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Episode Fifty Four: Fox News Cancels Itself · The Death Of Journalism

0:00
Welcome to episode number fifty four of the Death of Journalism podcast. My name
0:04
is John Ziggler. I am your host and on this edition to the podcast.
0:08
Fox News is suffering a ratings collapse in the wake of the Tucker Carlson
0:13
firing. R F K Junior gets blatantly censored by ABC News, and I
0:19
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And hey, thanks for sponsoring the show. Okay, folks, this
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is perhaps our most jam pack show ever. For a lot of reasons that
1:12
will become evident as we belong. We will begin with the ratings collapse for
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Fox News in Tucker Carlson's old eight pm time slot, because this is not
1:23
just interesting and tells us a little bit more about the biggest story of last
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week, but also maybe the entire state of and the future of cable news
1:34
and corporate media in general. To review. Obviously, Tucker Carlson was removed
1:41
from his eight pm time slot, where he was the highest rated host on
1:44
Fox News Channel in all of cable news. By the way, it appears
1:48
as if he may not have actually been fired. Megan Kelly is reporting,
1:52
and I think this makes some sense that he was taken off the air,
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but he's still under contract, so that has negotiating power one to keep him
2:02
from going somewhere else immediately, and as they negotiate some sort of exit package,
2:09
Tucker really won't have total freedom to do whatever he wants. Although he
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did put out a video on Twitter that went viral in a huge way,
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a very vague video about the state of our media and basically our national conversation,
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and it had tens of millions of views in less than a day,
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which really shows people are extremely interested not just in Tucker but in this particular
2:35
story, but with regard to Tucker's ratings or the Fox News Channel ratings in
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his old eight pm time slot. This has been catastrophic for Fox News Channel.
2:45
Worse than I expected, and I expected there to be a dip,
2:47
especially considering he was replaced by some rather subpart talent. Of course, I'm
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a big believer in Tucker's talent, and then that's what made his show unique
3:00
different and why so many people gravitated towards it that weren't very very ardent Fox
3:07
News Channel viewers and may have made that the only Fox News Channel show that
3:10
they would watch on a daily basis. But right now, as of this
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taping, it appears as if well over a million, maybe two million people
3:22
per show last week decided to take a pass on the Tucker carl what used
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to be the Tucker Carlson program on Fox News Channel. That is extraordinary.
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They basically lost at least half the audience, maybe more depending on how you
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do the math from one week to the next. And in the twenty five
3:42
to fifty four demo, which is what the advertisers care most about, Fox
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News Channel lost to both CNN and MSNBC on multiple nights last week Ian Tucker's
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old eight pm time slot. This is potentially catastrophic for Fox News Channel.
4:00
If this holds, and if you don't replace Tucker with somebody who can expand
4:05
that audience and bring people to the table and stop the bleeding, then this
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is going to have a major impact on Fox News Channel going forward, not
4:16
just from a ratings perspective, but as someone who's obviously deeply interested as I'm
4:21
sure many people are who are listening to this and what's going to happen in
4:26
the Republican primary process of the twenty twenty four election. I believe that maybe
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the biggest and the most understated part of the Tucker Carlson firing is that I
4:35
now believe that Fox News Channel is going to be largely irrelevant to that primary
4:43
process, assuming there even is a primary process, which may not happen.
4:46
I'll get to that later, but the reality here is that if Fox News
4:53
Channel now in the post Tucker era, without Tucker there, with Fox News
4:58
Channel having lost a lot of street cred within Trump World, because now all
5:01
the conspiracy theories are out as far as what really happened to Tucker, and
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he's the you know, a universal martyr now, no matter what your cause
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is. That's the reason Tucker got fired. And he was a conspiracy theorist
5:15
to begin with, and most of the Republican Party now seems to be dominated
5:19
by conspiracy theorists. So they lost an enormous amount of street cred, especially
5:25
in Trump world. There's nobody left there that would even theoretically flip on Trump.
5:30
Sean Hannity's not going to do it, Laura Ingram's not going to do
5:32
it, and nobody cares about anybody else. And so even if Fox News
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Channel does is what many have expected, which is to drift away from Trump,
5:43
and they tried to do that for a few months and then they abandoned
5:46
that. But even if they really went after Trump, I don't think it
5:48
would have any real major impact. And who knows, they may end up
5:53
getting back into the Trump fold once they realize that it seems pretty inevitable that
5:58
he's going to be the nominee. So, you know, I think Fox
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News Channel has already had greatly diminished impact on what's going to happen in the
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Republican nominating process. But there's an even bigger picture than that. We may
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be seeing the beginning of the end of corporate media in general, because you
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know, Tucker is going to go eventually do something else, and his audience
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is going to be at least as bigger bigger. The platforms, while important,
6:26
are not nearly as powerful as they used to be, but they're still
6:30
saddled with a lot of the restrictions, both on content as well as from
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a business model standpoint. We talked before about part of what made Tucker Carlson
6:41
somewhat vulnerable was that his show, while very successful from a rating standpoint,
6:46
was not a huge moneymaker because the Left has done such a great job of
6:51
making Fox News Channel and shows like Tucker Carlson's toxic to advertisers, to big
6:57
time advertisers, and so when you're dealing with these, you know, the
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my Pillows of the world and a bunch of small, nickel and dime type
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of advertisers, you're not going to be able to make nearly as much money.
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And so that changes the entire dynamic. And I'm not going to suggest
7:16
that, you know, Fox News Channel is going to go out of business
7:19
by any stretch of imagination, even though they just paid almost eight hundred million
7:23
dollars to dominion voting systems in a lawsuit settlement. But this does not bode
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well. And I think Fox News Channel has miscalculated here. Fox News Channel
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became convinced, much like ESPN, that it's about the system. It's not
7:39
about the stars. We don't want the stars. They're too expensive, they're
7:43
too high maintenance, they're too much of a pain in the ass. We
7:46
as management, we want to be in charge. We want to be in
7:48
control. And the reality is, it doesn't matter really who we put in
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there. It's the system that matters. It's Fox News Channel that's really the
7:57
star. And for a while that was the case. I just don't think
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it is as much anymore in this day and age, especially with podcasting as
8:05
popular as it is, and when independent media can now reach as many people
8:11
without nearly the content restrictions that you have in corporate media. And I just
8:18
think that from a branding standpoint, Fox News Channel has really screwed themselves,
8:24
as well as from a rating standpoint. Now, why did this happen?
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Now? I've been outspoken saying that I had a source that this was about
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messages from the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit that had been redacted that were very hypercritical
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and disparaging of Tucker's bosses, and that that was really the primary reason why
8:43
he got fired. And I still had questions and concerns about the timing,
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and I still have questions and concerns about the timing, but my report has
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been vindicated. Now I don't think it's been accepted as true by the main
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street because it's not an explanation that fits anybody's agenda, and it doesn't fit
9:01
a real conspiracy theory. It's far more fun for you know, people,
9:07
the Trump people to think that, oh, he was starting to be more
9:09
Trump, so they got rid of them because of that. Or he,
9:11
you know, he wasn't down with the war in Ukraine, so they got
9:15
rid of them over that. Or he had RF Kate Jr. On the
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show and he became anti fact so they got rid of them over that.
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Or he made a speech about the importance of prayer and Christianity and that's why
9:26
he got fired, which is just ridiculous. But I've seen every possible conspiracy
9:31
theory as to you know, why it is that Tucker Carlston got fired.
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I don't believe any of that. I believe that my sourcing was correct.
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It got verified by multiple mainstream news outlets, including and most prominently, the
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Wall Street Journal. Now this is where this gets interesting from a media perspective
9:52
and how people perceive things, often very wrongly. And look, I'm a
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cynical and contrarian as any buddy you know, but I don't buy into conspiracy
10:03
theories. And there are lines that that I will draw and I will not
10:07
usually go across unless I have a lot of evidence that forces me to do
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so. And what I'm referring to here is the fact that the Wall Street
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Journal really got the goods on this story. Know why would that matter?
10:20
Well, the Wall Street Journal is owned by News Corp, which is the
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same parent company of Fox News Channel. So this, I think shows a
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big difference in the way that the public sees things, and maybe someone like
10:33
myself sees things in the public mind. The Wall Street Journal is inherently discredited
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in anything they say about this because they're owned by the same company, and
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therefore they're being ordered to put forward a particular narrative to promote a particular agenda.
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They're just doing their bosses bidding and so therefore they cannot be trusted.
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And that's not the way I look at this. I look at this and
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it's point. Okay, they're owned by the same company, so we need
11:03
to be skeptical and questioning of the report. But we shouldn't presume that it's
11:09
a total fabrication just because it's from the same company, because guess what,
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being from the same company gives them better sourcing in this case, much better
11:20
sourcing, because those who are really in the know are going to be far
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more willing to talk to someone who they know won't screw them because they all
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work for the same company. And in this case, obviously Rupert Murdock,
11:33
the ultimate boss, is deeply invested in what happened here. He's the one
11:39
that made the decision apparently to get rid of Tucker Carlson. So in my
11:45
mind, there is inherent credibility in this particular circumstance. Again, doesn't mean
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they're completely telling the truth, but it also means that there's a very good
11:56
chance that they're willing and able to verify information and that other outlets are not.
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And here's what the Wall Street Journal wrote in a very very long,
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detailed piece about the Tucker Carlson firing, and sure enough, it validates exactly
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what I told you in the last episode of the podcast and what I said
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online and in a News Nation television appearance the very night of Tucker Carlson's firing.
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Headline in the in the Wall Street Journal, Tucker Carlson's vulgar, offensive
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messages about colleagues helped seal his fate at Fox News. That's exactly what I
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told you. That's exactly what I told Dan Abrahams on News Nation that these
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were redacted messages within the Dominion System voting Systems lawsuit settlement where he was disparaging
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of top executives at Fox News Channel. The Wall Street Journal subheadline is primetime
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host called executive the C word in redactive missive network grew wary of further embarrassment
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from possible disclosure. Of course, is weird because that's just got disclosed in
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the Wall Street Journal, which is owned by the same company, News Corps.
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And as I said, this article is very, very detailed and long.
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I'm just going to share a couple of paragraphs because it'll give you the
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essence of what happened here. They begin several weeks ago, as Fox News
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lawyers prepared for a courtroom showdown with dominion voting systems, they presented Tucker Carlson
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with what they thought was good news. And let me stop right there.
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I continue to be very confused by the timing here. The first words in
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this piece are several weeks ago, So I don't know how this fits into
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them deciding that to Fridays ago and late night they're going to finally fire him,
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and then they're gonna tell them one of money Day and that's how it's
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going to go down with no one set to replace him. But okay,
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back to the Wall Street Journal, they thought they presented him with good news.
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They had persuaded the court to redact from a legal filing the time he
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called a senior Fox News executive, by the way, one of the two
14:18
that would end up firing him the c word according to people familiar with the
14:24
matter. Now when it's the Wall Street Journal owned by News Corp. People
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familiar with the matter, are people really really really familiar with the matter,
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They go on to write. Mister Carlson, Fox News's most watch primetime host,
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wasn't impressed. He told his colleagues that he wanted the world to know
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what he had said about the executive in a private message. The People said,
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mister Carlson said comments he made about former President Donald Trump quote I hate
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him passionately unquote, that we're in the court, that we're in court documents
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were said during a momentary spasm of anger, while his dislike of this executive
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was deep and enduring. So let's review this because there's a very funny and
15:16
maybe tragic aspect of this whole situation where Fox thinks that executives like, hey,
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Tucker, we did you a solid here, buddy. We are going
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to we got redacted where you called your ultimate boss the sea word, So
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go ahead and thank us. And Tucker apparently is like, thank you,
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What are you kidding? I really believe that she's the sea word, and
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I wish people would know that she's the sea word. That's how That's what
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I'm getting out of this. And that didn't go over very well. Now.
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I don't know why it would have taken then several weeks for the firing.
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Maybe, I mean, I can see why they would wait until the
15:56
settlement was done, right, And as I said News Nation Television when I
16:02
was stunned at Dan Abrams and David Schuster and Megan Kelly, the other people
16:07
who were on in the same segment, that none of them thought the Dominion
16:11
voting System's lawsuit was directly related to Tucker's firing. I said, wait a
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minute, that doesn't make any sense. The settlement is an earthquake, all
16:22
right, And when you have an earthquake and a couple of days later a
16:26
building that seemed to be in good shape suddenly collapses right near the earthquake zone,
16:33
then there's probably a correlation. And so that's what, in my mind
16:37
happened here. And that was even before we had this Wall Street Journal article
16:41
which validated exactly what I had been told from a very good, although odd
16:48
source within the news industry that was dead on apparently about what was really going
16:53
on here. So I still have questions about the timing. I you know,
16:59
I still it's a little hard for me to believe that Fox News Channel
17:03
would blow all this up over an executive being called the C word. You
17:08
know, to me, okay, that's a maybe you suspend Tucker Carlson.
17:12
Maybe he then would have quit. Who knows, but to fire him without
17:18
any backup plan you know, at a critical juncture, especially with regard to
17:23
this Republican primary process, and do so in a way that is going to
17:30
really harm you. I mean, the stock price plummeted for the parent company
17:34
after this happened, and the ratings results have been darned to your catastrophic.
17:41
So all of this is bad for Fox News Channel. And then very few
17:47
people are actually going to accept this explanation. I mean, I believe it's
17:52
true. I believe that's the essence of what occurred. Now, the article
17:55
goes on to indicate another thing that I had already theorized a battle this podcast,
17:59
which is that basically Tucker got too big for his bridges, that he
18:03
became too much of a pain in the ass, that he decided that he
18:07
was above the rest of the network, which is what any network really hates.
