camp, that's Trump. There is no Trump camp. Now
28:32
is there some an intermediary? So there's plausible deniability, I'm sure, But
28:37
nobody is speaking on behalf of Donald Trump indicating yeah, we'd be open to
28:42
that. Without it coming from Trump directly, that's just impossible to conceive of.
28:48
But according to Lewis, now this is I guess you'd call it hearsay.
28:52
But according to Lewis and what he said on sixty Minutes, this was
28:57
something that the Trump quote unquote camp had considered. But then Sam Bankman freed,
29:03
lost all his money and the whole idea went down the toilet. But
29:07
here's what that sounded like on sixty Minutes on CBS. One of the most
29:11
shocking passages in this book, I thought, came with this revelation that Sam
29:15
had looked into paying Donald Trump not to run. That only shocks you if
29:19
you don't know Sam. Sam's thinking, we could pay Donald Trump not to
29:25
run for president? Like, how much would it take? Did he get
29:27
an answer? So he did get an answer. He was floated. There
29:30
was a number that was kicking around, and number was kicking around when I
29:33
was talking to Sam about this was five million dollars. Sam was not sure
29:37
that number came directly from Trump. Airy way, So Sam's looking into paying
29:41
Trump not to run and he actually get didn't men come from Trump himself,
29:44
but he actually got a price. He got one answer. Yes. The
29:48
question Sam had was not just his five billion dollars enough to pay Trump not
29:55
to run, but was it legal? Well, why didn't this happen?
29:57
Why didn't you fall through? Well they were still having these conversations when FTX
30:02
blew up, So why didn't happen? He didn't have five million dollars anymore.
30:07
Approach for comment by sixty minutes. Neither former President Trump nor Senator McConnell
30:11
responded. Last November, in a matter of days, mega billionaire Sam Bankman
30:17
Freed lost virtually everything and he soon faced an onslaught of federal fraud charges.
30:22
Now do I know for sure that that actually happened? No. I had
30:26
to say that felt pretty credible to me. As insane as the rest of
30:33
this Sam Bangmin Freed story is that actually sounded plausible. Sounded plausible, And
30:38
what Lewis said the way he said, it sounded pretty credible to me.
30:45
Now, you're never going to be able to prove that. The five billion
30:49
number is a bit bizarre to mazonce. Trump has never even been worth five
30:55
billion dollars on his best day ever. He's claimed to be worth more than
31:00
five billion, but he's never been close to worth that much. But I
31:04
did find it interesting and a little bit humorous that somehow Sam Bankmin Freed,
31:10
and John Zigler are on the same wave went Unfortunately that didn't work out.
31:15
I still believe that that's the only path, and I still believe that it's
31:19
a viable bathtlethough if this story is true, Sam Bankman Freed may have blown
31:23
up any chance for it to occur because he's just set the price at five
31:29
billion dollars. Nobody has five billion dollars to make this happen. I would
31:34
still I would love I would love to know whether or not Trump would do
31:38
this for a reasonable bott amount of money. I gotta believe he would,
31:44
because at this point this is just a fricking pain in his ass. Now,
31:48
of course, he needs to still be the biggest problem in this theory
31:52
now is he needs to be a candidate when he's in front of a jury,
31:57
he needs to be a candidate, because if he's not a candidate,
32:00
that greatly reduces the urgency for any pro Trump person on his jury to hold
32:10
the line and make sure that he doesn't get convicted, which I think is
32:15
the key that the media is ignoring to all of these for indictments, because
32:22
you're gonna have to figure out a way to keep a Trump fan, at
32:25
least one or two of them off every single one of those juries. And
32:29
if you do that, I mean demending on how you do it, that's
32:34
gonna be major problems from an appeal standpoint. I just don't know how you
32:37
get a even theoretically fair jury with the most divisive man in the minern history
32:43
of America. You can't do it in either direction, and so inherently all
32:47
these trials are going to be suspect at best. But that to me would
32:53
probably be if that those indictments didn't exist. You know, I think Trump
33:00
would probably be more open to this idea, which is obviously just theoretical,
33:05
but at least in theory. Sam Bankman free try when he was still theoretically
33:10
super rich to get Donald Trump out of the race. I mentioned in episode
33:16
number ninety three that our king here in California, Gavin Newsom, whom I
33:22
despise, had appointed the successor for Diane Feinstein, who passed away at the
33:27
age of ninety even though she should have been out of the Senate long ago.
33:31
And he appointed a woman by the name of Lafonza Butler. And the
33:37
only credentials that Lafonza Butler appears to have, other than being extremely pro choice
33:45
and you know, doing a few things in her career, the only qualification
33:50
she seems to have to be a US Senator is that she is a black
33:55
lesbian, a black lesbian. She's a black female lesbian. And those are
34:02
literally her qualifications. We're now in such a world so dominated by identity politics,
34:08
especially on the left, that how many boxes you check are literally qualifications,
34:16
even for an appointment. So you didn't run for this office, you
34:21
didn't earn this office. You were given this office out of nowhere. And
34:28
so she's a black female lesbian from Maryland. Currently she's currently living in and
34:37
registered in Maryland. Now she apparently may have a residence in California, and
34:42
the residency issue is going to be fixed, but newso decides to go to
34:47
Maryland to pick a black female lesbian, and the media coverage to this,
34:53
especially here in California, has been basically exactly as I expected, very very
35:00
benign, no real attacks. I actually responded to one reporter out of San
35:07
Francisco, I think is local CBS affiliate, a white guy who attended the
35:13
press conference where Newsom was announcing Butler's choice, and he went down the laundry
35:20
list to, you know, very gently, you know, the issues that
35:23
it's historic that she's a black female lesbian, and oh, by the way,
35:28
you know she lives in Maryland, but that doesn't seem to be a
35:30
problem. And I responded to this person's TikTok video and I said, so,
35:36
we're just going to ignore the fact that she was chosen but cause she's
35:43
a black female lesbian and oh, by the way, doesn't live in California.
35:46
And the guy responded to me on TikTok by saying, well, I
35:52
did ask the question about the residency, and if you have a problem with
35:59
her being a black lesbian, and that's on you, not me. I'm
36:02
like, dude, my problem is not that she's a black lesbian. I
36:07
couldn't care less. My issue is that's why she was chosen. Those are
36:15
her credentials. And oh, by the way, you didn't ask a follow
36:19
up question when Newsom gave you the BS answer response to picking someone from Maryland.
36:27
And then I added, by the way, on the black female lesbian,
36:30
dude, you're soon going to be replaced by a black female lesbian.
36:35
You know, you're a white male, seemingly straight guy in the San Francisco
36:38
market. Eventually you're going to be replaced by a black female lesbian. So
36:43
he didn't respond to that, at least as of this taping. But that
36:46
was generally the gist of everything I saw here in California. What it was
36:51
not a big story at all. I mean, Taylor Swift's a much bigger
36:55
story even here in California, and what she's doing to the NFL. Well,
37:00
then you know the fact that our king has now appointed the Attorney General,
37:06
the Secretary of State, and both US senators. That's a fact.
37:10
All those are elected offices, but our King has chosen selected the people who
37:17
fill all of those positions. And then what really got me, and probably
37:22
the reason why I'm even mentioning it again in this episode, is that Newsome
37:25
on multiple occasions, touted her appointment and her official swearing in as the new
37:34
senator from California, even though she lives in Maryland, as quote unquote historic
37:39
or history in the making history. This is now our definition of history,
37:45
the history being I guess the fact that she's the first black lesbian or the
37:51
first lesbian. Again, it's not history if you're appointed that. You can't
37:59
just say we've made history by appointing somebody that didn't do anything to earn it.
38:07
And by the way, it's historic if someone's a lesbian. What is
38:12
a lesbian? A lesbian is someone who doesn't like having sex with man.
38:15
I guess that makes you historic now. I mean, it's just it's just
38:22
mind blowed boggling that there's no self awareness at all, and that this is
38:29
now the definition of history. I can choose someone because of the color of
38:35
their skin and because of their sexual preference, which is a choice in this
38:40
situation in my opinion, and because I do think there's a fundamental difference between
38:46
male homosexuality and female homosexuality. That's a whole nother story for another day,
38:51
but I do think that there is a difference, not always there's some biological
38:57
and inherent explanations for both. I have no problem with homosexuality in any way,
39:02
shape, or form, period and of sentence. But I don't think
39:07
that male homosexuality and female homosexuality are the same. Sometimes female homosexuality can be
39:14
effectively a political choice. I have no idea if it is in Butler's case,
39:20
But that doesn't become historic. That choice doesn't become historic because you get
39:25
chosen out of the blue with no credentials to be a US Senator from California
39:31
when you live in Maryland. But this is the world we're now living in.
39:37
It's absolute insanity, and there's not going to be any price for Newsom
39:43
to pay here at all. Now, this is so obviously an affirmative action
39:46
pick that maybe there'll be some people in California you'll go, wait a minute,
39:51
hold on what the hell is going on here. But the percentage of
39:53
people you know, from a demographic standpoint who might be predisposed to that belief
40:01
is very small now in California, and it will probably be overwhelmed by the
40:07
number of people who are thrilled by it, who actually really think this is
40:13
history and that this is a great thing, because this is now the value
40:16
system of California, which is not American, and which is a threat to
40:23
what America has been and was supposed to be and what will be America if
40:29
this cancer is allowed to grow beyond our borders here in California, which knew
40:35
some clearly, very clearly wants to make happen. And one of the areas,
40:42
one of the many areas where this is the case, is in the
40:45
realm of free speech. I wrote a book called The Death of Free Speech
40:49
back in two thousand and five. It was incredibly prescient. No one bought
40:52
it, but it's probably one of the things I'm most proud of in my
40:55
career because I was way ahead of the game and where we were heading on
41:00
free speech. And there is a new pull out, it's about a week
41:06
old, that indicates that Democrats have absolutely positively no value in free speech at
41:15
all, any significant value. And let's be clear, it used to be
41:21
that liberals, liberals were the champions of free speech. They believed in free
41:28
speech, maybe even more so than conservatives did. I mean, that was
41:32
a bedrock principle of liberals not that long ago. And now all of a
41:38
sudden, Democrats to a shocking degree. Especially young Democrats do not believe in
41:47
free speech. They just don't believe in it. They don't understand it because
41:52
they've been taught it properly in schools apparently, but they just don't. They
41:57
do not believe in it. Here are the results. These results are chilling.
