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Episode One Hundred Seventeen: The Rocky Statue Must Go · The Death Of Journalism

• 0:00
  Welcome to episode number one hundred and seventeen of the Death of Journalism podcast.
• 0:03
  My name is John Zigler. I'm your host on today's show. Our defense
• 0:07
  secretary went missing and no one seemed to care very much. Elon Musk and
• 0:11
  Mark Cuban get into an epic battle OVERDEI we are a week away from the
• 0:16
  Iowa Caucus, and the right wing media goes bananas over the Jeffrey Epstein document
• 0:22
  dump Nothingburger. I'm known as the Dutch Digital marketing Man. I'm a digital
• 0:28
  advertising SEO and email marketing specialist that also happens to be a big fan of
• 0:33
  John Ziegler and the Death of Journalism. Do you need help reaching your target
• 0:38
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• 0:42
  best channels for your business. Please visit my website, the Dutchdigital Marketingman dot
• 0:48
  com and let me help you tell your story. The website is the Dutch
• 0:53
  Digital Marketingman dot com. If you want to grow your business, Peter can
• 0:58
  help. That's the Dutch Digital Marketingman dot com. And hey, thanks for
• 1:03
  sponsoring the show. We begin this podcast episode with a story that may not
• 1:07
  mean very much may not have any real world impact, but I do think
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  it says a lot about our media and our culture. It deals with the
• 1:18
  United States Defense Secretary and news that he basically went missing into the hospital into
• 1:26
  ICU for several days without anybody, including the President of the United States,
• 1:33
  knowing about it. This is how The Blaze, a conservative media outlet,
• 1:37
  reported on the story, a news service last week that US Defense Secretary Lloyd
• 1:41
  Austin had been hospitalized since January first, while the press was kept in the
• 1:47
  dark that Austin had been hospitalized. It is now reported that President Joe Biden
• 1:51
  was also unaware of the concerning medical situation. A noteworthy Republican has described the
• 1:56
  incident as quote a shocking breakdown alarming. New details emerged on Saturday regarding Austin's
• 2:02
  sudden hospitalization. The Pentagon did not inform President Biden and other top officials is
• 2:08
  in his administration, including National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, about Austin's hospitalization for
• 2:15
  three days. Three US officials reportedly told political Austin was admitted to Walter Reed
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  National Military Medical Center on Monday evening after complications following a recent elective medical procedure.
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  Pentagon officials did not reveal what procedure Austin had, what the complications were,
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  or how serious the medical situation was. Now, again, this may
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  not end up causing any real world impact whatsoever, But there are two things
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  about this story that I find interesting. Number One, I'd like you to
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  consider how different it would be portrayed and how big a deal it would be
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  if in the Trump administration the Defense Secretary suddenly went into the hospital for no
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  specific reason. In ICU, the President wasn't informed. Even the deputy Defense
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  Secretary didn't know really what was going on, and everyone was kept in the
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  dark, and to this day there's still mystery about what the heck actually happened.
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  If the same set of circumstances occurred in the Trump administration, this would
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  be a big deal. The media would see this as part of a narrative
• 3:21
  of incompetence and secrecy, and who knows what else that they would find that
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  would be negative about this story if it was in the Trump administration. But
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  there's another element of the story that I think dovetails a lot with other stuff
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  that's going on in the news lately, and that is that the Defense Secretary
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  in question, Lloyd Austin is a black man. Now, being a black
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  man may have absolutely positively nothing to do with this story or even how it's
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  being covered or not covered in the left wing mainstream news media. However,
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  we now live in a world where it's almost impossible not to at least consider
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  that possibility that because he's a black man, the left wing media and the
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  administration itself and the Pentagon are far more hesitant to jump on the story and
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  potentially make a black man look bad or embarrassed or what have you. Who
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  knows because we don't know all the details of what actually happened here. And
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  I hate this. I talk about this all the time, about how because
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  we now live in a world where it's equity over everything and DEI hires and
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  affirmative action and the media treating black people differently than virtually every other race,
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  usually with kid gloves, this becomes not just a rational possibility, but it's
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  almost to the point where you have to consider it to be the most logical
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  outcome or cause or explanation for what is happening. That Oh, okay,
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  so this is a black mant a black man in some way, shape or
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  form. Again, I don't know if that's the case. We'll probably never
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  know, And I hate the fact that we're even now forced to consider these
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  things. But we now see everything through the prism of race, even things
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  that don't necessarily have anything to do with race. And it's bad for everybody.
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  It's bad for the country, it's bad for the culture, it's bad
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  bad for black people, it's bad for every race of people. This is
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  really at the heart of why I can't stand DEI or affirmative action. It's
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  because now every successful person of color is automatically, in a rational world,
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  presumed to be being treated differently. Maybe they got their job because of their
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  race or gender or sexuality or whatever it is, especially in the Biden administration,
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  which has made it very clear they're more than proud. It's not just
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  a matter of pride that organically, you know, we get all sorts of
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  people in positions of power who are either people of color, or female,
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  or transgendered or homosexual, whatever it is. It's obviously part of the agenda.
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  This didn't happen by accident. It's part of the actual strategy here.
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  This is the way they look at the world. So we have to presume
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  Lloyd Austin got the job at least in part because he's a black man,
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  And is he being treated differently, And is this story is being treated differently
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  because he's a black man. Again, I don't know, but we have
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  to presume that's at least a possibility because of everything else that's going on in
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  the world. And of course, this is all happening in the aftermath of
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  the Claudine Gay situation where she was essentially forced to resign as the president of
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  Harvard, first black president of Harvard, a black female, a person though
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  who has lived a very privileged life and will continue just as I predicted when
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  I said she would be forced to resign a couple episodes ago, still be
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  living a life of privilege, making almost a million dollars a year. She'll
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  continue as a professor. She'll be a bigger celebrity in the left wing world
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  than she ever was before. She's now a martyr, and the left wing
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  media is continuing to promote these absurd narratives that somehow this was a right wing
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  plot to get her. The left wing is in complete rationalization and revenge mode
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  because they can't stand that one of theirs got taken out. The whole idea
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  that this is some sort of a right wing plot is so utterly laughable.
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  I mean, being the target of a right wing plot is a feature,
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  not a bug in the liberal academia world. This is something you brag about
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  at cocktail parties at Harvard and other Ivy League institutions and other elite academic institutions.
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  If you are a target of the right wing, that means you're doing
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  something good. That means you're dangerous to that. This is something to be
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  proud of. And I'm being this, I'm being completely serious about this.
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  The right wing media has absolutely no power whatsoever in liberal academia. The reason
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  why this happened was because it was I guess you would call them moderates or
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  or not as Marxist. Left wing thinkers realized that this was an untenable situation,
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  whether it was because of donors or just public embarrassment, or maybe just
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  maybe the actual principle of having a serial plagiarist be the president of Harvard was
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  not something that could be withstood, and so eventually she was forced to resign.
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  And I'm sure she'll eventually be replaced by somebody who's at least as Marxist,
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  liberalist, liberal socialist and has as many or maybe more DEI points as
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  she does. But this has been an absolutely hilarious and telling effort by the
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  left wing to pretend that she would just the target of a right wing plot
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  to get her because she's a black female. So this is the maddening element
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  of this. She gets her job because she's a black female, she holds
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  on to it initially because she's a black female. She gets fired, I
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  believe because the story got too big and it was too embarrassing for the entire
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  issue of DEI. But now in the left wing narrative, she was essentially
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  forced to resign and or fired way you want to look at it, because
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  she's a black female. No, if she was a white, straight male,
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  she never first of all, would have gotten the job, and second
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  of all would have been fired like the University of Pennsylvania president was after the
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  disastrous congressional testimony on the entire issue of Israel and Hamas and anti Semitism on
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  campus. So all this is an upside down world. And I mentioned that
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  the left wing media is in rationalization and revenge mode. The revenge part of
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  this came when a guy by named of Bill Ackman, who you may not
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  have heard of, but he's very prominent in social media, especially on Twitter.
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  He's the CEO of Pershing Square. He's a professed democrat, although I
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  doubt he's as much of a democrat as he used to be. And he's
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  got a million Philip followers, actually more than that on Twitter. And he
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  went to Harvard and he has been leading the charge for basically this anti wokeness,
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  anti Semitism crusade at Harvard and elsewhere with an elite academia and business insider
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  went after his wife for alleged plagiarism. She has absolutely nothing to do with
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  the story. And this is a classic example of you know, you take
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  one of ours, We're going to go after one of yours. It's like
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  the mafia. And this is the way the news media sees this is that
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  they now have to get revenge for the ouster of Claudine Gay. And Bill
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  Ackman has a parent at least his wife has been the victim of this.
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  I have no idea whether she's guilty of plagiarism, but I don't think it's
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  relevant to the story at all. This is clearly a tit for tat situation.
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  This is the way the modern media works or thinks about things. They're
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  activists, they're not journalists. But perhaps the most interesting thing that has happened
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  in this realm of DEI in the last several days, at least since our
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  last episode of the podcast was clearly an online I don't know if you call
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  it a fight or a debate or somewhere in between that broke out between Elon
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  Musk obviously the guy who owns Twitter or x, and Mark Cuban, who
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  is most well known these days is I guess he's still the owner of the
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  Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team, although he's just recently sold I think most of
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  his share he still controls it. He basically did a reverse mortgage on the
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  Dallas Mavericks. The way I understand it, he still lives there, he
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  still controls the Mavericks, but he doesn't have the equity in the organization.
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  A lot of people were speculating that because he had done that with the Mavericks
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  and has all this cash now, and because he's leaving Shark Tank on ABC,
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  that maybe he was paving the way or clearing the decks for a potential
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  independent presidential run after this debate with Elon Musk. I don't think there's any
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  real chance of that, nor do I think that was ever really in the
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  plans. But I have to say Cuban is somebody who I've always found to
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  be interesting and in fact, on a few occasions in prior years when people
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  would ask for names of potential independent candidates. In fact, there was even
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  one time when my I guess now former friend, Democratic Congressman Johnny Armouth for
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  Democratic Chairman of the House Budget Committee, asked me, you know, whether
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  or not there was a nonpartisan person who was publicly known that I think would
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  have a good chance to be Speaker of the House, because there was some
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  thought that maybe you pick some from somebody from outside the House representatives to be
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  speaker. And I actually volunteered Mark Cuban's name because I think he's a smart
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  guy. He's obviously a business guy. He's you know, he didn't seem
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  to be captured by the woke mind virus, he didn't seem to be super
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  liberal. He seemed to have some balls, you know, obviously nowhere near
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  perfect. But we're talking about very slim pickings in this realm of the world
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  and getting slimmer every day, and so somebody for whom I've had some respect
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  and I was interested in. But this debate with Musk really revealed either how
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  much Cuban has changed or how much he's virtue signaling. Now I'm not sure
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  what it is, but the essence of the debate was over the issue of
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  DEI diversity, equity and inclusion and hiring, and it went back and forth
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  and back and forth. I just I'll give you my general impressions and analysis
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  of what transpired here. Basically, you know, Cuban was trying to make
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  the point that he thinks DEI is getting a bad rap, that it's actually
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  good business. And his bedrock presumption, which I think is beyond faulty,
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  is that there is inherent racism still in society when it comes to hiring practices,
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  that people of color or of certain genders or sexualities are inherently still not
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  always, but you know, often discriminated against when it comes to hiring.
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  And that is a premise for which I don't think there is any evidence.
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  Now, are there still I'm sure very isolated situations, of course there are,
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  but that's you know, this is a classic liberal tactic where you know,
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  because something isn't perfect, they decide they can destroy it and remake it
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  in their own, you know, Marxist ideology. So we're never going to
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  have a perfect society. Liberals somehow pretend that we can. We can't,
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  but you don't let a very few isolated situations destroy the essence of the entire
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  system. And I just do not buy, nor do I believe there's a
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  shred of evidence that there is anything close to systematic racism in today's society preventing
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  certain groups from getting hired other than maybe straight white males and maybe some Asian
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  people who are effectively especially when it comes to academia and getting into certain colleges,
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  be and this is what largely what the Supreme Court found are in fact
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  being discriminated against in a essentially racist fashion. So Cuban has a false premise.
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  He even acknowledged that he people might disagree with him on this, and
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  I don't even know how he could truly believe this, especially given the fact.
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  And of course this is where Musco almost immediately went in this debate to
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  Cuban's great vulnerability on this subject, where he is the owner of the Dallas
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  Mavericks, which is an NBA back basketball team which almost exclusively hires at least
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  as players black men, and understandably so, because everybody knows that the NBA
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  is dominated by black men because for whatever reason, black men are better at
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  basketball than any other racial entity. That's pretty darn clear. Now. Of
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  course, the media doesn't want to talk about why that is, but it's
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  clearly the case and everyone now accepts that that's the case. But at the
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  Mavericks it actually goes beyond just the players on the court. The Mavericks have
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  a black female CEO, So you know, at least give Cuban this.
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  You know, he's practicing what he preaches when it comes to DEI. I
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  have no idea you know how good she is or how qualified she is,
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  but it's relevant with regard to Cuban's intentions and actual actions here. But back
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  to the issue of NBA basketball. So Musk immediately chides Cuban about this.
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  Then you know, why aren't you hiring other people to play basketball for the
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  Mavericks other than you know, really tall black men. And you know,
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  of course this was something that resonates with the average person because that just doesn't
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  make any sense. Of course, if you really believe the DEI, right,
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  the why is it on the basketball court? The DEI doesn't matter.
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  Why is it that somehow thirteen percent of the population of males black men are
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  making up, you know, eighty ninety ninety five percent of NBA basketball teams,
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  including the Dallas Mavericks. How could that possibly be if it was simply
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  done, you know, in a way that was consistent with DEI. Because
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  remember, DEI is not about equality of opportunity. DEI is about equity of
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  outcome. Right, I've been saying it like a broken record, but it's
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  incredibly important. Bears repeating. I can't say it enough. That's the fundamental
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  change in America from a quality of opportunity to equity of outcome. So if
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  equity of outcome actually matters, then how is it the outcome of NBA basketball
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  players could possibly be in the eighty to ninety percent of for a group of
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  people who only make up thirteen percent of the population. That's not possible.
