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Welcome to the Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast where you will learn how to identify, evaluate, negotiate, perform due diligence on, finance, turn-around and operate mobile home parks! Your host is Frank Rolfe, the 5th largest mobile home park owner in the United State with his partner Dave Reynolds. Together, they also own and operate Mobile Home University, the leading educational website for both new and experienced mobile home park investors!
It was all the way back in 2019 that John Oliver did his famous depiction of the mobile home park industry on his show, "Last Week Tonight," the very show in which he said that I personally was the biggest a-hole in America. That was also the same year that Elizabeth Warren sent her famous warning letter to all private equity groups throughout the United States, warning them if they were to even think about buying a mobile home park, she would bring down wrath and condemnation and somehow drive them out of business. But it's been a long time since 2019, about seven years to be exact, and yet we haven't seen any other big news stories or PR attempts like that in just the longest time. So how did the industry get so lucky? This is Frank Rolfe with another "Mobile Home Park Mastery Podcast." We're going to explore how the industry has escaped that avalanche of negative PR that rained down upon it back in 2019. Let's first note that back in 2019, it wasn't that big a rainstorm. You had just those two items. You had the John Oliver segment on the evils of mobile home parks, and then you had Elizabeth Warren echoing the same thing, and they kind of work in tandem.
So you often find the same topics get beaten to death over and over and over in the woke media, and they're typically doing it together. It's all pre-planned. In fact, there was roughly 40 negative anti mobile home park articles or shows that all came out simultaneously in 2019, which no doubt were all part of such items as the Private Equity Stakeholders Project by George Soros and all the others who hate capitalism, hate landlords, hate America, hate just about everything. So how did we suddenly go from being the most hated people in America to people who are pretty much ghosted by the media? Well, the first obvious thing would be that the Democratic hatred for all things today revolves around Donald Trump, and they call it Trump Derangement Syndrome, or TDS.
And the media, and I don't know if anyone has ever tracked this, maybe AI would tell me, the sheer number of articles and programming devoted to anti-Trump is the largest I've ever seen. It's been a nonstop campaign from the very first moment Trump took office. And Trump does not own any mobile home parks. If Trump owned even one mobile home park, no doubt there would be 1,000 shows and commentaries condemning it, but he doesn't. He owns condominium buildings. He owns hotels. He owns golf courses. But he doesn't own any mobile home parks. So the simple fact that there's no Trump in our industry has helped as far as that TDS insanity.
And also, of course, there were a lot of disruptions that came on. Maybe there was going to be more anti-mobile home park stuff back in around 2019, but of course, just shortly thereafter, we were in 2020, the year of COVID, and suddenly everything was disrupted, including all programming. All of these woke shows suddenly couldn't even film. They were too afraid to even go in wearing masks, so they would do them out of their houses and basements, and the viewership fell off a cliff. So COVID helped a lot. And then, of course, we had a few other distractions since COVID. We have the Ukraine War. We have the war in Iran.
Lots of things. So it isn't like there was no news in between. No, there was really a lot of big things, things that probably interested the audience way more than mobile home parks. And then if you look at the topics, if you simply go on AI and ask AI to map out what John Oliver has been up to since 2019, you'll see that his top most repetitive topics are, of course, Donald Trump. That's in the number one position. And then abortion. That was huge. And then tech monopolies. He's obsessed with tech monopolies. And then ICE. He just wants to do almost every show with some segment on ICE because he knows the people who watch his show just love any kind of anti-ICE narrative. So there just has been too much distraction for most Americans to give a darn about mobile home parks. But at the same time, what happens? Because in seven years, there's the old saying, the seven-year itch, which often destroys marriages. Surely, after seven years, we'll get some more bad PR, right? It would be, you would think, inevitable.
