Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode Ninety Nine: When People Show You Who They Are, Believe Them

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Episode Ninety Nine: When People Show You Who They Are, Believe Them · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number ninety nine of the Death of Journalism podcast My name is
• 0:04
  John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show. The news media continues to
• 0:08
  expose and embarrass itself on the Israel Hamas War. Donald Trump, just as
• 0:13
  I always told you, bails on the third GOP debate. The entertainment media
• 0:17
  blows it on various stories and more evidence that tackle football is indeed doomed.
• 0:24
  I'm known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man. I'm a digital advertising SEO and
• 0:30
  email marketing specialist that also happens to be a big fan of John Ziegler and
• 0:34
  the Death of Journalism. Do you need help reaching your target audience? Let
• 0:39
  me help you develop the riot messaging and colfated message and the best channels for
• 0:43
  your business. Please visit my website, the Dutchdigitalmarketingman dot com and let me
• 0:49
  help you tell your story. The website is the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com.
• 0:56
  If you want to grow your business, Peter can help. That's the
• 0:59
  Dutch Digit Marketingman dot com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show.
• 1:04
  Obviously, since this is episode number ninety nine of the Death of Journalism podcasts,
• 1:08
  for those of you that may not be that great at math. The
• 1:14
  reality is that that means the next episode is episode one hundred, and as
• 1:19
  part of episode number one hundred, we're going to be doing another Ask John
• 1:23
  Anything segment, which means I need your help, and I'm giving you the
• 1:27
  opportunity to ask me any legitimate question. I promise a totally sincere and honest
• 1:33
  answer to it. Hopefully those questions relate to anything about the podcast itself or
• 1:38
  the subjects that I talk about on the podcast. You can even get personal
• 1:42
  if you want my opinion on something that you haven't heard me talk about.
• 1:46
  However, the one thing I would ask people not to ask about because you've
• 1:49
  been wasting your time is a question about the future of the podcast itself,
• 1:53
  which I plan to address extensively in the next episode, which, again for
• 2:00
  those not that great at Math, will be episode number one hundred. So
• 2:05
  that's going to be very interesting. I can assure you that you're going to
• 2:07
  want to tune in for that alone, because while the news itself won't be
• 2:14
  that earth shattering, the reason behind it is going to be pretty fascinating stuff,
• 2:19
  and hopefully Ask John Anything will be interesting as well. But I need
• 2:22
  your help in doing that. So the best way for you to ask me
• 2:25
  a question would be, well, there's actually various ways you could email me,
• 2:30
  and the best email to use for that is john Z john Z john
• 2:35
  Z at Media eight that's media itemediaiit dot com. Or you can just respond
• 2:42
  to the post of this particular episode on Twitter or on Facebook, or you
• 2:46
  can message me if you're a friend of mine on Facebook, or if you
• 2:51
  follow me on Twitter, you can direct message me that way with your question
• 2:55
  and we'll get to those in episode number one hundred, which will be the
• 2:59
  next episodeisode of the podcast. We start off episode number ninety nine with yet
• 3:04
  another example of me being wrong. Basically, I've been wrong about two things
• 3:08
  in the aftermath of the Israeli Hamas war, the terrorist attack on Israel and
• 3:15
  the war that that incited. The first thing I was wrong about was how
• 3:19
  Trump would respond by attaching himself to Benjamin Nett and Yahoo. As I addressed
• 3:23
  in the last episode of the podcast, that turned out to be inaccurate and
• 3:29
  Trump, for whatever ego driven reasons, stepped in it with regard to that.
• 3:34
  And I'm also wrong about how I thought the initial media reaction, which
• 3:40
  was very much not in favor of Israel, at least in comparison to what
• 3:46
  it should be. Taking this bogus idea that there's gray area in the middle,
• 3:53
  we have to tell both sides of this that that initial media narrative and
• 4:00
  I even went on Dan Abrams show on News Nation to talk about this subject
• 4:04
  the Monday after the original terrorist attack against Israel, and then on this podcast,
• 4:10
  I said, if there was one other thing that I should have mentioned,
• 4:13
  if I had had a few extra seconds in that TV appearance, it
• 4:15
  would have been I do believe that we're going to see a shift in the
• 4:20
  media narrative. It's not going to be one hundred percent, but I do
• 4:24
  think that there's going to be some elements of the news media, especially in
• 4:28
  the left wing, that are going to realize what they're doing and that there's
• 4:31
  nothing good in it for them, and that effectively they're going to knock it
• 4:35
  off because they're going to realize that one it's not true, not that they
• 4:39
  really care about that anymore, but that two, it's not good for their
• 4:43
  agenda. And specifically I'm talking about liberals and Democrats here, because the majority
• 4:47
  of Americans are going to support Israel here and fairly strongly, and we're getting
• 4:54
  this weird dynamic where the right wing media is supporting Israel, with the exception
• 4:58
  of Tucker Carlson, far more strongly than the mainstream or the left wing media.
• 5:03
  And I thought I was seeing some pushback on the media reaction to that,
• 5:09
  and I made another incorrect prediction, because it's been very clear that there
• 5:14
  has been very little, if any recognition by the mainstream and liberal media to
• 5:20
  correct this narrative. They are still, especially after the bombing whatever you want
• 5:28
  to call it, of the hospital in Gaza, which initially many, if
• 5:33
  not most, mainstream media outlets absurdly and instantaneously blamed on Israel based on nothing
• 5:42
  but the word effectively of Hamas, and have done very little to correct that
• 5:47
  now clearly false narrative, a narrative that never made any sense, and that
• 5:53
  was very quickly, even on live stream video from Al Jazeera, a pro
• 5:58
  Hamas media outlet, proving or at least very much indicating that that narrative that
• 6:03
  Israel was responsible for the hospital bombing was completely and totally bogus. And you
• 6:11
  would think that even at that point, right at that point, when they
• 6:15
  get so embarrassed, so humiliated, where the President of the United States,
• 6:19
  you know, their guy, Joe Biden, is saying, no, this
• 6:23
  is not the way this happened. Our intelligence is very confident that Israel was
• 6:27
  not behind this, that that would at least chase in the news media,
• 6:31
  and that there would be a reversal. There might even be an overcompensation by
• 6:35
  the news media to try to at least make up for past wrongs and to
• 6:40
  be perceived as being at least remotely fair. But that does not happen.
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  And I'm not sure why it hasn't happened, But I'm fully willing to admit
• 6:50
  that I'm wrong. I'm married, so I do this all the time,
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  and I was wrong about there being a reversal of the media narrative and the
• 6:59
  met reaction to this. If anything, they're doubling and tripling down, at
• 7:03
  least when itin the so called mainstream and the left wing. And just to
• 7:10
  be clear on the facts of this situation, as I already referenced, Joe
• 7:14
  Biden made it obvious that US intelligence and he himself, the president, strongly
• 7:23
  believed that Israel had nothing to do with this. There was an extraordinary impromptu
• 7:29
  press conference on Air Force one with Joe Biden on his way back from Israel.
• 7:34
  Now, this thing lasted for about eight minutes. I'm sure to Biden's
• 7:39
  advisors it must have felt like it was about eighty minutes, because this was
• 7:45
  like watching Biden walk on a tight rope. I mean, this is the
• 7:48
  guy that falls downstairs all the time. But can you imagine that the advisors
• 7:54
  being terrified of almost eighty one year old Joe Biden, clearly tired after a
• 8:01
  long trip to Israel, answering questions face to face, which he hardly ever
• 8:07
  does anymore. For some strange reason, they decided this was a good idea.
• 8:11
  And if you watch the entire eight minutes or so, it could not
• 8:16
  be more obvious that Joe Biden is not capable of doing this job. But
• 8:20
  I only want to play a short clip of this. It's a little less
• 8:22
  than a minute, and it's very much towards the end of this eight minute
• 8:28
  impromptu press conference. In a rational world where the news media was remotely fair
• 8:33
  and where journalism was not dead, every single American would be intimately exposed to
• 8:39
  what I'm about to play for you one because it shows Biden with no energy,
• 8:46
  being completely feckless, being clearly way too old for the rigors of this
• 8:52
  job. But then it ends with Biden making a statement which if Donald Trump
• 8:58
  had said, or any Republican, but especially Donald Trump, if Donald Trump
• 9:03
  had said it, it would have been a phrase that every single American will
• 9:09
  be talking about because it's in response to the issue of was Israel responsible for
• 9:16
  the bombing of the hospital in Gaza. Biden, very meekly, weekly and
• 9:22
  at times even pausing, with a very little power in his voice, makes
• 9:26
  the case that Israel was not responsible. But then at the end he admonishes
• 9:33
  Hamas for not shooting straight, saying they've got to learn how to shoot straight.
• 9:41
  And before I comment on that, here is that clip last week with
• 9:45
  the press and Joe Biden on Air Force One. I know what the hospital,
• 9:48
  sir. People all over the region are upset about the hospital and don't
• 9:52
  necessarily believe you or the israelays that they didn't have anything to do that.
• 9:56
  You have a message to the people in the streets right now. Understand why
• 10:00
  in this circumstance they wouldn't believe. I can understand that, but I would
• 10:07
  not notice, I know, say things like that unless I have faith in
• 10:11
  the source in which I've gotten in our defense department, it says it's highly
• 10:18
  unlikely, it is rare. He is a bit of a different footprint,
• 10:22
  and I've intercepted anyway. And so that's why, if you notice I didn't
• 10:28
  say it first, I've been I wanted to make sure that I knew and
• 10:33
  look, and I'm not suggesting that a mosque deliberately did it either. That's
• 10:41
  that old thing got a lot how to shoe strength. Now, that last
• 10:45
  statement by Biden is extraordinary if you think about it, right, because what
• 10:48
  he's saying verstually seemingly trying to make a joke out of this horrible tragedy.
• 10:56
  But even if he's being I'm not sure which is worse, whether he's trying
• 10:58
  to make a joke or if he's being serious. But by saying that Hamas
• 11:03
  should learn to shoot straight, what he was saying was he wished that the
• 11:09
  missile or whatever it was that was fired from Gaza would have hit its intended
• 11:13
  target. Presuming that this was not some sort of self sabotage for propaganda purposes,
• 11:20
  which I agree with Biden that seems unlikely. But if that was not
• 11:24
  the intent. Then what Biden's really saying is he wishes that they had hit
• 11:28
  the target in Israel. That's what he's saying. Now Again, I would
• 11:33
  ask you to use the standard of what if Trump said it. And obviously
• 11:37
  I'm an ardent Trump critic, but I have always acknowledged that the treatment that
• 11:43
  he gets from the news media is completely different than for instance, Joe Biden.
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  And this is a classic example of it. In the realm of omission.
• 11:52
  This is classic o mission. The media just ignores this. It was
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  posted online by by some right wing sources, including the Republican Party, and
• 12:01
  it went semi viral on Twitter, but not nearly enough. I mean that
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  one minute clip right there, even while Biden is telling the truth, although
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  I don't think he's as strong about it as he should be. I mean
• 12:13
  he should be if he really believes that Israel was not responsible for the bombing
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  of the hospital, which I think is accurate. In fact, I'm positive
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  is accurate based upon what we currently know, then he ought to be stronger
• 12:26
  about it because it's outrageous. It's outrageous one what Hamas and the Palestinians attempted
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  to do in trying to win a propaganda battle using their killing of their own
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  people in a hospital, including women and children. That's horrible, number one.
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  But also there's the element of the damage that was done by the news
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  media here. He ought to be taking on his own media outlets, which
• 12:54
  he does not do because he knows they're his friends and he's not allowed to
• 12:58
  do that, apparently, I guess his world, even though that would have
• 13:01
  an effect, that would have a real impact if Joe Biden castigated the New
• 13:07
  York Times or many other liberal media outlets, all of whom, in fact,
• 13:13
  some not even liberal media outlets, The Wall Street Journal did the same
• 13:15
  thing, all of whom jumped to an absurd and erroneous conclusion. He does
• 13:20
  not do that. So there's two elements of this where Biden is not nearly
• 13:24
  strong enough, and then he makes this massive gaff at the end where he
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  says Hamas ought to learn to shoot straight. None of this has become nearly
• 13:33
  the story that it should, and that has consequences, and that is really
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  I think the most insidious form of media bias that there is in this day
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  and age. Oh mission I talk about all the time about how we're now
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  living in a world where it's not what gets reported that matters, it's what
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  gets repeated, and they'll always be able to say, well, we did
• 13:54
  report that, but you know, we reported it one time and we moved
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  on and everyone forgot about it, and most people aren't paying attention and it
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  never reaches critical mass. And as far as the news media itself, this
• 14:07
  is where I've been totally wrong. They have not been chasen in large part
• 14:11
  by this massive error on the hospital attack at all. CBS Evening News,
• 14:18
  you know, formerly highly esteemed journalistic outlet, actually tweeted well after it was
• 14:26
  well known that Israel was not responsible for this, after the president had made
• 14:30
  it clear that Israel is not responsible for this. They tweeted out the following
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  The humanitarian crisis in Gaza continues to grow. Following a hospital explosion that killed
• 14:43
  hundreds, CBS News spoke to a doctor who says Israel's army had previously warned
• 14:50
  the facility to evacuate. What the hell is that this is? After after
• 14:58
  the initial reporting was debunked, after many outlets, including The New York Times,
• 15:05
  had to change their headlines. The New York Times, by the way,
• 15:09
  the best they've done as far as accountability is that they had an editor's
• 15:13
  note, an editor's note which like five people probably read in The New York
• 15:18
  Times indicating that they had quote relied too heavily on the word of Hamas for
• 15:24
  their reporting effectively Hamas for their reporting on the bombing of the hospital. That's
• 15:31
  the best we get when it comes to accountability here, and it goes even
• 15:35
  beyond the issue of the hospital. You would think you would think that once
• 15:41
  they were lied to by the Palestinians about the cause of the hundreds of horrible
• 15:46
  deaths at the hospital, that they would be more hesitant to rely on Palestinian
• 15:52
  sources for war information. But again, after after the story was debunked,
• 16:00
  NBC News tweeted out the death toll in Gaza has exceeded three thousand, seven
• 16:07
  hundred people. This was several days ago, so presumably that number was true.
