Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode One Hundred Twenty Nine: He Doesn't Know It's A Show, He Thinks It's A Fight

Transcript

Episode One Hundred Twenty Nine: He Doesn't Know It's A Show, He Thinks It's A Fight · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and twenty nine of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 0:04
  My name is John Zigler. On today's show, the prosecutors of Donald
• 0:08
  Trump in Georgia and New York expose themselves in multiple ways. What the hell
• 0:15
  is going on with Tucker Carlson, the Kansas City Chief, super Bowl celebration
• 0:19
  turns tragic, a unicorn re emerges in elite academia, and the Joe Paterno
• 0:26
  controversy is back in the news. I'm known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man.
• 0:31
  I'm a digital advertising SEO and email marketing specialist that also happens to be
• 0:36
  a big fan of John Zigler and the Death of Journalist. Do you need
• 0:40
  help reaching your target audience? Let me help you develop the right messaging and
• 0:45
  confated messages and the best channels for your business. Please visit my website,
• 0:50
  the Dutchdigital Marketingman dot com and let me help you tell your story. The
• 0:55
  website is the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com. If you want to grow your
• 1:00
  business, Peter can help. That's the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com. And
• 1:06
  hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. This promises to be a jam packed
• 1:11
  and potentially slightly lengthy episode of the podcast, as there is so much interesting
• 1:15
  stuff to get to. But there is no more entertaining, enlightening, and
• 1:21
  potentially significant story than what happened at the end of last week with regard to
• 1:26
  Donald Trump's prosecutors in the Georgia election interference case. Now, I'm not going
• 1:33
  to spend too much time on this, although I easily could, because my
• 1:38
  perception is that virtually every conservative commentator in America is going to be obsessed with
• 1:42
  what occurred. But it absolutely deserves some analysis if somehow you missed it,
• 1:49
  the Fulton County DA Fanny Willis and her boyfriend Nathan Hale were part of a
• 1:57
  incredibly dramatic and bizarre hearing determined whether or not they essentially should be dismissed from
• 2:02
  the case involving Donald Trump and many others because essentially of a conflict of interest
• 2:09
  and also potential perjury and lying as well as misused of funds. There's all
• 2:15
  sorts of different allegations here, and I guess the big takeaway. I mean,
• 2:22
  this was just absolutely crazy and it's still ongoing into this next week,
• 2:28
  and frankly, I do wonder whether not the second day of testimony last Friday
• 2:32
  may have been more significant than even the Thursday testimony of Fanny Willis herself,
• 2:39
  even though it didn't get nearly as much media coverage, And it would be
• 2:44
  very easy to get bogged down into the weeds on this. But to me,
• 2:49
  my big takeaway from this absolute shit show is that this is a perfect
• 2:54
  example of how power corrupts and ultimate power corrupts ultimately, and that there is
• 3:02
  a feathdom in Fulton County, Georgia, and we are now living in this
• 3:07
  very strange world where you know, in generations past, there would have been
• 3:12
  stereotypes, I'm sure which had some truth to them that you might find a
• 3:15
  county deep in the South that was dominated like by white men who ran justice
• 3:22
  the way they wanted to run it, and there was probably an enormous amount
• 3:24
  of corruption because there was no way to fight it. There wasn't a lot
• 3:30
  of media attention, and the people that were in charge knew that they were
• 3:34
  untouchable. Well, now we're living in a world where the same thing could
• 3:38
  happened, only the people in charge happened to be black, and that they're
• 3:42
  using their race as a weapon or a force field protection against any kind of
• 3:50
  criticism, and that the only way that a Fannie Willis could get to the
• 3:54
  position that she's in and have the audacity to try to take out the Republican
• 4:01
  Party's leading presidential candidate in a case that's very duplicative of a case that was
• 4:08
  already filed in federal court. The only way that could happen is as someone
• 4:12
  feels so unbelievably confident, so cocky that they cannot be touched, that they
• 4:19
  have lived their career in a way where they are not held to the same
• 4:25
  standard as everybody else because they're a black female and therefore one they've been taught
• 4:31
  that their crap doesn't stink. This woman does not believe that her crap stinks
• 4:38
  because she's never been told at stinks. Because she has had rose pedals put
• 4:43
  down in her path wherever she has gone, largely because of her race and
• 4:47
  gender, and that this has over time, it certainly seems to me,
• 4:51
  as I interpreted her testimony, has created an arrogance that is off the and
• 5:00
  that is in no way, shape or form consistent with what any county DA
• 5:05
  ought to be, but especially one going after a person who is going to
• 5:11
  be the Republican presidential nominee in a state that could very well be key in
• 5:16
  deciding who the next president of the United States is. So that to me
• 5:23
  was the major takeaway. This is a person who knows how to use her
• 5:28
  gender and her race as a weapon, and it has been exceedingly effective.
• 5:33
  And it essentially this person got to this position without really being fully vented.
• 5:39
  I mean, by god, she literally promised, she literally promised in her
• 5:44
  campaign to be DA that she would not be sleeping with people that she hired,
• 5:50
  and she would not be misusing public funds. That's on tape. And
• 5:55
  yet this evidentiary hearing proved that both of them those things are exactly what she's
• 6:01
  been doing. My god, she essentially admitted to campaign finance violations. She
• 6:08
  essentially admitted what seems to be to violations of tax law. Not to mention,
• 6:15
  it appears as if she's lied to the court, maybe committed perjury.
• 6:18
  Clearly had a relationship with Nathan Hale well before she hired him as the special
• 6:25
  prosecutor on the Trump related case, and of course that was a source of
• 6:30
  a lot of the hilarity that occurred here, because it was obvious one that
• 6:34
  Nathan Hale was screwing around with a lot of different women, and in fact,
• 6:39
  at one point was cheating on Fanny Willis. And there's even a narrative
• 6:45
  that Fanny Willis was basically keeping Nathan Hale as a male prostitute, which got
• 6:49
  to the whole issue of the money and how they were paying for things,
• 6:56
  and whether or not they were reimbursing each other for their trip these very lavish
• 7:00
  romantic getaways. And that was really another area where race came into this,
• 7:06
  the whole money aspect. And I found this to be one of the more
• 7:11
  interesting and also disturbing and frustrating aspects of this whole situation because their story is
• 7:17
  that they dealt mostly in cash. Now we're living in an almost cashless society,
• 7:25
  and and so you know, the idea of using cash in a very
• 7:30
  significant way is inherently suspicious in the normal world, in in the in the
• 7:38
  world where where County DA's normally live, that using cash is inherently suspicious,
• 7:46
  obviously, except in isolated circumstances. However, it's suspicious because obviously cash is
• 7:54
  much more difficult to be traced. You don't know exactly how much was used,
• 7:58
  and it gives inherent plaw deniability, at least in the old world.
• 8:01
  Now it's so rarely used that it's inherently suspect, and understandably so. But
• 8:09
  in order to combat that inherent suspicion that is intrinsic to somebody using a lot
• 8:16
  of cash for reimbursement, especially when they're being accused of impropriety, Fanny Willis
• 8:24
  tried to play both the gender and the race card that oh no, no,
• 8:30
  you don't understand. I'm a woman and I'm a woman of color.
• 8:33
  I'm paraphrasing, but I need cash around because I never know what's going to
• 8:37
  happen to me, and I don't trust. Basically, I don't trust the
• 8:39
  government. I don't trust the banks. This is part of my culture and
• 8:45
  this is who I am, so you bear it best not even question it,
• 8:48
  because it would be racist or sexist to do so. And I did
• 8:54
  not think that that was gonna fly, But I think with it, at
• 9:00
  least some people, at least in the media, it may have. I
• 9:03
  had a bizarre interaction with somebody I really respect who has been outspoken in a
• 9:09
  way that is critical of Fanny Willis in a public fashion, who was very
• 9:16
  much defending her on this cash issue. And I have to say, the
• 9:22
  implications seemed to be, and this is my interpretation, it seemed to be
• 9:28
  a little bit of the soft bigotry of low expectations, like this was somehow
• 9:33
  well, this is the way black people operate. That was that was never
• 9:37
  said, but that was what it seemed like was being said to me.
• 9:41
  And I'm like, what, so, we don't expect black people to participate
• 9:48
  in the banking system, now, okay, but even if that's true,
• 9:52
  let's pretend that there's some sort of cultural thing with regard to cash. And
• 9:56
  I'm not saying that there isn't, but it it's awfully convenient for that to
• 10:01
  be the story when one of the major issues at play here is the use
• 10:07
  of public funds and reimbursement and what have you. And so, all right,
• 10:13
  I'll listen to this idea that you're using cash and that's why there's no
• 10:18
  record, But what about the issue of taking money out of the bank and
• 10:22
  depositing money in the bank. There's no record, for instance, to Nathan
• 10:26
  Hale, at least based upon what was presented in court, that Nathan Hale
• 10:31
  ever deposited significant amounts of cash into his bank accounts, so what the hell
• 10:37
  did he do with it? And there's no evidence that she took money out
• 10:41
  of the bank. I mean, she has a direct deposit for her salary
• 10:45
  as DA and what have you. Right, it's not like she's being paid
• 10:46
  in cash. She has to get to the cash some way, some way,
• 10:50
  shape or form. But it seems to me as if we're not holding
• 10:54
  her or hal to the normal standard of behavior, especially give him the aches
• 11:00
  here, and that's mostly because of their race. It's almost like it's kryptonite
• 11:05
  with even really smart people in the media who aren't even liberal, who are
• 11:11
  like, whoa, whoa, whoa, we can't be critical of that because
• 11:15
  you know that seems like it might be racist. Well, they know that
• 11:20
  they're playing that card. They know it's kryptonite. That's how they got to
• 11:24
  their positions in the first place. It's just it is infuriating, but it's
• 11:31
  also very enlightening as to what has happened in our culture and the cracks that
• 11:37
  have formed in the foundation that somehow a Fanny Willis can get to this position
• 11:43
  where she can very easily potentially influence and dramatically impact a presidential election with a
• 11:54
  case I can't repeat enough is effectively a duplication of a federal case it's already
• 11:58
  ongoing. It's basically a backup plan. And I've been someone who thinks that
• 12:05
  there are definitely significant, real legal issues related to January sixth. Then the
• 12:11
  entire effort to try to overturn the election things that have proven are very very
• 12:16
  troubling to me. But I don't even before we realized that Fanny Willis is
• 12:22
  a nutjob, I did not support the Georgia case because I thought it was
• 12:26
  superfluous. It seemed to be piling on. It seemed like it was a
• 12:31
  backup plan in case they didn't get a good jury pool in the federal case.
• 12:35
  And to do it in Fulton County, obviously, where you're going to
• 12:39
  get a very democratic, very largely black, maybe entirely black, depending on
• 12:43
  how they do this jury pool, is very, very troubling, even to
• 12:48
  someone who loaths Donald Trump. But the bottom line of all this is Fanny
• 12:56
  Willis is not of the stuff that someone should be made of. It has
• 13:03
  nothing to do with her race, nothing to do with her gender. She
• 13:05
  is not of the stuff that someone should be made of. To be at
• 13:09
  this level of our legal system. She's just low class, straight and simple.
• 13:16
  She's low class. I mean a lot was made of the fact by
• 13:18
  the way she was wearing her dress on backwards. I do not know how
• 13:24
  to interpret that. She was also wearing an upside down American flag lapel.
• 13:30
  She was the one that insisted on testifying, which was incredibly strange. Her
• 13:35
  attitude was beyond inappropriate, beyond inappropriate, and it was so bad that there
• 13:41
  were even some liberal commentators that were condemning her, saying that she's going to
• 13:46
  be dismissed from the case. There was one female commentator on MSNBC that went
• 13:50
  viral for essentially saying that this is over, she's lost all credibility. Now,
• 13:56
  there were others on MSNBC who were, you know, cheering for her.
• 14:01
  She's standing on business. She's standing on business. You go, girl,
• 14:07
  she's a fighter. We love her because obviously, being a black female
• 14:11
  liberal going after Trump, she's gonna have an audience, she's gonna have a
• 14:16
  fan base, especially on a place like MSNBC. So I am not convinced
• 14:26
  that one this is gonna make a huge mark in the public perception of this
• 14:31
  case. Obviously among Trump supporters, it does, and it did get a
• 14:35
  lot of media coverage, mainly because it was so enticing and enthralling and titillating
• 14:41
  that there was live coverage. So there's not a lot the media can do
• 14:46
  to change perception there. People are seeing it for themselves. But I haven't
• 14:52
  seen as much mainstream coverage of the actual event in the aftermath that I think
• 14:58
  this deserves herbs. And I think that's mostly because the liberals in the media
• 15:03
  know this makes Fanny Willis, Nathan Hale and the process execution against Trump look
• 15:09
  really bad. And let's be clear, when Trump was indicted in Georgia,
• 15:16
  it was a massive story. It was endless wall to wall coverage, leuch
• 15:22
  like the other three indictments, but it was it was not even by the
• 15:26
  time we got to Georgia. This was you know, we'd done this before
• 15:31
  a couple of different times, but this was still given enormous credibility, enormous
• 15:37
  coverage. And Georgia is a key, key state. And I have said
• 15:43
  even before last week's fiasco that I thought, barring a black swan or a
• 15:48
  criminal conviction, that Donald Trump will win the state of Georgia largely because I
• 15:54
  think that there has been a backlash against Fanny Willis, and I would anticipate
• 15:58
  that that backlash, at least among white voters, is going to continue after
• 16:03
  what happened last week. To what extent it's hard for me to say.
• 16:07
  I have to believe that people in Georgia were paying even more attention to this
• 16:11
  crazy story than people were nationally. And I've already referenced one the playing of
• 16:18
  the race card and the playing of the gender card, and two that Friday's
• 16:22
  testimony may have been even more significant from a technical standpoint. It also had
• 16:27
  maybe the most insane testimony of all and that came from Fanny Willis's father.
• 16:36
  Now, he was key for a couple of different reasons, but the reason
• 16:40
  why I'm mentioning him now is one he played the gender and the race card
• 16:47
  for her on multiple occasions and even said this was the topper. Even said
• 16:55
  that her house, since she had to leave her house because she had been
• 16:59
  a victim of sexist and racist graffiti, that the B word, I guess,
• 17:06
  bitch, that the B word and the N word had had been graffitied
• 17:12
  over her home. But there's no evidence of that, and that he's not
• 17:15
  even sure Fanny Willis knew about it, because he himself, this elderly man,
• 17:22
  got rid of all the graffiti before she even saw it. My first
• 17:27
  thought was, Wow, did he do the same thing for Lebron James when
• 17:33
  Lebron James claimed that his Brentwood estate had been marked with racist graffiti and then
• 17:41
  he decided to move to Los Angeles to play for the Lakers after that.
