May 5, 2026
O.J. Simpson and Tonya Harding Enter the Spirit Airlines Blame Game
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RSS Feed A controversial meme, reposted by Republican Senator Mike Lee, shows a picture of O.J. Simpson labeled “Elizabeth Warren” and O.J.’s former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson labeled “Spirit Airlines.” Lee added the caption “nailed it” in his since deleted post which has drawn significant backlash. Meantime, a crowdsourcing site says they’ve raised $130 million dollars so far, hoping to buy and build back the low cost carrier.
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00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hey, folks, it is Tuesday, May fifth, and do you want to buy Spirit Airlines? There is a growing movement out there and people are pledging money, regular citizens to buy Spirit. Meanwhile, a political blame game is going back and forth that has gotten a tad ugly over who it is to blame for the airline going out of business with that, Welcome to this episode of Amy and TJ. I should probably give a little more when I say it's gotten ugly.
00:00:32
Speaker 2: We're used to that.
00:00:33
Speaker 1: But somebody has compared Spirit Airlines Nicole Brown Simpson. Your first thought is like, wait, what, but how could that ever be okay?
00:00:42
Speaker 3: It's never okay.
00:00:43
Speaker 4: And then to compare OJ Simpson, or at least compare sorry, Senator Elizabeth Warren to OJ Simpson in that same photo, that makes it even more disturbing.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: So yeah, let's get that out of the way at the top. Yes, political blame game going back and forth. But the reference you're making, and this senator got taken to task court, and we should say he has already taken it down if you want to understand just how much flak he got. But this was Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican goes on and it was a retweet, a repost of somebody else's, but he certainly elevated this image, Roke.
00:01:16
Speaker 4: Yes, and he put the caption, nailed it after we all see this really disturbing image, because yeah, it shows OJ and Nicole Brown Simpson together as a couple, and then to have over OJ's chest Elizabeth Warren written and then over Nicole Brown Simpson's Spirit Airlines. Obviously, the implication is that Elizabeth Warren killed Spirit Airlines.
00:01:40
Speaker 1: Okay, there's a bunch of ways, disgusting. Well, there's a bunch of ways to make that criticism of her.
00:01:46
Speaker 4: There's a bunch of ways, and that's a really incendiary, disgusting, disrespectful way to do it. And honestly, I know we keep saying this, but my god, senators, isn't there some decorum. Isn't there some level of civility that needs to exist or that we would hope could exist, even if you disagree, even if you want to blame someone to put the name of a US senator over someone who most people believe is a murderer because he's not a convicted murderer, but still, just this very divisive public just awful photo. Just to put this up and try to compare it to a senator and the situation with an airline going under. Seventeen thousand people lost their jobs, but a woman lost her life, and that is what makes this so terrible.
00:02:39
Speaker 2: Growth that's it.
00:02:41
Speaker 1: A lot of people there are to be offended by this, first and foremost Nicole Brown Simpson's family, Yes, you think that is like, that's not a moment where you thought maybe this was awful to the memory of this woman.
00:02:55
Speaker 2: To throw it literally is.
00:02:57
Speaker 1: A picture of her with just spirit air slapped over top of her.
00:03:02
Speaker 3: It's you feel physically ill.
00:03:05
Speaker 4: I haven't seen anything from Nicole Brown Simpson's family reacting to this, but interestingly, Shannanne Watts, a very famous story out of Colorado, her she actually her family has created an organization called the Shannane Watts of Mom's Demand Action. They actually have an AX they put out there a murdered mom mime is hysterical?
00:03:24
Speaker 3: Am I right? I mean just calling it out for what it is?
00:03:28
Speaker 2: Does it need to be called out? Does he not know this is? You don't do this now.
00:03:34
Speaker 1: Mike Lee has been a guy who's had to take down some tweets in the past. Should we consider the source? Should we consider who's doing it? But if we do that, robes we should also consider we should hold him to his past history, but hold him to being a US senator.
00:03:49
Speaker 2: Maybe we shouldn't. Maybe can you laugh? Can you defend this? Now?
00:03:53
Speaker 1: He hasn't come out and said oops, even though he's taking it down, which is in some way an acknowledgment that it shouldn't have gone up, or acknowledgment of the criticism.
00:04:01
Speaker 4: Look, I think at the end of the day, it's fair to say, I feel like everyone could agree with this. It's morally disgusting what he did. That to me is the best way to put it. And yes, this is a senator whose Twitter account I guess x account sorry was deactivated for a while because he threatened or it appeared that he was threatening the Japanese Prime minister.
