The Glenn Beck Program - Best of The Program | Guests: Jason Whitlock & Amy Peikoff | 1/11/21

Episode Date: January 11, 2021

The world we live in now isn’t the same as it was before the Capitol riots: There are two Americas now. The riots did nothing but strengthen Big Tech. Columnist Jason Whitlock breaks down his new BlazeTV op-ed, “Ignoring the Concerns of Trump Supporters Will Destroy America." Google, Apple, and Amazon took social media site Parler off the internet. Parler chief policy officer Amy Peikoff joins with the latest on Big Tech’s attack and Parler’s efforts to rebuild and move forward. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, podcasters, it's Monday. And it still reminds me halfway through this podcast. This is only day six of our broadcast year. Day freaking six. Amazing. It's an insane year. And if you feel the way we do, uh, whoa, you should listen to today's show. Again, you always say, why did I waste all those blackouts back in the day?

You could have seen. Man, if I didn't become an alcoholic 25 years ago, now is the time to start drinking. In fact, I think that should be, that might be the message on tomorrow's podcast. Just, hey, if you're not an alcoholic yet, start drinking. Now's the time. Now is the time. Great podcast for you for a Monday. Here it is.

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. I think you feel it. If you don't, if you don't, maybe you're not paying attention. And I know a lot of people that are just disconnecting from. the news and disconnecting from what's going on and they tell me and with a with complete understanding I listen to them I feel better Glenn I feel better when I don't listen in the news I understand that but now is not the time to disconnect from what's going on because the world is changing quickly something noteworthy and historic has occurred

over the last couple of days. It is something historic, but it is also something terrifying. And I'm not talking about the capital riots. Those were perhaps terrifying for a brief moment, but they are being made historic by the type and scope of media coverage that they are getting. But anyone trying to make the claim that American democracy almost died that day, or a small handful of violent thugs represent some existential threat to the U.S. Constitution has quite simply lost the plot.

It is important to realize that the world we live in after the Capitol riots is not the world we were in on Tuesday. We have crossed a threshold, and we now live in a very different nation. And it's not because of the riots themselves. Those could have been nothing more than a minor blip in the grand scheme of things. But in case you don't feel or haven't realized it yet, we now officially live in a United Nation in name only. And that is because of the way the left and even some of those so-called centrists. have decided to respond. We now have two distinct countries inside of one nation.

We have two distinct peoples, two distinct cultures, two distinct economies. And one economy is truly under attack. We are way past now being just politically or ideologically divided. the leftist coalition now includes governments, media, and big tech. And they have declared war, although a cold war, they have declared a cold war on us. It's economic warfare designed to remove the ability for half the country to communicate ideas, communicate with each other, even be able to make a living. We have seen hints of this in the last few years where credit card companies and banks have refused to do business with

firearm companies, where single individuals were targeted to be deplatformed for what social media companies deemed to be hate speech. Those were trial balloons. Those were probed. Those were probed. to see how we would respond, to see how the courts would respond. They have been laying in wait, ready for a catalyzing event that they could use to justify open economic warfare. And the capital riots foolishly have given them that event. I actually, I know I might sound tense today, and I am. because every word that any of us speak live, unscripted, most of the time, is going to be monitored, scrutinized, and twisted.

And the responsibility to keep a voice that can be heard is overwhelming on all of us, Dennis Prager, Rush Limbaugh, Dave Rubin, Mark Levin. This morning, they have officially de-platformed parlor from Amazon. Over the weekend, it was Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, but now the Amazon Web Services have shut them down. They are no longer able to, you can't find them on the Internet anymore. They're gone.

Now, these companies, Amazon Apple, Facebook and Google, they did it all at the same time. I want you to know this is not about Trump. This is about them. The far left has talked about breaking up these companies for a long time. Elizabeth Warren, even I think Kamala Harris was talking about breaking them up too, wasn't she, during the primaries? They've talked about breaking these companies up. They know that the power structure.

has totally changed. They must find a way to be on the side of the left. This is something I warned you of four years ago, that there would come a time when unemployment and the beginning of this transition and the economy would change, and people would begin to lose their jobs, and you wouldn't be able to replace them because a profound technological change,

is coming. And I told you at the time, high tech will need the government and the government will need high tech. And they will work together to preserve their power and their position. This is what's happening today.

