Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode One Hundred One: Begging For Forgiveness

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Episode One Hundred One: Begging For Forgiveness · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and one of the Denta Journalism podcast. My
• 0:04
  name is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show. We review a
• 0:08
  ton of news since our last regular episode, including a lot of revisionist history
• 0:13
  on the COVID panic, and we complete part two of Ask John Anything.
• 0:20
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• 1:00
  Well, a lot has happened since our last news based episode, which
• 1:03
  was episode number ninety nine. If you happen to have missed episode number one
• 1:07
  hundred, I urge you to take a listen to it. Not only did
• 1:11
  we do the first half of Ask John Anything your questions to me about virtually
• 1:15
  any legitimate subject. But also I outlined the state of the podcast and our
• 1:23
  plans to end the podcast in early, very early twenty twenty four, so
• 1:27
  check that out if you have not yet listened to it. But because of
• 1:32
  episode number one hundred being our essentially one year anniversary and Asked John Anything,
• 1:37
  there's a bunch of stuff to catch up on. Also, a lot of
• 1:40
  things have happened in the interim. I want to get through as much of
• 1:42
  this as I can as possible, as quickly as possible, so that this
• 1:47
  isn't a four hour episode. We'll see how we do. We begin with,
• 1:51
  obviously probably the biggest news story of the last week in the United States
• 1:56
  of America, which is the massacre that occurred in Maine because of a nutjob
• 2:01
  who shot up a couple different locations in Maine. Thirty one people were injured.
• 2:07
  In total, eighteen people were murdered killed. It's obvious that this person
• 2:14
  had very great mental problems and was on the radar of law enforcement prior to
• 2:22
  the massacre. Of course, immediately this becomes overtly politicized. The Left tries
• 2:28
  to use this as yet another example of why we need more gun control.
• 2:31
  Interestingly, the state of Maine, which is a rural state, and it's
• 2:37
  a liberal state generally, but it's also fairly pro gun and the gun laws
• 2:43
  there are fairly rational, although recently they had tried to limit the ability of
• 2:51
  the mentally ill to gain firearms, and so there have been some new restrictions
• 2:55
  in the realm of firearms and guns. And you know, this is a
• 3:01
  situation that has no real answer. It's a little bit like the Middle East.
• 3:07
  There's no good resolution to this. We have the Second Amendment for a
• 3:12
  reason. I think the Second Amendment has been a little bit misinterpreted, but
• 3:15
  I'm generally a very strong proponent of the freedom of Americans to buy and own
• 3:23
  guns. I actually believe that when you have, for instance, concealed carry,
• 3:29
  it is a disincentive to these kinds of things happening, because the gunman,
• 3:34
  the nutjob never knows for sure whether or not someone that they're attacking may
• 3:38
  have a gun themselves. Now, there is concealed carry in Maine, although
• 3:44
  it's a little bit complicated because in certain towns you need to have a permit
• 3:49
  for concealed carry. I have no idea, and we'll probably never know because
• 3:53
  the person is now dead who committed these atrocities, whether or not that was
• 3:59
  even in the mind mindset of the person who went on this rampage, whose
• 4:02
  name I will not use. However, I did think it was interesting that,
• 4:06
  for instance, the Washington Post did an article about one of the heroes,
• 4:12
  or at least someone who tried to be a hero in this situation where
• 4:16
  they were killed after lunging for the gunmen, and I read the article thinking,
• 4:24
  well, gee, it would have been great if they haven't have had
• 4:26
  a gun instead of being forced to lunge at the gunmen. But there's no
• 4:31
  simple answer to this. Obviously, there is a massive problem. I believe
• 4:36
  it's much more in the realm of both mental illness as well as more and
• 4:42
  more people lacking the belief in a higher power and an afterlife. I think
• 4:46
  that's the unspoken reality of why we have a lot more of these situations in
• 4:50
  recent years. Because when you have someone who has nothing to live for and
• 4:56
  nothing to fear in an afterlife, and they just want to go go out
• 5:00
  creating as much havoc and death and destruction as possible, this is what's going
• 5:04
  to happen in a semi free society where you have access to guns, and
• 5:11
  that genie is out of the bottle. I don't understand how you possibly even
• 5:15
  theoretically fix this at this point, because the more you make guns illegal,
• 5:18
  the more obviously outlaws are going to be the ones who are able to access
• 5:23
  guns, because you can't eliminate guns at this point. It's literally logistically impossible
• 5:29
  from immediate perspective. The only thing I will say about the coverage, and
• 5:33
  the coverage of the main situation was dominant for a couple of days, and
• 5:38
  now that he's dead, you probably won't hear much about it since we're out
• 5:43
  now into a new week. I will say that the amount of coverage of
• 5:47
  these types of massacres has always befuddled me. And what determines how much coverage
• 5:55
  there is. There seems to be this unspoken line now and the line has
• 6:00
  moved a little bit. It used to be double digit deaths, then I
• 6:04
  think it got over a dozen deaths, and now the line seems to be
• 6:10
  more like in the twenty to twenty five that's a major, massive news story
• 6:15
  because of our desensitization. But obviously the number of people being killed is paramount
• 6:21
  to how the news media interprets the importance of any one of these situations.
• 6:26
  Also, the nature of the perpetrator, the fact that this was a younger,
• 6:31
  white male with an automatic weapon, you know, the fit a lot
• 6:38
  of what the news media likes to portray in these types of situations. Obviously,
• 6:44
  the circumstances that happened in Tennessee with the transgender person shooting up a Christian
• 6:48
  school that disappeared. We still don't even know what's in the manifesto that that
• 6:54
  was the allegedly the the depiction of the motivation of that situation, because that
• 6:58
  didn't fit any agenda by the news media, and then they dropped that one
• 7:02
  almost immediately. I think that some of the coverage and I don't I don't
• 7:08
  even really, I don't feel strongly about this because I don't want to diminish
• 7:11
  what happened. What happened in Maine, in those small towns is absolutely devastating,
• 7:15
  horrendous, the types of stuff that you never recover from. So this
• 7:19
  was a huge deal. But I do think some of the media coverage was
• 7:24
  dictated by a perception at the start that the death toll was going to be
• 7:30
  even worse than it was, because the initial reports were that already people in
• 7:34
  the twenties had died, that sixty people were injured, which is basically twice
• 7:39
  as many people that turned out to be injured. And because of the pictures
• 7:44
  that came out, and because of the you know, this guy is former
• 7:46
  military and well trained and well armed and on the run, I think there
• 7:54
  was a thought among the media that this was going to be you know,
• 7:58
  this had record breaking potential here as far as a death toll. Thankfully that
• 8:01
  did not happen. Thankfully, the guy is dead, and unfortunately we're in
• 8:05
  a situation where this will happen again, and like Groundhog Day, we're going
• 8:11
  to go through the exact same media dynamic. Speaking of death, obviously,
• 8:16
  the biggest death that has occurred from a celebrity standpoint in recent days is the
• 8:20
  death of Friends star Matthew Perry here in southern California, in Los Angeles.
• 8:26
  It was originally reported as a cardiac arrest, then that's been reported as a
• 8:31
  drowning in his hot tub. I presume will eventually know what actually happened.
• 8:37
  There's no indication as of this point that drugs or foul play were involved.
• 8:43
  The death of Matthew Perry, I think is interesting from a cultural perspective.
• 8:48
  I have to say that someone who is fifty six, right around Matthew Perry's
• 8:52
  age, and obviously was in that generation, I wasn't a huge Friends fan,
• 8:58
  but like most people, it was almost required as a white person in
• 9:01
  that era to watch Friends for at least a little bit of time. And
• 9:07
  that one hit home mainly because you're starting to think, oh my gosh,
• 9:11
  you know, people of my era are dying of what seemed to be natural
• 9:16
  causes, and that's disturbing. But there's also a phenomenon that I've talked a
• 9:22
  lot about on this podcast that deals directly with our changing nature of the news
• 9:26
  media. I talk a lot about the power of seventies celebrity and eighties celebrity
• 9:33
  and how that has diminished over time because of our fragmentation and the media fragmentation.
• 9:39
  I've talked many, many times about how my late great friend Frank Oharris
• 9:45
  became famous because of a play called The Immaculate Reception in nineteen seventy two that
• 9:50
  wasn't even in a championship football game, And you know, he became world
• 9:56
  famous because of that. Now he also became a Hall of Famer in one
• 9:58
  four Super Bowls, but that play was the defining moment of his life.
• 10:03
  And if that had happened today, I don't know that it would have even
• 10:07
  lasted a year, because that's just the changing nature of our society. Our
• 10:13
  attention spans are so much shorter, and we are so distracted, and it's
• 10:16
  much more difficult for any one or anything to make a mark, make a
• 10:22
  mark on our culture, make a mark on our collective consciousness. And the
• 10:28
  Friends phenomenon, I think is almost the exception that proves the rule, because
• 10:33
  that was a show that was on from nineteen ninety four to two thousand and
• 10:37
  four, and that's pretty much going to be the last of the Mohicans.
• 10:43
  When it comes to over the air certainly sitcoms. I mean, this was
• 10:46
  a show that had six different stars. Six there was no one star.
• 10:52
  There's never going to be another show where someone who was won sixth of a
• 10:56
  hit over the air television show dies almost twenty years later, and it's a
• 11:03
  huge cultural deal. That's not gonna happen anymore. And so I find that
• 11:09
  to be interesting from a media and cultural perspective. I mean, think about
• 11:13
  it. I mean, today there's no show that even comes close to making
• 11:18
  the cultural mark that Friends did. And I also think it's interesting to point
• 11:24
  out that Friends could not even exist as a show today. It couldn't.
• 11:28
  We wouldn't even get out of the batter's box. You wouldn't even you wouldn't
• 11:31
  get past the drawing board. Wait a minute, you're gonna have six straight
• 11:37
  white people. Forget about the fact that the whole setting was unrealistic in New
• 11:41
  York City, where none of them seem to have jobs and they're living in
• 11:45
  this awesome apartment and all that. Okay, fine, whatever, I'm just
• 11:48
  talking about the basic demographics. You can't have a show that stars six straight
• 11:54
  white people in twenty twenty three in network television. We probably can't even have
• 12:00
  than in streaming. And so, you know, Friends could not exist today.
• 12:05
  We say this all the time, but it's true. I mean,
• 12:07
  there are all sorts of things that we that we revere and even today the
• 12:13
  media celebrates, even though the media themselves are a large part of the reason
• 12:18
  why they can never be duplicated. I talked about that with the recent death
• 12:22
  of Dick Buckus in football and how you can't have a Dick Buckets anymore.
• 12:26
  Well, you're not going to have a friends anymore for a lot of different
• 12:30
  reasons, some of which are fragmentations, some of which are PC and cultural.
• 12:35
  But the death of Matthew Perry, which has had a massive impact on
• 12:39
  social media and certainly within a certain demographic, I think, does show a
• 12:46
  lot about how our culture has changed and how television has changed as well.
• 12:50
  Another big story in the political realm, which I did at least touch on
• 12:54
  at the beginning of episode number one hundred, is that, much to my
• 12:58
  surprise, almost shock, there is a new Speaker of the House, Republican
• 13:03
  for Louisiana. Mike Johnson was finally elected speaker after four other Republicans failed to
• 13:09
  get enough votes to do so. I had kind of come to the conclusion
• 13:13
  that we were in a stalemate, and I am I still to this day,
• 13:18
  I'm not one hundred percent sure how Johnson, out of nowhere was able
• 13:22
  to get the votes. I'm assuming that there had to have been at least
• 13:26
  some element of people just getting tired and realizing that, you know, this
• 13:33
  was a situation that needed to be resolved. And that Johnson was inoffensive and
• 13:39
  someone who could at least appeal to the vast majority of the different factions within
• 13:43
  the Republican caucus. As far as Johnson himself, he's being portrayed by the
• 13:50
  news media as an election denier. Breitbart dot Com put out a tremendous video
• 13:54
  where they had all these different media outlets repeating the phrase election denier, denier,
• 14:00
  election denier, all because, I guess, under their definition of the
• 14:07
  term, believes that Joe Biden didn't necessarily win the twenty twenty election. Of
• 14:11
  course, election denier has lost a lot of its meaning in the last couple
• 14:16
  of years in the mainstream news media. But Johnson is also being called an
• 14:22
  ord Christian. That's the other thing the news media is latching onto. He's
• 14:26
  very very Christian, which I guess in their minds is a bad thing.
• 14:33
  I don't have a big problem with him. He's good on some issues.