00:04:21
Speaker 3: So obviously this guy is a provocateur.
00:04:23
Speaker 4: The question is, I guess, And the decision about whether or not he should remain a United States senator has to be with the people who voted him and elected him to office.
00:04:31
Speaker 2: I've said, period, point blank. But it's out there, been talked about. He does this don't know why.
00:04:37
Speaker 1: It's just another one of these things Wherebes that raises it just sets a new bar which is getting.
00:04:43
Speaker 2: Lower and lower and lower for our rhetoric.
00:04:46
Speaker 1: His point is worth examining, is worth talking about it. Yes, let's have a conversation because Senator Elizabeth Elizabeth Warren, who has been a very big anti business, anti billionaire. She wouldn't call herself outtime business, but she's anti big business in billionaires. She years ago argued Robes pretty forcefully and pretty publicly that she didn't want Spirit Airlines to be saved when it had a bit of a lifeline.
00:05:13
Speaker 4: At the time, it had a pretty big lifeline. This was back in twenty twenty four, correct. Spirit Airlines and Jet Blue were set to merger. You've got this big airline that wanted to absorb Spirit Airlines. Therefore you would save Spirit Airlines or at least a lot of the positions and jobs there as it folds into Jet Blue. And it was a judge, but the DOJ and the Biden administration did not want this merger to go through.
00:05:39
Speaker 2: So it wasn't her. She had no power necessarily at the time.
00:05:43
Speaker 1: She didn't stop the deal, but she was very public, and she seemed to celebrate at the time the fact that the merger wasn't going through. That is what now Robes has gotten. I guess her to this point of some scrutiny, which let's have that COmON and that's okay. You don't need a Nicole Brown Simpson mean to make that point. So March twenty twenty four, Robes her tweet that Elizabeth Warren had, which has come back and a lot of people are looking at She seemed to be very gleeful and excited that that merger didn't go through. That Robes looks really in poor tastes when you realize seventeen thousand folks just lost a job before.
00:06:24
Speaker 4: I guess, yes, And when Mike Lee read or put something back up, he actually had her original tweet from March twenty twenty four and then basically pointed out the fact that she was celebrating, as you would say, the inability to merge. Yes, she said, this was her original tweet from March of twenty twenty four. I've worn for months that a Jet Blue Spirit Airlines merger would have led to fewer flights and higher fares. Justice ATR and US doot were right to stand up for consumers and fight against runaway airline consolidation. This is a Biden win for flyers. Okayings, that's tough after last weekend, that is a tough one to hear.
00:07:04
Speaker 1: And as an exclamation point, even after this is a Biden went yeah, that looks bad.
00:07:09
Speaker 2: Let's yes, let's talk about it. What happened then? What can we do in the future? Was she right?
00:07:12
Speaker 1: Then? Can we do better? Yes, let's talk about that. You don't have to put up a damn meme like he did. She did respond she knew all this was going on and that she was being blamed or a lot of people were pointing to her as the part of the conversation rope is that Democrats are getting the blame for killing Spirit because of what happened back then, and then they're being right back in their faces. Where Democrats are throwing the Iran war, they are saying it's fuel prices. It's your president, you Republicans. They're saying, it's the president that has caused Spirit Airlines to go under because they couldn't survive the high fuel costs.
00:07:49
Speaker 2: Let's have that conversation.
00:07:50
Speaker 4: Yes, but it's just kind of remarkable. An entire airline has gone belly up. People are out of jobs, a lot of folks plans and yes, travel plans could be business pleasure and important, but all upended because of this.
00:08:05
Speaker 3: A lot of lives impacted.
00:08:07
Speaker 4: But let's just go ahead and instead of trying to figure out how to move forward, we're just gonna point the finger.
00:08:13
Speaker 3: It's the Democrat's fault, or it's the Republican's fault.
00:08:15
Speaker 4: Yes, classic response, and it gets so mean spirited and so unnecessary. So yeah, Elizabeth Warren tried to get ahead of this, and her response was to put this up today on X as well.
00:08:28
Speaker 3: Correct, you put this up on X.
00:08:30
Speaker 4: She said spiking fuel prices from Trump's war was the nail in the coffin for twice bankrupted Spirit Airlines. For what it's worth, Jet Blue merger failed because a judge appointed by Ronald Reagan said the deal was illegal. Republicans are desperate to shift blame from higher cost hitting families. That's a little bit of her reach. Now she's gonna blame Ronald Reagan, Republican Ronald Reagan, while she actually gave credit to Joe in her original tweet for stopping the merger which would have saved Spirit Airlines.
