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Feb. 4, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:44
FACEBOOK EXODUS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep264
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There's an exodus from Facebook sending the Facebook stock plummeting in IFA one.
I'm very happy about it.
I'll tell you why. I'm going to talk about some exciting film details for my upcoming movie, 2000 Mules.
Jeff Zucker, the head of CNN, is out.
But it's not for the reason that they say, I'll tell you more.
Former Texas Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman will join me.
We're going to talk about voter integrity.
And the 1619 Project wants to claim the black anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston.
But in fact, the real Hurston would be the 1619 Project's worst nightmare.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
I hate Facebook.
I mean, I hate Facebook.
Did I mention that I hate Facebook?
Facebook is terrible.
Recently, I see that they removed the page promoting the Freedom Convoy by the truckers, and they have tried to block exposure of the whole trucker resistance to forced vaccine mandates.
I've had my own miseries with Facebook.
I'm currently demonetized.
I don't care about that so much, but I'm also restricted, which means there are people who used to get my page, it would come in their feed, and now they restrict my distribution.
It's all based upon a completely bogus I posted an innocuous clip about Kyle Rittenhouse.
They said, oh, by posting this clip, you're promoting a dangerous individual.
Then they themselves decided, after Rittenhouse was exonerated, that he's not dangerous.
But since my post was in the period where he was deemed dangerous, they refused to take it down.
This is the sheer arbitrariness, the sheer unreasonableness of Facebook, which also now goes by the idiotic name Meta.
Now, generally, I like to see the economy doing well.
I like to see the stock market doing well.
But the stock market took a kind of hit, and Facebook was leading the downward drop.
And the blow to Facebook, I'm looking here at a report from CNN, wipes out $31 billion of Mark Zuckerberg's personal wealth.
Isn't that great? It's awesome.
In fact, it's threatening to kick Zuckerberg out of the top 10 richest men in the world.
He's currently number 10.
He dropped like four places.
And Facebook itself saw a sharp decline, a one-day market value drop.
In fact, it's apparently...
A 20% drop, the biggest single day drop for any US company ever.
Now Facebook says that part of the reason for this is inflation and I guess we can blame Biden for that.
The fears of inflation of course affect stocks across the board and tech stocks more than normal stocks.
So we saw some drops at Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest.
But the Facebook problem is also more unique to Facebook and that is that after growing just unbelievably over the past several years.
And projecting similar growth into the future, Facebook has essentially now stopped growing.
Its growth is flat.
In fact, you see slight declines.
Younger people are not using Facebook.
In fact, Facebook admits this.
They say younger people are now using TikTok.
They're using Snapchat.
And so Facebook is appearing to lose its earlier luster.
Facebook is hoping to save itself by this new concept called the metaverse.
I'll do a separate segment on this some other time, maybe go into it in some detail.
It's a really strange idea that you can live in virtual reality.
Eventually, I guess they want to supply you with some virtual reality goggles.
But right now, they claim that you can purchase virtual real estate.
You can create a virtual avatar, a kind of substitute you.
And the substitute, you can have all the qualities that you in real life don't have.
In other words, it's perfectly suited for losers.
It's like, my own life is horrible, but you know what?
I'll be Batman. My avatar's gonna be cool.
I'm really gonna marry a supermodel.
I'm gonna make a million dollars a year in virtual money.
Now, amazingly, Facebook is in the metaverse.
You can buy real estate.
Obviously, it's not real real estate, but it's virtual real estate, and you can spend real money to do that.
So Facebook has tried to create this sort of remarkable, and who knows?
I mean, when Twitter first started, I thought it was an idiotic concept, so what do I know about where these trends are going?
I will say this. Facebook is a horrible censorship platform.
So is YouTube. And for this, I wish them the worst.
I wish that these platforms suffer.
I'd like to see them collapse.
I'd like to see them broken up.
And their misery is my happiness.
So long-term, it's hard for me to see why people would want to be on these platforms.
It's one thing to say, okay, I'll go on Facebook.
I'll find my old college friends.
This was the early promise of Facebook.
And this is what made Facebook appealing, that it's kind of a way, a mechanism, kind of almost like the invention, the original invention of the telephone.