• 17:45
  I mean, that's the craziest story that the media ever just completely decided to
• 17:48
  drop and ignore. That one's better left unsolved. We're not going to like
• 17:52
  the outcome of that fraud, fraudulent case that never happened. Lebron James lied
• 17:57
  about that, and I believe it's pretty obvious that Fanny Willis's father is lying
• 18:03
  about this because it's awfully convenient to be playing the race card and being able
• 18:08
  to come up with a justification for why you're leaving residences and creating all sorts
• 18:15
  of plausible deniability. And then, by the way, the other crazy element
• 18:21
  of the dad's testimony was they were trying to figure out whether or where Fanny
• 18:26
  Willis was in twenty nineteen, because there's evidence that the relationship between her and
• 18:33
  Nathan Hale began in twenty nineteen, obviously, way before this case was ever
• 18:40
  even thought of, because this case originated with the end of the twenty twenty
• 18:44
  election. And so therefore, if if Willis and Hale were having a relationship
• 18:49
  romantically back in twenty nineteen, it causes all sorts of problems. One,
• 18:55
  there's issues of lying to the court, potential perjury, but there is also
• 19:00
  the conflict of interest that she hired a person with whom she has a longstanding
• 19:04
  romantic relationship to be the special prosecutor. So, in an effort to try
• 19:08
  to nail down what was going on in twenty nineteen, they asked Faddy Willis's
• 19:12
  father about the circumstances at that time and his claim, and this is not
• 19:21
  an exaggeration. It's a paraphrase, but it's not an exaggeration. His claim
• 19:26
  is, well, you know, I wasn't really able to do very much
• 19:30
  in twenty nineteen because of COVID, And of course the response was, well,
• 19:34
  COVID didn't start till the spring of twenty twenty, and I shit you
• 19:38
  not. Faddy Willis's dad claimed, well, I knew COVID was coming I
• 19:45
  knew COVID was coming in twenty nineteen, and so that therefore I wasn't moving
• 19:52
  around very much. He already knew that socially distant in the fall of twenty
• 19:57
  nineteen, or whatever the hell it was. I mean, this is the
• 20:00
  level of absurdity that was this testimony under oath about this incredibly important case and
• 20:08
  the significance the implications of all this is. If Fanny Willis and or Nathan
• 20:15
  hal are removed from the case, it certainly seems as if the case is
• 20:19
  dead, at least with regard to its impact on the general election. I
• 20:25
  mean, it just seems impossible if they are dismissed, or if Fanny Willis's
• 20:30
  dismissed, that somehow they could recover, either from a timing standpoint or from
• 20:34
  a credibility perspective, because the credibility issue here is very significant, even more
• 20:41
  so than in a normal criminal case. In a normal criminal case, it
• 20:45
  was not getting nearly this much attention. If this happened, this would be
• 20:49
  an issue that the defense could use a trial, and it might even seep
• 20:53
  into the jurors consciousness through some sort of media coverage. Who knows whether or
• 20:57
  not they would be sequestered. Have you here, though, every single juror
• 21:04
  is going to at least be at least potentially and probably very much aware of
• 21:11
  this issue and the lack of credibility now that it may not impact your credibility
• 21:15
  at all, especially among black women. In fact, it may enhance her
• 21:19
  credibility among black women the way that she's fighting this, and that seems to
• 21:25
  be part of a plan. But as far as you know this ever,
• 21:30
  going to trial, it's hard for me to imagine how they get a conviction
• 21:37
  unless it really is an all black jury and they still get a bad jury
• 21:44
  pull if you're the Trump team, I have no way of knowing what the
• 21:48
  likelihood of that is. But I got to tell you, after what we
• 21:52
  saw last week, if Fanny Willis is not removed, and if that trial
• 21:57
  goes forward and mostly or maybe even all black jury that convicts Donald Trump,
• 22:06
  there will be riots. I mean I might even protest at that point,
• 22:10
  and I hate Trump. That's how outrageous that would be. That scenario,
• 22:15
  which is a long shot. There's a lot of ifs there, but it's
• 22:18
  certainly within the roman possibility. Even I would be beyond outraged if that occurred
• 22:23
  because Fanny Willis is not a credible person. Does that mean that Donald Trump
• 22:27
  is innocent? No, But this kind of stuff matters, especially when the
• 22:33
  stakes are this high, especially when obviously all of this is so incredibly political.
• 22:41
  It's unbelievably political, all of it. And you know, I would
• 22:48
  like to believe that in the state of the Georgia there will be I've already
• 22:52
  perceived there to be some, but I would like to believe there will be
• 22:53
  more anti Fanny Willis backlash, which would theoretically help Donald Trump in Georgia.
• 23:00
  Now he's got a lot of problems in Georgia, I mean, the heck,
• 23:03
  the Republican governor and he hate each other's gots apparently, but he's winning
• 23:07
  every single poll out of Georgia for the last several months outside the margin of
• 23:12
  error, and I would like to believe that will continue to happen. So
• 23:18
  this whole situation is a complete fiasco. It is scary what happens when you
• 23:25
  overturn a rock and see what's living underneath. This is a sausage making factory
• 23:30
  that was on live television on the cable news networks, and it was absolutely
• 23:36
  pathetic. What we saw what the result of this is. I do not
• 23:40
  know. There are some people that think this is deadlock since she will be
• 23:44
  removed. Others are not so sure. And as they said, even as
• 23:48
  we tape this on the President's Day holiday this week, that hearing is supposed
• 23:52
  to continue, and I have no idea when a decision will actually be made
• 23:56
  on what happens with her and Nathan Hay going forward on that case. But
• 24:02
  that obviously was not the only case going on surrounding Donald Trump over the last
• 24:07
  few days. We now know, for instance, that the so called Stormy
• 24:12
  Daniels cover up case in New York is going to go first, that there
• 24:19
  is a trial date set for that. And considering what's happened in New York
• 24:26
  with both the E. G. And Carroll case, which I thought was
• 24:29
  an abomination from a justice perspective, and the civil fraud case which was just
• 24:36
  decided to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars against Donald Trump, both
• 24:41
  of those in New York, both of those where the due process aspect of
• 24:45
  what happened was an embarrassment to the United States of America. An embarrassment to
• 24:52
  the United States of America. Again, someone who lows Donald Trump as much
• 24:56
  as any conservative on the planet. I am completely outraged by both the E.
• 25:03
  G. And Carrol case and the civil fraud case that just got decided.
• 25:07
  And so the idea that the first of the four indictments on a criminal
• 25:12
  from a criminal standpoint is going to happen in New York over this bullshit Stormy
• 25:18
  Daniels case. If I'm someone who is in the team Trump, which obviously
• 25:25
  I'm not, I'm a bit concerned about this. Now there's a narrative out
• 25:30
  there that this is actually good for the Trump team because it's the weakest of
• 25:34
  the four criminal cases. And I agree that on paper, this is the
• 25:40
  weakest case. I think the you know, in some ways, it's an
• 25:44
  easy case to prove from a misdemeanor perspective, because we're you know, we're
• 25:48
  not even talking. I mean, we're talking about such bullshit. I mean,
• 25:52
  but there's no real damage done to anybody in this case. I mean,
• 25:56
  the allegation is that Stormy Daniels paid before the twenty sixteen election to cover
• 26:03
  up an affair, and that this was a violation of campaign finance laws.
• 26:07
  Well, there's all sorts of problems with the statute limitations. But there's also
• 26:11
  a bigger problem with regard to Okay, to make this a felony, there
• 26:17
  has to be something that is a felony that's being covered up, and there's
• 26:22
  zero evidence of that. There's not even an allegation, at least not publicly
• 26:27
  of that yet. So from a factual standpoint, I think you could argue,
• 26:32
  all right, Trump is very vulnerable on a misdemeanor which it's polls indicate
• 26:37
  voters aren't going to care very much about, and seems to be on safer
• 26:41
  ground when it comes to the felony. But we're dealing with New York here,
• 26:45
  and I have said continually that these cases are not going to be about
• 26:52
  the facts. They are not going to be about the law. They're not
• 26:56
  going to be about the testimony. Evidence is not going to matter. We're
• 27:00
  talking about the most divisive character maybe in American political history. This is gonna
• 27:07
  be O. J. Simpson on steroids. It's gonna be all about jury
• 27:11
  selection and what the jury wants to do, what's gonna make them feel better
• 27:18
  about themselves. That's what it's gonna be about. Now. The media is
• 27:22
  unbelievably slow to understand this reality, they're still pretending that these cases are gonna
• 27:27
  be remotely normal, that facts will matter and the law will matter, and
• 27:32
  what happens in court is gonna matter. It's not going to matter. It's
• 27:37
  gonna be decided by jury selection. And when you consider in New York City,
• 27:42
  and you consider what's already happened with E. G. And Carroll and
• 27:45
  that jury and the judge in the civil civil fraud trial, who was an
• 27:52
  absolute joke. I mean this guy. I mean again, I hate Trump,
• 27:56
  but Trump is one hundred percent right about this asshole. I mean,
• 28:00
  he has no business being where he is. He handled that case horrendously.
• 28:07
  I am absolutely in the camp of Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank, who has
• 28:11
  been one of the few objective voices in the mainstream who has been saying this
• 28:18
  is pretty much normal behavior for New York real estate, what Trump was accused
• 28:23
  of here, and that there was no harm done to anybody, that nobody
• 28:27
  lost any money, there's no victim of this alleged crime. And yet here
• 28:33
  you have this judge essentially when it's all said and done, costing Donald Trump
• 28:40
  about a half billion dollars. Now he's going to appeal who the hell knows
• 28:45
  what the final result of that is going to be. But this, this
• 28:48
  is absurd, and the proof of it being absurd came from the New York
• 28:55
  Governor herself, Governor Hakell Hokeel. Governor Hokele essentially said the quiet part out
• 29:03
  loud. She essentially admitted that this was a specific prosecution of Donald Trump.
• 29:12
  She publicly said, because you know what was interesting. You know, if
• 29:15
  you listen carefully enough and you're patient enough, the truth will always come out,
• 29:21
  and it came out very fast here because you know, in theory,
• 29:25
  New York has a problem, right if you're gonna go after your real estate
• 29:30
  barons like Donald Trump for this kind of behavior, the same kind of behavior
• 29:33
  that, according to Kevin O'Leary, is perfectly normal and doesn't have any actual
• 29:38
  victims. If you're gonna do that, you're going to create a chilling effect
• 29:44
  on business, especially in New York City, especially when we're in the middle
• 29:48
  of a crisis when it comes to commercial real estate. So you have just
• 29:55
  caused a potentially very dramatic andive chilling effect on business in New York. If
• 30:03
  people like Donald Trump look at what he was accused of and say, oh,
• 30:07
  my god, I can't do business in New York. Well, Governor
• 30:12
  Holkol said, no, no, no, no, don't worry about that.
• 30:15
  Just don't be like Donald Trump. Just don't be Donald Trump. It's
• 30:18
  almost a direct quote, just don't be Donald Trump and you'll be okay,
• 30:23
  because she needed to make sure people were calm about that this didn't create a
• 30:29
  contagion of business people deciding that they can't do business in New York, at
• 30:34
  least not in the real estate realm. Well, what is she really saying.
• 30:40
  She's really saying that, No, No, Donald Trump was a political
• 30:42
  target. That's why we went after him for doing pretty much exactly the same
• 30:47
  thing that many other people do in the real estate business in New York.
• 30:52
  My god, and I would like to believe that that's going to have some
• 30:56
  influence on an appeal here. When the governor of the state is basically admitting
• 31:00
  that you're a political target, I can't believe. I just spent twenty five
• 31:04
  minutes here condemning all of Donald Trump's opponents. I had to say, if
• 31:10
  Donald Trump has a genius, it is in picking his enemies. Not that
• 31:15
  he necessarily picks them, but boy, oh boy, you know, what
• 31:18
  did the Chinese say about having choosing your enemies or having enemies that fit yourself
• 31:25
  interest? I'm watching this badly, but the reality is, you know,
• 31:27
  there's all sorts of old adages about may you have the correct enemies? And
• 31:33
  Donald Trump has benefited dramatically from having beneficial enemies, and these cases are further
• 31:41
  proof of that. And the governor just really played right into Donald Trump's hands.
• 31:47
  So I think that the Stormy Daniel's case is bullshit, but I think
• 31:53
  it's actually dangerous for it to go first. If I was on the Trump
• 31:59
  team, I would rather have, you know, if I was gonna absolutely
• 32:04
  positively have to have a criminal case before the November election, I would prefer
• 32:09
  it to be in Florida and the classified documents case, even though that case
• 32:15
  seems to be on a factual basis and from an evidentiary perspective, a slam
• 32:19
  dunk. Most experts seem to think that's a slam dunk. But I don't
• 32:22
  believe that's gonna matter, because I don't think you're gonna be able to find
• 32:27
  twelve people in this environment to be able to criminally convict on a felony.
• 32:34
  The Republican presidential nominee in a case where there's no known harm to the country,
• 32:42
  I just don't think it's gonna happen in Florida. I just cannot believe
• 32:45
  that. I mean, all you're gonna need is two or three Trump friendly
• 32:49
  jurors, and those people are gonna hold on for dear fucking life. There's
• 32:53
  not gonna be a conviction, and all Trump needs is a hung juror.
• 33:00
  And so my opinion, if I had to, you know, if I
• 33:04
  had nothing, I have anything to do with this. But if I was
• 33:06
  a Trump team and I had one case that I had to do, if
• 33:08
  I was gonna absolutely positively go on trial before the election, that's the one
• 33:15
  I would pick, because then I at least have a shot with the jury
• 33:17
  pool. The New York situation, to me, is a crapshoot. And
• 33:22
  the idea that you're going to rely on a New York jury to follow the
• 33:27
  law and say, well, wait a minute, we can't convict of a
• 33:29
  felony because there's no underlying felony. I don't know if I feel very confident
• 33:34
  about that, especially after what we saw with Egene Carroll and this civil fraud
• 33:38
  case and what Governor Hokel said, I mean, it's just to me,
• 33:43
  it's mind blowing, and it's scary, and it's frustrating as hell is.
• 33:47
  It's almost giving me sympathy for Donald fucking Trump, who I loathe. Now,
• 33:53
  in response to all of this, you know, of course, Trump
• 33:57
  came out with his normal statements about everything being rigged against him. And then
• 34:00
  the next day he came out, I'm not making this up. I mean,
• 34:06
  holy desensitization, batman. He came out with a new sneaker line.
