The following is a transcript from the Pro America Report.
Welcome, welcome, welcome. Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Great to be together today. We’ve got another great program. We will have a couple of interesting guests.
Again, we’ll talk to our friend Dr. Ted Malloch, and he will talk about Italy. He knows Giorgia Meloni personally, so that’s cool.
And John Schlafly will join us, and we’ll talk a little about the Supreme Court and some cases up there.
What you need to know today is a souffle only rises once.
A souffle only rises once. The phrase is one that’s been bandied around in politics a number of times. It is variously attributed to different people. I think it was, I think, was it Margaret Truman that initially said it somewhere in that period of time. The other phrase you’ll sometimes hear it is the souffle never rises twice. Either one of those works fine.
My point in telling you that is that you’re starting to see the stories of Beto O’Rourke. Beto O’Rourke was the guy who ran for Senate a few years ago and came kind of close to beating Ted Cruz. Then he ran for president and didn’t come anywhere near there. And now he’s running for governor of Texas, and he’s losing. They’re starting to write the stories, and they’re saying Beto O’Rourke is, it’s the end of his career if he loses.
Now, here’s the interesting thing. You can have sort of second chances in politics, but you sort of have to figure out how to either ride it up, ride the wave up and succeed, or come back later. My examples are, you know, Barack Obama was a state senator. He then ran for U.S. senator and won and kept going and won for president.
So he kept sort of rising. He rose with the thing.
Other examples of sort of you flame out. I mean, John Edwards was a big one, but he flamed out more spectacularly. But on the Republican side, like Rick Santorum, there was a minute where Rick Santorum seemed to be a real national leader. And then next time he ran, nothing. Huckabee ran. Next time there was nothing. You sort of have, especially when you rise in the polls, you sort of have one chance unless you can build on it. Now, here’s an interesting thought.
Somebody like Pete Buttigieg, he ran and was the, you know, the red hot souffle rising. And then he stepped into the Cabinet and sort of insulated himself. Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz ran, and he was hot in 2016, and he’s sort of been back around a little bit. He’s been able to kind of rebrand himself and work through the Senate.
But it’s funny to see Beto O’Rourke was, literally they were calling him the second coming of John F. Kennedy, the original, not JFK Jr. for all the people that are conspiracy theories. And Beto O’Rourke was going to be this incredible populist success. He was going to end up as president of the United States, blah, blah, blah, and his career’s ending, ending fairly miserably.
And it does bring to mind, I have said, that it will be very difficult to be a two term president because the klieg lights of the modern era are much brighter. They’re not just bright. In fact, they’re 100% bright as day, 24 hours a day. If the klieg lights were bright in the past, they at least came on at night and they kept you up late, but then they went out. and during the day . . . . They’re on 100 percent, a million watts, megawatts of energy shining onto people in office is very hard to sustain, I think, for in the long term. And so somebody like even, well, Biden, obviously, it’s incredible to watch the difference in his cognitive ability over the last few years. That’s unbelievable to watch. But even a younger person, you will see the difference be very, very stark. And I think that’s because of the dynamic you have in our current system of this sort of bright lights that never stop. There’s no break to it, and there won’t be. There won’t be at all.
But the stories of Beto O’Rourke, I mean, he’s down by ten points right now. And these polls are lies. This is the period of time where they’re lying about the polls. So you’re going to see that over and over again. What will be interesting to see is if there are any others who either well, there’ll be two things to see to watch in the fall.
There will be some new stars rising, and there will be some others that step out and fade.
One is Beto O’Rourke, of course, but it will be Herschel Walker if he wins. Will that be a big one? Could be, if the Republicans win the Senate. Senator Rick Scott, who has been the head of the campaign committee, I think he will try to take credit and rise. He’s a very wealthy guy who is also positioned to run for president if he wants to.
Now, let me shift gears to Elon Musk. I’m trying to look at my notes here. I’m trying to get it. Elon Musk has made this bid for Twitter.
He changed his mind about the lawsuit over Twitter. Well, he’s in the lawsuit because Twitter sued him and said you have to go forward. He said, okay, I’ll go forward at the regular price. I think it seemed like he was negotiating to go down. He’s going to say, I’ll pay 54 plus dollars a share. The reality of this is, if he goes through with the sale, it probably would happen in the next three months, six months, so he would be in charge by 2024.
He says he’s for free speech. But here’s the question. Here’s how these are related.