How cool! I can actually call people who live far away.
I can talk to them. I can hear their voice.
How great is that? But imagine if the phone companies started doing surveillance on people and stealing their data and listening in on their phone calls and cutting them off if they didn't like what they heard you say.
This is exactly what Facebook has become, an ugly, deformed version of its earlier self.
And for this reason, the stock slide at Facebook, the blow to Zuckerberg's personal wealth, I think are reasons for widespread public jubilation and joy.
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You've got to use promo code DINESHDINESH. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about my...
Upcoming film, 2000 Mules, which I expect will be out in the second half of April.
Now the weird thing is that in an era of censorship, I can't openly discuss my own film.
This is how crazy our environment is.
And so I have to speak to you about it in a sort of code.
I will tell you that on other platforms, notably platforms like Rumble and Getter and then Locals, I will do very candid Q&As.
If you really want to get the scoop on this stuff, and this could be the biggest story, I mean, not of the year.
It was Scott Adams who said in his recent conversation, this, if true, will be the story of the decade, and I believe it is true.
So if you want to get the inside scoop, sign up for a Go to dinesh.locals.com, subscribe to my Locals channel.
Inside of that channel, I'll be talking to my local supporters and giving them the kind of unadulterated scoop.
I just got back from LA. Debbie and I were there for a couple of days and we were filming a very interesting reflection on some of my findings by my fellow Salem radio hosts and podcasters.
And so it was really cool. Larry Elder was there and Eric Metaxas, Charlie Kirk.
Who else, honey? We had the whole gang.
Sebastian Gorka, Dennis Prager.
So just a very intelligent and, by the way, a quite diverse set of ideas on this topic.
And so it was really fun to have this conversation.
We filmed it. And, of course, we posted a couple of photos on Instagram.com.
I'm moving into filming at breakneck speed, and the trailer is doing incredibly well.
It's now up to, well, it's over 1.5 million hits on Rumble.
Again, I haven't posted it to Facebook.
I'm not going to. I haven't posted it to YouTube.
I'm not going to. So it just means that these important discussions are not going to take place on those platforms.
But do share the trailer.
Do tell people about it.
And And it looks like Twitter is relatively safe for it because lots of people have posted on Twitter, no problems.
Remember, if you're sharing it on Twitter, retweet.
A like doesn't do anything except sort of put a little heart.
But a retweet takes the trailer and sends it to your friends and your followers.
And this is a way of getting it out.
I'm still thinking about how to distribute this film.
Theaters are not quite back to normal.
So Debbie and I this morning were talking about, should we do a theatrical release?
I mean, I love putting my movies in the theater and then going to home box office.
But we'll figure this out over the next few weeks.
So we want to have a distribution strategy that makes it easy for everybody to see this movie.
And by everybody, I mean everybody in America, for sure.
In some ways, even worldwide, because there's worldwide interest in this topic.
Trump has put out no less than three statements about it.
The first statement specifically referenced both me and Katherine Engelbrecht.
Katherine Engelbrecht is the founder of True The Vote, and you can check them out at truethevote.org.
And in the subsequent statements, he refers to some of the evidence that is only suggested In the trailer.
And Trump believes that there's a lot more.
And you know what? He's right about that.
So this is a very exciting project.
I think it's going to end up being my most important movie ever.
And if you want to learn more, watch the trailer.
By the way, sign up for emails so I can update you as this comes along.
Go to 2000meals.com.
That's the website. 2000meals.com.
Make sure you fill out. Just type in your email address.
And this way we can send you email notifications.
We'll have a direct communication with you that nobody else can intercept or stop.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome back to the podcast Eva Guzman.
Eva's actually been buddies with Debbie for a while, and she's a lovely lady.
She's been a Texas judge for 22 years, 12 of those in the Texas Supreme Court.
She was appointed by Governor Perry, and she is now running for Texas Attorney General.
Iva, thanks for coming back on.
Great to have you.
Let me start by asking you, I've been reading some, well, kind of disturbing articles about the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which has evidently made a ruling saying that the Attorney General cannot prosecute cases of voter fraud except for some very limited cases,
limited exceptions. I guess the logic is Is that the Attorney General's office was prosecuting a woman from Jefferson County.
