Latest / The Death Of Journalism / Episode Eighty Seven: What’s Happened To Tucker?

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Episode Eighty Seven: What’s Happened To Tucker? · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number eighty seven of the Death of Journalism podcast. My name
• 0:04
  is John Ziggler. I'm your host on today's show. Tucker Carlson falls to
• 0:09
  a brand new low, more evidence of the coming climate change lockdowns. The
• 0:15
  New York Times makes a stunning admission on COVID school closings and the state of
• 0:22
  the presidential race. I'm known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man. I'm a
• 0:27
  digital advertising SEO and email marketing specialist that also happens to be a big fan
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  of John Ziggler and the Death of journalisten. Do you need help preaching your
• 0:37
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  is the Dutch Digital marketing Man dot com. If you want to grow your
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  business, Peter can help. That's the Dutch Digital Marketman dot com. And
• 1:02
  hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. When I left the so called conservative
• 1:07
  right wing media, which would have been around twenty ten, which seems like
• 1:11
  a really long time ago. Even though it was a long time ago,
• 1:15
  now thirteen years ago. One of the reasons that I did so was because
• 1:19
  I had become convinced by my direct interaction with a lot of the top people
• 1:26
  in the right wing conservative media, that the right wing media was inherently corrupt,
• 1:34
  that it was a business disguised as a cause. Now, I am
• 1:40
  fully aware that the media is a business. To me, it's always been
• 1:45
  about how much of a business. It's always been a lot like sports.
• 1:48
  Like sports is a business, but it shouldn't be all business like it has
• 1:53
  become, even on the college sports level. But that's another story for another
• 1:57
  podcast. But when it came to the right wing conservative media, my experience
• 2:02
  was that it was vastly, vastly dominated by commercial interests, business interests,
• 2:12
  and not by the truth, or certainly not by what was good for either
• 2:16
  the country or the conservative movement. Now, I was a bit naive when
• 2:22
  I got into talk radio, which would have been in the mid nineteen nineties.
• 2:25
  I really thought this was about saving the country, which was ridiculous in
• 2:30
  retrospect. With a small business element to it, you could actually make a
• 2:36
  living doing it thanks to Rush Limbaugh. But I quickly realized that that was
• 2:40
  farcical. And a fantasy. But even I was horrified by the reality of
• 2:46
  what I learned, and the higher I got up into the hierarchy and the
• 2:51
  more I learned about these people, and especially after the two thousand and eight
• 2:55
  presidential election, when I did a very high profile documentary called Medium Malpractice,
• 3:00
  How Obama got elected and Pailin was targeted, That's when I really got a
• 3:05
  firsthand look at almost all of the major players in the right wing conservative media,
• 3:12
  and I was exceedingly disappointed and became very suspicious of almost everybody within this
• 3:20
  right wing media industrial complex. And I also thought, as bad as it
• 3:25
  was then, I saw it getting worse because I could see that the business
• 3:30
  model was broken, and with the business model being broken and these people being
• 3:36
  scoundrels, I knew that the standards were going to get lower and lower,
• 3:42
  and we were going to drift further and further away from what had been the
• 3:45
  origins of the conservative media, and that it was becoming effectively a scam and
• 3:53
  a grift. And that was again way back in two thousand nine ten.
• 3:58
  Well, I think I've pretty damn vindicated by what has happened in the ensuing
• 4:03
  twelve or so years. And it was this experience that I think allowed me
• 4:09
  to be one of the first conservative commentators to see what was going to happen
• 4:14
  in twenty sixteen during that Republican presidential race. At first, at the very
• 4:18
  beginning, I thought, there's no way Donald Trump is going to do this.
• 4:21
  This can't possibly be. But it only took I don't know about a
• 4:26
  month of me seeing how the media was reacting and putting all the pieces together
• 4:31
  and realizing where this was heading that I shifted course very dramatically and started saying
• 4:39
  Trump is going to win the nomination. Now, I never thought he would
• 4:41
  beat Hillary in the general election, but I saw that Trump understood the vulnerabilities
• 4:49
  of the conservative media to an almost savant like level and had an incredible ability
• 4:57
  to manipulate them. And they wanted to be manipulated because he divided them with
• 5:00
  the ratings and content that they so greatly desired. He even manipulated the mainstream
• 5:04
  news media during that twenty sixteen GOP presidential campaign because they also wanted the same
• 5:12
  content and ratings, and they didn't think that he had any chance of winning
• 5:15
  a general election, so they thought they could have fun playing with fire.
• 5:19
  Well, the reason I'm telling you all this is because it kind of sets
• 5:24
  the foundation for one why I have been so disappointed with Tucker Carlson this year.
• 5:31
  I've talked a lot about the former Fox News Channel host and how he's
• 5:36
  become the MVP of the Trump campaign, and maybe even more depressing than that,
• 5:42
  he's become a full blown Alex Jones like conspiracy theorist. And that's not
• 5:46
  an exaggeration. And this was the guy for whom I probably had more respect,
• 5:51
  at least from a talent perspective, than anybody else in the right wing
• 5:55
  conservative media. And I have even said that I feel kind of foolish in
• 6:00
  retrospect thinking that he could have theoretically been the guy to drive a stake into
• 6:05
  Trump's heart during this campaign, if he had had the balls and the self
• 6:12
  interest to do so. Instead, he went dramatically in the other direction.
• 6:15
  But it's the conspiracy theory part and the whack job part of Tucker Carlson that
• 6:20
  I have suggested indicates that something is wrong with him, that he is broken.
• 6:28
  I've even suggested that maybe there's some sort of drug issue, whether it's
• 6:30
  illegal drugs or prescription drugs. I don't know. Something is wrong with Tucker
• 6:35
  Carlson, because it's not just about selling out the Trump. To sell out
• 6:40
  the Trump, as much as I would be infuriated by, that, at
• 6:44
  least makes some logical sense, especially once he got fired from Fox News Channel,
• 6:47
  which is when I knew for sure he would one hundred percent be going
• 6:51
  on the Trump train because that was now very clearly in his self interest.
• 6:56
  But it's the conspiracy stuff and then stuff the Alex Jones like stuff that indicates
• 7:02
  to me there's something wrong here, that this is either a giant troll job
• 7:09
  and that he's just screwing with us for his own amusement, or there's something
• 7:14
  very very wrong, and I'm not sure what it is. I really don't.
• 7:17
  I'm just telling you this is not the Tucker Carlson that I thought I
• 7:21
  had a pretty decent idea of. It's not the Tucker Carlson that our guest
• 7:26
  in episode eighty five, Matt Lewis, who knows Tucket Carlson far better than
• 7:30
  I do, thought that he knew. And the most recent example of this,
• 7:34
  and the reason why I'm starting the podcast episode this way, is that
• 7:39
  Tucker Carlson just posted another one of his long form interviews on Twitter now known
• 7:46
  as x and this quote unquote interview is with a guy by the name of
• 7:51
  Larry Sinclair. Now, if you're a right wing news junkie, you probably
• 7:59
  have heard the name Larry Sinclair. At least his story may be familiar because
• 8:03
  he became a minor fifteen seconds of famous celebrity during the two thousand and eight
• 8:11
  election when he claimed, without any evidence, without any logic, having failed
• 8:16
  a lie detector test, having a long criminal record that includes numerous crimes of
• 8:24
  deception and forgery, that he in nineteen ninety nine had had Barack Obama purchased
• 8:33
  drugs from him, cocaine, and that they engaged in a overtly sexual encounter
• 8:39
  and relationship I guess something. You would call it a relationship, but they
• 8:43
  had sex together. So they did coke together, and they had sex together.
• 8:48
  This was allegedly in nineteen ninety nine. Again, no evidence for this,
• 8:54
  no contemporaneous report for this. You know theo if it really did happen,
• 8:58
  the time when you would have come forward would have been certainly two thousand
• 9:03
  and four, when Barack Obama becomes famous almost overnight because of his speech at
• 9:09
  the two thousand and four Democratic convention and then his Senate run that fall to
• 9:16
  win a Senate seat, which would then set him up for the two thousand
• 9:18
  and eight presidential run. So if this really happened, and even though he
• 9:22
  was high on coke, and he somehow remembers the name, the very strange
• 9:28
  name, Barack Obama, and you know, he somehow identifies that this is
• 9:33
  the same guy, he would again no contemporary his report, no journal entry,
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  apparently, no telling him any friends. It would have been two thousand
• 9:41
  and four that he would have come forward, But he didn't come forward in
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  two thousand and four. He came forward in two thousand and eighty, when
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  Barack Obama not only was a presidential candidate. By the way, you could
• 9:52
  argue, if it wasn't two thousand and four when he came forward, he
• 9:54
  certainly would have come forward in two thousand and seven, when Obama was a
• 9:56
  media phenomenon and at the beginning stages of the Democratic primary and he wasn't the
• 10:03
  nominee yet. But that's not what happened either. So this didn't happen basically
• 10:07
  until Obama was the nominee, and therefore it would be you know, far
• 10:13
  a far bigger story, at least on the right, because then at that
• 10:16
  point, once he's the nominee, the right wing media is desperate for any
• 10:18
  sort of dirt on Barack Obama, no matter how crazy or no matter how
• 10:24
  lacking in evidence or logic it is. And this story never got any even
• 10:30
  I would call it mainstream right wing media attention. It got some attention in
• 10:33
  foreign media outlets, and you know the whack job conspiracy elements of I guess
• 10:39
  what you call the right wing, but it never got any credibility at all,
• 10:45
  and it didn't deserve any credibility at all. And by the way,
• 10:50
  there's so many problems with the Sinclair story, but one of them completely contradicts
• 10:56
  an article of faith of the right wing media itself and of right wingers,
• 11:01
  which is that Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton and the Clinton machine, which is
• 11:05
  capable of killing people apparently getting away with it without any concerns whatsoever, whether
• 11:13
  it's Vince Foster or many other people, and are able to do all sorts
• 11:18
  of magical things. They somehow lost a race they had no business losing in
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  two thousand and eight to Barack Obama, a guy who was gay, engaging
• 11:30
  in all sorts of gay affairs with drug dealers and criminals, and this never
• 11:37
  became an issue. The Clinton's never figured this out or never figured out a
• 11:41
  way to get this into the media media ecosystem. Come on, at least
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  be remotely consistent. So which is it. Are the Clinton's completely moronic and
• 11:52
  incompetent and incapable of taking someone down? Or is this story obviously bullshit?