42:00
The results of this poll. Forty seven percent of Democrats say free speech
42:07
should be legal only under certain circumstances. Almost half, forty seven percent free
42:14
speech should be legal only under certain circumstances. Now, the wording of that
42:19
is even more terrifying because it implies that the burden is on those trying to
42:25
prove that free speech should be legal. That's the way at least I read
42:30
it, and forty seven percent, so almost half of Democrats just don't get
42:37
it. Forty seven percent of Democrats say free speech should be legal only under
42:43
certain circumstances. But it gets maybe even worse than that. Thirty four percent
42:47
of Democrats say Americans have too much freedom. A solid third of Democrats say
42:53
Americans have too much freedom. This is coming out of the COVID Panic,
43:00
where our freedoms were more limited than in any other time in the modern history
43:05
of America, seventy five percent of Democrats say government has a responsibility to censor
43:12
hateful social media posts. I'm going to play a clip from Joe Biden about
43:17
this issue in just a moment, but this is maybe the most bonkers of
43:22
all the poll results. Seventy five percent three quarters of Democrats say government has
43:30
a responsibility to censor quote unquote hateful social media posts. And this one hits
43:37
really close to home because I started railing about hate crime legislation twenty years ago,
43:45
maybe more than twenty years ago, because I saw that one coming like
43:47
a freight train from a mile away, that this was an effort by the
43:54
left to create a loophole to free Because if you are punishing people for quote
44:02
unquote hate, hate crime legislation adding punishment because you did it your crime for
44:07
hateful reasons, or because we didn't like the political element of your crime,
44:14
or your victim had political protection because of their race, or their gender,
44:20
or their sexuality, their religion, whatever it is that there is. It's
44:24
a very small step from doing that to punishing hate in general. And once
44:30
you decide you can punish hate in general, you decide that, well,
44:35
this speech is hateful so if we're punishing people for hateful acts as opposed to
44:42
just the crime they committed, then we can certainly start punishing people for things
44:46
that they say are hateful. And even if the verbage was always very dangerous
44:52
hate crime legislation, once that becomes normalized, once people start to think,
44:58
oh okay, yeah, hate crime, he committed a hate crime. Well,
45:04
what if you're using verbiage that's hateful. Oh yeah, add that one
45:07
in there too. Absolutely, let's end hate. And even just the word
45:13
hate being demonized the way that it is has always greatly bothered me. A
45:19
lot of really good things have happened in this world because of hatred. I
45:23
know that's politically incorrect to say, but do you really think we would have
45:27
won World War Two if we didn't hate the Germans and the Japanese. There
45:32
was an enormous amount of hatred of the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. There was
45:37
an enormous amount of hatred of Hitler that was driving the American effort to win
45:44
World War Two. I don't think we would have if we didn't have,
45:49
if there wasn't legitimate hatred driving us as a tremendous motivator Hatred is a tremendous
45:54
motivator and if channeled properly, can do a lot of good things. Now,
46:00
obviously it can also be very, very bad. But just even the
46:02
demonization of the word hate, I think has is an incredibly politically dangerous thing
46:09
that the Left has done, and probably done so on purpose. So that
46:14
part of this poll was chilling. And then finally, only thirty one percent
46:19
of Democrats strongly agree with the statement I disapprove of what you say, but
46:25
I will defend to the death your right to say it. Only thirty one
46:30
percent thirty one percent, so over two thirds of Democrats do not agree with
46:40
the statement I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the
46:45
death your right to say it, which is a statement I one hundred percent
46:51
agree with. Because if we're not willing to fight to the death to defend
46:55
the right for people to say something that we disagree with, then we have
46:59
no free speech. And if we have no free speech, then we're no
47:01
longer America. We are something completely and totally different. And the Democratic Party,
47:07
which is you know, clearly, as I've already stated earlier in this
47:09
podcast, is on the verge of a complete takeover of America. Does not
47:15
believe in any of this, not even a little bit, not even a
47:20
little bit. And we saw during COVID just how much they don't believe in
47:23
it. They went out of their way to use government force to get social
47:31
media companies to do exactly what seventy five percent of Democrats say they have a
47:37
responsibility to do, which is to censor quote unquote hateful social media post.
47:43
Now they didn't describe it necessarily as hateful social media posts. In fact,
47:46
it might have been worse. They were censoring social media posts that they deemed
47:53
to be misinformation, whatever the fuck that means miss information. And this has
48:02
been proven, I mean, especially on Facebook and Twitter. It has been
48:07
proven that the Biden administration and by the way, even the Trump administration to
48:13
a certain degree, were censoring social media posts specifically about the vaccines, vaccine
48:21
effectiveness. And I guess they would call it vaccine conspiracy theories, some of
48:25
which turned out to be at least partially true. And I'm sure there was
48:30
a lot of this on mask usage. Interestingly, you know, in my
48:35
view, the Biden administration was totally wrong when it came to vaccine mandates and
48:40
the issue of the vaccine's stopping transmission. They were also completely and totally wrong
48:45
on mask mandates because masks obviously never did anything. But this was the essence
48:52
of the effort to censor quote unquote misinformation. Well, last week Joe Biden,
48:58
President Joe Biden was asked about this in a sit down interview and he
49:04
talked about this issue of misinformation and where people get their information from and how
49:10
the government has their responsibility to step in and to stop misinformation from gaining traction.
49:20
Those are my words describing what he said. But here's what that clip
49:23
sounded like. What about what Elon Musk has done to Twitter, lowering guardrails
49:29
against misinformation? Does that contribute to it? Yeah? It does. Look
49:34
one of the things, as I said to you, when I thought I
49:36
wasn't going to run, I was going to write a book about the changes
49:38
taking place, and most of us directed over the years for these fundamental changes
49:44
in society by changing technology, Gutenberg printing and the printing press, change the
49:50
way Europeans could talk to one another, all the way to today. Where
49:53
where do people get their news? They could they you know, they go
49:59
on the internet, They go online, they go and you have no notion
50:06
whether it's true or not. Now, this issue puts me in kind of
50:08
a strange position because I actually agree with some of what Biden said there,
50:16
In fact, a lot of what Biden said there. It's just I completely
50:20
disagree with what the remedy is and how we got here. The idea that
50:25
the government should have any role in cracking down on misinformation is totally and completely
50:31
insane and an American because inherent in deciding what is misinformation is political. It's
50:39
a political decision, and we've already seen with vaccines, with masks, with
50:46
school closings, with all sorts of things related to COVID, and I would
50:51
also argue related to climate change, which is essentially the same thing in the
50:54
liberal mindset. We've already seen that oftentimes what gets labeled misinformation is just information
51:02
that liberals don't like, it doesn't fit their agenda, and that they are
51:07
more than willing to be completely and totally wrong, either knowingly or unknowingly,
51:12
probably both at times, in order to pursue their own agenda by shutting down
51:17
debate. I mean, they literally say the debate is over, the science
51:22
is settled. Everyone believes in climate change. You're a heretic, you're a
51:27
denier if you don't believe it. They did the same thing with vaccine effectiveness,
51:32
They did the same thing with masks. They did the same thing with
51:36
so many elements of the COVID response, and they were almost totally wrong.
51:39
In many areas, they were completely wrong. So it's not the government's role,
51:45
even if, by the way, I trusted the government, which I
51:46
don't, regardless of which administration it is, Republican or Democrat. But it's
51:52
not the government's role. It's inherently wrong for the government to have a role
51:58
in this. But the part about that really pisses me off is not nothing
52:04
beats government censorship as a libertarian. But close behind that is the fact that
52:09
Biden is unwilling or unable to see how we got here, which was largely
52:16
put in part because of him telling us that the vaccines stop transmission. If
52:22
you get the vaccine, you're not gonna get COVID. That was a lie,
52:25
That was misinformation, That was a lie. He was the one that
52:30
pushed mask mandates. One hundred days of masking, he said, federal mask
52:37
mandate, including on airplanes and all sorts of other places. That was misinformation.
52:43
Masks don't do anything, So he is responsible for an awful lot of
52:47
misinformation and an awful lot of lack of trust in government institutions to tell us
52:53
what the hell the truth is and to not give us misinformation. But then
52:59
he references the media and how technology has changed. And I talk about this
53:04
all the time about how changes in technology have changed the business model of the
53:08
news media. It's changed the incentive structure, and it has caused there to
53:14
be a broken news media model and thus the death of journalism the name of
53:19
this podcast. So I agree with Biden as far as how we got here
53:24
evolutionary from an evolutionary standpoint. However, he's not only not mentioning his own
53:32
role in government's role in this lack of trust that people have in their sources
53:37
of information and why they seek out sources of information that are oftentimes unreliable,
53:44
but he's completely neglecting the idea that, you know what, we could have
53:50
had these technologlogical changes that opened up avenues for other sources of information and if
53:58
the previous game keepers, the mainstream news media, had not abused their trust
54:05
so dramatically. I still believe that in twenty twenty three, we would be
54:09
living in a world we're not entirely, but for the most part, these
54:15
fringe sources would not be having nearly as much traction now. Clearly, people
54:21
want to believe what they want to believe, and they will seek out sources
54:23
of information that backs up their beliefs to make them feel better about themselves.
