Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode Sixty Four: Have We No Pride?

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Episode Sixty Four: Have We No Pride? · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome the episode number sixty four of the Data Journalism Podcast. My name is
• 0:04
  John Ziegler. I'm your host on today's program, The Pride Month, Wars,
• 0:08
  Divide the Media and America. More drama at CNN. If Biden falls
• 0:16
  in the forest and the media didn't hear it? Did it really happen?
• 0:20
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  Digital marketing Man dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show.
• 1:04
  We've got a lot to get to in this episode of the Death of Journalism
• 1:08
  and I want to begin with the story involving June, the month of June
• 1:14
  being Pride month, and all the insanity that that has created in and around
• 1:21
  the news media in many different ways, and it is already manifested itself very
• 1:26
  early on in the month of June in some very bizarre fashions. I want
• 1:33
  to begin with some general thoughts about how this insanity has overtaken the entire country
• 1:44
  and what used to be. I always thought of it as a gay Pride
• 1:48
  month, which was fairly harmless and maybe even productive at times during our history.
• 1:53
  I've said many times that the pendulum always tends to swing, and when
• 1:57
  it swings, it usually swings too far. And I'm sure that we had
• 2:02
  gone too far in the direction of rectifying past sins when it came to homosexuality.
• 2:08
  But homosexuality is a real thing, and I certainly don't believe that homosexual
• 2:13
  people should be discriminated against. And if they want to be prideful publicly about
• 2:17
  who they are, that's more than within their rights to do so. And
• 2:21
  I think that if done properly, it's not harmful to society at all,
• 2:24
  and so I have zero problem with any of that. But somehow this is
• 2:29
  now morphed into basically transgender pride. And one of the elements of this,
• 2:35
  and the many elements of this that has me very very confused, is how
• 2:38
  it is that it doesn't appear to have created a backlash among people who are
• 2:44
  just simply gay, Because if I was a gay person and my Pride month
• 2:50
  was being overtaken by transsexual people, I'd be pretty pissed off. Because transsexualism
• 2:57
  is completely different the homosexuality. It's somehow they get lumped in together. I
• 3:02
  believe that transactual sexualism is largely, not totally, but largely based in a
• 3:09
  mental disorder, in a confusion. It's often a decision that is made by
• 3:15
  someone who is very confused, and it is their problems that beget the wanting
• 3:23
  to transition their gender or their sexuality, rather than vice versa. That that's
• 3:30
  where the media, that's the primary issue where the media gets it wrong.
• 3:34
  The media thinks that because bad things happen to people who are transgender, that
• 3:39
  it must be because of societal pressure and that we must rectify that bigotry and
• 3:45
  you know, the mean, angry conservatives who are ruining innocent people's lives.
• 3:50
  Now, I believe in the vast majority of cases it's exactly the opposite,
• 3:53
  that the problems are what beget people wanting to transition their gender, not vice
• 4:00
  versa. And I think the evidence in the logic is overwhelming in that so
• 4:04
  that's the primary problem. But politically, I am absolutely flummixed beyond comprehension how
• 4:13
  we have gotten to this point without any backlash among the homosexual community that I
• 4:17
  can discern, certainly total embrace by the news media, and in watching a
• 4:25
  lot of the media covered especially here in southern California, I gotta tell you,
• 4:29
  I now believe that transsexualism is fast approaching and may have already exceeded in
• 4:34
  some ways the protection that people of color get, that this has become such
• 4:42
  a third rail, that transsexuals are now such a protected class within the media,
• 4:48
  and how the media covers issues related to transsexuals and transsexualism that they're now
• 4:56
  even more protected than, for instance, causes related to being an African American
• 5:02
  or discrimination against Black people alleged, real or otherwise, and how that doesn't
• 5:09
  piss off black people is also a mystery to me. How it is that
• 5:15
  the transsexuals have somehow gotten in line ahead of black people when it comes to
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  grievances and kid glove treatment in the news media is beyond me. And again,
• 5:27
  the fact that there's been no backlash seemingly that we can tell certainly the
• 5:30
  media is not going to report on it, if they ever existed, is
• 5:34
  absolutely stunning. And I don't have a really good explanation for it, other
• 5:41
  than people are so afraid to be seen as critical of this gross overstepping of
• 5:51
  what started out as basic human rights and now is going into the realm of
• 5:57
  privileges and distortions of reality and even into the abuse of our children in many
• 6:05
  different ways. And let me just give you an example of one example I
• 6:11
  saw here in southern California. So we've had many protests here in Southern California,
• 6:16
  I think because we have the most extreme elements of this insanity who feel
• 6:23
  entitled and enabled by the liberal nature of Southern California and Los Angeles and certainly
• 6:28
  the media here. But there are still some remnants of rationality, especially in
• 6:32
  the outskirts of say Los Angeles, like in the communities where I live,
• 6:36
  where it's not a liberal bastion. But they're mostly people who are just want
• 6:42
  to get along. They don't they don't want to cause liberal outrage or woke
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  outrage, or they get the woke mobs you know, to be you know,
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  attacking them for whatever they think or believe. But by and large it's
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  it's not liberal insanity outside of Los Angeles, and so I think that's why
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  there's been a couple of incidents and episodes that have sparked protests. One involved
• 7:08
  a rainbow flag being burned outside of Santa Fe Elementary School. Now, what
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  the hell is a rainbow flag being is? Why is a rainbow flag being
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  flown outside of an elementary school? That's the first question that people ought to
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  be asking. But it got burned and the LAPD was investigating it as a
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  hate crime. A hate crime. You can burn the American flag, no
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  problem, but you burn the rainbow flag during Pride Month, and now you've
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  got a big problem. You might have a hate crime charge against you.
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  And this is one of the many, many reasons why I have been against
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  hate crime legislation since the very very beginning, because I saw that coming from
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  a mile away where that was a direct attack on free speech. Once you
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  decide there's such a thing as hate crime legislation, then the people who get
• 8:00
  to decide what hate is or not. The people I'm going to be agreeing
• 8:03
  with, especially in California, these are people that are going to use the
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  word hate as a political weapon to shut down the people they don't like.
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  And it's going to be very, very political. And what is hate and
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  what is not hate, and what's a crime and what's not a crime.
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  So there was these protests, and there was live coverage and get escalated.
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  And I was watching KTLA, a major station here in Los Angeles, and
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  they had live coverage of the protest and the counter protests, and I crop
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  you not, I exaggerate not a bit. They put up on the screen
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  in fairly large letters in the upper left hand corner, the words viewer discretion
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  advised, Viewer discretion advised. This was live coverage of a protest and a
• 8:58
  counter protest revolving around the issues of transgenderism and what to teach kids and what's
• 9:07
  role in schools, and obviously both sides are heated. But you know,
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  I don't even know what the viewer discretion advised was related to. Where they
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  concerned about the transgender people being naked on camera, I don't know. I
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  think they were mostly concerned with what the counter protesters, the same people might
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  actually say that could be offensive to somebody. That was my perception of what
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  the news organization was doing with the viewer discretion advised being put in the upper
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  left tag corner of the screen. But this is how insane things have gotten,
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  and the news coverage I have seen in general, again both nationally and
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  here in Los Angeles, has basically been lip service to the side of the
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  extreme left, extreme woke, the extreme pro transgender sides of these arguments.
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  They buy into the basic narrative, which is that somehow transgender people are under
• 10:09
  attack, when that's not at all what's happening. There's basically two things that
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  are happening transgender people because they've gotten way too far in seeking privileges and to
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  be able to do things that are wrong without being attacked in any way.
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  Because that has happened, there's been some pushback politically, not nearly as much
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  as there should have been, but there's been some pushback politically on this insanity.
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  That's number one. And then there's been attempts to try to protect children
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  from out of control transgenderism, whether it's what they're being taught in school or
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  whether it's whether it's regarding physically having surgeries to mutilate their bodies at ages where
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  they're not even allowed to consent to basic things. They're not to vote,
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  they're not allowed to drink, they're not allowed tom they're not allowed to drive,
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  but somehow they're allowed to get gender quote unquote affirming surgeries, and that
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  to prevent them from that or from doing that or denying that is somehow discriminatory
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  against transgender people. I mean, it doesn't get crazier than this, at
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  least it doesn't seem to. But who hold on, We never know.
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  I mean, so the craziness has gotten to an extreme level, and the
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  media is absolutely enabling and facilitating this in so many different ways. UK Glamour
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  magazine celebrated a pregnant man on the cover of their magazine, pretending that this
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  is a real thing, a photograph of a man proud to be pregnant.
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  He's not pregnant. This this is not a real thing. This is an
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  imaginary thing. But NBC News here in America highlighted this, promoted this without
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  a shred, without a shred of Hey, by the way, this is
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  not actually a man who got pred that would be discriminatory to mention that obvious
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  and basic truth. That's where we are now. They're they're terrified, they
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  are terrified. This has become more of a third rail, I believe,
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  at least at the moment, at least during this month of June, more
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  of a third rail than even racial issues are. And that's really saying something,
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  because in the media's mind, that's the easiest way to get fired you
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  can possibly create. It's just to say something racially insensitive, go against a
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  the accepted narrative when anything relates to race in this country. But it might
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  be even worse when it comes to transgenderism, as at least as of right
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  now. And all of this craziness kind of came to a head in a
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  very strange and ultimately rather positive way, and for me, the pessimist,
• 13:03
  to look on the positive side, all came together in a positive way in
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  a very odd controversy involving Twitter, Elon Musk, Matt Walsh, The Daily
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  Wire, and Matt Walsh's documentary What Is a Woman Now? This was extraordinary
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  on so many different levels. If you're unfamiliar, you probably are familiar,
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  because at this point, almost anybody who's paying attention to the news, especially
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  if you're on Twitter, is aware that Matt Walsh has done this documentary What
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  Is a Woman, which is basically, I mean, this is not an
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  exaggeration. Basically, what Matt Walsh did was simply to go to liberal,
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  woke quote unquote experts and try to ask them the question what is a woman?
