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Episode Fifty Five: America is Better Than This · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number fifty five of the Death of Journalism podcast. My name
• 0:05
  is John Ziggler. I am your host and on today's program, The New
• 0:09
  York Times Things it knows why Tucker Carlson was really fired from Fox News.
• 0:16
  Americans are convinced in overwhelming numbers that the news media is a destructive force,
• 0:21
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  The website is the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com. If you want to
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  grow your business, Peter can help. That's the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot
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  com. And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. So The New York
• 1:11
  Times has now weighed in on why it thinks, or at least someone from
• 1:19
  Fox News is telling them to think why Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News
• 1:26
  Channel. This is becoming frankly comical now as Tucker is a universal martyr for
• 1:34
  almost any cause you want. It's almost religious, where no matter what your
• 1:41
  pet cause is, you could argue that's why Tucker Carlson really got fired.
• 1:49
  And there are so many of them. If I start listening them, I'm
• 1:52
  gonna get ticked off of myself because I'm sure I'm going to forget one or
• 1:55
  two on the list, but I'm sure we'll at least reference them as we
• 1:59
  go along here, Just to review, in episode number fifty four, I
• 2:02
  thought we had pretty much gotten to the bottom of this. I mean,
• 2:07
  it's kind of it's bizarre to me that the Wall Street Journal owned by News
• 2:14
  Corp. Therefore having extremely good sourcing. Now I realized they have a conflict
• 2:19
  of interest, and that should be considered, But I mean, this is
• 2:22
  the same company owned by the same people, run by the same people,
• 2:25
  have the same bosses effectively as Fox News Channel does, so they have their
• 2:31
  finger on the pulse of what really happened with Fox News Channel and their explanation
• 2:38
  for why Tucker Carlson was fired to me, makes perfect sense. It's not,
• 2:43
  you know, it doesn't answer of every single question, but it's exactly
• 2:46
  what I told you that it was. On the very day this happened,
• 2:51
  I said this. I went on NewsNation television with Dan Abrams MC and Kelly
• 2:55
  David Schuster, and I said, guys, this is about the dominion voting
• 3:00
  systems lawsuit, redacted messages disparaging his bosses, and that's why he got fired.
• 3:07
  Well, the Wall Street Journal was able to further detail what I had
• 3:12
  told you, which was from very good sourcing, although odd sourcing, and
• 3:15
  they said that the primary cause of Tucker Carlson's firing was a redacted message where
• 3:23
  he had referred to the top female boss at Fox News Channel as the C
• 3:30
  word. And then, maybe most importantly and most amusingly in a weird way,
• 3:37
  when they came to Tucker to brag to him that they had redacted this
• 3:43
  from the discovery on his behalf to protect him, he essentially said, well,
• 3:47
  why are you doing that. I want everyone to know that I think
• 3:50
  that she's the C word, because she's really the C word. Those are
• 3:53
  my words. But that's essentially what happened. And then the Wall Street Journal
• 3:58
  went in and did a extensive, very detailed, very long story on every
• 4:04
  aspect of what led to Tucker Carlson's firing, But that was the primary thing.
• 4:11
  And I've always said, look, the timing here is is pretty telling,
• 4:15
  and I think it's a good It's a good metaphor, so I'll use
• 4:17
  it again. When you have an earthquake, like an eight hundred million dollar
• 4:23
  lawsuits settlement, and something as public as the dominion voting system's lawsuits settlement,
• 4:29
  and then a couple of days later, a building that seemed to be in
• 4:30
  good shape suddenly collapses, which would be Tucker and his role at Fox News
• 4:35
  Channel. There's probably more than just a correlation there. There's a causation.
• 4:43
  One caused the other, which is kind of ironic, by the way,
• 4:46
  because I didn't even realize that Tucker Carlson is a nine to eleven conspiracy theorist
• 4:50
  who can't understand why Building seven collapsed on nine to eleven, which is just
• 4:58
  you know how much I just spies conspiracy theories, but that one is one
• 5:02
  of the more nonsensical ones. Just not to get aside here, not to
• 5:10
  get side tracked, but it's somewhat relevant to the not just the metaphor,
• 5:15
  but to where Tucker's head was over the last several months before he was fired.
• 5:19
  I really do think that Tucker was starting to lose it. I mean,
• 5:23
  he believed that you would get fired if you even questioned why Building seven
• 5:28
  collapsed on nine to eleven. You mean, because there were not one,
• 5:32
  but two earthquakes right across the street from Building seven on that day. And
• 5:38
  gee, I wonder why a building would collapse when two earthquakes occurred. But
• 5:42
  anyway, I digress. The point here is that it was very obvious,
• 5:46
  at least to me from both my sourcing and using my own brain, that
• 5:50
  the dominion voting System's lawsuit had to be at least indirectly, if not directly,
• 5:57
  related to why Tucker Carlson got fired. And I thought that the Wall
• 6:01
  Street Journal story, well, I knew it wasn't going to be accepted by
• 6:03
  the public because it's not for some reason. Juice enough, can we just
• 6:09
  for a second contemplate how weird it is that this explanation for his firing just
• 6:15
  hasn't even been accepted within the media. I'm sorry, if you call your
• 6:20
  female boss in twenty twenty three, or at least becomes known in twenty twenty
• 6:26
  three that you call your female boss the C word and you want it to
• 6:30
  be public when they tell you it's redacted, that's a fireable offense. Now,
• 6:38
  if I was in charge, what I have tried to suspend Tucker Carlson
• 6:42
  first and see how that went. Yeah, probably, But this shouldn't be
• 6:46
  that much of a mystery. How did this? How is this not a
• 6:49
  good enough explanation? I mean, anyone I know would be immediately fired under
• 6:57
  that situation. And there is some weirdness to the delay that occurred from the
• 7:01
  time that they found out about this and Tucker said no, please don't redact
• 7:05
  it, and then that Friday night late when Tucker Carlson was finally fired,
• 7:11
  and then he gets fine, he gets notified of that on the following Monday.
• 7:14
  So I'm still a little confused about the timing of it all. But
• 7:17
  I thought the Wall Street Journal had pretty much figured it out within their own
• 7:21
  company and pretty much proved in the case. But according to The New York
• 7:26
  Times, that's not good enough. Now, somehow, in the post B
• 7:30
  two world, calling your female boss the C word. That's just not good
• 7:34
  enough. No, no, no, The New York Times thinks they know.
• 7:39
  So here's what The New York Times is reporting as of this taping the
• 7:44
  morning that I'm taping this on Wednesday, headline, Carlson's text that alarmed Fox
• 7:49
  leaders quote it's not how white men fight. So we're still talking about redacted
• 7:58
  texts from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit. But this isn't a completely different realm.
• 8:03
  Their subhadline is the discovery of the text message contributed to a chain of
• 8:07
  events that ultimately led to Tucker Carlson's firing. Okay, so right there,
• 8:11
  they're admitting this is not the main reason. And the way I interpret this
• 8:16
  now having read the article and read the text in question, that this is
• 8:22
  this is bs. This is them coming up with a reason to make this
• 8:26
  more important, way more important than it really is. But they're even admitting
• 8:31
  this ain't the real reason, but for they have a political agenda here to
• 8:35
  try to make this at least be perceived as one of the reasons. Are
• 8:41
  part of a series of events that resulted in Tucker Carlson's firing. And by
• 8:46
  the way, I am perfectly willing to accept that there's more than one reason.
• 8:50
  I mean, usually when something this big, in this shocking happens,
• 8:54
  there's a confluence of events, there's a domino effect, there's more than one
• 8:58
  reason. But I'm still of the belief that calling his female boss the C
• 9:03
  word and wanting that to be public, it's the primary reason for why this
• 9:07
  happened. But I think it's interesting what The New York Times is doing here,
• 9:11
  and it's also kind of funny in a weird way. So I'm going
• 9:16
  to share it with you. Here's more of the actual article in The New
• 9:18
  York Times. A text message sent by Tucker Carlson that set off a panic
• 9:24
  at the highest levels of Fox on the eve of its billion dollar defamation trial,
• 9:31
  showed its most popular host sharing his private, inflammatory views about violence and
• 9:39
  race. The discovery of the message contributed to a chain of events that ultimately
• 9:43
  led to mister Carlson's firing. In the message, sent to one of his
• 9:50
  producers in the hours after violent Trump supporters storm the Capitol on January six,
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  twenty twenty one, mister Carlson this scribed how he had recently watched a video
• 10:03
  of a group of men Trump supporters, he said, violently attacking quote an
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  Antifa kid. It was three against one at least, he wrote, and
• 10:16
  then he expressed a sense of dismay that the attackers, like him were white.
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  The text alarmed the Fox board, which saw the message a day before
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  Fox was set to defend itself against dominion voting systems before a jury. The
• 10:35
  board grew concerned that the message could become public at trial when mister Carlson was
• 10:41
  on the stand, creating a sensational and damaging moment that would raise broader questions
• 10:48
  about the company. What when when you when you hear the entire text,
• 10:54
  I think you're going to realize this is just bullcrap. There's there's no way
• 10:58
  that this off this kind of alarm bells that this would have even theoretically become
• 11:03
  part of the trial testimony, because I can't believe any judge would have considered
• 11:09
  it to be remotely relevant to the issues at hand. But The New York
• 11:13
  Times continues the day after the discovery, and this is where the timing of
• 11:18
  all this is still confusing to me. The day after the discovery, the
• 11:22
  board told Fox executives it was bringing in an outside law firm to conduct an
• 11:28
  investigation into mister Carlson's conduct. The text message added to a growing number of
• 11:33
  internal issues involving mister Carlson that led the company's leadership to conclude he was more
• 11:39
  of a problem than an asset and had to go, according to several people
• 11:46
  with knowledge of the decision. In other message, this is where The New
• 11:48
  York Times decides texts who refer to what really happened. In other messages,
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  he had referred to women, including a senior Fox executive, in rude and
• 12:00
  misogynistic terms. He called her the C word. The message about the fight
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  also played a role in the company's decision to settle with Dominion for seven and
• 12:11
  eighty seven point five million dollars, the highest known payout in a defamation case.
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  It remains unclear how the texts escaped more notice earlier, given that the
• 12:22
  Fox legal team was aware of it and other offensive texts written by mister Carlson.
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  Fox's lawyers had produced the tax as part of the discovery process and were
• 12:33
  involved in the redactions. Mister Carlson had even been asked about it during a
• 12:39
  deposition. According to several people who would have read the unredacted transcripts of his
• 12:45
  deposition. Again, the machinations of this and the timing of this I still
• 12:50
  have not been able to get a firm hold on. But look, it's
• 12:54
  pretty clear there was a lot going on. There were a lot of reasons
• 12:58
  for concern about Tucker's thinking and whether or not Tucker thought he was getting too
• 13:01
  big for his bridges, which I think is a much bigger issue than the
• 13:05
  substance of this text. But I think the real issue and why I'm leading
• 13:09
  this episode of the podcast, is how the New York Times thinks and why
• 13:13
  it is that they are making such a big deal out of this particular text
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  within the redacted portions of the Dominion Voting System's lawsuit. Because this is just
• 13:26
  absurd. This is ridiculous that The New York Times is at least pretending to
• 13:31
  think that this is why Tucker Carlson got fired again. This is context.
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  This is a private message to a producer with him basically venting about seeing video
• 13:46
  of what happened on January sixth. And as you listen to this and as
• 13:52
  I read it, obviously you can decide to interpret whatever you want. The
• 13:56
  first thing that I thought of was Okay, this is actually sounds like a
• 14:00
  Tucker monologue Number one that would be easily considered, you know, content that
• 14:07
  would be on Fox's air without even a hint of concern. I mean,
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  this wouldn't even be you know, if you put on a ten scale,
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  this wouldn't even be above a five or six when it came to issues that
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  would create concern from a content standpoint for Tucker's opening monologue on any given night.
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  But number two, as I read this, I'm thinking liberals ought to
• 14:33
  actually like most of what he says here. And this is a guy who
• 14:37
  is contemplating what he's seeing and trying to be as open and honest about his
• 14:45
  reaction as possible. Again in a private message, So here's what Tucker wrote.
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  A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting in
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  the street in Washington. Now it's important to point out a couple weeks ago
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  this Again, this message is a Wary seventh twenty twenty one. So this
• 15:03
  is in the aftermath the day after the January sixth, whatever you call it,
• 15:07
  riot. So he's referring to something a couple of weeks ago. I
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  was watching video of people fighting in the street in Washington, a group of
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  Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him.
• 15:22
  It was three against one. At least, jumping a guy like that
• 15:30
  is dishonorable. Obviously, it's not how white men fight. Now, that
• 15:37
  is the phrase that made it into the New York Times headline. That's the
• 15:41
  phrase that, at this moment, as I tape this is trending on Twitter.
• 15:45
  That's the money shot. Somehow, that's I guess racist. It's not
• 15:50
  how white men fight. And you can agree or disagree. I don't know
• 15:54
  how white men fight. I don't know. I don't know where Tucker is
• 15:58
  getting that from. But even out of context, I don't think that that
• 16:03
  is inherently racist. That's just an opinion that he has based on whatever that
• 16:10
  he doesn't think that that's generally how white men fight. He's talking about.
