The Stone Zone | 01-19-26
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
3
sentences flagged
Hate speech
10
sentences flagged
Summary
Val Valentino, the legendary Italian designer who built one of the great fashion houses of the modern era, has died at the age of 93. While in his passing, the world loses not merely a designer, but a titan of the industry whose work reaffirmed timeless elegance and the enduring beauty of femininity of the designers.
Transcript
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Every week, the Payne family cuts straight to the real financial story.
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The one question, Bob, everyone's asking is, are we in an artificial intelligence bubble?
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You've been through boom and busts. What do you think?
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No hype, no myths, just what actually matters to your money.
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Does feel very similar to what we experienced in the 90s. Where are we,
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Listen to the Payne Points of Wealth on the Red Apple Podcast Network.
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It's the Family and Friends event at Shopper's Drug Mart.
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Get 20% off almost all regular-priced merchandise.
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Two days only, Tuesday, January 20th, and Wednesday, January 21st.
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Valentino, the legendary Italian designer who built one of the great fashion houses of the modern era,
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While in his passing, the world loses not merely a designer, but a titan of the industry,
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whose work reaffirmed timeless elegance, in my opinion, craftsmanship,
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and the enduring beauty of femininity of the designers.
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He, of course, was one of Nancy Reagan's favorites.
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Born Valentino Clemente Ludovico Garavati in Bulgaria, Italy in 1932,
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Valentino was trained in the classical traditions of European haute couture at Paris' École des Beaux-Arts
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and the Chamber Syndicale des Coutures Paris-Jean.
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I mostly know Italian, and almost all of those are curse words.
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Anyway, he appreciated, pardon me, he apprenticed under masters like Jacques Fath and Cristobal Belenchiaga
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before returning to Rome, where he founded his own fashion house,
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Today is, of course, Martin Luther King Day, a federal holiday observed every year on the third Monday of January.
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The holiday was actually passed into law and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983.
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My good friend Congressman Jack Kemp, Republican of upstate New York,
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And King's birthday became a national holiday after enormous public pressure and national debate.
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Dr. Martin Luther King plays a very interesting role in the history of American presidential politics.
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In 1960, he was arrested, leading a peaceful demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama, shortly before the 1960 election.
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There were very real fears as to whether Dr. King was safe in a Birmingham, Alabama jail.
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John F. Kennedy, running for president in a very tight race with Vice President Richard Nixon,
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on the advice of his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy,
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the father of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who currently serves as our Secretary of Health and Human Services,
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And while Senator Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, called the governor of Mississippi to demand the release of King,
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Bobby Kennedy called the judge in the King case.
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Vice President Richard Nixon was advised by William P. Rogers,
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who was then the attorney general under Dwight Eisenhower,
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it would be improper for him to call the judge.
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who was at that time the chief pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church,
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changed his position publicly from supporting Richard Nixon,
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That gesture, which became, of course, front page news across the country,
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was very definitely a deciding factor in the very narrow defeat of Richard Nixon by Jack Kennedy.
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What's interesting, however, is that after King's more successful march on Washington,
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and more precisely, after he came out against the Vietnam War,
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he was wiretapped by the Kennedy administration.
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who hated King and insisted that King was a communist.
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P.S., no evidence ever emerged to show that King was a communist,
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although it is clear that one Stanley Levinson,
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among his entourage, was thought by King to be a communist.
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But King was wiretapped, and those wiretaps were approved by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Sr.
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Now, those wiretaps, of course, revealed some very embarrassing things about Dr. King.
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We won't get into them because they're incredibly graphic,
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but among other things, we learned that Dr. King was having multiple extramarital affairs with as many as 40 women
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as he carried his fight for civil rights across the country.
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All of this raises an uncomfortable but essential question.
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Why are we celebrating the life of a man that the FBI tried to destroy?
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You see, once the FBI under Hoover—this is one of the most disgraceful chapters in American governmental and political history—
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But once Hoover obtained the evidence of King's infidelity,
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he had letters sent to King threatening to exposing and suggesting that the civil rights icon commit suicide.
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Why does the government hold ceremonies, speeches, and official tributes today for a leader at once treated unfairly like a subversive enemy?
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The answer is simple, because during the long arc of history,
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people eventually recognized what the powerful tried to suppress,
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Despite his personal failures as a man, he had no failures as a leader.
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He was a great leader who preached nonviolence in contrast to Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers
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and others of the same era who preached violence.
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Martin Luther King preached the nonviolence of Gandhi.
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Now, in 1968, of course, Dr. King was assassinated.
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I have serious reservations about whether he was, in fact, assassinated by James Earl Ray,
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the man who was convicted of his assassination.
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Ray, of course, later recanted his confession, insisting it had been coerced from him.
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And it's important to know that the King family sued the FBI, the Secret Service, the U.S. government,
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and the Memphis police in a civil suit over what they said was the wrongful death,
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in this case the murder, of Dr. Martin Luther King.
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And they won that lawsuit, which means a federal civil court essentially certified that King was murdered on the basis of a conspiracy
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by elements of the federal government rather than murdered by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee.
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The death of King caused a conundrum for Richard Nixon,
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who was then on his way to the greatest comeback in political history.
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Some of Nixon's advisors said that Nixon should not attend the funeral,
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and more importantly, the processional march from the church to the cemetery for Dr. King in Atlanta, Georgia.
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He flew privately to meet Coretta King and did so without any public announcement going to the King home the day before the funeral.
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It is there that Richard Nixon privately gave Coretta King a check from Richard and Pat Nixon,
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which covered the cost of the college educations of the remaining King children.
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This is a gesture that was not known to history or anyone, of course,
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until many years after both Richard Nixon and Dr. King were dead.
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But then came the actual day of the funeral and the procession.
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Nixon made a decision that he would attend the church service,
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but that he would not march in the entourage behind the caisson,
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that's the horse-drawn carriage that was bringing Dr. King's body to the cemetery.
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Of course, all of his rivals, Senator Eugene McCarthy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy,
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Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Governor Nelson Rockefeller,
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all of those who were running for president in 1968 were in that procession.
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And Nixon had originally planned, according to what he told me,
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to leave the church from a side door where he was to be taken to the Atlanta airport
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standing, sitting next to Nixon at the funeral,
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Whereupon Nixon, who was not planning to march,
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decided it was probably a better idea in the face of a very large Wilt Chamberlain
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Today, I posted a picture on social media of Wilt Chamberlain
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After about three blocks with Nixon's advance men
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You know, Wilt, I'm not going to be able to continue.
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I have a plane waiting for me to take me back to New York.
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So Nixon and Wilt Chamberlain departed the entourage,
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headed to the cemetery, headed for the airport.
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Wilt Chamberlain had decided that he would actively support
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Richard Nixon's campaign for president in 1968.
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He became a major surrogate for Nixon's election.
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This was an interesting view of the fact that Jackie Robinson,
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had supported Nixon for president in 1960 over John F. Kennedy.
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but despite the fumbling of the question of Dr. King's arrest,
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the American electorate in 1960 awarded Richard Nixon
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percentages of the vote among African-Americans
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was of a devout and disciplined Baptist family,
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who helped shape her son's early moral seriousness
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King demonstrated exceptional gifts as a speaker,
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his fatal mistake in terms of his own longevity,