Apparently, the FBI had reported some campaign violations.
And what the Court of Criminal Appeals is saying is that, look, it's not your job to do that.
This is a local matter for local prosecutors or local county attorneys to do.
And so you have this bizarre...
A scenario in which the leading law enforcement official in the state somehow has hands tied in trying to go forward on cases of voter fraud.
Now, you know this landscape very well.
Can you say what's going on?
Is this a legitimate decision?
Is it going to stand?
And what is your stand on it?
Well, first of all, thank you for having me here this morning.
Blessed to be here.
It is cold outside today, but talking about this is something I'm very well familiar with.
As you said, I spent 12 years on the Supreme Court of Texas deciding these types of complex constitutional law questions.
Now, I do want to point out for everybody, Texas is unique.
Texas and Oklahoma are the only two states that have High Court for Criminal Cases and then the Texas Supreme Court that decides the civil cases and manages the justice system.
The court oversees the entire system.
So what happened here is you had a court in Houston, which used to be all Republican, but because we've been losing these courts all around the state, frankly, under the watch of The current executive leadership, our counties have gone blue, and it's time to take those counties back for a lot of reasons.
But here, the Court of Criminal Appeals, it's all Republican.
There are nine members, and they have the final word on state law.
And so they were asked to decide whether...
The current Attorney General could prosecute election fraud, and the legislature had given the Attorney General the authority to do that under Section 273.
And this is a case Ken Paxton should have won.
He's lost credibility, in my view, and he lost this case.
I think the court's opinion is wrong.
The court...
Basically overruled 70 years of Texas Supreme Court precedent.
They looked at the 1876 Constitution, and they just got it wrong.
Judges can't rewrite the Constitution.
Now, it seems interesting because you just said that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals is a Republican-dominated court, and this was not a close decision.
In other words, of the nine justices, you might have thought, well, maybe somehow anomalously it was 5-4, but it was an 8-1 decision.
Was the Republican court here trying to send a message that...
About separation of powers between the Attorney General and this should be done locally?
Or do you think there was a distrust that the Attorney General is somehow promiscuously prosecuting these cases and maybe going after people who aren't guilty?
Or was this a purely kind of structural and constitutional decision based upon, as you said, a reading of an old document and they just read it poorly?
These judges, like every judge I've encountered for the most part over my 22 years, Believe that they're following the law.
I think that their decision was wrong.
I hope that they grant rehearing and take another look at this.
There's one justice who wrote a separate opinion.
In my view, there's no structural argument that can be made to support the decision.
They decided that district attorneys were exclusively part of the judicial branch and that somehow there was a separation of powers issue.
They relied on a Latin rule that To come to this decision, they overruled 70 years of Supreme Court precedent.
There's just a lot of Um, analytical questions that they didn't decide correctly.
That happens sometimes, even with very good judges.
They sometimes get the law wrong.
That's why we have this process called rehearing, so that the court is giving one more opportunity to take a look at it.
Um, now the court has the benefit of better arguments, quite frankly, uh, made by not only the attorney general, but other interested, um, And stakeholders, amicus briefs.
And so I think the court will take a hard look at it.
But to do what Ken Paxton has done and suggest to the public that they should call the court and try to influence them in some manner outside of the constitutional process, the rule of law process, which is file a document with the court, tell them why they got it wrong, ask them to look at their decision again.
And if they refuse to do so, there's a way to change it.
There really is.
And that's a constitutional amendment.
So what you're saying is that there's no higher court to appeal to above and beyond.
You can ask the court to hear it again, to reconsider.
But if the court says, no, we got it right the first time, the only recourse at that point would be to amend the Texas Constitution in order to perhaps limit the power of the court or to direct them to have a law that says something different that they would then have to take into account.
So it happens not infrequently that the courts will decide something.
The legislature actually decides to come back in session.
When they do, they do their job, and they overrule the decisions of the court.
And so the legislature has the final word on this one if the 1876 Constitution doesn't allow this interpretation of the duties and powers.
And the...
Solution is a constitutional amendment.
And that's, you know, that's been done to overrule court decisions.
I think we have a really hard working, good criminal court of appeals.