• 16:11
  He's a white guy talking about white guys that supposed to give you more leeway.
• 16:18
  At least it works that way in the opposite direction. So even out
• 16:21
  of context, I don't see the problem here. But in a larger context,
• 16:23
  it's not offensive at all. Because he goes on to write, yet
• 16:27
  suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they'd hit
• 16:34
  him harder kill him. That's a little weird, and I think an indication
• 16:41
  of there were some problems and Tuckers thinking and he might be losing it a
• 16:44
  little bit. But then he comes off the rails there and he writes,
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  I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then,
• 16:52
  somewhere deep in my brain an alarm went off. This isn't good for
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  me. I'm because something I don't want to be. The Antifa creep is
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  a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much
• 17:10
  as I'm sure i'd hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn't gloat
• 17:15
  over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that
• 17:22
  somewhere somebody probably loves this kid and would be crushed if he was killed.
• 17:27
  If I don't care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics,
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  how am I better than he is? Now? That is again,
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  I don't agree with all of it. Some of it I don't understand.
• 17:42
  But you know, that's a very introspective message. That's a guy who is
• 17:48
  clearly battling with what he's perceiving. He's being honest about what he is thinking,
• 17:55
  even if it doesn't sound particularly good. Again, this is a private
• 17:57
  message, so that should be understandable and should be interpreted very differently than if
• 18:03
  this was said publicly. And he's coming to a conclusion that, as I
• 18:10
  said, liberals really ought to be applauding almost right. I mean, he's
• 18:15
  kind of realizing his own prejudices and condemning himself for how he reacted to this
• 18:23
  video. And I'd love to see the video. As of this moment,
• 18:26
  there's I'm not seeing anybody come up with what they think is the video that
• 18:30
  Tucker was referring to here. But you know, to me, it was
• 18:33
  a very introspective and interesting take and an honest take on how he perceives something
• 18:41
  in a private message. So I don't believe for a second that that's really
• 18:47
  why Tucker Carlson got fired, or that he even played a significant role.
• 18:52
  So what's really going on here? Well, there's the first element that everybody
• 18:56
  wants this story right. Everyone wants to figure out why really happened here,
• 19:02
  And it's you know, news media and journalistic ego and competitiveness that everyone wants
• 19:10
  to be able to say we nailed it, we got the story when someone
• 19:15
  else didn't. And I'm sure there's some jealousy at the New York Times that
• 19:18
  the Wall Street Journal had a massive advantage here because they are being run by
• 19:25
  the same company that they have the ability to get more information, get better
• 19:27
  sources, they can confirm things. People are more willing to talk to the
• 19:32
  Wall Street Journal because they know they're not going to get screwed over because they
• 19:34
  all work for the same company. So there's inherent industry jealousy going on as
• 19:41
  far as might motivate the New York Times to decide, ah see, we
• 19:45
  really got the reason for why this happened. But I think there's something bigger
• 19:49
  too, And I think that part of this is to try to paint Tugert
• 19:56
  Carlson as a racist US. It's not how white men fight, which is
• 20:03
  the headline here, and I guess that sounds racist in today's day and age.
• 20:07
  I don't even think it is, as I said, even out of
• 20:11
  context, but in context, it's clearly not racist in my opinion. But
• 20:15
  here's why they want to do it. It's not just to paint Tugger Carlson
• 20:18
  as a racist. They want to explain his popularity. They want to explain
• 20:26
  his popularity as being based in white racism. That's what I think is really
• 20:33
  going on here. Whether it's conscious or subconscious whatever, But the real motivation
• 20:38
  here, the real agenda by the New York Times, is that they need
• 20:42
  to explain why it is that Tucker is so damn popular. And frankly,
• 20:48
  his popularity is being exposed even more after his firing than it was while he
• 20:52
  was at Fox News Channel. Fox News Channels ratings are tanking. The video,
• 20:56
  the kind of weird, vague video that put out on Twitter, got
• 21:00
  tens and tens of millions of views, and you know, like a day
• 21:03
  or two, and so it's quite obvious Tucker Carlson is a very popular figure.
• 21:11
  Well why is that? I agree, by the way, that part,
• 21:15
  it's a small part of why Tucker resonated with a mostly white audience,
• 21:22
  is that there's a lot of white angst in the country, and there ought
• 21:25
  to be white angst because white people, especially straight white males, are clearly
• 21:30
  and obviously, no matter what the news media tells you, under systematic attack
• 21:34
  in this country on almost every front. And that is absolutely driving a lot
• 21:41
  of Tucker Carlson and people like him their popularity, and there's nothing mysterious or
• 21:48
  wrong about that. I mean, the left created that. And so the
• 21:55
  left is really the reason why Tucker Carlson at least not maybe not exist,
• 22:00
  but certainly prospered to that level because they're the ones that put straight white guys
• 22:06
  under attack. But they need to turn white angst, which is natural and
• 22:12
  in most cases perfectly logical and legitimate. They need to turn white angst into
• 22:18
  white racism, and which, of course, by the way, is further
• 22:22
  proof that straight white males are under attack. Even our angst isn't allowed because
• 22:27
  it's racist. We're not even allowed to complain about the fact that we're under
• 22:33
  attack because oh, clearly, what's really going on here is that white people
• 22:37
  are just racist and they're afraid of losing their their privilege and their power to
• 22:42
  people of color. Well, no, no, you're you're you're taking away
• 22:47
  our jobs, and you're taking away our ability to get our kids into schools,
• 22:49
  and you know, you're depicting us as you know, the only people
• 22:53
  you're allowed to attack in the media, and you're taking us out of commercials,
• 22:57
  and you know it's all sorts of affirmative action in every aspect of society,
• 23:03
  and we're blaming us for everything. I mean, so no, no,
• 23:04
  that's the reason why there's there's white eggs. And it's not always racism.
• 23:11
  Now, is there some racism? Of course there is. There's always
• 23:12
  going to be racist on every side of this equation, no matter you know
• 23:18
  what race you're talking about. So I'm not naive I realize that. But
• 23:22
  is that what's really driving it? Is that even close to the majority.
• 23:26
  No, it's not. But that's the narrative that the New York Times one.
• 23:30
  So that's my explanation for what The New York Times is really doing here.
• 23:36
  I think it's kind of funny, but I also think it's instructive of
• 23:38
  how the news media really works and what their agenda really is in this situation.
• 23:44
  It's also, by the way, an indication of just how big Tucker
• 23:48
  has become in his firing. I think he's bigger in having been fired than
• 23:52
  he ever was actually at at Fox News Channel. And there really is almost
• 23:59
  a religious element of his martyrdom. I mean, it is astonishing how many
• 24:04
  different groups have an invested interest in saying that that's why he got fired.
• 24:10
  The anti pharmaceutical people, the anti vaccine people think it's because he had RFK
• 24:17
  Junior on The Trump people think it's because he was getting softer on Trump and
• 24:21
  more pro Trump, and that the Fox News Channel need to get rid of
• 24:25
  him for that. The people that don't like our involvement in Ukraine think that
• 24:27
  it's because he was against our involvement in Ukraine that he got asks acted.
• 24:33
  The Christian people Christianity groups think that it was a speech he gave about prayer
• 24:42
  and the importance of religion and Christianity and our culture that got him fired.
• 24:48
  I'm sure that the JFK conspiracy people think that's why. You know, he
• 24:52
  got fired because he very very matter of factly, it absurdly said recently that
• 24:57
  the CIA had killed JFK, and then he knew this to be true,
• 25:02
  and then he had a source that was a name that told him, which
• 25:03
  is just ludicrous. You know, the Epstein didn't kill himself. People,
• 25:10
  I'm sure to think that that's part of what happened with Tucker, because Tucker,
• 25:14
  bizarrely and erroneously is one of these morons who thinks that it's very obvious
• 25:19
  that Epstein was murdered, even though they don't have a damned suspect, when
• 25:22
  it would be the easiest crime to solve in history because it was happening in
• 25:26
  a federal prison where you know exactly who the people are there, You could
• 25:30
  identify them instantaneously and you would at least have a handful of suspects by now.
• 25:36
  Instead, there's nobody, nobody on the suspect list for the murder of
• 25:41
  Jeffrey Epstein. And then I've already referenced the nine to eleven conspiracy people,
• 25:45
  the January six conspiracy people. I'm sure think that that he doing what Tucker
• 25:51
  did with regard to that story and getting the tapes from Speaker McCarthy was probably
• 25:56
  part of why he got fired. I mean, the list goes on and
• 26:00
  on and on. It never ends. Now Tucker is a universal martyr for
• 26:06
  any cause you want, and it's making him bigger than he ever was at
• 26:10
  Fox News Channel. To me, I'm an oxymist riser guy. Simplest explanation.
• 26:15
  I think there are two basic reasons why Tucker Carlson got fired. Maybe
• 26:21
  there's three, depending on how you had defined them. But I think he
• 26:23
  was getting too big for himself. I think he lost his mind a little
• 26:27
  bit. I mean, when he's a genius, right, and when you
• 26:32
  give a genius that much power and that much money, you know, there's
• 26:36
  a fine line between genius and insanity. I think Tucker crossed the line.
• 26:41
  I think Tucker crossed the line from genius to insanity. This is why he
• 26:45
  got deeply embedded in a lot of these crazy conspiracy theories. I think he
• 26:49
  became too big for his britches, uncontrollable, which is what scares the living
• 26:55
  daylights out of management at a place like Fox News Channel. And then it
• 27:00
  was found out that he called his primary female boss the C word, and
• 27:06
  that he wanted that to be public. I think that's an important part of
• 27:08
  the equation here. It wasn't oh my god, guys, I'm so sorry.
• 27:12
  I said that in a fit of rage, you know, thank you
• 27:15
  for redacting it for me, which is I'm sure what they expected as reaction
• 27:19
  was going to be when the lawyers came to him. Instead, it was,
• 27:22
  what are you guys doing? I want everyone to know that she's the
• 27:25
  word. Oh fat would be alarming, That would set off the alarm bells
• 27:29
  that The New York Times was referring to here that is a fireable offense every
• 27:34
  single day of the week when it comes especially to the media. So I
• 27:40
  really don't get why that there's still confusion on this issue. I don't know
• 27:42
  whether or not there's going to be another theory to come out next. My
• 27:45
  senses, we've kind of reached the end of the line on theories on why
• 27:49
  Tucker got fired, but you know, I will certainly update you if we
• 27:55
  get any more of them. Now, the title of this podcast is obviously
• 27:59
  the Death of journal and the evidence that journalism is dead is overwhelming, and
• 28:03
  we try to document that on a regular basis. But there's more evidence that
• 28:10
  the American public is realizing just how dead journalism is. And I wanted to
• 28:17
  share this poll that came out from the Associated Press, ironically enough, because
• 28:22
  the Associated Press is I think, a really good example of how journalism has
• 28:26
  died. But they have a new poll out about just how destructive the American
• 28:33
  people are currently viewing the news media as being. And it's really dramatic.
• 28:40
  So here's an article written by The Hill Online newspaper and they write, roughly
• 28:48
  three quarters of Americans in a new poll, three quarters say the news media
• 28:53
  is widening the political divide. Seventy four of US adults believe the media is
• 29:02
  increasing political divisions, six percent said it's decreasing polarization, and eighteen percent said
• 29:10
  it doesn't have any impact this. According to a new survey from the Associated
• 29:15
  Press, broken down by party, seventy two percent of Democrats, eighty one
• 29:21
  percent of Republicans, and sixty one percent of independence said they think the news
• 29:26
  media is stoking the divisions in American culture. Nearly all adults, or ninety
• 29:34
  three percent, said that they see the spread of misinformation to be a problem.
• 29:41
  Of course, who's going to say misinformation isn't a problem? I never
• 29:45
  understood as someone who's dabbled in polling it was a polling analyst for about fifteen
• 29:48
  minutes in my very eccentric career. Never understood why anyone would ask such a
• 29:56
  question like that, Like, who's going to say, no, this misinformation
• 29:57
  is not a problem. Maybe Donald Trump would answer that misinformation is not a
• 30:03
  problem because he manipulates it very very well. But I digress. So ninety
• 30:07
  three percent said they see misinformation as a problem, with roughly three quarters of
• 30:11
  Democrats and Republicans flagging it as quote a major issue. Sixty one percent of
• 30:18
  Republicans said the news media is hurting democracy. Frankly, mma is that that
• 30:23
  number is not higher. Sixty one percent of Republicans said the news media is
• 30:29
  hurting democracy. By the way, I would love to see a ven diagram
• 30:33
  on at sixty one percent and support for Donald Trump because it's probably dark near
• 30:37
  universal since he began the whole fake news and enemy of the people mantra when
• 30:44
  it comes to the media and his campaign, well just twenty three percent of
• 30:49
  Democrats. Now, right there, that proves the divide, right, there's
• 30:53
  one thing to say that the news media is creating or exacerbating a political divide,
• 30:59
  and then there's the proof of it, which comes within this very poll.
