Jake Novak hosts The Stone Zone, critiquing the Wall Street Journal's economic illiteracy regarding structural deficit overspending and promoting ASBGold.com amidst claims of a 20% dollar value drop since 2020. He highlights DNI Tulsi Gabbard's revelation that Trump's 2019 impeachment was a fabrication ignored by mainstream media while attacking liberals like Eric Swalwell and Ro Khanna as partisan hacks. Novak contrasts Pope Francis's alleged Iran alignment with John Paul II, discusses CNBC's corporate pressure against his 2016 Trump predictions, and concludes by exposing coordinated Democratic media spending strategies. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Roger Stone Self Promotion00:14:41
This is Roger Stone for American Sovereign Bullion.
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This is the Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
People love him and respect him.
Roger Stone.
Now, get in the zone.
It's the Stone Zone.
Here's Roger Stone.
And I'm Jake Novak filling in for Roger Stone on this Tuesday night, April 14th.
I hope you have your taxes done.
And if you don't and you want to file an extension, you got to send in the money tomorrow.
You don't get an extension on when the money's due.
So, even if you don't know how much you owe for sure, make an estimate and send it in, or you'll get dinged for a penalty.
That's my little bit of advice for you right now.
I know a lot of folks are going to be going on TurboTax tonight and tomorrow.
Good luck with that.
It's not the worst process in the world.
Just make sure you have all your documents.
And, you know, I think I speak for almost everyone.
I'm sure I speak for Rogers on this one as well.
This isn't a stretch.
I would have a lot less problem with doing my taxes, with paying my taxes.
If I really felt like that money was being spent somewhat efficiently, really helping someone better than I could do myself.
I remember one year I completely took a look at how much I paid in taxes and thought about all the good things I could have done for American businesses, even some charities, and how much better I could have done with that money if I had just directly decided to dole it out myself.
I could have bought a car, I would have bought a car that year, a new car, which would have helped create American jobs.
And get a commission for the salesperson and et cetera, et cetera.
I would have given to a particular school and I wouldn't have just given it to their general fund.
I would have donated an iPad or a bunch of school books.
I mean, you know, a lot of schools have these kinds of opportunities.
And we all know that that's not really that the actual amount of money that the government takes in is totally immaterial to how much they're going to spend.
No matter who the president is, no matter who's in Congress, it's just incredible that there are people in this country who still think that it matters.
That our deficit problems and our budget problems are because we're not taking in enough money.
There could be infinity money coming in from the people and it wouldn't matter.
We would still outspend it.
We have a spending problem and we have a structural problem that doesn't curb our spending.
And it's one thing that the average Joe on the street or Democrat politician pushes that or maybe even really believes it.
But I literally saw, and you can find it on my social media feed, I literally saw a few months ago a headline in the Wall Street Journal talking about how we have a revenue problem.
And of all people, The folks at the Wall Street Journal don't understand that.
You can have as many partisan opinions as you want.
And we know that there have been so many things now on the front page of the journal in the last few years that have been really leftist, and it just feels weird to see it there.
And as bad as that is, that's one thing.
But for the Wall Street Journal to be economically illiterate, and you need to be pretty economically illiterate to believe that we have a revenue problem and not a spending problem in this country.
That takes a level of mathematical ineptitude that's almost beyond comprehension for an adult person, especially someone who works at the Wall Street Journal.
You know, the Wall Street Journal and all financial news, and I'm telling you this as a guy who was an executive producer for over 30 years in TV news.
And I've been in front of the camera and the mic now for a couple of years.
So you're talking about almost 35 years of experience.
I can tell you right now, and I did a lot of financial news.
I was an executive producer at CNBC, I was their senior editorial columnist for many years.
And the whole financial news workforce is an anathema, it's kind of an anachronism, I should say.
It's also an anathema.
It's an anachronism in and of itself because most people get into journalism because they want to avoid math.
It's like the old Chevy Chase joke from the original SNL when he's impersonating Gerald Ford at the debate and they ask him a question about fiscal stuff.
And he says, It was my understanding there would be no math.
I mean, people get into journalism so they don't have to do math.