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  Well, Oxym's Razor will tell you, by the way, I don't believe
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  in that the Clinton narrative of them being magical and having killed people, But
• 12:07
  that's that's an article of faith in the right wing. Trust me, I
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  know, and I'm somebody who you know consulted on the very famous Hillary the
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  movie that ended up facilitating the Citizens United Supreme Court case. I'm very,
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  very familiar with all the theories and conspiracies surrounding the Clintons, most of which
• 12:28
  are not true, and I despise the Clintons. My record on that is
• 12:31
  extremely strong. But the point of this is that if this story about it
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  Baba had any truth at all, if the Clinton machine was anything close to
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  what the right wing has always claimed that it is, this story would not
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  have been kept under wraps. The reason why it didn't become a big deal
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  in two thousand and eight was because it's not true. It's obviously not true.
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  Now, the only shred only semblance of rationality for why Tucker Carlson would
• 13:00
  do this now is that there is a legitimate piece of I guess you would
• 13:07
  call it evidence that does at least make a rational person question Barack Obama's theoretical
• 13:16
  sexuality. Now, what am I referring to here, and that is that
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  an Obama biographer has fairly recently acknowledged the existence of and the legitimacy of a
• 13:30
  letter that Obama, a very young Obama, sent to a girlfriend at the
• 13:35
  time, where he writes some things that certainly sounded as if he has at
• 13:41
  least had homosexual thoughts or fantasies. Now, there's nothing in there about him
• 13:48
  actually acting out on homosexual thoughts or fantasies. But I will acknowledge that the
• 13:56
  left wing media is incredibly uninterested in this. I mean, you would think,
• 14:01
  right, if homosexuality is this great thing, that Barack Obama providing evidence
• 14:07
  that he might have been the first bisexual president, I mean that would be
• 14:11
  historic. He was already the first black president, even though he's half black,
• 14:15
  half white. So why the media wouldn't be interested in this is kind
• 14:20
  of interesting and I think very very telling and hypocritical. But when you know,
• 14:24
  I read the letter and it again, this is a left winger.
• 14:28
  This is a very incredible person who has provided this information that's been hidden for
• 14:33
  quite a while for I think obvious reasons. This is a strange passage in
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  this letter. Now there are possibilities for this. Maybe he just had a
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  homosexual thought and was sharing it with a girlfriend. That wouldn't be incredibly unusual
• 14:50
  than you know, the quote Jerry Seinfeld. That wouldn't be anything wrong with
• 14:54
  that, Not that there's anything wrong with any of this in theory, except
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  we're talking about politics here. The reality, though, is, you know,
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  it could also just be Obama somehow trying to prove how woke he was,
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  well before there was such a thing as wokesm to a girlfriend. That's
• 15:11
  certainly possible. I mean, as strange as it seems in the world in
• 15:16
  which most of us live, I can certainly see a set of circumstances where
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  Obama might feel as if this was making him seem bigger, better, more
• 15:26
  woke. Whatever you want to call it, more progressive in the eyes of
• 15:31
  this girlfriend he was writing too. It's also you know, there's all sorts
• 15:35
  of possibilities, but this letter does not, in any way, shape or
• 15:37
  form indicate or proved that Barack Obama has ever actually had a homosexual affair.
• 15:43
  I'm gonna make that clear again. Not to do it would be anything wrong
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  with that. And in fact, based upon the current rules of engagement,
• 15:52
  you know, you would think that the media would be wanting to get to
• 15:54
  the bottom of this to prove history. Pete Buddha Judge might get upset because
• 16:00
  you know, that would eliminate his opportunity potentially for history in the future.
• 16:03
  But I digress again. So the point of all this is there is this
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  shred of evidence that I'm sure Tucker Carlson is using as a fig leave to
• 16:15
  justify an interview with a nut job. That's who Larry's Sinclair is. He's
• 16:19
  a nut job who with not a credible story for all the reasons I've already
• 16:23
  stated. And Tucker doesn't do this interview to try to debunk what Sinclair says.
• 16:30
  In fact, he's already in previous interviews before this one was posted online.
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  He's already vowed for Sinclair's credibility, he's already said he believes him,
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  and he's blamed the media for ignoring the story in two thousand and eight,
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  and that this somehow might have been the reason why Obama won in two thousand
• 16:52
  and eight. Now, I consider myself to be one of the world's foremost
• 16:55
  experts on the media coverage of the two thousand and eight election, having done
• 16:59
  a documentary film called Medium Malpractice. Al Obama got elected and Sarah Palin was
• 17:03
  targeted. And I do not believe in any way, shape or form that
• 17:07
  this story, if it had been told by the mainstream news media, would
• 17:11
  have changed the outcome of the election. One because it's not true, and
• 17:18
  there's no evidence or logic that it's true. And you know, just because
• 17:22
  Sinclair gets lucky. And we find this letter very belatedly where Obama says this
• 17:29
  strange thing about having had homosexual thoughts, does not in any way, shape
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  or form change whether Larry Sinclair is a credible person. He's still just as
• 17:38
  lacking incredibility as he was in two thousand and eight. And for the record,
• 17:45
  the story that I believe dictated what happened in the two thousand and eight
• 17:48
  election was very clearly the Reverend Jeremiah Rights story. That was the story that
• 17:52
  should have ended Obama's presidential aspirations based upon the rules of the time, and
• 17:59
  instead it effectively ensured him the Democratic nomination because it got him the Black vote
• 18:04
  and tied two hands behind Hillary's back because she was not allowed to attack him
• 18:11
  on any of it, and the mainstream news media said, well, let's
• 18:12
  keep this off to the side until the general election, and then John McCain
• 18:18
  decided not to use the issue either because he was playing mister nice guy,
• 18:22
  which, by the way, I believe played a huge role in Donald Trump
• 18:27
  eventually being the Republican nominee in twenty sixteen, because what with McCain taking a
• 18:33
  dive on Reverend Right in two thousand and eight and Mitt Romney playing two nice
• 18:37
  in twenty twelve, Republicans had had enough and it was understandable. I mean,
• 18:44
  it was ill suited and it'll focus to the wrong guy benefited from it.
• 18:48
  But I got the anger and frustration of playing two nice, playing by
• 18:53
  the media's rules and losing twice to Barack Obama. But the bigger issue here
• 19:00
  from the media standpoint. Why I'm beginning this episode of the podcast in this
• 19:04
  fashion is that this is a low that even Tucker Carlson has not ever hit
• 19:11
  before. And it is consistent with this theory I have that he's broken,
• 19:15
  that something has snapped in Tucker Carlson. This is way beneath the Tucker Carlson
• 19:22
  that we knew just even a few months ago. And he's been dabbling in
• 19:26
  these conspiracy theories and these nutty ideas about what the truth is. And and
• 19:33
  now he's I hope hit the Nator, although who knows, maybe there's a
• 19:37
  place he can go that's even lower than this. And you know, by
• 19:41
  the way, when it comes to conspiracy theories about Barack Obama, you would
• 19:45
  think that Trump completely shitting the bed on the birtherism claim where he was humiliated.
• 19:53
  I mean, it's just it's really one of the most amazing facts in
• 19:56
  modern American political history that Trump got humiliated on birtherism and ended up being the
• 20:03
  twenty sixteen presidential nominee and winning the right winning the presidency, winning the presidency
• 20:11
  just a few years after being humiliated by claiming that the current President United States,
• 20:17
  Barack Obama was not a real citizen of the United States and that his
• 20:21
  birth certificate was faked, and Obama dropped the mic on him and proved that
• 20:26
  that story was bullshit. Now it's still believed by a significant number of Republicans.
• 20:30
  I don't know what the number is, but it's a significant number against
• 20:34
  all logic and all evidence that somehow Barack Obama was not really born in Hawaii.
• 20:40
  He was born in Hawaii. Now, I fully acknowledge that there are
• 20:45
  things about his past, which I deal with in my movie Medium Mail Practice,
• 20:48
  that the media was not interested in, and that we still have questions
• 20:52
  about. I still have questions about. I mean, there is a book
• 20:59
  that was written by Barack Obama where the literary agent, which claimed, you
• 21:07
  know, Obama, claims it was written by the literary agent, describes Obama
• 21:11
  as having been born in Africa. Now Obama claims that that's a mistake,
• 21:15
  but that mistake probably came from Barack Obama himself, because that's how these things
• 21:21
  get written, especially when you're a non celebrity. So you know, that's
• 21:26
  I think that the essence of what happened here in a lot of why some
• 21:30
  of like for instances, college records are not known. It's because I think
• 21:33
  Obama was creating a fake persona about himself. So it wasn't that he wasn't
• 21:37
  born in the way, he was trying to create an exotic history, and
• 21:45
  he probably made some statements in applications or whatever that are not true. And
• 21:52
  that this is why, you know, he doesn't want those records out and
• 21:56
  they've never come to public view, and why the media is so disinterested in
• 22:02
  ever telling us the real history behind Barack Obama, because that's my theory.
• 22:07
  My theory is that Barack Obama tried to create this very exotic background and history
• 22:15
  and narrative about his life and then realized, oh my god, I'm gonna
• 22:18
  be running for president. I never imagined that was possible. I just wanted
• 22:22
  to be, you know, an author and a community organizer, and I
• 22:25
  thought this was cool. Now, all of a sudden, these things I've
• 22:29
  said in the past, written the past there are part of my fake history,
• 22:33
  are no longer convenient, and so now I gotta hide them somehow.