• 34:10
  That's right, Golden Sneakers. For only three hundred and ninety nine dollars,
• 34:16
  you can own a pair of Trump sneakers, the Golden Sneakers. This came
• 34:24
  out at the same time as plans for a Trump cologne and perfume. So
• 34:34
  we've got Trump sneakers and Trump cologne and Trump perfume, obviously, all as
• 34:43
  a way to try to generate some revenue and get some of the money back
• 34:46
  that he's lost, not only just paying legal bills, but you know,
• 34:50
  the e Gen Carrol case, so that this civil fraud case, and it
• 34:54
  appears as if people are buying up the Maga cult can't get enough for this
• 35:00
  now You may not have heard this part about the sneakers and the colone and
• 35:05
  the perfume, but apparently Trump's new sneaker line will be called Air Indictments,
• 35:13
  and they're going to have the number ninety one on the side of the shoe,
• 35:17
  and the cologne and the perfume line will be called O Do in Peachmont,
• 35:24
  Oh Do in Peachmont, and they'll have the number two on those bottles
• 35:30
  for the colonne and the perfume. So O do IMPEACHMENTT and Air Indictments and
• 35:37
  all of this is part of the exclusive rigged Election collection from Donald Trump.
• 35:46
  Now I made all that last part up, but you're probably not one hundred
• 35:50
  percent sure that I did, are you, Because it's that's the world we're
• 35:53
  now living in, folks. Everything I the first part of what I just
• 35:58
  told you is true. Sneakers, the clone, the perfume, that's all
• 36:02
  true. The part about air indictments and O do Impeachment and the rigged Election
• 36:08
  collection, that's not true, but it could be because that's the insane world
• 36:13
  we're now living it. That's where we are in all of this insanity.
• 36:17
  By the way, I should mention when it comes to the New York City
• 36:22
  civil fraud situation. There is talk of a boycott of New York City by
• 36:30
  pro Trump truckers because of the negative reaction to what they see as an unjustified
• 36:37
  prosecution of Donald Trump. I'm not yet convinced that's actually going to happen in
• 36:44
  a significant way, but that's something that's out there and at least worthy of
• 36:47
  keeping an eye on. But as of this moment, there's no evidence that
• 36:52
  that's actually happening. But that's you've been getting some news coverage that there's an
• 36:57
  effort to try to do that on behalf of Dinald Trump. As far as
• 37:01
  where we are on the presidential polling, in the last couple of episodes of
• 37:06
  the podcast, I have been saying, first, I predicted after the Special
• 37:10
  Council report indicating that the President of the United States, Joe Biden, can't
• 37:16
  remember when he was vice president or when his son died, and that he
• 37:20
  can't be prosecuted in the classified documents case because he just doesn't have the mental
• 37:24
  acuity to be able to warrant prosecution because he can always say that he forgot.
• 37:31
  I said at the time that while that was a very significant development in
• 37:36
  the path for the presidential race that I did not anticipate that there would be
• 37:40
  much movement in the polling. In other words, there would not be a
• 37:45
  collapse of Biden's support. We would not see polls indicating Trump was now winning
• 37:50
  by ten or fifteen points. And there were a lot of reasons why I
• 37:53
  believe that was the case, and I have been patiently waiting for there to
• 37:59
  be made a polls in the aftermath of the Special Council report from Robert Hurr.
• 38:06
  We've not seen as many as I expected, and certainly not as many
• 38:09
  top tier polls as I would have anticipated, but there's enough data now.
• 38:15
  I was not one hundred percent confident in this, but there's based upon the
• 38:20
  data we currently have, there is absolutely, positively, as of this taping,
• 38:25
  zero evidence that Joe Biden has suffered politically because of that Special Council report.
• 38:31
  And I predicted that there wouldn't be a dramatic shift, but I would
• 38:37
  have thought there'd be a point two points, maybe three points, not a
• 38:42
  nil zippo. As of this taping. If anything, you could argue that
• 38:47
  Biden might have gotten a point and a half bump, which of course could
• 38:52
  just simply be noise or sampling error, or who the hell knows what it
• 38:57
  is. So I mean, that's basically mean less when it comes to polls,
• 39:01
  especially this far out from the actual election. But the most important part
• 39:06
  of this is I now think we have enough data to say, guess what,
• 39:10
  even a special Council report from a Department of Justice that you know allegedly
• 39:17
  is run by the Biden administration, even though this is a special council and
• 39:22
  Robert Hurs and a Republican employ appointee, that even a special Council report,
• 39:30
  which is one hundred percent consistent with what people can see and hear with their
• 39:34
  own eyes and ears that the President of the United States is not all there
• 39:39
  mentally at the age of eighty one, even that is not enough to create
• 39:45
  a major or any real shift in the polling data. I mean, we're
• 39:52
  living in the world now, folks, where you know it basically takes a
• 39:55
  political earthquake just to move the needle, even a fraction, even a fraction.
• 40:04
  We've seen this with Trump time and time and time again, and I
• 40:07
  no longer a think that it's only a Trump phenomenon. It's more exaggerated with
• 40:13
  him because he has a cult, and because we're so desensitized to all the
• 40:16
  insanities surrounding Donald Trump. So therefore nothing is ever new, and nothing ever
• 40:22
  really hits us hard between the eyes and wakes us up and goes, oh
• 40:27
  my god. You know, and there's very few people that haven't already made
• 40:30
  up their minds about Donald Trump. But here we have a situation that I
• 40:35
  guarantee you, I guarantee you if the exact same thing had happened during Ronald
• 40:39
  Reagan's re election campaign, there is no doubt in my mind that even before
• 40:49
  the debacle with the Mondale debates, which we went into a couple episodes ago
• 40:53
  in the podcast, where Reagan joked about it, and that's in great contrast
• 40:58
  to the fact that Biden was angry about it, which I think frankly showed
• 41:01
  these on the verge of dementia, because that's the way men in their eighties
• 41:06
  who are losing their minds react to this. They get very angry and very
• 41:09
  stubborn about it. But if this kind of revelation had happened in the eighties
• 41:15
  in a very different media environment, I really do believe that Reagan would have
• 41:21
  been done. Reagan would not have been able to win reelection, and he
• 41:25
  ended up winning a landslide. But we just do not live in that world
• 41:30
  anymore. And this was a story that got a lot of media attention.
• 41:35
  I praised a lot of it. It happened just a couple of days before
• 41:37
  the super Bowl, you know, where people in theory would be talking about
• 41:43
  this, and therefore it would be more difficult for people to either ignore it
• 41:49
  or not hear of it, or not think it's very significant. And yet
• 41:53
  even that does not seem to have had any real impact on the presidential polling.
• 42:00
  And I have to say one that's kind of depressing on a number of
• 42:06
  levels about the country and the state of our media and our fragmentation and how
• 42:09
  splintered we are and how divided we are. But that's also a problem for
• 42:15
  the Trump campaign. If this week finishes without any indication at all that Trump
• 42:22
  has gained even an inch and maybe even is somehow losing ground to Biden in
• 42:29
  the aftermath of the Special Counsel report, that's ominous for Donald Trump. That
• 42:34
  really is ominous. I still believe that the Special Counsel Report will make it
• 42:38
  very difficult for Biden to dodge the debates unless somehow he's winning at that point,
• 42:45
  you know, barring black swans and criminal convictions, what have you.
• 42:47
  I really think it will be very difficult for Biden to dodge the debates after
• 42:53
  the Special Counsel report. But as far as the short term impact right now,
• 43:00
  there doesn't seem to be any at all. And as far as the
• 43:02
  age issue is concerned, I made a suggestion a couple of episodes ago,
• 43:08
  somewhat tongue in cheek, but also somewhat seriously. I mean, I meant
• 43:13
  this sincerely when I made a suggestion to the Trump campaign team. Not that
• 43:17
  they listened to me at all, nor should they, I guess, since
• 43:20
  I'm not a sympathizer or a supporter, But I said, you know,
• 43:24
  what would be a great idea for the Trump team to really draw attention to
• 43:30
  the fact that Joe Biden is going to be eighty four eighty five years old
• 43:34
  by the time he finishes a theoretical second term. Put someone like my father
• 43:39
  in law, who's eighty four years old, had a very successful career as
• 43:44
  a financial advisor, very smart guy, in pretty good physical health. Put
• 43:49
  him on a twenty four to seven TikTok live stream and I really think this
• 43:55
  is a genius idea. I mean, this would be viral on tip if
• 44:00
  it was a twenty four to seven. I don't know if you could do
• 44:01
  it twenty four to seven, but you know, you do it as much
• 44:05
  as you possibly can, and you show the real life of an eighty four
• 44:10
  eighty five year old man in good health and have people fully understand what they're
• 44:17
  voting for in a second Biden term, because it is my belief, based
• 44:22
  upon my experience in life, that all men hit a wall at some point
• 44:30
  in their eighties, if they're lucky enough to make it to their eighties,
• 44:35
  they hit a wall, and it's often a really hard wall. It happens
• 44:39
  fast, it happens dramatically, and there's no recovery. And I haven't had
• 44:45
  a ton of experience, but I've had three or four situations that I've been
• 44:51
  very close to that all fit this exact pattern. And part of what made
• 44:54
  me think about this was my father in law, who's eighty four, Like
• 44:59
  I said, good health, great career, smart guy, but he's starting
• 45:04
  to lose it and he knows it. It bothers the hell out of him.
• 45:08
  And if people saw his life on a day to day basis, they
• 45:14
  would think there is no possible way then an eighty four year old man not
• 45:19
  in absolutely perfect mental health could possibly be president of the United States. Well,
• 45:27
  as I said, I mostly was joking about this, and state would
• 45:31
  have it. Just a few days ago, the proof of what I'm talking
• 45:36
  about really came forward in a rather dramatic and unfortunate way. He fell down
• 45:45
  doing something he probably shouldn't have been doing, although it wasn't a dramatic effort
• 45:49
  on his part. He was in his backyard. His backyard has got a
• 45:52
  lot of different stares and elevation changes. I mean, the house is a
• 45:57
  terrible place for two people in their eighties to be living. And he's been
• 46:01
  warned about this for decades, but he's very, very stubborn and doesn't want
• 46:05
  to move. And he fell down and he broke his elbow, and now
• 46:10
  he's in the hospital, and as of this dating, he's still in the
• 46:13
  hospital and probably will be for quite a while. And you know, to
• 46:17
  me, it was just another example of the insanity of what we're voting for.
• 46:23
  Now. There might be some people who think, well, John,
• 46:25
  every individual is different. I'm sorry, there's no evidence that Joe Biden is
• 46:30
  some sort of unicorn when it comes to eighty one year old men. He's
• 46:36
  clearly suffering mentally. Yeah, he's in good physical shape. But are we
• 46:44
  really gonna believe that at eighty four eighty five Joe Biden is going to be
• 46:47
  remotely capable of doing this job. I mean remotely, And you know,
• 46:53
  my tongue in cheek suggestion of a livestream TikTok of an eighty four eighty five
• 47:00
  year old man, I think would really illustrate the reality of this. It's
• 47:07
  insane. Anybody who's had experience with this nose you cannot possibly rehire somebody for
• 47:16
  over four years because remember, you know, if he's reelected in theory,
• 47:22
  he's gonna be president still at the age of eighty five plus years old,
• 47:29
  and he can barely do it now at eighty one. And I've said many,
• 47:35
  many times that basically you have to understand that if you're voting for Joe
• 47:38
  Biden, you're essentially voting for Kamala Harris, because Kamala Harris, either by
• 47:45
  necessity or by choice, is gonna be president of the United States at some
• 47:50
  point during Joe Biden's second term. If he beats Donald Trump, and I
• 47:55
  just want people to understand what they're voting for. And the media is starting,
• 48:00
  largely because of the Special Counsel Report, to be forced to acknowledge this
• 48:06
  as the significant issue that it is. But I still think they're underplaying it
• 48:09
  because this is just it's absurd. It is a ridiculous notion, completely insane
• 48:16
  that we're even contemplating this, or that the Democratic Party is forcing us to
• 48:22
  make this decision. I have to give kudos to NBC's former sports legend broadcaster
• 48:29
  now I guess a CNN contributor, Bob Costas, who have gotten to know
• 48:34
  decently well over the last dozen years because of our musual experience in the Penn
• 48:39
  State, Joe Paterno, Jerryson Dusky case. He went on Bill Maher's show
• 48:45
  and blasted recently the Democratic Party and Joe Biden for putting us through this.
• 48:51
  I congratulated him on via text, and Bob said something along the lines,
• 48:55
  It's amazing how much applause you can get for pointing out the blatantly obvious reality
• 49:01
  of a situation. That's almost a direct quote from Bob, and he's exactly
• 49:06
  right, you know, I think he referenced it as the emperor has no
• 49:09
  clothes. This is an emperor has no close moment. Where what the hell
• 49:15
  are we doing? How can we not see this guy? Cannot possibly do
• 49:21
  the job for plus years from now. It's just not possible. Now.
• 49:27
  As far as issues related to Biden and Hunter, Biden and Biden's scandals,
• 49:34
  I have to say, it's looking like I was right. Stop me if
• 49:37
  you've heard this before. It's looking as if I was right when it came
• 49:43
  to not jumping on the bandwagon that there was evidence of bribery from foreign governments
• 49:51
  to Hunter and Joe Biden. Remember that whole five million dollar check thing for
• 49:55
  Hunter and for Joe Biden. I said at the time, I'm guys,
• 50:00
  I'm open to this because of the timing and where Joe Biden thought he was
• 50:06
  in his career. But this seems really way too obvious, way too good
• 50:10
  to be true. If you're this corrupt, no one is this dumb.
• 50:16
  I mean, Joe Biden's not brilliant at all, But this just seems impossible
• 50:21
  to believe that they could be this clear about it and that they could be
• 50:25
  this clumsy. Well, it turns out that the FBI informant or whistleblower,
• 50:32
  whatever you want to call him, has now been indicted for perjury related to
• 50:38
  their testimony in this case. Now, of course, every Trump supporter immediately
• 50:43
  says, ah, this is all part of the massive Department of Justice cover
• 50:47
  up that the DOJ is doing Biden's bidding, and that's why they have been
• 50:54
  indicted. So, by the way, somehow special counsel doesn't mean anything in
• 51:00
  this case. Although we just got a special counsel report related to Biden,
• 51:04
  it couldn't have been worse for him, at least in theory. Politically,
• 51:07
  they never explain how that's possible. But look, you know, I would
• 51:12
  like to see the evidence of perjury when it comes to this FBI informant,
• 51:17
  and the fact that the or at least the allegation that this bribery claim is
• 51:22
  false, that it was made up, that it's not true. I'd like
• 51:29
  to see some evidence of that. But the fact that there's an indictment.