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  It's a perfect title because that's really the almost the entire movie is what
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  is a Woman? And the answers he gets are when he gets answers,
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  which oftentimes he doesn't even get an answer, sometimes even gets kicked out before
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  they even try to give him an answer. But the answers that he does
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  get are batshit crazy. They're batshit crazy, and it's the ultimate way to
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  expose these people for the nut jobs that they are. And it's a very
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  well done it's entertaining, it's enlightening, it's an important film, and The
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  Daily Wire wanted I'm sure to take advantage of all of the controversy surrounding Pride
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  month to put the movie on Twitter for free, because now you can put
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  very large videos if you're verified and you pay the money, you can put
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  very very large videos on your Twitter account and so they did that. They
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  planned to do that with the documentary, and at first it looked like this
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  was going to be a disaster for the cause of the truth regarding transgenderism and
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  the defining of what a woman is and everything related around this, because the
• 15:01
  Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro and Candice Owens and people that are related to The
• 15:05
  Daily Wire. I'm sure Matt Walsh himself, in fact, I know because
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  I saw some of his tweets. They were very concerned because at first the
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  movie was being labeled as potentially harmful, and it was restricted and you couldn't
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  retweet it, you couldn't share it. I'm sure you could like the tweet,
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  and it was a whole mess, and they got Elon Musk involved,
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  and at first Musk seemed to be rather vague about his answers and said there
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  was a mistake and it would be corrected. And then, you know,
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  the person in charge of all this, apparently seemingly a woke female, quit
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  her job, indicating some high level of conflict within Twitter about I guess have
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  to handle this. We don't know for sure, but the timing certainly seems
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  to indicate that, and for a while it looked like this movie was going
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  to get screwed and that people were thinking that, my gosh, Elon Musk
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  has betrayed us. And you know, i'ven't had people saying to me,
• 16:07
  you know, well, you know, John, I know you haven't been
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  totally on the Elon Musk bandwagon. Maybe this is why. And by the
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  way, for the record, when I say I don't trust Elon Musk,
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  which I've said many times on this podcast, it's not really because I think
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  he's a bad person. I want to make that clear, because I'm not
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  sure I have done that in the past. I actually think Elon Musk is
• 16:30
  probably a good person. I don't trust him because I don't trust anybody who
• 16:37
  is that rich, that parent of powerful. You know, that much of
• 16:41
  a celebrity has that big of an ego, probably doesn't have people around him
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  telling him the truth, or isn't willing to listen to people who are telling
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  him bad news. And in this case, he also happens to be at
• 16:53
  least a little bit of not a lot, autistic, And so I think
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  that that messes with someone's brain and that it might not even be intention but
• 17:03
  sometimes they screw things up, like I think Elon Musk did with Rohnda Santis's
• 17:11
  presidential announcement on Twitter. I think that that probably happened largely because of Elon
• 17:17
  Musk's, his ego and his lack of attention to detail. And oh,
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  by the way, let me just point one other thing out. Maybe this
• 17:23
  has already implied when with the other list of things that I use to describe
• 17:29
  Elon Musk. But the guy has got to be unbelievably busy, right,
• 17:33
  I mean, it's insane many very important decisions he has to make on a
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  daily basis, and how many very important people he has pulling at him for
• 17:44
  his time and his resources and money and everything else. So whenever someone has
• 17:49
  their time that stressed and has that many things going on, things are going
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  to follow through the cracks. It's just a never because there's just only so
• 18:00
  many hours in a day. So those are the basic reasons why I don't
• 18:04
  really trust Elon Musk. And so when this controversy was happening, I really
• 18:10
  wasn't that surprised that this was getting screwed up. I didn't know why.
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  It seemed awfully strange. There seemed to be conflicting reports, there seemed to
• 18:19
  be conflicting motivations. It was obvious that there was some divide within Twitter.
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  And then it all turned out perfectly well or for the Daily Bail and for
• 18:33
  the movie, because after all was said and done, and at first it
• 18:37
  looked like the movie was going to be restricted, Elon Musk not just apparently
• 18:42
  fixed the problem, he created the greatest commercial for the movie he possibly could
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  by tweeting out the Daily Wires tweet with the movie, saying that every parent
• 18:55
  should watch this movie. And Elon Musk has probably the most, if not
• 19:00
  by far, the most popular Twitter account on Twitter, like a hundred million
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  followers and people. Anything he tweets gets an extraordinary amount of play and almost
• 19:11
  inherently goes viral. And this time it went super viral, I'm sure partially
• 19:18
  because of the topic, but also because this whole thing couldn't have played that
• 19:22
  any better. And I'm not suggesting it was all part of a plan,
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  because there's no way anybody would be smart enough to have planned this all out.
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  There's just no way. This can only happen spontaneously and organically, where
• 19:34
  it's a clusterfuck. And then Elon Musk basically seemingly from my perception decided,
• 19:41
  you know what, this whole thing was messed up. So I'm gonna try
• 19:42
  to make it right. And I'm going to send this tweet out, and
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  the original Daily Wire tweet with the movie in it. As of this taping
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  has about one hundred and seventy million impressions. One hundred and seven million impressions.
• 20:03
  Now, impressions aren't views, and impressions oftentimes are very overrated, but
• 20:10
  it is an indication of how many people were exposed to just that one tweet
• 20:15
  and to this story, and so obviously, and the data isn't available,
• 20:21
  but I'm sure that the movie has been seen, at least in part by
• 20:25
  millions of times, probably by multimillions of people. And that might even be
• 20:30
  a small number, it might be many millions of people. And that's extraordinary.
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  And it wouldn't have happened if the controversy hadn't been created and if Elon
• 20:38
  Musk hadn't gone out of his way to fix the problem. And that didn't
• 20:41
  surprise me all that much either, because I do think if there's a positive
• 20:45
  about Elon Musk is I think other than being a smart guy with common sense,
• 20:49
  I do sense that he has a good sense of justice, that he
• 20:53
  likes to try to make things right. And boy did he to the Daily
• 21:00
  a surface and a solid here in that movie. And it also showed just
• 21:04
  how many people are upset by this issue I think. I mean, there
• 21:11
  is there is a I know, a big believer in the silent majority,
• 21:15
  but on this issue, there's a silent majority. There is a huge number
• 21:18
  of people who are afraid to speak out publicly about how nuts this whole thing
• 21:25
  is. But this was a fairly safe way for them to express their feelings
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  on the topic by going and watch this movie, especially since the movie is
• 21:37
  entertaining and has an important point. Of course, a lot a lot of
• 21:41
  those in the liberal media they either ignored this or they tried to focus on
• 21:48
  the very negative elements of it. And CNN did their very best attempt or
• 21:53
  early on in the controversy to emphasize that this was an anti anti transgender documentary.
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  That's how they referred to it when they described what was happening with regard
• 22:07
  to the controversy to this movie going on Twitter and the impact that it had
• 22:12
  internally on Twitter. And here's what that sounded like on CNN. Meantime,
• 22:18
  Twitter's head of Trust and safety, telling Reuters that she has resigned from the
• 22:22
  social media company. Ella Irwin, who was in charge of content moderation,
• 22:26
  stepped down the same day that Twitter blocked and then unblocked access to an anti
• 22:32
  trans documentary. Billionaire Elon Musk has faced criticism for wax protections against potentially harmful
• 22:37
  content since he took over back in October. Now, it can't be said
• 22:42
  enough that the movie is not anti transgender. Just because you don't accept what
• 22:49
  transgenderism as a whole is trying to sell doesn't make you anti transgenderism or anti
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  trans gender people. No, you don't have to accept everything they say.
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  That's not how this works. You can disagree with them, say that they
• 23:10
  are wrong, especially when they're clearly wrong when it comes to basic biology.
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  And for the record, I mean, I think I stand with the majority.
• 23:17
  I hope I stay with the majority. I thought we solved this already
• 23:21
  in the realm of science a long time ago. You see, we discovered
• 23:25
  these things called chromosomes, and we realize that men have a Y chromosome and
• 23:32
  women don't have a Y chromosome. And I thought, I really honestly thought
• 23:37
  that we had this nailed, I thought that this was no longer a matter
• 23:41
  of controversy. But somehow, especially over the last couple of years, in
• 23:47
  this great reset and the post COVID era where everything's up up for grabs again,
• 23:52
  we get to redo all of society we have yet to determine for sure,
• 23:56
  after all these many, many many years of having accepted reality, that
• 24:02
  suddenly we don't know what a woman is and we therefore don't really know what
• 24:04
  a man is, and all the insanity that ensues after that. And if
• 24:11
  this was only a philosophical conversation, it would be mostly humorous, but it's
• 24:15
  not, because it's impacting our children in very significant ways, and that's why
• 24:21
  people are outraged about it. And I am stunned that politically, Democrats are
• 24:26
  seemingly so willing to be on one side of this issue, the wrong side
• 24:32
  not just the wrong side biologically, scientifically, logically, but the wrong side
• 24:37
  politically. And I don't get it. I really don't get it at all.
• 24:42
  But you know, I like to talk about things that maybe other people
• 24:45
  aren't talking as much about, or where I have a unique perspective, And
• 24:49
  so because I actually agree with almost every other major conservative commentator on the subject.
• 24:55
  I don't want to spend too much time on it, but there were
• 24:56
  so many things that occurred, especially with regard to that Twitter situation, that
• 25:02
  I wanted to mention it in this particular episode of the show. Now I
• 25:04
  mentioned CNN, and you know, I think it's there's an interesting there's a
• 25:10
  lot of interesting things going on in CNN. And let me just state at
• 25:15
  the top, and I've done this before, that I may or may not,
• 25:18
  I don't even know yet, really have a conflict of interest with regard
• 25:22
  to what's going on at CNN. I've talked a lot about this over the
• 25:26
  last many months about all the changes that are going on internally at CNN.
• 25:33
  I hope to eventually be transparent about what may or may not be happening and
• 25:37
  causing this conflict of interest with CNN. But I just state that because I
• 25:41
  can't be totally open and honest as I normally end about what it is that
• 25:47
  I know. I may have really good information about what's going on in CNN.
• 25:51
  I might have really bad information about what's going on in CNN. I'm
• 25:53
  not sure yet. So when I know and I can talk about it honestly
• 25:56
  and openly you will. But I do think that there's an interesting parallel between
• 26:03
  Twitter and CNN in a lot of different ways where you have this conflict going
• 26:11
  on internally, Like there's the old remnants of the pre elon Musk Twitter that
• 26:19
  was basically seemingly going rogue and trying to sabotage the movie What's a Woman,
• 26:29
  and that this is causing problems for the guy who's in charge, who's not
• 26:32
  nearly as wogue, not nearly as liberal as those that were running the day
• 26:37
  to day operation certainly before he took over, and inevitably there's still going to
• 26:41
  be some remnants of that even after you take over, and even after you
• 26:45
  get rid of massive numbers of employees. Well, CNN is in it.
• 26:51
  I think somewhat similar situation where they got rid of Jeff Zucker, who was,
• 26:57
  you know, the guy who was running CNN for many years. And
• 27:03
  Jeff Zucker has a very long history, including with Donald Trump. I believe
• 27:07
  he played a significant role in why Trump got denomination on the Republican side in
• 27:12
  twenty sixteen. I think he probably felt guilty about that. Then he had
• 27:18
  CNN basically go all negative Trump all the time. Once Trump became president,
• 27:23
  and then of course did the same thing with regard to COVID, and then
• 27:27
  he got fired with involving a couple different scandals, one involving who he was
• 27:33
  dating and one involving consulting with the governor in New York during COVID Andrew Cuomo,
• 27:41
  and he got canned. But there are still a lot of people apparently
• 27:48
  at CNN who are loyal to Jeff Zucker. Now this is strange to me
• 27:51
  too, because I've never known Medium people to be particularly loyal a general,
• 27:56
  and very much not loyal to people who have been fired and have no power
• 28:00
  more and aren't going to have any power in the future. But apparently there
• 28:03
  are Zucker loyalists still within CNN. And the guy who took over at CNN
• 28:10
  eventually was a guy by name of Chris Lick. Now, Chris Lick had
• 28:12
  a very strange background. He was a late night talk show host producer.