54:29
And in this era, because of technology changing so much, that's never been
54:32
easier. That's a big problem. I talked about it in my book The
54:37
Death of Free Speech. I talked about how fragmentation of the news media was
54:40
going to destroy America because we were all going to get into our own silos
54:45
and get our own information and believe what we want to believe, and disregard
54:47
any information that didn't fit with what we already wanted to believe. And that
54:52
has happened in spades. But a major part of that equation, and a
54:57
major reason why that was allowed to happen, is is that the former gatekeepers,
55:00
the mainstream news media, the New York Times, the Washington Post,
55:06
USA Today, ABC, NBCCBSCNN, MSNBC, and even Fox News Channel I
55:12
think fit into that category in different ways. Talk radio, which is now
55:17
an abombination. Are all different sources of information that used to be at least
55:23
mostly credible have completely jumped the shark. They've jumped the shark for a million
55:30
different reasons, which we talk about continually on this podcast. Mainly because the
55:34
business model broke, mainly because the incentive structure became perverse, but mainly because,
55:40
for the most part, from a liberal conservative perspective, liberals in the
55:45
mainstream news media let their hair down and decided, fuck it, we're just
55:51
gonna, you know, we're just gonna do what we want. Because now
55:52
there's this thing called Fox News Channel, so we feel like we're obligated to
55:57
no longer even pretend to be objective. And since we're all liberals anyway,
56:01
now we're going to be activists. And once that Pandora's box opened up,
56:07
there was no going back because now there was no trust at all on the
56:13
right, and COVID ended any trust there was on the right of mainstream news
56:17
media. It had already been largely destroyed because of Trump and Russia Gate and
56:22
a whole series of other things that happened before that, But that was the
56:27
death. Now, that was the final nail in the Coffin, and even
56:30
for me, because I'm somebody who, even though I'm as strong a conservative
56:36
libertarian as I know and as much of a media critic as I know,
56:39
having dealt with a lot of these people, I at least had a modicum
56:45
of trust and respect for some of them. Post COVID that was completely over
56:50
done. I don't believe anything you tell me now, I presume everything you're
56:53
telling me. It could very easily be false or maybe totally fall I mean
57:00
that doesn't mean I inherently disbelieve it because it comes from that source. I
57:04
evaluated the same as I would evaluate information from virtually any other source, from
57:09
my kids, my wife, my friends, whatever. They're no more credible,
57:15
especially in certain circumstances than the average person. So sometimes they're still telling
57:20
the truth, but that's only by accident. So I'm kind of in a
57:23
unique position here, and I have to say that for me, and I
57:29
think for a large portion of the population, we started to leave the gravitational
57:34
pull of the earth during the two thousand and eight presidential election, which is
57:37
why I did a documentary called Medium Mountpractice. How Obama got elected and Palin
57:43
was targeted. Now, there had always been liberal bias in presidential elections,
57:49
you know, for decades before that. Richard Nixon was railing about this decades
57:53
before the two thousand and eight election. But for me, as a very
57:58
close observer of this, we went to a completely different level when it came
58:02
to the elevation of Barack Obama. I mean, it was literally comical,
58:07
it was religious, It was unprecedented, and it was at that moment,
58:13
especially when they were successful by getting Barack Obama the nomination and winning him the
58:17
presidency, the media thought, Okay, we still have the power to do
58:22
this, and we got away with this, and you know, this is
58:25
the way we're going to do things going forward. And a critical moment in
58:30
the entire two thousand and eight presidential election was the takedown of vice presidential candidate
58:37
on the Republican side, Sarah Palin, by Katie Kirk, who was then
58:42
the anchor of the CBS Evening News. Previously, she had become very very
58:46
famous as Matt Lauer's co host for fifteen years on the Today Show on NBC,
58:52
And a large part of my documentary Media Man Practice tries to show and
58:58
I think effectively showed how that interview for which Katie Kirk got all sorts of
59:05
praise, I mean, Hosanna's literal awards that she got because she destroyed Sarah
59:14
Palin in a taped interview that they did together. And I am not someone
59:21
who claims that Sarah Palin was remotely perfect or that she made no mistakes in
59:25
that campaign or in that interview. The documentary goes into great detail and all
59:31
of that and acknowledges that understandably someone who was just dropped in out of nowhere
59:38
from being the governor of Alaska to being the vice presidential candidate in the middle
59:43
of a media mousetroam where the media was so incredibly invested in Barack Obama's victory,
59:49
and Sarah Palin comes along and that's the only time that the McCain campaign
59:53
was ahead. Was actor Sarah Perlin's vice presidential nominating speech at the convention which
59:59
I attended, which my wife bizarrely was sitting directly behind Sarah Palin because she
1:00:05
couldn't get to her seat, and she literally witnessed Sarah Palin's teleprompter breaking down
1:00:12
in the middle of the biggest speech of her life, and she handled it
1:00:15
like a champ. And that speech for if you didn't witness it or if
1:00:19
you forgot it, I mean that was electric. That was the greatest speech
1:00:22
I've ever witnessed in person by far that I mean, she blew the lid
1:00:27
off the arena in Minnesota. I mean, that was the only moment in
1:00:31
that campaign where the McCain camp had any hope. And there's literally quotes,
1:00:37
there's literally quotes in major mainstream media outlets that are in my documentary from Obama
1:00:45
campaign. Female Obama campaign advisors who were watching the Sarah Palin speech and said
1:00:52
that woman's trouble and they were right, that woman and at that point Sarah
1:01:00
Palin was a real danger to Obama's reelection and she needed to be destroyed.
1:01:08
And the left wing media apparatus, led by Katie Kuric, one hundred percent
1:01:15
did that one hundred percent with not by doing journalism, and Sarah Palin just
1:01:22
collapsed because she wasn't ready. I mean, there were things she said that
1:01:25
weren't perfect, but if you compare them to things that Joe Biden said during
1:01:30
the same campaign as Obama's vice presidential nominee, they were no worse than that.
1:01:36
In fact, I don't think they were nearly as bad as some of
1:01:37
the things that Joe Biden said that the media completely ignored because he'd been around
1:01:43
forever and ever and they had no interest in destroying him because they were clearly
1:01:46
on Team Obama. But there were things that Katie Kuric did in the editing.
1:01:52
There were tactics that she used that were very obvious to someone who understands
1:01:58
the way these things work to try to manipulate Sarah Palin and to make things
1:02:02
look way worse than they actually were. I think it was a major mistake,
1:02:07
certainly in retrospect, but they should have understood this at the time.
1:02:13
Why you do a series of taped interviews with Katie frickin' Kirk when you're at
1:02:19
this critical point of creating your narrative and you just had this amazing convention speech
1:02:23
and things are starting to go right. When you tape an interview with someone
1:02:29
who is your enemy, you are giving them the authority and the ability to
1:02:36
make you look whatever way they want. And Katie Kirk was not a good
1:02:42
faith actor. She was not, And it's very It's always been very obvious
1:02:49
to me, especially after I interviewed Sarah Palin about this in her home and
1:02:52
the only major interview she ever did about the media coverage of the two thousand
1:02:55
and eight election. And then that interview I did with Palin and viral and
1:03:00
exploded across the media universe, and I went on the View and every cable
1:03:06
news network, and then Dey viewed the documentary on the Today Show in a
1:03:10
very contentious interview with Matt Lower. I mean, it was very very obvious
1:03:17
what was really going on here. It was very obvious when you understood the
1:03:23
real story behind that very famous interview. Again, Palin was not perfect,
1:03:28
and my bigger view of Palin is that she became a whack job because she
1:03:32
became what the media made her. And that's a very seemingly complex concept,
1:03:37
but I strongly believe it. The Sarah Palin of today is not the person
1:03:43
I knew, not the person I interviewed, that I dealt with in a
1:03:47
fox hole. She was imperfect, she was probably not ready, but no
1:03:52
one would have been ready for that set of circumstances. But she was not
1:03:55
the person that Katie Kirk made her. And Katie Kerk is a full blown
1:04:00
liberal activist, and I found it particularly interesting that recently at an event in
1:04:06
Texas, Katie Kirk effectively admitted exactly what I've always said about her. And
1:04:14
you know, this thing with Katie Kirk went pretty far. In fact,
1:04:16
I got I don't know if you could call it arrested. I was detained.
1:04:23
I was detained at USC here in Los Angeles because Katie Kirk was getting
1:04:29
the Walter Cronkite Journalism Awards, specifically for her Sarah Palin interview. And this
1:04:34
outraged me. And you know, my movie Medium Malpractice was still being talked
1:04:41
about quite a bit. It was still available on DVD, we were still
1:04:45
doing screenings. And in fact, here's what happened. I went on Fox
1:04:49
News Channel the day before the Katie Kirk Walter Cronkite Award event at USC I
1:04:56
did an interview with Megan Kelly of all people, because I wanted to express
1:05:00
outrage. And I said in the interview with Fox News Channel, I was
1:05:04
going to go to this award event which I could not gain access to.
1:05:11
I had asked for access. They wouldn't let me in, you know,
1:05:14
they wouldn't give me a press pass. I couldn't get a ticket. You
1:05:16
know, it was one of these you know, liberal academia events that were
1:05:20
in a small venue. Was I guess sold out, but I said,
1:05:24
you know what, I'm going to go there. And I don't know if
1:05:27
I use the word protest, but my plan was to hand out copies of
1:05:34
my movie, the DVD of my movie back when they had DVDs, back
1:05:39
in two thousand and nine, to hand out DVDs to everybody who was attending
1:05:44
this event. And on the DVD there was the entire Sarah Palin Interviews as
1:05:49
a special feature where we go in depth into what really happened with the Katie
1:05:55
Kuric interview for which she was being honored with the Walter Cronkite Journalism. So
1:06:00
I did that on Fox News Channel and the next morning I go to USC
1:06:06
and all I have with me is me and a camera person. And I
1:06:12
show up and there are barricades that have been set up as if I'm bringing
1:06:16
an army. Literally, I think they thought I was bringing protesters, because
1:06:24
there were serious barricades that were set up to protect the people that were attending
1:06:30
this event. And I thought, this is really strange because all I'm doing
1:06:33
here is I'm going to videotape myself giving copies giving away copies of my movie
1:06:40
to people who are attending this event honoring Katie Kurk for her Sarah Palin interview.
1:06:46
Well, I got told to leave the premises by some level of authority.
1:06:51
I don't even remember who it was. I said, no, I'm
1:06:54
not leaving. Well, then they bring in these rent A cops. I
1:06:59
don't even know what technical legal authority they had, but I was then told
1:07:03
again to leave and I said I'm not leaving. And then, much to
1:07:09
my shock, because I was still pretty naive, I guess about the way
1:07:12
the world works. At this point, I got taken to the ground and
1:07:17
handcuffed, handcuffed by these rent a cops because I refused to leave a you
1:07:25
know, it's a private university, but this was a public outdoor sidewalk.
1:07:29
I felt like I had every legal right to be there, and certainly I
1:07:33
had every legal right not to get handcuffed and abused. And I start laughing.
1:07:43
And this video was very much misinterpreted. It got, you know,
1:07:46
quite a bit of play. It would have been huge in today's social media
1:07:49
world, but this didn't really exist in two thousand and nine, but it
1:07:54
did get aired on Fox News Channel and in fact, when the larger authority,
1:08:00
the person really in charge, came by and realized that this was a
1:08:03
bad situation, they told me, look, we won't arrest you if you
1:08:10
just decide to leave. That was essentially the deal that I was offered.