00:09:07
Speaker 3: It's all insanity.
00:09:10
Speaker 1: Seventeen thousand people out of jobs, and these folks are tweeting at each other about things that don't even matter. This is a midterm year, Robes, this is what it is. He eagerly he latched onto one because it's a big deal. When you got gas prices, people are pissed.
00:09:23
Speaker 2: They want to blame somebody. Seventeen thousand people just lost jobs. They're pissed.
00:09:27
Speaker 1: They want to blame somebody who should we blame And that's why these things are flying. And this why these accusations are coming. But Robes, he wasn't done. Now this next one. I don't even find it that funny either, if he had posted this other one first, But he the OJ Simpson Nicole Brown Simpson picture wasn't the only image he used showing two people and labeling one of them OJ or labeling one of them Elizabeth Warren and labeling one of them Spirit Airlines.
00:09:53
Speaker 2: Would you have found the other one funny?
00:09:55
Speaker 4: It would have been funnier, Yes, Nancy Kerrigan was we're talking about Tanya Harding and Nancy Agan. I think everyone listening probably knows obviously what happened where Tanya Harding or at least people who were working on behalf of Tanya Harding at least deliberately injured Nancy Kerrigan, who then couldn't compete.
00:10:18
Speaker 1: That was all settled, just going backwards like, there's no question about that.
00:10:21
Speaker 4: There were convictions and oh I sat down for hours with Tanya Harting.
00:10:25
Speaker 2: This is not a.
00:10:26
Speaker 1: Situation where there's speculation and allegations of This is like part of history and Olympic history. She had these people banged this woman's knee. She claims they did it without her asking. But yes, okay, see I know I was missing something about that story.
00:10:41
Speaker 2: I know I was missing something.
00:10:42
Speaker 4: Okay, she has distanced herself from the culpability of that.
00:10:45
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, there it is. But we all get the point.
00:10:48
Speaker 1: So that picture you said in context is hard to see it as funny now given who is not who posted.
00:10:53
Speaker 3: It correctly correct.
00:10:55
Speaker 4: However, it is one of the it's a little bit less incendiary because it wasn't a brutal order of a woman, a mother.
00:11:03
Speaker 3: No, this was. Yes, it was a brutal attack.
00:11:05
Speaker 4: It had very big consequences, but maybe it's not as disgusting in the sense that there's enough distance, enough time from it and no one died where you could maybe chuckle that I might give you as maybe something in bad taste.
00:11:21
Speaker 3: The OJ, the OJ Nicole.
00:11:23
Speaker 4: Brown Senson was disgusting and reprehensible. The Nancy Kerrigan tany harding thing is just maybe distaste.
00:11:30
Speaker 2: Okay, that's a good way to put it. In poor taste.
00:11:32
Speaker 1: While all that blame game is going on, would you believe there is an effort, an effort now to save Spirit Airlines. It's an effort that thousands upon thousands of people have signed up for and have committed nearly one hundred million dollars too. We'll explain why this is a big deal and maybe not so big of a deal at the same time.
00:11:57
Speaker 2: So here.
00:12:07
Speaker 4: Welcome back everyone to this episode of Amy and TJ. Where look, we learned this week that Spirit Airlines abruptly had to shutter all of its operations, leaving seventeen thousand people with jobs, without jobs, thousands upon thousands of folks without the plane tickets they thought they had already secured, and really truly potentially bringing the prices up for all of us who travel by air because when you lose an ultra low budget carrier like Spirit Airlines, the idea is that, yeah, the competition.
00:12:40
Speaker 2: Has just now lost a competition.
00:12:43
Speaker 4: Correct, and so now other airlines don't have the same incentive to keep prices low worse. So, yes, this is a major, major loss of a low cost carrier that is likely to upend airline tickets as we know it.
00:12:59
Speaker 3: So yeah, yes, there has been a lot of back and forth, a lot.
00:13:02
Speaker 4: Of fingerpointing, but there is an effort by the people to bring back Spirit Airlines.
00:13:09
Speaker 3: Just how legit is this, Well, it's called Spirit two.
00:13:12
Speaker 1: Point Oh it looks legit to me, Like these people put some time and effort and a little bit of thought into this.
00:13:17
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they are asking all of us who want to help Spirit Airlines, spirit flight attendants, and just to bring Spirit Airlines back to pledge. It's a forty five dollars minimum pledge to try and I guess refuel so to speak, Spirit Airlines, or at least get them the money they needed to start ANEW.