• 16:11
  It's higher now and more than thirteen thousand have been injured. Palestinian health
• 16:18
  officials say in Israel, fourteen hundred people have been killed, fourteen hundred people
• 16:25
  have been killed and thirty five hundred have been wounded since the October seventh Hamas
• 16:30
  attacks. Now that sounds like a benign report. But that's actually insidious because
• 16:37
  first of all, what they are trying to do in NBC there is they're
• 16:41
  trying to show that over twice as many people in Gaza have died, and
• 16:48
  over three times as many people or four times almost as many people have been
• 16:52
  injured in Gaza then in Israel. So the message there is that Israel is
• 16:59
  doing doing more harm to presumably at least some innocent people. And if you
• 17:04
  believe the Palestinians all innocent people, civilians, women, children, etc.
• 17:10
  Than what was done to Israel originally and in the aftermath of that October seventh
• 17:17
  terrorist attack, that would be bad enough, because that's a false equivalency there,
• 17:22
  because this was all begun by Hamas, that none of this would be
• 17:25
  happening without Hamas's terrorist attack, none of it. So they're the ones responsible.
• 17:30
  But it's worse than that. The source of the information is the Palestinian
• 17:37
  health officials, which, of course you know this is correct, me if
• 17:41
  I'm wrong, and tell me if you've heard this before. But this is
• 17:44
  a lot like COVID, where if it's a health official, it's automatically a
• 17:48
  credible person. No, sometimes health officials are not credible people. Sometimes calling
• 17:53
  someone health official is just cover for someone who's a political hack, and no
• 18:00
  doubt that that's likely the case here. So the source, the source of
• 18:03
  this number of people who have died in Gaza and injured in Gaza is effectively
• 18:11
  the same source that provided the wrong information about the attack on the hospital.
• 18:18
  And how in the world and the fog of war could they possibly have accurate
• 18:22
  numbers at this point anyway, we're told that, you know, Gaza doesn't
• 18:25
  have electricity, they don't have water, they don't have food. You know,
• 18:27
  how in the world could they possibly have an accurate number of the dead
• 18:32
  and injured. Now I'm not saying that there're not been people killed in Godza,
• 18:36
  obviously they have. The response from Israel has been very strong so far,
• 18:40
  although it is not as of this taping, including a ground war and
• 18:45
  a ground invasion, which Israel by all accounts, has been planning. But
• 18:49
  it appears as if the Biden administration has tried to push a pause button on
• 18:56
  Now. I have no idea this is. This is a realm that I
• 18:57
  am not an expert on, So I don't know if that if that's a
• 19:02
  good idea, a bad idea, A proper, you know, counseling from
• 19:06
  the from the Biden administration towards Israel or not, I do not know,
• 19:10
  but that seems to be the reality of the narrative currently about where Israel stands
• 19:17
  with regard to a ground invasion. And we got the news media continuing to
• 19:19
  do the work for Israel's enemies, even after they were caught red handed blaming
• 19:29
  Israel for something that they were not responsible for. And you know, frankly,
• 19:33
  even my god, the October seventh attack should have destroyed any credibility on
• 19:38
  the Palestinian side to begin with. But then after the lie, the total
• 19:45
  lie about Israel being responsible for the hospital bombing, you would think the news
• 19:49
  media would never give any credibility to that side, whether they call them health
• 19:55
  officials or not. And so the media is not learning here. And you
• 20:00
  know, I'm as big a media critic as there is. I'm as cynical
• 20:03
  about the media as anybody I know, And even I have been kind of
• 20:07
  shocked by the lack of accountability and the lack of willingness to try to at
• 20:12
  least pretend for their own self interest, to pretend to be fair, especially
• 20:18
  after they blew it. So badly on the attack on the hospital story.
• 20:23
  And it's not just the mainstream news media. I mean, just to show
• 20:26
  you how pervasive this anti Israel bias has been, you know, become deeply
• 20:33
  rooted in very prominent elements of liberalism. The satirical website The Onion, which
• 20:41
  used to be really funny. I mean, I think the demise of the
• 20:45
  Onion kind of shows so much about what has happened to our culture, how
• 20:48
  divided we are, and how liberals have lost their goddamn minds. And this
• 20:53
  has really opened up an entire market for the Babylon b which is basically the
• 20:57
  conservative Onion. I mean, the Onion can't do satirical news anymore because you
• 21:03
  can't satirize, you can't parody the insanity of the liberal world anymore. And
• 21:08
  so what does the Onion become. It's become like the nuttiest left wing site
• 21:14
  you could possibly imagine, and it's not even remotely funny. Here's one story
• 21:18
  that they tweeted out several days ago. Quote unquote so horny for this unquote
• 21:23
  tweets official Israeli Twitter account with picture of dead civilians. Let me repeat that
• 21:30
  this is a alleged comedic website Twitter account the Onion tweeting so horny for this
• 21:41
  tweets official Israeli Twitter account with picture of dead civilians. In other words,
• 21:45
  the message being, which is not funny nor accurate, that somehow Israel is
• 21:51
  literally sexually aroused by pictures of dead civilians. And again, this is in
• 21:56
  the aftermath of the false story of Israel bombing or being responsible for the attack
• 22:03
  on the hospital. And then there's academia. I mean, it's insane as
• 22:07
  that is. I mean, all of this is related. It's it is
• 22:11
  infiltrated elite liberal thought, and that's why it's made its way into the news
• 22:17
  media. That's why it's made its way into our college campuses. And these
• 22:22
  are all these people are all effectively related. They're all in the same bubble.
• 22:29
  And I have been stunned to the extent to which anti Israeli, pro
• 22:34
  Hamas pro Palestinian thought has infiltrated the highest levels of liberal elite. And we've
• 22:44
  seen it in college campuses all over the country. I've talked a lot about
• 22:48
  that over the last couple episodes of the podcast. The University of Pennsylvania has
• 22:52
  now entered the contest for the most insane reaction so far, and maybe most
• 23:00
  anti Israeli reactions so far, depending on how you interpret what they did.
• 23:04
  But they had several high profile Jewish alumni, including the Huntsman family, say
• 23:12
  Okay, you know what, University of pen We're not going to give you
• 23:17
  any more money. We're not going to give you any more money if you
• 23:19
  are gonna effectively be anti Israel and pro Hamas, if you're not going to
• 23:25
  crack down on the anti Israeli pro Hamas elements of your community, then sorry,
• 23:33
  we're not going to give you any money anymore. And that is,
• 23:36
  in my opinion, more than appropriate. That is the exact right response.
• 23:44
  If you broaden this subject to more of more general view of academia, this
• 23:49
  is the way conservatives ought to be reacting to academia. I mean, I
• 23:55
  cannot believe that any conservative would ever get significance amount of money to any major
• 24:03
  academic institution that I can think of. I mean, as a graduate of
• 24:07
  Georgetown University. I mean, whenever I get a fundraising call, not that
• 24:11
  I have much money to give them anyway, but I tell them immediately there's
• 24:15
  no way, shape or form I remember are going to give a dime to
• 24:18
  Georgetown. You guys have become a Marxist communist organization. I don't support that
• 24:23
  in any way, shape or form, And that has nothing to do with
• 24:26
  what's happening with Israel. That's just in general the wokeness of modern academia.
• 24:33
  So this ought to be the response of anybody who's not a Marxist or a
• 24:37
  communist. And I'm not exaggerating here. I mean, it sounds hyperbolic,
• 24:41
  it sounds exaggerated, But what we have seen in the aftermath of the attack
• 24:45
  on Israel is that some of our worst fears may not even be bad enough.
• 24:51
  That's how insane it has gotten on college campuses. But basically, the
• 24:55
  University of Pennsylvania faculty Senate, and I don't want to read the whole the
• 25:00
  whole statement that they put out there, but basically the statement was, you
• 25:04
  know what, go fuck yourself, Go fuck yourself. You're not going to
• 25:07
  intimidate us or manipulate us with your money. And there's some phrases in there
• 25:11
  that have been interpreted as being anti Semitic, because obviously Jewish people are perceived
• 25:18
  as having money and you know, ruling the world and the banks and all
• 25:22
  of that, I mean, and I don't necessarily disagree with that, at
• 25:26
  least being part of the mindset of what the faculty sentate at the University of
• 25:30
  Pennsylvania was doing. But then also they hilariously try to claim that this is
• 25:34
  an academic institution and we believe in academic freedom and freedom of thought and freedom
• 25:41
  of expression, which of course we've seen time and time again is total bullshit.
• 25:47
  In this day and age, they don't believe in that at all,
• 25:49
  well, especially when it comes to anybody who might be a conservative. Hell,
• 25:53
  you're not even allowed to say that biological men can't play or shouldn't play
• 25:59
  sports against biological women or females on college campuses without being canceled, like what
• 26:04
  happened at penn State University, which is different than the University of Pennsylvania,
• 26:08
  to be clear, but it's you know, it's all basically the same.
• 26:12
  Now, these are all the same types of people running these academic institutions,
• 26:18
  and so I don't know how effective the turning off the money spicket is going
• 26:23
  to be, but based upon what happened to the University of Pennsylvania, they
• 26:26
  don't see the care very much and a lot of these top academic institutions.
• 26:30
  They have endowments that are so unbelievably large because they've been ripping off people for
• 26:37
  so long, and they've got such an incredible scam going. When it comes
• 26:41
  to a lead academia that they don't release right now, they don't care about
• 26:45
  how much money they may or may not get. There are other people that
• 26:49
  are still giving. Liberals are still giving, But I still think I would
• 26:52
  strongly advise anybody who was thinking about giving money who is a nonliberal to an
• 27:00
  elite academic institution to not do it, to not do it. Even regarding
• 27:06
  this response by the University of Pennsylvania, which was basically, fuck you,
• 27:08
  We're not going to be manipulated by you dirty Jews. I mean, that's
• 27:11
  that's kind of been the interpretation of what the University of Pennsylvania did. They
• 27:18
  ought to at least still be forced to do that, and the statement frankly
• 27:22
  sounded so deranged, it almost felt desperate, and so maybe it actually did
• 27:27
  hit a mark more than it appeared to at first glance. So the entire
• 27:33
  reaction to this Israel Hamas war has been shocking, It has been depressing,
• 27:40
  and it has been telling. It has really exposed a lot of people.
• 27:45
  And maybe the most surprising, at least to me, element of this whole
• 27:48
  thing has been the lack of response from Hollywood. Now, I live in
• 27:56
  the Los Angeles area. I know I'm not embedded within the anything close to
• 28:02
  the Hollywood elite, but i know a lot of people in the movie making
• 28:07
  business, and I've been around that now for twenty years having lived in this
• 28:12
  area, and there I know from golf, I know a lot of people
• 28:17
  who are in the Jewish community in Los Angeles. I've played a lot of
• 28:21
  golf of Jewish based country clubs like Brentwood Country Club and Hillcrest Country Club in
• 28:29
  the downtown La Beverly Hills area, and so I feel like I have some
• 28:33
  knowledge of this subject. And there has always been a very pervasive stereotype or
• 28:41
  presumption that Jewish people have an enormous amount of influence over what happens in Hollywood.
• 28:48
  I mean, that's a very well known stereotype, and it's a stereotype
• 28:52
  because there's some truth to it. Now, do I think that that is
• 28:57
  something that ought to lead people to cant conspiracy theories, No, but that
• 29:02
  there is absolutely truth to that reality and we see it all the time,
• 29:07
  and I have been blown away that Hollywood. You would think that if Hollywood
• 29:14
  really did have a situation where the major movers and shakers, they influence peddlers
• 29:22
  in Hollywood were really Jewish people who were running the show behind the scenes,
• 29:27
  that you would see some sort of significant reaction from Hollywood when it came to
• 29:34
  Israel and Hamas and as if this taping, you have not. And this
• 29:41
  became dramatically articulated by actors Julianne Margalize at a variety event. Variety magazine the
• 29:49
  trade magazine for Hollywood, and they were doing a public event a panel,
• 29:56
  and Julianne Margolis, a well known actor US who is Jewish, she was
• 30:03
  asked about this, and I thought her answer was rather poignant because she,
• 30:07
  far more articulately and with more credibility than me, since I'm not Jewish,
• 30:14
  was able to express her concern and her shock that the Hollywood community has not
• 30:22
  stood up for Israel. And here's what that sounded like. Why is there
• 30:26
  such a deafening silence from Hollywood? Why do you think from Hollywood at large?
• 30:32
  Well, I've been asking myself that question. I've been trying to get
• 30:38
  past feelings so disheartened by it, to try and understand and work around why
• 30:51
  every single person in our industry isn't standing up. I don't understand. It
• 30:57
  is shocking that, yes, yes, yes, And I've really been ruminating
• 31:10
  on this and realizing, like, well, everyone processes things differently, right,
• 31:14
  and maybe they're afraid. I honestly don't know what they're afraid of losing.
• 31:23
  I don't know followers. I mean, it's just insane to me that
• 31:27
  we're talking. It comes down to that, yes, yeah, anyway,
• 31:32
  that's not how I roll, so thank god, yes, But but I
• 31:37
  also I listened. The last thing I thought in my life was that I'd
• 31:42
  be the one actress speaking up for Jews. But I'm proud to be here,
• 31:49
  and I hope I inspire other people to come out and talk and use
• 31:55
  their voice and their platform to draw attention to this. I found that sound
• 32:00
  bite to be one very powerful but also quite remarkable that we have a situation
• 32:08
  where an actress is willing and able and feels the need to speak out publicly
• 32:15
  at a variety event in that dramatic a fashion to say basically, what the
• 32:22
  hell is going on here? And I don't have a good explanation for this.