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  Oh, so you're saying that basketball is a realm where achievement and talent actually
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  matter, and therefore you can choose who gets the position based upon that talent
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  and achievement, and therefore race or sexuality or whatever does it matter. Well,
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  of course I'm all in favor of that. I don't care how many
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  black people are on the basketball team. I just want the best basketball team.
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  I want the players that are the best to be on the team.
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  That's how this ought to work. That's the essence of America. And we
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  let the chips fall where they may. Now, do we keep an eye
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  on certain situations to make sure that there there isn't racism or sexism or whatever.
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  Of course, But you've got to have a very wide latitude, a
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  very long leash here, because there are certain enteavors where, for whatever reason,
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  whether it's cultural or social or genetic or whatever, it is, that
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  certain ethnicities do better or not as well in certain endeavors, like, for
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  instance, very few Asians are good at basketball, largely because of the height
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  issue. No one would ever argue that Asians are not as tall as other
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  ethnicities or races. This is just basic common sense and observation and science.
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  Remember, science is supposed to matter except in realms where it's politically incorrect.
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  So so back to this issue of DEI and basketball. So Cubans rebuttal to
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  that was unbelievably weak and basically, again I'm paraphrasing, Basically he makes the
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  argument that, well, basketball is unique, or I don't know if he
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  said unique, but it is certainly the implication. It's somehow it's a realm
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  where it's easier to determine who has talent or achievement than in other realms,
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  because there's a lot of jobs where the differences between one candidate for a job
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  and another candidate is so small that you have to consider race in that.
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  It's almost exactly what he said that, you know, basically, race or
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  gender or sexuality is a tiebreaker because diversity is an inherent good. Now,
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  look, natural diversity, I think is fantastic. I've talked often about how
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  the perfect formula for football success is to have a mixture of different races organically
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  occur on your football team. An entire book about high school football team in
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  Steubenville, Ohio, a nationally known powerhouse, and at the essence of why
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  Steubenville Big Red is so good to this day. There are a lot of
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  reasons, but the main reason is that the makeup of the town culturally is
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  absolutely perfect from a football perspective, tough Italian white kids and fast black kids.
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  That's always been the essence of it. Plus there's a whole bunch of
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  other cultural positives that come with that cultural and ethnic diversity. And so that's
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  just one example of many. I'm all in favor of diversity, but it
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  should happen organically. And this idea that somehow there are very few endeavors that
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  you can really tell the difference in the candidates based upon their talent or their
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  achievement, whatever it is, is a fallacy. Now there are some jobs
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  that's the case. I do find it ironic that, you know, Hollywood
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  is is as gung ho about dei as any place on the planet. And
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  you could argue that that's one of the places where until you become a celebrity
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  and therefore you actually have power and box office cachet and you can actually you
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  know, put people in the seats because you're a celebrity. Until you get
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  to that point, you know, the difference is between one candidate and another
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  candidate. When there's thousands of candidates who really want these acting jobs or whatever
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  it is in entertainment, that the difference between them is exceedingly small, and
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  that therefore equity is more easily done. Because they're all the same. Anyway,
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  you might as well, just in their minds, pick people based upon
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  race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, what have you, because that'll,
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  you know, that'll make you feel good, that'll show you'll signal your virtue,
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  they'll check off the quotas qualify for the oscars, which is literally a
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  thing. Now you've got to have a certain Dei score to qualify for the
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  oscars. So I do find that to be rather ironic. I mean,
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  when you consider realms like entertainment, where you've got a zillion people that want
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  a job, and the difference between them is very, very small, maybe
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  imperceptible, it's completely subjective. Then all of a sudden, I can understand
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  why someone might say, well, you might as well choose based upon the
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  Dei quotion, because that's those are the current rules of the game. But
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  I think that is an exception, and probably an exception that proves the rule.
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  In most endeavors in life. It's not that difficult to tell the difference
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  between candidates, and I don't think it's a coincidence. I don't think it's
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  a coincidence at all that the Left, specifically in academia, is systematically trying
• 23:55
  to do away with ways to mark achievement meant or talent or to be able
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  to discern the differences in candidates. And this is most dramatic when it comes
• 24:07
  to getting into schools. This is how, in large part, they're going
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  to get around the Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action, because it's becoming almost
• 24:17
  impossible to determine the difference in candidates. They're in March's part, getting rid
• 24:22
  of the SAT and standardized testing scores. The grade point average has been diluted
• 24:29
  to basically mean nothing, and so when you get rid of the standard of
• 24:34
  the standardized test was This has been a long time in coming. This has
• 24:37
  been decades, decades and decades where the Left has attacked standardized test scores as
• 24:45
  allegedly being racist because they are very, very inconvenient to their cause. Because
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  if you have a standardized test score and it's accepted as legitimate, then it's
• 24:57
  very difficult to be able to say, well, these candidates are all equal.
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  Well, no, we have a quantitative way of determining the differences between
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  candidates. We have a test score, I mean, when I was going
• 25:11
  to high school in college, your SAT score was a huge, huge deal.
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  Well that's been almost completely eliminated, not totally, but here in California
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  it's effectively been eliminated. And that's not a coincidence. Now they claim it's
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  because the test is racist. They did all sorts of things to try to
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  eliminate that, and it didn't impact that. The inequity in the minds of
• 25:37
  liberals in the testing results. And I've mentioned this so many times before,
• 25:42
  but liberals basically panicked when even after eight years of Barack Obama, we didn't
• 25:48
  see any significant difference in the outcomes, whether it was in test scores or
• 25:56
  in jobs or achievements or whatever. They basically everything basically stayed the same from
• 26:02
  an outcome standpoint when it came to rapes and ethnicity, and liberals decided,
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  Aha, Okay, it can't be us, since we just had eight years
• 26:14
  of Obama. It must be society. It must be systemic. We are
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  an inherently racist country. That's the only acceptable explanation for why we're seeing still
• 26:26
  inequity in outcome. And so now we as a society must enforce equity in
• 26:34
  outcome and that's wrong, that's Unamerican, and that is a recipe for the
• 26:40
  end of the country as well as enormous societal unrest because people are starting to
• 26:47
  get it, and white people and I hope Asian people are starting to understand
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  what this is really all about, and it is It goes right to the
• 26:56
  heart of what the country is supposed to be. And it is a situation
• 27:00
  that I think is combustible from a societal, societal, and cultural perspective.
• 27:06
  Now, one of the other things that Cuban tried to do where he was
• 27:08
  trying to get cute because he got crushed on social media, especially by Elon
• 27:14
  Musk's supporters, and I think he understood he was going to get crushed.
• 27:19
  But in his effort to try to rebut the criticism against him, he tried
• 27:25
  to make a joke I guess about how important DEI is and made the argument
• 27:32
  that the Trump administration had very little DEI and look at what a disaster the
• 27:36
  Trump administration was. Well, first of all, there was actually more racial
• 27:41
  representation in the Trump administration than the media gives him credit for. But okay,
• 27:48
  let me just accept this argument since I'm an anti Trump conservative. Yeah,
• 27:52
  I didn't like the Trump administration, especially the last year of it.
• 27:56
  And so you want to make the argument that somehow, if they had had
• 28:00
  more DEI that they would have been better. I don't buy that at all.
• 28:03
  But okay, let's look at the Bio administration. The Biden administration is
• 28:07
  steeped in DEI. It's the essence of the Biden administration. It's the DNA
• 28:14
  DNA, not the DEI. It's the DNA of the Biden administration. And
• 28:18
  yet Biden's approval ratings are at historic lows, way worse right now than even
• 28:25
  Donald Trump's were at this point in his presidency. So how's that working out?
• 28:30
  Mark Cuban, And let me just give you one example. Kamala Harris
• 28:36
  was the ultimate DEI selection. Why how Well because Joe Biden telegraphed that he
• 28:44
  was going to choose a woman as his vice president and made it very clear
• 28:48
  he was probably gonna choose a black woman or a woman of color as his
• 28:52
  vice president. That's his DEI affirmative action as it gets. And this is
• 28:56
  the part that drives me bananas. When you say that you're only going to
• 29:03
  consider one ethnicity for the job or one gender for the job. Inherently that's
• 29:11
  racist or sexist, but it's worse than even that, because what you're then
• 29:15
  doing is you're subjecting that person who gets the job to all sorts of ridicule
• 29:22
  and lack of respect because you are forcing people to come to the rational conclusion
• 29:29
  that that's the only reason why they got their job. It's just astonishing to
• 29:33
  me that liberals, democrats, the media don't understand this or don't care about
• 29:37
  it because it is insulting to people of color, or to women, or
• 29:44
  to people who are homosexual, or whatever, whatever the DEI standard is in
• 29:48
  the particular situation, it's insulting to them, especially when you telegraph that those
• 29:53
  are the only people that are eligible for the job. So in the history
• 29:57
  of America, may not you more obvious DEI higher than Kamala Harris? Well,
• 30:04
  how's that turned out? Mark Cuban. Not only is she a terrible
• 30:10
  vice president, I mean, you know, the statements that she makes are
• 30:14
  constantly ridiculed as basically being you know, out of the playbook of a third
• 30:19
  grade teacher. And that's on a good day. But it's not just that
• 30:25
  she is ridiculed. Her lack of popularity her lack of respect is why the
• 30:33
  Democrats are forced to go with an eighty one year old candidate who have showed
• 30:37
  signed dementia. That's the essence of an entire problem, at least on the
• 30:45
  Democratic side. You could even argue on someone on the Republican side for why
• 30:51
  we're gonna get Biden versus Trump in the twenty twenty four election. If Kamala
• 30:56
  Harris had not been a DEI selection and therefore was not the subject of ridicule,
• 31:03
  did not have approval ratings that were even worse than Joe Biden's. If
• 31:07
  someone competent had been chosen, Biden could have decided not to run for a
• 31:11
  second term and we wouldn't be facing this horrendous situation of a guy who's in
• 31:18
  his eighties who signs the dementia against the nut job in his late seventies who
• 31:23
  seems to be slowing down rather quickly in this horrendous Trump Biden rematch that looks
• 31:30
  like we're going to get in twenty twenty four. That happened because of a
• 31:33
  DEI selection. Now, was that the only reason. No, But that
• 31:37
  is a key part of the equation for why we're in this mess. This
• 31:44
  is what happens when you make big decisions based on DEI and Kamala Harris is
• 31:49
  a perfect example of that. So Mark Cuban got crushed in this debate.
• 31:56
  I don't think there's any chance he's going to run for president as an independent,
• 32:00
  not because of the debate with Elon Musk, but because I just don't
• 32:06
  think, based upon the things he said, that he's even thinking about it,
• 32:09
  because if he was, that's not the lane. That's not the lane
• 32:14
  you would pick. If you were going to be an independent candidate to be
• 32:17
  president, you would be picking the rational, anti woke, left of center
• 32:23
  lane. That's what you would be doing. And especially since you owned the
• 32:28
  Dallas Mavericks, you would have the political cover to be able to do that
• 32:35
  because no one's going to claim that you're, you know, somehow racist,
• 32:39
  and you've got a black female CEO for your basketball team. I mean so,
• 32:44
  So Mark Cuban has plenty of cover to go in that direction, and
• 32:47
  the fact that he's not tells me there's no chance that he's running, at
• 32:52
  least not in a way that would ever be successful as an independent candidate for
• 32:55
  president. Now, I mentioned that Hollywood is an interesting case study when it
• 33:00
  comes to equity for the reasons that are pretty obvious. One, it's very
• 33:06
  very very liberal, and also too because the nature of the job is that
• 33:14
  thousands of people want every single position, and the vast majority of them can
• 33:19
  do the job plausibly. I mean, especially when it comes to acting.
• 33:23
  I mean, I don't want to put down actors, but until you become
• 33:28
  a star, a celebrity, and if you're one of the very very few
• 33:31
  people that has some sort of real talent or real magic, until you reach
• 33:37
  that status, you bring basically no value to the table because somebody else can
• 33:42
  do the job just as well, because the job's not that difficult and everybody
• 33:46
  wants it because it's very, very prestigious, And so it's a realm that
• 33:52
  is very right for equity, right because of the nature of the job,
• 33:58
  the number of people that wanted, the political motivations of the people making the
• 34:01
  decisions, especially in recent years. And so it's in that light that I
• 34:07
  found it's somewhat interesting to look at what happened at the Golden Globes, the
• 34:10
  Golden Globe Awards here in Los Angeles on Sunday evening. Now, to be
• 34:17
  clear, nobody was watching the Gloden Globes, especially against a key NFL game
• 34:23
  that had a big impact on the playoffs. As of this taping, I
• 34:28
  don't know what the ratings were for the Golden Globes, but I'm sure they
• 34:30
  were terrible, even though I mean, somebody sent out a memo at the
• 34:36
  Golden Globe. Somebody sent out a memo to the stars, to their agencies,
• 34:40
  and to the studio heads, because the stars that do exist all came
• 34:47
  out for this Golden Globes and I'm not exactly sure why. I don't know
• 34:52
  if it's maybe because this is a new version of the Golden Globes, because
• 34:54
  the old version was deemed to be racist the Hollywood Farm press, and so
• 34:59
  they basically got canceled and they're not on NBC anymore. CBS picked it up,
• 35:05
  so I don't Maybe Paramount, who's in discussions with Warner Discovery for a
• 35:09
  merger, maybe that had something to do with it. For some reason,
• 35:14
  the star power of the people who were in attendance and participated in the ceremony
• 35:20
  the award ceremony was very high for a Golden Globe, although the host was
• 35:24
  absolutely awful. Knowing you know in the mainstream's ever heard of him. Apparently
• 35:29
  was the last second decision, the worst host of a major awards show I've
• 35:32
  ever seen. But from an equity standpoint, here's what I found to be
• 35:38
  interesting. Now, The Golden Globes notoriously has been the least credible of all
• 35:44
  the awards ceremonies. You know, basically, you could buy an award or
• 35:49
  at least a nomination, and it's clear to me from what I saw the
• 35:52
  ceremony last night that that's still possible. I'm not saying that all the awards
• 35:57
  are purchased. Ricky Gervase, ironically enough, got Comedian of the Year and
• 36:02
  he was a former host of the Golden Globes, and he didn't even show
• 36:07
  up. So that told me that that award at least was legitimately given,
• 36:10
  because generally they would try to make sure you're going to show up to get
• 36:14
  the award before they would give it to you, especially for something as relatively
• 36:17
  minor as that. So when it comes to the Golden Globe Awards, I
• 36:21
  don't put a lot of stock at all in the outcomes because I know they're
• 36:25
  often very contrived. But I did find it interesting that they had a bit
• 36:32
  of a problem from an equity standpoint when it came to who would get the
• 36:37
  awards and how much representation everybody would have, whether it was presenting the award
• 36:45
  or you know, how many people got nominated, how many people won.
