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Episode Eighty: Storytime With Zig · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome the episode number eighty of the Death of Journalism podcast. My name is
• 0:04
  John Ziggler. I'm your host, and on today's show, the Endless Hunter
• 0:07
  Biden investigation now gets a special counsel. The Trump indictment watch continues with a
• 0:13
  twist, CNN comes so close to getting it, the sports media blows it
• 0:19
  on the Phil Mickelson gambling claim, and I finally tell my epic O J
• 0:24
  Simpson's story. I'm known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man. I'm a digital
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  the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot com. If you want to grow your business,
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  Peter can help. That's the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot com. And
• 1:03
  hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. We begin episode number eighty with the
• 1:07
  biggest news of the past week in the United States, which is the horrible
• 1:12
  situation in Maui, Hawaii, where it looks as if at least a hundred
• 1:18
  people, maybe many more than that, will have died in horrendous wildfires there.
• 1:25
  And you know, there's numerous elements of the story that have a media
• 1:30
  component to them, and I hate politicizing tragedy, but that's what the Left
• 1:36
  has become experts at doing, and they are certainly trying to do that in
• 1:41
  this case, trying to claim that this is evidence of climate change, the
• 1:46
  wildfires in Maui, Hawaii. I'll get to that momentarily, but in the
• 1:52
  big picture, what we have here is a situation of obvious media bias in
• 2:01
  omission. Because I want you to think back to Katrina, obviously, the
• 2:07
  hurricane that hit in two thousand and six in New Orleans, which was horrendous
• 2:14
  and by the way, I think there's some similarities from an environmental standpoint between
• 2:20
  New Orleans and a hurricane, and for instance, in this case Maui with
• 2:25
  regard to what happened here, I'm not in any way, shape or form
• 2:30
  suggesting we shouldn't have empathy for or sympathy with the victims. This is a
• 2:36
  horrible, horrible thing that happened. However, there are certain places where humans
• 2:40
  have decided to live that are effectively ticking time bombs. Living in LA there
• 2:47
  are a lot of them that are certainly in this category, especially when it
• 2:51
  comes to things like mud slides, places where when you look at it,
• 2:55
  you go, how in the world did anyone decide it was safe to live
• 3:00
  year long term? And New Orleans was that way with regard to flooding.
• 3:06
  I mean literally, the city is below sea level and the protections they had
• 3:12
  were very limited. And then when the tragedy struck, in my opinion,
• 3:17
  the people in charge screwed the pooch in every possible way, and that was
• 3:22
  turned into a Republican scandal. This is where I'm getting to the media bias.
• 3:27
  I mean, that was almost the end effectively of George Bush's second term.
• 3:31
  His presidency was because he got blamed for what happened in Katrina. Forget
• 3:36
  about the local Democratic mayor or the state officials, or just that bad things
• 3:43
  happen, or the inevitability of something like this occurring in New Orleans. No,
• 3:47
  no, no, this was a purely political scandal. And now,
• 3:51
  of course, the fact that we were in a midterm election year that put
• 3:53
  gasoline on that fire. To use a bad metaphor talking about Maui, but
• 3:59
  that's what happened with Katrina, and it was overtly political, and all the
• 4:02
  rules were changed, and George Bush was too naive to see it happening before
• 4:09
  it was way too late, and Democrats effectively ended up taking over in two
• 4:15
  thousand and six in the in the Congress because of what happened with Katrina.
• 4:19
  Now, let's compare that to what's going on in Maui. Maui, we
• 4:25
  have a death toll that is the worst apparently in modern American history with regard
• 4:30
  to wildfires, and we have a similar situation, in my opinion, about
• 4:34
  a ticking time bomb. I mean, here is a place that is between
• 4:39
  essentially a jungle and an ocean, an ocean by the way, that is
• 4:43
  susceptible to tsunamis. Obviously, it's in a hurricane alley and it's very difficult
• 4:50
  to get in and out of because it's in a very congested area, because
• 4:56
  everyone wants to live there because it's beautiful. It's also a volcano. I
• 5:00
  mean, this is an extremely exotic place to live, which ninety nine point
• 5:05
  nine nine percent of the time is fantastic. However, the other point zero
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  point zero zero one percent of the time, whatever it is, that's the
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  ticking time, Bob. And unfortunately, the circumstances had a confluence, a
• 5:24
  confluence of events here that caused there to be a tragic wildfire. Now again,
• 5:30
  that doesn't mean you lack empathy or sympathy, or that somehow people who
• 5:34
  live there deserved it, or you don't do anything to try to help them.
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  It's just I do look at these kind of things in a different way
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  when they occur in places where, well, you probably shouldn't have been living
• 5:46
  there in the first place without at least accepting some level of risk. That's
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  what life really is about. It's about risk and reward. And you know
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  you've gotten the reward of living in Maui for a very long time. One
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  of the risks are that if something like this occurs, it's very, very
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  dangerous because of the inherent physical circumstances. And it appears to me as if
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  the local authorities did a very poor job of warning and preparing people for what
• 6:17
  was about to happen, or could theoretically happen. For instance, they didn't
• 6:21
  turn off the electricity. Apparently the warnings which should have been out there,
• 6:28
  you know, frankly, I mean we do that. One of the good
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  one of the rare good things we do in California is, especially when it
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  comes to wildfires, was we probably warn people too much of the apparent danger
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  and maybe we desensitize people to it. But it did not appear as if
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  the people there had sufficient warning. There's no evidence in my view, that
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  climate change is responsible for this. In fact, we don't even know what
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  the cause of the fire and Maui is. There was a report that's been
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  basically memory holed by the news media on CBS in fact, in twenty twenty
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  two where there have been a series of arson related fires in the Maui area.
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  You know, I have no idea whether or not that's what happened here,
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  but it certainly could have been the reason why the fire occurred or was
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  allowed to occur and then explode, was that you had this very strange weather
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  pattern where there was a hurricane far enough off the coast of Maui where you
• 7:30
  didn't get the moisture, but you got the wind, and whatever caused it
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  ended up resulting in this inferno in a very confined area where people couldn't get
• 7:41
  the heck out of there fast enough. Now, in my opinion, you
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  know, while there could be incompetence that has contributed to this tragedy, it's
• 7:50
  not inherently political. But if you use the Katrina example, there's plenty of
• 7:57
  plenty of room for this to be how a political scandal if the left wing
• 8:03
  media wanted it to be. Not only do you have Democratic officials in charge
• 8:07
  there in Hawaii and a Democratic governor claiming this is climate change with absolutely no
• 8:15
  evidence. Of course, The New York Times then backs her up on that
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  by saying, how climate change turned lush Hawaii into a tinder box. Again.
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  I've talked many, many times about how there is no evidence that climate
• 8:30
  change is increasing wildfires and we don't even know what actually cause. Well,
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  can't we just wait to find out what the cause of this particular fire is
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  before we start politically blaming climate change. But not only do you have Democrats
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  in charge in Hawaii, but you also have a Democratic president and a Democratic
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  vice president who spent this past weekend literally on the beach in their own vacation
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  spots on the East coast of the United States. And then you have President
• 9:05
  Joe Biden being asked at a distance by media about the reaction to the wildfires
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  in Maui and he literally says he had no comment. No, no comment
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  now, and then gets into a limousine. Now, can you imagine if
• 9:22
  George Bush in Katrina had just spent the weekend vacationing once again after having just
• 9:28
  gotten back from a vacation, you know, spending a vacation and then getting
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  into a limousine being asked a question from a distance by the media about this
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  horrible tragedy in Katrina and saying no comment. I mean, there would have
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  been a complete meltdown in the mainstream news media, complete total meltdown. And
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  you know, there's right wing outrage over Biden's reaction to all this. But
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  I have yet to see, as of this taping anything close to what in
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  the mean stream media what it would have been had George Bush done the same
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  thing in Katrina. I mean, he eat complimented. Remember, you're doing
• 10:07
  a heck of a job, Brownie. The guy who was in charge of
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  female at the time and at the you know, the initial reaction to New
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  Orleans was that things had gone well. It was only it was a couple
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  of days later when all hell broke loose. Well, you know, every
• 10:22
  single American knew about doing a heck of a job, brownie. And you
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  know, my guess is nowhere near that same percentage is going to know that.
• 10:31
  Joe Biden flippantly said, no comment went asked about the reaction to the
• 10:39
  wildfires in Maui. So if the media wanted there to be, this would
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  be a political scandal. Now what the heck, you know Biden is supposed
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  to do? I have no idea, much like I had no idea what
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  the heck George Bush was supposed to do when it came to Katrina. I
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  do know that the claims that this is climate change are just complete garbage,
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  And the fact that this is now the knee jerk reaction to the left to
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  try to take advantage of people's deaths is just disgusting. And of all the
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  climate change elements in the news media, the wildfire thing probably eats at me
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  more than anything, because this was a situation where even just a few years
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  ago, the so called environmental experts and I watched this very very carefully,
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  would push back they would push back on connecting quote unquote climate change with wildfires.
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  Almost every article would have some sort of expert at least slightly going,
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  well, we don't really have evidence of that, but you know, obviously
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  it's a danger. You know, whatever the phrasing they did to try to
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  make sure they gave the media what they wanted and not be disqualified from being
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  asked for comment in the future whenever this subject came up, which is what
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  experts always want. They want to be quoted in these news articles. That
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  has stopped in recent years. And my theory for why it has stopped is,
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  well, maybe one news media to stop going to those people because they
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  weren't getting what they wanted in comments. But also too, the so called
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  experts realized that their allies in the media really, really, really want wildfires
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  to be part of the climate change global warming equation, one because they're scary
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  and two because they make for great pictures and video. And so to give
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  up wildfires, especially since you know, it's just human nature. Obviously,
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  fire is hot, and if the globe is warming and things are getting hotter,
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  you know, from a visceral standpoint, that makes sense, right,
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  except from a scientific perspective, it makes absolutely no sense. There's no evidence
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  for it whatsoever. And yes, when things are drier, if we follow
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  the logic here. By the way, if things are dryer, they're more
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  vulnerable to wildfire. But that's what it is that generally keeps a place like
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  Hawaii from getting dry. Well, it's the occasional hurricane, and hurricanes were
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  supposed to be more plentiful because of climate change, and there's never been any
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  damn evidence of that at all, especially in recent years. So none of
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  this makes any sense. It's all political and it's being perpetrated by the highest
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  levels of the news media. As I said, even the New York Times
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  with the headline how climate change turned lush Hawaii into a tinder box, although
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  that wasn't maybe the worst headline. Another purely left wing quote unquote news organization
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  had the headline how colonialism contributed to the Maui wildfires. So we're gonna try
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  to find any possible reason we can other than the actual reason. Their sub
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  headline is unsurprisingly, the disaster may be worse because of the actions of US
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  colonists. The reality here is we don't know the direct cause of this.
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  I'm suspecting that it's going to have absolutely nothing to do with nature. I
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  don't know that, but that's just a guess that I have. But I
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  do also know that we already have evidence that human beings that allows the job
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  of reacting to and preparing for what happened there. CNN, of all places,
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  had a reasonable article headline, Hawaii underestimated the deadly threat of wildfire,
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  records show, they tweeted out Hawaii officials underestimated the deadly thought of wildfires,
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  even as they acknowledged a lack of necessary resources to reduce the risk. Again,
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  wildfires in Hawaii are not that unusual, but they usually occur because of
• 14:54
  volcanoes, or because of lightning, or because of arson. And there's no
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  evidence that I know of that this could have been a volcano or lightning situation.
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  But I do think that the possibility of arson is still very much in
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  play here. But most importantly here, we all have all the makings if
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  the news media wanted to to make this into a bad issue for Joe Biden
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  and for Democrats, And instead most of the mainstream news media is spouting this
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  bs about it being climate change and echoing a democratic governors claims that this is
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  evidence that climate change is here. No climate change is an excuse for you
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  to get away with not having your state prepared for what was an inevitable situation
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  now inevitable. I don't know that means that you know how many decades or
• 15:48
  centuries go by, But this was going to happen in a place like Maui
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  eventually, and unfortunately it did, and it is a tragedy. And I
• 15:58
  just I really wish we wouldn't even have this conversation. I really wish we
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  would be in a situation where these kind of things would not be politicized in
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  either direction. But to me, the Katrina versus Maui wildfire comparison tells you
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  a lot, an awful lot about how the mainstream media operates and how much
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  hypocrisy is inherent within their very biased coverage. Speaking of Joe Biden, I
• 16:23
  have mentioned many times that I do not like the Hunter Biden's story. By
• 16:30
  the way, I've thought a lot about why I don't like the Hunter Biden's
• 16:33
  story, and there are several reasons. I've said. One, the truth
• 16:37
  here is murky, and I don't trust either the left wing media or the
• 16:41
  right wing media to give me the truth about this, and so it's very
• 16:45
  difficult to discern what is true and what is not, and I consider myself
• 16:49
  to be pretty much of an expert in doing that. So the story is
• 16:52
  frustrating. It's slippery, you know, it's like picking up a barrow web
• 16:57
  soap. And I don't trust anybody. I mean, there's nobody here who
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  has a good set of incentives. That's probably number one. Number two is
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  that this is the son of the president. It's not the president. And
• 17:11
  these allegations occurred when the current president was vice president, which is I think
• 17:15
  incredibly important part of this equation because the entire premise from the right wing perspective
• 17:22
  in this scandal is that Joe Biden was an incredibly powerful person and that this
• 17:29
  power was being sold off via a foreign enemy, Bearisma and in other ways
• 17:36
  to foreign countries and in some allegations, including China. That I just don't
• 17:44
  buy that premise because Joe Biden was a vice president, which is a very
• 17:48
  powerless position with no political future. That's the key part of this. Joe
• 17:55
  Biden thought he was going to go spend every day on the beach after two
• 18:00
  sixteen was over, because he wasn't going to run for president and Hillary Clinton
• 18:04
  was going to be the Democratic nominee and she was going to win, and
• 18:07
  his career was going to be over. So it was last call for selling
• 18:11
  off the Biden brand, and it was at least it was unseemly, and
• 18:17
  it was unethical, and it was wrong based upon what we currently know,
• 18:22
  it's hard to find evidence right now of illegality, in my opinion, or
• 18:27
  in a situation where something specific was sold off that impacted US policy, And
• 18:36
  the only thing that has been submitted that is concrete along those lines is I
• 18:42
  think a situation that has been misinterpreted. And I'm referring to an now infamous
• 18:48
  videotape of Joe Biden bragging about having gotten a Ukrainian prosecutor fired. And it
• 18:56
  has been perceived by the right wing that somehow, now this was Joe Biden,
• 19:00
  I guess, blowing up his own cover up and bragging about what he
• 19:04
  was doing on behalf of Barisma and his son. Well, that's not in
• 19:10
  evidence that. In fact, you know, there is a strong theory and
• 19:15
  again this is where they think the story gets slippery. But the conventional wisdom
• 19:21
  on that that it was exactly the opposite, was that this prosecutor was soft
• 19:25
  on corruption in Ukraine. And that's why the United States and Biden was I'm
• 19:30
  sure bragging about his role in it, because it really wasn't him. It
• 19:33
  was the United States using funding leverage just to get rid of a prosecutor that
• 19:38
  was soft on corruption. If you'll look at the testimony of Devin Archer,
• 19:44
  the guy who the right wing is now touting and Tucker Carlson has interviewed,
• 19:48
  the former business associate of Hunter Biden, is him being the smoking gun.
• 19:53
  Well, if you look at his testimony to Congress, he was asked about
• 19:57
  the firing of that prosecutor, and he was His testimony was consistent with the
• 20:03
  idea that Barissma was not happy about the firing of the prosecutor because they felt
• 20:11
  like he was in check or something to that effect, that he was not
• 20:15
  a threat to them, and that getting rid of him would not be seen
• 20:18
  as good and it might even be seen as bad. Now, in hindsight,
• 20:23
  the tape looks terrible, But to me, I think the more logical
• 20:27
  scenario here is that the tape is being used to reverse engineer a scandal that
• 20:33
  tape has been out there for a long time. It was very much in
• 20:38
  play online during the twenty twenty presidential election, and now it's being used as
• 20:45
  the smoking gun of this massive bribery scandal, that this was what Barissma was
• 20:52
  getting for hiring Hunter Biden, and that's why you know there was ten percent
• 20:57
  for the big guy, and Biden profited from all of this. Well,
• 21:02
  the whole premise falls apart if the firing of that prosecutor was not for the
• 21:07
  reasons that the right wing is now claiming, and I've seen no evidence.