• 14:37
  I do say. I will say I was a bit taken aback and offended
• 14:43
  by a video of an interview that he did with a liberal during the pandemic,
• 14:48
  and I do think that this kind of I have to give a little
• 14:52
  bit of leeway because everyone had lost their minds during the pandemic. But he
• 14:56
  was being asked about George Floyd, and he was completely on board with this
• 15:01
  being murder and how horrible it was. And he happens to have an adopted
• 15:09
  black son. And the part that offended me about what he said was that,
• 15:16
  you know, he has two sons that are basically the same age,
• 15:20
  and he believes that the black adopted son will have a much I'm paraphrasing,
• 15:24
  we'll have a much more difficult life than his white son. And that was
• 15:31
  because of systemic or intrinsic racism within our society. Now that to me one
• 15:39
  is not accurate. And it felt very much like blatant virtue signaling during a
• 15:45
  time period in which there was a ton of virtual virtue signaling after the death
• 15:48
  of George Floyd in the midst of the COVID panic. But that's just not
• 15:54
  true. And now are there challenges I'm sure that there are challenges for uh,
• 16:00
  you know, Johnson's black adopted son. Their challenges for everybody in this
• 16:04
  in this day and age. So is the is the challenge different for a
• 16:10
  black adopted son? Sure, Like, for instance, how do you deal
• 16:12
  with your black identity? When you have, uh, you know, white
• 16:15
  parents in your adopted family. I get that that's a challenge, you know,
• 16:21
  I understand that, so the challenges are different. But I don't think
• 16:25
  there's any evidence at all or any logic that that somehow it's going to be
• 16:30
  a much more difficult or significantly an intrinsically more difficult path for the black adopted
• 16:37
  son. And I think buying into that buys into one of the great myths
• 16:42
  of the left. You know that we live in an intrinsically, inherently fundamentally
• 16:48
  racist society. I think, frankly, that you can make a strong argument,
• 16:52
  depending on the situation, that a black boy of a certain age may
• 16:57
  have more advantages than I white boy of a certain age, depending on their
• 17:02
  socioeconomic status they start from. And I believe that strongly. I mean,
• 17:07
  I thank my lucky stars every day that I have two daughters being a white
• 17:12
  guy and not have a white son. I just I really do believe that
• 17:18
  for the mass majority, not all. Obviously, if you come from money
• 17:23
  or fame or power, that's a different set of circumstances. But if you
• 17:29
  don't, I think, depending on your age, that being a white male
• 17:33
  is an obvious disadvantage in most not all, most situations, and that in
• 17:40
  many situations, being a black male can be an advantage, and the fact
• 17:45
  that Johnson either doesn't see that or is unwilling to admit that those are two
• 17:49
  different things is troubling to me. Now, does it, you know,
• 17:53
  make him a bad person or a bad speaker? No, I'm just saying
• 17:59
  that when because I've been asked what do you make of this Johnson guy,
• 18:00
  who I've never even heard of before? That was something that was troubling to
• 18:04
  me. But overall, I'm just happy that there's a speaker and that potentially
• 18:08
  this problem is behind us, and he seems like a decent enough guy,
• 18:14
  smart enough guy, And we'll see how long it takes before Matt gets and
• 18:18
  the other assholes that started this problem get upset with him, because the fundamental
• 18:23
  issues are still going to be there. You still have a minuscule majority among
• 18:26
  people who have very, very, very different beliefs and agendas, But at
• 18:32
  least there's now a speaker now. Interestingly, within Alice the representatives, there's
• 18:37
  another news story that kind of shows what I was talking about with regard to
• 18:41
  the advantages of being a black male as opposed to a white male and that
• 18:45
  is the saga involving Democratic Congressman Jamal Bowman. Now you may recall that Bowman
• 18:52
  I wouldn't even say famously because the news media very much diminished this, but
• 18:56
  certainly online this became famous or infamous where he pulled a fire alarm to stop
• 19:03
  a vote in the midst of all of the House chaos several weeks ago,
• 19:11
  and he flat out lied. I mean, he was a former school principal,
• 19:15
  high school principal. So anybody who's a high school principal knows exactly what
• 19:18
  a fire alarm is about. You're not going to mistake a fire alarm for
• 19:22
  something else. Well, new video came out that clearly showed he knew what
• 19:26
  he was doing. He took down some of the signs, the warning signs
• 19:32
  surrounding it. It could not be more obvious that he was consciously triggering the
• 19:37
  fire alarm to create a delay in a vote. And he has been charged,
• 19:44
  but he got a slap on the wrist for this. And does anybody
• 19:48
  really believe does anybody seriously believe that if a white, straight male Republican congressman
• 19:55
  had done this to you, to to somehow subvert some liberal cause in a
• 20:00
  vote in the House of Representatives, one that it wouldn't have gotten way way
• 20:06
  more media coverage, and that that person wouldn't have been punished more severely than
• 20:10
  Bowman was, especially when it turned out they lied blatantly about what happened.
• 20:14
  I mean, come on, I mean, come on. This is so
• 20:18
  obvious, and yet the Bowman story will now quickly fade away. From a
• 20:22
  political standpoint, there's been several developments. Former Vice President Mike Pence has officially
• 20:29
  withdrawn from the presidential race on the Republican side. I'm a little bit surprised
• 20:34
  by the timing of this, although it makes sense. I've never understood what
• 20:38
  the rationale for Mike Pence's candidacy was. I guess he must have been delusion
• 20:47
  enough to think that people who were Trump fans would still like him because he
• 20:52
  was picked as Trump's vice president and he was loyal to Trump, too loyal
• 20:57
  to Trump for four years, and that non Trump fans would respect him for
• 21:04
  I guess you would say breaking with the president when it came to fulfilling his
• 21:07
  duties on January sixth, But in fact it was exactly the opposite. And
• 21:14
  it was always going to be exactly the opposite for Pence. No Trump fan
• 21:18
  was ever going to give Pence any credit because as soon as he ran against
• 21:25
  Trump, he's a trader, not to mention, they somehow think he was
• 21:29
  a trader for doing his constitutional duty on January sixth, twenty twenty one.
• 21:34
  So he was never going to be eligible to get any Trump fans. And
• 21:38
  the non Trump fans aren't gonna go with the guy who sat there and kissed
• 21:45
  Trump's ass for four years as his vice president, especially when there are other
• 21:51
  better options. So the Mike Pence candidacy never made any sense. It's now
• 21:57
  officially over. He does doesn't have much support for that support to go elsewhere.
• 22:03
  My guess is it'll just kind of disappear into the ether and won't go
• 22:07
  to any one particular candidate. As far as the polling, as you probably
• 22:12
  already know, I have already called this race officially quote unquote for Donald Trump,
• 22:18
  barring his death or physical imprisonment before the height of the primary season,
• 22:25
  which unfortunately I doubt is likely to happen because I think Trump will in fact
• 22:29
  be the nominee. But the most recent poll of interest is out of Iowa,
• 22:33
  which is the really only hope of the DeSantis team to try to disrupt
• 22:38
  the current narrative. And this is a poll by the des Moines Register,
• 22:45
  very well respected Iowa poll, and they have Trump leading by almost thirty points.
• 22:49
  But the most devastating element of this poll if you're a Desanta supporter,
• 22:53
  as I still am, is that DeSantis is at sixteen percent, not horrendous,
• 23:00
  but Nicky Haley is also at sixteen percent. So DeSantis in the state
• 23:06
  that is an absolute must win for him, He's tied for second way behind
• 23:12
  Trump and the DeSantis super pack. The Political Action Committee Never Back Down has
• 23:18
  actually been running TV commercials, not attacking Donald Trump, attacking Nicky Haley.
• 23:26
  Not a good side when you know, here we are, we still have
• 23:30
  the holidays, with Thanksgiving coming up and Christmas and New Year's and then very
• 23:36
  in the middle of January is the Iowa Caucasus, and we're running out of
• 23:40
  time. And your thirty points or thereabouts down in Iowa more than that nationally
• 23:45
  to Donald Trump, and you're running commercials attacking Nicky Haley. That's not a
• 23:49
  good sign. And I have predicted that there's a very good chance that by
• 23:55
  the time this is all over, which will be South Carolina in an likelihood
• 24:00
  that if Nicky Haley stays in through South Carolina, her home state where she
• 24:03
  was once governor, that Nicky Haley will get more votes in those first states
• 24:10
  than Ron DeSantis will. That's I've made that prediction. I'm not one hundred
• 24:15
  percent sure that's going to happen. I hope it doesn't happen, but I
• 24:18
  think we're still very much in the realm of that being a strong possibility.
• 24:22
  And obviously this is all good for Donald Trump because you know, there was
• 24:27
  always very little chance that anyone was going to beat Trump. But you can't
• 24:32
  beat Trump when Haley is going to stick in, and and Scott's going to
• 24:36
  stay in, and Obama Swami's going to stay in, and and obviously hopefully
• 24:42
  rond de Santis I'm assuming we'll stay in at this point. And so that's
• 24:47
  enough. Those are those are enough candidates right there to make sure that Trump
• 24:52
  only needs to get forty percent of the vote to win. I've always said
• 24:56
  that was the problem. If you have a multi candidate race, it means
• 25:00
  all that has to happen is Trump needs forty percent, because no one else
• 25:03
  will get over forty percent. And the reality is that Trump owns about forty
• 25:10
  percent of the party. It might even be more than that, but he
• 25:11
  owns at least forty percent of the Republican voting base. Therefore, game,
• 25:18
  set match, It's over. And you know, as far as as Trump
• 25:23
  is concerned, I do think that there's been a bit of very convenient revisionist
• 25:30
  history on the right about what a second Trump term would be like. This
• 25:36
  has been one of the major tenants of my opposition to Donald Trump, because
• 25:41
  there was a narrative on the right that I think is not irrational that Trump's
• 25:47
  first term other than COVID, which is where I will absolutely draw the line,
• 25:52
  but the first three years of Trump's term wasn't quite as bad as people
• 25:56
  like myself had thought or predicted that it might be. I think that's a
• 26:03
  rational thing. I don't think it was as good as trump people like the
• 26:06
  claim that it is. I mean, I Trump is a bit like a
• 26:11
  family vacation, where you know, a year or two later, you forget
• 26:14
  about all the bad things and you only remember a couple of good things that
• 26:17
  happened, and that's why you want to take the vacation again. You forget.
• 26:21
  Oh my god, this was horrible, But I'm willing to accept that
• 26:26
  as a semi rational argument. The first term wasn't as bad as you all
• 26:30
  said it was going to be Okay, fine, I'll grant that for the
• 26:34
  first three years. But to me, you know, other than COVID,
• 26:37
  missus Lincoln, how was the play, It doesn't matter at that point.
• 26:42
  COVID changed everything and wiped out any good that might have theoretically happened either because
• 26:48
  of Trump or despite Trump in those first three years. But my argument has
• 26:52
  always been, folks, that second term, if it ever happens, yes,
• 27:00
  I would love to see Biden be prevented from having a second term.
• 27:03
  But Trump's second term is gonna be awful, and it's gonna be way,
• 27:08
  way worse than the first term, largely for two reasons. Number One,
• 27:12
  nobody credible is gonna work for him. Nobody nobody. In the first term,
• 27:18
  there was a rally around the flag effect that people who were patriots said,
• 27:23
  oh my god, I have got to be part of this to make
• 27:26
  sure we keep Trump on the rails. That's not going to happen in a
• 27:32
  second term because there are no people left, those bridges have all been burned.
• 27:36
  Trump has disparaged all of them and vice versa. So you're gonna get
• 27:41
  the D team surrounding Trump. And Trump is now really pissed off, and
• 27:48
  he is promising retribution, not just idly, it's literally his campaign promise,
• 27:55
  his campaign slogan, I am your retribution. And Bill Barr, guy who
• 28:00
  I've been very very critical of, especially with his initial handling of the Moler
• 28:03
  Report, Trump's hand pick attorney General, has been I think better than anybody
• 28:10
  else on this issue. And a couple of days ago, he was doing
• 28:12
  a public event where he was asked about a second Trump term, and very
• 28:18
  succinctly, Bill Barr laid out what I think is the absolute reality of what
• 28:23
  a second Trump term would be like. And here's what that sounded like.
• 28:27
  What do you think Trump would be like as president in twenty if he wins
• 28:32
  in twenty four. Well, he's already saying it's going to be about retribution,
• 28:37
  and he's you know, he's a very petty man and it's all about
• 28:41
  him, and he's has a very fragile ego, and you know, something
• 28:49
  happened to him as a kid, and I'm not gonna spend time psychoanalyzing it.
• 28:53
  But you know, every encounter he has to come out showing the other
• 28:59
  guy that he's beat. It's all about, you know, the assertion of
• 29:02
  his ego. And I think he will be self indulgent in a new administration,
• 29:11
  and you know, it won't be as effective as he could otherwise be,
• 29:17
  and probably things would start moving towards chaos. I totally agree with Bill
• 29:23
  Barr. I wish more people were talking about this, you know, even
• 29:29
  I because I so despise what the Democratic Party has become, and I loathe
• 29:36
  Joe Biden, and because I think he's way too old even be considering running
• 29:38
  for a second term. Even I have have thought, well, gee,
• 29:44
  you know, would it be better if Trump won? You know what,
• 29:48
  it would be the least bad scenario between Trump and Biden, and I just
• 29:52
  can't get behind that. I think that they would be equally bad, just
• 29:56
  for different reasons, and I think Barr articulates that very very well. And
• 30:00
  as far as Biden is concerned, I continue to say the Democrats have to
• 30:07
  be very very nervous. The Gallup Poll just put out a survey where Biden's
• 30:12
  approval rating is now down to thirty seven percent nationally, thirty seven percent,
• 30:21
  thirty seven percent as an incumbent president. And what's really interesting about this is
• 30:26
  that Gallop itself believes, they said so in the summary of the poll,
• 30:33
  believes that the diminishing recently of Biden's approval rating is not because you know,
• 30:41
  Republicans, Republicans already universally disapprove of him, and not really independence. It's
• 30:47
  that Biden is losing young liberal wokesters over his support for Israel. They specifically
• 30:56
  said that, Now, that's difficult to discern in one sur but this was
• 31:00
  a very large poll, and there is some data to back this up,
• 31:04
  and there's some logic to back this up, because as we've seen on college
• 31:07
  campuses, my god, everyone, everyone, including myself, is shocked by
• 31:14
  the pro Palestinian, pro Hamas, anti Israel sentiment that is obvious among young
• 31:19
  people in this country. And so Biden may be suffering because of his support
• 31:27
  for Israel, and the Democrats continue to be in a really bizarrely bad situation.