• 31:03
  Sixty one percent of Republicans say the news media is hurting democracy, only
• 31:07
  twenty three percent of Democrats. Why. Well, because the news media generally
• 31:12
  helps the causes they believe in, so they think that that's not hurting democracy.
• 31:18
  They actually think that's helping democracy. Again, I'm a little confused as
• 31:22
  to why it's only sixty one percent of Republicans who think the media is hurting
• 31:26
  democracy. Thirty six percent of independence feel the same. Way, About three
• 31:32
  quarters of respondents said that news stories that mostly create conflict rather than help address
• 31:37
  it are a major problem in the United States media three quarters, So that
• 31:45
  number keeps coming up in this poll. About three quarters of the American people
• 31:48
  at least have some semblance of understanding of how damaging the news media is to
• 31:55
  our country. Majorities agreed. Other major problems include outlets that quote spread conspiracy
• 32:01
  theories and unsubstantiated rumors, journalists from real news organizations making stuff up, and
• 32:08
  journalists having too much opinion in their stories. So majorities agreed on all three
• 32:15
  of those particular topics as being problems. And again, this is a poll
• 32:21
  put out by the Associated Press. And it's funny to me that the Associated
• 32:25
  Press did this, because I think the Associated Press has become a joke.
• 32:30
  The Associated Press used to be an outlet that you could at least rely on
• 32:36
  for at worst mild bias towards the left because everyone working there is a leftist.
• 32:42
  But they were at least somewhat objective. I mean, the Associated Press
• 32:45
  was supposed to be the gold standard for eliminating bias and doing substantive reporting.
• 32:53
  And in my very strong opinion, that's no longer the case. Here's just
• 32:59
  a seeming small, but I think significant example that just happened in the last
• 33:02
  few days. Now, this was not something that I figured out on my
• 33:07
  own. There was a prominent Twitter account that tweeted this and it got quite
• 33:12
  a few views. But they juxtaposed two different Associated Press headlines about two recent
• 33:19
  stories. One was about the launching of Robert F. Kennedy Junior's presidential campaign
• 33:27
  that was a couple of weeks ago, April nineteen, and how the Associated
• 33:31
  Press headlined that story, and how the Associated Press headlined the story of an
• 33:38
  illegal immigrant who killed five people in Texas. So this is a mass shooting,
• 33:46
  five people dead in Texas and this person was found and apprehended. Okay,
• 33:54
  so we got an illegal immigrant killing five people and we've got a Kennedy
• 34:00
  running for president right now, what's the possible connection here? Well, back
• 34:07
  on April nineteenth, the Associated Press headline was anti vaccine activist rf K Junior
• 34:15
  launches presidential campaign. Anti vaccine activist rf K Junior launches presidential campaign. Now
• 34:25
  there are dozens of ways, and that's not even really a full sentence.
• 34:30
  It's barely one sentence headline there are dozens of ways you could frame Robert F.
• 34:37
  Kennedy junior, nephew of Robert Kennedy, I mean, sorry, nephew
• 34:43
  of John F. Kennedy's son of Robert F. Kennedy, John Kennedy,
• 34:46
  former president RFK, Robert Kennedy, his dad, former attorney general, and
• 34:52
  at one point presidential front runner who gets killed by Sir Hans Snerhan during that
• 34:57
  presidential campaign. I mean, there's all sorts different ways. This guy has
• 35:00
  also had a rather accomplished life and outside of his views on vaccines, and
• 35:06
  so there's all sorts of ways the Associated Press could decide to frame the launching
• 35:12
  of a presidential campaign. Remember, you only get one bite of that apple.
• 35:15
  This is the one headline you're gonna get where you know, in theory,
• 35:22
  it should be positive and at least somewhat fair. And the Associated Press
• 35:27
  decides to label him anti vaccine activist, which, of course, in the
• 35:31
  minds of the news media is about the worst thing you can be. It's
• 35:36
  about the worst thing you can be as an anti vaccine activist. And and
• 35:40
  you might not even if you're RFK junior, you might not even agree that
• 35:45
  it's it's accurate to describe him that way. I can understand why someone would
• 35:50
  refer to RFK Junior that way, but I think he would probably object even
• 35:52
  to the accuracy of that. Forget about the appropriateness of that when you're launching
• 35:58
  a presidential campaign. That's how the Associated Press described RFK Jr. Anti vaccine
• 36:04
  activist. So how did they describe the illegal immigrant who killed five people in
• 36:13
  Texas? How'd they refer to him? How'd they label him? Suspected gunmen
• 36:22
  caught after five dead in Texas mass shooting, suspected gunmen, not even suspected
• 36:31
  murder, not even alleged murderer, not even alleged killer, not illegal immigrant,
• 36:37
  nothing, nothing. He's not referred to as an illegal immigrant, not
• 36:40
  even an undocumented worker, which we don't even know if he was working or
• 36:44
  not. But that's what the media loves to transform these words. That's I
• 36:47
  think it's I talk a lot about the difference between equity and equality, how
• 36:52
  equality is morphed into equity in the media's world. Well, this all began,
• 36:57
  I think with the shifting of legal alien or illegal immigrant to undocumented worker
• 37:04
  or undocumented migrat or whatever, the all sorts of different words they use to
• 37:07
  try to mitigate the fact that someone is here illegally because that's got a negative
• 37:14
  connotation, and there's it's even racist somehow. So we've got a guy who
• 37:20
  killed five people by all accounts, he gets referred to as suspected gunman.
• 37:25
  Meanwhile, we've got a guy A Kennedy running for president and he's an anti
• 37:30
  vaccine activist. Same organization, the Associated Press, which is supposed to be
• 37:37
  the gold standard for objective reporting, which of course it's not, And that's
• 37:43
  just yet another example of the death of journalism. Now, as far as
• 37:47
  this issue of the quality versus equity, which I have been pointing towards throughout
• 37:54
  this entire podcast, is maybe the most dangerous transformation of the definition of a
• 38:01
  word and the history of the country. And I mean that sincerely, because
• 38:06
  if we fully accept the idea that equality of opportunity is now going to be
• 38:13
  interpreted really as equity of outcome, then the United States is done. That's
• 38:19
  a stake through our heart. And I played the clip many weeks ago of
• 38:23
  even Bernie Sanders being confronted about this on Bill Maher's HBO show, or even
• 38:30
  Bernie Sanders who had never even thought about this, seemingly was forced to admit
• 38:35
  that, no, no, it should be equality of outcome, not equity.
• 38:38
  I'm sorry, equality of opportunity, not equity of outcome, which is
• 38:44
  obvious to any thinking American who believes in our not even forget our founding principles,
• 38:51
  the principles that have guided us throughout the entire history of our country.
• 38:53
  So even Bernie Sanders, when forced to think about it, admitted, yeah,
• 39:00
  it's equality of opportunity, not equity of outcome. But don't tell that
• 39:02
  to the news media, because equity of outcome has become the basis on which
• 39:08
  they evaluate everything. And here's a story from ABC News that illustrates this in
• 39:14
  a chilling way. And it's becoming embedded, it's becoming completely normalized. It's
• 39:21
  becoming just how people in the news media think about everything, especially when it
• 39:28
  comes to race, and it's now starting to get into subjects that aren't just
• 39:31
  academic. It's not just about how many commercial actors there are, and how
• 39:37
  it is that we somehow got to a place where seemingly fifty percent of the
• 39:40
  people on television and commercials are non white, and at least close to fifty
• 39:46
  percent of them are black, even though black people only make up about twelve
• 39:50
  or thirteen percent of the population. That's a somewhat academic I think it's more
• 39:53
  important than people give it credit for. But it's a somewhat academic issue.
• 40:00
  It's getting into announced situations where lives literally could be at stake, and that's
• 40:06
  what I'm referring to in this ABC News article. Listen to this folks headline.
• 40:10
  More black physicians could improve life expectancy of black patients, say researchers.
• 40:20
  Diversifying the workforce quote is important for improving public health. Okay, so they're
• 40:28
  making the argument, and they claim that there's some research to back this up
• 40:31
  that having more black physicians will improve the life expectancy of black patients. So
• 40:39
  here's the article. Weeks of shoulder pain landed a reluctant Whitney Nichols in urgent
• 40:46
  care. As a previously healthy, twenty four year old black woman, she
• 40:52
  pleaded for additional testing to uncover the cause of her pain. As a last
• 40:57
  resort, the doctor ordered a CT scan of her chest. The result blood
• 41:01
  clots in both of her lungs. Even after this seemingly scary diagnosis and after
• 41:07
  being transferred to a hospital. Nichols said she felt dismissed when a doctor told
• 41:14
  her she would be fine. Now, first let's stop here for a second.
• 41:20
  So a black woman gets told by seemingly a non black I'm going to
• 41:25
  presume white maybe Asian doctor telling her that she's fine, She's gonna be fine.
• 41:31
  This is dismissive. I mean, that's like bedside manner one on one,
• 41:37
  especially if you're gonna be the doctor thinks you're gonna be okay, that's
• 41:42
  what you want to hear, right, You're gonna be fine. That's I
• 41:45
  mean, how has this become dismissive to me? That the bigger issue here
• 41:50
  is this is like a seemingly a classic example of where black people of this
• 41:54
  younger generation have been taught by the media, by academic maybe buy their own
• 42:00
  families to perceive any slight that is real, perceived, imagined, whatever it
• 42:08
  is to be because of their race. When here we have a situation where
• 42:14
  a doctor is trying to make sure that she knows she's gonna be okay,
• 42:19
  she's gonna be fine, that somehow this is this is a negative, this
• 42:22
  is dismissive. And then the article goes on Nichols now twenty nine, So
• 42:29
  eighty minute, that was five years later, and she's still alive and ABC
• 42:32
  News is doing a story on her, so she's clearly okay. She turned
• 42:37
  out to be fine. So the original doctor was right, right. So
• 42:43
  Nichols now twenty nine and a graduating medical student, so she's not like fine,
• 42:47
  she's on her way to becoming a doctor. Reflected that these interactions with
• 42:53
  dismissive doctors made her feel quote so alone in that space and so unsafe.
• 43:01
  What but Nichols said that night everything changed when a black physician, doctor Erica
• 43:09
  Walker, walked into the room. Walker explained the blood clots were serious but
• 43:15
  treatable. Walker advised Nichols to stop taking her estrogen base birth control, which
• 43:22
  can increase the risk of blood clots, and prescribe medication that would break up
• 43:25
  the clots. She said, it was great, quote just seeing somebody that
• 43:32
  I felt like I could be comfortable with. Now, look, I'm not
• 43:36
  dismissing the idea that having someone to whom you can relate, someone you have
• 43:42
  something in common with, someone who might be able to understand your situation better
• 43:45
  because they share your race, that that has value in any circumstance in life.
• 43:51
  I would like that to be fair for every race. I'd like it
• 43:57
  not to be racist for a white person or an Asian person to say the
• 44:00
  same thing I like. I like for the standards to be at least somewhat
• 44:04
  similar. But they're clearly not because if a white person, can you imagine,
• 44:07
  can you imagine for a minute, if a white person was on an
• 44:14
  ABC News article saying, you know, I just didn't feel comfortable with those
• 44:16
  black doctors. I thought they were gonna kill me. But thank god,
• 44:20
  thank god, this white doctor finally came to see me and told me the
• 44:24
  same thing that the other doctors said, and I turned out to be okay.
• 44:28
  That would be obviously seen as racist within the prism of ABC News or
• 44:32
  anybody else in the news media, but they don't even see it because because
• 44:37
  this is the reverse racism world in which we live. But then ABC gets
• 44:43
  to the real crux of the matter, So they're just setting this up as
• 44:45
  this is the best example they could come up with. By the way,
• 44:49
  think about how all the how crappy the other examples that didn't make it into
• 44:53
  the story must have been. If that was the best they got of an
• 44:59
  example of a black patient being saved because they finally got a black doctor with
• 45:05
  whom they felt comfortable. No, no, no, The real issue here
• 45:09
  is equity of outcome, even in the realm of medicine and who becomes a
• 45:15
  doctor. ABC News Rights Black people make up thirteen percent of the US population,
• 45:22
  but black doctors are not equally represented. In other words, where's the
• 45:29
  equity of outcome? For example, only seven percent of primary care physicians are
• 45:35
  black. According to a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association.