• 32:28
  I don't. I am baffled by it. I mean, the only
• 32:32
  thing I can think is that this infiltration of elite liberal thought that I have
• 32:38
  talked about numerous times since the attack on Israel is even more pervasive than I
• 32:44
  thought, and that even Jewish people in Hollywood, even very rich, very
• 32:49
  powerful people, are somehow afraid of it. That's the only thing I can
• 32:54
  come up with. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I
• 32:58
  don't know where this is the powerful pro Hamas lobby in Hollywood or anywhere in
• 33:05
  America other than you know, maybe on some college campuses. I don't get
• 33:10
  it. But somehow liberal elite thought has been so corrupted that this is a
• 33:20
  situation where even powerful people in Hollywood who have a self interest in defending Israel
• 33:25
  so far are not doing so, at least not on Moss. And that's
• 33:30
  why Julianne Margolis felt like she had to say what she did. So this
• 33:36
  is a really remarkable situation. But my biggest takeaway from all this is when
• 33:42
  people show you who they are, pay attention. That's really the bottom line
• 33:47
  of all this, and what we've seen in the last few weeks is a
• 33:52
  lot of important people showing us who they really are, and the vast majority
• 33:59
  of them are liberals, and they have been exposed, and the news media
• 34:05
  itself has been even further exposed when it comes to their reaction to this story,
• 34:10
  which is course, is not going away. This thing could is much
• 34:15
  more likely to get bigger from where it currently is than it is to fade
• 34:19
  away anytime soon, and I'm sure we'll continue to talk about it as long
• 34:23
  as this podcast exists. Now. While I was wrong about a lot regarding
• 34:30
  the reaction, especially from a media perspective, to the Israel Hamas war,
• 34:37
  I have been dead on when it came to predicting what was going to happen
• 34:40
  with the chaos and the House of Representatives. Regarding the ouster of Kevin McCarthy,
• 34:46
  I said immediately that this was idiotic, This was imbecilic, This was
• 34:52
  a temper tantrum. This was a situation where they don't have the votes to
• 34:57
  get anything done, and eight more Maga morons, led by Flaming Dick Matt
• 35:02
  Gates, sided with every single Democrat in the House of Representatives to create chaos
• 35:08
  at a very critical time period with no plan, no plan whatsoever. And
• 35:15
  I have said, I don't see how anybody, at least anyone who had
• 35:19
  been mentioned, had any chance of getting enough votes two hundred and seventeen to
• 35:23
  be named speaker. Now that McCarthy was ousted, and I have been vindicated
• 35:29
  in that Steve Scalize couldn't get that done, Jim Jordan couldn't get that done.
• 35:35
  And now Jim Jordan has officially waved the white flag. And now as
• 35:38
  of this taping, there are apparently nine different Republicans who have put their hat
• 35:45
  in the ring to be Speaker of the House. The tensions are high.
• 35:50
  There was apparently, I don't know if you want to call it a fistfight,
• 35:53
  but an almost fistfight within the Republican caucus last week about this entire issue.
• 36:01
  Jordan never really even came that close. As I told you in the
• 36:07
  last episode, he was going to lose votes as the process went along,
• 36:10
  and when he did, he was toast. Because once you start to lose
• 36:16
  votes, especially given the dynamics as they currently exist, especially when you're a
• 36:22
  lightning rod like Jim Jordan, there's no way you're going to get to two
• 36:27
  hundred and seventeen votes. And so now they've tried the compromise guy in Steve
• 36:30
  Scalise, they've tried the lightning rod guy in Jim Jordan. Neither one came
• 36:36
  close to two hundred and seventeen votes. And I continue to believe that the
• 36:40
  only scenario, and I don't think that this is a likely scenario. It's
• 36:45
  possible, but I don't know what percentage I would put on it, but
• 36:47
  it is less than fifty percent. But the only path that makes any sense
• 36:53
  at all is for Kevin McCarthy to eventually become Speaker again, because there are
• 37:00
  two hundred and seventeen human beings and the House of Representatives who have previously voted
• 37:05
  for him to be speaker, and so therefore he at least has the theoretical
• 37:09
  potential to get two hundred and seventeen votes. That was his greatest qualification for
• 37:15
  the job, other than being a fantastic fundraiser, was that he could get
• 37:19
  two hundred and seventeen votes and is in a caucus that is as fractured as
• 37:24
  the Republican Party is in House of Representatives, and with a margin as slim
• 37:29
  as it is, then that's the only qualification that matters other than that,
• 37:36
  Missus Lincoln, how was the play? If you can't get the two hundred
• 37:38
  and seventeen votes, nothing else matters. And every day that goes by,
• 37:45
  more and more damage is done to the Republican Party's reputation, and there's more
• 37:50
  and more peril about how this is all going to work its way out.
• 37:53
  Of the candidates who are announced, the most interesting one is Donald's. Donald's
• 37:59
  is a African American Republican from Florida who's a Trump supporter. I actually like
• 38:05
  Donalds, even though he's a Trump supporter. I think he's a smart guy.
• 38:08
  I like him. I didn't like the way he treated the the whole
• 38:15
  bogus teaching slavery in Florida issue, which I think he was doing Donald Trump's
• 38:21
  bidding against Ron DeSantis on that particular issue. So I'm not a huge fan
• 38:24
  of Donald's. But what I am a fan of is a pathway out of
• 38:29
  this, and the only other than Kevin McCarthy somehow coming back into the into
• 38:36
  the equation here. The only pathway where Republicans can save face out of all
• 38:42
  this and claim some semblance of a net victory is if somehow Donalds is elected
• 38:49
  as the first African American Speaker of the House. You know, you want
• 38:53
  to stick at the liberals, that's how you do it. Now. I
• 38:58
  don't actually think that Donalds is qu qualified for the job. So, but
• 39:02
  you know what, at this point, qualification smallifications. Who cares? Just
• 39:07
  get somebody in there, you know, for the next year or so,
• 39:12
  so that we don't get further damage done to the country and to the election
• 39:16
  prospects of holding the House in twenty twenty four. And you know, if
• 39:21
  you were able to create history, since that's what the media claims is the
• 39:24
  most important thing in the world, if you can create African American history,
• 39:28
  then my god, that's inherently good. Right, So that would be a
• 39:32
  net positive. You got rid of of a white male for a black male.
• 39:37
  That's a net positive in the liberal mindset. And that would certainly end
• 39:42
  this issue politically because Democrats would essentially be disarmed when it came to raising a
• 39:49
  rucas about this. I mean, I realize we don't live in a world
• 39:51
  where rationality matters or consistency matters, but that would make it much more difficult
• 39:57
  for Democrats to demogogue this issue. And they've gotten a free pass so far.
• 40:01
  I mean, it is unbelievable, even by our broken standards, I
• 40:06
  mean where everything is broken and the media is totally completely broken, that Democrats
• 40:10
  have gotten no significant blowback for having caused this chaos. Now, there have
• 40:15
  been some Republicans like McCarthy and others his allies who have tried to make the
• 40:22
  argument in the news media that, hello, there were only eight Republicans that
• 40:28
  wanted this. Every single Democrat voted for this chaos that Democrats are now decrying,
• 40:36
  holy hypocrisy, Batman. But they've gotten nowhere. There was one clip,
• 40:39
  and unfortunately I couldn't get it into a format that would be easily used
• 40:43
  on the podcast. But there was a CNN interview. Brianna Keeler, female
• 40:47
  news anchor from CNN, had a Republican congressman on who was trying to explain
• 40:52
  to her why this was the Democrat's fault, and she was having none of
• 40:58
  it. And it seemed like she was having none of it simply because she
• 41:01
  didn't understand the issue or she didn't understand basic maths. She just kept saying,
• 41:06
  but you guys are in the majority, This isn't the Democrats fall.
• 41:08
  You guys are in the majority. And I gotta believe that she just simply
• 41:14
  didn't understand the process, or maybe even worse, doesn't understand basic math.
• 41:20
  Because if only a handful like four or five Democrats had said, no,
• 41:27
  this is bad for the country. I'm not going to vote to Alice Speaker
• 41:30
  McCarthy, none of this would have happened. And all but eight Republicans voted
• 41:37
  in that direction, the direction that the media claims was the right direction.
• 41:40
  Right, So how holy? I mean, the hypocrisy here is off the
• 41:44
  charts. So we're being told by the media that it was the wrong thing
• 41:49
  to throw the country into chaos by getting rid of McCarthy. Okay, so
• 41:53
  then who you blame for that? Well, there were every single Democrat voted
• 41:58
  that way and only eight nutty maga pro Trump Republicans who you claim to hate.
• 42:05
  And so you're telling us that that was the correct vote. How do
• 42:08
  Democrats not get any blowback for siding with the nuttiest of maga Republicans and voting
• 42:15
  in favor of chaos and confusion and at a critical time, the inability of
• 42:23
  Congress to do anything they don't because we don't live in a rational world anymore.
• 42:30
  Somehow, Democrats get to have their cake and eat it too here,
• 42:34
  and it's got to be very, very frustrating for Republicans. But this is
• 42:37
  where the media bias and the broken industry of journalism really matters, because this
• 42:45
  is something where Democrats should be at least getting the same amount of blame as
• 42:51
  Republicans. But that's not the case. And I still see no pat I
• 42:55
  don't think that Donald is going to be the speaker. I hope that this
• 43:00
  point that somehow he gets enough votes, but I don't even know if he's
• 43:04
  going to get the most number of votes from in conference, given the fact
• 43:08
  that there's so many different candidates. But he's the only path that I see
• 43:13
  where you could theoretically have a situation where Okay, in the end, this
• 43:20
  wasn't a big problem, This didn't create an enormous amount of irreparable harm or
• 43:25
  damage. But after Donald's I have no idea where you go from there,
• 43:30
  none, because I just don't know how anyone gets to two seventeen, and
• 43:34
  I certainly don't see how you can find someone where anybody can with a straight
• 43:39
  face say you know what this was worth it? Well, we just went
• 43:44
  through the embarrassment and the chaos and the confusion, and the throwing the country
• 43:51
  into a dangerous situation, and all of that, all the negative media coverage,
• 43:55
  all this was worth it because we got an upgrade from Kevin McCarthy.
• 44:00
  There's no one, no one that remotely is going to fit that description.
• 44:06
  So this was a massive mistake, and people are even on the Republican side,
• 44:09
  starting to more fully acknowledge exactly what I have said from the very beginning
• 44:14
  that this was dumb, this was wrong, and this was destructive. Now,
• 44:20
  speaking of Republican politics, there's been several things that have happened regarding Donald
• 44:24
  Trump that I want to address in the next few minutes of the podcast.
• 44:29
  Here. There has been a plea deal in the Georgia election denial case,
• 44:36
  whatever you want to call it. This is the case out of Atlanta where
• 44:40
  Sidney Powell, a lawyer who was kind of sort of on team Trump after
• 44:47
  the twenty twenty election. This is the woman who famously created the phrase release
• 44:52
  the Kraken. Well, she didn't create that. That's from a movie,
• 44:57
  but she used that to pretend that she had all this evidence that was going
• 45:00
  to prove that the twenty twenty election was stolen and she was going to release
• 45:06
  the kraken, and she has now pleaded guilty and effectively flipped on Donald Trump.
• 45:15
  She's going to testify against Donald Trump, along with another former Trump lawyer
• 45:20
  who has done a similar thing in this case where they have pled guilty,
• 45:24
  and in exchange repleading guilty, they have to provide their testimony apparently by all
• 45:31
  accounts and all logic, against Donald Trump. Now, if we lived in
• 45:37
  a remotely rational world, in a remotely rational world, this would have devastating
• 45:45
  consequences on the Trump campaign. I mean, can you imagine if before say
• 45:50
  twenty sixteen, and Trump changes the world and changes all the rules and everything
• 45:54
  that's happened since, where we've left the gravitational pull of the rational earth and
• 46:00
  nothing matters anymore. We've still lived in the world where we pretended where things
• 46:04
  mattered. Say this is twenty twelve, and there was a Republican front runner
• 46:08
  who was indicted for election interference in a key, integral, maybe most important
• 46:16
  swing state of Georgia, and a lawyer that was very much associated with them
• 46:25
  and their election team had planned guilty and was now going to testify against that
• 46:31
  candidate. That would be game, set match. It would be over.
• 46:37
  It would be over, and the right wing media would be leading the charge.
• 46:39
  We cannot possibly have a candidate that's going to have to go through this.
• 46:44
  This is going to be a disaster. I don't care how great this
• 46:46
  person is. This is too dangerous. This election is too important to win.
• 46:51
  Biden is too vulnerable. Why would we want to do this. We
• 46:54
  got to make this a referendum on Biden, not a referendum on Donald Trump.
• 47:00
  That would be the narrative, and instead this is going to get lost
• 47:05
  in effectively the fog of war. And this is where, by the way,
• 47:09
  I think Trump benefits from being indicted four times. And I don't think
• 47:15
  liberals are smart enough to have figured out that this is going to work for
• 47:19
  them in this way. But indicting Trump four times, I think in the
• 47:23
  minds of the average Republican voter discredited all the indictments and discredited everything that happens
• 47:32
  within the indictments, and if nothing else, it made it very difficult for
• 47:37
  people to even follow the goddamn story. Because I do this literally in my
• 47:45
  existence. My existence is based upon being a podcaster or a television commentator and
• 47:52
  immersing myself in the news of the day, and there are times when I
• 47:54
  have difficulty remembering which of these four cases was witch And if I'm in that
• 48:01
  boat, can you imagine the average Republican voter who doesn't have the time or
• 48:06
  the inclination to dive into this cesspool on a daily basis. They're just gonna
• 48:13
  disregard the whole thing. And it's not gonna matter now whether this will eventually
• 48:19
  result in a conviction of Trump, I have no way of knowing, because
• 48:22
  I've said time and time again, it's not about the facts, it's not
• 48:24
  about the law. It's about jury selection. That's the only thing that's going
• 48:28
  to matter here. And so it really doesn't matter if Cindy Powell is turning
• 48:35
  on Donald Trump, because if you get enough, you know, one or
• 48:37
  two really solid Trump cult members on that jury, they're not gonna convict,
• 48:42
  especially if Trump is the Republican front runner or the Republican nominee. Whatever,
• 48:46
  it is not gonna happen. But in a world where facts and rationality still
• 48:52
  mattered, this would be very, very significant, and instead it's not going
• 48:58
  to And this is right part of the price we pay for the Republican Party
• 49:02
  effectively being owned by the Trump cult and enabled by the right wing media that
• 49:10
  is afraid to piss off that Trump cult. Now, I will defend Donald
• 49:15
  Trump on another thing that has occurred. I already did so with the gag
• 49:20
  order against him in a completely different case. This is the DC case.