• 36:49
  I mean, it's obvious that that's the prism through which Hollywood sees everything.
• 36:53
  Now, you got to have proper representation of every race, every gender,
• 37:00
  city, sexuality, whatever it is, except for straight white males. That's
• 37:05
  not that important to have straight white males, but every other, every other
• 37:08
  group must be over represented to make sure that we signal our virtue. But
• 37:14
  they had a bit of a problem because the three most successful entities this past
• 37:22
  year in categories where the Golden Globes gives awards were the following projects, Oppenheimer,
• 37:30
  the movie, Succession, the TV show on HBO Max, and Barbie,
• 37:37
  which was the big box office winner from twenty twenty three. Now,
• 37:40
  all three of those, especially Oppenheimer and Succession, are largely white, straight
• 37:49
  Endeavors and Barbie to a lesser degree, but the main characters and the main
• 37:54
  people behind Barbie are also white and straight. So by you know, current
• 38:00
  Hollywood standards, Barbie is a generally a white, straight project. So you
• 38:07
  have those three as the big ones who were the most significant winners Oppenheimer's succession
• 38:12
  in Barbie, and that's just too many white people and too many straight people.
• 38:16
  So everything that didn't have to do with Oppenheimer's succession in Barbie was off
• 38:22
  the charts when it came to DEI. Now, was that the reason why
• 38:28
  those people won or they were nominated? I can't prove anything, but I
• 38:32
  must, using common sense, I must presume that was at least a factor,
• 38:37
  which I hate because then anybody that I see who wins anything and I
• 38:44
  haven't heard of them, or their performance wasn't overtly outstanding, I automatically go,
• 38:50
  oh, that's a DEI selection, and I can't stand that. I
• 38:54
  must come to that conclusion. That's not the society I want to live in.
• 38:59
  That that's not good for anybody, including the people that win. But
• 39:02
  that's the reality that the Left has created, and I can't stand it.
• 39:07
  And we saw a lot of it at the Golden Globes. By the way,
• 39:12
  speaking of movies, every Christmas season, my wife and I get the
• 39:19
  privilege of getting screeners from a friend of ours in the movie industry for awards
• 39:25
  consideration, and so we don't go to see any movies in the theater other
• 39:30
  than kids movies during the year because we've got two young kids. But during
• 39:35
  Christmas time, when she's off from work as a teacher and can stay up
• 39:39
  a little bit later, we tend to watch a lot of movies. And
• 39:43
  virtually everything we saw this year was crap. I mean, God Almighty,
• 39:49
  do not see Ferrari. Ferrari is absolutely horrible. Maestro is also horrible.
• 39:55
  The Bradley Cooper Leonard Bernstein movie absolutely horrible. But we did see one movie
• 40:02
  that I have to say, I am stunned has not yet become a thing
• 40:08
  in the right wing media because this movie American fiction. While it's got some
• 40:15
  woke elements to it, and my analysis is that they put the woke elements
• 40:21
  in there as basically backside protection because I think they thought they were gonna get
• 40:25
  crushed because the main plot line is extremely anti woke and very funny. It's
• 40:34
  basically the story of a black male writer who isn't getting getting anywhere writing stories
• 40:42
  that don't have anything to do with his blackness, so he decides to,
• 40:45
  almost as a joke, write this caricature, the satire pretending to be real
• 40:52
  about the black experience, and white liberals in the book industry and in academia
• 40:59
  just up and all of a sudden it becomes an overnight success and hilarity ensues.
• 41:05
  Now again, there are a couple of subplots that are boring and woke,
• 41:09
  and I don't even understand why they were in there, other than maybe
• 41:14
  my theory about backside political protection. But the essence of the movie, and
• 41:19
  it really my view, should have been a shorter movie, maybe an hour
• 41:22
  and twenty minutes long. If they had just focused on the primary plot line,
• 41:28
  this anti woke, mocking, you know, white liberal narrative, I
• 41:34
  think they would have had a massive hit on their hands. But so far
• 41:37
  the left hasn't embraced it because it's a little scary for them, and the
• 41:40
  right, I don't know if they just don't know about it yet, something
• 41:45
  I think might end up breaking. I don't know. Somebody on the right
• 41:49
  has got to recommend American Fiction, because while it seems like a liberal movie,
• 41:55
  it is not. It is somehow a trojan horror that got within the
• 42:01
  woke liberal establishment of Hollywood. And I do recommend with those caveats that I've
• 42:09
  already mentioned. I do recommend you checking out American fiction if you get a
• 42:14
  chance. One other story that deals directly with this issue of race and even
• 42:21
  situations that are not hiring or not even you know, legal circumstances where equity
• 42:29
  seems to pervade everything, and how there are decisions made in the media that
• 42:35
  make no sense except that they must be being influenced by race. There comes
• 42:42
  a story out of ABC Disney that is not a big deal, but I
• 42:45
  at least wanted to mention it, and it deals with an actor by the
• 42:50
  name of Jonathan Majors. Now, Jonathan Majors had been an actor that was
• 42:57
  working for Disney and you know, not a huge star. But he ended
• 43:02
  up getting fired less than a month ago because he was convicted of beating up
• 43:07
  his ex girlfriend and the evidence was apparently overwhelming and rather brutal, and by
• 43:14
  the way, he had made some racially charged counter allegations that turned out to
• 43:19
  be false. So this is a guy who, by all accounts ought to
• 43:22
  be canceled. I mean, he's a black man, gets convicted of beating
• 43:28
  up his ex girlfriend, Disney fires him as an actor, and then what
• 43:32
  happens Good Morning America this week gives him a high profile softball interview, and
• 43:44
  of course Good Morning America is on ABC, which is owned by wait for
• 43:47
  it, Disney. Now, how the hell does this make any sense?
• 43:53
  So Disney fires the guy, and then ABC Disney gives him a play in
• 44:00
  a softball interview for him to cry and and and you know, maybe somehow
• 44:07
  get uncanceled via Good Morning America. I don't I don't even know how that
• 44:12
  makes any sense, but I wanted to mention it because we're living in such
• 44:15
  a bizarro media world where that, you know, circumstance can happen. Very
• 44:22
  few people will pay any attention to it. But I mean, I don't
• 44:28
  even know how to make sense of that. So is Disney trying to rehabilitate
• 44:32
  the guy they fired? And again I go back to race. I must
• 44:36
  presume that the only reason why this can happen is because he happens to be
• 44:39
  a black man, not if he was a straight white male, or an
• 44:45
  Asian male, or or or didn't have any special you know, DEI powers
• 44:52
  to bring to the table, then there would be no motivation to do this.
• 44:57
  But we're somehow both living in a systematically racist society, and a society
• 45:02
  where a black man can get be convicted of beating up his ex girlfriend,
• 45:07
  make false racial allegations in the course of that investigation, be fired, but
• 45:15
  then have the same company in less than a month put them on Good Morning
• 45:19
  America for a Sawpaull interview. What a racist country we are, what a
• 45:22
  racist society in racist culture we are in America. It's just absolutely amazing.
• 45:27
  Of course, this issue of dei and pervading every element of the media doesn't
• 45:34
  stop with race, that's for sure. I mean it goes clearly into the
• 45:39
  realm of gender and sexuality and all sorts of other things. And there's another
• 45:44
  great example of that that just occurred in the last couple of days. This
• 45:49
  seems like a small example, but to me this is fascinating and very very
• 45:52
  telling about how the news media works. You may have heard that there was
• 45:57
  a school shooting about a week ago in Iowa and there were a few people
• 46:02
  who died. It was another terrible situation, as all these school shootings are,
• 46:07
  and it turned out that it appears, based upon the social media posts,
• 46:14
  that the shooter was transgendered. Now, this is a classic situation of
• 46:20
  where because the news media ignores a data point because it's inconvenient for them,
• 46:25
  it doesn't become a thing in the public consciousness, it doesn't become a narrative.
• 46:30
  But we have seen numerous situations related to these school shootings where the perpetrator
• 46:38
  appeared to have been at some level transgendered, at some stage of becoming a
• 46:45
  transgendered person. Probably the most high profile of those situations was the Nashville shooter.
• 46:51
  And remember that manifesto didn't come out for months afterwards, and it was
• 46:57
  in large part, in my view, because of the politically combustible element of
• 47:01
  the fact that the person was transgendered. Well, one of the right wing
• 47:07
  media outlets that put forward this narrative that this theory that the Iowa shooter was
• 47:15
  transgendered is an account called Libs of TikTok. Now. Libs of TikTok as
• 47:22
  a major force on Twitter. They're basically a watchdog, I guess. They
• 47:25
  started as a watchdog for what liberals were saying on TikTok, thus the name,
• 47:30
  but they have a presence on multiple social media platforms. They are run
• 47:36
  by a woman by the name of Chaia. I guess she's the founder of
• 47:40
  Libs of TikTok, and Libs of TikTok was putting forward the story that the
• 47:46
  Iowa shooter was transgendered, and all of a sudden, Chia gets a direct
• 47:52
  message from an NBC reporter by the name of Matt levityes and Matt Levity's a
• 48:02
  reporter for NBC. In his bio on Twitter, actually says that his job
• 48:09
  is covering lgbt Q issues and then has he and him as his personal pronouns.
• 48:16
  That's a reporter for NBC News. They have a to say they are
• 48:22
  covering LGBTQ issues is absurd. It's they're covering up for lbgt Q issues.
• 48:31
  They're an activist for LGBTQ issues, and of course then do gratuitously virtue signaling
• 48:39
  their personal pronouns. I mean, that's that's a parody, that's a satire.
• 48:44
  You can't make that up. But that's an NBC reporter. And this
• 48:49
  NBC reporter direct messaged Chaia and this is this This direct message is again it
• 48:55
  seems like a parody. It seems like this was something you would make up.
• 49:00
  But there's no evidence that anyone made this up. Hi Chaia hope you
• 49:05
  are well and having a good start to the year. I'm reaching out with
• 49:08
  regards to your recent social posts in relation to the Iowa mass shooters LGBTQ identity.
• 49:16
  Each time there is a mass shooting where the shooter's identity is possibly LGBTQ,
• 49:23
  you and other conservative influencers appear to fixate on this and suggest to your
• 49:30
  millions of followers that people with LGBTQ identities are prone to violence. What would
• 49:38
  you say to your critics who say you're stoking fear, hatred, and potential
• 49:45
  violence against a marginalized group of people. Please let us know if you would
• 49:52
  like to comment as soon as possible. We will be publishing a story EOD
• 49:59
  at the end of the day and would welcome your response. Thank you for
• 50:02
  your time, Matt, I mean, this is this is this is the
• 50:09
  media in today's day and age, This is NBC News that we must attack
• 50:15
  this narrative. This is getting to become, you know, too dangerous,
• 50:20
  and so we must attack the people behind it because they are the ones that
• 50:24
  are fixated on it, and they're stoking fear and potential violence. Now can
• 50:30
  you imagine, I mean, we don't have to imagine because we know,
• 50:32
  I mean, because a lot of these shooters tend to be straight white males
• 50:37
  too, and there's no hesitancy whatsoever. And if there was ever a series
• 50:42
  of these that occurred where the straight white male was a clear Trump supporter,
• 50:46
  there would be no concern whatsoever about making that the narrative. What's going on
• 50:52
  here? Why are straight white male Trump supporters killing kids in schools? That
• 50:58
  would there would be no concern about stoking fear, anger, or counter violence.
• 51:02
  That would be called the news. They would be jumping all over it.
• 51:07
  But because it's a protected class in their minds, LGBTQ, then this
• 51:13
  is inherently wrong and we need to attack you for this. Now. Another
• 51:19
  element of this direct message that is really telling and fascinating, actually quite hilarious
• 51:24
  is the response that Chaia gave. Because in the olden days, back when
• 51:30
  the mainstream news media had real power. I mean, if you got contacted
• 51:35
  by a reporter for NBC News, you felt like you had no choice but
• 51:42
  to provide a quote. This was going to be a massive problem for you.
• 51:45
  This was a big deal. You know, you had to play their
• 51:50
  game. Well, no longer, because the mainstream has lost so much power,
• 51:54
  not just in their total audiences. I mean, you know the shrinking
• 52:00
  audiences of all mainstream outlets, but they those audience are basically non existent when
• 52:07
  it comes to somebody who you know, their audience is right wing and they
• 52:13
  don't care at all about what NBC writes about them or maybe puts on their
• 52:17
  air about them. They don't care. It's not going to hurt them.
• 52:22
  They're living in their own right wing bubble. In fact, it will only
• 52:25
  help them with their audience, with their TikTok followers or their Twitter followers,
• 52:32
  because they're being attacked by the bad guys. It's a lot like what I
• 52:37
  said earlier about academia. You know, if you're a left wing academic person
• 52:42
  and you're getting attacked by the right wing media, that's a badge of honor.