And so financial journalists are already an anachronism in themselves.
That said, you would expect the reporters at the journal, the fully staffed, the editorial staff there to know just, and this isn't a partisan statement.
I'm sorry.
If you think it is, I feel so sorry for you.
This is math.
We've been taking in more revenues in this country with the exception of a year or two when we had the Great Recession.
We take in more money every month, every month.
It's crazy.
It's not about getting more money out of the rich.
Or out of the corporations.
It's about spending it more wisely.
And we have no ability to do so, apparently, and certainly no will.
And why would there be?
If you're a politician and the amount of money that you spend is going to get you more votes and it's not your money, then who cares?
We got to do something to change that.
We have to find something in the Constitution that will allow us to provide for some, or we need a constitutional amendment to provide for some kind of real limits on how much we spend, period.
But they've been trying it for years.
They tried balanced budget amendments.
They tried Grand Rumman haulings.
The deficit and the debt just keeps growing and growing and growing.
I shouldn't say the deficit because we've had some shrinkage in the deficit thanks to the tariffs in the last few months, and that's great.
But our debt just keeps growing and growing and growing.
Now, I want to stay on the news business just for a second because those of you who listen to me on this program and the many other programs I do know that I really, really, really have a problem with bad journalism.
And it's not just because of the partisanship and it's not just because of the bias.
I'm talking about just doing a bad job because this is a business.
Hello, I'm trying to get your attention.
And so is everybody else in the news media, or at least they're supposed to be.
I become more and more convinced every day.
That there are people, especially at the mainstream media outlets, who have no interest in growing their audience.
They just have a partisan bent.
And they're not interested in it, and they don't seem to understand that this is a business.
At some point, even the corporations that own some of the mainstream media outlets, who use those mainstream media outlets as a loss leader to promote lobbying efforts.
In other words, if you're Comcast and you own all the NBC properties, you use CNBC and you use NBC Nightly News to promote the messages that the bureaucrats that you have to deal with at Comcast, and there are quite a few, want to hear.
Comcast makes its money on broadband.
You know how easily a Bureaucrat in DC can screw with the broadband program with all the land rights you need and the technical licenses.
They can really screw with that.
And Comcast NBC isn't stupid.
They know that.
And they've been using CNBC and NBC Nightly News and MS Now.
And I know they spun off CNBC and MS Now.
Whatever.
You can believe that if you want.
When a company spins some things off, they still have tremendous influence, even though it's an independently traded stock.
I can tell you a lot of examples of that another time.
But they use these outlets and have used them for years as a de facto lobbying effort.
And even though they lose money on them a lot of the time, they don't necessarily lose money on CNBC, but even though they do lose money or don't make that much money on it, they save themselves maybe billions in lobbying.
So, whatever, fine.
That's what they use it for.
That's why I think they don't really care about this.
But my biggest example is what we're dealing with right now with this incredible revelation we got from DNI Tulsi Gabbard in the last couple of days showing that the 2019 impeachment process against President Trump.
Was made up out of whole cloth.
As many of us suspected, and some people, like at the Federalist, immediately blew the whistle on, and that's great.
But now we have the documents to prove that the so called whistleblower was completely lying, almost tried to recant the lie, et cetera, et cetera.
But they still, they just completely, you know, basically cannot contrive this from the beginning, got it all the way through.
Now, you're not hearing about any of this in the mainstream media.
They've completely ignored the story.
That's bad business.
Even if you're MS Now and you know all your viewers are lefty Trump haters, even if you're the other mainstream media outlets where you think most of your viewers are Trump haters, that doesn't matter.
It's a fascinating, clickable story.
It's a lot more interesting than the accusations in the first term, first impeachment thing.
I mean, it was so contrived.
President Trump made a phone call and he made a comment about helping him in his election, which was clearly just a comment, never actually talked about.
I mean, it was such a contrived thing.
It wasn't a sex scandal, it wasn't a murder, it wasn't a big cover up.
I mean, that was their choice for the big thing that would get people outraged.
People walking down the street saying, President Trump said something on the phone.
I'm really upset.
I'm like, come on.