• 49:24
  This is a federal case. But he's been put under a gag order,
• 49:28
  which I think is utterly ridiculous. As I've said previously, for a presidential
• 49:32
  candidate to be put under a gag order, considering the fact that the case
• 49:38
  itself is a theoretically unfortunately not in reality, theoretically a huge issue in the
• 49:45
  campaign itself. I'm sorry, You've got to give a presidential candidate wide latitude
• 49:52
  to speak freely about a criminal case against them. That's just if we're going
• 49:58
  to believe in free speech, if we're going to believe in the First Amendment.
• 50:01
  And I would love for the Supreme Court to step in on this thing.
• 50:05
  I don't think that they will. I have no idea if they will,
• 50:07
  because I think Trump actually likes the idea that he's under a gag order
• 50:10
  because it makes him into the victim. But Trump has already been fined like
• 50:16
  five thousand dollars in the response to that gag order and the alleged violation of
• 50:24
  that gag order. And I'm sure he's going to continue to get fined because
• 50:29
  it appears as if he's going to use it to his advantage. See,
• 50:31
  they can't shut me up. And so Trump is probably very happy secretly to
• 50:37
  be under a gag order. But from a philosophical standpoint and a precedents standpoint,
• 50:43
  I think this is very, very dangerous ground when it comes to the
• 50:46
  issue of the First Amendment and free speech, and Trump should not be under
• 50:51
  that gag order. Now, as far as the expected general action battle between
• 50:58
  Trump and Biden, the pull continues to go in the same direction that I
• 51:02
  have been highlighting for the last several weeks, which is that slowly but surely
• 51:08
  Donald Trump is not just dead. Even at least in national popular vote polling
• 51:15
  with Joe Biden, he appears to have a small advantage. Now there's some
• 51:20
  polls like this Harvard poll. I mean, my god, I hope you
• 51:22
  find someone in life that loves you as much as the Harvard poll loves Donald
• 51:28
  Trump. I mean, it's unbelievable, both on the Republican side and in
• 51:35
  the general election polling, the Harvard poll, which is hilarious to see Donald
• 51:39
  Trump bragging about Harvard Pole results when he doesn't even believe in election day results
• 51:45
  and is continually condemned liberal polling through most of his political career as being against
• 51:53
  him and even calling election interference. Well, now you know, I guess
• 51:57
  it's the opposite. It's election interference on his behalf. But you know,
• 52:01
  this is another poll among several recently that show that Donald Trump is actually winning
• 52:08
  over Joe Biden, and not by a minuscule amount. I mean, it's
• 52:13
  only a few percentage points, but Biden is unable as an incumbent to get
• 52:20
  over forty two or forty three percent in most of these polls. Now,
• 52:23
  I realize that Trump is also going to have a ceiling because he's so hated
• 52:28
  by about fifty three fifty five percent of the public, and I think he's
• 52:31
  hated more than Biden is. And I think that there are other elements that
• 52:36
  are not being fully accounted for that would occur in a general election campaign that
• 52:42
  the polling can't possibly predict. At this early early stage. We're still a
• 52:46
  year. Really, voting will start in less than a year now that we
• 52:51
  have month long voting with mailings and all that, but we're basically a year
• 52:54
  away from people making this decision. And I still think Biden, should he
• 52:59
  be The now is going to have many advantages, including Taylor Swift, which
• 53:02
  I've mentioned several times before. I think the Swift cold is going to come
• 53:06
  out hard for Joe Biden. But still, right now, it is remarkable
• 53:12
  how poorly Joe Biden is doing in this polling. And of course it only
• 53:15
  helps solidify Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, because that's the be all end
• 53:22
  all. I mean, you're willing to put up with an awful lot if
• 53:27
  you're an average Republican voter, You're willing to put up with an awful lot
• 53:30
  of problems with Donald Trump if you think he's the guy who will beat Joe
• 53:36
  Biden, almost nothing else matters. If you were convinced that he was not
• 53:39
  going to beat Joe Biden, all of a sudden, all these problems start
• 53:44
  to matter a heck of a lot more. But because the perception has been
• 53:49
  created and it's based on a lot of data, Now I don't know how
• 53:52
  good the data is. I really don't. I'm very skeptical that this is
• 53:55
  based in reality. I find this very hard to believe, even as weak
• 54:00
  as Biden is, and I still believe if you had an election, an
• 54:05
  actual election, if you held it this November instead of next November, I
• 54:07
  still believe Biden would win. It wouldn't be by a lot, but he
• 54:12
  would win in the electoral college, and he probably would win in the popular
• 54:16
  vote. But that's not the perception among the Republican base, which of course
• 54:21
  is incredibly ironic and almost hilarious and frankly tragic. That is based upon the
• 54:27
  perception being created by mostly liberal pulling outlets that Republicans pretend not to believe unless
• 54:32
  it happens to fit their prior beliefs about what they want reality to be.
• 54:38
  So if it's a good poll for Trump, they believe it. If it's
• 54:42
  a bad Trump for Trump, the bad poll for Trump, they don't believe
• 54:45
  it. This is the bizarreness of the world in which we currently live.
• 54:49
  And I have said from the beginning of this process, probably my best prediction
• 54:55
  that I've made among many that have turned out to be correct in this Republican
• 55:00
  primary process. I have said from the beginning the polling matters, one from
• 55:05
  the standpoint of it creating a perception of inevitability and invincibility that Trump feeds off
• 55:12
  of, but also because it means that Trump will not do any debates,
• 55:19
  and the debates were always what DeSantis fans were banking on as being the turning
• 55:24
  point seeing dot Ron DeSantis go face to face with Donald Trump and confronting him
• 55:31
  on several key issues and showing that he's not afraid of Trump, showing that
• 55:37
  he's the better man than Trump, and maybe having a moment where where Trump
• 55:42
  breaks. That was always I think a fantasy, but at least it had
• 55:47
  a theoretical possibility attached to it. I kept saying for many many months since
• 55:54
  like March or April of this year, Uh huh, that's not going to
• 56:00
  happen, because Trump is going to use the polling advantage he has, which
• 56:05
  back in March and April wasn't nearly as big as it is today, to
• 56:08
  not do the debates, and the Republican right wing media will not hold him
• 56:15
  accountable because they are afraid of pissing off the Trump cult. And Trump knows
• 56:22
  this, and so this gives him enormous leverage and he's not going to do
• 56:27
  the debates. I told you wouldn't do the first debate, and then the
• 56:30
  way that went down, I told you he wasn't going to do the second
• 56:31
  debate, and then the way that went down, I told you he's not
• 56:35
  going to do the third debate. Well, guess what Trump is now announced
• 56:38
  that he is holding an event in Florida on the same day, November eighth,
• 56:44
  a Wednesday, and a few weeks from now, where the third GOP
• 56:47
  debate is scheduled to happen, also in Florida. Now, I had originally
• 56:52
  said I didn't think there was going to be a third debate, then I
• 56:54
  realized it was in Florida, and that meant De Santras was of course going
• 56:58
  to do it. I mean, I think basically might be in a baseball
• 57:01
  situation, three strikes and you're out. This will, in my view,
• 57:07
  be the last quote unquote major debate. There'll probably be some semblance of a
• 57:12
  debate in Iowa, if only for tradition purposes, and maybe by the time
• 57:17
  we get to New Hampshire, who the hell knows, but at most that's
• 57:21
  what's going to happen here. This third debate is going to be a bigger
• 57:24
  joke than the second debate, more pointless than the second debate. Everyone knows
• 57:29
  it now. The audience will be even further diminished. The second debate had
• 57:34
  lost an enormous amount of its audience from the first debate. The same thing
• 57:37
  will happen in the third debate. People will and then you have a downward
• 57:40
  spiral, and then, like I said, you might have a perfunctory tradition
• 57:45
  based non Trump debate in Iowa, New Hampshire. That's about it. But
• 57:52
  none of these are going to matter, and Trump will not be held even
• 57:55
  remotely accountable. In fact, from what I have seen in the right wing
• 57:59
  meetia, Trump has actually gotten more praise for dodging the debates than he has
• 58:05
  gotten criticism praise, and by the way, not without some logic, because
• 58:09
  he has he dodged the shit show of that second debate at the Reagan Library,
• 58:14
  which was a complete joke. Fox News Channel deserves enormous amounts of criticism
• 58:20
  for how they handle both debates, but especially the second debate. And so
• 58:24
  with Trump not being held accountable for being a coward and being afraid to debate,
• 58:30
  and his pulling lead only growing, there's no chance Trump ever does a
• 58:35
  debate. And I want to go back, and this is going to sound
• 58:37
  self serving, but whatever it is, what it is. I want to
• 58:40
  go back to a TV appearance I made on News Nation before the first debate,
• 58:45
  and I was on Dan Abrams show and I was on with Sean Spicer.
• 58:51
  Now, this to me is fascinating and has nothing really to do with
• 58:53
  me, although obviously I'm involved. Sean Spicer was Donald Trump's first press secretary
• 59:00
  in the White House, worked on his twenty sixteen campaign, was his goddamn
• 59:05
  press secretary, So nobody should know Donald Trump better than Shawn Spicer, and
• 59:13
  Sewn Spicer in that appearance was effectively saying, well, Trump's missing the first
• 59:19
  debate, but I think he's just basically playing a game and he'll do future
• 59:22
  debates because that would be the right thing to do. That's I'm paraphrasing,
• 59:27
  but that's essentially what Sean Spicer said. And I jumped in and Dan Abrams
• 59:31
  agreed with me. I said, Sean, you don't really believe that Donald
• 59:36
  Trump is going to do any of these debates, do you? And he
• 59:39
  said yes, And Dan and I were like incredulous because almost literally on live
• 59:46
  television. We're like, there is no chance, and I said this,
• 59:50
  I said, there's no chance that Donald Trump is going to do another debate.
• 59:54
  And I don't think there's going to be any general election debates because I
• 59:58
  think the Trump dodging of these debates, plus how toxic Trump is and how
• 1:00:02
  vulnerable Biden is, is going to give everybody a self interest for there to
• 1:00:07
  be no general election debates, assuming that it's Biden versus Trump, which would
• 1:00:12
  be terrible for democracy, terrible for our election process. But that's where we're
• 1:00:17
  heading. And nobody on the right is holding Donald Trump accountable. And I
• 1:00:22
  guess the major issue here is it's not that I was right more loudly and
• 1:00:27
  forcefully and sooner than anyone else on this issue. It's just amazing to me
• 1:00:30
  that how could Sean Spicer be so wrong? And I don't think he was
• 1:00:35
  faking it. He really believed this. I met Donald Trump one time backstage
• 1:00:39
  at the Today Show for like three to five minutes and exchanged an email with
• 1:00:45
  him. That's the entire accounting of my direct interaction with Donald Trump, and
• 1:00:51
  I was positive he would never do these debates. How the fuck was Sean
• 1:00:54
  Spicer not able to see this. It's just a remarkable phenomenon, and it
• 1:01:00
  was obvious to anybody with half a brain. This is the way this was
• 1:01:02
  going to work. And this was the advantage that Trump had because he has
• 1:01:07
  a cult, and because the right wing media is terrified of pissing off that
• 1:01:12
  cult. Now, Mitt Romney, who is now maybe the most hated Republican,
• 1:01:17
  certainly in the US Senate, maybe in the entire Congress, who has
• 1:01:21
  announced he's not running for reelection as a senator from Utah, has because he's
• 1:01:27
  not running for reelection, become far freer to express his real opinion about Donald
• 1:01:35
  Trump. Now, look, I really like Mitt Romney as a person.
• 1:01:39
  I think he is a man of character. I believe he is a man
• 1:01:44
  of strong and true sincere beliefs. I think he is wrong about a lot.
• 1:01:50
  He is completely wrong about climate change, global warming, for instance.
• 1:01:53
  He is far too liberal on many issues for my taste. But as a
• 1:02:00
  human being, Mitt Romney is a good man. I would want Mitt Romney
• 1:02:06
  on my jury or to be a judge if I was ever accused of something
• 1:02:12
  criminal. I believe in his judgment. I believe he is sincere, which
• 1:02:16
  by the way puts you way ahead of almost every other politician in Washington in
• 1:02:22
  this day and age. And I think Romney proved that when he was the
• 1:02:25
  only Republican to vote to convict Trump, not once, but twice in two
• 1:02:30
  different impeachment trials. And he did so based on strong rationality, based upon
• 1:02:37
  the facts, based upon a philosophy, and he did so out of I
• 1:02:42
  think, real courage. So I have a lot of respect for Romney.
• 1:02:46
  And Romney said something that may not sound that new, but to me it
• 1:02:52
  was new ish, and I thought it was an important point. He did
• 1:02:55
  this on CBS's Sunday Morning Show, where he talked about the corrosive element of
• 1:03:02
  Donald Trump going way beyond, way beyond just the politics of the Republican Party.
• 1:03:10
  And here's what that sounded like from Mitt Romney on CBS this past weekend.
• 1:03:15
  I don't think I've heard a single member of my caucus, the Republicans
• 1:03:21
  in the Senate, say, you know, Donald Trump is great. Aren't
• 1:03:22
  we lucky to have him as our leader? Donald Trump represents a failure of
• 1:03:27
  character, which is changing, I think in many respects the psyche of our
• 1:03:30
  nation and the heart of our nation, and that's something which takes a long
• 1:03:34
  time, if ever, to repair. Now I agree with most, if
• 1:03:38
  not all, of what Romney said there. However, I am a little
• 1:03:43
  bit conflicted about which came first, the chicken or the egg. See.
• 1:03:49
  I am now of the belief that Trump, well, there's no doubt he
• 1:03:53
  changed things to some degree. I think he more revealed the way things had
• 1:04:02
  always been, or at least had been for quite a while. In other
• 1:04:05
  words, I'm not sure we ever actually were what we thought we were.
