Episode Two Hundred Twenty Nine: True Bromance

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to episode two hundred and twenty nine of the
Death of Journalism podcast. My name is John Zigler. I'm
your host on today's show. Free speech becomes a major
issue in the news on multiple fronts. Why I'm feeling
better about the long term viability of the Donald Trump
elon musk romance, an analysis of the fiftieth anniversary of
SNL that you will not here elsewhere. USA Hockey suddenly

(00:24):
takes center stage, yet another major abuse allegation turns out
to be false, and more on how Trump is brokering
a deal between the PGA Tour and the Saudis. The
biggest media moment of the last week was undoubtedly something

(00:44):
that happened on CBS's Face the Nation last Sunday when
host Margaret Brennan, who has been in the news when
it comes to examples of media bias numerous times in
the last year or so, particularly when she co hosted
the vice presidential debate last year, and she was interviewing

(01:05):
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and a remarkable series of
events happened. But before I get to what actually occurred,
there needs to be some backdrop here. First of all,
you have to understand that CBS paramount sixty minutes, as
part of that group, is currently being sued by Rubio's boss,

(01:29):
Donald Trump, and there are rumors and reports that CBS
is about to settle that lawsuit for election interference related
to the editing of the Kamala Harris sixty minutes interview
last year, which was wrong. It was mediam malpractice. I

(01:51):
don't think it was illegal. I don't know what the
definition of election interference is. Does this mean you're never
allowed to broadcast edited interviews anymore? I mean, the mind
boggles as to the implications of this, And I certainly
don't think that the sitting president of the United States
should be suing major media outlets, especially over something that's

(02:13):
pretty frivolous. I understand it's not frivolous from a substantive standpoint,
but I'm talking about from a legal perspective. But there's
a lot of angst within CBS News that their bosses
are going to cave to Trump just like ABC did,
just like Meta did, and that this is going to
make them look very, very bad, and that this is

(02:34):
going to have a chilling effect on their quote unquote
journalism during the Trump administration. So that's part of the
backdrop of this remarkable situation that occurred between Brennan and Rubio.
But for further context, I need to take you back
further than that, or at least from a timeline perspective,
and that is that the subject of Vice President JD.

(02:58):
Vance's speech in Europe, specifically in Munich, Germany, which happens
to be where my father was born and I guess
when he grew up. I was also born in Germany,
in Heidelberg when my father was in the US military
stations in Heidelberg. But that's another story for another day. Anyway,
Jade Vance was in Munich, Germany, and he gave a

(03:19):
very controversial speech ripping to shreds the European culture, specifically
when it came to the issue of free speech, and
how so much of Europe is caving in on the
entire concept of free speech, specifically Great Britain and also
Germany and based almost the entire continent has fallen when

(03:43):
it comes to this primary principle of democracy of freedom
of expression. And some people were very upset by Vance's speech,
especially those in Europe, but a lot of people, especially
here in America, especially Trump fans absolutely loved this speech.
And here's a couple of minutes of it, just to
give you a flavor of JD. Vans taking the European

(04:05):
leadership to the woodshed when it comes to the topics
that are related to free speech.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
And unfortunately, when I look at Europe today, it's sometimes
not so clear what happened to some of the Cold
Wars winners. I looked to Brussels, where EU Commission commissars
warned citizens that they intend to shut down social media
during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what
they've judged to be quote, hateful content. Or to this

(04:36):
very country where police have carried out raids against citizens
suspected of posting anti feminist comments online as part of
quote combating misogyny on the Internet a day of action.

Speaker 1 (04:49):
I looked to Sweden. We're two weeks.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
Ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in
Kuran burnings that resulted in his friend's murder, and as
the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden's laws to
supposedly protect free expression do not in fact grant and
I'm quoting a free pass to do or say anything

(05:14):
without risking offending the group that holds that belief, and
perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends
the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights
has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular
in the crosshairs.

Speaker 1 (05:32):
A little over two years ago.

Speaker 2 (05:33):
The British government charged Adam Smith Conner, a fifty one
year old physiotherapist and an Army veteran, with the heinous
crime of standing fifty meters from an abortion clinic and
silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting
with anyone, just silently praying on his own. After British

(05:57):
law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he
was praying, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of
the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aboarded
years before. Now the officers were not moved. Adam was
found guilty of breaking the government's new buffer zones law,
which criminalized a silent prayer and other actions that could

(06:19):
influence a person's decision within two hundred meters of an
abortion facility. He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds
in legal costs.

Speaker 1 (06:27):
To the prosecution.

Speaker 3 (06:29):
Now.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
I wish I could say that this was a fluke,
a one off, crazy example of a badly written law
being enacted against a single person.

Speaker 4 (06:37):
But no.

Speaker 2 (06:39):
This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish
government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within
so called safe access zones, warning them that even private
prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law. Naturally,
the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected

(07:00):
guilty of thought crime. In Britain and across Europe, free speech,
I fear is in retreat.

Speaker 1 (07:08):
Now, buy in large vance is absolutely right here. I
wish that we didn't live in such a glass house
on this topic, because I don't think we're doing a
particularly good job on free speech. I know Elon Musk
obviously has tried to change the game on that and
there have been some improvements. And clearly Musk is a
champion of free speech, and he's a massive portion, obviously

(07:31):
of the Trump administration. I'm not a big fan of
the Trump administration or Donald Trump himself when it comes
to the free speech topic, but I certainly do trust
Elon Musk. That being said, we have a lot of problems.
You know, this is supposed to be a bedrock of
who we are. It's our first amendment. And I'm not
just talking about, you know, the First Amendment. When I

(07:52):
say free speech, it's an entire value system. It's a
principle of free speech. And I'm not sure that the
modern Republican, already under Donald Trump, really truly believes in it.
But Musk is clearly a fighter, and he has lived it,
and he has walked the walk and talked to talk
and buying Twitter clearly was a massive win for free speech.

(08:15):
But I still don't think that America isn't a place
where we ought to be on this, and so that
would be I think one of the potential weaknesses in
Vance's argument. But you know, for him to be lecturing
Europe about this, but there's no question, no question that
this is a huge issue and that Europe is falling,
if not already has fallen, when it comes to this

(08:39):
primary principle of democracy in Western civilization. So it was
in that context that Margaret Brennan had an exchange with
Marco Rubio over this. I guess you would call it
the issue a free speech but bizarrely Brennan tried to
make the argument, and I think she was doing so

(09:00):
in an effort to try to attack jd Vance. I mean,
and she clearly seems to have some sort of animus
towards jd Vance. I don't know if it goes back
to that vice presidential debate or what have you, but
she really stretched here in an extraordinary way to try
to paint jd Vance as effectively being sympathetic to essentially

(09:26):
Nazi causes. She didn't say that, but that's effectively what
she said. And then it got even stranger where she
tries to make the argument that free speech is what
led the Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. And kudos to
Mark or Rubio, the guy who I supported for president
in twenty sixteen. Boy, would in the world have been

(09:47):
a different place if that had worked out as it
should have. But Mark Rubio does an extraordinary job of
instantaneously pushing back, very effectively against this very strange statement
by Margaret Brennan. And here's what it's satellite on CBS
has faced the nation.

Speaker 3 (10:04):
And so I think if anyone's angry about his word,
they don't have to agree with him, but to be
angry about it. I think actually makes this point. I
thought it was actually a pretty historic speech. Whether you
agree with him or not, I think the valid points
he's making to Europe is we are concerned that the
true values that we share, the values that bind us
together with Europe, are things like free speech and democracy
and our shared history in winning two World Wars and

(10:26):
defeating Soviet communism and the like. These are the values
that we shared in common and in that court where
we fought against things like censorship and oppression and so forth.
And when you see backsliding and you raise that, that's
a very valid concern. We can't tell him how to
run their countries. He's simply expressed in a speech his
view of it, which a lot of people frankly share.
And I thought he said a lot of things in

(10:47):
that speech that needed to be said, and honestly, I
don't know why anybody would be upset about it. People
are allowed, you know, you don't have to agree with
someone's speech. I happen to agree with a lot of
what he said, but you don't have to agree with
someone's speech to at least appreciate the fact they have
a right to say it. And then you should listen
to it and see whether those criticisms are valid. I
assure you the United States has come under withering criticism

(11:09):
on many occasions from many leaders in Europe, and we
don't go around throwing temper tantrums about it.

Speaker 5 (11:15):
Well, he was standing in a country where free speech
was weaponized to entuct a genocide, and he met with
the head of a political party that has far right
views and some historic ties to extreme groups. The context
of that was changing the tone of it, and you

(11:38):
know that that the censorship.

Speaker 3 (11:39):
I disagree with you specifically about the right. Now I
have to disagree with you. The free speech was not
used to conduct the genocide. The genocide was conducted by
an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal
because they hated Jews, and they hated minorities, and they
hated those that they had a list of people they hated,
but primarily the Jews. There was no free speech in
Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition

(12:02):
in Nazi Germany. They were a sole and only party
that governed that country. So that's not an accurate reflection
of history. I also think it's wrong again. I go
back to the point of his speech. The point of
his speech was basically that there is an erosion in
free speech and in tolerance or opposing points of view
within Europe. And that's of concern because that is eroding.
It's not an erosion of your military capabilities, that's not

(12:23):
an erosion of your economic standing. That's an erosion of
the actual values that bind us together in the Transatlantic
Union that everybody talks about. And I think allies and
friends and partners that have worked together now for eighty
years should be able to speak frankly to one another
in open forums without being offended, insulted.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
Or upset.

Speaker 3 (12:41):
And I spoke to foreign ministers from multiple countries throughout Europe.
Many of them probably didn't like the speech. I didn't
agree with it, but they were continuing to engage with
us on all sorts of issues that unite us. So again,
at the end of the day, I think that people
give all that is a form in which you're supposed
to be inviting people to give speeches, not basically a
chorus where everyone is saying the exact same thing. That's

(13:03):
not always going to be the case when it's a
collection of democracies where leaders have the right and the
privilege to speak their minds and forms such as these.