00:13:41
Speaker 3: So this is kind of crazy.
00:13:43
Speaker 4: One hundred and fifty four thousand total pledges right now, and they claim they have one hundred and thirty two million dollars pledged to restart Spirit Airlines.
00:13:55
Speaker 2: What's the name of the the website again.
00:13:57
Speaker 3: Spirit is called Let's Buy Spirit air Dot.
00:14:00
Speaker 1: I thought that was cool too. It's back up and running right now. But when we first got up this morning it crashed. It had a message up top that said, we have crashed because of the overwhelming support and attention we've gotten. We need to revamp, rethink, and then get our servers up and running. So they seem to have robed some thought. I'm not sure how serious, but they are not just saying this ropes. They are doing and modeling themselves after the Green Bay Packers, which a lot of people understand is a essentially a crowd a fan owned team. They all have individual shares in that team. The community owns it. He's trying to say doing something similar, is this possible?
00:14:41
Speaker 3: You know what? I applaud the effort.
00:14:44
Speaker 4: I'm curious to see what happens they You know, I didn't realize they said that in twenty twenty four, forty four million Americans flew Spirit Airlines. So this isn't just impacting one hundred thousand or so. Hot There are saying that millions of people are impacted by the and that yes, let's try and own this airline. Have this be a crowd sourced and owned airline.
00:15:08
Speaker 1: I don't know how much money they would need yet. The government bailout was what five hundred million.
00:15:13
Speaker 4: Five hundred million is what they were talking about. If they've already got one hundred and thirty two million dollars, it's kind of amazing.
00:15:20
Speaker 1: So here is the other part of that. The money's not sitting in an account right now. People can just make a non binding pledge. So if this were to move forward, I'm not sure how they would go about getting all that money from people. But still I think symbolically speaking, at least right now, rhobes that's that's a big deal.
00:15:44
Speaker 3: It's cool.
00:15:44
Speaker 4: And look, I like how they priced it out, that forty five dollars minimum pledge. They say that is I didn't realize that that is the average price of a one way Spirit ticket. So they say, you've already paid to fly on this airline, now you can help own it. And it's just it is it's cool for people to think that they have skin in the game, so to speak. And I do think the Green Bay model is a pretty cool one. That I wasn't even aware of, but they spell it out on their website to kind of explain how this would work. They say, three hundred and sixty thousand ordinary people own shares and because of that, no billionaire can move the team, no hedge fund can gut it for parts. And that's exactly what they're hoping to do for Spiritual Spirit Airlines hasn't weighed in on this by the way that I that I'm aware of.
00:16:26
Speaker 1: Yes, because they don't have phones or computers anymore. Apparently when they shut down, they shut down.
00:16:31
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's interesting, they said, what was they said they were going to wind down? Yeah, they like just completely bailed out morning.
00:16:38
Speaker 3: It was Sunday. It was at three am, Sunday, three am something like that.
00:16:43
Speaker 1: Backup Sundays. Okay, yeah, son, Can this work?
00:16:47
Speaker 2: Who knows?
00:16:48
Speaker 1: But I think that's got to feel a little good. As much as they were the butt of many jokes, they did become a part of our culture in this really strange weight robes that we love to talk about them, we love to talk down about it. We'll have to make fun of the planes. But at the same time they helped all of us. I've never been on a Spirit plane. They helped us out still by keeping competition, making better routes, do all kinds of stuff, keeping people employed. Robes, you don't know what you got until it's gone. Yeah, oh, now people are so nostalgic and wanting Spirit to be around and we missed them. And at the same time, robes are your daughters in particular, I see all the time. But a forty nine dollars one wayfare is not something necessarily we would click on. But robes, college kid, young adult just need to get from point A to point B with a backpack. This is an option they don't mind. It has a service it provided, and it's a damn shame we don't have it anymore.
00:17:42
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's an option that they were actually relishing, and it afforded them the ability to go places they couldn't have before.
00:17:51
Speaker 3: So yeah, this is a big deal. And oh the irony.
00:17:54
Speaker 4: That this judge Elizabeth Warren, the Department of Transportation on to the Biden administration, whoever you want to say, didn't want that merger to take place. The whole point of why they didn't want the merger to take places because they didn't want Spirit Airlines to go away. They recognized the value of having a low priced carrier like Spirit Airlines, but oh the irony it ended up being there undoing. They couldn't financially keep themselves afloat, and yes, fuel prices were the final nail in the coffin. So everyone actually is correct. It was kind of everyone's fault. Everyone made mistakes along the way, but that's no and hindsight is twenty twenty. But if we can learn from it instead of just blaming other people for it, we could possibly do better next time. But we'll wait for it in the meantime. Thank you for listening to us everyone. I made be Robock alongside TJ. Holmes.