• 21:11
  I'm not saying it's not possible, but it seems rare strange to me that
• 21:17
  Biden would be dumb enough, this evil genius, that it would be dumb
• 21:21
  enough to publicly brag on in front of a crowd on camera about basically his
• 21:27
  own cover up or his own scandal. Again, he's not the brightest bulb
• 21:33
  in the chandelier, but that's pretty extraordinary if that's what was really happening here.
• 21:37
  To me, the simpler explanation is that people with an incentive to misinterpret
• 21:45
  that tape having have indeed misinterpreted it. I don't know that. Again,
• 21:51
  that's partially why I hate the story, But that seems to be logical to
• 21:56
  me. Well, the latest development in this never ending Hunter Biden's story.
• 22:00
  By the way, the other part of the reason why I hate the Hunter
• 22:02
  Biden's story is that the right wing is using it to try to mitigate and
• 22:07
  distract from, and even equate two the Donald Trump scandals and indictments, and
• 22:15
  there's just no comparison. They've also trying to use it to discredit the entire
• 22:21
  justice system because of the two tier justice system in the Hunter Biden case,
• 22:26
  and therefore we can't trust anything that is being alleged against Donald Trump. I
• 22:30
  guess that's the part that really pisses me off the most, is the false
• 22:33
  equivalency. There's no equivalency here between a very unseemly scandal involving a scumbag son
• 22:42
  of a president and the guy who is leading to be the Republican nominee for
• 22:49
  president in twenty twenty four, who has been indicted three times, and by
• 22:55
  the time you hear this, could be indicted a fourth time in Georgia,
• 22:59
  which get to just seconds from now. But there is now a special counsel.
• 23:04
  That's why I'm talking about the Hunter Biden story that I hate. The
• 23:08
  same guy that's been investigating this for quite a long time, David Weiss has
• 23:11
  now been given special counsel powers, And this is another part of why I
• 23:17
  hate the story, because traditionally, if a special counsel is appointed by a
• 23:25
  democratic administration to investigate the son of a democratic president, you would think that
• 23:30
  that would be a positive development that would be consistent with transparency and saying,
• 23:37
  hey, look, you know we want to get to the bottom of this.
• 23:38
  There's no cover up, and you know there's going to be some justice
• 23:42
  here. If there needs to be justice, that's that's what you would use.
• 23:47
  That's what the special counsel statute was intended to do, to provide some
• 23:52
  level of confidence that now this is going to be taken care of in an
• 23:56
  objective fashion, because there's inherent conflicts of interests with regard to the administration,
• 24:02
  and they're obvious here because he's the son of the president, and there's even
• 24:04
  allegations that the president then vice president were involved. But in this case,
• 24:11
  the trust level is so low, especially on the right, that the right
• 24:15
  is now seeing the appointment of David Weiss as a special counsel as still part
• 24:22
  of the cover up that this is in their theory, this is going to
• 24:26
  take away the authority of Congress to fully investigate, this is going to delay
• 24:30
  things, and that they see nothing but a rat in this situation. And
• 24:36
  unfortunately, I can't even argue against that because I understand the inherent lack of
• 24:41
  trust in the entire system. This is how broken everything is, and again
• 24:47
  it's also part of why I hate this story. So I don't know what's
• 24:52
  going to happen with regard to Weiss now being a special counsel. I guess
• 24:56
  I said, from a traditional standpoint, this would be a positive development.
• 25:00
  There are new allegations that the Republicans and Congress have put out there that now
• 25:07
  they have been able to pinpoint twenty million dollars that went to and this is
• 25:12
  interesting how they phrased it either to Hunter Biden, or to Biden family members,
• 25:18
  or to Biden linked companies, And that always makes me nervous. I
• 25:25
  hate the word linked. The right wing has become a master at misusing the
• 25:33
  word linked. We saw that with Hillary Clinton all the time, and I
• 25:37
  feel like they're doing the same thing here. The left wing has done the
• 25:40
  same thing. Linked is one of those those words. When I see it,
• 25:44
  I go, Okay, the story must be bullshit, because if it
• 25:48
  wasn't bullshit, you wouldn't be saying the word linked, because linked can mean
• 25:52
  almost anything, and especially when it comes to these companies, all it takes
• 25:56
  to linked to a company is somebody who knows somebody or used to work for
• 26:02
  somebody, And to the to the you know, the person, the average
• 26:06
  person, they go, wow, it's all part of a big conspiracy.
• 26:08
  Well know, oftentimes, you know, things that look like their quote unquote
• 26:12
  linked really have very little of any real connection at all, and nobody has
• 26:17
  any any leverage in the situation, and it may just look a lot worse
• 26:22
  than it actually is. I don't know that here. I'm just telling you
• 26:26
  that when I see the word linked, then I automatically I have alarm bells
• 26:30
  going off. And that was my reaction to the to the latest allegation against
• 26:36
  the Biden family. I realize that my opinion on this uh is the least
• 26:41
  popular, probably of any I have. It's maybe it's right up there with
• 26:47
  my opinion on Ron de Santis's chances of winning the primary. How popular that
• 26:52
  is among rond de Santas fans, but I am not saying there's no scandal.
• 26:56
  The best way I can describe this as I think Dan Abrams, on
• 27:00
  whose TV show and News Nation I appear about once every other week, I
• 27:03
  think he is the closest to the truth on this is that everybody's wrong,
• 27:08
  that it's somewhere between what the left wing media is portraying and somewhere and the
• 27:12
  right wing right wing media is portraying. That it is a scandal. Biden
• 27:18
  did lie. That's important to point out. I probably haven't done that enough.
• 27:22
  Biden has lied about his role in Hunter's business activities. There's no question
• 27:27
  about that. Now, whether there was any actual meat there, whether there
• 27:32
  was any actual quid pro quo or what was traded, and far as far
• 27:37
  as US policy, that's to me is still a very open question whether or
• 27:41
  not there's criminality, but that this scandal is somewhere between the left wing media
• 27:45
  effectively ignoring it and the right wing media pretending that this is one of the
• 27:49
  worst things that has ever happened. That's where I currently am. If I
• 27:53
  get new facts, I will be the first person to change my position on
• 27:57
  that. Now, as far as the Trump indictments go, we are still
• 28:03
  on Trump indictment watch number four, this one out of Georgia, and CNN
• 28:11
  had an interesting scoop with regard to what may be coming out very shortly out
• 28:18
  of that grand jury in Georgia involving allegations that Trump tried to overturn the twenty
• 28:23
  twenty elections. CNN reported just a couple of days ago, Atlanta area prosecutors
• 28:30
  investigating efforts to overturn the twenty twenty election results in Georgia are in possession of
• 28:36
  text messages and emails directly connecting members of Donald Trump's legal team to the early
• 28:42
  January twenty twenty one voting system breach in Coffee County. Sources tell CNN Fulton
• 28:51
  County District Attorney Fannie Willis is expected to see charges against more than a dozen
• 28:56
  individual individuals when her team presents its case before a grand jury this week.
• 29:03
  Several individuals involved in the voting system's breach in Coffee County are among those who
• 29:10
  may face charges in the sprawling criminal probe. Now, if that's true,
• 29:15
  then you know that seems like there's a lot of meat on the bone with
• 29:18
  regard to the allegations there. To me, this is all much like the
• 29:23
  Classified Documents case is all about a tape, a tape that I have said
• 29:29
  does not hurt Trump very much at all, because it sounds it doesn't sound
• 29:33
  like a crime is being committed. Everyone's happy, everyone's laughing, chuckling.
• 29:37
  Doesn't sound like Trump is hiding anything, you know. So to me,
• 29:41
  I think the Classified Documents case one because the jury pool is going to be
• 29:45
  in South Florida, and two because of the fact that that tape is not
• 29:51
  nearly as nefarious as the meat he has tried to make it sound. I
• 29:55
  think he's not going to get convicted in the Classified Documents case, but this
• 30:00
  case, should it come to fruition, and it could any day now,
• 30:04
  I think is a bit more dangerous. One if they have that kind of
• 30:08
  documentation, But two because the tape there sounds a hell of a lot more
• 30:15
  nefarious. The tape there is Donald Trump telling the Republican Secretary of State of
• 30:22
  Georgia and others to find a very specific number of votes eleven thousand. I
• 30:30
  believe, in some odd so that he wins the State of Georgia. Now,
• 30:34
  Trump has this amazing, amazing thing, and I've always equated Trump to
• 30:40
  a mob boss where his language. He's very careful about the language where he
• 30:45
  gets a message across, but he also allows for plausible deniability in the way
• 30:52
  that he's being interpreted. And because he's such a buffoon and such a jokester,
• 30:56
  he can always claim, well, now, I was just being facetious,
• 31:00
  I was just joking around. I was just really urging him to realize
• 31:04
  the importance of this, and I just you know, we need to we
• 31:07
  need to be on the stick on this thing. Well, I'm not buying
• 31:11
  it in this situation, because if you listen to that tape, it's pretty
• 31:15
  clear what Trump is telling this official in Georgia, and you know that certainly
• 31:22
  sounds like a crime to me. And it also appears as if Trump is
• 31:26
  very worried about this particular investigation. In fact, just this morning, he
• 31:30
  posted on true social that the former Lieutenant governor of Georgia, a Republican Jeff
• 31:37
  Duncan, should not, as is being reported, should not be testifying before
• 31:44
  the Fulton County Grand jury. This is a quote from Donald Trump. I've
• 31:48
  heard that he's going to testify. He shouldn't, he shouldn't. This is
• 31:56
  this is unbelievable. I mean, if this was a non resident situation,
• 32:00
  a situation of normal circumstances, where a guy who was the focus of a
• 32:07
  criminal probe of this seriousness and was publicly saying that a witness should not test
• 32:14
  flight to the grand jury, that would be a scandal of itself. And
• 32:19
  then when you consider the power that Donald Trump has within the right wing and
• 32:23
  his cult, and how it is that he can destroy anybody's reputation simply by
• 32:30
  posting, even on just true social and that there's inherent pressure within any message
• 32:37
  like this. I mean, this you could argue as a crime in and
• 32:39
  of itself. It's witness intimidation. So Donald Trump is telling witnesses to the
• 32:47
  grand jury to not testify. To me, that one indicates a high degree
• 32:55
  of concern on his part, but also just how believably reckless he is that
• 33:01
  he would he would do this publicly. And so you know, I'm interested
• 33:08
  in what's going to happen in Georgia. I do not believe, as I've
• 33:13
  said many times in the past, that we're suddenly going to get to a
• 33:15
  magic moment where the Republican the majority of the Republican voting base wakes up and
• 33:21
  goes, what the hell are we doing? This is insane. We've got
• 33:24
  a guy who's been indicted now four times, three of which at least are
• 33:30
  on serious charges and have at least some threat of preventing him from being a
• 33:37
  viable candidate for president. Could even put him in jail. By the way,
• 33:43
  I don't believe this is going to happen, but they're the proposed date
• 33:47
  for the January sixth allegations, and the trial involving those allegations is now in
• 33:54
  January of next year, before I think the voting for the Republican nominating process
• 34:00
  even begins. I don't believe that's going to happen. I've seen a lot
• 34:05
  of legal experts on television who do not believe that it will even happen before
• 34:09
  the general election. That will there will be plenty of ways for Trump to
• 34:14
  delay this, and if I'm Trump, I definitely want that one delayed,
• 34:21
  mainly because of the jurisdiction being Washington, DC. Now, unless Trump really
• 34:25
  has big balls, which during COVID we realized he doesn't, but if he
• 34:30
  did, I mean, he may want to get convicted in Washington, DC
• 34:36
  because it'll be so outrageous to have a jury that's at least ninety percent Democrat
• 34:44
  and probably almost all black, convicting this hero among many white people who realize
• 34:54
  inherently that the system is rigged against him. I mean, you want to
• 34:58
  talk about piss people off. Even I might get outraged if Trump gets convicted
• 35:06
  under those circumstances unless the evidence is really, really, really good. And
• 35:10
  I have said that the allegations in that indictment are very serious, but I'd
• 35:15
  like to see some actual proof of that. And unless they get people to
• 35:17
  flip on Trump the co conspirators, I'm not sure they're going to be able
• 35:22
  to do that. So it is my guess, not being an expert in
• 35:25
  this area, that there's no way that there's really going to be a January
• 35:30
  trial. If there is a trial right now, I mean that is because
• 35:34
  of the jurisdiction, that's the place where Trump is most likely to actually get
• 35:38
  convicted of something. And then even when that happens, you know, we're
• 35:43
  in completely uncharted territory and all hell is likely to break loose, and who
• 35:49
  the hell knows what's going to happen at that point. I mean, all
• 35:52
  predictions are off at that moment. I mean all predictions are off with regarding
• 35:55
  the Republican race for the nomination the general election, civil unrest, I mean,
• 36:01
  who the hell knows? And frankly, the news media once all this
• 36:05
  because there's nothing the news media likes better than uncharted territory. Oh, this
• 36:09
  is new, this is historic, this has never happened before. We don't
• 36:13
  know what's going to happen. That means ratings, that means content, That
• 36:16
  means the ability to speculate. That means excitement, and that's what the media
• 36:22
  really really really wants, and which of course is not good for the country.
• 36:27
  But the media doesn't give a damn about being bad for the country.
• 36:30
  Now. I referenced in my teas for the podcast that CNN there was a
• 36:37
  moment on CNN where they came so very close to getting it on a topic
• 36:44
  that I think is really at the heart of what's going on with the media
• 36:49
  in general and right wing politics in particular regard to the Trump campaign in the
• 36:57
  twenty twenty four Republican nominating race. I have taught a lot, probably more
• 37:01
  than any conservative on the planet, about how the right wing media has become
• 37:07
  a conspiracy machine and that Trump has both facilitated this and benefited from it.
• 37:14
  And the number one perpetrator because he's so popular, has been Tucker Carlson.
• 37:19
  I've even referenced Tucker Carlson being the MVP of the Trump campaign. And I've
• 37:24
  also talked about how once you buy one big conspiracy theory as being true,
• 37:30
  it becomes incredibly easy for the next conspiracy theory to be true, and the
• 37:36
  next one, and the next one and the next one. I've used the
• 37:38
  example if you believe in Santa Claus, then buying the Easter Bunny and the
• 37:45
  tooth fairy becomes very, very easy. And that is effectively what has happened
• 37:51
  with regard to the right wing, and as someone who despises conspiracy theories,
• 37:57
  this has really bugged me. I mean, I'm a truth guy, I'm
• 38:00
  a logic guy, and you know, unfortunately, the most bizarre part of
• 38:07
  me being an anti conspiracy person is that a lot of people who don't know
• 38:10
  me perceive me as a conspiracy person because I hold a lot of very contrarian
• 38:15
  opinions. The most obvious example is with regard to the Penn State Joe Paterno
• 38:22
  Jerry Sandusky case, and they think that I'm the conspiracy theorist, when in
• 38:27
  fact, on the anti conspiracy theorists, they just don't understand the goddamn case.
• 38:31
  And so it's extremely frustrating on so many different levels. But I really
• 38:37
  do believe that this is at the heart of why Trump is the heavy favorite
• 38:40
  to be the Republican presidential nominee in twenty twenty four, barring some sort of
• 38:47
  miracle involving his health or his legal issues. And CNN had a fascinating conversation.
• 38:54
  It's fascinating on so many different levels. One of the levels this was
• 38:59
  fascinating is that the two people involved used to be married to him one another,
• 39:04
  and one of them just took the other's job. Data Bash, the
• 39:08
  female in the two clips I'm about to play for you, used to be
• 39:13
  married to John King, and she just recently took his gig at CNN.