How silly was that?
That story wasn't interesting, actually.
The impeachment process was, but the whole scandal wasn't.
But this is interesting.
And even if you are trying to serve up the kinds of things that the Trump haters want to hear, you could still do this story.
You could do it.
Hey, look what Gabbard's doing.
She's trying to say that whole thing wasn't true.
We think it was.
And just pound the table about it.
It's a clickable story.
It's a watchable story.
This is a major scandal, one way or the other.
It's either a scandal because of what I believe is the truth that it was absolutely connived from the beginning, a contrivance from the beginning, or it's a scandal that the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has released documents that make it seem like it.
Either way, it's a really cool story.
One that would get you some more clicks, one that would get you higher ratings.
But no, let's talk about the Pope.
And I got to tell you, I don't think most Americans give a darn about what the Pope has to say ever.
I mean, I've lived in this country my whole life.
I'm 55 years old, and the lack of interest in what the Pope says has precipitously gotten larger over my lifetime.
I remember when I was eight years old and the two Popes died back to back, Paul VI and then John Paul I.
They preempted all broadcasts on all TV.
Like that was the end of cartoons for days.
They would never do that now.
They would do it maybe on CNN for a second, but they would never do it.
I mean, the interest in the Pope is minimal.
These days.
But that's, I think, they think that's a big story.
I mean, good luck with that.
It's not.
It's just not.
This is a huge story that people should be talking about that is very clickable.
You had a contrived plot against Donald Trump for the dumbest thing in the world, too.
Like, I mean, even if it was some kind of law that he broke by saying, you should help me with my election, without him actually saying, hey, I want you to say this, that, and the other thing 100 times, he said it.
I mean, it was obviously just like a corner of his mouth kind of comment.
That's the big scandal.
It's not like Watergate covering up a burglary of your opponent's headquarters.
It's not like a sex scandal.
It's not like the president murdered someone and is trying to cover it.
I mean, honestly, it was such a flimsy thing in the beginning, but that's what they went with.
And they gummied up the country at a crucial time, 2019.
We all know what was going on towards the end of 2019 going into 2020, which was the whole COVID thing.
And it was just sad, sad to see.
And now we see that it was absolutely, it shouldn't have gone anywhere.
So, there you go.
That's a clickable story.
If you're a crazy Trump hater, then you're interested in the fact that maybe you want to accuse Gabbard of bringing up these documents either out of context or making them up.
Either way, huge story.
No coverage in the mainstream media because they're not interested in reviewership.
They're not really interested in making money.
So, if you're a shareholder of Comcast NBC, if you're a shareholder of Warner Brothers Discovery, if you're a shareholder at Paramount Skydance, maybe you want at the next shareholders meeting saying, can we just cut these TV stations loose?
They don't make as much money, they don't really make money.
They don't want to, and their lobbying value is diminishing by the day anyway.
Have a nice day.
All right, I'm Jake Novak filling in for Roger Stone in the Stone Zone.
By the way, in the second half hour of this program, I want to hear what you have to say about all this and many more.
800 848 9222 is the number.
Going to get to your calls in the next half hour, but I want to get into this Swalwell thing when we come back.
This is the Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
He likes politics and he's a professional at the highest level.
Roger Stone.
Who is Roger Stone?
The Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
Roger Stone, who's a very, very one of the smartest political minds.
Roger Stone was persecuted.
People forget he's actually a brilliant, brilliant political analyst.
Now, get in the zone.
It's the Stone Zone.
Here's Roger Stone.
As always, we're live tonight.
It's 8 23 p.m. East Coast time.
I'm Jake Novak filling in for Roger Stone.
Love the opportunity to be able to speak with you.
In the next half hour, I want to start taking some calls.
The number is 800 848 9222.
This Eric Swalwell thing, you know, there's altogether too much self promotion in radio.
By the way, there has to be some self promotion.
As the first rabbi said, Hillel, if I am not for myself, who will be for me?
But if I'm only for myself, then what am I?
Got to do a little bit.
So I'm going to stop short of full time crazy self promotion, but I will say this on this Eric Swalwell matter.