1:08:13
Now, normally I would have said, go fuck yourself. You can arrest
1:08:17
me because I'm not leaving. But I couldn't do that in my mind,
1:08:24
because I was scheduled to leave for Louisville, Kentucky, on a flight that
1:08:30
afternoon for a screening of the movie. And on Louisville's a place where I
1:08:34
used to live and was a radio talk show host and a TV host,
1:08:38
and so you know, I couldn't miss the screening. And I knew that
1:08:43
if I got arrested, I was gonna miss my flight. It was gonna
1:08:45
take forever. By the way, I had parked the car in a place
1:08:48
that my car that you know, I think I only had an hour or
1:08:51
two hours of time on it, and so I had in my mind,
1:08:56
I'm thinking they're going to tow away my car. This is going to take
1:09:00
forever. I'll miss the flight. And so I just said, okay,
1:09:02
fine, I'll leave, and so they unhandcuffed me and I left. Then
1:09:11
I weirdly, I did another Fox News Channel appearance with Greta van Sustern,
1:09:15
who was a big Sarah Palin fan at that time, to talk about the
1:09:19
detention or the handcuffing or whatever. I guess you would call it an arrestal
1:09:24
though I was never charged with anything, there's no I don't think there's any
1:09:27
paper record of this. But this is the insanity that I dealt with.
1:09:31
I was simply trying to educate people attending this Walter Cronkite Journalism Awards ceremony for
1:09:39
Katie Couric and her Sarah Palin interview about what really did and did not happen
1:09:45
during this alleged active journalism, which was really an active overt liberal activism.
1:09:50
And I got handcuffed because of that, and I was blown away, absolutely
1:09:59
blown away. And I even went to two different lawyers to see whether or
1:10:04
not there was a lawsuit against USC, and that was a whole nother story
1:10:10
for another day, because the details matter. But basically what happened was one
1:10:14
was a liberal lawyer, one was a conservative lawyer. Both thought that legally,
1:10:18
for different reasons, I had a great case, but then on second
1:10:23
thought, decided that politically it didn't make sense for them to pursue it.
1:10:28
So I had two meetings, both of which were, this is an amazing
1:10:30
case. You know you're going to get a huge settlement out of this.
1:10:33
I don't know if they actually told me that, but that was the implication.
1:10:38
But then they both decided that politically the case didn't work for them.
1:10:42
I don't know whether I had a legal case or not. I had to
1:10:45
do with public's public property and what's not at USC. But the bigger issue
1:10:49
for me was this is the way academia used, for instance, free speech
1:10:56
and how much they were willing to protect Katie Kuric and this hit job that
1:11:02
she had done on Sarah Palin. Well, part of the reason I'm talking
1:11:05
about all this right now is that recently Katie Kuric did an event where,
1:11:13
according to this Fox News Channel article, she embraced her liberalness that she's finally
1:11:19
willing to be liberated because she's no longer in the mainstream news media. Headline
1:11:26
Katie Kiric embraces her liberal stance following years in broadcast news quote unquote, I'm
1:11:30
not for everyone. The former NBC star says, I do feel more liberated
1:11:36
to speak about abortion and gun control. I do find it interesting that she
1:11:42
still referred to as an NBC star because of her days with Matt Lauer on
1:11:45
the Today Show, even though she ended up becoming the CBS anchor person in
1:11:53
a fairly historic fashion. And that's where she was when she did her hit
1:11:59
job on Sarah Panlin, which to me was the most obvious and most impactful
1:12:04
moment of her liberal activism. Here's what Fox News Channel wrote. Broadcast news
1:12:11
veteran Katie Kirk is owning her liberal posture following her decades long career in television.
1:12:16
Speaking at the twenty twenty three Texas Tribune Festival, Texas Tribune is a
1:12:21
very very liberal quote unquote news outlet in Austin, which is a very very
1:12:28
liberal town in Texas, Kirk was asked about her embrace of social causes in
1:12:33
recent years, like abortion rights and gun control, quote unquote, I do
1:12:38
feel more liberated, Kirk said. I think that for so long I had
1:12:43
to appeal to this mass audience, you know, on the Today Show,
1:12:46
and I think we all, especially women, can port ourselves into that,
1:12:50
you know, desire to be likable and I think at some point in my
1:12:56
career, I just realized that not everybody is going to like me. She
1:13:01
recalled once being in a donut shop in Nantucket where she saw someone wearing a
1:13:06
shirt that read I'm not for everyone, and I was like, I want
1:13:11
that shirt, Kuric said, So I came home, I googled it,
1:13:14
and I ordered that shirt. I mean, at some point, I think
1:13:16
I believe strongly in reproductive rights, blah blah blah, gun control. And
1:13:21
essentially what she's saying here is, hey, look now that I don't have
1:13:25
to appeal to everyone, Now that I don't have a real job, now
1:13:30
that I'm not a broadcaster, Now that it doesn't matter how many people hate
1:13:33
me or dislike me or distrust me, I can be who I really am,
1:13:39
which is a liberal activist. Interestingly, this is almost exactly the same
1:13:43
thing that happened with Dan Rather. Dan Rather took over for Walter Cronkride as
1:13:46
the anchor of the CBS Evening News. He was considered the bashing of journalism
1:13:50
for a long time. In his retirement. You look at his tweets,
1:13:54
I mean he is a left wing nut job. Now his career essentially ended
1:13:58
because he did a hit job George W. Bush during the two thousand and
1:14:01
four election, which he still to this day doesn't fully acknowledge. But these
1:14:06
are this is who these people really are, and it's only in retrospect that
1:14:12
we finally realize it or they're willing to admit it because their incentive structure changes,
1:14:16
they no longer have to pretend. And so I felt a bit of
1:14:21
vindication, many many years too late for my crusade against Katie Kirk that she's
1:14:29
essentially admitting. I mean, the person that just made that statement is more
1:14:32
than willing to do a hit job on a person that the Left is seeing
1:14:39
as a threat to the election of their Lord and Savior, Barack Obama.
1:14:45
And that's what Katie Kirk did. And then there's a one little addentum,
1:14:49
which is typical of my life and how bizarre it is. But I mentioned
1:14:56
that this all occurred at USC between me and Katie Kirk. Although Katie Kirk,
1:15:00
I don't even know she was even aware of what happened. She hadn't
1:15:02
have been made aware of it, I guess, but I never saw her
1:15:06
that day. But this weekend, I'm attending the USC football game against Arizona,
1:15:14
and I'm attending it with two people. My high school friend who I
1:15:17
actually mentioned in episode number ninety three, Dave Petrucco. We're back in touch
1:15:23
after I went back to Philadelphia last week for a basketball reunion and his son
1:15:29
goes to USC. But I'm also meeting up with Katie Kirk's former co host,
1:15:34
Matt Lower, who also has a son that goes to USC. So
1:15:40
unless plans somehow change, it's going to be this bizarre situation where at the
1:15:44
very same university where I was detained for protesting, Katie Kirk are going to
1:15:49
be watching a football game with Matt Wower. So this is my life.
1:15:56
This is the strangeness of my life. When I do feel at least some
1:15:59
level of vindication there. Now, speaking of vindication, we've got to talk
1:16:05
about this story involving former Los Angeles Dodger pitcher Trevor Bauer, and this goes
1:16:11
to an issue that I am very passionate about and have been very much on
1:16:15
the record about and have been attacked over quite a bit, which is the
1:16:19
issue of me too. By the way, speaking of Matt Lower, I've
1:16:25
been in touch with Matt about the Trevor Bower story, and he found it
1:16:28
very very interesting and very telling and not really surprising at all, because I
1:16:32
actually think that Trevor Bauer story is very similar to what happened to Matt Lower
1:16:39
and the bogus allegations of sexual assault and rape against him that were levied by
1:16:44
Ronan Farrow in a completely bogus book. But if you somehow missed it,
1:16:48
Trevor Bauer was a very very successful pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and
1:16:55
about two years ago his career was destroyed because he got accused of rape and
1:17:01
sexual assault by a woman by the name of Lindsey Hill. And the allegations
1:17:08
were horrendous. The allegations were that he raped her, that he beat her,
1:17:14
that he fractured her skull. That I mean, this was as bad
1:17:18
as as it gets, really, and the sports media and the baseball establishment
1:17:28
threw Trevor Bauer under the bus immediately, immediately and without any thing resembling due
1:17:36
process, and he got punished more severely than to my knowledge, any baseball
1:17:43
player ever has in history. He got suspended at first for over three hundred
1:17:48
games. Now, beat let's be clear, there was no criminal charge at
1:17:54
the time, and there never was a criminal charge at the time, no
1:17:59
criminal charge, which ought to be a massive red flag right there, especially
1:18:03
in the post me To era, and some prosecutor could make themselves famous by,
1:18:10
you know, successfully prosecuting a guy as prominent as Trevor Bauer, but
1:18:15
that never happened. But our got over a three hundred game suspension, so
1:18:23
basically two full years of games you cannot play in now that got reduced to
1:18:30
I think one hundred and ninety or one hundred and ninety two something like that,
1:18:32
So just over basically a season and a half almost of games that he
1:18:39
was eventually suspended for. And there were lawsuits that were filed against him by
1:18:45
Lindsey Hill, and he countersued her for defamation because he always proclaimed his innocence,
1:18:53
but he was never able to speak about it publicly. One because I'm
1:18:58
sure he was concerned about criminal charge, but also too because I'm sure as
1:19:02
lawyers were telling him, you can't talk about this while we have litigation ongoing.