• 39:17
  Now they're apparently still friends, and it's bizarre to me that they would be
• 39:22
  on the air together alone, because I'm not sure how many people even know
• 39:25
  that they used to be married to one another. But I'm going to break
• 39:30
  this down into two different clips. The first clip is from Data Bash,
• 39:35
  and she's talking about this issue of conspiracies and the right wing media, because
• 39:40
  they're basically commiserating with each other in these two clips. And I'm going to
• 39:45
  play for you about how it is that, you know, basically right wingers
• 39:49
  believe a whole bunch of crazy stuff, and that they want to blame the
• 39:53
  right wing media for enabling these beliefs. And here's Dana Bash starting what is
• 40:00
  going to be this two clip conversation I'm going to play for you. One
• 40:04
  of the things that struck me first and foremost obviously was, and it really
• 40:08
  in my gut and my heart, was just how seeped in these completely conspiratorial
• 40:19
  questions and thoughts are in the zeitgeist, particularly when you're talking to Republicans who
• 40:27
  consume conservative media who don't tell them the whole truth. Now, one of
• 40:30
  the reasons I'm playing these two clips for you and I'm separating them is that
• 40:37
  Dana Bash is basically playing the role here of a person who just doesn't get
• 40:43
  it, who has no self awareness at all, the type of person that
• 40:50
  really has caused this problem to begin with, because she's looking down her nose
• 40:55
  on right wingers for believing all sorts of crazy things. Now, she's not
• 41:00
  wrong in most cases, although I would argue that if we found out what
• 41:05
  beliefs she thought were crazy, we would find out that a lot of them
• 41:08
  are not. I would love to know, like, for instance, what
• 41:13
  does does she think that the conservative position that the vaccines for COVID didn't stop
• 41:17
  transmission? Is that a crazy conspiracy theory? Or that MASK mandates didn't do
• 41:22
  shit? Is that a crazy conspiracy theory? Or I mean all sorts of
• 41:27
  things related to COVID. You know, I would love to know whether or
• 41:30
  not those are in the category or not, because I'm certainly among those who
• 41:35
  believe that they're They were claimed, it's claimed to be conspiracy theories, but
• 41:39
  they were never conspiracy theories. They were actually just logical. I mean,
• 41:44
  it was logical that MASK we're never gonna work, and it was logical that
• 41:47
  the vaccines we're not going to be miraculous and stop transmission. It was the
• 41:52
  crazy theory on the left that they latched onto for emotional and political purposes that
• 41:57
  turned out to be totally wrong. And so just because the left calls something
• 42:00
  a conspiracy theory because they have no other argument, doesn't make it a conspiracy
• 42:07
  theory when it turns out to be right. This is something that I've seen
• 42:10
  so often on the right, where because the left erroneously calls something a conspiracy
• 42:16
  theory and it turns out to be right, that this somehow means that conspiracy
• 42:20
  theories are often, if not usually right. No no, no, no,
• 42:23
  no, no no, that's not how it works. But I don't
• 42:27
  want to get too far adrift here. So Dana Bash is basically trying to
• 42:32
  commiserate with her ex husband John King about how the right wingers believe these nutty
• 42:38
  things and the right wing media is enabling this. Now, again, there's
• 42:44
  a lot of truth to what she's saying, and I'm the first to blame
• 42:46
  the right wing media. Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity. You
• 42:52
  know, there are other people who certainly fit in this category, even people
• 42:57
  I used to respect, like Mark Levin and Kelly you know, these are
• 43:00
  a lot of people have to whatever degree, have sold out to Donald Trump
• 43:05
  and now they have to conform to this very distorted worldview of conspiracies that the
• 43:12
  Trump world has embraced because these conspiracies helped Donald Trump sell his bullshit. I
• 43:19
  mean, I mean, obviously the twenty twenty election being stolen is right at
• 43:23
  the center of this. If going back to my Santa Claus Easter bunny tooth
• 43:28
  fairy theory, you know, part of the reason why Trump was able to
• 43:32
  sell that the twenty twenty election was stolen is because he had already he had
• 43:39
  already created this atmosphere on the right where there's a deep state out to get
• 43:45
  me. And you know, there's all sorts of other crazy conspiracy theories that
• 43:51
  aren't true, aren't based in reality, but if you believe them, well
• 43:55
  then it's very easy to go, well, gee, you know those vote
• 44:00
  just got counted in the middle of the night. It's sure seems suspicious.
• 44:02
  I went to sleep, Trump was ahead, I woke, Copy was behind.
• 44:06
  They must have stolen the election. It's ridiculous. The reason why that
• 44:10
  happened was because the way the votes were counted, thanks to COVID and in
• 44:15
  person and mail in voting, it was very logical to media did a terrible
• 44:17
  job of preparing people for what was going to happen. But that's really at
• 44:22
  the essence of why so many people think that the twenty twenty election was stolen.
• 44:27
  It's just basic logic. It was I mean, I remember very vividly
• 44:30
  the night of the twenty twenty election, and it looked like Trump was winning
• 44:34
  big. My wife, who's not even a Trumper, but you know,
• 44:38
  it's clearly someone who's very anti Democrat, literally doing a dance in front of
• 44:44
  me, literally doing a dance in front of me. This would have been
• 44:46
  like an eleven o'clock on the Pacific coast time before she went to bed and
• 44:51
  I said to her, you got this wrong. Trump's not gonna win because
• 44:55
  these man and votes are going to come in later than the in person day
• 45:00
  votes, and Biden is going to win this thing in the end. And
• 45:04
  she thought I was crazy, And of course the next morning it turned out
• 45:07
  that I was right. But this, this is, I'm sure, very
• 45:12
  very pervasive, this belief, and it's it's it's a massive conspiracy theory,
• 45:19
  as is the theory that Trump is being indicted all these times because someone is
• 45:22
  out to get him. Now, do they hate him, Sure they do,
• 45:25
  But I do not believe that this is all a massive conspiracy to destroy
• 45:30
  Donald Trump of anything. If there's a conspiracy, there's a conspiracy to make
• 45:34
  him the Republican nominee so we can lose to Joe Biden, but I don't
• 45:38
  want to get go down that path either anyway. So data Bash back to
• 45:44
  CNN because I find this really important and quite fascinating. So data Bash puts
• 45:49
  out basically what I would consider to be the the mainstream view among the elite
• 45:57
  legacy media of what they really think of Republicans and the right wing media,
• 46:04
  which again from a substance standpoint, is mostly though not totally accurate, And
• 46:12
  then her ex husband John King responds, and John King gets a little bit
• 46:19
  in fact, he gets a lot closer to the truth, although he's not
• 46:22
  quite there. John King at least shows some semblance of self awareness, and
• 46:30
  at the end of this clip where he talks about he basically takes what data
• 46:36
  Bash has said and he goes to the next level with it, and he
• 46:39
  talks about this, how mysterious it is that these really good people believe these
• 46:45
  crazy things are things that we in the mainstream news media think of as crazy.
• 46:50
  And he finally gets to the biggest part of the point at the very
• 46:53
  end, when he acknowledges indirectly that they them cells are part or a big
• 47:01
  part of the problem. And here's what that sounded. Leg on CNN when
• 47:06
  you hear the Ukraine Exchange there, it's like watching the open of an old
• 47:09
  Tucker Carlson show. He's not there anymore, but that's what it is.
• 47:13
  And these are busy people. These are hard working people. Are there are
• 47:15
  too many Democrats who want to say they're deplorable, so or you know,
• 47:17
  why talk to these people? There are millions of them. This is a
• 47:22
  family that literally is an economic anchor in the community. The business started in
• 47:24
  the basement employs eighty people. The new solar company employs fifteen people in a
• 47:28
  part of the country that has been devastated economically and challenged economically the last twenty
• 47:31
  five years. They're good people. They raise money for the Girl Scouts,
• 47:35
  they go to church. But they believe things that would break our fact check
• 47:37
  machine. That's just a fact, and they don't trust us. They think
• 47:39
  we're part of the problem. Now, when I saw that, I thought,
• 47:44
  Wow, so close John King is so very very close to getting this.
• 47:51
  And frankly, if CNN is ever going to get out of this massive
• 47:55
  hole that they're in, to me, this is the path. Not just
• 48:00
  a little bit of self awareness, but a lot of atonement and a lot
• 48:07
  of recognition of reality and a lot of maybe even apologizing for past sins.
• 48:15
  Because and I've used this analogy before with regard to a fireman, I think
• 48:20
  this is a great analogy that the news media, the fourth of state journalism,
• 48:27
  whatever you want to call it, that the reason why this had been
• 48:31
  so revered in America for so long is that it played an incredibly important role
• 48:38
  in keeping our leaders accountable. And in order to do that, they needed
• 48:45
  to protect their credibility at all costs. And in the fireman analogy, the
• 48:52
  news media is credibility is the water in their hose, all right, the
• 48:58
  water in their hose to put out any fires on either side. But in
• 49:04
  order to do that, you need to maintain your credibility and objectivity. And
• 49:08
  that means during down times and when your business model is broken, you don't
• 49:14
  spend half a year chasing as a missing Malaysian airliner like cnnded in twenty fourteen
• 49:20
  because your ratings got a bump. Doing that has a cost. And that's
• 49:25
  just one of probably dozens of examples, but it's a very obvious one,
• 49:30
  and it's non political. You don't sell out your credibility for a short term
• 49:36
  gain in the ratings, because when you do that, you're using up a
• 49:40
  lot of the water in your hose. And when it came to Trump,
• 49:45
  this was an actual emergency, all right. This was a threat to the
• 49:52
  entire American political system. And Trump understood this better than anybody. He exact
• 50:00
  surveyed it, and he took advantage of it. And he realized the media's
• 50:04
  vulnerability because their business model had broken, and instead of using whatever credibility they
• 50:12
  had left in their fire hose, they actually helped spread the fire because they
• 50:17
  thought the fire was fun and it was good for them. In twenty fifteen,
• 50:22
  and they helped Trump get the nomination because they thought, well, that
• 50:25
  will never happened. It will certainly never win, and we all want Hillary
• 50:29
  to win anyway, so this will be great for everybody. Oh shit,
• 50:34
  he won. And then they decided to finally use the fire hose, and
• 50:40
  guess what happened. Their hose had no more water in it. And in
• 50:45
  fact, the more they tried to use the fire hose, the more the
• 50:52
  water turned into gasoline, especially when they blew it on Russia Gate. Russia
• 50:58
  Gate, which I still maintained was in fact a scandal, just not nearly
• 51:01
  as big as the media pretended that it was. They went all Manchurian candidate
• 51:07
  on the whole thing. And this turned out to be the greatest thing that
• 51:09
  ever happened to Donald Trump, because Russia Gate fell flat on its face,
• 51:15
  largely because of inflated expectations and massive media overkill. I think that in a
• 51:22
  lot of ways, that's the Santa Claws to the Easter Bunny and the tooth
• 51:24
  ferry when it comes to conspiracy theories, and so CNN being maybe the most
• 51:30
  prominent example of this. Instead of having credibility left in their fire hose,
• 51:37
  they've got nothing but gasoline. And so now when they attack Trump or try
• 51:43
  to tell what they think is the truth about Trump, it actually helps him,
• 51:45
  it actually exacerbates the fire. And John King seems to at least understand
• 51:52
  this at some level. They don't trust us. Well, they don't trust
• 51:57
  us because we lost our credibility. We gave it up, and then when
• 52:02
  an emergency came, a crisis came in the name of Donald Trump, we
• 52:07
  couldn't do anything about it. In fact, we turned out to be part
• 52:09
  of the problem because now Trump is in this and I tweeted about this over
• 52:15
  the weekend. Trump is in this incredibly advantageous position where the left wing media
• 52:22
  has been completely neutralized by their lack of credibility when it comes to anything Trump
• 52:29
  related in the eyes of Republican voters, and in fact, at times left
• 52:35
  wing media attacks help Trump. And simultaneously, the right wing media is completely
• 52:40
  invested in Donald Trump and afraid to piss off his cult like base because they're
• 52:46
  they're best consumers. So he's neutralized the left wing media, He's co opted
• 52:52
  the right wing media, so nothing can harm him in the media. Nothing.
• 53:00
  And that's really the fundamental reality for why I'm so despondent about what's going
• 53:06
  to happen barring a miracle in the twenty twenty four Republican nominating process. Let
• 53:12
  me just say, and I've said this before, because there you know,
• 53:15
  there is one reason, one reason only other than I guess the legal problems.
• 53:20
  But the main reason why I have not one hundred percent given up on
• 53:25
  Rhoda Sanders winning the Republican nomination is that Trump is ahead by so much now
• 53:32
  that there isn't at least a path, a narrative path where if Trump starts
• 53:38
  to hemorrhage in a significant way and Desanders does start to decrease the gap,
• 53:46
  which is now about forty points nationally. If that does happen even just a
• 53:52
  little bit, say it gets down to twenty five points or twenty points,
• 53:57
  then that creates the potential momentum him and at that point Trump could implode to
• 54:06
  a level where he's beatable. Now, his cult is so strong, he's
• 54:08
  never going to implode to the point where it's a route, but he could
• 54:14
  under that circumstances. It's theoretically possible that that reverse momentum may swallow him up.
• 54:21
  And that's really the only scenario that I see and the only good thing
• 54:24
  that's happened in this year so far, where we've gone from a race that
• 54:29
  was five to ten points to now being a forty point race after Rhonda Santis
• 54:34
  has already announced. So I really found the CNN exchange between Dana Bash and
• 54:40
  John King to be quite telling and belongs in a museum for the history of
• 54:46
  the news media. But they still don't fully get it. They really still
• 54:51
  don't fully get it. Whether they ever will, I don't know. I
• 54:53
  hope so because it's the only hope for journalism ever recovering in some sort of
• 54:59
  way. But I just don't know that mainstream news media members have it in
• 55:04
  them. I don't think they have the self awareness. I think their egos
• 55:07
  are too big. I think they're all part of the same club. They're
• 55:10
  all philosophically and politically of the same mindset. So I think it's a long
• 55:15
  shot that they ever get full self awareness or any real accountability for what they
• 55:21
  have done to create this current situation with regard to Donald Trump. But this
• 55:25
  is a subject I'm sure I'm going to revisit again in the future. Speaking
• 55:30
  of Trump in the Republican nominating process, he told an interviewer that he is
• 55:37
  not going to take the debate pledge. Now, I've talked an awful lot
• 55:42
  about how I don't believe Trump is going to be part of the debates unless
• 55:45
  he's forced to, and even if he is part of the Republican debates,
• 55:50
  those debates will be so stunted as to basically be meaningless. It's very obvious
• 55:54
  he's not going to take part in the first debate in a couple of weeks
• 55:58
  in Wisconsin, actually less a couple of weeks from now, the Fox News
• 56:01
  debate. But the pledge is interesting on another level, one because it gives
• 56:08
  him a theoretical out for why he's not going to partake in the debates.
• 56:15
  Take part in the debates. I mean, I don't know if this is
• 56:19
  his strategy or not. But by saying he will not indorse whoever the Republican
• 56:24
  candidate is, and that's the pledge right now, there's only going to be
• 56:29
  two people. It's either you who Obviously he would endorse a Ron de Santis,
• 56:32
  but he was very vague in this interview where he said, well,
• 56:37
  there are people who are running who I would not indorse. Now, part
• 56:42
  of me thinks that this is a gambit on his part, which in his
• 56:45
  mind might even be brilliant, where he's going to be prevented from taking part
• 56:52
  in the debates. Therefore it's not his choice. Now, I find it
• 56:59
  hard to leave that. If Trump said, oh, I'll debate, but
• 57:01
  I'm not taking the pledge that the Republican Party and their media partners would go,
• 57:07
  Okay, well you're not allowed in the debate, that seems like a
• 57:10
  stretch to me. But if that did happen, then that would get Trump
• 57:15
  off the hook for being a coward and being afraid the debate, Ron de
• 57:19
  Santis, That's what it seems like might be the strategy here. Now the
• 57:24
  counter to that, if the right wing media was at all fair about this
• 57:30
  and held Donald Trump's feet to the fire like they do, for instance,
• 57:34
  Ron de Santis, the follow up question would be, Okay, which candidate
• 57:38
  or candidates who are running would you not endorse over Joe Biden. I would
• 57:47
  love to know the answer to that. That would be a very illuminating answer.