Donald Trump and the riots are an excuse. And it is extraordinarily difficult to swallow the hypocrisy. It's extraordinary to hear about all the hate that was on parlor. When things like Kathy Griffin, she reposted the picture of her with the beheading of Trump, Trump's bloodied head. She reposted it on Twitter on Wednesday of last week.

no one has said anything about it. Still, still from Slate is the tweet, nonviolence to protest, has always been important, but so is violence. It's very difficult to swallow. But we're the people that understand life is not fair. Let's not become all that we despise. this is not the end of this. This is where the left is starting.

Today they say they're deplatforming people because they're inciting violence or for hate speech. But after that, we'll be anything they decide is fake news. Anything they decide is anti-science. Anything they believe may lead to the next Trump. And those who persist in standing for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to assemble, freedom to keep and bear arms, those people will be targeted for deletion. You will be hounded, boycotted, fired, ostracized, and deplatformed. And the louder and the more significant and effective your voices, the bigger the target is on your back.

First, let me say this. I will never stop. standing for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to assemble, freedom to keep and bear arms, and all of the rest of the Bill of Rights. That is the American thing to do. And I don't care what you do to my voice. I don't care. I don't care if you imprison me.

I will continue to stand. because I know the truth wins in the end. I believe Nelson Mandela was a hero, and he too went to prison for what he believed. This is the best of the Glenn Beck program. Jason Whitlock. Jason is a sports writer. Why the heck is he on the Glenn Beck program?

Well, because he is a deep-thinking man who has been making a lot of waves in his own life to his own career in many cases for speaking what he believes is the truth. And he just wrote a new op-ed. It's up on the blaze. Ignoring the concerns of Trump supporters will destroy America. Welcome, Jason Whitlock. You bet. How are you, man? I'm awesome.

Well, hold on. That was a, I'm actually not. I'm concerned. I'm literally what the event's going on. Yeah, you know, I said today that I hope the audience doesn't interpret. Somebody who's been listening to me for 20 years, they might interpret how I sound today as afraid or whatever. I'm not. I have, I have, I know who leads my life.

I know what I need to do. But it is concerning, deep. if you're not a little afraid of what's going on, you're not, you don't understand what's going on. Yeah, I mean, for just me now in America, or not used to, not what our founders intended. Being afraid, I believe in being fearless. I believe in leaning into God. But America right now, it is the most disconcerting thing that's happened to me in my lifetime. Well, they have, you know, they, Apple and Amazon and Google, they decided they were going to delete Parlor from their app stores.

But this morning, Amazon has taken them off the Internet. You can't find them anywhere on the Internet today. That's stunning. Yeah, is that not true of cell phones? Do you think the people, whoever did whatever was done at the Capitol, you think, They didn't use a cell phone to help execute that? Do you think there haven't been threat to cell phones? Are we going after the iPhone?

Are we deplatforming the iPhone? I don't, I just don't, the logic here and the justification, this isn't to beat my chest, but it's four or five years ago I started talking about, hey, man, Silicon Valley, Northern California has way too much power. America, all of the media. Liberal from New York is completely different than the liberal from Northern California. This concentration of power in Northern California, where that's a very revolutionary in Northern California.

It is brought of a brush, but no American values turned over this power, and I just never understood why our law. Well, I do understand they were all getting checks and money and big tech as bought off everybody. And now they need each other. Now one needs the protection of the other. Yeah. So let me talk a little bit about what you wrote in your op-ed piece. You say there are two Americas. There's two American realities. Can you go into that a bit? Yeah, the capital thing into, that's an example of like the progressive elites in Hollywood and the incident that happened last, Wednesday.