• 1:04:12
  Former NFL head coach Dennis Green famously screamed at a press conference, they are
• 1:04:18
  who we thought they were. If you're a football fan, you'll probably remember
• 1:04:23
  that. I think about that all the time in terms of both the Republican
• 1:04:27
  Party and the United States of America, because I'm now convinced that and I
• 1:04:31
  don't know when it changed, but I think for a long time before twenty
• 1:04:36
  sixteen and Trump revealing how broken we were, that we were not who we
• 1:04:42
  thought we were, and COVID, in my opinion one hundred percent cemented that
• 1:04:48
  sentiment that we are not who we thought we were, We are not who
• 1:04:54
  we pretended to be, and the Republican Party was not who we pretended to
• 1:04:59
  be, and I have to I'm saying. Part of why I have come
• 1:05:01
  to this, I wouldn't call it a conclusion, but more of a strong
• 1:05:04
  suspicion, is that I remember well before Trump, always being a bit confused
• 1:05:12
  as to how the hell Republicans were basically able to get fifty percent of the
• 1:05:17
  vote in a national election, or close to fifty percent of the vote in
• 1:05:21
  the national election, because I didn't believe that fifty percent of the country actually
• 1:05:28
  believed in Republican principles like limited government and lower taxes, and being pro life
• 1:05:35
  and being pro gun, and the principles that used to make up what was
• 1:05:44
  thought to be the core of the Republican Party. Because when I looked around
• 1:05:47
  one anecdotally speaking to real human beings, which I am more prone to do
• 1:05:54
  since I'm not in a media bubble like most people in the media are,
• 1:05:58
  but also looking at polling data, always thought this doesn't make any sense.
• 1:06:02
  There are no small government Republicans. I mean these the number of people that
• 1:06:06
  believe in small government is minuscule, which is why our government keeps growing,
• 1:06:11
  growing and growing and growing, our debt keeps exploding, exploding, exploding,
• 1:06:15
  but we just pretended that that's those were the principles that were driving it.
• 1:06:20
  And what I think was really happening was it was just basically people that hated
• 1:06:25
  Democrats and and Trump took advantage of that, and you know, and there
• 1:06:31
  was a lot of anger and frustration and a lot of people that really don't
• 1:06:35
  know, you know, very much about our system and don't understand the basic
• 1:06:43
  principles of what the country was founded on. They might claim that they do,
• 1:06:46
  but they really don't, and they don't believe in character. In fact,
• 1:06:50
  they actually love it when someone shits all over the other side. Regardless
• 1:06:56
  of how many crimes they have to commit, or how many times they to
• 1:07:00
  be indicted, or or how many things that they do that are clearly immoral,
• 1:07:04
  if they get away with it, that makes it even better. That
• 1:07:08
  makes that makes it even more exciting, and you know more makes them seem
• 1:07:13
  more powerful. And that's what I think is driving a lot of Trump's popularity
• 1:07:17
  among Republicans. Desantus is way too effective and not nearly enough drama. I
• 1:07:25
  use the analogy all the time that Trump is the the billionaire, famous bad
• 1:07:29
  boy and and DeSantis is the perfect marriage material. Well, what college girl
• 1:07:33
  is going to go for the for for the the marriage material. When that
• 1:07:39
  when the rich, famous, bad boy billionaire is available, he's a lot
• 1:07:45
  more fun. And that's what the Republican base has become. It's not based
• 1:07:49
  in principle, it's based in basically what we always criticize liberals for being.
• 1:07:55
  It's based upon feeling. It's about excitement, it's about having fun, and
• 1:08:00
  it's about you dropping the mic on the other side owning the Libs. And
• 1:08:05
  that's largely why Trump is ahead, and as I have said many times,
• 1:08:10
  is going to be the nominee, barring death or physical imprisonment, before the
• 1:08:15
  Republican Convention next summer. Now, another part of the Trump phenomenon, of
• 1:08:23
  course, is did Trump create the distrust in the media or did he take
• 1:08:29
  advantage of it? And I'm very firmly in the latter camp here that he
• 1:08:33
  took advantage, although he exacerbated it. He took advantage of the lack of
• 1:08:41
  trust in the media, especially among Republicans. But because of Trump, the
• 1:08:45
  lack of trust in the media has now been exacerbated, ironically on both sides
• 1:08:49
  of the political aisle. And there's a new poll out that shows this in
• 1:08:54
  very stark terms. The Gallop Poll every single year, almost every single year,
• 1:09:00
  surveys Americans when it comes to their trust in the news media, and
• 1:09:04
  the most recent results are basically catastrophic. And here's what my old media outlet,
• 1:09:12
  Media Height, where I was a senior columnist for several years. Here's
• 1:09:15
  how they reported on the most recent Gallup survey headline Americans with no trust in
• 1:09:21
  the mass media hits all time high and latest Gallop poll. Last week,
• 1:09:28
  Gallup released its annual poll Americans confidence in the US media and found that the
• 1:09:31
  number of people saying that they have no trust at all in mass media had
• 1:09:39
  hit an all time high of thirty nine percent. No trust at all,
• 1:09:47
  I mean that's a really stark statement to say you have no trust at all
• 1:09:53
  in an endeavor an industry journalism that's base past didn't trust. I mean,
• 1:10:00
  that's really all you have as a media outlet is whether or not and to
• 1:10:04
  what degree people trust you. And to say you have no trust at all
• 1:10:10
  is an extraordinary statement. I mean, it's not like these are It's not
• 1:10:15
  like lawyers or you know, used car salesmen. I mean, those people
• 1:10:20
  are not thought to be trustworthy, but journalists or members of the news media,
• 1:10:28
  that's their stock in trade, and to say you have no trust at
• 1:10:31
  all is extraordinary. Thirty nine percent of Americans responded that way, thirty nine
• 1:10:40
  percent. We're getting darn near half of Americans have no trust at all in
• 1:10:45
  the news media. The twenty twenty three poll of over one thousand adult Americans
• 1:10:49
  from across the country registered an all time high number of respondents who described their
• 1:10:56
  trust in mass media as none at all. In twenty six twenty seven percent
• 1:11:01
  of those polled answered none at all. So since twenty sixteen and Trump's selection,
• 1:11:08
  the number of people with no trust at all in the media has gone
• 1:11:11
  from twenty seven percent to thirty nine percent. That's an extraordinary increase in a
• 1:11:16
  fairly short period of time, while in twenty twenty three that number shot up
• 1:11:20
  to thirty nine percent, a devastating indictment of the public's belief in established public
• 1:11:25
  facts and narratives. The poll also found that only thirty two percent of those
• 1:11:30
  polls had a great deal of trust of what the mass media reports, and
• 1:11:38
  that they report fairly accurately and fully. So thirty two percent have a great
• 1:11:44
  deal of trust in the news media, thirty nine percent have no trust at
• 1:11:49
  all. The thirty two percent matches the all time low, which was established
• 1:11:55
  back in twenty sixteen, so that's extraordinary. There's now a seven percent gap
• 1:12:01
  between the number of people who have no trust in the news media at all
• 1:12:05
  and those that have a great deal of trust. In twenty eighteen, forty
• 1:12:12
  five percent of those polls said they had a great deal of trust in mass
• 1:12:15
  media, but that number steadily declined back down to the thirty two percent registered
• 1:12:21
  this year. Now, of course, my thought is, yeah, there's
• 1:12:26
  two factors here. There's the Trump effect, but there's also the COVID effect,
• 1:12:30
  which the news media will never acknowledge, is a large part of this
• 1:12:33
  equation. It's not a coincidence that post COVID we now have thirty nine percent
• 1:12:40
  of the country with no trust in the news media at all. By the
• 1:12:44
  way, just for the record, obviously, I I host a podcast twice
• 1:12:46
  a week called The Death of Journalism, and I'm a huge media critic.
• 1:12:51
  Even I probably would not say I have no trust at all in the news
• 1:12:58
  media. I have very very little, but generally in certain areas and certain
• 1:13:02
  outlets, if I'm told something I have a predisposition to believing it. Now,
• 1:13:09
  I'll never believe it blindly, especially post COVID. I will never ever
• 1:13:14
  ever believe anything any news media outlet tells me of a significant nature blindly post
• 1:13:20
  COVID. But that's to me, I think, an effort to try to
• 1:13:25
  show you just how remarkable and dramatic that number is for thirty nine percent to
• 1:13:30
  say no trust at all. And of course it's not without rationality. I
• 1:13:38
  mean, post COVID, you can make an extremely good argument why people should
• 1:13:43
  have no trust at all. And you know it's not just COVID itself.
• 1:13:47
  There are all sorts of things that happened during the COVID panic, one of
• 1:13:53
  which got back into the news over the last several days, and that I'm
• 1:13:58
  referring to the Georgie which Floyd alleged murder. I'm sure you know that police
• 1:14:03
  officer Derek Shaman was convicted of murdering African American George Floyd, where he infamously
• 1:14:13
  was stepping on his neck and there's this horrible video and Floyd died and it
• 1:14:19
  was right in the middle of the COVID panic in twenty twenty, and the
• 1:14:24
  media went bananas, and they allowed there to be protests and riots, and
• 1:14:29
  even the health experts allegedly said, no, no, no, no,
• 1:14:31
  those are perfectly good for democracy, and we shouldn't need to worry about health
• 1:14:36
  restrictions when it comes to protests and riots as long as we agree with whatever
• 1:14:41
  is being protested against or whatever is motivating the riots. And there's been some
• 1:14:47
  fascinating and to me, as a student of the Jerry Sandusky, Penn State,
• 1:14:51
  Joe Paterno Panic, not all too surprising revelations in that case. And
• 1:14:57
  I'm going to do something a little bit unusual here. I've been very,
• 1:15:00
  very critical of Tucker Carlson, who I used to have a lot of respect
• 1:15:03
  for, and I have called him continually the MVP of the Trump campaign in
• 1:15:10
  twenty twenty three, and I have also suggested strongly that I think something is
• 1:15:14
  wrong with Tucker Carlson. And part of why this has been so frustrating is
• 1:15:18
  that I have a great deal of respect for his talent and at times his
• 1:15:24
  courage, but he's been so wrong on so many things in such a catastrophic
• 1:15:30
  fashion in twenty twenty three, and he's done so much damage when it comes
• 1:15:32
  to promoting Trump's candidacy that I don't think I can ever forgive him for that.
• 1:15:38
  However, he released a Twitter video on the revelations in the George Floyd
• 1:15:44
  case that was so great and so dead on and so encompasses the most recent
• 1:15:51
  revelations that I want to play the clip from Tucker if nothing else, to
• 1:15:56
  show that the real Tucker Carlson still exists somewhere within this conspiracy cancer that has
• 1:16:03
  overtaken his brain. And so here was Tucker Carlson talking about the most recent
• 1:16:10
  revelations and what we now know was going on behind the scenes when it came
• 1:16:15
  to the prosecution in the case involving the death of George Floyd. Significantly,
• 1:16:21
  they also sent a cop called Derek Chauvin to prison for more than forty years.
• 1:16:26
  He would be the racist, white devil who murdered George Floyd. But
• 1:16:30
  the question is did he actually murder George Floyd? And the answer is,
• 1:16:31
  well, no, he didn't murder George Floyd. And we're not guessing about
• 1:16:35
  that. We know it conclusively thanks to a new court case now underway in
• 1:16:40
  Hennepen County, Minnesota. The case was brought by a prosecutor there called Amy
• 1:16:44
  Sweezey. She's suing her boss. So the case is not actually about George
• 1:16:48
  Floyd or Derek Chauvan, but it tells you an awful lot about both of
• 1:16:51
  them. Inner deposition, which you should read, Amy Sweezey describes a conversation
• 1:16:57
  that she had with the county medical examiner Andrew right after George Floyd died.
• 1:17:01
  Quote. I called doctor Baker early that morning to tell him about the case
• 1:17:05
  and to ask him if he would perform the autopsy on mister Floyd. Seeze
• 1:17:11
  recalls all this under oath in the deposition. Quote he called me later in
• 1:17:14
  the day on that Tuesday, and he told me that there were no medical
• 1:17:17
  findings that showed any injury to the vital structures of mister Floyd's neck. There
• 1:17:21
  were no medical indications of asphyxia or strangulation. Oh. In other words,
• 1:17:30
  George Floyd, according to the official autopsy, was not murdered. He died
• 1:17:35
  instead of what we used to call natural causes, which in his case would
• 1:17:39
  include decades of drug use as well as the fatal concentration of fentanyl that was
• 1:17:44
  in his system on his final day. So this was not a killing.
• 1:17:48
  It was yet another narcotics OD in a country that cords more than one hundred
• 1:17:53
  thousand of them every year. The medical examiner clearly understood that, in fact
• 1:17:58
  articulated it, and sweezy, he said to me, she recalls in the
• 1:18:01
  deposition Amy what happens when the actual evidence doesn't match up with the public narrative
• 1:18:08
  that everyone's already decided on. And then he said, quote, this is
• 1:18:13
  the kind of case that ends careers. In other words, everyone lied about
• 1:18:18
  it from the very beginning. The people who knew the truth hid the truth
• 1:18:24
  and allowed the revolution to proceed. Now they've been exposed. Not only was
• 1:18:29
  that a commentary very well done and I think very much to the point,
• 1:18:34
  but at least for me personally, there was a lot of deja vu there,
• 1:18:39
  because that's effectively what is being alleged to have really happened in the George
• 1:18:44
  Floyd case is effectively what happened in the Jerry Sandusky Joe Paterno Penn State panic,
• 1:18:48
  which we obviously documented in our epic podcast with the benefit of hindsight.
• 1:18:53
  It's the exact same dynamic, except no one died in the Jerry Sandusky case
• 1:18:57
  and no one was sexually abused in the Jerry's Dusky case, but it was
• 1:19:01
  all reverse engineered. They needed a verdict, so they got the verdict they
• 1:19:08
  wanted. Nobody wanted to stand in front of the freight train, and I
• 1:19:12
  can understand why no one wanted to stand in front of the freight train.
• 1:19:15
  I myself didn't get heavily involved in the George Floyd situation, even though I
• 1:19:19
  suspected that exactly what Tucker was saying there was probably the case because I've been
• 1:19:25
  so associated with so many other cases that were similarly contrarian that at the time,
• 1:19:30
  I'm just like, you know what, I don't have the bandwidth.
