Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode One Hundred Thirty: From Russia With Love

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Episode One Hundred Thirty: From Russia With Love · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and thirty of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 0:04
  My name is John Zigler. On today's show, here we go again,
• 0:08
  Russian influence has once again become a major issue in a Trump presidential campaign.
• 0:14
  Trump finally gets his polling surge from the Biden Special Counsel Report, and how
• 0:19
  a prankster at the British Oscars and the collapse of the NBA All Star Game
• 0:25
  tell us so much about our badly broken culture. I'm known as the Dutch
• 0:30
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• 0:41
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  The website is the Dutch Digital marketing Man. Do if you want to
• 1:00
  grow your business, Peter can help. That's the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com.
• 1:07
  And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. One of the primary reasons
• 1:11
  that I am ending the free version of this podcast next week is the prospect
• 1:19
  of what a horrible year twenty twenty four is going to be caused me to
• 1:23
  want to end this endeavor. And then our executive producer, Mike Gagavino,
• 1:30
  through how Marypass and enough of the listeners of this podcast caught that pass,
• 1:36
  and we are now intending to shift this podcast from being a free advertiser based
• 1:42
  endeavor to being a paid subscription project, and that'll happen at the beginning of
• 1:49
  March. And one of the main reasons that the prospect of going through twenty
• 1:57
  twenty four doing it the way we previously were, where it was not economically
• 2:01
  feasible, was so daunting is that I really didn't want to have to sift
• 2:08
  through the muckiest and murkiest of news cycles that I anticipated twenty twenty four to
• 2:15
  be, mostly with regard to the Trump legal cases, where I knew the
• 2:22
  truth was going to be very nebulous, that there would be nobody to root
• 2:25
  for that I don't like Trump, but I also don't like a lot of
• 2:30
  the allegations against him, and the timing of the potential trial dates and the
• 2:37
  New York cases bullshit and Fanny Willis is in not in the Georgia case.
• 2:42
  And so there's all sorts of things that I wasn't really looking forward to.
• 2:46
  But what I did not anticipate that we would have yet another element brought into
• 2:52
  twenty twenty four that would be incredibly murky and potentially mucky as well. And
• 2:59
  that is once again the issue of Russian influence in an American presidential election.
• 3:06
  And we are seeing through numerous data points in the last couple of weeks that
• 3:10
  we're heading once again into a Russia Russia Russia situation. And this is not
• 3:19
  something that I'm looking forward to, mainly because I'm a guy who's always trying
• 3:23
  to figure out what the truth is, and in certain situations figuring that out
• 3:29
  is more difficult than others. When Russia is involved. It's almost impossible for
• 3:34
  various reasons. Well, one of which is that Russia seems to be very
• 3:40
  good at misinformation or disinformation campaigns that play both sides, that purposely confuse you
• 3:50
  as to what is really going on. And then there's a whole mythology surrounding
• 3:53
  Putin Russia and the old KGB Russian intelligence agencies, and then the history of
• 4:01
  what did and did not happen in the twenty sixteen election. And for the
• 4:04
  record, my view of what happened in the twenty sixteen election is, as
• 4:10
  is usually the case, a bit nuanced and a bit contrarian. I don't
• 4:14
  believe in the Russian collusion theory. However, I also strongly believe that Trump
• 4:21
  committed obstruction of justice in the Mueller investigation. I personally believe that the core
• 4:29
  issue at work in the twenty sixteen campaign when it came to Trump and Russia
• 4:33
  is that Trump was afraid, hilariously in retrospect, afraid that it would be
• 4:40
  learned that he was using the Republican presidential nomination to try to leverage a deal
• 4:46
  with Russia and putin to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. And that is
• 4:53
  something that Michael Cohen lied to Congress about in a way that had to be
• 4:57
  facilitated by Trump or Trump lawyers for him to know exactly how to do that.
• 5:02
  To me, that was always the core of that whole scandal. And
• 5:05
  it's amazing that very very very few Americans I don't even know what the percentage
• 5:11
  is, probably in single digits, even understand that element of the story.
• 5:15
  I mean, considering the mountains and mountains of news coverage that was spent on
• 5:21
  the entire Russia collusion theory which ended up collapsing, and the essence of it,
• 5:27
  the core of it, the part that I think was actually real.
• 5:30
  The media is so incompetent that they never told that part of the story,
• 5:35
  and that, to me, was the essence of it. That's why Trump
• 5:39
  was acting so weird and trying to effectively cover that up. Now, there
• 5:43
  were other weirdness elements to the story. To me, I've always said that,
• 5:47
  you know, if you're Trump, but you don't want to be accused
• 5:50
  of colluding with Russia, maybe you don't publicly ask Russia to hack into Hillary
• 5:57
  Clinton's emails. Maybe you don't do that, which is exactly what Donald Trump
• 6:02
  did. And then, by the way, immediately Russia did try, according
• 6:05
  to the Mola report, to try to hack into Hillary Clinton's emails. So
• 6:10
  there's the truth of that. Whole situation is somewhere in between what the Democrats
• 6:15
  and the media tried to pedal and what Trump tries to pretend to be the
• 6:19
  case and Trump's supporters tried to pretend to be the case, which is that
• 6:23
  there was nothing there at all. That's not true. And so in that
• 6:27
  context, we've had numerous things occur in this last week or so that make
• 6:32
  it very obvious that this issue is going to repeat itself very much in the
• 6:38
  twenty twenty four campaign, probably more so than it did before the twenty sixteen
• 6:44
  campaign was finished, because obviously most of that issue was dealt with in the
• 6:49
  media after Trump won, and I do believe that if Trump had not won
• 6:55
  in twenty sixteen, we never would have heard anything about the Russian collusion theory.
• 6:59
  The Russian colllupe theory was basically a way for liberals to be able to
• 7:01
  rationalize how Trump won and how they were so wrong, and how this could
• 7:06
  possibly happen in America. It was really very much based in psychology and therapy.
• 7:14
  That's what the Russian collusion theory really was. It was therapy for liberals
• 7:18
  on how to deal with the fact that Trump won fair and square the twenty
• 7:24
  sixteen elections. But let's just go through what's happened recently. We have Trump
• 7:30
  bizarrely telling Russia to do whatever the hell they want with regard to our NATO
• 7:34
  allies who don't pay dues, a story that has been vastly undercovered, especially
• 7:41
  in the right wing media. You of course have Trump's MVP of the Republican
• 7:46
  presidential campaign, Tucker Carlson, going over to Russia and doing an interview with
• 7:50
  Vladimir Putin that was, in Putin's own words, soft, and then he's
• 7:56
  doing all sorts of weird propaganda videos on behalf of the Russian economy, which
• 8:01
  is just amazing. I addressed that in episode number one and twenty nine of
• 8:05
  the podcast. You've got Putin effectively endorsing Biden for the US presidency, and
• 8:13
  then Trump hilariously saying that that's a good thing because because you don't want Trump,
• 8:18
  you don't want if you're Trump, you don't want Putin's endorsement. Of
• 8:22
  course, if Putin had endorsed Trump, you would have flipped that on its
• 8:26
  head and rationalized that that actually was a good thing. That's what you can
• 8:30
  do when you have a cult. You know, the reality doesn't matter,
• 8:33
  consistency doesn't matter. Whatever occurs is always good if you if you want it
• 8:39
  to be. But you've got Putin endorsing Biden, and you've got the Navalney
• 8:46
  situation where Alexi Navalney was obviously murdered by Vladimir Putin, which I'm sure you
• 8:54
  know makes Tucker Carlson look even worse than he did previously because he he did
• 8:58
  not address that is of Putin's opponents dying suddenly. And then of course you
• 9:03
  have the issue of dying in prison, which is very reminiscent of the Jeffrey
• 9:07
  Epstein situation, which Carlson has convinced happened because the US government either facilitated,
• 9:13
  aloud or maybe even caused Epstein to be murdered in a federal prison, which
• 9:20
  is not what happened. He actually committed suicide. But in this case,
• 9:22
  Navalny did not commit suicide. He was assassinated, murdered what have you,
• 9:28
  by Putin while in a prison. And so that's obviously a big part of
• 9:33
  this in the media. I mean, I'm not going to play the clip
• 9:35
  because the audio is so bad, but CNN's MG Lee actually said the President
• 9:43
  Biden, or asked President Biden whether or not Navalny's blood is on the hands
• 9:48
  of House Republicans, I guess for delaying funding of Ukraine and the Ukraine Russian
• 9:56
  conflict. I don't even know how that would theoretically work, And by the
• 10:00
  way, to Biden's credit, he didn't take de bait totally and did not
• 10:05
  claim that Navalny's blood is on the hands of House Republicans. And then speaking
• 10:11
  of Navalney as we tape this on Wednesday morning. Last night, Donald Trump
• 10:16
  did a town hall I guess you would call it an interview, I guess
• 10:20
  you would call it with Laura Ingram on Fox News Channel, and he invoked
• 10:26
  Navalny in the most bizarre, inappropriate way possible. And this is not a
• 10:33
  situation where he misspoke, because he did it almost exactly the same way in
• 10:39
  a truth social post when when Navalney was found to have been murdered essentially in
• 10:46
  a Russian prison, Trump posted that this reminded him of the situation he's facing
• 10:52
  with regard to his criminal cases. That was all about him, which is
• 10:56
  classic Trump narcissism and ego. But you know, there's ego, and then
• 11:03
  there's this, and then he repeated this. This is a very short clip
• 11:07
  of a longer answer where Trump invokes Navalny with regard to his treatment in the
• 11:16
  New York civil fraud verdict that he just endured a verdict that I don't agree
• 11:22
  with, and I think was clearly politically motivated, and it's obvious that it
• 11:26
  was not just from the behavior of the judge, but also statements from Governor
• 11:31
  Holkel in New York basically saying, no one else has to worry about being
• 11:35
  prosecuted for this unless they're Donald Trump. That's a pretty good paraphrase of that
• 11:41
  insane statement by the New York governor. But here is Donald Trump referring to
• 11:46
  a navalny and the civil verdict against him being a navalny. In other words,
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  in his mind, this is very similar to what happened in the valney.
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  What's happening to him by our government is very similar to what happened in
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  navalney in Russia. And here's what that sounded like on Fox News Channel.
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  How would you put up that kind of money because you have a bond to
• 12:09
  put up even if if you appeal, you got to put up escrow money.
• 12:13
  That's it's a lot of form of Navali. I mean, that's a
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  classic case of how desensitized we are to Trump's insanity. I mean, can
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  you imagine in a pre twenty sixteen world where the Republican presidential nominee was referencing
• 12:35
  what's happening to him as being very similar to Russia assassinating an opposition leader in
• 12:43
  prison. I mean, it's the mind boggles, but this is this is
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  where we are now. And of course, you know, nobody blinked an
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  eye. Laura Ingram didn't, didn't confront him on that and say, what
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  do you mean a navalney what? How are you comparing these two situations that
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  I'm sure never even entered her mind to do that. And then we have
• 13:01
  the situation involving the alleged bribes that Republicans were claiming they had proof of that
• 13:09
  was really a huge part of the effort to impeach Joe Biden. The five
• 13:15
  million dollar checks that allegedly went to bribe Hunter Biden and Joe Biden. This
• 13:20
  was a story that I never bought into. It made no sense. It
• 13:24
  seemed way too obvious, way too easy, too simple. Nobody's this dumb,
• 13:31
  not even the Bidens. And we now have this story where Alexander Smirnoff,
• 13:37
  who was the FBI and foreman or whistleblower on whose testimony I guess you
• 13:43
  would say that information was based. Well, he has now been indicted by
• 13:50
  the Special counsel for perjury, and there's that now a new wrinkle to that
• 13:56
  situation. I referenced this in the last episode of the podcast, but now
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  we're learning that smirnov has said that he got information about Hunter Biden from wait
• 14:11
  for it, Russian intelligence. And I'm like, oh my god, here
• 14:16
  we go again, because you know, this is where the murkiness of the
• 14:22
  whole situation makes it impossible to get to the truth. And nobody's ever going
• 14:26
  to admit when they're wrong because in a rational person's brain, and I would
• 14:33
  like to think I'm in that category, although there's not too many people in
• 14:35
  there with me an irrational person's brain. Okay, let's pretend that the indictment
• 14:43
  of Smirnoff is legitimate. We don't have enough information to know that. I
• 14:46
  would like to believe that we can still rely on a special Council to not
• 14:50
  be making up an indictment just to discredit and a whistleblower against the current president
• 14:58
  of the United State. Now to Trump fans, that's a leap. Oh,
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  you can't do that, Zigler. No, No, In fact,
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  this is this Actually, in a weird way, this old story is increasing
• 15:09
  Smeiranoff's credibility with them. That's the upside down, very dangerous world we're now
• 15:15
  living in where nobody trusts anything to the extent where no, no, no
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  no. If Smearanov is indicted, that means he's more credible because he's close
• 15:26
  to the truth and he's dangerous and he must be destroyed. And it's the
• 15:31
  same thing with this Russian intelligence element. Trump fans are going to rationalize that,
• 15:37
  oh okay, so this is all start. You know, they're going
• 15:39
  to try to do the same thing they did in twenty sixteen, that somehow
• 15:45
  you know that Trump is aligned with Russia. Well, what seems to be
• 15:50
  happening here? Again, I need more information. But if we take this
• 15:56
  at face value, which is unfortunately danger sometimes to do, but if we
• 16:00
  take this as it currently appears, it seems like Russia is involved in a
• 16:07
  very complex misinformation disinformation campaign that is working both sides here, which is why
• 16:17
  it is so complicated, so complex, so murky, and so frustrating,
• 16:23
  and probably why it's so effective because the primary goal ear appears to be to
• 16:30
  destroy trust in American institutions, including our entire electoral system. And if that
• 16:37
  was the goal by the way, Russian intelligence could not possibly have imagined it
• 16:42
  would be this successful. But we now have a situation where Republicans and House
• 16:48
  representatives have egg all over their face and may have worse than that. If
• 16:53
  thus all turns out to be as it's currently being reported, where they're in
• 17:00
  foremant, their whistleblower is indicted for perjury and is acknowledging that he got at
• 17:06
  least some information. It's weird. It's weird because I don't know for sure
• 17:10
  which information, but potentially this information about the bribe itself came from Russian intelligence,
• 17:17
  which would be consistent with the idea that it was purposely fraudulent in an
• 17:22
  effort to try to create confusion and dissent within our electoral system. Now,
• 17:30
  frankly, I'm always hesitant to believe that people are this smart, but even
• 17:36
  Russian intelligence. But like I said, Russian intelligence, if this is true,
• 17:41
  could not possibly have imagined it would be as successful as it already is.