• 31:34
  On sixty Minutes on Sunday Night, Kamala Harris was featured. Now,
• 31:40
  this is interesting from a media perspective, So within a couple of week period
• 31:44
  of time, Scott Pelly did an interview with Joe Biden, and now Bill
• 31:48
  Whittaker did an interview with Kamala Harris. Now that's interesting one, because it's
• 31:52
  kind of unusual to have the president and the vice president on sixty minutes,
• 31:56
  you know, separately, in such a short period of time. I find
• 32:00
  it almost hilarious that, Okay, so let's have the white guy, Scott
• 32:04
  Pelly interview the white guy, Joe Biden, and let's have the black guy,
• 32:07
  Bill Whitaker interview the woman of color, Kamala Harris. I mean,
• 32:12
  we've really almost gotten to that point now where, at least when it comes
• 32:15
  to liberal on liberal interviews, that you have to have somebody of the same
• 32:22
  demographic in order to make it look fair. I mean, we see this
• 32:27
  all the time in local news, you know, whenever here in Los Angeles,
• 32:30
  whenever there's a story that's in Compton or South LA you got to have
• 32:36
  the black reporter. You can't have a white person go there. And if
• 32:38
  it's in Korea Town, you got to have the Asian reporter. And there's
• 32:42
  some logic to that, but I do think there's also danger in it that
• 32:45
  somehow, even just subconsciously, there's this premise within news now that there has
• 32:53
  to be some coordination, there has to be some connection between the reporter and
• 33:00
  the interviewe or the subject matter, that you can't have a white person reporting
• 33:06
  on a black story. Occasionally gonna have a black person reporting on a white
• 33:09
  story because no one cares about white people are discriminate against white people. But
• 33:14
  that's another story for another day. The point is, I did not think
• 33:16
  that that was coincidental. And of course it was mostly a softball interview with
• 33:21
  Kamala Harris. She did not come off well at all. It is obvious
• 33:24
  that she just does not have it. She just does not have it.
• 33:29
  And she was asked, how the hell are you losing to Trump with ninety
• 33:32
  one criminal indictment, shouldn't you be up by thirty points? And Harris had
• 33:37
  no answer for that either. So you got Biden with a thirty seven percent
• 33:42
  gallop approval, young people getting upset with him because of his support for Israel,
• 33:47
  Kamala Harris clearly doing no better and looking poor in every interview that she
• 33:52
  does. You got Gavin Newsom over in China, kissing the ass of the
• 33:59
  Chinese just horrendous fashion playing basketball with little Chinese kids and running one over,
• 34:06
  literally running one over. On video. He did a pretty decent job of
• 34:10
  trying to cover it up by hugging the kid and making it almost seemed like
• 34:14
  it was the kid's fault, but it was clearly Newsome's fault. The video
• 34:19
  went viral on Twitter, and so you know, Trump has got to be
• 34:23
  licking his chops here. And it's a long long way or a year from
• 34:29
  actual voting, but right now, I mean, all bets are off.
• 34:34
  I mean, Trump could absolutely win this thing, and right now he's actually
• 34:37
  winning by a small margin in many of these popular vote polls, which is
• 34:43
  I still don't believe would be an indication of what would actually happen a year
• 34:46
  from now, but who knows. I mean, maybe Biden's health gets even
• 34:50
  worse and that issue becomes a bigger deal, and maybe the economy gets even
• 34:53
  worse and Trump wins, Which brings me back to that Bill Bars sound bite
• 34:59
  and why it is significant because even as much as I cannot stand the Biden
• 35:05
  administration, I would have grave concerns, grave concerns in very different ways about
• 35:10
  a second Trump administration. Now I mentioned the Israeli Hamas conflict, maybe hurting
• 35:16
  Joe Biden's approval numbers among young liberals. There has been an escalation there.
• 35:23
  The ground attack by Israel is underway. There's been escalation obviously in hostilities,
• 35:30
  a lot more casualties, a lot more information that's coming out, there's a
• 35:34
  lot more speculation about this war expanding. And there's also been a lot of
• 35:38
  news about how shocked people are that in two basic areas, the support for
• 35:45
  Hamas and the criticism of Israel has been far greater than people like myself thought
• 35:53
  was even possible. One is in Europe, where these pro Hamas demonstrations are
• 35:59
  frankly scary. Europe has fallen. Europe is not Europe anymore, and we
• 36:05
  are not fully understanding or accepting the reality and the significance of that. And
• 36:09
  very similarly, our college campuses are lost. They're completely lost. And you
• 36:16
  know, people like me have been saying for a long time that there's a
• 36:20
  major problem on college campuses, and you know, the left has kind of
• 36:25
  rushed us off as well. This has always been the case. These are
• 36:29
  just young kids, no big deal, and it's not as bad as you
• 36:30
  think it is. And and you know, we think this is great that
• 36:35
  these people are so woke. I mean, this is the general older person
• 36:38
  liberal reaction to college campuses. I think even that has changed a little bit
• 36:44
  among some groups as obviously, especially Jewish people in this country, seeing what
• 36:49
  we have seen over the last couple of weeks. And Ron DeSantis really knocked
• 36:54
  it out of the park when he talked about this on Newsmax. This is
• 37:00
  Ron de Santis really going after what's happening on college campuses. And I wish,
• 37:07
  God, I wish this guy was going to be the Republican presidential nominee
• 37:12
  in the next president United States, because he really does seem to get it
• 37:15
  on most issues. Unfortunately, this is just the wrong time and the wrong
• 37:19
  place for him. But this is Rond de Santis talking about the situation on
• 37:23
  college campuses when it comes to the Israeli Hamas conflict. But I must say,
• 37:28
  in my day, yeah, you had a lot of things that these
• 37:30
  students would do that were outrageous, but actually celebrating a terrorist attack when the
• 37:36
  blood wasn't even dry on some of these Israeli civilians. You had students out
• 37:40
  there celebrating Hamas. It has gotten worse over the last couple decades. There
• 37:46
  is a sickness on these college campuses. I don't know why American taxpayers are
• 37:52
  funding these universities if that's the type of garbage they're going to produce. And
• 37:57
  the response by a lot of these universe city administrators have been absolutely pathetic,
• 38:02
  particularly in places like the Ivy League and Harvard. They're offering counseling for Palestinian
• 38:09
  Arabs who may feel bad, they're not doing anything to help. They're Jewish
• 38:14
  students who are now under attack. You saw what happened in Cooper Union in
• 38:17
  New York City. This is as bad as it's been in my lifetime,
• 38:22
  and these universities are a big part of the problem. Now, speaking of
• 38:27
  Ron DeSantis, I have already articulated why he's not going to be the nominee
• 38:32
  barring a massive miracle, and I really do blame the news media for a
• 38:37
  lot of why that's the case. The news media is incredibly hypocritical, the
• 38:44
  left wing media, especially when their claim is that Donald Trump is a grave
• 38:49
  threat to democracy. He's a unique character, this is a unique situation,
• 38:53
  unprecedented, and yet they're treating the one guy who can beat him for the
• 38:58
  Republican nominee as if they would treat any other Republican, not even a Democrat,
• 39:04
  a Republican. They have nitpicked and attacked and lied about him at every
• 39:09
  possible moment. And you know, I don't even know if they're doing this
• 39:15
  consciously. I don't even think they've thought about it in this way. But
• 39:20
  it's the lack of self awareness is astonishing that there's this disconnect. Okay,
• 39:27
  if you really believe that Trump is this dangerous, then why are you treating
• 39:30
  the one guy who can beat him the way you would treat any other Republican?
• 39:36
  Which is terribly And there was another small, but I think significant example
• 39:40
  of that on Meet the Press on NBC this past weekend. Kristen Welker,
• 39:45
  the new host of Meet the Press, who, by the way, is
• 39:46
  going to be moderating the debate in next week in Florida in Miami, which
• 39:54
  will probably be the last National Republican debate because Trump's not to be there.
• 40:00
  But Kristin Welker went after DeSantis. DeSantis did a pretty decent job, as
• 40:05
  he always does, throughout most of this interview, and the issue of crime
• 40:08
  came up, and you know, gun violence and of course, obviously in
• 40:14
  light of what's going on in Main and DeSantis you'll hear him at the beginning
• 40:17
  of this clip make the argument that crime in Florida is down, and then
• 40:22
  Kristin Welker throws out, while trying to move on and not give the Santis
• 40:28
  the opportunity to respond, some bogus micro stat that sounds made up, and
• 40:36
  even DeSantis is confused as to what the hell she's even talking about, and
• 40:38
  then she doesn't give the Sandus the opportunity to even respond to it, and
• 40:45
  it just came off as just, Wow, how broken is the news media
• 40:50
  here? And this is what happened on NBC's Meet the Press. You can
• 40:53
  look. You know, in Florida, our crime rates out of fifty year
• 40:57
  low at our violent crime rates down thirty percent since I've been governor, So
• 41:00
  so we're handling it strong. Governor. Actually, statistically, speaking to CDC
• 41:06
  says that the fire our mortality rate is actually higher under your administration than it
• 41:09
  was under your predecessor's administration. But I do want to move on to the
• 41:13
  campaign and just what mortality rate Now, no firearm mortality rang but was actually
• 41:22
  and then your predecessors that's according to the CDC. Let me move on to
• 41:25
  the campaign, well, right, because well, because you had COVID and
• 41:29
  all that stuff. Excess mortality, is that what you're saying? That went
• 41:31
  up everywhere in the country from twenty twenty on, all that fire governor fire
• 41:37
  anybody, the firearm mortality. Let me move on to go to the campaign,
• 41:42
  because I want to let you respond. I was as confused as Rohn
• 41:45
  de Santis there. I really don't even understand what stat Welker was referring to.
• 41:51
  I do think that Desanders was probably correct in his instincts that that stat,
• 41:57
  let's assume it's even real, was I'm sure distorted by the COVID lockdowns,
• 42:02
  because once the COVID lockdowns happened, all sorts of things went haywire.
• 42:07
  And that, of course occurred during Rohnda Santeles' first term as governor. Not,
• 42:14
  by the way, the idea that somehow the governor of a state as
• 42:16
  large as Florida would be responsible for some you know stat regret that is a
• 42:23
  micro stat regarding violent crime or gun crime or whatever the hell it is that
• 42:29
  she was referring to, is ridiculous, and it was obviously just a pot
• 42:34
  shot, that's all it was, which is not what you would do one
• 42:37
  if you were trying to be fair and two if you really thought, if
• 42:40
  you really truly thought, as the mainstream news media has said time and time
• 42:45
  again that Dessandras's opponent is a threat to America. If he's a threat to
• 42:50
  America, then you shouldn't be doing that to Rhand de Santis. But they
• 42:54
  do it all the time, and it doesn't matter to them. In fact,
• 42:59
  they want Donald Trump to be the nominee. Don't ever let them fool
• 43:02
  you about that. It's good for them in every way, shape or form.