1:19:09
And this week that litigation ended. Both sides, both hillside and Bower
1:19:15
side ended the litigation, and there was apparently no direct payment from either side
1:19:23
to the other person. Now, you might think, and some media reports,
1:19:28
including on ESPN, have you know, indicated that's the story. Well,
1:19:32
you know, remember that Trevor Bauer thing. Well, you know,
1:19:35
both sides have decided to end their lawsuits. Nothing else to see here,
1:19:41
terrible story, let's move along. That's generally how a lot of the mainstream
1:19:46
media and the sports media, not all, but a lot, have handled
1:19:51
this set of circumstances. But that's not the story. That's not even close
1:19:57
to the story. The real story is that Trevor Bauer relis a video that
1:20:00
has gone mega viral on Twitter where he tells his side of the story and
1:20:09
he brings receipts, and he has texts that this woman, Lindsay Hill,
1:20:15
sent to friends that make it very, very overtly obvious that she was targeting
1:20:25
him for a money grab. And it could not be more clear, I
1:20:30
mean almost comically clear that she was targeting him for his money. She even
1:20:36
talks about needing to get choked out and act like a whore so that she
1:20:42
can get paid. This was pre planned and it was as obvious as could
1:20:48
possibly be. Now. The allegation at the time, which never made any
1:20:54
sense to me, was that they had had consensual sex a few times,
1:20:59
and then Bower raped and assaulted her and even fractured her skull beat her up,
1:21:08
and that just that never made any sense to me. Now. I
1:21:11
don't even remember if I even tweeted about it. I wasn't doing a podcast
1:21:15
at the time, so there was no venue for me to get into it.
1:21:17
And frankly, my bandwidth on this entire story after putting myself out there
1:21:23
on Penn State, Paterno Sandusky and Matt Lower and Michael Jackson and a few
1:21:29
other cases where I think I've been vindicated time and time again, I just
1:21:32
don't have a lot of bandwidth or patience or energy for these stories anymore,
1:21:39
because if I did, I mean, I've even had situations where I've had
1:21:43
I don't want to name names, but I've had a major media figure say,
1:21:45
hey, John, you want to take on this particular me too case,
1:21:49
and I'm like, I agree that there's a problem here, but I
1:21:53
just I just don't think I can continue to do that kind of story because
1:21:58
it's going to seem like I don't believe anybody, or that this is all
1:22:01
I care about, or this is my whole quote unquote Brand, and they
1:22:05
understood. But I absolutely had suspicions about Trevor Bauer from the very beginning,
1:22:14
mainly because I understand the relationship between celebrities and sports figures and women when it
1:22:21
comes to sexuality. Now, I've talked about this previously with regard to Russell
1:22:27
Brand, and it's a very similar situation. I mean, here, Trevor
1:22:31
Bauer is at the height of his career. He's young, he's good looking,
1:22:36
he's making tens of millions of dollars, he's a celebrity, he's a
1:22:41
success. The last thing he needs to do is to assault a woman.
1:22:47
He's having women throw their panties at him, almost literally on a daily basis,
1:22:55
very attractive women. There is no need, no reason at all for
1:23:00
him to do this. Now, there's a set of people in the media
1:23:05
and radical fetemininism who have created this mythology that somehow there are certain men that
1:23:11
get off on this. Which is it possible that that person exists, I
1:23:17
guess, but that is a very rare situation, and it's not somebody who's
1:23:23
a success in life. It's somebody who's a loser who has an enormous amount
1:23:28
of anger at women. Because they don't find him to be attractive, because
1:23:33
he's a loser. The winners in life have no need or desire to rape
1:23:41
a woman. Women are throwing themselves at a guy like Trevor Bauer. And
1:23:48
I've said previously that some of these allegations come about because celebrity does something to
1:23:54
a woman's mind. Not all women, but a lot of women. It
1:23:57
does something to their mind where they do things that they wouldn't ordinarily do that
1:24:01
they later regret, Like, for instance, in the Russell Brand case,
1:24:04
I think there's a very good chance that one of the women decided to have
1:24:09
sex with him without a condom, which she was later horrified by because she
1:24:14
would not normally have done that, but because it's Russell Brand, she ends
1:24:16
up having sex without a condom, she regrets that, she then blames him
1:24:20
for that, and then somehow that evolves into an allegation of assault or harassment
1:24:29
or even rape, whatever you want to call it, especially when there's a
1:24:31
news media hungry to help facilitate that story. And so the allegation against Bauer
1:24:39
made no sense, especially the brutality of it. Well, one of the
1:24:45
things that Bauer provides in this super viral video is a videotape that Hill herself
1:24:53
took the night of the alleged assault, or I guess after the alleged assault,
1:24:59
the more after, where she's in bed. She pans the camera on
1:25:04
her phone to Bauer, who's still asleep, and back to herself, and
1:25:10
she's smirking and winking at the camera like you know, a cheshre cat,
1:25:15
like she's she's love and life. Look what I just did with no marks
1:25:20
on her No nothing. I mean this is I've been a student of these
1:25:27
cases for many years now, and I am unaware of a high profile case
1:25:31
where it is more obvious that the person who was alleged to have committed these
1:25:38
acts was innocent and in fact was the victim of a complete and total hit
1:25:44
job. It's that obvious, and I had to say that. One of
1:25:48
the more shocking things for me in learning Bower's side of the story is that
1:25:57
Hill's attorney is the guy I've mentioned on this podcast before, Brian Friedman.
1:26:01
Brian Freeman is an incredibly well known, high profile, very rich attorney here
1:26:08
in Los Angeles who has represented Megan Kelly, represented Tucker Carlson, represented the
1:26:15
Michael Jackson estate. And you may recall I've had lunch with Brian Freeman about
1:26:21
my support for the Michael Jackson allegator against the allegations against Michael Jackson, specifically
1:26:30
in the HBO mockumentary Leaving Neverland. I believe Michael Jackson. It took me
1:26:35
a long time to come to this conclusion, but Michael Jackson was not a
1:26:39
pedophile. And the movie is a complete and total joke, and I've been
1:26:44
very high profile about that. And Freeman asked me to come to lunch along
1:26:47
with Howard Whitzman, who was O. J. Simpson's original attorney entry he
1:26:51
killed two people. Ironically enough, we had that lunch right across the street
1:26:57
from the old metsaloona restaurant which doesn't even exist anymore, but that's where you
1:27:01
know that night that OJ killed Nicole and Ron Goldman began. So that was
1:27:06
rather surreal. But I had a very positive experience with Brian Freeman. But
1:27:11
Brian Freeman is Lindsey Hill's attorney, and according to Bauer, it appears to
1:27:17
me is if Freeman may have done some hanky panky with regard to the hiding
1:27:21
the evidence here. Now that part may not shock me because my experience with
1:27:27
Freeman after our lunch was was not positive. I mean, he asked me
1:27:31
to do some things that I was not comfortable with and that were not based
1:27:35
In fact. I could not tell if he was just mistaken or if something
1:27:42
worse was going on here. But I don't have a lot of warm and
1:27:46
fuzzies towards Brian Freeman. But what is being alleged by Bauer is sounds like
1:27:51
something that might get somebody just barred at least was immoral. And again,
1:27:58
given the fact that I know, oh Freeman one hundred percent believes that the
1:28:03
allegations that are currently a matter of a civil case involving Michael Jackson are totally
1:28:11
false, and he's very clear about that. Why he would be so willing
1:28:16
to believe and then potentially even cover up for an allegation against against Trevor Bauer
1:28:24
by Lindsay Hill is really mystifying to me, other than you know, he
1:28:29
just wanted some money. I mean, I think this guy's rich as hell.
1:28:30
I don't. I can't. I can't understand why the money that that
1:28:34
Hill might have gotten from Bauer in a civil suit would have been worth doing
1:28:39
that. But that's again, I don't have enough facts to know one hundred
1:28:43
percent that that's what happened, but that's what Bauer is alleging. And to
1:28:46
me, Bower's on the side of credibility right now because he has proven that
1:28:51
Hill's allegation was totally bogus, and the news media played right along with it,
1:28:58
even fabricating some of the major points of the narrative against Bower, specifically
1:29:04
that Lindsay Hill had a fractured skull, which she did not have. And
1:29:12
there's a reporter named Molly Knight for The Athletic, which is owned by the
1:29:15
New York Times, who knew, according to court documents, that the medical
1:29:20
records indicated that Hill did not have a fractured skull, but she reported that
1:29:25
anyway. And we have this incredibly interesting divide now in the reaction to Bower's
1:29:32
revelations, where the right wing media, much like with Russell Brand, is
1:29:38
largely rushing to his defense, people like Klay Travis at outkicked who now has
1:29:44
become mister anti me too. Yet I can't get in the talk about Penn
1:29:47
State, Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, which is forever going to frustrate the
1:29:51
hell out of me, because I know if he was open and honest,
1:29:55
I could convince him on that rather easily, especially given his opposition to most
1:30:00
of these highly suspect me two stories. But the right wing is embracing Bauer
1:30:08
and destroying Lindsey Hill. The maistream news media is trying their best to ignore
1:30:14
this, to pretend that they didn't blow this. This goes you know,
1:30:17
this is a minor version of what happened with Penn Sta, Joe Paterno,
1:30:20
jerrys Dusky. They put so many chips down in that case that they can
1:30:25
never admit they were wrong because they'll be bankrupt. Well, no one wants
1:30:30
to admit they were wrong on this either. And speaking of OutKick, Bobby
1:30:34
Barak, a guy I know a little bit who writes for OutKick. He
1:30:40
did a synopsis of the media reaction to Trevor Bauer's revelations, vindicating himself in
1:30:47
very clear terms as an innocent man and these allegations that destroyed his life and
1:30:54
career. And so I want to share with you some of what Bobby wrote.
1:30:59
By the way, in the middle of this, it's not why I'm
1:31:01
sharing it, but because in fact I didn't even realize it until I was
1:31:04
getting ready to tape the podcast. But in the middle of this story he
1:31:09
places my own tweet about how ESPN decided to cover this story, which was
1:31:15
to ignore the viral video that vindicates Trevor Bauer. But here's what Bobby Barrock
1:31:23
wrote for OutKick Ken Rosenthal is among the most influential baseball writers in the industry.
1:31:29
He now writes for The Athletic. Each organization reads what it has to
1:31:34
say, and his stance on the matter was clear. Bauer should be out
1:31:39
of the league over the unproven allegations. This was two years ago. Quote
1:31:44
Dodger's decision to cut ties with Trevor Bauer shouldn't have been difficult at all.
1:31:48
Rosenthal headlined a column last January criticizing the team for not releasing Bauer sooner.
1:31:55
What did Rosenthal write this week after Bauer publicized the accusers damning text messages.
1:32:01
Nothing. He didn't write anything. The top baseball writer provided neither a new
1:32:08
story nor an opinion, one of the rare baseball stories that transcends beyond sports.
