All right, now everybody quiet. Listen to me. We're going to start a show. Now, some of you people have been with me before. You know it's going to be a tough grind, but we're going to have a show.
Oh, thank you. It's such a pleasure to return. Thank you. There is no crowd up. Please, people, please, please. There is, there is nothing like the warmth of a recorded audience to make me feel wanted around the holidays. And there is no group that I would rather spend time with as we review the hellscape that is America and the earth and the human species bent on its own destruction. We will review the weekend with you that was filled with horror. Frankly, the shocking news out of Hollywood that in itself is horrifying. The broader issues that are no longer even implicit, I think explicitly laid out in some of what's going on worldwide when it comes to anti-semitism. And it's a sad state of affairs on one level. However, it's not all a sad show. First of all, three of my favorite guests will be here today.
Gary Dietrich with the raw politics of things. That's bottom of this first hour. Also coming up, Liz Oyer is here, everyone. That's right. Liz Oyer, the pardon attorney, who has been so wonderfully outspoken and I think so wonderfully elucidative, if I can use that word. I like to. Yes, that's my holiday ding word. Just shedding a lot of light on the pardon process and how it has been completely perverted by this administration. I mean, it is so perverted to the point that you'd like to see the power of the pardon reversed or modified. But I'll discuss with Liz why you might like to see that. That will never happen. There is no incoming administration that would then roll back their own ability to produce pardons. The fiat, the utter caprice, the impulsive crap that goes into these Donald Trump pardons is embarrassing and in itself a comment on how far we've fallen over ruling his own justice department. His own justice department working hard to bring some of these cases to bear, some of these convictions to the finish line and then he just pardons it. He just issues a pardon. So, we'll get into that with Liz Oyer, but we'll also discuss the real, I think broader issue that kind of overhangs everything in America and that is can you put Humpty Dumpty back together again? I don't think you can, but I don't think you should stop trying. And I feel as though whatever pieces you can put together, just as we've seen, whatever bits of damage have been done by the administration that you can handle in the courts, for example, or that you can modify or soften maybe through the courts, you must do it. You're compelled to do it. So, we'll talk to Liz about that. And then, of course, Sarah Kenzor joins us. Top of the next hour. She's brilliant, she is blunt, and she is truly a gift to this show. She joins us every Monday. So, thank you for being here. Tony, I've missed you.
Hi, Tony.
And Kim, I've missed you as well. It's nice. How are you?
Nice to see you both.
Did you miss Lucy?
Lucy, my favorite Mulligan, is rocking early on. Big shout out to Lucy Mulligan. We are a crowdfunded show. I won't go into all the details, but I'll just tell you that much of the ad revenue associated with YouTube shows has been drained, has been reallocated, I guess might be a way to say it. So, all I'm trying to mention to you is if you support independent media of any kind, do support it. Continue to support it because it likely needs your support and we fall into that category. So, I make a big deal out of the part of the crowd that funds us. And again, we're generally fueled by Patreon and PayPal. And so, if you're part of that crowd, wow, you rock it. Thank you so very much. And for those of you who throw in on super stickers and super chats, that's a great way to support this show because no matter what happens with ad revenue, we get to keep those things associated with super chat and super stickers. So, thank you for that as well. I'm sick over the Reiner murders, says Dlette. The New Zealand murders and the murders at Brown University. I think it was Australia, but your point's taken.
What the f? Let's start with um, let's start with the Reiner stuff because I think it's just a little shocking and it's bizarre and yet I think I hate to say it in this kind of, you know, we'll start with this tragic story but there they are. The Reiners. Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle. And by all accounts, he was a wonderful man. I mean, with a heart in the right place, politically active. Created and directed some of the most memorable films in history, in the history of cinema. I guess that's the Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan, Rob Reiner group shot from When Harry Met Sally. And I don't mean to make this about, you know, you have a choice here. You can make this about his legacy and about who he was and what he was and who she was and what she was. And I think on some level we'll do that in the short time we have. But also the bizarre nature of this. You can't ignore that. There's Rob Reiner as a director. You'll remember he probably never needed to work again after the fame and success he achieved on All in the Family, but then he went and there he is with Carroll O'Connor. I mean, this show was number one, All in the Family by a lot.
Yep. And it took on serious societal issues, cultural issues, and it was funny as hell. And Rob Reiner was a key part of it. It was a small cast. But he went on, as I say, to direct all of these wonderful films. I mean,
That's from Stand by Me. Is that Stand by Me?
Yeah. Stand by Me. Yeah.
And those actors in Stand by Me, of course, they went on to their own careers. But his, you know, he wasn't limited that way. Rob Reiner's list, he did Misery, you'll remember.
A Few Good Men, that was the Aaron Sorkin script but he directed it.
The Princess Bride, massive movie. And I mean, think about these films.
Yeah. This Is Spinal Tap. And he wasn't done. I mean, he was still making movie magic. His career has been cut short. Even at, you know, was he 78? He was still working and still creative and still making a mark.
He just had done the sequel to Spinal Tap. Just finished that. He did a whole promotion tour on the talk shows. You probably saw him if you watch any late night talk shows. And he did another movie called The American President. And that was a movie I was in.
And it was the first film that I was cast in when I arrived in Los Angeles. And the reason I mention it is it was a really big deal to me because it wasn't just like reporter number two or anchor number one. The character had a name. And the only reason I know that that was important is because Jane Jenkins, who cast the film with Rob, told me, 'This is a big deal that you have a named character.' And I had and she said, 'And you have a scene with a principal.' And again, I just kind of was getting to know all these terms meant.
And I had a scene with Richard Dreyfuss. So we were... It was very exciting to me.
Did you get to meet Rob Reiner?
Well, of course. Rob Reiner is directing, you know. But listen, I don't want to mischaracterize it. I was no friend of Rob Reiner. I didn't know him well, but I knew his work. And then later I went on to create a show, an animated show called The Agent. And we did a pilot and the lead character, The Agent, was voiced by Rob Reiner.
And what I remember from the table read was that he had to get up at one point to take a call from Al Gore. He was a very active Democrat. He was in the Democratic party in an active way and I feel as though Rob Reiner was involved in righteous causes. But here is the tragedy of family. His son battled addiction. They did a movie together about the battle that his son was enduring and going through. And clearly, I mean, I don't know. This is speculation, but I'm guessing that his son on and off medication may have been off medication on this night in Brentwood where he takes the life of his mother and father. I mean, it's positively stupefying. You just don't know.