• 51:34
  It's not looking good, and there aren't some Republicans in the House who have
• 51:39
  been pushing this that are starting to back off of it, and rightfully so,
• 51:44
  because this ought to be humiliating. If this turns out to be a
• 51:47
  legitimate indictment. Republicans should be humiliated for being stupid enough to buy into the
• 51:54
  idea that, you know, there were five million dollar bribery checks to both
• 51:59
  Hunter and Joe Biden, because that's just not the way this works. Of
• 52:02
  course, Republicans are now starting to move on to another aspect of Biden corruption,
• 52:07
  and this one's getting some significant media attention, even within the mainstream news
• 52:13
  media, and it deals with Joe Biden's connection to his brother and his brother's
• 52:20
  shady healthcare business. Now, this is a complicated story that there's a lot
• 52:24
  that's unknown at this point, so I'm going to hold off on taking a
• 52:29
  deep dive into it until I know more. I have to say I'm inherently
• 52:34
  skeptical because of allegations that turn out not to be true, like the bribery
• 52:39
  allegation, but this one seems to be getting at least some traction in the
• 52:44
  mainstream news media. Similarly, on the Trump side, much like I did
• 52:49
  not buy into the Biden bribery narrative, I have never ever bought into the
• 52:54
  idea that the twenty twenty presidential election was stolen or against Donald Trump, and
• 53:01
  specifically I have never bought into the quote unquote documentary film two Thousand Mules by
• 53:09
  Densh de Suza. Now, I will acknowledge an inherent dramatic bias against Denesh
• 53:17
  Desuza, because I know a lot about Densh de Suza and it's not good.
• 53:23
  Now I'm not able to talk about it because it would betray some important
• 53:29
  confidences to me. But you're just gonna have to trust me. Densh Desuza
• 53:34
  is a fraud, and he's a pseudo intellectual, and he's a grifter.
• 53:39
  And the fact that he came out with that movie made no impact on my
• 53:45
  view of that election at all. I didn't have to do a deep dive.
• 53:50
  I just did a cursory glance. It was alleged, and I knew
• 53:54
  it was all bullshit. Well, it turns out that the group true the
• 54:00
  vote on which Denest de Suza relied quite a bit for what was in his
• 54:05
  quote unquote documentary film, was asked to provide evidence of in court of the
• 54:14
  alleged vote rigging or whatever you want to call it, and they admitted they
• 54:20
  had no evidence. This just happened a few days ago. They acknowledged they
• 54:24
  had no evidence they were asked to provided and they said, sorry, we
• 54:30
  don't have any. Now that's a paraphrase, but that's an accurate paraphrase.
• 54:36
  And you know, there's been so many different acknowledgements, including people pleading guilty,
• 54:40
  cleaning Rudy Giuliani, the things that they would never plead guilty to if
• 54:45
  any of this was true at all, and it's not. And by the
• 54:50
  way, there's so many different ways to combat this mythology surrounding the twenty twenty
• 54:55
  election. And the first to admit that the rules of the twenty twenty election
• 55:00
  we're horrendous. I hate mail in voting. There's no question that if you
• 55:04
  want to make an argument for the election being stolen, it was stolen via
• 55:07
  the use of COVID and the COVID restrictions and all that. I one hundred
• 55:12
  percent agree with that. But as far as the counting of the votes and
• 55:15
  the casting of the votes within the rules that existed in twenty twenty, there's
• 55:20
  no question that Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. And the reason why, one
• 55:24
  of the many reasons I'm very confident of this is we have this thing called
• 55:29
  the precinct system. We don't have national elections. We don't even have state
• 55:34
  elections. We don't even really have county elections. When it comes to president
• 55:37
  We have precinct elections, which are incredibly small jurisdictions that have both a Democrat
• 55:45
  and a Republican that we're overseeing the vote counting total. So there's no place
• 55:51
  to just all of a sudden dump tens of thousands of fake votes. It
• 55:55
  can't work without it being easily uncover and there would be massive amounts of evidence
• 56:02
  of this instead as true. The vote was forced to acknowledge there is none
• 56:08
  now. One of those that has flipped their opinion at least allegedly on the
• 56:14
  twenty twenty election and a whole bunch of other things in a very suspicious way
• 56:19
  is Tucker Carlson, who I have referred to many times as Trump's MVP of
• 56:23
  the twenty twenty four Republican presidential nominating process. And I have to say that
• 56:31
  I have theorized in the past that there's something wrong with Tucker Carlson that I
• 56:37
  didn't know what it was. I even speculated wildly at one point that maybe
• 56:40
  he's on some sort of drug because he was so frantic in one particular speech
• 56:46
  he gave. I haven't seen him duplicate that kind of weird behavior, so
• 56:52
  I'm kind of I'm no longer really suspicious of drugs, but something is up
• 56:57
  with Tucker Carlson, and most recently, obviously, he just interviewed Vladimir Putin,
• 57:01
  which I was okay with. I was waiting to see the nature of
• 57:06
  the interview. It wasn't the worst interview in the world. It wasn't the
• 57:08
  best interview in the world. He pressed him on some things, but not
• 57:13
  on others. Putin himself said that it was a soft interview that was softer
• 57:17
  than he wanted. The Kremlin strongly implied that Carlson was paid for his involvement
• 57:24
  in that interview. But that's something that's never been figured out either way,
• 57:29
  as far as I can tell. As far as I know, Carlson's never
• 57:31
  even been forced to address that particular issue. But Carlson has not yet given
• 57:37
  up on this whole Putin Russia narrative. I thought it was just going to
• 57:42
  be he went to Russia, he interviewed Putin, and you know, you
• 57:45
  got a whole bunch of views on Twitter, millions and millions and millions of
• 57:50
  views on Twitter. And that that would be the end of it. But
• 57:52
  that's not been the end of it. Instead, Tucker Carlson has been releasing
• 57:57
  videos of his tour of Moscow, and they have been very varied pro Moscow
• 58:07
  videos. In fact, he's made comments and interviews about how great Moscow is
• 58:12
  in comparison to most American cities. And you know, he had a video
• 58:17
  out there of him touring a grocery store, which was hilarious on a bunch
• 58:22
  of different levels, because, you know, it seemed very much like Tucker
• 58:28
  hadn't been to a grocery store in a very long time, because he was
• 58:30
  completely enamored with all sorts of rather mundane aspects of the process. But that
• 58:37
  wasn't the most important part. He started that particular video by referencing what he
• 58:44
  said was the primary feature of Cold War propaganda in the West, which was
• 58:57
  the Soviet grocery store. But that statement which he opened this video with,
• 59:04
  to me was like a slap across the face, like, holy crap,
• 59:08
  what is going on here? What are you doing with Tucker Carlson. I'm
• 59:15
  want to repeat what he said there a feature of Cold War propaganda in the
• 59:22
  West. I mean Vladimir Putin could not possibly have written that any better from
• 59:30
  his perspective. For Tucker Carlson to say in front of a Russian grocery store,
• 59:36
  and then the whole course, the whole narrative is, look how awesome
• 59:39
  this grocery store is. And he did another one with the subway system.
• 59:43
  Look how beautiful this is. It's like a museum compared to our own subway
• 59:47
  system. And I'm sure to a lot of people the videos were very compelling
• 59:52
  and convincing. Of course, you can go to any place and find,
• 59:57
  you know, especially if you're being guided by people with an agenda like those
• 1:00:01
  around the Kremlin to make sure that you only see the very best places to
• 1:00:07
  go. Of course, you can make any place look fantastic. There's another
• 1:00:12
  aspect. I mean, when you look at the subway system, of course,
• 1:00:15
  the subway system looks like a museum. Because if anybody commits any vandalism
• 1:00:20
  in a Moscow subway, the government, or at least as an expectation that
• 1:00:23
  the government is going to be able to destroy your life forever. So there's
• 1:00:29
  a great deal of fear, which may not be the worst thing in the
• 1:00:31
  world, but it's there's a downside to that. Unfortunately, we've gone way
• 1:00:36
  too much in the other direction, where there's no fear of anything. So
• 1:00:38
  our subway systems in our major cities look like crap because there's no fear of
• 1:00:44
  any kind of punishment. But in the Russian world, there's still an enormous
• 1:00:49
  amount of fear. And I have no way of knowing that whether the grocery
• 1:00:52
  store that Tucker Carlson visited is representative of the normal Moscow grocery store. I've
• 1:00:59
  never been the Moscow. My father has been there, spent a lot of
• 1:01:01
  time there a few years ago, and he described it almost exactly this way.
• 1:01:07
  He said, it's like a Hollywood set. Then on the on the
• 1:01:10
  front the vernier, it looks fantastic if you scratch the surface, though it's
• 1:01:15
  a crap hole. Those are my words. But that's I think a pretty
• 1:01:19
  good and as you know, summary of his experience in Moscow. I've seen
• 1:01:24
  similar experiences expressed online in the wake of what Tucker Carlson is doing, and
• 1:01:31
  of course the irony of all this happening at the time period when Alexni Alexi
• 1:01:39
  Navalny, Alexi Navalni, who is a Putin critic, a political opponent of
• 1:01:45
  Putin, he just mysteriously dies in prison. Of course, nobody believes that
• 1:01:52
  Navalney really just died in prison. It's obvious to anybody with the brain that
• 1:01:57
  he was killed or assassinated. And you know, the reason why this is
• 1:02:00
  ironic is not just because of the timing for Tucker, where he did not
• 1:02:06
  press Putin at all on this particular issue of his political opponents dying with great
• 1:02:12
  regularity. But Carlson is someone who believes very fervently that the United States government
• 1:02:20
  murdered Jeffrey Epstein in prison, who, by the way, is a former
• 1:02:25
  friend of the president at the time, Donald Trump, who, by the
• 1:02:29
  way, that president at the time, Donald Trump, of whom Tucker Carlson
• 1:02:34
  is a big supporter, told Tucker Carlson to his face he didn't think he
• 1:02:37
  was murdered. He thinks he committed suicide. And Carlson didn't care. But
• 1:02:42
  here we have Tucker Carlson, big believer that Epstein was murdered, going to
• 1:02:50
  Russia, interviewing Putin, not confronting him at all on this issue of a
• 1:02:54
  political opponent suddenly dying, and then Alexi Navalny suddenly eyes in prison and to
• 1:03:00
  my knowledge. You know, Tucker Carlson hasn't done a video on that,
• 1:03:05
  at least not as of this taping. You know, I don't know whether
• 1:03:08
  or not he's gonna think that Navali, you know, committed suicide prison like
• 1:03:13
  Epstein actually did or not. But at the time, he could not have
• 1:03:16
  been very good for Tucker Carlson. As far as the bigger picture, I
• 1:03:22
  don't know what's happening. I'm honestly stumped as to what has gone on with
• 1:03:27
  Tucker Carlson. It feels like he's lost his mind. Yet you know,
• 1:03:31
  he's still able to function. He's still at times still funny, at times,
• 1:03:36
  he still makes good points. I've always felt like he had a really
• 1:03:40
  good intellect and a fantastic sense of humor and was a fantastic writer. That's
• 1:03:45
  why it was so frustrating for him to go off the reservation, especially after
• 1:03:50
  he was fired from Fox News Channel, and to sell out so completely to
• 1:03:53
  Trump. And I understand that The simplest explanation here is he's no longer in
• 1:03:59
  Fox News Channe, so he has to sell out completely to Trump. I
• 1:04:01
  get it. That's probably a large part of what has happened there's no question
• 1:04:06
  that's an element of it. But it seems even more dramatic to that.
• 1:04:12
  I really feel as if there's something we don't know, and I don't even
• 1:04:17
  really have a great theory as to what that is. I just have this
• 1:04:20
  very strong sense that eventually we're going to find out, Oh, that's what
• 1:04:27
  was going on with Tucker Carlson. Now it makes at least a little bit
• 1:04:30
  of sense, and I can't make it make sense. And you know,
• 1:04:35
  for him to now basically be rewriting the history of the Cold War and essentially
• 1:04:41
  making it sound as if we were the bad guys, that we were creating
• 1:04:44
  propaganda about Russian grocery stores so that we could win the Cold War, I
• 1:04:51
  mean, it's just insane. It's a guy who grew up as a big
• 1:04:55
  fan of Ronald Reagan. I mean, it's just an upside down world here.
• 1:04:59
  I don't even under I don't even understand what right wing or conservative or
• 1:05:03
  Republican politics is with regard to foreign policy, or specifically with regard to Russia
• 1:05:10
  anymore. I honestly I have no idea. I know. I mean,
• 1:05:14
  Nicky Haley is still trying to hang on for dear life saying Russia is not
• 1:05:16
  our friend. But you know, in a Trump world, it's really hard
• 1:05:23
  to understand what the position is, what the principle is, what the policy
• 1:05:27
  is. And look, I am I want to make it clear. I
• 1:05:31
  don't know what's happening with Tucker Carlson, but it's a little bit in my
• 1:05:36
  mind right now, like what I say about Trump, quite a bit.
• 1:05:41
  I don't believe that Donald Trump is a Democratic Party plant or Democratic Party asset.
• 1:05:48
  I do not believe that because I don't think the Democrats are nearly this
• 1:05:50
  smart. But if Donald Trump was a Democratic asset, a Democratic plan,
• 1:05:59
  what exact exactly would he have done differently in the last seven or eight years
• 1:06:03
  Other than stick by Justice Kavanaugh. That's about the only thing he would have
• 1:06:12
  done differently. Maybe you know, a couple of the other Supreme Court nominations.
• 1:06:16
  Other than the Supreme Court. I can't really come up with much as
• 1:06:23
  to what Donald Trump would have done differently if he was an actual Democratic asset
• 1:06:29
  or Democratic plant. I really don't. I mean, the most recent example
• 1:06:32
  is the destruction of Ronda Santis, the future of the Republican Party. He
• 1:06:36
  did that in a way that the Democratic Party could not possibly have done on
• 1:06:42
  their own far more systematically, far more easily, far more completely, at
• 1:06:47
  least in the short run, than the Democratic Party could ever possibly imagined.
• 1:06:53
  And that's just one small area. Well, similarly to that, if Tucker
• 1:06:58
  Carlson was, I'm not saying he is. I'm in fact, I'm saying
• 1:07:01
  I don't believe that he is. But if Tucker Carlson was a Russian asset
• 1:07:08
  or you know, a Russian plant of some sort of he was on the
• 1:07:11
  tape from Russia, which again I'm making clear I don't believe that to be
• 1:07:15
  the case. But if he was, what would he have done differently over
• 1:07:19
  the last several months, and specifically the last couple of weeks with regard to
• 1:07:24
  his trip to Russia to interview Putin and the aftermath. What would he have
• 1:07:28
  done differently? I can't think of anything. In fact, if he was,
• 1:07:31
  he probably wouldn't have made it so obvious that he might be. That's
• 1:07:36
  how over the top Tucker has been on this whole situation. So I don't
• 1:07:42
  have a good answer on Tucker Carlson, but if I find one, I'll
• 1:07:45
  be sure to give it to you. Now, one of the big stories
• 1:07:48
  of the last week was the tragic shooting at the end of the parade for
• 1:07:55
  the Kansas City Chiefs as they celebrated their Super Bowl victory, second Super Bowl
• 1:08:00
  victory in a row. And this was significant on a couple different levels.