How powerful is the choice of big tech and big media of who the rising stars are?
How powerful is big tech and big media at defining the range, the constellation of stars in politics. If you just watch the coverage of, say, Alex Jones. Alex Jones is a one. It’s not fair. It must be 80% name I.D. in America done by the media and big tech. Even as they ban him, they promote him, meaning people know who he is.
And I’m reminded there was a number that was analyzed, and I don’t know if it was scientific or it was anecdotal of the number of times that Kamala Harris was talked about as a leading presidential candidate, now, on CNN. She was, the head of CNN at the time, Jeff Zucker had a fundraiser for her, had said she was one of the great candidates.
She was a terrible candidate for president, and yet she ended up VP. And the power of the media to pick the range of winners and losers is more powerful than ever.
So now, pausing, it is true 100 years ago, maybe 120 years ago, you had Pulitzer and you had Hearst helping to pick their candidates. They wrote about them. They talked about them. They defined them. That’s common. There’s nothing about that that’s uncommon.
That the power of media and the power of the messaging, getting the message out can be controlled and dominated by, you know, at a certain point in Chicago, there was the Chicago Tribune and other entities. Time magazine had a disproportionate influence at one point.
But the power of big tech and big media, it’s beyond anything we’ve ever had.
And without even knowing it, we are having our choices defined for us. So think about how what it would be like to know and have glowing interviews and glowing analyses and glowing, you know, New York Times magazine pieces on, pick somebody.
Pick somebody that’s not famous right now. I guess Devin Nunes already had that happen a little bit. But right now, we are being told by the media that Ron DeSantis is the candidate, right? He’s being picked. We’re being told that Ron DeSantis’s is this and that. Now he’s done a pretty good job. I’m not actually complaining.
I’m just saying, beware of Fox News telling us who our candidates are. Beware of CNN telling us who our candidates are, and by coverage and big tech.
You know, I did an interview earlier today, and they played back the clip of Zuckerberg saying that the FBI contacted him a month or two before the election in 2020 and said, beware Russian disinformation is coming.
And then when the Hunter Biden laptop came, the intelligence community said, it’s Russian disinformation. And Zuckerberg said, Oh, I guess it is. We were warned about that, and they shut it down. Again, those are just the ones you’re seeing. These are just the examples that you can see because it’s become publicly known or become somewhat known.
Imagine the power of being able to pick which souffle rises, which star is a shooting star, and of course, which star has the most trouble. You talk about the wrapup smear that Nancy Pelosi’s talked about where she said, you know, you say a smear, they write the smear, then you cite the writing of the smear. Then you go forward.
I have told you over and over again, that’s amateur hour, the wrap up smear. What she really means is the Narrative Machine, where big government frames the issue, media covers it, then the politicians comment on it.
And the best example is Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida, who the smear on him was big government. They said, oh, we’re investigating trafficking. Trafficking. Now, Matt Gaetz was single at the time. He’s married now. He was single. He was certainly dating. I think that was he was well known. He’s a Floridian. He’s a goodlooking enough guy. I think he had a bunch of different girlfriends. And so there he is.
The Narrative Machine said we must cover, the Department of justice, sources say we’re investigating him. One of his friends looks like a real letch. And for years now, two years, the media has covered that, and the media has frozen that politician. He is, was, one of the more effective communicators on the Republican side, and he was totally iced out.
Big tech and big media picked the winners and losers. And again, they don’t have to say, don’t pick so and so to be your presidential candidate. They never let them emerge. They never let them emerge. It’s like the coverage of Nikki Haley, who I’m no fan of, as she tries to be positioned for president, she gets more coverage from the media that wants to cover her. In my opinion she’s pretty soft on a bunch of conservative issues, and she’s kind of a neocon. Not kind of. She is. Now, she did support Trump at times, and backed off at times, but she’s picked by Fox News. She’s picked by CNN. And the universe that we’re allowed to look at that we can see in the sky, the stars that we can see in the sky are controlled by big tech and big media like never before.
It’s breathtaking. A souffle only rises once, and we don’t even get to do the bakin’ anymore. That’s the problem. All right?
That’s what you need to know. We’ll take a break. We’ll be right back.
It’s Ed Martin here in the Pro America Report. Don’t forget visit ProAmericaReport.com. Sign up there for the daily emails. ProAmericaReport.com. Be right back, Ed Martin here on the Pro America Report. Back in a moment.