What, there it is, Being Charlie. Thank you, Tony. That was the name of the film that was really about addiction and about a father-son relationship that was torn to pieces by addiction. And at the end of the movie, there was real question the two of them had as to how to end it because, you know, it's not always the happiest ending. And they did end it with sort of a rapprochement, you know, the two get back together and there's a warming of relations. It's not clear that that was the way the Rob Reiner and Nick Reiner relationship actually ended. Although Reiner himself said that they, and I think Nick made the point as well, they became closer through the process and that they did actually get closer. But you know, things that we know, the apparently it's likely the daughter found them.
And made this call to police and then Nick now is in custody. He is likely charged with murder, a double murder. And his mother Michelle and his father Rob are losses that this community feels very deeply. Devastating, as Kim says, these are vital, vibrant, continuing productive members of the community. And so this is a crime of violence that's so horrifying.
That adds to the tragedy. You know, what else do we know, Kim? Anything?
I think it's important to note, and I love that you made it about Rob Reiner, but I know a lot of people are talking, especially in the chat, about the president's response to the deaths of a man and his wife who have made a mark on American culture. Right. This is a death. Whether you loved him from All in the Family or whether you loved his movies or whatever it is, he has fans and people who will be saddened by the news of his death. And instead of coming out and saying something simple but comforting, think, we're saddened to hear of the deaths of the Reiner family, whatever, he didn't say that. He said something really ugly because of Rob Reiner's politics. So, I'll read this off the screen with all of you. So, it means I have to make this screen bigger. If I freeze or if I drop out or something because of some internet thing, Kim will pick it up. A very sad thing, this is from Donald Trump. A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away together with his wife Michelle, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind-crippling disease known as, this is in capital letters, Trump Derangement Syndrome, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people crazy, in capital letters, by his raging obsession of President, I'm reading it even though it's not grammatically correct. I'm reading it the way he wrote it. Driven people crazy by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness. And with the golden age of America upon us perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michelle rest in peace. Exclamation point.
What was that? I mean, what is that?
That's insanity to me. I mean, you can see Trump is losing it, right? He's an obsessed older man. I mean, I hate to say old man because there are so many people who are old who are vibrant, clear thinkers. So, somehow I don't mean to suggest that being old is at all an infirmity.
But I mean, in the classic sort of parodied way that, you know, an old man sits there in the White House and it's 3:00 a.m. and he just punches out these hateful screeds. That's what he is. And it's, to what end? To what end? I mean, is that to own the libs? Does that really land with MAGA people? To own the libs? I don't know. It just is a sad coda to the whole thing. But believe it or not, I got to move on. I've got other tragedy in the world that I want to touch on. And I am so saddened by this crime of violence. Clearly a crime and horror perpetrated by someone who literally was insane, brought on by some chemical imbalance perhaps mentally, some cerebral issue. I mean, I don't know what was going on with Nick Reiner, but I know that this is a horrifying event.
And it's not one perpetrated by someone in their right mind. And the last thing I'll say is that, you know, when you use a knife in this way, it's clearly a crime filled with emotion. You know, they talk about crimes of passion. This is that. And so you can see that whatever derangement he had, whatever illness he had, mental illness, it was fueling a rage in him. I mean, again, you don't have all the information. How can you say? Guys, come on. I mean, certain things seem self-evident. And so that makes it all worse. Somehow it does. I can't imagine coming on a scene in her home where she finds her mother and father that way, the daughter. The whole thing is profoundly sad.
So that is that when it comes to this situation in Hollywood. Obviously if we have any more details we'll let you know. So, the Mark Thompson Show. I wish I had better news to move on to, but actually the biggest story worldwide, I think, in terms of hate crimes and tragedy is this mass shooting killed at least 11 at Bondi Beach in Australia.
The Jews in Australia already suffering from two years of unprecedented anti-semitism. And so many gathered on this beach and it was a celebration of the start of Hanukkah and the result is this horror. And Kim, we have some video I believe in all of this there is a remarkable story within the story.
But this is the first time that gun violence, and gun violence in Australia is not common the way it is here as you know. It comes after this major report and this is the first gun violence turned on Jews in Australia. But it comes after this major report that was just issued documenting a rise in anti-Semitic events in Australia in the last two years. And so the story within the story is that there were acts of heroism. There was one very high-profile act of heroism in all of this. Even as a father and his son were the perpetrators of this horror in Australia. The father's in his 50s or 53 I think and the son is 24, something like that.
And they are just shooting at all of these celebrants, of all of these observers. Tony's showing you a still of And this is true heroism. A guy disarming the one of these perpetrators. Actually, I think it's the younger guy. His name is Ahmad Al Ahmed. He's a 43-year-old owner of a fruit shop nearby. He's a bystander to all of this. And he took the gun off of the perpetrator, according to officials, at great risk to himself, suffered serious injury as a result of that, had to go to the hospital, be operated on, but a relative of Al Ahmed told Australian TV news service that he was shot twice during this incident and that he would not hesitate to step in to stop death and suffering.
Extraordinary. Really extraordinary. At least 16 people apparently, including one of the alleged gunmen, died at the shooting in Sydney. They were 10 years old to 87 years old. And some of the stories within the stories beyond the heroism that Kim has just described, remarkable. I mean, I think there was a Holocaust survivor who was killed. I mean, imagine being a Holocaust survivor. You're now the victim of more anti-Semitic violence, Jew haters opening fire on a Hanukkah celebration. He threw himself over his wife to protect her and that's how he died. It's a remarkable thing. The couple both Holocaust survivors and they faced the unspeakable terror of the Holocaust of the Nazis, dreadful conditions in Siberia. He survived. He along with his mother and younger brother struggled for survival. The notion that they could seek a brighter future out of that. They moved to Australia from Ukraine and now he's dead.