Well, let's explore that for a moment because coming up, we have some very contentious midterms. And following the midterms, you're going to have a full two years of a Trump presidency with no boundaries, no barriers, no more elections to really worry about. And I have the feeling, as Trump has said himself, there will be some of the most amazing things coming up that will no doubt cause Democrats to go completely unraveled. So I think rather than have fewer distractions following the midterms, we'll probably have even more.
So if distractions have helped the industry in the past, that'll help a lot too. And then as far as John Oliver is concerned, his audience has declined from 1.3 million back in 2019 to only about 300,000 today. So the impact of his show, which was in fact canceled, and then they suddenly brought back to life, but the numbers suggested it should be canceled, that he was being overpaid for the audience.
It doesn't have anywhere near the firepower that it once had. And then, of course, Elizabeth Warren has very little cachet today. She's kind of worn it all out. Her with the nasty face and the finger-pointing, but no results, has kind of given people the impression, it's kind of the boy that cries wolf. She all the time likes to jump on the bandwagon with different issues that get her on some degree of media attention, but doesn't really ever go anywhere. She never really gets any laws passed or anything happening like that. And of course, all the people like that, like Elizabeth Warren, like John Oliver, today they're branded as radical blue crazy people.
But back in 2019, we didn't really know what radical blue crazy people really were. So as a result, people watched more of that kind of programming and actually gave it a grain of salt and thought that somehow, even though it's a satirical news show, that he actually had some importance. But today, of course, it really doesn't. It's not really relevant. Today, you're either a blue or a red viewer, and if you're a red viewer, then you're just so anti the blue viewers, it's not even funny, and vice versa. So those kinds of shows, those kinds of people who appeal and give speeches to that audience, fortunately, they're on the wrong team because in the capitalist world, in the world of real estate, where you've got banks and appraisers and property owners and lawyers, all of those people are on the red team.
So giving a pep rally to the blue team doesn't have a lot of impact on the red team. In fact, some would say that being on John Oliver is kind of a badge of honor as to how important you must be in the anti-blue cause that you would even end up being on the program. Also, the issue is, if things get nasty, and they will, because we're going to have a depression at some point. We have to. They run in cycles. We're already seeing higher interest rates. We're seeing all the makings of the things that typically lead to a Great Depression, a Great Recession, a dot-com bust.
All of the features are in place for things to just, again, radically be changed. There's an expression among younger people, people like my daughter, who's 30. It's called cheugy. And cheugy means that things get kind of, they've timed out. They're no longer relevant. They're no longer timely. They've kind of run their route. And kind of this whole thing with Oliver, Warren, and the people who they surround themselves with has really kind of become cheugy.
Just does. You may have noticed a while back, there was another senator like Warren. Her name was Maggie Hassan. She came out with almost the same condemnation of the industry as Warren had done. She didn't even get any media play with it. Didn't even get much mentioning because people don't really care. They're moving on to new things now. One of the new things, of course, they're moving on to is this whole DSA movement, the whole anti-landlord movement, and an entire party that wants to basically take away all housing, take away all real estate, and give it to the people. The complete communist agenda.
But it's going to take a new form. When you look at Warren and you look at Oliver, all of these people are very old. They're at the older end of the baby boomer grouping. I don't know how old Warren is. I assume she's probably close to 80. And Oliver's no longer a spring chicken. He tries to represent the more youthful part of America, but he's not youthful. He's just an old guy, too. I think probably in the future, most of the media attacks that will come on capitalists and anything like that are going to come from younger folk because that's more relevant to the young people who are so anti-capitalism, anti-landlord, and anti-everything else. So those players will be changed.
Now, who it will be in the future if someone does attack the industry again, I have no idea. But equally importantly, I don't know who would really care inside the business community at large. So not really too worried about the next John Oliver segment. Not really worried about Senator Warren. Not really worried about any of that stuff because the world has changed so fundamentally since back in 2019. This is Frank Rolfe, the "Mobile Home Park Mastery" podcast. Hope you enjoyed this. Talk to you again soon.