Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode Sixty Two: Failure To Launch

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Episode Sixty Two: Failure To Launch · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number sixty two of the Data Journalism Podcast. My name is
• 0:04
  John Ziggler. I am your host on today's program, the aftermath of the
• 0:09
  desantist Twitter announcement, Trump stupidly opens the door on his pathetic COVID response,
• 0:15
  and an update on the never ending search for justice in the Jerry Sandusky Penn
• 0:20
  State case. I'm known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man. I'm a digital
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  the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot com. If you want to grow your business,
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  Peter can help. That's the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot com. And
• 0:59
  hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. Oh if you had a good Memorial
• 1:03
  Day weekend. On our last episode of the podcast, episode number sixty one,
• 1:07
  we actually did a special recording just after Ron de Santist finally officially announced
• 1:15
  his presidential campaign via a Twitter event with Elon Musk, and when I recorded
• 1:21
  that podcast, I have to acknowledge it may have been obvious at the time,
• 1:25
  although I tried to not make it as clear as it may have been
• 1:29
  otherwise, that I was livid. I was especially livid with Elon Musk because
• 1:34
  I believe that Elon Musk's ego was at the core of why the De Santists
• 1:40
  campaign launch was perceived and reported as somewhat of a disastrous event. Now I
• 1:48
  fully acknowledged that in reality what happened there was not that big of a deal.
• 1:55
  It was a twenty minute delay, and then it was a crappy chat
• 1:59
  room audio announcement that was supposed to be somehow new and exciting and different and
• 2:05
  have some connection to Elon Musk, who is a figure who is very,
• 2:09
  very popular, especially on the right these days, which is rather ironic given
• 2:14
  Elon Musk's history is especially with the electric car. But my basic concern about
• 2:19
  this was the perception. The perception is reality, and that narratives can easily
• 2:23
  be created, especially when your opponent is Donald Trump, and that Donald Trump
• 2:29
  and the Trump friendly conservative media. We're going to use the glitches and the
• 2:35
  delay and the rather poor production values of DeSantis's announcement to create this narrative that,
• 2:46
  you know, the whole failure to launch thing, that not ready for
• 2:49
  prime time thing, that this guy isn't up to beating Donald Trump, because
• 2:54
  after all, Trump is the showman. Trump's the guy who is twenty fifteen,
• 2:59
  and anouncement is still remembered and talked about because he walked down a golden
• 3:06
  escalator. I mean, not that that was that big of a deal,
• 3:08
  but it resonated with people, and this was a situation that was particularly critical.
• 3:15
  And this is where I guess I differ from most to Santas fans,
• 3:20
  who are, in my view, delusionally optimistic about the state of the race.
• 3:23
  I believe that there is very little time left to try to get back
• 3:28
  into this game. I have stated it many times, but it is important
• 3:32
  to repeat because I don't think many people understand it, and certainly the media
• 3:37
  is not reporting it this way. I'm beginning to think maybe the media is
• 3:39
  delusional and doesn't even understand how close we are to this thing officially unofficially being
• 3:46
  over, effectively being over. The mercy rule being called because Trump will shut
• 3:53
  down the debates, he will pretend as if there is no primary, and
• 3:59
  as long as he's fifty percent in the polls and nobody else is even close
• 4:03
  because of the split field, I think he can get away with that.
• 4:06
  I think there'll be elements of the conservative media that will actually praise him for
• 4:11
  that, and that anything that anyone who goes against that is actually somehow helping
• 4:15
  the cause of Joe Biden in the general election. And so it is imperative
• 4:21
  critical that in these next couple of weeks, De Santisa closes the gap,
• 4:27
  gets somewhere near where he was before Trump's indictment, so that Trump can't claim
• 4:34
  mercy rule, that he can't shut down the process. And the announcement was
• 4:40
  critical to being able to gain traction immediately and in a big way, and
• 4:46
  it did not go anywhere near as had been hoped or expected. And we
• 4:53
  now know and part of the reason why I tried to hold my ire in
• 4:57
  episode sixty one is I didn't have all the facts. Well, now it's
• 5:00
  becoming more and more clear that this was Twitter slash Elon Musk's fault. Not
• 5:06
  only did Musk acknowledge during the event that they had had previous problems whenever they
• 5:11
  used his own account to do something like this, and yet they still tried
• 5:15
  to do it that way. But it now has been learned that because of
• 5:19
  Twitter cutbacks, Twitter had just recently stopped paying for a particular service that was
• 5:27
  critical to make an event like this with so many people trying to crash into
• 5:31
  the Twitter space at one point, seven hundred thousand accounts tried to listen to
• 5:38
  the Santis's announcement via Twitter spaces, that that may have been a major reason
• 5:44
  why the whole thing collapsed. And so I have always said I am distrustful
• 5:49
  of Elon Musk. I am thankful for him for what he has done on
• 5:54
  free speech, especially when he bought Twitter, and what he has done in
• 5:57
  the fight against the revisionist history on COVID and trying to tell the truth about
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  what happened with COVID and the censorship that occurred during the COVID pandemic. So
• 6:06
  he deserves a lot of credit for that. But I have never trusted him,
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  not that I think he's evil, but I don't trust people with that
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  much power, that much money, that much celebrity to begin with, I
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  also think he's a bit autistic, and I think he could be a little
• 6:23
  bit nuts. But most importantly, I think he's got a massive ego,
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  and I think he either doesn't have people around him or who are willing to
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  say, hey, Elon, I don't think this is gonna work, or
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  his ego is so large that he thinks, well, you know what,
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  it's Elon Musk. So it's always going to work out in the end.
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  And by the way, if it doesn't work, and I think this might
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  have been really a big part of what happened here. If it doesn't work,
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  we've learned something on the path to making it perfect. Well, guess
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  what, Elon Ron de Santas only gets one shot at this, so you
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  might have learned something about Twitter. Space is great, because that's the way
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  it seems to be his m This is the way he does things. You
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  know, he fires rockets off and they explode and he thinks it's a success,
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  which because in his mind it doesn't matter how much money he wastes.
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  This is all a journey to learning how to perfect things. Well, was
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  he using Rhonda Santis as an experiment, and so in his mind it was
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  good And by the way Elon Musk was bragging about how much publicity it got
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  and how much attention it got. Yeah, but a lot of it was
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  negative attention. It might have been good attention for Twitter and Elon Musk's mind,
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  because you know the old all publicity is good thing, which is sometimes
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  true, but not in this particular case. And Elon Musk never took responsibility,
• 7:40
  He never took any blame, he never apologized. But this has a
• 7:45
  potentially very critical impact on Rhonda Santis at a very very critical time. This
• 7:51
  needed to be seamless. I still do not understand the strategy of doing something
• 7:56
  in an audio format. It makes no sense. There was no need to
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  re invent the wheel. The video is where we are in this world,
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  and this should have been a video event and I would have much much,
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  much, much much rather had this be a normal, typical whether it was
• 8:13
  a rally or maybe even just a TV interview. I still don't understand why
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  Elon Musk if he wanted to be part of it, because couldn't have done
• 8:18
  a live, one on one video interview with Ronda Santis that would have had
• 8:24
  all the benefits and other negatives of what ended up happening here. But I
• 8:28
  blame Elon Musk, and I blame Twitter, and I do believe it was
• 8:31
  a bigger problem than a lot of the Santis fans would like to believe.
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  There's no question that was a huge part of the media narrative about the announcement.
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  You only get one shot at an announcement, and you don't want technical
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  glitches in your headlines when you are running for president while you are down heavily
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  to a former president with a cult following about whom a large portion of the
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  conservative media is already very deep invested. Now, as is usually the case,
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  I am on the pessimistic side. I even put out a pole on
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  my Twitter feed asking people, okay, how damaging was this, if at
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  all, to the de Santis campaign, and the results were really much more
• 9:18
  optimistic than I am. The response was pretty strong, over seventeen hundred votes
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  of individual people. You can't vote more than once in a Twitter poll,
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  so well, it's not scientific. I think it's at least somewhat relevant,
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  especially given the nature of my account, which I'm assuming is filled with largely,
• 9:37
  although not totally, people who also are fans of Rhonda Santis. So
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  I asked the question the Rhonda Santis announcement on Twitter did not go as planned,
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  what is the best way to describe the impact it will have on his
• 9:50
  campaign? I gave four options, No real lasting impact, actually mostly positive,
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  Yeah, it will hurt a bit, or four it is rather devastating.
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  Well, no real lasting impact one with fifty nine percent of the seventeen
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  hundred plus votes. Actually mostly positive was second with seventeen percent. Yet it
• 10:13
  will hurt a bit is at fourteen percent, and it is rather devastating at
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  ten percent. So if you combine all that together, harmful but certainly not
• 10:24
  horrendous, more negative than positive. If you combine it'll hurt a bit with
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  devastating that's twenty four percent, as opposed to seventeen percent who think it is
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  mostly positive. So, as usually the case, I am on the more
• 10:41
  pessimistic side of this particular equation. Doesn't mean I'm wrong, doesn't mean I'm
• 10:46
  right, But I do think that we are at a very very critical time,
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  and while a perfect announcement may not have won the day, when you're
• 10:56
  this far behind and you're at this critical juncture, every little bit matters,
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  especially when it comes to narrative and of course Trump jumped all over this.
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  Trump predictably put out all sorts. He had one parody video mocking the whole
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  thing, which I'm sure his Trump fans loved. He put out another video
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  of a rocket with Ronda Santas's name on it failing to launch and exploding on
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  liftoff. It was exactly what Trump would have wanted. It played right into
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  what Trump is trying to do with regard to a narrative about the de Santis
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  campaign, which is partially why I was so livid about this. Now on
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  the bright side, On the bright side, the santa Is raised a really
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  strong amount of money in the twenty four hours after he announced, over eight
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  million dollars, so that's good. And there is only one poll as of
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  this taping where most or if not all, of the polling was done after
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  the announcement, and it was in Florida, and that poll indicates movement into
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  Santis's direction, where the Florida pole is now basically tied between Trump and De
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  Santis in both a multi person race as well as a head to head race.
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  In fact, the Santis is slightly ahead in the head to head race,
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  although within the margin of error. So that's good news. However,
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  which I'm going to get to a little bit later on, there was some
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  horrific polling, and I mean horrific polling that came out in the last few
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  days that was done before the announcement. And I am not of the belief
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  that the announcement, especially when it got got butchered the way that it did
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  by Elon Musk and Twitter, was going to have this magic on the race,
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  that we were suddenly going to reset to the way things were let's say
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  last November or December, even into January of this year, where the Santist
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  was effectively tied naturally almost tied naturally ahead in some key states, and that
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  this was very much a toss up race. I don't think it's going to
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  be magic. Even if it had been perfect. I don't think an announcement
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  would have been magic, but this one certainly was not perfect in at least
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  not in perception. Again, I want to emphasize de Santiss has made no
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  mistakes really in the substance of his announcement. Now, I will say part
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  of why I was also livid, and I didn't get into this very much
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  in episode number sixty one. I was not. I was, I would
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  say, more confused and concerned by some of the content of the Santist's announcement.
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  Number one, he didn't even mention Donald Trump's name. Now, it
• 13:52
  now appears a few days later that that was just part of a Day one
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  strategy, that the first day strategy be all about the Santis and his announcement.
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  So I'm okay with that, But at the time I was thinking,
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  wait a minute, is this the official campaign policy? That were that they're
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  not going to go after Donald Trump directly, They're not going to go after
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  him by name. That I found to be extremely concerning. But that has
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  not been the case since, and by the way, Trump has allowed that
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  to happen because of some mistakes that I think that he has made, which
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  he'll get to in just a second. But I was concerned about that.