Tony, can we show the picture of Matilda? Matilda was 10 years old. 10 years old and she was on the beach celebrating Hanukkah with her family. I mean, it's just the saddest thing. She was called bright and joyful and spirited and a child who brought light to everyone around her. I mean, you have a Holocaust survivor, you have a 10-year-old child. It's just the senselessness of hate. I don't... Yeah. It's deliberate. It's anti-Semitic. It's Jew hating on a level we've never seen before in Australia with a kind of targeted violence. It's the deadliest mass shooting in Australia since 1996. The entire incident raises questions about the radicalization around anti-semitism. And you can look at Australia and go, 'Well, they have strict gun laws.' And there's already talk in Australia about changing these gun laws, making them more intense. But I mean, I think what provokes even greater discussion is, you know, why do we still have these targeted moments of Jew hating and Jew killing, killing members of the Jewish community during these moments and celebrations meant for joy. It is endemic. And of course, it's been supercharged by the Gaza situation. The Gaza situation kind of gave license to a lot of these people who I think are looking for an excuse to hate on Jews. And so this community that has suffered since the beginning of time with pogroms and with ethnic cleansing and with everything that defines the kind of persecution that they have been used to. This community has thrived in pockets and across the world, but has always had to worry about this, about violence that has spiked in the last two years worldwide. And in Australia, where these gun laws are so much tougher, these gunmen find a way to turn guns on the Jewish community.
And still, unlike America, the Australian prime minister is promising tougher gun laws after this shooting. So at least there's that. You know that here in America, someone opens fire on a school like we had a shooting at Brown University. You hear anything about tougher gun laws? You hear nothing. You hear nothing about doing something about the problem.
Well, as I said to you years ago on this show, once Sandy Hook happened and there were no additional gun laws, I knew that this country would never have any sort of gun laws. It was the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan and his chief of staff that produced some gun legislation that was then allowed to lapse. But after Sandy Hook, if you can kill elementary school students on that level and still not produce any action, that is a country that is completely held hostage by the fetishized nature of guns, the relationship, if you will, the cultural relationship we have with guns. And you can say the NRA, the political heft of the NRA or just the political essence associated with guns and gun ownership, meaning you don't need the NRA anymore. It's sort of baked in that if you do anything toward gun legislation or restriction, it's going to cost you politically. So,
By the way, just as a note, because I think really the story here is one of Jew hating.
Because that's what this is. A Jewish family in San Bernardino County, victims of hate crime by three suspects who opened fire on their home. This just happened last night. I believe it was last night, actually. It might have been two nights ago. 8:00 at night, the father and his son about to leave and apparently three suspects, two women and a man in a four-door sedan come by and were yelling, 'Free Palestine.' Then they used the N-word and then opened fire. The father and son got into their car, drove away, but moments later, the family's home surveillance cameras captured the vehicle returning, firing more than 20 rounds. What was likely, according to investigators, an airsoft gun. So what is that? Like, is that a BB gun or is that an airsoft gun?
It's kind of like a BB gun. It shoots, it's just kind of like a BB but a little different, but essentially yeah.
I mean again, this is intimidation and a horrifying rise of anti-Semitic violence.
Well, the family had Hanukkah decorations up outside of their home.
And so now what you have, according to another article, is New York, Los Angeles law enforcement all on alert after this Australian mass shooting at Bondi Beach during a Hanukkah celebration. And now you have people, I would imagine, that are scared to have decorations in front of their home, you know, that are frightened to show their religion to anyone or celebrate in any way. Don't go to Hanukkah celebrations that are public, right? But what I was reading was that one of the aspects of Hanukkah celebrations is that you show your menorah in the window. Like that's apparently something that is very much part of the Jewish tradition around Hanukkah. It's a festival of lights. So in a way, the idea is to be showing that we are a home that celebrates this holiday. But as you say, I mean now you'd be scared. And isn't that the idea?
I mean, I think I would be scared, you know, given everything that's going on.
Temples have to hire security guards now.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
Oh, no. I mean, the Jewish community is definitely a community that is facing some renewed challenges, but as I was saying before, they're a community that has faced challenges, it seems, since the beginning of time. All right, we continue, the Mark Thompson Show. It is great to be back. One of the things that I have looked forward to all weekend is talking to this guy. He is the political ninja who is the political analyst at iHeart Radio, also across the CBS television station. He's our former colleague at KGO Radio. How about it for the wonderful Gary Dietrich, everyone?
Well, good morning, Mark, on a very sobering Monday for all the reasons I know you and Kim have already been talking about and more. It's, these things are always difficult but during a holiday season when Jews, Christians, others are celebrating their highest of holy days, it is particularly tragic.
Yeah, I think that's so very true. I mean, you sort of hope that the spirit of the holiday season is bringing brotherhood, a fraternity, a sense of oneness to the world. Those are the ideals, I think, that are embodied in the holiday season. And yet, this reminds us that sadly, it's a complicated world and it's filled with those who are bent on tearing it to pieces. And so I want to ask you, and I'm going to get to Brown University in a second. I want to ask you something that is a little more may overlap a bit with that which you're so good at, which is I think dissecting and understanding the body politic, and in this case I'm going to extend it to the world. So this may be a big ask, but I feel, and I was just noting that in the time since the Gaza thing started, the world of anti-semitism and violence against the Jewish community has been animated in a way that we really just haven't seen in many decades. And all the statistics bear that out. The Gaza thing became the hook on which many Jew haters could hang their hate and try to justify it and wash it somehow in a righteousness. I wonder if you can help me figure if that's just the state of things or if we can get back to some kind of reasonable conversation that brings us some tranquility.
Yeah, Mark, that's a good and in some ways profound question. You know, let me answer that on a couple levels real quickly if I can. First off, I don't think there's any doubting exactly what you say, and that is that the Gaza situation was a new trigger point. It happened on college campuses. It happened all over social media. It happened on the mainstream media. It happened all over the world. And that's the point I sort of want to get to first is that the modern media particularly social media right now creates the sad ability for what would have been seen as sort of a regional crisis to a global crisis and one in which everybody not only has an opinion but sadly can organize and orchestrate nefarious activities related to that news. Does that make any sense? It doesn't just happen in Israel or in Gaza. It isn't just on your nightly news as in the past once at six o'clock, maybe at 11. It's 24/7. And so that does give rise to the opportunity for all kinds of craziness to ensue. You know, you use the word Jew hating. Some people would just go, you know, it's an opportunity for people to vent about what they perceive to be Zionist activities that, you know, America's favored nation status with Israel in the Middle East. I mean, there's so many different aspects to it, right? And I think that is true. The crazy part of it to me is what you and Kim were just talking about, that it gets down to decorations of somebody's home in a Los Angeles region, right? That's the part of it. Now, I think that has become in many ways the most deeply concerning. If it's a regional crisis or a nation state conflict, people sort of say, 'Okay, well, those have been going on for thousands of years.' But the attacks on innocent people on a beach in Australia, on a home in a neighborhood in the LA region, that's the part of it that I think in some ways, Mark, maybe raises it to a new level.