Speaker 5 (13:12):
Mister, I'm told that we are out of time now.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
That clip went viral and rightly created an awful lot
of outrage, especially on the right, a lot of confusion
over what the hell Margaret Brennan was even trying to say.
And I have to tell you, it's hard for me
to provide full analysis of this because I don't even
understand it. I really don't understand what she was trying

(13:35):
to say. My only guess is that she was reaching
so hard to find something with which to attack jd
Vance that this is the best that she could come
up with. And let's face it, with all the cutbacks
throughout the entire legacy media, there are not nearly as

(13:55):
many good producers as they used to be to put
a stop to this kind of thing, to make sure
that her questions were fully vetted and that people had
spoken to her about where she was going to go
in any particular circumstance when it came to the Rubio interview,
and she was obviously not prepared. That's the best interpretation

(14:16):
of what transpired here, But I really don't even understand
what she's trying to say. It doesn't even make any
sense to me. So the Nazis used free speech to
take over Germany, and that's why we had the Holocaust.
I again, it's impossible for me to even fully understand
what she was saying, and a lot of people, including myself,

(14:39):
were strongly implying that she should be this is a
fireable offense. Now, I don't think she's gonna be fired.
It hasn't happened yet. There's, to my knowledge, no even
talk internally of any sort of reprimand against Brennan. But
that's the nature of the culture of the legacy news
media now. I mean, you know, we're living in two
very different worlds, the right wing world in the left

(15:00):
wing world of the legacy news media. And so I
don't know that she's even gonna have any internal repercussions,
but she should. There should be accountability because that was
absolutely embarrassing. And Mark Rubio one hundred percent handled that
situation fantastically, and that was not an easy circumstance to
deal with because he had to be confused too. He

(15:24):
had to be And I've been in similar situations on
live television and you're you're not one hundred percent sure?
Did I just hear what I think I heard? And
you don't want to, you know, go out of your
way to create a moment unless you're one hundred percent
sure you're right and you didn't mishear it or misinterpret it,

(15:45):
or is she referring? I kept thinking, are we going
to hear something that she's referring to that I'm not
aware of? I mean, maybe giving her way too much credit,
Like what was the basis of her argument? What was
the basis of her question? And so I was very
impressed that Rubio. It's one thing to think, you know,
that doesn't make any sense. And Rubio could have just

(16:08):
made a weird expression to show the audience that he
was confused by where she was going, but he went
way further than this, and he immediately rebutted her. I
guess you would call it an argument for lack of
a better term. And so Rubio really impressed me there,
and I thought that was a fantastic job by him.

(16:28):
But maybe the most bizarre part of this whole situation
was the timing of it. Now, I don't believe this
was on purpose. I really don't, because I don't think
these people are this competent. Maybe there is a possibility
that this was in Margaret Brennan's mind, because maybe she
was aware of what sixty minutes was doing on CBS

(16:50):
later that day. I mean, that's certainly very plausible. So
maybe that had some sort of impact on how and
why Brennan did this. But it just so happened that
that night, Sunday Night, sixty Minutes did an entire segment softballing,
and I mean softballing the dramatic, absurd and very dangerous

(17:14):
overreach by the German government when it comes to cracking
down on free speech. I mean, this was almost a parody.
A few years ago, I would have thought that the
sixty Minutes piece was a parody of how the left
simply does not respect free speech. And it's always baffled

(17:38):
me as to how it is that the mainstream news media,
how you can get to sixty minutes and be a
sixty minutes corresponded and not value free speech as a concept.
It's the the entire foundation of journalism. But what I
have come to believe, especially am younger quote unquote journalists,

(17:59):
is that they are so enraged that might be too
strong a word, but they're so upset by the fact
that they have lost the monopoly and that the establishment
has lost the monopoly over what is so called truth
and who's allowed to speak in a way that is

(18:19):
heard by the mainstream. They have lost that. They've lost
that because of social media. They've lost that in America,
because of the rise of the right wing media. They've
lost that because they themselves have lost so much credibility
and trust that their audiences have shrunk and very few
people outside of their core audience still look to them

(18:42):
with any real trust and belief in what they're doing.
So that, I mean that is the story of the
news media, especially in the Trump era, especially in the
post COVID panic era, is the massive loss of trust
in the news media, especially by conservatives. So in this country,
they have certainly lost their monopoly. And that's the only

(19:05):
semi logical explanation I can come up with for why
it is that people like this CBS correspondent that you're
about to hear from a woman who is interviewing German
prosecutors about the crackdown on freedom of expression. I'm talking
about basic stuffs here, basic stuff, talking about what's an insult,

(19:28):
you know what's racist, you know what's a lie, that's
a I mean, are we really not upset as a
journalist not upset by the idea that that prosecutors from
the from a government can decide what is an insult

(19:48):
and what is a lie and then exert real legitimate punishment,
sometimes jailing people going on raids to their houses with
police because they posted a meme on the internet. I mean,
I'm not even sure Hitler would have been capable of

(20:09):
this kind of stuff with regard to free speech. Of course,
according to Margaret Brennan, he was a big free speech guy.
So I mean, this is this is just craziness that
that there's no concern here at all about where this leads.
I mean, it's one thing. In my view, these are
two totally different worlds. There's a world where okay, if

(20:30):
everything was perfect, would you want a world where you
could somehow punish insults and lies? I can at least
somewhat understand why that would appeal to some people. But
then there's the second part of this equation, which is
how do you possibly implement that without their being abuse

(20:52):
When you give the government the power to decide what's
an insult, what racism is, and what is a lie
a truth? It's over because those are inherently obviously, very
very subjective, and they can determine anything they want to
be a criminal offense, and therein lies the real problem.

(21:13):
But apparently that's completely beyond the comprehension of this particular
sixty minutes corresponded as she interviewed several I think three
German prosecutors and was basically giddy even in this incredibly
telling moment where it just kind of gets laid out
as to what's a crime in Germany.

Speaker 6 (21:36):
Is it a crime to insult somebody in public, Yes, yes,
and it's a crime to insult them online as well.

Speaker 4 (21:43):
Yes.

Speaker 7 (21:43):
The fine could be even higher if you insult someone
in the internet, because in Internet it stays there. If
we are talking you face to face, you insult me
and soult you, okay, finish. But if you in the internet,
if I insilt you or a police.

Speaker 6 (22:00):
That sticks around forever. Yeah, the prosecutors explain. German law
also prohibits the spread of malicious gossip, violent threats, and
fake quotes. If somebody posts something that's not true and
then somebody else reposts it or likes it. Are they
committing a crime?

Speaker 4 (22:19):
In the case of reposting it as a crime as well,
because the reader con't distinguished whether you just invented this
or just reposted it. That's the same for us.

Speaker 6 (22:30):
The punishment for breaking hate speech laws can include jail
time for repeat offenders. Is it a crime to insult
somebody in public? Yes, yes, and it's a crime to
insult them online as well.

Speaker 4 (22:43):
Yes.

Speaker 7 (22:43):
The fine could be even higher if you insult someone
in the Internet. Why because in Internet it stays there.
If we are talking face to face, you insult me
and sold you okay, finish. But if you in the internet,
if I insilt you or a politician.

Speaker 6 (23:00):
That sticks around forever, the prosecutors explain. German law also
prohibits the spread of malicious gossip, violent threats, and fake quotes.
If somebody posts something that's not true and then somebody
else reposts it or likes it, are they committing a crime?

Speaker 4 (23:19):
And the case of reposting it is a crime as well,
because the reader contstinguished whether you just invented this or
just reposted it. That's the same for us.

Speaker 6 (23:29):
The punishment for breaking hate speech laws can include jail
time for repeat offenders.

Speaker 1 (23:35):
That's chilling. That is absolutely chilling if you understand human
nature and if you believe in the concept of freedom
of expression and you're concerned about governmental overreach, especially in
a place like Germany. And let's be clear, it's not
just Germany, you know, as JD. Van said, it's really

(23:56):
swept through most of not all, of Europe. Great brain
and is frankly more shocking to me given their history
than Germany is. But this is something that I have
seen coming for a very long time. I'm a big
believer in the slippery slope, and I don't think there's
been any greater vindication of the slippery slope. And I've

(24:17):
always said there's no slippery or slope than when it
comes to free speech. And I'm a big believer in
that entire concept. And it has been one hundred percent
vindicated in Europe. And it began basically earlier in this
I would I would you know, in my recollection it
was early two thousands where all of a sudden Europe

(24:39):
started to do things like making Holocaust denial illegal. And
I don't remember what year that started to happen, but
it was in that realm of the turn of the century,
and in conjunction with that, they also made it illegal
to express any sort of racism at soccer games. And

(25:00):
those are two issues where it's impossible, especially in the
PC world, to stand up and go, wait, I mean,
I'm in favor of people denying the Holocaust or I'm
in favor of soccer racism, and I truly believe that
those particular subjects were chosen because no one was gonna
stand up against them. But that's where the slippery slope begins.

(25:26):
You start with Holocaust denial and racism at soccer games,
and then all of a sudden, twenty years or so later,
you can't post a meme on the internet it turns
out to be false. It's're gonna get punished by the
government and maybe go to jail. I mean, that's the

(25:46):
slippery slope in action. That's why you don't make laws
like even the ones that sound good, like you can't
deny the Holocaust because wait, we don't want to have
Nazi Germany again. And if we people from denying Holocaust,
or if you banned people from you know, being pro
Nazi or expressing pro Nazi beliefs, then that'll fix it. Well, no,

(26:11):
that doesn't work. I mean in a weird way. I'm not,
to be clear, not comparing Trump to Hitler or Nazi Germany.
But we saw what happened after Trump got knocked off
of Twitter and Facebook and then had all the lawfair
against him, he became president, and in large part because
of that, at least, that was a major element of

(26:33):
his narrative. People didn't like that he was seen as
a fighter going up against the establishment. So trying to
ban something, usually in this situation, especially when it comes
to free speech, is going to have negative repercussions. And
to me, that's what in the that's the short story
of what has happened in Europe. It may have begun

(26:55):
with good intentions, but it has turned out to be
absolutely horrendous. And this sixty minutes piece on the heels
of what happened on CBS's faced the nation that morning
was an absolute abomination, not just journalistically but from the
standpoint of their view of history, their view of Western civilization,

(27:18):
and their value system. It was completely wrong and very,
very troubling. But here's where I get conflicted again, because
when we turned to the United States and we turned
to Donald Trump, who a lot of his fans, partially
because of Elon Musk, see as a champion of these principles.