• 1:08:05
  Obviously, the first level is that someone died and that many kids were injured.
• 1:08:13
  I mean, there were approximately twenty significant injuries in this shooting. And
• 1:08:18
  you know, especially when it's kids involved, even if they live, these
• 1:08:23
  are lives that are impacted, probably forever in potentially very very negative ways.
• 1:08:29
  So while this one doesn't have the death toll that some others do, the
• 1:08:34
  fact that it happened at such a public celebratory event and the fact that kids
• 1:08:40
  were involved, to me makes it very very significant and very very tragic.
• 1:08:45
  But the weirdness of this story is, as of this taping, we still
• 1:08:50
  don't know with one hundred percent certainty who did this. It seems as if
• 1:08:56
  we do, it seems as if we know that this is sly was a
• 1:09:01
  dispute between what seems like teenagers who appear to be black, and this has
• 1:09:12
  conservatives very suspicious as to why we're not getting more information because obviously, if
• 1:09:17
  these were adult white males. The media would be all over this story.
• 1:09:21
  Instead, we don't seem to be very interested and who actually committed this heinous
• 1:09:27
  act. And of course every sportscaster, oh my god, everyone on ESPN
• 1:09:31
  and Rich Eisen from the NFL network, immediately they all ran out there with
• 1:09:36
  their gun control talking points and their virtues signaling, and there were all sorts
• 1:09:42
  of laws that were clearly broken here in numerous directions, including appears it appears
• 1:09:48
  as if age being a factor with regard to the possessing of handguns and an
• 1:09:56
  age that is too young under the law. And so immediately knee jerk did
• 1:10:02
  all the virtue signaling and gun control stuff. But here we are now almost
• 1:10:08
  a week later, and we're still not getting any specific information about who the
• 1:10:15
  perpetrators were here. And this came up on Bill Maher's HBO show and and
• 1:10:21
  Culter God bless her. Now that she's free of the Trump shackles, she's
• 1:10:27
  back to the old and culture, just telling the truth and not giving a
• 1:10:30
  damn. She was on with Bill Maher and she made it very clear that
• 1:10:39
  she knew that the perpetrators were black males. Now, this was pretty obvious
• 1:10:46
  right from the beginning, because we had the photos of people dramatically and heroically
• 1:10:53
  capturing the perpetrators. So we had the video and photographic evidence right from the
• 1:10:59
  beginning. You haven't had any official confirmation at this point, which shows you
• 1:11:03
  the different standards that are used based upon race and gender and sexuality. I
• 1:11:10
  mean, if it's a black mail, we have to wait for one hundred
• 1:11:13
  percent confirmation because we can't possibly be rushing the judgment here. But Ann Coulter
• 1:11:18
  was saying, look, the fact that we don't know is proof that we
• 1:11:23
  do know. And this clip was interesting not just because Ann Colter was willing
• 1:11:30
  to say it. By the way, she was sitting next to Van Jones,
• 1:11:34
  a black male CNN commentator who I have complimented in the past, and
• 1:11:41
  so I thought that made it even more dramatic that she was willing to do
• 1:11:44
  this not just on the show of a liberal on a liberal network HBO,
• 1:11:48
  but also sitting next to a black mail liberal in Van Jones. But it
• 1:11:54
  wasn't just that she was, you know, saying what was very obvious and
• 1:11:59
  somehow well this was a dramatic statement. But also Bill Maher I really I
• 1:12:05
  think showed his ass here and where his politics is shifting back to, because
• 1:12:11
  you know, he had been the one, lone mainstream media liberal who was
• 1:12:16
  rational on COVID and against woke them And it's obvious to me now that COVID
• 1:12:23
  has faded, he's starting to go right back to where he was before.
• 1:12:27
  He's even praised Gavin Newsom as the person who want to be the Democratic presidential
• 1:12:31
  nominee, which is just astonishing to me considering someone like mar was very anti
• 1:12:36
  COVID panic and wants he wants to support glowingly Gavin fucking Newsom, Are you
• 1:12:43
  kidding? So I'm starting to lose respect almost by the minute for Bill Maher
• 1:12:47
  as he morphsed back into the pre COVID Bill Maher. But this was Anne
• 1:12:51
  Coulter, and listen to what she says and how Bill Maher has to know
• 1:12:57
  she's right, But he also asked the virtue Dylan pretend that she might not
• 1:13:00
  be. And here's what that sounded like on HBO. I mean, we
• 1:13:03
  don't know who did this shooting, by the way, the Super bowlshit,
• 1:13:06
  we have some idea, what if it were a white man shooting, we'd
• 1:13:13
  know, Well, we don't know. I mean that happens. We know
• 1:13:17
  it's not a white man. I can tell you that much. Do you
• 1:13:20
  think they were repressing that reporting. They wouldn't tell us about the transgender woman
• 1:13:26
  that shot up the Christian school for what like a year? Oh, San
• 1:13:30
  Bernardino out here, remember the crazy terrorist Muslims. That's when I first noticed
• 1:13:36
  they're not telling us who it is. It's not a white male. The
• 1:13:41
  longer they go without telling you it's not a white male. Okay, well
• 1:13:44
  we don't for this one for right now as of Friday night, February sixteen.
• 1:13:48
  Now we don't officially know. Okay, you know you have special powers.
• 1:13:55
  But what a strange world we're living in where someone can make such an
• 1:14:00
  obviously correct statement. Is what Anne Culter said, and it can be seen
• 1:14:04
  as, oh my god, look what she said. And even Bill Maher,
• 1:14:10
  mister anti woke liberal mister, tell it like it is, not be
• 1:14:15
  afraid of the reaction, even he had to pretend that Anne Caulter might not
• 1:14:21
  be right. We don't know for sure. Well, even since that appearance,
• 1:14:26
  there's been more video and photographic evidence that indicates that she's exactly right.
• 1:14:31
  Now, why we don't have more information at this time is beyond baffling.
• 1:14:35
  There's been a controversy in Missouri between the governor of Missouri and the mayor of
• 1:14:42
  the city of Kansas City over the use of the word thugs. We're not
• 1:14:46
  allowed to call these guys thugs because that's somehow racially biased. I mean,
• 1:14:53
  it's just it's insane making it's upside down world stuff. But it plays right
• 1:14:58
  into conservatives perception of how the media works and doesn't work, and why it's
• 1:15:05
  broken, and why they're afraid of issues of race, and it's to me,
• 1:15:11
  I don't even have a good understanding as to why they're doing this.
• 1:15:14
  They can't hide this forever, so it makes you wonder if there's something else
• 1:15:17
  in play here. But there's one other, much less serious aspect of what
• 1:15:24
  happened at the Kansas City Chief celebration that I at least want to mention because
• 1:15:29
  in the last episode of the podcast we called it white trash adjacent because we
• 1:15:36
  were talking or I was talking about Travis Kelcey and whether or not, you
• 1:15:44
  know, he may be at least somewhat white trash and therefore may not be
• 1:15:49
  worthy of Taylor Swift, and that there might be a problem long term in
• 1:15:54
  their relationship because of some of the things that he did both at the Super
• 1:15:58
  Bowl as well as after the Super Bowl. Specifically, I was referring at
• 1:16:02
  that time to his Viva Las Vegas diatribe after the Super Bowl, and uh,
• 1:16:11
  you know, and how that gave a lot of Swifties the ick and
• 1:16:15
  and that you know, the lady boners were gone when it came to Travis
• 1:16:19
  Kelcey, because he'd been very, very popular among the Swifties and Taylor Swift
• 1:16:24
  fans, and I had perceived that his approval rating was collapsing. Well,
• 1:16:30
  yeah, obviously everything about what happened at the chief celebration got overshadowed, understandably
• 1:16:39
  by the tragic shooting. But if that shooting had not happened, I really
• 1:16:44
  believe that the narrative coming out of the Chiefs celebration would have been yet another
• 1:16:51
  situation, maybe the most dramatic yet, where Travis Kelcey has proven himself to
• 1:16:57
  not be in Taylor Swift's lead. And I mean from a genetic evolutionary perspective,
• 1:17:04
  because he got up there before the shooting and started singing Garth Brooks Low
• 1:17:13
  Places, which is almost a white trash anthem, by the way, but
• 1:17:17
  he was doing so while drunk off his ass. Now, because of the
• 1:17:21
  shooting, most people didn't see this or hear this. You really got to
• 1:17:27
  see it to fully appreciate it, which is why I'm not going to play
• 1:17:30
  the clip on the podcast. But it's it is so bad. I mean,
• 1:17:34
  being a little tipsy at your Super Bowl celebration party is perfectly appropriate and
• 1:17:41
  probably a little charming, and everyone likes it. Kelsey went way too far.
• 1:17:46
  He was out of his mind, drunk, completely drunk, and you
• 1:17:53
  know, he's a terrible singer to begin with. By the way, if
• 1:17:56
  you're hoping to maybe mary and pro create with the number one pop star in
• 1:18:01
  the world, maybe not emphasized to the world that you cannot sing at all
• 1:18:08
  pro tip maybe a good idea. And yet you know, here Travis Kelcey
• 1:18:14
  is screaming Viva Las Vegas in a very weird fashion just after winning the Super
• 1:18:19
  Bowl. And even worse, I mean, I think this this Garth Brooks
• 1:18:24
  performance was way worse than Viva Las Vegas because he was completely drunk. He
• 1:18:29
  almost had to be carried off the stage, and it was horrendous in every
• 1:18:34
  possible way. Again, it wouldn't matter if he wasn't dating Taylor Swift.
• 1:18:41
  I'm talking about this from then the context of he's dating the most famous woman
• 1:18:45
  in the world. It's not even close. And you know, they seem
• 1:18:50
  to be very very serious. I've said many times this is a real relationship.
• 1:18:55
  But after seeing what happened at the Super Bowl, seeing you know,
• 1:19:00
  Kelsey borderline assault his coach, the Viva Las Vegas thing, the being drunk
• 1:19:05
  of the celebration and very very poorly singing Garth Brooks low places friends in low
• 1:19:12
  places. I gotta tell you, I'm willing to amend my previous prediction,
• 1:19:17
  and that is here's my amended prediction with regard to Travis Kelcey and Taylor Swift.
• 1:19:25
  Taylor Swift is not going to purposely pro create with Travis Kelcey. She's
• 1:19:30
  not going to do that. There's just no way. He is completely out
• 1:19:34
  of his league. And I don't mean that from a famed perspective, although
• 1:19:39
  she's way more famous than him, or a money standpoint, she's way richer
• 1:19:43
  than he is, But just from a class perspective, class still matters.
• 1:19:48
  We pretend that it doesn't, but it does. And I actually like the
• 1:19:54
  Kelsey's. I like the Kelsey family. I think Travis and Jason do a
• 1:19:58
  good job on their podcast. Jason did a fantastic job of holding Travis accountable
• 1:20:02
  for his behavior regarding Andy Reid on the post super Bowl version of their podcast.
• 1:20:09
  So there's a lot to like about the Kelsey's. But pressure and alcohol
• 1:20:15
  can bring out sometimes the best, sometimes the worst of people, and if
• 1:20:20
  you're not of a high level of class, it's going to come out under
• 1:20:27
  pressure, especially when alcohol is involved. Now there's no indication the tailor understands
• 1:20:32
  this yet. In fact, based upon TikTok, she was still referencing him
• 1:20:39
  while she was in Australia, So there's no indication that this isn't going to
• 1:20:43
  happen. It's gonna be a breakup anytime soon. But I'm reminded of the
• 1:20:48
  Greek mythology story of Icarus, whose wings of wax melted because he got too
• 1:20:57
  close to the sun and he fell back down to Earth. Well, I
• 1:21:01
  gotta tell you, I feel like Travis Kelcey is the personification of Icarus right
• 1:21:08
  now. I don't know how long it's gonna take. It'll probably take who
• 1:21:12
  knows, If you know I'm sure Taylor had to see the video of what
• 1:21:15
  happened at the Chief celebration and it didn't seem to impact her very much,
• 1:21:20
  at least not yet. But this has got to give her second thoughts.
• 1:21:25
  And I'm telling you, as insane as it sounds, the fact that Kelsey
• 1:21:29
  is no longer super popular among the Swifties is gonna have an impact. It's
• 1:21:33
  gonna have an impact because if he loses the Swifties, then all of a
• 1:21:39
  sudden, it's a lot easier for someone around Taylor to say, are you
• 1:21:45
  sure about this? Are you sure about this? And I don't know how
• 1:21:48
  long it's gonna take, but I just cannot believe that the most famous woman
• 1:21:55
  in the world, you know, and one of the richest women in the
• 1:21:59
  world, and one of the most talented and with the biggest fan bases,
• 1:22:02
  is going to pro create on purpose with the guy who did what he did
• 1:22:08
  at the Kansas City Chief Super Bowl celebration. I just I find that very
• 1:22:13
  hard to believe. And this is an area where I'm a little bit of
• 1:22:15
  an expert when it comes to shooting for women out of my league, so
• 1:22:20
  I know the challenges of this. My wife and everyone around. My wife
• 1:22:25
  will tell you I married someone way out of my league. I've tried to
• 1:22:29
  date a lot of women out of my league, some successfully, some with
• 1:22:33
  spectacular catastrophic consequences that went extremely poorly. So I've been on both ends of
• 1:22:41
  the spectrum. So i have a little bit of experience in this area.
• 1:22:45
  Not that I've ever dated the Taylor Swift, but within my realm, I've
• 1:22:49
  dated some celebrities, at least minor celebrities and women that were definitely out of
• 1:22:55
  my league. And I feel very strongly at this point that Taylor is going
• 1:23:00
  to eventually realize this is not the guy that I'm going to procreate with,
• 1:23:04
  if only because of the singing. By the way, I mean for Taylor
• 1:23:08
  Swift, aren't you gonna procreate with someone who can at least carry a tune
• 1:23:12
  so your kids have a shot at being decent singers. I don't know how
• 1:23:16
  much of impact that has on her decision making, but it's got to at
• 1:23:19
  least be some somewhere along the criteria. So I am very much down on
• 1:23:27
  the long term future of Travis Kelsey and Taylor Swift. Back to a much
• 1:23:32
  more serious topic, that is, at least somewhat related to what happened in
• 1:23:36
  Kansas City, and that is that there was a police shooting, not police
• 1:23:43
  of like an unarmed suspect, but shooting of police and a medic in Minnesota
• 1:23:50
  that left two police officers dead, one medic dead, all of whom just
• 1:23:57
  happened to be white. And yes, the porpetrator who committed this horrible crime,
• 1:24:02
  killing two police officers and ametic was a black man with a very serious
• 1:24:09
  criminal record. Now can you imagine can you imagine if the situation was reversed
• 1:24:16
  right? I mean, this would be a story that everyone would know about.