Yeah, those are such good points. The notion that a community of any kind has to go underground or has to be careful about talking about or showing the way they observe, you know, it's funny, you may recall, I'm sure you do recall, after the Iranian revolution and then the students, as they were called, who took over the embassy and the hostage crisis and the sentiment of America, of course, turning very much against Iran. The Iranian community in America felt very, in an instant, sort of persecuted or threatened might be a better word, and it took a long time to get over. I mean, the hostage crisis went on a long time, but I'm just saying the after effects really took a long time to fade as well. This one just is one of those persistent generational type conflicts and issues and prejudices that is formed by a kind of bigotry that just doesn't seem to be unrelenting, you know.
Yeah. And you know, I recently went and saw Nuremberg, the new movie that Russell Crowe stars in that is amazingly graphic in some ways if people have seen it and amazingly poignant about one of the apexes in history of this. But I think what I'm hearing from you, Mark, is sort of it just doesn't seem to fade. I mean, it does. It goes sort of in cycles, right? And you're right, other people groups have been singled out more recently. People are talking about the Somali people, right? All of them are not, quote unquote, grifters in Minnesota, obviously, but people can get labeled that way. And that's truly and tragically sad. To tie this real quickly into the politics of this and the policy, you know, apparently, I mean, now some of the details are coming out about the two individuals in Australia who had six licensed weapons, right? These weren't just something they got off a black market or smuggled in. And that's just part of the problem. You know, how do you effectively combat some of this through any kind of a regulatory or legislative framework? It's not as easy as it sounds, especially when Australia and others do have restrictions that we don't currently in the US, but they apparently in Australia's case were ineffective.
Yeah. Yeah. And of course then there's the Brown University killing which just, you know, begins to just like, oh yeah, that's sort of the typical American killing, right? It's on a college campus. They have no suspect yet in custody. But what was odd to me about that or notable among all of the horror is that those kids who were affected by that shooting on the Brown campus are used to shooting drills. They're used to these drills that actually run through active shooter scenarios. In fact, one of the girls there or women there, the students who was studying, she was a victim, if you will. I mean, again, she survived it, but she was a victim of a shooting at her high school. There were two high school shootings that that girl lived through. I mean, this is America where we have to sort of run through this stuff like it was just a fire drill.
Well, and there's one more recent incident that has been really shocking to people. I think this happened, Mark, while you were gone, but the Stockton, California shooting at the birthday party for a young child where multiple people were killed, many more wounded in what now appears to be a gang related shooting where, you know, they just stormed into a birthday party with 100 people and just started literally unloading. And one of the challenges there has been that because of the fear in those communities about gang violence, it's been exceptionally difficult to get anybody to turn people in, to have any kind of state's evidence brought to say, 'Do you know any of these individuals?' People are just mum because they're fearful of the consequences. So, as you know, Mark, there's sometimes a lot of different antecedents to these various things. All of them are worthy to take note of and really have to be addressed continually in the public arena. I'm going to follow up on the Somali thing with you here a little bit just with also a view toward the demonization of certain communities or certain people, and I think that demonization has taken on, at least in its early stages, those who are here in undocumented capacity. They are, and then different narratives, they're taking your jobs, they're taking your housing, they're taking your social programs, whatever it might be. I mean, most of it is not true, but the compartmentalized Somali, Latinos, etc. And of course, we've had the Arab community affected here in this country. We've had the Asian community affected in this country. I'm wondering how that's playing and this gets to you, and this is why I'm asking you politically, because we even in Southern California know that the Latino community isn't particularly an encumbrance, that they do a lot of things and are a vital part of both the culture and the economy. I think that's true in the communities that have large Somali populations and Arab populations, etc. So, I'm wondering how that's playing politically because there's really an effort to demonize them and yet I don't know that it's sticking.
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you one thing that you're, I think you're seeing happen very rapidly, especially in Washington. And that is a lot of members of the GOP are saying, you know, listen, we don't buy any of this stuff, right, about like this group, that group. I think there's a real concerted effort to push back, you know, whatever verbiage is emanating from different political circles by, I'm just going to say it, the more responsible members of both parties who are just saying, you know, enough is enough of this garbage. You know, no, it's not every Somali. Certainly no, it's not every Latino. You just go down the list, right? No, it's not every black person any more than it's any woman or man or whatever. And I think that, you know, the term that's been used, as you know, Mark, in the past, so-called identity politics, where one aspect of politics, one branch of politics or another either takes on and adopts sort of an identity group right or rejects them, seeing that as somehow politically advantageous, I sense that there's far more caution and even weariness and frankly disgust about that than I think they're, at least that I've witnessed inside places like the Beltway.
Well, that's encouraging because it strikes me as just personally as a colossal, well, it's a colossal waste of money. I mean, this whole thing, the Department of Homeland Security being supercharged. These ICE agents who are, in my view, just glorified thugs going into these neighborhoods and performing all of this. I mean, to me, that's it. But it's also insanely divisive and wasteful of whatever political capital could have been used in a positive way. And so, there's a piece of video, isn't there, Tony? There's a video with the gnome, I think, taking on, and I understand that this could be viewed as sort of political grandstanding on some level. This is kind of why I'm playing it for you. Tell me, does this stuff land or is this the stuff that Democrats on the left just kind of run in their silo and in the GOP right silo, it just never gets the light of day. Go ahead, Tony. This is back and forth between Christine Gnome and here she is on... Oh, that's her on a horse. Are you okay? Waiting. Yeah, she does a lot of videos. By the way, I just came back from out of the country and you are inundated with Christy Gnome videos as you know. You're inundated with the airport domestically if you're flying or going anywhere. You're in, they really do a lot of media this administration. And by the way, maybe that's not a bad thing. Meaning, you know, maybe the Biden administration, the Democrats, they should have taken some victory laps and they should have done some media as well, and if they were, they weren't doing it very effectively because I didn't see any of it. Do you have it or not? No.
Okay. Hey, Mark, on that, I think what we're seeing is a very deliberate strategy from the current administration to flood the zone with their perspective, and while it might seem like grandstanding, it actually has an effect on the base and the broader public. But to your point about whether it lands, it depends on the audience. For the core supporters, it's effective. For everyone else, it can be polarizing.
I think you've hit on something that is distinctly different and having nothing to do with policy, but just politics. The Trump administration could not be more different. And this is widely understood inside Washington. They found a way in 2024 to jump on social media, to jump on podcasting, streaming, and now to jump on accessibility. I mean, Trump does basically Q&A sometimes multiple times a day. He'll just be randomly doing some signing or even at a ceremony of some kind or sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and the Q&A just starts up. And that is something that I do think Democrats learned the hard way, that sequestering your leaders and trying to just put a lid on things coming out of the White House, that doesn't work anymore in the age of modern media.
Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, Trump, I think he's a mad king, but he is a mad king who's always looking for a microphone and is ready to say whatever. He gave himself an A++ for the economy. Again, I don't know how much of that gets down to Joe's six-pack, but I know Joe is paying more for that six-pack than he used to have to pay. And the tariffs are clearly something that are affecting Americans as we move through the holiday season. Is that beginning to carry a political weight?
Oh yeah. I was going to say that next, Mark, based on what you were talking about previously. The two big animating issues last year in 2024, there's no secret Democrats and Republicans now agree on this, it was rising costs and immigration. Those were the two big animating issues that Biden and then Harris got really stuck on and never seemed to come up with good descriptions because they had really bad numbers when it came to border issues and immigration and when it came to the economy and inflation. They just couldn't get away from that. Some say that was inexcusable, others say they did a horrible job of messaging it. But for right now, this is what I'm reading the political tea leaves going into the midterms, which now, crazily, are less than 11 months away, a little over 10 and a half months away. The immigration balloon has had a lot of air go out of it. The ICE raids have taken a lot of the headlines and gotten some of the bad guys out in their view. But it's not the animating issue. The gigantic billboard issue now is affordability. And there is Republican angst about the fact that if they don't have a good story to tell six months from now, it's going to make the midterms tough. Democrats are starting to catch on to this. Trump did his first foray out into the hinterlands about that in Pennsylvania. But even after that, his own people in the Republican party are saying, 'Look, you can't just fake this thing. You can't say everything's wonderful and affordability is a hoax.' A lot of people tried to do that and learned the hard way. That was where the Clintonian message of 'It's the economy, stupid' came from and has been resonant since.
I remember seeing a Maduro rally and there was a shot of the crowd and there are people starving under Maduro and he said, 'I can see you all, you're on the Maduro diet.' He was kind of laughing about it and it became this thing, the Maduro diet. There's just a scarcity and people aren't eating as much. And I thought of that as Trump just sort of began to play off the affordability crisis. 'Oh, all I hear about is affordability, affordability. It's a Democratic hoax.' So what you're saying is no, you can say that all you want as president, but on some level you're owning it. And there'll be a political price paid not even by Trump, but by his party is what I'm hearing from you.
Well, it's going to be both because the midterms next year, if those things are a disaster, de facto they're a disaster for Trump. We've talked about this, Mark, and we'll be talking about this a lot in the next 10 months. Make no mistake about it, there is only one political game in town right now. There's only one political target that has any resonance for the next three and a half years and that is next year's midterms. Control of the House particularly is absolutely tenuous at best for Republicans and that will have absolutely calamitous impacts on the second half of a Trump term and they know it. The White House knows it, the Republicans know it. There's not a united front yet about messaging obviously because to your point, there's Republicans saying no, you can't fake this one. When people go to the grocery store, when they go to the gas station, it's either better or worse. Now, apparently right now it looks like, and maybe this is just the winter slump in terms of gas prices, gas prices have been coming down even in places like California. But there's going to have to be a sustained sense that things are getting better for the average person or midterms are going to be rough waters for Republicans.
Quickly, military conflict in Venezuela, that's really going to happen. Well, it's going to happen in a limited way, I think, is what most people believe now, just like it is now. The saber rattling is increasing. Couple F-18s flying off the coast last week, flybys by B1s and others. The biggest ship in the world, the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, off the coast, reportedly 15% of our active duty fleet now in the Caribbean. This is for real. Nobody believes at this point, Mark, there's going to be American boots on the ground. I think there's absolutely zero appetite for that, less than zero amongst Republicans in Congress. But Trump chipped his hand again over the weekend along with the boats carrying drugs supposedly. Are there likely to be strategic strikes even within sites in Venezuela? It's looking like that might be more likely. What would avoid that is that leader leaving. That's the pressure point. That's what all this is pointing towards. 'Look buddy, we're tightening these political and policy and pragmatic nooses. You're gone.' It's just a matter of when and how.
Sure. All right. I'm out of time. Great to talk to you again. I guess I have one more visit with you before Christmas.
That's right, buddy. We'll look forward to that next week with hopefully some better news to talk about.
That'll be great. Gary Dietrich, everybody. Thank you, Gary.
Gary segment sponsored by Bill Campbell, Remax Gold. If you are relocating into or from Northern California, a lot of Northern California listeners, you need a highly respected real estate professional like Bill Campbell to help you out. Remax Gold is where you can find Bill Campbell. Text him, call him. 530-448-7474. Bill Campbell, Remax Gold.
The Mark Thompson Show.
Thanks everybody for being here. I got to do the YouTube stuff where you have to smash the like button. It helps us in the world of YouTube and it's a help to us in the algorithm. It's a YouTube thing. So thank you for hitting the thumbs up and for sharing and for subscribing and doing all that stuff. This is all stuff that helps build the footprint of the show. I'm so excited. But one of the good things that's happened this year is the addition of this person who I have mad respect for. Brilliant journalist, author, and you can pick up her books. Many of you have written to me and said I've purchased all her books after seeing the conversation with you. We have links always to her books under all our conversations. 'The View from Flyover Country,' 'Hiding in Plain Sight' followed that, and then 'The Last American Road Trip' is her most recent offering. How about it for the wonderful, brilliant Sarah Kendzior, everybody?
What a weekend, Sarah Kendzior. You do a lot of reporting and research and exposing of the institutions, the corrupt institutions, media, government, law. When I look at something like what happened in Australia and the anti-Semitism that seems to have shown up now in Southern California, a Jewish home being riddled by bullets, and when I see the crime not associated with anti-Semitism, but just the run-of-the-mill American violence on the Brown University campus, I think of the flaw that is baked into this culture that apparently extends beyond our shores. When I see it in Australia, they have pretty strict gun laws and these guys had legal weapons and they opened fire on a crowd celebrating the first night of their holiday. Help me with this. I know there's a lot here, but I would love your thoughts.
