The newspapers had too much pressure. Newspapers also didn't like me because I criticized the news a lot. And so it was just a news thing. It was just business and there was nothing suspicious here. Very possible.

But I can't really conceive of a situation where the CIA wouldn't want to take me out and they have the ability. It's one phone call. One phone call cancels me worldwide. Now, do you think that I will have as much influence after being canceled? What do you think? Will I have as much influence after being canceled? Well, it would be a good bet that I would go away like Roseanne, right? If you were going to bet, you'd bet, okay, it's going to be a Roseanne situation. You know, he might come back in five years or something, but basically he's off the field for the next election cycle.

Somebody says this is not an issue for the CIA. Let me tell you why it is. The CIA does want to protect its own power and its own mission and I'm a critic. It's pretty straightforward. If people don't try to get rid of their critics when they can, I don't know. I wouldn't understand the CIA if they couldn't act on things that they thought were important. So I'm not going to make a claim that the CIA decided to cancel me. I'm going to make the following claim. It would look just like this. It would look exactly like this. And you wouldn't be able to know.

Now the problem is not me because, you know, I know some people say when I talk about my situation it's whining or complaining. I'm not whining or complaining. I'm just describing. My life is fine. I'm in a good place. I don't have a problem in the world, right? But you should know that you can't tell what stories are real anymore. If the CIA decides that's your narrative, well that's your narrative in the news. Will they only have to get a few news people to say it's true and then it's a big story everybody's talking about? So if you thought it was hard for the CIA or anybody else to change the entire narrative or to take on a person, it's not. It's one phone call. It's just one phone call. That's it. You can change the whole narrative. Which doesn't mean they're doing it. It's just that they could.

All right. Rasmussen did a poll on designating the cartels as terrorist organizations. It turns out 79 percent of likely U.S. voters are in favor of designating the Mexican drug cartels as a serious threat to the United States. Who would disagree with that? I mean, seems obvious, right? See, let me see. We disagree. Okay, well 20 percent strongly disagree with that. 20 percent. But then there's another 10 percent that are not sure. So let's say the 10 percent that are not sure, if they found out a little more they could go either way. Unless it's one sort of a coin flip. So take half of them and add it to the 20. Oh yeah, that would be 25 percent are not in favor of it. Huh. Very surprising. Very surprising. I don't know.

I wonder how many of the people who said they wanted to designate them as a terrorist organization, how many of them know that that guarantees military action? I'm not sure if the people answering the poll knew that they were voting for war. They're voting for a hot war. They sort of favor that. Now I do. I'm in favor of a hot war. A limited one. I mean one that just goes after the bad guys. But I can say that loud.

All right. Here's a shift in the narrative that I'm seeing and you can decide if I have anything to do with this, right? So your assignment will be, as I mentioned a few different related stories, to see if anything that happened to me recently allows people to talk this way in public. In other words, have I had any impact accidentally on broadening the discussion zone? Things you can say out loud.

Here are some things that people are saying out loud, which I'm not agreeing with. This is important. These are not things I agree with. The point is people are saying it out loud. That the problem with Silicon Valley Bank was a diversity hire. Now as people point out, you know, most of the leadership was white men, but the person in charge of risk management may have been a diversity, let's say, influenced hire. Now I'm not going to say that that was why the person got hired. I'm just saying that that's the conversation. And I don't know that we would have had that conversation out loud before. And the out loud part is, okay, we should at least look at whether this was caused by a diversity hire. We should look at it. People are saying that out loud. I don't think you could say that out loud, I don't know, a month ago. It seems like you couldn't say that.

Here's another one. The report is that Southwest Airlines has consciously decided to reduce the risk or reduce the safety to get more diversity in their pilots. That's actually being spoken about out loud and in the news. That your plane might go down because of diversity hiring. Now again, this is not my opinion. My only point is that it's now a conversation. People are actually saying this out loud now.

And then the third one. Joe Rogan, I just saw he was saying on his show that he'd vote for Trump over Biden because Biden's just an empty shell of a human at this point. But he pointed out that the Biden administration couldn't even hire good people because he used Sam Brinton as the, you know, the cross-dressing bag-stealing guy, used him as an example of somebody who clearly in Joe's opinion was a diversity hire and clearly could not have been the best choice. The implication is there was a better choice.

So again, I have no opinion on whether Sam Brinton was brilliant at his job. He could have been. I mean, there's no smoking gun in my opinion that says that any of these people are less qualified. There's no smoking gun. But it is part of the conversation now and it should be because it might have mattered. Like it might be true that Sam Brinton is purely a diversity hire.

Now why do I say that? Let me explain to you everything about every big organization. Here's the thing. In any big organization, whether it's business or government, it is better to appear woke because everyone can observe it right away. You can see it. How many people of color do you have on your board? How many people did you hire? What is your diversity? It's just obvious. But that's more important to look woke because people can see it compared to being competent, which is often invisible.

Do you know what happens if you're good at your job? Nobody notices because there are no problems, right? If the risk manager at Silicon Valley Bank had done everything right, you would never even have known that was a bank. I literally never heard of that bank. I'd never heard of it. The only reason we're even talking about it is that somebody was not competent. But we don't know if that's because of a diversity hire. That would be a leap. That's not an evidence.

But here's what you can know for sure. Managers being managers and leaders being leaders, they will choose to look good compared to performing well. Does anybody disagree with that? If they have to choose. Now the first choice we all say is but Scott, but Scott, you can do both. You can have great diversity hires and you can have great performance. There's no conflict at all. I'm not saying there's a conflict. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the managers don't care if there's a conflict. They're going to manage to what you can see. They're not going to manage to a long-term output that you can't determine if it's because of who they hired or not, right?

The Silicon Valley Bank is a perfect example. There are people saying, oh, this might have been the diversity hire problem. But there will always be people who say reasonably there's no direct link. There's no direct link. It's really about interest rates and the environment and whatever. So managers will always manage to that which can be confirmed by everybody. The things you can see and it will never manage to the things that can't be proven. The things that can't be proven, you can manage those by the way you talk about it.

This is the same reason that a new leader likes to come in and then change all the metrics and the departments because what it does is it erases the past and so you can't be compared to what you've done before. Because once you've reorganized, all the measurements of who's doing what are now obsolete. So you erase the past and then you say the new things we're doing, yeah they're not paying off now. Of course it's