• 28:18
  I don't know how that qualified him necessarily to be the head of CNN,
• 28:22
  which is a massive job and obviously a very serious position. But from what
• 28:30
  I can tell, Chris Lick is not certainly not wanting to make CNN into
• 28:37
  this fashion of liberalism. Based upon some of the comments he's made, especially
• 28:41
  recently, maybe to his own peril, he doesn't sound like a liberal at
• 28:45
  all. He sounds actually kind of conservative a little bit, at least in
• 28:49
  comparison to the average employee at CNN. And he has been trying, and
• 28:56
  we've talked about this on the podcast before, he has clearly been trying to
• 29:00
  move CNN back to the center. You know, Fox News Channel be the
• 29:07
  right, MSNBC the left, CNN be the center. And he has not
• 29:11
  been successful in doing that, largely because there are Jeff Zucker loyalists that don't
• 29:18
  trust him. Then also because the ratings keep going down, and the ratings
• 29:22
  keep going down at CNN, I believe for a number of reasons, but
• 29:25
  one of the main reason is they lost their two biggest ratings drivers, Donald
• 29:30
  Trump and COVID. I mean, I predicted this a long time ago that
• 29:33
  CNN was gonna have a big problem when your entire programming is based upon you
• 29:38
  know, anti Donald Trump and then COVID hysteria, and both of them go
• 29:42
  away and there's not that much going on in the world and you're the breaking
• 29:47
  news station. What are you gonna do for ratings. And when you've pissed
• 29:51
  off at least half the country, that's that's not liberal because they don't trust
• 29:56
  you anymore, then what are you gonna do? And so this was always
• 30:00
  going to be a very difficult situation. But Chris licks has not been successful
• 30:06
  at trying to do what he was apparently hired to do. And The Atlantic,
• 30:11
  the Atlantic used to be The Atlantic monthly many many years ago. They
• 30:15
  did the twenty three page cover story about me by David Foster Wallace became very
• 30:19
  infamous. So I have a bit of an animus towards the Atlantic. But
• 30:23
  The Atlantic did a scathing profile of Chris Lick a couple of days ago,
• 30:29
  extraordinary profile. He gave an incredible access to this reporter and who spent a
• 30:33
  lot of time with him, and The Atlantic just tortured Chris Lick, just
• 30:40
  tortured him, especially over the Trump town hall from a month or two ago,
• 30:45
  where Trump just dominated the entire situation. I guess it was only a
• 30:49
  month ago, it seems longer than that, but where Trump just dominated the
• 30:53
  entire situation and both the right and the left hated it. The only person
• 30:59
  that in that situation was Donald Trump, and Chris Lick clearly lost, and
• 31:04
  the CNN ratings decline continues, and it certainly appears. I mean, it's
• 31:10
  almost so obvious that lick days are numbered that I feel kind of silly even
• 31:15
  mentioning it. He apparently has already been relieved of about half of his duties
• 31:21
  by David zaslof, the guy who runs the parent company, Discovery, and
• 31:26
  who knows what's going to happen next. But my sense is that there's a
• 31:30
  lot more going on here from what I can tell, and how it's all
• 31:33
  gonna end up, I don't know, but there's a lot going on behind
• 31:36
  the scenes that again, hopefully eventually I'll be able to be totally transparent about.
• 31:41
  Hilariously, The New York Times like the next day or maybe thirty six
• 31:47
  hours later, did an extensive feature on Jeff Zucker. So you got the
• 31:53
  Atlantic crushing Chris Lick, who's this moderate, you know, person and maybe
• 32:00
  center right depending on what your definitions are, trying to move CNN correctly to
• 32:06
  the middle to be a real news network again, and he gets destroyed by
• 32:12
  the Atlantic. You got Jeff Zucker, who made CNN into this left wing
• 32:17
  bashtion going away from its roots as a hard news organization, made them have
• 32:25
  every every egg into the basket of Donald Trump and COVID, and then they
• 32:30
  had no eggs left when those baskets went away. And he gets fired,
• 32:37
  largely in disgrace, and the New York Times does a largely glowing profile on
• 32:46
  Jeff Zucker, even in the headline implying ridiculously that he could come back and
• 32:54
  save CNN. There's zero chance of that based upon what I know, and
• 33:00
  that's just not just from public but also private information. It's not earth shattering
• 33:06
  because it's so obvious, but this is the treatment you get from the New
• 33:08
  York Times if you are in the favored class of liberal elites. And Jeff
• 33:15
  Zucker is definitely in the favored class of liberal elites. Even after he got
• 33:20
  fired. He is a very very well connected guy to this day, and
• 33:25
  the New York Times story proves that in spades. What I've abound to be
• 33:30
  most hilarious about this is I know from a very very good source that Zucker
• 33:37
  was actually a bit concerned, I think that's putting it mildly concerned about the
• 33:43
  New York Times profile that was coming out because he thought it was going to
• 33:45
  be mostly a hit piece, and The New York Times ended up doing a
• 33:51
  softball piece on him. So even the subject thought, you know what,
• 33:57
  the Times is probably gonna hit me pretty hard in this thing, and instead
• 34:00
  he gets a love letter. This is the world you get to live in
• 34:05
  if you are part If you are a made man in the liberal media,
• 34:09
  that's a lot like the mafia. If you are a made man in the
• 34:14
  liberal media and you don't do anything major to get yourself kicked out of the
• 34:16
  club and they like you for whatever reason, you will always get the benefit
• 34:22
  of the doubt. You will always get the better treatment. And that's what
• 34:27
  happens to Jeff Sucker. So here we have Jeff Zucker, who's unemployed in
• 34:30
  disgrace, getting flowers sent to him by the New York Times, and Chris
• 34:36
  Leck, who, against all odds, is trying to do the right thing,
• 34:38
  maybe not doing it perfectly and not having any rating success and attempting to
• 34:43
  do the right thing, and he's getting destroyed by The Atlantic. That right
• 34:46
  there, I think tells you a lot about the dysfunction in the major mainstream
• 34:52
  news media. And I can ensure you that we're going to talk about this
• 34:55
  more again in the future, because this is not going to be the last
• 34:59
  shooting drop here. There's gonna be more stuff happening because the media is rapidly
• 35:04
  changing. The legacy media is almost on a daily, certainly a weekly basis
• 35:10
  evolving at an incredibly swift pace. I mean, Tucker Carlson is gone,
• 35:15
  and who knows when he's finally going to come back to Twitter. I guess
• 35:19
  Fox News Channel took a part of his studio and Maine, so now I
• 35:23
  guess he gets to rebuild his studio. That at least there were photographs that
• 35:27
  indicated that. But we've got you know, Don Lemon gone at CNN and
• 35:31
  all sorts of personnel changes. Chuck Todd is out at NBC as the host
• 35:37
  of Meet the Press, which I'm sure was not his decision. I'm sure
• 35:39
  that that was something that he wanted to do for the rest of his career.
• 35:44
  But he's out shocking that a straight white male would be replaced by a
• 35:49
  woman of color. Kristen Walker will be taking over eventually at Meet the Press
• 35:54
  on NBC for Chuck Todd. My sense of Chuck Todd, by the way,
• 35:59
  it's a little bit like CNN because Todd didn't know who his audience is.
• 36:06
  I do not like Chuck Todd. I don't think he's smart. I
• 36:08
  don't think he's good. I don't think he's certainly not good looking. That
• 36:13
  there wasn't much to him. He wasn't ever humorous or insightful, so he
• 36:19
  really had much going for him. He basically got the job by accident after
• 36:22
  Tim Russer passed away. I believe that was the timing of it in my
• 36:28
  recollection. But he certainly was just the, you know, the right guy
• 36:32
  at the right time kind of situation to get the gig at the NBC Meet
• 36:37
  the Press, which used to be a very, very very prestigious position.
• 36:40
  And I don't think he understood what his audience was or who his audience would
• 36:45
  be because the world changed. And I actually think Todd deserves a little bit
• 36:52
  of credit because he tried to be somewhat fair at times, like he would
• 36:58
  push back on some liberal narratives and ask some decent questions of liberal politicians,
• 37:05
  and he would be somewhat fair to conservatives. And I think he thought he
• 37:09
  was being an old school journalist, but what he was really doing was setting
• 37:14
  himself up for failure. Because conservatives no longer consume that show, They no
• 37:22
  longer trust NBC or Meet the Press, So your audience is inherently people who
• 37:29
  care about politics and aren't conservative. Well, if you care about politics enough
• 37:37
  to be watching Meet the Press on Sunday mornings and you're not a conservative,
• 37:42
  then who are you going to be? You're going to be liberal, and
• 37:46
  likely very liberal. And so what's going to happen when you push back even
• 37:52
  slightly against some politicians or liberal narratives or or you know, throw a softball
• 37:59
  to a conservative, You're gonna get reamed by liberals? And the twitter woke
• 38:05
  mob hated Chuck Todd because he didn't always dance to their tune, but he
• 38:13
  didn't get any benefit from that because conservatives so distrust the mainstream news media and
• 38:20
  understandably so, that they weren't watching Chuck Todd or Meet the Press except for
• 38:27
  maybe a clip or something online, and so he had no audience. And
• 38:32
  I hate that. That's the way it works now. I hate that dynamic.
• 38:37
  It is incredibly destructive, but it incentivizes someone in that situation to now
• 38:45
  clearly pick a side and to never do anything that's going to offend that side,
• 38:51
  because if you offend them, they have a hundred different places they can
• 38:52
  go for their information, and they're not going to watch you anymore, and
• 38:58
  that hurts your rates. And eventually, I believe that's probably what ended up
• 39:04
  causing NBC to say, look, Chuck, why don't you do something else?
• 39:07
  Let someone else do this job. Will go with a woman of color
• 39:10
  because that fits everything else we do here at NBC Now. I talk a
• 39:16
  lot on this podcast about stories that get ignored that could if the news media
• 39:24
  wanted them, to be a big deal, and I think we definitely had
• 39:30
  one of those events occur over the last few days. And I have to
• 39:35
  say that when I first saw this now, I didn't see it lie because
• 39:38
  I was playing in a golf tournament at the time, but of course a
• 39:40
  lot of people sent it to me the clip. I thought this might be
• 39:46
  a big deal. This might be the moment that we have talked about in
• 39:51
  this podcast previously, where I've said many many times that Joe Biden is going
• 39:57
  to be the Democratic presidential nominee unless, unless there is some massive moment that
• 40:07
  can't be spun that enough Americans see, especially enough Democrats see, that make
• 40:13
  them question whether or not Joe Biden is physically capable of serving another five years
• 40:19
  in office. If that happens, then maybe there is a possibility of either
• 40:24
  him being forced to withdraw from the race or Saya Gavin Newsom finally has the
• 40:30
  balls to actually do what he wants to do, which is clearly to run
• 40:34
  against Joe Biden, because it's clear that the polling offers up a wide lane
• 40:39
  for someone else to get in the race. There are a lot of Democrats
• 40:43
  who do not want Joe Biden as the nominee. Now they'll vote for him
• 40:47
  if he is the nominee, especially against Donald Trump, but they don't want
• 40:51
  him to be the nominee. But I have been I have held a very
• 40:54
  high bar for what that moment would have to be to spark that series of
• 41:00
  events. And now you probably aware what I'm referring to is that Joe Biden
• 41:07
  was at the graduation ceremony for the Air Force Academy, and he was on
• 41:14
  stage and he turned to do something I'm not even sure what, and it
• 41:19
  appears as if he tripped over a box. Now, when you're dealing with
• 41:24
  Joe Biden, how the advanced team doesn't make sure that everything is as clear
• 41:29
  as could possibly be. I don't know, but the excuse that's being given
• 41:32
  is that he trips over a box and he dramatically falls right in the middle
• 41:37
  of this graduation ceremony, and he has trouble getting up and it takes two
• 41:40
  or three people to help him get up. And it looked awful. I
• 41:44
  mean, it looked just terrible. Now, he wasn't apparently hurt, but
• 41:49
  the fall was really bad. And this is not the first time he's fallen.
• 41:53
  He's fallen several times when it comes to the stairs to get onto Air
• 41:59
  Force one, and there's been other situations where he's falling, fall off his
• 42:04
  bike one time. Now, I would love to know it would be it
• 42:07
  would be fascinating to do a poll and find out how many Americans are even
• 42:12
  aware of the series of events where Joe Biden has fallen. My guess is
• 42:20
  that number wouldn't be that high. If you asked, are you aware of
• 42:22
  this incident, this incident, this incident, My guess is you know you
• 42:27
  wouldn't. You certainly wouldn't get anywhere close to seventy or eighty percent American people
• 42:30
  that are fully aware that this is a narrative that this is a series of
• 42:35
  events that clearly if the news media wanted them to be a narrative, would
• 42:38
  be a legitimate narrative, not a made up narrative, a legitimate narrative.