• 52:45
  Well it's the same thing now, it's a badge of honor to be
• 52:47
  attacked by the mainstream left wing media. If you're somebody who runs an account
• 52:52
  called libs of TikTok, and their response is so typical of this chain changed,
• 53:00
  this radical fundamental change in the nature of the news media and how the
• 53:05
  mainstream is no longer to be feared in this day and age. Their response
• 53:08
  was as follows, pronouns in bio equals opinion discarded, and that was apparently
• 53:17
  it. That was apparently the only response. I mean, that is amazing
• 53:22
  that in twenty twenty four an NBC News reporter can be just basically told to
• 53:30
  go fuck themselves for all intensive purposes. Understandably so, maybe justifiably so because
• 53:37
  of the nature of the inquiry. Was clearly not in a good faith effort.
• 53:40
  This was clearly a veiled, not even really veiled attack on them.
• 53:46
  And you know here they have in their Twitter bio their personal pronouns, and
• 53:52
  it's obvious that they're an activist for LGBTQ causes, so they're not a good
• 53:58
  faith actor. And the person that runs the libs of TikTok account basically told
• 54:02
  them to go fuck themselves. You've got pronouns in your bio. I don't
• 54:06
  care about your opinion. Now there's parts of that that are not positive.
• 54:10
  I mean, that is not a situation that's particularly healthy. When the right
• 54:16
  and the left can't even have a conversation. It's an immediate attack. And
• 54:21
  there's an important point being lost in all this, and that is it does
• 54:24
  appear. Now. I'm someone who is very skeptical of antidotal evidence, and
• 54:30
  I think people, especially in the media, are far too quick to put
• 54:34
  data points together if it fits their agenda to create a narrative. But I
• 54:37
  have to say, there's something that does seem to be going on here when
• 54:43
  it comes to transgender people and these acts of violence, and to me,
• 54:50
  it's consistent with what I believe and what most people in the right belief is
• 54:54
  really going on here, and that there is an element of mental illness at
• 54:59
  work, and that drugs that help in the transitioning period for transgender people may
• 55:06
  be playing a role in this. These are certainly questions that ought to be
• 55:09
  asked and would be being asked by the mainstream news media if it didn't so
• 55:14
  clearly go against their agenda in a dangerous fashion. So I found that story
• 55:21
  to be particularly interesting on a number of levels. There's something else going on
• 55:25
  in the realm of political correctness, and you could certainly argue that this deals
• 55:30
  with the woke mind virus and does have a racial component and probably even an
• 55:35
  equity component, and that is that the federal government. It's important to point
• 55:39
  out that this is the federal government because it's the park system and the Secretary
• 55:46
  of the Interiors, apparently the ultimate decision maker here, has decided to remake
• 55:53
  the so called Welcome Park in Philadelphia. And the reason this is significant for
• 56:00
  a couple of different reasons. One is because this is where the Liberty Bell
• 56:02
  is, So this is this is a very famous place in Philadelphia. You
• 56:07
  know, every tourist has this spot on their map. And one of the
• 56:12
  things that's happening is that they're remaking the center of this park area. And
• 56:17
  as part of the plans to remake it, they are getting rid of a
• 56:23
  statue of William Penn. Now, William Penn is by the name pretty obvious
• 56:31
  Pennsylvania is the essentially the founder of the state, and you know, was
• 56:37
  a huge part of the history of Philadelphia to this day. William Penn's statue
• 56:43
  is at the top of City Hall there. It used to be a law
• 56:46
  in Philadelphia that you cannot have a building that ever went over William Penn's head.
• 56:52
  That that's been gone for a few decades now. But I mean this
• 56:55
  is this was a situation where, you know, William Penn was considered the
• 57:00
  founder of essentially the city and the state right up there with Ben Franklin,
• 57:04
  maybe more than Ben Franklin. And you know the penn Quakers, University of
• 57:10
  Pennsylvania Quakers. William Penn was a Quaker himself. I mean it. You
• 57:15
  know, you don't get more Pennsylvania than William Penn. And they're going to
• 57:20
  take down his statue and they're going to put instead a tribute to indigenous people,
• 57:27
  you know, Native Americans, Indians, And they're actually asking the public
• 57:32
  for suggestions, and I'm sure they're going to get after this news broke over
• 57:36
  the last couple of days, I'm sure they're going to get a lot of
• 57:38
  very interesting suggestions with what they can do with themselves, because a lot of
• 57:43
  people are understandably very upset by this initial plan to get rid of William Penn.
• 57:50
  And this site was a place where William Penn once lived. Believe he
• 57:54
  may have even grown up there. I can't remember for sure, but I
• 57:57
  mean this is a site that has significant to William Penn's own history. And
• 58:02
  so you're going to get rid of William Penn and you're going to put in
• 58:06
  this tribute to indigenous people. And it should be pointed out that the ultimate
• 58:10
  decision here is made by the US Secretary of the Interior, who is a
• 58:15
  woman by the name of deb Holland. And Deb Holland made history. That's
• 58:22
  right. Nothing better you can do than making history by simply existing as a
• 58:25
  liberal. She made history when she became the first wait for it, native
• 58:30
  American to serve as a cabinet secretary. So you have a Native American as
• 58:37
  the Secretary of the Interior with the ultimate decision making power over the removal of
• 58:44
  Billy Penn's statue in Philadelphia to be replaced with some sort of tribute to Indigenous
• 58:51
  people. And there's no evidence that William Penn ever did anything horrible to Native
• 58:55
  Americans except I guess be a white male at a time period where Native Americans
• 59:01
  were in retrospect losing land. I guess that was his great sin. And
• 59:07
  you know this, this is a symptom of a much larger problem. I
• 59:13
  am very curious to see whether or not John Fetterman, Senator from Pennsylvania,
• 59:21
  steps into this fray. I even tweeted this because this is going to be
• 59:24
  an interesting test case to see whether or not the new John Fennerman is the
• 59:30
  real John Fetterman or not the most underrated political story in the last five or
• 59:36
  six months has been John Fennerman recovering from his stroke and suddenly becoming the most
• 59:40
  rational member of the Democratic caucus in the in the US Senate. And it's
• 59:46
  probably not even close, especially, you know, given the fact that the
• 59:51
  Democratic senator from from West Virginia who's effectually a Republican is going to be retiring.
• 59:58
  But John Fetterman has suddenly become anti woke, very rational, almost like
• 1:00:05
  a rational form of Donald Trump. You know, he's very much against illegal
• 1:00:08
  immigration. He's ripping his alma mater, Harvard, said they were always pinko
• 1:00:15
  but now essentially said they're communists, doesn't even recognize them anymore. I mean,
• 1:00:20
  he's made all sorts of statements on a consistent basis over the last couple
• 1:00:22
  of months that make you go, what the hell is going on with John
• 1:00:25
  Fetterman. I gotta believe he understands that this is ridiculous, and as a
• 1:00:31
  US Senator, as a Democrat, and this being a federal issue, Fetterman
• 1:00:37
  may actually have the influence to fix this or to save the day. And
• 1:00:43
  I've looked far and wide. I'm not being able to find any statements that
• 1:00:45
  Fetterman has made on it. This is a fairly new story. It's only
• 1:00:50
  really broken over the last couple of days. But keep your eyes on John
• 1:00:52
  Fetterman. We're going to find out whether not John Fetterman is really been transformed,
• 1:01:00
  whether that's this is some sort of a temporary, you know, situation
• 1:01:04
  regarding his recovery from a stroke. Who knows. We're gonna find out who
• 1:01:07
  the real John Fetterman is if he comes in and tries to save the day
• 1:01:10
  when it comes to William penn because this should not be happening, and Fetterman
• 1:01:15
  is probably, as a senator Democrat from Pennsylvania, the only guy who could
• 1:01:20
  potentially salvage this salvage of this situation, which I actually hope he does,
• 1:01:24
  because this has got to stop somewhere. And I talk all the time about
• 1:01:30
  the slippery slope, and there's no more dramatic or obvious example the slippery slope
• 1:01:36
  than when it comes to these issues of statues and commemorations and our history,
• 1:01:42
  and it all begins, I mean, that doesn't begin. But there were
• 1:01:45
  a couple of seminal moments. Now our last episode was called Seminal moment because
• 1:01:51
  I made a play on the words seminole and Florida State seminoles because of what
• 1:01:57
  happened with regard to them giving up in the bowl game and what it says
• 1:02:00
  about college football. But there were a few seminal moments when it came to
• 1:02:05
  this entire issue of the slippery slope and our history being systematically destroyed and erased.
• 1:02:13
  And I would suggest that in the realm of politics, it was the
• 1:02:16
  Confederate flag, and in the realm of sports, it was the Washington Redskins
• 1:02:21
  nickname, And in both of those situations, they were incredibly similar. The
• 1:02:25
  Confederate flag going from a symbol of Southern pride to something that was so racist
• 1:02:31
  that even NASCAR events would not tolerate their existence, and even Southern states were
• 1:02:37
  eliminating any sign of the Confederate Flag ever really existing. And Nicki Haley deserves
• 1:02:45
  an awful lot of blame in my view, because that's what happened when she
• 1:02:47
  was the governor of South Carolina, when the Confederate flag went down the way
• 1:02:53
  that it did, and when the Washington Redskins nickname suddenly was turned into something
• 1:02:59
  that was rais and the Washington Redskins, a historic National Football League franchise,
• 1:03:05
  suddenly becomes the Washington Football team and then the Washington Commanders with these crappy uniforms.
• 1:03:12
  That to me opened the floodgates in both the realm of politics and sports.
• 1:03:17
  And it is not a coincidence that after those two things happened, we
• 1:03:23
  have seen a dramatic and systematic takedown of our entire history and that America has
• 1:03:32
  been now deemed to be inherently and systematically racist. And they never stop where
• 1:03:38
  they say they're going to stop. This is a situation where you give them
• 1:03:43
  an inch, they will take more than a mile. And I would even,
• 1:03:47
  you know, give the benefit of the doubt and say that there were
• 1:03:52
  people like Nikki Haley who were very naive who thought, well, okay,
• 1:03:57
  we'll give them the Confederate flag and and this will end, this whole situation
• 1:04:01
  will end it. No, no, no, no, no, you're
• 1:04:04
  not ending it. You're opening floodgates. You are admitting now, you are
• 1:04:11
  admitting that everything to do with the South is inherently racist, anything at all
• 1:04:16
  to do with the Confederate flag is inherently racist, and that has enormous implications
• 1:04:24
  for the way our country is viewed, especially by young people who are still
• 1:04:28
  learning about the nature of our country and our history. And the same thing
• 1:04:32
  happened in sports, and then you lose the Cleveland Indians right after that.
• 1:04:38
  These things matter, and it's not a coincidence that this younger generation, Generation
• 1:04:44
  Z, has been taught that we're a racist countries, first generation in American
• 1:04:48
  history that's been openly taught, not just in school, but in actions,
• 1:04:54
  that we are a racist country. When they see things like the Confederate flag
• 1:05:00
  being eliminated, or the Washington Redskins being eliminated, or the Cleveland Indians being
• 1:05:03
  eliminated, and all these statues being taken down, it has an impact.
• 1:05:12
  We have taught a generation of kids that our country and our history is inherently
• 1:05:19
  racist and wrong, which has enormous implications. Among other things, it makes
• 1:05:26
  this generation believe that they're the first smart generation. They're going to fix everything,
• 1:05:31
  that history doesn't matter. Your elders are not to be believed because they
• 1:05:35
  were all racist. And so this is how we get to where we are
• 1:05:41
  with Generation Z. It's all connected and there are enormous implications to all this
• 1:05:48
  to the future of the country. So you know, you don't get to
• 1:05:51
  William Penn right away. You got to start with the Confederate flag and the
• 1:05:57
  Washington Redskins. And where this ends, I have no idea, which is
• 1:06:00
  why I'm interested in what happens with John Feenerman, maybe putting a stop to
• 1:06:05
  it, at least in Philadelphia. Of course, you know, I grew
• 1:06:09
  up in the Philadelphia area. It's just amazing to me that this is happening
• 1:06:13
  there. I mean, they got rid of the Kate Smith statue outside of
• 1:06:16
  the Philadelphia Flyers Arena, which was absolutely absurd because she sang a song in
• 1:06:23
  the World War Two era. This was a couple of years ago. A
• 1:06:27
  song she sang in the World War two era is now deemed racist, and
• 1:06:31
  she gets her statue taken down, and she had become part of Flyer's lore
• 1:06:36
  because she sang God Bless America back in the glory days of the Broad Street
• 1:06:41
  Bullies. I'm telling you they're gonna take down the Rocky statue at some point,
• 1:06:45
  you know, because after all, you know, he kind of got
• 1:06:48
  Apollo Creed killed a black man, so I'm sure based on that, and
• 1:06:53
  you know, he beat up club or Lang. Mister t I mean,
• 1:06:56
  he was bad to black people in a lot of ways that that Rocky fi
• 1:07:00
  So the Rocky statue is probably next when it comes to being taken down in
• 1:07:04
  Philadelphia. I want to say a few words about the state of the Republican
• 1:07:11
  race as we head into the Iowa Caucus next week, although I'll have more
• 1:07:15
  in the next episode of the podcast, where I will give my specific prediction
• 1:07:20
  for what will happen in the Iowa Caucus. But I at least want to
• 1:07:24
  mention the Nikki Haley, who's been getting a lot of attention and seemingly making
• 1:07:28
  a lot of headway in the polls, especially in New Hampshire, not as
• 1:07:30
  much in Iowa, but there is a chance she could finish second in Iowa
• 1:07:36
  and totally destroy any semblance of Rhonda Santras' campaign really put him into the realm
• 1:07:43
  of humiliation. But she has made several gaffes in the last couple of weeks.