• 57:52
  I doubt Trump will ever be asked the question in a way that gets
• 57:55
  us a coach and answer to that question. Frankly, if I'm run to
• 58:00
  Santist I asked that question, I don't know. If I do it at
• 58:04
  the debate where Trump isn't there, it might not be a bad idea,
• 58:06
  since since you could bring it up in relation to the fact that Trump isn't
• 58:10
  there. But but I would certainly if I'm the Santist campaign, I would
• 58:16
  make this an issue for a couple of reasons. One, it would be
• 58:21
  fascinating to see what Trump's answer would be. But two, the Trump team
• 58:25
  has told us, and I was at the Sanders supporter I've heard this many
• 58:29
  many times that if if you don't support Trump against Biden, you're a traitor
• 58:36
  to the cause, You're you're you're basically essentially a Democrat. Then you're more
• 58:40
  worse. And so they're expecting ultimate loyalty from all Republicans to support Trump no
• 58:50
  matter what if he's the nominee. Well wait a minute, how does that
• 58:54
  make any sense? If Trump isn't willing to pledge his support to anybody else
• 59:00
  who might be the nominee. And by the way, it's not like there,
• 59:04
  you know, there aren't plausible scenarios if Trump gets sick significantly, or
• 59:10
  if he's in jail, where you know, his endorsement to his cult might
• 59:16
  matter, but where he's not able to actually be the nominee. That's at
• 59:21
  least theoretically possible, given his age and the fact that he's facing a fourth
• 59:25
  indictment and seemingly the coming days. So this is a very important question and
• 59:32
  one that should not be forgotten. So Donald Trump, tell us which Republican
• 59:37
  candidates you would not endorse if they were the nominee against Joe Biden. Boy,
• 59:44
  I'd love to hear that answer, And I'd also love to hear the
• 59:46
  rationalizations of Trump fans to try I'm sure they come up with something to try
• 59:52
  to justify how it is that any Republican would not be supported by a Republican
• 59:59
  again, Joe Biden, given what they have said about how we're all supposed
• 1:00:04
  to be loyal to Tunald Trump even when he wins the Republican nomination, And
• 1:00:08
  so I hope that issue doesn't get lost. But it's very clear, as
• 1:00:14
  I have been predicting for months, Trump ain't showing up at that first debate,
• 1:00:16
  and that first debate is going to be perilous for Ron De Santis,
• 1:00:22
  a campaign that's already in big trouble. The best case scenario, as I've
• 1:00:25
  said before, is that the Santist holds his own and doesn't lose any ground
• 1:00:31
  when it comes to second place, and he's going to have to do very
• 1:00:35
  very well just to maintain that because everybody's going to be going after him.
• 1:00:39
  Nobody's going after Trump, and just being on the same stage with the Santists
• 1:00:45
  is going to elevate people like Vague Ramaswamy and Tim Scott and Nicki Haley,
• 1:00:51
  people who are going to be nipping at his heels who really don't have a
• 1:00:55
  significant support level right now. They're in single digits, but they're in high
• 1:01:01
  enough single digits where combining they take enough away from de Sandus where he has
• 1:01:05
  no chance of overtaking Trump. So I am not optimist. Stop. Maybe
• 1:01:10
  you've heard this before. I'm not optimistic about how that debate will go from
• 1:01:15
  the political perspective of Rhanda Sandus, even though I'm very confident that he will
• 1:01:20
  do very well from a substance standpoint. And when it comes to the de
• 1:01:24
  Santas campaign, this really pisses me off. We're already seeing an effort by
• 1:01:31
  the mainstream I call it media to rationalize why de Sandis's campaign has failed,
• 1:01:40
  even though obviously it's only August. No votes have been cast yet, and
• 1:01:44
  they won't be cast for several months yet. But the mainstream news media is
• 1:01:49
  in a weird spot because they clearly have said for a long time, you
• 1:01:54
  know that Trump shouldn't be the nominee, he's a threat to democracy, blah
• 1:01:58
  blah blah. But they did not embrace ron De Santis at all under the
• 1:02:02
  guise of vetting. Now, I would maintain that if the media was motely
• 1:02:07
  fair, Rona Sandus would have gotten effectively the two thousand and seven this year,
• 1:02:12
  he would have gotten the two thousand and seven Barack Obama media treatment.
• 1:02:15
  Now that was never going to happen, one because he's a Republican, two
• 1:02:19
  because of COVID. I mean, but if the media was fair, Ron
• 1:02:22
  de Sanders would have been hailed by the mainstream news media is the guy who
• 1:02:25
  was right more than they were, far more than they were when it came
• 1:02:30
  to the COVID response, and that this would have given to Sandus a large
• 1:02:34
  enough footprint, and it would have enabled him to show in general election polls
• 1:02:39
  that he does better against Joe Biden than Donald Trump does. But the mainstream
• 1:02:45
  news media did nothing like that. In fact, they did the opposite.
• 1:02:47
  They emphasized all these bullshit stories out of Florida and distorted everything, whether it's
• 1:02:53
  don't say gay or Disney or this slavery bullcrap, whatever they could to try
• 1:03:00
  diminished a Santists. And that's one of the reasons why I knew this wasn't
• 1:03:04
  gonna work, because because you can't have both the mainstream news media and the
• 1:03:08
  right wing media both effectively favoring Donald Trump and attacking you as the underdog and
• 1:03:17
  still pull this off. It's it's almost impossible. And I just found this
• 1:03:22
  one small example from from the Cook Political Report, which I would consider me
• 1:03:28
  mainstream and probably liberal in its bias, But they did an article about why
• 1:03:35
  rohnd to Santists failed to launch because they need a rationalization, right boil boy.
• 1:03:39
  You know, it's just such a shame that I don't say this,
• 1:03:44
  but I mean, they need to come up with some explanation for why it
• 1:03:46
  is that that the Santists didn't mount nearly the challenge that was forecast for Donald
• 1:03:54
  Trump. And it can't be their fault. It can't be their fault for
• 1:03:59
  creating a found on which Trump was always gonna win. I mean, that's
• 1:04:05
  not within their mindset. They don't have the self awareness or the willingness to
• 1:04:11
  admit their own flaws. And so here's what they tweeted out. Republican voters
• 1:04:15
  wanted a proven winner who could win over swing voters and beat Joe Biden.
• 1:04:21
  De Santis wanted to be a culture warrior who could siphon away very conservative voters
• 1:04:28
  from Trump. So that's what they're gonna go with the political misstep. He
• 1:04:32
  went too conservative. I had Dan Abrams from News Nation have me on a
• 1:04:39
  couple of weeks ago on his TV show to talk about this very topic,
• 1:04:43
  and I pushed back against Dan's theory, which was similar to what the Political
• 1:04:48
  Cook Political Report was putting forward there, that this was somehow a misstep politically.
• 1:04:55
  To me, this is antiquated thinking. I don't even think this is
• 1:04:58
  the way politics works anymore, at least not in the Trump world. It's
• 1:05:00
  really not about issues. It's all about perceptions and who's the alpha and what
• 1:05:08
  makes the voter feel better about themselves. Issues themselves, unfortunately, I think
• 1:05:14
  make very very little difference. It's all about narratives, and this is a
• 1:05:18
  false narrative. Now, look, did de Sandis do some things like sign
• 1:05:25
  a six week abortion band which did not help him in some circles politically.
• 1:05:30
  Yeah, And I think I think that's I do think that that's had an
• 1:05:32
  impact. It may have had an impact when it comes to the general election
• 1:05:35
  polls between DeSantis and Biden. But I want to go back to who the
• 1:05:41
  real culprit here is. If the news media had been fair and telling Ron
• 1:05:45
  de Santis story, and let me go back to the mid term election day
• 1:05:50
  of twenty twenty two. I mean, I talked about it on this podcast
• 1:05:54
  at the time. As usual, I was way ahead of the curve.
• 1:05:57
  That was one of the first alarm bells that I was sound when it came
• 1:06:00
  to De Santis twenty twenty four, was that De Sandis was the star of
• 1:06:05
  that night. Democrat or Republican. He wins the Florida governorship by twenty points
• 1:06:12
  after being attacked for two years by the entire media establishment over his COVID response,
• 1:06:17
  and he wins, and he wins big, and he comes out during
• 1:06:21
  a time period of the night where it was still prime time, still early
• 1:06:26
  enough, there was nothing else going on, to give a fantastic speech about
• 1:06:30
  how his view had been vindicated. American values have been vindicated, Freedom had
• 1:06:35
  been vindicated. Someone stood up when the rest of the world went crazy,
• 1:06:40
  and it was Florida, and today we were vindicated. A fantastic speech which
• 1:06:46
  would have set the tone for his twenty twenty four presidential campaign way better than
• 1:06:53
  Barack Obama's Democratic nomination to be not his nomination, but his convention speech in
• 1:06:59
  twenty twenty. In twenty four and twenty four, Barack Obama gave a speech
• 1:07:03
  talking about red states and blue states and no one America blah blah blah,
• 1:07:06
  no black and white h you know it was. It was a rab rab
• 1:07:11
  bish boombah kumbaya speech in the twenty four Democratic Convention. That was what launched
• 1:07:17
  effectively his two thousand and eight presidential campaign as a first term senator. This
• 1:07:24
  was that was fantasy, This was reality. And only Fox News Channel carried
• 1:07:30
  it, not even Newsmax or One American News, not CNN, not MSNBC,
• 1:07:36
  not ABC, not CBS, not MBC. That should have been seen
• 1:07:41
  by every single politically minded American that night, and if it had, it
• 1:07:46
  would have expanded the Santis's footprint to a point where he could not be diminished.
• 1:07:54
  He wouldn't be in any way, shape or form worried about holding on
• 1:07:57
  the second place right now. His base support would have been large enough to
• 1:08:02
  where he wouldn't have to worry about those kinds of things. He would have
• 1:08:06
  a rock solid twenty five or thirty percent of the Republican base, His fundraising
• 1:08:13
  would be even better than it has been, and Trump wouldn't be ahead by
• 1:08:17
  forty points right now. So there's a lot of blame to go around here,
• 1:08:20
  but large part of it's the news media. But now they're going to
• 1:08:23
  be looking They're gonna be looking for excuses for why De Santists wasn't able to
• 1:08:28
  pull this off, because they don't want it to be about them, even
• 1:08:30
  though it really is about them. They're the ones to blame. But like
• 1:08:33
  we saw with the Dana bash John King exchange, there's no self awareness here,
• 1:08:39
  there's no accountability here. But that's the reality. And you're gonna see
• 1:08:43
  a lot of these stories about how the campaign wasn't up to the challenge and
• 1:08:47
  De Santists has no personality. It's all bullshit. It's an indictment of a
• 1:08:54
  lot of things. I frankly think if this turns out the way it looks
• 1:08:57
  as an indictment of the Republican voter, I'm not gonna I'm not going to
• 1:09:00
  pretend that's not reality. But it's an indictment of a lot of different institutions,
• 1:09:04
  including the news media, the left wing media, the mainstream news media,
• 1:09:09
  and the right wing media all take blame for this. Now, another
• 1:09:14
  point about Donald Trump. This past weekend, the Live Golf Tour, which
• 1:09:19
  I despise and which I've talked a lot about, hosted yet another event,
• 1:09:24
  one of four events this year on their limited schedule at Trump's golf course in
• 1:09:30
  Bedminster, New Jersey. Now I've played this golf course. I know Bedminster
• 1:09:35
  very well because my first major girlfriend, her family owns a upscale jewelry store
• 1:09:42
  in Bedminster, New Jersey. Very nice place. Bedminster is wonderful. The
• 1:09:46
  golf course is fine. But the reason why this is significant to me is
• 1:09:51
  it just exposes how incredibly pathetic, especially the sports media is when it comes
• 1:10:00
  to anything remotely political, and how very obvious stories just get totally lost with
• 1:10:11
  evaluation, no imagination, no nothing, even when they're right out there in
• 1:10:18
  the open. And I have been one of the very few of not only
• 1:10:21
  conservatives who has been screaming bloody murder about the absolute inherent scandal. I mean,
• 1:10:29
  it's just this maybe goes to partially why I hate the Hunter Biden's story.
• 1:10:32
  Here we have, you know, the Hunter Biden story is all about
• 1:10:35
  alleged foreign influence over then Vice President Joe Biden. Well, here we have
• 1:10:42
  former President Trump, favored to be the Republican nominee for president, and right
• 1:10:46
  out in front of daylight, on broad daylight, in front of God and
• 1:10:50
  everybody, Donald Trump is hosting four events in one summer where he is being
• 1:10:59
  paid by the Saudi Arabian government the royal family directly, not indirectly. It's
• 1:11:04
  not linked. It's not linked to the Saudi royal family or linked to the
• 1:11:10
  Donald Trump. It's a direct payment from the Saudi Royal family to Donald Trump
• 1:11:15
  in what has to be millions of millions of dollars. And why do I
• 1:11:20
  know it has to be millions of millions of dollars, way way way above
• 1:11:24
  market price when it comes to the rental of Donald Trump's golf courses, because
• 1:11:30
  that's the entire business model of live golf, and the Saudis they grossly overpay
• 1:11:38
  for everything on purpose, and the incentive structure here couldn't be more obvious.
• 1:11:44
  This is like the greatest opportunity for money laundering and influence peddling I could ever
• 1:11:51
  possibly imagine, and doing it right out in front of everybody where in an
• 1:11:56
  undisclosed amount. Nobody, to my knowledge, is even asked Donald Trump,
• 1:12:00
  say how much money are you getting to rent out your golf courses to live
• 1:12:03
  golf four times in one summer. No one's even asked that. I would
• 1:12:09
  love to know the answer to it, and I would bet anything, speaking
• 1:12:13
  of Phil Mickelson, which I'll get to shortly, I would bet anything,
• 1:12:16
  and I'm not a better a better, I would bet anything that it's way
• 1:12:21
  way above market price. By the way, part of why I know it's
• 1:12:26
  above market price is that one of these events was added to the schedule late.
• 1:12:30
  So Donald Trump just said sure, with no notice. I mean he's
• 1:12:36
  that means he's got to blow out whatever it was supposed to happen that at
• 1:12:41
  his course for at least a week or two week period. He's just gonna
• 1:12:44
  give up one of his courses to live golf. For him to do that
• 1:12:48
  under no notice, he's got to get paid a lot of fucking money,
• 1:12:54
  and it's got to be way above market price for him to make a decision
• 1:12:57
  like that, lickety split. Now, the other part of this equation,
• 1:13:00
  which also gets lost, is he's not just taking money from the Saudi Arabian
• 1:13:04
  government. He's doing so in an effort to destroy an American institution, the
• 1:13:11
  Pgia Tour, which is a fucking charity. So Trump is taking millions of
• 1:13:15
  dollars from foreign what I would call adversarial oftentimes government in Saudi Arabia and helping
• 1:13:24
  to contribute to their Kamakazi attack against the American charity the PGIA Tour, and
• 1:13:31
  getting zero blowback for any of this. I mean, it's just absolutely amazing,
• 1:13:39
  and nobody ever mentions it. And that would have been amazing under normal
• 1:13:45
  circumstances, but it's particularly astonishing when this week, in conjunction with this live
• 1:13:54
  golf event in Bedminster, New Jersey, out came a new book, a
• 1:14:00
  new book about Phil Mickelson. Now, the book is written by a guy
• 1:14:04
  who was a very famous gambler, and the headlines so far are that this
• 1:14:12
  guy knew all about Phil Mickelson's gambling. Addiction of Phil Mickelson is on the
• 1:14:18
  Live Golf Tour. He basically was the guy who facilitated the LIV Golf Court
• 1:14:23
  Tour. He got paid the most money to go to the lib Golf Tour,
• 1:14:27
  reported about one hundred and fifty million dollars or thereabouts to go to the
• 1:14:30
  LIV Golf Tour, even though he's now technically a senior fifty two years old,
• 1:14:35
  way passed his prime, even though he won a major championship a couple
• 1:14:39
  of years ago, and fluke there but Phil Mickelson without Phil Mickelson, there
• 1:14:43
  is no live golf tour. Okay. So this book comes out former associate,
• 1:14:48
  very well known gambler at who tells the story of how many bets Phil
• 1:14:57
  Mickelson made and lost during his relationship with Michelson. And the headlines are all
• 1:15:03
  about Michelson bet a billion dollars on mostly sports events. He lost at least
• 1:15:10
  a hundred million dollars, which, if you know anything about betting, doesn't
• 1:15:14
  really surprise anybody. If you bet a billion dollars, and the vig as
• 1:15:18
  they call it, is generally ten percent over time. Being average, you're
• 1:15:25
  gonna lose ten percent of your money. Ten percent of a billion dollars is
• 1:15:29
  one hundred million dollars, so whatever I mean. So I guess he was
• 1:15:31
  an average better he's just bad at math, but he's a you know,
• 1:15:36
  Michelson has always been known as as somebody with a gambling addiction. He's acknowledged
• 1:15:42
  this. He used to bet for tons of money on tour during practice rounds
• 1:15:47
  and you know, in his friendly games in San Diego are legendary within the
• 1:15:53
  golf world. And so this book comes out and it alleges not just these
• 1:15:59
  maths of gambling debts, but also that Michelson tried to bet on the Ryder
• 1:16:06
  Cup, which is the biennial battle between the United States and Europe when it
• 1:16:15
  comes to golf, an event run by the PGA. He was gonna bet
• 1:16:17
  like four hundred thousand dollars on the United States to win the Ryder Cup,
• 1:16:23
  and the guy who wrote the book did not take the bet, saying you're
• 1:16:26
  crazy if you're not heard of Pete Rose basically, and Michaelson apparently said,
• 1:16:32
  okay, I won't make the bet. And Michelson has then subsequently said he
• 1:16:39
  never been on the Ryder Cup. So who knows what's true and what's not
• 1:16:42
  because I don't really trust Michelson's word here. But there's another element to the
• 1:16:46
  story, and this is where the news media and the sports media are completely
• 1:16:51
  blowing this. There's two there's a couple of different elements. Number one is
• 1:16:55
  okay, So now we have the best documentation yet of Phil Mickelson's betting problems
• 1:17:01
  and the financial difficulty that it was likely causing Phil Mickelson. So then why
• 1:17:09
  are we not reevaluating how and why Mickelson went to live golf. I mean,
• 1:17:16
  this isn't difficult, stop folks, if you've lost at least one hundred
• 1:17:21
  million dollars, which, even in Phil Mickelson's world, is a lot of
• 1:17:25
  money in gambling debts. And trust me, phil Mickelson's life costs a lot
• 1:17:29
  of money. I mean, have you seen his wife, have you seen
• 1:17:31
  his kids? You know, the private jet, you know, the whole
• 1:17:35
  the whole bit. It costs a lot of money to live Phil Mickelson's life.