• 45:38
  Amid a growing recognition that Black Americans experience disparities in health and medical care,
• 45:45
  new research suggests that black patients are more likely to live longer and healthier lives
• 45:53
  when their primary care doctors are also black. Now that's interesting if true,
• 46:02
  But color me highly skeptical and suspicious of whatever data or research is allowing him
• 46:14
  to come to that conclusion. I mean, I would, I am inherently
• 46:19
  suspect of this. But here's how the article continues on, and it's a
• 46:23
  stunning It is a stunning conclusion that this article leads you to. Michael Dill,
• 46:30
  director of Workforce Studies at the Association of American Medical colleges team analyze the
• 46:37
  relationship of black primary care physicians and the health outcome of people who lived in
• 46:44
  those same areas. Evaluating sixteen hundred US counties, Dill and his colleagues found
• 46:52
  that a ten percent increase in black primary care doctor representation was associated with an
• 47:00
  extra month of life expectancy for black patients. Now let me stop there for
• 47:06
  a second. So this is an argument for a ten percent increase in black
• 47:13
  primary care doctor representation because it was associated with an extra month of life expectancy.
• 47:19
  Now, let's be clear, a month of life expectancy is sounds like
• 47:24
  a lot from a statistical standpoint. When you have as many people seemingly were
• 47:30
  involved in this study, that is basically statistical noise. That's nothing. And
• 47:37
  there are all sorts of potential explanations for why that would be, including what
• 47:42
  might make the geography that has more black physicians different than areas that don't have
• 47:50
  more black physicians. But again, you're also talking about a pretty small difference
• 47:54
  in the percentage of black primary care doctor representation, because you remember going to
• 48:00
  talk about seven percent, right, So you have seven percent of doctors in
• 48:04
  the general doctor population. That happened to be black. So if you're a
• 48:07
  ten percent, increase of seven percent is nothing. It's almost statistically imperceptible.
• 48:16
  It's less than one percent of the overall doctor population. So just by going
• 48:22
  by the numbers, this is highly dubious. But then they get to the
• 48:28
  really remarkable part. The higher the representation of black physicians. This is back
• 48:34
  to the ABC report. The higher the representation of black physicians in the workforce
• 48:38
  per county was associated with less death of any cause for county residents black and
• 48:46
  white patients. Thus, even people not actively being treated by black physicians benefited
• 48:55
  from their presence. I don't o that was poorly written, so I'm not
• 49:01
  sure that was one are articulated by the way that I shared it. But
• 49:07
  what they're saying. What they're saying here is that this is magic. Black
• 49:12
  physicians are so magic that they not only increase the life expectancy of black patients,
• 49:17
  but apparently even of white patients too, and patients that they didn't even
• 49:22
  treat. So so hiring more black doctors is literally magic. The guy who
• 49:30
  did the study said, quote, We've found that diversifying the physician of workforce
• 49:36
  is important for improving public health Okay, look again, I'm not convinced that
• 49:43
  the data is saying that that is highly highly suspect data that based upon that
• 49:50
  article. It's hilarious to me that we're living in a country that still doesn't
• 49:53
  in a middle medical establishment that still doesn't accept that masks don't work, despite
• 50:00
  a mountain of three years of real world evidence throughout the entire world proving that
• 50:06
  masks don't work. That's not enough evidence. No, no, no,
• 50:08
  no, we need more. We need more. We need more studies that
• 50:12
  are done by people invested in masks before we can determine whether or not masks
• 50:16
  really work. And no matter how many studies we get to say they don't
• 50:19
  really work, we're going to come up with rationalizations for why those studies don't
• 50:22
  really say that or they're not definitive. I mean, so why because politically,
• 50:27
  we have no interest in being proven wrong about whether or not masks work.
• 50:31
  So data doesn't matter, logic doesn't matter, real world results don't matter,
• 50:37
  Overwhelming evidence doesn't matter. But when it comes to something that we believe
• 50:42
  in, which is we want more black doctors, and we're going to do
• 50:45
  everything we can to facilitate that. Not by the way of, you know,
• 50:51
  trying to get more people who are black to want to be doctors or
• 50:54
  to get qualified for being doctors. No, no, no, we're gonna
• 50:58
  do this through political and the political pressure is going to be where, well,
• 51:02
  it's going to be on academia to produce more black doctors. How do
• 51:08
  you do that, Well, you lower the standards for black people to get
• 51:13
  admission into the right schools and the right medical schools and to become actual doctors.
• 51:17
  Well, what's the downside of that. Well, it's quite obvious because
• 51:22
  you're dealing with doctors, and the standard for someone to become a doctor cannot
• 51:28
  be lowered because guess what, eventually someone, maybe lots of people are gonna
• 51:32
  die because of that, regardless of whether or not there's some residual psychological benefit
• 51:39
  that can't really be proven that somehow black people who are patients do better when
• 51:45
  they have black doctors. And again, I have nothing against black I think
• 51:49
  it'd be fantastic if we had more people who are qualified to be doctors who
• 51:52
  happen to be black. Fantastic. But that's not where this is headed.
• 51:58
  Because we've lost the the plot here, We've lost the entire concept of equality
• 52:02
  of opportunity. See that's the way this was supposed to work. All right,
• 52:07
  Let's create equality of opportunity. We've done that. Let's try to get
• 52:10
  as many people who are qualified to be able to achieve under that environment of
• 52:15
  equality of opportunity. And see where the you know, the chips land,
• 52:21
  see how the cards play out. And if it doesn't work out, then
• 52:23
  we just re emphasize trying to get people interested in becoming doctors. I mean,
• 52:30
  if this is I have no problem with the goal. It's the way
• 52:32
  the goal is going to be achieved, because it ain't going to be achieved
• 52:36
  through equality of opportunity. It's going to be achieved through equity of outcome.
• 52:39
  And that inherently getting that number from seven percent of doctors being black to thirteen
• 52:46
  percent as if that's the magic number, because that's the percentage of the overall
• 52:51
  population, that's going to be the inherent goal. And that's not productive.
• 52:54
  In fact, that's counterproductive, not just from a philosophical standpoint, but from
• 53:00
  the standpoint of having qualified doctors. And that is really very very dangerous.
• 53:06
  All right, Now, I want to move to the Republican primary process,
• 53:09
  which, as I continue to document. It is absolutely remarkable to me how
• 53:16
  little attention from a national media perspective now that it's getting no attention. But
• 53:22
  to me, we are so incredibly close to Donald Trump effectively clinching the Republican
• 53:30
  nomination, and both the right wing media and the light wing media are just
• 53:35
  kind of like, Okay, well that's interesting, and there's no focus on
• 53:38
  it, and there's nothing being done to stop it. Everyone seems fine with
• 53:43
  it. The right wing media seems fine with it because they they're almost reading
• 53:47
  a sigh of relief that they're not gonna have to offend their audience by going
• 53:51
  through a Republican primary process that could be very, very divisive. I mean,
• 53:58
  if you look at it from the stand point of a conservative media outlet,
• 54:01
  even though it's fantastic programming and content, and I was thinking about this
• 54:07
  the other day, I mean, if we don't have a real primary and
• 54:13
  we don't have real debates, I mean, this is six months of really
• 54:21
  potentially great content and programming that the conservative media would be giving up if this
• 54:28
  does not happen, because you know, the debates are supposed to start in
• 54:31
  August and then you get you know, the primaries in January February March of
• 54:36
  next year. I mean, so, and that's that's even assuming that it's
• 54:39
  not a long slog to the convention. So I mean, that's at least
• 54:45
  six or seven months of really solid content and programming that the conservative media seems
• 54:52
  to be okay with losing. If in fact, Trump is able to shut
• 54:59
  this process sessed down before it ever happens, and there's more indication as we
• 55:04
  speak that that's exactly what his plan is. This is kind of like if
• 55:09
  ESPN was in a situation where you know, they had to decide whether the
• 55:15
  NFL Draft is going to get canceled and the NFL draft is basically two or
• 55:21
  three months of ESPN programming. As absurd as that is, this will actually
• 55:24
  be bigger, in my opinion, than than ESPN is saying, you know
• 55:30
  what, sure, we don't need there to be an NFL draft this year.
• 55:31
  Yeah, do you want to do the NFL draft in in silence or
• 55:35
  that gets canceled somehow, then that's fine with us. We'll just we'll just
• 55:38
  abandon that two or three months of programming. That would be ludicrous, that
• 55:44
  would there would be there would be riots in the ESPN studios in Bristol,
• 55:47
  Connecticut, and that would never happen. Well, this is way more dramatic,
• 55:53
  and yet the right wing media seems to be almost relieved, this is
• 55:58
  my perception of this, because they won't have to pick sides. I mean
• 56:02
  they you know, picking sides would either mean you're gonna piss off the Trump
• 56:07
  cult, which is what has been the greatest fear of every media outlet on
• 56:10
  the right since really late twenty fifteen and why Trump remains so popular in conservative
• 56:19
  media circles, or you know, if you had a legitimate Trump, say
• 56:24
  the Santis battle, and you sided with Trump, you're gonna have at least
• 56:30
  some of your audience pissed off about that too, because there's at least a
• 56:34
  quarter to a third of the Republican base that is in the never Trump category.
• 56:40
  So if this thing gets shut down, even though you're gonna lose lots
• 56:45
  of programming and lots of content, it seems to me, and I don't
• 56:49
  know whether that they're smart enough to have thought about this, or maybe it's
• 56:52
  subconscious or what it is, but in a weird way, that might end
• 56:55
  up being the best scenario for a conservative media outlet, even though you would
• 57:00
  think. I mean, this is this is the content you live for.
• 57:06
  A contested primary between a former president and a rising star and Descantis and debates
• 57:15
  and primary night, I mean primary night, My gosh, that's the easiest
• 57:17
  thing the media gets to do. There's no work involved. Primary and debate
• 57:23
  coverage is as good as it gets in for the news media than for the
• 57:30
  political news media, because then they become like sports reporters. They know exactly
• 57:35
  when the game is, where the game is. They just sit on their
• 57:37
  asses and watch, and then they tell you what they think happened. That's
• 57:42
  the easiest thing that could ever occur. I mean, it's manner from heaven.
• 57:46
  And we are really close to that being given up. And I'm going
• 57:51
  to get to why that we're really close to that being given up in a
• 57:54
  moment, but first I want to give a little bit more context of where
• 57:58
  we are and how we got there. Now, there's some more polling,
• 58:02
  and the polling is really quite dramatic in every way, but very very different
• 58:10
  when it comes to the head to head matchup between Trump and Desantists, which
• 58:15
  is absolutely going in Trump's direction. Every single especially national poll and even most
• 58:22
  state poles now show Trump crushing the Santists and everybody else in a Republican primary
• 58:30
  race. It is an absolute bloodbath. And as a Decantist supporter, you
• 58:35
  know, I'm more than willing to acknowledge and admit that. In fact,
• 58:38
  I've gotten into some some hot water with the de Santist people online for being
• 58:45
  very open to admit that. I mean, apparently that's a that's a sin.
• 58:47
  You're not allowed to be realistic. I guess. I guess there's it's
• 58:52
  optimism over everything, and I'm not an optimism over everything guy. I think
• 58:57
  that oftentimes where reality based pessimism can be very very helpful because it can cause
• 59:02
  you to realize you're on the wrong path and to try to fix it.
• 59:07
  If you're wrong the wrong path, you better fix it because only get one
• 59:09
  shot at this and the country might be at stake, and I believe is
• 59:14
  at stake here. So I don't have any patients for Oh no, no,
• 59:17
  it's all gonna be fine. It's all going to magically work out.
• 59:22
  People are gonna realize Trump can't win, and they're gonna see it once Desandis
• 59:25
  announces how awesome he is. And you know, these indictments are gonna take
• 59:30
  their toll on Trump, and DeSantis is going to be clearly the nominee,
• 59:35
  and there's so much he can use to attack Trump, and logic and facts
• 59:38
  are gonna make it so clear that the Santist is the better nominee. And
• 59:43
  I'm like, that's just not the way the world works, folks. In
• 59:45
  fact, I tweeted out yesterday and seeming a lot of people understood where I
• 59:51
  was coming from that the reality here is part of why the de Santist crowd
• 59:58
  is I believe a more optimistic than they should be, is that to them,
• 1:00:04
  being logical people, that the choice is so incredibly easy that they can't
• 1:00:10
  understand why anybody else would would not make the same choice. And my argument
• 1:00:17
  to them is, have you not noticed the nature of the Trump cult for
• 1:00:22
  the last eight years. These people are are not persuadable. These people are
• 1:00:28
  not coming to their conclusions based upon logic and facts and reason. They are
• 1:00:34
  a cult. This is why people refer to cults the way that they do.
• 1:00:39
  It's not based in logic and reason and facts. It's emotional. It's
• 1:00:45
  the opposite of being reasoned. And I've said continually, all I really need
• 1:00:52
  to know is what is the Trump Cult number? What is that number when
• 1:00:57
  it comes to his troll over the Republican Party? Is the Trump Cult more
• 1:01:01
  than forty percent of the Republican voting base? Or is an under forty percent?
• 1:01:06
  And that really will tell you the tale of how this whole thing would
• 1:01:08
  work out. And so right now it's way above forty percent. Of course,
• 1:01:14
  it's impossible to know how many of those people are Trump Cult members.
• 1:01:17
  I believe that the Trump voting base within the Revolving Party is basically three tiered.
• 1:01:25
  I mean, you could probably argue it's more than that, but I
• 1:01:28
  think there's three basic tiers. There's the maga hat wearing, rallying, going
• 1:01:35
  true cult member, which is probably about twenty twenty five percent of the party.