I think they got it wrong.
I hope they reconsider.
But suggesting that, you know, they're rogue, that's wrong.
Judges get it. Judges do their best most of the time.
And sometimes they just get it wrong.
Now, you said a moment ago that you thought it was inappropriate for people to sort of be outraged by the decision, as I sort of am.
In other words, the idea that somehow, you know, regardless of the merits of the case...
I didn't say it was inappropriate to be outraged.
I'm outraged that the court got it wrong and stripped from the Attorney General of Power.
I think that The Attorney General has.
I think it's good to be outraged, but there is a way to communicate with the court about its decision.
Now, the public, you can get on and blog about it and talk about it, but Ken Paxton is a licensed attorney, and he's supposed to follow the rule of law.
He doesn't. He flaunts it all the time.
So for him to suggest that people communicate privately with the judges is wrong.
The outrage is appropriate.
every Texan should be outraged.
In fact, if I was Attorney General, I would work for an amendment that would allow the Attorney General to prosecute illegal immigrants that commit felonies along the border.
Texas is one of the, you know, handful of states where the Attorney General is not allowed to prosecute cop killers, to prosecute these felons that are committing felonies.
So you have Soros that refuse to follow the law.
They refuse to prosecute crime.
The AG in Texas can't just come in and prosecute someone who's gunned down a police officer.
If I'm Attorney General, I would work for an amendment to allow the AG to come in and prosecute these felonies and prosecute illegal immigrants who are committing felonies on our soil.
Ken Paxton's been in office almost eight years and has never done that.
Ibu Guzman, thank you very much for joining me.
This was very interesting.
And like you, I hope that this situation gets rectified.
Thank you very much. And thank you.
And thanks for bringing it to everyone's attention.
I think it's important. Pleasure.
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For many decades, in fact, almost a century, California was considered the golden state, the state that represented opportunity, going all the way back to the days of the gold rush when people moved westward looking for freedom, but also looking for a chance to make a better life.
And all of that is now in the past.
California is, quite honestly, no longer the golden state.
And Texas appears to have taken that title.
In fact, there's an article in Texas Monthly, and it's called The New Golden State.
And I think in that sense, it is right on.
Now, amazingly, the article kind of misunderstands its own premise because the editor, Dan Goodgame, said, He goes, why do so many still move here?
And he goes on to say, wow, it's kind of a puzzle.
He says, you know, Texas is enacting all these controversial and unpopular laws like the abortion restriction law, restrictions on voting rights.
This is the voter integrity bill.
And he goes, and yet, and yet, people still want to come here.
In other words, this is a liberal, and he says Texas has all these Republican policies, and he claims Republican policies that don't reflect the majority of Texas.
Well, first of all, Texas has a Republican governor, Republican legislature, so he couldn't be more wrong about that.
But nevertheless, his point is that he's sort of baffled by the appeal of Texas, which he then subsequently tries to explain.
Before we get to the explanation, let's talk about some of the interesting facts about Texas.
Texas's population in the last decade has grown by about 4 million.
That's far more than any other state.
If you look at these kind of lists that you see of fastest growing cities in America, what do you see?
You see Fort Worth, you see Austin, you see San Antonio.
By the way, in the previous decade or so, Houston would have been consistently on that list.
And then even smaller parts of Texas, places like Frisco and McKinney and New Braunfels, are growing.
The question is, who's coming to Texas and why?
Now, we think of people coming to Texas from California, and California is the largest feeder.
It's the single biggest state from which people come to Texas.
But it's not the only one.
I found it very interesting that only about half of the people who come to Texas Are even coming from the United States.
A bunch of people are coming from other parts of the world.
And the point being that when they come to America, they come to Texas.
Why? Because they see Texas, I think, as reflecting an older America, or at least an America that still has open horizons, opportunity, where even working class guys can make a good living.
And as you read this Texas Monthly article, you begin to see that, you know, the reasons why people are coming is low regulation.
In other words, there's a regulatory environment in which you can start a business.
They quote entrepreneurs, We're good to go.
And so now Texas is home to apparently 50 Fortune 500 companies.
Texas' GDP is $2 trillion.
California is still number one.