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  I was also concerned about some of the points of emphasis that the Santist campaign
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  decided to focus on. There was nothing close to my narrative, which I
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  had hoped would be at least somewhat part of the original announcement, or at
• 14:52
  least in the aftermath of it. This whole idea of taking on the Biden
• 14:56
  Trump establishment, and that we don't want to have a rematch, and that
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  I'm the only opportunity to prevent this national nightmare of Biden versus Trump two point
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  zero. That has not been part of any of this as far as I
• 15:09
  can tell, at least not yet. Doesn't mean it won't be in the
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  future, but it certainly wasn't in this first wave of announcement content. And
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  so you know, I'm a critic by nature, but I was unimpressed by
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  the first twenty four hours or thirty six hours whatever it was of the Desantists
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  campaign and the announcement. But then something really strange, even by the standards
• 15:39
  of the Trump world, happened, where Donald Trump released a video out of
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  the blue. There was nothing really sparking it that seemed to me to be
• 15:50
  a dramatic unforced error. I mean, I have to say at this point
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  about the only evidence I see that the Santist could win this is that Trump
• 16:03
  doesn't seem to be convinced he's gonna win. In some of the things that
• 16:07
  he's saying, in some of the things that he's doing, in the way
• 16:11
  that he's saying them, he is not acting like a candidate that has this
• 16:15
  thing completely in the bag, which the polling would indicate in the history of
• 16:21
  him in the Republican Party and over the last seven years would indicate is very
• 16:25
  likely the case. And a lot of people have picked up on this,
• 16:29
  but it's it's very strange. It is it's very odd, and it opened
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  the door dramatically on what should be Desandis's number one issue. I mean,
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  I can't even imagine what the thought process was in the Trump camp or in
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  the Trump camp basically means Donald Trump at this point. So Trump looks at
• 16:49
  the perception of the announcement for DeSantis being a disaster, and he decides,
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  you know what I'm gonna do. I'm going to release a video taking Andrew
• 17:03
  Cuomo's side in the COVID response over Ron de Santis. That's what I'm gonna
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  do. I think that is where the Republican voting base is. Yeah,
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  they want they want me to raise the issue of COVID, and they want
• 17:18
  me to attack Ron Santis basically from the left and to praise New York's response.
• 17:27
  Andrew Cuomo's response, this is a guy who effectively killed people in a
• 17:32
  nursing home shut down. New York in ways that had no positive impact for
• 17:38
  far too long, ended up losing his job, not directly because of this
• 17:42
  but because of other allegations. But I do believe this indirectly played a role.
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  And so Trump is going to praise Andrew Cuomo in comparison to Ronda Santis
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  all I guess, I guess with the intention of trying to destroy this perception
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  that Trump is scared of and understandably so, the Desantist got COVID right and
• 18:11
  he got it wrong. And look, I believe that Trump knows this is
• 18:15
  the case. I believe it eats at him. I believe this is probably
• 18:21
  why he was effectively forced into this, this inexplicable error to even go in
• 18:27
  this direction, because his ego is so large. He can't stand the idea
• 18:33
  one that he got it wrong and that the Santists got it right and the
• 18:37
  Santis had balls when he had none. So he has to do these mental
• 18:41
  gymnastics to try to rationalize that no, no, no, no, De
• 18:47
  Santis actually did a bad, bad job during COVID, which by the way,
• 18:51
  is contradicted not just by the overwhelming mountain of evidence, but also by
• 18:59
  Donald Trum's own words. Donald Trump has praised Rhonda Santis and did so at
• 19:03
  the time, many many times, very publicly on video and in his COVID
• 19:10
  response. But of course, with Trump, past statements mean nothing, they
• 19:14
  have no impact. It's all about what's ever good for him or what he
• 19:18
  thinks is good for him in the moment. So he releases this video,
• 19:22
  which is just full of lies, full of distortions, comes to a conclusion
• 19:26
  that is absurd and in my view, opens the door on a topic that
• 19:33
  is not good for Trump and allows the Santis to get the upper hand and
• 19:38
  the moral high ground to counterattack. And here's what Trump had to say about
• 19:45
  that. When the Rhonda sanctimonious facts come out, you will see that he's
• 19:51
  better than most Democrat governors, but very average at best compared to Republican governors
• 19:56
  who have done a fantastic job. How about the fact that he had the
• 20:00
  third most deaths of any state having to do with the China virus or COVID.
• 20:06
  Even Cuomo did better. He was number four. He shut down everything,
• 20:11
  including the beaches. Other Republican governors didn't do that. They kept it
• 20:15
  open. It was their choice. I gave them all their choice. The
• 20:18
  Democrats blew it big. A lot of Republican governors did a fantastic job,
• 20:23
  and look at Disney and what a message is. Could have worked out an
• 20:27
  easy settlement, but no, he wanted to show the fake news how tough
• 20:33
  a guy he is. He's not, and the whole Disney thing is really
• 20:37
  very unfortunate. Now thousands and thousands of jobs of being stopped, and a
• 20:41
  lot of people are very upset about it. Thank you. Now, you
• 20:47
  could probably do an entire podcast about how inaccurate what Trump said there was about
• 20:52
  Florida's response to COVID, and you know it would be valuable. I don't
• 20:59
  have time, I'm or the inclination to do that. I've done so basically
• 21:02
  in the past. But the bottom line here is this that Trump is flat
• 21:07
  out lying about the bottom line. And he's I don't to say he's distorting
• 21:11
  statistics, is actually inaccurate. He's just making stuff up or doesn't understand or
• 21:18
  is pretending to not understand basic statistics. He's using raw numbers. He's not
• 21:23
  even accounting for population. And for the record, the per population, the
• 21:33
  population adjusted death rate for Florida and New York is very much a wash.
• 21:41
  It is basically the same. When it comes to deaths via COVID over three
• 21:47
  years, New York is slightly ahead. However, that doesn't account for age
• 21:55
  adjusted deaths per per per population. So it's an irrational metrics to be using
• 22:03
  to begin with. I mean, and by the way, the premise is
• 22:07
  unbelievably flawed that somehow deaths are the only standard by which COVID response should be
• 22:17
  judged. That is a liberal view. That's not a conservative view. That's
• 22:22
  a view that Trump himself, at one point during the pandemic tried to push
• 22:27
  back against where he used an analogy which I think is valid. He got
• 22:32
  mocked for it. But you know, if deaths are everything that matters it,
• 22:37
  if it's all about death, if that's the only metrics that matters for
• 22:41
  government, then government should be doing all sorts of things that they're not doing.
• 22:47
  And number one would be that the speed limit on our roads would be
• 22:51
  ten miles per hour and strictly enforced. Because if he did that, tens
• 22:55
  of thousands of people would be saved every single year. Now, the economy
• 22:59
  would comp shut down, but tens of thousands of lives would be saved.
• 23:06
  So we don't do that. We all have acknowledged, whether we think about
• 23:08
  it or not, as a society, that that's not the role of government,
• 23:11
  and that we just accept that there's going to be a certain number of
• 23:15
  deaths so that our society doesn't shut down. Now, very few people think
• 23:21
  of it this way, but there's no pushback in society to decide, Okay,
• 23:26
  we're going to save these tens of thousands of deaths by putting the speed
• 23:30
  limit at ten miles per hour, even though it would be extremely effective if
• 23:34
  we did so. So the entire premise is not just flawed, it is
• 23:41
  fundamentally catastrophically flawed. But on the facts it's also wrong because when you adjust
• 23:47
  for age and population, Florida did better than New York. And if you
• 23:52
  look at excess deaths, if you really want to talk about deaths, the
• 23:56
  only death number that conservatives conservatives should accept as legitimate is total mortality or excess
• 24:07
  deaths over the three year period. Okay, I am willing to accept that
• 24:12
  that number is relevant. Give me total deaths of your jurisdiction, your state,
• 24:18
  whatever, and if you want to know judge it by excess deaths.
• 24:22
  That's fine. So give me the excess deaths over three years, and by
• 24:27
  that standard, Florida did way better than average because excess deaths includes all the
• 24:36
  people who died either directly or indirectly because of the lockdowns, drug use,
• 24:42
  suicide, lack of medical care, all that kind of stuff. And Florida
• 24:48
  did better, way better than average when it came to excess deaths, especially
• 24:55
  when you adjust for age, which obviously Florida is one of, if not
• 25:00
  the oldest states in the country, and it was older people who were obviously
• 25:03
  far more vulnerable to COVID than anybody else. By the way, speaking of
• 25:07
  age and COVID, Israel just released data which is mind blowing, which the
• 25:15
  media of course ignores. Israel just released data that they did not have one
• 25:22
  death under the age of fifty due to COVID for a perfectly healthy person.
• 25:30
  In other words, the number of people under the age of fifty in Israel
• 25:33
  who died of COVID who had no comorbidities for the entire pandemic was zero zero.
• 25:45
  Now you would think that that would be headline news, but of course
• 25:48
  it's not. But it's an absolute fact. Check it out for yourself.
• 25:52
  So this idea that somehow Trump believes that Florida did poorly in comparison even to
• 26:00
  New York shows him either to be dumb, or to be a liar,
• 26:07
  or to be a liberal, or maybe all three, because only a dumb,
• 26:11
  lying liberal could possibly come up with that conclusion. Now, I want
• 26:18
  to say one other thing on this, on the data issue, and I've
• 26:21
  said this before, but again it bears repeating. If if going without major
• 26:29
  restrictions, as Florida did early on, not at the beginning, but very
• 26:33
  early on, far earlier than the nation did, far earlier than the Blue
• 26:37
  States did, if going without restrictions on COVID really made that big of a
• 26:42
  difference the data, or any real difference, the data would be overwhelming over
• 26:48
  three years. There would be no debate about this. There wouldn't be an
• 26:52
  argument of, well, they didn't do as great as Dessanta says. No,
• 26:56
  no, no, they would be the worst. If restrictions really mattered,
• 27:00
  if there was a correlation between more restrictions and less death, especially on
• 27:06
  excess death, which there's clearly no correlation at all between more restrictions and less
• 27:11
  excess death. But even if you accept their bogus data that we're just going
• 27:15
  to count count this based upon COVID deaths. Even if you do that,
• 27:19
  this should be a bloodbath in places like South Dakota, Georgia, Florida,
• 27:27
  maybe Texas to a lesser degree. You know, other red states that were
• 27:33
  much more, much more quickly went back to normal. Sweden, of course,
• 27:37
  internationally, should be the worst when it came to excess deaths. Sweden
• 27:42
  did anybody did as well or better than anybody else in the entire their entire
• 27:47
  region of Europe. So you know, Sweden was completely vindicated here. The
• 27:52
  media won't tell you that story. And frankly, I gotta say, if
• 27:56
  there was one sentence for why Rhoda Santis is advantaged in comparison to the way
• 28:02
  he should be when it comes to the Republican race and the potential general election
• 28:07
  race, it's that the American news media never vindicated Sweden. If the American
• 28:11
  news media had vindicated Sweden after they attacked them much like they did with Florida,
• 28:17
  then I think the Santists would have a much better chance. But to
• 28:21
  the vast majority of the American people, and I think a majority even of
• 28:23
  Republican voters, that narrative has never taken hold that the Santist was right and
• 28:29
  they were wrong. And this is a very incredibly critical point where Trump is
• 28:36
  effectively on the same side as the liberal media. The liberal media and Donald
• 28:41
  Trump have the same self interest, which is to protect the bogus narrative,
• 28:47
  to not acknowledge they were wrong when it mattered. And this is so critical
• 28:52
  not just to the election, but to the future because this narrative, if
• 29:00
  it holds, and if the Santis isn't the nominee, it will hold,
• 29:03
  it will hold forever. If Rond de Sandis is not the Republican nominee,
• 29:08
  the narrative that what we did on COVID, well, there might have been
• 29:11
  some minor screw ups, and of course we're gonna be scrubs because we've never
• 29:15
  dealt with us before, but by and large, we did the right thing,
• 29:18
  and you know, we did we did the best we could, and
• 29:21
  we should probably do exactly the same thing or close to it if it ever
• 29:25
  happens again. That narrative is going to hold if Ronda Sandis is not the
• 29:29
  nominee. Period end of sentence, because then you're gonna have Biden versus Trump
• 29:33
  two point zero. The two presidents during COVID so how else is history going
• 29:37
  to view that that vindicates both sets of COVID responses. For all intents and
• 29:44
  purposes, only in the Santis nomination can stop that from happening, And that
• 29:48
  narrative, if it holds, is death to America, because it's not just
• 29:53
  gonna happen again. If there's another virus, it's going to the same exact
• 29:57
  thing is going to be used already as being used with regard to global warming
• 30:00
  and climate change. And I think that ought to be a big part of
• 30:03
  the Santist's campaign, because I think one of the problems he's going to have
• 30:08
  here is making the COVID response relevant to what's happening today and the future.
• 30:17
  And I think people very naively don't see it. They think, wow,
• 30:21
  you know, it was one hundred years before we since we had a virus
• 30:23
  like this, the Spanish flu, So it's gonna be another hundred years.
• 30:26
  This is not something that's really on my radar. We're past it. COVID
• 30:30
  is in the rear of your mirror. It's in the dust bin of history.