(27:40):
I don't see that. I see a very different story.
I see a story that is not that dissimilar to
some of what we're seeing in Europe. Because it was
that very same weekend when Donald Trump tweeted out a
quote from Napoleon. He said, he who saves his country

(28:03):
does not violate any law. He who saves his country
does not violate any law. Apparently a quote from Napoleon.
By the way, I wonder if Trump understands how it
all turned out for France and Napoleon. Could someone please
give Trump a history laughing on this, but let's forget

(28:24):
about the fact that it came from Napoleon and the
problematic element of that he who saves his country does
not violate any law. This is a tweet that, as
of a couple days ago I haven't checked. I'm sure
it's larger than this now had two hundred and twenty
five million impressions, two and twenty five million Twitter calls

(28:51):
it views. I think it's a bit more as impressions,
but regardless, that is an insane number of people have
seen Trump's tweet. He who saves his country does not
violate any law, and it was widely interpreted, including by myself,
that this was a way for Trump to push back

(29:11):
against those that are saying that he's acting like a king,
that he's usurping congressional authority, that he's he's wielding executive
power and through executive orders far too much. He's going
around Congress and he's exerting authority that he technically doesn't
have under the Constitution. That's I think a rational way

(29:31):
of understanding why Trump would do this. Because Trump does
not tweet very often. He posts on so on true
social but this was an actual tweet on x and
that's why I got so many views and impressions. That
is an absolutely chilling statement from the President of the
United States, and any true conservative should be extremely disturbed

(29:56):
by that. Now, of course, Trump benefits, as I've said
many times, from the fact that if you like him,
you're just gonna go Ugh, Trump's being so funny there.
He's just trolling the left. Ah, isn't that hilarious? And
you know what, maybe that's what he's doing there. Maybe

(30:16):
maybe I guess that's what I'm hoping for, but I
don't know that for sure, because it's certainly consistent with
his actions. I mean, that's my number one concern about
this first portion of Trump two point zero is that
we are blowing up our processes. We're blowing up a
lot of what we pretend to believe in this constitutional,

(30:40):
democratic republic that we don't believe in kings. He's absolutely
acting as a king. Now you might like a lot
of it. I like a lot of it, but it's
still very trouble like, especially considering the fact, you know what,
in three years, three and a half years, we could
have a democratic administration that's gonna go hog wild using

(31:00):
the exact same, uh, you know, principles that Trump blew up.
This is just going to be a downward spiral that
has no end, where one side gets power and they
try to up the other side. And this is you know,
we are a nation of laws, not men. That's you know,

(31:22):
that would be the rebuttal to what Trump said there,
we are a nation of laws, not men, and he's saying,
he who saves his country does not violate any law. Well,
how do we know that?

Speaker 8 (31:33):
You know?

Speaker 1 (31:34):
It's a bit like, how do you determine, you know,
when it comes to free speech, what's an insult or
what's a lie? What's the truth? Well, how do we
know you're saving the country. We're supposed to put all
of our faith in one man, you and trust that
you know what's best for the country when we're not

(31:58):
even in a crisis current. I get, you know, if
you're in a massive crisis, and sometimes the laws of
the principles might have to be put aside for a
moment to deal with a crisis. But we're not in
that situation currently. So I had a big problem, a

(32:18):
big problem with Trump tweeting he who saves his country
does not violate any law, because that is extremely problematic.
That is the declaration of a king, and that's rule
number one of the United States of America. We don't
do kings, at least we didn't used to. And Conservatives

(32:39):
or Republicans or whatever they're called now, used to understand that,
used to believe in that, But apparently we don't. And
it's not just theoretical. We saw a great example of
something that if it had occurred in a democratic administration,
with everything being exactly the same or flipped on its head,

(33:02):
Republicans would rightly be going bananas right now, And in fact,
some Republicans are going bananas, but very very few. However,
they're the ones that should actually matter here if we
lived in a rational world where truth was still the
currency instead of popularity. I'm referring here to the fact

(33:23):
that Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, has had
the federal case against him, the corruption case against him,
dropped by the Trump administration. Now, this is something that
was as easy to predict, maybe even easier than Joe
Biden pardoning his son Hunter actor saying that he would

(33:45):
not do so. I predicted that many other people predicted
it long before it happened. Well, it's been bubbling underneath
the surface for quite a while that Eric Adams has
been publicly lobbying for some if not a pardon or
a commutation or well, they can't have a commutation because
he hasn't been convicted of anything. But the point is

(34:07):
that Eric Adams has been kissing Trump's butt at every
opportunity in an effort to try to get around these
federal corruption charges, including being willing to do his bidding
when it comes to enforcement against illegal immigration in New
York City, and it worked because the case has been dropped.

(34:33):
But the case was not dropped without controversy. There were
resignations within the US Attorney's office over this, including one
very high profile resignation from Assistant US Attorney Hagen Scott,
who I urge you, if you care about this at all,
to look up their statement that they released declaring that

(34:57):
they were resigning in protest over the dropping of the
case against Eric Adams. And this person is a very
strong conservative. They clerked I believe under Scalia and Kavanaugh.
I mean, they are a hardcore constitutional conservative and they

(35:18):
resigned in one of the most scathing resignation statements I
have ever seen because of the fact that the Eric
Adams case was dropped for obvious political purposes. Now as
an actual conservative and a constitutional conservative, and I know
a lot of Trump media commentators like Mark Levin still

(35:41):
claimed to be that, but they really aren't. This is
a subject that should have people absolutely outraged, but we
don't do that on the right anymore. Because the King
is spoken. Eric Adams is now somehow more favorably viewed,
just like Robert F. Kennedy Junior is now more favorably

(36:03):
viewed among MAGA world or the republican world. Trump world, then,
like Pences, former Trump Vice president and hardcore conservative, that's
not an exaggeration because we're living in a monarchy. We're
living in a place where if the king blesses you,
you are now part of the team. If the king

(36:25):
jettisons you, banishes you, no matter what your history, no
matter what your beliefs, no matter how or why it happened,
whether the king was right or wrong, you are no
longer part of the team. That's not a democratic republic.
That's a monarchy. And I salute Hagen Scott for doing

(36:48):
what they did because I talk all the time about
how we used to have this culture of people resigning
from their very prestigious and sometimes cushy gigs because something
very very wrong happened. Well, we don't do that anymore
because there's really no benefit to it. I mean, I
frankly think from a career standpoint, I don't know what

(37:08):
they have lined up, maybe, but this is probably not
a good move, especially in this day and age where
now they're gonna be seen even though they're politically conservative
philosophically conservative, they're gonna be seen as anti Trump. How's
that gonna work with regard to their job prospects moving forward,
especially in government theoretically. I mean, that's just the one

(37:33):
small element of this. So kudos to them for standing
up because this smells the high hell. And I guarantee
you if a democratic and brand new democratic administration did
this to a rhino, you know, government officials somewhere that
was kissing their ass and clearly was trying to get
out of a federal investigation, and then it immediately got

(37:55):
dropped and they went on you know, in this case,
Adams went on Fox News Channel with the head of
Immigration Enforcement to pledge his cooperation just as this was happening.
If all that happened in reverse and this rhino went
on MSNBC to pledge cooperation with this new Democratic president

(38:18):
and all of a sudden the federal case against them
got dropped, Republicans would be screaming bloody murder, and rightfully so.
And now we have a situation where everybody is showing
their hypocrisy because the governor of New York, Governor Hokeel
has publicly stated that they may take the extraordinary measure

(38:41):
of removing Adams as the mayor of New York, which
apparently I didn't even know this. I guess the Governor
of New York has some theoretical authority to do that.
I have a real hard time believing that this is
actually gonna happen. Maybe it will, but if it does

(39:01):
so much for the Party of Democracy, right, I mean,
Adams got elected. He hasn't you know, he hasn't been
convicted of any crime. By the way, he's a black man.
So the Democratic Party, the Party of Democracy, may remove
city mayor of New York, the largest city in America

(39:22):
because of why because he's helping the Trump administration and
force immigration policy. How's that gonna work? I mean, that's
the strange world. We're limited. There's nobody to root for here,
there's absolutely no one to root for. And there's another
case where there's no one to root for, and that
deals again with Donald Trump and his war on the press,

(39:44):
And in this particular case, I'm referring to the Associated Press,
formerly prestigious mainstream Newsmania outlet, where they have refused to
accept that the Gulf of America, as Trump refers to it,
is in fact the gol Golf of America. They are
still under the belief that this is the Golf of Mexico,

(40:06):
but Trump has declared that the Golf of America. And weirdly,
the Associated Press and Trump have decided that this is
where they're gonna draw the line. This is where the hill,
that this is the hill they're gonna die on. Is
that we will not cave in to the president. This
is the Associated Press's view. We will not cave into

(40:27):
the president on the issue of the Golf of America.
We're gonna keep calling it the Golf of Mexico. And
Trump has now banned the Associated Press from basically having
any direct access to the president. They can't go into
the Oval Office, they can't go on Air Force one.
They're still allowed in the press briefings, I believe, but
you know, their their access, especially to him directly, has

(40:51):
been effectively eliminated. And this is creating an enormous amount
of controversy in the news media. And I have to say,
as someone who believes in journalistic principles and fighting for
the fourth of State and the free press, my inclination
is to side with the Associated Press because I don't

(41:14):
like the idea that a president is punishing a major
legitimate news outlet simply because he doesn't like the fact
that they haven't accepted his renaming of a body of water.
This feels very much like a king right. It wasn't
like it was a declaration of Congress. This was one
man declaring that the golf of Mexico was now the

(41:38):
golf of America, and now he's punishing a major media
outlet because they won't go along with that. So my
natural inclination would be, Okay, I'm signing with the Associated
Press here, even though I don't like the Associated Press,
but from a principal standpoint, that's where my natural inclination
would be. However, the associate the Press makes it extremely

(42:02):
difficult to side with them here. First of all, jd Vance,
who is a very smart guy, has been arguing I
think a little too vociferously, but I understand where he's
coming from. He's been even in fact, got in an
argument with a reporter about this on x or Twitter,
and his argument is, well, this is a privilege. This

(42:24):
is not a right to be able to go into
the Oval Office and Air Force one and have access
to the President, and so therefore this isn't that big
of a deal. That's essentially JD Vance's argument, and I
understand where he's coming from. However, this is something that's
being taken away from the Associated Press clearly because of

(42:49):
their view on a topic that really is not very
important and is based essentially on, as I've already said,
one man's action and the executive order to change the
name of the Golf of Mexico to the Golf of America.
And so I'm not really sure this is a great hill.
This is why I don't. I started this topic by

(43:10):
saying I don't have anyone to root for here because
I don't. Now that's a great hill to die on
when it comes to the Trump side of this equation,
and I'm not sure it's a great hill to die
on from the Associated Press's perspective either. And my biggest
problem with the Associated Press here is, Okay, so your
argument is you're special, and you know you are the

(43:30):
bedrock of American journalism, which they have been for many
many years. You know, the Associated Press has been extremely powerful,
very influential, very very respected for a very long time. However,
and you and your belief is that because you're special,
you shouldn't have privileges taken away from you. Okay, But

(43:52):
here's the problem. The Associative Press, like virtually every other
mainstream media outlet, has squawned the public trust so dramatically
and so blatantly that I don't believe that they still
deserve to be treated in a way that would be
considered special, that they're any different than anybody else. So