• 1:07:48
  I did talk about what she said about what caused the Civil War,
• 1:07:53
  which was really weird given the fact that she said it in New Hampshire,
• 1:07:57
  and I disagreed with the answer. I mean, she did not she did
• 1:08:00
  not suggest that slavery was a cause of the Civil War in New Hampshire,
• 1:08:05
  which was very odd, you know, and inconsistent with her her handling of
• 1:08:11
  the Confederate flag issue. But that was a bit of a gaff. I
• 1:08:15
  don't know how much it hurt her in New Hampshire. I don't think it
• 1:08:16
  could help her there. I think she made a gaff that And again I
• 1:08:20
  don't know how much attention it got in Iowa. But to me, this
• 1:08:26
  was a maybe a more of a bonehead move than the slavery answer, because
• 1:08:30
  the slavery answer was defensible in my view, except for how she handled the
• 1:08:34
  Confederate flag. You know, it's at least an argument that you can you
• 1:08:39
  can stand on, especially in a Republican primary. But in Iowa, she
• 1:08:44
  tried to panderr to Iowan's by saying how excited she was to I don't know
• 1:08:50
  if she was saying to see Caitlin Clark play basketball or she referenced Caitlyn Clark,
• 1:08:57
  the star basketball player for the Iowa women's basketball team. We've discussed Clark
• 1:09:01
  before. She's amazing in every possible way. And uh, and so she
• 1:09:06
  tried to reference Caitlyn Clark at an Iowa town hall which this is fine,
• 1:09:13
  okay, typical pandering to the locals. You know, Caiton Clark is a
• 1:09:16
  is a huge figure in Iowa and nationally, and obviously, since Nikki Haley
• 1:09:21
  is a woman, you know, you want to promote other women and promote
• 1:09:26
  that part of your candidacy. I get all that, except she didn't call
• 1:09:29
  her Caitlyn Clark. She called her Caitlyn Collins. Now that's that's not just
• 1:09:35
  a normal gaff. I mean, Ice grew up names all the time.
• 1:09:40
  The problem with that gaff is she didn't just get Clark's last name wrong.
• 1:09:45
  She called her the name of a CNN anchor woman, an anti Trump CNN
• 1:09:50
  anchor woman, Caitlyn College. So that to be, you know, showed
• 1:09:55
  where her brain is added it. And she's clearly viewing Caitlyn Clark as a
• 1:10:00
  positive figure for her to come up with the name Caitlyn Collins. You know,
• 1:10:04
  it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out or a psychologist to figure
• 1:10:09
  out that that she viewsed Caitlyn Collins in a similarly positive way. At least
• 1:10:14
  that's how I interpreted it. Again, I don't know how much traction this
• 1:10:17
  has gotten in Iowa, but The video kind of went viral because there was
• 1:10:23
  a couple of Iowa voters that were sitting in the crowd just behind Niki Haley
• 1:10:29
  when she said it, they looked at each other with puzzled looks. It
• 1:10:31
  was kind of a funny moment, but I thought that that was a bigger
• 1:10:35
  gaff than maybe even the Civil War situation. And then she also dissed Iowa
• 1:10:42
  by I think correctly. I've gone through this same history on this podcast previously,
• 1:10:46
  myself correctly stating the history of the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary,
• 1:10:54
  saying essentially that Iowa starts it and then New Hampshire fixes it. And
• 1:11:00
  you know, from her perspective, historically that's mostly accurate. The winner of
• 1:11:06
  the New Hampshire primary has a much better record than the winner of the Iowa
• 1:11:11
  caucus when it comes to winning the Republican nomination. However, you don't say
• 1:11:16
  that in this day and age where Iowa voters are obviously gonna hear about it.
• 1:11:21
  Again. I have no way of knowing how many Iowa caucus voters are
• 1:11:26
  aware that Nikki Haley dissed Iowa, but she keeps making these kind of gaffes,
• 1:11:33
  and you know, to me, I'm not sure that she's all that
• 1:11:38
  smart. Frankly, I mean, she's not dumb, but you know,
• 1:11:43
  there's a lot of problems with Nikki Haley's candidacy. In my view, she's
• 1:11:46
  very PC and I don't think she has any chance to win the nomination because
• 1:11:51
  she's not even appealing to the vast majority of the Republican base. However,
• 1:11:57
  if you're in the anti Trump camp, there's no nowhere else to go in
• 1:12:00
  your mind, especially since the SANDUS no longer appears to be a legitimate threat
• 1:12:05
  to beat Trump. And so that's why to twenty percent of the party,
• 1:12:10
  Nicky Haley is currently very appealing, and in a place like New Hampshire,
• 1:12:14
  it's more than twenty percent because you get a very liberal voting base because of
• 1:12:18
  the rules and the nature of New Hampshire when it comes to who can vote
• 1:12:23
  in the New Hampshire primary. So she's probably gonna do pretty well in New
• 1:12:28
  Hampshire. I would like to believe that she's gonna finish third in Iowa,
• 1:12:31
  but I'm gonna hold off of my official prediction for Iowa until the next episode
• 1:12:38
  of the podcast. There was a rumor, and I'll say it was only
• 1:12:42
  a rumor, although it was picked up by The Hill, which is a
• 1:12:46
  seemingly, you know, mostly credible, usually right leaning, now in many
• 1:12:53
  ways political website. They put out the story claiming a couple of solses within
• 1:13:00
  the Desanta's campaign that DeSantis's plan is to withdraw after Iowa. Now I don't
• 1:13:08
  believe that that is actually a plan right now within the DeSantis campaign, I
• 1:13:15
  don't believe that. I don't know. You know, they were anonymous sources,
• 1:13:19
  so I don't know what the nature of the sourcing was. It felt
• 1:13:23
  to me like this may have been people with a political agenda as well as
• 1:13:29
  a reporter who's essentially doing what I call predictive reporting. Predictive reporting is a
• 1:13:35
  very dangerous and common practice when it comes to the media, especially when it
• 1:13:41
  comes to the fringes of the right wing and the left wing media where they
• 1:13:45
  give raw meat to a segment of their audience. Is using anonymous sources,
• 1:13:51
  and you know, if it turns out to be right, they look like
• 1:13:56
  geniuses. Aha. See I had the story way before it had and if
• 1:14:00
  it doesn't turn out to be right, well, people either forget or you
• 1:14:03
  know, something else happened to change the plan, whatever it is. So
• 1:14:10
  I think that there is a chance that this is actually what does happen.
• 1:14:13
  In fact, if if DeSantis finishes second, and it's a decent second,
• 1:14:19
  but not a close second, where he actually could theoretically make a race out
• 1:14:24
  of this for at lest at least a little bit longer, I would be
• 1:14:28
  urging him to get out while he can still save face and maintain his future
• 1:14:32
  and get out of this without a total disaster. That would I would one
• 1:14:35
  hundred percent be in that camp if I was advising Ron DeSantis. If you
• 1:14:41
  could, if you get a decently strong second place finish, but you're still,
• 1:14:45
  you know, twenty points behind Trump, twenty five points behind, and
• 1:14:47
  the Poles aren't moving into Hampshire, get the hell out and save face.
• 1:14:54
  So that could be what ends up happening. But I don't think that's currently
• 1:14:58
  the plan as to that actually happening. And I think these sourcing the sourcing
• 1:15:03
  is probably poor and politically motivated, and the reporter is essentially engaging in predictive
• 1:15:10
  reporting that could end up being right, although you know, I actually think
• 1:15:14
  it won't end up being right because I don't think that the Sandras campaign fully
• 1:15:18
  understands what they're up against. And I also think that there's too much stock
• 1:15:23
  being put in this idea that Trump may not make it to the finish line
• 1:15:27
  because of legal problems. But again, more on the Iowa Caucus in the
• 1:15:31
  next episode of the podcast. I do want to talk about what's happened with
• 1:15:35
  regard to Jeffrey Epstein and the document dump and the hysteria mostly in the right
• 1:15:42
  wing media when it comes to this entire issue, and this drives me crazy
• 1:15:47
  on so many levels. It's largely a conspiracy theory, and I hate conspiracy
• 1:15:54
  theories. It's also based in a view of the world that I strongly believe
• 1:16:00
  to be false, which is this idea that there's this small group of very
• 1:16:03
  powerful people that are that are running everything, and they can make magical things
• 1:16:09
  happen, and they're covering up for each other, and you know, they're
• 1:16:12
  all pedophils or something, and that's just not a realistic view of the world.
• 1:16:18
  And I also hate this story because I don't want to get into it,
• 1:16:25
  you know, obviously, because the allegations against Epstein. I've got two
• 1:16:29
  young daughters, and so you know, it's abhorrent the allegations and charges against
• 1:16:34
  him. And because of my history when it comes to the Sandusky case and
• 1:16:39
  the Michael Jackson case and the Matt Lower case, I really don't have the
• 1:16:43
  bandwidth or the desire to get involved in another one of these situations. Epstein
• 1:16:47
  is obviously guilty. It's clear he's guilty, not just because of the evidence,
• 1:16:53
  but because he killed himself in prison. That that's what happens when you're
• 1:16:57
  guilty and you know the jig is up. And that's partially why it drives
• 1:17:00
  me nuts that so many on the right, and especially Tucker Carlson, even
• 1:17:05
  though Donald Trump said to his face that he believes that Jeffrey Epstein did kill
• 1:17:10
  himself, refused to accept this obvious reality. And I've gone through many,
• 1:17:15
  many times why we know Epstein killed himself because if he had been murdered in
• 1:17:20
  a federal prison, you would have the smallest number of suspects in the history
• 1:17:25
  of murders. We would know the identity of everybody who had any opportunity to
• 1:17:30
  be in that area of Epstein's cell and have access to his cell. We'd
• 1:17:35
  be able to monitor their actions, whether they left their job, left the
• 1:17:40
  country all of a sudden came into money. This would be what their connections
• 1:17:45
  were, their cell phones, emails, whatever. This would be the easiest,
• 1:17:48
  easiest crime solved in history. Plus you have Donald Trump at the top
• 1:17:55
  of the cover up, at his Attorney General Bill Barr, who's in directly
• 1:18:00
  in charge of the federal prison system, in charge of the cover up.
• 1:18:02
  I mean, it just is insane. It makes absolutely no sense, especially
• 1:18:06
  given the fact that it's almost entirely Trump supporters that believe this bullshit. And
• 1:18:12
  so the fact that Epstein killed himself but is perceived on the right as having
• 1:18:17
  been murdered to cover up for the crimes of all these other powerful people,
• 1:18:23
  without a shred of evidence that this actually happened, even though you know,
• 1:18:28
  Tucker Carlson just this few days ago put out a video saying with the headline
• 1:18:33
  there's overwhelming evidence that Epstein was murdered. That is just not true. There's
• 1:18:40
  an overwhelming desire among right wing kooks for Epstein to have been murdered because it
• 1:18:49
  fits with their worldview, their distorted, conspiracy minded worldview, even though their
• 1:18:56
  own theory would dramatically implicate their hero O'donald Trump, which seems to be just
• 1:19:01
  ignored again, even by Tucker, who had Trump. I cannot say this
• 1:19:05
  enough say to his face in a recent interview that he believes Epstein did in
• 1:19:11
  fact kill himself, but there is no evidence of this. But this whole
• 1:19:15
  story, the whole idea, the whole theory that somehow he was murdered,
• 1:19:21
  has driven an enormous amount of interest in what really happened and who was all
• 1:19:29
  this covering up for, Who was the beneficiary of this massive cover up that
• 1:19:33
  resulted in Epstein's murder in a federal prison. And so when there was this
• 1:19:39
  document dump, there was a whole lot of interest and a built in audience,
• 1:19:44
  which is always dangerous in the modern media era because when you have a
• 1:19:47
  built in audience, guess what's gonna happen. You're gonna have media outlets,
• 1:19:51
  especially in the fringes, more than happy to give that audience what they want.
• 1:19:57
  Because the cult audience drive the bus, the tail wags the dog.
• 1:20:02
  So you have a desire for a narrative, and that is the Epstein cover
• 1:20:08
  up, especially since I believe he was murdered, and this all feeds on
• 1:20:12
  itself. We have this terrible character, he gets charged with horrible crimes.
• 1:20:17
  He kills himself in prison, then his partner, his female partner. She
• 1:20:21
  gets convicted, and you know, again, I don't even want to get
• 1:20:25
  into this, but i gotta tell you, based upon my id have not
• 1:20:28
  done a deep dive, but I'd dine a semi deep dive, and I'm
• 1:20:31
  not comfortable with the evidence that resulted in her convictions. And it felt very
• 1:20:35
  much like a whole moral panic rush to judgment. We need blood because Epstein
• 1:20:41
  killed himself and someone has to pay for this, and that she may ended
• 1:20:45
  up paying for his crimes. I'm not saying she was not involved. She
• 1:20:48
  shouldn't have known better. She may have even known a lot. It just
• 1:20:51
  felt like that she was railroaded in large degree because of the political names of
• 1:21:00
  the story and the fact that Epstein had killed himself. If Epstein had gone
• 1:21:03
  to trial and been convicted, I truly don't believe Maxwell would have faced anywhere
• 1:21:09
  near the punishment and the charges that she did. That's just my general opinion.
• 1:21:14
  I can have my mind easily changed on that because I've not done a
• 1:21:17
  super deep dive, but that's the essence of my feelings on it. But
• 1:21:21
  I've not made a big deal of that, largely because I know, you
• 1:21:27
  know, publicly, I'm already associated with all these other cases, and I
• 1:21:30
  have no interest in being even remotely seen as defending anything close to the Epstein
• 1:21:35
  story, except for the fact that he wasn't murdered and that this was not
• 1:21:41
  part of this massive cover up. But you have this this audience that greatly
• 1:21:45
  desires this, and so they're going to be given that narrative because it's good
• 1:21:49
  for media business. And so there's this massive document dump, and I did
• 1:21:56
  not expect there to be any real bombshells in here, and in my opinion,
• 1:22:00
  there was not. There are a lot of big names that were cited,
• 1:22:04
  including Donald Trump, but Bill Clinton was a big one. RFK Jr.