• 17:47
  And we're just at the beginning of this whole situation. So you know,
• 17:51
  Oxhom's razor. That to me is what's happening. That Russia is purposely
• 17:56
  playing both sides of this to confuse the hell out of every body and to
• 18:00
  sow the seeds of distrust. And then there's the issue of this Los Angeles
• 18:07
  based ballerina, I guess former ballerina now Casina Carolina, who was just arrested
• 18:15
  in Russia. She's a Russian who came to the United States and is now
• 18:19
  a US citizen married to a United States citizen. And she apparently first got
• 18:29
  arrested for cursing and then she got charged with treason for donating fifty one dollars
• 18:37
  to a Ukrainian cause. And the reason why this is significant is that this
• 18:44
  is going to get and already has a lot of news coverage. Now Russia
• 18:48
  has a former marine that they effectively have as hostage. They have a Wall
• 18:55
  Street Journal reporter who's essentially a hostage in Russia. Of course, they just
• 19:00
  gave up Brittany Griner last year, you know, when we gave away the
• 19:04
  house to get Britney Griner back. But you know, a former marine and
• 19:10
  a Wall Street Journal reporter don't really move the needle in the US media.
• 19:15
  But a ballerina who is very attractive and of whom there are bikini pictures of
• 19:22
  her walking on the beach looking at like a ten or near close to a
• 19:26
  ten. That's a story the US media is going to get behind. We
• 19:32
  don't care about former Marines, they're Wall Street Journal reporters. But if we
• 19:36
  can put up a picture of a former ballerina in a bikini walking on the
• 19:41
  beach, that's a story we're not going to be able to resist. And
• 19:45
  so once again, is Russia doing this on purpose? Is the timing of
• 19:51
  this all planned? Is this purely coincidental? Who knows, But they could
• 19:56
  not have picked If Russia was trying to create a lot of attention, especially
• 20:00
  in the media of the United States, that could not have possibly picked a
• 20:04
  better target than this former ballerina, And especially when it comes to the issue
• 20:11
  of why she's being detained and arrested, and there's there're pictures of her being
• 20:15
  blindfolded and handcuffed, and you know, in treason potentially would get her twenty
• 20:22
  years in a Russian prison for donating fifty one dollars to a Ukrainian cause.
• 20:26
  So they are all sorts of things happening on this Russian front. All of
• 20:32
  it is nebulous and confusing, And you know, I'm trying my best like
• 20:37
  everybody else, to sift through it. But there is no question that this
• 20:41
  is going to be a major topic and issue in the twenty twenty four presidential
• 20:47
  campaign. Now, speaking of that campaign, I for the last couple of
• 20:52
  episodes, I have been wondering and waiting for a polling surge by die Old
• 21:00
  Trump with regard to the aftermath of the Special Counsel Robert Hurr's report on Joe
• 21:07
  Biden regarding classified documents and the decision not to charge him, not because he
• 21:11
  didn't do anything that was potentially criminal, but because his memory is so bad
• 21:17
  and his mental acuity is so weakened that you could not pop properly prosecute him
• 21:22
  because he could always say he just simply doesn't remember, because he doesn't know
• 21:26
  when he was vice president, he doesn't know when his son Bo died,
• 21:30
  and what have you. And this created an enormous amount of media coverage.
• 21:34
  A lot of it was actually very credible, and I complimented a lot of
• 21:38
  it. And it was my theory for the last couple of weeks that we're
• 21:44
  not going to see a massive polling serge for Trump here. We're not going
• 21:48
  to see a complete collapse when it comes to Joe Biden's standing in the polls,
• 21:52
  but we should see something, and if we don't see anything, that
• 21:56
  that's an ominous sign for the Trump campaign, because you know, this is
• 22:00
  as big as it gets with regard to the mainstream news media being willing to
• 22:06
  go after Joe Biden. It happened just a few days before the super Bowl,
• 22:08
  so theoretically there was a lot of conversations among people and social events and
• 22:15
  parties surrounding the super Bowl, and so I just felt like there has to
• 22:19
  be some movement in the polls. I did not think it would be huge,
• 22:22
  but I thought it would be something. And in the last episode,
• 22:26
  I pretty much jumped the gun and I almost concluded. I think I left
• 22:30
  open the possibility that there still could be polls that indicate a Trump surge,
• 22:36
  but I spoke too soon, and I essentially said, you know what,
• 22:38
  there's no evidence of a Trump surge or a Biden collapse at all here,
• 22:45
  and that there appears to be no movement whatsoever. In fact, if anything,
• 22:48
  if there's any noise, it's in a pro Biden direction by like a
• 22:52
  point. In polls that were done after the Special Council's report, Well,
• 22:57
  sure enough, in the last twenty four hours since we released episode number one
• 23:03
  hundred and twenty nine, the floodgates opened up. I don't want to say
• 23:07
  they were floodgates, but there was definitely a a general shift and a pretty
• 23:14
  significant move in Trump's direction when it came to four polls, all of which
• 23:21
  are of a major variety. Four national polls came out and indicated pretty much
• 23:26
  exactly what most people, including myself, would have expected to be the aftermath
• 23:33
  of the Special Council Report regarding Joe Biden. Let me just quickly review them.
• 23:37
  RAS Mustin Reports, which is a polling outlet. I don't have a
• 23:41
  lot of faith in. They're generally very pro Trump, although they're weirdly when
• 23:47
  it comes to Joe Biden's approval rating. They're actually one of the most pro
• 23:51
  Biden polls, So I don't really understand what goes on at RASP Muscin Reports.
• 23:56
  They're all over the map. But for the record, they have Trump
• 24:00
  winning now by six points nationally. This is popular vote. This has nothing
• 24:04
  to do with the electoral college six points over Joe Biden forty seven forty one
• 24:10
  Emerson, which is a decent polling outlet. They have Trump winning over Biden
• 24:15
  by one point forty five forty four Morning Consult which has a huge sample over
• 24:22
  six thousand registered voters, a margin of error of only one point. So
• 24:27
  that's that's about as good as you can get when it comes to a poll
• 24:32
  in this day and age, and Trump is now beating Biden head to head
• 24:37
  by four forty five forty one. That to me was probably the most significant
• 24:44
  of the polling results in the post Special Council era here in the last couple
• 24:48
  of weeks, with Trump winning by four in a sample of over six thousand
• 24:53
  registered voters. Then you have the Harris x poll. And I've often said,
• 24:57
  if you're lucky in life, you find someone who loves you as much
• 25:03
  as the Harris X pole loves Donald Trump. I don't know why this is
• 25:07
  the case, but the Harris pole always has Trump in a better position than
• 25:14
  most other poles do. And this is once again the case as Trump is
• 25:18
  beating Biden by eight points nationally in the most recent Harris X pole. So
• 25:23
  you've got now four poles, all posts Special Council report, all with significant
• 25:30
  increases well three of the four, and significant increases in the other showing Trump
• 25:36
  barely beating Biden, but six points, one point, four points and eight
• 25:38
  points. That that's a shift. That's pretty much what I had expected would
• 25:44
  happen after the Special Council Report. And it's important to point out these are
• 25:48
  the head to head battles when you break it down and you add in RFK
• 25:56
  Junior into the mix, and you add in a couple of the other potential
• 26:00
  third party candidates, both of whom are very, very liberal, no question
• 26:06
  about it. Under those circumstances, Joe Biden is harmed. Now how much
• 26:11
  he is harmed, it's hard to tell. It's at least a point or
• 26:15
  two. RFK Junior is going to be a very complex part of this whole
• 26:21
  equation because there are going to be some voters he takes, assuming he's on
• 26:25
  the ballot in key states, that are potential Trump supporters. There are also
• 26:30
  but obviously, with the Kennedy name and the fact that he's a liberal and
• 26:33
  in my view, a nut on most issues, especially environmental issues, he's
• 26:38
  going to take some liberal voters who are looking for some place to go because
• 26:44
  they think Joe Biden is too old. I think that is maybe the most
• 26:48
  potent aspect of the age issue when it comes to Joe Biden, if you
• 26:52
  have an alternative, I mean, this is why rf K Junior and a
• 26:57
  couple of these other candidates could be very dangerous to Joe Biden because he gives
• 27:03
  people who would never vote for Trump a way to vote, but not vote
• 27:08
  for a guy they know is too old to be president. And so it's
• 27:12
  not huge the influence, but it's significant, especially in very close states.
• 27:18
  And there could be five or six very close states in this election that will
• 27:23
  decide things. And so when you add in RFK Junior and the other very
• 27:30
  liberal candidates that are hoping to be on the ballot, that only makes the
• 27:34
  case for Trump even better. So the numbers I gave you are actually not
• 27:40
  even the best numbers that Trump could possibly imagine. Like, for instance,
• 27:45
  let me give you an example in Pennsylvania. Now, I have spoken a
• 27:48
  lot about my former home state of Pennsylvania and how the special election results of
• 27:53
  a couple of weeks ago. I don't think we're at all conducive to the
• 27:57
  idea that Trump is going to win Pennsylvan like he did in twenty sixteen.
• 28:00
  And without Pennsylvania, the path to victory becomes very, very narrow for Donald
• 28:07
  Trump. But there's a new Emerson poll out in Pennsylvania that shows Trump beating
• 28:14
  Biden by two points. Now I am very skeptical of that, especially since
• 28:18
  the same poll had the Democratic senatorial candidate Robert Casey. He's been a longtime
• 28:26
  member of the Senate from Pennsylvania, Democrat and well known name in Pennsylvania.
• 28:30
  Casey, you know, he's winning over his Republican opponent by ten points in
• 28:36
  the same polling sample. So Trump is out doing the Republican senatorial candidate by
• 28:44
  twelve points. That seems like very difficult for me to believe because the Republican
• 28:51
  senatorial candidate's a you know, a decent, credible guy. There's not like
• 28:55
  he's you know, incompetent or not ufied or toxic or anything like that.
• 29:02
  He's a fairly well known name. So twelve points seems like a stretch that
• 29:07
  Trump would be out running the Republican senatorial candidate. Although obviously Joe Biden is
• 29:15
  exceedingly weak because of the economy and because of his age and what have you.
• 29:21
  But part of the reason I'm mentioning this Pennsylvania poll is that when you
• 29:26
  add in the third party candidates, Trump goes from winning by two to winning
• 29:30
  by five. Now three points in Pennsylvania is you know massive. I mean,
• 29:37
  that's the difference between winning the election and not winning the election right there,
• 29:41
  especially when you consider that. I believe we now know that there is
• 29:47
  weirdly a pro Republican bias in a lot of these polls. We saw it
• 29:52
  in the twenty twenty two midterm election where there was no red wave. We've
• 29:56
  seen it time and again in these special elections. And you know, to
• 30:02
  me, it's because of mail in balloting and because of the toxicity of the
• 30:07
  Trump effect. Now there is a scenario here, and I've talked about this
• 30:11
  previously in a weird way, this could lead to the nightmare scenario that I've
• 30:17
  talked about where Trump wins and then Democrats take the House in the Senate.
• 30:21
  There's a weird phenomenon here that even though Trump is very, very toxic with
• 30:26
  a huge portion of the population somewhere around fifty percent, that weirdly, because
• 30:34
  he has a cult, he may actually do better than the general Republican candidate
• 30:41
  would do, especially one that's not a celebrity and or not an incumbent,
• 30:47
  and that weirdly, Trump would actually outdo a generic Republican even though he's so
• 30:56
  toxic with half the country. Now, how this works is a little bit
• 31:00
  difficult to understand. However, I actually think, and I proposed this theory
• 31:07
  previously, I think that there is a certain percentage, and I don't know
• 31:11
  what it is, folks, I don't know what the percentage is, but
• 31:14
  there is a percentage of the population that simply wants Donald Trump for the entertainment
• 31:22
  factor. And it might be three points, it might be five points.