Texas is number two.
But the trend is in favor of Texas and against California.
So, as the Texas Monthly article continues, you begin to realize that they interview people and they say things like, I came because I like the fact that Texas encourages oil and gas.
I came because Texas has a low, kind of an easy regulatory environment.
I came because I don't like state income taxes on top of the high federal taxes I already pay, and Texas has no state income tax.
So, as you go down the list, you begin to realize that contrary to what this Foolish editor has been saying it is precisely conservative and Republican policies for which people are coming.
And in case you think that the appeal of Texas is somehow the appeal of, you know, ethnic homogeneity or the way the world used to be in 1940, not at all.
The single largest group in terms of percentages coming to Texas is, in fact, Asian Americans.
Big surprise. Texas, of course, has more Hispanics than Asian Americans, but Hispanics are growing mainly through a higher Hispanic birth rate.
Hispanics, in other words, have a higher birth rate than non-Hispanic whites, and so the Hispanic population is swelling, but for that reason.
If you look at newcomers coming to Texas from the outside...
The largest number is Asian Americans.
So to give you an idea, 613,000 Asians came to Texas.
Over half a million out of that number, out of that 4 million number that I mentioned earlier, 600,000 plus were Asian Americans.
So Texas is becoming an ethnically diverse state.
I think that's actually good.
Texas has also become culturally more diverse.
It's amazing to me when we first...
Debbie's been in Texas, but when I moved here from California, I was really struck by the cosmopolitanism, not just of Houston, but also the suburbs of Texas.
If you go to the suburbs of Dallas, the suburbs of Houston...
You find that there is Afghan food, Persian food, Indian food.
And so something that one might not expect, you might expect, well, you're going to get really good steak, really good barbecue, but not a whole lot else.
And that is no longer true.
I don't even know if it ever was true, but it is...
But in Houston, it's become a kind of culinary paradise.
I think what I'm saying here is that Texas is a very livable state.
I have to concede, if I had to pick the most beautiful state in the country in terms of natural beauty, I'd have to go with California, probably followed by maybe Colorado, maybe Virginia, maybe Utah and Wyoming.
Texas wouldn't probably be at the top of that list.
But in terms of the overall standard of living, just the everyday pleasantness of life in Texas, I've come to believe that Texas is rightfully number one.
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Whoopi Goldberg. Yes, Whoopi Goldberg has been suspended for two weeks from The View.
Why? Because evidently she made some offensive remarks about Jews.
She was quoted saying...
That the Holocaust, quote, isn't about race.
This was actually a statement that she made.
And then when she joined Stephen Colbert and was asked to sort of explain what she was getting at, she said, well, quote, the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people.
So her point was, if this is white against white, obviously it can't be about race, and therefore the idea that Jews are somehow claiming that Nazism was racist and the Nazis were racist, she's basically saying, no, no, this was a white man squabble, so to speak. Now, understandably, I think you'd have to be really foolish not to see that this would raise eyebrows at the very least.
And the question is, what's going on here?
Is Whoopi Goldberg an anti-Semite?
I don't think so.
But she's an ignoramus.
And she's an ignoramus because she's looking at race in the pure black and white lens.
And so according to her...
Jews, for example, cannot be victims of racism because they aren't, after all, a race.
And so that raises a question I want to explore, the deeper question, are Jews, in fact, a race?
Now, strictly speaking, no.
Why? Because in a broad anthropological sense, there are really only three racial groups in the world.
There are the Caucasians, there are the There's the Negroid race, at least using a somewhat antiquated vocabulary.
And there is the Oriental or Asian or what used to be called Mongoloid race.
And everybody falls into one of those groups.
And those groups do not correlate completely with skin color.
You can have people... Ethiopians, for example, who are dark-skinned, but nevertheless would qualify in features as Caucasian.
You can have American Indians who fall into the Asian or Mongoloid group, in part because of the understanding that their ancestors came from Asia at one time.
And so this is the complexity of race.
Well, what about Jews? Well, This is where things get really tricky.
For Hitler, Jews were a distinct race and not a religion because Hitler didn't care if you were a practicing Jew or not.
For Hitler, Judaism had to do with who your grandparents were.