About four or five weeks ago, on my own regular program, which is heard on the flagship station WABC here in New York, many of you here at other stations, about four or five weeks ago, I think it was four or five weeks ago, I reported a story.
Probably was the only broadcast person to report this story.
Coordinated Media Conspiracy00:08:46
I reported the story that the Democrats were pooling a big money cash chest together to try to get some Democrats to drop out of the California gubernatorial race because they were losing in most of the polls.
They weren't going to get even one candidate in the general election in November.
And they were freaking out and panicking, as they should, because they have something called a jungle primary in California where the top two finishers go to the general election and they're both Republicans.
That's the way it goes.
Sorry, Democrats.
And they're both Democrats, as it usually is.
Sorry, Republicans.
And in most of the polls, two Republicans kept polling ahead of everybody else.
Swalwell, Eric Swalwell, was the top Democrat in all the polls coming in third.
Now, that's me tooting my own horn.
I was the first to say this on radio or TV.
Here's where I admit I screwed up.
I naturally assumed that that money would be used to pay off some of the bottom feeders in the poll.
Hey, dude, get out.
Anthony Villarregoza, get out.
Here's $10 million to your foundation, whatever they were going to do.
And what a fool I was.
Instead, they clearly spent the money in ginning up this media campaign against Eric Swallow.
Now, that doesn't mean, don't read into what I was saying.
That doesn't mean I think the accusations are untrue.
I think they're probably mostly true, but I don't know.
And anyone who pretends to know, other than the actual actors in this whole thing, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I don't know.
I don't know who's telling the truth here.
Again, gun to my head, I'd say, yeah, I think so, but I would never vote that way if I were on a jury because I don't know enough.
But here's what I do know from my decades in television news and regular TV news.
This was a coordinated effort.
It cost a lot of money.
You got to fly the accusers from point A to point B. You got to get your law firms involved, making sure that every accusation is covered so that no one gets in trouble.
None of this is cheap, by the way.
You got to get your PR firms involved.
You got to get Nancy Pelosi's polygrip fund going so that her teeth don't fall out when she talks about it on the air.
My God, what is a multi millionaire, almost billionaire, doing with freaking bad dentures, by the way?
That is a mental illness.
By the way, whenever you see really wealthy people, I would never make fun of a poor or lower middle class person with bad teeth, don't get me wrong.
But when you see really rich people with bad teeth, which I see regularly, it is a red flag mental illness.
This person is either a control freak or something else is going on.
But that's, I'm sorry, sidebar.
But let me get back to this.
This is a coordinated effort.
That's where the money went, Democrat donors.
The money went for this coordinated effort.
It was very well coordinated.
Oh, and don't forget, whatever money they spent on the San Francisco Chronicle.
I'm not saying that they bribed the reporters, but I'm saying they took them out to lunch.
I'm saying they made sure they got all the stuff written.
It was probably written out for them in nice, easy bullet points that they could cut and paste.
I know how this works.
Don't even try to pretend that that isn't what happened.
I know how this business works.
We get spoon fed stuff in this business, and it's hard to say no to it sometimes, especially at the local level.
Don't, please.
And for those of you who are going to call and say, I think it was all organic, understand who you're talking to.
I don't know everything, but I know how these things go because I've been on the receiving end of this kind of stuff since my first day in local news.
I started in local news in December of 1994 at WVII in Bangor, Maine.
And the first thing I had to deal with was something from the insurance company that was sending us these great videos about how you should buy insurance for your dog.
And it was completely produced.
And I had to resist the effort to just run that.
Without any of my own input.
All right, I'm Jake Novak in for Roger Stone.
We're going to get to your calls.
We're going to talk about some of this stuff going on in Iran when we come back.
This is the Stone Zone.
Now, get it.
Get in the zone.
It's the stone zone.
A man who's gone through hell, but he's kept going and he's smart and he's strong and people love him.
Not everybody, but people love him and respect him.
Roger Stone.
Where's Roger Stone?
Here's Roger Stone.
And I'm Jake Novak filling in for Roger Stone this evening.
You know, I love independent thinkers, and I got a feeling that our first caller here, I want people to call in.