It's horrible. A lot of it I didn't pay attention to in great detail in part because a lot of these stories tend to be very inaccurate when they're first reported. I wait for later details. In the Brown case at Brown University, they arrested the wrong person and let them go. It's also just soul-crushing to witness. It's senseless, cruel, awful. I feel for the victims. When I was looking at the Brown case, I kept thinking about how these two kids who were killed, these 18-year-olds, are the same age as the children from Sandy Hook back in 2012. That would have been the same kindergarten class. They have spent their entire lives growing up in this world and having it culminate in this. There was also a victim who escaped Parkland and was at Brown. They've had to grow up in this kind of environment. That's also the same age as my daughter and I remember when she was in kindergarten when Sandy Hook happened. So I was thinking about that in a personal way. In terms of Australia, the only relief is that at least they tend to take their gun massacres much more seriously and actually do something about them, in contrast to us in the United States where this just happens time and time again. Hopefully there will be swift action to prevent this from recurring. But it was emotional overload. I don't think that we as human beings are meant to absorb this level of tragedy in such a cruel and impersonal way through social media with people making callous remarks, anti-Semitic remarks, anti-Muslim remarks. There's a mix of victims and heroes involved in all of these events that should show our collective humanity and our collective grief, but it's often unfortunately not displayed that way.
Yeah. The Sandy Hook tie-in I hadn't thought of. That's really incredible. You're right. These kids are now of college age. I made this point repeatedly on the show at the time and made it again, that when there was no gun legislation offered after Sandy Hook, I knew that this country would never have it because it couldn't be more intense. The images, the idea that you could slaughter all of these kids in an elementary school and do nothing, absolutely nothing. It was an extraordinary moment. But that's the country we live in. I think I was making the point before that I think we fetishize guns and we fetishize the military in this country. We wear camo. I understand that there's, I don't mean to be the buzzkill here, but I'm speaking about the intense way in which we have seen these things fetishized. I'm speaking specifically of guns and military aggression. I think on some level that does reflect the kind of America that we live in.
I think that's always been the case since the founding of this country, where we have it conceived in an amendment. The type of guns, the type of military equipment meant for an actual armed forces instead of a civilian is not what any founding father or other lawmaker envisioned when they were protecting gun rights. But I think to some degree there's a desensitization of it in media. But there's something deeper going on, which is just a general disregard for the sanctity of human life. I think you see the same treatment of people not just in gun laws or in gun violence but in how people responded to COVID, how they respond to poverty, how they respond to climate change, how they respond to a lot of preventable crises. The way people interact with each other on these social media platforms where they'll say hurtful, callous things just to get attention or to stoke some sort of reaction. It kind of shocked people when people began behaving that way publicly online 10 or 15 years ago, saying things they would not really say in person. There's a whole generation, really two generations, that have grown up with that kind of casually hateful discourse. That frightens me because in a lot of these mass shootings, you see a kind of copycat persona way of viewing the world in which people are treated like objects in a video game. There's way more to it than blaming movies, video games. I remember hearing that when I was a teenager during Columbine and thinking it was mostly BS, and I still kind of do because most people who are engaged in that are not actually going out and reenacting it. But we have created a culture in which that is rewarded, glamorized, and I do think that's harmful.
Well, all over the world they have video games and they don't have the problem that we have in America. It seems so clear. Let me pivot to something else if I can, Sarah, and that is this military flex that we're seeing in Venezuela. I wonder if you can give me a couple of minutes on that.
I'm watching that with the ongoing horror that I'm watching all of the Trump foreign military engagements, because we're never going to have clarity, transparency, honesty about this. I think Congress has been remiss in getting to the bottom of why exactly we're going to war with Venezuela. There were a variety of reasons, some of which are economic, the endless search for fossil fuels and oil. There was also a proclamation by Roger Stone just flat out saying that the ultimate goal was to destabilize Latin America in order to retake Cuba. He said that a little while back just kind of casually in the way that they admit these things. I think last time I was talking to you on this show, I brought up Elliott Abrams, a kind of eternal warmonger from Iran-Contra who appears in administration after administration, also heavily involved in this Venezuela initiative. You'll see a lot of op-eds about his role in stoking wars for unprovoked reasons. He was also an architect of the Iraq war under George W. Bush, was brought up by Ilhan Omar way back in 2019. And then of course now we're seeing all of these attacks on Ilhan Omar, on her community, on her family, which I think is meant to delegitimize her not just as a Black Somali representative but as somebody who is a critic of Elliott Abrams, who everyone seems to kind of forget about. You see a lot of recurring players and a lot of old bad goals that remind me of Iran-Contra, in which there's all these private arms dealing, finance dealing, regime change done for mercenary reasons.
Yeah, I'm with this crew, but I think what you reveal in your writings is that you can do it with every crew. Looking for the transaction, looking for the money, looking for the interests that are served that have nothing to do with the narrative that's being laid out.
And I'm not even sure what the narrative is. That's the interesting thing. I used to go and break down the narratives for these various administrations with Iraq, with the endless rotation with wars in Iran. Here it is so incoherent. You hear different things from different people. I don't quite know what, because they're not trying to cover up as much. That's the problem. They're more just flaunting their impunity. They're changing public perception of what the military is to be used for. As we're seeing this ramped up aggression abroad, we're also seeing ramped up aggression towards Americans and towards green card holders and towards people going through the immigration process. This normalization of military troops, ICE, soldiers, people just patrolling the streets, grabbing you, throwing you in a van, all of these hallmarks of a dictatorial regime. And then Congress just kind of twiddling its thumbs being like, 'Gosh, should we impeach him? Is there an impeachable offense?' It's like, yes, obviously, he commits like one a day. But they're as inactive about that as they were in 2019. Sometimes I feel like I'm watching a rerun. It's like watching a sequel. When you were talking about gun violence and the glamorization of it, I kept thinking of Die Hard. I love the original Die Hard, but as you keep watching the Die Hards, they get worse and worse. I feel like we're on the 20th iteration of this regime where it's pure hackery on one part, but also just dangerously bad. You're not even seeing people trying to enforce any kind of accountability. They're going through the motions of pretending to care. But if they truly cared, they wouldn't have allowed him to run for office again to begin with after committing sedition, high crimes and misdemeanors, and a variety of other offenses the first time around.
That was the whole thing. It's incredible. You've allowed this Frankensteinian monster, the creation of the capitalist elite, this guy who's politically charismatic, informed by intense bigotry and racism, you've allowed him to survive, and so now we endure it. There are moments in your writings where you actually do point to, in addition to deconstructing these things, how activism and how we still have to stay in the fight. I think there is a quality of this now which is associated with, I always use this phrase, so sorry to my audience who always hear me say it, but how do you put Humpty Dumpty back together again? It feels very all lost. But the reality is you have to try to put together what pieces you can.