(44:16):
you know, to whom much is given, much is expected, Well,
you blew it. You blew it. You were no longer objective, nonpartisan,
journalistically based just the facts. Man. That's not who the
Associated Press is anymore, and hasn't been that way for

(44:37):
quite a while. So if you really cared about protecting
your special place where you're the Associated Press, of course
you have access to the Oval Office and to Air
Force one, then maybe you shouldn't have screwed that up
so badly. Maybe you shouldn't have squandered that special place

(44:58):
so many times over the la last however many years
you want to go back, especially when it comes to
several issues related to Donald Trump specifically, maybe you should
have considered that. So I really can't be on either
side here. I understand what the Associated Press is trying

(45:20):
to do here. It's interesting that some other mainstream media
members and outlets have come to their defense. Hilariously, former
CNN anchor Jim Acosta has said that he thinks that
the mainstream news media and solidarity with the Associated Press,
should boycott coverage of Donald Trump. Oh my god, what

(45:43):
an idiot. That would be, like the greatest thing that
ever happened to Donald Trump, especially over this particular topic.
Because again, it's not like, yes, there's a concept here
that in the Associated Press's mind, they think they're being
punished because of their I guess you would call it
their free speech rights, that they're there have the free

(46:05):
speech rights to call that body of water the Golf
of Mexico. But it's not a topic that the general
public gives a crap about, and many, especially obviously Trump fans,
love the whole idea of Golf of America. So it's
not like you're standing on some incredibly moral subject here

(46:25):
or something that's really impacting people's lives. It's all theoretical,
and no one trusts you anymore, no one has any
belief in you anymore. So you know, I don't really
have a strong opinion on this either way. I don't
I think what the Trump team is doing. What Trump

(46:45):
himself is doing is petty. But then Trump fans will
say to you, well, look at what Biden did to
conservative media outlets, and I can't argue with that. You're right,
I mean, I'm I hate the whole slippery slope, this
the downward spiral to oblivion. Where does this stop? This?
Tit for tat? I hate all that. But you know,

(47:08):
there's no question that the Biden administration did some of
the similar stuff, not as dramatically. And they did it.
It's not like they banned Fox News Channel because they
refuse to accept you know whatever, you know whatever belief system.
That was the most important thing on their plate that day.
That didn't happen. But there were other conservative outlets that

(47:30):
were purged from being able to cover the White House.
There's so it's hard to argue. Again, if you don't
want that to happen to your side, then don't do
it when you have power. But unfortunately it's human nature
that that's not the way this thing is going to
go down. It's going to go down the opposite way,
especially when you have someone like Trump in charge here,

(47:51):
and you know, there's a real life impact to this,
which may or may not have been part of Trump's strategy.
As I've said a hundred times, you never know. Is
Trump just getting lucky? Is he paying chess? Is he
playing checkers? Is he playing shoots and ladders? You're never
one hundred percent sure. But just this morning, before I
was about to tape this podcast, the Associated Press, as

(48:14):
others did, similarly, came out with a story that the
claims by Elon Musk and Donald Trump regarding the massive
amount of social Security fraud that they have found during
their DOGE investigation is greatly exaggerated. You've probably heard, oh
my god, there are millions and millions of people who

(48:35):
are over the age of one hundred who are still
getting Social Security benefits, which, of course, you know, the
implication is obvious that that's fraudulent. And the Associated Press
and others came out with a story saying, no, no,
Elon Musk is misinterpreting some of this data, that they're
the problem that they are suggesting is greatly exaggerated. Now

(48:59):
I don't know the truth is here. The numbers that
must put out there seem hard for me to believe.
So I have to acknowledge that I am and I've
said before that, I don't really trust what Elon Musk
tweets because I don't think he vets this stuff nearly
well enough. He just doesn't have enough time in the day.

(49:19):
It's got to be more than one Elon Musk. I mean,
he tweets more than I do, and that it takes
a lot of my day so to be able to
make sure that what you're tweeting or posting is credible
and truth based. And I know he's got people working
for him, but I'm sorry, there's just too much on
his place. He's spread way too thin, and those numbers

(49:41):
fell insane to me. But of course they've already set
the predicate that people will believe almost anything when it
comes to how insane the spending has been in government,
and so the right wing, the Trump fans, MAGA world.
There's nothing Elon Musk could say when it comes to
government waste and corruption where Magaworld would go. Really, that

(50:03):
doesn't seem right. There's nothing because our expectations now have
been completely obliterated with some of the stuff that has
already come out, some of it true, some of it
not true, some of it we're not sure if it's
true or not. But my point here with regard to
this associated press controversy is I was looking at the

(50:23):
AP story, I'm like, Okay, they seem to have a
pretty credible perspective here that this is greatly exaggerated. But
I know nobody in magaworld is going to believe it.
One because it's against their self interest to believe it.
In two because it's the Associated Press. They're on the
banned media outlets list. Trump has made them an enemy.

(50:46):
They won't say Golf of America. So how can anything
they report, especially about Donald Trump, be even remotely credible
or legitimate or truthful or to be trusted. It's not,
and so Trump has effectively eviscerated the credibility of the

(51:08):
Associated Press. Be clear, I'm not sure people fully understand this.
The Associated press is usually it's not as much as
it used to be, but it's usually the basis for
which other mainstream news media outlets get their information. It's
at the core of the entire news system is the

(51:28):
associated Press. So if you can't trust the Associated Press,
it's like, I don't know, it's like not trusting what
the Weather Service says is the current temperature. I mean,
the whole system collapses, and yet at least among his supporters, Trump,
either by design or by luck or somewhere in between,

(51:51):
has now created a situation where it doesn't matter that
the Associated Press is saying that the social Security fraud
claims are exaggerated, because no one who matters to Trump
will believe that. And that's very, very depressing, it's very troubling.
I'm someone who obviously despises the mainstream news media as

(52:13):
much as anybody, but that's not healthy. That is not
healthy at all. And so my guess, my number one
question is how do we ever get out of this?
How do we ever get out of this in a
way that's remotely healthy for a functioning society, because we
need a strong fourth estate that's part of the system
as it was created, and we don't have it, and

(52:35):
Trump has destroyed it for his own purposes, sometimes for
good and other times not necessarily for good. So that's
the associated press situation. But you know, part of my
problem here, and there are many elements to this, is
that I just don't buy that from a principal perspective

(52:57):
that Trump team, or Trump himself or Trumpsters in general
are consistent about this. Let's take another free speech issue.
This seems like a very small topic, but to me,
this is important. So the head of the New York
University Republican club or group, a young woman, seemed very nice.

(53:22):
She was forced to resign from her position as the
head of the New York University Republican Club. Why because
she had the audacity to refer to Baron Trump Trump's
new favorite son. I think he's usurped Donald Trump Junior
as Donald Trump's favorite son. That she referred to Baron Trump,

(53:46):
who was attending NYU, as an oddity on campus. That's
what she said, He's an oddity referring to the fact
that he goes to class and then goes home. So
it's a little ambiguous to She means that it's odd
in that it's unusual to see him because he's not
around on campus. Or is it odd because his presence

(54:10):
as a six foot seven son of the President United
States creates an odd situation. I'm not sure, but it
doesn't matter to me because neither of those interpretations is
an insult to Baron Trump. It's just obviously basic logic.
I mean, it's an oddity to see a six foot

(54:31):
seven son of the president in your university class. That's
all she said, and for some reason she felt forced
to resign. Now, human nature being what it is, there
had to be some pressure for her to do that.
There's no reason why she would do that otherwise that
I'm aware of. And you know, my point here is

(54:53):
that there's a massive amount of hypocrisy when it comes
to the issue of free speech. And this is all
so consistent with a monarchy with a cult. This is
the type of thing that the people will demand if
we're living in a monarchy. Oh my gosh, a prince
might have been offended by There was no evidence that

(55:14):
Baron Trump himself was offended by this very benign common
but a prince has potentially been offended, So therefore the
person who potentially offended them must be gotten rid of.
That's not the kind of society I want to live in.
That's not consistent with the beliefs that I thought we

(55:35):
believed in as Americans, especially as Republicans. Big deal, Why
would this happen. It only happens because there had to
be some pressure within that group that this was an
embarrassment to them, because, oh my god, we've spoke in
a way that could have been perceived as negative towards
the prince, and we're in a monarchy slash cult and

(55:57):
so therefore that's a mass of problem. And it's again,
it's not a big issue. Hopefully this woman will be okay.
I have no idea the details of the situation there,
but it just to me was a bothersome set of
circumstances that it was related, especially to this whole issue
that Trump is viewed as a as a king or

(56:20):
a god. Because that's the only circumstance where this would happen.
I could guarantee to you that would never have happened.
If you know, one of George Bush's daughters was referred
to as an oddity on campus. There were never in
a million years would there have been enough pressure to
make sure that they were removed from their position if

(56:42):
anyone had said that during that era, because it wasn't
a monarchy, even though you know, there were people who
claimed that it was because obviously George Bush got the
job in part because of his dad. But even under
those circumstances, it wasn't. It wasn't lived out in the
same way that it is now where people have to
be removed from their positions simply because they spoke potentially

(57:06):
but not really ill of somebody. Now, as I always
do when it comes to the issue of Donald Trump,
I try to be as objective as possible. I try
to praise when worthy, I try to defend when needed
and deserving, and I have a little bit of a
change in position when it comes to something that I

(57:27):
think is critical to how the Donald Trump two point
zero administration is going to go. I've referred several times
to the fact that the Donald Trump Elon Musk romance
is critical to how this will all turn out for
obvious reasons, and I've also said that it's very clear
that the news media understands this and that they're doing

(57:49):
everything they possibly can to break up the bromance between
Donald Trump and Elon Musk, most dramatically Time magazine putting
Elon Musk behind on Trump's desk in the Oval office
and putting that fake photo on the cover of their magazine.
So I was very curious and very interested in the

(58:11):
fact that Trump and Musk decided to do an interview
together with Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel, and they
specifically addressed this issue of the media trying to break
up their relationship and how aware they are of that.

(58:32):
And I thought that this exchange with Trump and Musk
with Sean Hannity was really interesting and very telling and
provided some optimism for the fact that they understand what
they're up against and that that may give them a
much better chance of surviving it. And here's what that

(58:56):
sounded like on Fox News Channel.

Speaker 9 (58:58):
You have to be keenly aware that the media and
the punditry class not that you know. I think you've
proven they have no power anymore because they threw everything
they had at you and they didn't win. And that
was you know, the New York Times, Washington Post, three networks,
every late night comedy show, two cable channels.