• 22:37
  And that effort, I think led Trump down the wrong path and thinking that
• 22:44
  the birth certificate must be fake. Trump was assuming he even believed this it
• 22:48
  was exactly the opposite. No, the Hawaii story is true, it's it's
• 22:55
  the other stuff that Barack Obama was probably making up that he was very concerned
• 23:00
  about coming out in a presidential election. But I'm getting more deeply into this
• 23:07
  than I anticipated doing. But it's all interesting, I think, important stuff.
• 23:11
  But the primary focus I have here is one what's going on with Tucker
• 23:15
  Carlson, that he's no longer a credible person at all, and that this
• 23:19
  is the biggest star the right wing media currently has, and he is not
• 23:23
  a credible person. He is a couple of inches away from Alex Jones territory.
• 23:30
  And that's not an exaggeration, and it gives me no joy to say
• 23:32
  that that is a sad, sad statement that Tucker Carlson has fallen so far
• 23:37
  now to literally the level of Alex Jones. And then there's maybe an even
• 23:42
  bigger issue of what it is that you have to believe to be a right
• 23:48
  winger or quote unquote conservative, as you may have noticed, I hate even
• 23:52
  using that term now because it's not conservative. I mean, conservatives has nothing
• 23:56
  to do with any of this anymore. I guess you could call it right
• 24:00
  wing or maybe Republican orthodoxy, but to be a Republican and good standing in
• 24:07
  the Trump era, you gotta now believe that Barack Obama was a gay drug
• 24:12
  user and reckless about it and somehow hit all of this even from the Clintons.
• 24:18
  You gotta believe Paul Pelosi was gay and that's why he got attacked in
• 24:23
  the middle of the night by his gay lover. Makes no goddamn sense.
• 24:27
  And as I've told you many times before, I know personally from my own
• 24:30
  father's experience of knowing the guy for sixty years and gone on double and triple
• 24:36
  dates with him and Nancy Pelosi at Georgetown, and having a very good friend
• 24:38
  who is even closer to Paul Pelosi than my father, there's zero chance he's
• 24:42
  gay. But this is you gotta believe that now. You gotta believe Jeffrey
• 24:45
  Epstein was murdered in prison, even though that would require Donald Trump himself to
• 24:51
  be in on this massive, nonsensical conspiracy. And of course, you gotta
• 24:56
  believe that the twenty twenty election was completely stolen, even though the governor of
• 24:59
  Georgia, Republican Brian Kemp vehemently says that's not the case. And has suffered
• 25:04
  greatly for not supporting that particular cause. And that's just the tip of the
• 25:10
  iceberg. You gotta believe all sorts of crazy things now, and I don't
• 25:15
  even I don't even know what the hell the definition of being a Republican is
• 25:18
  anymore. I thought that we might get that definition back if ron De Santis
• 25:23
  was the nominee or at least gave Trump a really good run for it,
• 25:27
  but it appears as if that's not going to happen. So now we have
• 25:32
  Tugger Carlson, the biggest right wing media star, who's effectively now just a
• 25:37
  more intelligent and a funnier version of Alex Jones. Although Alex Jones can be
• 25:41
  inadvertently funny, there's no question about that. And we have this incredibly long
• 25:45
  and increasing list of nutty conspiracy theories that have no evidence behind them, no
• 25:52
  logic behind them, that have nothing to do with policy, and are certainly
• 25:56
  not productive. The country is at stake here, and this is the bullshit
• 26:03
  that the right wings biggest media star is worried about. I mean, it's
• 26:07
  totally irrelevant even if it's true. That's the maybe the biggest most obvious issue
• 26:12
  here. Barack Obama's career is over. There's nothing to gain here. And
• 26:18
  for those who might say, well, John, what does it really matter,
• 26:22
  It does matter because you know, up until at least a couple of
• 26:26
  months ago, Tucker Carlson with somebody who might break a legitimate story that the
• 26:32
  news medium would have to make a decision on whether or not to report it.
• 26:37
  Like let me, I mean, let's pretend. Let's pretend for a
• 26:40
  second that Greg Kelly's report in Newsmax, which I dealt with in episode eighty
• 26:45
  six, there's gonna be a tape that's gonna wipe out Biden's re election campaign.
• 26:51
  It might even force him the resign. Let's pretend that that's true,
• 26:53
  even though I don't think it is. Let's pretend that's true. And let's
• 26:56
  pretend that Tucker Carlson is the person that gets that tape, which is hardly
• 27:02
  a stretch. In fact, he would probably be one of the most likely
• 27:06
  people to get such a tape, given his status currently in the right wing
• 27:10
  media. Well, if he goes forward with it, inherently thanks to this
• 27:17
  Larry Sinclair fiasco, it's going to be far far easier for the mainstream left
• 27:23
  wing media to do exactly what they want, which is to not cover it
• 27:26
  at all, because anything that now has Tucker's fingerprints on it is inherently illegitimate.
• 27:33
  It's inherently got a stench on it, because this is the guy who
• 27:37
  is peddling the bullshit story about Barack Obama engaging in gay sex while doing cocaine,
• 27:45
  and so these things have ramifications, folks, And it just really does
• 27:49
  show how unbelievably broken the right wing media has become, even worse than I
• 27:57
  ever imagined or predicted. When I jettison myself out of this, and of
• 28:02
  course I was also probably kicked out of the right way media as much as
• 28:04
  I as much as I got out of it, it was definitely a mutual
• 28:08
  decision because I made no bones about the fact that I felt like most of
• 28:14
  the people in this grift were corrupt and we're not people I wanted to deal
• 28:18
  with, and they didn't want to deal with me either, because I was
• 28:22
  seen, I think, at least in part one, is too much of
• 28:25
  a contrarian and not reliable, but also too is dangerous because I saw,
• 28:30
  I saw how corrupt this whole scam was, and I was not afraid to
• 28:34
  talk about it, because I cared more about the cause than the business elements,
• 28:41
  much to my own negative self interest. And my wife will be happy
• 28:45
  to talk to you about that if you ever see her. But the reality
• 28:48
  is that I got a first row seed even probably closer than first row seed
• 28:53
  into how the sausage was made here, and it is ugly, and it
• 28:56
  is getting uglier almost on a daily basis, and it is not good for
• 29:03
  anything other than maybe some people's bottom lines. I guess, I don't.
• 29:07
  I guess there's some benefit financially to some people here, but it's not credible,
• 29:11
  it's not the truth. It's not good for the party, it's not
• 29:14
  good for the country, it's not good for the cause, and it's certainly
• 29:17
  not isolated to Tucker Carlson. It just this is a minor thing I'm gonna
• 29:22
  mention here, but if it dovetails so perfectly with my disdaining over the right
• 29:26
  wing media and Tucker Carlson, Leo Terrell is somehow a major figure in the
• 29:33
  right wing media because Sean Hannity has taken a liking to him over the last
• 29:38
  several years, especially during the Trump era, And I think the only reason
• 29:42
  why Sean Hannity has taken a lanking to Leo Terrell is because he's a black
• 29:47
  man. And you know black men who are willing to go on TV and
• 29:52
  enthusiastically endorse Donald Trump, are you know, they don't exactly grow on trees.
• 29:57
  Well, Leo Terrell is somebody who became infamous in the mid nineteen nineties
• 30:04
  as literally the last person on television who was still pretending, at least to
• 30:11
  believe that OJ Simpson was completely innocent. There's your OJ Simpson reference for this
• 30:15
  episode where I wanted to see how many episodes in a row I can reference
• 30:19
  O J. Simpson, But this one's a legitimate, very legitimate reference,
• 30:22
  because that's what made Leo Terrell famous. He was literally the last guy in
• 30:29
  America who went on television and seemingly truly believed that OJ Simpson was innocent.
• 30:36
  That's how dumb he is, or that's how lacking credibility is. If he
• 30:41
  was faking it. If he was faking it, he's a hell of an
• 30:45
  actor. But you have to be an imbecile, You literally have to be
• 30:48
  an imbecile to say the things that Leo Terrell did about the O. J.
• 30:52
  Simpson case, and now somehow he's a major voice in the right wing
• 30:59
  media, and he tweeted out and this really infuriated me. He tweeted out
• 31:06
  a couple of days ago, those of you who betrayed President Trump and supported
• 31:11
  Ronda Santis, you are not welcome back exclamation point hashtag God Bless President Trump.
• 31:23
  And I'm thinking to myself, what kind of a world do we live
• 31:27
  in when O. J. Simpson's last ardent defender is somehow considered a credible
• 31:34
  and legitimate and prominent voice in the right wing media, so much so that
• 31:41
  he can criticize the supporters of the best Republican governor in at least a generation
• 31:49
  or more for allegedly being traders, for having betrayed a former president, a
• 32:00
  long liberal and loser who lost the presidency, and and somehow it's a betrayal
• 32:07
  of him to even dare to run against him, even as he faces four
• 32:14
  criminal indictments. You just can't make this ship up. And you know,
• 32:19
  this is a tweet that is of last check has had over four hundred thousand
• 32:23
  views, and you know, I mean, it's it's way more popular than
• 32:28
  any tweet I'm gonna put out anytime suit, and this is Leo fucking Terrell,
• 32:32
  And this is just the upside down world in which we live in the
• 32:36
  incredibly corrupt right wing media that I'm glad I'm no longer part of, but
• 32:42
  I'm just saddened by by what it has become because it, you know,
• 32:45
  it used to be a pretty darn good thing. You know, what began
• 32:49
  with the best of intentions has turned into a completely corrupt grift that is bad
• 32:54
  for the movement and bad for the country, and and I'm not sure exactly
• 32:59
  how we overcome it now. One of the things that I've been talking a
• 33:02
  lot about in recent episodes, and I'm not sure whether people fully understand how
• 33:08
  serious I am about this. I this is not a theoretical proposition that I'm
• 33:14
  putting out there where I talk about how the left is going to use and
• 33:20
  I've been predicting this ever since COVID, that the left is going to use
• 33:23
  climate change, global warming, whatever you're gonna call it, to be able
• 33:29
  to do exactly what they almost did when it came to COVID. The problem
• 33:34
  for COVID in the left wing authoritarians minds was that it had an end date.