• 1:01:43
  And then there's tier two, which is I would still consider to be
• 1:01:47
  cult like and pretty much unpersuadable, but they like to pretend that they're not
• 1:01:53
  part of the cult, and that's probably again in the fifteen to twenty percent
• 1:01:59
  range. And then you have the third tier that don't love Trump, but
• 1:02:04
  they gravitate towards him. And there's going to be somebody somebody would really have
• 1:02:09
  to make a hell of an argument to convince him not to be in Trump's
• 1:02:15
  corner. Well, we add all that up together, it's it's over fifty
• 1:02:19
  percent of the party for sure. And that's what's happening in the national polling
• 1:02:22
  is that Trump is now over fifty percent. Now, let's be clear to
• 1:02:28
  Santis hasn't actually officially announced, and that is absolutely a factor, but I
• 1:02:31
  don't think it's the massive factor that a lot of the Santists supporters are hoping
• 1:02:36
  that it is. And what's so frustrating about this. There's so many infuriating
• 1:02:40
  elements, but one of them is that even as Trump continues to dominate the
• 1:02:45
  Republican side of the polling, de Santis continues to dominate where it really matters,
• 1:02:53
  which is head to head with Biden in Key states. The only polling
• 1:02:59
  down out of it really matters when it comes to who is going to be
• 1:03:02
  the next president of the United States is who's gonna win a very small number
• 1:03:09
  of key states. And I've said this numerous times, it bears repeating.
• 1:03:16
  Georgia is at the top of that list. If there's one state you absolutely
• 1:03:22
  positively have to win, it's Georgia. And if there was one state that
• 1:03:28
  really proves the advantage of having to Santas as your nominee over Trump. It's
• 1:03:32
  Georgia. We just had a twenty twenty two election where a De Santis like
• 1:03:38
  anti Trump governor Brian Kemp won by a fairly comfortable margin, while the Trump
• 1:03:46
  supported and endorsed senatorial candidate herschel Walker, who I personally liked, lost not
• 1:03:53
  once but twice by two solid points. There was about a five to seven
• 1:04:00
  sent difference there. You could argue that Trump in Georgia is about a seven
• 1:04:05
  percent weight if you will, on the Republican ticket in Georgia. You cannot
• 1:04:12
  afford that in a state that has now gone purple like Georgia. Well,
• 1:04:15
  Georgia happens to border Florida, and it's got a governor that's very popular there
• 1:04:21
  who is effectively the same kind of character as De Santis is, and actually
• 1:04:28
  even more anti Trump than DeSantis is, And the santiss on paper would do
• 1:04:34
  very well in Georgia if only because of the fact that the state borders Florida
• 1:04:39
  and they basically had the same COVID philosophy. And sure enough, when it
• 1:04:45
  comes to a general election polling outcome in Georgia, de Santis is six points
• 1:04:55
  better against Biden than Trump is against Biden himself. Some of the words,
• 1:05:01
  it matches exactly what we saw in twenty twenty two most recent Paul out of
• 1:05:06
  Georgia. The Santist betters Trump by six points when it comes to a head
• 1:05:13
  to head matchup against Biden in Georgia, the most critical state. Six points
• 1:05:19
  is a lot in a situation where we are this divided and in this is
• 1:05:25
  a state that clearly knows all about the Santists and clearly is far more likely
• 1:05:31
  to go for the Santis against Biden than they are Trump against Biden. And
• 1:05:36
  that's before Trump gets indicted in the state, which is quite possible because of
• 1:05:44
  issues related to election and inference. So can you imagine how that's going to
• 1:05:47
  work out if and when Trump gets indicted over his meddling in the post election
• 1:05:56
  situation in Georgia. So to me, no, I'm reminded the old famous
• 1:06:02
  you know Brady Bunch episode Marcia Marsha Marcia to me, it's Georgia, Georgia,
• 1:06:06
  Georgia, Georgia, Georgia, Georgia. This is all that should matter.
• 1:06:13
  And DeSantis is the clear candidate. But it's not just Georgia, Nevada,
• 1:06:18
  which is another one of the key states. I mean, this whole
• 1:06:21
  thing really only comes down to Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and
• 1:06:29
  maybe Pennsylvania, while hanging on in North Carolina. That's the whole election right
• 1:06:35
  there. That's the future of the country right there. And so we know
• 1:06:41
  de Santa this is clearly the guy in Georgia. And there's a new Poland
• 1:06:44
  in Nevada that says exactly the same thing once again, same numbers. Basically,
• 1:06:48
  DeSantis is seven points better against Biden than Trump is in Nevada. Now,
• 1:06:56
  you know, in Nevada, they probably don't know DeSantis nearly as well
• 1:07:00
  as they know him in Georgia. So are the numbers is reliable? Probably
• 1:07:04
  not, But that seven points is extremely significant in a situation where we are
• 1:07:12
  as divided as we are, and where these are states that are generally decided
• 1:07:16
  by very very small margins, and the and the margin for error that Republicans
• 1:07:24
  have in the twenty twenty four presidential map is basically zero. It's basically zero.
• 1:07:31
  You cannot lose North Carolina, which Trump might. You can't lose Georgia.
• 1:07:36
  You pretty much gotta win Arizona or Nevada. Ideally you gotta win both.
• 1:07:43
  And if you don't do that, you certainly gotta win Wisconsin and maybe
• 1:07:45
  Pennsylvania. Now you don't have to win every state that I just mentioned,
• 1:07:48
  but you gotta win almost every one of them. And it's very clear that
• 1:07:53
  the Santis is the guy. But it's also very clear that we're on the
• 1:07:58
  current path we're on, desantist isn't going to be the guy, barring some
• 1:08:02
  black swan of end. And it's incredibly frustrating, and you know, I
• 1:08:11
  don't know what else I can do. I mean, not that I have
• 1:08:13
  any real control over any of this, but I'm just telling you what the
• 1:08:15
  reality is, what the situation is. And there you know, the De
• 1:08:20
  Santis side is trying desperately to come up with some scenario where the polling data
• 1:08:27
  still provides a path for de Sandis to pull this off. And I'm not
• 1:08:31
  I want to make this clear. I still believe there is a theoretical path
• 1:08:36
  for De Sandis to win the nomination. I still believe Trump would sabotage him
• 1:08:41
  in the general election should it get to that. But at least want to
• 1:08:45
  at least give that a try, because that's the only hope we have for
• 1:08:48
  the country on a number of different levels. But there was a CBS poll
• 1:08:53
  that came out that got a lot of conversation online where I was forced to
• 1:08:57
  disagree with a lot of people who are on my side in this because a
• 1:09:01
  lot of the Santis people said, see, this is this has hope for
• 1:09:06
  us. This shows that Trump is a paper tiger, that this is all
• 1:09:11
  gonna come collapsing down on him once the Santis is a real candidate and starts
• 1:09:15
  to get attacked. And let me give you their argument, because it's not
• 1:09:20
  our interrational argument. I understand where they were coming from. I just having
• 1:09:25
  to think they're wrong. And the pull from CBS, which it should be
• 1:09:29
  pointed out, shows Trump beating the Santis by thirty six points nationwide. Okay,
• 1:09:36
  thirty six points. Thirty six points. It's a mass of margin when
• 1:09:45
  the guy leading is a former president who has a hundred percent name recognition and
• 1:09:51
  about whom every single Republican already has a very strong opinion. So right there,
• 1:09:59
  it's so fa. So you're almost in a situation of okay, it's
• 1:10:02
  over you how do you overcome that? But okay, fine, the Santis
• 1:10:08
  isn't a candidate yet, and you know there are things that can happen,
• 1:10:11
  and who knows, these indictments might finally jar some people loose from the Trump
• 1:10:16
  train. But here's the part of the CBS poll that a lot of the
• 1:10:20
  Santis supporters were latching onto. They asked the question and some of these questions
• 1:10:27
  were good, better than most posters I've seen. At least they tried to
• 1:10:30
  get to the heart of the matter. How many people are in the only
• 1:10:34
  Trump category? You're only considering Donald Trump as your choice to be the Republican
• 1:10:44
  nominee. So these are the only Trumpers. This would be the hardcore cult
• 1:10:48
  members. And the percentage they got was twenty four percent. Now, that
• 1:10:54
  number didn't surprise me, because, first of all, you have to remember
• 1:10:58
  for someone to respond, think about this, folks, if you're going to
• 1:11:02
  admit to a polster, Nope, I'm only considering Donald Trump. I'm at
• 1:11:08
  least the only guy I'm considering. I'm with him, come hell or high
• 1:11:12
  water. There's no one else I'm considering for my choice. You gotta be
• 1:11:16
  pretty hardcore Trump coldest, because you know, the polster doesn't, at least
• 1:11:23
  in your mind, the poster doesn't like Trump, And it's kind of inherently
• 1:11:28
  counterintuitive to say, no, I'm not even considering everybody anybody else, before
• 1:11:31
  all the candidates are even in the race, before there's ever been a debate,
• 1:11:35
  before there's even close to a primary. I mean, So to me,
• 1:11:40
  that number was more troubling than the de Santis supporters, the average the
• 1:11:45
  Santis supporter online was giving a credit for. Because that number is hard hardcore
• 1:11:53
  to tell a polster that is pretty extraordinary because you're basically saying, yeah,
• 1:11:58
  I'm a cult member because I'm not even gonna consider anybody else. So I
• 1:12:02
  think that number was a bit misinterpreted. And then there was another number that
• 1:12:08
  seemingly gives some hope, which is the number of people who are in the
• 1:12:12
  never Trump category. In other words, Trump has already been crossed off their
• 1:12:17
  list. These are likely Republican primary voters who say, Nope, I'm not
• 1:12:23
  going to vote for Donald Trump no matter what. I'm going to figure out
• 1:12:27
  the alternative and that's who I'm gonna go with. That number was twenty seven
• 1:12:31
  percent, and so on paper, the way they're looking at this, They
• 1:12:35
  go, well, gee, the never Trump number is slightly higher than the
• 1:12:42
  only Trump number that gives us a shot. And again I understand why people
• 1:12:48
  would look at it that way. However, I think that it's a lot
• 1:12:54
  easier to tell a polster now I've crossed Trump off my list, I'm not
• 1:12:59
  going to consider voting for him. That doesn't make you a cult test that
• 1:13:03
  hell in the you know, to the minds of the person they're speaking to.
• 1:13:06
  That makes you probably a smart person because so you're you're not afraid of
• 1:13:12
  any kind of negative blowback when you tell a pholster that I'm in the never
• 1:13:15
  Trump category. So I think that there's some bias when it comes to how
• 1:13:19
  people would respond to those two questions. But even even if I accept,
• 1:13:25
  I'm going to accept for the sake of argument, that those two numbers are
• 1:13:28
  in the ballpark of correct that it does, at least in theory on paper,
• 1:13:33
  gives some hope, It gives some path to Ron de Sanders defeating Donald
• 1:13:40
  Trump. But here's the negative way of looking at it, and the way
• 1:13:44
  I looked at it, which is typical considering I'm perceived as a pessimist.
• 1:13:49
  So we got twenty seven percent in the never Trump category. You know what
• 1:13:55
  that means. That means seventy three percent are not in the never Trump category.
• 1:14:04
  And if you're in the if you're not willing to tell a polster,
• 1:14:08
  you're in the never Trump category at this stage, after you've seen Trump for
• 1:14:12
  eight years, after January sixth, after his indictment, after what he's done
• 1:14:19
  to Rohn de Santis, and all the lies he's told about him for his
• 1:14:24
  own selfish purposes, all the thousands of reasons why you could be against Donald
• 1:14:30
  Trump. If you are not at this stage willing to tell a polster you're
• 1:14:35
  never Trump. That means you're least leaning towards voting for Donald Trump. So
• 1:14:43
  that means seventy three percent of the repub likely Republican voting base is at least
• 1:14:50
  leaning towards Donald Trump. And to me, if you're leaning at this stage
• 1:14:57
  to Donald Trump, there is a very very good chance you're going to vote
• 1:15:01
  for Donald Trump. Is no? And are some of those people you know,
• 1:15:06
  there's I'm sure there's different percentages for different tiers of that seventy three percent,
• 1:15:12
  but that is a daunting number. That is a daunting number at this
• 1:15:15
  stage. If Trump was going to be defeated. That never Trump number would
• 1:15:23
  be higher than twenty seven percent, in my opinion. But that's not even
• 1:15:28
  the most troubling number in the entire poll. The most troubling number in the
• 1:15:31
  entire poll is they asked for qualities of people that they would support or not
• 1:15:38
  support, and what they wanted in a candidate, and what they wanted and
• 1:15:43
  why they liked Trump, and some of those answers were really depressing why they
• 1:15:46
  liked Trump. By the way, electability was a major reason why they liked
• 1:15:50
  Donald Trump. Over eighty percent of his supporters said that they support him because
• 1:15:56
  they think he's the most electable candidate, which is just put a bullet through
• 1:15:59
  my head. Please not that I think it's impossible for Trump to beat Biden,
• 1:16:03
  because I do think Biden Harris is going to be a very, very
• 1:16:06
  historically weak incumbent candidate. But Trump is as toxic as it gets, and
• 1:16:13
  I do think he would be a significant underdog in defeating Joe Biden unless we
• 1:16:17
  had an economic collapse. But the idea that somehow electability is a positive for
• 1:16:23
  Trump is incredibly depressing. And by the way, I'm being told, very
• 1:16:27
  incredibly from the top top sources within the Desantists. It's not officially a campaign
• 1:16:33
  yet, but the people that are likely to make up his campaign that in
• 1:16:36
  focus grouping they are finding that this is exactly the case that people are not
• 1:16:43
  buying the electability argument when it comes to DeSantis being more electable than Trump.