I think a lot of it, we're getting hit on so many sides. What I've emphasized, and I said this in an essay I published now nearly a decade ago, I think it was called 'We're Heading into Dark Times' right after Trump was first elected, is how you have to hold on to your moral core. You should write down now what your values are, what you stand for, what lines you will not cross because you're going to be pressured to cross them and you're going to gradually absorb what's happening and possibly normalize it. I think in the last year in particular, we have had this onslaught of AI and of technology that basically encourages you to abandon what is good and human inside you. It's a spiritual attack, an attack on your soul. That last place of refuge, where your conscience is, where your imagination is, the place that dictatorships throughout history have never been able to permeate, is now under attack through the devices that we are forced to carry in order to live a life in America, through our phones, through our computers, through this technological dependence. That's something to struggle with and consider because I do think they're trying to shape us inside. It's not enough for them to try to shape our economy, strip us of our rights, strip us of our laws, make things we need like healthcare unaffordable. They want to control our thoughts as well. This is why Trump has his list of Antifa and other fictitious threats. It's why he's making lists of bad journalists and bad citizens on very spurious, very vague ground. I'm worried for 2026 that that's the direction they're going to be going and that they're going to use technology, digital technology, in order to achieve this agenda.
Speak to what you were just saying about the dependence on AI leading to a giving up of ourselves in a sense. Can you just give me another beat on that?
You can just say screw AI. That's what I do. I don't use it at all. I'm completely against it and I'm not a strict parent, but it's the one thing I will not let my kids use. Do not go to a ChatGPT for life advice. You don't need that. What unfortunately we are often dependent on is just cell phones for basic communication. As a writer, I need to use platforms that are owned by oligarchs that I don't like. I have to promote my work on those platforms. We're kind of on one right now with YouTube, but keep hitting that like button. They've pushed us in this terrible situation where we constantly have to kind of beg for applause within the confines of creations owned by absolutely horrible people. The struggle is to within that try to retain your integrity. I do that as much as I can. Some of it is just security things like not using QR codes, apps, basically using the internet as if I'm running a blog from 2006. There's only so much a person can do. A lot of it is just not letting it bend and break you, but also not being intellectually lazy. Continue to read books, explore the world, consume analog, enjoy analog art and culture, and don't let all of this outside pressure, this algorithmic pressure, shape what you see and what you experience. They're trying to push you in different directions. So do what you can to not be pushed and live your life like you're thwarting that algorithm. Push back at it and don't let it try to shape who you are inside.
The thing I've noticed about ChatGPT is that it's wrong a lot. When I say a lot, I mean...
It's so wrong. It has me labeled as a killer for one thing because on Blue Sky I quoted 'Folsom Prison Blues' by Johnny Cash and I got suspended for making reference to the line 'I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.' There's another quote from me out there where I was on book tour and I was telling the person interviewing me, 'I am so sick of COVID,' as in I am so sick of COVID dominating our life and us talking about it. ChatGPT says that I was deathly ill. I've actually never gotten COVID, but it says I nearly died. There's this whole fake version of me, this digital doppelganger, and it spits out fake quotes. Those fake quotes end up in these AI slop articles. Those get amplified by real articles. I encourage people to look for primary sources. Don't look for out-of-context text. These LLMs are an absolute nightmare. There's a fake biography of me that was written by a robot. I can't believe that this is my life. On top of everything, I have to battle robots. It's like every dystopian movie that I watched as a child is now colliding into my daily living and honestly it's a drag. I've been alive in the 21st century longer than the 20th and I really don't like it.
Yeah, it's been a rough year across the board and the rise of ChatGPT is just one of them. There are all these different AI models and they're super powerful. I think you hit on it because the LLM part is really what separates them. You can Google search or internet search any number of things, but when the machine speaks to you as though you're, with the 'Wow, Mark, that's a really good question, let me find some stuff,' it's like, 'Oh wow, this is a different experience than just typing it in.' That's a devious way, I guess, to make it into my life as a real thing when it's actually just not.
I think it's especially bad for folks who are lonely and for young people. People who don't necessarily realize how abnormal this is. I think of teenagers looking for answers for questions that they might not want to ask their parents. There have been numerous examples of young people turning to these chatbots and being coerced into suicide, into self-harm, into all these awful behaviors. It's tragic. I think it speaks to a broader problem of loneliness that you can't completely blame on technology. But if there is any other product that, first of all, all of this is getting shoved down our throat. I haven't seen a lot of people asking for it. This is not like the excitement that was created when the iPhone debuted. This is something that is involuntarily being forced upon us. Usually when there's a product out there that is so defective it has resulted in multiple deaths, it gets pulled from the market. In this case, because so much is wrapped up in this AI bubble, there has been no recourse, very little has been done to help the victims of this. I think that's a really terrible sign again of the devaluing of the sanctity of human life. The idea that there be AI regulation of any kind in various states has now been completely undermined by the Trump administration. He has removed the ability of states through executive order. We'll see how it goes. I'm sure it'll be challenged in court. He's removing the power of the states to control AI in any way.
And that's a super interesting thing for me because this is not coming from Trump. Trump is an old school gangster, a mafioso. He doesn't write anything down. He doesn't even take notes on paper. This is somebody who never leaves a trace. He is the last person who would use AI and pour out his thoughts into it. This is coming from these backers. This is coming from people like Peter Thiel and JD Vance who is standing in there for him. People like Jared Kushner. A lot of people who are wrapped up in Silicon Valley and this techno-fascist view of the world. Trump is just their bulldozer, their way in. But it's an incredibly harmful view of humanity. The fact that they're trying to rush these laws, I think that's because they know that Trump may not be here for the long run, just purely due to age. He's almost 80 years old. That's a logical conclusion. I'm not speaking of any kind of specific illness. But they're trying to rush this in and lock it down as quickly as they can. I just hope that if somebody else comes in, they approach these executive orders the exact same way Trump did by just simply throwing out everything that the prior president did, starting over, slashing and burning, because these are all horrible executive orders that he's putting into place.
You know, I don't mean to skip ahead too far in the movie, but I am very concerned about this crew. They populated every aspect and institution in Washington of the federal government of their giving up power ever. I don't mean to skip too far ahead, but you made me think of it when you talk about the election, and I was just thinking, gosh, I feel like the midterms because they are going on at the state level, they might be able to, there may be a legitimacy and a way in which they can actually be conducted and we can get to the finish line on those. But I feel like in a general election, I don't see any way these guys are giving up power. They're literally making up stuff. The Justice Department is making up stuff and producing these slipshod lawsuits and they are building enemies lists as you were noting before. This is the stuff of an autocracy that's not going away easily just based on a vote.