• 30:33
  It's not they're gonna use anything they can to do it again, but
• 30:37
  they're specifically going to use global warm and climate change. What they realize they
• 30:42
  can get away with on COVID, they are absolutely going to use and already
• 30:47
  are trying with regard to global warm and climate change. And Trump doesn't get
• 30:51
  it on that issue any better than he did on COVID, and so I
• 30:55
  hope that that eventually becomes a big part of the the Santists campaign strategy and
• 31:00
  narrative now. But as far as the COVID response, I really got to
• 31:06
  say, I was stunned that Trump was this dumb to needlessly go down this
• 31:11
  path. I mean, this is his absolute weakness, and here he is
• 31:17
  opening it up, handing a gift to Ron de Sandis, just after his
• 31:23
  campaign has endured this embarrassing announcement on Twitter. Trump walks right into walks right
• 31:33
  into de Santis' best issue in a way that puts him far to the left
• 31:40
  of Rohn De Santis, and De Santis took advantage, and he went on
• 31:45
  Ben Shapiro's show, and Shapiro clearly is a guy who gets it, especially
• 31:51
  on COVID, and he clearly doesn't like Trump, and he clearly supports De
• 31:56
  Santis, although I doubt he'll ever say it publicly because it's too risky to
• 32:00
  say it declaratively and to actually endorse a guy who very likely is going to
• 32:05
  lose the primary, and then you have to spend it almost an entire year
• 32:08
  pretending that you're in favor of Trump Overbiden the general election to keep your business
• 32:13
  model afloat. But here is Ben Shapiro asking Rhonda Santis about Trump's video that
• 32:20
  we just played for you, and how, in his words, bizarre it
• 32:23
  is that Trump is still trying to rewrite history in a way that is not
• 32:30
  just inaccurate and also dangerous, but very much to the left of Ron de
• 32:37
  Santis, which is consistent with a lot of other things that Trump and his
• 32:39
  supporters have been doing in response to Ron de Santis. And here's what that
• 32:44
  sounded like today. The President's actually attacked you by suggesting that Andrew Cuomo has
• 32:49
  done a better job in New York, which is sort of a shocking thing
• 32:52
  coming from a president who's declared that he is the enemy of the left when
• 32:54
  it comes to COVID. Andrew Cuomo, of course, did not do a
• 32:58
  better job. He's been He's been sitting statistics suggesting using sort of absolutely numbers
• 33:02
  of people who died per state, as opposed to looking at population adjusted,
• 33:06
  which of course seems deeply dishonestout on a statistical level. What's your take on
• 33:08
  those attacks? They're very bizarre. I mean, first of all, Florida
• 33:13
  had less access mortality than California or New York. Part of that is because
• 33:16
  states like California had access mortality derived from the lockdown policies, which is really
• 33:22
  really avoidable mortality. But if he thinks Chromo handled it better, that's an
• 33:29
  indication if something like this were to happen again, he would double down and
• 33:32
  do what he did in March of twenty twenty. That was a difficult situation.
• 33:37
  We didn't have all the facts, and people can kind of understand,
• 33:39
  you know, if you did things that may not have worked out. But
• 33:42
  we all have to sit here today in twenty twenty three look back at March
• 33:46
  of twenty twenty and say Faucism was wrong, Faucism was destructive. Faucism has
• 33:53
  set us on this path with the Tears Act and the FED printing money,
• 33:58
  creating inflation and creating some of the economic problems that we have today. So
• 34:04
  if you could do it again, would he do the same thing? I
• 34:07
  sure, hope not. Now. From a substance perspective, I thought that
• 34:10
  was perfect. How many people saw it or exposed to it, I don't
• 34:14
  know. I doubt the mainstream news media picked up on it, because again,
• 34:16
  this is the Santis's biggest disadvantage. The mainstream news media has no self
• 34:23
  interest in allowing the Santist to get traction on this issue, and bizarrely,
• 34:30
  the mainstream news media is siding with Trump on this. I mentioned this earlier
• 34:36
  in this episode, where Trump and the mainstream news media have the same interest
• 34:40
  in maintaining the conventional wisdom narrative on COVID and how dangerous this is. So
• 34:50
  it's only going to be an issue that can resonate on the right. And
• 34:53
  because Trump controls much of the main quote unquote mainstream conservative media, I am
• 35:00
  dubious that this is ever going to get popular enough to have a major impact
• 35:06
  on the campaign. There are past elections, I would say all of them
• 35:13
  where the exchange we just played for you where Trump is siding with Democrat in
• 35:20
  New York when it came through COVID response over what Ronda Santis did and Desandis's
• 35:25
  rebuttal that that right there would be game set match for the nomination. If
• 35:31
  we lived in a rational world and this was something that every Republican voter was
• 35:37
  educated about and exposed to, it would be over for Trump. But we
• 35:43
  don't live in that world, and so desandists can only do what he can
• 35:46
  do. Although, by the way, I'm not real thrilled with the audio
• 35:51
  quality on de Santis's interviews, much like with the Twitter announcement, but that's
• 35:54
  another aside. I guess I don't understand why production values aren't better with all
• 36:00
  the money that the Santis has, but from a substance standpoint, that was
• 36:05
  dead on and the Santis is one hundred percent right on the facts and on
• 36:08
  the data. And he's also right in his analysis of how weird it is
• 36:13
  that Trump is coming at him effectively from the left. And I think maybe
• 36:19
  the most interesting element of this situation from a human perspective is that this really
• 36:27
  exposes how Trump's massive, colossal, way out of proportion ego how much of
• 36:37
  a negative impact that has on Trump's ability to respond to any situation. Because
• 36:45
  I'll be the first to acknowledge it, and I was talking with Steve Cortez,
• 36:50
  former Trump aide who now works on team to Santis, we interviewed him
• 36:53
  a couple of podcasts ago, good friend of mine. We both agreed that
• 37:00
  Donald Trump could end officially the nominating process today today if he simply acknowledged he
• 37:12
  was wrong in many parts of his COVID response, if he apologized for that
• 37:19
  and pledged with some level of credibility to make sure it never happened again.
• 37:23
  If Trump did that, which would be incredibly easy and simple, You could
• 37:29
  do it in two minutes, in two minutes, maybe five tops. You
• 37:36
  could do so in a way that was credible. You wouldn't even have to
• 37:38
  humiliate yourself. But all it would take for Trump to win the nomination and
• 37:45
  to Sanders's campaign would be to acknowledge reality that you screwed up, that you
• 37:52
  learn from your mistakes, and you are never going to let that happen again.
• 37:58
  If Trump did that, this thing is over. But Trump is physically
• 38:05
  and psychologically incapable of doing that. He's incapable. And this is a large
• 38:14
  part of why I was always in the camp that he is uniquely ill suited
• 38:21
  to be president of the United States, because that is a key element of
• 38:28
  someone's personality and psychology and makeup. To make them a decent leader and to
• 38:34
  make them a decent president, you have to be able to admit when you're
• 38:37
  wrong. You have to be able to change course. That's what the santist
• 38:43
  did on COVID. But Trump is incapable. He's still incapable. He's always
• 38:49
  going to be incapable. He's not going to change now in his late seventies,
• 38:52
  even when it's in his self interest. So instead of acknowledging mistakes,
• 38:59
  apologizing and pledging to never let it happen again, which would clench him the
• 39:05
  nomination, and I mean that sincerely, this thing would be a hundred percent
• 39:09
  over. It may already be very close to over, but it would be
• 39:14
  a hundred percent over if Trump did that. It doesn't even it doesn't even
• 39:20
  become considered by him to do that. It doesn't even come into his mindset
• 39:24
  to do that, because he's physically incapable of doing something that is absolutely paramount
• 39:34
  for any decent leader to be able to do. Forget about decent leader,
• 39:37
  any decent person, any decent human being, any decent parent. I mean,
• 39:45
  how in the world you could be functional without this ability is beyond me.
• 39:52
  But Trump doesn't even have it a little bit, and instead, instead
• 39:58
  of doing the right thing and thevious thing and the thing that would be most
• 40:00
  effective, Trump decides that he has to go in the other direction because I
• 40:07
  cannot admit I was wrong. That is like rule number one. It's like
• 40:12
  the most important commandment of Trump world is Trump can do no wrong. And
• 40:16
  for a huge part of his bass is cult base, that's fine, but
• 40:22
  that's not enough to win a general election, and it's certainly not enough to
• 40:27
  be a good president. And I was always concerned. One of my many,
• 40:32
  many objections to Trump being the Republican nominee in twenty sixteen and being president
• 40:37
  was what happens in a crisis. And I was a thousand percent vindicated in
• 40:43
  that when it came to COVID, even more so than I feared, because
• 40:46
  there were no balls and there was no ability to change course. There was
• 40:51
  no ability to admit when you were wrong, there was no ability to right
• 40:54
  past wrongs, there was no ability to combat the forces of progressivism and wokeism
• 41:02
  and liberalism. And he got had and he got schnookeerd, and he gave
• 41:07
  up his presidency to doctor Fauci and the rest. Unfortunately, his history and
• 41:10
  it's been far, far, far more damaging than certainly any Trump supporter understands,
• 41:15
  and certainly Trump would ever be willing to admit. And that's one of
• 41:20
  the many reasons why I'm so in favor of Rhonda Santis and why it's critical
• 41:23
  for the future of the country to the Santis at least be the Republican nombinee,
• 41:29
  so that this thing, at some level does not get set in history,
• 41:34
  as we responded basically correctly to COVID, because if that's the history,
• 41:39
  we're done. It's over in every possible way, not just with regard to
• 41:45
  response to pandemics, but regard to our value of freedom, our basic rights,
• 41:51
  the property rights, how we treat our kids, how we view people
• 41:57
  telling us what to do with our lives, whether we have taught me over
• 42:00
  our own lives. This goes to the very heart of who we are as
• 42:04
  a society. And if it's not corrected in any substantive or substantial way,
• 42:09
  it's over. And that really, to me, is the core of this
• 42:14
  entire Trump to Santis battle. If Trump wins and it's Trump Biden, then
• 42:20
  it's over. It's over in many many ways, but it's specifically over in
• 42:25
  that particular fashion, and I just find it amazing that I'll bet Trump is
• 42:31
  never even considered. You know, if I just admit I was wrong,
• 42:36
  here, tell the truth and say it's never gonna happen again, I'm going
• 42:42
  to be the Republican nominee without even a fight. But instead, you know
• 42:46
  what, I can't admit I was wrong. I'm just gonna make crap up
• 42:50
  to take Andrew Cuomo's side. When it comes to COVID over run to Satis,
• 42:55
  it's just pure insanity, and it at least gives the Santist some level
• 43:01
  of hope. And by the way, it's not just COVID where Trump is
• 43:07
  all over the map when it comes to his position where he just can never
• 43:12
  admit that he's wrong. He's now flipped on the entire Disney issue, which
• 43:17
  is just amazing. I mean, Trump has been harping on what a non
• 43:22
  issue Disney is and how Mickey Mouse is beating the Santists and that the Santist
• 43:28
  never should have taken on this fight. And then there was some polling data.
• 43:31
  I'm sure this was not coincidental, there was some polling data that indicated
• 43:37
  that Republican primary voters really hate Disney. That even surprised me. I mean,
• 43:44
  the numbers were overwhelming, that among Republican primary voters, Disney's approval was
• 43:50
  very, very low, and that the fight against Disney pulled extremely well,
• 43:55
  at least in theory. If you're Rhonda Santis and now, all of a
• 44:00
  sudden, over Memorial Day weekend, Donald Trump decides he's going to completely flip
• 44:07
  on Disney. Because of course, this is what a cult leader can do,
• 44:10
  because the cult members never hold you accountable for what you said previously.
• 44:15
  And this is part of why Trump just shifts his position constantly based upon what
• 44:20
  he thinks is good for him at that moment. But he posted on True
• 44:23
  True Social the following I guess you would call it tweet or whatever they call
• 44:28
  it on True Social. Disney has become a woke and disgusting shadow of its
• 44:32
  former self, with people actually hating it. Must go back to what it
• 44:37
  once was or the quote unquote market will do irreparable damage. This all happened
• 44:44
  during the covernorship of quote unquote Rob the sanctimonious. I have no idea why
• 44:49
  he calls him Rob. You put that in quotes there, but it's incredibly
• 44:52
  demeaning and disrespectful, but Rob the Sanctimonious instead of complaining now for publicity reasons
• 45:00
  only, he should have stopped it a long time ago. What had been
• 45:07
  easy to do still is exclamation point. I mean, there's so many problems
• 45:15
  with that, but the main one is Okay, If Ronda Sanctimonius, Rob
• 45:21
  the Sanctimonius should have been going after Disney long ago, then why were you
• 45:29
  bemoaning and criticizing him going after Disney at all? Just a few weeks ago,
• 45:35
  just a couple of days ago, a month ago, you put out
• 45:37
  a similar post that was a hundred and eighty degrees different from a substantive standpoint.