• 1:24:24
  You know, if if if it was clear cut that the three white
• 1:24:30
  or or two white police officers had killed a black man, uh, you
• 1:24:34
  know, with an unsubstantiated police shooting, that would be major national news,
• 1:24:42
  you know, George Floyd all over again. But it's instead, it's two
• 1:24:46
  dead police officers and a dead medic. They're all white perpetrators black therefore,
• 1:24:51
  and he's got a criminal history, so therefore we're not interested in this story.
• 1:24:57
  The media is not going to tell you about this story, and it
• 1:25:00
  is so emblematic and symbolic and indicative of how broken the media is when it
• 1:25:06
  comes to almost everything related to the police, and this mythology that has been
• 1:25:12
  created by the media and obviously came to its climax with the entire George Floyd
• 1:25:18
  fiasco in twenty twenty, where somehow police are racist against black people and that
• 1:25:27
  therefore anything bad that happens with regard to police and black people is inherently racist
• 1:25:33
  and it is happening because of racial bias. And it's in that context that
• 1:25:40
  I found an interview and I didn't find it, but it was well known
• 1:25:44
  and well publicized over the last couple of days. But it's an interview that
• 1:25:47
  I stumbled across and frankly made me feel incredibly stupid that to my knowledge,
• 1:25:56
  I was never familiar with this particular person before or having viewed this interview that
• 1:26:01
  was done by Barry Weiss of a guy by the name of Roland Fryar.
• 1:26:06
  Now it's possible I knew who Roland Fryar was, but to my knowledge I
• 1:26:15
  did not. And this interview was so extraordinary on so many different levels that
• 1:26:21
  in a moment, I'm going to play for you maybe the longest and maybe
• 1:26:26
  the most compelling clip I ever have in the history of the death of journalism
• 1:26:32
  podcasts. But first some context. So barr Weiss is a former New York
• 1:26:38
  Times columnist. She's a liberal, she's a lesbian, but she got it
• 1:26:42
  on COVID. COVID seemed to be an eye opening experience for her. And
• 1:26:47
  she's no longer with the New York Times. And she's actually kind of associated
• 1:26:53
  a guest with with Elon Musk now and the whole Twitter files thing, and
• 1:26:58
  you know, but she's basically doing dependent work now and she was interviewing Roland
• 1:27:02
  Fryer at the University of Austin in Texas. Now, this is an interesting
• 1:27:09
  element of this whole story because I never even heard of the University of Austin
• 1:27:15
  at in Texas, because you know, there's obviously the University of Texas at
• 1:27:18
  Austin. This ain't it. This is a brand new university. And my
• 1:27:25
  perception, and doing a little bit of research about it, is that this
• 1:27:29
  is, you know, a liberal arts university that seems to be liberal in
• 1:27:35
  its intended definition. Then in other words, my perception is that it's non
• 1:27:43
  woke liberalism. Which if that's true, that's fantastic. More power to them.
• 1:27:48
  And I think Austin Texas is an interesting place to put a liberal university
• 1:27:53
  that's non woke, because obviously Texas is still mostly conservative state, but Austin
• 1:27:57
  itself is an extremely liberal city. So this is a new university. And
• 1:28:02
  Bari Weiss was hosting this coy the name of Roland Fryar for an interview.
• 1:28:09
  Now again, if I've ever heard of Roland Fryar, I've forgotten it,
• 1:28:14
  and I'm embarrassed that I've never been, to my memory, have any knowledge
• 1:28:21
  of this story, because his story is extraordinary and everybody ought to know about
• 1:28:27
  it. And here's the short version of his story. So he's a black
• 1:28:31
  guy who grew up in the hood, who grew up in a horrific set
• 1:28:36
  of circumstances, raised by his grandmother, and you know, didn't even have
• 1:28:42
  that great of grades or that great essayt scores, and didn't go to a
• 1:28:45
  prestigious college. But as he went through his academic career, there were professors
• 1:28:51
  who tried to urge him to take this to the limit and you know,
• 1:28:58
  really pursue a career in academia, and long story short, he ends up
• 1:29:03
  at Harvard as a professor. Now, you know, it seems to me
• 1:29:09
  very clear that he ended up at Harvard as a professor largely because he's a
• 1:29:14
  black male who is quote unquote authentically black, not like Barack Obama, you
• 1:29:20
  know, who basically lived a mostly white existence, but he lived and quote
• 1:29:26
  unquote authentically black life from the hood, underprivileged, you know, crack dealing
• 1:29:32
  on one side of the family. You know, as I said, no
• 1:29:38
  real raising. It wasn't really raised by his parents, raised by his grandmother,
• 1:29:44
  all sorts of issues. And so therefore, in the minds of a
• 1:29:47
  Harvard this guy is, you know, a unicorn. Oh my god,
• 1:29:53
  he's super smart, and he's black, and he wears dreadlocks, and you
• 1:29:58
  know, he's is one of us. And he you know, he becomes
• 1:30:02
  an economics professor at Harvard, and he wins all sorts of awards, and
• 1:30:10
  in twenty sixteen he decides to do a study on the issue of racial bias
• 1:30:16
  when it comes to police activity. And what he finds is to him rather
• 1:30:24
  startling that when it comes to lower level interaction, you know, non shootings,
• 1:30:30
  that there's some minor level of bias against black people, but it's not
• 1:30:35
  super significant. But when it comes to actual shootings, there's no bias against
• 1:30:43
  black people, and in fact, the data indicates there may be a bias
• 1:30:47
  against shooting black people when it comes to police officers. And as you're gonna
• 1:30:54
  hear in a second, he's so startled by this he actually redoes the study
• 1:31:00
  and then he gets told, you know, you don't want to put this
• 1:31:02
  out there. He puts it out there. In his words, all hell
• 1:31:06
  breaks loose, And to me, what you're about to hear in this very
• 1:31:12
  long clip is so illustrative of so much that is going on in this country
• 1:31:19
  with regard to academia, when it comes to race, when it comes specifically
• 1:31:25
  to the issue of police, when the issue, when it comes to the
• 1:31:29
  issue of courage and lack thereof in telling the truth, and people in positions
• 1:31:35
  of prominence and power being willing to accept potential consequences for taking unpopular positions.
• 1:31:44
  I mean, this clip hits on every single one of these things. So
• 1:31:49
  again I'm not exaggerating the reason I'm playing this for you. It's a few
• 1:31:54
  days old. This clip is maybe the most most important that I've ever played
• 1:32:00
  on this podcast before. And I'll have a lot to say after you hear
• 1:32:04
  this. This is Roland Fryer in an interview with Bari Weiss, explaining a
• 1:32:10
  lot of what I just said, and then really getting into detail as to
• 1:32:14
  why he did not back down and would eventually suffer consequences because of it,
• 1:32:21
  in their interview together a few days ago at the University of Austin. I
• 1:32:26
  alluded to it earlier in a bit of a joke. But the key question
• 1:32:29
  is not just this arbitrary, silly snapshots that some journalists not named Barry do
• 1:32:39
  a lot, which is Black people are thirteen percent of the population, and
• 1:32:44
  they are fifty percent of the police shootings. I'm sorry about that, but
• 1:32:48
  I don't know what that has to do with the question, right. And
• 1:32:54
  it was in this moment in twenty sixteen that I realized people lose their minds
• 1:32:59
  when they don't like their result. Right. And so what my paper showed
• 1:33:02
  you'll see tomorrow some of you, was that, yes, we saw some
• 1:33:08
  bias in the low level uses of force every day, pushing up against cars
• 1:33:11
  and things like that. People sent to like that result, but we didn't
• 1:33:15
  find any racial bias in police shootings. Now, that was really surprising to
• 1:33:24
  me because I expected to see it. The little known fact is I had
• 1:33:29
  eight full time ras that it took to do this over nearly a year.
• 1:33:33
  When I found this surprising result, I hired eight fresh ones and redid it
• 1:33:41
  to make sure they came up with the same exact answer. And I thought
• 1:33:45
  it was robust. And then I went to go give it, and my
• 1:33:47
  god, all hell broke loose. Tell us about that? What was there?
• 1:33:53
  I mean, well, your former paper published the thing, published a
• 1:33:56
  report about it, and it was a hundred and four page, dense academic
• 1:34:03
  economics paper with one hundred and fifty page appendix. Okay, it was posted
• 1:34:11
  for four minutes when I got my first email, this is full of shit,
• 1:34:15
  doesn't make any sense, And I wrote back, how'd you read it
• 1:34:19
  that fast? That's amazing, you are a genius. People lost their minds.
• 1:34:29
  I mean it was like colleagues of mine were going, well, I
• 1:34:30
  don't believe these results. He's using regressions. I'm like, well, what
• 1:34:34
  the hell have we been using I mean, we've been using them for ever.
• 1:34:39
  That's what you use. And I had colleagues take me into to the
• 1:34:46
  side and say, don't publish this. You're ruin your career. I said,
• 1:34:55
  what are you talking about? I said, what's wrong with it?
• 1:34:58
  Do you believe the first part? Yes? Do you believe the second part?
• 1:35:03
  Well, it's the issue is they just don't fit together. We liked
• 1:35:09
  the first one, but you should publish the second one. Another time,
• 1:35:13
  I said, let me ask this if the second part about the police shooting.
• 1:35:16
  This is a literal conversation. I said to them if the second part
• 1:35:24
  showed bias, do you think I would should publish it then? And they
• 1:35:28
  said, yeah, then it would make sense. And I said, I
• 1:35:30
  guarantee you I'll publish it. We'll see what happens. So it was.
• 1:35:36
  You know, I lived under under police protection for about thirty or forty days.
• 1:35:44
  I had a seven day old daughter at the time. I remember going
• 1:35:48
  and shopping for it because you know, when you have a newborn, you
• 1:35:50
  think you have enough diapers. You don't. So I was going to the
• 1:35:55
  grocery store to get diapers with an armed guard. It was crazy. It
• 1:35:59
  was really truly, it's crazy. And yeah, it was a really phenomenal
• 1:36:03
  experience. There are a lot of people, many people, and this has
• 1:36:11
  been a realization for me over the past few years of my own life,
• 1:36:15
  who faced with that exact decision point would make the opposite choice. I think
• 1:36:20
  the majority of people actually would make the opposite choice. They would think,
• 1:36:27
  I'm going to preserve my career, my professional status, my prestige. You
• 1:36:31
  were the golden I mean, you were a golden boy at that point.
• 1:36:34
  I'm going to preserve my popularity, my ability to get along with my colleagues.
• 1:36:39
  Someone nice to sit next to me in the cafeteria. Like, every
• 1:36:43
  incentive, to use an economics term, would be pushing you to make that
• 1:36:46
  choice. What is it inside of you? What can everyone here learn about?
• 1:36:54
  What allowed you to make the opposite choice, to make the choice that
• 1:36:58
  would force you to for all of the consequences you would come to suffer,
• 1:37:01
  some a direct result and some adjacent to it. I don't covet what they
• 1:37:06
  covet. And I tell my undergraduates every year in the final lecture of my
• 1:37:13
  undergraduate classes, each one of them, the key to Harvard is get a
• 1:37:20
  great education without letting this place change you. It's really important. It can
• 1:37:29
  be corrupting. So not every incentive was pushing in that direction, Because every
• 1:37:34
  day I have to look myself in the mirror and say, what are you
• 1:37:38
  here for? What did you leave behind? I did not grow up wanting
• 1:37:44
  to go to Harvard. I didn't. I really didn't. I wanted to
• 1:37:53
  do something, and I, like many others in here, I want to
• 1:37:59
  acknowledge that have suffered a lot of losses in my life. My grandmother is
• 1:38:04
  no longer here, my father is dead. I don't know where my mother
• 1:38:09
  is I have They're all gone. Every single cousin has gone. My favorite
• 1:38:15
  cousin when he the day he got released out of prison after twenty five years,
• 1:38:19
  someone walked up behind him and shot him directly in the head. So
• 1:38:27
  I have to make this journey worth it. I am here because I want
• 1:38:32
  to solve problems. I am here because I have seen so much talent in
• 1:38:41
  these neighborhoods, and I know they know bullshit when they see it, so
• 1:38:47
  I'm not gonna lie to them. I wouldn't be able to show my face
• 1:38:51
  in these places if I told lies of them, like oh, oh,
• 1:38:56
  I hear this result from you. The thing about it is if you do
• 1:39:00
  a result. What has happened with the actual police departments is that because they
• 1:39:09
  actually believe the results and they're willing to reform on the lower level use as
• 1:39:14
  of force because someone told the truth about the others. And you know,
• 1:39:21
  it's the importance of being thought of someone, of being an actual truth teller
• 1:39:29
  is so so very important. Maybe not in the moment, but I don't
• 1:39:38
  I didn't go to Harvard to have chardonnay at ten thirty in the morning.
• 1:39:41
  I just don't want to. It's not my thing. And it's okay if
• 1:39:45
  it's someone else's thing, it's just not my thing. I came here,
• 1:39:48
  came there. I went there to make a difference. Truly. I know
• 1:39:51
  that sounds naive to many of you. As I tell my students, remember
• 1:39:56
  when you came to Harvard, you had lofty dreams of changing the world.
• 1:40:02
  It wasn't downside risk protection, right. Everybody I know who I've seen walk
• 1:40:11
  through that those ivy doors rocks the boat until they get in the boat and
• 1:40:16
  then they say steady. Now. I rocked the boat until I got in
• 1:40:23
  the boat, and I said, let's see how fast we can go.
• 1:40:27
  And I've fallen out the boat got run over by the boat. It is
• 1:40:30
  what it is. But you got to be for something, right, And
• 1:40:35
  so I mean, I actually don't understand those other people. I don't know
• 1:40:40
  what they're maximizing. Let's talk about yes, let's talk about getting I don't
• 1:40:55
  know if you can get run over by a boat, but falling out of
• 1:40:58
  the boat. Now, the reason why we let that clip play out for
• 1:41:02
  you to hear the applause is that I found that very end to be quite
• 1:41:09
  interesting that the audience didn't really know how to react. If a bunch of
• 1:41:15
  mostly white liberals in Austin who are probably stunned by what they've just heard,
• 1:41:21
  so part of them wants to applaud the courage and the truth telling, but
• 1:41:27
  also he's telling them a story and a narrative that's completely anesthetical to their belief
• 1:41:32
  system. So they're confused as to how to react and respond, and Bari
• 1:41:39
  Weiss is like waiting for them to applaud, and it took a while,
• 1:41:43
  It took a couple of beats, and then you had like a smattering of
• 1:41:45
  applause. So I found that to be really interesting and telling part of the
• 1:41:51
  clip. But there's other parts of this that are more important than even that.