• 43:07
  And Trump knows this. Trump has talked about this continually. It's one
• 43:10
  of the things he's most correct about. The news media needs Donald Trump,
• 43:15
  and that's always been why the number one reason of many why I've been convinced
• 43:20
  that Trump is a lock to be the nominee is that the people in charge,
• 43:23
  the people in power, and for every element of the news media is
• 43:27
  deeply invested and incentivized to make Donald Trump and allow Donald Trump, enable Donald
• 43:32
  Trump to be the Republican nominee. And so that's what's going to happen now
• 43:37
  speaking of Ron De Santis, and I reference COVID there. There's been a
• 43:42
  remarkable amount of revisionist history in recent days surrounding COVID. In fact, three
• 43:49
  major liberal media outlets have engaged in this in just very recent time. I'm
• 43:55
  going to start with Real Time on HBO, which is hosted by Bill Maher,
• 44:00
  who has been by far the best liberal when it came to the COVID
• 44:06
  panic. I hate my hats off to Bill Maher. He almost from the
• 44:10
  beginning was very contrariant and was willing to be outspoken, and then once the
• 44:16
  dust final he settled. He's been really the only liberal who has been on
• 44:21
  the attack when it comes to this issue. Although I'm going to be a
• 44:25
  little bit critical of something that happened on his most recent show this past weekend
• 44:30
  because he had a guy by name was Scott Galloway on the show. And
• 44:35
  Scott Galloway is a liberal college professor who was among the worst when it came
• 44:43
  publicly, especially when it with regard to the vaccines. This is a guy
• 44:47
  who made very threatening public statements about people who didn't take the vaccines and believed
• 44:52
  that people should lose their jobs and maybe even go to prison. I mean,
• 44:57
  this guy was as bad as it got, specifically on the vaccines and
• 45:01
  in COVID in general, and there's been this this movement. I mean,
• 45:08
  I'm not even sure why they're doing this, because there's really nothing forcing them
• 45:12
  to and they don't seem to have a conscience. But there's an element of
• 45:15
  the left that wants to be forgiven for what they did during COVID, which
• 45:22
  of course would be an acknowledgment that they did something wrong. Right, I
• 45:27
  don't know how why are they asking for forgiveness if they didn't do anything that
• 45:31
  was that wrong. Now, in this particular case, Scott Galloway does acknowledge
• 45:37
  that he was wrong. He goes on real time on HBO and acknowledges that
• 45:43
  he was wrong, especially regarding the damage to kids, which has been my
• 45:47
  number one pet peeve about COVID of many, because I have two young daughters
• 45:52
  whose lives were destroyed for almost two years thanks to Gavin Newsom here in California
• 45:58
  and the COVID panic that he helped create. And so Scott Galloway basically goes
• 46:04
  on acknowledges that he was wrong and begs for forgiveness. And you're not gonna
• 46:10
  be able to hear it in this clip, but Bill Maher essentially lets him
• 46:14
  get away with this. And here's what that sounded like on HBO. Well,
• 46:19
  I was on the board of my kids school during COVID. I wanted
• 46:22
  a harsher lockdown policy, and in retrospect I was wrong. The damage to
• 46:27
  kids of keeping them out of school longer was greater than the risks. But
• 46:30
  here's the bottom line. Myself are great people to CDC. I'd like to
• 46:36
  think the governor, we were all operating with imperfect information and we were doing
• 46:40
  our best. So it's well, so let's but let's learn from it.
• 46:50
  Let's learn from it, let's learn from that, let's hold each other accountable.
• 46:53
  But let's bring a little bit of grace and forgiveness and that the shit
• 46:57
  show that west harder. Yeah. Now, when I saw this clip,
• 47:01
  I'm like, well, that's interesting. Okay, thank you for at least
• 47:05
  acknowledging you were wrong about some things. This idea that somehow we didn't know
• 47:10
  better is ridiculous, and this is maybe the most insidious element of this entire
• 47:16
  issue of the begging for forgiveness. We absolutely positively knew, we absolutely how
• 47:23
  did I know? How did I know? And how did a lot of
• 47:27
  other people know? How did that happen? We knew, We knew immediately
• 47:35
  know why we knew not just because of common sense, but because we had
• 47:39
  the cruise ship data. People just pretend that that didn't exist. We had
• 47:46
  the data from not one, but two cruise ships at the beginning of this
• 47:52
  whole thing that were perfect scientific experiments where the cruise ships didn't know they had
• 48:00
  a problem, they acted normally. And if you've ever been on a cruise
• 48:04
  ship, my god, this is the kind of thing where something like this,
• 48:07
  if nearly it was nearly as bad as we were told, would spread
• 48:10
  like wildfire. People were quarantined together on those ships for extended periods of time.
• 48:16
  We had the data for how many people got the virus, how many
• 48:21
  people died from the virus. On one of the two cruise ships, no
• 48:24
  one died, no one. On the other cruise ship. There were I
• 48:30
  think seven people who died, all of whom were elderly. These were I
• 48:36
  don't know exactly how many people were on these cruise ships, but over a
• 48:38
  thousand people on both of these cruise ships. And by the way, to
• 48:45
  me, the most stunning stat from those cruise ships, given the nature of
• 48:49
  the fact that we didn't know anything was going on, there were no precautions,
• 48:52
  and how crowded a cruise ship is, and how easily a virus could
• 48:58
  spread on a cruise ship. Not that many people even ended up testing positive
• 49:02
  for the virus. It was in the hundreds, but it was nowhere near
• 49:07
  even fifty percent, which told me, wait a minute, this thing isn't
• 49:12
  nearly as contagious as we're pretending that it is, because everybody on these cruise
• 49:19
  ships should have gotten this if this is what we're being told that it is.
• 49:23
  And again, the death rate was way below what was feared, so
• 49:28
  we should have known immediately that what we were dealing with was bad, but
• 49:32
  not to the extent that we were told that it was. And then when
• 49:37
  it came to the restrictions and the precautions, we also should have known that
• 49:44
  a lot of what was being done was nonsensical and wasn't going to have any
• 49:47
  impact at all. We always knew this. That's the part that drives me
• 49:53
  crazy. This is a false narrative that somehow, well we just didn't know
• 49:58
  yet this is and this is not just Scott Galloway on HBO PBS Frontline had
• 50:07
  a show recently. Now this was is about two weeks old, I believe,
• 50:10
  but it just came to my attention online in the last few days where
• 50:15
  they go after Elon Musk. The focus of this this show is on Elon
• 50:21
  Musk taking over Twitter, but it's part of that is the issue of Elon
• 50:27
  Musk being a contrarian on COVID. And you're gonna hear in this clip in
• 50:32
  a second kind of an intro and some news coverage. You know, the
• 50:37
  first voice you're gonna hear is I believe Elon Musk's fake voice where he's reading
• 50:43
  one of his tweets and he refers to, I think what a fraud COVID
• 50:47
  is or whatever. He's being a contrarian on COVID. And then you hear
• 50:52
  some news coverage of that. Then you hear a woman by the name of
• 50:58
  Kara Swisher who's a extreme liberal commentator, where she is basically doing the same
• 51:07
  thing that Galloway did, which is, well, g okay, maybe Musk
• 51:10
  was right about masks and a few other things, but so what, He's
• 51:14
  not a doctor, and this is what science is about. We just didn't
• 51:16
  know this at the time. So here is PBS Frontline with basically the same
• 51:23
  narrative that you just heard on HBO. The coronavirus panic is dumb. I
• 51:30
  think Elon Musk's tweets are a lot more fun when sucks go up and it's
• 51:32
  a bull market. When it's more serious like this, it feels a little
• 51:36
  like you know all the time, not now. Elon he had a point
• 51:39
  of view about that the virus was not dangerous, and that might have been,
• 51:43
  but at the time people did not know, and it could have gone
• 51:45
  a lot of different ways and a million people died. At one point.
• 51:50
  It was like I read everything and I now know, and I'm like,
• 51:52
  thank you, doctor Musk. I was like, you don't know anything.
• 51:54
  It's like ridiculous. Well they're wrong about the mask wearing or they're wrong about
• 52:00
  don't touch things. I said, well, they didn't know. Now they
• 52:01
  know. It's called science. Now, what Swisher says there maybe even more
• 52:06
  infuriating than what Galloway said, because the elitism inherent in to that is off
• 52:14
  the charts. That because Musk isn't a doctor. Therefore, the fact that
• 52:19
  he was right about masks and other things should be irrelevant. You only get
• 52:24
  to be right about that or be listened to if you are of the right
• 52:29
  you know, academic pedigree and you have the right degree. Now, look,
• 52:34
  I absolutely believe that degrees matter, and that in an ideal world,
• 52:39
  the people we would be listening to would be doctors. But in the COVID
• 52:45
  panic, In the COVID panic, there was an upside down reality where the
• 52:50
  more esteemed you were in the medical community, the least likely you were to
• 52:55
  actually be willing and able to tell the truth publicly because you had more to
• 53:00
  lose than anybody else. And masks are the perfect example of this. Nobody
• 53:06
  ever thought masks worked. Do these people really think that? In It was
• 53:13
  February and March of twenty twenty was the first time the medical community ever thought,
• 53:17
  gee, I wonder if masks might help stop a viral contagion. Did
• 53:24
  they really believe that? That's the first time anyone thought about this. No,
• 53:30
  there had been numerous studies done on this over decades, and they all
• 53:36
  came up with the same conclusion, Eh, not really any impact. In
• 53:40
  fact, there might even be some negative impact of wearing masks when it comes
• 53:45
  to transmission of a virus. And yet that and that's why doctor Fauci and
• 53:53
  others at the beginning said no, in fact, they mocked masks. It
• 53:58
  was only when the police citical dynamics. And that's why Galloway's a liberal and
• 54:02
  Swiss is a liberal. It was only when the political dynamics changed, when
• 54:07
  the panic set in, the experts needed to pretend that they were doing something,
• 54:12
  And masks became very popular among liberals, one out of panic because they
• 54:17
  wanted to pretend that they were doing something. And two it became a virtue
• 54:22
  signal and a signal of your opposition to Donald Trump. And that's an absolute
• 54:27
  fact. And once it became political, then the experts like doctor Fauci had
• 54:31
  to get on board. Otherwise they were going to lose their status as the
• 54:36
  go to experts. They were going to get kicked out of the club.
• 54:39
  So they flipped their position. And it's the great irony that the only thing
• 54:44
  I'm aware of that doctor Fauci has ever said he was wrong about was the
• 54:47
  only thing he was absolutely right about, which was the efficacy of masks.
• 54:52
  He's had to do gymnastics in order to to rationalize his original statement to sixty
• 55:00
  minutes, ironically enough, in March early March of twenty twenty, mocking masks,
• 55:05
  he's had to say he lied about that or was wrong about that.
• 55:08
  It's all bullshit. It's all bullshit. They always knew masks did not work,
• 55:13
  and we now have a mountain years of real world, unprecedented data proving
• 55:20
  that masks do absolutely, positively nothing, and the idea that so Elon Musk
• 55:25
  was right, and so what, so what, he's not a doctor,
• 55:30
  so I don't care. I mean that to me. You know what that
• 55:34
  does? It goes to show that these apologies are nonsincere. These the begging
• 55:37
  for forgiveness is actually virtue signaling. And that's partially why Bill Marlett Scott Galloway
• 55:44
  get away with this, because mar is still a liberal at heart, and
• 55:46
  so you don't want to be mean about it. Ah, he's begging for
• 55:49
  forgiveness, So okay, I'll let it go. No, hell no,
• 55:53
  Hell to the No. You did enormous damage and there's been no accountability and
• 56:00
  no sense that we're not going to do this again. And they're doing the
• 56:04
  exact same thing as I predicted on climate change, global warming, So go
• 56:07
  fuck yourself. No, I'm not interested at all in forgiveness, and just
• 56:14
  by coincidence, sixty minutes in the same show where they're profiling and trying to
• 56:19
  prop up the best that they can Kamala Harris, they did a story which
• 56:23
  was really hilarious about how a choir this was back at the beginning of the
• 56:30
  pandemic in early twenty twenty, a choir of old people getting COVID in a
• 56:37
  significant way and having two people in their eighties die within the COVID, within
• 56:43
  the COVID panic, that that somehow was the smoking gun evidence and the big
• 56:49
  revelation that came too late that even though these choir members had done all the
• 56:54
  right things, and in their own words, they had been they had behaved
• 56:59
  well, they'd behaved well and followed all the instructions from the so called experts,
• 57:04
  they almost all got COVID and two of them died. Shockingly. The
• 57:08
  revelation from this is, you know what, we didn't realize at the time
• 57:14
  that this virus was airborne and that therefore touching things and washing your hands didn't
• 57:21
  make a goddamn bit of difference, even though that was what the experts told
• 57:23
  us at the beginning. Remember, that was before masks. Wash your hands,
• 57:28
  Wash your hands, Wash your hands. That was completely meaningless. They
• 57:30
  dropped that without ever saying anything about it, all of a sudden over time,
• 57:36
  you know, washing your hands got replaced with masks. Masks was much
• 57:38
  better because that made it clear publicly that we were in a panic situation and
• 57:44
  unprecedented situation, and it was a sign of submission, virtue signaling, and
• 57:47
  your opposition to Donald Trump. But that's another nonsense narrative that somehow, you
• 57:53
  know, let's just pretend it's real that, oh my gosh, the experts
• 57:59
  didn't realize until situations like this one with the choir that the virus was airborne.
• 58:04
  So you're saying you're not really an expert, then that's what you're saying.
• 58:08
  They're saying that those degrees and all that studying didn't mean shit, because
• 58:13
  that's that's pretty much the whole ball wax there, that's everything. How do
• 58:19
  you get that wrong so catastrophically, and what the hell did they get right?
• 58:23
  There's nothing they got right. Nothing at any level did they ever get
• 58:28
  one hundred percent right on this ever, So they're not really experts. That's
• 58:35
  what really ought to be examined here, and so I'm not buying this revision
• 58:39
  is history. I'm not buying the forgiveness. And you know, I don't
• 58:45
  think I don't think thinking people are either. But the media is trying,
• 58:50
  no question, they're trying, in large part to try to This is all
• 58:55
  in an effort to try to get them out of responsibility. Where's the media
• 59:00
  outlets saying mea culpa, we were wrong. I haven't seen any of that.