• 33:40
  You know, people weren't going to put up with it forever because you
• 33:44
  know, it's a virus, and there, you know, there it was
• 33:46
  obvious from the even the data that you know, it was no longer a
• 33:52
  big deal. And you know, they claimed that that was because of the
• 33:55
  vaccines. I am more and more convinced every day that while vaccines were effective
• 34:00
  in certain demographics and may have saved a lot of lives early on, that
• 34:07
  over time, the vaccines did absolutely nothing to help the community spread. In
• 34:15
  fact, it may have hindered the community spread, which then may have actually
• 34:20
  increased the number of people at least dying with COVID, if not of COVID.
• 34:25
  And that the real benefit quote unquote of the vaccines was giving the left
• 34:32
  the excuse they needed to get back to normal without having to admit that they
• 34:37
  had crapped their pants. That's essentially what the vaccine's greatest attribute was. They
• 34:44
  we needed something for the left and for the elites and for the scientific establishment
• 34:50
  and the so called experts and democrats in power. If we're going to get
• 34:55
  back to normal, we couldn't just do it without something magical, because if
• 34:59
  we did that and nothing bad happened, it would expose the fact that we
• 35:02
  never had to do any of this to begin with. So the vaccines provided
• 35:07
  that incredibly important component here that you know, well, we can we can
• 35:14
  now get back to normal because we have the magic vaccines, even though there's
• 35:17
  no evidence that the vaccines were actually magic. And so I have talked a
• 35:24
  lot about how with climate change there's going to be no way to ever have
• 35:31
  an end date because there's no way to actually impact any change, and because
• 35:36
  it may not be real to begin with. At least COVID was real.
• 35:38
  So if you had, you know, lots of people getting COVID and then
• 35:42
  all of a sudden no one was getting COVID, the public is smart enough
• 35:45
  to understand, okay, this thing is over with. Well, you're never
• 35:49
  going to get that moment when it comes to climate change, because there's always
• 35:52
  going to be things going wrong in the weather, as we talked a lot
• 35:55
  about in episode number eighty six, and so this is really the holy grail
• 36:00
  that you know, COVID might have just been a test riding. I'm not
• 36:04
  suggesting a massive conspiracy. I'm saying that this was a situation where they found
• 36:08
  an opportunity, they took advantage of it, and they lent it and look
• 36:12
  back and go, wait a minute, look what we were able to get
• 36:14
  away with here with no political backlash whatsoever. In fact, you know,
• 36:17
  all the lockdown governors essentially all got reelected. Trump got kicked out of office.
• 36:22
  The Santis is getting his butt kicked in the twenty three twenty four Republican
• 36:29
  presidential primary process. So you know, the public seems to be perfectly fine
• 36:32
  with what we did. So let's do it again. Let's do it again
• 36:37
  in a situation where there's no end date. And I have been documenting all
• 36:40
  sorts of examples of the media doing exactly what I predicted they would do,
• 36:45
  going down this very same path with climate change, global warming, weaponizing the
• 36:51
  weather, and pretending that all sorts of realities don't exist that where they should,
• 36:57
  like, for instance, the complete dissipation of the drought here in California
• 37:01
  and lack of wildfires now for basically two years, which is supposed to be
• 37:07
  the wildfire center of the world or at least a country, allegedly because of
• 37:10
  global warming. You know, they just ignore anything that doesn't fit the narrative
• 37:15
  or their agenda, and they exaggerate things that they think do even when they're
• 37:19
  contradictory or nonsensical. Well, we have a new entry into the sweepstakes,
• 37:25
  if you will, of the news media's efforts to try to connect climate change
• 37:31
  to, you know, the end of the world in a COVID like fashion.
• 37:35
  This one is going to be tough to beat because even I did not
• 37:38
  anticipate that they would literally try to claim that climate change is going to give
• 37:45
  us much more disease and that that may threaten humanity. I thought I was
• 37:52
  almost in awe when I saw this article in the Washington Post. I thought,
• 37:55
  Wow, Okay, that's that's pretty good. That's ingenious. So now
• 37:59
  you you're not just following the same path from a political perspective, and you
• 38:05
  know how you want to try to be able to manifest the authority to dictate
• 38:09
  what people are allowed to do and not do in their lives. You're going
• 38:13
  to connect essentially a COVID like situation to climate change. And if you can
• 38:21
  connect those two things, look out. Well that's what the Washington Post spend
• 38:24
  an enormous amount of resources trying to do. This was an extensive investigation they
• 38:30
  did. They sent people to Pakistan, where they had just had massive flooding
• 38:35
  and then a lot of heat. And when you have flooding and then heat,
• 38:37
  you get a lot of disease that follows. And based upon that,
• 38:42
  they wrote this article with the headline, and I shit you not, this
• 38:45
  is the actual headline, climate linked ills threaten humanity. That's right, climate
• 38:54
  linked ills or diseases. They and other online they referenced to diseases climate linked
• 39:01
  diseases threaten humanity, not are going to cause a problem. No, no,
• 39:07
  they threaten humanity. And the key early paragraph of this story, after
• 39:15
  they set the scene of how horrible things were in Pakistan because of this massive
• 39:21
  flood followed by heat, they write, Pakistan is the epicenter of a new
• 39:25
  global wave of disease and death linked to climate change. By the way,
• 39:32
  they could have just said linked to bad luck with the weather in recent times,
• 39:37
  that's the same thing. But no, no, linked to climate change.
• 39:42
  According to a Washington Post analysis of climate data, leading scientific studies,
• 39:47
  interviews with experts, Oh boy, that's credible, and reporting from some of
• 39:53
  the places bearing the brunt of earth heating. This exa nomination of climate fueled
• 40:01
  illnesses tied to hotter temperatures and swifter passage of pathogens and toxins shows how countries
• 40:09
  across the globe are ill prepared for the insidious, intensifying risks to almost every
• 40:17
  facet of human health. Oh my god, we're all gonna die because wait,
• 40:27
  this sounds like global warming. This doesn't sound like climate change. Hold
• 40:32
  on a second, here, they told me this was climate change. This
• 40:37
  article is clearly about global warming. Can we please get our story straight.
• 40:43
  They're saying that this whole article is based upon ridiculous assumptions about how the globe
• 40:49
  is warming and will continue to warm without any reversing of any cycle we might
• 40:54
  be in currently. It's all about global warming, which is important because that
• 41:00
  change in branding is the essence to understanding the scam. Because they started with
• 41:06
  global warming, that was inconvenient because every time it got cold, then,
• 41:10
  you know, it didn't look like global warming was happening to the average person.
• 41:15
  They changed the climate change. Then they can weaponize the weather because anything
• 41:17
  bad happens, even if it doesn't have anything to do with the weather or
• 41:22
  the climate, like for instance, the wildfires and Maui, we can claim
• 41:25
  that it does. And this is all going to work for us because we're
• 41:28
  gon, we're gonna symbiotic relationship with the liberal politicians and the Democratic Party because
• 41:34
  this is the best way we know to instill socialism, to cripple the United
• 41:38
  States economy, to give us the authority to dictate how people run their lives,
• 41:45
  which is what liberals like doing more than anything else. And so we
• 41:50
  almost pulled it off during COVID. We see a lot of potential here to
• 41:53
  do the same thing over a longer period of time with regard to which is
• 41:59
  a climate change, a global warm And we can't really keep our story straight
• 42:02
  on a more serious and I'm being somewhat serious there being also facetious because I
• 42:07
  mean, it's hard to keep this story straight, But can we be serious
• 42:13
  for a moment? Not in this article at all? Is the idea two
• 42:20
  things? Number one, well, there may be in the Washington Posts research.
• 42:24
  I'm sure they were looking for it. So that's amazing how they'll be
• 42:28
  able to find it. When you put enough resources into something, reporters are
• 42:31
  going to find what you want them to find to justify, you know,
• 42:35
  their trip to Pakistan. But the number one thing that they don't mention is
• 42:42
  that actual deaths from weather disasters are way way down over the last several decades.
• 42:51
  As much as I loathe the fake Obama swamy, he makes this point
• 42:54
  all the time, which is absolutely accurate, that in recent decade, they
• 43:00
  won't tell you this, but human deaths from natural disasters are way way down
• 43:08
  from what they used to be decades ago. And the main reason for that
• 43:13
  is we have satellite technology which has greatly improved weather forecasting, which has given
• 43:20
  people warnings about what's going to happen with the weather. It was only a
• 43:24
  few decades ago where we did not have reliable weather forecasts, where people routinely
• 43:30
  were caught off guard by an unusual weather event, and that causes deaths.
• 43:37
  So this idea that okay, I'm gonna grant just for the sake of arguing,
• 43:42
  maybe it's warming, maybe all sorts of reasons why that could be.
• 43:46
  If it's warming, I can see where that might cause some more disease or
• 43:52
  illnesses in some areas of the world. That's theoretically possible, but that number
• 43:58
  is minuscule. And by the way, it's also completely mitigated by the fact
• 44:05
  that if the globe is warming, if this is really global warming, which
• 44:09
  is what the post is now, claiming, then guess what that means,
• 44:14
  fewer people dying of cold, And it's not even close on a yearly basis.
• 44:21
  How many people die of cold as opposed to die of heat. The
• 44:27
  media won't tell you this, but far, far more people die of cold
• 44:30
  in the world than die of heat, especially since we now have this thing
• 44:36
  and most of the world called air conditioning, which, of course, ironically
• 44:40
  the liberals want to take away from us because somehow that causes global warming,
• 44:45
  this never ending circle of insanity. But the reality here is that cold and
• 44:52
  this is just basic logic. This is statistical, but it's also basic logic.