• 1:41:59
  The first thing I want to say about this is this guy, Roland
• 1:42:02
  Friar is a fricking unicorn, But he's a unicorn in a situation where his
• 1:42:11
  behavior should be normal. That's how crazy and upside down everything is. What
• 1:42:16
  he did should be the normal way for a true academic to respond, especially
• 1:42:23
  one who has tenure and who has media cachet, and who has the protection
• 1:42:28
  of being a blackmail from the hood. Hey look, good news. I
• 1:42:32
  found out that our police force is not inherently racist. In fact, there
• 1:42:35
  might even be some reverse racism when it comes to police shootings. Isn't this
• 1:42:41
  interesting and important? That should be normal? But it's not normal. It's
• 1:42:47
  not normal because of a whole lot of reasons, but the main one is
• 1:42:54
  courage is dead. No one wants to be criticized. No one wants to
• 1:42:57
  risk any thing that they have. No one wants to put any skin in
• 1:43:02
  the game. We've seen this all the time when it comes to the media
• 1:43:06
  coverage of Trump on the right wing. No one wants to risk anything,
• 1:43:10
  and going after Trump the ultimate sacred cow in the right wing media, because
• 1:43:15
  you might lose your position. You might end up like Glenn Beck almost did
• 1:43:19
  in twenty sixteen, well the Roland Friar. He was tenured again blackmail.
• 1:43:30
  He knew he didn't have that much to lose, but to me. What
• 1:43:33
  was most compelling about what he said there is what was motivating him. That
• 1:43:40
  he didn't come to Harvard to hang out with the cool people. He came
• 1:43:45
  to Harvard to try to make a difference. He came to Harvard because,
• 1:43:50
  as he said another point in that interview, there's almost no one alive from
• 1:43:56
  his neighborhood from when he was a kid, and that he it in his
• 1:44:00
  mind to his community to do what's right and pursue the truth. And that's
• 1:44:06
  the way his grandmother taught him. And you know, this resonated very much
• 1:44:13
  with me because in a much lower level, I'm no Rolling Friar, and
• 1:44:16
  obviously I'm never going to be anything like a Harvard professor, but I've lived
• 1:44:21
  this in a very similar way where it's my view that I have an obligation
• 1:44:29
  to tell the truth as I see it, mainly because there's nobody else in
• 1:44:34
  my position willing and able to do it. I got to tell you,
• 1:44:38
  folks, you know, trying to be as as humble as I possibly can,
• 1:44:44
  which is sometimes difficult in this in this business, in this endeavor.
• 1:44:47
  But if I was not the only principled conservative who was anti Trump, but
• 1:44:58
  who hadn't sold out any of my principles because of my opposition to Trump,
• 1:45:01
  and has never benefited at all or even tried to benefit from my opposition of
• 1:45:06
  Trump. If there were other people like me who did as good a job,
• 1:45:12
  or hopefully even better a job, at expressing that point of view than
• 1:45:15
  me, I would have quit this thing a long time ago. I really
• 1:45:20
  honestly would have, because there would be no point to it, especially if
• 1:45:26
  I if I wasn't able to make a living doing it for my family.
• 1:45:30
  But there isn't anybody, and so I feel an obligation, whether it's you
• 1:45:36
  know, all sorts of different things, not just Trump, but obviously the
• 1:45:40
  most dramatic examples of the Penn State Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky case. If
• 1:45:43
  there was somebody else willing and able to tell the truth about that, I
• 1:45:47
  would have been glad for someone else to do that. But there isn't.
• 1:45:53
  And I'm a big believer in the whole you know, to whom much is
• 1:45:57
  given much as expected type of philosophy, And you know, I was given
• 1:46:02
  a lot in this world. I've lived a pretty privileged life, not nearly
• 1:46:09
  as privileged as some people think, by the way, I live a very
• 1:46:11
  middle class life on a very strict budget, but I will fully acknowledge that
• 1:46:16
  I've had a lot of opportunities in life that came about because of my parents
• 1:46:21
  and my grandparents, and I feel a great debt to them to do what
• 1:46:29
  I think is right and what they would think is right, but also in
• 1:46:32
  a broader sense. Not to get too philosophical about it, but I really
• 1:46:38
  believe that if you are given the opportunity because of circumstances beyond your control,
• 1:46:46
  like the fact that I grew up in a situation where I didn't have to
• 1:46:49
  worry about where I was going to eat or where I was going to sleep,
• 1:46:53
  and I had some semblance of financial security. Well, I feel like
• 1:46:57
  I have an obligation not just to my parents, my grandparents, but also
• 1:47:01
  to all those who suffered and sacrificed and died for this country to be able
• 1:47:06
  to use those benefits in a unique fashion. Because I've always known that there's
• 1:47:15
  a direct correlation between how much someone is willing and able to risk when it
• 1:47:21
  comes to free speech or taking principal stands, and being at least somewhat financially
• 1:47:30
  secure or secure in their position. I talk all the time about one of
• 1:47:34
  the reasons why journalism is dead is because you've got to have both balls and
• 1:47:42
  leverage in order to be able to be a good journalist. Well, the
• 1:47:48
  business model is broken to the point where nobody has security, no is Therefore,
• 1:47:55
  no one has the balls, no one has the leverage. Everyone's afraid
• 1:47:59
  of losing their job. Well, I was in a unique position through much
• 1:48:02
  of my life to not care that I was gonna put it out there regardless,
• 1:48:09
  because I believed very strongly in this country, and very strongly in the
• 1:48:13
  truth, and very strongly in what is right. And I was very much
• 1:48:16
  aware throughout most of my career I've made a lot of really dumb mistakes,
• 1:48:23
  but none of them were of ill intent, and lots of them were made
• 1:48:28
  because I knew I had the flexibility to do that that no one else did
• 1:48:33
  or hardly anybody else did, because of the fact that I knew I wasn't
• 1:48:39
  gonna go hungry. I was never going to be rich, But I also
• 1:48:42
  didn't care about being rich, just like Roland Fryar doesn't seem to be to
• 1:48:46
  care about being rich. He doesn't seem to care about being like That's another
• 1:48:49
  thing I didn't care about. So you can't do this, especially in this
• 1:48:54
  day and age. You cannot be a true truth teller if you care deeply
• 1:49:00
  about being rich or what people think of you, or you know, being
• 1:49:04
  afraid of criticism or potential retribution or suffering. You know you can't do it.
• 1:49:13
  It's not possible. So you know, well, it's not exactly the
• 1:49:16
  same situation. I very much relate to what Roland Fryar was talking about there
• 1:49:24
  to put it in a different way. You know, I always use a
• 1:49:27
  quote from Rocky one from Apollo Creed's trainer when he tells Apollo Creed enter Rocky
• 1:49:34
  has knocked him down. That he says to Apollo Creed, he meaning Rocky,
• 1:49:42
  he doesn't know it's a damn show. He thinks it's a damn fight.
• 1:49:45
  Well, that's what I kept thinking about with Roland Fryer. Harvard thought
• 1:49:51
  they hired him for the show. Hey, look at our our Negro,
• 1:49:58
  our authentic Negro. He's from the look at the dreadlocks. Look at this.
• 1:50:02
  He's so smart. And then instead of being part of the show,
• 1:50:10
  Rowan Fryar decided it was a damn fight and he was in this for real
• 1:50:15
  and he was gonna tell the truth, and boy did he suffer for it.
• 1:50:21
  And it wasn't just regarding criticism for the results of that study. And
• 1:50:27
  let me before we get to the results of the criticism for that study and
• 1:50:30
  the ramifications in Fryar's life, let's just be clear, if the media and
• 1:50:36
  academia had embraced Friar's study in twenty sixteen, the influence of the George Floyd
• 1:50:45
  episode would have been vastly different. It would have been seen as a blip
• 1:50:51
  on the radar and an anomaly instead of symbolic of a larger reality that was
• 1:50:59
  requiring mass of riots, protests, and dramatic social, cultural, and legal
• 1:51:05
  changes in our society. And that is incredibly significant and I believe obviously true.
• 1:51:13
  And so if there not been a cover up of Friar's work to the
• 1:51:16
  point where I don't even remember this episode even happening, if this has become
• 1:51:21
  a major national news story and has been accepted that the research of a black
• 1:51:29
  male Harvard economics professor from the hood proved that there is no systematic racial bias
• 1:51:35
  when it comes to police shootings, George Floyd wouldn't have changed the world in
• 1:51:41
  twenty twenty. And by the way, I hope you're also connecting this to
• 1:51:45
  the way academia handles COVID and climate change. If they can't be trusted in
• 1:51:51
  this kind of a situation, when when the evidence is so clear when it
• 1:51:57
  comes to police shootings, my god, how can they popossibly be trusted when
• 1:52:00
  it comes to academic studies on COVID, specifically masks or vaccines or climate change.
• 1:52:10
  Because this is the way this works now, Rowan Friar is exposing you
• 1:52:15
  know, the sausage making. He's telling you, hey, look, don't
• 1:52:20
  trust the machinery here. The machinery is broken, especially when it comes to
• 1:52:27
  elite academia like Harvard, because even when it comes from an authentically black man
• 1:52:32
  like me, they're gonna try to cover it up, and they're going to
• 1:52:36
  try to destroy you if you blaspheme, if you commit blasphemy, if you
• 1:52:45
  become a heretic against the religion, whether the religion is COVID, the religion
• 1:52:49
  is climate change, where the religion is racial bias among police, and so
• 1:52:57
  Friar, not coincidentally, in my view, did in fact suffer personal retribution,
• 1:53:02
  not just the censorship and the false debunking of his study, but in
• 1:53:11
  twenty seventeen, just a year later, not a coincidence, he was suspended
• 1:53:16
  for two years based upon an investigation of him for I don't even know what
• 1:53:26
  you would call it. It's not really sexual harassment, because even in the
• 1:53:32
  press release announcing his suspension from Harvard Harvard, the University of Harvard specifically stated
• 1:53:42
  that what Friar did was not sexual harassment, that it was somehow creating an
• 1:53:49
  uncomfortable environment for his fellow colleagues in the workplace. And to hear Friar talk
• 1:53:57
  about it, it sounds like Friar's just as you can already tell from the
• 1:54:00
  clip you heard, who you know is no BS kind of guy, likes
• 1:54:04
  to joke around, doesn't have much of a filter, and apparently made a
• 1:54:11
  few jokes that were deemed to be somehow if not inappropriate, made someone feel
• 1:54:16
  uncomfortable, someone who apparently had been to his house for Thanksgiving dinner and he
• 1:54:21
  thought of as a friend. To me, it had all the markings of
• 1:54:25
  a hit job. I mean, a year after this controversial study, they
• 1:54:30
  go after him, they find nothing, and so they suspend him on a
• 1:54:33
  bunch of bs without pay for two years, essentially destroying his career, destroying
• 1:54:42
  his reputation, harming him economically. And guess who. Guess who was behind
• 1:54:48
  the suspension, not just peripherally directly the person quoted in the release that Harvard
• 1:54:58
  created to acknowledged the suspension of Rowan Friar. You guessed it, Clauding Gay,
• 1:55:08
  the now former president of Harvard, who was super into in the whole
• 1:55:13
  DEI thing. She was hired because not just of her work in DEI,
• 1:55:16
  but because Harvard was looking for a DEI president, hiring a black female president
• 1:55:21
  who ends up getting fired almost immediately in the aftermath of her congressional testimony regarding
• 1:55:29
  the entire Israel Hamas controversy as well as allegations of plagiarism and so Bari Weiss
• 1:55:39
  asked Rowan Friar in a somewhat humorous fashion about how he feels now that he's
• 1:55:46
  gotten past the suspension. He's back at Harvard and still standing in Clauding Gay
• 1:55:54
  has been fired, and that created this rather humorous exchange between the two of
• 1:55:59
  them in this interview at the University of Boston. One of the details in
• 1:56:02
  this story is that you were suspended by a woman who I had never heard
• 1:56:06
  of until recently. Her name is Claudine Gay, and she said this in
• 1:56:12
  a letter to the Economics Department At the time, Professor Fryar exhibited a pattern
• 1:56:15
  of behavior that failed to meet the expectations of conduct within our community and was
• 1:56:19
  harmful to the well being of its members. The totality of these behaviors is
• 1:56:24
  a clear violation of institutional norms and a betrayal of trust of the Harvard community.
• 1:56:29
  So I guess I want to ask, do you believe in karma?
• 1:56:42
  Here's a motherfucker? And also does calling for the genocide of Jews constitute bullying
• 1:56:49
  and harassment? Yes? Or no? A thousand percent. I found the
• 1:56:54
  entire interview of Roland Fryar by Bari Weiss to be absolutely fascinating an incredibly important.
• 1:57:00
  It's a little bit over an hour long. You can find it on
• 1:57:03
  YouTube if you just search up Rolling Fryar and Bari Wisse. I'm sure you'll
• 1:57:09
  be It'll be very easy for you to find it. I urge you to
• 1:57:12
  take the time, if you have it, to watch the entire interview.
• 1:57:15
  Although I will acknowledge that we've just played the two best clips for you,
• 1:57:19
  so there's no real obligation for you to do that. But I know I'm
• 1:57:24
  always hesitant to get too excited about any particular individual because human beings will always
• 1:57:30
  let me down. But I am a huge fan of Rolling Fryar, and
• 1:57:33
  I think every American ought to know who he is and his story because it
• 1:57:39
  tells you so much about so many different aspects of what's wrong in our culture,
• 1:57:44
  especially when it comes to elite academia. Now, speaking of academia,
• 1:57:49
  I want to talk, you know about a story that I have discussed thousands
• 1:57:56
  of times over the last dozen or so years, and that is the latest
• 1:58:00
  in the Penn State Joe Paterno Jerrysondusky scandal. Most of you probably are aware
• 1:58:05
  that we did an epic podcast called With the Benefit of Hindsight, which proves
• 1:58:10
  beyond any shadow of a doubt that all of Penn State was innocent in that
• 1:58:15
  fraudulent scandal, including Joe Paterno and obviously most specifically Jerry Sandusky. As bizarre
• 1:58:21
  as it is given the conventional wisdom and the media narrative, and it's not
• 1:58:26
  even close. If you don't believe me, just check out the podcast With
• 1:58:30
  the Benefit of hindsight. Well, the story is back in the news because
• 1:58:34
  an effort to try to name Penn State's football field for Joe Paterno, the
• 1:58:42
  coach legendary coach who was fired in the aftermath of Jerry Sindusky's arrest back in
• 1:58:46
  twenty eleven, has been made public. And there's a couple of different aspects
• 1:58:54
  to the story. First of all, let me talk about the politics of
• 1:58:58
  this first. I had been hopeful, although very realistic, about Joe Paterno
• 1:59:05
  potentially being honored in some significant way by the university. And the reason I
• 1:59:14
  had become somewhat optimistic was rather ironic because the whole name, image and likeness
• 1:59:21
  situation had changed the incentive structure and had changed the incentives surrounding the university.