00:18:51
Speaker 3: We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1: Hey, folks, it is Tuesday, May fifth, and do you want to buy Spirit Airlines? There is a growing movement out there and people are pledging money, regular citizens to buy Spirit. Meanwhile, a political blame game is going back and forth that has gotten a tad ugly over who it is to blame for the airline going out of business with that, Welcome to this episode of Amy and TJ. I should probably give a little more when I say it's gotten ugly.
00:00:32
Speaker 2: We're used to that.
00:00:33
Speaker 1: But somebody has compared Spirit Airlines Nicole Brown Simpson. Your first thought is like, wait, what, but how could that ever be okay?
00:00:42
Speaker 3: It's never okay.
00:00:43
Speaker 4: And then to compare OJ Simpson, or at least compare sorry, Senator Elizabeth Warren to OJ Simpson in that same photo, that makes it even more disturbing.
00:00:55
Speaker 1: So yeah, let's get that out of the way at the top. Yes, political blame game going back and forth. But the reference you're making, and this senator got taken to task court, and we should say he has already taken it down if you want to understand just how much flak he got. But this was Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a Republican goes on and it was a retweet, a repost of somebody else's, but he certainly elevated this image, Roke.
00:01:16
Speaker 4: Yes, and he put the caption, nailed it after we all see this really disturbing image, because yeah, it shows OJ and Nicole Brown Simpson together as a couple, and then to have over OJ's chest Elizabeth Warren written and then over Nicole Brown Simpson's Spirit Airlines. Obviously, the implication is that Elizabeth Warren killed Spirit Airlines.
00:01:40
Speaker 1: Okay, there's a bunch of ways, disgusting. Well, there's a bunch of ways to make that criticism of her.
00:01:46
Speaker 4: There's a bunch of ways, and that's a really incendiary, disgusting, disrespectful way to do it. And honestly, I know we keep saying this, but my god, senators, isn't there some decorum. Isn't there some level of civility that needs to exist or that we would hope could exist, even if you disagree, even if you want to blame someone to put the name of a US senator over someone who most people believe is a murderer because he's not a convicted murderer, but still, just this very divisive public just awful photo. Just to put this up and try to compare it to a senator and the situation with an airline going under. Seventeen thousand people lost their jobs, but a woman lost her life, and that is what makes this so terrible.
00:02:39
Speaker 2: Growth that's it.
00:02:41
Speaker 1: A lot of people there are to be offended by this, first and foremost Nicole Brown Simpson's family, Yes, you think that is like, that's not a moment where you thought maybe this was awful to the memory of this woman.
00:02:55
Speaker 2: To throw it literally is.
00:02:57
Speaker 1: A picture of her with just spirit air slapped over top of her.
00:03:02
Speaker 3: It's you feel physically ill.
00:03:05
Speaker 4: I haven't seen anything from Nicole Brown Simpson's family reacting to this, but interestingly, Shannanne Watts, a very famous story out of Colorado, her she actually her family has created an organization called the Shannane Watts of Mom's Demand Action. They actually have an AX they put out there a murdered mom mime is hysterical?
00:03:24
Speaker 3: Am I right? I mean just calling it out for what it is?
00:03:28
Speaker 2: Does it need to be called out? Does he not know this is? You don't do this now.
00:03:34
Speaker 1: Mike Lee has been a guy who's had to take down some tweets in the past. Should we consider the source? Should we consider who's doing it? But if we do that, robes we should also consider we should hold him to his past history, but hold him to being a US senator.
00:03:49
Speaker 2: Maybe we shouldn't. Maybe can you laugh? Can you defend this? Now?
00:03:53
Speaker 1: He hasn't come out and said oops, even though he's taking it down, which is in some way an acknowledgment that it shouldn't have gone up, or acknowledgment of the criticism.
00:04:01
Speaker 4: Look, I think at the end of the day, it's fair to say, I feel like everyone could agree with this. It's morally disgusting what he did. That to me is the best way to put it. And yes, this is a senator whose Twitter account I guess x account sorry was deactivated for a while because he threatened or it appeared that he was threatening the Japanese Prime minister.
00:04:21
Speaker 3: So obviously this guy is a provocateur.
00:04:23
Speaker 4: The question is, I guess, And the decision about whether or not he should remain a United States senator has to be with the people who voted him and elected him to office.