• 44:57
  Think about your own life often have you been so hot that you thought
• 45:02
  you might die? A few times? Maybe, I mean, unless you
• 45:07
  live in the desert, But there's ways that still As I said, with
• 45:13
  air conditioning and staying hydrated, that it's seemingly usually pretty easy to survive a
• 45:19
  heat wave. If it's really if you live in a really cold area and
• 45:23
  you're stuck outside, you die fast. And much of the world is far
• 45:30
  too cold. So I'm one of my many rebuttals to the whole global warming
• 45:36
  thing is to me, I'd like to see a little bit of warming on
• 45:39
  the globe. I mean, statistically, fewer people will die, more areas
• 45:44
  will will be able to be farmed properly, the growing season will be longer.
• 45:50
  I mean, there's all sorts of benefits to global warming and if it's
• 45:53
  it's actually happening, but the media is not interested in that. They want
• 45:57
  to tell you how very isolated circumstances that may or may not be related to
• 46:01
  a warming globe that will cause more death because of illnesses without ever telling you
• 46:07
  about, like I said, the fact that weather events are causing far fewer
• 46:13
  deaths and more people die of cold than die of heat on a yearly basis,
• 46:17
  and it's not even close. So I wanted to address that one because
• 46:22
  that that story the Washington Post may take the cake when it comes to the
• 46:28
  connection, at least subliminally between what happened with COVID and what they're trying to
• 46:32
  do with climate change now as far as COVID is concerned, you know,
• 46:37
  I have to give credit where credit is due. Of what I do on
• 46:43
  the Death of Journalism podcast is media criticism, but I got to do some
• 46:46
  media praise here. I'm almost in shock that this happened, especially given that
• 46:52
  it was The New York Times. But one of my many pet peeves about
• 46:58
  the COVID response, and maybe the most underreported element of the COVID response,
• 47:04
  has always been related to school closings, and I was one of those.
• 47:10
  I was not alone, but I was definitely, you know, shouting as
• 47:15
  loud as I could. When the school started to close in the spring of
• 47:19
  twenty twenty. I said basically two things. I saw more than two things,
• 47:22
  but two things. Right off the bat. I told our principle of
• 47:27
  my daughter's school, if you don't have a very clear date that we're going
• 47:30
  to return to school, or at the very very least an extremely clear standard
• 47:37
  of where the virus is when we return, or what's going to cause us
• 47:42
  to return, we will not return for years into full to full schooling.
• 47:47
  The principal thought I was crazy. A few months later, when we talked
• 47:52
  on the phone, when he was actually leaving the school, I think maybe
• 47:55
  because of the COVID response, because he was getting out of being a principle
• 48:00
  and going into administration. He said to me on the phone, quote mister
• 48:05
  Ziggler, and why he calls me mister Ziggler, But he called me mister
• 48:07
  Ziggler. I think of that conversation almost every day and essentially said, yeah,
• 48:13
  you were right and I was wrong. And that was always going to
• 48:16
  especially here in California, that was always going to be a massive problem because
• 48:21
  once people became incentivized to keep the schools closed. I mean, teachers were
• 48:24
  gonna love it, students weren't going to care, some parents were going to
• 48:30
  actually like it. Not all. I don't know what the percentage might be,
• 48:35
  but Democrats were definitely gonna love it, especially in a presidential election year,
• 48:38
  because as long as schools were closed, it sent a message that we
• 48:43
  were in unprecedented times and therefore we had to get rid of our president Donald
• 48:47
  Trump. And so I was one hundred percent right on that. But the
• 48:52
  other thing I said right off the bat on when it came to school closings
• 48:57
  is okay, folks, you do understand and that if we close schools for
• 49:01
  an extended period, which we will, because once you close them, now
• 49:05
  you've got to prove why you're going to have them back, and that's almost
• 49:07
  impossible given the media environment and the political environment, especially in the presidential election
• 49:14
  year. Once you close them for an extended period of time, then you
• 49:17
  are sending a message to an entire generation of both students and parents. You
• 49:27
  are sending a message. You are teaching a lesson that school doesn't really matter,
• 49:34
  that skipping school was not a big deal, because, after all,
• 49:37
  we skipped it here in California for basically a year and a half over a
• 49:44
  virus that didn't impact the students at all, didn't impact any healthy teachers,
• 49:52
  didn't impact any healthy parents, barely impacted any healthy grandparents, and had far
• 50:00
  less impact or spread on the school community even when they did go back to
• 50:07
  school, then had been been worried about or predicted. And so if we
• 50:14
  can cancel school for a year and a half over a non emergency virus,
• 50:21
  then it's not a big deal to skip school for any reason that just simply
• 50:27
  fits yourself interest on that day. And by the way, I'll be the
• 50:30
  first to acknowledge that in the post COVID era, even my family you know
• 50:37
  here I am. You know I'm as ardent about this issue as anybody I
• 50:42
  know. My wife is a public school teacher. We cared very passionately about
• 50:49
  our child's education. We know that my older daughter got screwed out of at
• 50:52
  least a year and a half of critical school years and lessons and has a
• 50:58
  learning disability that was wasn't picked up on fast enough because of the timing of
• 51:02
  this whole thing. So we are in the top two percent at least when
• 51:07
  it comes to being passionately in favor of making sure kids go to school.
• 51:14
  And even we post COVID have found ourselves saying, you know what, ye
• 51:20
  skip school today if you if you want to go to the amusement park Disneyland
• 51:23
  or or you know, Magic Mountain or whatever it is, things that we
• 51:29
  would not have done in the past. Part of its subconscious, part of
• 51:32
  its conscious. And it hasn't been dramatic, it's been from time to time.
• 51:37
  But if it's happening with us, I knew it was going to happen
• 51:42
  with the vast majority of families that don't have the same opinions that we do
• 51:45
  about education and don't have the same options that we do when it comes to
• 51:50
  education and taking care of our kids. And we're a two parent home,
• 51:54
  which it puts us head of the game when it comes to many families in
• 51:59
  this day and age anyway, So I predicted right off the start of this
• 52:04
  thing we are going to rule this if only from a truancy standpoint, that
• 52:08
  there's gonna be massive truancy. And I thought that it would be the worst
• 52:14
  in the cities, and I thought that it would be worst in the places
• 52:16
  that had the greatest COVID restrictions. I was actually sent this story from Steve
• 52:22
  Cortez, who's the Santists Never Backed Down Political Action Committee, who's been a
• 52:28
  guest on this show and is a good friend of mine, and he acknowledged
• 52:31
  that I had been calling this from the very beginning. And it's true because
• 52:36
  the New York Times, much to my shock, vindicated almost word for word
• 52:40
  everything that I've said, and they really didn't try to mute it at all.
• 52:45
  I mean they obviously if I had been writing the article, this would
• 52:49
  have been a different tone. But I'm when i'm, you know, judging
• 52:53
  by New York Times standards, this is pretty darn good. So here's the
• 52:57
  essence of the story. The headline in the New York Times more pandemic fallout
• 53:04
  the chronically absent student. Now again, I'm judging on a curve, to
• 53:08
  use an academic term, I'm grading on a curve here because I have very
• 53:14
  low expectations when it comes to The New York Times, this is not pandemic
• 53:17
  fallout. This is panic fallout. Okay, So I do take issue with
• 53:22
  the headline. It's not more pandemic fallout, It's more COVID panic fallout the
• 53:28
  chronically absent student. There's sub headline. At one middle school, more than
• 53:32
  forty percent of the students have been chronically absent this year. Districts are going
• 53:38
  to great lens, offering gift cards and night classes to reach them. So
• 53:46
  right off the bat, I'm like, Wow, Okay, I cannot believe
• 53:51
  the New York Times is doing this. Like I said, I have a
• 53:52
  problem with the pandemic word being put into the headline, but okay, it's
• 53:59
  better than it could And this was not just in the Times. This was
• 54:02
  also in the newsletter of a Times reporter by the name of David Leonhardt.
• 54:08
  Now, David Leonhardt, to me is kind of interesting guy. I consider
• 54:13
  him to be pretty fair, and he tried more than almost anybody else at
• 54:17
  the Times to be fair during COVID. Now he always couched it in a
• 54:23
  way that allowed the covidiots to not feel badly about themselves. I mean,
• 54:28
  that's that's really what the Times has to do. They've done this so many
• 54:30
  times, I mean the New York Times. I'll never forget. Early on
• 54:36
  in the in the mask era, there was that Dutch study that obliterated the
• 54:40
  alleged efficacy of masks, and the New York Times was forced to change their
• 54:45
  headline from something along the lines of you know, Dana's study says masks don't
• 54:52
  work, to Dana's study, you know questions whether masks work and here's why
• 54:57
  you should wear one anyway. They literally put that into an altered version of
• 55:01
  the headline online because they got so much blowback from their woke customer base on
• 55:07
  Twitter, they had to put that in the headline, Here's why you should
• 55:12
  wear one anyway, even if they don't work, because you can't make your
• 55:15
  customer base feel bad about themselves. So anyway, I have some respect for
• 55:21
  David Leonhard. He has tried, at least within the confines of the New
• 55:25
  York Times, to be somewhat fair. And in his newsletter here's what he
• 55:30
  wrote about this same subject that was in the New York Times. It starts
• 55:35
  off with the phrase empty seats, and he writes, if you're a child
• 55:40
  or a former child, you know how hard it can be to summon the
• 55:44
  energy to leave the house each day for school. It's early in the morning,
• 55:46
  and you are tired, maybe you have a test or a social situation
• 55:51
  that's making you anxious. Staying in bad often seems easier. For as long
• 55:54
  as schools have existed, so have these morning struggles none lest children overcome them
• 56:01
  almost every day, sometimes with a strong nudge from parents. Going to school
• 56:07
  was the normal thing to do, then suddenly it wasn't. The long school
• 56:15
  closures during the COVID pandemic were the biggest disruption in the history of modern American
• 56:21
  education, and those closures change the way many students and parents think about school.
• 56:28
  No way get out of town. Who could have possibly seen that coming.