• 1:19:33
  I just can't do this. I'm dealing with COVID and the insanity involving that,
• 1:19:39
  and there's no question there was a relationship if we were not going through
• 1:19:43
  COVID at this time. I don't think the George Floyd's story explodes nearly the
• 1:19:47
  way that it does for a variety of reasons. But I am definitely one
• 1:19:54
  of those that was looking around, going all right, someone needs to step
• 1:19:57
  in front of this freight train, and no one's going to because having stepped
• 1:20:00
  in front of the Sandusky freight train, I can kind of understand why no
• 1:20:03
  one would, because there's nothing in it for you. The truth doesn't matter,
• 1:20:08
  justice doesn't matter. We just need the result that's going to make you
• 1:20:12
  know, this go away, that's going to cause people to stop being angry.
• 1:20:15
  It doesn't matter that a man who didn't commit murder is going to be
• 1:20:19
  spending the rest of his life in prison and having his entire life destroyed.
• 1:20:24
  Now. I don't know whether or not this can be fixed. It's possible
• 1:20:28
  that now that the panic has subsided, that this kind of information could be
• 1:20:31
  helpful on appeal. I hope that it will. But for me, I
• 1:20:38
  mean, there was there was so many parallels here to the Sandusky case that
• 1:20:41
  I just had to mention it because this is the type of thing that happens
• 1:20:45
  in a panic. This is why you don't do criminal cases in a panic,
• 1:20:51
  because invariably, I mean, you would think we have learned this from
• 1:20:56
  the Salem witch trials, but we didn't. Hundreds of years later, we
• 1:21:00
  did not learn the lesson. This is the type of thing that can easily
• 1:21:03
  occur, and it happened on video, right in front of God and everybody,
• 1:21:09
  and it's very obvious that the evidence did not justify the criminal charge against
• 1:21:15
  Derek Shavin, and so kudos to Tucker Carlson for taking this on. Of
• 1:21:20
  course, he's now in a position not being employed by Fox NewsChannel anymore,
• 1:21:25
  where he's free to do that type of stuff, and you know, there
• 1:21:27
  are some benefits to that, and I think this was one of them.
• 1:21:30
  I want to talk about several different stories that appear to be trivial because they're
• 1:21:36
  in the realm of entertainment, but they're actually not. So bear with me,
• 1:21:41
  I promise there is an important point to be made in all of these
• 1:21:45
  stories that I want to get into. The first deals with what's been going
• 1:21:48
  on with Jada Pinkett Smith Will Smith's I guess you would call her wife,
• 1:21:55
  who has a book out now. This is amazing and fascinating and very telling
• 1:22:00
  about the broken state of the news media, and specifically the broken state of
• 1:22:04
  the Today Show on NBC, which used to be not that long ago,
• 1:22:09
  the preeminent morning news show and maybe the most influential news organization in many ways
• 1:22:15
  in the entire country. This was back in the Matt lower era until Matt
• 1:22:20
  Lauer got decapitated unfairly. In case you don't know, Matt used to be
• 1:22:26
  my nemesis and now he's one of my best friends. And I talked to
• 1:22:29
  him at least on a weekly or bileeguely basis, sometimes several times a week
• 1:22:34
  depending on what's going on, played golf with him a couple of times,
• 1:22:39
  just met with him at the USC football game a couple of weeks ago.
• 1:22:42
  And this situation involving Jada Pinkett Smith really exposed how totally broken the entire news
• 1:22:50
  system is and specifically what used to be the preminent morning news show in the
• 1:22:57
  Today Show. So here's what happened. A couple of weeks ago. Jada
• 1:23:00
  Pinkett Smith, in announcing her book, does an interview with Hoda Copy.
• 1:23:04
  Hoda Copy. You know, this is an interview that would have been done
• 1:23:08
  by Matt Lower several years ago, but now it's done by Hoda Copy.
• 1:23:12
  Now, Hoda is not terrible, but she's no Matt Lower. I mean
• 1:23:15
  nobody was Matt Lower when it came to being a good interviewer. And she
• 1:23:19
  interviews Jada Pinkett Smith and it's basically a softball interview, and the headline from
• 1:23:24
  the interview is that Jada Pinkett Smith is now saying that effectively, in twenty
• 1:23:30
  sixteen she and Will Smith separated and that have essentially they've been divorced ever since,
• 1:23:35
  and that this is significant because of the context obviously involving the now infamous
• 1:23:42
  fight I guess or slap of Will Smith against Chris Rock at the twenty twenty
• 1:23:47
  two Oscars, you know, And so that's the reason why anyone cares about
• 1:23:53
  this, really, And so Hobby and Smith do this interview, and there's
• 1:23:59
  no question that Smith is agreeing with Copy's depiction of the book and the separation
• 1:24:06
  with Will Smith, and yes, yes, yes, divorce, divorce,
• 1:24:10
  divorce, and that becomes the headline, and there's blowback against Jada Pinkett Smith
• 1:24:15
  for this, and bizarrely, Jada, I presume asks or demands to go
• 1:24:24
  back on the Today Show to clarify the misperception that got created not by her
• 1:24:31
  or her book, but basically by Hot to Copy, even though Smith was
• 1:24:36
  acknowledging and agreeing with everything that Copy was saying in giving her description of what
• 1:24:44
  was said in the book itself, which I have not read. And so
• 1:24:46
  not only does the Today's Show allow her back on which is extraordinary, but
• 1:24:51
  they allow her to come back on and humiliate ho to copy by essentially letting
• 1:24:58
  her blame Hodaki for her own description of her marriage, which she was agreeing
• 1:25:06
  with in the original interview, and Holdah had to sit there and take it
• 1:25:12
  and be humiliated, and she pushed back only slightly, and it was basically,
• 1:25:15
  huh ha ha ha. I don't know how you created this crazy perception
• 1:25:20
  that Will and I aren't married anymore, and you know we're still working on
• 1:25:24
  our marriage and it's a work in progress and we're gonna make it and blah
• 1:25:28
  blah blah. And the significance I found there were two significances here. Number
• 1:25:33
  one, I'm telling you, and I've said as many times, the loss
• 1:25:38
  of Matt Lower is huge when it comes to the entire industry, if you
• 1:25:44
  will, of major news and entertainment interviews, because Matt Lawer would have sliced
• 1:25:53
  and diced, sliced and diced Jada Pinkett Smith, and he would have had
• 1:25:57
  the leverage to do so, and the wherewithal to so Hoda does not.
• 1:26:01
  There are two women of color, and so therefore they have to be seen
• 1:26:05
  as on the same team. And because she's a guess a celebrity and the
• 1:26:10
  wife of a major celebrity, and she's a woman of color, she has
• 1:26:13
  to be treated with kid gloves, and so Hoda is forced to eat it
• 1:26:17
  and look like a jackass and give Jada Pickersmith more opportunity to promote her book
• 1:26:25
  at her own expense. That never would have happened if Matt Lauer was still
• 1:26:30
  on the Today Show. Never, and related to that as the second point,
• 1:26:34
  the reason why the interview is dead that there are no great interviews anymore
• 1:26:41
  with high profile people. I mean, it's incredibly rare. It's so rare
• 1:26:45
  that that's why we did half a segment or half an episode on our podcast
• 1:26:49
  recently when Sarah Gonzalez did that amazing interview with Trevor Bauer's accuser. That was
• 1:26:56
  one of those very rare situations where a really good interviewer had an opportunity to
• 1:27:00
  interview a newsmaker and was having none of it. Well, the balance of
• 1:27:06
  power now has shifted so dramatically that the celebrity has all the power, the
• 1:27:13
  interviewer has none. They have to sit there or even hote a copy,
• 1:27:16
  has to be humiliated on her own show for something she didn't do. Because
• 1:27:23
  the celebrity, even a minor celebrity like Jada Pinkett Smith, she she has
• 1:27:29
  all the power. And so that I think is very, very significant.
• 1:27:34
  And by the way, you want, you want to prove for this,
• 1:27:38
  if you ever get a chance, go to YouTube and Google or you know,
• 1:27:44
  search up Google and YouTube, same thing. Search up the Matt Lauer
• 1:27:48
  Tom Cruise interview, right, the very famous interview might be the last truly
• 1:27:55
  great interview of a major celebrity in morning television history, where this is the
• 1:28:00
  one where Tom Cruise massive celebrity, way bigger than Jada Smith, way bigger,
• 1:28:08
  ginormously bigger, especially back in that in this era where Tom Cruise tells
• 1:28:14
  Matt Lower he's being glib and this is over the issue of pharmaceutical drugs and
• 1:28:18
  criticism of Brooks Shields, and both Cruise and Lower give the other guy the
• 1:28:26
  business. They're having none of it. It is mono amano. It is
• 1:28:30
  a It is as close to a boxing match as you're ever gonna see,
• 1:28:35
  especially in this day and age on morning news television, and Lower had the
• 1:28:41
  balls to do it even with Tom Cruise, and Cruise didn't give a shit
• 1:28:45
  that it was with Matt Lower because he was such a celebrity and it was
• 1:28:47
  fascinating television. I gotta say both guys did a hell of a job in
• 1:28:50
  that interview. That is done, that is dead, and the hot a
• 1:28:56
  copy situation with Jada Smith really proved that in spades, especially since it was
• 1:29:01
  on the NBC Today Show, which used to be hosted, obviously by Matt
• 1:29:05
  Lower. The next story I want to talk about, which is also in
• 1:29:09
  the entertainment realm but not really, also has a Matt Lower connection to it,
• 1:29:14
  and that is that Britney Spears has written a book. Now, Britney
• 1:29:17
  Spears is clearly very troubled and she's written a book, and there have been
• 1:29:23
  some revelations that have made news. Again, I haven't read the book,
• 1:29:26
  but I've been carefully following the revelations for reasons that will become clear momentarily now
• 1:29:33
  in the media's mind. The big revelation of the Britney Spears book, and
• 1:29:38
  this is fascinating, is that, according to Brittany Justin Timberlake, her teenage
• 1:29:44
  boyfriend, they were together, you know, with the Mickey Mouse Club when
• 1:29:48
  they were kids, and this was a fairy tale type of romance. Teenagers
• 1:29:54
  too famous, you know, very good looking. I guess you would call
• 1:29:58
  them still kids in their late teen means that Justin Timberlake got Britney Spears pregnant
• 1:30:03
  and then effectively, I don't know forrest will be the right word, but
• 1:30:08
  coerced, manipulated whatever her into having an abortion. This is probably the number
• 1:30:14
  one revelation from the book. Now, again, I don't know how true
• 1:30:18
  this is. It sounds plausible. Justin Timberlake has not denied it at least
• 1:30:26
  then is this taping? At least my knowledge of it, I don't think
• 1:30:28
  he's even significantly addressed it, and so I'm going to presume that this is
• 1:30:32
  true. The media reaction to this is fascinating because there's been a lot of
• 1:30:39
  sympathy for Britney Spears and a lot of criticism of Justin Timberlake. And I'm
• 1:30:45
  like, wh whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, woah, Wait a
• 1:30:46
  minute. I thought that, you know, among liberal elites that there's absolutely
• 1:30:51
  nothing wrong with abortion and abortion is good, right, I mean, especially
• 1:30:57
  if you're out of wedlock and you're not ready to have kids, you know
• 1:31:00
  you should probably get an abortion. Well, what's wrong with that? I
• 1:31:02
  mean, that's the mindset, the liberal mindset, especially the media mindset.
• 1:31:06
  So there's been some interesting, you know, exposing of true beliefs when it
• 1:31:12
  comes to the reaction to Britney spears allegation against Justin Timberlake. So I find
• 1:31:19
  that interesting and significant. But there's something way more significant that has also been
• 1:31:25
  revealed or confirmed in Britney spears book, and that is she says that Justin
• 1:31:30
  Timberlake cheated on her, and she cheated on him, and it's who she
• 1:31:36
  cheated on him with that should be impacting a different major news story, but
• 1:31:44
  is not, because the news media is broken and it is filled with a
• 1:31:47
  bunch of complete morons who are not capable of independent thought. What I'm referring
• 1:31:55
  to here is that Britney Spears has confirmed the long held rumor that she cheated
• 1:32:00
  on Justin Timberlake with Wade Robson. Now, the Wade Robson name may or
• 1:32:05
  may not ring a bell with you, but if you followed the Michael Jackson
• 1:32:10
  case even a little bit, you know who Wade Robson is. Wade Robson
• 1:32:15
  is the star of the HBO. I don't even call it a documentary,
• 1:32:19
  it's a mockumentary, a joke. It's a fictional movie, a fantasy movie.
• 1:32:26
  It's even a pro pedophilia fantasy movie that alleges that Michael Jackson was a
• 1:32:30
  serial pedophile. And it stars Wade Robson another guy in the name of James
• 1:32:34
  Safechuck. Now, Wade Robson is a very interesting character here, and his
• 1:32:44
  story in Leaving Neverland is that he would. And of course it changes.
• 1:32:47
  All these accounts to that are bogus. The dates change, there's all sorts
• 1:32:54
  of problems. There's contradictions, the behavior of his mother that I've caught his
• 1:32:59
  mother in, you know, makes no sense. For instance, Wade Robson
• 1:33:02
  announced many many many years after being a huge Michael Jackson fan, after testifying
• 1:33:08
  on Michael Jackson's behalf at his criminal trial, he announced on the Today Show
• 1:33:12
  in an interview with You Guessed It Matt Lower, that he was actually sexually
• 1:33:17
  abused by Michael Jackson. Now, at the time of that interview, Matt
• 1:33:20
  and I were not friends. We were still adversaries. But Matt's producer actually
• 1:33:26
  contacted me to find out what I thought of the Matt of the Wade Robson
• 1:33:30
  Matt Lower interview, because I've now learned that Matt had some serious reservations about
• 1:33:36
  whether or not Wade was telling the truth. Well, I can assure you
• 1:33:41
  Wade Robson was not telling the truth. And here's his story in Leaving Neverland.