• 31:26
  It might even be higher than that if you include into this group the fuck
• 31:32
  them all people who they don't really give a shit about policies or character or
• 31:37
  experience or anything. They're just so angry at the establishment, and Trump's the
• 31:42
  biggest middle finger they can possibly find. And so, whether it's because they
• 31:48
  want entertainment or they just want to say fuck you to everybody, they're going
• 31:52
  to go with Donald Trump. These are not Republican voters. These are not
• 31:56
  people that are concerned about Republicans holding the Senate or taking the Senate or holding
• 32:00
  the House. They don't care. And so this is the best explanation I
• 32:06
  have for how it is that Trump seems in some very significant places like Pennsylvania,
• 32:13
  to be outdoing the generic Republican, which would explain why in that special
• 32:19
  election I referenced recently in Pennsylvania, in the state House election that determined the
• 32:24
  control of the State House of Pennsylvania, the Republican got crushed way worse than
• 32:31
  pass polling and past results would have indicated. Was likely lost by thirty five
• 32:37
  points in a district that Biden only won by ten and twenty twenty. So
• 32:42
  there could be this very weird phenomenon that even though Trump is toxic with half
• 32:49
  the country, he actually does better in presidential polling. There's also and this
• 32:54
  gets into complicated theories about how people vote, but I do think Pennsylvania it's
• 33:00
  possible that having a Democrat be a sure winner on the senatorial side weirdly helps
• 33:08
  Trump because you have people who will go, well, I'm not a Democrat
• 33:15
  or a Republican, so I'm going to vote for Casey for Senate and Trump
• 33:20
  for president, and that actually makes them feel good about themselves. It makes
• 33:23
  them feel like they're not a partisan, that they're an independent. They have
• 33:29
  kind of played both sides here and by the way, especially if Trump has
• 33:31
  perceived is going to be the winner. There's a lot of people that love
• 33:35
  voting for winners, period, and that would also play into the k Cy
• 33:39
  Trump mix in Pennsylvania. I'm still not convinced that Trump is winning Pennsylvania,
• 33:45
  and a lot of my Twitter followers who are from Pennsylvania, from the penn
• 33:50
  State, Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky case, are also very skeptical that Trump
• 33:53
  is going to win Pennsylvania. But there's polling right now that indicates he very
• 33:58
  well could. And I'm just trying to come up with explanations and theories to
• 34:01
  explain what seems to be inexplicable now as far as Trump's strategy, I want
• 34:07
  to go back to this Laura Ingram quote unquote interview on Fox News Channel because
• 34:13
  one of the reasons I'm still very dubious of this idea that Trump is I
• 34:19
  mean, my god, and Trump fans minds Trump is a sure winner now,
• 34:22
  I mean, and Trump is ahead in most of the betting markets as
• 34:28
  the favorite to be the next president, despite facing ninety one felony indictment counts
• 34:35
  that he has to somehow navigate and avoid between now and November. But if
• 34:40
  you ask Trump fans he's a sure winner, Well, I'm not in that
• 34:45
  category. I don't know whatever I am right now. I keep hovering in
• 34:47
  the fifty to fifty range. Some days I'm at Trump at fifty two and
• 34:52
  some days I'm at Biden at fifty two percent. I mean, it's going
• 34:55
  to be that difficult to determine. And obviously a lot of this has to
• 35:00
  is going to be told, and the fates will be determined by what happens
• 35:05
  in court when it comes to Donald Trump's indictments. But back to one of
• 35:08
  the reasons why I am skeptical that Trump is really gonna win. He has
• 35:14
  no money. He has no money personally, no cash personally. The Republican
• 35:17
  Party is broke as it could possibly be. I think this is going to
• 35:22
  kill Republicans on the House side. It's not going to help on the Senate
• 35:25
  side. I think Trump's celebrity can overcome a lot of that, but resources
• 35:32
  still matter at least a little bit in a presidential campaign, even when you
• 35:36
  have two very very very very well known entities and Trump and Biden, and
• 35:40
  there's not that many undecided voters to begin with. But this clip I'm about
• 35:46
  to play for you is the definition of delusion, and Laura Ingram is playing
• 35:52
  right into this. I mean, I don't know what her game here is.
• 35:57
  I really don't, because I mean, she's generally a decently smart person,
• 36:01
  although she's completely captured by the Trump cult, and you know, she
• 36:07
  has to know, she has to know that the narrative that she's spinning here
• 36:10
  is ridiculous. But she's trying to convince Trump that he can win New York
• 36:16
  because one poll shows it within twelve points, which is he's at thirty six
• 36:22
  percent in the poll that she references. There's no way Donald Trump is winning
• 36:28
  New York. And then Trump responds that he thinks he could win maybe even
• 36:31
  California and all these other liberal states. And then he starts talking about other
• 36:37
  states that you know, should in all likelihood be out of his reach.
• 36:42
  This fifty state strategy. It's delusional, it's absolutely absurd. We already have
• 36:51
  the data in a race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. We know exactly
• 36:58
  what's possible and what's not. States could be close and which will not be
• 37:01
  close. I mean, not that much has changed since twenty twenty. And
• 37:06
  if anything more, Trump voters have died, and more Biden voters have turned
• 37:10
  eighteen, you know, than existed in twenty twenty. So I just want
• 37:16
  to play this the show, just how completely out of touch with reality Laura
• 37:22
  Ingram is, at least pretending to be, and Donald Trump seems to actually
• 37:28
  be when it comes to strategy and the twenty twenty four presidential campaign going on.
• 37:34
  I think there's a chance to win New York. The people are very
• 37:36
  very unhappy the poll today that just came out and New York. Just to
• 37:39
  remind everybody, in twenty twenty, Biden beat you by twenty three points in
• 37:44
  New York, but in the latest Siena pole, Biden's only ahead of you
• 37:47
  by twelve points. And that's what zero Republican presence, and you know,
• 37:52
  no ads, nothing. Now you're winning men forty seven to forty in this
• 37:58
  pole, but you're upside down with women fifty four to twenty nine. How
• 38:02
  could you turn that around in New York with women voters again, many of
• 38:07
  them love your policies, but maybe some of the other stuff there. So
• 38:09
  nationally, we're doing very well with women. You know, We're leading Biden
• 38:13
  by a lot nationally by twelve and fourteen points, and we're doing much better.
• 38:16
  We're talking about this fifty state strategy. I'd like to do the fifty
• 38:21
  state I'd like to focus on it. I wish I had more confidence in
• 38:22
  the election. And you know in all of the way they accumulate ballots,
• 38:27
  to be honest with you, because I think we do very well in California,
• 38:30
  but not when they send out thirty six or thirty eight million. But
• 38:32
  there's real progress in New York. I mean this is a significant poll with
• 38:36
  no Republican advertising, and among Latinos you're at forty one percent in New York.
• 38:42
  Among African Americans you're at twenty six percent. Those are forty percent increases
• 38:46
  from twenty twenty. So with a little work and a lot of these states.
• 38:51
  New England has twelve Senate seats. I mean, I'm from Connecticut.
• 38:53
  Why is Connecticut down the tubes? Why is Illinois down the tubes? Why
• 38:57
  is California law? New York, New Jersey? New Jersey very strong?
• 39:00
  With great Trump's state, I think we have a chance. If you win
• 39:05
  any of them, you automatically win the election. I mean you'd win.
• 39:07
  Virginia is another one. New Mexico we did great in New Mexico. I
• 39:12
  think we have a really good shot there. You know, Colorado is very
• 39:15
  interesting because of all this mess where you had this group of people trying to
• 39:19
  take somebody out of the ballot. They're saying, we're doing very well in
• 39:22
  Colorado. I think we're doing well everywhere, but we're beating him nationally by
• 39:25
  a lot. In fact, right now, we're winning the popular vote by
• 39:29
  a lot. Pure delusion, Absolute delusion. Now I get that part of
• 39:36
  what Trump's trying to do here is to create the perception that he's inevitable,
• 39:40
  that he's a juggernaut, and that he can't be beaten, and you know,
• 39:45
  get on my bandwagon. And by the way, there's probably some positive
• 39:51
  to that. I will say that, And I don't know if he's smart
• 39:53
  enough to think about this, but I will say that if this current polling
• 39:58
  surge holds, which we won't know again for another couple of weeks, but
• 40:02
  if it does hold, and if Trump really is now clearly ahead by three
• 40:07
  four points nationally, whatever it is, I really think that this the real
• 40:15
  impact of this is not what's going to happen in November. But as I've
• 40:17
  said previously, it's going to impact the path of the campaign and make it
• 40:22
  very, very difficult for Biden to dodge debates, especially given the concerns about
• 40:27
  his age. But here's another thing that Trump actually probably cares more about than
• 40:30
  it does. If it becomes clearly cemented in the consciousness of the public and
• 40:37
  the media that Trump is really the favorite and in his mind a heavy favorite,
• 40:44
  right but he's not heavy favorite. He might be the favorite right now,
• 40:47
  and that's the perception, and sometimes perception creates reality. The place where
• 40:53
  this is really going to help him most is in these court cases, because
• 40:58
  folks, I'm I keep looking at the big picture of these court cases,
• 41:04
  and the timing here is obviously absurd on its face, the idea that these
• 41:09
  people all played it way too cute. They all wanted to make sure they
• 41:15
  could get Donald Trump, but then they waited too long, and now these
• 41:20
  trials may or may not happen before the November election. The idea of having
• 41:23
  a criminal trial of a Republican presidential candidate, a major candidate, that was
• 41:31
  ridiculous on its face, But now that he's clearly the nominee, that makes
• 41:38
  it even more absurd. But then you add he's the favorite to Win's he's
• 41:46
  very likely the next president. That takes it to an entirely different level of
• 41:54
  insanity and absurdity. And I gotta believe that, at least subconsciously, that
• 42:01
  is gonna make it even more difficult to get a conviction, even in some
• 42:07
  of these very liberal jurisdictions. Now New York City could be, you know,
• 42:13
  a situation where all bets are off based upon what happened with Egene Carroll
• 42:16
  and the civil fraud case. But even there, I gotta believe, are
• 42:21
  they really are they really gonna put on trial and convict, especially in a
• 42:27
  case like in New York City it's based upon bullshit, the whole Stormy Daniels
• 42:31
  cover up situation. You're really gonna do that in the middle of a presidential
• 42:37
  campaign where the favorite is being put on trial, the favorite to win.
• 42:44
  So he's no longer just a candidate, he's no longer the presumptive Republican nominee.
• 42:49
  He's clearly gonna be the nominee, even though Nikki Haley hasn't dropped out.
• 42:52
  And I'll get to that momentarily. But now he's being perceived as being
• 42:57
  the favorite to win. That feels to me like a heck of a force
• 43:02
  field protection. Now is an impenetrable force field protection. No, but it's
• 43:09
  got to have an influence. And so you know, to me, if
• 43:13
  you're based upon what Donald Trump considers to be most important, that's got to
• 43:17
  be the best part of what has happened. I mean, if it,
• 43:20
  Let's pretend the opposite occurred. Let's pretend that you know, for some reason,
• 43:25
  people really took the e Gen Carroll verdict seriously and the civil fraud case
• 43:31
  seriously, and Trump's approval collapsed even among Republicans, and he was down to
• 43:37
  Biden by ten or fifteen points, and there was no chance he was gonna
• 43:42
  win. Under those circumstances. I think there's a much better chance to get
• 43:47
  a criminal conviction. I really do, because I am of the belief this
• 43:51
  is going to be all about jury selection, these cases which everyone's ended up
• 43:54
  going to trial, and it's going to be all about perception. It's going
• 43:59
  to be all about how you feel about Donald Trump, and all about how
• 44:02
  you feel about the process. If you're a juror, and I gotta believe
• 44:07
  there's going to be one or two jurors they are going to be uncomfortable with
• 44:09
  the idea of doing this with a guy who is favored to be the next
• 44:15
  president of the United States. I could be wrong about that, but perceptions
• 44:19
  matter, and this perception is now close. It's nowhere near cemented, but
• 44:23
  it's close to becoming close to cemented. In a few weeks, this perception
• 44:30
  could be very much real that Trump is in fact the favorite. I still
• 44:36
  don't buy that, because I still think there's weather that's going to be in
• 44:40
  Biden's favor. I still think the Taylor Swift factor is at play here.
• 44:45
  I still think mail in ballots are making it very, very difficult to get
• 44:49
  accurate polling results. And I'm someone who's generally, you know, in favor
• 44:53
  of polling. I've worked as a polling analyst many years ago for Quinnipiac University
• 44:58
  Polling Institute. I've commissioned three major polls myself. I have pretty good knowledge
• 45:04
  in this area. But even I am skeptical that these polls aren't overestimating Donald
• 45:10
  Trump's popularity or Joe Biden's unpopularity. The age issue, of course, though,
• 45:16
  changes everything, and that's partially why I think the third party candidates could
• 45:22
  be so important because if you have an off ramp for liberal voters who don't
• 45:29
  believe Biden can possibly serve out a second term, there's a very good chance
• 45:34
  that they're going to vote for somebody else other than Biden or for Trump.
• 45:37
  So that's going to be an important part of the equation here. And another
• 45:43
  part of the equation that we haven't talked that much about recently is who's going
• 45:46
  to be Trump's VP? And Trump was asked about that by Ingram in a
• 45:51
  very weird way. There's been There were thousands of Twitter accounts last night that
• 45:55
  were claiming that Trump had named his short list for vice president, and he
• 46:00
  did no such thing, no such thing at all. Laura Ingram ran off
• 46:05
  a list of names that she liked that she says her audience liked, and
• 46:08
  asked whether or not they were all on the short list, and Trump basically
• 46:13
  noded and said yeah, like he was going to single somebody out on that
• 46:16
  list to say no, they're not on my short list, and then he
• 46:19
  didn't answer the question at all. In fact, he went off on some
• 46:22
  weird tangent about all the things that he's in favor of and Democrats are wrong
• 46:27
  on. Although I have to give him a little bit of credit as someone
• 46:30
  who spent an entire year plus of my life researching the two thousand and eight
• 46:36
  presidential election and doing a movie on it called Medimal Practice, how Obama got
• 46:38
  elected and Palalin was targeted. Trump did accurately describe what happened with Sarah Palin
• 46:45
  in the two thousand and eight election, where he was talking about how rare
• 46:50
  it is that a VP selection actually impacts votes except for Sarah Palin, and
• 46:55
  he gave her credit correctly for initially causing a probe McCain surge, and then
• 47:04
  he accurately described how the media destroyed her and that even some Republicans helped destroy
• 47:09
  her, and that that surge reversed itself. That's one of the more accurate
• 47:14
  historical analysis is that I've ever heard Donald Trump give and I was like,
• 47:19
  Wow, Okay, maybe he's watched my movie. I don't know, but
• 47:22
  that's exactly what happened. Well, he was talking about this in the context
• 47:27
  of how he's going to make his VP selection, and he seemed to come
• 47:32
  to the conclusion that he doesn't think that the vice presidential nominee matters very much
• 47:37
  with regard to voting, but it will matter when it comes to what would
• 47:43
  happen if something occurred to him, or obviously what happens in the twenty twenty
• 47:46
  eight election should he win, because that person would then be the heir to
• 47:51
  the throne in the Republican Party, and it's obvious that Nicky Haley is not
• 47:58
  going to be the person. Nicky Haley was not on that list. Nikki
• 48:01
  Haley, in my view, would absolutely shore up a lot of very hesitant
• 48:08
  Republican voters who might be prone to either not vote or go in some other
• 48:13
  direction. Although I don't think they would be RFK junior voters, but maybe
• 48:17
  they just wouldn't vote at all. But I do think that Haley, for
• 48:22
  all of her faults, would give a lot more confidence, especially given the
• 48:28
  fact that you know this Russia issue it's rearing its head again, that you
• 48:31
  might have a lot of Republicans who would be a lot more comfortable voting for
• 48:36
  a Trump Haley ticket than for instance, he Trump the fake Obama Swami ticket.