Speaker 1 (59:19):
They just threw.

Speaker 9 (59:20):
They threw everything, warfare, weaponization. And now I see they
want you to to start They want a divorce.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
They want you.

Speaker 9 (59:29):
To to start hating each other. And they try. Oh
President Elon Musk, for example, you do know that they're
doing that to you.

Speaker 8 (59:37):
Oh, I see it all the time. They tried it,
then they stopped. That wasn't They have many different things
of hatred. Actually, Elon called me, he said, you know,
they're trying to drive US apart. I said absolutely. Now
they said, we have breaking news. Donald Trump has seated
control of the presidency to Elon Musk. President Musk will

(59:57):
be attending a cabinet meeting at AFLO, And I say,
it's just so obvious. They're so bad at it. I
used to think they were good at it. They're actually
bad at it. Because if they were good at it,
I'd definitely be president. Because I think nobody in history
has ever gotten more bad publicity than me. I could
do the greatest things. I get ninety eight percent bad publicity.

(01:00:18):
I could do outside of you a few of your
very good friends. It's like the craziest thing. But you
know what I have learned Eland the people are smart.
They get it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
Yeah, they do it. They get it.

Speaker 8 (01:00:29):
They really see what's happening.

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
I thought that that exchange was outstanding. If you're someone
who is rooting for the Trump Musque relationship to survive
and maybe even prosper under this kind of pressure, you
should feel much better about things based upon first of
all the fact that Trump and Musque would do this

(01:00:53):
interview with handity together, and even more important than that,
that they would directly address this is you and make
it clear that they are very very much aware of
what the media is trying to do, and given how
they both view the media, I think this may underline

(01:01:15):
may but I'm pretty optimistic about this right now, at
least into the foreseeable future. I think this may have
given them essentially force field protection against that relationship being
busted up because now they are both very personally invested
in the idea of not letting the media be successful

(01:01:38):
in this obvious quest. And that's huge. That's huge because
now it's almost as if their attempts to break up
the relationship are only going to make it stronger as
long as they can continue to keep clear communication and
Elon Musk doesn't misinterpret things or do things that he shouldn't.

(01:02:00):
And that's always been my greatest concern about what was
going to eventually erode or potentially destroy the relationship is
Musk is so spread thin. I mean, he's got so
many things going on, and I keep thinking he's going
to tweet something based upon you know, lack of information

(01:02:21):
or without thinking it through, or without getting approval from Trump,
because I mean, let's be clear, time is a huge
part of the problem here. Both Trump and especially Musk
are incredibly busy. So there's no chance that when Musk
is tweeting dozens and dozens of times a day and
reaching millions and millions of people, effectively having his own

(01:02:45):
massive media outlet, that he that he's not going to
be able to pass something by Trump every single time.
And my concern has always been what happens when he
doesn't think it through, misinterprets the situation, and Dazzler says
something that Trump doesn't like. Maybe he doesn't even realize
Trump has changed his mind about something. Who knows, But

(01:03:08):
there's there's the situation is fraught with danger from that
perspective because there's just no possible way for must I mean,
they'd be doing this all day long if Musk was
passing everything he was gonna do or say or retweet
by Donald Trump. It's just not logistically possible. But now,

(01:03:29):
because they have gone through this, they're kind of they're
in this Fox Hall together and they've survived this initial attack.
They have survived this initial attack, and now they realize,
and they publicly stated that they realized that they those
two together, their relationship is under siege, that it's them

(01:03:50):
against the world. I think that that will enable them
to survive any sort of miscommunications or fumbles, especially on
Elon Musk's part, because obviously he's not the president, and
Trump's got the massive ego here, and Trump's got the insecurities.
So the most logical scenario where trouble would occur is

(01:04:13):
Musk oversteps his bounds and Trump gets pissed off about it,
and that creates a downward spiral. I think that the
fact that they have survived this initial salvo, this initial
attack by the news media, and they've both realized what
they're up against and they have publicly stated it. I

(01:04:35):
think this is that's a strong relationship, that is a
firm foundation from which to work, and the news media,
as has happened so often with Trump, their efforts appear
to at least right now, to be backfiring. They've actually
made the Trump Musk relationship stronger. And part of why
I feel so passionately about this is I've kind of

(01:04:58):
I don't want to put myself anywhere close to their level,
but I do think that there's an analogy to be
made here in a situation that I myself have lived through.
I've spoken many times about my relationship with the late
great Frank o'harris Pro Football Hall of Famer Pittsburgh Steeler

(01:05:19):
Penn Stater. And again, just to be clear, I'm not
putting this situation on the level of Trump or Musk,
but I do think you're going to see some interesting
comparisons to what happened here. I have discussed many times
about how Franco and I had this growing relationship that

(01:05:39):
Scott Paterno, the son of Joe Paterno, tried to destroy
for his own selfish political purposes. He wanted to kill me,
and he saw, at least in his mind, that my
relationship with Franco was huge when it came to how
I was viewed in the Penn State community. I don't
even know if that's true or not. I never even

(01:05:59):
thought about it in that way, but in Scott Paterno's tiny,
distorted mind, that was a big deal. And on the
With the Benefit of Hindsight podcast, we played a clip
from a phone call that I had with Scott Paterno
where he directly threatens my relationship with Franco Harris and
I thought, because the relationship was fairly new at the time,

(01:06:22):
we hadn't been in a Fox hole together nearly as
much as we would end up being. I figured, okay,
that's the end of it. You know, Scott's going to
go to Franco or probably have his mom, Sue go
to Frankocus. Sue's a lot closer to Franco than he is,
and he's a coward, so he's probably gonna have his
mom do it for him, and that'll be the end.

(01:06:42):
And so you may recall I called frank Coharris up
and I said, Franco, we got a problem. Scott is
gonna publicly attack me and try to, you know, criticize
you for being close to me. I don't know exactly
what I said, something to that effect, and I just
want you to know, you know, it's perfectly fine for

(01:07:03):
you to throw me under the bus. I get it,
I understand it. And that's when he, you know, in
my mind, very famously interrupted me and said, John, I
am independent. You do what you need to do to
find the truth. And that is always stuck with me.
And you know, it's probably why I ended up staying
on the Penn State case as long as I have,

(01:07:23):
because that was a moment that evoked an enormous amount
of loyalty towards Franco. On my part, I was stunned
by that, especially given who Franco was. And that was
not the only time, but that was the first time,
in the most dramatic time, that people who were seemingly
important tried to attack that relationship. That relationship bothered a

(01:07:47):
lot of people, especially when within the Penn State establishment,
in the Penn State elites, if you will. But once
Franco and I got past that first attack from Scott Paterno, frankly,
it very much strengthened the relationship. And I think we
both knew. We didn't talk about it directly, we may

(01:08:08):
have mentioned it from time to time, but I think
we both knew. Again this is the analogy to Trump
and Musk. We both knew, Okay, they're out to separate us.
So if there's any sort of confusion, let's talk to
each other to make sure that we don't fall victim
to this. Again. I don't know that that was ever said,
but that was the understanding, and that was in effect

(01:08:29):
what happened. And you know, another very prominent example the
day that I got arrested at the Matt Sandusky event
in a very horrific set of circumstances and totally ridiculous
and unjust, and Franco shows up at Oakmont Country Club
that night to take a picture with me and Bob Capredo,

(01:08:49):
a member of the Penn State Board of Trustees. So
that would not have happened without the initial strengthening of
the relationship, because that was another situation where people we're
going to use that to try to separate me and Franco. Again,
I'm not relating it directly or putting it on the
level of the Trump and Musk, but I think I've
lived through something somewhat similar and I'm seeing it happening.

(01:09:15):
And I while there are going to be a lot
more complications and a lot more challenges than Franko and
I faced, I do feel pretty strongly that this is
a situation they can survive. I've said before, tell me
how the Trump Musk relationship goes, and I'll tell you
how the Trump two point zero administration goes. And I

(01:09:36):
think that, barring a major earthquake, that relationship right now
is in a good place for them to do what
they did on handity, and so I wanted to mention that,
and I hope I'm right about that. I'm not rooting
for Trump to fail, especially when it comes to trying
to save America. I just have problems with the way

(01:09:58):
he's currently doing it. Now, I want to transition to
a completely different topic, and I have a lot to
say here. Hopefully I don't have too much to say,
because I'm not one hundred percent sure how much people
are interested in this topic, but it certainly did get
an awful lot of publicity. And what I'm referring to

(01:10:19):
is the fiftieth anniversary of Saturday Night Live. Now, I
understand that for at least a couple of decades, especially
most conservatives, have not paid any attention to what's been
happening on Saturday Night Live. What I consider the fiftyth
anniversary of Saturday Night Live to be very emblematic of

(01:10:40):
the history, the evolution, and the current state of television.
I mean, it's almost a mirror image. And that's why
I think looking at this show through the prism of
their celebration of their fiftieth anniversary is very very interesting.
It's interesting if you care about the show itself, but
it's also I think fascinating to look at from the

(01:11:01):
perspective of where are we and where have we been?
When it comes to television, which is this incredible invention
network television, probably the most impactful societal development in the
modern era. I mean, it's just it's incredible the impact
that television has had, you know, especially you know, I

(01:11:22):
always say that the television age began a November twenty second,
nineteen sixty three, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated,
And we may be seeing the end of the television era,
much like I think we're seeing the winding down of
Saturday Night Live. And so it's in that context that

(01:11:43):
I think this is worthy of some analysis and discussion
that you're not going to hear anywhere else. I've been
a big fan at times of Saturday Night Live. I've
also been very angered by Saturday Night Live. I did
an entire documentary film about the two thousand and eight
election that was in large part motivated by the treatment
that Saturday Night Live gave to Sarah Palin during that election,

(01:12:07):
maybe the last election that Saturday Night Live had a
major impact on. It probably was for reasons that I'm
going to get to momentarily. But you know, and I
don't watch the show nearly as much as I used to,
because I've gotten trained to believe that it's not going
to be funny. But for a long period of time,
it was funny. Even even when it wasn't funny, it

(01:12:27):
was significant. It had relevance in what was going on
in society, especially when it game to presidential elections. That's
no longer the case. So, you know, it's not as
if I'm a huge fan of the show anymore. I
get why people don't like it, But again, I think
there are some larger cultural implications here that I want
to discuss. So the first thing I want to talk

(01:12:49):
about with regard to the S and L fiftieth anniversary
is that it's not really the fiftieth anniversary. They celebrated
this past weekend with a massive concert on Friday and
then a live three and an almost three and a
half hour show on Sunday Night on NBC, But it's
not the fiftieth anniversary. The fiftieth anniversary isn't until October.