1:32:15
In fact, Rosenthal's only acknowledgment of the update came by way of a
1:32:18
repost formerly known as a retweet of an Athletic article citing the settlement. See
1:32:27
this is how nefarious the media works. They decide, Okay, the story
1:32:31
here is that both sides are ending their lawsuits. That's the story. No,
1:32:39
the ending of the lawsuits allowed Bauer to finally tell his version of the
1:32:44
story, and he has the receipts. That's the headline here. But as
1:32:48
Barrock wrote, however, the article he shared failed to mention the text messages
1:32:54
in which the accuser admits to framing Bauer Rosenthal. The Athletic didn't bury the
1:33:00
lead, they neglected to report the lead, and they had no comment when
1:33:04
contacted by OutKick Tuesday afternoon of this week about the saying can be said about
1:33:11
ESPN It's article Monday reference Bower's video, but excluded the part where Hill acknowledged
1:33:16
her plan to make Bauer her quote unquote next victim per ESPN quote. Bower
1:33:23
thirty two subsequently released a near four minute video on YouTube alleging that Hill's legal
1:33:30
team approached him multiple times about a financial settlement that his side consistently declined.
1:33:38
Bower said in the video that the defamation lawsuit allowed his legal team to uncover
1:33:43
additional cell phone material that was quote deliberately and unlawfully concealed from his lawyers.
1:33:48
That's the Ryan Freedman part of this equation, most notably a video of the
1:33:54
woman quote lying in bed next to me while I'm sleeping, smirking at the
1:33:59
camera with a had a care in the world or any mark on her face
1:34:02
unquote, on the morning after the second alleged incident unquote. The article also
1:34:08
failed to hyperlink to Bower's video, which would have directed readers to the full
1:34:13
context of his commentary. Such coverage was irresponsible and dishonest, and in the
1:34:17
case of reporter Molly Knight, scandalous. Knight is the reporter I reference with
1:34:24
regard to the medical records. According to a lawsuit Bower filed against the Athletic,
1:34:30
which he dropped as the outlet was not technically at fault, Knight tweeted
1:34:33
while employed at the outlet, that Bower fractured Hill's skull. Though here's the
1:34:40
catch. Per the suit, Knight had in her possession medical records that showed
1:34:44
there was no fracture. Knight deleted the tweet as part of the agreement.
1:34:49
However, the impact of her post proved significantly, and then talks about how
1:34:57
dead Spin used Knight's tweet to publish the type of filth it did, referencing
1:35:02
a headline Trevor Bauer should never pitch again that was in Deadspin, which is
1:35:08
a super barely alive now but used to be very influential, super liberal site
1:35:14
that was, by the way, one of the very very, very very
1:35:16
worst when it came to the Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky Penn State story. Then
1:35:24
OutKick Rights. Of course, the remains of dead Spin failed to retract that
1:35:27
article. This week, the outlet instead posted a quick, hitting, poorly
1:35:30
written news story titled Trevor Bauer, sexual assault accuser settle lawsuits Again. When
1:35:38
the news media has any option at all to get out of admitting they were
1:35:44
wrong, they will take it every time. And I actually wonder whether that
1:35:48
Bower should have waited at least a little bit of time between the ending of
1:35:56
the lawsuits and the revealing of his his receipts and doing his videos, so
1:36:01
that it would not have made it so easy for many of these news media
1:36:05
outlets to simply focus on, well, the legal portion of this case is
1:36:11
over. Oh, by the way, there was some sort of video the
1:36:14
Bower release, but we're not going to give you the details on that.
1:36:15
Let's move along before anyone realizes how incredibly wrong we were. This article and
1:36:21
that's been did not include Hill's texts either. By all accounts, Lindsey Hill
1:36:27
pimped herself out for financial exploitation. The press enabled her to do so with
1:36:31
its cheapest coverage that mostly assumed Bower's guilt. And then it ends by saying,
1:36:40
you know that this is basically the death of journalism in sports, which
1:36:42
I've been saying for many, many years now. I don't know what happens
1:36:46
from here. In a remotely just world. Trevor Bauer should be back in
1:36:53
Major League Baseball. I mean how the Dodgers ought to have him back,
1:36:57
but I doubt that's going to happen because no one wants to admit that they
1:37:00
were wrong. This is where you know, a wrong act begets more wrong
1:37:05
acts, because once people become invested in something happening having happened that was wrong.
1:37:11
I mentioned this with gard to COVID all the time. You know,
1:37:14
no one wants to admit they were wrong about masks because then they have to
1:37:16
take responsibility for all the damage, especially done to kids because of masks,
1:37:21
so we just ignore it and we move on. So rehiring Bauer would force
1:37:27
someone to admit that they cause great damage and that they were wrong. It's
1:37:30
much easier to just say, well, we've we've cut bait, we've moved
1:37:33
on, and you know, good luck to him. Somebody, considering how
1:37:39
good he was, ought to take a chance on Bauer. I'm most baffled
1:37:44
by the lack as far as I can tell, of reaction from the Major
1:37:48
League Baseball Union. The Union ought to be screaming bloody murder about this,
1:37:55
because obviously almost every single Major leaguer is vulnerable to something similar happening to them.
1:38:03
These guys have targets on their back. Their salaries are literally public record.
1:38:10
I mean, this woman referenced Bower's net worth at fifty one million dollars.
1:38:15
And you know, they're all young, they're all in different cities almost
1:38:20
the entire year. They have women throwing themselves at them constantly. And this
1:38:27
is the type of thing that's incredibly easy to have happen, especially in the
1:38:31
post Me Too era where the media is complicit in this ridiculous narrative, and
1:38:39
so to my knowledge, the Union has not done anything of significance on Bower's
1:38:44
behalf, but they absolutely positively should. And you know, I think it's
1:38:49
possible that this is a seminal moment when it comes to the to the me
1:38:56
too movement. I mean, this video that Bower did has tens and tens
1:39:00
of millions of views Elon Musk has helped promoted on Twitter. I mean,
1:39:05
this is a situation where, you know, I'm very conflicted about Elon Musk,
1:39:09
but prior to Elon Musk owning Twitter, I'm not sure Bauer would have
1:39:14
even been allowed to post his video on Twitter. He wouldn't have even had
1:39:18
the option. And so I do think there's some positives here that because Twitter
1:39:26
is now owned by Musk and is now open to the other side of a
1:39:30
story and must clearly does have a good sense of justice or really hates injustice
1:39:36
and has no regard, Musk might have less regard form the mainstream news media
1:39:41
than I do. So because that avenue exists, and because the right win
1:39:46
now has caught on to what a scam these cases can be. I think
1:39:51
we may have seen a change in the environment where it's gonna be much more
1:39:57
difficult to get away with this kind of stuff going forward, the Russell I
1:40:00
think Russell Brand probably benefits dramatically from the Trevor Bauer story because now it's it's
1:40:08
even easier for people, at least on the right and in the right wing
1:40:12
media to believe that this is not as it appears, and that there's a
1:40:16
good chance that Russell Brand is actually innocent. So I think that's all positive,
1:40:21
but I also hope that eventually it gets us to re evaluate some of
1:40:26
the other cases that people bought into. I mean, Brett Kavanaugh opened the
1:40:30
eyes of a lot of people in the right because that was totally bogus,
1:40:33
you know. And I've been trying to get people to reevaluate Matt Lauer,
1:40:38
who I know with certitude is one hundred percent innocent, and obviously the white
1:40:44
whale. The moby dick for me is Penn State, Joe Paterno, Jerry
1:40:47
Sandusky, which unfortunately, no one's ever likely ever gonna take a serious second
1:40:53
look at because there were just too many chips put down on that story.
1:40:56
Now it's too old and doesn't seem relevant to people. But this is happening
1:41:00
a lot and has happened and will continue to happen unless things are rectified and
1:41:06
people like Lindsay Hill are punished. I mean, how does she get away
1:41:11
with this without any serious punishment. I don't know why the suit against her
1:41:15
was dropped. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, other than
1:41:19
maybe from a strategic standpoint, Bower wanted it all to end so they get
1:41:24
his story out there so that he might get a job for next season.
1:41:28
That's the only the scenario that makes any sense to me, which I hope
1:41:32
actually happens now. To be fair and to not be hypocritical, when it
1:41:38
comes to the issue of a rush to judgment, there is, at least
1:41:42
in theory, another scenario here, which is somewhere in the middle between Trevor
1:41:47
Bauer's story and Lindsay Hill's story. And you know, I've seen in past
1:41:55
situations where there's a rush to judgment and then years later there's a rush to
1:42:03
read judgment and neither ends up being accurate. That the one story that comes
1:42:09
to mine most dramatically is Mantitao. I think that the news media blew it
1:42:15
on Mantiteo's dead girlfriend in the first narrative, and then I think years later
1:42:20
when a documentary came out and all of a sudden everyone supported Mantitao. I
1:42:25
thought that they got the story wrong to a certain degree there as well.
1:42:29
So there's always the chance that that's happening. And I don't know if that's
1:42:33
happening here. I'm still on Trevor Bauer's side in general in this, but
1:42:40
I do have to acknowledge that something incredibly odd happened the day after that Bauer
1:42:45
released his video, and that is that Lindsey Hill did an interview. Now,
1:42:54
the fact that she did an interview is not surprising. I mean,
1:42:57
if Bauer was one hundred percent telling the truth, you would think that Hill
1:43:00
would just run away and hide. So the fact that she did an interview
1:43:04
is interesting. Has me at least somewhat open minded. Okay, is it
1:43:11
possible that there's yet another side to this story, But it's who Lindsay Hill
1:43:17
did an her interview with. It's most shocking because based upon the amount of
1:43:24
publicity this story has gotten and how big a deal it was, and how
1:43:28
obviously very pro victim the mainstream news media is, you would presume that Lindsey
1:43:34
Hill would have picked the Today Show or Good Morning America, and I mean
1:43:39
they would be happy to have her on. You would think, I mean,
1:43:42
it would create interest and they would be on her side. You would
1:43:45
think that she would feel comfortable going into that arena and getting the largest platform
1:43:51
possible. But that's not what she did, as far as I can tell.