• 48:43
  Now, there's all sorts of rumors that are going around. I think
• 48:45
  they're all fake. I mean, Steve Cortes came on this podcast and claimed
• 48:50
  that you know within MAGA world, the rumors are that Ben Carson is going
• 48:53
  to be the nominee. I'm still hearing that. I just cannot believe.
• 48:57
  I cannot believe that when the issue number one issue here is Joe Biden being
• 49:02
  eighty one years old, that you're gonna have a VP nominee who's seventy two
• 49:07
  years old, not qualified for the position, and who was a gaff machine.
• 49:10
  Men. I like Ben Carson as a person, but I just think
• 49:14
  to me, that was a fake trial balloon that was put out there somehow.
• 49:17
  But the most recent trial balloon that I also think is fake is for
• 49:23
  fake Obama Swami. And I don't believe that Trump is going to pick the
• 49:29
  fake Obama Swamy because I think Trump is smart enough to know that the fake
• 49:32
  is a snake and that the fake is a threat to take over MAGA Inc.
• 49:37
  And he cannot be fully controlled even though he's a little puppy dog.
• 49:42
  And when it comes to Trump and he's a you know, obviously a surrogate,
• 49:45
  just as I predicted from the very very beginning of this whole race that
• 49:47
  he's effectively a Trump surrogate, that I would not believe that Trump could be
• 49:53
  dumb enough to trust for fake Obama Swamy. With a position this important,
• 49:59
  who is gonna pick? I don't know, but I don't believe it's gonna
• 50:01
  be Haley. It's not gonna be Ronda Santas, who was also on that
• 50:05
  list that Laura Ingram gave him. And it's I don't think it's gonna be
• 50:08
  the fake Obama Swami. Now, as far as Nicky Haley is concerned,
• 50:14
  she dramatically announced, I ain't leaving. I'm not getting out no matter what.
• 50:20
  I'm staying in the race, even though I'm gonna get clabbered in my
• 50:22
  home state of South Carolina this coming weekend. I am gonna stay in till
• 50:29
  the very end. And you know, obviously the strategy here seems to be,
• 50:36
  you know, something bad could happen to Donald Trump, whether it's from
• 50:39
  a legal perspective or from a health standpoint, and therefore someone needs to be
• 50:45
  here in case that happens. I understand that philosophy, even though it's you
• 50:50
  know, maybe a most a one percent chance of something like that occurring.
• 50:53
  But see, I don't even buy that if something like that actually happened,
• 51:00
  that Haley would be in a good position at all. I mean, what's
• 51:04
  the scenario. Let's pretend that there is a black swan massive event, whether
• 51:08
  it is Trump being incapacitated from a health perspective, or he gets convicted of
• 51:15
  a felony in a criminal from a criminal standpoint, there's no scenario that I
• 51:21
  can see that that means Haley is the nominee. Yeah, she would have
• 51:24
  a head start on the process, but there's still going to be delegates at
• 51:31
  the convention that are committed to Trump. The people making these decisions are still
• 51:37
  all going to be Trump people. The rules would basically be thrown out for
• 51:43
  all intents and purposes because of the uniqueness of the situation and the idea.
• 51:50
  In a weird way, Haley sticking in waiting for this to happen makes her
• 51:57
  far less palpitable to Trump fans if anything does happen. In other words,
• 52:02
  it's so transparent what she's doing that if the black swan occurs, she's almost
• 52:10
  inherently disqualified because she was morbidly sticking around waiting for Trump to either die or
• 52:20
  getting indicted on a felony. So she would be the last person that Trump
• 52:25
  fans would ever be willing to accept if they absolutely positively needed an alternative to
• 52:31
  Trump. I mean, weirdly, I think Ron de Santis might be in
• 52:36
  a better position under those circumstances than Nicky Haley would be in. She's essentially
• 52:40
  disqualified herself in magaworld by not conceding, by not bowing to the king,
• 52:47
  by not kissing his ring. And look, you know, I don't like
• 52:52
  Haley. I don't hate Haley. You know, I would rather have Haley
• 52:55
  as the nominee than Trump any day of the week. But that's not going
• 53:00
  to happen. And I don't think that even under the black Swan scenario,
• 53:04
  that could happen. So I don't know what her strategy is. I don't
• 53:07
  think it's good for her personally in her future. I think the way this
• 53:12
  is going to play out, unless she does way better in South Carolina than
• 53:15
  what is expected, I think this is going to play out worse for her
• 53:21
  than it will for Ron DeSantis in the long run, because unlike DeSantis,
• 53:25
  she's unemployed, and she doesn't have a next chapter that is, you know,
• 53:31
  easibly foreseeable in her career. You know, I predicted many, many
• 53:37
  months ago that Haley would end up coming in quote unquote second place in this
• 53:42
  process and get way more votes than Ron de Santis, and that's turned out
• 53:45
  to be true. But I actually think that in the long run, obviously,
• 53:50
  all this depends on does Trump win, who is VP pick is,
• 53:52
  what have you? So all that could be academic. If Trump wins and
• 53:57
  his VP pick is is at all credible, then that's the future of the
• 54:01
  Republican Party. It's not going to be DeSantis or Haley, at least not
• 54:07
  in the near run. But I actually think that where we're headed here,
• 54:09
  Haley has screwed herself more in the future than Ron DeSantis has as far as
• 54:16
  the South Carolina primary is concerned. Look, my predictions for how this whole
• 54:22
  thing was going to go down actor DeSantis got out have been pretty much dead
• 54:27
  on. I told you that nationally this was going to be an eighty twenty
• 54:30
  race, and almost all the national polls between Trump and Haley are in that
• 54:36
  range of eighty twenty, about a sixty point margin. And I told you
• 54:39
  that I thought that in South Carolina it would be sixty five thirty five because
• 54:45
  it's Haley's home state, is the former governor of the state. Is it
• 54:49
  possible that Haley does a little bit better than sixty five thirty five, Yeah,
• 54:53
  I think that's possible, but she's not going to do way better than
• 54:58
  sixty five thirty five. I still think she's capped out at forty percent,
• 55:02
  that there's no way she gets closer than sixty forty. But I'm going to
• 55:06
  stick with since this has been my general prediction all along, I'm going to
• 55:09
  stick with a round of sixty five thirty five, maybe sixty four thirty six.
• 55:14
  Trump victory in South Carolina this weekend. And at that point, I
• 55:17
  mean, the race is already over, but it's it's really over when you
• 55:22
  lose your home state by that significant a margin. But she's not going away,
• 55:28
  and I don't really understand what the endgame strategy of that is. I
• 55:32
  want to mention two other quick things when it comes to politics and to polling
• 55:39
  and strategy, and these really don't have much to do with actual politics.
• 55:45
  I just find these two situations to be extremely entertaining. And one of them,
• 55:50
  they both have to do with the US Senate, and one of them
• 55:52
  has to do with my state here in California, And this to be is
• 55:58
  so both of them situations, I'm going to tell you about are so funny
• 56:02
  and hilarious and telling and say so much about the media, especially the one
• 56:08
  here in California. So here's the situation in California. Obviously, we are
• 56:14
  an extremely democratic state, and we have a Senate seat that's up now.
• 56:20
  The Senate seat is currently being held, you know, by a DEI selection
• 56:23
  that's not even from California, made by Gavin Newsom, a woman of color
• 56:29
  who's not running for the seat. She's basically just holding it after the death
• 56:32
  of Diane Feinstein. So you know, we have this complicated situation where we're
• 56:39
  actually running for a short term senator and a long term Senator. But put
• 56:45
  that aside for a second. The way we do it in California is this,
• 56:49
  which is completely screwed up. But when we have a primary, we
• 56:53
  don't have Democrat and Republican primaries. We choose the top two vote getters to
• 57:00
  then go up against each other in the general election. Now I hate this
• 57:05
  system, and the system was designed basically in theory, it was designed to
• 57:10
  elect more moderates, but in practice it's just elected more Democrats. So you
• 57:16
  know, I hate this system, but in this particular case, it has
• 57:21
  created a very bizarre situation that the media is so dumb they're not even catching
• 57:28
  on to what's going going on and what's likely to happen here. So you
• 57:31
  have multiple candidates. You've got Adam Schiff, Democratic congressman, very well known
• 57:38
  because of the whole Russian collusion situation, who was censored by censured by Congress
• 57:46
  because of his role in that whole situation. You've got Steve Garvey, a
• 57:52
  Republican, former Los Angeles Dodger baseball player, former San Diego Padre baseball player.
• 57:59
  And then you have two other female Democrats who are in Congress who are
• 58:06
  also running, and so you've got four major candidates, but you also a
• 58:10
  few other minor candidates that are Republican. Now here's why this is so fascinating
• 58:16
  and hilarious. So because of this system where the top two vote getters go
• 58:22
  to the general election, it has become very very obvious that the Adam Shift
• 58:28
  campaign has, in my opinion, brilliantly, brilliantly created a situation where they
• 58:37
  want and I believe are going to facilitate Steve Garvey being the number two vote
• 58:45
  getter so that they get to run against a Republican in a general election in
• 58:51
  California where a Republican basically has no chance. And the way they're doing this
• 58:57
  is so genius it's actually almost evil. I mean, this is the Russian
• 59:05
  Intelligence Agency will look at this and go, wow, that's some good stuff.
• 59:08
  So Adam Shift has been running commercials here in California almost entirely on conservative
• 59:16
  media, either on Fox News Channel or I've seen it a lot during golf
• 59:22
  broadcasts, where of course you're gonna get a lot of conservative voters, right,
• 59:27
  So on Fox News Channel and on golf broadcasts, Adam Shift has run
• 59:31
  a commercial claiming to be anti Steve Garvey. Yet the messaging and the photos
• 59:39
  of Steve Garvey make you want to like him more if you're a conservative.
• 59:45
  He's too conservative for California. By the way, Look how handsome he is,
• 59:51
  and do you remember what a hero he was on the baseball field.
• 59:54
  Boy, that's Steve Garvey is terrible. And in fact, one of the
• 59:58
  ASTs that ran on Fix ste Shuttle actually has the words vote for Steve.
• 1:00:06
  If you read it in one way, it looks like it's saying vote for
• 1:00:08
  Steve Garvey, and then they put the word don't or stop in red,
• 1:00:15
  so you don't actually see it. So what they're essentially doing is the Shift
• 1:00:20
  campaign is spending money the Garvey campaign doesn't have. Steve Garvey's campaign was dead
• 1:00:27
  in the water. He just had name recognition, that's all he had.
• 1:00:30
  But the Shift campaign basically took his campaign and elevated it and said this is
• 1:00:37
  the guy we've got to stop. We must stop the evil Steve Garvey.
• 1:00:42
  He's too trumpy, he's too conservative for California. And it has absolutely positively
• 1:00:49
  worked because now all the Republicans in the state have galvanized around Steve Garvey and
• 1:00:57
  the two Democratic women who a shot have been boxed out. And if the
• 1:01:02
  polls are accurate, in this primary is at the very beginning of March,
• 1:01:07
  so we're only a couple of weeks away. If this polling holds, what
• 1:01:10
  we will have is the wokest state in the country, California, having a
• 1:01:17
  circumstance where the two candidates for US Senate to replace a DEI selection are straight
• 1:01:25
  white men. Because those two straight white men effectively colluded together to box out
• 1:01:34
  two women with minoritist status, and the news media in this state is so
• 1:01:39
  dumb, so clueless, they don't even realize what's going on now. I've
• 1:01:44
  mentioned this to Alex Michael said, the Fox LA you know in here in
• 1:01:50
  Los Angeles, the Fox LA news anchor who's been a guest of the show.
• 1:01:53
  And I've discussed to him many times previously, and he and I have
• 1:01:57
  messaged messaged each other about what's going on gone here, and he acknowledges that
• 1:02:01
  he's one of the few people that has mentioned this phenomenon happening with the Shift
• 1:02:07
  campaign elevating Steve Garvey. But the effectiveness of it is what is so amazing,
• 1:02:14
  and the fact that the news media is so completely clueless about it is
• 1:02:19
  so telling and so hilarious. So it looks like, and this depends on
• 1:02:23
  the polls being right, that somehow we're going to get two straight white males
• 1:02:29
  as our senatorial candidates because the Shift campaign, on purpose, this was the
• 1:02:34
  reason why they did it on purpose elevated Steve Garvey because they didn't want to
• 1:02:38
  have to run against the Democrat and the general election, because if they had
• 1:02:43
  run against say, Katie Porter, a female Democrat from Congress, they might
• 1:02:49
  have lost because you know, who knows how that breaks out, especially in
• 1:02:52
  a presidential election year, So it looks like Shift will end up getting the
• 1:02:59
  candidate that he wants to run against, in Steve Garvey. Now, Shif's
• 1:03:02
  gonna beat Garvey, there's no question about that barring some massive event, But
• 1:03:08
  there is kind of a scenario where it could be close, or at least
• 1:03:14
  close ish, which would be even more hilarious if Shift ends up in a
• 1:03:19
  dogfight because he got the candidate he wanted to run against in the general election,
• 1:03:23
  Because if you think about it right, women voters could be pissed off
• 1:03:29
  about this whole situation, especially if it becomes publicized what Shift did with regard
• 1:03:34
  to Garvy and how the women were treated. Shift is not particularly popular within
• 1:03:39
  elements of the Democratic Party. He's not charismatic. He's a straight white male,
• 1:03:45
  and so he doesn't naturally appeal to wide swaths of the California electorate.