800 848 9222.
As we talk about some of these issues, because Gail in Pennsylvania, I think she's got her finger on something as a good independent thinker.
Gail, thank you for joining us.
Hi.
Hi.
Good evening, Jake.
Yes, I think that the legacy media is monopolistic.
There used to be 52 media international companies, there are now only six.
And because I asked myself, why would they be promoting the Democrat Party spin all the time?
Well, I think the answer is they want their Democrat cronies who they sponsor to put on more taxes and regulations.
Which, why would a business want that?
Well, they want to put out their small business competition.
That's right.
It's called regulatory capture.
You're exactly right.
I was right, Gail.
You are an independent thinker.
And by the way, you know what I like about another thing I like about what you had to say?
It wasn't a conspiracy theory.
You know why I don't like conspiracy theories?
Not because I think they're crazy, not because I think they're all wrong.
It's because they're so pessimistic.
Most conspiracy theories, there's really nothing you can do about it.
There's nothing you or I can do about it.
This is something that we can do about it, do something about it.
Now, Gail, we've had a tremendous reversal in this country from the beginnings of broadcast media when the government was much more vigilant about breaking up monopolies.
The government has done it before, they did it many years ago with NBC.
NBC was the dominant.
Radio station national network in this country.
It was so dominant and so popular, they had to build two channels, NBC Blue and NBC Red.
There might be one person listening who remembers this.
I'm only 55.
I don't personally remember this, but I've researched it.
And the government was like, so, at that point, it was just so obvious, like, oh my God, we got to break this up.
NBC Red became ABC because it was broken up by the government.
Here's what's the funny thing about monopolies because a lot of people think, well, these monopolist countries, companies don't want to be broken up because they'll lose money.
Wrong.
If you are a shareholder in a company that's a monopoly that gets broken up, you make a lot of money.
What they don't, the reason why they don't want their monopolies broken up is because they lose power.
They don't have as much influence.
And if you're a media company, you love influence.
And what Gail was describing was something else also regulatory capture.
They can create a situation where they lobby the government for all these licenses you need.
By the way, something like that is happening in Boston right now, not in broadcast, but with food delivery.
Boston is now imposing on everybody but Amazon.
Amazon doesn't.
Everybody who does deliveries for food in Boston has to pay for a delivery license.
And if you don't, you get like a big fine every time they catch you without the license.
That's what a big company lobbies for rules and regulations that they can afford, but their smaller competitors can't afford.
And these tech companies are so relatively new.
A lot of them are only in their 20 or 25 year period.
They know how small they used to be, they know how a small company can disrupt.
Look what they did to the big computer companies.
And look what the digital film did to Kodak.
I mean, you know, they know very well what a small company can do to them.
And the same thing with the news media.
The news media is incredibly monopolistic.
There are so many obvious breaking up.
Listen, I'm not a big government guy, but antitrust stuff is important because it really hurts an economy and it really hurts a society.
And if you think the media is bad, have you checked out hospitals lately?
The hospital industry.
Which isn't like they do anything important.
All they do is save our lives.
Hospitals have consolidated in this country more than even the media has, and even more than banks since the mid 90s.
But we allow them to consolidate.
They buy up private practices, they merge with each other.
Guess what?
It's made healthcare more expensive and worse quality.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how's the show?
Religious Ignorance and Hate00:08:33
All right, Sandra in New Jersey, you want to talk about Swalwell.
What do you got for me?
Hi, Jake.
I wanted to ask you a question.
Sure.
When I hear the word choke, he choked his victim.
To me, when you want to choke someone, that means you want to kill them.
I don't know if he wanted to do that.
I think he wanted to have sex.
So what he put in the drink makes sense.
He wanted her to cooperate.
So why would he go to that extent to choke her when she was under the influence of a drug so you don't have to choke her because she's going to cooperate anyway?
Sandra, bless your heart.
I don't, this is not the Dr. Ruth Westheimer show, but there is a, how am I going to say this in a PG 13 way?
There is a, oh my God, how am I going to say this?
There is a way of achieving sexual gratification via choking.