• 56:32
  Attendance in short, has come to feel more optional than it once did,
• 56:39
  and absenteeism has soared, remaining high even as COVID has stopped dominating everyday
• 56:46
  life. On an average day last year the twenty twenty two twenty twenty three
• 56:53
  school year, close to ten percent of K through twelve students were not there,
• 57:01
  almost ten percent on the average day. This, according to preliminary state
• 57:07
  data, about one quarter of US students qualified as chronically absent a quarter.
• 57:14
  If you if you get qualified as as chronically absent, that effectively means you
• 57:21
  didn't go to a full year of school and all. And by the way,
• 57:24
  these are usually not the best students to begin with. So these are
• 57:28
  kids that that can't afford to have missed, you know, enough school to
• 57:32
  be qualified as chronically absent. So you're essentially losing them. They may not
• 57:38
  technically be losing them, but in the real world you've lost them as a
• 57:43
  student. This means that they missed at least ten percent of school days,
• 57:47
  or about three and a half weeks. That's a vastly higher share than before
• 57:53
  COVID. Here's some quotes from alleged experts. I love when the experts stunned.
• 58:00
  So then why the hell are you still an expert? But Thomas d
• 58:04
  a Stanford economist who has conducted the most comprehensive study on the issue, said
• 58:08
  quote, I'm just stunned by the magnitude unquote. Why were you stunned?
• 58:15
  I mean this should have been expected if you were an expert. I mean,
• 58:19
  you don't even have to be an expert. You just have to have
• 58:20
  common sense and use your brain and not be clouded by politics or panic to
• 58:28
  realize how this was all going to shake out. Back to the New York
• 58:32
  Times newsletter, the surge of absenteeism is one more problem confronting schools as they
• 58:38
  reopened for a new academic year. Students still have not made up the ground
• 58:44
  they lost during the pandemic, and it's much harder for them to do so
• 58:49
  if they are missing from the classroom. Let me stop there for a second.
• 58:52
  I gotta tell you another one of the most underreported stories about education post
• 58:59
  COVID is that, at least in our experience in a good school system,
• 59:05
  you know, in the suburbs of Los Angeles, there has been zero,
• 59:10
  zero effort to try to ramp up the intensity post COVID. In other words,
• 59:17
  make sure we don't miss any days. Maybe figure out a way to
• 59:21
  get extra school days in there, make sure that teachers aren't missing school,
• 59:25
  make sure that we're getting more done. No, they went right back to
• 59:31
  complete normalcy when it came to basically a very lack of daisical attitude towards you
• 59:39
  know, making sure that the kids hit grade level. And I mean,
• 59:45
  heck, my daughter's teacher last year she was getting married in the summer,
• 59:49
  she took off a ridiculous number of days, all allegedly to prepare for her
• 59:54
  wedding. And I'm thinking, Okay, this would be absurd under normal circumstances.
• 1:00:01
  But why is there absolutely positively no semblance of all hands on deck.
• 1:00:08
  We just had an emergency allegedly, right, So let's make up for it
• 1:00:13
  by making sure that these next couple of years we try to catch up.
• 1:00:16
  None of that, None of that happened at all, and on large part
• 1:00:22
  because of the teachers union. The teacher's union has to be been pointed for
• 1:00:27
  blame here because they have no interest in that. They don't give a shit.
• 1:00:31
  And many of them were very happy with remote quote unquote learning and school
• 1:00:37
  being off as long as it was, and a lot of them ended up
• 1:00:39
  getting pay raises out of the whole thing because the federal government has injected so
• 1:00:45
  much money into schools allegedly to try to get them to prepare to reopen after
• 1:00:51
  COVID and what have you. Back to the New York Times, because I
• 1:00:54
  really thought that they were going to soft pedal the connection to COVID that they
• 1:00:59
  would come up is some other explanation for why it is that this has happened
• 1:01:04
  and blame it on something else or try to mitigate the influence of the COVID
• 1:01:08
  restrictions. But they really didn't and they couldn't do it because the evidence is
• 1:01:14
  so overwhelming. Indeed, study he looked for explanations for the trend, and
• 1:01:20
  the obvious suspects didn't explain it. Places with a greater COVID spread did not
• 1:01:27
  have higher lingering levels of absenteeism, for instance, The biggest reason for the
• 1:01:32
  rise seems to be simply that students have fallen out of the habit of going
• 1:01:38
  to school every day. Consistent with this theory is the fact that absenteeism has
• 1:01:46
  risen more in states where schools remain closed for longer during the pandemic. Wow,
• 1:01:57
  I mean, interrational world. That's a statement that every single American,
• 1:02:00
  especially those that have kids in school, would know by heart, and every
• 1:02:07
  media outlet would be blaring this with trumpets, so I'm going to repeat it.
• 1:02:12
  Consistent with this theory is the fact that absenteeism has risen more in states
• 1:02:16
  where schools remained closed for longer during the pandemic, like California and New Mexico
• 1:02:27
  and Washington DC. They then show a chart, a remarkable chart that shows
• 1:02:35
  how long each state was basically off for the pandemic and what their level of
• 1:02:42
  absenteeism is or has been post pandemic, and the correlation is very, very
• 1:02:49
  very clear. In fact, The New York Times even describes this chart with
• 1:02:53
  the words states with more virtual schooling later had more absenteeism. So they're not
• 1:03:01
  trying to mute this. They're not trying to mitigate it, they're not trying
• 1:03:05
  to obfuscate. They're being very very clear. And California had the most days
• 1:03:12
  off of school thanks to COVID, and California has one of the highest rates
• 1:03:16
  of absenteeism in the country. New Mexico is probably the worst when it comes
• 1:03:22
  to absenteeism in comparison to how many days they had off due to COVID,
• 1:03:29
  but they were right behind California when it came to missing school. And this
• 1:03:35
  should not be a surprise. This is not a coincidence. This is definitely
• 1:03:38
  a situation where correlation does mean causation. This is not just correlation. This
• 1:03:45
  is causation. Is a direct and obvious line, and it could not be
• 1:03:50
  more clear, and you know, I've already chided our local Fox Los Angeles
• 1:03:57
  anchor person to make sure that they we'll be asking our Governor Gavin Newsom about
• 1:04:01
  this story. At first they were noncommittal, but I think I've gotten a
• 1:04:06
  commitment from them on that. I'll see whether or not that actually happens.
• 1:04:10
  But I mean, this should be huge. This should be a massive story,
• 1:04:14
  and unfortunately it won't be, even though it was in the New York
• 1:04:15
  Times. So I got to give the Times at least some kudos for that.
• 1:04:20
  As far as this alleged new COVID surge, which I do not see
• 1:04:25
  any evidence of at all in the data. The only evidence of it is
• 1:04:29
  in renewed efforts for there to be media hysteria and for some people to be
• 1:04:34
  able to get back to wearing masks, which for some reason they like so
• 1:04:38
  much, and to force other people to take a vaccine that they don't need
• 1:04:41
  and doesn't seem to be very effective. We have a study by Boston scientists.
• 1:04:47
  This is in the Boston Globe, so kind of like the New York
• 1:04:50
  Times making their remarkable admission involving COVID in schools, the Boston Globe deserves a
• 1:04:57
  little bit of credit here because they have story about a study led by Boston
• 1:05:01
  scientists finding that the latest COVID nineteen variant is less of a threat than feared.
• 1:05:11
  Imagine that, you mean those that were creating hysteria were wrong again.
• 1:05:17
  I just can't imagine how that could have possibly happened by the way. I
• 1:05:21
  do wonder whether or not it would have been more accurate to say, instead
• 1:05:26
  of the variant is less of a threat than feared, it might have been
• 1:05:30
  more accurate to say the variant is less of a threat than hoped. Because
• 1:05:34
  there's no question in elements of the news media and in liberal circles that there's
• 1:05:40
  been a lot of hope for this new COVID strain to get us back into
• 1:05:45
  some sort of era of restrictions and get the band back together. That does
• 1:05:51
  not appear to be in any way, shape or form justified by the data.
• 1:05:56
  I mean, I have been looking for weeks as to what the hell
• 1:05:59
  people are talking about, and there is absolutely positively no evidence of this at
• 1:06:03
  all. Not that that seems to matter anymore, but it does not exist
• 1:06:08
  except unless you know. If you're the first Lady Joe Biden, she has
• 1:06:13
  tested positive for COVID, which I guess further proves that the vaccines don't stop
• 1:06:17
  you from getting it. In fact, they may actually facilitate you get in
• 1:06:20
  COVID. Of course she's going to be fine, even though she's very advanced
• 1:06:26
  in age, because COVID is no longer a major threat and shouldn't be viewed
• 1:06:30
  as such. But that story certainly was out there, and of course Joe
• 1:06:34
  Biden, without Jill there, he made more news for a completely separate illness
• 1:06:42
  which appears to be some level of dementia, because he was hosting a Medal
• 1:06:46
  of Honor ceremony. And this is really remarkable video. It doesn't work on
• 1:06:50
  a podcast, but really remarkable video which you may have seen, where he
• 1:06:56
  goes through with the Medal of Honor ceremony, he clumsily salutes the winner the
• 1:07:02
  recipient, shouldn't say the winner, the recipient, and then he leaves and
• 1:07:10
  everyone seems kind of shocked as to why he's leaving. He seems very confident
• 1:07:15
  as to why he's leaving. No one else leaves, He's the only one
• 1:07:18
  that leaves, and he does so before the benediction. The ceremony was not
• 1:07:24
  over yet it was incredibly awkward, and it does not appear as if it
• 1:07:29
  was some sort of miscommunication or the president had to go someplace on an emergency.
• 1:07:35
  Maybe it was a bathroom emergent emergency, who knows, but it certainly
• 1:07:40
  appeared to be a moment of elderly incapacitation or some sort of dimension or where
• 1:07:49
  Bidens didn't know where the hell he was or what he was doing, or
• 1:07:51
  we got confused. I mean, who knows. But at this point Biden
• 1:07:56
  has lost the benefit of the doubt. I mean, when you have so
• 1:08:00
  many of these moments. If this had been one isolated situation, if we'd
• 1:08:03
  never dealt with us before, what happened at the Medal of Honor ceremony might
• 1:08:08
  not be seen as a big deal at all. But when you put it
• 1:08:11
  in the context of all these other episodes, a rational person not in the
• 1:08:15
  mainstream news media would have to go, what the hell is going on here?