• 1:22:11
  Was in there. Louis Free was in there, which was particularly interesting
• 1:22:15
  giving my history with the Penn State, Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky case. I
• 1:22:20
  despise Louis Free with a white hot passion. And so, you know,
• 1:22:26
  did I laugh when Louis Free's name got attached to Jeffrey Epstein. Of course,
• 1:22:32
  But I am honest and objective enough that I'm not going to automatically presume
• 1:22:38
  that somehow Louis Free was a pedophile because he's cited in these court documents that
• 1:22:45
  are related to Jeffrey Epstein's case. In fact, I have a whole theory
• 1:22:49
  as to what Epstein was really doing here, which I'm going to get to
• 1:22:54
  momentarily. But I was getting a little bit of flashback and ajita going through
• 1:23:01
  some of these documents because it felt a lot like my experience going through the
• 1:23:06
  Penn State settlement documents. And at the core of all of this is this
• 1:23:13
  incredible misnomer, this ridiculous premise that somehow words in a court document automatically take
• 1:23:24
  on some sort of magic or greater weight because it's a quote unquote court document.
• 1:23:30
  I saw this all the time in the Penn State case. The media
• 1:23:34
  loves citing court documents. Say what does that mean? Court documents says in
• 1:23:44
  this situation, as in the vast majority of the case when it came to
• 1:23:47
  the Penn State settlement documents, court documents simply means an anonymous person saying something
• 1:23:58
  where they may have a huge perverse self interest to lie or exaggerate. That's
• 1:24:06
  just because you, especially when it's a civil situation, you put a person
• 1:24:12
  under oath it's basically meaningless. It's nobody ever, Bill Clinton knows. It's
• 1:24:17
  better than anybody. Nobody gets criminally charged for committing perjury in a civil deposition.
• 1:24:24
  That was a huge issue in Clinton's entire impeachment saga with regard to Monica
• 1:24:30
  Lewinsky and Paula Jones. So it is a false premise, it's a fallacy,
• 1:24:35
  it's a joke, the idea that in the vast majority of cases,
• 1:24:41
  these court documents mean anything. So we're basically to me, this is the
• 1:24:47
  same weight as an anonymous Twitter account claiming something on Twitter. In fact,
• 1:24:56
  you could argue that might be more credible because you don't have any harent financial
• 1:25:00
  interest in most cases, and something that an anonymous account might say on social
• 1:25:05
  media. But here we don't know the person's identity, we don't know what
• 1:25:11
  their agenda is, we don't know what their self interest is. And there
• 1:25:14
  are a lot of very prominent names here who are also rich. I mean,
• 1:25:21
  those things tend to go hand in hand. But when you have a
• 1:25:25
  guy like Epstein who somehow was super rich, allegedly super rich, it's one
• 1:25:28
  of the great mysteries of his life as to how the hell he supposedly got
• 1:25:31
  super rich. But when you have all these other people named like Prince Andrew
• 1:25:38
  and others, well there's money involved. Those are hugely deep pockets. If
• 1:25:43
  you can get into the royal family or you know, Bill Clinton or whatever.
• 1:25:48
  I mean, there's money to be made there. I'm not saying that
• 1:25:53
  we know that that was the agenda of the person who was providing the testimony,
• 1:25:58
  but we don't know their identity to t and this might be my greatest
• 1:26:01
  pet peeve in all of these cases. Is it somehow the media has accepted
• 1:26:08
  this idea that all alleged victims or accusers must have their identities protected. Okay,
• 1:26:18
  in certain situations, I understand that, But for this now to be
• 1:26:21
  a blanket rule that has created a massive problem and evaluating allegations, because in
• 1:26:30
  order to evaluate an accusation, you must understand who a person is. You
• 1:26:35
  need to understand their situation, you need to understand their history, you need
• 1:26:40
  to understand their credibility, you need to understand what their self interest and their
• 1:26:44
  agenda might be. You can't do that when it's anonymous. So what we
• 1:26:49
  get is these stray off and out of context statements from anonymous people who might
• 1:26:56
  have huge perverse self interest, including money, that are somehow now implications of
• 1:27:03
  people being partners in crime in pedophilia with Jeffrey Epstein. That's not the way
• 1:27:11
  this should work. Now. Is a statement like that a lead in certain
• 1:27:15
  situations? Yeah, it's a lead. Oh that's interesting. Someone said this
• 1:27:23
  about Bill Clinton liking his girls really young. By the way, you know,
• 1:27:29
  I found the context of that statement to be lacking incredibility on multiple levels,
• 1:27:32
  and I hate Bill Clinton, but I digress. It's a lead.
• 1:27:39
  So okay, let's find out why weren't there criminal charges in any of these
• 1:27:44
  other situations, including Prince Andrew. Again, I'm no fan of Prince Andrew.
• 1:27:48
  I don't even like the Royals, but Prince Andrew's never been put on
• 1:27:53
  trial for any of this, and he's had his life basically destroyed, and
• 1:27:58
  they primary the accuser in his situation has huge credibility problems. Huge. Again.
• 1:28:06
  I'm not saying that her story is made up or she's lying. I'm
• 1:28:11
  just saying there's a reason why Prince Andrew has never been convicted of anything,
• 1:28:15
  and there's a reason why Jeffrey Epstein wasn't initially convicted of anything. In the
• 1:28:20
  first go around. And then my guess is what happened was they finally got
• 1:28:25
  enough to nail him. They put him in federal prison. He realized the
• 1:28:29
  jig was up, and he killed himself. But the idea that somehow everybody
• 1:28:35
  that was associated with Jeffrey Epstein is is it guilty with him or a pedophile
• 1:28:43
  or whatever is it's absurd. But there are many many people who believe that
• 1:28:48
  and who want to believe that. And you know, one of the reasons,
• 1:28:51
  one of the I guess you would call it substantive reasons that people believe
• 1:28:59
  this. I mean, when you want to believe something, you'll latch onto
• 1:29:01
  anything that helps justify your opinion, and so all of a sudden, things
• 1:29:06
  that would be stray, you know, pieces of evidence or leads or whatever,
• 1:29:13
  all of a sudden become bump bump bum aha, see I told you
• 1:29:16
  so stuff. And in this particular case, the best example of that is
• 1:29:20
  probably the tape of Amy Robock. Now. Amy Robach is the former ABC
• 1:29:28
  twenty twenty Good Morning America host. She lost her job last year because she
• 1:29:31
  was having an affair with her co host. By the way, Weirdly,
• 1:29:36
  she's still with her former co host. They both got fired, and her
• 1:29:41
  former spouse and his former spouse are now apparently together as bizaar As. That
• 1:29:45
  is, but Amy Robach, you know, she was taped while she was
• 1:29:50
  getting ready to do something else. This was one of those situations where she
• 1:29:55
  was killing time and somebody recorded what she was saying. This was several years
• 1:30:00
  ago, and she started riffing on the entire Epstein case, and she made
• 1:30:04
  the argument that she had the Epstein case now years ago, and that ABC
• 1:30:09
  pulled her off the story or that they didn't run the story, and basically
• 1:30:14
  she was blowing off steam in a way that indicated that, aha, see
• 1:30:18
  there's a massive media cover up to protect Jeffrey Epstein, and that this is
• 1:30:24
  consistent now with the whole world covering up for Jeffrey Epstein, and this is
• 1:30:28
  how he gets murdered so that other powerful people will be protected. Except I
• 1:30:33
  look at that tape very very differently. First of all, I look at
• 1:30:38
  Amy Roboch very differently. Amy Robock is not a journalist, or was not
• 1:30:42
  a journalist. She was a spokesmodel, a very attractive woman hired because she's
• 1:30:46
  a very attractive woman. And to be clear, she used her attractiveness to
• 1:30:54
  a great extent during her career. It wasn't just how her career at ABC
• 1:30:59
  ended while she was having an affair with her co host, She had multiple
• 1:31:03
  affairs with other people within the media business. And so this is who Amy
• 1:31:09
  Robock was now. Does not make her a terrible person, No, but
• 1:31:11
  that's not She's not a journalist. This is not her calling. She's there
• 1:31:16
  because she's on TV, and she looks good on TV, and she's attractive
• 1:31:21
  and men find her sexy, and that's why she was there. And so
• 1:31:27
  for her to be blowing off steam about how her journalism was not accepted at
• 1:31:31
  ABC, I don't find that to be all that inherently credible. What I
• 1:31:36
  think is happening is, first of all, she's not the one doing the
• 1:31:41
  journalism. She was not, you know, not the one that was nailing
• 1:31:45
  the story. She probably had a producer or somebody at twenty twenty that was
• 1:31:49
  doing the work and coming back to her. So it wasn't like it was
• 1:31:53
  in all likelihood her real work and her real story. But even more importantly
• 1:31:59
  than that, what I see in that tape is somebody rationalizing the past twenty
• 1:32:05
  twenty hindsight, this exact same thing happened with Harvey Weinstein and Ronan Farroh.
• 1:32:13
  You know, NBC passed on the Ronan Pharaoh Harvey Weinstein story, and that's
• 1:32:18
  partially, in my view why they got rid of Matt Lower later, because
• 1:32:21
  they needed a met you scalp to make up for the fact that they were
• 1:32:25
  being perceived as having killed the Harvey Weinstein story to protect him. Now,
• 1:32:30
  is it possible that they were less likely to go with the Harvey Weinstein story
• 1:32:35
  because of his connections at NBC and his power at the time, Sure,
• 1:32:41
  obviously, But it is my strong believe, especially knowing what I now know
• 1:32:45
  about Ronan Farroh, that Ronan Pharaoh's original reporting on that was not nearly as
• 1:32:50
  good as it was cracked up to be, and at NBC it was not
• 1:32:55
  nearly good enough to meet the threshold for going public. NBC mectually made the
• 1:33:00
  right decision at that time, based upon the information they had at that time
• 1:33:06
  to not go with the Harvey Weinstein story. It looked bad and retrospect but
• 1:33:12
  they made the right decision journalistically at the time. Well, I think a
• 1:33:15
  very similar situation probably happened with ABC Epstein was far less known than Weinstein was,
• 1:33:23
  and this was not a situation that was proven. There were credibility issues
• 1:33:29
  with particularly the one witness involving Prince Andrew and and so and other, and
• 1:33:33
  there are other issues with regard to the evidence at the time. So just
• 1:33:38
  because we now know, because we learned a lot more information because Epstein killed
• 1:33:42
  himself in prison, that Epstein was in fact a criminal pedophile, doesn't mean
• 1:33:47
  that because you were close to nailing the story years ago and ABC decided not
• 1:33:51
  to run it, that somehow this is evidence of a huge cover up to
• 1:33:57
  protect Jeffrey Epstein and all his friends. That's not the way this works,
• 1:34:01
  but that's the way a lot of people want to believe that it works,
• 1:34:05
  mainly people who have never met a famous person in their life. They don't
• 1:34:10
  understand the way this actually works. So I don't put a lot of credibility
• 1:34:15
  into the Amy Robot tape, and I also don't put a lot of credibility
• 1:34:18
  into something Megan Kelly said in light of the Epstein document dump happening. She
• 1:34:27
  very coyly said that she believes that we're going to be hearing a lot more
• 1:34:31
  about this, and we may even be hearing from Epstein himself, implying that
• 1:34:36
  she had knowledge I guess of some sort of tape involving Epstein. Is that
• 1:34:41
  possible? Sure what we're going to learn from that, If that even exists,
• 1:34:45
  I have no way of knowing. But this very much, you know,
• 1:34:47
  kind of similar to how the document dump reminded me of the Penn State
• 1:34:51
  settlement documents, which were all bullshit, you know, the Megan Kelly promise
• 1:34:57
  reminded me very much of the promise that she made Matt Lauer. She made
• 1:35:01
  a huge deal as a former Today I guess you would call her Today Show
• 1:35:05
  host an NBC host that had the hour for a short period of time after
• 1:35:11
  the Today Show ended and is now considered to be an extra hour of the
• 1:35:15
  Today Show. So she was a de facto Today's Show host. She was
• 1:35:17
  brought on with great fanfare and got paid a ridiculous amount of money. They
• 1:35:21
  gave her a show that didn't fit her talents or interests at all. She
• 1:35:28
  pretended to like it, but it was terrible and she ended up getting fired.
• 1:35:32
  And so she had a great animus against NBC for understandable reasons. And
• 1:35:38
  so when the Matt lower rape allegation comes out in Ronan Pharaoh's bogus book,
• 1:35:43
  and I can assure you that Matt Lower never raped anybody. I know more
• 1:35:45
  about that case than anybody in the world other than Matt Lauer, and that's
• 1:35:50
  probably it. And I've talked about that previously on the podcast before in great
• 1:35:56
  detail. Megan Kelly was leading the charge to have NBC release all women who
• 1:36:03
  had ever signed an NDA a non disclosure agreement, so that they could talk
• 1:36:09
  openly about their experiences, specifically with Matt Lower, and to blow up the
• 1:36:15
  cover up. These are my words, but it's a pretty good paraphrase the
• 1:36:18
  cover up that NBC was performing on behalf of Matt Lower to protect him because
• 1:36:26
  he was obviously this I guess, serial rapist, and that NBC was protecting
• 1:36:30
  him, and that they made all these women sign NDAs so that the public
• 1:36:34
  wouldn't know about it. Now. I knew this was bullshit at the time.
• 1:36:40
  Matt knew this was bullshit at the time, and I tried to tell
• 1:36:43
  Megan Kelly that this was bullshit, but she didn't respond to me at all,
• 1:36:46
  even though she has responded me on other matters, and we have somewhat
• 1:36:50
  of a connection through her lawyer through the Michael Jackson case, and I do
• 1:36:55
  like her in a lot of ways. But she made a huge deal out
• 1:36:59
  of this and NBC decided to do exactly that. When Rachel Maddow and Ronan
• 1:37:05
  Ferrell and Megan Kelly were all calling for the for the women to be released
• 1:37:10
  from NDAs, NBC did that very publicly, and guess what happened. Nothing?