• 1:16:48
  Now, can that change, I guess, But you know it's We're living
• 1:16:54
  in this bizarre world where Trump is touting all of these polls showing him winning
• 1:17:00
  the Republican primary against the Santists, So those are all accepted as real by
• 1:17:05
  the Trump supporters, But the polls showing the Santists doing better against Biden than
• 1:17:10
  Trump, those are fake news and rigged polling because it's cult that's cult like
• 1:17:17
  thinking, and that's that's what the Santist people are going to run up against
• 1:17:21
  here. But the number that was most disturbing in the internals in this poll,
• 1:17:29
  in the qualities that people wanted in a candidate, only seven percent of
• 1:17:36
  likely Republican voters wanted Donald Trump criticized. Now, it's possible that the way
• 1:17:45
  they asked that question produced a result that was worse than it sounds, or
• 1:17:51
  sounds worse than it actually is, But I'm sorry, no matter how you
• 1:17:55
  slice it, if true, that's game, set match you gotta pull.
• 1:18:01
  That shows Trump's up by thirty six most people think he's electable. Only twenty
• 1:18:09
  seven percent of people are in the never Trump category, but only seven percent
• 1:18:15
  of Republican voters want to see Trump criticized, which means, so how do
• 1:18:19
  you so, how do you make up the thirty six point deficit if you
• 1:18:25
  don't criticize him while he's attacking you on a daily basis, when you're not
• 1:18:30
  even a candidate yet. I mean, I'm sorry. It's sad, but
• 1:18:33
  it's also funny. I mean, there's just no way to do this.
• 1:18:39
  Now. I do think there is a way, and I'm going to get
• 1:18:41
  to the details of the way, which I first articulated in episode fifty four,
• 1:18:45
  which if you missed, I hope you'll go back and listen to.
• 1:18:48
  But if you if you did miss it, I think you'll you'll particularly enjoy
• 1:18:53
  what's coming up at the end of this particular episode number fifty five. But
• 1:18:58
  before I get to that, I want to review kind of quickly how we
• 1:19:00
  got to where we are when it comes to this Republican primary process, because
• 1:19:06
  it really has been extraordinary, and the media has done a terrible job,
• 1:19:12
  of course of detailing the evolution of this story, because it has been remarkable
• 1:19:20
  how we have gotten from the mid terms in twenty twenty two. We're just
• 1:19:25
  after the midterms. This race between Trump and DeSantis, when Trump was a
• 1:19:31
  declared candidate and DeSantis was not yet a declared candidate. DeSantis was basically almost
• 1:19:41
  exactly head to head with Trump. He was probably a little bit behind nationally,
• 1:19:46
  but in many of the state polls he was either head to head,
• 1:19:50
  dead even or maybe even ahead in certain in certain states. So so if
• 1:19:56
  we go back to last November December of twenty twenty two, this was effectively
• 1:20:02
  a dead even race, and today, while nothing you could are, the
• 1:20:10
  only major thing that's happened either of these candidates is that one of them got
• 1:20:14
  indicted for campaign hush money to a porn star, and that's the person that
• 1:20:20
  now has jumped ahead by about thirty five points nationwide. How the hell did
• 1:20:28
  that happen? Well, here's my very short version. I'm sure at some
• 1:20:33
  point I'll get into a deeper dive into how and why this happened. But
• 1:20:38
  the short version is this so in retrospect. When that polling was happening back
• 1:20:45
  in November and December of twenty twenty two, we had a couple of things
• 1:20:48
  that were dominating the headlines. Obviously the disappointment among Republicans for how the midterms
• 1:20:56
  turned out, and Rohn de Santis was literally the only star that broke out.
• 1:21:02
  He was the only Republican that defied expectations, that did way better than
• 1:21:08
  expected, won by basically twenty points in Florida, blew the doors off of
• 1:21:12
  it, despite the media attacking him all for a year and a half two
• 1:21:15
  years over his COVID response, and he was vindicated and he won big,
• 1:21:23
  while Trump lost in every race that really mattered, and Republicans did not get
• 1:21:29
  the red wave. They barely took the House, they lost ground in the
• 1:21:31
  Senate thanks largely to Trump. Trump was getting not as much as he deserved,
• 1:21:35
  but at least some blame for that, And so we had a classic
• 1:21:40
  situation where it's Trump looking like he's the past, the Santis is looking like
• 1:21:45
  the future. Also in late twenty twenty two, I think COVID was still
• 1:21:50
  much more at the forefront of people's minds, and even though it's only been
• 1:21:55
  a few months since then, and I've predicted this, and it's been a
• 1:21:58
  worry for me about up to the Santis campaign all along. And that is
• 1:22:03
  people have very short memories, and they really forget bad things. I think,
• 1:22:12
  much more quickly than certainly I do. And I'll never forget what happened
• 1:22:16
  during COVID. But for a lot of people, they have either rationalized,
• 1:22:20
  forgotten, or it's not that relevant anymore. COVID is in the rear view
• 1:22:26
  mirror, and you know, for people like me like, okay, fine,
• 1:22:29
  but what are the accountability and where's the making sure this doesn't happen again.
• 1:22:33
  But I don't think that the majority of even Republican voters are in the
• 1:22:39
  camp that that is the most important issue, or even close to the most
• 1:22:44
  important issue. And even those that are in that camp, many of them
• 1:22:48
  are still part of the Trump cult. So even though they may feel strongly
• 1:22:53
  about COVID, it doesn't do any good for the Santis because they just rationalize
• 1:22:57
  how Trump blew it. If he did it, you know, he won't
• 1:23:00
  blow it again. He learned deep State took over what you know, whatever
• 1:23:04
  crap that they're going to pollute their minds with to rationalize why their hero shit
• 1:23:10
  the bed during COVID, and so COVID is fading and the mid term somehow
• 1:23:17
  is fading. And so I think that really is the foundation for why these
• 1:23:25
  poll numbers have shifted. And then you add into that the Tucker Carlson factor.
• 1:23:30
  Basically, then I'm not just talking about his firing. What he did
• 1:23:33
  on January sixth, I think was a huge help to Trump because it reversed
• 1:23:40
  the narrative on the right for a lot of people. It continued it get
• 1:23:44
  forward to this narrative that Trump is being unfairly attacked and that he's vindicated and
• 1:23:48
  everything, and that he's right and that January sixth wasn't what we were told.
• 1:23:54
  I mean, January sixth, by the way, should hurt Trump on
• 1:23:57
  so many levels, not just because it makes him toxic to independent voters and
• 1:24:01
  he got impeached the second time, but you know, frankly, up until
• 1:24:05
  very recently, he's done absolutely nothing to support those that went to jail on
• 1:24:11
  his behalf, despite claims that he would. And instead, Tucker turns January
• 1:24:16
  sixth somehow into a positive and then Trump gets indicted, and this clearly,
• 1:24:23
  you know, was the death now in retrospect, if this is the way
• 1:24:27
  that turns out the death now was that when he got indicted, both the
• 1:24:31
  left wing and the right wing media is turned exactly into what I feared that
• 1:24:38
  they would, probably worse than I feared that they would. They did exactly
• 1:24:41
  what Trump would have wanted, and there was this rally around the flag effect
• 1:24:45
  on the right towards Trump, and even worse than that, Tucker created and
• 1:24:50
  Glenn Beck also helped create and promote this absurd narrative that we must nominate Trump
• 1:25:00
  to prove to the left that they can't get away with this kind of a
• 1:25:04
  political prosecution against the former president. And that I knew at the moment that
• 1:25:12
  I heard it, and I raised bloody hell on this podcast about it.
• 1:25:15
  I knew that was going to be very devastating, at least in the short
• 1:25:19
  run, because that was going to resonate. And boy did that idea resonate.
• 1:25:26
  And it also gave a lot of people that were on the fence an
• 1:25:29
  excuse for jumping back on the Trump train. I saw it in my own
• 1:25:33
  personal life and I saw it in the polling, where you know, people
• 1:25:38
  who were iffy on the fence decided you know what, screw those assholes.
• 1:25:44
  They're gonna do this. We're gonna stick it to them by making Trump the
• 1:25:46
  nominee, and they're gonna be sorry they did this. And I could even
• 1:25:51
  somewhat understand it, even though it's irrational, I can understand why that happened.
• 1:25:57
  I was hopeful that that was going to fade, that emotional reaction,
• 1:26:01
  but it has not faded, and I don't see any sign that it's going
• 1:26:08
  to fade. And I think the reason why it hasn't faded is that part
• 1:26:13
  of what was happening here from a psychological perspective is that we're an uncharted territory.
• 1:26:21
  We're an unprecedented situations here. We've never had in the modern era a
• 1:26:27
  former president who lost an election who claims that he didn't really lose the election
• 1:26:34
  run in the next cycle in a contested primary. We've never had anything like
• 1:26:41
  that happened before. So I think psychologically, there was a lot of people
• 1:26:45
  on the right who were kind of like, so, are we really going
• 1:26:48
  to do this Trump thing again? Really? Are we really? I mean
• 1:26:53
  I'm not totally against it, but are we really going to do this?
• 1:26:57
  And then the reaction after the indictment basically told them, oh, oh,
• 1:27:01
  we are going to do this. Okay, all right, if everyone's on
• 1:27:04
  board, I'll be on board. That's fine, let's do it. Let's
• 1:27:06
  go. And psychologically, I think that really really inflated the post indictment surge
• 1:27:17
  or bump or whatever you want to call it, was more than a bump
• 1:27:19
  because I think there were a significant number of people, maybe twenty percent of
• 1:27:25
  the party that were really on the fence, and they're the sheep. They
• 1:27:30
  go, Okay, if everyone's gonna go ahead and do this, I want
• 1:27:32
  to be on the side of good. I want to be on the side
• 1:27:33
  that wins. So let's do it. I'm all right. I wasn't sure
• 1:27:39
  we were going to do this, but clearly we're gonna do it. So
• 1:27:43
  that shifted a lot of support that was on the fence towards Trump. And
• 1:27:46
  then something that I have talked a lot on this podcast about and I think
• 1:27:50
  I've been pression about everyone was incentive incentivized to attack Rhonda Santis, including every
• 1:28:00
  handidate, not just Trump but all the other Republican candidates. They're not going
• 1:28:02
  to attack Trump because they don't want to get destroyed by him, and They
• 1:28:06
  know his support isn't going to move to them, but they know that the
• 1:28:11
  non Trump support is very much up for grabs and that much of the de
• 1:28:15
  Santis support is soft. Plus they can get in Trump's good graces by attacking
• 1:28:20
  the Santis. And the right wing media understands this, and so much of
• 1:28:25
  the right wing media has been nitpicking the Santis. The left wing media has
• 1:28:29
  been very happy to see the Santis be brought down several notches because they're much
• 1:28:32
  more afraid of him than they are of Trump, both as a candidate as
• 1:28:36
  well as as a president. And I mean the nitpicking, which is something
• 1:28:41
  I also predicted was going to happen. I mean, you know, Trump
• 1:28:45
  is immune to all viruses, and the Santis, you know, isn't immune
• 1:28:49
  to that many. I guess he's immune to the COVID virus, he got
• 1:28:53
  through that, but apparently not the Mickey mouse virus or the book banning virus,
• 1:28:58
  or they don't say gay virus. I mean, all this other bull
• 1:29:00
  crap and the idea that conservatives have been so nitpicky towards the Santis, which
• 1:29:09
  is something I feared, has just been infuriating. I tweeted yesterday and I
• 1:29:14
  think this is an apt metaphor that Republicans who don't like Trump and don't think
• 1:29:18
  he can win, who are hesitant to get on board with the Santis are
• 1:29:24
  basically like passengers on the Titanic who refuse to get on a lifeboat because the
• 1:29:30
  seating looked uncomfortable. Get the goddamn boat. This is the last shot.