• 42:43
  What's going on with Joe Biden's health? If this did not happen in this
• 42:49
  case, it could have because this was dramatic video at a you know,
• 42:53
  at a military graduation ceremony. So this is a situation where it's particularly bad
• 43:00
  to look weak, right, I mean, you're at the commencement address of
• 43:04
  the Air Force Academy and you fall to the ground and you can't get up.
• 43:08
  It was horrendous, but by and large, the news media either ignored
• 43:14
  it or downplayed it, especially in comparison to what they did with Donald Trump
• 43:20
  when he was president. You may recall, and I'm someone who lows Trump,
• 43:23
  obviously, but I have always sought for him to be treated fairly,
• 43:29
  and I've defended him when he deserved it. But there was an enormous amount
• 43:34
  of media coverage, and some people did a pretty good job on Twitter of
• 43:37
  exposing the hypocrisy here. There was an enormous amount of media coverage when on
• 43:40
  a rainy day, Donald Trump very gingerly and slowly walked down or ramp,
• 43:46
  didn't fall held onto the rail, looked a little frail doing it, but
• 43:52
  there was no incident, and that was used to create an enormous amount of
• 43:59
  media were surrounding the idea that Trump may not be physically up to the job
• 44:04
  of being president, and the major news media made no bones about it.
• 44:08
  And this was a situation that was isolated and was not nearly as dramatic as
• 44:14
  falling in the middle of the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony. Yet there was
• 44:20
  far more media coverage of Trump's circumstances than there are for Biden, and Biden's
• 44:27
  has a very obvious narrative that Ken and I believe, if the news media
• 44:31
  was fair, should be created surrounding this issue of his health. And let's
• 44:37
  also be clear, Biden is older than Trump was even when he was president,
• 44:42
  much older than when Trump was president, and he's in his eighties now,
• 44:46
  and if he gets elected re elected, he's going to still be president
• 44:51
  at the age of eighty five, which is just insane. Even if he
• 44:55
  was imperfect health and had high mental acuity, he clearly does not, and
• 45:01
  so I mean, there was some commentary on the left, but not very
• 45:06
  much at all. There was no major Democrat who stood up and said,
• 45:09
  you know what, it's time to consider whether or not Joe Biden should be
• 45:14
  the nominee, and whether or not this makes sense for him and makes sense
• 45:17
  for the party, it makes sense for the country. Nobody who was prominent
• 45:22
  had the balls to do that. I theorized on Twitter that if that's going
• 45:24
  to happen, the first person I would look to for that to happen from
• 45:30
  would be Van Jones, African American commentator on CNN. I've mentioned him before.
• 45:35
  He's a smart guy. I disagree with him a lot, but he
• 45:37
  can be contrariing at times. He also is on CNN, and so I
• 45:42
  think he must realize that there is a thirst among the leadership at CNN for
• 45:47
  people who are a little bit more down the middle than has been previously the
• 45:52
  case. He's also an African American, which gives him all sorts of protection
• 45:58
  from criticism. So if I was going to make a bet if this was
• 46:00
  ever gonna happen, and I'm not saying it will, but the person I
• 46:05
  would look to to be the first Democrat major Democrat on television say it's time
• 46:10
  for us to reconsider this. I would bet on Van Jones, just for
• 46:15
  the record, just I'm laying that down there in case it actually happens.
• 46:19
  But it did not happen this week, and I have a feeling that it's
• 46:23
  it's not going to happen because I think everyone's too afraid and the media has
• 46:30
  not created the foundation. See, this is where when the media ignores data
• 46:35
  points and they don't create a narrative, then it impacts all sorts of events
• 46:39
  down the road. Because if because the public hasn't been fully educated about this
• 46:45
  and they haven't been told, not that they really have to be told,
• 46:47
  because they all have experience of this in their own lives, with their parents
• 46:52
  and their grandparents or maybe themselves what happens when you get into your eighties.
• 46:57
  But there's not been enough of a foundation laid by the news media for someone
• 47:01
  to feel safe to wade into these waters. Now, once two or three
• 47:07
  prominent people do so, then the floodgates might get open. But as if,
• 47:13
  as of this moment, we're not at that point yet, and I'm
• 47:16
  not sure we're going to get to it, because what could be worse than
• 47:20
  what happened at the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony, it would be really kind
• 47:23
  of hard. I mean, the bar might be set higher than I even
• 47:27
  realized. It's going to be difficult to imagine. Okay, So what does
• 47:30
  Biden do now to force this national conversation about whether or not this eighty year
• 47:37
  old man in not great health should be the next president of the United States,
• 47:43
  Because the mind kind of boggles at this point. Instead of a fixation
• 47:47
  on what happened at the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony, Biden has got a
• 47:52
  lot of credit for his role in the debt limit negotiations, and I think
• 47:58
  largely the reason why he is and declared the victor in that situation where the
• 48:02
  debt ceiling was once again kicked down the road and we're not going to default
• 48:07
  on the debt for at least another couple of years, it looks like,
• 48:09
  is because conservatives were more pissed off than liberals. That's basically how the media
• 48:15
  evaluates this, which is not a completely illogical way to look at it,
• 48:19
  but I do think it's not one hundred percent accurate because there are different incentive
• 48:22
  structures on each side. Both sides were not happy about certain elements of it,
• 48:28
  but conservatives were more vocal about being pissed off, and more Democrats in
• 48:32
  the House ended up voting for the deal that Biden negotiated with Health Speaker Kevin
• 48:39
  McCarthy than Republicans did. So those are two pretty good indications that Biden must
• 48:45
  not have done too badly. I don't think it's proof, but you know,
• 48:49
  and as I said in the last podcast, of course he won.
• 48:51
  He had all the advantages. He's the president, he has the Senate.
• 48:55
  McCarthy has a minuscule advantage. In the House, sumong people that strongly disagree
• 49:00
  over everything, and there's no unanimity on almost anything. I mean, the
• 49:06
  Democratic side is far more united. And also the media is one hundred percent
• 49:10
  of the Democratic side because they've defined all the terms here in ways that are
• 49:16
  to the Democrats' advantage. So McCarthy was basically negotiating with a hand and a
• 49:22
  leg behind his back. So it's no wonder that he didn't do worse.
• 49:28
  Now, the one place where McCarthy seemingly won, and this was because Joe
• 49:34
  Mansion from West Virginia apparently played a big role, is that in this deal
• 49:39
  there was this thing called the Mountain Valley Pipeline that was allowed to be promoted
• 49:46
  and to go forward and to be actually be used, which is remarkable given
• 49:51
  this administration's horrendous record when it comes to creating options for fuel and partiser part
• 50:00
  of the reason why our fuel prices are so incredibly high. I mean,
• 50:02
  I pay over five dollars a gallon of gas here in southern California routinely.
• 50:07
  Now that's just accepted as the reality. Now five dollars is normal, that's
• 50:13
  normal. I can't believe we've gotten to this point where five dollars for a
• 50:15
  gallon of gasoline is just perfectly normal, and we'll only go up probably in
• 50:21
  the future. So this Mountain Valley Pipeline is part of the deal. And
• 50:27
  the reason I mentioned in this now is not just because it's the one one
• 50:30
  of the few loan things that the liberals and the woke crowd were upset about
• 50:35
  with regard to this debt ceiling deal, but because there was an interesting footnote
• 50:40
  in the media coverage about the Mountain Valley Pipeline and a guy by the name
• 50:45
  of Ryan Maui. I guess is how you say his name on Twitter put
• 50:52
  out a really good thread about how the media coverage of this thing is so
• 50:58
  transparent and so exposed. Is how broken the news media is, especially when
• 51:02
  it comes to environmental issues and how political pressure impacts so called scientists. This
• 51:12
  is this going to seem like a small, little data point, but I
• 51:16
  found this to be really interesting and important. So Ryan Maui writes, anti
• 51:22
  pipeline and climate activists are using emission figures that are likely off by a factor
• 51:29
  of five to fifteen. That's five to fifteen times they're off with regard to
• 51:37
  the emission figures that would be estimated from this Mountain Valley pipeline. He asked
• 51:44
  the question, why haven't you heard this until now? From the New York
• 51:46
  Times of the Washington Post. Here's a hint. Energy analysts on the words
• 51:53
  so called experts scientists would only speak anonymously, fear ring honesty would amount to
• 52:00
  an endorsement of the pipeline project. The Washington Post wrote, this is a
• 52:07
  doozy of a paragraph here, folks. The Washington Post wrote about this project
• 52:13
  in the following manner. A third energy analyst agreed with the critiques, saying
• 52:20
  a more accurate estimate of the pipeline's annual emissions would be six to sixteen million
• 52:25
  metric tons of carbon dioxide rather than eighty nine million metric tons. That's a
• 52:32
  massive difference between six million metric tons and eighty nine million metric tons. Those
• 52:39
  are the two different quote unquote expert they supposed, you know, infallible experts
• 52:46
  that are never wrong. According to the news media. That's an incredibly wide
• 52:51
  disparity in estimates of carbon emissions here. But this is the most important part.
• 52:57
  So the post rites. The analysts spoke on the condition of anonymity to
• 53:01
  preserve relationships with environmentalists who oppose the pipeline and who might view lower emissions estimates
• 53:13
  as a tacit endorsement of the project. Holy crap, right there in that
• 53:22
  sentence I just read from the Washington Post, you have the heart of one
• 53:29
  journalism is so broken, and to why we are so screwed when it comes
• 53:34
  to all issues related to global warming and climate change and everything related to energy
• 53:39
  policy. Because even the experts that realize this is all bullshit are terrified of
• 53:49
  saying so, because they will get kicked out of the club. They will
• 53:55
  get kicked out of the club, and so they will only speak anonymously,
• 54:00
  which then prevents the Washington Post or the New York Times, which creates the
• 54:06
  narrative on the left still to this day, from being able to fully tell
• 54:09
  their side, because if you're not willing to put your name out there,
• 54:14
  you can't have your credentials out there, and you can't be have your view
• 54:17
  put forward in a highly incredible fashion if you're only doing so anonymously and say,
• 54:23
  well, you know, actually I think that number is kind of bullshit,
• 54:25
  but can you please not use my name? Please? Pretty please?
• 54:29
  Because I don't want to kick kick out of the club. I like the
• 54:31
  club. I like, you know, getting asked to all these events and
• 54:36
  the cocked up parties and getting grants and all sorts of other things that happened.
• 54:39
  Please, I just I mean, this is the truth. I know
• 54:42
  it's the truth, but please just keep my name out of it, would
• 54:45
  you please. And that's the atmosphere, that's the atmosphere of fear that permeates
• 54:51
  all of this, and it's an extraordinary thing, and it is so destructive
• 54:59
  to the media coverage of this as well as eventual policy on all of this,
• 55:04
  because it allows the other side to control the narrative totally and completely.
• 55:12
  And it's such an incredible, incredibly important situation. And in a moment,
• 55:16
  I'm going to get to a very similar circumstance regarding our new CDC director.
• 55:22
  But first I want to talk about something that's happening more directly related to global
• 55:29
  warming and climate change in the media's mind when it comes to insurance companies and
• 55:36
  the state of California. I'm referring here specifically to State Farm, which recently
• 55:42
  announced that it would no longer take any new insurance policies in the state of
• 55:47
  California. And the news media thought they immediately knew exactly why this must be.