And if you had Jewish grandparents, you would qualify, again, regardless of whether or not you went to the synagogue, and even regardless of whether you identified as a Jew, whether or not you sort of lived a Jewish cultural lifestyle and sort of inhabited the Jewish community.
None of this really mattered to Hitler.
For him, this was an issue of racial physiognomy.
In other words, your racial features defined you as Jewish, and that was the end of the story.
Hitler very much saw the Jews as a distinct physical or biological type.
Now, what is Judaism really?
It's obviously a religion.
But the irony, of course, is that the vast majority of Jews worldwide don't practice and do not fully identify with Judaism as a religion.
Even as a religion, of course, there are gradations of it.
There are the Orthodox Jews, there are the conservative Jews, there are the sort of Reformed Jews.
And so Judaism is, I think, more generally understood less as a religion today than as a culture.
Some people talk of it in terms of a tribe or of a family.
These are people who, in a sense, maintain a distinct identity.
These are people who see themselves as a part, but a part, again, not because of religion and faith.
But because of a kind of a shared history.
For many centuries, Judaism did not have a, quote, nationality because Jews didn't have a country.
They were, after the Jewish diaspora, Jews were scattered all over the world.
In fact, they broadly scattered into so-called European or Ashkenazi Jews and then Asian or Sephardic Jews.
But they were dispersed.
It's only after the formation of the State of Israel In 1948, the Jews also now became a nationality.
So Jews are a little bit of a religion and a little bit of an ethnicity and a little bit of a nationality and a little bit of a culture.
There's a kind of complexity to Judaism.
And I think that Whoopi Goldberg kind of strolled into that or sort of blundered into that.
And spoke, I think, hastily and certainly in a kind of callous way.
I'm not surprised that there was a bit of an uproar.
And so, of all people, it is now Whoopi Goldberg, at least for two weeks, who finds herself cancelled.
CNN is the network that no one watches.
Well, hardly anyone watches.
But people still like to talk about.
And there's been a lot of buzz over the resignation, the abrupt resignation, of the head of CNN, the bald-headed Jeff Zucker.
Now, the stated reason for this resignation is so preposterous.
Jeff Zucker has basically said, I've been having a relationship that began during COVID-19 With CNN's head of communications, a woman named Allison Gallust.
And I failed to, I should have, but I failed to disclose it.
And so for this reason, I'm resigning.
Now, the idea that a senior executive at the head of a company would be forced out because he had a relationship with We're good to go.
And everybody knows it makes no sense.
And so, obviously, Jeff Zucker, the head of a news organization, is flatly lying.
Now, here's Trump, who put out his statement, obviously kind of exulting in the departure of Zucker.
He goes, Jeff Zucker's not out at CNN for, quote, concealing a relationship, as the fake New York Times writes.
This New York Times, of course, is just playing the Jeff Zucker music.
He goes, he's out because a horrible rating is down 90% and all-time low.
Now, true, Zucker has been a failure at CNN. But CNN, I mean, everyone over there is a failure.
All their shows are, like, in last place.
They're one disaster on top of the other.
And, in fact, they can't even report competently on their own organization.
Here's Brian Stelter.
He's supposed to be the media reporter.
This show is called Reliable Sources.
Well, he evidently had no idea what's going on at CNN. He's such a fool that he couldn't see what was going on around him.
Or he did know...
I think this is probably more likely.
He did know. But he's corrupt.
And so he's got Jeff Zucker, his little water boy, and he was covering up for Zucker.
And so even though he knew, this so-called media reporter is not disclosing a big story going on at CNN that was evidently broken from the outside.
And in fact, when it was broken from the outside, Stelter jumps in to say that the outside reporting was inaccurate.
Now, let's think about what's the deeper story here at CNN. Well, the deeper story is this.
This woman named Alison Gallist.
Was apparently at CNN. And according to Rolling Stone, her relationship with Jeff Zucker has been going on for a long time.
The Rolling Stone article implies, well, it says, that it's been going on since the mid-1990s.
And it was not, in that sense, a big secret at CNN. This has been going on for a long time.
But the interesting tidbit is that Alison Gullis then leaves CNN and goes to work for Guess Who?, Governor Cuomo.