Us that live in the real world, that's an example of what happens when you tell 74 million people they're unworthy of living here in this country. They have no rights. They're all racist. They're Nazis. When you tell 74 million people that people on the planet, you don't have a voice here in America, and the one voice you have, which was a powerful voice, the president, we are silencing and removing from office.

now we're coming for you. You 74 million people, anybody that supported Trump, I'm just opposite reaction. And so you can't demonize 74 million people. You can't call your racist. It will not stand. I'm not trying to defend the people that stormed. No, no, no. There's, you know, I said last week, there are really important reasons why this happened.

There are no excuses. there are important reasons and until the left and the media understands their role in it. It's not that you just said, you're bad people, you're racist, you have no place here and we're coming after you. They also at the same time have done everything in their power to destroy their own credibility. The media and the government has lied, has twisted, has done everything. Everything, everything that destroys any kind of honest, give and take, any kind of trust that you've had. So when you don't trust them at all and you say, hey, wait a minute, I think there might be a problem. And then on top of it, then you say, I'm shutting everything down, shut up, sit down.

This is of course, they're surrounded. The left surrounds themselves with behavioral scientists. They know exactly what caused this. They know exactly this naive or this uninformed. But yesterday, I had to ask someone because I keep hearing it, talked about in the media, but I didn't understand it. And then someone explained it to me, it was actually gasped him, explained it to me. And I said, hey, the reason why something like QA-N-on can grow in popularity,

and take root is because of the failure of the media. If the media did its job, there would be far less conspiracy theory. Yes. Yes. When you have when you have when you have Jeffrey Epstein and all of the records and all of the stuff that he had, all of the very powerful people he was involved in, go to jail. He's killed under unusual circumstances. and then it just goes away.

Of course conspiracies are going to come out of this. Of course. Because no one is saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. That shouldn't have happened. That never happens. And we're still going to pursue exactly what did happen and who was involved. But they don't. And so conspiracies grow out of that.

And our Trump colluded with Russia and they undermine the election. repercussions from it. There's no people because of it. These are all evil. You must be destroyed. We must shut you down. The hypocrisy is too easy to spot for rational people living in reality, not to react and say, hey, man, this is just unfair. This is in principles, and we're destroying it. And the free speech that is guaranteed is the free speech to question and, petition your government for answers. Let me give you another one. You know about the Solar Winds hack that happened, what was it, a month ago,

where the government was hacked into and it looks like it was Russia that did this big hack? Do you remember this? Vaguely. Okay. Well, it was everywhere for about a day. Everywhere. It's a really big story. Well, guess what was released at 2 o'clock in the afternoon?

on Wednesday, last Wednesday. Quote, the U.S. Justice Department has released information now that they are the latest federal agency to say that it was breached by hackers in the Russia-linked cyber attack that ripped through the government agency. So a month later, they come out and say 3% of the Justice Department's Microsoft email accounts were potentially accessed in the attack. It happened on December 24th. It has eliminated the identified method by which the actor was assessing Microsoft email accounts. They were looking at and going through email accounts that contain sensitive information about investigations and national security related issues. Why didn't you say this when everybody else was... what was announcing that they were attacked.

They were attacked and hacked in the same day and the same times as all of the other departments that already released this. Why would you release this on the day when you know the news is all going to be about what? The electors actually being verified by the Congress. And then an extra gift of this. That's the time and day they release this. this is the kind of stuff that leads to conspiracy theories. Why didn't you release it before? Why then?

As you do or others do. Yes. Yes. People can understand no coverage of it until after the election. Right. And it's still going to not really get coverage or an investigation is my guest. Is my guess. We have Jason Whitlock with us.

Now, Jason, I am going to sound like an idiot to you because I don't follow sports and Outkick and everything else. But I read a story that you are leaving Outkick. Didn't you just join Outkick? Person, but I got to move on. Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but you are now carving out your own career path. Yeah. And because you've been at ESPN and you really helped ESPN and then they looked at you and are like, yeah, we don't agree with you politically. So beat it.

You are, I assume you're building something that is as bulletproof as possible in today's world. Today and this weekend must have scared you a little bit. Yeah, certainly. but and even in the sports lane that I have been in, if people have followed my work, I've always included themes that were larger than sports and tried to explain America to sports fans. And so I want to continue down that path.