• 55:53
  It's got to be because California is the epicenter of climate change, and
• 55:58
  therefore, you know, there's too many disasters, and that's why it's no
• 56:01
  longer in State Farm's best interest to sell insurance in California, at least new
• 56:07
  policies. And that's what the media ran with. But that's not what State
• 56:13
  Farm said. That's not what State Farm said at all. They didn't come
• 56:19
  close to saying that, but the news media decided that that's what they meant.
• 56:23
  The Washington Post even acknowledged this, saying in their article about State Farm's
• 56:30
  decision. Quote. In a statement, State Farm cited rapidly growing catastrophe exposure
• 56:37
  among the key factors behind its decision. That's pretty much code for quote,
• 56:44
  climate change is making things worse. Unquote. That's the Washington Post saying,
• 56:51
  don't worry about what State Farm actually said. We're going to determine for you
• 56:55
  what they really meant. That this is climate change. Now, I can
• 57:02
  understand that potentially being the thinking. I use that kind of thinking myself all
• 57:08
  the time. But the facts don't back that up here. Not only in
• 57:12
  what State Farm didn't didn't say, but as I've mentioned many many times before,
• 57:16
  we have not had catastrophes here in California in the last year and a
• 57:22
  half. Wildfires are by far the biggest factor that in earthquakes here in California
• 57:29
  with regard to insurance catastrophes. Well, we didn't have any major wildfires last
• 57:36
  year in California, any major ones in comparison to previous years. It was
• 57:40
  the lightest wildfire year in modern history, so we didn't have any In December
• 57:47
  of twenty twenty one, we had none in twenty twenty two, these are
• 57:51
  major fires. And in twenty twenty three, because we had such a wet
• 57:55
  winter, we're into June now we still haven't had any major wildfire. So
• 58:00
  we're going literally a year and a half without any major wildfires in California.
• 58:06
  And State Farm suddenly decides to make this decision, and the Washington Post thinks
• 58:10
  they know, Oh, it's got to be climate change. The New York
• 58:14
  Times did a similar thing their headline, climate shocks are making parts of America
• 58:21
  uninsurable. It just got worse, and then they did the story. When
• 58:25
  it comes to what State Farm did, Axios actually had to change their story
• 58:32
  to adjust their initial statement that this was about climate change. There are all
• 58:38
  sorts of reasons why selling insurance in California would be a bad idea. I
• 58:44
  mean, you've got property values that are extremely high, you've got overpopulation,
• 58:49
  you've got a crazy government. You've got you've got if there's in situations where
• 58:55
  there are lawsuits, you've got juries that are going to give judgements that are
• 59:00
  completely out of control. You've got all sorts of government regulation. There's a
• 59:06
  whole host of reasons why State Farm would get out of California and by the
• 59:10
  way, not getting out of California. They're just stopping new insurance policies in
• 59:15
  California. They have nothing to do with climate change, nothing, but because
• 59:20
  it fits the media's narrative. It didn't matter what State Farm actually said,
• 59:24
  or what they meant, or what the facts are. They got their story
• 59:27
  and they're sticking to it. It reminded me a lot of what happened when
• 59:31
  the Disney Company, Walt Disney Company decided not to go forward with a plan
• 59:37
  to build this billion dollar complex in Orlando, and they all decided, well,
• 59:43
  this must be because of Rhonda Santists. It's gotta be Ryn to Satis.
• 59:46
  It can't be the new CEO or returning CEO at Disney, and it
• 59:52
  couldn't be changing economic factors. No, no, it's got to be Rhynda
• 59:54
  Santist because that's the narrative we like. Because facts and logic be damn.
• 1:00:00
  It's all about our narrative. And there's nothing that the media loves more than
• 1:00:05
  tying anything and everything, even when it has nothing to do with it.
• 1:00:07
  With alleged climate change and global warming. Now, an episode number sixty three
• 1:00:13
  of the podcast, I made my strongest attempt probably to date to tie the
• 1:00:21
  COVID response to the response, the governmental liberal response on global warming climate change.
• 1:00:29
  And I told you that it's clear as day that they're going to do
• 1:00:31
  the exact same things with climate change global warming that they did with COVID.
• 1:00:37
  That they learned what they could get away with, and this fits their entire
• 1:00:39
  worldview that they know how to run your life better than you do, and
• 1:00:44
  they want to control your life, and they're going to use emergency and the
• 1:00:46
  greater good as a justification for doing that. And to me, the evidence
• 1:00:52
  of this is overwhelming. It's very obvious this is happening. What I did
• 1:00:57
  not realize was at the same time, John Carey, who is basically the
• 1:01:00
  climates are for the Biden administration. I don't know what happens when you lose
• 1:01:06
  a presidential election as a Democrat, whether you're Al Gore or John Carey,
• 1:01:09
  and you get this consolation prize called global warming climate change. For some reason,
• 1:01:15
  Hillary Clinton has never gotten that consolation prize. I guess they're too pissed
• 1:01:19
  off that she lost to Trump. But Gal Goore got his consolation prize and
• 1:01:23
  John Carey has his, and John Carey gave a speech, and John Carey
• 1:01:29
  is really I mean, you want to talk about the definition of someone who
• 1:01:34
  thinks he's smart but is actually a full blown idiot, it's John Carey.
• 1:01:38
  And John Carey gave a speech that if we had a remotely fair and rational
• 1:01:45
  media that was not in the tank, especially on this issue, would have
• 1:01:51
  been mocked in all sorts of different ways. Then I'm sure ninety eight percent
• 1:01:57
  of the American people are even unaware that he did it or set it.
• 1:02:00
  I mean, hack I do a podcast called The Other Journalism and I missed
• 1:02:04
  this when I should have put it in the last podcast. And this is
• 1:02:08
  a speech that he gave about food consumption and agriculture. And get this,
• 1:02:15
  this is it's so mind blowingly stupid. It's hard for me to describe.
• 1:02:20
  But what you're about to hear is John Carey making the argument that we need
• 1:02:25
  to curtail our food growth so that people don't starve. Let me repeat that,
• 1:02:37
  not exaggerating. I'm going to prove it to you in a second.
• 1:02:40
  But John Carey said in a speech that that we are going to starve.
• 1:02:47
  We have too many people on this planet that because of food production, we
• 1:02:54
  are increasing admissions too much, it's going to increase the temperature too much,
• 1:03:00
  and that that will then cause starvation, that the increase in temperature over time
• 1:03:06
  will cause starvation. And so to fix the problem, we need to curtail
• 1:03:13
  the way that we create food, which apparently is not going to cause any
• 1:03:17
  starvation, but somehow magically will stop the temperature increase which allegedly might cause starvation
• 1:03:27
  way down the path into the future. And in case you think I'm somehow
• 1:03:31
  exaggerating or lying, I'm not. I'm actually underplaying the colossal stupidity and the
• 1:03:37
  abject gaslighting of this statement from John Kerry, especially when it comes to the
• 1:03:44
  end where he relies on science. These are scientists that are telling us this.
• 1:03:52
  These are infallible scientists who have never been wrong and who actually get those
• 1:03:57
  folks have had their predictions always come true, only more dramatically than they fought.
• 1:04:03
  And here was this load of crap from John Kerry. Agriculture contributes about
• 1:04:09
  thirty three percent of all the emissions of the world, depending a little bit
• 1:04:14
  on how you count it, but it's anywhere from twenty six to thirty three,
• 1:04:17
  and we can't get to net zero. We don't get this job done
• 1:04:24
  unless agriculture this front and center is part of the solution. But with a
• 1:04:28
  growing population on the planet, we just crossed the threshold of eight million fellow
• 1:04:32
  citizens around the world. We just crossed that in this last year. Emissions
• 1:04:36
  from the food system alone are projected to cause another half a degree of warming
• 1:04:44
  by mid century. On the current course that we are today, a two
• 1:04:47
  degree future could result in an additional six hundred million people not getting enough to
• 1:04:56
  eat. And you just can't continue to both warm the planet while also expecting
• 1:05:03
  to feed. It doesn't work. So we have to reduce emissions from the
• 1:05:08
  food system to keep the one point five degrees alive. Why do we have
• 1:05:11
  to keep one point five degrees a lot? Because scientists, as a basis
• 1:05:16
  of physics and mathematics, not ideology and politics or party labels or anything else.
• 1:05:24
  As a matter of physics and mathematics and some biology and chemistry have told
• 1:05:29
  us these are the consequences, and we already see it happening, and almost
• 1:05:34
  everything they've predicted for thirty plus years now it's coming true. But the problem
• 1:05:40
  is it's coming through faster and bigger than was in fact predicted. Now I
• 1:05:45
  could probably talk for an hour or two, and no one would want that
• 1:05:50
  about how insane what John Kerry said there really is, but just for the
• 1:05:57
  record, because I feel obligated to make the point in case somehow it's already
• 1:06:03
  been missed that there are so many layers of absurdity in that that it boggles
• 1:06:09
  the mind. The first is we know from the history of the globe.
• 1:06:15
  It's even proven in Al Gore's Oscar winning documentary, although he didn't want you
• 1:06:20
  to notice this an inconvenient truth that temperature change has preceded, preceded CO two
• 1:06:30
  increase in the atmosphere throughout the history of the globe. This has happened every
• 1:06:35
  time, and it's been by hundreds of years. So the whole premise is
• 1:06:42
  absurd. There's no evidence at all that CO two increase increases temperature. It's
• 1:06:47
  the opposite. There's also no evidence whatsoever that we can do anything about this.
• 1:06:55
  There's no correlation between our actions that we I mean, even if there
• 1:06:59
  was, there's no there's no proof, nor logic, nor evidence that we
• 1:07:02
  could ever pull this off, and they would have one ounce of real impact
• 1:07:08
  on the temperature. So that's number. That's the second biggest problem. In
• 1:07:14
  this whole thing. Then there's the obvious intellectual absurdity of we're going to stop
• 1:07:18
  making food so that people don't starve. Even even the average imbecile can understand
• 1:07:25
  how ridiculous that is. And that's partially why it's so objectively hypocritical and ridiculous
• 1:07:31
  for the news media to not mock John Kerry about this, because if a
• 1:07:35
  Republican ever made a statement that could be so easily understood by the average person
• 1:07:41
  as being idiotic, they would be all over them for it. So we've
• 1:07:45
  got to curtail our food consumption and our output now so that we don't increase
• 1:07:51
  the temperature in the future, and we're trying to prevent people from starving one
• 1:07:58
  two hundred years from now. I mean it, it's just crazy. You
• 1:08:01
  can't make this up. It's a fantasy. And then the part that actually
• 1:08:04
  pisses me off the most. The first part of that was funny, the
• 1:08:08
  second part just angers me because how the flying fuck do they get away with
• 1:08:14
  After COVID, relying on the scientist said, do not dare to question the
• 1:08:24
  experts because science said, and this idea that somehow their predictions have ever come
• 1:08:31
  true is just a flat out lie. It's gas lighting. I ask all
• 1:08:36
  the time for any of their predictions to have been proven to have been true,
• 1:08:43
  and I never get in a coaching answer in any of this. I've
• 1:08:45
  never found any place where someone has said, here's what the experts said fifteen
• 1:08:49
  years ago, and here's what's happening today. It's all bullcrap. It's just
• 1:08:55
  a fantasy. I would love to know how much he really believes this.
• 1:08:58
  I really would And he's so dumb. I actually believe that John Carey thinks
• 1:09:01
  it's true. That's how dumb John Carey is. I honestly don't think he
• 1:09:06
  believes that he's lying. He has just bought into this fairy tale and and
• 1:09:12
  it's and it's so destructive. I mean, they're going literally for our food.