• 45:43
  That's number one. But number two. If this happened long ago,
• 45:47
  and it's all Rhonda Santis's fault that he let Disney get out of control,
• 45:52
  which is insane, then why didn't you ever say anthing about this while you
• 45:57
  were president of the United States? I mean, this is this is gaslighting.
• 46:04
  This is pure gaslighting. But for Trump's cult it will work. See
• 46:08
  now Trump is somehow to the right of the Santist on the Disney issue.
• 46:15
  The Santist isn't doing enough, He's not fighting. He didn't fight soon enough
• 46:20
  against Disney, and he's not doing it right, although he's not going to
• 46:23
  tell us what the easy solution of this problem is, mainly because he doesn't
• 46:28
  have one. But this is what Trump can get away with. And this
• 46:32
  is partially one of many reasons why I've always felt it was going to be
• 46:37
  very, very difficult to defeat Donald Trump in a Republican primary, because he
• 46:42
  is allowed to do things his opposition could never dream of being allowed to do.
• 46:49
  Trump can change his positions on a day to day basis dramatically, not
• 46:52
  just a little bit, and getting no blowback at all. Conversely, the
• 47:00
  Santist slightly clarifies his position in the Ukraine War, which is still a far
• 47:07
  more rational position than Donald Trump's is, and he gets brutalized by everybody.
• 47:15
  Meanwhile, Trump can can take whatever position he wants on any day. It
• 47:19
  can totally contradict what he said previously and it does not matter. But again,
• 47:24
  I think the most important element of this is this is not a guy
• 47:29
  who thinks he has the nomination wrapped up. He is I mean, whether
• 47:34
  it's opening the door on the COVID response idiotically, or shifting his position on
• 47:40
  Disney rather dramatically. These are not the statements of somebody who is extremely confident,
• 47:46
  and I have to say I'm not. I'm not sure why this is
• 47:52
  the case, because if I was in Trump's position, I would be rather
• 47:55
  confident right now on virtually every front, especially when when it comes to polling,
• 48:02
  Things couldn't look much better for Donald Trump. The Donald Trump luck seems
• 48:09
  to never run out, not when it comes to what's good for the country,
• 48:14
  but what's good for him. I mean, it's been legendary. He
• 48:16
  once said, it's with me. It's like magic. It just works somehow.
• 48:22
  And it's occurred many many times in his life, even when he was
• 48:24
  in great peril, whether it was when the banks were about to destroy him
• 48:29
  in the early nineties and they let him up the hook and gave him an
• 48:32
  allowance to pretend that he was still rich so that they could potentially get their
• 48:37
  money back via his brand, or whether it was after the access Hollywood taped
• 48:40
  during the twenty sixteen election when everyone thought he was done, and he survived
• 48:45
  that and survived two impeachments, he gets indicted and New York and his poll
• 48:53
  numbers go through the roof well, you know, here we have a situation
• 48:58
  where, because Trump is perceived as weak at the beginning of this Republican nominating
• 49:04
  process, a whole bunch of candidates get in that might not have gotten in
• 49:07
  otherwise, making it a crowded field, which is exactly what Trump wants and
• 49:12
  needs, and why he embraces everyone who comes into the race except for Ron
• 49:16
  to Santis, who he fears, because he knows the Santis is the only
• 49:20
  one that could theoretically beat him, and so Trump's weakness helps him in the
• 49:25
  Republican nominating process by getting all these candidates into the race and preventing the Santis
• 49:30
  from having a one on one clear shot. And I think I think a
• 49:35
  similar situation is occurring right now with Biden's polling. Biden is now so weak
• 49:42
  that it is taking away the electability issue from Ron to Santis, which might
• 49:49
  be the most important thing that's happened in the campaign over the last couple of
• 49:51
  weeks, maybe even more important than the Twitter announcement of the Santis's campaign,
• 49:58
  because up until a few weeks ago, you could still make a very strong
• 50:04
  argument with data to back it up, that Trump was clearly going to lose
• 50:08
  to Biden in a general election, and while I still think that's far more
• 50:14
  likely than not, it is becoming much more difficult to make that argument based
• 50:19
  on the data. Now the data can change, but Biden's approval ratings have
• 50:24
  absolutely positively dipped since his announcement, and I posited the theory at the time
• 50:31
  that this might be one of those situations where you get a reverse announcement bounce,
• 50:37
  because up until Biden announced via videotape that he was running for reelection,
• 50:45
  there was a thought among a lot of Democrats and independence well that maybe he
• 50:49
  wouldn't do this, and maybe there would be a better choice out there,
• 50:52
  and you know, there was hope, There was hope that we wouldn't end
• 50:58
  up with Joe Biden running as an eighty year old with signs of dementia.
• 51:02
  Well, now that that hope appears to have been dashed, it is clear
• 51:08
  that his approval ratings have gone down by two or three points and he is
• 51:14
  now at basically Trump's lowest level during his presidency. That's essentially where Biden is
• 51:22
  with regard to approval ratings. He's had his approval rating as low as thirty
• 51:28
  five percent in a CNN poll that just came out a couple of days ago.
• 51:34
  He's in a minus thirteen and a half at last check. Again,
• 51:38
  that is that's as bad as some of the worst Trump numbers while he was
• 51:45
  president Trump was, and so because Biden is now so weak, it's clearly
• 51:52
  helping Trump in these general election polls. Now, I haven't seen evidence of
• 51:57
  it in the Key States yet, which is all it really matters, but
• 52:00
  nationally, which creates perception Trump is doing much better against Biden than he was
• 52:07
  a few months ago. I think it has mostly to do with Biden's weakness,
• 52:13
  and so once again Trump gets the benefit of incredible luck. His own
• 52:16
  weakness creates a dynamic for the Republican nominating process that very much goes to his
• 52:22
  favor by having too many candidates in it. And then just when DeSantis gets
• 52:28
  into the race, someone who can actually beat him, someone who's not afraid
• 52:30
  to go after him, all of a sudden, the electability issue seems to
• 52:36
  be fading away, at least from a data perspective, that maybe it will
• 52:39
  come back, but right now it's becoming increasingly difficult even for me to make
• 52:47
  the data based argument that Trump is clearly the weaker general election candidate against Biden
• 52:55
  than DeSantis is, or that Trump is a sure loser in the general election.
• 53:00
  You can't make that based on logic and data right now and when you
• 53:07
  might be able to make it based on logic, because I do think things
• 53:08
  are going to change dramatically once it's Biden versus Trump. I mean, the
• 53:14
  left will pull out all the stops, and I mean all the stops to
• 53:17
  prevent another Trump presidency. So I still believe that Biden would beat Trump.
• 53:24
  I'm just not as positive of it as I was. And the reason is
• 53:30
  because the data has shifted as far as the data on the Republican side,
• 53:35
  and again, these are all data points that occurred before De Santis's announcement,
• 53:40
  so that's an important caveat. But boil boy, there have been some horrendous
• 53:46
  polling results recently, even in key states, and there's a weirdness of primary
• 53:53
  polling that for some reason, national polling seems to shift before or state polling.
• 54:00
  I don't I've never understood why this is the case, even as someone
• 54:04
  who worked as a polling analyst, but I have noticed this over many,
• 54:07
  many years, and so there seems to be a lag or a delay when
• 54:12
  it comes to state polls catching up with national polls and then vice versa.
• 54:16
  But I mentioned that there's a poll that has De Santis and Trump tied in
• 54:21
  Florida, which is nice that there's some level of a seeming bounce for DeSantis
• 54:27
  Aftter's announcement, But it's Florida. I mean, Santis has to win Florida.
• 54:30
  There's no if ands or butts about it. And the fact that they're
• 54:35
  only tied with a heck of a lot of undecided I don't think it is
• 54:38
  a particularly great news for DeSantis right now, but it's better news than he's
• 54:43
  getting elsewhere. There's a California poll out by the Los Angeles Times, which
• 54:47
  in February had De Santas up by eight now has Trump up by eighteen.
• 54:52
  That's a dramatic shift twenty six points. And I think to me, that
• 54:58
  California poll, and remember I mentioned the California poll in the podcast. I
• 55:02
  was a bit surprised by it at the time that the Santis was beating Trump
• 55:06
  in California because I've always perceived Republicans here in California as being very trumpy.
• 55:12
  To be a Republican in California, You've got to have tough skin, and
• 55:15
  so it's not I think there's a misperception that somehow, because California is such
• 55:20
  a liberal state, that Republicans must also be liberal Republicans, or be Rhinos
• 55:24
  or softer Republicans, and therefore somehow more predisposed to support the Santists. I
• 55:30
  don't believe that at all. It's the opposite. Those that are still Republicans
• 55:36
  in California tend to be very hardcore, and so I've always perceived them as
• 55:39
  being far more trumpy, and I thought it was great news that the Santists
• 55:44
  was somehow winning California back in February. Well now it's Trump by eighteen in
• 55:49
  California, and you might think, well, what difference does that make.
• 55:52
  Well, California usually has the most or among the most delegates to the convention
• 55:57
  because there's still a lot of Republicans here in California, though they're very dramatic
• 56:00
  minority, because California obviously is the most populist state, popular with the largest
• 56:07
  population almost forty million people in California. So although many of these people have
• 56:13
  been leaving to Texas and to Florida over the last couple of years. Anyway,
• 56:17
  the point of this is that I think that poll in California really illustrates
• 56:24
  the benefit of the news cycle towards Trump over the last couple of months,
• 56:28
  specifically regarding the indictment. But it's not just the indictment. I mean,
• 56:31
  it's the revisionist history on January sixth by Tucker Carlson. There's you know,
• 56:37
  things like the Durham Report, I mean, every little piece of information and
• 56:42
  even Tucker Carlson's firing I think somehow helps Donald Trump. But mostly it's the
• 56:46
  indictment. That the news cycle has been very, very much more favorable,
• 56:52
  bizarrely, strangely counterintuitively to Donald Trump over the last several months, from February
• 56:58
  to May. And now that's why Trump is up twenty six points in comparison
• 57:04
  to what he was back in February. Can that be reversed? I guess
• 57:07
  so, I guess. But because it's Trump, I'm much more skeptical of
• 57:14
  that. I mean, we're not dealing with Herman Kane here or Michelle Bachman
• 57:20
  or you know other people who led Republican primaries in the past for fifteen minutes
• 57:25
  simply because they were the flavor of the week or the month. That's not
• 57:30
  what Trump is. And I think a lot of the Santas fans are misinterpreting
• 57:35
  the polling data because they look back and they go, well, these kind
• 57:38
  of leads have evaporated in the past, and no one's really paying attention.
• 57:43
  Yeah, but you've never had an ex president with a cult and huge portions
• 57:47
  of the conservative media invested in not attacking them who's been around for seven years
• 57:53
  now as the leader of the party. So that's bad news. But frankly,
• 57:59
  that was nowhere near as bad a news as two poles that came out
• 58:02
  before De Santis announced in Iowa. And these were poles that were done after
• 58:09
  the Santists had, by all accounts, a very successful trip to Iowa,
• 58:13
  and Trump didn't even make it to Iowa because he claimed that a tornado watch
• 58:20
  prevented him from having his rally, and there was speculation it was really because
• 58:23
  the crowd wasn't what he was expecting and he didn't make the trip. And
• 58:28
  what was thought to be including by me, to be a fantastic weekend in
• 58:31
  Iowa for De Santists in comparison to Trump, did not show up in the
• 58:37
  polling at all. There were two poles that came out last week. One
• 58:42
  had Trump up twenty five, and this is a pro Trump firm, which
• 58:49
  indicated actually a shrinking somewhat, not dramatically, a shrinking somewhat of Trump's lead
• 58:55
  in Iowa. But it's still twenty five, which is a big number.
• 59:01
  Not catastrophic, but a big number. Very difficult to overcome when you're dealing
• 59:07
  with someone like Trump, who's so well known and so loved and according to
• 59:10
  the des Moines Register as an eighty percent of approval rating there among Republicans.
• 59:16
  So that's a tough hill to climb, not impossible. But there was an
• 59:20
  Emerson Paul which I didn't even see until I was preparing for this podcast,
• 59:24
  that an Emerson has been very very pro Trump for some reason. And I
• 59:29
  don't consider them to be that great a polling outfit. But I'm sorry,
• 59:32
  you still have to come up with some explanation for this. They have Trump
• 59:36
  up in Iowa by forty two points after that trip that the Santists made to
• 59:44
  Iowa where Trump stiffed Iowans forty two points. How do you spend that?