(01:13:10):
Now why is that important? That's important because it shows
the incredible power of football, and ironically enough, the very
first episode of Saturday Night Live was hosted by George
Carlin and his first I don't know if it was
the first thing he talked about, but was the first
major element of his monologue was about football and baseball.

(01:13:31):
Because it was in October of nineteen seventy five, both
seasons were still going on, and Carlin basically correctly predicted
that football was gonna usurp baseball as America's pastime. It
might have been the most impressient thing that was said
in that first episode, although Carlin also, weirdly, because I
watched it they replayed it this past weekend, he weirdly

(01:13:54):
kind of gave up. I don't know if you call
it a prediction or a foreboding foreshadowing, not a foreboding.
It was a foreboding foreshadowing about that a foreshadowing of
nine to eleven because he talked about how easy it
would be to take over a commercial airline and high jacket.
That was kind of weird in nineteen seventy five in

(01:14:18):
New York City. But anyway, the point of this is
that they decided to celebrate it in February, the weekend
after the Super Bowl, because doing in October in the
middle of football season would have been impossible for NBC,
so that's the power of football. That they actually changed
the anniversary of SNL and celebrated the fiftieth anniversary half

(01:14:41):
a year early, more than half a year early, because
of the fear of football, so that I thought was interesting.
It's also important to point out that there was a
fortieth anniversary of SNL. Now forty years and fifty years,
I think is an interesting difference. When you get someone
who's of my age, you know, I'm about to turn

(01:15:04):
fifty eight, and you start to think about things in
a very different way. You know, a fortieth anniversary or
a reunion is a celebration because you've had most of
your life, but you still have at least a little
bit going on into the future. You're still kicking, and
there's still hope for things to happen beyond the fortieth,

(01:15:26):
and you still have the fiftieth to look forward to.
But a fiftieth anniversary is a very different animal, you know,
especially a fiftieth reunion, especially if it's a college reunion.
You know there ain't going to be a sixtieth. If
there is, you ain't gonna be kicking and no one's
going to be around for it. You know, you're either

(01:15:47):
going to be dead or in a nursing home in
all likelihood with some exceptions. But it's not going to
ever be the same. You know, most people are going
to be gone. So if a fortieth is a celebration,
a fiftieth fields almost like a goodbye. Maybe not a funeral,
but it's a goodbye. So and what's interesting in the
context of SNL is that the show has sucked so

(01:16:10):
much over the last ten years, been so insignificant. It's
been by far it's most insignificant culturally in the last
ten years, that there almost was nothing to talk about
over the last ten years. They could have just replayed
the fortieth anniversary for the fiftieth anniversary and the content
wouldn't have been that much different, except this was a
bigger deal, because fifty is a bigger deal than forty.

(01:16:33):
But you know, when you actually watched that show, almost
nothing from the last ten years came about. I mean,
nothing significant happened at SNL in the last ten years
except for somehow the Weekend Update host Colin yost inexplicably
getting Scarlett Johanson the actress, to marry him. That it's

(01:16:53):
about the most significant thing that's happened at SNL over
the last ten years. How that occurred. I have absolutely
no idea for a show that is diminishing in its relevance,
and you know, he's not particularly funny, and you have
yet somehow he got Scarlett Johansson to marry him. But
you know, other than that and maybe a couple of
sketches from you know, Nick Bargadsey I think is his name,

(01:17:18):
George Washington sketches. You know, not much has really happened
in the last ten years, but they you know, they
still needed to do a fiftieth anniversary, so most of
that was focused on what happened, I would say in
the mid range of Saturday Night Live. Obviously they did
some on the beginnings back in the nineteen seventies, but

(01:17:40):
a lot of it was from the era of the
nineties and the early two thousands, when you know, a
lot of these comedians, these actors are still alive and
kicking and relevant and still very much part of the
S and L family. But when you think about it,
there's really been like three or four different errors of
Saturday Night Live. Obviously, there's the seventies era when the

(01:18:03):
show began, and I'm a big believer I've said this
many times that there is nothing like nineteen seventies celebrity
because that's when television was still new, still growing. There
was very little competition, there was no fragmentation. There were
basically four channels, So you put anything on network television

(01:18:25):
and you were going to get a large audience. And
anything that's new and different and exciting is going to
get attention. And there was a mythology that was created
surrounding the origins of Saturday Night Live. Again, watching that
first ever episode, it's really not that great. Other than
a couple of things that George Carlin said that in

(01:18:45):
retrospect turned out to be true. The show was really
pretty awful. But you know, I'll acknowledge that that era
that you know, the John Blue Sheet, Chevy Chase, Bill,
Maury dan Akroyd, that whole thing. Okay, they were what
they did was interesting and had never been done before,
and for a lot of people that will always be
what Saturday Night Live is. But you know, the reality is,

(01:19:09):
I believe that almost anything that happens in the nineteen
seventies historically is going to be overrated because of the
newness and because of the fact that they were handed
massive audiences that don't exist today because of an incredible
amount of fragmentation. Instead of four channels, we've got four
hundred channels and all sorts of streaming and all sorts

(01:19:32):
of competition from your phone and what have you. So
audiences everywhere have greatly, greatly diminished. But I do believe
that that first iteration of Saturday Night Live birth a
generation of comedic geniuses. Not all. I'm not trying to

(01:19:53):
pretend that everybody on Saturday Night Live was a comedic genius,
but there were several comedic geniuses that were earth in
the eighties and the nineties, or came about in the
eighties and the nineties, maybe the early two thousands, because
they were inspired by the nineteen seventies version of Saturday
Night Live. And this is something that I talk about
all the time in all sorts of endeavors, whether it's music,

(01:20:16):
whether it's movies, whether it's sports. It's not so much politics,
I guess now, because politically we're going to be living
in a world where everything is related to the Trump
monarchy and the Trump bloodline. So there's a pipeline there,
but the pipeline is now broken. The pipeline for the
S ANDL was created because of that first cast in
the seventies. But there's no great memories of younger people

(01:20:40):
coming up to want to, you know, to be inspired
to be part of the SNL legacy, because nothing all
that interesting has happened in the last say, fifteen years,
so the pipeline is clogged for a lot of reasons.
I'm gonna get to a few others in a moment,
But that era was pretty good. There were some bad times,

(01:21:01):
but generally the eighties and nineties were pretty funny. Into
the two thousands, that was still relevant, but it's really been,
frankly since two thousand and eight was the last time
and certainly in a presidential election that Saturday Night Live
and he had any real impact on what transpired, and
it was very very much in favor of Barack Obama

(01:21:22):
as they destroyed Sarah Palin. That was not always the case,
by the way, it's important to point out that like,
for instance, in the two thousand election, I thought SNL
was very, very fair and may have actually helped George W.
Bush beat out Gore because they made Al Gore really
look like a complete dufist and a nerd and somebody

(01:21:42):
you wouldn't want to have a beer with. Unlike George W. Bush,
it was portrayed as kind of dumb but cool and
a guy you would like to hang out with. So
that was obviously an extremely close election, and Saturday Night
Live may have played a significant role in why Bush
won there. So it wasn't always that SNL was very,
very liberally biased. I'll get to that more in just

(01:22:03):
a second. But over time, in these different eras of
the show, I think it's natural that when you have
something that successful, complacency and rick of risk aversion are
going to set in, and people, when they become successful,
they become risk adverse. And as the comedy rules started

(01:22:23):
to change, become more politically correct, and the show got
more and more liberal and more and more female dominated
into the two thousands, that to me is when it
was no longer must see TV. And there's no question
that in the two thousands there was a cabal of women,
and cabal has a negative connotation to it. I don't

(01:22:46):
have anything against any of these women, but there was
a group of women Tina Fey, Amy Poehlert Meyer, Rudolph
Kate McKinnon and Kristin Wigg who completely took over the show.
And when you have women taking over for men, inherently
things are going to get more liberal. Doesn't mean it's
going to become less funny, but that's part of why
the show became more and more liberal was because of

(01:23:08):
those women taking over for men. The show used to
be male dominated, and in the last fifteen twenty years
it became much much more female dominated. And I've referenced,
you know, the two thousand and eight situation with Sarah Palin.
They could not do that today. They could not do
that today because they don't have the ratings to have

(01:23:32):
that kind of an impact. In two thousand and eight,
they still did. The show still had a lot of
social credibility, and it also had a large enough audience.
And it also this was really important in my documentary
Mediam Malpractice. It had so much cachet with the mainstream
news media that clips This was the real power of

(01:23:53):
SNL in two thousand and eight, that clips of Sarah
Palin of Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin on Saturday Night
Live were used as news stories and not in an
isolated situation, routinely, routinely, and their ratings have never been
as high since then, the ratings that SNL got when

(01:24:15):
Tina Fey was portraying Sarah Palin in two thousand and eight, interestingly,
and this shocked me because, as I've said, I've already
I did a massive documentary. This was a huge part
of my life. I didn't even realize until I stumbled
across it a few months ago that the original SNL

(01:24:36):
skit about Sarah Palin's selection in two thousand and eight
as John McCain's vice presidential nominee was actually extremely anti
media and it was, in my view, brilliantly written. Brilliantly written. Now,
it was not executed particularly well. I had huge problems

(01:25:01):
with some of the acting in it, but from a
writer's perspective, it holds up extremely well. Uh I today,
I mean it would, it would really you could put
it on, you know, any sort of right wing media
outlet as a parody of the of the left wing
media from a positive perspective, and basically the essence of

(01:25:23):
it was a meeting of the New York Times staff
as they strategized how to destroy Sarah Palin. Now this
was before this is right after her selection and before
the Katie Kirk interview, and when the you know the
clause came out, the blood was in the water and
Tina Fey became a Sarah Palin and SNL one hundred

(01:25:45):
and eighty degrees shifted on her. But I am quite
positive that that sketch had to be written by a
guy by the name of Jim Downey, who was a
writer on Saturday Live for over thirty years, and I
am confident was a closet conservative. And I know this
not just because of that sketch, which was written when

(01:26:08):
he was there, but because this is a weird story.
Tucker Carlson gave me Jim Downe's phone number during this
entire controversy because he was friends with Jim Downe. He
assured me he was a conservative and said that I
should talk to him. I think I had a conversation
with him, but I'm not positive. I may never actually

(01:26:30):
spoken to him. But Jim Downey did a hell of
a job of hiding the fact that he was a conservative.
But when you go back and you realize that Jim
Downey was a huge influence on the show. You can
see especially in the older shows like in the eighties,
during the Reagan administration where his influences felt. And it's