• 1:09:16
  Yeah, you know. Elon Musk more credit to him. He's pushing
• 1:09:20
  back against the story I told you about in episode sixty three that Ireland wants
• 1:09:24
  to kill two hundred thousand cows to stop cow admissions to help prevent global warming
• 1:09:30
  climate change. It's I mean, there's a lot of cows in Ireland.
• 1:09:33
  I mean, one of the things I've been to Ireland a couple of times
• 1:09:35
  and one of the first things you think about is, Wow, these cows
• 1:09:39
  have the greatest views in the entire world. But a lot of them are
• 1:09:43
  going to have that view very much longer if this if this plan actually goes
• 1:09:45
  through, they're going to be sacrificed, literally on the altar of the religion
• 1:09:49
  of climate change, global warming, and it's completely absurd to anybody with a
• 1:09:54
  with a goddamn brain. But going back to COVID, so we now have
• 1:10:00
  a new CDC director, and I gotta tell you, and I've referenced this
• 1:10:03
  just a few minutes ago, but this might be my favorite thing that I
• 1:10:06
  was looking forward to the most in this particular podcast, because you know,
• 1:10:13
  like any human being, I love vindication and I believe that there is a
• 1:10:16
  statement from the new CDC director. Her name is Mandy Cohen. By the
• 1:10:21
  way, what a perfect name for a woke CDC director, Mandy Cohen.
• 1:10:28
  She used to be the health director in North Carolina for a Democratic governor,
• 1:10:33
  and so she is taking over for Rachel Lensky. And she appears to be
• 1:10:40
  at least as woke as Lensky was, and that's really tough to do.
• 1:10:44
  I mean, she is all in on masks. In the fall of twenty
• 1:10:51
  twenty, she tweeted, did you know it's World Mask Week? Face coverings
• 1:10:58
  are one of our strongest tools to slow the spread of COVID nineteen in our
• 1:11:01
  communities, and like my doctor Faucci mask. She in this tweet, she
• 1:11:08
  had a picture of herself wearing a doctor Faucci mask. They can be fun
• 1:11:13
  too, Join me in masking up this week and beyond. Every time you
• 1:11:18
  leave the house, that's Mandy Cohen, your new CDC director, Ladies and
• 1:11:24
  gentlemen. But that's not the part that I really was looking forward to sharing
• 1:11:28
  with you. No, there was a video that when I guess semi viral
• 1:11:32
  when it was determined that she was going to be the new CDC director,
• 1:11:36
  of her talking about how decisions, some very important decisions were made during the
• 1:11:44
  pandemic. Now I refer you to episodes number two and three of this podcast
• 1:11:48
  of Death of Journalism, where along with Lizza Bibe, I go through what
• 1:11:55
  I call my alternative narrative what really happened with regard to the response to COVID.
• 1:12:00
  And one of the basic premises of that is that this was not about
• 1:12:03
  science and it was about politics, but it was not necessarily, at least
• 1:12:10
  at first about Democrat Republican politics, although there was a lot of that involved,
• 1:12:14
  because every Democrat knew destroying the economy was good for preventing Donald Trump for
• 1:12:18
  being reelected. But there's a different form of politics, and that is having
• 1:12:25
  your ass covered and going by what other people are doing and feeling like when
• 1:12:30
  you have political cover, you feel safe in doing something. And then there's
• 1:12:35
  the other element of this from a human standpoint. I have said many many
• 1:12:40
  times, and did so in fact with our interview in episode number sixty three
• 1:12:45
  with doctor Bardacharia, which I urge you to listen to Stanford Professor Covid Contrarian
• 1:12:51
  from the beginning, and I talked to him about how I believe that for
• 1:12:59
  a lot of these help to directors who are nutty, unqualified people, most
• 1:13:02
  of them are Marxists, this was the greatest thing that ever happened to them.
• 1:13:06
  They enjoyed it, They loved having the power. These are small people.
• 1:13:13
  When you give them a little bit of power like an hoa director,
• 1:13:16
  look the hell out. These are people who cannot handle it, and they've
• 1:13:23
  lived their whole lives hoping for a situation like this to happen, and it
• 1:13:26
  finally happened, and they got to enjoy it for over two years, and
• 1:13:30
  it went to their heads. Well, I can't imagine one short clip better
• 1:13:36
  validating and vindicating everything I just told you about my view of these experts.
• 1:13:44
  And this is now a woman who was going to be the director of the
• 1:13:46
  CDC, and here she is. When you listen to this, I want
• 1:13:49
  you to listen to the joy in her voice, reminiscing about how she would
• 1:13:57
  call up the health director in massive shoots. Now. It's it's interesting that
• 1:14:01
  she picked Massachusetts because, and she references in this clip that that's a Republican
• 1:14:08
  governor, although not a real Republican governor, very liberal Republican governor, and
• 1:14:13
  so in their minds, liberal state Republican governor, kind of the opposite of
• 1:14:18
  North Carolina conservative state democratic governor. So for her, this was a good
• 1:14:25
  person to rely on because if they're doing something in Massachusetts, then we're probably
• 1:14:31
  going to be forced to have to do it here because we can't be to
• 1:14:34
  the left of Massachusetts. But if Massachusetts is restricting it with a Republican governor,
• 1:14:41
  that gives us political cover to do what we want to do, which
• 1:14:45
  is destroy everybody's fucking life because we enjoy that, especially when it's football.
• 1:14:49
  Because that was the essence of what she was so happy about being canceled.
• 1:14:55
  I mean, if you're I mean, if you're a football fan. I
• 1:14:59
  mean again, I don't even understand what where Republicans are on this issue right
• 1:15:04
  now. I'll get to more of that a little bit later on. But
• 1:15:09
  if I'm in charge of the Republican Party, this clip you're about to hero
• 1:15:13
  would make a hell of a commercial when it comes to appealing to football fans
• 1:15:18
  and how angry they must be to hear this was the kind of rationale,
• 1:15:24
  and this was the kind of discussion that resulted in whether or not they were
• 1:15:28
  able to see or attend their football teams play their games, either on television
• 1:15:33
  or in person. Back in twenty twenty and I'm presuming also parts of twenty
• 1:15:39
  twenty one as well. So here is Mandy Cohen in a short clip that
• 1:15:44
  says so very very much about how utterly corrupt the essence of our COVID response
• 1:15:53
  was, especially among these so called health directors. So I would call probably
• 1:15:58
  the person I called most of the Secretary of Health and Human services in Massachusetts.
• 1:16:01
  She worked for a Republican governor, just Tom But you know when she
• 1:16:06
  was like, are you are you going to let them have professional football?
• 1:16:11
  And I was like nope, and She's like, okay, either a way
• 1:16:13
  neither wait. So you know, it was like conversations like that, so
• 1:16:20
  or I'd be like, so, when are you gonna think about lightening up
• 1:16:24
  a mass or like for like next Monday, I'm like, okay, next
• 1:16:27
  Monday. Listen to that clip just made my blood boil, And that the
• 1:16:32
  only reason I wasn't even angry or was because I did get some joy out
• 1:16:36
  of the vindication that it gives me on so many different levels, because that
• 1:16:43
  was always exactly how I knew these decisions were being made. They're not being
• 1:16:47
  made based upon science. They're made based upon political politics. And once again
• 1:16:54
  we have an ah moment. We have someone saying the quiet part out loud.
• 1:17:00
  We have a moment that should expose the whole thing as a scam in
• 1:17:04
  a situation that's very newsworthy because this person is now the new CDC director and
• 1:17:11
  there's crickets in the mainstream news media. Nobody in the mainstream news media.
• 1:17:15
  I'm sure at least that I saw, and I'm quite positive because this would
• 1:17:18
  be stunning to me if this was not the case. Has made anything about
• 1:17:23
  that particular clip, and that clip says it all right there when put in
• 1:17:28
  proper context. And there's all sorts of other COVID related stories going on.
• 1:17:32
  There's a lawsuit between Missouri and the Biden administration that further is exposing the massive
• 1:17:40
  amount of COVID censorship from our government when it came to what was allowed to
• 1:17:45
  be said publicly with regard to COVID and vaccines and vaccine mandates and the proper
• 1:17:51
  way to respond to COVID. And this was obviously Joe Biden took over in
• 1:17:57
  January of twenty twenty one. This is almost a year into COVID, but
• 1:18:01
  we're learning more and more. It wasn't just the Twitter files. There's all
• 1:18:06
  sorts of revelations that the news media is by and large ignoring because it doesn't
• 1:18:12
  fit their agenda and it doesn't fit their narrative. They can't go back now,
• 1:18:15
  they're too deeply, deeply invested in a mythology and so I don't know
• 1:18:21
  it would be It's going to take a Rhonda scientist nomination for this issue to
• 1:18:27
  ever really be truly revisited in a way that the media can't curtail. I
• 1:18:31
  mean, even little things that happened. It should make people go, what
• 1:18:35
  the fuck is going on here? And holy hell, doesn't this expose what
• 1:18:40
  a fraud the whole thing was? But Philadelphia's Septa public transit system last week
• 1:18:47
  put out a very declarative, almost angry statement declaring a ban on get this
• 1:18:57
  on most masks when riding the Septa system to cut down on crime. So
• 1:19:04
  now here we are in twenty twenty three, and in the Philadelphia Septa public
• 1:19:11
  transit system you're not allowed to wear a mask, and in fact, you'll
• 1:19:15
  be arrested if you're wearing the wrong kind of mask in Philadelphia transit system because
• 1:19:20
  get this. Who could have possibly imagined having lots of people in masks helps
• 1:19:28
  to enable crime or helps people get away with crime. Who could have possibly
• 1:19:33
  thunked this? I mean, I remember, in the middle of the pandemic,
• 1:19:40
  I went into my bank wearing a golf cap, dark sunglasses, and
• 1:19:46
  a V for Vandetta movie mask that covered most of my face. The V
• 1:19:53
  for Vendetta was because the movie I thought had some anti COVID narratives in it,
• 1:19:58
  even though it wasn't directly about COVID. But you could hardly see anything
• 1:20:02
  of me. You couldn't see, you know, my hair. You couldn't
• 1:20:04
  see my eyes, you couldn't see my nose, you couldn't see my mouth.
• 1:20:08
  I go into the bank and the teller compliments me on my mask,
• 1:20:13
  And I'm thinking, if I had come into this same bank a year ago,
• 1:20:15
  I probably at least would have been asked to take the mask off or
• 1:20:20
  the hat off, or it might have even been arrested, for God's sake,
• 1:20:25
  because I would have looked like somebody who was about to rob the damn
• 1:20:28
  bank. But these are This is just one one, incredibly small example of
• 1:20:32
  a hundred and one other things of unintended consequences or maybe even intended consequences that
• 1:20:41
  people just either never decided to concern themselves with or pretended wouldn't exist because of
• 1:20:46
  these asinine COVID restrictions that did absolutely positively nothing to curtail the spread of the
• 1:20:53
  virus itself. And then there's another issue that the media loves to talk about.
• 1:20:58
  They won't tell you about the Septa bad in the proper light. They
• 1:21:02
  won't tell you about the history of the CDC director, but they love to
• 1:21:06
  tell you about long COVID. And why do they love to tell you about
• 1:21:11
  long COVID. Well because COVID itself wasn't deadly enough. I got into this
• 1:21:17
  with doctor Bardachari a little bit in our interview in episode sixty three, where
• 1:21:24
  the biggest thing that happened early on in the pandemic was after that first initial
• 1:21:29
  wave and things kind of calmed down a little bit, everyone looked around and
• 1:21:31
  went, Okay, so do we either go back to normal or do we
• 1:21:36
  pretend this thing as permanent. Well, it was too early to go back
• 1:21:40
  to normal because Trump could have been reelected, and also our fund would be
• 1:21:44
  over as health directors and we would lose the power to tell people what they
• 1:21:47
  want to do. But also we would have to admit that we overreacted.