18:11
But if you're gonna do that, you better be bringing home the bacon.
18:15
You better be bringing home Buku box. And while Tucker had amazing ratings,
18:22
he wasn't generating nearly as much revenue as those ratings would have generated in
18:26
the past, largely because the business model is broken. And that gets me
18:33
back to this issue of is this the end the beginning, not the end,
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but this is the beginning of the end for corporate media in general.
18:41
And is this the end of Fox News Channel as the dominant force within conservative
18:48
media? Again, the beginning of the end of that. We're nowhere near
18:51
the end. But I think you see where I'm going with this is are
18:55
we starting down this path where this is the beginning of the end of both
18:59
Fox News Channel's dominance within the conservative media as well as cable news and corporate
19:04
news media in general. And I think we are now you know at what
19:10
stage of the process we're in, who knows, but you can certainly see
19:14
that path. You can certainly see that path. And what happens with Tucker,
19:18
I think is going to tell a lot of that story. Is he
19:21
able to get out of his deal with Fox News Channel and then go do
19:23
something in a fairly quick fashion, And what will that be? Will that
19:30
be an independent media? My guess it will be. I mean, Tucker
19:34
clearly values free speech, and his opinions were becoming more and more fringe,
19:41
more and more conspiratorial, more and more dangerous to the corporate media elite.
19:45
So he really fits far more with an independent media model now than he does
19:52
with a corporate model, and if he does that in a major way,
19:56
is that going to take away that chunk which maybe a million viewers a night,
20:03
based upon the current rating situation at Fox News Channel from them on a
20:07
permanent basis. And that happens, then that is that's lethal at least in
20:12
some ways, that's lethal to Fox News Channel. So obviously this is an
20:17
ongoing story, but it is a big, big deal within the news media
20:22
industry on a number of levels. And that's why I wanted to start this
20:26
edition of the podcast off with the latest in the Tucker Carlson situation. Now
20:32
I want to move on to Robert Kennedy Junior RFK Junior, who is running
20:37
for president on Democratic side. For those who may not remember, RFK Junior
20:44
is the son of Robert Kennedy. He is the nephew of John F.
20:48
Kennedy, and he has been most well known. Although he would object to
20:52
this description as an anti vaxer. He says, he's just asking questions about
20:57
the vaccines, and but I'm talking about how he has perceived and that's how
21:03
he has gotten an enormous following. I mean, he's already polling it about
21:10
nineteen percent at least according to one poll on the Democratic side against Joe Biden.
21:15
And I do think that he's going to cost Biden some problems. I
21:21
mean, if the current situation exists during a Democratic primary, where you've got
21:27
Biden pretending he's not really running, that it's a fate to complete, that
21:32
he's it's just a coronation, and so he's not campaigning, and as people
21:37
aren't energized, and people aren't energized about Biden in particular anyway, unless unless
21:42
he's running against Trump, in which case, you know, eighty one million
21:45
people get energized to vote against Trump and they happen to vote for Biden.
21:51
But if you get Biden, you know, in this fake campaign for re
21:56
election on the Democratic side, and you have an energized Robert Kennedy Junior with
22:00
a base of support that is very, very very passionate. I mean,
22:07
the anti vax community is not massive, but they are passionate, and they're
22:12
going to vote for rfk jor no matter what. Now I'm not suggesting it's
22:17
going to be a you know, a Pat Buchanon, you know, George
22:21
Herbert Walker Bush situation in nineteen ninety two, which caused a bush all sorts
22:26
of problems, but it could come close to that, largely because how do
22:32
you get the Biden people to even show up if they if they think there's
22:37
no actual contest. And so that's something to look for for as we move
22:41
along on the Democratic side, which of course is not getting very much attention.
22:45
But RFK Junior, who in a different world would be you know,
22:51
blessed by the news media as democratic royalty. I mean, you don't get
22:56
more democratic royalty than a Ken who you know, has the lineage that I
23:03
that I just documented, and you know, it's unfortunate for him that he
23:07
really can't speak. He has a strangled voice. And because of the strangled
23:15
voice, which has gotten slightly better recently, apparently with surgery. Without the
23:19
strangled voice, I think he would be far more dangerous to the Democratic Party
23:25
than he currently is now. He would always be limited by this, this
23:30
vaccine issue being his branding. But but he's not just about the vaccine,
23:37
and he's a smart guy and he says some interesting things. And I'm with
23:40
him completely on the COVID panic. I'm not with him being anti vaccine.
23:45
I'm not with him on the issue of vaccines causing autism. I have not
23:49
been convinced of that connection. But I want to be fair to him as
23:55
well, because he doesn't say that there is is a you know, he
24:02
believes that there's a correlation between the for instance, COVID vaccines and negative outcomes.
24:11
He hasn't proven causation yet, and I think that's a that's a fair
24:17
thing to say. You can argue over the degrees. I think the most
24:21
important point here is I don't think that Robert Kennedy Junior is a whack job.
24:25
I don't. I just disagree with him. I think he goes too
24:27
far, and I do believe, whether he accepts it or not, that
24:33
has become his branding, and that branding comes with it a basically cult like
24:40
following, But it also comes with a pretty short ceiling of what his potential
24:45
support is because to a lot of people, that's still too toxic. However,
24:52
it shouldn't be as toxic as ABC News decided that it was because they
24:56
did an interview with our k Junior last week. A woman by the name
25:03
of Lindsay Davis did the interview and this was remarkable and really scary and nineteen
25:11
eighty four George Orwell esque, regardless of your views of RFK Junior and the
25:18
vaccines. But they did this interview, and of course Davis confronts RFK Junior
25:26
in a negative way about the vaccines and basically makes the argument that you're such
25:32
a nut job. She doesn't say this, but you're such a nut job
25:36
on the vaccines that even your own family, most of them, don't support
25:40
you for president. Your own siblings now should be pointed out. He's I
25:44
think, got nine siblings. Robert Kenny Senior was awfully busy, as was
25:51
his wife before he was killed by Sirhan Sirhan. But you know, she's
25:56
got a lot of family members and as he said, you know some of
25:59
them do you support? I mean, but you know, like in a
26:00
lot of families, you always have the difference of opinions. But the point
26:06
was that Davis was willing and able to use the vaccine issue to attack RFK
26:12
Jr. But then they edited out Kennedy's response on the vaccine issue, so
26:21
he gets the worst of both worlds. He gets attacked on the vaccine issue,
26:26
but they literally censor him when it comes to Okay, what's his view,
26:33
what's the basis for why, for instance, members of his family don't
26:38
agree with him on the vaccines. Shouldn't he at least be allowed to give
26:42
his side and if you you know, heck, you want to give his
26:47
side, and then you want to correct him with facts. That's what a
26:51
good interview and debate ought to be about. But ABC News did not do
26:56
that. ABC literally edited out RFK Junior's response, so they attack him.
27:04
He doesn't get a chance for a rebuttal. And then this is where it's
27:10
really really chilling. At the end of the interview, Davis comes on camera
27:18
and basically gives a blanket disclaimer, explaining that they had edited out his comments
27:27
on the vaccine and declaring definitively that he's factually wrong and had been and it
27:36
was making misstatements about the vaccine and that was the cause of the censorship of
27:44
a Democratic presidential candidate named Kennedy. I mean, it's mind blowing that we've
27:49
gotten to this point and that with a straight face, ABC News does this.
27:56
And here was that very chilling statement by ABC News anchor Lindsay Davis.
28:03
We should note that during our conversation, Kennedy made false claims about the COVID
28:07
nineteen vaccines. Data shows of the COVID nineteen vaccines prevented millions of hospitalizations and
28:11
deaths from the disease. He also made misleading claims about the relationship between vaccination
28:15
and autism. Research shows of vaccines and the ingredients used for the vaccines do
28:19
not cause autism, including multiple studies involving more than a million children, and
28:23
major medical associations like the American Academy of Pediatrics and the advocacy group Autism Speaks.
28:30
We've used our editorial judgment and not including extended portions of that exchange in
28:33
our interview. We thank mister Kennedy for the conversation. I'm sorry that's as
28:40
orwellian as it gets. ABC News, a major news outlet, puts out
28:47
a statement like that that you're not allowed. We don't even trust you,
28:51
our viewers, to be able to hear the other side of such an important
28:56
issue as vaccines. Now, if we hadn't just gone through the COVID panic
29:03
and insanity, this would be troubling and wrong in my opinion. But when
29:11
we just went through a period of over a year where the entire media industrial
29:21
complex and our government at every level was lying to us about the efficacy of
29:29
vaccines, hiding negative aspects of the vaccines as they get paid tens and tens
29:37
of millions of dollars by the pharmaceutical companies. They're completely wrong on the issue
29:44
of transmission. They don't stop these vaccines. Never stopped you from getting COVID,
29:48
or at least they certainly didn't after the first couple of months. They
29:52
never stopped you from getting it or transmitting it. Yet that was not acknowledged
29:57
and still, to my opinion, it has never been fully acknowledged by the
30:02
media industrial complex or by those in the government that lied about this. So
30:07
you have them being totally wrong in a way that resulted in mandates mandates for
30:15
this vaccine. And by the way, let's never forget not just mandates which
30:19
are still going on, I mean no. Vak Djokovic, still the number
30:22
one player in the world of tennis, cannot enter the United States legally to
30:29
this day because he has decided rightly to not take a vaccine he doesn't need
30:33
that could have negative side effects that he has no against, the virus,
30:37
heat that he has no vulnerability to, and the media just ignores this,
30:44
which should be a massive issue in and of itself. But we have a
30:48
situation where the media has been completely wrong about these vaccines to what they know.
30:55
And I'm even somebody who doesn't believe that we have hard asked evidence the
31:00
vaccines are killing lots of people. So I consider myself a moderate on this
31:07
issue of the COVID vaccines. But I've always been against the mandates, and
31:11
I've always been pissed off that they basically lied to us, never admitted they
31:17
were wrong about the issue of transmission, which was the basis of the mandates
31:22
to begin with. And so here to me, that makes what ABC News
31:26
did so much worse because we've just gone through a situation where they were wrong
31:33
before, and they have no credibility, They have no credibility to censor a
31:40
major Democratic presidential candidate and to this blanket say he's wrong on an issue that
31:48
the government has lost credibility and the media has lost credibility for very good reasons.
31:56
I mean, it's it's my blowing, it's chilling, and I gotta
32:02
say, by the way, it's probably the best thing that's happened to Robert
32:05
Kennedy Junior's campaign. I really do believe that because there has been a very
32:10
negative reaction to this online and within his base of support. I mean,
32:16
so in this case, censoring him is really only gonna make him stronger.
32:22
It's not good for the dialogue, it's not good for journalism. It's wrong.
32:29
It sets an incredibly dangerous precedent. But from a standpoint of just how
32:32
it impacts politically, I'm quite sure this is not going to harm RFK Junior.
32:38
Now, it may cause him problems down the road where now ABC has
32:45
set the precedent, right, you know, they signaled their virtue by not
32:50
allowing RFK Junior to have his say, and so now every other major media
32:54
outlet is going to feel compelled to do exactly the same thing, and that
33:00
will hurt his ability to get his message out because my guess is they're going
33:05
to use this as the excuse for why they are ignoring his campaign. Oh,
33:09
we just can't have Robert Kennedy Junior on because he might say something inaccurate
33:15
or you know, give misinformation about the vaccines and that might kill people.
33:20
By the way, even that our argument is bogus now because we know we
33:24
know that certainly today the vast majority that people don't need the vaccine, and
33:32
that the vaccine is no longer saving if it ever did nearly as many lives
33:37
as it once did. And I was someone who at the very beginning of
33:42
when the vaccines were rolled out said, wow, okay, the data really
33:45
does indicate that this is stopping transmission, it's lowering deaths, lowering hospitalizations,
33:52
and that may there might have been more than just correlation. There may have
33:55
been direct causation there for a couple of months, but then it stopped.
34:01
And so even at every single level, the basis of this censorship falls apart.
34:07
And ABC News ought to be embarrassed, and it's funny to me,
34:13
and I think I think it's more than funny. I think it's indicative of
34:17
a larger reality than ABC is the same company that aired that incredibly bizarre Damar
34:24
Hamlin interview the day after the Super Bowl with Michael Strahan, where in retrospect
34:30
now it's obvious to me. Of course, I've doubt anyone of ABC News
34:35
has even thought about this, But now that Damar Hamlin is claiming that his
34:38
heart attack occurred because the Commodio corus, which we know is a lie,
34:42
and the only reason why you would come up with that lie four months later,
34:45
is you were trying to hide for something else. And the answer he
34:47
gave to Strahan was completely consistent with something he was afraid of talking about,
34:52
which could only be the vaccines and so ABC, which, of course,
34:57
like every other major media outlet, takes millions millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical
35:01
companies. They are not to be trusted on this issue at all, and
35:07
they ought to be embarrassed by what they did to RK Junior. One of
35:13
the things on ABC News, it's not directly related to any of this,
35:15
but I forgot to mention it. In the last episode of the podcast,
35:21
ABC Disney has apparently canned Nate Silver. Now, Nate Silver, if you're
35:28
not a political junkie is probably someone who you've never heard of. If you
35:32
are a political junkie, you probably know Nate Silver. Nate Silver is a
35:37
super geeky guy who became known as the polling Guru and during a couple of
35:45
election cycles starting back in two thousand and eight, really became the darling of
35:49
the left wing media because he was the guy who I guess he was most
35:53
well known for having nailed Barack Obama's victory in two thousand eight, and liberals
36:00
fell in love with this guy. I mean, he looks exactly like every
36:06
computer geek you've ever thought of, and you know, he was making positive
36:12
predictions for liberals that turned out to be true. So he's the guru,
36:16
and he became a star on television as well as in social media. And
36:24
I had a very interesting interaction with Nate Silver before he became really legitimately famous,
36:32
in an interaction that I think really said a lot about the way this
36:38
whole thing works and why it is that we should be very, very skeptical
36:44
of mainstream news media. But before he got fired, you know, this
36:47
was basically the track of Nate Silver. He started by doing these predictions,
36:52
and all he really did was just average other people's polls. That was always
36:57
the part of Nate Silver that I never understood, the great allure of.