• 1:33:47
  Okay, and this is why the Britney Spears revelation matters. So we
• 1:33:53
  are now led to believe, if Leaving Neverland is true, that Wade Robson,
• 1:33:59
  his general story is that he was sexually abused by Michael Jackson for seven
• 1:34:04
  years basically from the year of he was seven to fourteen. Brutal, horrible
• 1:34:13
  sexual abuse by a man at his most formative years. Wade Robson, now
• 1:34:19
  forget the fact that every single bit of his behavior is completely contradicted by the
• 1:34:25
  idea that he was sexually abused by Michael Jackson, or the fact that he
• 1:34:27
  has a massive incentive to lie because he lost out on the job as a
• 1:34:30
  choreographer on the Michael Jackson Circusile Show in Las Vegas and all of a sudden,
• 1:34:36
  that's when he turned and then went on the Today Show to become a
• 1:34:41
  victim and is suing the Jackson estate for over a billion dollars and all that,
• 1:34:46
  I just want you to go with his allegation and how little this makes
• 1:34:51
  sense in the real world, especially now that Brittany has confirmed this rumor.
• 1:34:59
  Becau, do use your brain for a second. Wade Robson, sexual abused
• 1:35:05
  from seven to fourteen, has an affair with Britney Spears at the height of
• 1:35:15
  her fame just a couple of years after that abuse stops as a minor at
• 1:35:23
  best celebrity. He was known because of his relationship with Michael Jackson. With
• 1:35:28
  Michael Jackson, but Britney Spears is a goddess, a goddess, and she's
• 1:35:36
  dating Justin Timberlake. I am sorry. There is no way possible, given
• 1:35:45
  anything, if anything, we've been told about the impact of child sex abuse
• 1:35:50
  to this extent, over this extended period of time, the impact that that
• 1:35:56
  has on a male psyche, there is no possible way that Wade Robson is
• 1:36:02
  getting Britney Spears when she is dating Justin Timberlake. From a confidence standpoint alone,
• 1:36:11
  there is zero chance of that happening. Zero. And you know what
• 1:36:16
  else is really extraordinary is that Wade was apparently cheating on somebody else when he
• 1:36:25
  was with Brittany cheating on Justin Timberlake. You know who Wade was cheating on,
• 1:36:30
  a warn by the name of Brandy Jackson. Brandy Jackson is Michael Jackson's
• 1:36:38
  nace. They dated for several years, first in a puppy love situation and
• 1:36:44
  then apparently in a very romantic circumstance while they were teenagers, during the exact
• 1:36:50
  same time of the alleged abuse that Robson was suffering at the hands of Michael
• 1:36:57
  Jackson. And you know who sat up up Brandy Jackson. I know this
• 1:37:01
  because I've been to the Jackson house. I've interviewed Brandy Jackson extensively about this.
• 1:37:08
  She is incredibly credible. Michael Jackson set up Wade Robson and Brandy Jackson.
• 1:37:15
  So we're to believe this is the this is the Wade Robson narrative.
• 1:37:20
  This is the star of an HBO movie that the media and Oprah Winfrey completely
• 1:37:25
  and totally embraced as being obviously truthful. We're to believe that Waye Robson was
• 1:37:33
  sexually abused by for seven years by Michael Jackson, never told anybody, never
• 1:37:38
  told Brandy was dating Brandy during this entire period of time, was dating her
• 1:37:45
  after the abuse allegedly stopped. And the reason why it has to stop is
• 1:37:49
  because the narrative is that once you hit puberty, Michael Jackson wasn't interested anymore,
• 1:37:55
  even though the dates, especially for James Safechuck, the other accuser in
• 1:37:58
  the in the Leaving Neverland case, don't add up at all, because you
• 1:38:01
  got to believe he was being sexually abused till sixteen, and he was much
• 1:38:05
  taller than Michael Jackson at that time, and none of this makes any goddamn
• 1:38:09
  sense. But facts don't seem the matter anymore. But here's the Wade Robson
• 1:38:14
  narrative. Is sexually abused to fourteen while he's dating Michael Jackson's niece who was
• 1:38:19
  set up by Michael Jackson. He's still dating Brandy, and then he suddenly
• 1:38:26
  is able to figure out a way to get in bed with Britney fuckin' Spears
• 1:38:30
  while she's dating Justin Timberlake. Really really, and he never told Brandy,
• 1:38:40
  he never told Britney, and we know he never told Britney one because it's
• 1:38:45
  not in the book. And also, when the Leaving Neverland movie came out,
• 1:38:49
  Britney posted a video of herself dancing on Instagram or wherever hell it was
• 1:38:55
  to a Michael Jackson song. Now everybody knew she was connected to Wade Robson
• 1:39:00
  at that time, Wade Robson was in the news. And I agree with
• 1:39:03
  those that interpreted that as a statement by Britney Spears on behalf of effectively Michael
• 1:39:12
  Jackson's innocence and saying without saying it, Wade Robson is full of shit.
• 1:39:16
  And by the way, Britney spears and Michael Jackson famously did a duet together
• 1:39:21
  at an awards show well after this would have gone down, so Brittany would
• 1:39:29
  have had all sorts of reasons to suspect Michael Jackson was no good and instead
• 1:39:36
  has never shown any indication of that whatsoever. So I defy anybody to put
• 1:39:43
  together a remotely rational narrative that is consistent with Wade Robson actually being sexually abused
• 1:39:51
  by Michael Jackson. And that's before we get to all the contradictory statements and
• 1:39:57
  the things that he said after Michael Jackson died, praising I'm Up and Down
• 1:40:00
  and writing a blurb and a pro Michael Jackson book, and all sorts of
• 1:40:04
  testimony. Again, not just testifying on Michael Jackson's behalf, being the first
• 1:40:10
  witness of Michael Jackson's defense, put up there by Tom Mezzro, a brilliant
• 1:40:14
  lawyer, a guy I know, well, there's no freaking chance in the
• 1:40:15
  world Wade Robson would have been on the witness list. Nevertheless, the first
• 1:40:19
  witness, and I'm pretty sure Michael Jackson would have tell Tom Mezzro, you
• 1:40:23
  know, maybe we shouldn't put him up there on the stand. I just
• 1:40:26
  got a weird feeling about this, But none of that happens because Wade Robson
• 1:40:30
  is a fucking liar and a fraud and the Britney Spears book further proves that.
• 1:40:36
  And yet nobody other than me will ever mention this, although I will
• 1:40:41
  say that when I tweeted about it, Brandy Jackson was one of the first
• 1:40:45
  people to respond and said, well, well said Sigmund Freud. And I
• 1:40:48
  felt like that was a pretty good vindication when the guy who who was dating
• 1:40:53
  Wade Robson when he cheated on her to be with Britney Spears, while Britney
• 1:40:58
  Spears was with Justin Timberlake, Like, that's pretty good SOURCINGE feel pretty confident
• 1:41:01
  about that. One other entertainment related story that's not really about entertainment, there
• 1:41:08
  has been further developments on the Taylor Swift Travis Kelcey saga. She was at
• 1:41:12
  his football game again for the Kansas City Chiefs. Boy, she was really
• 1:41:16
  overacting in the suite. Oh my gosh. I mean almost to a comical
• 1:41:21
  degree. You know, she thought he was injured at one point, and
• 1:41:25
  you know, looked like she looked like Hillary Clinton watching Osama bin Laden's assassination.
• 1:41:30
  I mean, it was that over the top. But it's very very
• 1:41:33
  clear, as I've said previously, that while they are i'm sure exaggerating this
• 1:41:38
  relationship and playing it for all it's worth from a pr standpoint, since they
• 1:41:43
  both have a lot to gain, that there really is a romantic relationship going
• 1:41:45
  on there, and it seems as if it's going to go on for quite
• 1:41:49
  a while. And I further my prediction, especially since the Miami Dolphins maybe
• 1:41:57
  the only team that could compete with the Kansas City Chiefs and the AFC,
• 1:42:00
  the Kansas City Chiefs are going to the super Bowl, and it's one because
• 1:42:03
  of the momentum this is created. The rising tide lifts all Boats scenario,
• 1:42:09
  and how everybody on that team has got to feel, you know, pretty
• 1:42:13
  good about their lives considering you know that now that the biggest story in sports,
• 1:42:16
  and Taylor Swift is at almost all their games and they got this winning
• 1:42:19
  streak going on with her. But also there is just no way the NFL
• 1:42:25
  and the officials are going to allow the Kansas City Chiefs as long as Patrick
• 1:42:30
  Mahomes their quarterback and Travis Kelcey, Taylor Swift's boyfriend, are healthy. There's
• 1:42:34
  just no possible way you're going to go into Kansas City and beat the Chiefs
• 1:42:40
  in a playoff game. There is too much money to be made in a
• 1:42:43
  chief Super Bowl, probably a Chiefs Eagles super Bowl, since you'll have the
• 1:42:46
  Kelsey brothers and Taylor Swift there. I mean, that's just a bonanza.
• 1:42:51
  And I hate that I'm saying this. I'm the most ardent anti conspiracy person
• 1:42:56
  on the planet. I have never believed in the idea of game being anything
• 1:43:00
  close to being fixed, especially in the nation of the Football League. But
• 1:43:02
  that's how little trust I now have in the entire system. Where again,
• 1:43:10
  there's not gonna be a memo about this. The doesn't need to be.
• 1:43:13
  Everybody is self interested here, much like everyone is self interested in Donald Trump
• 1:43:16
  being the Republican nominee, Democrats, Republicans, left and right, media,
• 1:43:19
  the whole bit. Everybody has that incentive. Everybody has an incentive for the
• 1:43:24
  Chiefs to make the Super Bowl because there's too much money to be made and
• 1:43:27
  there's no frickin way. Then an official is going to allow Travis Kelce to
• 1:43:31
  be touched in an AFC Championship game without calling past interference because if nothing else,
• 1:43:39
  forget about all the money they'll be costing the NFL and the networks potentially,
• 1:43:45
  But now we've got the specter of that person being targeted by a cult
• 1:43:50
  of swifties. And I'm being serious about this. This has got influence officiating.
• 1:43:57
  If you are officiating a game and Travis Kel's is part of a key
• 1:44:00
  play and he gets touched and you don't make the call, you're going to
• 1:44:04
  get destroyed, destroyed by everybody human beings being what they are. I'm telling
• 1:44:11
  you, it would take a herculean effort to overcome that in an AFC championship
• 1:44:15
  game, especially in Kansas City against the Chiefs, which is where this is
• 1:44:19
  heading. Unless Mahones or Kelsey get injured, and it's just sad. It's
• 1:44:25
  just sad that I even have to say that, but that it's as obvious
• 1:44:29
  as could be in my opinion, and I'll be shocked. I'll be the
• 1:44:32
  first to admit if we're still doing the podcast at that time, if I'm
• 1:44:35
  wrong. But it certainly seems to me as if the Chiefs, again barring
• 1:44:40
  major injury, are a lock to be in the Super Bowl because everybody is
• 1:44:44
  incentivized for that to happen. In episode number ninety eight, speaking of football,
• 1:44:48
  I went into a very deep dive into my long held belief that football
• 1:44:55
  is headed tackle football is headed to some form of flag football, even at
• 1:44:59
  the National Football League level and certainly at the high school level, especially in
• 1:45:04
  certain parts of the country like here in California. If it's not there already
• 1:45:09
  that I urge you to go back, if you're interested in this subject and
• 1:45:11
  listen to episode number ninety eight, because I think there's some important things there.
• 1:45:16
  But I think there's already been vindication of my commentary because one of the
• 1:45:21
  things that I used in my argument was the fact that flag football is now
• 1:45:28
  going to be part of the twenty twenty eight Olympic Games here in Los Angeles,
• 1:45:32
  which is a joke to begin with. Before I get to the impact
• 1:45:36
  of that. I mean, I don't think in the last episode I did
• 1:45:40
  justice to just how absurd this is and what a watering down of the Olympic
• 1:45:45
  gold medal this is. I mean, especially on the women's side. Can
• 1:45:47
  you imagine there's going to be a presumably from the United States, you would
• 1:45:51
  think, a women's flag football team that win real Olympic gold medals. I
• 1:45:58
  don't know how many gold medals they are going to give it out to the
• 1:46:00
  team members who play flag football, but female flag football players are gonna win
• 1:46:05
  Olympic gold medals. I mean, they're gonna be people on that team that
• 1:46:13
  are probably not even good athletes. Mac. I'm sure that they'll be impressive,
• 1:46:18
  you know, from from a certain perspective, but it's gonna be an
• 1:46:23
  absolute embarrassment to the Olympic tradition that, you know, a sport that barely
• 1:46:28
  even exists today, that's barely a sport to begin with, somehow gets Olympic
• 1:46:32
  designation and you're gonna be giving out gold medals on the men's side, and
• 1:46:38
  the women's side. By the way, I don't even know how you're gonna
• 1:46:39
  differentiate men and women anymore. But okay, that's another story for another day.
• 1:46:43
  The point here that is this is gonna be an Olympic sport, and
• 1:46:46
  Tom Brady jumped all over that and saying, wait a minute, this is
• 1:46:48
  this seems to be where the NFL is heading. Well, this past weekend,
• 1:46:53
  I got sent and I tweeted this as well, a screenshot of the
• 1:46:58
  networks promoting the fact that there's gonna be flag football in the twenty twenty eight
• 1:47:04
  LA Olympics, with the NFL shield within the promotion and an exclamation point at
• 1:47:13
  the end of it. And there's already been reports that the NFL is not
• 1:47:16
  only allowing their players to participate, they are encouraging their players to participate in
• 1:47:25
  this. In my view, the way the world works, the NFL clearly
• 1:47:30
  had a major major role in this becoming an Olympic sport, a major role.
• 1:47:35
  The NFL was not on board. I don't think there's any chance that
• 1:47:40
  the Olympic Committee allows this to happen. But the Olympic Committee is trading their
• 1:47:45
  credibility in exchange for some star power from the NFL. That's what's happening,
• 1:47:51
  and why is the NFL doing this? I will acknowledge there are some rational
• 1:47:57
  and non there are some benign explanations for this. You know, obviously,
• 1:48:03
  tackle football is very, very difficult for a lot of kids to play.