• 1:17:40
  Okay, So even though he's made a lot of money on the course
• 1:17:43
  and off the course and endorsements, losing one hundred million dollars matters. And
• 1:17:48
  it's pretty interesting to me that if you do the math, you know what
• 1:17:53
  he got allegedly from Live Golf minus taxes is basically one hundred million dollars.
• 1:18:00
  So how is it, then, media that we're not going gee huh.
• 1:18:04
  We had suspected this previously, but now it's pretty clear the whole fucking reason
• 1:18:10
  why Phil Mickelson went to live was not out of some act of principle to
• 1:18:15
  try to change the essence of the evil PGA tour, but instead it was
• 1:18:20
  because he was trying to pay off as goddamn gambling debts. That's number one.
• 1:18:26
  I mean, literally On the day the story of this book broke out,
• 1:18:30
  Kick allegedly conservative sports outlet put out an article praising Phil Mickelson for what
• 1:18:38
  he had done to change the entire dynamic of the PGA tour, as if
• 1:18:43
  this entire movement to live was an act of principle, an act of principle.
• 1:18:47
  We're not living in such an upside down world. That's selling out the
• 1:18:50
  PGA tour, going for blood money to work for the Saudi royal family in
• 1:18:56
  a Kamakazi attack on the or that made you who you are, and doing
• 1:19:01
  so in a efort to help pay off your gambling debts. That's an act
• 1:19:06
  a fucking principle, now are you? Are you kidding me? That's that's
• 1:19:12
  how insane things have gotten. But there's another element to this. There's always
• 1:19:16
  a Trump element, folks. It's amazing how there's always a Trump element.
• 1:19:21
  So this is this The guy who wrote the book I've known about for a
• 1:19:27
  long time, and I'm I'm always very skeptical of things that I hear on
• 1:19:33
  the golf course or on golf driving ranges, because golfers, I think more
• 1:19:40
  than most people, especially at private country clubs, they seem to think that
• 1:19:43
  they're they're important, and that their information that they get is, you know,
• 1:19:47
  better than most people's, and therefore it's inherently truthful. Because I've heard
• 1:19:50
  a lot of bullshit stories from very prominent people on golf courses. I gotta
• 1:19:56
  say, frankly, part of how I think I got good discerning what's bullshit
• 1:20:00
  and what's real is because I've heard these types of stories from very prominent people
• 1:20:05
  that I was able to figure out weren't actually true. But several years ago,
• 1:20:12
  I got told by a person I considered to be incredible and certainly someone
• 1:20:15
  who is in the know in the golf world that this guy who just wrote
• 1:20:19
  the book was taking a dive on behalf of Phil Mickelson because of insider trading.
• 1:20:28
  And this is a guy who just had his federal conviction on insider trading
• 1:20:35
  charges on the last day of Donald Trump's administration. He had that insider trading
• 1:20:45
  sentence commuted by Donald Trump. And there were articles at the time Jeffrey Tube
• 1:20:53
  and Google it yourself, the guy from CNN and masturbation infamy, the guy
• 1:21:00
  who I considered to be a pretty credible legal mind. In twenty seventeen,
• 1:21:05
  he wrote a great article in Golf Digest outlining the connections between the guy who
• 1:21:11
  wrote the book, the insider trading, and how it is that Phil Mickelson
• 1:21:15
  was somehow miraculously able to avoid getting charged himself in the same insider trading scandal
• 1:21:25
  with the guy who just wrote the book and the guy who sentence was commuted
• 1:21:28
  by Donald Trump. Now, you know, with regard to the insider trading,
• 1:21:34
  it certainly seems as if this was all connected to Phil Mickelson's gambling debts.
• 1:21:43
  If you just think about it from a mob standpoint, you get a
• 1:21:45
  guy who is in debt for his gambling right now, he's vulnerable. Now
• 1:21:53
  he needs a way out. Well, he's looking for ways to make money,
• 1:21:58
  and they engage in this insider trading scheme. And it was told to
• 1:22:04
  me again seemingly incredibly, that this guy, the guy wrote the book,
• 1:22:10
  was taking the fall from Michelson. Well, now his sentence hasn't been commuted
• 1:22:15
  by Trump, he's out of jail. He writes this book, and the
• 1:22:20
  excerpts are out, but the book is not. And I gotta believe,
• 1:22:26
  I gotta believe that there's gonna be revelations once this book comes out in totality
• 1:22:31
  related to the insider trading element of this, because that's the way you would
• 1:22:35
  do this if you were creating publicity for a book. You put out the
• 1:22:41
  first story that's not your very best stuff, but it's juicy enough to get
• 1:22:45
  publicity. But you got to have a second act for when the book itself
• 1:22:49
  comes out. Otherwise it's nothing new here. So my gut tells me that
• 1:22:54
  this guy has now decided screw you, Phil Mickelson. You know I took
• 1:23:00
  to die for you, and you didn't reciprocate, or you didn't do what
• 1:23:03
  I thought the deal was, or whatever reason. The incentive structure has now
• 1:23:08
  changed, and I'm going to have my say. I don't know that,
• 1:23:11
  but that's what my gut tells me. But going back to this idea of
• 1:23:15
  conspiracies, right, and I hate conspiracies and I hate allegations without really strong
• 1:23:19
  evidence. But I want you to imagine how Trumpers and the right wing media
• 1:23:26
  would put these dots together if they involved Democrats, because what I'm about to
• 1:23:32
  tell you would be effectively, in their minds proof of an inherent scandal and
• 1:23:40
  conspiracy. So you have Phil Mickelson getting away at some level miraculously with this
• 1:23:46
  insider trading. The guy he's insider trading with takes the dive and goes to
• 1:23:53
  jail, his sentences commuted by Donald Trump on the last day office in twenty
• 1:24:00
  twenty one. Soon after that, Phil Mickelson leaves the PGA Tour to go
• 1:24:06
  to live golf again. I believe at least partially motivated by this need to
• 1:24:12
  pay off gambling debts and to make up for gambling debts. And you have
• 1:24:15
  Donald Trump, who not only gives out his golf courses that I'm sure very
• 1:24:20
  inflated prices to live golf, but he effectively becomes the pr agent for live
• 1:24:27
  golf. He even gets Tucker Carlson to come to a live golf event to
• 1:24:31
  do interviews with the live golf stars, including Greg Norman, something I chided
• 1:24:36
  Tucker Carlson for via text, and Tucker basically apologized to me that's not too
• 1:24:44
  strong a way to describe it, saying I probably shouldn't have done it.
• 1:24:46
  I don't really understand the story. I'm not a sports guy. I'm like
• 1:24:50
  Jesus Christ, Tucker, what the hell are you doing? He was clearly
• 1:24:55
  doing Trump's bidding, So Trump was showing the Saudies what he can do for
• 1:25:00
  them, loaning them his media apparatus and his cult as a base of support
• 1:25:08
  for their kamikaze effort to destroy the PGA Tour. And so when you put
• 1:25:13
  all these thoughts together, you got Trump and Michelson. By the way,
• 1:25:16
  Trump and Michelson were chumping chummy as hell this past weekend in Bedminster. All
• 1:25:23
  these dots again, doesn't prove conspiracy, doesn't prove a scandal, but it
• 1:25:29
  ought to at least raise some fucking questions. When you've got Trump in the
• 1:25:34
  tank for the Saudis, in the tank for live golf. Commuting the sentence
• 1:25:39
  of Phil Mickelson's insider trading partner, Michelson goes to the live tour and makes
• 1:25:45
  all this money. Trump's making all this money, and the Saudis are gaining
• 1:25:48
  who knows what kind of influence over Trump as well as fowarding their effort to
• 1:25:54
  destroy the PGA Tour. And the sports media is completely quiet about this,
• 1:26:00
  total silence and in the news media. And this is where Russia Gate really
• 1:26:04
  helps Trump. I really truly believe that, as I said early in this
• 1:26:10
  podcast, Trump Russia Gate was the best thing that ever happened to Trump,
• 1:26:14
  because now the news media is so terrified of connecting any dots that even seemingly
• 1:26:20
  sound like the whole Russia allegation that they won't do it because they don't want
• 1:26:27
  to get burned again. They were burned so badly on Russia Gate. And
• 1:26:30
  I have always felt that the real scandal with regard to Trump has got to
• 1:26:35
  be related to golf. That's where to me, and I realized that this
• 1:26:40
  is a subject that I'm passionate about and that I know a little bit more
• 1:26:44
  about. But when you look at the real red flags about Donald Trump's life,
• 1:26:48
  it's in the realm of golf. And when you look at his purchase
• 1:26:53
  of Turnberry in Scotland or draw in Miami, two places I have a lot
• 1:26:59
  of affinity for, they make no sense all of a sudden. He's paying
• 1:27:02
  massive amounts of cash when he's always done it via credit. He's doing it
• 1:27:06
  at a time period where he didn't seemingly have a lot of cash. I
• 1:27:11
  mean, not doesn't prove anything inherently, but there's some shady elements of that.
• 1:27:15
  There was some murmurs in the left wing media that investigations into Turnbury and
• 1:27:20
  Doral. We're gonna find Russian money behind that. That never came fully to
• 1:27:25
  fruition to my knowledge, But I got questions about that. I mean,
• 1:27:30
  golf is the biggest thing in Trump's life, especially now that these two old
• 1:27:32
  to have sex with Milannia. I mean, this guy is driven by attention,
• 1:27:39
  he's driven by money. He used to be driven by sex, and
• 1:27:42
  now that's been replaced by golf, which happens to a lot of guys when
• 1:27:44
  they get to that age. And so the reality here is, look at
• 1:27:48
  golf where you want if you want a real scandal with Donald Trump. To
• 1:27:53
  me, golf is always going to be part of it. And yet the
• 1:27:57
  media has been cowed, I think largely because of their fear of a redo
• 1:28:01
  of the Russia Gate in a situation, and also the lack of imagination and
• 1:28:05
  a lack of ability to connect the dots. But when it comes to Trump
• 1:28:10
  live and fill Michelson, it's not even that difficult. And I'll be very
• 1:28:14
  interested to see what ends up happening once this book comes out. In totality.
• 1:28:19
  With regard to gambling, though, this is another thing I want to
• 1:28:21
  mention, you know, because the gambling allegations, of course, is what
• 1:28:26
  everyone's latching on too, with Michaelson and then most of the media sports media
• 1:28:30
  saying, well, you know, he's admitted his addiction. It's an illness,
• 1:28:32
  he's got it behind him. What's the big deal. It is amazing
• 1:28:36
  to me how the perspective of sports gambling or gambling on sports has fundamentally changed
• 1:28:45
  in the last generation. I mean, we've gone from Pete Rose, the
• 1:28:49
  all time hit leader in baseball, being banned from baseball and the Hall of
• 1:28:55
  Fame seemingly forever because he bet on his own team to win. It seems
• 1:29:00
  as if the Cincinnati Reds there's no evidence to my knowledge that he ever bet
• 1:29:05
  on his team to lose, which to me would be completely different. I
• 1:29:09
  mean, betting on your team to win is problematic because if you get in
• 1:29:13
  trouble then you might reverse yourself. But so I'm not in favor of it,
• 1:29:17
  but it is fundamentally different than betting on your team to lose. But
• 1:29:23
  so we've completely wiped out Pete Rose, and now because the business models are
• 1:29:28
  all broken, everybody needs massive amounts of cash, and because betting is this
• 1:29:32
  untapped reservoir, sports leagues have completely in sports media have completely embraced gambling at
• 1:29:42
  every level, at every level, and no one seems to care, No
• 1:29:45
  one seems to think this is dangerous at all. I mean, currently there's
• 1:29:50
  a scandal going on at Iowa and Iowa State where football players we're betting on
• 1:29:56
  games in ways that were very, very dangerous. I mean, there's a
• 1:30:00
  there's a video of one Iowa football player scoring a touchdown and not reacting like
• 1:30:06
  he just scored a touchdown because it appears as if it destroyed his his bet
• 1:30:11
  on the under on the point total in the game. I mean, but
• 1:30:15
  this is and there's always been betting scandals in college sports back in the day
• 1:30:18
  when they weren't getting paid. But guess what happened when they were found out.
• 1:30:24
  When they were found out, it created massive amounts of outrage and negative
• 1:30:29
  media coverage and accountability and in some effort to try to stop it from happening.
• 1:30:34
  But now, over time, we have become so desensitized to gambling and
• 1:30:41
  the and the sports leagues and the media itself. I mean, ESPN just
• 1:30:45
  signed a massive deal with Penn Entertainment, which gave David Portnoy back bar Stool
• 1:30:51
  Sports where ESPN is now completely invested in gambling. I mean, and we
• 1:31:00
  used to understand, we used to understand this is a very slippery slope.
• 1:31:04
  When you change, you know, the mentality, when you change the rules,
• 1:31:10
  when you change the perception from gambling being evil and verboten to actually now
• 1:31:17
  gambling being good, it makes it incredibly easy for these kinds of things that
• 1:31:24
  used to be called scandals to manifest itself. I mean, my god,
• 1:31:29
  the idea that there's an NFL football team in Las Vegas now is astonishing to
• 1:31:35
  me. Not only is there an NFL team in Las Vegas, the Raiders
• 1:31:41
  their play by playing out so Brent Musburger, a guy who I've been a
• 1:31:44
  big fan of through most of his career, is a part owner in a
• 1:31:47
  casino in Las Vegas. I mean, so the lines are getting blurred so
• 1:31:54
  much that we've already had scandals in tennis and soccer and with an NBA referee.
• 1:32:02
  And I mean, the fact that the NFL still does not have full
• 1:32:05
  time officials who are some isolated and insulated from this is astonishing to me.
• 1:32:13
  I mean, to me, the bottom line and what I'm telling you is
• 1:32:16
  somewhat like the ticking Tom Bomb of a Maui or New Orleans. There is
• 1:32:21
  gonna be a massive betting scandal in sports, probably in the NFL, because
• 1:32:27
  that's the league where it matters the most in the not too distant future,
• 1:32:31
  if there hasn't been already. And let's be clear, the NFL is king
• 1:32:35
  right now largely because of both direct and indirect betting. If you took away
• 1:32:41
  fantasy football and the betting on games now being easier than it's ever been,
• 1:32:46
  the NFL would not be nearly as popular as it currently is because the connection
• 1:32:53
  between the communities and the teams has been dissipating and evaporating for quite a while.
• 1:32:59
  I'm amazed still exist as much as it does in most cases. I'm
• 1:33:02
  amazed that they're still able to pack stadiums with rabbit fans. But you know,
• 1:33:06
  people don't want to give it up and that it They don't want to
• 1:33:10
  believe that this is all just a business and it's all just a farce.