00:04:31
Speaker 2: I've said, period, point blank. But it's out there, been talked about. He does this don't know why.
00:04:37
Speaker 1: It's just another one of these things Wherebes that raises it just sets a new bar which is getting.
00:04:43
Speaker 2: Lower and lower and lower for our rhetoric.
00:04:46
Speaker 1: His point is worth examining, is worth talking about it. Yes, let's have a conversation because Senator Elizabeth Elizabeth Warren, who has been a very big anti business, anti billionaire. She wouldn't call herself outtime business, but she's anti big business in billionaires. She years ago argued Robes pretty forcefully and pretty publicly that she didn't want Spirit Airlines to be saved when it had a bit of a lifeline.
00:05:13
Speaker 4: At the time, it had a pretty big lifeline. This was back in twenty twenty four, correct. Spirit Airlines and Jet Blue were set to merger. You've got this big airline that wanted to absorb Spirit Airlines. Therefore you would save Spirit Airlines or at least a lot of the positions and jobs there as it folds into Jet Blue. And it was a judge, but the DOJ and the Biden administration did not want this merger to go through.
00:05:39
Speaker 2: So it wasn't her. She had no power necessarily at the time.
00:05:43
Speaker 1: She didn't stop the deal, but she was very public, and she seemed to celebrate at the time the fact that the merger wasn't going through. That is what now Robes has gotten. I guess her to this point of some scrutiny, which let's have that COmON and that's okay. You don't need a Nicole Brown Simpson mean to make that point. So March twenty twenty four, Robes her tweet that Elizabeth Warren had, which has come back and a lot of people are looking at She seemed to be very gleeful and excited that that merger didn't go through. That Robes looks really in poor tastes when you realize seventeen thousand folks just lost a job before.
00:06:24
Speaker 4: I guess, yes, And when Mike Lee read or put something back up, he actually had her original tweet from March twenty twenty four and then basically pointed out the fact that she was celebrating, as you would say, the inability to merge. Yes, she said, this was her original tweet from March of twenty twenty four. I've worn for months that a Jet Blue Spirit Airlines merger would have led to fewer flights and higher fares. Justice ATR and US doot were right to stand up for consumers and fight against runaway airline consolidation. This is a Biden win for flyers. Okayings, that's tough after last weekend, that is a tough one to hear.
00:07:04
Speaker 1: And as an exclamation point, even after this is a Biden went yeah, that looks bad.
00:07:09
Speaker 2: Let's yes, let's talk about it. What happened then? What can we do in the future? Was she right?
00:07:12
Speaker 1: Then? Can we do better? Yes, let's talk about that. You don't have to put up a damn meme like he did. She did respond she knew all this was going on and that she was being blamed or a lot of people were pointing to her as the part of the conversation rope is that Democrats are getting the blame for killing Spirit because of what happened back then, and then they're being right back in their faces. Where Democrats are throwing the Iran war, they are saying it's fuel prices. It's your president, you Republicans. They're saying, it's the president that has caused Spirit Airlines to go under because they couldn't survive the high fuel costs.
00:07:49
Speaker 2: Let's have that conversation.
00:07:50
Speaker 4: Yes, but it's just kind of remarkable. An entire airline has gone belly up. People are out of jobs, a lot of folks plans and yes, travel plans could be business pleasure and important, but all upended because of this.
00:08:05
Speaker 3: A lot of lives impacted.
00:08:07
Speaker 4: But let's just go ahead and instead of trying to figure out how to move forward, we're just gonna point the finger.
00:08:13
Speaker 3: It's the Democrat's fault, or it's the Republican's fault.
00:08:15
Speaker 4: Yes, classic response, and it gets so mean spirited and so unnecessary. So yeah, Elizabeth Warren tried to get ahead of this, and her response was to put this up today on X as well.
00:08:28
Speaker 3: Correct, you put this up on X.
00:08:30
Speaker 4: She said spiking fuel prices from Trump's war was the nail in the coffin for twice bankrupted Spirit Airlines. For what it's worth, Jet Blue merger failed because a judge appointed by Ronald Reagan said the deal was illegal. Republicans are desperate to shift blame from higher cost hitting families. That's a little bit of her reach. Now she's gonna blame Ronald Reagan, Republican Ronald Reagan, while she actually gave credit to Joe in her original tweet for stopping the merger which would have saved Spirit Airlines.
00:09:07
Speaker 3: It's all insanity.
00:09:10
Speaker 1: Seventeen thousand people out of jobs, and these folks are tweeting at each other about things that don't even matter. This is a midterm year, Robes, this is what it is. He eagerly he latched onto one because it's a big deal. When you got gas prices, people are pissed.