1:43:56
Her first and only interview post Trevor Bauer rebuttal video on Twitter going super
1:44:03
viral was with The Blaze and a host, frankly I've never heard of before,
1:44:11
Alex Stein on the conservative outlet The Blaze. This is Glenn Beck's outfit,
1:44:19
and so an organization that I have been on quite a bit and I
1:44:25
generally like, and so I was stunned to see that Lindsay Hill did an
1:44:30
interview at all, but specifically with Alex Stein of The Blaze. Not the
1:44:38
platform you would think she would choose. From a number of different perspectives,
1:44:43
One from a political standpoint, the right is not really the place to go
1:44:46
right now in her situation, and also because it's not the largest platform by
1:44:54
a long shot that she theoretically could have gotten. Now. I've watched that
1:44:58
interview and I have a lot of questions about it. But from a demeanor
1:45:02
standpoint, she seemed at least she had some semblance of a case, and
1:45:08
she does not appear to be afraid of this issue at all. I mean,
1:45:11
of course, if you're willing to lie about all this to begin with,
1:45:14
you're willing to lie about it at all turns. And I do find
1:45:18
it interesting that, you know, who knows, maybe the mainstream outlets were
1:45:23
unwilling to have her on because of the weakness of her story. I don't
1:45:27
know, but I just have to mention this for full context and to make
1:45:31
sure that there's not this double rush to judgment. I still think, even
1:45:38
after watching Lindsay Hill's interview, that there's no question that Trevor Bauer got the
1:45:43
raw ind of the deal. Whether or not he's one hundred percent innocent,
1:45:46
I don't know. But it was a very very strange and bizarre circumstance for
1:45:54
Lindsay Hill to do an interview at all, but to do it with a
1:45:58
host I've never heard of on the BLO is particularly strange. Now, one
1:46:02
other thing in the Realm of sports. I talked a lot in episode number
1:46:06
ninety three about the entire Taylor Swift Travis Kelcey in Sanity, which has dominated
1:46:13
the National Football League. If you missed it, I went through a very
1:46:16
long and I think pretty unique monologue with regard to my take on the whole
1:46:23
thing, which I think was a little bit different than most people, and
1:46:27
goes into how it's actually impacting the game and will continue to impact, at
1:46:32
least perceptions of the refereeing of the game involving the Kansas City Chiefs as long
1:46:39
as this Taylor Swift Travis Kelcey thing continues. The ratings for the Sunday night
1:46:45
football game between the Chiefs and the Jets were off the charts. I mean,
1:46:49
this is a situation where this game was put on the schedule for Sunday
1:46:54
Night football because of Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers, and instead it got huge
1:47:01
ratings because of Travis Kelcey and Taylor Swift. Maybe dating this is the very
1:47:06
strange world of which we're living, But the game on Sunday Out and NBC
1:47:13
averaged twenty seven million viewers on NBC and Peacock, good for the second most
1:47:19
watched game the twenty twenty the twenty twenty twenty three NFL season, it ranks
1:47:25
just behind the Chiefs season opening loss to the treat to the Detroit Lions in
1:47:30
the week one kickoff game, which averaged twenty seven point five million viewers on
1:47:35
NBC. So basically the same number of people watched this Sunday night game between
1:47:43
the Chiefs and the Jets as watched the opening night game, which is pretty
1:47:49
extraordinary considering obviously there's a lot of anticipation for the opening game of the season.
1:47:56
In what is likely the most significant part of the Swift effect for the
1:48:00
NFL, NBC also discussed increased metrics for female fans on this Sunday night football
1:48:06
game. The number of female viewers watching increased by roughly two million, while
1:48:15
the twelve to seventeen, eighteen to twenty four, and thirty five plus demos
1:48:20
among females all increased by at least twenty four percent. That's extraordinary, but
1:48:30
the biggest number there is an increase of two million females to watch the game
1:48:38
over what is normal, So you can basically delineate now that there are two
1:48:44
million women who are willing to watch a Chief's Jets football game that normally they
1:48:53
would have zero interest in, simply because Taylor Swift was going to be shown
1:49:00
periodically watching the game. Not performing, not even doing an interview, presumably
1:49:08
not even you know, I guess there might have been hoping for this somehow,
1:49:11
kissing Travis Kelcey after the game or something. I don't know, though
1:49:14
the second half ratings were not as good as the first half ratings. Who
1:49:16
knows what they were hoping for or anticipating. But the reality is we now
1:49:21
have that number. That's you know, I talk about the Trump colt all
1:49:25
the time. What's the Trump cult number within the Republican Party? And you
1:49:30
know, I think the cult number, depending on how you define it,
1:49:32
is probably twenty five percent ish, but that the effective cult number is probably
1:49:39
forty percent where that's his bedrock low support when it comes to Republican voters.
1:49:44
Right now, Well, we now know that there are two million Taylor Swift
1:49:49
fans willing to watch a football game that they ordinarily would have zero interest in.
1:49:56
Why is that significant? Well, what it's significant for how the networks
1:50:00
and the league are going to handle this Taylor Swift Travis Kelsey thing. Because
1:50:04
this is very, very very good for them. This is manna from heaven.
1:50:10
This is a demographic they've never had major access to, and this play
1:50:15
is a you know, this is a lucrative demographic. By the way,
1:50:17
having young women watch NFL football games is not just beneficial because it brings young
1:50:25
women in, you know what, that also does that gives a permission slip
1:50:29
to guys to watch the game. That's a big part of this that no
1:50:32
one wants to talk about because we're living in an era now where you know,
1:50:36
women run the show run that won't run men's lives, and you basically
1:50:42
need permission in a lot of cases to be able to watch a three and
1:50:45
a half hour game. And if Taylor Swift is associated with it, that
1:50:48
becomes a lot easier for guys to get away with. So that's you know,
1:50:53
that's not a huge portion of this, but that's another element of this
1:50:56
whole thing that makes it very, very attractive to the NFL and to their
1:51:00
broadcast partners. But we now have that number of two million, and folks,
1:51:06
I'm sorry if Taylor's Swift without asking anybody to do anything, not even
1:51:12
lifting a finger, simply going to a football game with some celebrity friends can
1:51:17
get two million young women to do something they never would have done previously.
1:51:24
Think about how easy it's going to be to get those people to vote via
1:51:27
mail against Donald Trump in twenty twenty four. Now, not all of them
1:51:31
are voting age, some are below voting age, but I mean that number
1:51:34
is that's a pretty good number. Two million, even if it's even if
1:51:39
it's a million, million and a half, that is very difficult to overcome
1:51:45
because that's a demographic that doesn't generally vote. And I'm telling you I've been
1:51:50
mocked for this, although I've been vindicated already by statistics showing that when Taylor
1:51:57
Swift shared a voter registration link on her Instagram that voter registrations went up dramatically.
1:52:06
And I'm telling you this is the unspoken secret weapon that Democrats have in
1:52:12
the twenty twenty four election against Donald Trump, because this woman runs a cult.
1:52:16
She she's a cult leader that is I think at least as big and
1:52:21
strong, maybe more so than Donald Trump's. And you don't want to mess
1:52:28
with the Taylor Swift cult. And it is real. Now, a lot
1:52:31
of people are confused as to why that cult even exists. I mean,
1:52:36
there are a lot of people I know, especially in my eight group,
1:52:39
that don't understand what the tailor's swift appeal is. I mean her songs.
1:52:43
They're okay, but they're repetitive. They're mostly about people that she's dated previously.
1:52:47
There's been already been all sorts of mock ups, some of them very
1:52:50
very good about what the breakup song is going to sound like when she finally
1:52:55
gets rid of of Travis Kelcey, or vice versa. I'm not a huge
1:53:00
fan of her music. My my eleven year old daughter, Grace, really
1:53:02
likes her music. But you know, so what's the appeal? And I
1:53:08
think there's a lot of reasons for the appeal, but the one that doesn't
1:53:12
get enough play because it's politically incorrect, is basically this that her fans live
1:53:18
vicariously through her and through her relationships, partially because while she's attractive, she's
1:53:29
not hot. That's an important distinction. And you know, it's interesting to
1:53:35
point out that Travis Kelcey is probably considered physically a very, very attractive man.
1:53:42
Taylor Swift's attractive, but she's not a ten. She's not hot,
1:53:46
she's not a model. When she's all made up, she looks very pretty.
1:53:50
But in her essence, if she wasn't Taylor Swift, she wouldn't be
1:53:57
somebody who would be the be all end all when it comes to know dating
1:54:03
a woman. I mean, she wouldn't be put on a pedestal if she
1:54:06
was if she was just Taylor Swift, you know, folk singer from our
1:54:11
country, singer from Nashville, when no one had ever heard of before.
1:54:15
It's because of her fame and because of her money, which is usually by
1:54:19
the way, the way men are evaluated in sexual terms. That's what's kind
1:54:24
of interesting about this. This is flipping the normal narrative that Taylor Swift is
1:54:29
being seen as this trophy from a dating perspective, at least in Travis Kelsey's
1:54:34
mind, largely because of her celebrity and her money and her power and her
1:54:41
talent. I mean, she's a talented singer, but she's not a great
1:54:45
dancer. And again, I think the reason why girls and women love her
1:54:49
is that she's pretty but not hot, and yet she's attracting very hot men.
1:54:58
And this allows a lot of women and to associate with her live vicariously
1:55:03
through her because she's not threatening, she's somewhat attainable. Every woman thinks,
1:55:10
on her best day, I kind of look like Taylor Swift, So that
1:55:15
could happen to me. At least in my fantasies. There's actually a name
1:55:20
for what I'm describing here, at least I've used and I've heard other people
1:55:26
use, which is the Grey's Anatomy effect. Gray's Anatomy Effect. You're probably
1:55:30
wondering, what are you talking about. Well, there's a TV show on
1:55:32
ABC called Grey's Anatomy that's been on forever and ever and ever. And the
1:55:35
essence of the TV show, you know, it's in a hospital. But
1:55:40
basically the appeal of the TV show, which has almost an entirely female audience,
1:55:45
is that they have a lot of women who are attractive but not hot,
1:55:50
dealing with a lot of men who are hot. And so this is
1:55:56
a scenario that women who know they'll never be hot because, let's face it,
1:56:00
I mean, you know, that's ninety nine point nine percent of the
1:56:02
population from a genetics standpoints, is not attainable to be a you know what
1:56:06
it used to be a Victoria's Secret model or what used to be a Sports
1:56:10
illustrated swimsuit model. That's that's not attainable in the real world. And so
1:56:17
the vast majority of women, you know, they think that the best that
1:56:21
they're ever gonna be is I can be above average attractive on my best day.