• 1:33:14
  But even that's with that being the reality, if you took away fantasy football
• 1:33:18
  and gambling, the NFL would not be nearly what it is. Sports in
• 1:33:23
  general would not be as lucrative or as popular as it is, and unfortunately
• 1:33:28
  now sports leagues are completely invested in and relying on gambling money. And we
• 1:33:34
  used to understand that this was dangerous. Now we simply don't care. And
• 1:33:40
  the media is a big part of this. It's a lot like commercials or
• 1:33:45
  advertising and the pharmaceutical companies with regard to the vaccines. Once you get ESPN
• 1:33:51
  and the rest of the media deeply invested in gambling, literally, guess what's
• 1:33:57
  going to happen. They're gonna embrace gambling. There's not going to be nearly
• 1:34:01
  the same kind of negative coverage about gambling, and gambling scandals aren't going to
• 1:34:08
  get nearly the same kind of play that they might ordinarily get. There's I
• 1:34:13
  think a pretty good analogy there between the way that the pharmaceutical companies coopted the
• 1:34:16
  news media on the COVID vaccines and the way that gambling money has co opted
• 1:34:21
  the sports media and the news media when it comes to the dangers of gambling
• 1:34:27
  in sports now. Speaking of Las Vegas, a couple of weeks ago,
• 1:34:32
  I referenced on this podcast that one of my top ten stories of all time
• 1:34:39
  is my interaction and probably maybe top five stories of all time is my interaction
• 1:34:44
  with the O J. Simpsons story, and I really it's such a long
• 1:34:49
  story, but it's so so very good that I never knew, Okay,
• 1:34:54
  when am I going to tell this story on the podcast? And in our
• 1:34:58
  last episode we kind of had storytime with Zig where I talked about this horrendous
• 1:35:03
  cheating scandal at the US Amateur Qualifier that I had personally experienced. If you
• 1:35:08
  haven't heard that, I urge you to go back and listen to episode seventy
• 1:35:12
  nine, the last half hour or so of that podcast. Well, I
• 1:35:17
  figured out that I have an excuse to tell my O J. Simpsons story.
• 1:35:21
  By the way, the reason I mentioned the O J. Simpsons story
• 1:35:25
  a couple of weeks ago was that I made the analogy between the tape in
• 1:35:30
  the Donald Trump Classified Documents case where everyone's happy and laughing and that supposedly is
• 1:35:36
  the smoking gun of a crime in that case, and I said, that's
• 1:35:40
  not going to hack it, especially to a Florida jury, because it doesn't
• 1:35:45
  feel like anything bad is happening, anything evil, anything illegal is occurring.
• 1:35:49
  Well, at the essence of the Los Vegas O. J. Simpson case
• 1:35:57
  is a very similar audio tape that was that was really the only evidence against
• 1:36:02
  OJ Simpson other than you know, eyewitness testimony. But the core evidence against
• 1:36:08
  O. J. Simpson in the Las Vegas case where he ended up going
• 1:36:11
  to prison for eight or nine years, was an audio tape which did sound
• 1:36:15
  like a crime was being committed. There was yelling, there was screaming,
• 1:36:19
  there was cursing, there was reference to a gun, there was reference to
• 1:36:24
  don't go anywhere or stay where you are, meaning that you know, that
• 1:36:27
  was consistent with a kidnapping with a weapon. And that's why O. J.
• 1:36:34
  Simpson was convicted and why he went to prison for much longer than he
• 1:36:39
  did when he killed two people back in nineteen ninety four, including his ex
• 1:36:43
  wife and her friend Ronald Goldman. Well, the reason why I'm going to
• 1:36:46
  talk about that today is that O. J. Simpson put out a video
• 1:36:51
  on his Twitter feed that's been seen by about five million people and got quite
• 1:36:58
  a bit of news coverage where he tried to make the comparison between his case
• 1:37:03
  in Las Vegas, where he went to prison and was actually sentenced for a
• 1:37:09
  much longer than he actually served. He was sentenced up to thirty three years
• 1:37:13
  in prison four for what was essentially the real charges were kidnapping. And but
• 1:37:20
  you know, in his mind, he was convicted of stealing his own stuff,
• 1:37:24
  back his own memorabilia. Now that's going to be important to my story
• 1:37:28
  as we go forward here. But the essence of the Las Vegas heist was
• 1:37:31
  that O. J. Simpson, in his mind, thought he was stealing
• 1:37:38
  back his own memorabilia, and he brought some thugs with him, and there
• 1:37:42
  was a gun, and the audio tape that I referenced basically was consistent with
• 1:37:47
  this being a kidnapping, and the judge through the book at him. I
• 1:37:55
  believe largely because of what happened in the nineteen ninety four double murder case,
• 1:38:00
  where OJ Simpson was acquitted for something that he clearly did, and that this
• 1:38:03
  was basically legal karma. But OJ decided to put out a video where he's
• 1:38:11
  comparis comparing his case in Las Vegas to another case that I hadn't even heard
• 1:38:15
  of in Las Vegas, where someone got much less time for having driven a
• 1:38:21
  car and obscene speeds and killing a woman and her dog. And OJ thought
• 1:38:28
  that this was outrageous and wanted of all people to express the two tier justice
• 1:38:34
  system. I guess between what he got in Las Vegas and what this other
• 1:38:39
  case got in Las Vegas. And here's what his video that got seen by
• 1:38:44
  millions of people sounded like, Hey, X world, it's me yours truly.
• 1:38:48
  Now, I know I went to college on a football scholarship, but
• 1:38:55
  somehow this map is not adding up to me. You're driving a car and
• 1:39:00
  roughly one hundred and sixty miles an hour on a public street and end up
• 1:39:08
  killing a girl and her dog, and you get three to ten years.
• 1:39:15
  You go to a hotel room that you're invited to to retrieve your own personal
• 1:39:21
  stolen property property I now have because it was ruled to be mine by the
• 1:39:27
  state of California, and you get nine two thirty three years, same courthouse,
• 1:39:38
  same city, same state. I don't know. Somehow it just does
• 1:39:45
  not add up to me. I've just said, all right, so we
• 1:39:51
  got O. J. Simpson trying to claim that he got a raw deal
• 1:39:56
  in comparison to this other case. Now, before I get into my story
• 1:40:00
  involving how I relate to the Las Vegas case as well as to the O.
• 1:40:03
  J. Simpsons story in general, let me just first say that OJ's
• 1:40:09
  comparison is not valid. First of all, these are very different allegations.
• 1:40:13
  But most importantly, there was a plea bargain in the case he referenced.
• 1:40:16
  He did not plea bargain. He went to trial and was convicted. And
• 1:40:21
  once that happens, that gives the judge a lot more latitude to throw the
• 1:40:27
  book at you. And again I am the first to acknowledge, because even
• 1:40:30
  though I have had incredible, unmitigated the stain for OJ Simpson from many decades,
• 1:40:36
  now, I am always objective and I am more than willing to acknowledge
• 1:40:42
  that OJ Simpson did get raw justice when it came to the Las Vegas heist.
• 1:40:48
  I don't know what he's referring to there when he says the state of
• 1:40:53
  California determined that the stuff that he was convicted of stealing or trying to steal
• 1:40:59
  in Las Vegas is actually his. I would like to know more about that,
• 1:41:01
  but I don't know the details on that. I'm going to presume that
• 1:41:05
  there's at least some level of truth to that, but I'm going to explain
• 1:41:10
  what he's referring to there as I tell my story. So there's some very
• 1:41:16
  small semblance of truth to what Simpson is claiming there with regard to how he
• 1:41:20
  was treated, But I have no problem with it, because sometimes under extraordinary
• 1:41:27
  circumstances, you gotta do what you gotta do, and the only way to
• 1:41:30
  get any semblance of justice in this case was for OJ to be punished to
• 1:41:35
  the full extent of the law, partially because of what he did in killing
• 1:41:42
  two people in nineteen ninety four. And what most people in the media don't
• 1:41:45
  understand is that the two cases are not just somewhat related, They're directly related.
• 1:41:56
  There's a straight line between O. J. Simpson killing two people in
• 1:42:01
  nineteen ninety four and getting away with it and what happened in the Las Vegas
• 1:42:06
  High situation, which ended up causing him to go to prison for far longer
• 1:42:10
  than he he was in jail for having killed two people. And there are
• 1:42:15
  a lot of important parts to that straight line, but I am one of
• 1:42:18
  them, and I'm probably one of the most significant parts of that straight line.
• 1:42:25
  And very few people even know about this story. So I'm gonna tell
• 1:42:29
  that to you now without trying to be as I'm going to try to do
• 1:42:33
  this in a streamlined as way as possible, with also without omitting any of
• 1:42:38
  the really good parts, because this whole story is just mind blowing, and
• 1:42:43
  I guarantee you've never heard anything like it. So let me start at the
• 1:42:45
  very very beginning. This story really begins for me when I'm I think in
• 1:42:51
  the second or third grade, and I'm a big Oj Simpson fan. I
• 1:42:56
  love the way he ran, I love the Buffalo Bill's uniforms. At that
• 1:43:00
  time, I was an Eagles fan. Eagles weren't very good in the mid
• 1:43:03
  seventies, and so OJ was probably my favorite football player. In fact,
• 1:43:08
  I put him on the cover of a school report that I did. I,
• 1:43:12
  you know, drew a very very poor depiction of OJ Simpson in game
• 1:43:17
  action in a Buffalo Bill's uniform. And so I was always a big fan
• 1:43:21
  of OJ, and you know he was he was okay announcer, okay actor
• 1:43:28
  in the Naked Gun movies after his retirement. But I had always had affinity
• 1:43:32
  for OJ. I always thought, by the way, it was great that
• 1:43:36
  white America was willing and able to embrace a black celebrity. And I think
• 1:43:43
  that was really OJ's greatest social significance was people forget that he may have been
• 1:43:49
  the first black athlete to really truly break through. I mean, other black
• 1:43:55
  athletes had had done, you know, significant things when it came to commercials
• 1:44:00
  and being popular in the white community, but I'm not sure anyone ever broke
• 1:44:03
  through in such a big way as OJ Simpson did. And so he was
• 1:44:10
  significant from a cultural standpoint because of that. And so when I first heard
• 1:44:16
  about what occurred in Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman in nineteen ninety four,
• 1:44:21
  I'll never forget it. I was playing in a golf tournament in Ohio and
• 1:44:26
  there was a very tiny little blurb in the USA today. Because of course
• 1:44:30
  this happened late at night, I don't even know how it got into the
• 1:44:32
  into the paper the next day. I think it was the next day.
• 1:44:35
  I think it was that Monday, after the murders, but whenever, there
• 1:44:39
  was just an incredibly small blurb about Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman being murdered
• 1:44:45
  at her home. I immediately, and this was not rocket scientists. I
• 1:44:49
  immediately thought, oh, it doesn't look good for OJ, and incredibly long
• 1:44:56
  story short, it quickly became very obvious that Oja had done. He was
• 1:45:00
  obviously guilty as hell. I mean, the evidence was overwhelming you know,
• 1:45:06
  there's so many different things that people to this day, and as you probably
• 1:45:10
  know if you followed me, almost every big story I do a deep dive
• 1:45:15
  into, and I did about a personal and big deep a dive into ojas
• 1:45:19
  as any other story I've ever been somewhat involved with. You know, I
• 1:45:26
  have been to the crime scene. I mean my college girlfriend and I who
• 1:45:32
  she was living in Los Angeles at the time. I came to visit her
• 1:45:35
  and we went through the whole scenario of that night. We had dinner at
• 1:45:39
  the old met Saluna restaurant, which does not exist anymore. I think Dennis
• 1:45:44
  Quaid was eating dinner right next to us. I think it was Dennis Quaide,
• 1:45:46
  some Hollywood celebrity. We went from there to the crime scene and then
• 1:45:49
  to Rockingham where OJ lived, and and OJ was even there that night.
• 1:45:56
  I dropped a letter over his his his eight because I wanted to know how
• 1:46:01
  much I despised him. Because this was after the acquittal, which I was
• 1:46:06
  absolutely appalled by, although I had predicted that it would happen because I did
• 1:46:12
  not trust the jury and I thought it was just a complete indictment of the
• 1:46:16
  entire judicial system in our media and I was completely outraged by the whole thing.
• 1:46:23
  By the way, in touring the crime scene and his home, I
• 1:46:28
  actually learned quite a bit about how and why we knew OJ was guilty.
• 1:46:33
  The number one thing is when you go to Rockingham where OJ lived, I
• 1:46:40
  have never seen streets this narrow in my life. I mean the streets on
• 1:46:46
  where he used to live on Rockingham were so narrow that it basically made a
• 1:46:51
  key piece of testimony by the limo driver impossible for OJ to be innocent,
• 1:46:59
  because the como driver had described that when he pulled up to Rockingham there was
• 1:47:02
  no white Ford Bronco there, and then there was a white Ford Bronco there
• 1:47:08
  parked very poorly, which was clearly OJ quickly pulling up after having killed two
• 1:47:13
  people and scurrying out of his of his car going the back way, going
• 1:47:18
  past Kato Kaylan's apartment, hitting the air conditioning unit and dropping one of the
• 1:47:26
  bloody gloves by accident because he knew that the limo driver was there and he
• 1:47:30
  didn't want the limo driver to be able to see him going into his own
• 1:47:32
  house. Well, when you go to Rockingham, there's absolutely positively no chance
• 1:47:38
  that Alan parks. The limo driver didn't see the Bronco. I'm not even
• 1:47:42
  sure you could have driven a limo past the Bronco without hitting it. The
• 1:47:47
  streets are so narrow. But anyway, the point here is that I had
• 1:47:51
  always known that OJ was incredibly guilty. I was outraged beyond all comprehend that
• 1:48:00
  he got away with this, and he got away with this by claiming that
• 1:48:02
  it was racism and by dividing the nation. I thought it was an insult
• 1:48:08
  to every black person that had ever been wrongly convicted of anything in this country,
• 1:48:13
  or that ever been mistreated because of their race. I mean oj sins.
• 1:48:15
  It was literally the last person in the planet that deserved to be getting
• 1:48:18
  the benefit of our past racial sins. And I was so upset by this
• 1:48:26
  that and people I'm sure will misinterpret what I'm about to tell you, but
• 1:48:30
  I was fired from a TV job because of what I said about OJ Simpson's
• 1:48:35
  trial. And I was a TV sportscaster and at the Fox affiliate in Raleigh
• 1:48:43
  Durham, North Carolina. Now, back then, Fox affiliates had a very
• 1:48:47
  high percentage of black audience, especially in a place like Raleigh Dorham, and
• 1:48:54
  I had introduced a Bear's forty nine Ers playoff game by in the forty nine
• 1:48:59
  Ers ended up in the Super Bowl that year. I said that anybody who
• 1:49:01
  thought that the Bears had a chance to win this game must also believe in
• 1:49:04
  Santa Claus the tooth Fairy in OJ Simpson's innocence, and that I thought was
• 1:49:11
  a funny line. We were, you know, that was kind of the
• 1:49:15
  jive of the Fox affiliates back then, was to kind of be outlandish and
• 1:49:20
  trying to be funny whatever. And we had a black female main news anchor
• 1:49:26
  who got very upset by this, and I think she leaked it to a
• 1:49:30
  black columnist at the Raleigh Durham newspaper, Barry Saunders was his name, and
• 1:49:38
  he tried to make this into a racial issue. He misquoted me, never
• 1:49:42
  even talked to me before he wrote his column, and I ended up getting
• 1:49:45
  fired from the job, which was classic John Zigler. I mean, I
• 1:49:48
  get fired for making a joke about O. J. Simpson's lack of innocence
• 1:49:53
  when he's obviously guilty. Now you might think that that's partially why I have
• 1:49:59
  a vendetta again O. J. Simpson, It's actually not because I hated
• 1:50:01
  the job. I mean it was a great in theory, it was a
• 1:50:04
  great gig. I mean, being an on air TV sportscaster in a really
• 1:50:08
  good sports market like Raleigh Durham, North Carolina, you would think that would
• 1:50:13
  be awesome. But I was going through a lot in my life. My
• 1:50:15
  mother had just been killed in a car accident in September of nineteen ninety four,
• 1:50:19
  and so I probably got the job offer like like the couple days later.