• 1:08:20
  And can you imagine? Can you imagine if Joe Biden was still president
• 1:08:26
  five years from now, which is theoretically what is the most likely scenario,
• 1:08:31
  because he's going to be the Democratic nominee barring a cataclysmic event, and he's
• 1:08:36
  most likely to be reelected against Donald Trump. So if in assuming he lives,
• 1:08:44
  that would mean that if he doesn't do what I'm predicting that he's going
• 1:08:46
  to do, which is to resign right after the mid term elections in twenty
• 1:08:51
  twenty six, so that Kamala Harris can run for two terms because constitutionally,
• 1:08:59
  she would be allowed to do that and run for her first term as an
• 1:09:01
  incumbent, which would be key for her because she's such an awful, awful
• 1:09:06
  candidate that the only way she could likely win is if she was running as
• 1:09:13
  a historic incumbent. And so that's always been my theory, and I think
• 1:09:16
  it's rather obvious that that's what's going to happen. But we have to at
• 1:09:19
  least consider the possibility that he would he would be able to fill out his
• 1:09:26
  full term, and if he did that, he would still be president five
• 1:09:30
  years from now. Think about who Joe Biden was five years ago, okay,
• 1:09:36
  in twenty eighteen. If you go back and look at video of Joe
• 1:09:41
  Biden five years ago in twenty eighteen, he was not nearly this feeble.
• 1:09:45
  I mean, he was never very bright, but he was He looked much
• 1:09:49
  better. He would you know, he still had a spring in his step,
• 1:09:55
  he did not appear to have dementia, and I knew where he was
• 1:09:59
  going. Now five years later, he's a completely different person. And can
• 1:10:03
  you imagine five years from now under the stress of the presidency. I mean,
• 1:10:11
  I mean, this could really really get ridiculous. But of course,
• 1:10:15
  the fact that they have Kamala there, who would be historic as the first
• 1:10:18
  female president and someone of color, that always gives them an out. But
• 1:10:24
  this is a major, major problem, and it's going to be a problem
• 1:10:28
  in the general election because we've still got a full year before people would start
• 1:10:31
  voting in that and there's a very good chance that this is you could get
• 1:10:34
  even larger than it currently is. He's not going to get any better than
• 1:10:39
  he currently is. And based upon this most recent incident, something is very
• 1:10:44
  much amiss. As far as the polling in the presidential race. These polls
• 1:10:49
  continue to show Biden and Trump fairly close, sometimes neck and neck, both
• 1:10:57
  well below fifty percent, both having massive portions of the country disappointed that this
• 1:11:02
  is in fact going to be the choice, or apparently going to be the
• 1:11:05
  choice. Huge majorities over seventy percent of the American people are dissatisfied with the
• 1:11:14
  choice of Biden and Trump. Over seventy percent don't want Biden. That includes
• 1:11:18
  Democrats don't want Biden to run for reelection, similar numbers for Trump. Trump
• 1:11:25
  is probably the most hated man who's ever the favorite to be a Republican or
• 1:11:30
  Democratic presidential nominee with the greatest disapproval numbers. I mean, it's just unbelievable
• 1:11:36
  that this is where we're heading. And the idea that there's not apparently at
• 1:11:41
  least not yet going to be a credible third party option is really pathetic and
• 1:11:47
  almost inconceivable because it's just so obvious that there's fertile, fertile ground there for
• 1:11:53
  somebody to make headway as a third party candidate. Of course, you need
• 1:11:57
  somebody with celebrity, with the right power, takes them a lot of money,
• 1:12:00
  and that's a lot easier said than done. But the most likely scenario
• 1:12:04
  is we're going to see a rematch that nobody wants from an election that was
• 1:12:11
  terrible in every possible way in twenty twenty and it'll probably to be just as
• 1:12:14
  bad, if not worse, in twenty twenty four. And you know,
• 1:12:17
  I'm still not convinced that Trump would beat Biden. I hate, I really
• 1:12:23
  hate these. Now it's still commonplace for these general election polls to be national
• 1:12:30
  popular vote polls, and that was always absurd even before twenty sixteen, when
• 1:12:36
  Trump lost the popular vote and won the electoral college. But post twenty sixteen,
• 1:12:43
  the national popular vote is almost irrelevant. And by the way, we
• 1:12:50
  have so few contested states that you really only need to poll And I really
• 1:12:56
  don't understand why polling institutes don't do this, because this would actually be cheaper
• 1:13:00
  and give you a far better and more interesting result than doing these stupid national
• 1:13:05
  popular vote polls that are meaningless as far as who's actually gonna win or who's
• 1:13:11
  ahead. I mean to me, if I was running a polling institute,
• 1:13:14
  I would only be polling Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, and maybe
• 1:13:19
  Pennsylvania. And until I saw, you know, Pennsylvania as being highly competitive
• 1:13:27
  between Trump and Biden or you know, Biden and De Santis, I wouldn't
• 1:13:31
  even bother with any any other state. I mean, in those are the
• 1:13:35
  only states that matter, yet we see almost no good data on those states.
• 1:13:41
  Instead, we get these these bogus national popular vote polls. Which give
• 1:13:45
  Trump fans, I think, a false sense of security that their guy can
• 1:13:49
  win because it seems like he's tied or thereabouts with Biden. Of course,
• 1:13:55
  this is not including undecided voters and where they're gonna almost assure break against Trump.
• 1:14:01
  And so the idea that Trump is only at forty six percent, I
• 1:14:04
  don't know how he's going to get any higher than that unless somehow turnout is
• 1:14:08
  very low among Democrats, which could happen because there's obviously a lack of enthusiasm
• 1:14:14
  for Joe Biden. I mean, it's possible that the Trump would overwhelm him
• 1:14:18
  when it came to enthusiasm. But I still would need to see you some
• 1:14:24
  sort of data showing that Trump could beat Biden in Georgia or End or Arizona
• 1:14:30
  and or Wisconsin, because that's really the most likely path to actually winning the
• 1:14:34
  race. And that's assuming that Trump was able to hold on to all the
• 1:14:36
  other states that he won in twenty twenty as far as and it's just by
• 1:14:42
  the way, one last point in this, it's so frustrating to me personally
• 1:14:45
  to see how unpopular the whole rematch thing is, because if you may recall
• 1:14:50
  Steve Cortez and I talked an awful lot about how that's what we wanted the
• 1:14:56
  De Santis campaign to be based on. We don't want to rematch. America
• 1:15:00
  is better than this. De Santis is the only way out of this being
• 1:15:04
  a rematch that nobody wants. Also, you know, with this age issue
• 1:15:10
  becoming more and more prominent, I think it would have been very easy,
• 1:15:13
  not easy, It would have been very plausible to tie Trump and Biden together,
• 1:15:18
  which was always my strategy for the De Santis campaign. Tie them together
• 1:15:23
  as the old guard, the elderly guys who are way past their prime,
• 1:15:28
  who are part of a failed establishment. Even tie them together on COVID.
• 1:15:32
  That would have been a strategy that could have theoretically worked in a Republican primary.
• 1:15:36
  It was not tried by the DeSantis team. They went in a completely
• 1:15:41
  different direction. It is not turned out well at all, and the evidence
• 1:15:45
  is increasing on almost a daily basis that it's not going to turn out well.
• 1:15:48
  Trump is now winning big in the Republican race, by as many as
• 1:15:55
  forty six points in a Wall Street Journal poll, although there's some problems with
• 1:16:00
  pole and the poll actually may have been done by a Trump friendly polling outlet
• 1:16:04
  on behalf of the Wall Street Journal, which is ironic considering that Trump is
• 1:16:10
  constantly claiming that Rupert Murdoch's media operation is against him. It's often exactly the
• 1:16:15
  opposite, even a Fox News channel. But that's the way Trump does his
• 1:16:20
  business. It's all about him lying and whatever fits his agenda at the moment.
• 1:16:25
  But for whether you think it's a credible poll or not, Trump is
• 1:16:28
  up by forty six points, which is the largest margin nationally I've seen in
• 1:16:33
  a major national poll in recent times. And so Trump is up by forty
• 1:16:40
  six in the Wall Street Journal poll and by thirty four in the CNN poll
• 1:16:44
  over Ron De Santis, and the Santis margin keeps basically shrinking. Nicki Haley
• 1:16:49
  continues to make a little bit of a run. The only shred of good
• 1:16:54
  news is that the fake Obama Swamy's momentum seems to have been blunted. That
• 1:16:59
  seems to be pretty clear now. I don't see him getting it back in
• 1:17:03
  a major way, especially since I don't think that the viewership for the second
• 1:17:09
  debate is going to be all that great. I mean, he might create
• 1:17:12
  a ruckus there, but I think that many of his voters are obviously people
• 1:17:17
  who are much more prone to voting for Donald Trump. But his Trump's numbers
• 1:17:21
  get bigger and bigger, they have to come from someplace in the place they're
• 1:17:26
  most logically going to come from, or from vivek Obama Swamy, since he's
• 1:17:30
  been the most pro Trump candidate in the race. The most depressing poll number
• 1:17:35
  I have seen, and maybe the most important poll number I have seen,
• 1:17:40
  comes from that CNN poll, because CNN at least try to do something a
• 1:17:44
  little bit different, a little bit interesting, and they ask people, who
• 1:17:47
  would you still consider voting for? And when they asked that, eighty one
• 1:17:55
  percent of Republicans still said that they would at least consider. That means they
• 1:18:00
  were either planning to vote for Donald Trump or they would consider voting for Donald
• 1:18:04
  Trump in a Republican primary eighty one percent. And the way I look at
• 1:18:12
  that is okay, So, after eight years of a ship show, all
• 1:18:16
  the electoral losses in two thou eighteen, twenty twenty two, twenty one,
• 1:18:20
  twenty twenty two, the COVID fiasco, the four indictments, all the theoretical
• 1:18:29
  reasons that might cause a rational Republican to go, you know what, I
• 1:18:32
  can't even consider another four years of Donald Trump or sending him into the general
• 1:18:39
  election against Joe Biden. As unpopular as he is with non Republicans, I
• 1:18:43
  just can't do it. After all of that, only nineteen percent of Republicans
• 1:18:49
  say that they are in that camp that they cannot consider voting for Donald Trump.