1:56:27
Well, in Gray's Anatomy, that above average attractive woman is hanging out
1:56:32
with and being romantic with hot guys, and that's a scenario that women love
1:56:39
seeing. I mean, that's basically the entire Hallmark TV network is based upon
1:56:44
this concept, especially during Christmas from October through January, every single movie is
1:56:49
a Christmas movie about how a woman who's a seven or an eight somehow finds
1:56:54
herself with a guy who's a nine or a ten. I mean, that's
1:56:58
basically the entire narrative. That's the whole situation. Well, in a nutshell,
1:57:02
that's a large part of what's happening with Taylor Swift. She is the
1:57:08
personification of what every woman in this category wants to be and things as possible
1:57:14
could be her. And then there's also the whole mystery of issue dating not
1:57:18
dating. I mean, that's that's a huge part of this as I as
1:57:20
I said in episode number ninety three, if if somehow Travis Kelcey and Taylor
1:57:26
Swift got married, not that this is gonna happen, but if this happened,
1:57:30
I mean, it would be a huge story for about two days and
1:57:31
then the story would go away because there wouldn't be any mystery anymore. That's
1:57:38
a huge part of this. Are they or aren't they having sex? That's
1:57:42
a huge part. I mean, that's you know, women love this inherently.
1:57:45
Even guys I think are probably a little bit curious about that. But
1:57:48
there's a there's a lot of reasons why this Taylor's Swift phenomenon has happened in
1:57:54
the NFL that are not being talked about because I think they're too complex and
1:57:59
too politic incorrect. But I figured i'd share them with you because that's what
1:58:02
we do on the Death of Journalism podcasts. I still believe that the NFL
1:58:08
is playing with fire here, but clearly after the NBC ratings came out,
1:58:12
they're gonna ride this horse till it doesn't ride anymore. Because this is huge.
1:58:18
This is a huge ratings hit. It's absurd, It's gonna offend some
1:58:23
of the core audience. The media is going way too far on it.
1:58:26
The sports media is going way too far on it. I mean, my
1:58:28
god, We're only five weeks into football season. We've already gone through the
1:58:31
Aaron Rodgers mini series, the Deon Sanders mini series, and now we're in
1:58:36
the midst of the Taylors Swift Travis Kelcey mini series. It'll be interesting to
1:58:41
see how much longer this one goes on for. But whenever a story is
1:58:44
this white hot, it does tend to flame out a little bit faster than
1:58:47
normal. But we'll see what happens with that. I got to finish with
1:58:51
a very funny and I think telling moment that occurred this week on Fox NewsChannel.
1:58:58
Fox NewsChannel was doing live coverage of a mass shooting at Morgan State University,
1:59:04
which is a historically black college, which is important for context in what
1:59:10
ended up happening here. And they were doing live coverage which was being angered
1:59:15
by Trace Gallagher, and they said that they were going to take a phone
1:59:20
call from someone who was at Morgan State University and had some information about what
1:59:28
may have sparked the mass shooting. Now, obviously, hindsight is twenty twenty,
1:59:33
but the way this goes down in retrospect is a clear indication of massive
1:59:42
incompetence when it comes to the people who are behind the scenes at Fox News
1:59:47
Channel, and even by Trace Gallagher to a lesser degree, because what ends
1:59:53
up occurring is rather hilarious and has gone viral on the internet because the who
2:00:00
was referred to as Tyrone, which should have been the first red flag,
2:00:05
was not a real student at Morgan State University. Instead, it was a
2:00:12
conservative prankster by the name of Mark Dice, who's a middle aged white guy.
2:00:16
I've seen some of the videos he's done. He's actually pretty good,
2:00:19
although I think he's a big Trump supporter. But he goes to local board
2:00:27
of supervisors and makes these rather funny speeches where he pretends to be super liberal
2:00:32
and all these nut jobs are agreeing with him saying these crazy things. And
2:00:38
I've actually enjoyed some of his videos, but this I thought was hilarious for
2:00:44
completely different reasons. So here's what happened on Fox News Channel when they took
2:00:48
what they thought was a phone call from a Morgan State student, but instead
2:00:56
it was a Tucker Carlson supporter playing a prank on them. Years what that
2:01:00
sounded like, And that's where they declare a mister and a miss Morgan State.
2:01:03
And we've got Tyrone on the phone with us. Now, Tyrone,
2:01:06
when you say poker game, what exactly happened? What transpired? Well,
2:01:13
first we were watching and we'll all get together every Tuesday night and we watch
2:01:16
Tucker Carlston's show on x We used to watch him on Fox News. Obviously
2:01:21
he's out there and no more and still being the most credible guy in media
2:01:26
in America. We always get together to watch Tucker Carlston, and I think
2:01:30
he's doing probably better now he's not with Fox News because the corporate media always
2:01:33
controls what the teleprompter readers are able to say. And now, thank you,
2:01:39
can we maybe we can work to get Don back on the phone,
2:01:42
Tracy, We can get that clearly that was not a student at Morgan State
2:01:45
University. Now, it doesn't get much worse than that. Now, Gallagher
2:01:49
got out of it as fast as he could once he realized it was a
2:01:53
hoax. But again, keeping in mind at hindsight is twenty twenty, think
2:01:58
about the lack of thought that went into taking that call. First of all,
2:02:04
this is Morgan State University, historically black college. What are the chances
2:02:12
that there's a Morgan State student who decides, you know what, I have
2:02:17
some information about this mass shooting and I'm going to go and call Fox News
2:02:26
channel to share that information. Now, right there. That is a crazy
2:02:31
scenario, not impossible, but almost impossible, almost impossible that there would be
2:02:40
a Morgan State University student who would be in that position. And then,
2:02:45
I mean, you realize how difficult it is to figure out how to call
2:02:49
in the Fox News channel. I mean, I actually think I remember trying
2:02:56
to do this. I was, I was in Yosemite national part when Sarah
2:03:00
Palin resigned as the Alaska governor, which was maddening because I was essentially her
2:03:08
national unofficial national spokesperson at that point, and I was stuck in Yosemite in
2:03:14
our nearly vacation, and I remember in a little bit that I could get
2:03:17
cell phone service trying to call in the Fox News channel. And granted it
2:03:24
was a holiday and all sorts of things made it more difficult than it should
2:03:28
have been, but it was a very difficult process to get to the right
2:03:32
person. And the idea that you know, a Morgan State University student presumably
2:03:40
you know, you know, since they described their name was Tyrone, and
2:03:45
they were using a what would be perceived as a black dialect, it would
2:03:48
be presumed at Morgan State that this person is as a black student. The
2:03:54
idea that someone would even have the thought process and the and the where with
2:04:00
all and the determination to call in the Fox News Channel, the conservative news
2:04:04
outlet, to tell their story should have been a massive red flag right off
2:04:10
the bat. And their name should have been a massive red flag because Tyrone
2:04:14
is basically a stereotypical black name from like the eighties or the nineties. I
2:04:19
don't think that it's a name that would be very common. I could be
2:04:24
wrong about this, but my perception is not a common name among a black
2:04:29
student at Morgan State University today. And the reason I say this is when
2:04:33
I saw the video for the first time and Trace Gallagher said Tyrone, I'm
2:04:38
like, uh oh, what's going on here? Tyrone sounds like the kind
2:04:43
of name that someone might make up. And then again then there's the issue
2:04:46
of the person perpetrating this prank is a white guy, so he's clearly putting
2:04:54
on a voice. So whoever took the damn call at Fox News Channel did
2:04:59
not use their brain. There was no vetting at all. And this is
2:05:03
indicative of what happens when you're just so desperate to get something out there,
2:05:10
have it first, you know, feed the monster that vetting goes by the
2:05:15
wayside, and you get embarrassed. Now, usually don't get embarrassed to this
2:05:17
degree where someone is actually doing this to humiliate the entire network because they're a
2:05:24
Tucker Carlson fan and they want, you know, the viewers of the network
2:05:30
to hear this, this version of the Tucker Carlson narrative that the network would
2:05:34
not find to be helpful at all. That was obviously the agenda by Mark
2:05:41
Dice, and he ended up being able to perform that to his for his
2:05:45
agenda very very well. I mean, I can't imagine he would have ever
2:05:48
thought that it would have gone as well from his end as it actually did
2:05:53
and as bad for Fox News Channel as it did. This kind of also
2:05:57
reminded me, by the way, the most similar episode in my recollection occurred
2:06:03
in nineteen ninety four at the end of the Oj Simpson Bronco chase, when
2:06:09
after the you know, the news networks are showing Oj for an extended period
2:06:14
of time driving on the four h five, finally ending up at his place
2:06:17
in Brentwood at Rockingham, and there's this stalemate where OJ's not getting out of
2:06:24
the Bronco in front of his house and there's all this tension, and ABC's
2:06:29
Peter Jennings takes a phone call from what sounds like a black guy, you
2:06:35
know, talking to Peter Jennings, and he says, ah see OJ,
2:06:42
ah see OJ and I think in my recollection, I didn't go and research
2:06:47
the video. I'm sure it's on YouTube somewhere, but he's looking very nervous
2:06:51
or something along those lines. And then at the end the caller says Bubba
2:06:57
Booie and Peter Jens had no idea what Baba Booie meant, which is,
2:07:02
you know, from the old Howard Stern Show. And it was obviously a
2:07:05
prank call, and Al Michaels had to come in and explain to poor Peter
2:07:10
Jennings that he had just been pranked live on the air. But that was
2:07:15
a similar situation where again, I'm sorry, there are no neighbors of Oj
2:07:20
Simpson in Brentwood who sounded like the guy who called it. I can assure
2:07:26
you that. So this is not a phenomenon that is new to twenty twenty
2:07:31
three. This has happened in the past. But Fox News Channel definitely got
2:07:34
Schnooker there in a way that was very, very humiliating. But also telling
2:07:40
about how unbelievably broken the entire media industrial complex really is on virtually every level,
2:07:45
and thus the name of this podcast, The Death of Journalism. That'll
2:07:49
do it for episode number ninety four of the Death of Journalism. Please remember,
2:07:54
as always, to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast shirt with
2:07:57
others. If you shared on social media, please tag me. I'll be
2:08:01
happy to share it with my followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook. Until
2:08:05
next time, thanks so much for listening. My name is John Ziegler.