• 1:37:17
  Nothing, No one came forward, just as I said, no one
• 1:37:20
  would come forward because no one had ever made a complaint against Matt Lawer.
• 1:37:25
  There were no women under NDAs because of their relationships with Matt Lauwer. There
• 1:37:30
  was no NBC cover up of Matt Lawer. It didn't happen. There was
• 1:37:35
  no need for it. Matt Lawer had affairs, something he paid a huge
• 1:37:41
  price for, very consensual and in no way, shape or form even close
• 1:37:46
  to criminal. Did Megan Kelly ever apologize for being wrong about that? No,
• 1:37:53
  But it feels very similar to what she's doing now with this this situation
• 1:37:59
  where she went viral role for basically strongly implying that she knows something that we
• 1:38:04
  don't and that we're going to hear more about this, I guess you know,
• 1:38:09
  in her world, and this is very popular among right wing media now.
• 1:38:13
  Conspiracies are everywhere, this massive conspiracy on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein. So
• 1:38:17
  I'll be very surprised if we actually hear anything substantive on that front. And
• 1:38:23
  I will be stunned if we ever get any real evidence that there was a
• 1:38:27
  massive Jeffrey Epstein cover up, whether it was in the news media or whether
• 1:38:32
  or not. This was a situation where there were a whole bunch of very
• 1:38:35
  prominent people who are engaging in the same criminal activity that he was. My
• 1:38:42
  view of what he was doing is a bit like my view of what Bernie
• 1:38:46
  Madoff was doing. I think Epstein understood the power of being associated with prominent
• 1:38:56
  rich people, and that how other prominent rich people view you in a much
• 1:39:03
  more favorable fashion if you are connected to other prominent, famous, rich people,
• 1:39:12
  powerful people. It's human nature. It's high school. All the world
• 1:39:17
  is high school. And so when I look at the list of people who
• 1:39:21
  are associated with Epstein, there seems to be something very consistent. People who
• 1:39:29
  seem to have a lot of credibility, but who are not necessarily super rich,
• 1:39:35
  and so therefore are vulnerable to him. Vulnerable in for instance, you
• 1:39:41
  know, hey, you want to use my private jet, you want to
• 1:39:44
  come to my island for a vacation, whatever. People like Louis Free,
• 1:39:49
  a guy who clearly loves money, will wore himself out for almost any cause,
• 1:39:55
  which is what he did in the Penn State case as credibility as a
• 1:39:59
  former FBI director. And so if you're associated with Louis Free, you're a
• 1:40:03
  credible person. Malcolm Gladwell got named in the flight logs even though he never
• 1:40:10
  even met Jeffrey Epstein. I've told the story before where Malcolm Gladwell, who
• 1:40:14
  wrote a chapter in his book talking with Strangers about the whole Penn State Joe
• 1:40:17
  Paternal Jerrysondusky case, using a lot of my work. One of the most
• 1:40:21
  aggravating situations of thousands in my involvement in that entire case was we were ready
• 1:40:27
  to do a press conference with Jerrysondusky's lawyer in the aftermath of Malcolm Gladwell's book
• 1:40:33
  being released, and in one of the most idiotic decisions I've ever been faced
• 1:40:39
  with in my entire life. And that's really saying something Jerry Sindusky's idiotic lawyer
• 1:40:45
  canceled it at the last second because Malcolm Gladwell got named on Jeffrey Epstein's flight
• 1:40:49
  logs, and Gladwell himself thought this was utterly ridiculous. He never met Epstein,
• 1:40:55
  he took his plane one time under benign circle stances, and somehow,
• 1:41:01
  I mean, I knew at that point that I was never going to deal
• 1:41:04
  with Jerry's lawyer ever again, because that was just the dumbest thing I've ever
• 1:41:08
  heard of in history. You're gonna, somehow, you're not going to take
• 1:41:13
  a lifeline from Malcolm Gladwell because he's somehow tangentially associated with Jeffrey Epstein. You're
• 1:41:18
  already, you know, representing the most hated man in America, someone who's
• 1:41:24
  looked at very much like Jeffrey Epstein. You can't lose here. But anyway,
• 1:41:27
  I digress. But it's interesting to be that Gladwell's on that list,
• 1:41:30
  highly respected, well to do but not super rich, doesn't have his own
• 1:41:34
  airplane. Is certainly you know, and you know, having your own airplane
• 1:41:39
  isn't quite as big a deal today as it used to be. I mean,
• 1:41:43
  during this period of time that was a big deal. You have your
• 1:41:45
  own airplane here, take my plane. RFK Junior. Another big name,
• 1:41:51
  you know, credibility in a lot of eyes. Kennedy name probably not a
• 1:41:56
  ton of money, certainly not his own private jet. He got named Bill
• 1:42:01
  Clinton, you know, more money than he should have, obviously a lot
• 1:42:04
  of credibility. Became probably closer to Epstein than almost anybody else of a high
• 1:42:11
  profile nature here. And I have no way of knowing whether or not he
• 1:42:14
  ever engaged in any criminal activity, but there's no evidence that I've seen that's
• 1:42:17
  credible to that effect. But Clinton's another target. Trump was another target of
• 1:42:23
  Epstein early on. Big name, pretends to be rich, not as rich
• 1:42:29
  as he thinks that he is, or wants you to believe that. He
• 1:42:30
  is, very prone to manipulation by you know, basically complimenting him and tickling
• 1:42:39
  his ego. Bury enamored with the private jetn and Island. I mean,
• 1:42:45
  these are the type of people that Epstein targeted, and he created this persona
• 1:42:50
  where once you're attached to all these prominent, well respected, well known people
• 1:42:57
  and they're taking favors from you, it's easier to get more people into that
• 1:43:02
  fold. And the more you get people into that fold. The more credibility
• 1:43:06
  you get, and the less people are going to look at the details,
• 1:43:12
  the more they're going to look the other way at things that don't make sense
• 1:43:15
  or that look shady. They're gonna give you the benefit of the doubt because
• 1:43:20
  it's all a club. Famous people think they're in a club, and if
• 1:43:26
  you're one of them, and other people that you like or respector are associating
• 1:43:30
  with you, then you're part of the club too, and therefore you are
• 1:43:34
  given all sorts of benefit of the doubt, and you are perceived in a
• 1:43:40
  much better way than you would be otherwise. So to me, this was
• 1:43:45
  a strategy by Epstein very similar to the strategy used by Bernie Madoff when he
• 1:43:50
  pulled off his Ponzi scheme economic fraud, where people were begging to be part
• 1:43:57
  of Bernie Madoff's fun, where he was he was scamming people. It's a
• 1:44:01
  little bit different, but it's the same psychology. So him creating these associations
• 1:44:09
  with prominent people doesn't mean that it was all part of a massive pedophilia.
• 1:44:14
  It was a way for him creating a persona for him to get things done
• 1:44:19
  and to get away with things that he wouldn't orderly get and ordinarily get away
• 1:44:24
  with. And did that help him when it came initially to the media and
• 1:44:29
  to law enforcement. I'm sure it did. I'm not suggesting it didn't.
• 1:44:32
  But that's not the same as a massive, systematic, conscious cover up for
• 1:44:40
  child sex crimes. That's not, in my view at all what happened here.
• 1:44:44
  And that's why he killed himself and not murdered in a federal prison,
• 1:44:49
  with Donald Trump being a huge part of a massive, illogical cover up.
• 1:44:56
  So this whole story drives me crazy on so many different level. And by
• 1:45:00
  the way, there's one other element of it which I mentioned in the last
• 1:45:02
  episode of the podcast, and that is inadvertently the Epstein List created a firestorm
• 1:45:09
  at ESPN when Aaron Rogers and I ripped him for this. In the last
• 1:45:15
  episode of the podcast, New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers effectively implicated Jimmy Kimmel
• 1:45:21
  in the coming Epstein List. It's unclear to me whether Rogers was kidding or
• 1:45:28
  he was serious somewhere in between, but he took a shot at Jimmy Kimmel,
• 1:45:31
  and Jimmy Kimmel was understandably outraged. And threatened to sue Rogers. And
• 1:45:38
  just as I told you would be the case, Kimmel was not involved at
• 1:45:43
  all in the Epstein documents. And even though, by the way back to
• 1:45:48
  my point about when the audience wants something, someone will give the audience what
• 1:45:53
  they want. There was a screenshot that purported to be testimony from the Epstein
• 1:46:00
  document dump that showed Jimmy Kimmel was involved directly in Epstein's crimes, and it
• 1:46:08
  went viral, but it was clearly fake. Someone just completely made it up.
• 1:46:16
  But major right wing influencers were sharing this piece of crap, this totally
• 1:46:24
  fake, fabricated screenshot, and you know, even I was like, at
• 1:46:29
  first, like wait a minute, there's no way this is possibly true.
• 1:46:30
  And then I looked at it, I'm like, no, it's not true.
• 1:46:32
  But that didn't stop it from going viral, because that's what the audience
• 1:46:36
  wanted. These people are crazy. Most of themr Trump's supporters again, which
• 1:46:42
  is really ironic given the fact that Trump was president when Epstein died in federal
• 1:46:47
  prison, and has told again Tucker Carlson many times I've said this before,
• 1:46:51
  Bears repeating that he believes that Epstein did in fact kill himself, which she
• 1:46:57
  did. But back to the Rogers and Kimmel's story, So, you know,
• 1:47:00
  Rogers takes the shot at Kimmel on ESPN. On the McAfee show,
• 1:47:04
  it's important to point out Jimmy Kimmel works for ABC. They're all owned by
• 1:47:11
  Disney, so this is all under the same corporate umbrella happening on ESPN.
• 1:47:15
  Jimmy Kimmel, I'm sure, went to his corporate bosses and was like,
• 1:47:19
  what the fuck is this? This is ridiculous, And so ESPN put out
• 1:47:25
  a rather scathing statement against what Aaron Rodgers had said, and I think they
• 1:47:32
  probably thought that was the end of it. You know, kim wll threatened
• 1:47:35
  to sue, but I'm doubting that he'll actually do that. Kimmel was not
• 1:47:40
  involved in the actual documents, despite the fake screenshot that went viral. But
• 1:47:45
  then Pat McAfee goes on his show, and I actually thought at that point,
• 1:47:51
  you know, given the power of the corporate bigwigs, that maybe he
• 1:47:56
  might even announce that he's not gonna have Rogers on the show anymore. Since
• 1:47:59
  the football season is over, you know, this might be a good time
• 1:48:02
  to get rid of Rogers. McAfee seemingly goes in the other direction and goes
• 1:48:06
  after one of his own bosses, a guy in the name of Norby Williamson
• 1:48:11
  calls him a rat. I mean, wow, I mean someone who hates
• 1:48:15
  ESPN and hates most corporate bigwigs. I'm suspicious of Pat McAfee. There's parts
• 1:48:21
  of him I like, but I thought that was fantastic. I don't know
• 1:48:26
  where that's gonna lead and what punishment of any Matt Pat McAfee will get.
• 1:48:30
  I mean, he's as big as they get now at ESPN. They're paying
• 1:48:32
  him a ton of money, and his show's very successful. But he went
• 1:48:36
  after this Williamson guy, calling him a rat, seemingly in response to the
• 1:48:43
  Aaron Rodgers and Jimmy kimme O kerfuffle. But that all happened because of this
• 1:48:47
  bogus Jeffrey Epstein's story that seemingly never wants to end. And so, you
• 1:48:56
  know, one of the things about the Epstein story that I do find interesting
• 1:49:01
  and why I continue to say it, dealing with his alleged murder and what
• 1:49:06
  I believe to be suicide. I'm a big believer when it comes to evaluating
• 1:49:13
  situations that you must extrapolate from a scenario that you're being given in a way
• 1:49:20
  that is rational and see whether or not that fits with reality. And I
• 1:49:26
  did this all the time when it came to the Penn State Joe Paterno Jerry
• 1:49:30
  Sinowski case, and I've done it all the time in other cases I've worked
• 1:49:32
  with Michael Jackson. You know, there would be way, way, way,
• 1:49:35
  way more accusers, especially after his death, that he was actually a
• 1:49:39
  pedophile. That's the short answer to why Michael Jackson's not a pedophile. Matt
• 1:49:44
  Lower, I've already stated if you know, if there were women with NDAs,
• 1:49:47
  once they were released from their NDAs, they all would have come forward.
• 1:49:51
  He would have been sued multiple times, especially once New York dropped the
• 1:49:55
  statute limitations. This is the way that I think cases like this need to
• 1:50:00
  be evaluated. So if it had happened, what would have transpired rationally,
• 1:50:08
  if what you're alleging happened. Okay, I'll accept that premise. But now
• 1:50:12
  let me take that premise and I'm gonna go down the road here, and
• 1:50:15
  that's where I always go with Epstein. Okay, he's killed in a federal
• 1:50:18
  prison. That means we only have a couple people that could have done it.
• 1:50:23
  This is a case that would have been easily solved. Blah blah blah.
• 1:50:27
  Well, something very similar to that happened in a different realm over the
• 1:50:32
  last few days, and that occurred in New York in a girls' high school
• 1:50:39
  basketball game. Now you're probably thinking, zig, how could this possibly relate?