00:09:23
Speaker 2: They want to blame somebody. Seventeen thousand people just lost jobs. They're pissed.
00:09:27
Speaker 1: They want to blame somebody who should we blame And that's why these things are flying. And this why these accusations are coming. But Robes, he wasn't done. Now this next one. I don't even find it that funny either, if he had posted this other one first, But he the OJ Simpson Nicole Brown Simpson picture wasn't the only image he used showing two people and labeling one of them OJ or labeling one of them Elizabeth Warren and labeling one of them Spirit Airlines.
00:09:53
Speaker 2: Would you have found the other one funny?
00:09:55
Speaker 4: It would have been funnier, Yes, Nancy Kerrigan was we're talking about Tanya Harding and Nancy Agan. I think everyone listening probably knows obviously what happened where Tanya Harding or at least people who were working on behalf of Tanya Harding at least deliberately injured Nancy Kerrigan, who then couldn't compete.
00:10:18
Speaker 1: That was all settled, just going backwards like, there's no question about that.
00:10:21
Speaker 4: There were convictions and oh I sat down for hours with Tanya Harting.
00:10:25
Speaker 2: This is not a.
00:10:26
Speaker 1: Situation where there's speculation and allegations of This is like part of history and Olympic history. She had these people banged this woman's knee. She claims they did it without her asking. But yes, okay, see I know I was missing something about that story.
00:10:41
Speaker 2: I know I was missing something.
00:10:42
Speaker 4: Okay, she has distanced herself from the culpability of that.
00:10:45
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, there it is. But we all get the point.
00:10:48
Speaker 1: So that picture you said in context is hard to see it as funny now given who is not who posted.
00:10:53
Speaker 3: It correctly correct.
00:10:55
Speaker 4: However, it is one of the it's a little bit less incendiary because it wasn't a brutal order of a woman, a mother.
00:11:03
Speaker 3: No, this was. Yes, it was a brutal attack.
00:11:05
Speaker 4: It had very big consequences, but maybe it's not as disgusting in the sense that there's enough distance, enough time from it and no one died where you could maybe chuckle that I might give you as maybe something in bad taste.
00:11:21
Speaker 3: The OJ, the OJ Nicole.
00:11:23
Speaker 4: Brown Senson was disgusting and reprehensible. The Nancy Kerrigan tany harding thing is just maybe distaste.
00:11:30
Speaker 2: Okay, that's a good way to put it. In poor taste.
00:11:32
Speaker 1: While all that blame game is going on, would you believe there is an effort, an effort now to save Spirit Airlines. It's an effort that thousands upon thousands of people have signed up for and have committed nearly one hundred million dollars too. We'll explain why this is a big deal and maybe not so big of a deal at the same time.
00:11:57
Speaker 2: So here.
00:12:07
Speaker 4: Welcome back everyone to this episode of Amy and TJ. Where look, we learned this week that Spirit Airlines abruptly had to shutter all of its operations, leaving seventeen thousand people with jobs, without jobs, thousands upon thousands of folks without the plane tickets they thought they had already secured, and really truly potentially bringing the prices up for all of us who travel by air because when you lose an ultra low budget carrier like Spirit Airlines, the idea is that, yeah, the competition.
00:12:40
Speaker 2: Has just now lost a competition.
00:12:43
Speaker 4: Correct, and so now other airlines don't have the same incentive to keep prices low worse. So, yes, this is a major, major loss of a low cost carrier that is likely to upend airline tickets as we know it.
00:12:59
Speaker 3: So yeah, yes, there has been a lot of back and forth, a lot.
00:13:02
Speaker 4: Of fingerpointing, but there is an effort by the people to bring back Spirit Airlines.
00:13:09
Speaker 3: Just how legit is this, Well, it's called Spirit two.
00:13:12
Speaker 1: Point Oh it looks legit to me, Like these people put some time and effort and a little bit of thought into this.
00:13:17
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they are asking all of us who want to help Spirit Airlines, spirit flight attendants, and just to bring Spirit Airlines back to pledge. It's a forty five dollars minimum pledge to try and I guess refuel so to speak, Spirit Airlines, or at least get them the money they needed to start ANEW.
00:13:41
Speaker 3: So this is kind of crazy.
00:13:43
Speaker 4: One hundred and fifty four thousand total pledges right now, and they claim they have one hundred and thirty two million dollars pledged to restart Spirit Airlines.
00:13:55
Speaker 2: What's the name of the the website again.