• 1:50:26
  It was just I should never have even gone. It was just a
• 1:50:29
  terrible time. My boss, the guy who brought me in, a sportscaster
• 1:50:33
  by the name of Bobby Estol, who I had worked with in Boston,
• 1:50:38
  got very ill almost as soon as I got down there, and so I
• 1:50:42
  was working seven days a week as the TV sportscaster, and so it was
• 1:50:45
  just a bad situation. So I really the only thing that the firing did
• 1:50:50
  with regard to my view of OJ was that it left me unemployed and alone
• 1:50:57
  with nothing to do during the actual trial, and so I became completely obsessed
• 1:51:03
  with the trial, like a lot of people did. I mean to absurd
• 1:51:06
  degrees, and I mean I remember watching Haraldo Rivera's show, not just live,
• 1:51:13
  but I would watch again when they replayed it, which was completely insane.
• 1:51:17
  And so I know everything there is to know about the case. And
• 1:51:21
  again it was obvious, beyond all comprehension that O. J. Simpson was
• 1:51:25
  guilty as hell, to the point where and this was classic six degrees of
• 1:51:30
  John Ziegler. I would play golf in Raleigh with a lawyer occasionally. He
• 1:51:36
  was friends with two guys I would play with every single week, two very
• 1:51:40
  good friends of mine who were a therapists. And I was going through a
• 1:51:43
  deep depression because of my mother's car accident, and I'm sure the firing didn't
• 1:51:47
  help. And now I'm alone in a place where I don't know anybody,
• 1:51:51
  and I'm having some really dark, dark thoughts. And my friends helped put
• 1:51:58
  me on anti depression depressed the presence on Zoloft. And this person that we
• 1:52:04
  played golf with was a guy in my the name of Joe Cheshire. Well,
• 1:52:09
  Joe Cheshire would eventually later become very famous as the lawyer who helped get
• 1:52:15
  the Duke lacrosse players off the hook in that whole scandal, which was fascinating
• 1:52:20
  because Joe Cheshire was a huge North Carolina fan. I think I believe a
• 1:52:26
  graduate and here he was saving the Duke lacrosse players well before Duke Lacrosse.
• 1:52:32
  Joe Cheshire playing a significant role in the O. J. Simpson case because
• 1:52:38
  he was the guy who worked for the Dream Team to get the infamous Mark
• 1:52:43
  Furman N word tapes out of North Carolina. Basically what happened was Johnny Cochrane
• 1:52:48
  arrogantly tried to get them out of North Carolina. There was an old I
• 1:52:55
  guess you'd call it an old school Southern boy judge who didn't like Johnny Cochrane
• 1:53:00
  for reasons that you can interpret for yourself, and originally said go go pound
• 1:53:04
  sand I'm not letting you force these tapes out of North Carolina. So then
• 1:53:10
  the Dream Team decided they needed a white guy from North Carolina to help them
• 1:53:13
  get the tapes out, and Joe was hired to do that, and Joe
• 1:53:15
  got him out and it played a significant role in the case. Anyway,
• 1:53:19
  Joe and I would go back and forth all the time about the OJ case,
• 1:53:25
  and I would chide him about his role in it, and Joe knew.
• 1:53:29
  Joe knew that OJ was guilty, and at one point I even half
• 1:53:34
  jokingly, half seriously asked Joe whether or not when OJ gets acquitted, if
• 1:53:41
  I go and assassinate OJ, will you defend me and argue during null vacation,
• 1:53:45
  because I think I can get acquitted that way. Now, Joe didn't
• 1:53:48
  know exactly how to interpret that. You looked at our two friends, the
• 1:53:53
  therapists. They were like, he might be serious. We're not sure,
• 1:53:56
  but this is This is the level to which I was completely outraged by the
• 1:54:01
  entire OJ Simpson matter, and how positive I was that he was guilty and
• 1:54:08
  that something needed to be done to make sure there was some semblance of justice.
• 1:54:13
  So, long story short, I go in to talk radio and I
• 1:54:15
  bounce around, and eventually I come out here to Los Angeles in two thousand
• 1:54:20
  and four. Now this is, you know, a decade after the killings,
• 1:54:27
  and OJ has been acquitted, but he's also been found liabel in the
• 1:54:31
  civil case by the Goldman family, which gave some semblance of accountability. I
• 1:54:38
  mean, wasn't nearly what a conviction should have been, but you know,
• 1:54:43
  at least it was something. But it was always in my mind that I
• 1:54:46
  wanted there to be some real accountability to for what OJ Simpson did and killing
• 1:54:54
  two people and dividing the country along racial lines in order to get away with
• 1:54:59
  it. So one day, I was living in Burbank, California at the
• 1:55:02
  time. One day I read in the local Burbank paper that there's a sports
• 1:55:10
  memorabilia shop that is going to be hosting an autograph session with O. J.
• 1:55:15
  Simpson. Now, to my knowledge, that had never happened since the
• 1:55:20
  acquittals. Never anywhere had OJ Simpson done a public autograph session. And as
• 1:55:28
  fate would have it, this sports memorabilia shop was literally less than a thousand
• 1:55:34
  yards from my apartment in Burbank. So when I read this, I was
• 1:55:40
  like, this is not going to happen. And I was working as a
• 1:55:44
  talk show host on kf KFI at the time at the time, the number
• 1:55:48
  one talk station in the country, very large audience in Los Angeles, and
• 1:55:53
  a station that had been very much associated with the idea that OJ Simpson was
• 1:55:58
  guilty. So I went down to the sports member billio shop, which I
• 1:56:02
  want to be owned by a guy who was a director at the local NBC
• 1:56:06
  news affiliate in Los Angeles, which is also in Burbank at the time,
• 1:56:12
  and I said, are you are you the person in charge here and he
• 1:56:15
  said yes, Benny was his name. And I said, okay, let
• 1:56:20
  me give this to you straight. And this is not hyperbole. This is
• 1:56:24
  exactly what I said to him. I said, I saw the ad in
• 1:56:27
  the paper regarding the O. J. Simpson event. This can go down
• 1:56:30
  one of two ways. You can either cancel the O J. Simpson autograph
• 1:56:36
  event, or you can do the O J. Simpson Autograph event. However,
• 1:56:42
  if you do it, it will be done over my dead body.
• 1:56:47
  And I mean I was looking at him straight in the eye. I was
• 1:56:49
  not laughing, I was not smiling. I was being as serious as a
• 1:56:53
  heart attack. And I think he got the message because his reaction was basically,
• 1:56:58
  okay, let me tell you who's really in charge of this thing.
• 1:57:02
  I said, please do that, because I can assure you this is not
• 1:57:05
  going to happen, at least not on my watch. It's not going to
• 1:57:09
  happen on my watch. I mean I was. I was willing to go
• 1:57:12
  to the mat to make sure because I did not want a precedent set that,
• 1:57:16
  especially in my fucking backyard. This was going to be the first place
• 1:57:19
  where J. Simpson was going to be able to make money after the acquittals
• 1:57:25
  by signing autographs. And I knew that once he got away with it once
• 1:57:29
  he would be able to do it all over the country. And so this
• 1:57:32
  was just not going to happen. So Benny gave me the name of Alfred
• 1:57:36
  Beardsley and he said, this is the guy who's sponsoring this event. So
• 1:57:44
  I call Alfred Beardsley, and this is where things really start to get wild.
• 1:57:48
  So Alfred Beardsley is clearly, in my view as soon as I'm talking
• 1:57:56
  to him, he's a nut. I would later come to believe that Alfred
• 1:58:00
  Bearsley was multiple personalities. He was part naif, part nut, part con
• 1:58:10
  man, but mostly he was somebody who just really wanted to be loved and
• 1:58:16
  he really wanted to be important. And I explained to Alfred Bearsley after he
• 1:58:23
  told me a little bit about what his plans were with OJ, I said,
• 1:58:27
  you're not going to be able to do this. I am going to
• 1:58:29
  stop this. And I explained why I was going to stop this, and
• 1:58:32
  he said, well, why don't you have me on your radio show and
• 1:58:38
  we can talk about it. I'm like, okay, fine, So I
• 1:58:42
  have him on the radio show on KFI and I explained to him exactly what
• 1:58:47
  I had done in private. I said, Alfred, you're not going to
• 1:58:50
  be able to do this. I will bet you. I will bet you
• 1:58:55
  a thousand dollars to the Goldman family because at this point, the Golden family
• 1:59:00
  had not received to my knowledge a dime from from the judgment they had gotten
• 1:59:04
  from the civil trial against OJ Simpson because he wasn't paying it and going to
• 1:59:10
  great lens to not pay it. But I said, I will bet you
• 1:59:12
  a thousand dollars, which I will give to the Goldman family if in fact
• 1:59:18
  you know I'm right about this, that this is not going to happen,
• 1:59:21
  because because I'm going to make sure it doesn't happen. And he agreed to
• 1:59:25
  the bet. Well, long story short after me uh, you know,
• 1:59:30
  going balls to the wall on the air to create publicity surrounding this situation.
• 1:59:36
  The event was in fact canceled and Alfred Bearsley Classic Alfred Bearsley. He sent
• 1:59:44
  me a check for the Goldman's but it was only for one hundred dollars because
• 1:59:48
  he tried to claim that that was what the bet was for. It was
• 1:59:50
  not. It was a thousand dollars I would never have been one hundred dollars.
• 1:59:54
  That would have been meaningless. But I did send the check to Fred
• 1:59:59
  gold the father of Ron Goldman, for one hundred dollars from Alfred Bearsley,
• 2:00:05
  which I was quite proud of because at least symbolically, this was a situation
• 2:00:11
  where directly because of what had occurred, and Beardsley was clearly a big supporter
• 2:00:15
  of OJ Simpson and loved OJ Simpson, and I would later learn was integral
• 2:00:21
  in OJ Simpson's plot during the criminal trial to be able to raise money for
• 2:00:28
  his defense by selling off autographs, because that's what Beardsley's alleged trade was,
• 2:00:33
  was the memorabilia business. Now, it should be pointed out that when I
• 2:00:38
  started to raise Kane about this issue, I got contacted by Kim Goldman,
• 2:00:44
  Ronald Goldman's sister. Kim Goldman was probably most well known because not only was
• 2:00:49
  she Ron Goldman's sister and outspoken critic of OJ Simpson. But when OJ Simpson
• 2:00:56
  gets acquitted, when you hear the reaction into the verdict, you can't help
• 2:01:01
  but here Kim Goldman's sobbing, and Kim Goldman's sobbing in the camera almost immediately
• 2:01:08
  pans over to her in her father's lap, completely crestfallen because she has just
• 2:01:14
  witnessed a man she knows killed her brother and obviously his ex wife get away
• 2:01:21
  with murder in front of the whole country. So Kim contacts me and thanks
• 2:01:28
  me for what I'm doing, and we start to become friends, and we
• 2:01:32
  ended up dating fairly significantly. And I have to acknowledge that way back at
• 2:01:39
  the trial, I had a little bit of a crush on Kim Goldman one.
• 2:01:42
  I thought she was cute too, because I think I had this I've
• 2:01:45
  never had an empathy or sympathy crush before, but I certainly admired what she
• 2:01:49
  and her family was trying to do with regard to accountability and O. J.
• 2:01:54
  Simpson. But we started to pretty seriously date for a fairly extended period
• 2:01:59
  of time. I mean I even gotten to know her son fairly well,
• 2:02:02
  took him swimming at the club a few times, tried to teach him how
• 2:02:04
  to play golf. I mean, we were really really close friends. It
• 2:02:12
  was more of a friendship than a romantic relationship, but we were, you
• 2:02:15
  know, we were romantically involved for quite a while. And and I even
• 2:02:20
  I think I probably even had thoughts that maybe we would get married someday.
• 2:02:26
  That was never gonna work, largely because she's much, much, much more
• 2:02:29
  liberal politically than I am. But I had a lot of respect for her
• 2:02:34
  and her dad for what they were trying to do to stand up to O.
• 2:02:38
  J. Simpson. Just to finish the Kim Goldman story, she would
• 2:02:42
  end up coming to my wedding, which was a sore point still to this
• 2:02:46
  day from my wife, not just because Kim and I used to seriously date,
• 2:02:50
  but because my wife really hated Kim. Because Kim had come to a
• 2:02:55
  movie event of mine and they went to the bathroom at the same time,
• 2:03:00
  and my wife overheard Kim making some disparaging comments about John's girlfriends. So there's
• 2:03:08
  a there's a not a real good situation there, and Kim and I are
• 2:03:11
  no longer in touch, largely because of that. But the Kim Goldman aspect
• 2:03:15
  of this is an important part of the story from a lot of different perspectives,
• 2:03:20
  and it definitely continued to keep me involved in this chase for accountability.
• 2:03:28
  Now, I thought for a while that this story was over, but then
• 2:03:31
  all of a sudden, because I thought we had been victorious and that OJ
• 2:03:36
  had lost and that there wouldn't be another LA based autograph session. But then
• 2:03:42
  we get word that OJ Simpson is going to try again to do an autograph
• 2:03:45
  session, this time at a horror film convention in Northridge in the middle of
• 2:03:53
  the summer. And long story short, I find out that this event is
• 2:03:59
  being answered not by Alfred Beardsley, but by Thomas Riccio. Now, Riccio
• 2:04:04
  turns out to be a complete, completely different breed of cat and I was
• 2:04:10
  naive about him, and I had him on the show to ride him and
• 2:04:15
  basically go through the same thing I did with Beardsley, that we're going to
• 2:04:18
  try to shut this thing down. And he claimed on the air that I
• 2:04:23
  had have full access to the entire event, that I could interview OJ,
• 2:04:30
  that I could go anywhere I wanted, you know, unrestricted, and you
• 2:04:33
  know, have at it. And he, you know, basically was portraying
• 2:04:38
  it that he wasn't really even an OJ supporter, that this was just kind
• 2:04:41
  of just happening, and you know, he really didn't care one way or
• 2:04:45
  another if it went well for OJ. That was at least the perception he
• 2:04:48
  was creating. And so myself and my producer and my co host at the
• 2:04:56
  time, a woman by the name of Leah Brandon. I think they This
• 2:05:00
  was on a Saturday. We all go down on our day off to this
• 2:05:03
  horror film convention in Northridge in the summer where it's one hundred and ten decrees
• 2:05:10
  and this place has no air conditioning, and we show up in order to
• 2:05:14
  try to confront OJ and to try to stop OJ from getting away with this,
• 2:05:19
  because at the very least I want there to be an incident. I
• 2:05:23
  want there to be an incident so that that reputable autograph dealers across the country
• 2:05:29
  don't decide that it's safe to allow OJ Simpson to make money from his name
• 2:05:33
  and likeness. So I need there to be an incident that's known across the
• 2:05:40
  country that sends a signal. At the very least, that's my goalf.
• 2:05:43
  I can't shut the whole thing down. I need there to be an incident.
• 2:05:45
  So when we show up, the three of us, we see a
• 2:05:48
  group of police officers I believe they were LAPD I think they were, And
• 2:05:54
  so we go over to the police officers and we explain who we are.
• 2:05:59
  They know, at least, you know, certainly of KFI and I don't
• 2:06:01
  know if they remember who I am or not they I'm always presuming at this
• 2:06:05
  point that when I've talked about something on the air and police show up,
• 2:06:11
  that it's probably because of me. I don't know if that was why or
• 2:06:14
  not, but it certainly probably contributed to it. But the memorable part of
• 2:06:17
  the interaction with the police was one of us asked, I think probably me,
• 2:06:23
  So was the killer here yet? I remember this is this is a
• 2:06:27
  group of three or four police officers, and I say to them, as
• 2:06:30
  the killer here yet? And one of them responds, and I think the
• 2:06:33
  guy might even been a black police officer, which made this so much better.
• 2:06:40
  I can't be sure about that, but in my memory he was a
• 2:06:42
  black police officer, and he says, no, but we already have dropped
• 2:06:45
  a bloody glove just to be safe, which which was not only hilariously funny,
• 2:06:53
  but it also to me the most important part of that was that was
• 2:06:56
  a green light. I now knew I had a green light to create as
• 2:07:00
  much trouble as I possibly could, because the police were not gonna side with
• 2:07:06
  OJ Simpson over me in any sort of dispute, So that was important.
• 2:07:12
  So again, long story short, we get into this horror film convention.
• 2:07:16
  It's hot as hell. OJ eventually shows up, and you know, this
• 2:07:21
  is two thousand and what was it two thousand and six, I guess it
• 2:07:27
  was, And so you know, we don't have the same cell phone technology.