• 59:51
  I mean, that is that's just catastrophic. That's disastrous if it's even remotely
• 59:57
  based in reality. And so you know, again it's before the announcement,
• 1:00:02
  but we are, just as I have been saying, at a very very
• 1:00:07
  very critical juncture here. There are only a couple of weeks for DeSantis to
• 1:00:13
  get back in the ball game here. Otherwise Trump is going to shut down
• 1:00:16
  the process. And how you do that, I don't know. I don't
• 1:00:22
  know that there is a magic bullet anymore, because you're so far behind in
• 1:00:27
  many ways that I'm not sure that these attacks are going to be taken that
• 1:00:31
  seriously. I hope they are. And I'm not suggesting you give up.
• 1:00:37
  It's, you know, because the stakes are too high. I want to
• 1:00:39
  make that clear. In no way, shape or form am I ever saying
• 1:00:44
  that de Santis people should give up or de Santis should give up. I'm
• 1:00:47
  just trying to be realistic about what the chances are a victory, but the
• 1:00:52
  costs of defeat are so great that I see no other choice here. So
• 1:00:58
  I'm not giving up. I'm just telling you what the reality is. That's
• 1:01:02
  partially what this podcast is. This is reality based content and sometimes and oftentimes
• 1:01:09
  seemingly increasingly content is going to lead people to negative responses. It's going to
• 1:01:17
  seem pessimistic, because that's reality. I actually try to be as optimistic as
• 1:01:22
  possible given the reality that I'm sharing with you. And one issue that I
• 1:01:29
  wish, of many that I wish the Santists would be able to make resonate
• 1:01:34
  within the Republican base, and that should resonate, is one that he appears
• 1:01:38
  at least somewhat interested in, which surprised me, and it was very relevant
• 1:01:45
  this past weekend for a couple of different reasons. I'm referring to an issue
• 1:01:49
  that remarkably even the mainstream news media, the so called anti Trump news media,
• 1:01:54
  which really wants Trump to be the nominee, and they certainly don't want
• 1:01:59
  to help the Santists by correcting the record on COVID, that's for damn sure.
• 1:02:02
  But even the mainstream news media has completely ignored something rather extraordinary that happened
• 1:02:09
  regarding Donald Trump over Memorial Day weekend. And now I'm not referring to his
• 1:02:14
  backcrack crazy Memorial Day post, which was all about him and death and destruction
• 1:02:20
  and capital letters and typical insanity. I'm referring to the fact that Trump hosted
• 1:02:28
  a live golf event at his golf course just outside of Washington, DC.
• 1:02:35
  Now you might be thinking, John, what difference does that make so he
• 1:02:38
  supports live. I know you don't like live as a golfer yourself. You
• 1:02:44
  know, why would I care that Donald Trump is hosting a live golf event.
• 1:02:50
  Well, there's a good reason why you should care, because Donald Trump
• 1:02:54
  is doing this not once, not twice, but three times during the live
• 1:03:00
  golf season. This is the Saudi backed Greg Norman headed golf series that has
• 1:03:08
  Brooks Keepka and Phil Mickelson and some other former star players on the PGA Tour
• 1:03:13
  that have broken off and they're playing their own tournaments for you know where they're
• 1:03:17
  getting paid lots and lots of money to basically sell out the sport. In
• 1:03:22
  my view, Well, the reason when this is important has nothing to do
• 1:03:27
  with how corrupting live golf is to the sport of golf. It is to
• 1:03:31
  me, But I realized that I'm in a very very very very very very
• 1:03:36
  small group of people. The reason why it should matter to you or anyone
• 1:03:42
  that cares about the way we do business in the United States of America is
• 1:03:47
  that when Trump hosts a live golf event. What that really means. What
• 1:03:55
  that really means is Trump is accepting probably in the millions of dollars directly from
• 1:04:04
  the Saudi Arabian government. Now it's astonishing to mean, when I mentioned this
• 1:04:14
  online, how few people seem to understand how significant this is, especially by
• 1:04:20
  the way, when Trump and so much of the Republican Party is outraged over
• 1:04:26
  the allegations of influence pedaling against Joe Biden and Hunter Biden when it comes to
• 1:04:32
  foreign entities like China, which I'm against. But if you're going to be
• 1:04:38
  against that, then maybe it would be a good idea, if only for
• 1:04:43
  the imppearance of impropriety, for the inherent conflict of interest, which is dramatic,
• 1:04:50
  to not accept millions of undisclosed dollars. We don't know the exact amount
• 1:04:58
  because apparently no one's even asked Donald Trump about this, but millions of dollars
• 1:05:02
  it has to be. Millions of dollars has to be. And Trump has
• 1:05:08
  given up his courses three times. It's a huge portion of the entire live
• 1:05:14
  series is being played at Trump owned golf courses. So the Saudi Arabian government,
• 1:05:19
  which is sometimes adversarial to the United States, where obviously the vast majority
• 1:05:25
  of nine to eleven hijackers came from. There's some evidence that the Saudi government
• 1:05:29
  played a role in that, at least indirectly, but obviously on a day
• 1:05:34
  to day basis, they have us by the balls when it comes to the
• 1:05:36
  price of gasoline. So this is a country that is clearly adversarial in its
• 1:05:45
  foundation. When we may pretend to be friends with them, but the reality
• 1:05:49
  is that they have a lot of influence over life in America, if only
• 1:05:57
  via the price of gasoline. And here we have the Republican front runner,
• 1:06:01
  the clear Republican front runner. You could even argue the front runner to be
• 1:06:04
  the next president the United States, accepting what has to be millions of dollars
• 1:06:11
  in undisclosed money from directly from that government. There's not even like an inter
• 1:06:17
  mirror intermediary. This is effectively directly from the Saudi government. Where he is
• 1:06:25
  doing pr for the Saudi government. He does pr for liv golf all the
• 1:06:30
  time. He had Tucker Carlson come to a live event last year, and
• 1:06:36
  not just come to the event, he coerced Tucker Carlson into doing major interviews
• 1:06:42
  on his show including with Greg Norman and others promoting the LIVT Golf Tour.
• 1:06:46
  Why did he do that because he's in business with the Saudis. Plus he
• 1:06:51
  hates the PGA Tour because the PGA Tour, in his mind, screwed him
• 1:06:55
  because they took away one of the tournaments at his formerly famous golf course,
• 1:07:01
  Draw, where I spent many of the greatest moments in my youth. Another
• 1:07:06
  story for another day, but that used to be the host of one of
• 1:07:10
  the most famous PGA Tour events at Draw, and they took it away from
• 1:07:15
  him, and they put it in Mexico, at least temporarily, which should
• 1:07:19
  have been a major issue during the twenty sixteen presidential campaign that Trump, forget
• 1:07:24
  about building a wall in Mexico, couldn't even keep his own golf tournament from
• 1:07:28
  going to Mexico. But I digress. The reality here is Donald Trump is
• 1:07:33
  accepting millions of dollars from the Saudi government. We don't even know how much.
• 1:07:38
  No one's even asking him. He's promoting their entity. This is a
• 1:07:44
  massive conflict of interest, massive and it goes directly against the entire issue of
• 1:07:49
  going after Hunter and Joe Biden on foreign influence pedaling because one of the Saudi's
• 1:07:57
  getting for that, and I'm sorry, you can't. And this is where
• 1:08:01
  Trump gets away with everything because well, you know, Johnny's so rich,
• 1:08:05
  the money doesn't matter. Bullshit, bullshit. Money's all that matters to Trump.
• 1:08:12
  And I guarantee this, This money is in the millions. It's enough
• 1:08:15
  to get Trump's attention, and it's enough to get Trump to bring Tucker Carlson,
• 1:08:20
  who doesn't even like Golfwe I texted Tucker about this, and Tucker basically
• 1:08:25
  apologized to me for even doing the story because he didn't know anything about golf.
• 1:08:29
  Because I'm like, Tucker, yeah, I was like, dude,
• 1:08:32
  you just promoted something that's terrible, and he's like, yeah, I probably
• 1:08:35
  shouldn't have done it. I can't remember the exact text, but I probably
• 1:08:39
  shouldn't have done it. I don't know anything about golf. So this is
• 1:08:42
  not a passive situation here. This is something that Trump is invested in rather
• 1:08:47
  deeply, and the media won't even mention it, won't ask any serious questions
• 1:08:53
  about it. Well, DeSantis, much to my surprise and I'm pletly surprised.
• 1:09:00
  Over Memorial Day weekend, he met with the group of nine to eleven
• 1:09:05
  families that have been campaigning against the Lib Golf Tour because they believe that it
• 1:09:12
  is wrong for the LIB Golf Tour to basically whitewash the Saudi Arabian government,
• 1:09:18
  which they believe played a key role in the deaths of their family members on
• 1:09:23
  nine to eleven, and it did so a Memorial Day weekend. Now,
• 1:09:28
  I have to say the nine to eleven aspect of this, while important,
• 1:09:33
  has never been the most important element of this to me, and I get
• 1:09:39
  why people look at it that way, and I'm fine with what the Santists
• 1:09:44
  did to me. The most important part of this is that the Santists clearly
• 1:09:47
  sees it as an issue, and I hope he raises this issue of conflicts
• 1:09:53
  of interest with Saudi Arabia. How much influence or impact or residents that will
• 1:09:58
  have I have no idea, because I know too much about this, and
• 1:10:01
  I'm clearly in a very very small group of people who care passionately about it.
• 1:10:06
  But I do think that there's some level of the population, if at
• 1:10:11
  least among Republican voters, if they could be educated properly about this, that
• 1:10:15
  it might have some level of an impact because this is wrong, and it's
• 1:10:19
  particularly wrong when you're trying to make the argument that the Bidens and Joe and
• 1:10:25
  Hunter should be attacked for basically doing the same thing with China. How is
• 1:10:30
  it how is it wrong for the Bidens to do it when you're doing the
• 1:10:36
  exact same thing with Saudi Arabia. I have no idea, but it's someone
• 1:10:42
  who ought to at least asked Donald Trump that question, and to my knowledge,
• 1:10:45
  no one ever has, and I hope the Santists will eventually make this
• 1:10:50
  one of many many issues where I think Trump is vulnerable. Now. One
• 1:10:55
  of the many reasons why I have said that this election is incredibly critical is
• 1:11:01
  that I am in the camp that if Biden wins, he will absolutely resign
• 1:11:06
  in twenty twenty seven, and that Kamala Harris will be a historic first female
• 1:11:13
  president person of color, and that will actually allow her to then run for
• 1:11:17
  reelection as an incumbent in twenty twenty eight and then again in twenty thirty two.
• 1:11:21
  Because of basically a loophole in the Constitution, she'll be able to serve
• 1:11:26
  ten years. She'll be theoretically the last president to be able to do that.
• 1:11:32
  I don't know who the hell knows what's going to happen to our constitution
• 1:11:34
  in the future. But I've been surprised by how difficult it is to get
• 1:11:41
  people to believe that that's what's going to happen. There is so much over
• 1:11:45
  confidence when it comes to whether or not Kamala Harris could ever be elected president.
• 1:11:51
  People are so convinced that she's so unpopular in such a terrible candidate that
• 1:11:56
  there's no possible way she could ever be elected. And I get why people
• 1:12:00
  don't like her. I get why she is indeed a terrible candidate, but
• 1:12:03
  people are not paying attention to the way the world is changing. I mean,
• 1:12:09
  first of all, John Fetterman just got elected Senator in Pennsylvania well without
• 1:12:14
  being able to form a sentence and effectively lying about his physical condition. Joe
• 1:12:19
  Biden, if for this scenario to even occur, will have to be elected
• 1:12:24
  in twenty twenty four at the age of eighty showing signs of dementia. So
• 1:12:30
  why as an incumbent in twenty twenty eight would it be a stretch for Kamala
• 1:12:34
  Harris to be elected when Republicans would very likely have no viable candidate largely because
• 1:12:43
  of Trump. Let's say Trump is the nominee in twenty twenty four, right,
• 1:12:45
  and he loses to Biden, So who's going to be the Republican candidate
• 1:12:50
  to go up against terrors in twenty twenty eight? Trump again one more time.
• 1:12:55
  Very likely if he's alive, they'll try to do it. So you're
• 1:12:58
  going to do Trump for a fourth consecutive time in his eighties. De santists
• 1:13:03
  if he gets wiped out, will effectively be neutered in twenty twenty eight,
• 1:13:09
  He'll be unemployed at that time. COVID will be hopefully ancient history. So
• 1:13:14
  who would be the next person in the line? Who would be the next
• 1:13:17
  Granted things can happen, but it's hard to imagine who there would be.