• 59:07
  Occasionally you'll see minor so called experts in liberals sort of kind of acknowledge
• 59:12
  it. But the media has done nothing in the realm of mia culpa's or
• 59:16
  accountability. And that's because they hate admitting that they were wrong, because they've
• 59:21
  already lost so much credibility as it is now. I have attached COVID to
• 59:28
  a lot of things, climate change, global warming, and also the push
• 59:31
  for equity, which I think is driving a stake through the heart of this
• 59:36
  country. And I'm always looking for some semblance of good news, right because
• 59:39
  I realize firsthand just how depressing the news can be, and the content of
• 59:45
  this podcast can often be. But there was a little bit of good news
• 59:50
  when it came to the political correctness and equity front over the last few days,
• 59:54
  and they were somewhat related. One is the most recent episode of south
• 59:59
  Park, the animated comedy that is absolutely genius, has done a new episode
• 1:00:07
  on Disney and Disney's wokeness and Disney's push for equity, and it's not available
• 1:00:15
  as far as I can tell publicly right now. It's on Paramount Plus if
• 1:00:20
  you have it all though clips are online if you get a chance, check
• 1:00:23
  this out, because from what I've seen, it's absolutely brilliant and it skewers
• 1:00:30
  Disney, Its skewers equity, Its skewers Kathleen Kennedy as being the person at
• 1:00:37
  Disney who is in charge of all the equity and the revision of all the
• 1:00:44
  old Disney classics. And you know, it basically deals with this fictitious idea
• 1:00:50
  that Kathleen Kennedy has what they call the panderstone, this magical stone that she
• 1:00:57
  uses to determine what the Disney project are going to be, and it's to
• 1:01:00
  pander to certain ethnic groups and basically every the solution to everything is at a
• 1:01:07
  chick make or gay make it lame. And that it's both funny and I
• 1:01:14
  think also very insightful about what's going on in general in the entertainment media,
• 1:01:19
  but specifically at Disney. And coincidentally, right at basically the same time that
• 1:01:25
  this South Park episode was released, came word that the Snow White reboot,
• 1:01:32
  which has been absolutely eviscerated online because the snow White character, who is not
• 1:01:40
  even Caucasian, has made numerous really horrible statements, incredibly woke, very pc
• 1:01:52
  basically crapping all over the original classic Disney tale, which it's important to point
• 1:01:57
  out snow White is not just a normal Disney tale, It's literally why Disney
• 1:02:00
  exists. It was Walt Disney's baby. He risked the entire studio on snow
• 1:02:08
  White. Without snow White, there is no Disney today, which may eventually
• 1:02:15
  today would have been a good thing. Although for many decades, you know
• 1:02:20
  that the Disney brand has been a huge part of American culture in mostly a
• 1:02:25
  positive fashion, not always, but mostly, and so Snow White should be
• 1:02:30
  in a different category when it comes to the legacy of Disney. And they
• 1:02:37
  also were allegedly going to have instead of the Seven Dwarfs, they were gonna
• 1:02:42
  have these seven Wokesters, and pictures got leaked of that mess well, it
• 1:02:47
  now turns out that they're delaying the release of snow White for another full year,
• 1:02:53
  and they're going to get rid of the Seven Wokesters, and the Dwarfs
• 1:02:58
  are coming back and see Form, and who knows what else is going to
• 1:03:04
  be part of this snow White reboot. But it appears as if Disney is
• 1:03:08
  at least partially waving the white flag when it comes to Woke snow White.
• 1:03:14
  And we'll see whether that actually comes to fruition. But this is the kind
• 1:03:17
  of thing that has to happen. There has to be enough blowback to cause
• 1:03:22
  people to change and people to declare defeat, because then they'll stop doing it.
• 1:03:30
  That's why it's important if they don't get away with it. It's a
• 1:03:31
  lot like COVID. As I always say, it's a lot like COVID.
• 1:03:35
  Probably my favorite line of this podcast. I say it more than almost anything
• 1:03:38
  else I say, and that is that you know, you need to have
• 1:03:44
  there be some semblance of accountability to create a chilling effect so that people in
• 1:03:49
  charge will stop making the same mistakes or stop trying to get away with the
• 1:03:54
  same stuff. And so this snow White situation does appear to be a clear
• 1:04:01
  loss for Disney and for wokeness. Now, when it comes to equity,
• 1:04:08
  I have said many times that this is a huge issue that is being vastly
• 1:04:15
  under discussed, under reported for obvious reasons in the news media. That equity
• 1:04:19
  is replacing equality in all sorts of ways, especially in academia. I mean,
• 1:04:24
  all these academic institutions have have it an equity administration or department of Equity
• 1:04:31
  and inclusion and all these other woke buzzwords, and that equity, which is
• 1:04:39
  equity of outcome, is going to be a massive, massive problem. And
• 1:04:43
  I've said that one of the ways that this gets into our education system,
• 1:04:47
  not just at the college level, but even below that, even in public
• 1:04:53
  schools, is through the words ethnic studies, ethnic studies, that ethnics studies
• 1:05:00
  is a synonym for effectively, you know, this entire issue of equity.
• 1:05:08
  And there's been a lot of talk about whether or not this kind of stuff
• 1:05:13
  should be outlawed. Rond de Santis has gotten an enormous amount of flak because
• 1:05:18
  he has said, no, this is wrong, and you know, bandit
• 1:05:23
  in California. I wish you banned in California, banned in Florida for all
• 1:05:29
  intents and purposes, because ethnic studies is basically the Camels knows underneath the tent.
• 1:05:34
  It sounds fine, but then who's going to teach the ethnic studies.
• 1:05:39
  It's going to be some super liberal wokester, probably a minority, who will
• 1:05:44
  not be able to be fired no matter what they do or say. Well,
• 1:05:46
  in California, this is already law that ethnic studies is going to be
• 1:05:51
  required in all public high schools by twenty thirty. And there was an article
• 1:05:58
  about a high school just down the road for which is part of why I'm
• 1:06:00
  talking about this, because this is really starting to at home. I mean
• 1:06:03
  here, I am in Ventura County, just north of Los Angeles County,
• 1:06:08
  which is basically a purple depending on your perspective, bluish purple or maybe purplish.
• 1:06:15
  Red County used to be Red County, but now, like everything else
• 1:06:17
  in california's trending very much blue, and we're right on the edge. And
• 1:06:24
  a high school district just down the road from us, which is in a
• 1:06:29
  much more liberal area of the county has been criticized publicly and kind of shocking
• 1:06:34
  to me that this even made news because they've already started the ethnic Studies program,
• 1:06:40
  and it's everything that conservatives have been screaming and yelling about, that this
• 1:06:45
  is basically an attack on white people, that this is an attack on the
• 1:06:50
  idea that our society has white supremacy and that white people are essentially bad,
• 1:06:58
  and that there needs to be some recognition of this and there needs to be
• 1:07:02
  some fixing of this. That's the essence of the Ethnic Studies class. Now,
• 1:07:06
  I have no idea when not anything's going to be done. The fact
• 1:07:10
  that even made news was surprising to me. But it's evidence that this is
• 1:07:15
  happening, and it's going to happen all throughout California, and as I said,
• 1:07:17
  it's law for the entire state by twenty thirty. And this is how
• 1:07:23
  they're going to do it through things like Ethnic studies. And you know,
• 1:07:28
  when it happens at California, it will filter throughout the rest of the country,
• 1:07:32
  even if Gavin Newsom never becomes president, because that's the way our culture
• 1:07:35
  works. So I just this equity thing is a massive, massive issue.
• 1:07:42
  That is I had to say it's probably the most underrated issue facing America today
• 1:07:46
  because nobody has other than some elements of the right wing media nobody has an
• 1:07:51
  incentive to discuss it. Nobody and the left wing media is not going to
• 1:07:57
  touch this for most in most cases, for all intensive purposes, and even
• 1:08:02
  the right wing media I think is underplaying this. I want to switch to
• 1:08:06
  sports very briefly before we get back to the second part of Ask John Anything,
• 1:08:12
  and specifically to something that's going on at the University of Michigan, which
• 1:08:17
  I've found to be very interesting and I'm sure I'll talk about this as the
• 1:08:21
  facts become more clear in the coming weeks, But in case you've missed it,
• 1:08:27
  the University of Michigan football team is embroiled in a major scandal over what
• 1:08:33
  are allegations of cheating. Now, the issue of cheating in this realm gets
• 1:08:40
  a little bit nebulous because it deals in the sphere of sign stealing or signal
• 1:08:47
  stealing, And without getting too technical about the football element of this, even
• 1:08:53
  I did not know until this scandal broke that in college football it is illegal
• 1:09:00
  to in person scout another team, and part of the reason for that is
• 1:09:06
  the fear that people, especially with modern technology, would videotape the signals of
• 1:09:13
  the team that going to play in the future and be able to figure out,
• 1:09:16
  crack the code, steal their signals, and basically know what kind of
• 1:09:21
  play that they were going to run, which would obviously be a massive advantage.
• 1:09:26
  Now, of course, this gets a little bit vague and there are
• 1:09:30
  different lines here, because signs stealing during a game is literally part of the
• 1:09:35
  game. You're literally trying to do that. Coaches go to great lens to
• 1:09:40
  try to hide their signals, and when possible, there are other coaches on
• 1:09:45
  the staff who are there who are trying to pick up the other team's signal.
• 1:09:48
  But apparently you're you know, legally, by rule, you're not allowed
• 1:09:53
  to do this in a formal fashion by by going to your oppon this game
• 1:10:00
  and certainly not videotaping what they're doing. And the evidence that Michigan has been
• 1:10:04
  breaking this law or this rule this rule is pretty extensive, and almost comically
• 1:10:12
  so. I mean, there's been a lot of jokes online about just how
• 1:10:15
  obvious Michigan made this, almost to the point where they either didn't realize what
• 1:10:21
  they were doing was wrong or they didn't care. Who knows, But here's
• 1:10:28
  the bottom line. Reality. It certainly appears as if at this moment that
• 1:10:32
  Michigan was breaking the rules rather blatantly for a long period of time, and
• 1:10:38
  they may have been gaining a significant advantage because of that. Now I happen
• 1:10:41
  to think Michigan, based upon current results, is either the number one or
• 1:10:45
  number two football team in the country, which is partially why this is a
• 1:10:49
  major news story in the sports media. But here's where this got particularly interesting
• 1:10:57
  for me and hit very close to home, because there's been a lot of
• 1:11:00
  media coverage around about it and how much blame the head coach at the University
• 1:11:08
  of Michigan, Jim Harbaugh, how much blame he should receive. Now,
• 1:11:14
  this is a subject that obviously was a huge part of my life because of
• 1:11:17
  the whole Joe Paterno Penn State Jerry Sandusky scandal, and when that broke in
• 1:11:21
  twenty eleven, we were told unequivocally by every sports media outlet immediately before we
• 1:11:27
  had any details or any basic facts about what really did did not happen,
• 1:11:31
  that Joe Paterno had to know. He was a god, He knew everything
• 1:11:35
  that was going on in that program, and then obviously he knew about the
• 1:11:40
  personal behavior of a former assistant coach by the name of Jerry Sandusky because he's
• 1:11:45
  Joe Paterno and he's the head coach, and he knows everything. That was
• 1:11:47
  the entire narrative, and the facts didn't even matter to the sports media because
• 1:11:55
  that was their overriding belief. Paterno had to know everything. He's a god,
• 1:12:00
  he's been there forever. He's the head coach, and therefore all responsibility
• 1:12:06
  leads back to him, and he ends up getting fired, and that opens
• 1:12:10
  the floodgates of insanity, and four innocent people end up going to prison,
• 1:12:15
  and there's all sorts of settlements and punishments, And to this day, the
• 1:12:20
  vast majority of sports fans thinks that the Penn State scandal was the worst scandal
• 1:12:25
  in history of college sports, when it never even actually happened. And so
• 1:12:28
  imagine my reaction when I see Sports Illustrated who led the charge against Joe Paterno.