You got to be really careful with it.
There's been instances of people who've gone too far.
Need I say more?
Yeah, sorry about that, Sandra.
But bless your heart for not knowing all those details.
You're a good, that's not my thing, by the way.
Anyone listening, mom and dad, but I do know enough about that kind of stuff.
What can I say?
Hey, Jeff in Manhattan, you want to talk about Ro Khanna?
Oh, man.
Let me just take a deep breath because he irritates me.
Go ahead, Jeff.
I hope you hear me, right?
I hear you.
You hear me?
I hear you, Jeff.
Okay, yeah.
This guy, Ro Connor, has been leading the charge about the so called people that, you know, even tangentially were involved with Epstein and have them lose their careers.
And he's from Northern California, very close to Wewell's district.
So he can't be that stupid that he didn't know what's going on, especially since everybody says it's an open secret.
So how come he's been leading that charge against Epstein people, but not saying a word about Swahwell, a guy's biggest hypocrite, most ambitious.
Guy in the world.
And one other thing, real quick.
Sure.
I heard that he made on his stocks over 100%.
Now, that's virtually impossible.
And maybe if he did it, he probably could have maybe, if he's really smart and spent a lot of time on it, maybe done that.
So I want to know if he was spending all his time on the stocks to make the 100%, was he not serving his constituents?
And if he was doing other things, there's no way he legitimately made the 100%.
But the main thing is, Why did you shut his big mouth about Swallow when he was barking about Epstein?
All right, Jeff, let me talk about the first thing first, because that was really an astute answer.
There's a very simple answer to your question.
Why somebody like Ro Khanna, who apparently seems to be so worried about the Epstein victims, was clearly turning a blind eye to the Swallow?
Here's the answer they don't care.
You know, every once in a while, Jeff, I meet a true liberal, someone who actually really does care for the environment, a true feminist.
But 90% of the people who call themselves environmentalists, call themselves feminists, call themselves liberals are just people who hate the other side.
They don't actually care about the environment.
They just hate white Republican men and oil companies.
If an oil company tomorrow came up with the solution with a completely renewable fuel that would never pollute anything, they would still hate it.
They wouldn't want it because they don't care about the environment.
They just hate.
They don't care about women's rights.
If they did, And one of the people who's guilty of this was the great Gloria Steinem at Ms. Magazine, who refused to publish stuff in Ms. about the way that women in the Arab world are abused and wouldn't do any depictions of all the women politicians in Israel because she thought it would offend these people.
She didn't care about women's rights.
At the end of the day, she didn't.
Did she in the beginning?
Sure.
But at the end of the day, she was just another partisan hack.
And the same thing with Ro Khanna, who doesn't care about these victims.
He doesn't care about Epstein's victims, he doesn't care about Swalwell's victims.
They're just fighting this partisan war, and these people are pathetic and dangerous.
And they don't believe in anything.
And that's really dangerous.
I will take a radically religious person in Congress any day if they truly are a religious person.
At least I know what they believe in.
These people believe in nothing.
They believe in nothing, which, by the way, is sad because the established religions in the world, most of them have good food and good music.
I don't get either of those things from politics.
At least I get a good meal.
I mean, come on.
They don't care.
And that's the issue.
That's always been the issue.
And it's really rough.
And it's one of those things where I don't mind if someone has a disagreement with me, but I can see they truly believe in a particular cause.
And if I don't like the cause, at least I can say, well, at least they're a believer in something.
They're not just going to manipulate.
These people will burn the country down to gain one inch against the people they perceive as their enemies.
It is so frustrating.
We don't have a quorum in this country of key politicians who are willing to say, I want what's best for the country.
And if that means that Trump gets some bonus points for winning a war in Iran, or if the Democrats get something, then great.
We don't have a quorum, even, let alone a majority of our elected leaders who think that way.
And that is scary as AF, as they say.
Steve in New Jersey, you want to talk about the Pope and Trump?
Hey, Jake.
Yeah.
Look, full disclosure I'm nine years older than you, and I'm a Roman Catholic.
Having said that, I have no problem with what you said about the Pope.
With one exception.