• 1:18:56
  Nineteen percent. That is a pathetic number, and I think it really
• 1:19:02
  is the essence of why Trump would have to die At this point, I'm
• 1:19:06
  not one hundred percent there yet, I'm very very close to one hundred percent,
• 1:19:11
  But folks, in order for Trump to be defeated, that number has
• 1:19:16
  to be at least at least forty percent that would never consider voting for Trump,
• 1:19:25
  because then that forty percent could theoretically consolidate ideally around the santis and you
• 1:19:31
  might get a situation where you could squeak out of victory. But that's probably
• 1:19:36
  not enough. That number probably needs to be sixty percent. It needs to
• 1:19:42
  be at least three times what it currently is. And after eight years of
• 1:19:47
  all this this shit storm that Trump has created and endured, if it's only
• 1:19:55
  nineteen percent, now, how the hell are you going to get to sixty
• 1:19:58
  percent by the time I'm the major states are voting, it's just not possible.
• 1:20:04
  It's too baked into the cake that there's just there's just not enough people
• 1:20:11
  who are even really open minded about this still, especially after the four indictments.
• 1:20:16
  So that nineteen percent number, because those are you know, that's effectively
• 1:20:21
  the never Trump brigade, that number is even smaller than it was at the
• 1:20:26
  beginning of the year. Now, granted it's a different poll and you can
• 1:20:29
  get different sampling, but I mean, if you recall there was a CBS
• 1:20:32
  poll which we talked a lot about on the podcast, that indicated the twenty
• 1:20:36
  seven percent of Republicans were in the never Trump category. The number has gone
• 1:20:42
  down again, different poll, different sample, you know, so it's really
• 1:20:46
  not comparable, but it certainly hasn't gone up at all after four indictments and
• 1:20:54
  all sorts of other theoretical reasons and legitimate reasons why someone might go into the
• 1:20:59
  camp up. I'm sorry, I just can't vote for Donald Trump. And
• 1:21:01
  by the way, you know that number, I'd really like to know more
• 1:21:05
  about that nineteen percent of these people that would also never vote for him in
• 1:21:09
  a general election. I doubt it. I doubt I would guess there's a
• 1:21:13
  pretty good percentage of that nineteen percent that would still vote for him in a
• 1:21:16
  general election, just to try to avoid Joe Biden being re elected, which
• 1:21:21
  really just shows you just how I don't know, delusional the average Republican voter
• 1:21:29
  is, and how popular Trump still is and is becoming more and more so
• 1:21:32
  almost every day. It's really it's really quite amazing, and I just don't
• 1:21:38
  have an answer for how this ever gets fixed. I really don't. I
• 1:21:41
  wish I did. I mean, I will probably in an in an upcoming
• 1:21:45
  episode of the podcast, try to go through the most optimistic scenario I can
• 1:21:49
  come up with to try to justify how this might turn out in a way
• 1:21:55
  other than Donald Trump being the nominee. But as of this moment, it's
• 1:21:58
  really got hard for I would have to do some serious preparation for that podcast
• 1:22:03
  episode to be able to come up with that scenario, because I just don't
• 1:22:06
  see it as being very plausible. The last story I want to do for
• 1:22:12
  this episode eighty seven of the podcast deals with what's going on at CNN,
• 1:22:16
  which we've talked consistently about this year, all the changes at CNN and all
• 1:22:21
  those that could still be happening in the future. They most recently just hired
• 1:22:26
  a new CEO by the name of Mark Thompson, who has quite a liberal
• 1:22:30
  pedigree from The New York Times and the BBC, although I am told that
• 1:22:34
  he is mostly going to be in charge of the business side and not the
• 1:22:39
  editorial side, and that his claim to fame is monetizing digital for The New
• 1:22:45
  York Times, and so that may not be an indication of where CNN is
• 1:22:49
  going in the future, and that the effort to try to bring them more
• 1:22:51
  to the middle may still be in play. I don't know that for sure.
• 1:22:56
  I think we'll know more in the coming weeks and months, and to
• 1:23:00
  let you know as soon as I hear anything on that front. But Anderson
• 1:23:03
  Cooper, the main anchor at CNN, did an interview with The New York
• 1:23:09
  Times in which he basically disparaged or dismissed Chris Lick, demeaned him frankly not
• 1:23:16
  you know, not understanding what that was all about. I think it is
• 1:23:19
  basically a direct quote from Anderson Cooper about Chris Lick, who had been the
• 1:23:23
  previous head of CNN, who had been brought in to try to bring CNN
• 1:23:29
  more to the middle politically, he clearly trying to do that. He clearly
• 1:23:33
  of his own his own political beliefs, or seemingly his own political beliefs were
• 1:23:38
  much more moderate than previously, certainly under Jeff Zucker's leadership at CNN, and
• 1:23:45
  certainly more to the middle than the average CNN news personality, especially on COVID.
• 1:23:50
  I mean, Chris Lick actually sounded not quite like John Ziegler, but
• 1:23:54
  he was definitely much more in the rational realm when it came to COVID than
• 1:24:00
  the average CNN news personality. But the most interesting and maybe the most important
• 1:24:05
  and telling element of this interview, at least according to an article in Mediaite,
• 1:24:11
  my former news outlet where I was a senior columnist for several years,
• 1:24:15
  was when the issue of media bias came up. So the reporter got my
• 1:24:20
  name of MARCHESI was asking Anderson Cooper about media bias. This was after the
• 1:24:27
  conversation about Chris Lick, and Cooper was basically blowing off the whole subject that
• 1:24:32
  has done. You know, basically doesn't think he understands it. He barely
• 1:24:35
  had any interaction with Lick, and you know, he basically wants to pretend
• 1:24:40
  that it never really happened. Then came the issue of media bias in cable
• 1:24:45
  news, and Anderson Cooper is quoted in The New York Times as saying,
• 1:24:51
  this is going to sound like a cop out, but none of this stuff
• 1:24:57
  particularly interests me. Let me repeat that this is on media bias. Question
• 1:25:03
  about media bias at CNN, which is, you know, effectively, the
• 1:25:10
  bias is an existential threat to the existence of the network and certainly the credibility
• 1:25:15
  of those who worked there, and is at the forefront of most people's minds
• 1:25:20
  when it comes to evaluating the content that they're getting on CNN or any other
• 1:25:26
  cable news outlet. And so Anderson Cooper says this meaning the issue of media
• 1:25:31
  bias. This is going to sound like a cop out, but none of
• 1:25:35
  this stuff media bias particularly interests me. And interestingly, the reporter from the
• 1:25:42
  New York Times responded, this is the future of your job. Exclamation point.
• 1:25:46
  How could it not interest you? Question Mark? And that's a pretty
• 1:25:51
  good response, because I'm not sure had I been the one questioning Anderson Cooper,
• 1:25:56
  that I would have come up with one any better than that. I
• 1:25:59
  mean, that's just amazing that seemingly and I'm granted sometimes you know, written
• 1:26:04
  quotes are different than they are in reality. I'd like to see a video
• 1:26:09
  of this interview to existed. I'm not aware if it does, but based
• 1:26:14
  upon the words being used, that is really tone death, that is really
• 1:26:17
  out of touch, that is really clueless about about what the situation is.
• 1:26:23
  Because if you really, you know, are not particularly interested in quote unquote
• 1:26:30
  this stuff, then how do you ever turn this ship around? Because he's
• 1:26:33
  the captain of the ship, at least on air, Anderson Cooper is,
• 1:26:38
  And so that was kind of astonishing. And I think rather telling I talk
• 1:26:42
  all the time about the bubble, the celebrity bubble that these people live in,
• 1:26:46
  and that's an indication of the celebrity bubble right there, where, you
• 1:26:50
  know, bias, political bias, that stuff. It doesn't particularly interest me
• 1:26:57
  because within his bubble, he doesn't think of himself as a liberal. Within
• 1:27:01
  his New York Hampton's elite, they're all liberals and they all think they're right,
• 1:27:09
  and no one ever tells them they're wrong because they're rich celebrities and everyone
• 1:27:12
  wants to kiss their ass, and so it never occurs to him that what
• 1:27:17
  he's doing is very, very biased towards the left wing. He really thinks
• 1:27:21
  he's middle of the road, and any accusations contrary to that he doesn't take
• 1:27:28
  seriously because everyone he trusts and respects thinks that, you know, he's doing
• 1:27:33
  a great job, and he probably has a lot of friends who are way
• 1:27:38
  more liberal than even he is, So it further manifests itself in this delusion
• 1:27:43
  that he's not really left a center or that his content isn't biased towards liberalism.
• 1:27:48
  So I found that to be very very interesting and telling him we'll keep
• 1:27:53
  an eye on what's really going on at CNN because I think that that story
• 1:27:58
  is yet to be fully written. That seems very clear. I think there's
• 1:28:00
  still a struggle as to what the future of CNN is going to be,
• 1:28:04
  and it'll be fascinating to see how it all turns out. That'll do it
• 1:28:09
  for this episode number eighty seven of The Death of Journalism podcast. As is
• 1:28:13
  always the case, thanks so much for listening, and please remember to subscribe,
• 1:28:16
  rate, and review this episode share it on social media. If you
• 1:28:19
  do so, please tag me and I'll be happy to share it with my
• 1:28:23
  followers on Twitter and Facebook Until next time. Thanks so much for listening.
• 1:28:27
  This is the Death of Journalism podcast. My name is John Ziegler.