• 1:13:23
  There would be a viable person, a very strong candidate to take Harris on
• 1:13:27
  in twenty twenty eight, plus being an incumbent historic female. By it's fascinating
• 1:13:32
  that the press is very certain that she's a female. We don't know what
• 1:13:36
  the definition of woman is anymore, but we know Kamala Harris is a female
• 1:13:40
  when it suits our purposes. But anyway, the point is that she would
• 1:13:45
  be running as an historic incumbent, which will be an incredibly powerful force wind
• 1:13:51
  at her back against no viable candidate. And so to me, I think
• 1:13:58
  that well, obviously events happen. The most likely scenario if Biden wins,
• 1:14:04
  is Biden Harris mostly Harris for the next twelve years after that, and that's
• 1:14:11
  the end of the country. Well, I think there was more evidence that
• 1:14:15
  my theory is correct with regard to how well the media is willing and able
• 1:14:20
  to prop Kamala Harris up. That occurred this past weekend. Harris gave the
• 1:14:27
  commencement address at west Point, the US military college obviously Army as they're known
• 1:14:35
  in college sports, so the West Point Academy. She gives the commencement address.
• 1:14:42
  She's the first woman to do so. Again, hilarious that the media
• 1:14:46
  is very certain that she's the first woman. They know what the definition of
• 1:14:49
  a woman is when it comes to the history that fits their agenda. And
• 1:14:56
  what did she tell the cadets who were graduating at West Point. She told
• 1:15:00
  them, among other things, that the threat of climate change. Climate change
• 1:15:09
  is their biggest challenge. That's right, climate change is the biggest challenge facing
• 1:15:15
  the people. The cadets who are graduating from the West Point Military Academy,
• 1:15:20
  our premier military academy. They're going into the military for at least the next
• 1:15:27
  five years, and climate change is going to be among the most important factors
• 1:15:35
  that they will face, the biggest challenges they will face, if not the
• 1:15:39
  biggest challenge that they will face as members of the military. This is a
• 1:15:44
  fantasy, This is absurd, this is comical. I mean, she might
• 1:15:49
  as well have said facing ghosts would be the biggest challenge you will face in
• 1:15:57
  your military career. Climate change, even if it was real, even if
• 1:16:01
  man made climate change was real, is not going to be anywhere close,
• 1:16:06
  not in the top one hundred of the biggest factors or challenges the US military
• 1:16:13
  will face. And then let's say the next five years, which is what
• 1:16:15
  the military commitment when you go to West Point is. But even if you
• 1:16:19
  consider longer period of the time than that, it's not climate change. It's
• 1:16:24
  not even close. And the fact that she would say it, if we
• 1:16:28
  had a real news media, if we had a fair news media, if
• 1:16:31
  we had a news media that wasn't in the tank for any liberal female of
• 1:16:35
  color like she is, she would be mocked for that. But there's no
• 1:16:41
  mocking. Instead it's stated, and you know, except on the right,
• 1:16:45
  it stated very credibly, and you know, with you know, all sorts
• 1:16:50
  of glowing praise and great pictures of her, you know, in West Point
• 1:16:56
  giving the commencement address, and this has all taken very, very seriously,
• 1:17:00
  and she looks very presidential, being the first woman to give this a commencement
• 1:17:05
  address at West Point. And it just drives me crazy because one it's ridiculous,
• 1:17:12
  and two it's an indication of how broken the news media is. And
• 1:17:15
  in three, this issue of global warming climate change drives me bananas to begin
• 1:17:19
  with, especially living here in California. Interestingly, over the weekend, the
• 1:17:25
  San Francisco Chronicle, this is one of those smoking gun news articles where these
• 1:17:30
  people are so stupid that they don't even understand what they're doing. This is
• 1:17:35
  how dumb these climate change reporters really are, where if you have any ability
• 1:17:44
  for cognitive thinking or reasoning, you go, wait a minute, you just
• 1:17:48
  disproved your entire case. And the San Francisco Chronicle did that over the weekend
• 1:17:55
  in an article under the heading of climate This was their headline, and it
• 1:18:00
  hit me on several levels. Headline one of last glaciers near Yosemite was about
• 1:18:08
  to disappear. Then came snowy winter. Subheadline California's ancient glaciers have been pushed
• 1:18:17
  to the brink by the recent drought. This year's huge snows have provided relief,
• 1:18:27
  but for how long? All right? Now, for those of you
• 1:18:30
  who don't know, I talk a lot about Yosemite being the epicenter of California's
• 1:18:36
  climate. One because it is, and two because my family. Because my
• 1:18:42
  wife loves Yosemite more than anything. She loves it way more than she loves
• 1:18:45
  me. And she'll be the first to acknowledge that we go there every single
• 1:18:48
  year, at least once a year, usually during the summertime. And I
• 1:18:54
  find Yosemite fascinating. That's just because it's beautiful, but because it really does
• 1:18:59
  give you all the history of our climate that you could possibly ever want.
• 1:19:02
  And in my view, Yosemite single handedly, Semite Valley, single handedly proves
• 1:19:09
  that the entire concept of man made global warming climate change is inherently bogus.
• 1:19:15
  Why Well, because Yosemite Valley was created by glaciers, glaciers that started melting
• 1:19:23
  ten thousand years ago, which is why there is this magnificent Yosemite Valley to
• 1:19:30
  begin with. And so what caused the glaciers to start melting ten thousand years
• 1:19:40
  ago? It wasn't the Industrial Revolution, it was natural climate change. And
• 1:19:46
  that's how you get Yosemite Valley from glaciers that melted way, way, way,
• 1:19:53
  way way before there was any concept of man having any influence theoretical or
• 1:20:00
  in reality over our climate. And there are a few remnants of those glaciers
• 1:20:06
  still left near Yosemite, and that's what this article is about. So inherently,
• 1:20:14
  if you have a brain, you look at this article and you go,
• 1:20:16
  wait a minute, California's ancient glaciers. Yeah, they are ancient,
• 1:20:21
  So why have they almost disappeared if they were ancient? So you're saying that
• 1:20:29
  long ago Yosemite was way way colder than it currently is. Yeah, that's
• 1:20:34
  what we're saying. Well, wait a minute, doesn't that blow your entire
• 1:20:38
  argument to bits? And what's this part about what happened this year? So
• 1:20:43
  wait a minute. You're saying that some of the glaciers still, at least
• 1:20:46
  the remnants of them exist, and now they're being reborn because we just had
• 1:20:53
  a massive snow year record levels of snow. Well, how does that fit
• 1:20:59
  into your global warming climate change narrative? And then there's the issue of who
• 1:21:03
  the fuck cares like somehow that you know, I mean that somehow if these
• 1:21:11
  glaciers were to disappear, that it would be somehow devastating. There's they would
• 1:21:15
  have no impact on anything. The only thing we care about with regard to
• 1:21:20
  Yosemite in the Sierra Mountain Ranges is the snowpack in any given year, because
• 1:21:27
  that's where we get a lot of our water. Well, this year,
• 1:21:29
  the snowpack is literally at a record level. It is. It's such a
• 1:21:32
  high level that we are really very concerned about our vacation, which is going
• 1:21:39
  to be scheduled this year either for June. We have a backup plan for
• 1:21:45
  the end of July. Because there's so much water in Yosemite right now,
• 1:21:49
  then on a day to day basis, they might end up closing the place
• 1:21:54
  because of flooding. Now, it hasn't happened recently so far, and we're
• 1:21:59
  optimistic as of this taping, but that's how much water there is. I
• 1:22:04
  mean, the La Times, I don't know, it was about six or
• 1:22:08
  seven years ago, did an article. I'm gonna go have to find this
• 1:22:12
  when we go on our trip, saying that water in Yosemite will be a
• 1:22:18
  thing of the past by the time August rolls around. Then, in other
• 1:22:23
  words, it's gonna be so dry in Yosemite that it will be routine that
• 1:22:29
  by August Yosemite Falls will go dry and the streams will basically turn into trickles
• 1:22:35
  and there'll be no real water because water is the essence of everything in Yosemite.
• 1:22:41
  That this was a legitimate news article that they put out there. Well,
• 1:22:45
  this year in August, it's gonna look like it's March or April,
• 1:22:50
  and there's gonna there's gonna be water in Yosemite through October and November. In
• 1:22:55
  fact, we already h I said my wife. As their fiftieth birthday coming
• 1:22:59
  up in October, I said, why don't we look at a trip for
• 1:23:02
  Yosemite in October because normally it's dry, and Yosemite's not that great when it's
• 1:23:08
  dry. But this year it's going to be a completely different experience. And
• 1:23:12
  we looked into it, and you can't get any reservations because everyone's thinking the
• 1:23:15
  same thing. This is supposed to be in the middle of this horrendous historic
• 1:23:20
  drought that is the proof of global warm and climate change, because California is
• 1:23:26
  the epicenter of supposedly the horrendous global warm and climate change that we're all enduring.
• 1:23:32
  Well, California this year has proven that it's all a bunch of bologny.
• 1:23:38
  We've had the wettest coldest snow used winter by far in the twenty years
• 1:23:44
  that I have lived here. It's still cold in California. In fact,
• 1:23:47
  it's still cold in Yosemite to the point where the snow isn't melting as fast
• 1:23:53
  as they had feared. They had told us that we're going to be all
• 1:23:55
  sorts of massive floods, and that hasn't thankfully occurred as of yet. So
• 1:24:00
  every single and every single turn of these people are wrong. But I found
• 1:24:03
  this San Francisco Chronicle article to be hilarious because it's the glaciers in Yosemite that
• 1:24:10
  really are the smoking gun that this is all bulk crap. And if you
• 1:24:14
  have any ability to think for yourself, this article proves it. By the
• 1:24:18
  way, the glaciers in Yosemite and the history in history there are are so
• 1:24:25
  damning to the global warming climate change narrative that they've actually changed the verbiage in
• 1:24:30
  the Yosemite Museum. I've posted pictures of this on Twitter in recent years to
• 1:24:35
  conform to the global warming climate change narrative, because of course they're all environmental
• 1:24:42
  wackos there, and so I mean, it's all just insanity. And it
• 1:24:48
  really is important in the post COVID world, which already referenced earlier in the
• 1:24:54
  podcast, with regard to how they're going to use what they found out during
• 1:24:57
  COVID and what we'll put up with to be able to forward more and more
• 1:25:00
  restrictions on life in the name of stopping global warming and climate change, by
• 1:25:06
  the way, somewhat related. It's certainly within the realm of environmentalism, and
• 1:25:11
  it's certainly within the realm of the news media being totally broken. The US
• 1:25:15
  Supreme Court issued a remarkable ruling a few days ago on an issue that was
• 1:25:20
  related to protections of wet lands and how much control the federal government has over
• 1:25:27
  what can be done over such property. In the case basically revolved around whether
• 1:25:32
  or not and Idaho family was allowed to build a house on their own land,
• 1:25:40
  not a particularly complicated issue, at least not if you believe in the
• 1:25:45
  essence of property rights in the American Constitution and freedom, liberty and all,
• 1:25:50
  that this was such an obvious case decide in favor of the people from Idaho,
• 1:25:58
  We're trying to build a house on our own land. That the decision
• 1:26:03
  by the US Supreme Court was unanimous nine zip, which never happens in the
• 1:26:10
  Supreme Court anymore, never ever, ever happens. Yet the Supreme Court decided
• 1:26:15
  nine nothing in favor basically of property rights over environmental wackoism. That's how overwhelming
• 1:26:25
  this case was. That even the insane liberals on the Court sided in favor
• 1:26:30
  of property rights nine zero. But that's not how it got reported. Somehow,
• 1:26:35
  the Washington Post and The Hill and other media outlets, and even the
• 1:26:41
  Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer all reported or tweeted out that this was a five
• 1:26:47
  four conservative decision and that it was such a terrible decision that even Brett Kavanaugh
• 1:26:55
  had voted with the liberals in the minority, and that this was the conservative
• 1:27:00
  attack on environmental protections. Bullshit, five to four was on and the opinion
• 1:27:11
  about how they came to the unanimous conclusion this was not debatable. What I'm
• 1:27:17
  telling you this is a fact. And yet in many news articles a couple
• 1:27:21
  of ended up having to be corrected. But in certainly in the original versions
• 1:27:28
  and in their headlines, major news media outlets did not understand that this was
• 1:27:33
  the unanimous decision, and they all pretended that it was five to four,
• 1:27:38
  all to create this narrative that somehow John Roberts, who voted in the majority,
• 1:27:44
  who's not a conservative anymore, is somehow in an extremist against environmentalism.