00:13:57
Speaker 3: Spirit is called Let's Buy Spirit air Dot.
00:14:00
Speaker 1: I thought that was cool too. It's back up and running right now. But when we first got up this morning it crashed. It had a message up top that said, we have crashed because of the overwhelming support and attention we've gotten. We need to revamp, rethink, and then get our servers up and running. So they seem to have robed some thought. I'm not sure how serious, but they are not just saying this ropes. They are doing and modeling themselves after the Green Bay Packers, which a lot of people understand is a essentially a crowd a fan owned team. They all have individual shares in that team. The community owns it. He's trying to say doing something similar, is this possible?
00:14:41
Speaker 3: You know what? I applaud the effort.
00:14:44
Speaker 4: I'm curious to see what happens they You know, I didn't realize they said that in twenty twenty four, forty four million Americans flew Spirit Airlines. So this isn't just impacting one hundred thousand or so. Hot There are saying that millions of people are impacted by the and that yes, let's try and own this airline. Have this be a crowd sourced and owned airline.
00:15:08
Speaker 1: I don't know how much money they would need yet. The government bailout was what five hundred million.
00:15:13
Speaker 4: Five hundred million is what they were talking about. If they've already got one hundred and thirty two million dollars, it's kind of amazing.
00:15:20
Speaker 1: So here is the other part of that. The money's not sitting in an account right now. People can just make a non binding pledge. So if this were to move forward, I'm not sure how they would go about getting all that money from people. But still I think symbolically speaking, at least right now, rhobes that's that's a big deal.
00:15:44
Speaker 3: It's cool.
00:15:44
Speaker 4: And look, I like how they priced it out, that forty five dollars minimum pledge. They say that is I didn't realize that that is the average price of a one way Spirit ticket. So they say, you've already paid to fly on this airline, now you can help own it. And it's just it is it's cool for people to think that they have skin in the game, so to speak. And I do think the Green Bay model is a pretty cool one. That I wasn't even aware of, but they spell it out on their website to kind of explain how this would work. They say, three hundred and sixty thousand ordinary people own shares and because of that, no billionaire can move the team, no hedge fund can gut it for parts. And that's exactly what they're hoping to do for Spiritual Spirit Airlines hasn't weighed in on this by the way that I that I'm aware of.
00:16:26
Speaker 1: Yes, because they don't have phones or computers anymore. Apparently when they shut down, they shut down.
00:16:31
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's interesting, they said, what was they said they were going to wind down? Yeah, they like just completely bailed out morning.
00:16:38
Speaker 3: It was Sunday. It was at three am, Sunday, three am something like that.
00:16:43
Speaker 1: Backup Sundays. Okay, yeah, son, Can this work?
00:16:47
Speaker 2: Who knows?
00:16:48
Speaker 1: But I think that's got to feel a little good. As much as they were the butt of many jokes, they did become a part of our culture in this really strange weight robes that we love to talk about them, we love to talk down about it. We'll have to make fun of the planes. But at the same time they helped all of us. I've never been on a Spirit plane. They helped us out still by keeping competition, making better routes, do all kinds of stuff, keeping people employed. Robes, you don't know what you got until it's gone. Yeah, oh, now people are so nostalgic and wanting Spirit to be around and we missed them. And at the same time, robes are your daughters in particular, I see all the time. But a forty nine dollars one wayfare is not something necessarily we would click on. But robes, college kid, young adult just need to get from point A to point B with a backpack. This is an option they don't mind. It has a service it provided, and it's a damn shame we don't have it anymore.
00:17:42
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's an option that they were actually relishing, and it afforded them the ability to go places they couldn't have before.
00:17:51
Speaker 3: So yeah, this is a big deal. And oh the irony.
00:17:54
Speaker 4: That this judge Elizabeth Warren, the Department of Transportation on to the Biden administration, whoever you want to say, didn't want that merger to take place. The whole point of why they didn't want the merger to take places because they didn't want Spirit Airlines to go away. They recognized the value of having a low priced carrier like Spirit Airlines, but oh the irony it ended up being there undoing. They couldn't financially keep themselves afloat, and yes, fuel prices were the final nail in the coffin. So everyone actually is correct. It was kind of everyone's fault. Everyone made mistakes along the way, but that's no and hindsight is twenty twenty. But if we can learn from it instead of just blaming other people for it, we could possibly do better next time. But we'll wait for it in the meantime. Thank you for listening to us everyone. I made be Robock alongside TJ. Holmes.
00:18:51
Speaker 3: We'll talk to you soon.