There's been one pope in my life who really made a difference, who I saw him bringing people back to the church, 80s, 90s, John Paul II.
Absolutely.
And here's the difference between him and this jerk that's there now and the last jerk.
John Paul II got on the side with Reagan and Thatcher because of the issue of good versus evil.
See, that's a religious tenet of the faith, standing on the side of good and recognizing evil.
We don't know what John Paul's politics were other than that.
These two guys, they get on the right.
You follow?
They're getting into the political realm and they're wrong.
And by the way, they're on the wrong side.
The evil here is Iran and they're coming after Trump.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
Listen, as a Jew, I don't want to go too far in my criticisms of the Pope, but I can tell you that, first of all, John Paul II and my father met on a number of occasions, Benedict the 16th or the 15th.
I don't want to get that wrong, but Benedict, who also, John Paul II was a victim of the anti religious secularism of the Soviet Union and understood.
That communism and religion could never exist together, and so he was a big opponent of the Soviet Union.
He was also someone who witnessed firsthand the Holocaust.
His best friend in the world was a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust, and the Pope actually had him living in Vatican City, he had an apartment.
The Pope actually apparently spoke Yiddish pretty well, Pope John Paul II.
My point about the Pope, though, is not necessarily because of the politics.
That would be one thing.
It's just that there's so little interest in the popes personally.
Pope Francis, love him or hate him, was the most inconsequential Pope of my lifetime.
And I remember Paul VI, who almost no one remembers.
Paul VI, because he came out against the pill, you know, oral contraception, people remembered that.
That was a big issue and people were really into it at the time.
Pope Francis was an absolute non entity.
And that's exactly the opposite of what the College of Cardinals thought they were going to get from him.
They thought they were going to get this media darling who everyone was interested in.
He barely got any attention from the media, one way or the other, good or bad.
Now, this guy, they choose an American, you think, an American Pope.
This guy's going to get a lot of attention from the still America dominated media.
Well, now he's sort of getting it, but I promise you they'll forget tomorrow.
The news media is filled with religious ignoramuses who know nothing of religion.
They also don't know math.
We've already hit them on their lack of religion.
They also don't know religion.
I talked about math.
I talked about that at the beginning of the program.
These people are religious ignoramuses.
They know nothing of the church.
They know nothing of the Bible.
They know nothing of canon law, the catechism, the Talmud.
They know nothing.
And they're covering this stuff.
Naivete in a Jaded World00:07:04
I mean, not the ones who are on the beat of the bat.
I'm not talking about those people.
Those people know something.
But the mainstream media executive producers here in New York mostly don't know Jack about any religion, including Judaism.
They don't know, they know nothing.
I work with them and I know, believe me.
I'm not going to name them.
I'm not going to say I'm a great genius, but they know nothing.
You know, a lot of the executive producers in this town are Jewish.
If I put a Hebrew prayer book in front of them, they couldn't read it.
If I put a Talmud in front of them, they wouldn't even know what it is.
By the way, the Talmud is a 13 volume long thing.
It's in Aramaic, it has no punctuation.
I studied it as a, you know, starting in my middle school years.
It's a bear.
It's a bear.
But it's, by the way, basically how we live our lives as Jews, comes from the discussions there.
None of them know anything.
And they certainly don't know anything about the Pope.
They know nothing.
But they're going to try to make him a hero now.
All right, we're going to be back with more of your calls when we come back.
I'm Jake Novak in for the Roger Stone Zone.
Hope you're enjoying the program.
This is the Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
That is a great, great person, Roger Stone.
The Stone Zone is The Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
Roger Stone, who's a very, very one of the smartest political minds.
Roger Stone was persecuted.
People forget he's actually a brilliant, brilliant political analyst.
Now, get him a zone.
It's the Stone Zone.
Here's Roger Stone.
And I'm Jake Novak filling in for Roger Stone.
Got a few minutes left.
I had promised a little bit of an update on the Iran situation.
Blockade's still in effect, but we're seeing in the last hour or so some explosions going off in Iran.
And of course, the U.S. and Israel have stopped bombing.
So this would obviously be perhaps.