• 1:12:34
  Sports Illustrated put out an article by one of their primary columnists, Mike
• 1:12:40
  Rosenberg, with the headline or the tweet that was promoting this article saying the
• 1:12:45
  following quote, This is from Sports Illustrated about Jim Harbaugh and Michigan. There
• 1:12:51
  is a longstanding myth in college football that the head coach knows, aw,
• 1:12:58
  Mike Rosenberg just how improbable that is. This is the kind of article that,
• 1:13:05
  ahead of occurred maybe five or six years ago, really would have pissed
• 1:13:09
  me off, And now you can see I just find it hilarious because I
• 1:13:13
  mean, come on, really seriously, this is also the kind of article
• 1:13:16
  that I absolutely would have had a phone conversation with the late great Franco Harris
• 1:13:21
  about, which kind of made me sad because he's not around to talk about
• 1:13:25
  this with anymore. But I mean, that's just ridiculous. So you're telling
• 1:13:29
  me that somehow Joe Paterno, without question knew everything that was going on in
• 1:13:34
  Jerry Sandusky's personal life after he left the staff. But Jim Harbaugh doesn't know
• 1:13:42
  when there are videos of numerous Michigan players clearly reacting to the signals that the
• 1:13:50
  other team is giving on his sideline. He's the head coach and he has
• 1:13:55
  no idea even though there are resources being used on this, are there are
• 1:14:00
  people that are clearly deeply involved in this, and that it would intricately impact
• 1:14:06
  the calling of a game, the results of a game. I mean,
• 1:14:10
  there's just no there's absolutely no way that Jim Harbaugh wouldn't have some very clear
• 1:14:15
  idea that this was happening zero And yet here we have the exact opposite narrative
• 1:14:21
  being put forward by Sports Illustrated. Now, to be fair, there's been
• 1:14:26
  a lot of criticism of Jim Harbaugh, and there's a lot of people don't
• 1:14:29
  like Jim Harbaugh, and I will be very curious to see how this turns
• 1:14:32
  out. And the fact that Michigan is a major contender for national championship is
• 1:14:38
  going to play a huge role in this media narrative because if they weren't right,
• 1:14:43
  if they were had already had two losses, nobody in the media would
• 1:14:45
  really care about this. But this is going to be bigger and bigger,
• 1:14:49
  especially if Michigan ends up, you know, winning their last few games,
• 1:14:55
  especially against Ohio State and going on to the Big Ten championship game. This
• 1:14:59
  story is only to get bigger, and I'll be very curious to see how
• 1:15:01
  the sports media handles it. All Right now, I've already promised that we're
• 1:15:06
  going to finish up what we started in episode number one hundred, which is
• 1:15:11
  the second part of Ask John Anything. I have given you the opportunity to
• 1:15:15
  ask me any question you'd like, as long as it's legitimate, and I
• 1:15:18
  got through about half of the questions, maybe a little bit more than half
• 1:15:21
  of the questions in episode number one hundred, So I want to continue on
• 1:15:28
  with your questions for Ask John Anything and see if I can finish this up
• 1:15:31
  without this being a three or four hour episode of the podcast. Interestingly,
• 1:15:36
  I'm going to start part two with a question that relates to I guess the
• 1:15:41
  big news of episode number one hundred, which no one knew about when they
• 1:15:45
  were invited to ask me questions for Ask John Anything, which is the future
• 1:15:49
  of the podcast itself. So I got a question anonymously, this was before
• 1:15:56
  episode number one hundred was released that says, it's it seems like you are
• 1:16:00
  ending the podcast, because I had hinted to that effect. So what are
• 1:16:03
  your plans after that? What projects do you intend to work on? And
• 1:16:09
  in case you missed episode one hundred, go back. I go through an
• 1:16:12
  extensive, very extensive explanation for my thought process on this and why it is
• 1:16:18
  that my plan is to end the podcast at the end of January of twenty
• 1:16:23
  twenty four, assuming I can make it even that far, and unfortunately I
• 1:16:28
  have no alternative plan. In fact, my plan is to not just end
• 1:16:31
  the podcast. It's to go off the grid completely and to try to avoid
• 1:16:36
  even knowing what's going on in the news. I mean, right now,
• 1:16:41
  my goal is that I won't even know what's going on in the twenty twenty
• 1:16:45
  four presidential election unless somebody a friend of mine happens to text me. And
• 1:16:48
  I don't have very many friends, so there's not a whole large chance of
• 1:16:54
  that actually happening. That's my goal. I don't know whether or not I'm
• 1:16:57
  actually going to be able to achieve that. I'm fully aware that this is
• 1:17:01
  going to be a very difficult situation for me. I'm basically trading, you
• 1:17:08
  know, getting rid of an enormous amount of psychological pain and trading it for
• 1:17:13
  having enormous boredom, which I'm not looking forward to at all. I mean,
• 1:17:18
  I have nothing other than playing a little bit of competitive golf. I
• 1:17:23
  have nothing to go to in lieu of doing this podcast twice a week,
• 1:17:29
  and no thought of anything. Because it's really an all or nothing proposition for
• 1:17:32
  me. To immerse yourself in the muck that is the news of the day
• 1:17:36
  in order to make this a high quality and high caliber podcast, and for
• 1:17:42
  me to really know what's going on, you can't do it halfway, and
• 1:17:45
  so I just want out. The analogy I'll use, it's kind of like
• 1:17:51
  my career, through some fault of my own and through some unfortunate circumstances,
• 1:17:58
  my career is basically like my legs been completely mangled to the point where I'm
• 1:18:02
  not allowed to run anymore. And there's an enormous amount of pain involved in
• 1:18:08
  those legs being mangled. And I had been told, as I referenced an
• 1:18:12
  episode one hundred, for over a year that those legs would not just be
• 1:18:15
  fixed, they would be made almost bionic. And now I'm convinced that that's
• 1:18:20
  not the case, that there's not going to be any fixed for my legs.
• 1:18:24
  And so I've now essentially decided, all right, I want to go
• 1:18:30
  for amputation, because that way, even though I know I'll never run again,
• 1:18:34
  which I already knew, at least I'll be done with the pain that
• 1:18:40
  is caused by the mangled legs. And so that that's really dark, maybe
• 1:18:45
  too dark, but that's a truthful response to what I would be doing,
• 1:18:51
  which is not much at all. Once this podcast is over, you know,
• 1:18:57
  but as John Cougar Mellencamp famously said, life goes on long after the
• 1:19:02
  thrill of living is gone, and so that's really where I'm headed once this
• 1:19:09
  podcast is over. Steve asked, do you think the reason you've never been
• 1:19:14
  hired by the Blaze is that you aren't religious? And no, I don't.
• 1:19:23
  I mean, I probably doesn't help. But for the record, Glenn
• 1:19:27
  back many many years ago, indicated to me that he wanted to hire me
• 1:19:31
  when I visited there to do an entire day of interviews about the Penn State
• 1:19:36
  Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky case, and that was at the beginning of twenty seventeen,
• 1:19:42
  and he made it very clear that he wanted to hire me. That
• 1:19:46
  never happened, But I think part of that was because, you know,
• 1:19:50
  luck is so much in life. The timing was all off because the Blaze
• 1:19:55
  was in disarray at that time period because of Glenn's opposition to Donald Trump,
• 1:20:01
  and Donald Trump had just become President of the United States, and the Blaze
• 1:20:05
  was getting destroyed, destroyed, And now Glenn eventually made the decision to flip
• 1:20:15
  on Trump and it has saved the Blaze. And now you know, you
• 1:20:20
  could argue that the reason why I could never be hired at The Blaze actually
• 1:20:26
  is based in religion, because you know, the Trump cult is effectively a
• 1:20:30
  religion, and I'm not part of that cult. They have Steve Dace who's
• 1:20:34
  not part of that cult, but I'll be I'll be curious as to whether
• 1:20:40
  or not that lasts after the the Sanders campaign is officially over. You know,
• 1:20:45
  The Blaze is now going to a subscription based online service, which I'm
• 1:20:50
  not even fully understanding of exactly how they're doing it, but they made that
• 1:20:56
  announcement within the last week. And it's interesting because in response to episode number
• 1:21:02
  one hundred, I had a lot of people say to me, well,
• 1:21:04
  John, why don't you just go to a subscription podcast. That way you
• 1:21:09
  generate some income and make this worth your while. And my response to that
• 1:21:14
  is that goes against everything that I'm about. Number one, I don't know
• 1:21:18
  that we would have an audience large enough of people who would be willing and
• 1:21:23
  able to pay for a subscription to really change the world financially on that.
• 1:21:30
  But more importantly than that, to me, a subscription based service is inherently
• 1:21:38
  antithetical to what I do and by the way, it should be anathetical to
• 1:21:43
  what every truth teller does. I mean, if I was gonna interview Glenn
• 1:21:48
  back when I'm sure he probably wouldn't even do an interview with me because he
• 1:21:51
  knows he'd get blasted for his sellout to Trump, that would probably be one
• 1:21:57
  of the first questions I asked. So, you're going to description based service.
• 1:22:01
  So does that not inherently mean that you have to pander to the people
• 1:22:08
  who are paying you. I mean, to me, that's obvious. If
• 1:22:13
  someone is paying for your content, then you have to make sure that the
• 1:22:18
  content is what they want, which means you're not going to tell them something
• 1:22:23
  they don't want to hear. Not to mention that the nature of this podcast
• 1:22:27
  really isn't conducive to subscription because I'm an anti cult person. Cults are perfect
• 1:22:34
  for subscription services because they are passionate about the subject and they you know,
• 1:22:42
  if you give them what they want, they will continue to consume it,
• 1:22:45
  and they'll pay you for that consumption. And if you're feeding a cult,
• 1:22:49
  you have no qualms about not being willing to tell the full truth. You're
• 1:22:55
  not going to tell the Trump cult the truth about certain things because might piss
• 1:23:00
  off some subscribers and they'll stop subscribing. So I mean, that's why I
• 1:23:05
  always joke. If you don't like what you hear on this podcast, please
• 1:23:09
  feel free to apply for a full refund. I'll be happy to give it
• 1:23:13
  to you because it's zero, which means I'm under no obligation to pander to
• 1:23:17
  anybody. So you know, look, I could have fit in well with
• 1:23:23
  the Blaze at certain times, but that time has clearly passed, fortunately or
• 1:23:28
  unfortunately. Next question, Tyler asks, why do you think that Andy Basheer,
• 1:23:32
  who's the governor of Kentucky, where I used to live as a talk
• 1:23:35
  show host in Louisville, is polling well in his re election campaign despite the
• 1:23:40
  fact that Kentucky is a red state and he was a COVID lockdown fanatic.
• 1:23:45
  Easier to dupe people than to get them to admit they were duped. Question
• 1:23:49
  mark. I think Tyler's onto something there, and I agree. I am
• 1:23:53
  frustrated and a little baffled by the fact that it appears as if this year
• 1:23:58
  will win reelection. Kentucky, though, is a very odd state. I
• 1:24:01
  used to talk about this all the time with my I guess now, former
• 1:24:05
  friend who haven't talked to in years, former Democratic Congressman Chairman of the House
• 1:24:10
  Budget Committee, John Yarmouth, with whom I used to host a TV show
• 1:24:14
  on the NBC affiliate in Louisville, Kentucky, about how in Kentucky you have
• 1:24:19
  a lot of I guess you would call them quote unquote conservative Democrats, and
• 1:24:26
  it makes Kentucky a difficult state to poll, especially in this day and age,
• 1:24:31
  because there are still conservative Democrats don't really exist nationally, but there are
• 1:24:36
  a lot of people in Kentucky who still consider themselves culturally to be a Democrat,
• 1:24:43
  but they are certainly not Wokesters, and in some ways they would be
• 1:24:47
  conservative, which is why Trump dominates the state. Trump dominates Kentucky because those
• 1:24:56
  conservative Democrats love Trump, but for some reason on the state level, it
• 1:25:02
  doesn't transfer. And I think also goes to the fact that Trump can't transfer
• 1:25:08
  his own popularity. He is a unique personality. You see this all the
• 1:25:12
  time, and the people that he endorses they don't do nearly as well as
• 1:25:15
  he does because he has that certain magic. But I think as far as
• 1:25:19
  the COVID issue is concerned, I think this is the most important part of
• 1:25:23
  the question, and that is we have seen this throughout the country that almost
• 1:25:29
  every executive during COVID not only didn't get punished regardless of which direction they win,
• 1:25:35
  they got rewarded. DeSantis got rewarded in Florida. Newsom didn't get punished
• 1:25:41
  in California. Mike the Wine, who was the worst Republican you know that
• 1:25:46
  I can think of in Ohio, didn't get punished. There was you know,
• 1:25:50
  Pennsylvania didn't get a clue. Michigan rewarded their lockdown governor. And this
• 1:25:58
  happened throughout the country. And I've thought a lot about this, and I
• 1:26:01
  think it's because people became invested in whatever path they took during COVID because the
• 1:26:09
  stakes were so high. So if you were a lockdown state, that was
• 1:26:14
  the right path, you were emotionally invested in that. If you were a
• 1:26:16
  free state, you became emotionally invested in that. No one wants to admit
• 1:26:20
  that they were wrong, and yes this Tyler says, it's much easier to
• 1:26:24
  dupe people than to get them to admit that they were duped. No one
• 1:26:29
  wants to acknowledge that they did all these things for no reason. So therefore,
• 1:26:34
  you know, and let's be clear, right, if you're a lockdown
• 1:26:39
  governor, every single person voting, every single person voting survived the pandemic,
• 1:26:47
  So at some level, consciously or subconsciously, they think that that governor protected
• 1:26:55
  that. Now it's not what happened, but that has an impact. It's
• 1:27:00
  a lot like why maskers think that masks work. They get invested in it.
• 1:27:05
  Number one and two. They survived, so they think the mask is
• 1:27:10
  what they survived. It's not. But that's the nature of humanity, all
• 1:27:16
  right. John asks, do you think college football players will start opting out
• 1:27:24
  of the middle of the season once they're no longer in championship contention, as
• 1:27:29
  people are now suggesting that USC Heisman quarterback Caleb Williams should do. This seemed
• 1:27:33
  like the next logical step once the bowl games were decreed quote unquote meaningless.