She goes to work for Governor Cuomo, and then she took that job in 2012.
And then she resigned from that position and joined Zucker back at CNN, this time in a much higher position.
And then what happens?
Jeff Zucker and Golas together become huge promoters of the Cuomos.
First of all, they take untalented Chris Cuomo and they give him a show.
He's doing horribly at the show, but nevertheless, this doesn't stop him from getting promoted.
And then they become open advocates for Governor Andrew Cuomo.
They begin to talk about Cuomo as a potential presidential candidate.
They have Chris Cuomo interviewing his brother, making sort of fraternal jokes on CNN.
You're thinking of running for president?
No, why not?
Will you consider it?
All of this kind of banter aimed at elevating Governor Andrew Cuomo.
And also it turns out, very interestingly, not only does CNN cover up the nursing home scandal in which Governor Cuomo, Andrew Cuomo, is sending COVID positive patients into these nursing homes, infecting all kinds of other people at those nursing homes.
and causing a surge in nursing home deaths.
You won't have found out a whole lot about that on CNN. And now we see, from reporting in Rolling Stone, and I see it in a couple of other places, that quote, and now quoting from Rolling Stone, Zucker and Golist were advising the governor, not just at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, But, the quote, the couple provided the governor with talking points of how to respond to the president's criticisms of New York.
They also booked the governor to appear on the network exclusively, which became a ratings boon for CNN, with Chris Cuomo doing the interviewing.
So in other words, here you have CNN kind of openly collaborating with a Democratic governor to sort of hit back at a Republican president.
I mean, this is at the very least ethically inappropriate for a news network to do.
So all of this impropriety has come out.
How? Well, because CNN hired an outside firm, an outside law firm, to investigate Chris Cuomo.
And And investigating Chris Cuomo, well, they found out about the Jeff Zucker-Alison Gallist relationship, which was evidently been going on, and it can't have been that hard to ferret that one out.
So, the consequence is that we're dealing here not with a marital failure and indiscretion and cheating, but we're also dealing with a corrupt environment in which, I mean, let's think about it.
Don Lemon has had charges of sexual abuse, then you have Chris Cuomo, now you have Jeff Zucker, and it seems that poor Jeffrey Toobin sitting alone in a room and sort of playing on his human guitar is probably the...
He's the only guy who kept his hands to himself!
There's a sort of intellectual fight going on between historians.
Nicole Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Project is involved.
The writer...
There's a writer named Jeet Heer from The New Republic who's involved, the writer Andrew Sullivan.
And the argument revolves around a woman whom not many people know but deserves to be better known.
Her name is Zora Neale Hurston.
Zora Neale Hurston. Now, Zora Neale Hurston was a black writer, a folklorist, an anthropologist.
Also, she wrote a very vivid and moving memoir, which I'm going to talk about, called Dust Tracks on a Road.
And here's the argument.
The left would like to appropriate Zora Neale Hurston for themselves.
She was She was an outspoken black woman at a time when it was not easy to be outspoken.
She rose out from nothing, and she was born in obscure circumstances in Florida.
She became a celebrated writer, publishing in the Saturday Evening Post and other notable publications.
Her memoirs won prizes.
She became a recognized major figure in the 1930s and 40s.
And then, remarkably, she disappeared.
She kind of became a nobody.
And she died, unbelievably, in 1960, I believe.
And in her last decade, she worked as a maid.
So she represented both the meteoric rise of American life, the American dream, but remember the American dream, which involves upward mobility, can also involve downward mobility.
And in Zora Neale Hurston's case, she experienced both.
Now, here's Nicole Hannah-Jones basically saying...
That Zora Neale Hurston is like her.
She says, quote, the ignorance of people who think Zora Neale Hurston's work sits in opposition to mine.
So, according to Nicole Hannah-Jones, they are kindred spirits.
And we're going to find out if that is really true.
First of all, you find in Zora Neale Hurston, when you pick up her writing, a vivid and absolutely dashing and politically incorrect style.
Here's the phrase that she used for herself when she was at the height of her fame.
Quote, she says, I am the queen of the Niggerati.
Literally making a hybrid with the word literati and making a joke of it.