• 1:03:53
  Then you have Steve Garvey, who has huge name recognition, played for the
• 1:03:59
  Dodgers and the Padres, and I could see a scenario where you get a
• 1:04:02
  lot of disaffected Hispanic voters remembering Garvey from his days with the Dodgers and the
• 1:04:08
  Padres and don't like Shift, and they vote for the Republican for Senate.
• 1:04:12
  And now all of a sudden, you got a dog fight. So we're
• 1:04:15
  getting ahead of ourselves here. But I find what's happening in California the Senate
• 1:04:20
  race to be quite fascinating and rather hilarious. But even that may not be
• 1:04:27
  as hilarious as the poll that was run in Alabama for Senate, not even
• 1:04:31
  for this year, for twenty twenty six. This is the greatest fake poll
• 1:04:38
  that has ever been run, and I think tells us so much about everything,
• 1:04:44
  our politics, our sports, our culture. And that's why I want
• 1:04:46
  to share it with you right now. So there was a polling outlet that
• 1:04:50
  did a poll for the twenty twenty six Senate race in Alabama. Now why
• 1:04:58
  you're saying, zig, why do I care about this? Oh you'll care
• 1:05:00
  about this, folks, trust me. Just bear with me here for a
• 1:05:02
  second. So Tommy Tuberville is the incumbent Republican and he's the former head football
• 1:05:10
  coach at Auburn University. Obviously, Auburn and Alabama have one of the great
• 1:05:15
  rivalries in all of college sports, and so Tubberville wins purely based upon his
• 1:05:21
  reputation as Auburn's football coach, and he's the incumbent Republican. So for the
• 1:05:27
  twenty twenty six senatorial election in Alabama, this polling outlet they pulled Tuberville against
• 1:05:34
  a generic Democrat, in other words, basically the best Democrat you could possibly
• 1:05:39
  find. And Tubberville clocks cleans the clock of the general the generic democrat forty
• 1:05:45
  nine p. Thirty two, so winning easily by seventeen points over the generic
• 1:05:50
  Democrat. Then they pulled him against the Democrat who actually held this office before
• 1:05:58
  Tubberville took over, a guy by named with Jones, and Tumberville wins by
• 1:06:02
  even more than over a generic Democrat fifty two twenty seven. So it's a
• 1:06:08
  slaughter. Tumberville's gonna win reelection if you put him up against any kind of
• 1:06:14
  real Democrat, even a Democrat that's held the office previously. Then, for
• 1:06:19
  I guess, shits and giggles, they put Tubberville up against Nick Saban.
• 1:06:27
  Nick Saban, the legendary Alabama football coach who just retired after having won six
• 1:06:32
  national championships at Alabama, And guess what happens there? They put Saban Saban
• 1:06:39
  in as a Democrat. Now, there's no evidence to me that Saban is
• 1:06:43
  a Democrat. I think he's probably a Republican, but okay, whatever,
• 1:06:47
  they put him on the Democratic ticket, and guess what happens. Saban petes
• 1:06:53
  Tuberville forty two to thirty nine. So, even in Alabama, if you
• 1:07:00
  call Nick Saban a Democrat and you put them up against an incumbent Republican senator
• 1:07:06
  who happened to be the coach at Auburn, Saban, with no experience whatsoever,
• 1:07:13
  still beats him by three points. Now, that to me tells you
• 1:07:16
  everything you need to know about Alabama to begin with, and maybe a lot
• 1:07:20
  about college football as well, and the Alabama Auburn rivalry. But it doesn't
• 1:07:26
  stop there. So they asked you whether you had a favorable opinion of all
• 1:07:31
  these different characters in Alabama. And so they asked about Tommy Tuberville, and
• 1:07:38
  Tommy Tuberville's favorability was only forty nine percent, which is pretty low for a
• 1:07:43
  Republican incumbent senator. And then they asked about Donald Trump. Donald Trump's approval
• 1:07:47
  was fifty eight percent, which kind of goes to my theory, by the
• 1:07:51
  way, about how Trump is outperforming Republicans on the Senate side. And probably
• 1:07:58
  also on the House side, has a nine point approval rating advantage or favorability
• 1:08:04
  advantage over Tommy Tubberville. Then they asked about Charles Barkley. Now I have
• 1:08:10
  suggested that if Charles Barkley can say Dion Sanders were running together, although since
• 1:08:15
  Dion's busy at the University of Colorado, you know, I would take Charles
• 1:08:19
  Barkley and Bob Costas, even though Costas is extremely liberal. If the Charles
• 1:08:25
  Barkley Bob Costas ticket ran in this election, I would probably vote for Barkley
• 1:08:30
  and Costas well. In Alabama, Charles Barkley, who went to Auburn,
• 1:08:34
  has a sixty two percent favorability rating. And then they asked about Nick Saban,
• 1:08:41
  and his favorability is eighty one percent. And then that's considering the fact
• 1:08:47
  that you know, got to figure the nineteen percent that don't have favorable opinions
• 1:08:51
  of Nick Saban are probably Auburn fans. Anyway, I hope you found that
• 1:08:57
  nearly as entertaining as I did. The best fake pole you will get in
• 1:09:00
  all of twenty twenty four. To be sure, I want to shift gears
• 1:09:05
  now to a different kind of issue. Although there's going to be some sports
• 1:09:10
  elements to some of this as I move along in this particular topic. But
• 1:09:15
  recently, including the last episode of the podcast, I talked a lot about
• 1:09:19
  the Fanny Willis Nathan Wade situation going on in Georgia and that very controversial testimony,
• 1:09:26
  and how it seemed to me that a lot of the media coverage was
• 1:09:29
  based in the soft bigotry of low expectations for black people, and that Fanny
• 1:09:34
  Willis was playing the black card, the gender card, and oh, by
• 1:09:40
  the way, she's also playing the church card. She's been going to black
• 1:09:43
  churches in Atlanta, trying to make her case that she's the target of a
• 1:09:47
  destruction campaign, and that there's no possible way that the media would be treating
• 1:09:55
  two white people with as much kid gloves as they have with Fanny Willi Nathan
• 1:10:00
  Wade. And that's similarly also discussed in the last episode of the podcast.
• 1:10:05
  The aftermath of the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade shooting has had a similar
• 1:10:12
  phenomenon going on in the media, where the perpetrators of that horrible crime clearly
• 1:10:18
  were black, and yet weirdly, we have almost no details about who they
• 1:10:24
  are there's even as of this taping confusion because a couple of names have been
• 1:10:30
  released of those who have been charged, but it's not one hundred percent sure
• 1:10:33
  that they're the ones that actually did the shooting. But regardless, there's absolutely
• 1:10:40
  no question that the shooting has been handled in a very strange fashion, and
• 1:10:46
  that you have to consider the idea that they being black has played a significant
• 1:10:53
  role in how the authorities in the media have treated that particular story. That
• 1:10:59
  again, it's kind of the soft bigotry of low expectations that George W.
• 1:11:02
  Bush used to talk about to mean, that's the greatest phrase he probably ever
• 1:11:06
  came up with, or someone came up with for him in his presidency,
• 1:11:11
  the soft bigotry of low expectations. I'm a big believer in treating everybody the
• 1:11:15
  same way, good and bad, regardless of their race, their ethnicity,
• 1:11:21
  their religion, their gender, their sexuality. To me, that's what America
• 1:11:26
  is supposed to be all about. And we're now living in a world where
• 1:11:30
  it's either by perception or reality or a mixture of both, that in many
• 1:11:34
  situations black people are not being held to account in the same way they would
• 1:11:41
  be if they weren't black, because there's a fear of criticizing black people,
• 1:11:46
  especially in the media, because it's one of the easiest ways you can get
• 1:11:50
  fired if it goes sideways, is if you're somehow accused of racism or if
• 1:11:55
  you accuse a black person something they didn't do, especially if you're a white
• 1:11:59
  person, you have no place to go. You're very vulnerable. You could
• 1:12:04
  be canceled, fired, destroyed, and so no one wants to take any
• 1:12:10
  kind of risk that way, and we end up in a situation where bad
• 1:12:14
  behavior is effectively being enabled because someone's race is essentially a force field protection against
• 1:12:23
  legitimate or normal criticism based upon the circumstances of the situation. So it's in
• 1:12:29
  that context that I found it to be quite telling and rather amazing to look
• 1:12:35
  at what happened at the BAFTA Awards, which is I guess known as the
• 1:12:42
  British Oscars. Now, there's a very good chance you have not heard about
• 1:12:46
  this story, and it's astonishing to me that you haven't heard about this story.
• 1:12:51
  But it's very telling that this has not become a major story in the
• 1:12:56
  United States and even within the right wing in the United States, because I
• 1:13:00
  think This was one of those weird moments that exposed for all the world to
• 1:13:06
  see what's really going on when it comes to race and the fear of especially
• 1:13:14
  white liberals, of calling out bad behavior for fear of being called racist.
• 1:13:20
  Now, for those that have not heard about this story, let me give
• 1:13:25
  you the details. So there's these BAFT Awards, the British Oscars, and
• 1:13:31
  the best picture goes to Oppenheimer Oppenheimer, which is probably gonna win the Academy
• 1:13:36
  Award in a couple of weeks. But that's the movie about the making of
• 1:13:40
  the nuclear bomb. And so they announced I believe Michael J. Fox made
• 1:13:45
  the announcement. Oppenheimer wins. By the way, Prince William is in the
• 1:13:50
  audience here, I mean, this is a big deal. This is almost
• 1:13:55
  as big as the Oscars. So this is a massive deal. All the
• 1:14:00
  the big players are there. Oppenheimer wins, and up on the stage come
• 1:14:05
  the producer of Oppenheimer, a woman, the director Christopher Nolan, and the
• 1:14:13
  main star, Killian Murphy who plays Oppenheimer. So it's not like sometimes you're
• 1:14:18
  seeing these award ceremonies where there's dozens of people that come up. There's only
• 1:14:24
  three people that are associated with the movie that come up onto the stage,
• 1:14:28
  and the stage is rather small, so, you know, this saw seems
• 1:14:32
  rather normal until there's someone that no one recognizes that goes up on the stage
• 1:14:41
  with them and stands directly behind the woman who is the producer who's giving the
• 1:14:48
  acceptance speech for winning the BAFT Award for Best Movie. And this guy,
• 1:14:55
  he is tall, he is young, he's I think twenty one years old,
• 1:15:00
  and he is black, and he stands behind the woman giving the acceptance
• 1:15:05
  speech and he kind of smirks a little bit, nods his head a little
• 1:15:10
  bit, but he just stands there and nobody does anything anything. Nobody the
• 1:15:20
  crowd doesn't say anything. Security doesn't do anything. Christopher Nolan doesn't do anything.
• 1:15:29
  Killian Murphy doesn't do anything. Michael J. Fox doesn't do anything.
• 1:15:32
  And the entire speech goes on as if this guy standing right behind her is
• 1:15:40
  somehow associated with the movie. Now, is it possible that some people thought
• 1:15:45
  that he was a producer on the movie. I guess so. But he's
• 1:15:49
  twenty one years old, So that right off the bat, and he looks
• 1:15:56
  young, and that right off the bat, you know, should make people
• 1:16:00
  go wait a minute, he can't possibly be a producer on the movie.
• 1:16:02
  We know he wasn't in the movie. Hell, everybody in the movie is
• 1:16:04
  white, so he wasn't in the movie. So what the hell is he
• 1:16:09
  doing there? And most tellingly, most tellingly, when the speech is over
• 1:16:16
  and everyone starts to go off the stage, there is not any recognition of
• 1:16:24
  this black kid at all. It's not like Killian Murphy or somebody went up
• 1:16:29
  to him and shook his hand like, hey, thanks so much. Maybe
• 1:16:30
  maybe he was somehow part of the presentation party. It is clear that everybody
• 1:16:38
  there has a feeling he doesn't belong there. That's my point. In other
• 1:16:42
  words, it's not as if this was just a Oh I thought he was
• 1:16:45
  there to protect the award or to help guide us off the stage, or
• 1:16:49
  maybe he was just in the wrong place. No, if you look at
• 1:16:53
  the video, it's clear they're all pretending he doesn't exist because they're confused as
• 1:17:00
  all hell. But they don't want to do or say anything. And it
• 1:17:06
  is obvious to anybody with the brain as to why no one wanted to say
• 1:17:13
  anything, And it's because the kid is black. Now, the kid is
• 1:17:19
  a well known YouTube prankster who goes by the name Liz Wani, and this
• 1:17:26
  has generated some media coverage, especially in the UK, and hilariously, there
• 1:17:33
  was one article that I saw that was probably the most substantive about his version
• 1:17:39
  of the story and how he pulled this off. And this is absolutely like
• 1:17:44
  a parody. This is a parody. The story goes on and on about
• 1:17:48
  how he pulled this off, and he did so because of the type of
• 1:17:53
  jacket that he wore, and the type of jacket he wore was what allowed
• 1:17:58
  him to get away with this without anyone calling him on it. And I'm
• 1:18:02
  like, are you You're kidding right, You're kidding me. We're not even
• 1:18:06
  going to mention his race. It was not his jacket, it was his
• 1:18:12
  race. And he himself was astonished just how easy this was and how he
• 1:18:16
  even references you know, people think I'm a genius for pulling this kind of
• 1:18:19
  stuff off, but I really just kind of came up with this idea.