37:01
Okay, so he's taking other people's polls, he's averaging them, he does
37:06
some hocus pocus on it, pretends that he has some you know, magic
37:09
formula, and then makes not even real predictions. I mean, his predictions
37:15
were never real predictions. He would always say there's a sixty five percent chance
37:17
of this happening. Well, of course, that's that's an ultimate fallback position.
37:22
Cover your ass prediction, right, because if it happens, oh,
37:25
I said it was going to happen. If if it doesn't happen, oh,
37:29
wait a minute, I said it was a thirty five percent chance it
37:30
wasn't going to happen. Therefore it wasn't really a prediction. I wasn't really
37:34
wrong. Well back to my my interaction with him and why this was significant
37:40
in at least in my worldview, and I think you'll find this to be
37:44
enlightening. So before he became part of ABC News and was starting to make
37:49
a reputation for himself online. So in the two thousand and eight election,
37:53
his silver starts to get some legitimate celebrity. However, because he's left winger,
38:00
I'm not that familiar with him at all. And after the two thousand
38:06
and eight election, in preparation for my documentary Media Malpractice, Obama got elected
38:09
and PANLM was targeted. I commissioned a pole after the election, and it
38:16
was about what McCain voters and Obama voters knew, not what their opinions were,
38:24
what they knew or thought they knew about particular major news stories that dominated
38:31
the campaign narrative because I was trying to figure out how much did media coverage
38:37
influence people's perceptions of what they thought to be the truth, which is a
38:43
really important subject, right, especially if you're doing a documentary on the media
38:47
coverage of a presidential election. And to me, the two thousand and eight
38:52
presidential election was a completely different animal when it came to media coverage because while
38:58
there's though we've been always been buy it previous to that, there was this
39:01
was way, way, way beyond bias. I mean, this was lifting
39:06
Barack Obama on their shoulders and carrying him to victory. And this was you
39:09
know, taking out daggers to stab Sarah Palin in every way possible to make
39:15
sure she wasn't a threat to him. So I commissioned this poll from a
39:17
legitimate polling outlet, spent a lot of money on it. The polling outlet
39:23
and myself worked on the questions, you know, in a very detailed way.
39:29
This was not done haphazardly, and we came out with the results and
39:34
the results were pretty much as I expected, which was that the liberal media
39:38
had created misperceptions, especially among Obama voters on a whole litany of issues.
39:46
And I don't have the polling data in front of me, but I mean
39:49
you can probably find it online to this day. I mean it was it
39:52
was extraordinary. And you know, McCain voters were wrong about some things too,
39:58
but Obama voters were are really really wrong about I'll give you like an
40:04
example. I you know, one of the things that became a matter of
40:09
legend was that Sarah Palin had said that she could see Russia from her house,
40:15
right, which she never said. That's not Saturday Night Live actually created
40:20
that myth. Sarah Palin accurately said that you can see Russia from land in
40:25
Alaska, which most people don't know that there's a very small distance. In
40:30
fact, they used to be connected of Russia and Alaska, and so you
40:37
can literally see Russia from Alaska. She made that statement accurate statement as an
40:43
asside during an interview, ironically enough, with ABC News, and so the
40:51
left thinks that she was saying she can see Russia from her house. That
40:53
was like one of many examples we gave. So we put out the results
40:58
and it gets a bunch of media covers and Nate Silver immediately rushes to attack
41:05
the poll because he's a liberal, right and he's the liberal polling grewer,
41:08
so he feels like he has the need to defend the honor of liberals and
41:15
Obama voters by discrediting the poll, and he in a headline, in a
41:22
headline, he refers to my poll as quote unquote a push poll. A
41:30
push poll. Now, if you're don't know anything about polling, push polling
41:35
is a nefarious tactic that is used by campaigns during an election where they will
41:44
call people pretending to be a poster to give them some semblance of credibility,
41:51
and then they will feed voters who they've identified as potentially you know, from
41:57
a key demographic. That's why they're calling you. They call you and they
42:01
and they they provide you with information and most often that information isn't even true,
42:07
or at least it's it's very very biased. So they'll they'll feed,
42:12
they'll inject negative information about their opponent under the guise of being a polster.
42:19
And it's called a push pole. And now sometimes it's done to get the
42:23
results they want. In other words, they'll feed negative information about a topic
42:30
or a candidate and then they'll ask about that topic or candidate, and surprise,
42:34
surprise, the results they get are in line with what they wanted because
42:38
they just they despoiled, They poisoned the well by giving negative, biased information
42:46
under the guise of credibility, and that influences people's responses. So that's a
42:52
pushpole. A pushpole should be criticized. It is it is not valid,
42:58
you know, within polling, it is you know, almost the worst thing
43:00
you can call something is a push pole. And so when Nate Silver called
43:06
this a pushpole, I was like, what the fuck is he talking about?
43:10
And I didn't know that much about him, and I underestimated just how
43:15
well known he already was within the left wing. And I contacted him and
43:22
I said, this is ridiculous, dude, what are you talking about.
43:27
Go ahead and interview me about my pole. If you want to know about
43:30
the pole, I'm happy to be interviewed. And this is where I was
43:35
stupid. This was and I was incredibly busy. I cannot emphasize how busy
43:40
I was from the time period after the two thousand and election to getting my
43:46
movie done and out in time to get on the Today Show, which had
43:52
given us a date that they wanted me to come on to give them clips
43:55
from our exclusive Sarah Palin interview. I mean, it's a miracle. We
43:59
got the movie done on time and it was as good as it was.
44:02
So I was fried. I was incredibly busy. I was exhausted, but
44:08
I wanted to respond to this so silver and I should have done this so
44:15
differently, And if I was not dumb and naive, I would have.
44:19
But I stupidly trusted this asshole that he was going to one do a legitimate
44:24
interview, and I naively even thought he was going to understand the error of
44:30
his ways and basically admit that he was wrong. Well, none of that
44:35
happened, and instead he I'm sure he thought he was so smart. He
44:42
starts, after doing an interview at the beginning that seemed somewhat reasonable, he
44:46
starts asking me knowledge questions out of the blue, completely irrelevant, basically asking
44:54
me to name the senators from particular states. And I knew the senators from
45:01
the states, but I also knew where he was then going, I'm like,
45:05
what the hell are you doing? And I told him to go fuck
45:08
himself. On multiple occasions, he kept asking the same stupid questions about trying
45:16
to basically get me in a gotcha. Oh see, you didn't know the
45:21
senator from South Carolina or whatever it was, which didn't happen, and I
45:27
should have kept my cool. I could have should have just answered the damn
45:30
questions accurately. But again because I was so busy, so fried, and
45:34
didn't realize, you know, what a big deal Nate Silver was, I
45:37
thought he was just a gnat bugging me at that point. I didn't do
45:43
that, so I basically gave him exactly what he wanted. Other than not
45:45
knowing the answers to the questions, I ended the interview by telling him to
45:50
go fuck himself, and that, of course went viral. That went hugely
45:55
viral and really taught me a lot about the incredibly bogus nature of this whole
46:04
situation. And here was a guy who, at that point forward becomes this
46:08
massive media darling who I always consider to be a fraud one from the standpoint
46:15
of what he does, which was averaging other people's polls and making these predictions
46:19
that aren't really predictions. But I also knew his knowledge base couldn't be very
46:23
strong if he's calling my pole a push pole. And he can't be a
46:27
particularly honorable guy if he does this interview under these circumstances and tries to do
46:34
a gotcha game, which I should have handled better, but I did not.
46:37
But I and here's the weird part, which I think shows my credibility
46:42
and how objective I am. I always say I'm the most objective person on
46:45
the planet, and no one can convince me otherwise. But you know,
46:51
because Nate's Silver, I would think I would have an animus towards Nate's Silver
46:54
forever, and I'd be thrilled over his firing. I'm really not. Because
47:00
of the very very small group of liberals who had some semblance a brain activity
47:06
during COVID, Nate Silver was one of them because he was actually, you
47:10
know, in tune with the data enough to go, hey, guys,
47:14
are we sure we're doing this right now? It's basically Nate Silver's perspective,
47:19
and I do wonder whether or not it may have made him more vulnerable to
47:22
getting fired by ABC because he did lose a little bit of his liberal street
47:27
cred and his base of support. I mean, conservatives were never gonna like
47:31
Nate Silver, and then largely because he was a little bit of a COVID
47:36
contrarian liberals didn't either. In Disney, ABC is undergoing all sorts of cutbacks,
47:42
and Nate Silver was on the chopping block, and so I figured that
47:46
was worthy of mentioned. Given my rather colorful experience with Nate Silver, who
47:52
who, by the way, I also called out, this might have been,
47:55
you know, especially since I get all sorts of criticism from Trump fans
48:00
about the twenty sixteen election where I was wrong about Trump losing to Hillary.
48:07
I was wrong about that, although not as wrong as it appeared to be,
48:10
because privately my hair was on fire in my conversations with the Congressman John
48:15
Yarmouth Democrat, who I was telling was screwing you know, the Democratic Party
48:20
was screwing this up and playing with fire. But publicly I was very very
48:23
much in the camp that Trump will lose to Hillary. However, Nate Silver
48:30
in late twenty fifteen wrote a column saying Republicans should not be freaking out about
48:36
Donald Trump's poll numbers. He's not going to be the nominee. That's what
48:39
Silver wrote, and I wrote a column in response to that for Mediaite,
48:43
saying, dear Nate Silver, Republicans should be freaking out about Trump's poll numbers.
48:49
Here's why, because he's got a hell of a chance of winning the
48:51
nomination, and he was right. I was right. He was wrong.
48:54
And by the way, I'm getting the same hebgb's and the very reminiscent situation
49:00
deja vu all over again in twenty twenty four, which we'll get to a
49:04
little bit later on in the program. So my record versus Nate Silver is
49:09
actually pretty good. But again I'm not taking that much joy in his firing,
49:15
especially since it's not for the reasons that it should have been a long
49:19
time ago, which is basically, the guy's a fraud and a hack.
49:22
All right. I want to move to President Joe Biden and a controversy involving
49:27
him in a very rare press conference that he held last week, And this
49:30
is where my contrarian nature, I think will show itself in full bloom.
49:38
Now. The right wing is understandably exercised over the revelation that Joe Biden called
49:45
on an LA Times reporter and seemed to have a cheat sheet. It's clear
49:51
he had what you call it a cheat sheet, where he had the name
49:54
of the reporter, the picture of the reporter and a question that the report
50:00
seemed likely to ask, and that reporter was called on and pictures revealed that,
50:07
Oh my gosh, what is this? So the president is picking on
50:13
reporters at a very rare press conference where he knows what the question is going
50:16
to be. How did this happen? This sounds like a scandal. And
50:22
I will be the first to admit this is certainly an indication of the very
50:27
very very very very very cozy relationship between a democratic White House and the liberal
50:31
media, which the La Times is certainly part of that group. And this
50:37
created a bit of a firestorm, especially on the right. But I'm not
50:43
positive that this was a situation where there was a direct order, or this
50:50
was a situation where the reporter submitted their question for approval, or that the
50:55
White House gave the reporter the question. I don't think that's what happened.
51:00
Now, that doesn't mean this isn't significant, because again, it does indicate
51:05
the very cozy relationship, but I'm not sure this is a smoking gun that
51:10
it crossed over into a new line where we are in a situation where it's
51:15
totally and completely contrived, where the White Houses is telling reporters what questions to
51:22
ask where the reporters are submitting questions for approval. And the reason why I
51:29
don't think that that's what happened here is one the question that was asked,
51:34
while similar, was not exactly the same question. So if this fix was
51:38
in, you would think that the question would be exactly the same. I
51:45
think that what most likely occurred here is because there is such a cozy relationship,
51:52
the White House is smartened to figure out what any particular reporter is likely
51:58
to ask. They know that reporter will be friendly, which the La Times
52:02
reporter obviously would be, and that's a subject that they would like to answer.
52:10
So they put this cheat sheet together for Biden where they say, Hey,
52:15
you probably want to call on this La Times reporter and she's probably going
52:20
to ask about this, and here's some some notes on how to respond to
52:24
that. Now, I'm not being naive. Is it possible that there was
52:30
a wink wink, nod nod, and that's why the question wasn't exactly as
52:35
it was on the cheat sheet, That there was some plausible deniability involved.
52:40
Yeah, that's that's very possible. But there's also the scenario that you know,
52:45
it's really not that difficult to predict what these morons are going to ask.