• 1:48:10
  It's much more physical. Parents think it's more dangerous. There's a lot of
• 1:48:14
  equipment involved. I get it. Iving coached at that level, I get
• 1:48:17
  it. And obviously, when it comes to girls and women participation, female
• 1:48:24
  participation, this is I think an avenue that the NFL sees a lot of
• 1:48:28
  advantaging. That's what we're seeing with the Taylor Swift Travis Kelcey situation. We're
• 1:48:31
  seeing enormous numbers of Taylor Swift cult members tuning in to Kansas City Chief games.
• 1:48:39
  This is a dream for the NFL. Well, similarly, this is
• 1:48:43
  a way for them to get to a demographic, get women to understand the
• 1:48:47
  game, be invested in the game, even though it's not really the same
• 1:48:51
  sport, but it seems like football. It's called football, it has a
• 1:48:56
  football in it, it's just there's no tackling. It's that's white. It's
• 1:49:00
  called flag football. So from a marketing standpoint, I get it. But
• 1:49:03
  then there's the insidious interpretation, and that is that this is the normalization of
• 1:49:10
  flag football as real, incredible football, and that's where we're headed here.
• 1:49:17
  That's why the Pro Bowl went to flag football, That's why the NFL is
• 1:49:21
  embracing flag football at the Olympics. This is going to be a step by
• 1:49:27
  step, bit by bit, drip by drip down the slippery slope process of
• 1:49:32
  going from real tackle football to effectively flag football. And I am the first
• 1:49:38
  to acknowledge. I don't know what exactly it's going to look like, but
• 1:49:42
  I give it ten years tops, and that might be optimistic. This flag
• 1:49:45
  football Olympic plan makes me think that they have a pathway that's less than ten
• 1:49:50
  years before this happens, where you know, logically you're thinking about this.
• 1:49:57
  The first thing they would do is that they would put flag on the quarterbacks.
• 1:50:00
  Flags on the quarterbacks, you're not allowed to touch them. And by
• 1:50:03
  the way, there might even be some people that well, that would be
• 1:50:06
  horrendous and you know, basically want to make you throw up. At least
• 1:50:13
  it would prevent these absurd penalties where you don't even know what the hell a
• 1:50:16
  penalty is, right, I mean, because if you just had a hard
• 1:50:19
  and fast rule you can't touch the quarterback, you put a different color jersey
• 1:50:24
  on the quarterback, you put flags on them like they do in training camp.
• 1:50:27
  Basically in training camp, they don't put flags on them, but they
• 1:50:29
  have a different color jersey, so no one touches the quarterback. So it's
• 1:50:32
  already ingrained in the mindset of the players. The institutional memory of what tackle
• 1:50:39
  football was is already quickly fading. It fades in like three or four years.
• 1:50:43
  We got, as I said last week, we've got people in college
• 1:50:45
  football now that have very little memory of what football used to be before they
• 1:50:50
  completely eviscerated any form of actual tackling and any semblance of what the game was
• 1:51:00
  dur for instance, the Dick Buckus era, since Dick Buckets just passed away
• 1:51:02
  and he was he was glorified as this legend when he would have been committing
• 1:51:06
  a three or four penalties each quarter based upon today's rules. Uh. The
• 1:51:13
  reality here is that I think something like that is now inevitable. Now.
• 1:51:16
  There are a lot of people that disagree with me. I got into a
• 1:51:19
  text debate with my high school friend Dave Patruco, who I've mentioned previously on
• 1:51:24
  the podcast where you know he says, no, if that ever happens,
• 1:51:28
  they're going to lose a huge portion of their fan base, including me.
• 1:51:31
  And I said, Dave, you guys already showed that you're not going to
• 1:51:35
  leave. They already show they already showed during COVID. See this is I
• 1:51:40
  stop me having heard this before, but it all goes back to COVID.
• 1:51:44
  During COVID, the National Football League prevented their fans from attending outdoor stadium games
• 1:51:51
  for an entire year. They canceled in postponed games willy nilly over a virus
• 1:51:58
  that did not impact a single NFL football player, Not even a single NFL
• 1:52:03
  coach was severely harmed by COVID, and outdoor games for not scientific but purely
• 1:52:15
  political purposes were canceled in a way that I believe had a major impact on,
• 1:52:21
  for instance, the way schools responded to COVID, and a major impact
• 1:52:26
  on a presidential election, because there's no question that if the NFL had been
• 1:52:30
  normal in twenty twenty, Donald Trump's election chances reelection chances would have been greatly
• 1:52:36
  enhanced, and so effectively the NFL shit in the face of their base of
• 1:52:44
  support, middle aged white males who tend conservative or at least not liberal.
• 1:52:51
  They shit in your face for a year and there was no blowback, not
• 1:52:58
  a bit, No fans left, none, And the same people talk to
• 1:53:03
  a good game about the whole Colin Kaepernick situation. Oh they've lost me,
• 1:53:06
  their kneeling for the national anthem. Nothing really happened. So they got away
• 1:53:12
  with Kaepernick. They got away with COVID. Guess what they know They have
• 1:53:16
  you. They know they have you by the balls. You're addicted to NFL
• 1:53:23
  football, You're too invested in it. They can do whatever the fuck they
• 1:53:26
  want, and you will take it, and you will ask for more and
• 1:53:30
  once they know that they have you, And unfortunately, that phenomenon is a
• 1:53:36
  reality throughout all of society. I'm just using the NFL as an example,
• 1:53:42
  but that's what COVID proved. That's one of the most devastating elements of the
• 1:53:46
  COVID panic is it exposed they can get away with almost anything. They can
• 1:53:53
  fucking mask our children in and prevent school from happening for over a year with
• 1:54:00
  no accountability, based on nothing, and there'll be no significant blowback. And
• 1:54:08
  Ron Desanders won't even make a significant run to be the Republican nominee. Instead,
• 1:54:15
  the guy who was there in charge the time, Donald Trump is going
• 1:54:18
  to be the Republican nominee. That's devastating. Now back to football for a
• 1:54:23
  second. Further evidence occurred even Sunday night during this the premiere NBC game Sunday
• 1:54:29
  Night Football Eagles Dolphins, where there was yet another example of everything I've been
• 1:54:34
  talking about with regard to where the NFL is heading, heck where they currently
• 1:54:39
  are. There was a critical roughing the passer penalty against the Dolphins. It
• 1:54:45
  was a tie game at the time. Jalen Hurts, the Eagles quarterback,
• 1:54:48
  was literally pushed. Pushed looked like it literally looked like what football would be
• 1:54:56
  if you played two hand touch where the ball was released and then almost instantaneously,
• 1:55:01
  the Dolphin defender touched Jalen Hurts the quarterback with two hands and gently pushed
• 1:55:09
  him he fell to the ground. Of course, quarterbacks are now incentivized to
• 1:55:14
  exaggerate lake soccer players every single penalty. We've seen this in dramatic fashion.
• 1:55:18
  We've seen quarterbacks brag about the fact that they can now manipulate referees into throwing
• 1:55:24
  significant penalties, and these penalties are very significant. In this particular case,
• 1:55:29
  it basically gave the Eagles a touchdown, as it turned out. And I've
• 1:55:32
  been saying for weeks that it's clear to me that the NFL has sent out
• 1:55:38
  word to its media partners, knock it off when it comes to criticizing these
• 1:55:43
  penalties, and there was further evidence of that because this was as clear as
• 1:55:47
  day it was not a penalty. And on NBC, Chris Collinsworth, the
• 1:55:53
  color analyst, who normally is pretty outspoken, all he could manage was to
• 1:55:59
  ask the the rules analyst the NBC has there when these situations occur, what
• 1:56:04
  do you think that was it? What do you think? And the rules
• 1:56:09
  analyst, gently as possible, said, yeah, no, that's that's not
• 1:56:13
  roughing the passer, and then that was essentially the end of it. They
• 1:56:15
  moved on that's that's that's. First of all, it's an outrage from the
• 1:56:21
  from the perspective of the game itself, it impacted the game significantly, but
• 1:56:27
  more importantly than that, when you allow this to go unremarked on to create
• 1:56:32
  very little outrage, and I'm telling you there is a massive difference between last
• 1:56:38
  year and this year. Last year, we were still in an era where
• 1:56:42
  when those kind of penalties happened, they would go viral on Twitter. And
• 1:56:46
  partially what provokes a video to go viral on Twitter is the commentary. You
• 1:56:54
  need a strong commentary on the clip for people to realize, oh my god,
• 1:56:59
  that was ridiculous. Well that no longer exists, and so it takes
• 1:57:02
  the fire out of the video. And this video of the Janalen Hurts penalty
• 1:57:09
  did not, as far as I could see, go viral. It wasn't
• 1:57:12
  trending on Twitter. And I'm sure the NFL is thrilled about that. So
• 1:57:15
  they've been able to effectively mute by I believe. And it sounds conspiratorial,
• 1:57:23
  but it wouldn't even take much of a conspiracy. All it takes is a
• 1:57:26
  very subtle wink wink, nod nod. Hey, just knock it off.
• 1:57:30
  These people know where their bread is buttered, they know how lucrative and rare
• 1:57:33
  these gigs are, and it's just not worth it for them to push back
• 1:57:38
  anymore. So last year, Troy Aikman says, I think we got to
• 1:57:41
  take the dresses off the quarterback. He got away with that. This year,
• 1:57:45
  there ain't none of that. We're just getting along to get along.
• 1:57:48
  And that's a slippery slope because now there's no outrage, and now this allows
• 1:57:53
  the National Football League to systematically further cashtraight football from what it was, and
• 1:58:00
  there's no going back from this, and so further evidence that we will eventually
• 1:58:04
  end up exactly where I said we will. I am very confident. I
• 1:58:10
  don't know exactly when, I don't know exactly how, but tackle football as
• 1:58:14
  we know it is dead, and I just wish there would be an announcement
• 1:58:17
  of this. I guess maybe that's the part of this that drives me the
• 1:58:19
  most crazy. I mean, this is a huge deal, a huge part
• 1:58:23
  of American culture, has a major impact, especially in our nation's youth,
• 1:58:28
  because, as I've said, high school football is as close as the vast
• 1:58:31
  majority of young men are going to get to a military experience in this country
• 1:58:35
  since we no longer have a draft, and now that's been eviscerated, and
• 1:58:40
  so this isn't just entertainment. There's real major cultural impact of this. I
• 1:58:45
  mean, ironically enough, football began as a sport. I got many people
• 1:58:49
  know this. Football began as a sport ironically and somewhat hilariously in retrospect,
• 1:58:57
  after the Civil War, in the aftermath of the Civil War, forget this,
• 1:59:00
  After the bloodiest war in American history, horrific, horrific war, the
• 1:59:04
  Civil War, there was a thought, especially in the South, that American
• 1:59:10
  boys and men were becoming too soft, and so football was largely created and
• 1:59:15
  emphasized because of that as essentially a replacement for war. Now, again,
• 1:59:20
  it was probably way too brutal at a certain point, way too brutal,
• 1:59:25
  especially at the turn of the last century, a previous century, and so
• 1:59:29
  I'm not in favor of that. But now with the pendulum has swung so
• 1:59:31
  far in the other direction, it's ridiculous and there's no going back from that.
• 1:59:35
  And no one's talking about this because the sports media, first of all
• 1:59:40
  a bunch of freaking liberals, and they're completely and totally beholden to their sports
• 1:59:45
  properties, and they're all basically owned by the same people. They're all basically
• 1:59:49
  have the same bosses. The NFL rules the day, and the NFL is
• 1:59:54
  going to do whatever the hell they want. And as soon as a couple
• 1:59:57
  of these older old school owners, people like Jerry Jones as soon as they're
• 2:00:00
  dead, which is going to happen soon. That's going to be the key
• 2:00:02
  to this. Once Jerry Jones is dead and a couple other people are dead,
• 2:00:06
  then there's going to be no stop in this. The floodgates are open.
• 2:00:12
  The framework has already been set, the foundation has already been set.
• 2:00:15
  It's as clear as day, and again no one else is talking about it.
• 2:00:18
  One last football note, I think I've been further vindicated on my very
• 2:00:23
  solitary contrarian believe that Heisman Trophy winner Caleb Williams from USC is a borderline fraud.
• 2:00:30
  He's great in certain aspects of the game, but overall very very overrated.
• 2:00:35
  USC lost again, this time at home to Utah. Williams was very
• 2:00:40
  mediocre once again, And now suddenly the rest of the sports media is slowly
• 2:00:45
  starting to come to the same conclusion I did, having watched many of his
• 2:00:49
  games and having attended a game three weeks ago again actually won where I was
• 2:00:54
  unimpressed by him, and I think I've been fully vindicated on that he will
• 2:00:58
  not be a two time Heisman Trophy winner and USC will not be going to
• 2:01:01
  the playoffs. In fact, my prediction for them is they're gonna be going
• 2:01:06
  to a minor bowl game and Williams won't even play in the bowl game because
• 2:01:10
  it'll opt out to save himself for the Pro Draft. And if I was
• 2:01:15
  an NFL team, I would be very, very very hesitant to pick Caleb
• 2:01:18
  Williams first, or anything close to first, because I am not sold on
• 2:01:23
  him at all. All Right, that'll do it for episode number ninety nine
• 2:01:28
  of the Death of Journalism podcast. Once again, last reminder, last opportunity
• 2:01:33
  to send a question for episode number one hundred, which will be an Ask
• 2:01:36
  John Anything episode. You can email me at John z at medit dot com
• 2:01:42
  with your question for Ask John Anything, or you can message me on Twitter.
• 2:01:45
  You can message me on Facebook. You can respond to the post that
• 2:01:49
  I place for this episode on either Twitter or Facebook. Lots of different ways
• 2:01:55
  for you to participate, but do so quickly because we will be taping episode
• 2:02:00
  number one hundred on Wednesday morning, and obviously I'll need your questions before then.
• 2:02:04
  Until then, thanks so much for listening. Please remember subscribe, rate
• 2:02:06
  and review, and share this podcast with others. Share it on social media.
• 2:02:11
  If you do, please tag me and I'll be sure to share it
• 2:02:14
  on Twitter or Facebook myself until next time. My name is John Zigler.
• 2:02:17
  This is the Death of Journalism podcast