• 1:18:23
  You know, you know, I lived with my mother and I was just
• 1:18:26
  watching television one day and I thought, Wow, I really could get away
• 1:18:30
  with this. Now I don't know whether or not this Liswani is aware that
• 1:18:33
  his race is a force field protection, almost an a visibility cloak to allow
• 1:18:40
  him to get away with this kind of stuff, especially in a very woke,
• 1:18:43
  liberal environment where everyone's terrified, because that's the source of the power.
• 1:18:47
  The source of the power is everyone is terrified, terrified of saying what's he
• 1:18:54
  doing there and potentially being wrong because if you call out a black kid who's
• 1:19:01
  well dressed and saying he doesn't belong on stage and by some chance you're wrong.
• 1:19:09
  Now either he's you know, part of the the awards ceremony itself or
• 1:19:14
  somehow associated with the movie, You're done. Your career is over. So
• 1:19:18
  there's no risk reward ratio to this. Nobody in the crowd is gonna say
• 1:19:25
  anything. Nobody in security even is gonna say anything, apparently because everyone is
• 1:19:30
  too terrified, especially in this liberal, woke environment of a Hollywood. Even
• 1:19:36
  though this is in Great Britain Awards ceremony, and to me, I found
• 1:19:42
  this to be incredibly telling, incredibly telling. It goes to the very heart
• 1:19:48
  of why so many things in our culture happened. It was almost the ultimate
• 1:19:54
  perfect proof that there is this phenomenon that people are allowed to get away with
• 1:20:00
  bad behavior because of their race, because not only do we not live in
• 1:20:05
  a society that is racist, we actually live in a society which, in
• 1:20:11
  many ways is actively engaging in reverse racism, where we can't even call out
• 1:20:18
  people for bad behavior if they're from a protected class. And it's not just
• 1:20:23
  black people, it's all sorts of protected classes. But in this particular case,
• 1:20:30
  obviously, the fact that he was black played a hell of a lot
• 1:20:32
  larger role in how he got away with this than what kind of jacket he
• 1:20:38
  was wearing. And I have not seen any major media even theorize, even
• 1:20:43
  raise the issue, even ask him, Hey, do you think you got
• 1:20:45
  away with this mainly because you're black or even partly because you're black? I
• 1:20:49
  mean, we can't even ask this question, and yet it's so unbelievably obvious.
• 1:20:56
  So we're living in this bizarre world where we can't even believe our lion
• 1:21:00
  eyes. Common sense is completely out the window. We just have to pretend.
• 1:21:05
  I can't stand playing pretend. We have to pretend that, oh,
• 1:21:09
  this just happened as a security breach and he got away with it because of
• 1:21:13
  the type of jacket he was wearing. Are you fucking kidding me? Really?
• 1:21:17
  Come on, all right, Now I want to move to an issue
• 1:21:21
  that has a racial component, But I actually do not think this is primarily
• 1:21:28
  a racism issue, and I want to make that clear because, especially coming
• 1:21:32
  out of the BAFTA situation, it could be misperceived. But I want to
• 1:21:36
  make something clear, even though when I'm about to talk about deals in large
• 1:21:41
  part with black men, I don't think this is a racial issue. I
• 1:21:45
  think this is a human issue. And what I'm referring to is what has
• 1:21:49
  happened over the last several days regarding the NBA Basketball All Star Game. Now,
• 1:21:55
  I thought about talking about this in the previous episode of the podcast,
• 1:22:00
  but it's a tape on Monday morning, and that game was on Sunday evening.
• 1:22:03
  I did not realize to the great extent that this was going to become
• 1:22:09
  a media narrative within the sports media and on social media, and I realized
• 1:22:15
  many people don't give a damn about the NBA or basketball about the All Star
• 1:22:18
  Game. Let me just say a couple of words as a preface for why
• 1:22:24
  I'm talking about this. As a kid, I loved basketball. Basketball was
• 1:22:28
  probably my favorite sport. At one point, my dream career was to be
• 1:22:31
  a high school social studies teacher and basketball coach. I went to Georgetown University
• 1:22:39
  during the heyday of Georgetown's basketball program and dealt extensively with the legendary coach John
• 1:22:44
  Thompson. So I loved basketball. I can't even watch basketball anymore, especially
• 1:22:49
  at the NBA level. I mean, for a million different reasons, one
• 1:22:54
  of which is they can't even decide what the hell the traveling rule is anymore.
• 1:22:57
  I mean, it's the most basic rule of the entire sport, and
• 1:23:00
  they have no idea what the rule is, and it seems to be arbitrary,
• 1:23:03
  and it's enforced with some people and not enforced with others. I mean,
• 1:23:08
  and there's That's just one of dozens of different reasons why I have no
• 1:23:13
  interest in the in the NBA at all, and have almost no interest in
• 1:23:15
  college basketball, especially since it's been destroyed by the whole one and done phenomenon
• 1:23:21
  where players routinely play one year and then go to the NBA. So,
• 1:23:27
  you know, basketball is a part of my life that has almost completely disappeared,
• 1:23:30
  which was at one point a very positive element of my life. And
• 1:23:34
  I have to believe I'm not alone in having lost my love for the sport
• 1:23:40
  of basketball. But the reason why I want to talk about the NBA All
• 1:23:44
  Star Game is because I think this goes way way deeper than basketball, and
• 1:23:50
  it goes to the essence of humanity and the collapse of our culture. I
• 1:23:56
  even think that what's happening with the NBA Basketball All Star Game would have an
• 1:24:00
  influence on the presidential election in a very subliminal way, and I want to
• 1:24:04
  explain why. So here's what happened. There's been in recent years, especially
• 1:24:12
  since Kobe Bryant died, and Kobe was one of the strongest voices for people
• 1:24:18
  to actually compete in the All Star Game. The All Star Game was important.
• 1:24:23
  You had to give maximum effort, and the year Kobe died, the
• 1:24:27
  All Star Game was actually somewhat of a real basketball game. I mean back
• 1:24:30
  in the day, just to be clear, in the eighties and nineties,
• 1:24:33
  and I realized we live in a society where if you say anything was great
• 1:24:36
  in the eighties and nineties, you're a boomer yelling at clouds and you have
• 1:24:41
  no credibility. Go watch the goddamn videos, I mean the videos of the
• 1:24:45
  All Star Games in the eighties and the nineties. That was actual, real
• 1:24:48
  intense basketball, mainly because you had guys like Michael Jordan who really cared,
• 1:24:55
  who had pride, and many other people who competed at the highest life,
• 1:25:00
  and you know, they risked a little bit of injury and they gave everything
• 1:25:05
  they had because it mattered to them, not because of money, but because
• 1:25:09
  they wanted their conference to beat the other conference. They wanted to be better
• 1:25:13
  than the other guy. This is their one chance to all play together on
• 1:25:15
  the same court once a year in a nationally televised All Star game. Well
• 1:25:20
  after Kobe died, and that basically a dead cat bounce, the game has
• 1:25:26
  completely deteriorated where there's no defense at all. It's heading down the same path
• 1:25:32
  that the NFL Pro Bowl did, which ended up going into flag football,
• 1:25:38
  and there was no effort whatsoever. But it was still at least a semblance
• 1:25:43
  of a game. They maybe kind of pretended there was a game, and
• 1:25:46
  there seemed to be a bit more focused this year on the issue of effort.
• 1:25:55
  The game was held in Indiana. Indiana is obviously very associated with Garry
• 1:26:00
  Bird, an NBA basketball legend, probably the last great American white player to
• 1:26:04
  ever play in the NBA, and I want to play a clip from Larry
• 1:26:10
  Bird that he gave like hours before the game actually started, because this is
• 1:26:15
  again this is important for context. This was not a situation where you know,
• 1:26:20
  everyone was kind of looking the other way and you know, everything just
• 1:26:25
  collapsed without any emphasis or focus on this attention of whether or not this All
• 1:26:30
  Star Game was going to be a joke, or whether or not people were
• 1:26:34
  actually going to give decent efforts. So here you have a legend of the
• 1:26:39
  game in his home state of Indiana, admonishing and urging the players to actually
• 1:26:46
  play hard. This is just before the game itself, at some sort of
• 1:26:50
  a press event. This was Larry Bird. The one thing I would really
• 1:26:56
  like to see is they play hard tonight, in this tonight, in this
• 1:26:59
  All Star game. I think it's very important when you have the best the
• 1:27:03
  best players in the world together, you've got to compete, and you've got
• 1:27:09
  to play hard, and you got to show the fans how good they really
• 1:27:14
  are. So I hope you enjoy your weekend. I'm enjoying mine. Have
• 1:27:18
  a good All Star game. Now, in the olden days, having a
• 1:27:23
  legend like that admonish modern day players would have had a major impact, because
• 1:27:29
  Larry Bird is still very well respected even in the modern day NBA. I
• 1:27:32
  mean, there's all sorts of TikTok videos where you have black players who are
• 1:27:38
  absolutely astonished at how great Larry Bird was because you know, how could a
• 1:27:42
  white guy be that good at our sport? I mean, that's basically the
• 1:27:45
  tone of the comments. And this is this is very consistent. This theme
• 1:27:50
  is very consistent. He's Larry Bird is considered a legend. I mean,
• 1:27:55
  it's Larry the legend, largely because oh my god, can you believe what
• 1:27:58
  this slow white guy was able to do? And so in the olden days,
• 1:28:01
  that would have sparked at least some level of effort by the players.
• 1:28:05
  They wouldn't want to have embarrassed themselves. They would have wanted to put on
• 1:28:09
  a decent show. Pride would have had some significance, some element of motivation.
• 1:28:16
  But in this particular case, the exact opposite happened. And even by
• 1:28:20
  the standards of modern All Star games, and even by the standard of the
• 1:28:26
  NFL Pro Bowl flag football game, this was beyond a joke. I mean
• 1:28:30
  literally a joke. It completely collapsed. There was not even the pretending of
• 1:28:36
  this being an actual basketball game. One team scored over two hundred points,
• 1:28:43
  which is unheard of and absolutely impossible if you're playing an actual basketball game.
• 1:28:48
  Now, somewhat to my surprise and partially why I didn't address this in the
• 1:28:53
  previous episode of the podcast, the sports media went bananas. They went and
• 1:29:00
  condemning what happened with this NBA All Star game. And I want to play
• 1:29:03
  two clips for you, mainly because they come from people who are liberals,
• 1:29:10
  Rich Eisen and Stephen A. Smith. Now, Rich Eisen is generally associated
• 1:29:15
  with NFL football the NFL Network, but you know he comments on all sorts
• 1:29:20
  of sports related issues and he's clearly a liberal. Stephen A. Smith is
• 1:29:26
  a black man who's also very liberal. Now, both of these guys,
• 1:29:30
  though even though they're liberal, they're pretty smart, not geniuses. Stephen A.
• 1:29:33
  Smith, in my opinion, is a fraud, and I'm you know,
• 1:29:36
  I have a huge vendetta against him because of his handling of the Penn
• 1:29:41
  State Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky case. But I want to play back to back,
• 1:29:45
  first Rich Eisen and then Stephen A. Smith condemning in no uncertain terms
• 1:29:53
  the outrageousness of what they witnessed at the NBA All Star Game and the complete
• 1:29:58
  lack of effort, and how the league gotta be embarrassed and what have you.
• 1:30:02
  And what I found interesting and I want you to do the same thing
• 1:30:05
  is when you listen to this, what I'm hearing is two liberals coming so
• 1:30:12
  very close to understanding but not quite getting there, understanding how their philosophy of
• 1:30:17
  the world and their misunderstanding of human incentives and how important incentive structures are,
• 1:30:25
  and how when you destroy those incentive structures you're gonna get bad behavior from humans.
• 1:30:30
  But that, to me is like the essence of why liberalism and socialism
• 1:30:33
  can't work. They don't understand human incentives, and that when you shift human
• 1:30:40
  incentives, you're gonna often get bad behavior, and sometimes catastrophically bad behavior.
• 1:30:45
  And yet there's no self awareness here at all from these two liberals, Rich
• 1:30:50
  Eisen and Stephen A. Smith Adam Silver, who I adore. He wants
• 1:30:56
  this thing to work. He wants it to be old school right, he
• 1:31:00
  wants it to mean something to the players, and then thus it means something
• 1:31:02
  to you, Kobe Bryant said before his passing and then before the league named
• 1:31:11
  the the MVP of this game. After him, he said that this game
• 1:31:16
  should be like a pickup game between the greatest players on planet Earth. What
• 1:31:24
  happens when the greatest players on planet Earth suddenly wind up in the same court.
• 1:31:30
  What's it look like when you say who wants to win? Who wants
• 1:31:32
  it more? Between the best players in the league. That's what the All
• 1:31:36
  Star Game should be. I don't want to turn on the All Star Game
• 1:31:40
  with my kids and hear my thirteen year old have a conversation with his bff,
• 1:31:45
  Cooper's friend Jackson saying, I don't think these guys are trying it very
• 1:31:48
  hard. It's literally a thirteen year old said it. I don't think they're
• 1:31:51
  trying. Yeah, the winning team scores. Let me get this right,
• 1:31:56
  two hundred million points. It's like a machine. The score you look up,
• 1:32:00
  go how much is that earth? They were talking about it in There
• 1:32:03
  was one hundred points in the first half, Like what are we doing?