52:50
I mean, you know who they are, you deal with them on
52:52
a daily basis, you know what they're interested in, you know that they're
52:57
on your side. So I'm not really defending the White House or the La
53:01
Times or the ridiculousness of the modern bogus press conference. I'm just saying I'm
53:07
not sure this was quite as dramatic as a lot on the right have pretended
53:14
that it is. As far as the press conference itself, it was a
53:16
joke. I mean, how is it that we're even you know, in
53:21
this pretend world where inflation isn't still out of control, interst rates aren't at
53:27
an incredibly high rate that are threatening to put the economy into recession. We
53:31
don't have a banking crisis apparently, but I mean one of the largest banks
53:37
in the history of America just failed, and it's like, oh, hum,
53:42
no big deal. You know, the economy seems to be doing just
53:46
fine, I guess. I mean, it's a bizarre world. It's pretend
53:50
world. But that's what happens when you're a democratic president and you have the
53:54
media on your side, and you never have press conferences, and when you
53:58
do, you can pick and choose who's going to get to ask the questions,
54:00
and you pretty much know at least what they're likely to ask, if
54:05
not exactly what they're going to ask. Now, Biden did make an appearance
54:09
at the White House Correspondence Dinner over the weekend, otherwise known as nerd prom
54:15
This is an event that Donald Trump boycotted for four years, which showed really
54:21
what an incredible whoo see Trump really is. I mean, you would think
54:27
that a guy who loves being combative and hates the media, and you know
54:31
it, likes to think of himself as very funny, would love an event
54:36
like the White House Correspondence Dinner where you know, there's all sorts of jokes
54:39
being told. He would get his chance to attack the media right to their
54:45
face. They would do the same to him. That was the event where
54:49
famously Obama joked about Trump, which many people believe is what provoked him to
54:52
want to run for president in twenty sixteen to begin with. So I always
54:58
found it very, very very indicative of who Donald Trump really is that he
55:02
never attended the White House Correspondence Dinner As President. Biden had no problem doing
55:07
that. And I have to say, Biden, you know, made a
55:10
few halfway decent jokes of at least one of them, which I'll get to
55:15
later very much dovetails with the Trump campaign's attack on Ron De Santis, which
55:21
I don't think is coincidental. I think there were two things at least that
55:24
were most worthy of mention from Biden's appearance at the White House Correspondence dinner.
55:31
One is that he joked himself about being quote unquote Dark Brandon, and he
55:40
put on his trademark sunglasses and you know, he's a badass. He's Dark
55:46
Brandon. And why this is significant is I'm not sure he understands. There's
55:54
really no good scenario here. Either he doesn't understand what dark Brandon is or
56:01
he doesn't care, and the media is just letting him get away with with
56:07
referring to himself as a nickname Brandon. That came about because a crowd at
56:13
a race car event started chanting fuck Joe Biden, and the reporter nervously and
56:22
delusionally reference that they were. They were saying, let's go Brandon because she
56:28
was interviewing a guy named Brandon. And so this is all the origins of
56:34
Brandon is in a crowd saying fuck Joe Biden. And here he is apparently
56:43
obliviously. And I say obliviously because remember two Christmases ago, on Christmas Eve,
56:50
there was a caller that called in was he was, he was charting
56:53
Santa's progress across the globe. A caller came in and said him, let's
57:00
go Brandon, and Biden completely cluelessly said yeah, I agree, let's go
57:04
Brandon. I honestly, even I naively thought at that time that was going
57:08
to be a huge story, but the Christmas break allowed the media to just
57:14
completely and totally ignore it. I mean that that was that's unbelievable that the
57:19
President could be that clueless, that out of touch, that he could be
57:22
tricked into saying let's go Brandon, which is basically fucked Joe Biden, and
57:29
and nothing be made of it. Well, here he is, again,
57:31
either obliviously or bizarrely, creating this character for himself, Dark Brandon at the
57:38
White House correspondence dinner. And then, of course nobody in the media will
57:43
make anything of it, because let's go Brandon is to never be explained to
57:49
the general public. That is, it's almost like, you know, being
57:52
anti vaxxer at this point, and you know it's just the third rail.
57:55
You're not allowed to talk about it. So there was the dark Brandon element
57:59
of the dinner. And then there was this little moment where Tamara Keith,
58:04
the president of the White House Correspondence Association, was speaking, and she referenced
58:10
the fact that Joe Biden just hasn't done that many press conferences. She does
58:15
this as gently as she possibly can. Of course, she wouldn't do this
58:20
if it was a Republican president who never did press conferences, but because they're
58:23
on the same team, she has to be very very gentle about it.
58:28
And then there's a lot of laughter, like ha ha he he isn't this
58:31
funny? And while you won't be able to see it because this is audio,
58:35
Biden himself is laughing at the slight chiding over the fact that he never
58:43
does press conferences. And here's what that sounded like at the White House Correspondence
58:49
Association dinner. Every president privately and sometimes publicly bridles at his news coverage.
58:55
And yet they invite us in and take our questions of sir, maybe not
59:00
as many as we would like. Now to me, The most important parts
59:10
of that clip are two of them. One is the idea that Keith has
59:15
to be so gentle about an issue that is so paramount, it's so fundamental
59:21
to the relationship between the press and the president. What's the access to him?
59:28
The press conference used to be. I mean, presidential press conferences used
59:32
to be, you know, almost brawls. When you look back at what
59:37
Nixon faced during his press conferences. Now, granted, part of that was
59:42
because he was undergoing scandal. I mean, it's nothing comparison to what happens
59:46
now. And I have to say I think that they've even changed since COVID.
59:51
Now, part of that is because Biden is president. But you know,
59:55
when Biden started as remember when he did those COVID social distance press conferences.
1:00:01
I mean, he basically castrated the news media. They're in masks,
1:00:07
they're separated. The physical proximity is such an important part of this whole situation
1:00:15
that the entire tone and tenor of the press conference was basically, you know,
1:00:21
you're lucky to even be here, and you know, let's make sure
1:00:23
that no one dies of COVID. And they basically disappeared since then, and
1:00:30
the media is feckless to do anything about it. And there, and Biden
1:00:34
is laughing, not with the media. There, he's laughing at the feckless
1:00:39
press corps. He's laughing at them because they can't do anything. And you
1:00:45
know why they can't do anything. One because they're on his team and so
1:00:47
that they can't make this a big issue. And two, they've lost so
1:00:51
much credibility with the public that if they did make a big issue of the
1:00:54
fact that Biden never does press conferences, the public wouldn't alley around them because
1:01:02
the media has lost all credibility and Biden knows this. The White House press
1:01:08
people know this, so they're not going to turn on Biden. He's on
1:01:14
their team and they've lost all credibility with the public to force him to do
1:01:17
something he doesn't want to do. And he doesn't want to do it because,
1:01:20
let's face it, if you get Joe Biden in a long press conference,
1:01:24
I mean, you know, Trump, for all of his frailties,
1:01:28
he did long press conferences. If you get if you get Biden in one
1:01:32
of those situations without a teleprompter and you hit him with a tough question at
1:01:38
the wrong time, who the hell knows is what's going to happen. I
1:01:42
mean, it could be really, really embarrassing, and so they want to
1:01:45
avoid that at all costs. And they have been able to do that because
1:01:50
journalism is dead and the media is completely impotent and feckless to be able to
1:01:55
do anything about it. And they really don't even their heart's not even into
1:01:59
it, as that clip illustrated, I believe at the White House Correspondence dinner.
1:02:04
Now, one other thing about that dinner, CBS News. CBS News
1:02:09
had as one of their guests. That's how this works. You know,
1:02:14
the media outlets. They buy a table and they get to bring in guests,
1:02:16
and you try to bring in, you know, the biggest celebrity that
1:02:20
you can. That's kind of the tradition of this dinner. CBS News brought
1:02:24
in Brittney Griner and treated her as royalty. Now. Britney Griner, for
1:02:31
those who may not recall, is the is the w NBA basketball player who
1:02:37
Biden got released from Russia in a trade that nobody thought was a good trade
1:02:44
after she had been arrested on some drug charges, drug related charges. And
1:02:50
I did not I did not agree with the way she was treated in Russia.
1:02:52
But I also did not agree with the dea we made with Russia to
1:02:57
get her released, and was there not just as a guest of CBS News,
1:03:01
which to me is an incredible political statement. I mean, she is
1:03:05
a political figure in every possible way. I get that she's a celebrity,
1:03:10
and I get that some of the celebrities at this dinner are political in nature,
1:03:15
but I'm sorry to mean she has made herself very political, not just
1:03:22
on the issue of her release from Russia, but she's also made, most
1:03:30
recently a statement which I'll get to momentarily, about being in favor of biological
1:03:37
men playing sports against women, and and so to me, that's a political
1:03:44
statement, and CBS News decides to embrace that and virtue signal by having Brittany
1:03:51
Grinder as their guest. Grinder also met with Joe Biden, apparently backstage at
1:03:59
the dinner, and Biden praised Grinder during his comments at the dinner. So
1:04:04
basically, Grinder is being treated as royalty. And you know, the thing
1:04:11
about Brittany Grinder, the part about her entire narrative and story that I find
1:04:16
most interesting is that we all basically have to play pretend I say this all
1:04:23
the time. You know, it was clear cut during COVID, but it's
1:04:27
not just COVID. There are so many elements now of society where we just
1:04:30
have to pretend that completely insane things are normal, or that we're just supposed
1:04:38
to ignore things that seem rather obvious or at least ought to provoke questioning.
1:04:44
Like the whole Damar Hamlin situation. We just have to pretend now that that
1:04:47
was commodio cordis even that makes no damn sense. And there's another explanation that
1:04:51
makes a hell of a lot more sense. Well, with Griner, the
1:04:59
elephant in the one of the room. Here is what evidence do we have
1:05:03
that Brittney Griner is in fact a biological female. Now, nobody will mention
1:05:10
this, and I don't know the answer. I mean, I don't know
1:05:15
the answer. So but to me, there's enough cause for questioning that it
1:05:24
becomes pretty hilarious that now she is making herself part of the cause to have
1:05:30
men play biological men play sports against women. And you know, I'm going
1:05:38
to play a clip here where she comes out very strongly in favor of biological
1:05:44
men playing sports against women. Is this just happened last week? And to
1:05:48
be clear, Britney Griner is six foot eight six foot eight. Weirdly,
1:05:59
her dad isn't even like six feet I don't even understand how this happened Biologically.
1:06:06
Britney Griner has taken photographs you can find them for yourself, shirtless,
1:06:14
where as an adult she looks like a teenage boy. That's what she looks
1:06:20
like shirtless. And I wouldn't recommend you go seeing the pictures, but you
1:06:25
know, if you want to verify what I'm saying, they're there, and
1:06:30
her voice I think explains itself. And that's why I'm gonna play this clip
1:06:38
partially from the content standpoint, but I want you to imagine Britney Griner,
1:06:44
who physically looks almost like Tiger Woods does from a body structure and even facially,
1:06:53
and listen to her voice as she responds to this question from William Rowden,
1:06:58
who is a Cooper woke how must be black mail sports reporter who very
1:07:04
gently and reverentially asks Griner for her opinion on this issue of biological mails playing
1:07:15
sports against women, and Grinder comes out very much in favor of it,
1:07:20
in fact, saying it's a crime to prevent it. And here's what that
1:07:25
sounded like wanting Britney. I'm gon Bill Roden from ESPN an skating. It
1:07:31
was really great to see you. It was good to know the president answer
1:07:34
the question. You've always represented so much throughout your entire career by access and
1:07:42
you know, being able to do stuff. And I hate to put one
1:07:44
more thing on your plate, but there are number of states who are aggressively
1:07:48
moving to present transgender athletes plane and I was wondering, again, I hate
1:07:55
to put them more thing on your plate, but in terms of you on
1:07:57
your radar, where is that, Um, you're gonna have a tremendeous platform,
1:08:01
where is that gonna be on your read our terms to advocating for um,
1:08:06
you know, athletes, all the athletes stringing out to me what I'm
1:08:09
like, Oh, I mean that that rings high on the on the list
1:08:12
of things that I'll be fighting for and speaking up against. You know,
1:08:16
everyone has everyone deserves the right to play, Everyone deserves the right to come
1:08:20
here sitting these seats and feel safe and not feel um like there's a threat
1:08:27
or they can't be who they are or um like like it's just all eyes
1:08:32
on them. So UM, I think it's a crime honestly to to separate
1:08:43
um someone for any reason. Um So, I definitely will be speaking up
1:08:48
against against those that legislation and those aults that are trying to be past for
1:08:53
sure. Now, to be clear, I have no idea what Britney Grinder's
1:09:01
biological gender is, but that is not the voice of any woman that I've
1:09:11
ever heard before, and I've never seen a woman that fits all the character
1:09:16
characteristics physically that Britney Grinder has. Now, is it possible that that she's
1:09:25
somewhere in the middle, because that does happen from time to time. Yeah,
1:09:30
it is. And I'm not, you know, suggesting that that somehow
1:09:35
she's breaking any rules or you know, that she has male genitalia. I
1:09:42
don't have any information to that at all, nor do I want any information
1:09:46
that indicates that at all. But point of this is that we're all just
1:09:50
supposed to pretend that there's not something weird going on here and that it's not
1:09:57
relevant to the question of whether or not Britney Griner is in favor of biological
1:10:03
men playing sports against women, because you could argue that she has more knowledge
1:10:10
in this area than almost anybody else, and that it's incredibly ironic that Grinder,
1:10:18
and maybe appropriate that Grinder would come out in favor of biological men playing
1:10:25
sports against women, and the media never even contemplates this. Again, there's
1:10:31
a lot like the Marhamlin. We're just supposed to pretend. We're supposed to
1:10:36
just leave all critical thinking aside and just accept the narrative, no matter how
1:10:45
strange it is, no matter how many questions it might raise. No,
1:10:48
no, we're not allowed to even ask any questions. No questions are to
1:10:54
be asked here about Britney Griner. And that's the death of journalism. Their
1:11:00
folks now oftentimes almost not I wouldn't say exclusively, but certainly predominantly. On
1:11:06
this podcast The Death of Journalism, we talk about negative things that are happening
1:11:12
in the media. That's kind of the nature of commentary and critique and criticism.