• 1:29:36
  You're gonna die if you don't get in the boat. Okay, this is
• 1:29:41
  it. This is the best we have for you. Sorry, the luxury
• 1:29:45
  accommodations aren't perfect. If you're gonna nitpick about some bullshit that liberals have mind
• 1:29:51
  screwed you into believing that the Santis is some sort of a tyrant, or
• 1:29:56
  he's not ready for prime time or all this other utter bullcrap. But that's
• 1:30:01
  where we are on this. And so the nitpicking on de Santis has taken
• 1:30:06
  its toll as well. And you know Fox News, after the indictment,
• 1:30:12
  they start to bring Trump back into the fold and they normalize him, and
• 1:30:16
  now Tucker's firing, I think also has created this further narrative that you know,
• 1:30:21
  we've got to really do something dramatic to get the country back. Even
• 1:30:25
  Fox isn't even on our side anymore. So I think this all psychologically helps
• 1:30:30
  Trump and leads us towards Trump being the nominee. And so that's the It's
• 1:30:36
  not that short of version, but that's that's as short a version as I
• 1:30:40
  can provide as to how we got from basically a head to head matchup in
• 1:30:45
  December of last year to now here we are in May, and this thing
• 1:30:50
  is really close to being over before de Santis has even announced his run.
• 1:30:59
  And when I say it's close to being over, I mean that literally.
• 1:31:04
  So there's been a couple of developments just since our last episode of the podcast.
• 1:31:10
  Number one. Trump has agreed to do a CNN town hall meeting next
• 1:31:15
  week, and I had to say, this is bizarre on so many levels.
• 1:31:21
  I mean, I don't understand why how CNN can justify doing this when
• 1:31:28
  Trump is a grave threat to democracy and they're going to give him a platform
• 1:31:31
  where he's basically going to attack the Santis. And I'm sure that the attacks
• 1:31:36
  from the Santists are going to be amplified not just via CNN but every other
• 1:31:42
  outlet that'll pick up the clips from this appearance. So there's the hypocrisy on
• 1:31:46
  CNN's part, there's the weirdness that Trump is giving CNN access to him at
• 1:31:54
  the same time that he's bitching and moaning that he might not do the debates
• 1:31:58
  because he doesn't want to be vulnerable to left wing questioning, and they stated
• 1:32:03
  that on True Social and Maggie Habrman, his favorite reporter for The New York
• 1:32:09
  Times, is reporting that Trump is now likely to skip at least the first
• 1:32:15
  two presidential debates for a variety of reasons, including the fact that he feels
• 1:32:18
  screwed over by the Ronald Reagan Library here in southern California because they have the
• 1:32:25
  audacity to do a series of speaking events called a Time for Choosing, as
• 1:32:30
  if that's an affront to Trump because you're not allowed to have an actual process
• 1:32:36
  of choosing since he's supposed to get a coronation as the royalty of the Republican
• 1:32:43
  Party. And I'm going to get to the debate issue in a moment,
• 1:32:46
  but it's just very strange and so typical of Trump that, Okay, you
• 1:32:51
  know, he's being incredibly hypocritical doing a town hall with CNN, so he's
• 1:32:57
  clearly not afraid of CNN's questioning. I guess he's afraid of who he's going
• 1:33:00
  to debate, which would be Ronda Santis. So he's obviously more afraid of
• 1:33:04
  debating Ronda Santis than he is of facing CNN and then the other part of
• 1:33:10
  the CNN town hall. And this is so odd that I'm not even sure
• 1:33:14
  it's it's true. I must be misunderstanding this, but I can't find any
• 1:33:18
  information that contradicts this. But it appears as if this is going to be
• 1:33:25
  broadcast on CNN's streaming service, which is basically pay per view. So I'm
• 1:33:31
  not even one hundred percent sure this is going to be on CNN's broadcast air.
• 1:33:38
  I'm so baffled by that. I'm I must be mistaken in this,
• 1:33:42
  But that's what has been reported, and that's weird on so many different levels.
• 1:33:49
  One that CNN is going to be basically profiting from from this guy they
• 1:33:55
  believe to be a grave threat to democracy and to Trump wouldn't do this in
• 1:34:00
  a way that it reach the largest audience possible, And he's then going to
• 1:34:03
  make himself vulnerable to whatever CNN decides to edit and put out to the general
• 1:34:09
  public. I mean, again, the whole thing is just odd. But
• 1:34:13
  the most important part of this is the issue of the hypocrisy when it comes
• 1:34:16
  to facing questioning from somebody else. So Trump is fine with going and having
• 1:34:24
  CNN, who is you know, he's considered to be fake news and the
• 1:34:30
  enemy of the people, and he mocks constantly. But he doesn't want to
• 1:34:33
  do a debate on Fox News. And as I said, Maggie Haberman has
• 1:34:40
  said, Trump is now telling his advisors that he is likely to skip at
• 1:34:45
  least the first two debates. And you know, there are those who I'm
• 1:34:48
  sure are thinking naively that this is just a negotiating tactic, this is Trump
• 1:34:54
  being Trump, and that he's not actually going to go through with this,
• 1:34:58
  or that he wouldn't have the ability to pull the US off. I've gotten
• 1:35:00
  into a battle with the Santra supporters about this issue, and I think they're
• 1:35:05
  being very naive, and because I think that Trump is in a very very
• 1:35:12
  strong position to do exactly this, and it's actually in a weird way.
• 1:35:19
  It's evil, but it's actually genius. And this is one of those classic
• 1:35:25
  circumstances where I never know, is Trump just incredibly lucky and he's acting like
• 1:35:30
  a child and it all just turns out for him, because, as he
• 1:35:33
  once famously said, it's like magic. Everything just works out for him.
• 1:35:39
  Is it that? Or is he some sort of an evil genius where even
• 1:35:43
  he doesn't understand the full magnitude of his savant like powers to figure out how
• 1:35:49
  to manipulate every situation to his advantage. And maybe it's somewhere in between.
• 1:35:55
  But here's the bottom line on what I think is very likely to happen and
• 1:35:58
  why I have been sounding the alarm. And i gotta tell you behind the
• 1:36:01
  scenes, I'm getting ripped by the Santis people for having the audacity to say
• 1:36:06
  that this thing is a month or two away from being over if the polling
• 1:36:11
  doesn't dramatically change. And I'm basically giving the Santis two weeks at the re
• 1:36:17
  announces, which will likely be early June, when I'm being told if in
• 1:36:21
  two or three weeks after he announces in early June, so basically, you
• 1:36:28
  know, by mid to late June, if we are still anywhere close to
• 1:36:32
  this current polling, this thing will be shut down. And let me tell
• 1:36:38
  you how it will be shut down. Trump will not do the debates.
• 1:36:44
  He will not do the debates, and he will be if the polling is
• 1:36:47
  not dramatically changed. By then he will be in a position to pull this
• 1:36:51
  off, and he will. He might lose some semblance of support, but
• 1:36:58
  not much, not enough to make it matter. And so if in fact
• 1:37:03
  he does not do the debates, let's game plan this out. This doesn't
• 1:37:08
  take a genius to figure how this is all going to go down if you've
• 1:37:11
  been paying attention for the last eight years. So in a rational world,
• 1:37:15
  the right wing media would go no, no, no, no, no,
• 1:37:17
  you're not going to do this, mister president. Sorry, you're not
• 1:37:21
  a king. We're not running a monarchy here. You know, we're gonna
• 1:37:26
  have a legitimate primary process and you must debate your opponents. And by the
• 1:37:30
  way, we really want to have this programming because this is important to us,
• 1:37:33
  especially during the late summer when we got nothing else to talk about,
• 1:37:36
  and we're not going to give up debates and real primaries. And nope,
• 1:37:43
  we're not gonna let you get away with this. That was That's what would
• 1:37:45
  happen in a remotely rational media world. That's not going to happen on the
• 1:37:51
  right. In the vast majority of cases, you might have a few people
• 1:37:56
  that stand up and go this is wrong. Maybe Andy Shapiro, you know,
• 1:38:03
  Matt Walsh, Maybe I would have been curious to see how Tucker would
• 1:38:08
  have handled that if he was still on Fox News Channel. But now he's
• 1:38:11
  not there anymore. Obviously, Handity and Ingram will be down with it just
• 1:38:15
  fine. In fact, they will be making the argument that this is smart.
• 1:38:19
  It's smart because Biden's not going to have debates, So why should Trump
• 1:38:24
  make himself vulnerable to debates. We're just going to divide ourselves. We need
• 1:38:28
  to beat Biden. And it will be framed as making Trump debate is adverse
• 1:38:35
  to the cause of beating Joe Biden, and that will resonate. That will
• 1:38:40
  be the rationalization that people on the right and the media will make. So
• 1:38:45
  there will be very few attacks on Trump even when he bails on these debates,
• 1:38:49
  and in fact, I believe there will be more people carrying his water
• 1:38:54
  on this. They will say that they will say this is a great idea,
• 1:38:59
  this is good for the cause of beating Joe Biden. Well, then
• 1:39:02
  there are there are people say, well, okay, but John, so
• 1:39:05
  he doesn't do the debates, They're still going to have the debates, so
• 1:39:10
  won't that be bad for Trump again. I'm living in the real world.
• 1:39:15
  You're living in a fantasy world that no longer exists, because let me tell
• 1:39:18
  you what will happen in the real world. In the real world. Number
• 1:39:23
  one, those that go to the debates will inherently be diminished. I don't
• 1:39:29
  know if there's going to be exactly seven candidates other than Trump, but there's
• 1:39:32
  going to be in that ballpark. They will be referred to as the seven
• 1:39:35
  Dwarfs. That's the narrative that will be out there. Everyone that participates in
• 1:39:41
  a non Trump debate will be inherently diminished, and the audience for those events
• 1:39:47
  will be diminished. And then there's the content. Guess who everybody's going to
• 1:39:54
  go after in a non Trump debate, Ron De Santis. Guests who run
• 1:40:00
  Desantists won't be allowed to go after in a non Trump debate because he won't
• 1:40:05
  be there to defend himself Donald Trump. It'll be seen, somehow, bizarrely
• 1:40:12
  insanely as being against the rules for De Santists to attack someone who's not there.
• 1:40:20
  That'll make him somehow seem like the bad guy. Meanwhile, Trump will
• 1:40:27
  either completely ignore the event or he'll be live posting about it on truth social
• 1:40:32
  mocking everybody, whereas then he gets the best of both worlds, where he
• 1:40:36
  gets to have his say without being vulnerable to any questioning or attack. And
• 1:40:42
  so this is a lose lose, lose, lose lose. And so I'm
• 1:40:47
  amazed that there's any chance that Trump, based upon the current polling, is
• 1:40:51
  going to do the debates. And the only thing that's going to keep there's
• 1:40:56
  only a couple of things that could keep him from bailing on these debates.
• 1:41:00
  Number One, if somehow the conservative media rose up and said, hell,
• 1:41:04
  no, we're not allowing this, no, which they have an incentive to
• 1:41:09
  do, but they're not going to because they they're incentive structure is so perverse
• 1:41:14
  and so screwed up, and they're so afraid of the Trump consumer base.
• 1:41:20
  So that would be number one. Number two would be his polling lead diminished
• 1:41:27
  to the point where one he couldn't make the argument that I'm just like Joe
• 1:41:30
  Biden, I'm way ahead, this thing's over. You shouldn't put me through
• 1:41:33
  debates. And two, it would be close enough to where if they had
• 1:41:38
  debates without him and it didn't look good for him, and his lead started
• 1:41:42
  to road further than he might get into a situation where he was now in
• 1:41:46
  a real ball game. But you have to get close enough to what I
• 1:41:51
  call punching distance, and the Santis isn't within punching distance currently. So that's
• 1:41:59
  why I keep saying these polls matter. I can't tell you how many people
• 1:42:02
  don't understand. They think, well, John, there's no real votes for
• 1:42:06
  another eight months. Bullshit, do you understand how this is gonna go down?
• 1:42:13
  If there's no debates? Guess what happens to the Santis is fundraising.
• 1:42:16
  It's gone immediately, It's over. Once de Santis loses his fundraising, there's
• 1:42:24
  no path. So psychologically, Trump is able to shut the whole damn thing
• 1:42:30
  down by simply not going to the debates. And if he gets another month
• 1:42:39
  or two, not even really two months, basically six weeks, there's six
• 1:42:44
  weeks to turn this thing around from where we currently are. Otherwise Trump is
• 1:42:50
  the nominee and there's a better chance. I said this in the last episode,
• 1:42:56
  I can't believe this is where we are, as must be without much
• 1:42:59
  media, you know, discussion of this at all. I had had a
• 1:43:02
  conversation with a TV producer about this. This morning. How the hell is
• 1:43:06
  no one talking about this? We are this close to it being over.