• 1:27:40
  It's a good question, and I have to say I'm a little surprised we
• 1:27:45
  haven't seen this yet. Now the NI and L money, the nil money,
• 1:27:48
  name image and likeness money kind of changes the equation. The thought was
• 1:27:55
  that nil money was going to cause these star players to start playing in bowl
• 1:28:00
  games. Again, we haven't had enough data to know if that's actually true.
• 1:28:04
  What we need to know is what's the nature of the NIL deal Like
• 1:28:09
  this, Caleb Williams get a bonus for playing in a bowl game, and
• 1:28:13
  is that bonus enough to where you know he won't sit out in order to
• 1:28:19
  protect his draft status in the National Football League. There's no way to know
• 1:28:25
  that. So it's an unknowable thing because of NIL. But I will tell
• 1:28:30
  you one of the more disturbing phenomenon that I have seen recently, and it's
• 1:28:35
  only been very recently that I'm even aware that this happened, but in high
• 1:28:41
  school football, high school football, this is now happening among star players who
• 1:28:47
  have commitments to college where once their team is in their view out of title
• 1:28:55
  contention, they are dropping out of their senior year in high school. This
• 1:29:00
  happened just down the road in Calabasas, California, Kardashian Country, where a
• 1:29:06
  star wide receiver who is a five star recruit, he bailed on the high
• 1:29:12
  school season after they started the year two and two in high school. And
• 1:29:17
  so if you use that logic, by the way, playing football in Calabasas,
• 1:29:23
  I mean that's basically basketball. So there was no real risk for an
• 1:29:27
  injury for a wide receiver playing at Calabasas. I mean, that's ridiculous.
• 1:29:30
  If he was a running back playing in a place where they play real high
• 1:29:33
  school football, I could understand it. But a wide receiver in Calabasas,
• 1:29:38
  give me a freaking break. I mean, this is a very, very
• 1:29:43
  dangerous precedent that's being set all over the place. And I do think that
• 1:29:47
  this bowl season will tell a lot of the tale because you know, if
• 1:29:53
  you think about it, I've always wondered, Okay, well, why is
• 1:29:56
  the bowl game the point of no return? Right, because that's when a
• 1:30:00
  lot of these players bail to protect their draft status. Why would you play
• 1:30:05
  in the last game of a season if your team was out of title contention?
• 1:30:10
  Why would you bother? What's the difference between that and a bowl game?
• 1:30:15
  Again, other than nil money, I'm not sure there is one.
• 1:30:18
  And all so many unintended consequences. This is the biggest blind spot that liberals
• 1:30:28
  always have and everything they do. They don't understand how this is going to
• 1:30:30
  impact the real world and all of the domino effects and the unintended consequences.
• 1:30:36
  And we're seeing this throughout the sport of college football and even in the high
• 1:30:42
  school football. So I don't expect that Caleb Williams will play in the minor
• 1:30:45
  bowl game that USC is going to make. He probably wouldn't bail on the
• 1:30:53
  last games of the regular season because at that point he would still theoretically be
• 1:30:57
  in the Heisman race. That's the only that would keep him going. So,
• 1:31:01
  you know, but by the time his bowl game runs around, the
• 1:31:05
  Heisman thing will be over. He's not gonna win the Heisman anyway, but
• 1:31:09
  he might get a trip to New York out of it, and it probably
• 1:31:12
  would be good for his brand to at least be there. And so that's
• 1:31:15
  why for him in particular, it probably won't be until the bowl game that
• 1:31:20
  he actually sits out. I get another question. I actually got several questions
• 1:31:28
  related to the Penn State Joe Paterno Jerrysondusky situation, and I'll summarize those questions
• 1:31:35
  this way. A bunch of people seem to want a very short summary of
• 1:31:41
  what happened in the Jerry Sandusky case, because obviously, our podcast with the
• 1:31:45
  Benefit of Hindsight is extremely long, epic and compelling, and virtually anybody who
• 1:31:53
  gets hooked into it becomes convinced one that we're right, and to that it's
• 1:31:57
  an amazing piece of podcast and journalism. But I fully understand that when you're
• 1:32:02
  having a conversation with somebody, and this seems to be the context in which
• 1:32:06
  I'm being asked the question. When you have a conversation with somebody and you
• 1:32:12
  want to say what happened with Jerry Sandusky, I get that you want a
• 1:32:15
  short explanation, and so they're basically two two strategies that I use here.
• 1:32:23
  The first and the easiest is if the person is clearly a conservative and or
• 1:32:30
  a COVID contrarian, that is the easiest path to get them interested in This
• 1:32:35
  is just basically imagine that the Jerrysindusky case is COVID only, the COVID panic
• 1:32:44
  only related the child's sex abuse. In a case where there's no actual evidence
• 1:32:49
  and where the news media becomes deeply invested in a narrative and then everything gets
• 1:32:55
  flipped upside down, that's the shortest and easiest path to getting people to get
• 1:33:01
  the light bulb to go off over their head. But if they're not somebody
• 1:33:05
  who understands what really happened with COVID, which is probably unfortunately the majority of
• 1:33:12
  the country. The standard answer is this was a classic perfect storm rushed to
• 1:33:19
  judgment where the good guys get misinterpreted as the bad guys, and the bad
• 1:33:28
  guys get misinterpreted as the good guys, and all the incentives of the story
• 1:33:34
  flip upside down because in that panic, Joe Paterno gets fired, Graham Spaniard
• 1:33:41
  of the president of the university gets fired, and now Penn State University is
• 1:33:45
  deeply invested in pleading guilty to things that did not happen, and everything was
• 1:33:51
  done in an upside down fashion. The cover up, the cover up became
• 1:33:57
  the focus, and no one buys to check the math on Jerry Sandusky because
• 1:34:02
  it was just presumed that the math on Jerry Sandusky was correct. I checked
• 1:34:08
  the math on Jerry Sandusky. Well, not only wasn't correct, it wasn't
• 1:34:12
  even close to being correct. And the only way you make all these public
• 1:34:16
  puzzle pieces fit and all this math work is if, in fact, as
• 1:34:20
  I believe I have proven in the podcast with the benefit of hindsight, Jerry
• 1:34:26
  Sandusky is in fact innocent, and all the Penn State administrators are innocent,
• 1:34:30
  and that the good guys in this story, the so called victims are actually
• 1:34:34
  the bad guys because it was a scam and it made the millions and millions
• 1:34:40
  of dollars. So that's the shortest version I can come up with for how
• 1:34:44
  you explain the Jerry Sandusky story. Another anonymous questioner asks, what is your
• 1:34:50
  prescription for turning the country around? On the K through twelve education level?
• 1:34:56
  Is it salvageable? Are we doomed to a future of decivilization? Well,
• 1:35:01
  generally, any question asks whether I'm a pessimist or not is going to get
• 1:35:06
  the pessimistic answer. Parsonally, why my plan is to end the podcast at
• 1:35:12
  the end of January and twenty twenty four because I just don't see much hope
• 1:35:15
  moving forward here and our education system is a really good example of that.
• 1:35:20
  And I always talk about how living in California has prepared me for the future
• 1:35:26
  of the country because we're way ahead, unfortunately, of the curve here and
• 1:35:29
  we're seeing that in our education system. My wife is a longtime teacher here
• 1:35:33
  in California. Obviously, I have two kids in the public education system here
• 1:35:38
  in California, and it's a joke, It's an absolute joke. And we're
• 1:35:42
  actually living in an area of southern California that is probably better than average,
• 1:35:46
  maybe way better than average. But it's completely broken. And maybe one of
• 1:35:53
  the most shocking, even to me, elements of this education broken education system
• 1:35:57
  is there has been no effort whatsoever trying to make up for COVID at all
• 1:36:02
  at all, And just as I predicted, the post COVID impacts on the
• 1:36:08
  education system have been dramatic, not just in kids falling behind, but in
• 1:36:13
  the different value systems that now that take hold. Because you know, missing
• 1:36:18
  school is no big deal anymore. There's such a relaxed atmosphere. You would
• 1:36:25
  have thought it would have been the opposite. We got to make up for
• 1:36:28
  lost time instead. You know, my older daughter's teacher last year, the
• 1:36:32
  first full normal year they had post COVID, was last school year, and
• 1:36:38
  her fourth grade teacher, you know, my daughter had a learning disability that
• 1:36:43
  was not properly discerned because of COVID, and so she fell fell further behind
• 1:36:47
  because of it. Here she is in the first full year post COVID,
• 1:36:51
  and her fourth grade teacher is taking weeks off to prepare for a wedding.
• 1:36:58
  Weeks not all at one time, but intermittently weeks off to prepare for a
• 1:37:03
  wedding, and you can't even get substitute teachers anymore. Not that substitute teachers
• 1:37:06
  are worth anything to begin with, but because of all sorts of other factors,
• 1:37:12
  the pool of substitute teachers is basically minuscule, and there's just been no
• 1:37:18
  semblance of any effort at all to catch up. And in fact, you
• 1:37:24
  know, things get canceled more often now, whether it's because of you know,
• 1:37:28
  we're having Santa Ana wins now, I'm kind of surprised my kids are
• 1:37:30
  in school today because everything gets canceled now, whether it's you get a you
• 1:37:34
  know, some smoke from nearby wildfire or rain or whatever, it doesn't matter.
• 1:37:41
  There's any excuse whatsoever to cancel anything, whether it's school or an extracurricular
• 1:37:46
  activity, it gets canceled. There's really no effort to try to make up
• 1:37:51
  for lost time. The entire atmosphere is completely different, certainly than when I
• 1:37:59
  went to school, and I do think it's broken, and I think it's
• 1:38:02
  only going to get worse, unfortunately. Another question Mike asks if you suddenly
• 1:38:10
  had the authority to resolve the complex it's rarely Palestinian conflict. How would you
• 1:38:15
  go about it? Do you think the problem is even able to be solved?
• 1:38:19
  Well, I am full, I fully acknowledge that this is not an
• 1:38:21
  area on which I'm an expert. It's part of the reason why I really
• 1:38:25
  don't like talking about it. I try to avoid issues where I'm not an
• 1:38:30
  expert because I never pretend to be something that i'm not. I know enough
• 1:38:33
  to be dangerous, and I know enough to know that it's not resolvable.
• 1:38:38
  And it's not resolvable because it's based in religion, and not just in religion,
• 1:38:43
  but in views of the world that are completely and totally incompatible with one
• 1:38:49
  another. There's no way to reach common ground based upon what I can tell.
• 1:38:56
  And so you know, what we've seen in the last few weeks with
• 1:39:00
  this conflict show that there's just no way to reach common ground. These are
• 1:39:04
  groups of people who have completely and totally different views of the world, and
• 1:39:10
  it's based largely in their view of God and religion and history. I mean,
• 1:39:16
  when you can't even agree on a common history, you're screwed, which
• 1:39:20
  is by the way, partially why in a weird way, it's partially why
• 1:39:27
  I have such passion for our broken news media in America, because the news
• 1:39:30
  media essentially writes our history, and we're now living in a world it's becoming
• 1:39:35
  somewhat similar to the to the Israeli Hamas conflict in America. It's nowhere near
• 1:39:43
  that bad yet, but we're creating totally different realities for people on the right
• 1:39:48
  and people on the left, and the vast majority of people who aren't even
• 1:39:51
  paying any attention. The media is writing history real time, and it's writing
• 1:39:57
  history incorrectly and in a way where we're not even on the same page anymore.
• 1:40:02
  We're not even reading from the same book anymore. The United States of
• 1:40:06
  America is as divided as it has been since the Civil War, and culturally
• 1:40:12
  maybe even more so. And it's all because of this, these silos of
• 1:40:16
  information or misinformation or disinformation that we're all living in because of this fragmented media
• 1:40:23
  world. So I don't have any optimism at all that this can be resolved
• 1:40:29
  right now. I think the goal is just to save Israel and to try
• 1:40:32
  to maybe get to a point where you can have temporary peace. That's about
• 1:40:38
  the best I think you can do here. Michelle asks in light of liberals
• 1:40:45
  abandoning Israel in the halls of Congress and on college campuses and in other ways.
• 1:40:53
  Is it possible that this situation will change the way Jewish people in America
• 1:40:59
  vote? That's a essentially Michelle's question, and my answer to that is one
• 1:41:04
  I'm skeptical because it's really hard to peak to change people's minds about how they
• 1:41:11
  vote, especially when it's based in deeply rooted cultural characteristics and sometimes religious characteristics.
• 1:41:19
  And of course Judaism is complex because it's it's a religion, and it's
• 1:41:26
  a culture, and it's related to a state in some way, shape or
• 1:41:30
  form with regard to Israel. So it's really difficult to i think, categorize,
• 1:41:39
  you know, as as one thing, the Jewish vote. It's not
• 1:41:45
  monolithic. Number one. It's usually been very democratic, but not totally democrat
• 1:41:50
  democratic. There are absolutely a strong group of of Jewish Republicans in this country,
• 1:42:00
  and so I'm very skeptical that people will ever change the way they vote.