Resistance groups getting going there.
Hopefully, that's what's happening.
I'm certainly rooting for the free Iranian people to try to become free.
We'll keep a good eye on that.
I promise you, I'm taking this with a grain of salt.
I know it's most likely not necessarily the big uprising just yet, but when you're hoping for something, you at least report on it.
And as a responsible journalist, I just want to let you know that that's been happening in the last hour or so.
So let's hope that leads to something good there.
What can I tell you?
Also, want to tell you about a couple of other things.
We have here in New York City this incredible lesson about socialism and how it doesn't work.
And I was very humbled in 2016, 2015 going into 2016, because I, at that point, had spent about 10 good years of my career making these kinds of explanations, doing it on Fox and on CNBC, shows that I was running, letting people understand why socialism doesn't work, trying to explain these basic economic things, trying to remind people that capitalism has.
Ended so much poverty in the world more than anything else, not even almost anything.
And I thought I was getting through to something.
And then, you know, as the election moved on that year, I saw that Donald Trump was going to win.
And if the Democrats had been fair in their primaries, it would have been Bernie Sanders coming in second.
And I realized no one's listening to me.
And not because Donald Trump's a socialist, but that wasn't any of his real message, really.
He talked about it a little bit, but he was talking about the borders.
He was talking about our competition with other countries, which, of course, was a very pro capitalist message.
But, you know, I was humbled.
I realized, you know what?
My message, as good as I think it is, as far as on an intellectual level, it's a good thing I'm not running for office.
And, you know, when I'm, I don't know if this is true for you guys listening out there, but when I'm personally humbled that way, my best work comes next.
And when I got humbled by that and I saw how well Trump was doing in May of 2016, I wrote the editorial.
I was a senior editorial columnist at CNBC at the same time that I was running Larry Kudlow's show.
And I wrote the editorial saying that Trump was going to win.
I realized at that point he was going to win the election.
And I explained why at that point no one was giving him a chance.
We published it, I think, on the first day of June, even though I wrote it a few days before that.
And I spent the rest of that year leading up to the election being pressured by the bosses of CNBC to like retract it.
They thought it would be really, really good if somebody who had really written something saying he was going to win said, Oh, I was wrong.
I realize now he's going to lose.
And I just said, No, he's going to win.
And by the way, that was the beginning of the end for me at CNBC.
Having someone who was a reasoned, educated, and I'm not a genius.
I'm not a PhD.
By the way, I have that in my family.
So I know what a real genius is and I know what a real PhD is.
I'm neither.
But having someone who's relatively well educated, well reasoned, not a yeller, being someone who was explaining why Trump was going to win and explaining some of the policies was much more dangerous than the biggest MAGA person going to 100 rallies on the staff.
You understand why.
They kept me around for a little while after that, but the writing was on the wall.
Anyway, my point is I was humbled, though.
I was humbled by the fact that I didn't see Trump coming.
I was humbled by the fact that he was already running for a few months before I realized he was going to win.
And when that happened, when I had that moment of clarity, I had some of my best work.
So listen, I get humbled all the time in the work that I do.
That's why I'm on record.
Anyone can say, Jake, you said this a few months ago.
You were really wrong.
And if I can find out why I was wrong, which I usually can do, it's easier to find out why you were wrong, right?
Than making the mistake, than avoiding the mistake in the first place, right?
That happens.
Then I can really learn from it.
And that's a great way to go.
It's a great way to go.
So, folks, it's quite impressive.
I don't know if you heard one of the great all time radio moments a few minutes ago on this program when we had a woman call in and bless her heart, wanted to know why Eric Swalwa would bother choking his victims when he already drugged them.
And I had to try to explain in a PG version that some people find that's kind of a sexual move.
Not mine.
I'm not personally into that.
Please don't choke me.
But anyway, that's the answer to that question.
That was a delicate moment for us here.
This is a family program.
But honestly, good for her for that kind of night.
That's a good kind of naivete to have in this day and age.
You're also jaded.
We're all so jaded in this world.
I feel better about a lot of things.
I also feel better that I didn't actually have to explain all the little details about all that.