• 1:27:50
  That's just ridiculous. This was a technical five four that had nothing to do
• 1:27:57
  with the actual decision which was nine. Nothing unanimous, I mean, and
• 1:28:01
  that's incompetence. That's a liberal agenda combined with massive incompetence, and that's how
• 1:28:08
  you get the death of journalism right there. I mentioned that Kamala Harris was
• 1:28:14
  speaking at West Point in the commencement address. There was another commencement address that
• 1:28:17
  happened the week before that I wanted to mention, and this is a situation
• 1:28:24
  where I can't be totally transparent, which I normally would like, because I
• 1:28:28
  need to protect some sourcing here. But I'll assure you that my sourcing on
• 1:28:31
  this is extremely good. And what happened was at Boston University, David Zaslov
• 1:28:40
  gave the commencement address. This was two weekends ago. Now as of this
• 1:28:45
  taping, I didn't even know about this in our in our last taping of
• 1:28:48
  the podcast until my source alerted me to this in very dramatic detail. Kid
• 1:28:55
  did get some media coverage. As I would later go back in research,
• 1:28:58
  I think what happened was I was playing in a golf tournament at the time
• 1:29:00
  and missed what occurred. But basically, David Zaslov is the most powerful media
• 1:29:08
  owner in America, if not the world right now. He owns Discovery I
• 1:29:13
  guess that's what they're calling it now. Discovery has HBO and Warner Brothers and
• 1:29:17
  CNN and all sorts of other companies. And he was speaking at his alma
• 1:29:24
  mater, Boston University. Big moment for David Zaslov. Now, Zaslov is
• 1:29:28
  a liberal, he's a democratic donor, like anybody in Hollywood would be expected
• 1:29:33
  to be, especially at the executive level. And his speech, which had
• 1:29:39
  absolutely positively nothing to do with this issue, got interrupted, not just a
• 1:29:44
  little bit, not just mildly, not just one or two times, got
• 1:29:48
  interrupted continually by a couple of hundred Boston University graduates. These were people who
• 1:29:55
  were willing to destroy their own graduation ceremony to create a disturbance on behalf of
• 1:30:02
  the Writer's Guild who is striking currently in Hollywood, the Screenwriter's Guild. One
• 1:30:10
  of my best friends is a member of the Screenwriters Guild. He's currently on
• 1:30:13
  strike and and it's causing all sorts of problems in Hollywood. And you know,
• 1:30:19
  obviously, you know the biggest issue is payment and benefits. And in
• 1:30:26
  one of the key problems I think here is the specter of AI and how
• 1:30:31
  it is that AI in not too distant future could really replace a lot of
• 1:30:36
  the writers when it comes to things like entertainment and Hollywood and movie projects and
• 1:30:43
  TV projects, and that diminishes the writer's leverage. And so the writers aren't
• 1:30:48
  getting what they want. And the strike is continuing, and David Zaslow is
• 1:30:54
  one of many many owners who at least has some level of say in the
• 1:31:00
  final resolution of that strike is going to be well, some genius, I
• 1:31:03
  use that term loosely, somehow got a number of students, like I said,
• 1:31:09
  in the hundreds who were graduating at Boston University to protest on behalf of
• 1:31:15
  the Screenwriter's Guild. Now, how they did this, I have no idea.
• 1:31:17
  Why the hell you would give a crap about the Screenwriters Guild when you're
• 1:31:23
  a graduate at Boston University. I'm really confused by. My guess is that
• 1:31:30
  they were able to convince a couple of hundred of these graduates that this was
• 1:31:34
  the woke cause of the moment and that this was something that they could stand
• 1:31:41
  up for at their graduation ceremony and signal their virtue and attack a guy who's
• 1:31:45
  super rich and isn't sharing the wealth with those who work for him. Again,
• 1:31:50
  Zaslof has very very little impact directly over the resolution of this strike,
• 1:31:58
  but he's a symbol right because he's a massive media owner. Even though he's
• 1:32:02
  a liberal, he's somehow the embodiment of everything that's wrong with capitalism, I
• 1:32:08
  guess in the minds of these these super woke at Boston University graduates, and
• 1:32:14
  so they disrupt his speech continually in really beyond inappropriate fashion, completely inappropriate fashion.
• 1:32:25
  They're screaming at him, there's cursing at him. The leadership at Boston
• 1:32:30
  University is right there they do nothing, nothing. They are afraid of their
• 1:32:38
  own graduates. They won't even stand up and say knock it off. I
• 1:32:42
  mean, my god, we have we have as a society gotten to the
• 1:32:46
  point where somehow we're so afraid of these wokesters that even the president of Boston
• 1:32:53
  University won't stand up and say knock it off. I mean, this has
• 1:32:58
  happened many times in the past. I remember, most famously Sam White,
• 1:33:00
  who is the head football coach of the Cincinnati Bengals. His crowd was acting
• 1:33:06
  inappropriately once and he famously got on the microphone and said, knock it off.
• 1:33:11
  You live in Cincinnati. You don't live in Cleveland. You don't live
• 1:33:14
  in Cleveland. That's something people in Cleveland would do. And it was fantastic.
• 1:33:18
  Well, this isn't that difficult a thing to do, I mean,
• 1:33:23
  to stop this. And there was no effort to stop this at all,
• 1:33:29
  none. And Zasloff was, as anybody would be, very very perturbed.
• 1:33:35
  And and this is where I get a little bit into a situation where I
• 1:33:41
  have to protect sourcing. Let me just tell you I have it very reliably
• 1:33:45
  that this effort by these students backfired spectacularly, and that this may have been
• 1:33:54
  a situation where a guy who is very liberal and who as a Democratic donor,
• 1:34:01
  may have had his eyes opened to just how insane the this wokeism has
• 1:34:10
  become and how pervasive it is, especially among the younger generation. Now.
• 1:34:14
  I don't know what that's going to mean as far as actual impact, but
• 1:34:16
  this is a very powerful guy, and and it is my as terrible as
• 1:34:24
  this event was and tragic and sad and disheartening and infuriating, there may have
• 1:34:32
  been some good that came out of it because a very powerful person may have
• 1:34:36
  firsthand experience now instead of in a theoretical sense, firsthand experience with just how
• 1:34:44
  nuts these people are and how out of control this has gotten, and how
• 1:34:49
  how how there has got to be some pushback here. Otherwise we're toast as
• 1:34:57
  a society. Again, I don't want to overst ate it, but I
• 1:35:01
  did find this story to be important on a number of levels, and I
• 1:35:06
  wanted to share it to you with you because of that. As far as
• 1:35:11
  other things going on in the movie industry, I do think it's important to
• 1:35:14
  point out, especially since I referenced Disney earlier that the Little Mermaid movie came
• 1:35:18
  out this past weekend Memorial Day weekend, and did much better than a lot
• 1:35:25
  of people expected. The audience score was so good that some people have speculated
• 1:35:30
  there's something fishy going on with that. I have no way of knowing if
• 1:35:32
  that's true or not. But the Little Mermaid remake had created some controversy because
• 1:35:38
  the lead character is a black female, as opposed to in the cartoon version
• 1:35:45
  being a white redhead. Now it's a Mermaid, so I don't know what
• 1:35:48
  race Mermaids is supposed to be. And this is not an issue that I
• 1:35:51
  really care very much about, except for the fact that I have two young
• 1:35:54
  daughters who loved The Little Mermaid, both of whom have seen the trailer for
• 1:35:59
  the new Little Mermaid and both had very negative reactions to it. My older
• 1:36:03
  daughter, Grace, about whom I've spoken many times on the podcast, is
• 1:36:06
  about the turn eleven years old. She feels as if she's being played.
• 1:36:11
  She's angry about it. She gets it. Now. How much that comes
• 1:36:14
  from me, I don't know. I mean, I don't talk to her
• 1:36:15
  that much about this kind of stuff, but I'm sure she picks it up
• 1:36:18
  via osmosis that we're living in this politically correct woke world, and she immediately
• 1:36:24
  realizes that she's being played, that this is a play by Disney to somehow
• 1:36:31
  be woke or to signal their virtue by showing that they can change a major
• 1:36:38
  white character to a black character, and that she didn't like it. My
• 1:36:43
  six year old daughter, Diana also had a visceral reaction because she's like,
• 1:36:46
  wait a minute, doesn't look like Mariel at all? Is that racist?
• 1:36:50
  I don't think it's racist. I just think that they grew up believing that
• 1:36:55
  Mariel looked one way and now she looks completely differently. The part that offends
• 1:37:00
  me the most is that there's been reporting about this controversy that has described and
• 1:37:04
  I've saw this in more than one news outlet described the choice to make Mariel
• 1:37:12
  a black girl as quote unquote color blind casting. That conservatives have a problem
• 1:37:19
  with quote unquote color blind casting. Wait a minute, so hold on,
• 1:37:27
  So you're really gonna believe that Disney just happened to put a black female into
• 1:37:32
  the role of Mariel, that just they did an open casting call and they
• 1:37:38
  just decided that the best person for the role just happened to be a black
• 1:37:43
  female. Really, that's what you believe. I mean, I don't know
• 1:37:46
  how you could believe that when you're looking around the rest of the world and
• 1:37:49
  realizing what's actually happening. Now again, I wish I believe that that's what
• 1:37:55
  happened. I wish I believed that the best person got the role, regardless
• 1:37:59
  of there of their race. But I don't believe that because I live in
• 1:38:03
  the real world and I see everything else that's going on, and I see
• 1:38:05
  where Disney is headed as a company. So it's impossible for me to come
• 1:38:11
  to that conclusion. But to call it color blind casting is just insulting.
• 1:38:16
  Of course, it's all intended to make conservatives look racist for having any problem
• 1:38:20
  with this, And so the fact that this movie has done well is going
• 1:38:26
  to be seen as a victory for wokeism and for liberalism and for quote unquote
• 1:38:30
  colorblind casting, or that there's no punishment for doing things purely out of wokeism
• 1:38:38
  or virtue signaling. That's what I really think it is. This is virtue
• 1:38:41
  signaling, Hey, we're going to show you our virtue by changing an iconic
• 1:38:45
  white character and making them black, even if it doesn't make any goddamn sense
• 1:38:49
  within the plot, of the movie, which I have not yet seen and
• 1:38:53
  which my daughters really haven't expressed much interest in going to see, which is
• 1:38:58
  mildly surprising to me and I think indicative of the larger problems that Disney has.
• 1:39:03
  But at least for the first weekend, I don't know what that will
• 1:39:06
  maintain itself into future weekends. The Little Mermaid did better than some people expected,
• 1:39:13
  and I think that that was worthy of mention. I promoted at the
• 1:39:16
  top of the show that I have an update on the never ending and usually
• 1:39:21
  losing battle for justice when it comes to the Penn State Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky
• 1:39:27
  case, which of course I've been investigating for over eleven years now, and
• 1:39:31
  which is the basis for our epic podcast With the Benefit of Hindsight, which
• 1:39:36
  I co hosted with Lizza Bieven, who was which was produced by Mike Agavino.
• 1:39:42
  Agavino also produces this podcast of journalism, and an episode number fifty eight,
• 1:39:49
  if you haven't listened to it already, I heard you to do so.
• 1:39:51
  We did an interview with Keenan Trotter, former reporter at The Insider,
• 1:39:57
  who for years investigated the case with the intent to write a major piece along
• 1:40:03
  with another writer at The Insider about how everyone got it wrong on the Jerry
• 1:40:09
  Zanduski case. And it's a fascinating interview. It's frustrating as how to listen
• 1:40:13
  to, but if you have not yet listened in episode fifty eight, I
• 1:40:15
  urge you to do so. It's about two and a half hours long,
• 1:40:18
  but it's worth it if you care about this topic or if you care just
• 1:40:21
  about the death of journalism in general. So that's episode fifty eight with Keenan
• 1:40:27
  Trotter. Well. Part of the reason why we did the interview with Keenan
• 1:40:30
  Trotter when we did it is that Jerry Sandusky had another appeal hearing last week,
• 1:40:36
  and even by the very low standards of this case, I am told
• 1:40:43
  by all accounts that this was a disaster. This was such a disaster that
• 1:40:48
  maybe, just maybe some good might come out of it, because I guess
• 1:40:53
  in theory, maybe Jerry Sanduski will finally realize that he has no hope in
• 1:40:59
  state court. My biggest problem with Jerry recently has been I thought I had
• 1:41:02
  convinced him at his attorney's urgings a couple of years ago to ditch state court
• 1:41:09
  and to go into federal court where he might actually have a chance, because
• 1:41:13
  a federal judge is not elected and a Pennsylvania state judge is, and the
• 1:41:18
  entire state of Pennsylvania is very, very deeply invested in Jerry Zanduski's guilt and
• 1:41:24
  the entire false narrative surrounding the case, and so he's never going to get
• 1:41:28
  a fair hearing there. But the problem is that if he goes into federal
• 1:41:30
  court and he loses once, then it's all over. You can't go back
• 1:41:33
  into state court. And Jerry is terrified of what he's going to do with
• 1:41:36
  the rest of his life in prison with no hope and nothing to occupy his
• 1:41:41
  time, and so that's why he's going back into state court. Well,
• 1:41:45
  this particular appeal hearing, by my perception, was horrendous at every level.