• 1:59:30
  In other words, prior to NIL, the university really could tell some of
• 1:59:35
  the big Penn State boosters to go pound sand when it came to Joe Paterno,
• 1:59:42
  because the the risks of you know, engendering and creating all sorts of
• 1:59:47
  negative media attention were greater than the rewards of honoring Joe Paterno. However,
• 1:59:56
  NIL, I thought there was a chance would change the nature that equation because
• 2:00:00
  now all of a sudden, some of these older boosters have a lot more
• 2:00:04
  leverage. They have a lot more power because the football program is going to
• 2:00:09
  need money for nil collectives and where are they going to get that money from.
• 2:00:14
  Well, you're gonna get that money from older Penn State fans. Well,
• 2:00:17
  older Penn State fans are still going to have a lot of affection for
• 2:00:21
  Joe Paterno, and they're going to feel like, Okay, we'll give you
• 2:00:27
  the money, but you got to do something to restore Joe Paterno's legacy and
• 2:00:31
  reputation. That was a narrative that I always thought made some sense. And
• 2:00:38
  then you know, Frank o'haris died, and I thought that was a major
• 2:00:42
  blow because you know, Franco was kind of like the cleanup hitter in any
• 2:00:45
  kind of situation here, because he's obviously the most famous of Joe Paterno's supporters
• 2:00:51
  and has an enormous amount of credibility with the Penn State fan base and could
• 2:00:58
  garner media attention if need be. And so I was less optimistic when Frank
• 2:01:03
  oharris died, and then over the last couple of weeks, this effort has
• 2:01:09
  now become formalized where there are members of the Penn State Board that have officially
• 2:01:15
  proposed the idea of naming the Penn State football field for Joe Paterno. And
• 2:01:20
  immediately I realized, well, this is never going to happen. And the
• 2:01:26
  reason it's never going to happen is because this is not the kind of thing
• 2:01:30
  that you do in a way that allows it to leak out as a news
• 2:01:34
  story before the actual vote is taken. Now, I am not close to
• 2:01:41
  these people anymore at all. I know most of them, but especially now
• 2:01:45
  that Frank Coharris has died, I am completely out of it when it comes
• 2:01:49
  to the political aspects of what's going on here. But I know enough to
• 2:01:54
  understand that to make this work, you would have to have the votes and
• 2:02:01
  then take the vote, and then the news story is hence State just named
• 2:02:06
  its field for Joe Paterno, and then you let the media react to it.
• 2:02:14
  But to put this out there effectively like a trial balloon, Hey we're
• 2:02:17
  gonna try to do this tells me one you don't have the votes, and
• 2:02:23
  two you're a bunch of fricking morons, because by leaking this out there or
• 2:02:29
  letting it become public that you're trying to do this in a formalized way.
• 2:02:33
  It's reawakening all these medium morons who are deeply, deeply, deeply invested in
• 2:02:41
  this fairytale mythology of the story that includes somehow Joe Paterno being part of the
• 2:02:47
  cover up for Jerry Sandusky, which he was not. I mean, I've
• 2:02:50
  said a million times, even if Jerry Sandusky was guilty, which he's not,
• 2:02:56
  Joe Paterno not only wasn't guilty of a cover up, Joe Paterno is
• 2:03:00
  probably the primary reason Jerry Ssnosky's in prison today. The lead prosecutor in the
• 2:03:05
  case set on HBO that Joe Perturno wasn't part of a cover up. He
• 2:03:10
  was their star freaking witness. He was the lattict witness they interviewed before they
• 2:03:15
  arrested Jerry Sandovsky because they needed to make sure he didn't give himself any wiggle
• 2:03:19
  room to get out of his his testimony backing up Mike mcquerie, the main
• 2:03:24
  witness in the case. So the idea that Joe Paterno is somehow, you
• 2:03:30
  know, culpable here or somehow the villain is just absurd, especially now that
• 2:03:34
  we know everything that we do twelve years later. And that's even if Jerry
• 2:03:41
  Snowsky is guilty, which he is not. And so to me, it's
• 2:03:46
  as obvious that they don't have the votes, that this was basically a publicity
• 2:03:50
  stunt. It's my understanding that the administration at Penn State has said, we're
• 2:03:56
  not against this idea, but we just don't think it's the right time to
• 2:03:59
  do it now. And I interpreted that as we just need to wait for
• 2:04:03
  a few more people to die, and we know this issue will fade away
• 2:04:08
  forever, you know, die like frank O Harris did. Franco died,
• 2:04:13
  and you know, there's a lot of these guys who are still big Paterno
• 2:04:16
  supporters. They're in their seventies, maybe eighties, someone are in their sixties.
• 2:04:21
  But you know, we only got to wait another ten years, and
• 2:04:27
  we're eventually going to find out that, you know, these people are dead
• 2:04:30
  and they no longer have any power influence and we can just allow this thing
• 2:04:34
  to fade away forever and never have to deal with it. And then there's
• 2:04:38
  the media aspect of this, And look, I despised the news media before
• 2:04:44
  I got into the Penn State Joe paternal Joysonowsky case. But even I was
• 2:04:48
  stunned by just how horrendous the media coverage was of this case from day one
• 2:04:56
  till today. And there is no more madic example of the impact of media
• 2:05:02
  members being deeply invested in a narrative than what we saw in reaction to the
• 2:05:11
  idea that Penn State might name its football field for Joe Paterno. All the
• 2:05:17
  usual suspects, all the virtue signalers, came out of the woodwork with their
• 2:05:23
  columns about how horrible this is and how Penn State still doesn't get it,
• 2:05:28
  and there's still Paterno cult members, and that this will be bad for the
• 2:05:33
  current team and bad for recruiting and send the wrong message, and how can
• 2:05:39
  we forget what Joe Paterno did with regard to Jerry Sandusky, and he will
• 2:05:43
  always be associated with Jerry Sinewski even if it's not right. There were a
• 2:05:46
  couple of people that wrote, even if that wasn't based in reality, it's
• 2:05:50
  essentially the perception that all that matters is all that matters. And you know
• 2:05:56
  a couple of these people. I even had a pretty strong connection to one
• 2:06:00
  of the jackasses that wrote in the Philadelphia Inquired is the brother of a fan
• 2:06:05
  of mine from the Michael Jackson case, ironically enough, and you know,
• 2:06:11
  I offered through his sister for him to be invited on this podcast. He's
• 2:06:16
  more than willing to come on and explain himself, and I've not received any
• 2:06:20
  substantive response on that front, which didn't surprise me at all, because I'm
• 2:06:25
  sure he's a coward and knows he'd get absolutely crushed by me on this topic,
• 2:06:29
  because none of these people ever want to be questioned on the actual facts
• 2:06:32
  or the logic of their argument. And then there's another guy who's a Pittsburgh
• 2:06:38
  radio host. Paul Reese is his name, And this is a guy who
• 2:06:42
  I have been on his show on multiple occasions, including the night that Frank
• 2:06:46
  o'harris died, and we've had a pretty good rapport, communicated a lot on
• 2:06:53
  Twitter, and you know, we're supportive of each other. Certainly during the
• 2:06:57
  COVID panic, I was never particularly impressed with him. I thought he was
• 2:07:01
  kind of an idiot in some of the questions that he asked me, but
• 2:07:05
  I just thought maybe that was because he wasn't that familiar with the story.
• 2:07:09
  He came out with a column in the Pittsburgh Media saying that this is a
• 2:07:14
  bad idea for reasons that I didn't understand that all. He and I got
• 2:07:17
  into it on Twitter, and you know, I was very angry at him
• 2:07:23
  because he ought to know better, because he's very familiar with my work,
• 2:07:27
  although apparently not with the details of it. And I offered him to come
• 2:07:31
  on this podcast. It seemed as if he originally had agreed to do so,
• 2:07:38
  and then he's hemming and hawing about being delayed because he's traveling and he'll
• 2:07:44
  do it when he comes back if I agree to be respectful to him,
• 2:07:47
  and I'm like, I know, I'll be respectful of you. But my
• 2:07:50
  guess is, whenever someone like this is delaying, it's a lot like the
• 2:07:55
  Penn State administration. They're delaying so that people die and they don't have to
• 2:07:59
  worry about the Joe paterno wish you anymore. He's delaying so that I'll just
• 2:08:03
  let it go. I'm not expecting Paul to be on this podcast, although
• 2:08:09
  he's invited to do so, to try to figure out what the hell he
• 2:08:13
  was even trying to say in arguing that this is a bad idea because of
• 2:08:16
  the aftermath of the Sandusky scandal. So it's been very frustrating to watch these
• 2:08:24
  medium morons, all virtue signal, all totally clueless, none of whom are
• 2:08:30
  willing to answer legitimate questions or defend their positions. And I'm sure they're all
• 2:08:35
  being praised by their media outlets who have no clue about the actual facts of
• 2:08:41
  the case. And then there's one other aspect of this situation, and I
• 2:08:45
  do think it further substantiates, validates, and vindicates one of my primary thesises
• 2:08:52
  for how this entire story went down. And if you're a fan of the
• 2:08:56
  With the Benefit of Hindsight podcast, you know that Joe Paterno's son and his
• 2:09:01
  lawyer and pr person when the scandal hit, Scott Paterno and I hate each
• 2:09:05
  other's guts with a white hot passion, and we still do to this day.
• 2:09:11
  But the source of my aggravation with Scott is that I believe that Scott
• 2:09:18
  made a catastrophic miscalculation at the beginning of this entire scandal back in November of
• 2:09:26
  twenty eleven, where he decided it was in Joe Paterno, who he refers
• 2:09:31
  to as his own dad, as his client. That's that's true. Bizarrely
• 2:09:35
  not we call it refers to him as his client. That he made a
• 2:09:39
  gambit to try to save his client by throwing Jerry Sandusky under the bus,
• 2:09:45
  declaring him guilty on Joe Paterno's front lawn at a time when Joe Paterno was
• 2:09:50
  not speaking at all publicly, and that Scott Paterno was essentially seen as speaking
• 2:09:56
  on behalf of Joe Paterno. He declared Jerry Sandusky, who he had never
• 2:10:01
  met, to be clearly guilty and that there are boys who had been damaged
• 2:10:05
  and we need to say a prayer for the victims in this case. And
• 2:10:09
  it was the next day that Joe Paturna was fired. And I believe that
• 2:10:13
  this was one of the worst, most catastrophic, most impactful pr mistakes in
• 2:10:20
  modern history. And we're seeing the reality of that now all these years later,
• 2:10:26
  where because Scott Paterno turned Jerry Sandusky into a monster with no limitations,
• 2:10:33
  turned him into the COVID virus, where the media could make him into anything
• 2:10:37
  they wanted, and therefore nobody at Penn State, specifically Joe Paterno, could
• 2:10:43
  ever possibly be unscathed, could ever possibly not be culpable, could not possibly
• 2:10:50
  not have known about this had to be part of some sort of a cover
• 2:10:54
  up. And that's all because of Scott Patna and other aspects of this.
• 2:11:00
  Penn State hadn't panicked and fired Joe Paterno, no, everything might have been
• 2:11:03
  different as well. But this all goes back to the idea that without Paterno,
• 2:11:09
  Sandusky has a chance, and because Sandusky was turned into a monster,
• 2:11:16
  Paterno had no chance, especially once he died. And if you understand the
• 2:11:20
  political dynamics of the case, everything else falls pretty easily in place, because
• 2:11:28
  it helps you understand why Penn State panicked, why doing what they did was
• 2:11:33
  not a guilty plea on behalf of Paterno or the Penn State administrators or certainly
• 2:11:37
  not Jerry Sandusky, and how the median narrative was inherently flawed from the beginning
• 2:11:45
  because they saw it through that prism. But we now know, and in
• 2:11:50
  my view, this is the this is the dead cat bounce for the Joe
• 2:11:54
  Paterno effort of you know, some sort of vindicate I don't think it's going
• 2:12:01
  to happen now. I've always been confident that eventually Joe Paterno was going to
• 2:12:05
  be vindicated in some way, shape or form, honored by Penn State and
• 2:12:11
  in a very legitimate and lasting way, whether it was bringing back the statue
• 2:12:15
  or naming the field after him. I always thought there was a good chance
• 2:12:18
  of that. But now that Franco's gone, and now that this effort seemingly
• 2:12:22
  has failed and the administration is still, you know, delaying, I don't
• 2:12:28
  see how they get in any better position five years from now, because five
• 2:12:31
  years from now or whatever it is, there could be fewer paternal people on
• 2:12:35
  the board. You know, Jay's Jay Paterno, Joe Paterno's other son is
• 2:12:41
  on the board. Who knows if he continues to get re elected. But
• 2:12:43
  you know, the passion on the side of electing pro Paterno board members is
• 2:12:50
  fading over time. People are dying, you know, they were Joe Paterno's
• 2:12:54
  supporters. The case isn't going to get any stronger. Nothing's going to happen.
• 2:13:00
  Barring a black swan like Jerry Sandowski getting a new trial, which is
• 2:13:05
  would be the biggest black swan of all time, nothing's gonna change in the
• 2:13:09
  public perception. This is a political fight, and to me, they've lost
• 2:13:15
  the political fight, and it's it's frustrating, it's sad, but in a
• 2:13:20
  weird way, it's validation of my entire theory of the case and frankly what
• 2:13:26
  I've been saying since November twenty eleven, where I'm saying this was a catastrophic
• 2:13:31
  mistake, largely by Scott Paterno, that forever doomed, forever doomed Joe Paterno
• 2:13:39
  to a fate he did not deserve. Even if Jerry Sandowsky was guilty,
• 2:13:45
  which should be pointed out once again, believe it or not, he's not.
• 2:13:48
  And it's not even close. And if you're interested in check out the
• 2:13:52
  epic podcast with the benefit of Hindsight for far, far, far far more
• 2:13:58
  information on that incredible story. All Right, that'll do it for this episode
• 2:14:01
  of the Death of Journalism. Thanks so much for listening. If you are
• 2:14:05
  interested in participating in the new version of the Death of Journalism podcasts, which
• 2:14:11
  we'll begin in March when we go to a paid subscription model, make sure
• 2:14:16
  you email our executive producer, Mike Agavino. His email address for this purpose
• 2:14:20
  is Ago, Ago, Ago, and then TDJ The Death of Journalism Ago
• 2:14:26
  TDJ at gmail dot com, and then you will be sent a link at
• 2:14:31
  the beginning of March where you can sign up for the paid subscription version of
• 2:14:35
  the Death of Journalism podcast. Until next time, my name is John Zigler.
• 2:14:39
  Thanks so much for listening.