1:11:18
But there are a couple of good things that happened, at least two
1:11:21
good things that happened in recent days that I want to share with you.
1:11:26
The first deals with an interview that from two people that I have praised on
1:11:31
a consistent basis in this podcast, Elon Musk and Bill Maher, both of
1:11:36
whom I have reservations about you know, I think that mar is actually very
1:11:43
very liberal, and Musk I don't fully trust, not because I think he's
1:11:47
a bad guy, but you know, I think he's a little bit weird,
1:11:50
and you know, it's it's very very strange to me that the guy
1:11:54
who is most well known for promoting the electric car is now somehow see is
1:12:00
somewhat of a conservative because I think the electric cars, you know, one
1:12:04
of the biggest boondoggles that's ever happened in modern society, and it's very much
1:12:10
part of a leftist agenda. But that's neither here nor there. Musk has
1:12:15
done a great thing for free speech and for the truth by purchasing Twitter,
1:12:19
and most not at all, but most of what he has done with Twitter
1:12:24
I agree with in support, and mar has been an important voice when it
1:12:29
comes to the issue of trying to put a check on insane liberals or out
1:12:35
of control woke them. And I gotta give Bill Mark credit. I mean,
1:12:41
he's about the most prominent leftist in the media via his HBO show who
1:12:46
has had the courage and the willingness to take on the extreme elements of wokeism.
1:12:54
And he's been very successful at this and I think it's an incredibly important
1:12:58
service because wokism is not going to get under control from the right in most
1:13:03
cases, except maybe in Florida with you have a governor to Santis, But
1:13:08
nationally, the only way that's going to happen is if prominent liberals stand up
1:13:13
and say, knock it off. Enough is enough, stop this, this
1:13:17
is nuts. And so Elon Musk did an interview with Bill Maher on his
1:13:21
HBO show, and they talked about a lot of important things, but I
1:13:26
want to share just this one clip about the What mar refers to is the
1:13:30
woke mind virus, and Musk refers to the dangers of how academia has been
1:13:40
indoctrinating our nation's youth when it comes to this wokeism and how important free speech
1:13:46
is. And here's what that sounded like on HBO Woke mind virus? How
1:13:54
did it start? Was it? Bats it escape from the lab? I
1:13:58
mean, what is your assessment of why, because it's fairly recent. Why,
1:14:02
Why how did it start? And why I was I was trying to
1:14:06
figure out where where it's coming from. I think it's actually been a long
1:14:11
time brewing um in that it's uh, I think it's been going on for
1:14:15
a while. Um and Um. The amount of indoctrination that that's happening in
1:14:25
schools and universities is I think far beyond what parents realize. Um and I
1:14:30
only I sort of came to realize that somewhat late. Um, the experience
1:14:34
that we had in high school and college is not the experience that that kids
1:14:40
today are having, um and and hasn't been for I don't know, ten
1:14:45
years, maybe twenty years. So my parents themselves also a big part of
1:14:49
the problem. I think, Well, I suppose in some cases that parents,
1:14:55
but I think like the parents are just generally not aware of what their
1:14:59
kids being taught or what they're not being taught. Um, they're letting the
1:15:03
kids think that they're equal. I mean, yeah, let me, let
1:15:06
me let me you can be an example that that family told me, which
1:15:11
you know, his daughters go to college and so go to high school in
1:15:14
the Bay area. Um and and he was asking them like, well,
1:15:19
so who are the you know, who are the first few presidents of the
1:15:23
United States? They could name Washington, and I said, what do you
1:15:27
know about him? Well, he was a slave owner? What else?
1:15:29
Right? Exactly? Nothing? Right? Like okay, that's maybe you should
1:15:33
know more than that, you know, yeah, yeah, and that that
1:15:38
is the work mind virus exactly. So kudos do Bill Moore and Elon Musk,
1:15:44
neither of whom are really conservatives, for being on the right side of
1:15:47
history, as liberals like to say, on these particular issues, and the
1:15:51
issue of free speech is so incredibly important, especially in our post COVID world
1:15:58
and even the world we're now living in, as we see with ABC News
1:16:00
blatantly censoring major presidential candidates like RFK JR. The second positive thing that happened
1:16:08
in the major media that I want to share with you occurred on CNN.
1:16:11
Oddly enough, now, this was a clip that went viral because it attacked
1:16:17
Randy Weingearden. Randy Weinearden is the national head of the Teachers Union. She
1:16:26
is a disgraceful excuse for a human being. She is a liberal political hack,
1:16:34
and she gave congressional testimony last week where it was made clear she was
1:16:43
dictating, dictating during COVID the many of the policies by for instance, the
1:16:49
CDC. And when I say dictating the policies for instance, for school reopenings,
1:16:56
she was exerting ransom from the CDC and from our government. Randy Weingarten,
1:17:05
who clearly is a democratic operative, saw an opportunity during COVID. She
1:17:13
saw our children's schooling as an opportunity for at least two things. One to
1:17:23
impact the election in a way that was positive for Democrats, and two to
1:17:30
exert ransom on behalf of her union, ransom when it came to basically at
1:17:36
times creating the circumstances where it was impossible to reopen, or that if you
1:17:43
were going to reopen, there were going to be so many benefits. Some
1:17:45
of these benefits had absolutely nothing to do with COVID at all. It was
1:17:50
just exploiting a unique political situation where we were spending money out to Wazoo and
1:17:58
they had us over a bar role, and they had the political capital at
1:18:01
the time because everyone thought, oh, the teachers are gonna have to be
1:18:04
so brave to go back into the classroom, because my gosh, these are
1:18:09
gonna be situations where lots of teachers are gonna die because they were so brave
1:18:15
to teach these kids. And these kids everyone knows they all get viruses and
1:18:19
they give them to each other, and everyone's gonna die of COVID. So
1:18:24
therefore we're going to exert ransom on behalf of my union to either make sure
1:18:30
that the schools don't open, because, let's face it, a lot of
1:18:31
these teachers liked remote learning. They didn't like it from a from a teaching
1:18:35
standpoint, but it was, you know, made life a lot easier,
1:18:38
that's for damn sure. And there was no accountability at all. So he
1:18:42
didn't have to go into work as much and I to teach as much.
1:18:45
There was no accountability. This was something that a lot of teachers could like,
1:18:48
and to get them to stop doing that was gonna cost a lot of
1:18:53
money. And that was what Randy Weingarten was about. And she is a
1:19:00
just a disgraceful person. One of the more interesting things that came out in
1:19:02
her testimony is that the CDC was so beholden to her that one garden actually
1:19:10
had the CDC director's cell phone number. These were this was not science.
1:19:16
This was politics, liberal politics, that's what was driving This had nothing to
1:19:25
do with science at all. Yet if you criticize this, you were somehow
1:19:30
anti science and you were pro death and you were insensitive to the problems of
1:19:38
teachers. For the record, My position always was that schools should never be
1:19:43
closed. If you want, under these extraordinary circumstances, to allow teachers who
1:19:48
felt they are vulnerable to take a sabbatical, that's fine. I'm pretty sure
1:19:54
that for whatever period of time it would have taken for the panic to fade
1:19:57
under those circumstances, we could have figured it out. We could have figured
1:20:01
it out. But kids were not vulnerable. They never were vulnerable. And
1:20:06
as it turned out, there's no indication at all that one school returned to
1:20:12
normal, or in places where it always was normal, that we had any
1:20:15
significant number of people dying, whether it was student, students, or teachers
1:20:20
because of COVID. Well, the reason why I'm mentioning Randy Weingarten is that
1:20:26
she was confronted on CNN in a way that is unique, especially to CNN.
1:20:31
I don't think this ever, nothing like this has ever happened on CNN
1:20:35
in the COVID era, or really in the mainstream news media, where she
1:20:40
got confronted by a commentator there by the name of Scott Jennings. Now,
1:20:45
there's always a John Ziggler connection, right, six degrees of John Zigler.
1:20:48
I have referenced many times on this program that when I was in Louisville,
1:20:53
Kentucky, that I very strongly believe that the current Senate Minority leader Scott,
1:20:59
not Scott Jennings, but Fordy and slip Mitch McConnell. That Mitch McConnell had
1:21:03
it out for me and probably played a role, maybe a significant role in
1:21:09
my demise in radio and television in Louisville, Kentucky. That's another story for
1:21:15
another day, but the reason why it's relevant here is that at that time,
1:21:18
Scott Jennings was Mitch McConnell's muscle, and so I believe that Scott Jennings
1:21:26
had it out for me in Louisville, and on behalf of Mitch McConnell took
1:21:32
a dagger in my back, you know. Here we were supposed to be
1:21:35
on the same side, being conservatives, and I believe very strongly that Scott
1:21:40
Jennings played a significant role in that. By the way, he's I don't
1:21:43
even remember when he did this or why he did this, but he has
1:21:45
me blocked on Twitter. So I don't trust Scott Jennings from that perspective at
1:21:49
all, but he does a pretty good job on CNN. Again, I'm
1:21:53
showing my objectivity here, and he absolutely blows Randy one Garden out of the
1:22:01
water. He directly confronts her live on CNN, and you're not gonna be
1:22:05
able to see it because obviously this is audio. But while Scott Jennings is
1:22:11
going through this confrontation systematically eviscerating her, the fear and the look of Randywee
1:22:18
Garden's eyes is absolutely classic. So go check out the video clip for yourself
1:22:23
if you haven't already seen it. But here was Scott Jennings on CNN speaking
1:22:29
on behalf of so many parents, including myself, for their outrage against Randy
1:22:36
Wee Garden for how she and the teachers Union handled the COVID panic. Yeah,
1:22:43
we don't know each other, but speaking on behalf of millions of American
1:22:46
parents. I have four at home. I had to teach him at home.
1:22:49
My wife had to teach him at home. I am stunned at what
1:22:54
you have said this week about you're claiming to have wanted to reopen schools.
1:23:00
I think most you'll find that most parents believe you were the tip of the
1:23:03
sphere of school closures. There are numerous statements you made over the summer of
1:23:09
twenty scaring people to death about the possibility of opening schools, and I hear
1:23:14
no remorse whatsoever about the generational damage that's been done to these guys. I
1:23:18
have two kids with learning differences. Do you know how hard it is for
1:23:21
them to learn at home and not in a classroom that was designed for them,
1:23:27
And for you to sit in front of Congress and the American people and
1:23:30
say, oh, I wanted to open them the whole time, I am
1:23:34
shocked. I'm stunned. I'm stunned, and there are millions of parents who
1:23:39
feel the exact same way. Go ahead, So kudos do Scott Jennings were
1:23:48
taking on Randy Weingarten. Her response was, of course anemic and you know,
1:23:55
not worthy of even playing. But she's a fraud, and I'm glad
1:24:00
there was at least some semblance of accountability there. Whether or not this is
1:24:03
a sea change at CNN or the rest of the media, I don't know,
1:24:06
but that was a good sign. The fact that now, at least
1:24:11
that can be said publicly on live television without any ramifications against Jennings, at
1:24:17
least that I know of, is a positive direction. And we're more than
1:24:23
worthy of mention. Now, speaking of the COVID panic, doctor Fauci is
1:24:27
at it again. It's unbelievable. The guy is out of office, out
1:24:30
of power, and every single week he's doing some semblance of new major media.
1:24:36
This also on CNN, which shows you that, you know, CNN
1:24:40
is still carrying water for the major parts of the COVID narrative. But he
1:24:45
did an interview with Christine Amanpoor, who is probably the most sanctimonious of all
1:24:50
of the CNN long time of reporters and anchors, and this was about his
1:24:58
response to COVID and also scifically with regard to school closings. And Faucci is
1:25:02
basically on his don't Blame Me tour, that's, you know, his revisionist
1:25:08
history don't blame Me tour by doctor Fauci, and in this clip, this
1:25:13
is this is interesting and aggravating. He basically says, we don't we shouldn't
1:25:17
play the blame game, which means, don't blame me. I was just
1:25:23
giving recommendations, which is totally, incompletely bogus. That's not how this worked.
1:25:30
Everyone knows this. No one is claiming that what Faucci had was the
1:25:35
force of law, although effectively Trump abdocated his presidency to doctor Fauci. But
1:25:42
the way this was working in a panic, with the way the media was
1:25:46
making doctor Faucci into Saint Fauci, and the way that politics in general works
1:25:51
where you need political cover, and we're in an unprecedented situation, everybody was
1:25:58
going by the recommendation. I mean, it was a it was a domino
1:26:01
effect. So the schools would say, well, sorry, folks, we're
1:26:06
just going by the health director's recommendation. And the health and the health directors
1:26:12
were saying, well, it's just recommendations. We didn't force them to close.
1:26:15
Well, when you have a bunch of liberals who are running academia and
1:26:18
they're they're panicked and they're listening to the media, they're not going to go
1:26:23
against Saint Fauci. And all these health directors across the country and ours in
1:26:28
my county north of Los Angeles did exactly this. They did whatever Fauci said,
1:26:34
and so we had a bizarre situation in our county where we were subject
1:26:39
not just the Fauci, but we were also subject to the crazy person who
1:26:45
ran the health department in Los Angeles. We're not even in Los Angeles,
1:26:49
but our health director, if Fauci made an order, that was the way
1:26:56
it would go. And if Fauci didn't, but the LA director did,
1:27:00
we would then go by that because we border LA and we have to be
1:27:05
in line with Los Angeles because otherwise, I guess the thinking went that if,
1:27:11
for instance, our beaches were open, and it's absolutely insane that beaches
1:27:15
were ever closed anywhere, the safest place you could possibly be, but we
1:27:18
had major holidays where our beaches were closed under the guys that well, Los
1:27:24
Angeles didn't, and we have to be in lockstep with them because we have
1:27:29
to be part of the same team. Right We're on this part of the
1:27:32
the woke club. I don't want to get kicked out of my woke club,
1:27:36
you know, so I have to do the same thing Los Angeles does.