• 1:50:42
  Why is this significant? Why is it relevant? And it's relevant because
• 1:50:46
  I want to go back to what happened allegedly with the BYU Duke volleyball game
• 1:50:54
  from twenty twenty two, which where we began this podcast. Our very first
• 1:50:59
  episode of this podcast, The Death of Journalism, was a deep dive into
• 1:51:02
  that story and how it was a case of medium olpractice and a bogus narrative
• 1:51:08
  that somehow a BYU fan or fans was yelling the N word at a black
• 1:51:14
  Duke volleyball player. And there were all sorts of reasons why that story never
• 1:51:17
  made any sense. Why I know it didn't happen. I've already I already
• 1:51:21
  knew it didn't happen. I knew almost instantly it didn't happen, And we
• 1:51:24
  went into great detail. Check out episode one of this podcast, If you're
• 1:51:28
  curious as to why I know it didn't happen, But and I was very
• 1:51:31
  outspoken about that. I got written about in a Mormon newspaper, and you
• 1:51:38
  know, did a couple of TV appearances on News Nation about it. I
• 1:51:43
  was as outspoken as anybody that that did not happen. And the reason why
• 1:51:45
  I knew it didn't happen is because if it had happened, there's a whole
• 1:51:48
  bunch of things that would have transpired very very differently after the alleged event that
• 1:51:56
  none of which happened. Well, we have a girl's basketball game in New
• 1:52:00
  York City where there were allegations of an anti Semitic remark being made against Jewish
• 1:52:08
  basketball players. There's basically a black school, mostly Black school, and a
• 1:52:12
  Jewish school playing in a basketball game. And there was an allegation of an
• 1:52:16
  anti Semitic remark being made against one of the Jewish basketball players in this girl's
• 1:52:21
  high school basketball game. Very similar situation to BYU Duke volleyball, except in
• 1:52:30
  this situation, we have a whole series of things that occurred that did not
• 1:52:35
  happen. With BYU Duke Number one, we have video of a clear episode
• 1:52:43
  occurring. Now we don't have audio, but we have video of a clear
• 1:52:46
  episode occurring, and that immediately the basketball coach of the Jewish school brings their
• 1:52:57
  team together and they decide, after consultation that they are going to quit the
• 1:53:03
  game. Now, I'm not a big fan of quitting anything, especially athletic
• 1:53:08
  contests, and so I'm not sure this is how I would have handled it.
• 1:53:12
  But as far as proving whether or not the alleged incident actually happened,
• 1:53:17
  this is strong evidence that it actually happened because immediately they took their team or
• 1:53:24
  almost immediately off the court and said we're done with the game. And then
• 1:53:29
  the other team, which I don't agree with this either, but again this
• 1:53:32
  is about, you know, evidence that had actually occurred. The other team
• 1:53:38
  accepted a voluntary forfeit. So all of this is one hundred percent consistent with
• 1:53:45
  something actually happened. And this is that a high school girls basketball game with
• 1:53:50
  not nearly as many people around to witness it as what would have had to
• 1:53:57
  happened at the BYU sold out volleyball game in twenty twenty two. So this,
• 1:54:02
  to me, this whole situation was a one. It's an indication of
• 1:54:06
  just how much anti Semitism there is, you know, even in big cities
• 1:54:11
  which you consider to be liberal. In New York obviously as a very high
• 1:54:15
  Jewish population, that's a troubling subplot of all this. But as far as
• 1:54:19
  from an evidentiary standpoint, you almost couldn't create a set of circumstances that proved
• 1:54:25
  that the BYU Duke thing didn't happen more dramatically than this girls high school basketball
• 1:54:30
  game in New York, which got a bit of publicity, but probably not
• 1:54:34
  as much publicity as it deserved. And certainly I'm the only person on the
• 1:54:38
  planet that connected those two events. I tweeted as I was like, okay,
• 1:54:43
  deer sports media, especially Holly Row who jumped all over the Duke players
• 1:54:47
  being a heroin could you take a look at this situation please and tell me
• 1:54:53
  why none of this happened when it came to BYU and Duke. None of
• 1:54:57
  this happened when it came to BYU and Duke, because that didn't occur.
• 1:55:00
  And yet that's set off a huge wave of news media stories that even went
• 1:55:04
  after the BYU women's soccer team for similar situations that were also bogus. In
• 1:55:11
  my opinion BYU's reputation was besmirched. The entire narrative of you know, America
• 1:55:17
  still being a racist country was promoted and it was all bull crap. And
• 1:55:23
  yet here we have a situation where it seems to have been real. I
• 1:55:26
  don't know exactly what happened, but some clearly something bad really did happen,
• 1:55:31
  and it's obvious and the evidence of it is in fact overwhelming, and so
• 1:55:35
  I wanted to point that out in this particular episode of the podcast one last
• 1:55:41
  thing before I end. You know, I'm also someone when it comes to
• 1:55:45
  news media coverage who looks back and I go, remember when this was a
• 1:55:50
  really big story at the time, and let's look at how it's all turned
• 1:55:55
  out. And boy, isn't it interesting that, you know, it's not
• 1:56:00
  nearly as big, or isn't being treated as nearly as big a deal as
• 1:56:02
  it was when we first found out about it. Well, there's something that's
• 1:56:08
  happening right now that's very consistent with that phenomenon, and it deals with the
• 1:56:14
  issue of golf and the alleged PGA Tour Live Golf merger. Now, back
• 1:56:18
  in June, this story struck like a thunderbolt on not just the sports world,
• 1:56:25
  but the entire news media world, and we talked about on this podcast
• 1:56:30
  on a couple of different occasions. I'm someone who's a big golfer. I
• 1:56:32
  was once for the first place I was ever really fired from was the PGA
• 1:56:36
  Tour back in nineteen ninety, working there very very briefly, So I guess
• 1:56:43
  it was nineteen I guess it was somewhere in nineteen ninety nineteen ninety one.
• 1:56:46
  I was there for a very brief period of time, working for PGA Tour
• 1:56:49
  productions. I've been fired so many times it's difficult sometimes to remember all of
• 1:56:54
  them, but that was the first real firing. And so I have no
• 1:56:58
  love for the PGA Tour, but I do, you know, enjoy the
• 1:57:02
  PGA Tour. Have enjoyed the PGA Tour from a golf perspective through most of
• 1:57:06
  my life, and I've been very much on their side when it comes to
• 1:57:10
  this kamikazi attack by the Saudis called Live Golf, and without getting too deeply
• 1:57:15
  into all the issues, because I've talked about this previously, we have a
• 1:57:19
  situation where back in June this was a massive story and that this merger was
• 1:57:25
  basically a deal to make a deal, and the deal to make a deal
• 1:57:30
  had a deadline of December thirty first of last year. So this was a
• 1:57:36
  massive news story dominated the entire rest of the year when it came to anything
• 1:57:42
  related to golf. And yet when December thirty first came around, there was
• 1:57:45
  no deal, and there was hardly any discussion of an official extension of the
• 1:57:51
  deadline. And you know, to my knowledge, there's no official extension of
• 1:57:57
  the deadline. There's just a presumption. There's been fragmented reporting that yeah,
• 1:58:01
  they've decided to extend it maybe to April when the Masters comes around. But
• 1:58:06
  it seems like it's being treated as if, you know, no big deal
• 1:58:11
  or who knows. I don't even really fully understand, other than the fact
• 1:58:14
  that the golf media is completely incompetent as to why we don't have more details
• 1:58:19
  on what's actually transpired here. And obviously the players that are involved, the
• 1:58:26
  parties that are involved in negotiations don't want it to be known what the status
• 1:58:30
  of those negotiations are and whether or not there's a specific deadline that's been re
• 1:58:38
  established. After December thirty one came and went without a deal, I don't
• 1:58:41
  know what I have said because of the signing of John Rahm for like five
• 1:58:45
  hundred or six hundred million dollars, that there's no chance that there's going to
• 1:58:49
  be a deal made between Live Golf and the PGA Tour, that it's good
• 1:58:53
  for golf because the PGA Tour has lost all of its leverage because of the
• 1:58:58
  signing of John Rahm. And that's what really the signing of John Rahm was
• 1:59:00
  all about. The current Masters champion. That was a kamikazi attack by the
• 1:59:05
  Saudis, that was a shot across the bow that was, Hey, we
• 1:59:10
  don't like the way this negotiation is going, and so we're gonna show you
• 1:59:15
  what happens if you don't make a deal on our terms, and we're gonna
• 1:59:17
  pay John ram a ridiculous i'bsurd way, way way way over market value price
• 1:59:25
  to take him away from you, purely as a negotiating ploy. And it's
• 1:59:30
  worked because not only is there no talk of an actual deal and we don't
• 1:59:34
  even know when the deadline has been extended to, but now Rory McElroy,
• 1:59:40
  the great champion of the PGA Tour, the guy who has taken all the
• 1:59:44
  arrows, the guy who's been most outspoken, the guy who I have actually
• 1:59:47
  gained more respect for through most of this process than anybody else, because he
• 1:59:54
  has been up until recently tremendous when it comes to telling the truth about what
• 2:00:00
  Live is, holding the line against Live, holding the line against the saudis
• 2:00:04
  promoting the PGA Tour, trying to fight for what he thinks is right and
• 2:00:10
  for the future of the sport. And so I thought what Rory McElroy has
• 2:00:14
  been doing was fantastic. And I always get very hesitant when I start to
• 2:00:18
  start trusting anybody in a prominent position and started to get more esteem for them,
• 2:00:25
  because I'm inevitably going to be let down. And that's seemingly what has
• 2:00:30
  happened. Over the last couple of weeks. Ry McElroy has very much softened
• 2:00:33
  his statements on Live and he most recently gave an interview where he essentially waived
• 2:00:39
  the white flag of surrender to Live. So essentially what LIV did in signing
• 2:00:45
  John Rahm was not just a shot across the bow when it comes to negotiations
• 2:00:51
  and showing the PGA Tour, what is going to happen if they don't make
• 2:00:55
  a deal on the Saudis terms. They effectively bought John Rom to break Rory
• 2:01:01
  McElroy. That's what they did. John Ram should be you know, sending
• 2:01:06
  you know, thank you notes and a lot more to his buddy Rory McElroy
• 2:01:12
  because he got paid hundreds of millions of dollars way way over market value,
• 2:01:16
  because it was a strategy to break Rory McElroy and it worked. Rory McElroy
• 2:01:24
  has capitulated. Rory McElroy has been broken. He likes John Rom, their
• 2:01:30
  Ryder Cup teammates, you know, he loves the Ryder Cup, you know,
• 2:01:34
  and under the current rules, Rom would not be able to play in
• 2:01:36
  the Ryder Cup going forward. Rory has already said that's not going to happen.
• 2:01:41
  We're going to change the rules. And now he's making all sorts of
• 2:01:45
  kind statements towards the guys who left for Live and essentially admitting he was wrong,
• 2:01:51
  and it's all pathetic, it's all capitulation, it's all surrendered, and
• 2:01:56
  it's all further signs that whatever deal gets made eventually is going to be terrible
• 2:02:02
  for golf. It's gonna be awful for the PGA Tour. I'm sure that
• 2:02:06
  the moronics golf sports media will cheer any tour live agreement that looks like a
• 2:02:14
  merger and is going to bring the better players together more often. But that's
• 2:02:18
  not the biggest issue in my view. There are a lot of issues that
• 2:02:21
  are involved in this. And once you allow the Saudis to get their foot
• 2:02:25
  in the door, you know, to get under the tent, whatever metaphor
• 2:02:29
  you want to use, it's over. Because these people have bad intentions.
• 2:02:33
  They are not good faith actors. And when you ceize to be in total
• 2:02:39
  control and you give them significant control with all the money they have unlimited resources,
• 2:02:46
  eventually they're going to run the whole thing. And I had had hope
• 2:02:49
  that that might not be the case, that maybe the Saudis were effectively surrendering
• 2:02:57
  when it came to that June deal, But it's obvious that there was a
• 2:03:01
  either a miscalculation or misunderstanding, or maybe circumstances changed, whatever it is.
• 2:03:06
  But where we are to get today, there is no chance, especially with
• 2:03:11
  Rory McElroy eroding whatever leverage the PJ Tour may have still had into these negotiations
• 2:03:15
  by waving the white flag. Gee, thanks Rory, I mean you don't
• 2:03:19
  do that until after the negotiations are over. So I mean, Rory goes
• 2:03:25
  from being the PGA Tour's greatest champion to really being a negative influence in this
• 2:03:31
  whole situation. I mean, how the hell do you negotiate with the Saudis
• 2:03:34
  when you're your number one star is kissing up to live golf. I just
• 2:03:40
  see how you do it, especially when you just lost John Rahm and you
• 2:03:43
  had no real negotiating leverage to begin with, and you can't get into an
• 2:03:46
  arms race when it comes to money because you're a goddamn charity. Now you're
• 2:03:50
  a very rich charity, but that's what you are at your essence. If
• 2:03:55
  you're the PGA Tour and you're going up against these people that don't care about
• 2:03:58
  losing hundreds of millions of days, they only care about power and prestige and
• 2:04:03
  doing a ka Makazi attack on an American institution, and you're being helped by
• 2:04:06
  Donald Trump, who's gonna very possibly be the next president of the United States.
• 2:04:13
  This is an untenable situation in my view, for the current PGA Tour
• 2:04:17
  or for the sport of golf going forward. How it's all going to turn
• 2:04:23
  out. I don't think anyone knows, but it's not going to be good.
• 2:04:25
  And it just goes back to one of the bedrock realities of life that
• 2:04:30
  I've learned unfortunately all too often, that is basically, anything great that man
• 2:04:35
  creates, man will eventually destroy it. That's just the nature of humanity.
• 2:04:42
  And we're seeing it this year with college football and professional golf, two things
• 2:04:46
  that have played an incredibly important role in my life, two of the greatest
• 2:04:50
  certainly in the realm of sports, greatest things that America has ever created.
• 2:04:55
  And here we are, right before our eyes, much like the country itself,
• 2:04:59
  seeing its systematic destroyed. You know, is it going to be completely
• 2:05:02
  destroyed. Probably not, but it's not gonna be recognizable. It's not gonna
• 2:05:05
  be the same thing. And much of what made it great already has been
• 2:05:10
  destroyed and will continue to be destroyed. And so on that happy note,
• 2:05:14
  that'll do it for this episode of the Death of Journalism Podcasts. In the
• 2:05:17
  next episode, as I have already promised, I'll be giving my very specific
• 2:05:23
  prediction about what's going to happen next week in the Republican Iowa Caucus and the
• 2:05:27
  race for president. Until then, thanks so much for listening. This has
• 2:05:30
  been episode number one hundred and seventeen of the Death of Journalism podcast. My
• 2:05:34
  name is John Zigler.