• 1:32:06
  Two eleven to one eighty six is the final scorer. And these guys are
• 1:32:10
  so prideful, why doesn't it matter? They don't want to get hurt,
• 1:32:17
  which is part and parcel of this day and age of the NBA. And
• 1:32:20
  what happened transpired last night was an absolute travesty. Nearly four hundred points was
• 1:32:28
  scored, no defense, no effort whatsoever. This is the ultimate indictment against
• 1:32:34
  the NBA stars who show up on NBA All Star Weekend. You play harder
• 1:32:40
  in the summer league when you training, if you want to show such a
• 1:32:43
  flagrant disregard for the fans, for the audience, knowing that the product that
• 1:32:48
  you're putting out there is trash from the All Stars. I'm talking about superstars
• 1:32:55
  on the court together, all right, going up against one another, and
• 1:32:59
  you don't care to compete, why should we watch? Now? To be
• 1:33:02
  clear, I completely agree with both Rich Eisen and Stephen A. Smith.
• 1:33:08
  But what I find particularly compelling and fascinating and interesting and important here is that
• 1:33:14
  these are two over liberals who are effectively condemning what happens when you shift the
• 1:33:21
  incentive structures in a way that it disincentivizes full effort or any effort at all,
• 1:33:30
  whether that's regarding risk when it comes to injury. And by the way,
• 1:33:35
  let me just say, and I'm the only commentator that I know of
• 1:33:39
  that we'll make this connection, but I think that it is a very clear
• 1:33:43
  connection. I mean, this goes beyond just socialism and what happens to human
• 1:33:47
  incentives. It is not a coincidence. It is not a coincidence. You
• 1:33:53
  know, correlation doesn't always mean causation, but I believe that there's at least
• 1:33:57
  some causation here that the professional All Star games, specifically the NFL going to
• 1:34:03
  flag football and the NBA All Star Game completely and totally collapsing. It is
• 1:34:11
  not a coincidence that this happens just a couple of years after the COVID panic.
• 1:34:15
  This is a lot like what I predicted would happened with regarding school truancy,
• 1:34:20
  that when we close schools for over a year, especially in the Blue
• 1:34:24
  States, we were teaching an entire generation of kids that school doesn't matter,
• 1:34:29
  and you can go ahead and skip it whenever you want, because we're going
• 1:34:32
  to cancel it for a virus that you're not impacted by, and that's not
• 1:34:36
  really all that deadly to the general population, especially if you're not old and
• 1:34:42
  infirmed and unhealthy to begin with. So we taught an entire generation of kids
• 1:34:46
  school doesn't matter. Well, very similarly, we taught this generation of professional
• 1:34:54
  athletes, Hey, you know what. We can destroy an entire season,
• 1:35:00
  not just a couple of games, an entire season of a professional sport because
• 1:35:08
  of a virus that doesn't have any impact on the athletes at all, and
• 1:35:13
  that killed nobody in any of the sports. And we can cancel games for
• 1:35:18
  extended periods of time, we can shorten seasons, we can prevent fans from
• 1:35:24
  showing up all to avoid just the perception of the risk of basically getting the
• 1:35:30
  flu or maybe at worst case, a bad flu. So we have taught
• 1:35:35
  a generation of professional athletes, hey, when it comes to risk reward,
• 1:35:41
  you can never be too safe. My god, we can cancel entire seasons
• 1:35:45
  or not entire but they effectively. In my opinion, the twenty twenty professional
• 1:35:50
  sports seasons were beyond a joke, and NFL barely got through a real season.
• 1:35:57
  But even then they were canceling games, willing nil and had no fans.
• 1:36:00
  So we've taught them that when it comes to risk reward, you can
• 1:36:05
  never be too safe and there is no reason to take any risk at all
• 1:36:13
  unless there is a huge reward to be had. Well, when it comes
• 1:36:17
  to the NBA All Star Game, even though there's a very, very small
• 1:36:20
  risk of injury. There's no reward in their minds because pride doesn't matter.
• 1:36:27
  It's not even done by conferences anymore. So who really cares who wins this
• 1:36:31
  game? So why would I risk even the theoretical possibility of an injury.
• 1:36:39
  The league already taught me we can't risk even the theoretical possibility of getting a
• 1:36:43
  flu virus that didn't kill anybody that I know or anybody in the league.
• 1:36:49
  So the COVID connection here, I think is very important. It is not
• 1:36:56
  coincidental that the NBA and the NFL All Star games have completely collapsed in the
• 1:37:02
  wake of COVID, but that's not the whole reason, and that's not even
• 1:37:08
  the primary concern that I have about why this is significant to me. What
• 1:37:14
  happened here is when the players got too much money, it becomes impossible to
• 1:37:20
  incentivize them. Now, some people misunderstand this as a condemnation of capitalism.
• 1:37:27
  No, no, because at a certain point, and with NBA players,
• 1:37:31
  especially the Stars, this is the case money ceases to have any value.
• 1:37:38
  So it effectively becomes like a communist or socialist situation where you get paid regardless
• 1:37:45
  of whether or not you do work, and Therefore, effectively, money has
• 1:37:48
  no value. It's not an incentive creating machine because you're going to get paid
• 1:37:54
  regardless of what you do well. It has the same impact on human behavior
• 1:37:59
  when you have more money than you can possibly ever spend, and that,
• 1:38:03
  to me is always going to be the death of sports. I talk about
• 1:38:09
  this on the PGA Tour all the time. These the top fifty to one
• 1:38:13
  hundred players now making so much money that what happens on the golf course really
• 1:38:17
  doesn't matter very much. Even in semi major events. Now the majors still
• 1:38:23
  somewhat matter. Why because they still care about history and legacy, and it
• 1:38:28
  elevates, you know, completely different level of celebrity, and you'll make more
• 1:38:32
  money that way, and enough money to actually it might incentivize you. I
• 1:38:36
  mean, you're playing I guess for your great grandkids trust funds at that point.
• 1:38:42
  But it's still, at least at this points does some semblance of meaning.
• 1:38:45
  But in an all star game, there's the business model. Can't possibly
• 1:38:49
  provide enough money to the victors to incentivize them. Because these guys are making
• 1:38:56
  insane, insane amounts of money. The only thing that could incentivize them is
• 1:39:01
  pride, and we have a new generation that has been effectively taught that pride
• 1:39:09
  doesn't matter and it's all about them. And they're all a bunch of woosies.
• 1:39:15
  They've never been told anything negative about themselves. They've been coddled since they
• 1:39:19
  were little kids. They've been considered celebrities since they were teenagers. They've never
• 1:39:26
  really had to work for anything. And the Kobe Bryants of the world,
• 1:39:30
  the Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson's gone too. But the Michael
• 1:39:33
  Jordan's of the world, Mike, you know, even Magic Johnson and Larry
• 1:39:38
  Bird, they're gone because we're not producing any new ones. We're not producing
• 1:39:45
  any new ones for a lot of reasons. And when Lebron James and Steph
• 1:39:47
  Kurve Curry finally retire from the NBA, boy the NBA is in big trouble
• 1:39:54
  because they have no stars to replace them with. The part of the reason
• 1:39:57
  they have no stars to replace them is is because of the one and done
• 1:40:01
  situation in college. You know, I can't stand this idea that change is
• 1:40:06
  inherently good. I mean, I know, I'm an old fogie a boomer,
• 1:40:11
  even though I'm technically not a boomer, but I get called a boomer
• 1:40:13
  all the time because I don't like change. No, it's not that I
• 1:40:15
  don't like change. Some changes are good, but change for the sake of
• 1:40:19
  change is often very bad and has unintended consequences. And these fake civil rights
• 1:40:26
  issues that have changed every element of college basketball. It's not just nil and
• 1:40:31
  transfer rules that are fake race issues, fake civil rights issues that have destroyed
• 1:40:36
  the essence of the sport. I go all the way back to the whole
• 1:40:41
  one and done situation where you know, back in the Larry Bird Magic Johnson
• 1:40:47
  era in the seventies, it was still a rarity. You had to actually
• 1:40:51
  apply for hardship. That's what Magic Johnson did to be able to go into
• 1:40:56
  the NBA draft early. You had to apply for a hardship exemption to get
• 1:41:02
  into the NBA draft early. Well, what did that mean? That meant
• 1:41:05
  that college basketball players stayed for four years and if you were at the top
• 1:41:12
  programs, and that in that era, only if you know hand about a
• 1:41:15
  dozen programs got on television during the regular season because there was only three major
• 1:41:21
  networks and so it was you know, it was a huge deal to be
• 1:41:25
  on television Well, back then, if you were in one of those programs
• 1:41:29
  and you were a college basketball fan, you knew you knew everybody on the
• 1:41:32
  team. You knew the starting lineups of UCLA, Notre Dame, you know,
• 1:41:40
  Indiana, all the major programs. Because one, everything was consolidated,
• 1:41:46
  there wasn't fragmentation. But two, because they stayed for at least three usually
• 1:41:51
  four years, so you were attached to them. They had an identity.
• 1:41:56
  And it's not a coincidence that the most highly raided college basketball game in history
• 1:42:03
  to this day was when Magic Johnson and Larry Bird played against each other in
• 1:42:09
  the late seventies. Well, it's not a coincidence that that then facilitated the
• 1:42:13
  greatest era in the history of the NBA because you had the entire nation already
• 1:42:18
  knowing who Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were, and then you had this amazing
• 1:42:23
  rivalry between the flashy black guy and the hardworking white guy. I mean,
• 1:42:27
  that was and one was in Boston, one was in LA. It was
• 1:42:30
  perfect for the NBA. And then you brought in Jordan in the nineties and
• 1:42:33
  it just continued on and Kobe Bryant did the same. Well, that string
• 1:42:38
  is about to end with as soon as Lebron and Steph Curry are gone,
• 1:42:43
  because you know, ironic, neither Lebron nor Kobe went to college, but
• 1:42:47
  they were kind of the exceptions that proved the rule because they were so well
• 1:42:51
  known in high school. I mean, Lebron was a massive celebrity in high
• 1:42:56
  school and Kobe was the son of a former NBA player, and so he
• 1:42:59
  was almost as famous as Lebron was when he went to the Lakers. Well,
• 1:43:04
  that is all ending, and what we saw with the NBA All Star
• 1:43:08
  Game collapsing, I think is one of those peaks inside humanity and our culture
• 1:43:15
  that show how and why so much is broken. And that's why I think
• 1:43:20
  this is significant. This is just at the highest levels. I think this
• 1:43:26
  is indicative of what's happening throughout our society, and I referenced I think that
• 1:43:30
  it could have an influence subconsciously, even on the presidential election. I do
• 1:43:35
  because I think there are a lot of people who are looking around going what
• 1:43:42
  the hell is going on? Things are collapsing in all areas of life,
• 1:43:47
  and it's not just my imagination, and so something is fundamentally wrong. And
• 1:43:54
  when you believe something is fundamentally wrong. One, you're not in cla to
• 1:44:00
  vote for the incumbent, especially when he's eighty one years old and on the
• 1:44:02
  verge of dementia. And two you're more likely to vote for the disruptor,
• 1:44:06
  the guy who's going to potentially blow everything up and might be as entertaining as
• 1:44:12
  hell in doing so. And I think so in a weird way. I
• 1:44:15
  think all this subconsciously, in a small but not insignificant way, actually plays
• 1:44:20
  in Donald Trump's favor. Who knows, but there's no question that a lot
• 1:44:27
  can be learned from the collapse of the NBA All Star Game and the NFL
• 1:44:30
  Pro Bowl. One last story I want to talk about because it deals with
• 1:44:33
  one of my all time pet peeves, which is the issue of global warming
• 1:44:38
  and climate change. And here we have just been inundated with rain once again
• 1:44:43
  here in California. I mean, it's unbelievable how the permanent drought has been
• 1:44:46
  wiped off the map over the last couple of years. Wildfires have been wiped
• 1:44:50
  off the map for the last two and a half years, and we're not
• 1:44:54
  going to have a wildfire here in California for at least another six or seven
• 1:44:57
  months. Considering how drenched we are in Death Valley. Death Valley, the
• 1:45:01
  hottest, driest place in America, now has a massive lake, and that
• 1:45:06
  was before the most recent storm. A massive lake. It's gotten some news
• 1:45:12
  coverage, but of course not nearly is not much news coverage. If there
• 1:45:15
  was a lake this size that suddenly disappeared because of drought, that would get
• 1:45:20
  massive news coverage. But the emergence of a lake that's never been there before,
• 1:45:27
  I mean, this is huge. This is not like a little lake.
• 1:45:29
  This is massive in Death Valley, and I'm sure it's even bigger now
• 1:45:33
  that we've had the most recent storms. But you know, it gets minor
• 1:45:36
  news coverage and there's never any implication of boy, this is odd. I
• 1:45:41
  wonder. I wonder whether or not this is consistent with global warming climate change,
• 1:45:45
  or whether or not it's climate change, and it's potentially good. I
• 1:45:47
  mean, in Death Valley. There are videos I've posted myself online of this
• 1:45:54
  massive lake with snow capped mountains in Death Valley. Yet we're being told that
• 1:45:59
  this is the hottest year in the history of the world on record. It's
• 1:46:02
  just unbelievable, and the media just plays along and pretends that anything that is
• 1:46:08
  inconsistent with that narrative never actually occurred. But this story that I'm about to
• 1:46:13
  tell you is a new level of insanity, and I think is so telling
• 1:46:18
  about this entire issue. And it deals with the city of Chicago suing oil
• 1:46:25
  companies over climate change. This sounds like a parody. Five or ten years
• 1:46:30
  ago, this would be presumed to be a parody, but this story is
• 1:46:33
  real. From the Chicago Sun Times headline, Chicago sues five giant oil companies,
• 1:46:41
  accusing them of climate change destruction fraud. Subheadline, the suit says BP,
• 1:46:49
  Chevron, Conico, Phillips, Exceon Mobile, and Shell have hurt the
• 1:46:55
  city by discrediting science even as their products to quote catastrophic consequences including strong storms,
• 1:47:04
  flooding, severe heat, and shoreline erosion. Again not making this up.