1:27:39
But you know, they also argued, well, if we're open in
1:27:43
Los Angeles is and all the people from Los Angeles are gonna come up to
1:27:46
Ventura County where I live, and our beaches are gonna be packed, which
1:27:49
by the way, would have been freaking fantastic for businesses in our county and
1:27:54
it wouldn't have impacted anything with regard to COVID. But that was the mentality,
1:27:59
and it's just it's just fantasy that we pretend that that's not the way
1:28:02
this went down, or that somehow what Fauci said was just simply a recommendation.
1:28:06
But here's what he said that Christian Amanpoor where he adds in this little
1:28:12
detail that I did not know, which was incredibly infuriating, that his own
1:28:15
daughter taught in schools in Louisiana and they were hardly ever closed and nothing happened
1:28:25
there and it didn't apparently impact his willingness to say no, stop it.
1:28:31
Schools need to be open everywhere. And here's what that sounding lag on CNN.
1:28:35
But I want to know what you think you and the community got wrong.
1:28:41
Was the closing of the schools to draconian How much of a delay did
1:28:46
the fact that nobody fully understood the asymptomatic spread of this, nobody figured out
1:28:51
that it could actually bust through certain vaccine levels as well. What are the
1:28:56
real takeaways? And they're real lessons. But yeah, I think we have
1:29:00
to get away from the blame game because so many of the things that you
1:29:03
have mentioned were unknowns at the time. It's so easy and I made that
1:29:10
comment in my response to one of the questions that Davis Wallace Wells asked me
1:29:16
in the New York Times pile in the New York Times profile, and I
1:29:20
didn't mean it as an affront to him, but I said, you know,
1:29:23
this is really big time Monday morning quarterbacking here, which is what it
1:29:28
is. So rather than have a blame game, and that's one of the
1:29:30
things that we have to stay away from, because there were things that happened,
1:29:35
and it was a moving target, and there were things that you did
1:29:40
not know at the time, and you had to, out of necessity make
1:29:44
a decision, and sometimes the decision was partially right. For example, let
1:29:49
me give you an example of a partially right decision. I think the idea
1:29:55
when you were having trucks that were cooler trucks pulling up to hospitals in order
1:30:00
to put bodies in because the morgues were overflowing and the hospital beds were being
1:30:06
challenged, that you had a triage you had to shut down. I don't
1:30:12
think anybody who has any realistic evaluation knows that you got to do something dramatic.
1:30:17
Once that's done, then the thing that you need to now go back
1:30:21
and analyze. I don't think anybody would argue with the fact that you had
1:30:25
to shut down is how long you keep the shutdown and how complete it is.
1:30:31
How does that relate to schools when you shut down schools if you do.
1:30:36
And I have been very vocal about this, and I think the people
1:30:40
who like to point fingers, I say, go and look at the tape,
1:30:45
you know, the tail of the tape. When I kept on saying
1:30:47
over and over again, we've got to get the children back to school as
1:30:50
quickly as possible. We've got to get them in school safely, and we've
1:30:55
got to make sure that they are not essentially out of school at home getting
1:31:00
older the negative consequences. Different parts of the country interpreted that differently. There
1:31:08
were schools that stayed closed far too long and longer than they should have,
1:31:13
and there were those that essentially didn't close at all. You know, my
1:31:17
daughter was a school teacher hit in New Orleans. They closed down for two
1:31:20
weeks and we're essentially open for the rest of the time, and others,
1:31:26
and the result was, you know, they didn't do too badly. I
1:31:29
mean, the kids got infected, a lot of them, did you know,
1:31:31
virtually it was. It was very difficult to determine and say, well,
1:31:36
if you shut down this long, you get no negative effect on the
1:31:41
child and minimal effect on the infection. Those studies weren't done. It was
1:31:45
just trying to do as best as you can in the circumstances that you were
1:31:50
in. Now, at the end of that clip, Fauci is hemming and
1:31:55
hawing and pretending that somehow the school where his daughter was teaching in Louisiana had
1:32:00
some problems, although there's no specificity. The reality is they didn't have any
1:32:03
problems, because if they did, we would have heard about it. And
1:32:08
none of the schools had that opened up had major problems. The media was
1:32:12
desperate to find them, but they didn't find any because schools never should have
1:32:16
been closed, and it was a catastrophic mistake for which we will always be
1:32:23
paying. I mean, this is not a mistake that's ever going to go
1:32:25
away. We screwed an entire generation over. I mean, there's all sorts
1:32:30
of problems going on with this generation Z, some of which had nothing to
1:32:32
do with COVID, but all of which are being exacerbated by what they had
1:32:36
to go through with regard to COVID in every possible way, and we're just
1:32:42
going to all pretend. We're just going to pretend that you know that this
1:32:46
wasn't avoidable avoidable, and that the you know, the impacts are bad,
1:32:51
but you know they'll they'll go away eventually. Bologny and some of us like
1:32:57
me were saying from the beginning, if we go down this path, we
1:33:00
are going to rue the day. Not only is it wrong from a science
1:33:03
perspective that the collateral damage is going to be catastrophic and never ending. And
1:33:11
unfortunately we were right, and there's no accountability none. And let me give
1:33:15
another example of how the media is able to omit anything that doesn't fit their
1:33:21
narrative. I want you to listen to this clip from a White House briefing
1:33:27
where the White House Press Secretary, Karen Jean Pierre, the black socialist lesbian
1:33:35
who is the White House Press secretary, she gets asked by a kid.
1:33:40
I guess they were doing an event for kids. She gets asked by a
1:33:43
kid about whether or not the president is ever going to force them to wear
1:33:47
masks again. Now, I want you to imagine a world where the media
1:33:53
was fair and had any semblance of credibility and was willing to revisit how wrong
1:34:00
they were about masks and how this kind of a clip would easily become symbolic
1:34:08
or emblematic of the mistake we made with regard to masking in general and masking
1:34:14
kids in schools in particular, because this kid is using their one shot to
1:34:18
ask the White House Press Secretary a question, and it's about being forced to
1:34:24
wear masks. And my guess is you probably haven't even heard this because it
1:34:28
went absolutely nowhere, because the media is still completely in the tank and invested
1:34:33
in masks, not because they really believe in masks, but because they don't
1:34:36
want to admit they were catastrophically and totally wrong. And Karen Jean Pierre's response
1:34:45
is just about as aggravating as you might expect because it does not include the
1:34:50
words no, that will never happen again because it was a mistake. And
1:34:55
here instead, here's what that sounded like, just from I hope not,
1:35:02
I hope not. So. Look, we're in a different place than we
1:35:10
were, as you guys all know COVID. I mean, you guys are
1:35:12
at the age where you had to deal with COVID pretty pretty personally right.
1:35:16
I mean probably somebody probably started school and had to wear masks. And so
1:35:20
the President's working very hard every day to make sure that you know, we
1:35:26
do everything that we can to fight COVID so that I can promise you that
1:35:30
I can promise you. And now we're all in this room not wearing masks,
1:35:32
which is great, Which is great. Okay, So what has not
1:35:35
said there is the most important part. She says, basically, knock on
1:35:41
wood. I don't think you could hear her, but she she actually does
1:35:44
tap on her podium knock on wood. We won't have to do that again,
1:35:47
which implies that we would do it again if we ever had the opportunity
1:35:54
or the need or the alleged need. I mean, I don't think I
1:35:59
honestly don't don't think we have moved the ball that far when it comes to
1:36:03
preventing mask mandates in the future. The only thing I think we have done,
1:36:09
even though we've My side of this is one hundred percent right. And
1:36:14
I was way out of front of the curve on this one from the very
1:36:16
beginning and gave a viral speech to our border supervisors here in Ventura County that
1:36:21
went viral across the world where I condemned them to hell for what they were
1:36:27
doing, and I've been vindicated in every possible way. But the media has
1:36:31
mitigated that vindication as much as they possibly can, because they're invested in the
1:36:36
in the fallacy, in the fantasy, in the myth, the absurdity that
1:36:42
masks might work. To me, the only thing that we've done is that
1:36:45
if they try to do this again in non blue parts of the country,
1:36:53
there will be significant resistance. Now, I don't know whether that resistance would
1:36:59
be strong enough to prevent it, like if they did it on planes again,
1:37:02
if they if they you know that was that was eventually eliminated because of
1:37:06
a judge's ruling. But if they ever tried it on planes again, my
1:37:12
guess is there would not be enough pushback to stop it. I could be
1:37:15
wrong, but I'm just not optimistic about it because they got away with this
1:37:19
once and they never had to admit they were wrong, and they'll probably do
1:37:24
it again, even when it comes to punishing kids like that one who asked
1:37:28
the question of the White House Press secretary, all right, I want to
1:37:30
move on now to the Republican presidential race. And you know, in many
1:37:36
ways I think what's happening there is by far the most important story of the
1:37:43
last couple of weeks, partially because of how important the results of that twenty
1:37:49
twenty four Republican primary are going to be for the future of the country.
1:37:53
And as you know, I am someone who is generally pessimistic, but I'm
1:37:58
also always trying to be hopeful. But I'm also going to be very honest
1:38:02
about where things stand. And as of this taping, the last couple of
1:38:09
weeks have been brutal for Rhonda Santis, not because he deserved them to be
1:38:15
brutal, not because he made any major mistakes. Although you could argue that
1:38:18
signing a six week abortion ban if you think you're going to be the Republican
1:38:23
presidential nominee, was not a great political move. But Desantists, I'm told,
1:38:28
knew it wasn't a great political move. That he just really believes that
1:38:30
that was the right thing to do. But I am not in this camp
1:38:35
that of people who think, well, de Santists has just shown he's not
1:38:39
ready for prime time. He hasn't announced yet, He's made all sorts of
1:38:43
missteps. That's all bullshit. It's a complete bullshit narrative that is created one
1:38:48
by people who want Trump to be the nominee or who deep down don't want
1:38:53
to feel badly about Trump being the nominee, so they have to rationalize why
1:38:58
de Santis is not that great and of an alternative. But as I predicted,
1:39:03
and it's probably been my best prediction so far when it comes to the
1:39:06
Republican nominating process, as I had predicted, the Santis is getting brutally attacked
1:39:14
by virtually every element of this equation Republicans, Democrats, liberal media, conservative
1:39:24
media, anti Trump media, like the Lincoln Project. Everybody is incentivized to
1:39:30
attack a guy who's not even technically in the race yet, and hardly anybody
1:39:35
is incentivized to attack Donald Trump, including, by the way, the other
1:39:41
candidates in the race. The other candidates in the race have all been attacking
1:39:47
not Donald Trump, but a guy who's not even in the race, Rhnda
1:39:51
Santis. And this is probably happen even more dramatically than I predicted that it
1:39:57
would. But from Trump's perspective, I mean, this is the bizarre world
1:40:02
we're living in. Trump famously hates the news media, famously doesn't believe in
1:40:09
poles, He doesn't even believe in polls on election day, so fake news
1:40:15
hates the media, doesn't believe in poles. Yet Trump is non stop,
1:40:24
non stop, in all of his public statements and his fundraising emails, non
1:40:29
stop touting negative De Santis news media coverage and poles. So that Trump's entire
1:40:39
campaign is about touting negative to Santas media coverage, a lot of it from
1:40:43
mainstream outlets, liberal outlets that he would never consider credible. Sometimes he's even
1:40:48
been linking to the far left MSNBC bullcrap, and I mean, it's just
1:40:56
hilarious if it wasn't so serious. But Trump is now suddenly touting news media
1:41:02
coverage and pulling as proof that De Santis is no good and DeSantis can't beat
1:41:10
him, and that he's the alpha male, and that he's going to be
1:41:13
the nominee. And there's been a lot for Trump to choose from when it
1:41:17
comes to media coverage. I mean, he put out a fundraising email with
1:41:21
about a dozen different headlines, most of which were from liberal outlets or from
1:41:27
Trump leaning outlets. So gee, there's a surprise liberal outlets who are afraid
1:41:31
of the Santis and they claim that they really don't want Trump to be president,
1:41:36
but they're going to torpedo and sabotage the only guy that can stop Trump
1:41:41
from being the nominee because they want Trump to be the nominee because they consider
1:41:44
him to be by far the more easily defeated candidates. They don't really care
1:41:47
about the fact that he's this grave threat to democracy. And then other outlets
1:41:53
that are pro Trump and so therefore have an invested interest in attacking the Santis
1:41:58
on behalf of Trump up. So most of this is bogus to begin with,
1:42:03
but there have been all sorts of examples in the last couple of weeks
1:42:10
where you know this Disney, this Disney attack, the Mickey Mouse thing,
1:42:14
Oh my god, VI see one more headline, and even Joe Biden jumped
1:42:19
on this at the White House Correspondence dinner. One more headline that uses Mickey
1:42:25
Mouse. That's been the narrative now that DeSantis is losing the Mickey Mouse,
1:42:30
he's fighting Mickey Mouse. He can't even beat Mickey Mouse. He's that week.