And then she has, here's a line that I just pick almost at random from her memoir.
What did Haiti ever do to make the world glad it happened?
Basically what she's saying is Haiti's contribution to world civilization is...
Relatively negligible.
And this same Zora Neale Hurston that is supposed to be in line with the 1619 Project, when you start reading her work, you begin to realize that this woman couldn't be—she repudiates the 1619 Project flat out.
And I'm just going to read some really telling and vividly written sections that will give you the picture of this woman.
She's very much, I would say, an individualist and a conservative, and a conservative of the old right.
Here we go. She goes, one thing impressed me strongly.
The white people had held my people in slavery here in America.
They had bought us, it is true, and exploited us.
But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw was my people had sold me and the white people had bought me.
And she goes, that did away with the folklore I had been brought up on.
In other words, this folklore that sort of the white people and the other evil and the black people are virtuous and wonderful.
She goes, well, it's not quite all that simple.
And then she goes on to talk about the African princes buying and selling human beings, and she concludes, it impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory.
In other words, the distinction between greed and glory is not a racial one.
Now, she was asked about, and this is where she comes right to 1619, she mentions the year 1619, but look at the context.
She says, I'm now reading, And she uses a phrase called Old Black Joe.
But by Old Black Joe, she means you're either a field hand or a sharecropper.
And she goes, quote, For me to pretend I am Old Black Joe and waste my time on his problems would be just as ridiculous as for the government of Winston Churchill to build the Duke of Normandy, the first of every month, or for the Jews to hang around the pyramids trying to picket Old Pharaoh.
Okay. She's attacking the idea of reparations.
While I have a handkerchief over my eyes crying over the landing of the first slaves in 1619, there it is, a reference to 1619, and she's mocking it.
She goes, while I'm crying over that, she goes, I might miss something swell that's going on in 1942.
And what she means by that is, she wants to have her eyes firmly fixed on the present, take advantage of opportunities in the 20th century, and stop whining about what happened in the 17th.
And then we come to really the crusher.
She's talking about slavery.
And let's remember, the 1619 Project, the last essay, the second-to-last essay by Nicole Hannah-Jones is all about reparations.
And now listen to Zora Neale Hurston on this exact subject.
She says, From what I can learn, it was sad, meaning slavery.
Certainly. Certainly.
But my ancestors who lived and died in it are dead.
The white men who profited by their labor and lives are dead also.
I have no personal memory of those times and no responsibility for them, neither has the grandson of the man who held my folks.
That's Zora Neale Hurston.
And then you see, and this to me is perhaps the most poignant passage of all, where she celebrates the idea of judging people as individuals.
The colorblind idea that would, you know, a decade and a half later or two decades later be promoted by Martin Luther King.
I'm not quoting Zora Neale Hurston.
Light came to me, meaning I became enlightened, when I realized I did not have to consider any racial group as a whole.
And then a beautiful line.
God made them duck by duck, and that was the only way I could see them.
In other words, God didn't just create a hundred ducks.
He made this duck and then that duck.
Each duck has a kind of individuality.
Therefore, I saw no curse in being black, nor no extra favor in being white.
I saw no benefit in excusing my looks by claiming to be half Indian.
In fact, I boast I'm the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on my mother's side was not an Indian chief.
She's being sarcastic here.
The fact that many blacks go, well, I'm descended from the Native Americans.
And she goes, I may be the only one who's not.
I see no need to manufacture me a legend to beat the facts.
In other words, a fabricated, invented history that emphasizes only victimhood and nothing else.
No struggle, no achievement, no liberation, no advancing opportunity.
And she says about her race, I consider it neither an honor nor a shame.
And the key point is, I don't consider it an honor either.
There's no greatness in being white or black or tan.
And so what you see here in Zora Neale Hurston is not only that kind of piquant political incorrectness that's always refreshing in a writer, but behind it, a well-thought-out philosophy, a philosophy that looks at people as individuals, a philosophy that stops...
Groveling for favor, that tries to claim credit for victimhood, a philosophy that revels not in misery, but in achievement.
And this is probably why this woman who came from so little, even though she had a tragic end at the height of her powers, made it so very far.
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