(01:26:52):
clearly not from a liberal perspective, but it's just funny
to me to think about what might have been because
Jim Downey was trying to create the narrative at SNL
that the out of touch, elite, clueless New York media
was out to get this poor woman from Alaska. And
if that narrative it held, history might have been very,

(01:27:15):
very different, because that's how much influence that show had
in two thousand and eight. But that's no longer the
case because the show since then has gone into what
I would refer to as an impotence. Spiral media fragmentation
has killed the impact of SNL in two ways. It's

(01:27:35):
not just the fact that the audience has diminished, I
mean so, it's also the fact that it's almost impossible
to do topics in this era of American life that
can appeal to a broad spectrum of viewers because we
are so balkanized, we are so divided, we have almost

(01:27:56):
nothing in common. We are broken up into tiny, little
demographic groups, and so there are very few news stories
or things that happen in our culture that break through
to give content and fodder for Saturday Night Live other
than maybe a presidential election. So because the topics have

(01:28:19):
become so much more difficult to find at SNL. As
our society becomes more and more fragmented, they've lost subjects
that can work, which makes the show suck, which reduces
the audience. And then there's more fragmentation, which further reduces
the audience, which reduces the traction than anything that happens
on the show gets reduces its relevance. And this is

(01:28:43):
a downward spiral of impotence. And it's all because of
media fragmentation, something I frankly predicted in a book I
wrote called the Death of Free Speech back in two
thousand and five, only it's happened way faster and more
dramatically than I expected that it would. But SNL has
been hit harder, in my view, by media fragmentation than

(01:29:05):
any American media institution, because you can't make fun of
something that people don't know what the hell you're talking about,
especially when you have a very limited amount of time
to set things up. And as we've become more and
more divided politically, it's been much more difficult for SNL

(01:29:26):
to provide political commentary. It's now expected that it has
to be from the left. We saw that in the
last presidential election, where Maya Rudolph was picked as Kamala Harris,
not because she did a good Kamala Harris impression, just
because their skin color was basically the same as Kamala Harris.
And there was no mocking of Kamala Harris. There was

(01:29:47):
some mocking of Joe Biden, but that was okay once
he was no longer the candidate. But by and large,
it's all about mocking Trump and elevating Harris. It didn't
work because the show has no relevance any more, certainly
not nearly as much as it did back in two
thousand and eight, for reasons that I have already referenced.
And as far as the liberal conservative divide and the

(01:30:10):
bias of the show, I think there's a lot of
evidence of that. I've already referenced the Jim Downey situation.
He's no longer with the show. But when you look at,
for instance, the fiftieth anniversary and who was prominent and
who was not, it's all the liberals who are the
most prominent when it comes to who was featured on

(01:30:31):
the fiftieth anniversary show, and a lot of those that
ended up being conservatives weren't even there, and if they
were there, they were basically, you know, in the closet somewhere.
For instance, Victoria Jackson, who's a I don't know if
I consider still a friend. I haven't talked to her
many years, but she was a friend of mine for
a while. I would say more of an acquaintance, but

(01:30:52):
we knew each other, we communicated from time to time.
She's a bit nutty, there's no question about that. But
she's a Trump conservative. She was nowhere to be found.
Only had one or two references in the fiftieth anniversary show.
But Joe Piscopo, who was frankly a great element of
the cast in the late seventies early eighties. I believe

(01:31:13):
he's a radio talk show host, a big Trump guy.
He was nowhere to be found. Dennis Miller, another conservative,
He was nowhere to be found. Rob Schneider was there,
but not really even part of the show. As far
as I could tell, he's become very quote unquote conservative
or very trumpy. I actually believe that Dana Carvey has

(01:31:35):
become a conservative, but he might not have been there
because of a beef with Mike Myers over Wayne's world.
But there have been conservatives that have come out of
that show, but they're just not part of the cool
kids club. And a lot of this is really high school.
That's what SNL is. It's perpetual high school for the
people that are involved in it. And you saw that

(01:31:56):
manifest itself and how the fiftieth anniversary was and who
got to be a big part of the show and
who did not. But the funniest part to me, and
the weirdest part and the most perplexing element of why
and how the show has become so liberal is that
when you look at the structure of the production of

(01:32:19):
the show, it's actually incredibly conservative. This is the part
that always drives me crazy as to how it is
that liberals don't take what happens in their real lives
and then use that as a prism to see the
larger reality of American life. But if you know anything
about the way SNL works, it is survival of the fittest.

(01:32:43):
It is dog eat dog. It has one man as
the ultimate power structure. Lorne Michaels, who's been the executive
producer for forty five of the fifty years that SNL
has existed, and frankly, you know, it's really kind of
funny for for them to be criticizing Trump as a
king or a godlike figure when that's exactly what Lorne

(01:33:06):
Michaels has been. For better or for worse. He has
created a structure where everyone fears him. He has ultimate authority.
He's really like an old time college football coach. College
football coaches used to be like this. They were the
ones that had all the authority. Now college football coaches
have no power at all, which is why Nick Saban's

(01:33:26):
retiring and you know, all sorts of other chaos is
happening in college football because the coaches have no authority
over the players. Well, Warren Michael has extreme authority over
the lives and careers, at least he used to of
those who are on Saturday Night Live. And the structure
of creating competition, which is really at the core of conservatism,

(01:33:51):
especially when it comes to economic policy. That's what ES
and L is all about, creating an incredibly competitive environment
where you know your feelings don't matter. It's about whether
or not you can produce, and you may work all
week on something and it never sees air, and you're
gonna get disappointed, and you know, if you don't produce,

(01:34:14):
you're gone. And that is a very conservative environment, and
yet the show itself has become exceedingly liberal, and I
find that to be amazing and very telling about this
disconnect that a lot of liberals, especially elite liberals, have
when they're living in a world, whether they realize it
or not, that is actually very conservatively based. But to me,

(01:34:39):
what the part of this evolution that really ended it
for Saturday Night Live and why I now have disdain
for the program, is what happened during the COVID panic,
because I think it's very very telling about human nature
that Saturday Night Live began as the ultimate anti establishment program.

(01:35:03):
That's what it was all about. Oh my god, these
young kids, they're sticking it to the establishment. Oh my god,
they can't be controlled. That was how SNL began, That's where,
you know, or how it got popular. And then when
the COVID panic hit, this anti establishment show was marching

(01:35:27):
in lockstep with every single bit of the COVID insanity.
The anti establishment show had become the establishment. Not just
the establishment, they had become effectively the pr firm for
the establishment in accepting and promoting all of this COVID insanity.

(01:35:48):
In fact, SNL was the last place that I'm aware
of that was still mandating masks among their audience. And
how elitist does I mean the performers aren't wearing masks,
and this very small, the small confines of their studio
and thirty Rockefeller Center, but they were still mandating that

(01:36:10):
their audience wear masks, and their content I mean, my god.
I talked earlier about how there's so few topics that
everyone has in common that you can make fun of. COVID,
especially after the initial panic, provided an enormous opportunity for
SNL to have won a huge impact in trying to

(01:36:32):
subdue some of this insanity. But also they could have
gotten a brand new audience. They could have had a
hell of a lot of fun. There was enormous comedy
fodder that was provided by the reactions, mostly of liberals,
to the COVID panic, and SNL did nothing. They were
completely avoided the topic, like the plague, And then they

(01:36:55):
finally did one rather benign sketch where a bunch of
liberals were having dinner and they were starting to wonder
whether or not they had overreacted the COVID and liberals
went banana. There was enough of that they weren't going
to do that anymore. And there was the one funny
thing said in that Live had done basically since the

(01:37:15):
COVID panic began, And so they lost me forever on
COVID because COVID was why the show was originally created,
to poke fun at the establishment and poke fun at
some of the insane things people were doing. But S
and L would not do that because they now viewed

(01:37:36):
their audience as very, very liberal and they were all
run by liberals, and whatever conservative elements of the program
had been lost Jim Downey I believe was gone by
that point. And so that's why they ended up caving
and waving the flag four, caving two and waving the
flag four. The establishment the faucis of the world when

(01:38:00):
it came to the COVID panic, and that, to me,
that's very interesting from a human perspective. You know, success
is a very difficult thing to deal with. Money is
a very difficult thing to deal with. I talk all
the time about how no one who succeeds, no one
who has a cushy gig wants to do anything to
risk that. So doing the right thing doesn't matter. You're

(01:38:24):
not going to risk that because it's just not worth
it to you personally. You have too much to lose.
And as an institution, Saturday Night Live, even though it
wasn't nearly as successful as it used to be, especially
when Louren Michaels is now you know, very much into
senior citizenship, he's not going to do anything to rock
the boat. So they have become what they claim to

(01:38:45):
hate at the beginning. That's the bottom line of that.
They have become what they claimed to hate. And if
you broadness from not just Saturday Night Live, but to
TV in general and network news, I do think that
this fiftieth anniversary of SNL is symbolic that the end
is near for all of these institutions. It's not just SNL,

(01:39:10):
but network television and network news. The end is near.
This fiftieth anniversary of SNL really did feel like a
bit of a goodbye. Now, not everyone who participated in
this understood it. I thought Adam Sandler did I give
a lot of credit to Adam Sandler. I mean Adam Sandler,
who is probably worth more money than any cast member

(01:39:32):
in the history of Saturnnight Live. Because a lot of
his movies have done ridiculous box office, because he figured
out that there's a segment of the population, especially young men,
who like really stupid humor, and he has monetized that
in an extraordinary way. But he's a smart guy. I
think he's an earnest guy. I don't know him at all.
I mean, for all I know, he could be a jackass,

(01:39:53):
but I have a positive view of him. And he
put on I thought a tremendous p performance when he
created a song that kind of encapsulated the fifty years
of SNL, and it felt to me like this is
a guy who knew this was the last time this
was going to happen, especially when he was talking about
his friend Chris Farley and Norm MacDonald and Phil Hartman,

(01:40:16):
all of whom died under horrible circumstances far too early.
And the emotion that he expressed during that song, I thought,
to me, it felt like, Okay, he knows there's a
lot of these other people that are still pretending that
this isn't the end. It felt to me like Adam
Sandler knew this is the end that there ain't going
to be a sixtieth, and if there is a sixtieth,

(01:40:38):
it's not going to be the same. I mean, who
knows if NBC is going to exist ten years from now,
or you know, in SNL and Lord Michaels, they're all
going to be gone. Most of the people that were
in this show are going to be gone or in
a nursing home by the sixtieth anniversary. And so it
all does feel like it's coming to an end, and

(01:40:58):
it's symbolic of television itself. Now, the program, the fiftieth
anniversary show was okay. I found it interesting and important
to point out that there were three OJ Simpson jokes. Yeah,
think about this from a cultural perspective. Think about how