• 1:41:53
  Jerry wasn't even able to go, apparently because of a health issue. I
• 1:41:59
  don't know what the health issue is. I mean, logically, maybe he
• 1:42:02
  tested positive for COVID or something wasn't allowed to go. I don't know.
• 1:42:06
  He recently, I do know, lost his two front teeth biting into an
• 1:42:12
  apple apparently, and so the poor guy was unable to go to this hearing.
• 1:42:16
  I know he'd been looking forward to this hearing for months. It's really
• 1:42:20
  all he has to live for at this point, because he knows he's innocent,
• 1:42:25
  and he's desperately trying for something good to finally happen. And so they
• 1:42:31
  get this evidentiary hearing. He can't go for health reasons, he doesn't have
• 1:42:35
  his two front teeth. They put him up on a zoom call so that
• 1:42:41
  he can see and hear what's happening. But from what I understand from speaking
• 1:42:45
  to Gary Schultz, one of the threepence state administrators who was convicted in this
• 1:42:51
  case falsely for their role in a cover up that didn't happen, that Jerry
• 1:42:58
  could not hear. He could not there was something apparently technically wrong with the
• 1:43:03
  zoom set up. So Jerry's not there in person, he can't hear in
• 1:43:09
  the zoom. They then decide to have a phone hook up so that Jerry
• 1:43:15
  can hear on the phone what's going on in court. Jerry's still trying to
• 1:43:21
  tell the judge he can't hear. The judge basically just says, all right,
• 1:43:26
  well, sorry, we tried your judge. Your lawyer is here,
• 1:43:30
  Jerry, So that's all that really matters. So screw you, So,
• 1:43:34
  Jerry, poor guy, he's got whatever health issues that are keeping him from
• 1:43:40
  attending, he's lost his two front teeth. He can't even see or hear
• 1:43:45
  what's going on in this hearing, which I know for sure he's been looking
• 1:43:48
  forward to for a long time. He's now left to put all his faith
• 1:43:55
  in his lawyer, Al Lindsay, who I have always been exceedingly unimpressed with,
• 1:44:00
  and I'm sure he's less impressive than he even was then because he's getting
• 1:44:02
  older. He's I don't know how old he is, but he's definitely into
• 1:44:05
  his seventies, if not older than that. He should be retired at this
• 1:44:09
  point. He's got the worst combination of being a moron and an egomaniac.
• 1:44:14
  And by all accounts, he did a very very mediocre at best job with
• 1:44:19
  the substance of the hearing. The judge was obviously one hundred percent on the
• 1:44:25
  prosecution side, according to Gary Schultz and other people who attended this particular hearing,
• 1:44:31
  And not only did the evidentiary hearing part of this go very poorly from
• 1:44:38
  Jerry Sandusky's standpoint, not because he doesn't have a case just because the judges
• 1:44:42
  in the tank and the lawyers sucks, and the standard of proof is so
• 1:44:46
  incredibly high. But there was another element of this whole thing which was really
• 1:44:50
  infuriating, which was, I'm trying to simplify this as much as possible.
• 1:44:55
  Basically, they build Jerry Sandowski forty five thousand dollars for extra court costs that
• 1:45:02
  were associated with his trial. Now, let's be clear why those court costs
• 1:45:08
  happened. They were all because of the massive media coverage that the trial created.
• 1:45:14
  So let's do the math on this. So the media, railroads,
• 1:45:17
  Jerry Sandusky, they create an atmosphere that causes this to basically be the Salem
• 1:45:24
  which trial. They go bananas, creating a moral panic, and because of
• 1:45:30
  all that, they're extra court costs that are accrued supposedly to the tune of
• 1:45:38
  forty five thousand dollars that now Jerry Senduski has been billed with. So the
• 1:45:44
  media, railroads, Jerry Sandusky, and Sandusky, who has basically no money,
• 1:45:50
  is now being charged with the extra costs associated with his own railroading.
• 1:45:58
  The whole thing is enough to make you insane if you don't at least at
• 1:46:00
  some level laugh at it. But this sounded like it was very sad,
• 1:46:05
  and of course the coverage of it was typically awful, if for no other
• 1:46:11
  reason. You know, if the news media had a fricking brain and any
• 1:46:15
  objectivity on this case at all, they would at least at least go You
• 1:46:20
  know, this hearing didn't really provide much light on the case. But boy,
• 1:46:26
  isn't it interesting that Gary Schultz, one of the three Penn State administrators
• 1:46:31
  who was convicted of supposedly covering up for Jerry Zandoski, attended this hearing.
• 1:46:41
  Isn't that odd? Don't you think somebody in the media should go up to
• 1:46:45
  Gary Schultz and say, Gary, are you here in support of Jerry Sandowski?
• 1:46:49
  Which Gary would have said, I believe him to be innocent. He
• 1:46:54
  deserves a new trial. That's almost for sure what Gary would have said.
• 1:46:58
  He's said that numerous interviews with me and with also Lizza Biebe. So why
• 1:47:04
  would you not ask Gary Schulz? I mean, that's extraordinary that Gary Schultz
• 1:47:09
  is attending Jerry Sanduski's appeal hearing. It was mentioned that he was there in
• 1:47:15
  passing, and at least one news article that I saw, but no comment
• 1:47:19
  on that, the significance of that, No comment from Schultz on why he's
• 1:47:25
  there. Similarly, Penn State Board of Trustees, remember Anthony Lebrono was there.
• 1:47:31
  Well, how does that make any sense? Lebrono has access to more
• 1:47:36
  information on this case than anybody on the planet, much of it never made
• 1:47:43
  public. And I know Anthony Lebrono knows Jerry Sanduski to be innocent, and
• 1:47:50
  he was there for the very same reasons that Gary Schultz was there. You
• 1:47:55
  don't ask Anthony Lebrono why he's there. At the very very least, the
• 1:48:01
  presence of Gary Schultz and Anthony Lebrono should make somebody in the news media go
• 1:48:06
  gee, I wonder if there's more to the story here, Because these guys
• 1:48:12
  are two people who are at the epicenter of the whole ordeal. They have
• 1:48:15
  more information than anybody. In Schultz's case, he went to jail allegedly for
• 1:48:20
  covering up for Jerry Sandoski and he's here at his appeal hearing in support of
• 1:48:29
  Jerry Sandowski. How does that make any sense? Well, it only makes
• 1:48:31
  sense if you understand the whole goddamn story, which is the whole thing is
• 1:48:35
  a scam. It was a fraud, it was a panic. It didn't
• 1:48:41
  happen. The good guys are the bad guys are The bad guys are the
• 1:48:44
  good guys, which we proved in our podcast with the benefit of hindsight.
• 1:48:48
  By the way, in my very extensive conversation with Gary Schultz, he told
• 1:48:54
  me that if it hadn't been for scheduling conflicts, Graham, span, you're
• 1:48:59
  also would have been at Jerry Sandoski's appeal hearing. Now, that would have
• 1:49:02
  been interesting. I'm sure the media would have reported that exactly the same way
• 1:49:08
  they reported the presence of Schultz and Lebrono, but without any questioning whatsoever.
• 1:49:15
  That would have been really weird, I mean, but I'm very confident the
• 1:49:18
  media still would have not connected any dots that Graham's man, you're the guy
• 1:49:24
  who got fired at Penn State and went to jail allegedly for covering up for
• 1:49:28
  Jerry Sindski, that he and Gary Schulz are sitting there together at Jerry Sindoski's
• 1:49:32
  appeal hearing, were a member of the Penn State Board of Trustees also there.
• 1:49:36
  How does this make any damn sense? But of course no we can't
• 1:49:40
  ask any questions. No, we have our narrative and we're just gonna stick
• 1:49:44
  with it, and we're just gonna hope Jerry Sindski dies before anybody really starts
• 1:49:48
  getting to the bottom of any of this, at least those that have not
• 1:49:51
  listened to the podcast with the benefit of hindsight, or maybe read Mark Pendergrass's
• 1:49:57
  book The Most Hated Man in America, or seeing some other articles written by
• 1:50:01
  some other people, or maybe read a chapter in Mark Malcolm Gladwell's book Talking
• 1:50:06
  to Strangers. The reality is this is the biggest injustice in modern times.
• 1:50:15
  It's not even close. It's the most remarkable story that you've never heard,
• 1:50:19
  the proper telling of accept in our podcast with the benefit of hindsight. And
• 1:50:25
  I don't see, unfortunately, any way of fixing this unlesson until Jerry finally
• 1:50:31
  decides to go to federal court, which is the only tiny silver lining of
• 1:50:35
  this story I'm telling you, which I gotta believe, even as naive as
• 1:50:40
  Jerry Zandoski, is that as poorly as this thing went, he has to
• 1:50:45
  be he has to be closer. I would think, I'm hoping got to
• 1:50:50
  be closer to finally pulling the trigger and going into federal court. But at
• 1:50:54
  this point, Jerry's in his late seventies. He's not in great health.
• 1:50:58
  Now, I'm not in bad health, other than his teeth apparently, and
• 1:51:01
  so hopefully he'll still be alive for a little bit while longer. You never
• 1:51:04
  know at that age, especially when you're in prison. But that's the only
• 1:51:09
  hope for this. And interestingly, according to Gary Schultz, there are still
• 1:51:14
  people behind the scenes who are delusionally optimistic about this thing still being salvageable,
• 1:51:20
  who are more and more convinced, largely by our podcast with the benefit of
• 1:51:25
  hindsight, that the whole thing indeed was a scam, and that Jerry Sanduski
• 1:51:29
  is innocent, and that therefore obviously Penn State, Joe Paterno, the three
• 1:51:32
  administrators, they were all innocent as well. I do not share that optimism,
• 1:51:38
  because I've been through this rodeo many, many, many times before.
• 1:51:41
  But I just find it interesting that there are still people naive enough to think
• 1:51:45
  that this thing can still be fixed because the truth is on their side and
• 1:51:49
  that supposedly the truth still matters. Well, in this case, the truth
• 1:51:54
  does not matter, at least not to date. And I see no reason
• 1:51:58
  why that, unfortunately, is ever going to change anytime soon. Although I
• 1:52:02
  am not giving up on that one either. I mean, I don't have
• 1:52:05
  the same passion for it as I used to be, especially after Frank o'
• 1:52:09
  harris died, But you know, I'm still trying things behind the scenes whenever
• 1:52:15
  possible, and I will keep you updated whenever warranted. So that's the update
• 1:52:20
  on the Jerry Sandusky and Joe Paterno and Penn State story. By the way,
• 1:52:26
  I do want to mention one of the things connecting a couple of stories
• 1:52:30
  that we talked about in this podcast. Mike mcquerie, the main witness in
• 1:52:33
  the case, the only witness in the case, the guy I believe we
• 1:52:35
  destroyed in with the benefit of hindsight, the former Penn State assistant coach who
• 1:52:41
  allegedly saw Jerry Sanduski rape a boy in the Penn State shower, but he
• 1:52:45
  actually did not, and we proved it. We didn't just raised doubt about
• 1:52:48
  it. We proved what actually really did happen and when it actually really did
• 1:52:53
  not happen, and how the dates were all screwed up. That's episode number
• 1:52:57
  one. With the benefit of hindsight. He's handed a the live golf event
• 1:53:01
  hosted at Donald Trump's golf course over the weekend, and a supporter of mine
• 1:53:09
  took some pictures of him talking up some lady friends. Mike is divorced now,
• 1:53:14
  but of course he's rich from the judgments he got as an alleged whistleblower,
• 1:53:17
  which was absurd in the whole Penn State case. And the pictures I
• 1:53:23
  posted on my Twitter feed were pretty funny, So if you want to check
• 1:53:27
  those out and some of the things I wrote about what Mike might have been
• 1:53:29
  saying to his new lady friends, go and investigate that for yourself in my
• 1:53:33
  Twitter feed, which is at a Zigmund Freud. That'll do it for episode
• 1:53:39
  number sixty two of the Death of Journalism. Thanks so much for listening.
• 1:53:42
  Please remember to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. If you shared
• 1:53:45
  on social media, please tag me and I'll be happy to share it myself.
• 1:53:48
  Until next time, thanks so much for listening. My name is John Ziegler.