• 1:43:10
  You're gonna lose all this programming, and no one seems to care. But
• 1:43:15
  we are six weeks away from Trump being the nominee and likely losing, possibly
• 1:43:20
  bigly, to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and that leading to at least
• 1:43:28
  two more years of Biden and maybe ten years of Kamala Harris because then she
• 1:43:31
  becomes president after Biden resigns in twenty twenty seven. She runs as an incumbent
• 1:43:36
  in twenty twenty eight. There's no natural Republican to take her on. I
• 1:43:40
  know she's a terrible, horrendous candidate, but at that point, she's her
• 1:43:44
  historic female, first female president, woman of color. The media will create
• 1:43:49
  a completely different narrative around her. She will be seen in a very different
• 1:43:54
  way as an incumbent, historic president. And again, with the map going
• 1:43:58
  against Republican demographics going against Republicans on an almost daily basis, I'm sorry,
• 1:44:05
  we will have left the gravitational pull of the rational Earth forever and America will
• 1:44:11
  be gone. So that's why these next six weeks are so incredibly critical,
• 1:44:16
  and it's just astonishing to me, how few people understand this or seem to
• 1:44:21
  have their hair on fire like I do. Now. As you know,
• 1:44:26
  if you know anything about me, you know that I don't go down without
• 1:44:29
  a fight, and that I will do everything I can, even with my
• 1:44:32
  very very very limited powers and influence, to try to influence to impact events
• 1:44:38
  if I can, even in theory, and I referenced in episode fifty four
• 1:44:43
  that I had reached out to a good friend of mine who is in the
• 1:44:46
  process of becoming part of Team De Santis, with an idea that I have
• 1:44:53
  to try to fix this, even though I think that the chances are small.
• 1:44:59
  You know this, This is Luke Skywalker going into the Death Star,
• 1:45:02
  a metaphor I use a lot, but it's particularly apt here where even though
• 1:45:06
  it's a long shot, it's do or die this, so you can't give
• 1:45:12
  up until you've taken the shot. And I think the only shot left for
• 1:45:16
  Luke Skywalker in the Death Star is to completely flip the script on the way
• 1:45:23
  people think about this race in general and specifically whether you're running really against Donald
• 1:45:30
  Trump in a traditional primary battle, the way that I'm sure everybody in the
• 1:45:35
  De Santis campaign has been thinking about this, which is, you know,
• 1:45:41
  in basically one dimensional terms, where okay, it's us against Trump. We've
• 1:45:46
  got to first of all, make sure that you know, we get rid
• 1:45:49
  of these these single digit sideline warriors that are nipping at our heels because we
• 1:45:56
  have to consolidate the non Trump vote, but then we also have to attack
• 1:46:00
  Donald Trump. Had on and proved that we're the better candidate than Donald Trump,
• 1:46:04
  and that made sense two months ago, but that no longer makes sense.
• 1:46:11
  That battlefield leaves to slaughter, and so I have come up with a
• 1:46:15
  theory for how you change the battlefield. And you know, this sounds incredibly
• 1:46:20
  simple, and in many ways it is, but it also I believe fundamentally
• 1:46:27
  alters the entire dynamic of the race if what I'm proposing actually gets implemented properly
• 1:46:35
  by the DeSantis campaign. And my friend loved this idea and immediately proposed it
• 1:46:43
  to the person who will be most well positioned to actually make this happen.
• 1:46:47
  And I'm told that they loved the idea. And then my friend and I
• 1:46:55
  regrouped and thought about, okay, so how do we put some meat on
• 1:46:59
  this own And what I did was I put together a fictitious script, if
• 1:47:06
  you will, for a DeSantis announcement campaign announcement. And I realized this was
• 1:47:15
  never going to be RHN de Santis's campaign announcement, but I did this as
• 1:47:19
  an exercise to show the campaign what was possible and how this change in thinking
• 1:47:29
  could be implemented. So I did this, and I sent it to my
• 1:47:33
  friend. Actually did it an audio as well as in written form, because
• 1:47:39
  I wanted the context to be clear. And I sent it to my friend
• 1:47:43
  and they took it, and then they changed it and put it into their
• 1:47:47
  own words, using a lot of what I had done, and then their
• 1:47:51
  own ideas, and then they sent it back to the person who was in
• 1:47:57
  this position to actually make it happen. And I'm told that they had a
• 1:48:01
  very positive reaction to my friend's version of what I'm about to share with you,
• 1:48:08
  So and real I'm trying very hard to not cause any problems with revealing
• 1:48:14
  too much, and I don't think I have. But I also want to
• 1:48:17
  give you a sense of where things are and what I'm trying to do here.
• 1:48:21
  And while I'm not going to share with you my friend's version of this
• 1:48:27
  idea, I'm going to give you my version. So this is my original
• 1:48:30
  version of how, in an ideal world, I think Rhn De Santis could
• 1:48:36
  announce his run for president and dramatically change the dynamic of the entire race and
• 1:48:45
  how specifically Republican voters think about the decision that they are facing, and if
• 1:48:51
  done properly, I think could get the Santist back in the race. So
• 1:48:58
  again, I'm not delusional, although some people might think I am. And
• 1:49:04
  it's funny because I always argue against this idea that I'm a pessimist. I
• 1:49:09
  believe I'm a delusional optimist. I will go down to the very very end
• 1:49:14
  of any fight trying to be as optimistic as possible while also being realistic.
• 1:49:18
  And I will do everything and anything I possibly can, no matter what the
• 1:49:24
  odds are, to try to fix a problem that I see needs to be
• 1:49:28
  fixing. And it's clear that my hair is on fire far more than anybody
• 1:49:32
  else close to this situation, and I think I'm right. It's probably my
• 1:49:36
  greatest strength is seeing bad outcomes. I joke all the time that my old
• 1:49:42
  golfing buddy, Haley Joel Osman, in the sixth sense, he saw dead
• 1:49:45
  people. I see bad outcomes that was my gift. I see bad outcomes,
• 1:49:49
  and when I see bad outcomes, I'm almost always right. But sometimes
• 1:49:55
  when I see bad outcomes, I can try to figure out a way to
• 1:49:59
  prevent them from happening. So, without further ado or a claim, because
• 1:50:03
  I don't want to make too big a deal of this, but I think
• 1:50:05
  you'll find this to be interesting, here is my version of what the Santis
• 1:50:13
  could say as he announces his candidacy that would radically alter the way that people
• 1:50:19
  and maybe even in the right wing media think about this race going forward.
• 1:50:25
  So here's what I wrote, and these would be the words of Rhoda Santis.
• 1:50:30
  America stands a year away from a presidential election which may very well decide
• 1:50:35
  the fate of our republic, and already the Biden Trump establishment, in a
• 1:50:43
  desperate bid to protect their power in our stagnant status quo, along with their
• 1:50:47
  allies and the elite media and the failed class of paid political operatives and out
• 1:50:53
  of touch politicians, are telling us that a Biden Trump rematch is inevitable,
• 1:51:00
  so much so that the Biden Trump establishment cabal is trying to protect their records
• 1:51:05
  from scrutiny by preventing a legitimate primary process. They are telling us we must
• 1:51:14
  be resigned to the fact that another Biden Trump presidential election, a matchup between
• 1:51:18
  two ancient captains who have each had their own chance to write our listing ship
• 1:51:25
  and failed, despite being an outcome that no one in our country seems to
• 1:51:29
  actually want, just cannot be avoided. A contest whose movie we have already
• 1:51:34
  seen before, and for which, unlike the liberal elites in the news media,
• 1:51:40
  we really don't like, the ending simply must be accepted without even a
• 1:51:45
  decent fight. They believe that our country must be forced to choose between two
• 1:51:50
  relics of the past, both of whom helped create our current economic hardships,
• 1:51:57
  were nearly identical in their catastrophic miss handling of the COVID pandemic, and who
• 1:52:02
  routinely come down on the same wrong side of the deepening cultural divide which threatens
• 1:52:09
  to fundamentally transform this great nation forever. Heck, both Biden and Trump even
• 1:52:15
  agree that the tyrannical socialist governor of California should be praised while what we have
• 1:52:23
  accomplished in Florida should be erroneously defamed. The America I know and love deserves
• 1:52:30
  better than a Biden Trump rerun. We must do better than this. I
• 1:52:39
  believe we are better than this. My candidacy clearly offers the only viable alternative
• 1:52:48
  to this cruel destiny to which our elites are so content to condemn us.
• 1:52:56
  Join me in this fight on behalf of the soul of America. Help me
• 1:53:01
  prove that we are indeed still better than what our political establishment is allowing us
• 1:53:09
  to be. The future of America, and perhaps the world depends on this
• 1:53:15
  optimism being vindicated. This is something for which I'm willing to fight to the
• 1:53:21
  very end, and that battle for our future begins today as I officially declare
• 1:53:28
  my candidacy for the presidency of the United States of America. And for the
• 1:53:35
  record, I am calling this plan, this new campaign strategy. America is
• 1:53:44
  better than this, and that this being this Biden Trump rematch that nobody wants.
• 1:53:54
  That is the only path I see for De Santis pulling this off again,
• 1:54:00
  preventing Donald Trump from being the nominee. You tie him to Biden,
• 1:54:04
  you tie him to the establishment, You take away his anti establishment street cred.
• 1:54:12
  He gets all those endorsements of congressmen in Florida. Fine, your mister
• 1:54:16
  establishment now, buddy, And there are all sorts of things on which Biden
• 1:54:21
  and Trump agree, both politically and philosophically. There are last two presidents.
• 1:54:28
  Their COVID response was almost exactly the same. Their spending views created this current
• 1:54:33
  inflation. Hell, they even seem to agree on transgenderism. They even agree
• 1:54:39
  on Gavin Newsom, and they certainly agree that it's okay for an eighty year
• 1:54:43
  old guy to be president of the United States without even having to go through
• 1:54:46
  primaries and debates. This is actually a very easy argument to make and one
• 1:54:54
  that I think would resonate with a vast majority of the American people, and
• 1:55:00
  it would drive the Trump cult crazy because when I've shared this on line already,
• 1:55:04
  oh my god, their heads explode. And I think part of the
• 1:55:08
  reason why their heads explode is because they actually see that there's a lot of
• 1:55:12
  truth in it, and it really bugs the crap out of them that they
• 1:55:15
  have now created this cult of the worship for a guy who's the exact opposite
• 1:55:24
  of what they think that he is. Now, look, I'm not naive.
• 1:55:28
  I'm not naive that this is likely to actually be implemented, because you
• 1:55:31
  know, I use the analogy that I think we're rounding first based on this
• 1:55:36
  idea in episode fifty four. We're probably getting closer to second base as I
• 1:55:44
  tape this. Do I think this is going to get to home plate?
• 1:55:46
  Probably not, because that's just not the way the world works. But it's
• 1:55:49
  got a chance. It's in the right hands, and if ever implemented properly,
• 1:55:56
  I think it would work. More importantly, it's the only option there
• 1:56:00
  is. This is the only path, and I'm led to believe that the
• 1:56:05
  person who is in the best position to actually make this happen at least understands
• 1:56:10
  that. Now the Santist himself would have to sign off on this, and
• 1:56:14
  there are some reasons why he might not, including the fact that it doesn't
• 1:56:16
  really appeal to his ego. Not that his ego is dominant like it is
• 1:56:21
  with Trumps, but it's just the nature of being a presidential candidate. And
• 1:56:26
  to that I've even said to my friend Will, Look, that's that's not
• 1:56:30
  true, because first of all, this does two things for the santiss that
• 1:56:34
  I think are very much in his self interest personally. Number One, it
• 1:56:39
  reduces the expectations rather dramatically. You're you're casting this as an effort to try
• 1:56:47
  to pull off a miracle. You're going back to the Luke Skywalker in the
• 1:56:51
  Death Star metaphor, where you know, even if Luke had failed in that,
• 1:56:56
  he was still going to go down as a hero because he was trying
• 1:57:00
  to blow up the Death Star. Everyone knew it was a long shot.
• 1:57:01
  Well, that's kind of how I'm casting the Rhonda Santis campaign at this point,
• 1:57:08
  because I think that's pretty much accurate based upon where the odds currently are.
• 1:57:13
  And then there's the issue of from an ego standpoint, you're the only
• 1:57:17
  one that can stop this, and that's true, the only person that can
• 1:57:21
  stop other than death, So the Grim Reaper, I guess, would be
• 1:57:28
  the first person that could stop this, the first entity that can stop this.
• 1:57:30
  But other than the Grim Reaper, the only human being that can stop
• 1:57:35
  a Biden Trump Establishment cabal rematch is Rhonda Santis. And so I mean,
• 1:57:42
  that's not that's not like you're diminishing yourself if that's your claim. But again,
• 1:57:46
  I'm a realist above all else. I realize is not a strong likelihood
• 1:57:54
  that this is going to happen. But I share it with you for reasons
• 1:57:57
  that I think are obvious, one of which being I do think it's the
• 1:58:00
  only way out of this and it might be the only way to save the
• 1:58:02
  goddamn country. So on that note, that'll do it for this episode number
• 1:58:06
  fifty five of the Death of Journalism Podcast. As it's always the case,
• 1:58:11
  I ask you to please subscribe, rate, and review, and share it
• 1:58:14
  with others. If you share it on social media, I'd be happy to
• 1:58:16
  share your tweet or your post on Facebook, whatever it is, in effort
• 1:58:20
  to try to get the word out about what we do here. Until next
• 1:58:24
  time, this has been the Death of Journalism podcast, and my name is
• 1:58:27
  John Zickler.