1:42:34
I had to tell you. While I've been right about the attacks on
1:42:39
the Santis and everyone being incentivized, there's one element of this whole situation.
1:42:45
I have been wrong about I thought, honestly that DeSantis would have a huge
1:42:50
advantage over Trump in being an incumbent governor who was able to get things done
1:42:57
and have positive headlines and seemed to be powerful and in charge, while Trump
1:43:03
was basically unemployed and out of power and and feckless not able to do anything.
1:43:12
I have been totally wrong about that, because we're now in a situation
1:43:16
where de Sandis is getting punished because he's actually doing things that he's actually in
1:43:21
power. And the Disney thing is a classic example of this. I mean,
1:43:28
my god, Nicky Haley went after Ron de Sandis on Disney. Went
1:43:33
she went on national television on the cable news I can't I think I can't
1:43:38
remember was Fox or CNN, But and she pretended like she was still governor
1:43:43
South Carolina and offered Disney to come to South Carolina and leave Florida, as
1:43:47
if logistically that would be possible. Um, but you know that she was
1:43:53
offering on the state of South Carolina to bring Disney to her state. She's
1:43:59
not the governor. Boy, it must be nice to be able to just
1:44:02
do and say what you know. Ever to hell, you one with no
1:44:04
ramifications. We have no power, no accountability, and and this Disney thing
1:44:11
has been given, given the opportunity for everybody to do that. The big
1:44:15
Ramaswami, who I told you months ago was going to be troubled for DeSantis,
1:44:20
has vindicated me in spades. He's all over this Disney issue lying.
1:44:27
I don't even know for sure he's lying because he might just be that dumb
1:44:30
he doesn't understand the issue. But he's going out on numerous cable news outlets
1:44:33
and mainstream interviews. And of course they're so stupid they don't know either,
1:44:38
and they they want to attack the Santis too, so they don't they don't
1:44:42
confront him on it. But he's claiming that DeSantis is a hypocrite on on
1:44:45
the crackdown on Disney, which is just factually not true. He has the
1:44:49
timeline all wrong, he has the facts all wrong. Not that that matters.
1:44:54
Trump is on the side of Disney now, Asa Hutchinson is on the
1:44:58
side of Disney. Every all these conservatives are now on the side of Disney
1:45:02
against Ron de Sandis. Now. I'm not that big into the Disney fight,
1:45:08
but it's been greatly misunderstood. Disney has special privileges where they effectively in
1:45:15
Florida run their own government, and Desand has decided to try to revoke that
1:45:20
and to be clear, as partially punishment for their political activism, specifically when
1:45:27
it comes to issues involving transgenderism and other wokeism issues. And you know,
1:45:33
this is an issue that hits very, very very close to home for me.
1:45:39
My wife and my two daughters have been huge into Disney their entire lives,
1:45:45
and you know that may be ending very very quickly. I've already said
1:45:48
on this podcast we're no longer Disneyland pass holders for a number of reasons.
1:45:53
But just last night, this is a totally true story, just by coincidence.
1:45:59
You know, my daughters were really excited to watch the new Peter Pan
1:46:04
movie on Disney Plus on streaming. And you know, my older daughter,
1:46:11
Grace is almost eleven. When she was a little girl, she loved Peter
1:46:15
Pan. She her first crush was Peter Pan. We have video of her
1:46:20
at Disneyland about the age of three or four, meeting Peter Pan for the
1:46:25
first time, and it was as if she was, you know, a
1:46:29
teenage girl meeting justin Bieber justin Timberlake at the height of their fame. I
1:46:34
mean, she was so nervous, she was biting her fingernails. She could
1:46:39
barely speak to him. She loved Peter Pan, and my younger daughter Diane,
1:46:45
also like Peter Pan, but not as much as my older daughter Grace.
1:46:48
And I knew nothing really about this new Peter Pan. I presumed that
1:46:55
it was whenever they do a remake, now part of the experience is divert
1:47:00
she signaled by changing some of the characters and make them as woke as possible.
1:47:03
But I didn't realize to what extent this had been done with this new
1:47:06
Peter Pan. So, you know, we put on the streaming, I
1:47:11
go do some work. My wife is out for a walk, and my
1:47:14
eleven year old daughter comes to me and she is really upset about the fact
1:47:19
that these characters in Peter Pan called the Lost Boys, that several of them
1:47:26
are actually girls who appear to be transgender. And and you know, tinker
1:47:33
Bell was completely changed. Now tinker Bell used to be a white blonde.
1:47:38
Now she's a black girl. And my six year old didn't understand this,
1:47:42
and she loved tinker Bell, and she was all pissed off about that,
1:47:45
and that you know, it really turned them off. I had nothing to
1:47:49
do with this. I didn't prep them about this at all, and I
1:47:53
would say about a forty five minutes into the movie, they just turned it
1:47:59
off off and I doubt they're gonna watch it again. And it really felt
1:48:03
it honestly felt like the end of Disney in my family, and it was
1:48:11
kind of sad. I mean, I've never been a Disney fan. I've
1:48:13
actually been a Disney critic, way way way before they went woke for other
1:48:16
reasons. But you know, my daughters were really upset about this, and
1:48:24
so it's just very incredibly frustrating that Desantus is Desantus is trying to do something
1:48:29
about this that appears to be based in sound principle, where he's getting destroyed
1:48:35
by conservatives. He's being ridiculed by conservatives all because this is a great narrative
1:48:44
for them. Oh, he's losing the Mickey Mouse and by the way,
1:48:45
I'm not even convinced he's losing. You know, the fight is ongoing,
1:48:50
and but it's absolutely hurting him, and Trump is jumping all over it,
1:48:57
and as are his surrogates. And I would consider by the way, Ramiswamy
1:49:00
and Hanley to be part of the Trump's seregate class because they are clearly running
1:49:06
for favor of Trump, well Hailey for vice president, Ramiswamy for some position
1:49:12
within the administration, or maybe a media position, who knows, but it's
1:49:17
disgusting, and you know, the media hypocrisy, especially the left wing media
1:49:23
hypocrisy, is off the charts here. I predicted this, although it's probably
1:49:28
happened more so than even I thought that it would, that the liberal media
1:49:31
would show themselves to be a bunch of hypocrites when it comes to this issue
1:49:35
of Trump really being a grave threat to democracy. If he's really such a
1:49:40
great threat to democracy, then why are you facilitating his nomination in almost every
1:49:45
possible way, especially when it came to the coverage of the indictment. But
1:49:49
let me give you a specific example, because this just shows just how much
1:49:56
they fear Ron de Santis and how they don't fear Trump, because this one
1:50:01
article on CNN was basically a triple crown of media hypocrisy where it really exposed
1:50:12
just how incredibly duplicitus the media is and what they're willing to do to promote
1:50:20
their agenda, and how they're willing to contradict themselves on some of the biggest
1:50:27
issues they claim to believe in. This is an article on CNN and the
1:50:33
headline is how bad is it for Ronda Santis? He's polling at RFK Junior's
1:50:41
level. The way this was tweeted out, things have gotten so bad for
1:50:45
De Santis that a recent Fox News poll Fox News shows him at twenty one
1:50:51
percent, comparable with the nineteen percent of Robert F. Kennedy Junior. Now
1:50:59
here's the book crown of hypocrisy here. Number one, they're promoting Donald Trump's
1:51:04
nomination, the guy they consider to be a grave threat to democracy because De
1:51:10
Santis is the only person that can stop a Trump nomination and therefore another Trump
1:51:16
presidency. So that's hypocrisy number one. Number two, they're promoting the candidacy
1:51:26
of Robert F. Kennedy Junior. They're elevating him to the Santis's level,
1:51:30
which, by the way, even this poll doesn't really do that. Yes,
1:51:33
their support is similar, but the margin was very different. Now,
1:51:38
though not as much as it should be. Trump is crushing to Santas in
1:51:43
this poll, but not as much as Biden is crushing at RFK Junior.
1:51:46
But that's just for the factual record, but they're promoting RFK Junior, an
1:51:51
anti vaxer. Now, cnn belief system is much like ABC that you can't
1:51:59
be worse. There's no worse human on the planet than an anti vaxer.
1:52:02
But they're willing to promote RK to the Santis's level because it helps fit their
1:52:08
agenda here, which is anti de Santis. So they're promoting Trump, they're
1:52:14
promoting RK Junior, and they're promoting a Fox News poll. Twenty percent of
1:52:21
CNN's programming as of late has been anti Fox News Channel and what a joke.
1:52:30
Fox News is Fox fake news? And here they are promoting giving credibility
1:52:35
to a Fox News poll. So right there, this is how how much
1:52:41
they fear to Santis. They're willing to promote Trump, they're willing to promote
1:52:45
RFK Junior, and they're willing to promote a Fox News poll all to forward
1:52:50
the agenda that the Santis is collapsing when he hasn't even announced yet. He
1:52:56
hasn't even announced yet, And it's just to me, it's just it's funny,
1:53:02
but it's also important because it indicates just how stacked the deck really is
1:53:12
against Rhnda Santis. It's worse than I even thought it would be. I
1:53:15
predicted this a long time ago. I said everyone would be incentivized against the
1:53:20
Santis. But it's worse than I thought, and it is even gotten to
1:53:27
comical levels this. I'm gonna play a clip here from Meghan Kelly. Now
1:53:31
this is on her own show, her YouTube show. And I like Meghan
1:53:38
Kelly. I don't agree with her on everything. I think she's talented,
1:53:43
I think she's pretty, thinks she's smart. I've even suggested that would never
1:53:48
happened politically, but you know, Fox should rehire her to take over Tucker
1:53:54
Carlson's spot at eight pm. But here Meghan Kelly goes out after DeSantis.
1:54:00
Now she's gone after DeSantis before because he hasn't done her show. She went
1:54:04
after him really hard for some reason because he didn't do her show. I
1:54:10
mean, I thought, way too hard for something that could just be a
1:54:13
logistical issue, and the guy's obviously incredibly busy. But for whatever reason,
1:54:17
de Santis didn't do Megan Kelly show, and now here she is going after
1:54:23
DeSantis again in the weirdest way ever to compare him to Donald Trump. And
1:54:30
the reason I'm playing this clip, and the reason why I think it's important
1:54:34
and also I think it's flat out hilarious, is that Megan Kelly herself,
1:54:40
I think, as she tries to make this comparison, suddenly realizes just how
1:54:45
ridiculous the comparison is, especially when you think of DeSantis and the issue of
1:54:55
narcissism in comparison to the King of nariss Donald Trump. And here's what that
1:55:02
sounded like. Some friends of mine were at one of these dinners with him.
1:55:08
You know, he's not dumb. He's been having these muckety muck dinners
1:55:12
with very wealthy donors, and they were at one of them, and they're
1:55:15
common in DeSantis. Who they really liked, I mean they like him on
1:55:19
paper. Was that the entire dinner he did not ask one question of anyone
1:55:27
there. It was all about himself. He was happy to talk about himself,
1:55:30
but he showed zero interest in the people around the table, which is
1:55:34
a cardinal sin in how to run a dinner party, how to be at
1:55:39
a dinner party, never mind how to run for president. Trump is probably
1:55:42
the opposite. Right, Even as a reporter, Trump would call me all
1:55:45
the time, he'd send me notes, all the time newspaper articles about him
1:55:51
and he God, and make sure I saw this. I actually think it
1:55:56
could matter. When I saw that, I didn't know whether to laugh or
1:56:00
And I would like to believe that Megan quickly realized, wait a minute,
1:56:03
I'm not making any sense here, because even my example, Trump is talking
1:56:09
about Trump, He's not talking about me. And remember this is a woman
1:56:13
who strongly implied in her book after the two sixteen election that the Trump forces
1:56:19
had tried to poison her before a Fox News debate. And then of course
1:56:26
there was the whole thing where Trump claimed that she had blood coming out of
1:56:30
her whatever because she asked him a question he didn't like. I mean,
1:56:35
there's all sorts of history there that you would think would make Kelly far more
1:56:41
in negative towards Trump than the Santis. But I'm telling you, they're looking
1:56:45
searching for some reason to rationalize not going with the Santists, so that they
1:56:54
can excuse themselves for going with Trump, which is what their audience, most
1:56:59
of their audience wants them to do and fits the agenda. And it depends
1:57:03
on how cynical you are and how machiavellian you are. You know, is
1:57:08
this something something where conservative media commentators want Trump to be the nominee because it
1:57:15
gets them off the hook for pissing off a large part of their audience.
1:57:17
If they attack Trump and then Trump loses the general election, which means we
1:57:23
get at least four more years of a Democratic president to attack, that could
1:57:27
be influencing a lot of thinking. I'm not saying that's what's happening with Megan
1:57:30
Kelly, but the idea that you're gonna go after Ronda Santists for narcissism when
1:57:39
the alternative is Donald fucking Trump is comical, and I think an indication of
1:57:47
just how invested the conservative media is in this idea that you know, we
1:57:54
can't attack Trump and we need to come up with an explanation for why the
1:57:58
Santists just isn't the guy. He's just not up to it. There's something
1:58:01
wrong with him. It's all bullshit, It's all complete bullshit. I mean,
1:58:05
nobody's perfect, nobody is perfect, but DeSantis is about as perfect as
1:58:11
you could possibly ask for if you wanted an alternative to Donald Trump. However,
1:58:16
I'm ready to make a new call with regard to Ron De Santis.
1:58:20
I've already stated that barring a black Swan situation, specifically a death and or
1:58:29
economic collapse, that Ron De Santis is not going to be elected president of
1:58:34
the United States in twenty twenty four. The establishment is just too deeply invested
1:58:41
against him. By the way, every element of the establishment is too deeply
1:58:45
invested against him, largely because of COVID. They all fear COVID accountability.