(01:41:18):
that shows how dead comedy is and how difficult, as
I've said earlier, it is to do comedy when people
have so little in common, When you're doing a show that's,
you know, trying to target a broad range of demographics,
and you're trying to do comedy and there's so little
that we have in common that thirty one years after

(01:41:40):
the OJ Simpson murders, three jokes, by the way, three
of the better jokes during this three and a half
hour extravaganza were about OJ Simpson. That's amazing. It's kind
of sad, but it's amazing from a comedic perspective. To me.
There was a remarkable moment which I posted about and

(01:42:02):
got quite a few retweets and views, at least for me,
occurred when they did this Black Jeopardy sketch where Eddie
Murphy was absolutely hilarious impersonating Tracy Morgan. I mean he
was cooking. He was cooking with oil Eddie Murphy. And

(01:42:22):
by the way, it's very difficult to get Eddie Murphy
to do this kind of stuff, but he is still
a genius even in his old age, and he was
one of the best cast members in the history of
the show. And so Eddie Murphy is cooking on this
sketch and they nonsensically, without any explanation, replaced him with
Tom Hanks on this fake black Jeopardy show. Tom Hanks

(01:42:45):
playing a racist red cap wearing Trump supporter that wasn't funny,
then insulted in a huge portion enough of people watching.
How huge, I don't know, because Trump supporters is probably
not why said on that Live to begin with, But
there might have been a few tuning in because of
the curiosity of the fiftieth anniversary, and from a comedic

(01:43:07):
perspective and politically, this was absolutely a tird I can
never remember. I've watched the show almost my entire life.
I can never remember so much momentum being instantaneously stopped
and then reversed in a negative direction. Who the hell

(01:43:27):
had the idea of, let's stop Eddie Murphy and make
sure we have Tom Hanks playing a racist Trump supporter.
It was just crazy, And interestingly, Hanks became part of
another important element of the show, very telling element of
the show later on, when he did a bit that

(01:43:50):
he referred to as the immemorium section, pretending like they
were going to do a tribute to those who have
been on the show and who have passed away, but
instead it was a bit on jokes that they regret,
essentially all the racists and the ethnic and the sexist

(01:44:11):
jokes that they have done in the past that you
know they regret, and they even blamed the audience for
laughing at them. Now. I couldn't tell if this was
done at least partially tongue in cheek, whether they were
being serious I couldn't tell, but I found it to
be fascinating that essentially Saturday Night Live spent several minutes

(01:44:34):
of their fifteen anniversary explaining in real terms why the
show is no longer funny. Because the reality is, if
you are concerned about offending people, whether it's through racist jokes,
sexist jokes, you know whatever, in that realm, if you're
concerned about that has an incredible chilling effect. It's impossible

(01:44:57):
to do comedy, especially live comedy, to a broad audience
on a network television show which has extreme content restrictions
to begin with, if you're concerned about offending people, no
matter what you do. And so that was a I
thought very telling. Wait so wait a minute. Are what

(01:45:20):
I couldn't tell is are they now saying that they
shouldn't have done these jokes? Like, for instance, one of
the subjects was body shaming. Well, Chris Farley didn't made
an entire career out of being fat. Some of the
best moments in the history of the show were Chris
Farley using his obesity for comedic purposes? Was that illegitimate?

(01:45:42):
Are they saying that that should never happen? Again? I didn't.
I didn't fully understand it, but it hit on an
important subject about why it is that comedy is so
incredibly difficult in this modern age, especially on network television,
and it's I think, I think important to point out that,
you know what, one of the more remarkable things that's

(01:46:04):
happened in the show over the last few years is
that Shane Gillis got fired after being hired for only
a couple of days, got fired from Saturday Night Live
because somebody found an old podcast where he made a
crack about Asians and he got fired. He was brought
in because they thought they needed, you know, a straight
white male with a more non liberal bent, and then

(01:46:28):
he gets shit canned over something that really was not
that big of a deal, you know, And some of
the clips that SNL played during that Tom Hanks segment
were certainly consistent with the idea that, you know, if
they're saying that they shouldn't have done them in the past,
they were no worse than what Shane Gillis allegedly, you know,

(01:46:50):
the crime, the thought crime he committed on that podcast.
But he got fired, and in the past, that would
have probably been the end of his career, right, he
gets hired to his dream job, this big break SNL
cast member, he gets fired, and now he's bigger than
anybody that the cast has currently Just a few years later,

(01:47:10):
in fact, they even asked him to come back and
host the show. Now. I'm not a huge Shane Gillis fan.
He's sold out and done a bud Light commercial. But
the reality is he is good. He's funny. I like
him in general. But that to me shows how much
things have changed where it's kind of symbolic of the
independent news media and the right wing news media and

(01:47:31):
the Trump era where you know, the kind of like
Tucker Carlson or Megan Kelly, where now they're in some
ways bigger than they ever were when they were on
the mainstream because the world has changed so much, and
the Shane Gillis story is emblematic of that. But as
far as the death of comedy in general, I do

(01:47:54):
think this is a good opportunity to talk about something
I've never discussed previously. This is just a theory that
I have. I have no evidence to back this up,
but I thought it was worthy of putting out there
because I did a lot of As you can tell,
I've did a lot of thinking about this fiftieth anniversary
of SNL, And it's not just political correctness and wokeism

(01:48:18):
that has made comedy so difficult. I think there's a
pipeline problem. I referenced this a little earlier, but I
think there's a pipeline problem for reasons that no one
has ever mentioned, and I doubt the vast, vast majority
of people have ever thought about before. And this is
my theory on this. You know how RFK Junior and

(01:48:40):
Trump are putting forward this idea that vaccines may cause autism. Now,
I've never bought this idea. Stick stick with me here.
This is going to go places, trust me. So I've
never bought this idea that vaccines cause autism because I
think there is been an overdiagnosis of autism. I think

(01:49:04):
in years past it was probably underdiagnosed, and now autism
is grossly overdiagnosed, and that has created a situation where
people need an explanation. Why is this the case? Why
are we having this explosion of autism case? As well,
people like RFK Junior and Trump look at that and go, well,

(01:49:25):
my god, maybe there's a correlation with vaccines. And I
think it's more of a social contagion and an overcorrection,
a pendulum swing, if you will. And I think that
there is an analogy to be made or a comparison
to be made to what's happened to comedians, because I

(01:49:48):
think the overdiagnosis of autism has potentially potentially created a
situation where people who might have become great comedian get
medicated into being boring. Now I realized that that's that's
a whopper. That's my way. Wait to say, what are
you talking about. I'm saying that people that in a

(01:50:11):
previous generation would have just been considered to be weird
or off and may have ended up being in this
pipeline of potentially great comedians in today's world, they get
we're medicating everybody, and there's impacts to those medications, and
a lot of times it kills off the whatever positive parts,

(01:50:36):
the whatever creative parts may have existed for someone being
weird or off or being on the spectrum. And by
the way, autism may not be the right word for this,
but it's the way I think most people would understand it.
But think about what I'm saying in this context, there
is a very very fine line between genius and insaneanity,

(01:51:01):
especially when it comes to comedy, especially when it comes
to the history of comedy in this country, and especially
as it's related to Saturday Night Live. I mean, just
think about some of the great names of comedy before
this current era, which I will put at the last
twenty to twenty five years, where I think comedy has

(01:51:21):
gone in the shitter, and especially on Saturday Night Live,
where the pipeline has gone dry. This would also be
correlated to this era where you have people who are
being diagnosed. Young people who are being diagnosed and medicated.
Far more significant because you gonna remember people that are
on Saturday Night Live are generally in their very early twenties. Well,

(01:51:45):
think about Andy Kaufman, one of the original cast members
of SNL. That guy was nuts. I don't know which
part of the line of genius and insanity he was on,
but clearly he was on the spectrum somewhere. Today he
would have been medicated into oblivion. Now, some of the
people I'm gonna mention aren't Saturday Night Livers, but Robin

(01:52:07):
Williams crazy but also hilarious. I don't know that he
would exist today given the circumstances I've discussed, Bill Murray,
John Belushi, Pee Wee Herman, Jim Carrey, Sam Kinnison, Don Rickles,
even I think kind of fits this mold. Lenny Bruce,
Richard Pryor, Stephen Wright, Martin Short, Norm MacDonald, Larry David,

(01:52:30):
Dave Chappelle, Chris Farley. Now with some of these people,
there's another element that's not necessarily related to autism. It's drugs.
There might be a combination here of being a little
bit off and doing drugs and alcohol, And that's another
element of this whole thing. Drugs and alcohol, probably for
the good, are frowned upon much more so than they

(01:52:52):
were during previous eras of for instance, Saturday Night Live,
Chris Farley ended up succumbing to try an alcohol John mulaney,
who got a ton of time on the fifteen anniversary
even though he was really not a significant part of
S and L. But he's become a star since. I
don't think it's nearly as funny now that he's gone sober.

(01:53:14):
I'm not suggesting that it's bad he's going sober. He's
gone sober, but back when he was on drugs, I
thought he was a lot funnier than he is today.
There's an element of that. So when you combine the
fact that we've medicated the hell out of our kids,
and now in the main street we frowned upon drugs
and alcohol being a major part of a comedian's consumption.

(01:53:36):
I don't think it's a coincidence that we all of
a sudden have a dearth of great comedians, especially those
the likes of which I just named. Now, you may
think I'm crazy for that theory, but I think that that,
combined with the political correctness, with the WOCSM, with the
media fragmentation, is an explanation for why we end up

(01:53:57):
with the crap that we get Inbody in general and
Saturday Night Live in particular. So that's probably way more
than you ever needed to hear about the fiftieth anniversary
of SNL. But I found it to be a significant
cultural moment. And I'm big into our history. I'm big
into our evolution. I'm big into trying to see where

(01:54:20):
we're going with this, and and I did find it well.
There was some there were some entertaining moments. I do
want to say there was there were some parts of
the fiftieth anniversary show that I liked. Overall, it felt
a little bit you know, high school reunion is where
the cool kids dominated everything. There was too much focus
on old sketches that weren't really all that funny, But

(01:54:43):
there were some bright moments, and I hope you appreciated
the thought that I put into the significance of the
whole thing related to Saturday Night Live fiftieth anniversary. Thanks
for listening to today's free drop of the abbreviated show.
If you're interested in listening to the entire show, you
must become a patron. Please go to Patreon. That's p

(01:55:05):
A t R e O N dot com. Patreon dot
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e R. That's patreon dot com slash the Death of
Journalism with John Ziggler. Good luck to you on that.

(01:55:29):
But that's how you can subscribe.

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