• 1:47:12
  This story goes to detail the essence of the lawsuit by writing quote and
• 1:47:18
  they're quoting from the lawsuit by the City of Chicago against the five major oil
• 1:47:23
  companies. The climate change impacts that Chicago has faced and will continue to face,
• 1:47:30
  including more frequent and intense storms, flooding, droughts, extreme heat events,
• 1:47:36
  and shoreline erosion, are felt throughout every part of the city and disproportionately
• 1:47:44
  in low income communities. The city said in its lawsuit. So here we
• 1:47:49
  go. I keep telling you this. This is the way they're gonna get
• 1:47:54
  equity. This is the way they're gonna redo COVID'NNA. They're gonna make sure
• 1:48:00
  that they used as much that I once you also think about one other thing
• 1:48:02
  as I go through this. This is so much like what they did with
• 1:48:05
  smoking. It's right out of the smoking Playbook, which, by the way,
• 1:48:11
  I think was legitimate. That the smoking companies did engage in a cover
• 1:48:15
  up, and obviously smoking does cause lung cancer and that people ought to be
• 1:48:20
  notified to that. I actually don't think that smoking should be as restricted as
• 1:48:25
  it is because I'm a libertarian, but I'm all in favor of people being
• 1:48:30
  informed and educated. I think it's ridiculous that in the free society tobacco companies
• 1:48:36
  have been as restricted as they are in advertising. But they were so successful,
• 1:48:41
  The liberals were so successful in destroying big tobacco and using this argument that
• 1:48:46
  they're going to try to use the same argument against oil companies. But instead
• 1:48:49
  of using the impact of smoking on an individual human, which is easily proven.
• 1:48:57
  Right, the smoke goes into your box, and we see the photographic
• 1:49:00
  evidence on your lungs, and we have the scientific evidence to show the correlation
• 1:49:05
  between smoking and lung cancer. And this is all very sound logic and with
• 1:49:12
  enormous amounts of evidence behind it. Somehow to extrapolate that to well, oil
• 1:49:17
  goes into cars, and you know what causes CO two emissions, and that's
• 1:49:23
  why we're getting white weather or climate impacts that we don't like. I mean
• 1:49:29
  that that's insane. That is not an analogy that works in any way,
• 1:49:33
  shape or form. But that's what they're trying to do here. So back
• 1:49:36
  to the Chicago Sun Times, Chicago is following the lead of New York,
• 1:49:43
  California, and other cities and states obviously very liberal city and cities and states
• 1:49:47
  that seek to recoup potentially billions of dollars in damages blamed on the burning of
• 1:49:55
  fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas, that create carbon dioxide and have
• 1:50:00
  led to climate change. It's just amazing that that's stated as if it's a
• 1:50:05
  fact, just matter of factly everyone knows, oh yeah, because if we
• 1:50:10
  say it long enough and often enough, it's just accepted. In fact,
• 1:50:14
  if you don't accept it, you're a denier, you're a science denier,
• 1:50:17
  you're a heretic, you're a blasphemer. But we just have to accept that
• 1:50:23
  oil and natural gas create carbon dioxide that have led to climate change. And
• 1:50:29
  I would argue, we haven't even proven that there's climate change. There's always
• 1:50:32
  been climate change, but we haven't proven that it actually is happening. We
• 1:50:38
  don't know why it's happening. If it is, we don't even know if
• 1:50:40
  it's a bad thing, if it is happening, and we don't know whether
• 1:50:43
  that we can change it if it's actually happening, and if we do try
• 1:50:46
  to change it, who knows that we're going to change it too much in
• 1:50:48
  the other direction. But okay, back to the article. The city has
• 1:50:55
  not asked for a specific amount of money. The city is asked a court
• 1:51:00
  to hold companies responsible for the cost of climate change, including damage to property
• 1:51:06
  and infrastructure necessary to adapt. For instance, the city said it's spending one
• 1:51:14
  hundred and eighty eight million dollars on climate projects in low income communities. Okay,
• 1:51:19
  so holy circular argument, Batman. So here's what's happening. So they
• 1:51:24
  have used the excuse of climate change to spend a whole lot of tax money
• 1:51:30
  in low income communities, and now they're claiming that that is something they should
• 1:51:35
  be recouping because it's the oil company's fault. Well, no, what they're
• 1:51:41
  doing is they're using climate change as a boondoggle to justify spending one hundred and
• 1:51:46
  eighty eight million dollars in the communities of their most loyal voters. That's what's
• 1:51:53
  really happening here. But now, somehow that is evidence of damages. In
• 1:51:58
  a lawsuit against oil comptmpanies, the suit also accuses the companies of deceiving the
• 1:52:03
  public by waging campaigns to undermine scientific proof of the climate impact. This is
• 1:52:11
  back to the tobacco playbook. In addition to the companies, the city singles
• 1:52:15
  out the American Petroleum Institute, which it said, since nineteen eighty eight has
• 1:52:21
  led a number of quote unquote front groups that include the Global Climate Coalition and
• 1:52:27
  Partnership for a Better Energy Future to promote climate disinformation and advocacy from a purportably
• 1:52:35
  objective source. These groups were organized to cast doubt on climate science and promote
• 1:52:43
  consumer demand for fossil fuels the suit claims. Now, this one drives me
• 1:52:50
  crazy, among probably more than anything else, because much like what they did
• 1:52:56
  with tobacco. Okay, tobacco had real evidence, here, they're just saying
• 1:53:02
  you can't even defend yourself, you can't even make a counter argument, because
• 1:53:06
  then you're a denier, you're a heretic, you're a blasphemer. We've already
• 1:53:12
  accepted this as real. So the climate alarmists have jumped way ahead, way
• 1:53:17
  ahead. They've somehow gotten the media and all of the liberal establishment to just
• 1:53:23
  accept the fundamental premise of all this, a premise for which I don't believe
• 1:53:28
  there's any legitimate evidence and doesn't even make any damn sense and doesn't even remotely
• 1:53:35
  correspond to what we're seeing on the ground. Where are the real world impacts
• 1:53:42
  of this? And the next line in this Chicago Sun Times article, I
• 1:53:45
  think really hits home because it says the lawsuit also notes that the twenty twenty
• 1:53:53
  three was the planet's hottest year on record. Now that's just something that now
• 1:53:58
  has been accepted as part of the narrative. Was it the hottest year on
• 1:54:01
  record? I have no idea. I am very skeptical of the way that
• 1:54:05
  data is being accumulated. We have an incredibly small data pool. We only
• 1:54:11
  have forty or forty five years of data being accumulated under the same basic methods,
• 1:54:17
  which changed radically when we got satellite technology, which forty to forty five
• 1:54:23
  years is nothing. So I don't even know what it means when they say
• 1:54:27
  twenty twenty three was the hottest year on record for the planet. But you
• 1:54:30
  know what, for the purposes of this, I'm willing to accept it that's
• 1:54:33
  true. Maybe it is. But if it is, then why have we
• 1:54:38
  not seen the real world impact? By the way, it wasn't just one
• 1:54:42
  year. It's been multiple years in recent history that have been either the hottest
• 1:54:47
  or the among the hottest. So we're allegedly going through the hottest years on
• 1:54:53
  record, yet we're not seeing any real world impact. How is it that
• 1:54:58
  the drought in California has been completely wiped out, not just with rain,
• 1:55:02
  but with snow. How is that possible? How did wildfires disappear in California?
• 1:55:09
  How is it the drought in the entire United States, including Alaska,
• 1:55:14
  which supposedly is being hit hard by climate change. Alaska does not have one
• 1:55:20
  foot, not one foot that is currently in drought, not one foot and
• 1:55:28
  the drought for the entire Look up yourself. The US Drought Monitoring Service comes
• 1:55:31
  out every Thursday morning. It's easily found online. I look at it almost
• 1:55:35
  every single week. We have less drought in the United States of America,
• 1:55:40
  both in continental US as well as Alaska than we did a year ago and
• 1:55:45
  two years ago. How is that possible if the last two years were either
• 1:55:51
  the hottest or among the hottest ever on record. Where the hurricanes at a
• 1:55:58
  greater frequency or forsity. Where's the ocean surge, the ocean sea levels rising?
• 1:56:06
  Why isn't that happening? Then a certain point you got to ask the
• 1:56:13
  question, Okay, where's the beef? They keep telling us all it's actually
• 1:56:17
  getting warmer faster than we thought. Okay, fine, maybe, so then
• 1:56:24
  why aren't we seeing the impact that you keep claiming are going to happen?
• 1:56:28
  And it's most hilarious coming from Chicago, right, I was extremely liberal city.
• 1:56:32
  But who in Chicago likes the climate there? To begin with? It
• 1:56:38
  literally has maybe the worst climate in not maybe if not the entire United States.
• 1:56:44
  A huge portion of the United States. It's literally known as the windy
• 1:56:46
  city. My father lived there for many years. I spent a lot of
• 1:56:49
  time in Chicago. The summers are about two months long, maybe three at
• 1:56:55
  most. I mean, the winters are terrible. So who exactly is trying
• 1:57:01
  to get us back to a classic Chicago climate. Who's defending the status quo
• 1:57:08
  when it climes to Chicago's climate. It's just unbelievably funny, but it's also
• 1:57:15
  very serious because this is the weapon that they're gonna use, the primary weapon
• 1:57:19
  to destroy the essence of America. And fossil fuels, while not perfect,
• 1:57:25
  are like the greatest thing that's ever happened to humanity. And now here we
• 1:57:29
  are in this upside down world where fossil fuel oil companies are being sued because
• 1:57:34
  allegedly they've made the weather turned back in Chicago. Oh oh my god.
• 1:57:43
  It's just unbelievable. And yet you know, the media goes right along with
• 1:57:47
  this. There's zero skepticism, zero contrarianism, zero other side of this entire
• 1:57:56
  story. It's a religion that you just accept the premise for and once they
• 1:58:00
  accept, once they get you to accept the premise, which they have done
• 1:58:02
  with the younger generations, there's no combating it. You can't win once they
• 1:58:09
  brainwash you, because they've already set the terms in a way that can't be
• 1:58:14
  disproven. If it's hot, it's climate change. If it's cold, it's
• 1:58:17
  climate change. If it rains, it's climate change. If it's drought,
• 1:58:20
  it's climate change. It snows, climate change. If it does snow,
• 1:58:24
  no, climate change. Hurricanes yes, hurricanes no, Oh, that's climate
• 1:58:27
  change. Wildfire is climate Everything is climate change. When it just used to
• 1:58:32
  be normal, We just used to accept that that's the way things were.
• 1:58:38
  And I always ask and I never get an answer. If anyone has an
• 1:58:41
  answer to this, I would love it. But to me, I can't
• 1:58:45
  even take this issue seriously until you answer at least a couple of very basic
• 1:58:49
  questions. And the number one question among that group is what year do you
• 1:58:55
  want to go back to when it comes to the climate. What was the
• 1:58:58
  perfect year for the climate? I mean, these are people that think that
• 1:59:00
  the Constitution is an ever evolving organism. Nothing, you know, nothing should
• 1:59:06
  ever be considered to be static. Yet the climate somehow should never ever change,
• 1:59:12
  and that there was one year I don't know what it was that was
• 1:59:15
  perfect. Because I guarantee you, no matter what year they give you,
• 1:59:17
  which they never will something really bad happened at that time. Because that's the
• 1:59:23
  nature of our globe. We barely sustain life. There's a reason why this
• 1:59:29
  Earth is the only planet that we know of that sustains life, because it's
• 1:59:34
  a miracle. Now you might think God did it, or you might just
• 1:59:39
  think it was the law of averages that somehow we got lucky here on Earth.
• 1:59:43
  But we barely sustain life. And we've done an amazing job in recent
• 1:59:49
  generations of being able to more easily sustain life because of fossil fuels, because
• 1:59:56
  of air conditioning. Thank god, we've been able to sustain through winters,
• 2:00:01
  because of why fossil fuels, we get through summers, living areas we never
• 2:00:08
  dreamed of living in before. Why because of electricity, which also has a
• 2:00:13
  fossil fuel connection to it. People think electricity is magic, which is how
• 2:00:17
  we got the fraud of electric cars, which seems to be falling apart.
• 2:00:21
  But the media is ignoring that too. So anyway, I just I found
• 2:00:27
  that that story again feels like a parody. Ten years ago, I would
• 2:00:30
  have told you that was a parody. That the city of Chicago is suing
• 2:00:34
  oil companies for the impacts of climate change because they love their climate so much.
• 2:00:40
  In Chicago. Unbelieve what a completely screwed up world we're living in.
• 2:00:45
  All Right, that'll do it for this episode of the podcast. We have
• 2:00:47
  only two free episodes left, so next week we'll put out two new episodes,
• 2:00:55
  and the plan is for that to be it as far as free and
• 2:00:59
  clear episodes. We will then be going to a paid subscriber based podcast.
• 2:01:04
  If you want to participate in that so they continue to get this podcast at
• 2:01:09
  least twice a week, feel free to email or executive producer Mike g at
• 2:01:12
  Gavino. He can be reached at a go or ago TDJ ago tdj at
• 2:01:19
  gmail dot com and just let them know you want to participate and they paid
• 2:01:24
  subscription. You'll get a link at the beginning of March. It'll be very
• 2:01:28
  easy, and if you want to continue to get this podcast exclusively, you'll
• 2:01:32
  be able to do that. If not, we've got two more episodes left
• 2:01:36
  and I hope they will be as good as they can possibly be. As
• 2:01:41
  I kind of say goodbye to this version of the podcast, and so our
• 2:01:45
  last episode, I do plan on doing something special, so you'll have that
• 2:01:47
  to look forward to, I hope. Until then, thanks so much for
• 2:01:50
  listening. This has been the death of journalism podcasts. My name is John Ziggler.