• 1:21:53
  And so when the death rate didn't turn out to be what they had hoped
• 1:21:57
  for, what they promised, or what they expected, they started to come
• 1:22:00
  up with other features of COVID to make it scarier, and their favorite was
• 1:22:06
  long COVID. And the idea behind long COVID was, well, you know,
• 1:22:11
  it might not kill you. But even those people that get it and
• 1:22:15
  don't die, a lot of them are experiencing life changing symptoms that don't go
• 1:22:19
  away. Now, look, I'm sure that there are some cases of long
• 1:22:25
  COVID. Whether it's directly because of COVID or not, I have no way
• 1:22:29
  of knowing. I have no problem believing that in isolated situations there are people
• 1:22:33
  who survived COVID but who were never the same afterwards, and those people it's
• 1:22:39
  highly unfortunate. So I'm not saying this never ever happens, but I have
• 1:22:43
  always been highly skeptical of this idea that somehow this is widespread, and the
• 1:22:49
  evidence always seemed to be, always seemed to be that there was a correlation
• 1:22:56
  between people who had long COVID and people who have mental problems or illnesses or
• 1:23:02
  anxiety depression. They tend to be female, They tend to be liberal.
• 1:23:10
  I mean, in fact, I would I would love to see some stats
• 1:23:15
  on this, but no one would ever have the balls to do this in
• 1:23:16
  this scientific community. As to what percentage of people who say they have long
• 1:23:21
  COVID are liberal women, my guess is it would be a very high percentage.
• 1:23:28
  Well, I was stunned the other day when Harvard University, you know,
• 1:23:31
  supposed to be the be all end, all right, they're the elites,
• 1:23:34
  they're the really smart people. They put out a study which I'm sure
• 1:23:39
  they were very, very very careful the way that they they worded this,
• 1:23:44
  because this was in very dangerous territory, because if you use your brain here,
• 1:23:47
  you're going to come to a conclusion that the media is not gonna like
• 1:23:50
  and liberals aren't going to like. But they studied the issue of long COVID
• 1:23:56
  and they found, according to this report from Harvard itself, according to researchers
• 1:24:02
  at Harvard, depression and other mental illnesses have been associated with a greater risk
• 1:24:11
  of more severe COVID nineteen infection and an increased risk of long COVID. Subheadline,
• 1:24:19
  psychological distress before COVID nineteen infection may increase risk of long COVID. Let
• 1:24:29
  me translate that for you. For them to word it like that, there
• 1:24:32
  has to be a direct connection that that has to be the number one risk
• 1:24:39
  factor for someone to get the symptoms of quote unquote long COVID, you have
• 1:24:45
  to have had depression, mental illness, psychological distress, and that makes perfect
• 1:24:49
  sense, because if you're somebody who is already predisposed and has these mental illnesses
• 1:24:57
  depression, anxiety, distress, whatever it is, and you are told twenty
• 1:25:02
  four to seven by the news media that there's a good chance you're gonna die
• 1:25:06
  by getting a disease, that an illness or a virus, that there's no
• 1:25:11
  real way to stop, and you don't even know if you have it or
• 1:25:14
  how you're going to get it, and there's really not much you can really
• 1:25:16
  do other than hide in your house to lower your chances of getting it,
• 1:25:21
  which turned out not really to be true. Then what's going to happen to
• 1:25:25
  somebody with depression and anxiety? And by the way, what's going to happen
• 1:25:28
  to the person with depression when they're forced to be alone in their house for
• 1:25:30
  months at a time, So the body obviously is impacted by your mental state.
• 1:25:38
  I've never understood how it is that some of the symptoms of long COVID
• 1:25:43
  could be associated with the respiratory of viral illness. Made no sense, and
• 1:25:48
  so I've automatically presumed, given the fact that I knew that the news media
• 1:25:54
  was desperate for a narrative to make COVID scarier than it already even was that
• 1:25:59
  this was probably bullshit, and this Harvard study goes a long way in proving
• 1:26:03
  that. Now, of course they don't say that directly, and of course
• 1:26:06
  you kind of actually use your brain, and the news media doesn't want to
• 1:26:10
  do that because they don't want to carry water on this because they've built up
• 1:26:13
  this nice narrative that they like called long COVID. And by the way,
• 1:26:16
  long COVID is a security blanket for a lot of people that don't really want
• 1:26:19
  to go back to normal life, maybe don't want to go back to work.
• 1:26:24
  I want to be able to rationalize why they still don't feel well and
• 1:26:27
  why they haven't been able to deal with the stress of the last three years
• 1:26:30
  of the COVID pandemic. But that's the world we now live in as far
• 1:26:35
  as Harvard is concerned. Though, while I give them a little bit of
• 1:26:39
  credit for having the balls to publish that study, any credit that they deserve
• 1:26:44
  immediately evaporates upon the news that they have hired Get this, I mean,
• 1:26:49
  talk about a joke. Harvard is now hired the ex mayor of Chicago,
• 1:26:56
  LORI Lightfoot, to teach public health and leadership. This is like an onion
• 1:27:04
  story, a fake news story, a parody. Harvard hires the former mayor
• 1:27:10
  of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, who is a moron even by the standards of
• 1:27:18
  democratic mayors of big cities, and that's a pretty high standard for being a
• 1:27:25
  moron. This woman is an idiot. She is a legitimate imbecile. And
• 1:27:32
  yes she's black, so it's a black female. That's what Harvard decided to
• 1:27:38
  do. This is a pure virtue signal. This is another great example of
• 1:27:42
  where, well, you know, she's a black female, she's the failed
• 1:27:47
  mayor of Chicago. She got voted out of office harshly because of her COVID
• 1:27:53
  response. So let's signal our virtue and let's do a solid for someone who
• 1:27:59
  was on our side during the times when we really needed them, during COVID.
• 1:28:03
  And we're not going to have her teach public health and leadership. She
• 1:28:08
  completely screwed the pooch during COVID. We're gonna have her teach public health and
• 1:28:12
  she lost her job. I mean, how do you lose your job as
• 1:28:15
  the Democratic mayor of Chicago, And we're gonna have her teach leadership. And
• 1:28:18
  this is Harvard allegedly the best school in the country. But that's you know,
• 1:28:24
  every single one of our institutions is failing us, and elite academia is
• 1:28:30
  no different. And I've talked, you know about how one of the things
• 1:28:33
  I love about Rond de Santis's biography is that he went to Yale undergrad and
• 1:28:39
  he went to Harvard Business School, which shows not that he's smart, just
• 1:28:42
  that he's smart and he got into elite schools and he but he also knows
• 1:28:47
  the nature of these institutions. He knows the people that go there, he
• 1:28:51
  knows the people that run them. He has He's not enamored by them,
• 1:28:56
  he's not intimidated by them. He knows what bullshit this all is. This
• 1:29:00
  apparent especially since he went there fairly recently. He went there in the two
• 1:29:03
  thousands when things started to go awry and turn into the disaster that they currently
• 1:29:10
  are, where they're doing insane things like hiring Lori Lightfoot to teach public health
• 1:29:15
  and leadership. So I have always had to stain for a lead academia,
• 1:29:20
  and I blame a lead academia for a lot of what happened with COVID.
• 1:29:24
  I'm probably the only commentator I know of that has fingered. The cancelation of
• 1:29:29
  the IVY League basketball tournament is the first major sporting event to go, which
• 1:29:32
  started the Domino effect, which led us to everything that happened after that.
• 1:29:36
  You can check out episodes two and three of this podcast if you've not done
• 1:29:40
  so previously, I hearg you to do so to hear that alternative narrative.
• 1:29:45
  One last thing about COVID for this episode, Donald Trump is still lying about
• 1:29:48
  his COVID response. Now he's claiming that he didn't really defend New York Governor
• 1:29:57
  Andrew Cuomo. Now he hates Andrew Cuom. Well, it's just that he's
• 1:30:00
  stating facts that Cuomo's stats on COVID were better than Rhonda Santis and Florida's stats,
• 1:30:06
  which is total nonsense. He keeps saying a flat out lie. He
• 1:30:12
  keeps saying Florida was third in deaths and that they had more deaths than New
• 1:30:19
  York and so therefore as if that's the only measure, which is insane,
• 1:30:24
  especially if you're a Republican, that somehow that means New York's response to COVID
• 1:30:29
  was better than Florida. That is a flat out lie. I mean it's
• 1:30:32
  It is absolutely insane that a presidential front runner on the Republican side doesn't understand
• 1:30:40
  the concept of measuring based upon population, based upon age of population, based
• 1:30:47
  upon health of population, based upon overall mortality rates and excess deaths. The
• 1:30:55
  reason why Florida had the third most death is because they have the third highest
• 1:30:59
  population. California had the highest number of deaths because they have the highest population.
• 1:31:04
  Then comes Texas. I mean, it's unbelievable that this one is one.
• 1:31:12
  I would really love to know whether Trump understands this or is he just
• 1:31:15
  flat lying and trust that his supporters are so dumb they're gonna buy it.
• 1:31:19
  I don't know what the answer to that question is, but I would really
• 1:31:25
  love an answer. I would really love an answer because I don't know what
• 1:31:28
  it is. It's possible Trump is just that dumb. I would actually like
• 1:31:31
  to think that he's not, but he clearly is. And I spent a
• 1:31:36
  lot of the last episode going basically apoplectic over the somewhat anemic response by the
• 1:31:43
  Desantist team to this entire issue of Trump having the audacity to lie and claim
• 1:31:50
  that New York's response to COVID was better than Florida's and they have responded,
• 1:31:56
  but not as strongly as I would have. I mean, I believe that
• 1:32:00
  it's the number one issue for DeSantis, and I think the best way to
• 1:32:04
  prove this, if I was making the argument to the DeSantis people, I
• 1:32:09
  would say, if you don't really think this is your issue, then explain
• 1:32:13
  to me this. Why is Donald Trump so obsessed with taking the issue away
• 1:32:17
  from you? If it's not a potent issue, Why is he doing that?
• 1:32:24
  Why is he siding with Andrew Cuomo of all people, even while claiming
• 1:32:29
  that he's not if it's not an incredibly important issue to him, if he
• 1:32:33
  doesn't feel vulnerable on it, why is he doing that. He's doing that
• 1:32:39
  because he knows he's vulnerable on it. He knows in his gut that he's
• 1:32:45
  screwed up on COVID, and so, from an ego standpoint, which is
• 1:32:48
  all that really matters to Trump, he can't stand this idea that he's screwed
• 1:32:56
  up on COVID. So he has to pretend. He has to lie,
• 1:32:59
  and I think he's doing so partially to defend his own ego and feel better
• 1:33:03
  about himself, but also because I think he understands that this is an issue
• 1:33:08
  on which he is very vulnerable, and therefore he's trying to take it away
• 1:33:12
  from the Santa's. He's trying to convince enough people by gas lighting on this,
• 1:33:15
  by telling the opposite of the truth. I mean, it's the old
• 1:33:18
  liberal playbook, do the you accuse the other guy doing the exact opposite of
• 1:33:25
  what they're doing, or doing exactly what you're doing. Well, that's what
• 1:33:28
  Trump is doing. He screwed up COVID, So he's claiming that the Santa
• 1:33:31
  is screwed up COVID and here the quote unquote stats to prove it, and
• 1:33:35
  enough of his people might buy it. Well, he would only be doing
• 1:33:39
  that if he felt like this was an important or potent issue on which he
• 1:33:44
  was vulnerable, and there's new polling data that indicates that that's exactly the case.