You can't vote out the mafia and this is a mafia state. That's what they always intended it to be in 2016. It's what they intended it to be during Biden's entire term, which they spent waiting for Trump's reinstallation, which was made incredibly obvious. I think it was around May 2021 that I said Trump was coming back because it's very clear. If you're not going to punish anybody for sedition for attempting a coup, it is because you want that coup to succeed or because that coup on some level already has succeeded. There are overt signs of this, like when Trump was able to pack the Supreme Court to his liking and that court is able to grant him permanent immunity and grant whoever they want permanent immunity. That is not a real court. That is a court that is merely a group of people acting in the service of an autocrat. The same is true of lower level courts. They're not going to leave. I don't know what universe all of these timid Democrats and others who have refused to fight back for the last eight years come from. I don't know what kind of history they're reading because once an autocrat gets in, you've got to move fast. You've got to shut this thing down early or it just gets its tentacles in and it rips everything apart. Every now and again you get this illusion of normalcy that I think people very badly wanted to believe in during the Biden years. They certainly didn't want to listen to me when I said that it was merely an illusion and that the far-right aspiring autocrats were waiting in the wings and also shifting American political culture very hard to the right and normalizing a lot of things that people previously found abhorrent. Instead, they let it slide. They talked about reaching across the aisle while simultaneously calling the Republicans fascists. There was this confusion among the American people about how dangerous are they? If they're so dangerous, then why are they not being indicted? Why are they not being held accountable? That is a completely legitimate question. It unfortunately allowed a lot of people to believe they can't possibly be that dangerous or certainly Biden, Garland, others would intervene and they did not. They dug their own graves and they dug America's graves much more so because honestly, these big shots are going to slip right through. They're not the real targets. It's like the old George Carlin quote about the big club that we're not in it. You and I, we're not in it. I have a feeling that Hunter Biden or James Comey or whoever they're pointing the finger at now, they're going to be just fine with their millions of dollars and their fancy legal teams. It's the rest of us. It's regular folks who speak out, who protest. It's people who are just living their lives but they happen to be immigrants or students protesting on behalf of Gaza or whatever the target is of the day. They are the ones who will be targeted. It is so unjust, so unfair. A lot of it was preventable. But I think the path is always clarity. The path is retracing that history and making sure we know it because I think that's the other thing that happened during the Biden years. A lot of publications put up paywalls or they deleted their archives and it left people with a very faulty memory of what Trump's first term was like and how bad it actually was and how similar it is to the one happening now, where it's on hyperspeed but it's a lot of the same initiatives and a lot of the same plans. Folks shouldn't have been that surprised.
The dry cleaning of recent history goes alongside this dry cleaning of history that they're doing. You write so beautifully in your books about a historical context to so much and I just see how they're taking an eraser to all of this now. You make a good point especially as the media is going to be increasingly controlled by right-wing entities. I see the Ellison group rising with Saudi money. The Warner Brothers deal is huge for the death of CNN. You can look at CNN and go, 'Well, it's a sort of a tepid offering to begin with.' You'll be longing for that tepid offering soon.
Absolutely. I think that they also understand, and Trump understands this very well, that the infotainment complex, the news that just runs around the clock and beguiles you with scandal, is a way in and is something that they need to control. It was something that was somewhat of an obstacle for them in the first term. Honestly, I think they should have been exposing all of these crimes. For example, the Epstein information was all out there all the way back in 2015 when Trump first proclaimed his run. That could have been covered then. They did not do it. But it still created some kind of oppositional force. They are buying all those networks. They are merging them. They are controlling them. They are limiting who gets on them, limiting the content. That is intentional and that does bode extremely poorly for the year to come.
Yeah. Find Sarah as... I'm sorry I can't read the... because my screen is so small.
They say, 'Am I suggesting that the wealthy are depopulating the world so they can conserve resources for themselves?' A rhetorical question. Yes, that is exactly what they are doing. These oligarchs and bureaucrats. And it's not limited to Kennedy.
All right. We're out of time, but you can find... What did you say? You can find Sarah on Substack. There's a link to it under this video. And you can find her books. That's her latest, 'The Last American Road Trip.' Sarah Kendzior's books are treasures. Really get into them. I will tell you that there are links to all of them under this video as well. So grateful for you. Thanks for spending time with us and I look forward to next week. Thanks.
Sarah Kendzior, everybody. Right on.
Who's Mark Thompson?
Thank you for being here everyone. Great to be back and very excited to jump into some chats a little bit later, but I've got a very special guest. It's funny. I thought I was an early adopter to the Oyer lawyer space. Kim, I thought I was kind of on it early. You always feel like, hey, I'm excited. I've discovered someone who breaks down the law really well and who was in the belly of the beast. That's Liz Oyer. Then I see that the world's kind of discovered Liz Oyer. And then a few months later she's on 60 Minutes and she's a huge star.
Yeah. Well, because she's amazing.
Yeah, but I feel like what I'm saying is that my special discovery wasn't so special after all.
Well, and then you have a president that seems to be pardon after pardon after pardon of these wild pardons and so her expertise on this matter becomes really important.
Yeah, she is the most popular person at the dance for sure. She is the brilliant pardon attorney, former pardon attorney for the US government. Actually her story is really extraordinary because it involves a Hollywood celebrity. Mel Gibson wanted a firearm and for him to get a firearm because he had a domestic violence conviction, they had to go through Liz Oyer's office and Liz said we can't give it to him because he's got this conviction. There's a rule against it. And they said no but he's a friend of Donald Trump and for that reason he's got to get it. She wasn't good with that. I'm sure that looks like one of the more quaint things she would have been asked to do as a pardon attorney, but that led to her leaving government. How about it for Liz Oyer everyone? Hi Liz.
Hi, thanks for having me back, Mark.
Great to have you. You know what, I have Liz Oyer glasses too. Where are they? You got the best set of glasses. You got different ones. And these aren't them. Where are my credibility glasses? I have these that are a little bit better maybe, but I have really great dark ones. They're my Liz Oyer glasses, but I thought I had them and I don't have them handy.
You know, I actually get a lot of comments on my glasses on my social media posts and they're very polarizing. Some people love them and some people hate them.