• 2:07:30
  Unfortunately, we're not even we don't even have cell phone videos or your
• 2:07:35
  camera phones. Because this was a great video story of it, and we
• 2:07:40
  had had full video of all this in today's era, this would have gone
• 2:07:44
  super viral. But instead we only had audio, and the audience just doesn't
• 2:07:47
  do it justice. But we have all sorts of audio of me confronting OJ
• 2:07:53
  and asking him why he killed two people and you know, why people should
• 2:07:58
  be paying for his autograph, and and all this time he's running away from
• 2:08:01
  me, and he's got these goons that are blocking my path, and he's
• 2:08:05
  going upstaircases and they're stopping so he can get away, like they're his offensive
• 2:08:11
  line from the Buffalo Bills. And I'm literally trying to go underneath their legs,
• 2:08:15
  under these goons to get to OJ, unsuccessfully, And so I decided
• 2:08:20
  to stop that effort, and I reverse course and I go back to where
• 2:08:26
  we thought OJ was going to be signing the autographs up in this basically this
• 2:08:31
  attic of this fire hazard at this horror film convention in Northridge. And by
• 2:08:37
  the time I get to where the entryway is to where OJ is going to
• 2:08:41
  be signing the autographs, there's goons there blocking the way. Again, Riccio
• 2:08:48
  had completely lied to me about about whether or not I would be unrestricted by
• 2:08:54
  the way. He also lied, you know, when he says to me
• 2:08:58
  that I don't have the right to be recording anything, which is important for
• 2:09:01
  reasons that the weecome obvious later with regard to what a snake this guy is
• 2:09:07
  and what a hypocrite he is. But he was very concerned about me tape
• 2:09:11
  recording his customers and tape recording OJ and all this bullshit. So for the
• 2:09:16
  next at least twenty to thirty minutes I engage in what if it was on
• 2:09:22
  video, would have been one of the most hilarious things you've ever seen in
• 2:09:24
  your life. Where I think I'm trying to get to where OJ is signing
• 2:09:28
  autographs this little staircase and there's these three or four three hundred pound goons who
• 2:09:35
  are blocking my way, and we start to engage in basically a rugby match
• 2:09:43
  where I don't even know what the hell I'm trying to do. I'm just
• 2:09:48
  trying to create a disturbance where and I'm also trying to block people from getting
• 2:09:54
  to where OJ can sign the autographs. And I mean this audio again not
• 2:09:58
  nearly as good this video would have been, but it's hilarious because you hear
• 2:10:01
  me talking about how badly these goons smell, and you know, you hear
• 2:10:05
  the grunts of the rugby match, and once again I'm trying to get underneath
• 2:10:11
  their legs and all this is unsuccessful. Now, Unfortunately, my producer,
• 2:10:18
  good guy by name of Jason Nathanson, whos actually has a very high profile
• 2:10:22
  job at ABC Radio. Now, he kind of panicked because he had information
• 2:10:28
  that really would have been important to me, but he never gave it to
• 2:10:31
  me. And that was that. Literally, as this was happening, as
• 2:10:37
  I'm I'm I don't know if I'm trying to get to where OJ is or
• 2:10:41
  just blocking the way for people to get to where he is so we can't
• 2:10:45
  sign autographs. Unbeknownst to me, O J. Simpson is about eight feet
• 2:10:50
  away from me, right around the corner waiting for this whole situation to die
• 2:10:56
  down so we can get to where he can sign autographs. Now. Had
• 2:11:01
  I known that, Had I known that, I would have packed a lunch
• 2:11:05
  and stayed there all day. But I didn't know that until it was too
• 2:11:11
  late. When I finally gave up realizing, you know, I mean,
• 2:11:13
  we're all sweating like hell, and there doesn't seem to be anything that is
• 2:11:20
  happening to this productive here there. Now, there was an inside I think
• 2:11:24
  it was Inside Edition news camera there and they got a story about this,
• 2:11:28
  which I felt like was a success that. You know, That's what I
• 2:11:33
  wanted. I wanted there to be some news story out there that there had
• 2:11:37
  been a disturbance or an episode they were also at that point was some pushback
• 2:11:41
  I can't remember how much from the police or from the security, and I
• 2:11:46
  felt like, Okay, I've pushed it enough, because if I go too
• 2:11:50
  far, even these anti O. J. Simpson police officers are gonna have
• 2:11:54
  to do something against me. So I eventually waived the white flag, and
• 2:11:58
  then I realized, fuck, that actually gave OJ the opening to run through
• 2:12:05
  the line and get to where I needed to go to sign these stupid autographs.
• 2:12:09
  So the whole event was I don't know. It wasn't a total disaster.
• 2:12:15
  It created a lot of hilarious radio. Like I said, video would
• 2:12:18
  have been better, and it also at least got out there into the national
• 2:12:22
  ether that this didn't happen without incident. So that was my primary goal.
• 2:12:26
  I didn't want the signal to be out there that it was now coast is
• 2:12:30
  clear for O J. Simpson to be signing autographs post acquittal in this now
• 2:12:37
  two thousand and six. So once again I thought, all right, I
• 2:12:41
  don't know if I succeeded. I know I did the best I could kind
• 2:12:45
  of the story of my life. But I thought the story was over with.
• 2:12:48
  Now we fast forward another I don't know how long it was at least
• 2:12:52
  a few months. It could have been a year, because now we're in
• 2:12:54
  the year two thousand and seven, and all of a sudden, the story
• 2:13:00
  he breaks that O. J. Simpson has been arrested in Las Vegas,
• 2:13:03
  Nevada. For you know, basically, I guess theft and gun possession and
• 2:13:09
  kidnapping, and that it had to deal with a heist involving sports memorabilia.
• 2:13:18
  And when I heard that, I was like Holy shit, this has to
• 2:13:24
  be Alfred Beardsley and Thomas Riccio. At least one of them have to be
• 2:13:31
  involved in this, and sure enough, both of them were at the heart
• 2:13:35
  of the whole deal. And basically the untold story of the Las Vegas heist
• 2:13:41
  that would put OJ Simpson in prison after he escaped from being convicted in the
• 2:13:48
  double murder is that because of the efforts by the Goldman family to hold Simpson
• 2:13:56
  accountable by making sure he could not do business above ground with reputable people,
• 2:14:03
  O. J. Simpson was forced to go underground and deal with these scumbags
• 2:14:07
  in order to generate some revenue that the Goldman's could not get a hold of
• 2:14:13
  because of the the the judgment in the civil case against him, and so
• 2:14:20
  that forced OJ underground. And because I had created a disturbance one with the
• 2:14:26
  Alpha Bearsley event and two with the Thomas Chio event, it created a massive
• 2:14:31
  rift between Bearsley and Chio because unbeknownst to me, that first event that I
• 2:14:39
  had gotten canceled was not just sponsored by Alph Bearsley, it was also Thomas
• 2:14:46
  Ricchio. They were business partners at the time, and when I got the
• 2:14:52
  first event canceled, It created not just a rift between Riccio and Bearsley,
• 2:14:58
  it caused Reach to despise Beardsley with a white hot passion. And more importantly
• 2:15:05
  than that, it caused Riccio to start recording every interaction that he had with
• 2:15:13
  Beardsley. And it was Richio that was recording that day in Las Vegas when
• 2:15:20
  this heist happened, and is the reason why the audio tape exists. Putting
• 2:15:26
  O J. Simpson behind bars because of what happened in Las Vegas and what
• 2:15:33
  really transpired there is really comical. I mean it really is comical because here's
• 2:15:37
  what really happened. You got out for Beardsley, who has a bunch of
• 2:15:41
  O. J. Simpson memorabilia. Now how he got that memorabilia is still
• 2:15:50
  a matter of question to me, because OJ thinks he gave it to Beardsley
• 2:15:56
  for safe keeping. Beardsley believed it was because it was payment for Bearsley's role
• 2:16:03
  in helping OJ get money to pay his defense during his trial. These were
• 2:16:09
  things like, for instance, O. J. Simpson's acquittal suit, the
• 2:16:15
  suit he wore in that famous video when he was acquitted. This was Bearsley's
• 2:16:20
  prized possession of his life was that he was in possession of O. J.
• 2:16:24
  Simpson's acquittal suit. There were other things that were more related to OJ
• 2:16:30
  Simpson's playing career, but Beardsley thought they were his. And what I think
• 2:16:35
  happened here is that Riccio set up Beardsley and even set up OJ. Now
• 2:16:41
  to what motivation, I'm not sure, because Bearsley's a snake among snakes among
• 2:16:46
  steakes. He's one of the worst people I've ever had any contact with.
• 2:16:50
  By he ends up selling that audio tape to TMZ for a hell of a
• 2:16:54
  lot of money. So the only person that made any money out of this
• 2:16:56
  whole thing was Thomas Riccio. But he he basically lies to both Beardsley and
• 2:17:03
  Oja. Beardsley thinks he is meeting with an O. J. Simpson collector,
• 2:17:11
  not OJ himself, so that's what draws him to this hotel room in
• 2:17:18
  Las Vegas Casino. OJ thinks he is going to take back stuff that's in
• 2:17:24
  his mind his so RICHO is setting both Bearsley and Oja up and along the
• 2:17:31
  way they pick up a couple of goons. One guy didn't even know what
• 2:17:35
  the hell he was involved with. He got screwed more than anybody. He
• 2:17:39
  ends up leading guilty. He was just along for a walk with OJ.
• 2:17:43
  I mean, he thought this was cool. Basically, is what it sounded
• 2:17:46
  like what happened. And so they get in this hotel room and everybody's confused.
• 2:17:50
  Everyone's pissed off. Bearsley's I'm sure shocked that OJ's there. OJ I'm
• 2:17:56
  sure is shocked that Beardsley's there. He's pissed off. He wants his stuff
• 2:18:00
  back. There's this horrible audio tape that ends up creating the evidence that convicts
• 2:18:05
  O. J. Simpson. And and this bizarre scenario occurs now when it
• 2:18:11
  hits the news, I am not at all surprised when eventually the name's Alfred
• 2:18:18
  Bearsley and Thomas Ritchio come up. But I am surprised the morning after the
• 2:18:22
  ice when I get a phone call at home from Alfred Beardsley, and Alfred
• 2:18:28
  Beardsley is asking me for advice on what he should do to handle this situation
• 2:18:35
  because this moron thinks I'm his friend. This is what a nut job he
• 2:18:39
  is. I mean, this is and I actually almost felt sorry for Alfred
• 2:18:43
  Beardsley because he was such a loser and so weird and had such mental illness.
• 2:18:50
  At one point he thought that the mayor of Burbank was out to kill
• 2:18:54
  him. That was that's been in the public record. I mean, he
• 2:18:56
  was a crazy person, but I think in his essence, he just wanted
• 2:19:01
  to be loved and he really just wanted to be loved by O. J.
• 2:19:05
  Simpson. That was what was so crazy about this whole situation. I
• 2:19:11
  believed to this day that if Riccio wasn't a snake and he had just said
• 2:19:16
  to Bearsley, Hey, OJ wants his stuff back, Bearsley would have said,
• 2:19:22
  great, can I meet him? And can you give me an autograph
• 2:19:24
  football? And I'll be happy to give him back his stuff something. I
• 2:19:28
  mean, that's how easy this would have been. I mean, but that's
• 2:19:33
  not what happened, because Thomas Riccio was a snake who was pissed off at
• 2:19:37
  Alfred Bearsley because of the interactions that he had had with him that were disturbed
• 2:19:43
  by me. And if you think this is just me, you know,
• 2:19:48
  elevating or exaggerating my role in this, the person who most strongly believes that
• 2:19:52
  this is the reason why the whole thing went down the way that it is,
• 2:19:56
  or that it did was Alfred Bearsley. Albert Bearsley would constantly call me
• 2:20:01
  in the years after all this, telling me that I'm the reason why this
• 2:20:05
  happened, and that when the movie gets made that I should know or talk
• 2:20:11
  about who I want to play me in the movie. Now. He actually
• 2:20:13
  sent me what seemed to be a legitimate screenplay that someone had written that knew
• 2:20:18
  what the hell they were doing about this movie. And I always thought this
• 2:20:22
  would be a great movie, but it would have to be a dark comedy,
• 2:20:26
  and I don't know whether or not I would have a role in it
• 2:20:28
  or not, but Bearsley certainly thought that I did. And you know,
• 2:20:31
  Bearsley died a few years ago, which again I thought was was just I
• 2:20:35
  just thought he was a sad character. He was so so just wanting to
• 2:20:41
  be loved, and specifically wanted to be loved by O. J. Simpson,
• 2:20:45
  and the irony that that out for Bearsley ends up sending O. J.
• 2:20:50
  Simpson to prison for far longer than he did when he killed two people.
• 2:20:54
  It's just so fucked up and so typical of the way the world actually
• 2:20:58
  works. But the whole story of the Las Vegas O J. Simpson heist,
• 2:21:03
  which I'm not even able to give to you in totality because the story
• 2:21:07
  is so freaking long, is just so amazing and really would make a hell
• 2:21:11
  of a dark comedy movie even without Bearsley being alive. Now might be easier
• 2:21:18
  now that Bearsley's dead, but you have these remarkable characters and this bizarre world
• 2:21:24
  situation where O. J. Simpson is now complaining all these years later about
• 2:21:30
  how many years he was sentenced to prison for. And while he has a
• 2:21:35
  point with regard to what he actually did and whether or not it deserved that
• 2:21:39
  kind of punishment, he's also distorting the reality of it, the reality of
• 2:21:45
  the fact that he didn't plea bargain, and let's be clear, the reality
• 2:21:48
  that these two cases are in fact directly related. Without the killing of two
• 2:21:56
  people in nineteen ninety four and getting away with it, there is no Las
• 2:22:00
  Vegas heist case. Because OJ isn't dealing with the scum of the earth like
• 2:22:05
  Alfred Bearsley and Thomas reach you. He's dealing with the Krem Della Krem.
• 2:22:09
  He's doing this above board. He's not trying to avoid the Goldman judgment.
• 2:22:16
  It's the Goldman judgment that was behind the whole thing, with me pouring some
• 2:22:20
  gasoline on the fire from time to time. And the moral of this whole
• 2:22:24
  story to me has always been pressure matters. You've got to keep the pressure
• 2:22:33
  on. If the Goldman's hadn't kept the pressure on, and if I hadn't
• 2:22:39
  kept the pressure on, OJ would have gotten away with this. There wouldn't
• 2:22:43
  have been a problem between Alfred Bearsley and Thomas Reach You that ends up in
• 2:22:48
  OJ getting set up in the Las Vegas hotel room. There may not even
• 2:22:54
  have been an Alpha Bearsley and Thomas Reach You at all, because OJ,
• 2:22:56
  over time would have been free to deal with reputable people. But when you
• 2:23:01
  put the pressure on, bad things eventually happen. People panic, circumstances collide,
• 2:23:09
  and you get a situation like what occurred in that Las Vegas hotel room
• 2:23:13
  where OJ fumbles. There's an audio tape, there's a judge that gets it,
• 2:23:18
  there's a jury that gets it, and you end up allowing karma to
• 2:23:24
  take hold and a guy eventually does get some punishment indirectly, but I believe
• 2:23:30
  largely directly because of the fact that he killed two people and got away with
• 2:23:35
  it. In nineteen ninety four. So that is my role in the O.
• 2:23:41
  J. Simpsons story. I realize I've lived an incredibly bizarre life,
• 2:23:45
  and yet I'm not sure that even really is the top five. It's close.
• 2:23:50
  It's in the vicinity of the top five stories of my life, but
• 2:23:54
  it's one of those that has never, really, to my recollection, ever
• 2:23:56
  been fully told. I've told bits and pieces of it, but that's about
• 2:24:00
  the full extent of it. And that's Parsley why we went a little bit
• 2:24:03
  long in this episode of the podcast. But I hope you enjoyed story time.
• 2:24:09
  I don't know whether or not we will be able to continue this as
• 2:24:13
  an ongoing feature of the podcast, but when reality warrants it, we will
• 2:24:18
  certainly continue to tell stories that matter and that you will find to be interesting.
• 2:24:22
  And I hope you did that one. So that'll do it for episode
• 2:24:24
  episode number eighty of the Death of Journalism podcast. As is always the case,
• 2:24:30
  please remember to subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Please share
• 2:24:33
  it with others. If you do so on social media, tag me.
• 2:24:35
  I'll be happy to share it on Twitter and on Facebook. Until next time,
• 2:24:39
  thanks so much for listening to the Death of Journals. And podcasts.
• 2:24:43
  My name is John Ziegler.