• 1:33:48
  I mean, I couldn't have asked for it a better poll to prove
• 1:33:53
  my point on this. Weirdly, the pole was given to Newsmax, which
• 1:33:58
  is a very pro Trump news organization, but it's a legitimate polling outfit,
• 1:34:02
  and they did something remarkable. They asked Republicans nationwide, and they asked Republicans
• 1:34:10
  in New York whose COVID response do you prefer New York's or Florida's? What
• 1:34:17
  a great question, getting right to the heart of the matter, and the
• 1:34:23
  results were oh, per fuckingwhelming. I mean, it's hard to get any
• 1:34:28
  group of people to agree on anything these days, but Republicans are almost unanimous
• 1:34:34
  when it comes to their response to this in a way that's very gratifying.
• 1:34:40
  At least gives me some hope that all is not lost here because ninety two
• 1:34:45
  percent of Republican primary voters in this poll would have preferred to live in Florida
• 1:34:51
  under Governor Rhnda Santis then in New York under Andrew Cuomo during the pandemic two
• 1:34:58
  percent of Republicans nation wide. Interestingly, seventy eight percent of Republican New Yorkers.
• 1:35:05
  They asked a hundred Republicans in New York, which is not a huge
• 1:35:09
  sample, but okay, it's interesting. A hundred New Yorkers who were Republicans,
• 1:35:15
  they asked, would you prefer Florida or New York during the COVID pandemic,
• 1:35:20
  seventy eight percent said they prefer Florida to New York. And by the
• 1:35:27
  way, you know, you could argue that not. Remember, it was
• 1:35:30
  a little bit smaller than the ninety two percent nationwide, partially because so many
• 1:35:32
  New Yorkers moved to Florida, so they're no longer New Yorkers to be part
• 1:35:35
  of the survey. So if you had counted the people that moved from New
• 1:35:42
  York to Florida during COVID, that number of seventy eight percent would probably be
• 1:35:45
  a hot lot higher. The bottom line here is this is overwhelming evidence that
• 1:35:51
  this is an incredibly significant and potentially potent issue when it comes to attacking Donald
• 1:35:59
  Trump. It goes right to Santis's wheelhouse and right to Trump's vulnerability. And
• 1:36:05
  I certainly hope that the Santis people, although I've not seen evidence of it
• 1:36:10
  yet, are going to change their mind about how big a deal they want
• 1:36:13
  to make out of this, because this, to me, is their last
• 1:36:16
  best hope to getting back into the race before it's too late. Now,
• 1:36:20
  it's interesting how incredibly dangerous the Left is already seeing Ron De Santis as being
• 1:36:29
  I've talked about this previously, but there's more evidence of it now. They're
• 1:36:32
  going after Casey de Santis, Ronda Santras's wife, the Daily Beast calling her
• 1:36:40
  the Walmart Melania, partially because she wore this cool leather jacket to an event
• 1:36:46
  in Iowa where she had a map of Florida on her back. And it's
• 1:36:50
  where the woke goes to die, is what it said. But she's beautiful,
• 1:36:56
  she's the mom of three young kids. She's smart, she's a spark
• 1:37:00
  plug. I mean, she is absolute asset to Rhonda Santis, and they
• 1:37:04
  are clearly seeing her as a threat, so they're going after her. By
• 1:37:08
  the way, Trump people are going after her as well because they see her
• 1:37:12
  as so dangerous. And the left in general sees Rhonda Santis as far more
• 1:37:17
  problematic than Donald Trump because Donald Trump is a buffoon. Donald Trump is unlikely
• 1:37:24
  to get elected. Even if he is elected, he's already proven he's impotent
• 1:37:28
  when it comes to getting stuff done. De Santis is exactly the opposite.
• 1:37:31
  He gets more stuff done than anybody. And the De Santis campaign, to
• 1:37:35
  their credit, is trying to capitalize on this particular narrative because this is a
• 1:37:41
  narrative that I think will resonate with the Republican voting base. As bizarre as
• 1:37:47
  it is, it has now become I think a reality that if the left
• 1:37:53
  thinks one particular candidate is the most dangerous or they fear the most, then
• 1:37:58
  that's the guy we want. And there's a lot of evidence of that.
• 1:38:02
  And the De Santa's campaign put that all together in a montage of liberal media
• 1:38:08
  commentators saying exactly that that it's Ron De Santis, not Donald Trump, that
• 1:38:15
  they really fear. And here's what that sounded like. DeSantis is an even
• 1:38:19
  greater threat to democracy than Trump. Make no mistake, Rond De Santis is
• 1:38:24
  an unrepentent vote suppressor and election tonyer. You know, if anyone out there
• 1:38:28
  thinks that somehow he is any better than Donald Trump, then they don't know
• 1:38:30
  Rond Santis. If you thought Donald Trump was bad, you've got another thing
• 1:38:34
  to me, because De Santis actually knows the system. But the real reason
• 1:38:39
  this man is so terrifying is because he's managed to succeed in areas where Trump
• 1:38:45
  has failed. Ron De Santis is far more dangerous than Donald Trump, far
• 1:38:48
  more dangerous than Donald Trumps. But he's also more competent. I think he's
• 1:38:53
  more cunning, he would be more able to get things done. He's smarter
• 1:38:57
  than Donald Trump. He's far more strict Jack, I say this with conviction.
• 1:39:00
  I think Rhonda Santis is far more dangerous than Donald Trump. He's running
• 1:39:04
  more to the extreme than Trump on several issues. He's a threat to our
• 1:39:10
  democracy and a threat to He's a threat. If Donald Trump becomes president again,
• 1:39:18
  who'll be less dangerous than Rhonda Santis? If Trump was the original terminator.
• 1:39:24
  The sanctis is like the t one thousand. People need to realize this.
• 1:39:27
  And I'm trying to talk about as much as possible because it's really scary.
• 1:39:30
  It's really scary. Now. There were a couple of town halls on
• 1:39:43
  cable news networks over the last couple of days that were of note. The
• 1:39:46
  first involved Donald Trump going on Fox News channel to do a town hall with
• 1:39:53
  Sean Hannity in Iowa. And this was noteworthy because Sean Hannity basically telegraphed that
• 1:40:00
  this was going to be nothing like the CNN town hall, which meant that
• 1:40:02
  he was just going to toss saftballs to Donald Trump. That he was actually
• 1:40:06
  bragging, essentially that there would be no tough questions for Donald Trump. There
• 1:40:12
  would be no questions from the right as there should be on the many issues
• 1:40:16
  where Donald Trump has drifted very strongly to the left, especially when it comes
• 1:40:21
  to things related to and criticisms of Ron De Santis, So there wasn't a
• 1:40:27
  lot of news of any real news made in that particular town hall. Interestingly,
• 1:40:31
  Trump admonished Hannity for joking about Joe Biden's health issues, that this is
• 1:40:39
  not an issue that it's appropriate to joke about. I think I understood Trump's
• 1:40:43
  point, which was that this is so serious because he's the president United States.
• 1:40:46
  But the idea that Trump is going to be the person who says,
• 1:40:49
  oh no, that's beyond the pale, we can't be joking about Joe Biden's
• 1:40:55
  health issues is more than a bit ridiculous. But I did at least reference
• 1:41:00
  and mentioned the fact that Trump did a town hall with Hannity where Hannity bragged
• 1:41:04
  about the fact that he wasn' going to ask him any tough questions. Nicki
• 1:41:08
  Haley did a CNN town hall, which I'm sure it was seen by dozens
• 1:41:12
  of people on Sunday night, and so with a minuscule audience, it doesn't
• 1:41:16
  really matter that much what was said. But I do think that it's worth
• 1:41:20
  noting that she didn't really go after Donald Trump very much at all, certainly
• 1:41:25
  not by name, but she did go out to ron De Santis, surprise,
• 1:41:29
  surprise, and she went after Rhnda Santis on the issue of Disney,
• 1:41:33
  where she completely lied about what's going on there and what De Santis's motivations are,
• 1:41:39
  what the real issues are. But the most important part of this is
• 1:41:44
  that, as I have said time and time again, everybody is uniquely incentivized
• 1:41:47
  to not go after the front runner. I mean, Donald Trump is winning
• 1:41:51
  the national polls, although I weirdly haven't been any major national polls since Rohnda
• 1:41:58
  Santa's officially announced. I would expect that to change this week, but as
• 1:42:01
  of this taping, there's been very little polling done post announcement that is reliable.
• 1:42:08
  But before De Santis announced, Trump was winning by thirty ft forty five
• 1:42:13
  points nationally. You've got this one chance to do a CNN town hall,
• 1:42:16
  and you don't go after Donald Trump. You go out to the guy that's
• 1:42:18
  in second place. Well, that's because of the bizarre in strength of incentive
• 1:42:24
  structure here, which I have talked about numerous times. That is one of
• 1:42:29
  the many, many hurdles that is likely to prevent Ronda Santis from being the
• 1:42:33
  Republican nominee, because nobody is incentivized to go after Donald Trump for many many
• 1:42:39
  reasons. And I was disappointed that Haley would go after De Santis in such
• 1:42:44
  a way because she's not correct on it. You want to go after and
• 1:42:47
  fine, but at least be accurate in what you're saying, and she was
• 1:42:51
  not. And I will say that as far as polling, the Santis camp
• 1:42:57
  maybe the only good news that has happened over the last couple of months,
• 1:43:00
  as Trump has taken a race that was largely tied and now gone out to
• 1:43:05
  a massive lead nationally and in most of the state, the key states is
• 1:43:12
  that there's been nobody that has emerged from the crowd of Pence and Haley and
• 1:43:19
  Ramaswami and now apparently Chris Christie or Asa Hutchinson or Larry Elder or somebody like
• 1:43:27
  that, who are all claiming to be running for president Tim Scott. There's
• 1:43:31
  been no indication as of yet that anybody has broken away from that single digit
• 1:43:38
  pack, low single digit pack, and that is actually the death knell if
• 1:43:44
  it ever did happen for De Santis. So as long as that doesn't happen,
• 1:43:49
  the Santis still has a puncher's chance. The steak through the heart for
• 1:43:57
  the DeSantis campaign would be if a Nicky Haley or a Tim Scott or vag
• 1:44:01
  Ramaswami suddenly got into double digits consistently and then all of a sudden, it
• 1:44:09
  wasn't just Trump versus De Santis. As long as the narrative remains Trump versus
• 1:44:14
  De Santis, and most of the polling is Trump versus De Santis, and
• 1:44:16
  they continue to use De Santis in general election polling against Joe Biden, then
• 1:44:24
  the Santis is still in the game. But if someone emerges from the single
• 1:44:28
  digit pack and challenges even remotely De Santis for that second position, then it's
• 1:44:35
  over. Now. I don't see that happening as of yet, there's no
• 1:44:39
  evidence of it, and I don't think that Nicki Haley's CNN town hall change
• 1:44:44
  that at all. And so that's good news, and so on that good
• 1:44:46
  news. That'll be it for this episode of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 1:44:53
  As is always the case, please remember to subscribe, rate, and review
• 1:44:56
  this podcast, share it with others shared on social media. If you do,
• 1:45:00
  hag me and I'll be happy to share it with my friends on Facebook
• 1:45:02
  and my Twitter followers. Until next time. This is episode number sixty four
• 1:45:06
  of the Death of Journals and podcast. My name is John Zickler. Thanks
• 1:45:10
  so much for listening.