1:58:51
And DeSantis would completely change the game if he was president, and he's just
1:58:56
too many hurdles, too many mine fields. It's just not possible to navigate.
1:59:00
If he even got the nomination, Trump would sabotage him. Blah blah,
1:59:03
blah, blah blah. I already made that call several episodes ago,
1:59:08
when I did my deep dive into what's going to happen with regard to the
1:59:12
nominating process. I'm ready to make a new call. My new call is
1:59:16
this, I still believe the Santists can win the nomination, but I now
1:59:23
believe that there is a better chance that there is no real primary then there
1:59:30
is that the Santists ends up as the nominee. Again, obviously presuming Trump
1:59:35
is healthy and you know, alive and well and all that. But that's
1:59:41
my new call. There is now a better chance that there is effectively no
1:59:45
Republican primary process then there is that the Santists or anyone else beats Donald Trump.
1:59:54
That's how heavy a favorite Trump is right now. And make no mistake,
1:59:58
Trump is now act and his sarahrogates are now actively trying to shut down
2:00:04
the entire primary process, and they will be able to do this, as
2:00:12
insane as it sounds, they will be able to do this. They'll get
2:00:15
away with it if there is another month or two of polling like we have
2:00:20
seen recently. And unfortunately, it looks to me from what I'm hearing that
2:00:27
the Sandus isn't even going to get into the race until June. And so
2:00:33
for those that are hoping that magically, and I'm not in this camp,
2:00:39
I think there'll be some semblance of a bump, assuming it's done properly.
2:00:43
But I am not in the camp of the SANDUS supporters that believes that if
2:00:48
and when he announces, which he will, But when that happens, it's
2:00:51
suddenly, magically the race is going to go back to the way it was,
2:00:56
that we're going to be back to a Trump at forty two. Sand
2:01:00
is a thirty five situation, something like that, where it's a competitive ball
2:01:03
game and you're within punching range. I don't believe that's what's going to happen.
2:01:10
This thing is very, very very close to getting out of control,
2:01:15
and I cannot stand it when people tell me, John, you're panicking.
2:01:19
It's too early. That we've still got nine months before people start voting.
2:01:26
There's so much that can happen. Bullshit, bullshit. We are a month
2:01:31
or two away from this thing being shut down because Trump has the leverage to
2:01:40
not do the debates, and if he doesn't do the debates, there is
2:01:45
no alternative here. Now. Would he be hurt a little bit by not
2:01:51
doing the debates. Yes, And I'm gonna sound like I'm contradicting myself from
2:01:57
a prior episode. I'm not because the polling has gotten worse since I talked
2:02:02
about the fact that it could hurt him to not do the debates at a
2:02:08
certain point. I don't know what that number is, but we're in the
2:02:11
forty point range now where Trumps ahead nationally, and when you have Joe Biden
2:02:16
getting away with not doing debates with RFK JR. So the media is going
2:02:21
to go along with that. The left wing is gonna go along with that
2:02:24
because they want to protect Biden at all costs and they're afraid of RFK Junior.
2:02:28
So Biden's gonna get away with not having any sort of debates, which
2:02:32
means you can't have a real primary. Well, Trump's going to be able
2:02:36
if this polling continues to say, well, why in the world would be
2:02:42
stupid enough to put me through debates and make me vulnerable to liberal questioning and
2:02:49
get me, you know, on the record of things that I don't want
2:02:51
to talk about. Why are we gonna Why are we gonna give fodder to
2:02:55
the other side and make it more difficult for me to beat Biden? Why
2:02:59
are we being stupid? And that's an argument that will resonate. That is
2:03:02
an argument that will resonate with the Trump base, and it will resonate with
2:03:08
large parts of the Trump media and maybe even some of the quote unquote conservative
2:03:13
media. And so if Trump is still ahead by thirty five forty points in
2:03:19
a month or two when the decisions start getting made about these debates, he's
2:03:25
already made it clear he's going to bail and that will short circuit the entire
2:03:31
process by the way. I'm not someone that thinks that the debates would be
2:03:34
the be all, end all, but it psychologically will end it. If
2:03:41
there's no debates, there's no path for making up a huge deficit. Then
2:03:46
the fundraising evaporates overnight. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. So we are
2:03:54
incredibly close to this thing being over done. Could put you know, put
2:04:02
a fork in it, whatever metaphor you want. That we are a couple
2:04:08
nails in the cough in a way from this thing being buried, and nobody
2:04:13
seems to have any urgency. Well, I'm a big believer in a couple
2:04:18
of things that you never give up, never ever give up until there's absolutely
2:04:25
positively no other option. However, I do believe in reality based pessimism or
2:04:33
negativity having a potential positive side effects. See I especially when it comes to
2:04:40
politics. I cannot stand where people go, oh, you got to remain
2:04:44
optimistic. Well no, no, no, no, no, no no.
2:04:46
When you're heading down the wrong path, but you pretend that you're optimistic
2:04:51
about it, you're just heading towards disaster. So you need to change directions
2:04:58
while there's still a chance. When the deck of cards is stacked against you.
2:05:05
You do everything you can to get a new fucking pack of cards,
2:05:10
a new deck, a reshuffling. When you realize that the battlefield you have
2:05:16
chosen dooms you to slaughter, you don't continue to go down that path.
2:05:25
You pick a new battlefield, You retreat and reevaluate. And so it is
2:05:32
my very strong opinion that the de Sanders people need to flip the script here
2:05:40
if they go ahead and do as seemingly has been planned and run a normal
2:05:47
head to head, try to shake off these other single digit challengers that are
2:05:53
causing all sorts of problems for them, attacking the Sanders and taking away support
2:05:58
that would naturally go to the Trump's opponent if they try to do a normal
2:06:03
campaign, an attack, attack, attack Trump from a position of weakness,
2:06:11
where it's you're going simply after him on whatever issues he is vulnerable on.
2:06:15
Maybe you know, obviously COVID is the big one, doctor Fauci, I
2:06:19
agree with all that, but it's not going to be enough, and it's
2:06:24
certainly not going to be enough from a position of weakness, because you can't
2:06:27
attack the alpha male when you're forty points behind in a traditional way, going
2:06:33
after vulnerabilities, especially vulnerabilities where much of the Republican base has a reason to
2:06:41
discard them, or to rationalize them or to forgive them, is not gonna
2:06:45
work. And there may not be There may not be a scenario that will
2:06:51
work here, or a strategy that will work here. I've already shifted strategies.
2:06:56
If theoretically, if I was, you know, in charge in what's
2:07:00
happening with the De Santa's campaign on a couple of occasions, because I change
2:07:04
with the fact pattern, I go by what the current situation is. I
2:07:12
was in the Attack Attack, Attack camp a couple of months ago when this
2:07:16
thing was still pretty close. Then as it started to get less close,
2:07:20
I went to what I called the Whoville campaign, where you act like you
2:07:27
know the people of Whoville and the grine you stole Christmas. You just ignore
2:07:30
Trump and you tell your story until you get close enough and then you can
2:07:34
attack, attack, Attack. Well, I now have now come up with
2:07:40
a brand new theory or scenario, and I'm not going to detail it in
2:07:46
full in this episode. I'm gonna save that for the next episode of the
2:07:49
podcast, Parson, because I don't want to give it short shrift. But
2:07:54
I will also say, as a little bit of a teaser, that this
2:07:59
is not just theoretical what I'm talking to you about. This is something that
2:08:03
I came up with a few days ago, and I have already proposed to
2:08:09
a very good friend who is in the process of joining the de Santis campaign,
2:08:16
and they love this idea so much that they have already put it up
2:08:20
the flagpole to I don't want to be too specific, but to the person
2:08:26
who is most likely to be able to make it happen. So this is
2:08:31
not theoretical, and this is classic John Ziggler. So much for a public
2:08:35
person. For a public person, I would say that the most influential things
2:08:39
I've ever done in my life are things that I have no public ownership of
2:08:45
and happened way behind the scenes. And this may go no further than it
2:08:48
currently is, or it may go farther than that, who the hell knows,
2:08:52
but this is this is kind of a classic John Ziggler situation. So
2:08:58
here's what happened to facilitate this. I would say that this idea within the
2:09:03
Santa's campaign is probably rounding first base. We made it the first base,
2:09:07
and we're rounding first and we're heading the second Now it's a long way from
2:09:11
home, but it's a lot farther than it was a couple of days ago.
2:09:16
So, without further ado, here's the basics of the idea. And
2:09:20
it's going to sound incredibly simple, and some of the best ideas in the
2:09:24
world are so simple. You go, how the hell did I not think
2:09:28
of that? How to hell did no one think of that? But to
2:09:33
me, the only way to Santas has a shot here is he's got to
2:09:39
flip the script. He has to completely change the dynamic of the way people
2:09:46
view the race, specifically mainstream Republicans. And instead of going after Trump's weaknesses,
2:09:58
I believe you have to go after his strength. You have to attack
2:10:05
him right at his perceived strength, and in this particular case, his great
2:10:15
strength is right. He is seen as mister anti establishment. He is seen
2:10:22
as someone who is the attacker of Joe Biden. Right, he lost to
2:10:28
Joe Biden in twenty twenty, but he claims that he really didn't. And
2:10:31
so here he is the warrior. And for a lot of people, they
2:10:37
want someone to go after Joe Biden in a big way, and Trump is
2:10:41
the guy who can't be controlled. The establishment hates him so much that they're
2:10:46
willing to indict him, and he's the guy who Republicans, for some reasons,
2:10:52
still trust to fight that fight, even though he lost the twenty eighteen,
2:10:56
twenty twenty and two twenty two elections. So, to me, the
2:11:03
short version of what I'm proposing, and I'm calling this the America is better
2:11:09
than this campaign strategy, no more Hohoville. America is better than this campaign.
2:11:18
And what I mean by that is the this is a Biden Trump rematch.
2:11:26
You don't run against Trump. You run against a Biden Trump rematch that
2:11:35
nobody wants. The polling is overwhelming on this overwhelming. Nobody in the country.
2:11:46
Once these two old guys in a rerun of a movie we've already seen,
2:11:50
nobody, that's your chance. That's how you flip the script. You
2:11:58
don't run against Donald Trump, conservative versus conservative. You run against the Biden
2:12:05
Trump establishment cabal. You tie them together, you say, these guys are
2:12:15
on the same team. These guys actually have a lot of similarities, which
2:12:20
they do. They both loved doctor Fauci. They both loved spending so much
2:12:26
that it caused our current inflation. They both loved COVID restrictions. They both
2:12:31
loved COVID vaccines. They both loved gun control. They both loved Disney.
2:12:35
They both have no problem with transgenderism taking over America. They both seem to
2:12:41
love Gavin Newsome. They both think Florida sucks. They both loved the idea
2:12:46
of an eighty year old president of the United States. They both believe that
2:12:52
one failed term as president should not be a disqualifier, and they both really
2:12:58
want Donald Trump to be the twenty twenty four nominee. The Biden Trump establishment
2:13:05
cabal wants Trump to be the nominee because they know they can defeat him,
2:13:13
and they both don't want a real primary. The Biden Trump cabal is trying
2:13:20
to shut down the primary process. They're trying to shut down debate. They're
2:13:24
trying to censor their opponents because they want to protect their records. They are
2:13:31
the old guard, they are the establishment. Trump's the one now getting all
2:13:37
these endorsements, even from Florida congress people. He's the establishment. He's the
2:13:41
Rhino deep state establishment. He is part of the Biden Trump establishment cabal that
2:13:50
has gotten into the mess we are in. And the only way, the
2:13:56
only way to stop this Biden Trump rematch nobody wants, nobody asked for,
2:14:05
is Rhonda Santis being the Republican nominee. He's the only hope to prevent that
2:14:13
scenario from happening. And America is better than a Biden Trump rematch. That's
2:14:22
the essence of the argument. Now again, I want to preserve the right
2:14:28
to flush that out a little bit more in the next episode of the podcast.
2:14:33
And I've done this kind of thing many times before, where I get
2:14:37
an idea and it starts to get some momentum and something will occur and it
2:14:43
doesn't go anywhere. I don't know what's going to happen with this, but
2:14:48
I really, really really believe, and I think my friend agrees with me,
2:14:52
that this is the only path. This is the only way you change
2:14:56
the entire narrative. This is the only way you flip the ripped. This
2:15:01
is the only way you potentially assuming you announced and everything was perfectly and it's
2:15:05
by the way. This has to be has to be a major theme.
2:15:09
This can't just be, you know, a sideline situation. This can't just
2:15:13
be a thing we mentioned now. This has to be the major theme of
2:15:18
the campaign, and it will blow people's minds. Oh my god, it
2:15:24
will blow. This would blow the minds of Trump supporters all over the place.
2:15:28
And I've shared this on Twitter already and my gosh, you just see
2:15:31
the minds exploding. But a lot of people like this idea because there's a
2:15:35
lot of meat to it. It's actually based in reality, and I think
2:15:39
it would be incredibly effective. So again, in episode fifty five, I'll
2:15:43
put a little bit more being on that bone. Maybe I'll even have some
2:15:46
more information about whether or not we make it. The second base on this
2:15:50
idea actually coming to fruition. But until then, as is always the case,
2:15:54
please remember to subscribe, rate, and review this episode. If you
2:16:00
do share it, please make sure you're on social media you tag me.
2:16:03
I'll be happy to share your tweet for instance, And as always, thanks
2:16:07
so much for listening. Until next time, this has been the depth of
2:16:11
journalism. My name is John Ziegler.