• 1:42:04
  I mean, COVID didn't change the way most people vote. A few
• 1:42:08
  there were a few Democratic districts in Florida and Long Island that seem to go
• 1:42:14
  against Democrats because of what happened with COVID. But if COVID didn't do it,
• 1:42:18
  I mean, I guess this is a big enough issue if you're Jewish
• 1:42:21
  to potentially change your voting habits, and I would like to believe that that's
• 1:42:27
  going to happen to some degree, But I also question how significant that would
• 1:42:32
  be. Number One, the number of Jewish people in this country is not
• 1:42:36
  that large, and the places where Jewish people live are not in areas that
• 1:42:45
  are contested anymore. From a political standpoint, look at where the vast,
• 1:42:49
  vast majority of Jewish people in America live New York City, New Jersey,
• 1:42:56
  Philadelphia, Florida, and last as. Now one of those places is a
• 1:43:05
  contested area when it comes to elections statewide or even locally. Florida is now
• 1:43:14
  a very red state and all those other places are very very blue. So
• 1:43:18
  even if there was a significant change in the Jewish vote, I mean,
• 1:43:25
  would it be worth keeping an eye on, sure, But it would be
• 1:43:29
  very difficult for even a significant change in the Jewish vote to really impact results,
• 1:43:36
  like, for instance, a presidential election. I don't see how even
• 1:43:40
  a mammoth change in the Jewish vote against Democrats would really have that much significance
• 1:43:48
  in a presidential election. I mean, I don't know. Is it possible
• 1:43:53
  that in Pennsylvania Jewish voters in Philadelphia, you know, that could be close
• 1:44:00
  enough? I guess, I mean, you know, that would be the
• 1:44:02
  one place that I would look at. But Philadelphia wall has a significant Jewish
• 1:44:06
  population. It's not like New York, So you know, I question whether
• 1:44:13
  or not there's a lot of political significance to that phenomenon, even if that
• 1:44:16
  phenomenon is even real, which I don't know that it is yet. Susan
• 1:44:23
  asks, you have gone from declaring you will never be married to being married
• 1:44:27
  with two daughters. How has your review of women changed over the years now
• 1:44:31
  that you have had this experience? Wow? I could probably write a book
• 1:44:40
  about this, although it be mostly about what I do not know or understand,
• 1:44:44
  because it's a little bit like golf when you become a good enough golfer,
• 1:44:48
  and I'm a competitive golfer about a one or scratch handicap played competitively on
• 1:44:56
  the national level. As I say about golf, I'm good enough to know
• 1:44:59
  that I don't don't really know that much about golf, And it's similar with
• 1:45:03
  my relationship with women. I know enough to know that I really don't know
• 1:45:09
  hardly anything when it comes to understanding women. I just know that it's very,
• 1:45:15
  very difficult and that I'm not very good at it. That's about all
• 1:45:17
  I know. There's a lot of joy involving having two daughters and a wife,
• 1:45:24
  but there's also a lot of difficulty as well as a guy who is
• 1:45:30
  a man who doesn't really fully understand the female gender. Peter, who happens
• 1:45:36
  to be the sponsor of this podcast, so he'll get to ask more than
• 1:45:42
  one question. Peter asks, here are my questions for ask John anything.
• 1:45:45
  He has three of them. If you had a time machine and could redo
• 1:45:49
  any TV moment or interview, which one would it be and what would you
• 1:45:56
  change? I think is referring to me. I'm assuming he's referring to me
• 1:46:02
  and my TV moments or interviews. I will say that I'll answer the question
• 1:46:11
  this way. There's only one TV, major TV interview that I really regret
• 1:46:17
  in the way that I tried to do it or what my game plan was,
• 1:46:23
  and that was right after Sarah Palin resigned as the governor of Alaska,
• 1:46:28
  and at that time I was essentially seen as her the facto national spokesperson because
• 1:46:33
  she didn't have one, and I had done this movie called Medium Outpractice.
• 1:46:38
  At Obama got elected and Palin was targeted, I left my family vacation,
• 1:46:44
  you know, the annual family vacation in Yosemite, to go do the O'Reilly
• 1:46:50
  Factor on Fox News Channel. Now, that was a mistake, one from
• 1:46:54
  a from a from a relationship standpoint with my wife. Although we were not
• 1:47:01
  yet married at that point, we were getting close to being married, we
• 1:47:05
  were engaged. But more importantly, that was the only time I ever did
• 1:47:11
  a TV interview where I didn't really portray what I was actually feeling. I
• 1:47:18
  may have even convinced myself because my narrative was that this was an act of
• 1:47:24
  principle that she was forced into basically by democratic democratic attacks in Alaska, and
• 1:47:32
  I that was not really my belief about that. I thought that was the
• 1:47:38
  right thing for me to do, maybe politically or maybe even financially or career
• 1:47:44
  wise, and I let that get the better of me. It's the only
• 1:47:46
  time I can recall that ever happening, and I was wrong. I was.
• 1:47:53
  It was an interesting lesson because it showed to follow your instincts and to
• 1:48:00
  to not allow yourself to be impacted by outside factors when it comes to coming
• 1:48:08
  up with your opinion. My true opinion about what had happened there was that
• 1:48:13
  she had just screwed herself for all time, and that she was selling out
• 1:48:17
  in order to stay famous and get rich. That was my basic take behind
• 1:48:23
  the scenes, and that is not what I portrayed on the O'Reilly factor.
• 1:48:27
  Now. I was remarkably passionate and coherent. I mean, it's actually a
• 1:48:31
  pretty good appearance from the perspective of rallying the Palin supporters around a very difficult
• 1:48:39
  situation. But that is not what I should have done, because I was
• 1:48:43
  not telling the full truth of what I really believed, and I turned out
• 1:48:47
  to be wrong about that. So I regret that one. But even though
• 1:48:54
  that had a pretty big impact on my life, there's no question. If
• 1:48:57
  there's one that I could redo without, it's probably all of the Today Show
• 1:49:01
  interviews. The first Today's Show interview with Matt Lauer went not nearly as well
• 1:49:06
  as it should have because that was about mediam malpractice and there were some things
• 1:49:10
  going on behind the scenes that basically tied my hands behind my back. So
• 1:49:15
  I had a lot of regret about that. But the number one, if
• 1:49:18
  I had to pick one interview, it would be the second Today Show interview
• 1:49:21
  with Matt Lower, ironically enough, one of my best friends today, because
• 1:49:26
  that was about the Sandusky interview that I had done in prison, and I
• 1:49:30
  go through with this in great detail in with the benefit of Hindsight podcast.
• 1:49:34
  But if I had to do one interview over again, that would be it,
• 1:49:39
  because if I knew then what I know now, not only would I
• 1:49:44
  have handled that interview completely differently, I really think I could have made a
• 1:49:47
  difference. That was probably the last shot at potentially significantly changing the narrative of
• 1:49:55
  the entire Penn State Paterno Sandusky scandal, and I blew it now. I
• 1:50:00
  did the best I absolutely could under the circumstances that I was facing, which
• 1:50:04
  were incredibly difficult and based upon the knowledge I had at the time. But
• 1:50:10
  I should have had more knowledge. I should have followed my instincts, going
• 1:50:15
  back to the O'Reilly factor situation. I should have followed my instincts, specifically
• 1:50:18
  when it came to the real date of the so called Mike mcquery episode,
• 1:50:24
  and had I figured that out in time before I went on to do that
• 1:50:29
  Today's show an interview with Matt Lower, and had that been the headline and
• 1:50:33
  the focus of the interview with Lower, as we gave away clips of my
• 1:50:40
  interview in prison with Jerry Sandusky, I think I could have made a difference
• 1:50:45
  and it might have changed the trajectory of what remained of the case. I
• 1:50:48
  don't know that for sure, but boy, I would like to have at
• 1:50:53
  least given that a shot. So as I look now back on my career
• 1:50:57
  the things that could have changed things, that's probably right at the top of
• 1:50:59
  the list. And my greatest regret is that I was not prepared to go
• 1:51:05
  in a different direction there and I did not. I did not pull off
• 1:51:11
  what would have been basically a miracle, but it was within my grasp and
• 1:51:15
  I was not able to do it. So I would say that that was
• 1:51:18
  that is my number one regret with regard to a television interview or moment.
• 1:51:25
  Next question with Tucker Carlson going off the rails lately, who's your go to
• 1:51:30
  news person? Now? I never really had a go to person. There
• 1:51:33
  was there's a group of people that something would happen. I would be curious,
• 1:51:38
  Okay, what's their opinion on this, and I'll consider that. And
• 1:51:41
  I have at least some trust for this this person within this group, and
• 1:51:45
  they have the intelligence that I respect that that they might say something that I
• 1:51:49
  hadn't thought about. Tucker was absolutely at the top of that list before he,
• 1:51:55
  as Peter says, went off the rails and became a conspiracy nut.
• 1:51:59
  I would probab put Ben Shapiro in that group, even though I don't fully
• 1:52:02
  trust Ben because of the way he handled Trump in twenty sixteen and the way
• 1:52:06
  he handled me when I tried to tell him that the Ben State, Joe
• 1:52:10
  Paterno, Jerry Sandusky's story was a fraud. And there's some other things about
• 1:52:14
  Ben that I don't fully trust. But I do think he's a smart guy,
• 1:52:16
  and I do think he's generally motivated by the truth. So I would
• 1:52:21
  put Ben Shapiro in that group. There are a few others, but that
• 1:52:26
  group is getting very very small, almost minuscule at this point, because basically
• 1:52:30
  everybody in this business is a fraud. Everybody at some level is a fraud.
• 1:52:34
  I've tried very very hard not to be and it's done me absolutely no
• 1:52:39
  good, which I think probably is a greater indication of just how broken this
• 1:52:44
  entire media industrial complex really is than anything else I could possibly tell you.
• 1:52:49
  Last question from Peter, if Biden wins another term as president, what's your
• 1:52:54
  move like skip the country? Well, as I've already indicated, my plan
• 1:52:59
  is to to get off the grid and hopefully not even be in any way,
• 1:53:03
  shape or form involved in most of twenty twenty four because I just can't
• 1:53:09
  stand this idea of a Trump Biden rematch. I'm thinking that if I get
• 1:53:14
  out by the end of January twenty twenty four, I will miss the vast
• 1:53:18
  majority of what I expect to be the general election rematch between Trump and Biden.
• 1:53:25
  So I won't leave the country, but I will leave public life.
• 1:53:28
  At least. That's my plan and my hope. And I don't look forward
• 1:53:32
  to that because it's going to be another challenge and going to be boring as
• 1:53:35
  hell, and I've already addressed the difficulty of that. But at least it'll
• 1:53:41
  be less painful. It won't. It's kind of like watching a horror movie.
• 1:53:45
  I got asked in the first part of Ask John Anything, what do
• 1:53:48
  you fear? I don't like heights. I'm also not a big fan of
• 1:53:51
  horror movies and occasionally have to look away from particularly grotesque horror movies. Well,
• 1:53:58
  that's kind of the way I see twenty four. I just I need
• 1:54:00
  to look away. I can't watch this, especially when there's no good outcome,
• 1:54:05
  and that's the way I see either Biden winning or Trump winning. In
• 1:54:11
  twenty twenty four, Brian asks our final question, would you ever take another
• 1:54:15
  mainstream media job again or would it all depend on the compensation package? Ha
• 1:54:20
  ha. Well, as I went into great detail on in episode number one
• 1:54:27
  hundred, I was told several times, in no uncertain terms that that was,
• 1:54:33
  in fact what was going to happen, by multiple sources that seemed very
• 1:54:39
  trustworthy at the time. And now I'm convinced that that's not going to happen,
• 1:54:43
  and I'm convinced that that's never gonna happen, and it's not going to
• 1:54:46
  happen for reasons that I articulated in episode number one hundred. So yes,
• 1:54:51
  you're right to laugh at the end of your question, Brian, because that's
• 1:54:56
  not going to happen. I would have gladly taken the right opportunity in that
• 1:55:00
  realm, because I think I could have done a hell of a lot of
• 1:55:03
  good and trying to save journalism and do my part to save the country.
• 1:55:08
  Unfortunately, that does not appear to be in any way, shape or form
• 1:55:12
  in the card, so it's not something that I really need to contemplate further
• 1:55:15
  unfortunately. So that'll do it for ask John anything. Thanks so much for
• 1:55:20
  all of your questions. Maybe we'll do one more before we end the podcast
• 1:55:25
  at the end of January twenty twenty four. I have a happy Halloween,
• 1:55:29
  I'm sure. In our next episode, episode number one hundred and two,
• 1:55:32
  out on Thursday morning, I'll tell you about our Halloween experience here in southern
• 1:55:38
  California as my daughters eleven and six, Grace and Diana are very excited for
• 1:55:44
  what will probably be one of their last Halloweens where they're both in that category,
• 1:55:48
  so make sure to stay tuned for that in episode number one hundred and
• 1:55:51
  two. Until then, please remember to subscribe, rate, and review and
• 1:55:55
  share this podcast with others. If you share it on social media, please
• 1:55:59
  tag me and I'll share with my followers on Twitter and my friends on Facebook.
• 1:56:02
  Until next time, thanks so much for listening. This has been the
• 1:56:05
  death of journalism. Podcast, my name is John Ziegler,