I believe journalism is my contribution to this country and trying to wake people up and give them the facts. and from my point of view, information so that they can make better decisions. We have a very uninformed public right now because the mainstream media has completely failed them. That's why there's so much confusion and chaos. That's why, again, when you just talk about this false reality that people live in, LeBron James and other influencers that are curry in favor with China, to keep explaining to people, oh, my God, if that were black people that had stormed the

Capitol, what would have happened? They would have all been slaughtered. And I'm like, hey, man, have you not watched what went on this entire summer with Black Lives Matter and Antifa, burning buildings, murders of police officers? As you said, in your Blaze editorial, there are two Americas with two separate realities. This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and don't forget, rate us on iTunes. Is the chief policy officer at the social media platform parlor, which you're going to have a hard time finding today because Amazon has removed them. Amy is, she has her BS in math applied science, her JD at UCLA. She served as an editor on the UCLA Law Review.

after she got her law degree, she went to USC where she earned her Ph.D. in philosophy. She has taught at Southwestern Law School, Chapman University School of Law, and the United States Air Force Academy, also the University of North Carolina and University of Texas. So she really hasn't done a lot with her life, but we're going to cut her some slack today. Amy, welcome to the program. Thanks, Glenn, for having me. I'd be better if it was under good circumstances, right? So this is terrifying what is going on. And I think you guys are only the first.

You're not the last. Tell me what happened, what's been going on, where this whole thing stands. So basically, let me make one thing clear, which is that everybody agrees that all of this violence inciting content or if people are organizing to have an insurrection, et cetera, that this content is wrong and doesn't belong. Correct. But that content has been everywhere in the last weeks, and this is a very extraordinary time that we're living in. If I may say, if I may say, Amy, it's not only everywhere. On the left, it is still online at Twitter. Still online.

Yes. Yes. Okay. And so in this context, we feel that, of course, we are being treated unfairly. we were given no notice on Friday, we were told first by Apple and then by Amazon that if we didn't meet their expectations as to the handling of this huge flood of content, then they were just going to drop us completely. And, you know, we have a philosophical model at Parlor that we both were nonpartisan, that we believe in freedom of expression, but at the same time, we want to respect privacy of users so that, you know, in the spirit, of Section 230, the people who post the content are the ones who are responsible for the content. We are responsible for the content so long as we're taking reasonable steps once we become

aware of the content. And what's happening in the market, because you have the established players of Facebook and Twitter, using these algorithms to scan content constantly, 24-7, whether you have any particular I suspicion about a particular user or not, your content is scanned. That's becoming the standard of what's reasonable on the internet. And we say, no, we think that's an Orwellian standard and that we should go back to the model of the public square, where if you become aware that somebody is engaging in criminal activity, you take the appropriate action, which would be banning or reporting the law enforcement or both, right?

And humans are actually involved. Let me ask you, first of all, Apple did this, Amazon did this, they could. kind of all dogpiled on you. Is this a violation of any antitrust laws? You know, that is unclear. I'm not an antitrust law expert about this. So I'm going to leave that. You know, I am an academic lawyer and I did a lot of research into the theoretical foundations of privacy and have a whole theory about that. And that's why I'm at parlor, right, because I share their affinity for privacy and for trying to implement it on the internet and prevent 1984 from becoming reality, right? I know.

So vice is... It's not being pressured, right? We're pressured to conform to the exact same standards of content moderation and also data mining and, you know, algorithm scanning that our competitors use that these entrenched big social media are using. So they told us that if we would just, if we would just, you know, build our own platform, that'd be fine. Now it's not build your own platform.

It is build your own platform, create your own cloud, lay your own fiber. I mean, we're not welcome on anything, anything. You know, we're going to have to have our own banks, credit cards, and processing for everything. It's not reasonable. No, exactly. It's not reasonable. And the people who have been the biggest detractors and the ones who are really trying, to take us down. I think they need to ask themselves a question, do they want to live in the world

in which every single piece of content that you put on the internet is scanned by some algorithm for so-called wrongthink 24 hours a day, seven days a week? Now, mind you, I agree that this activity is illegal, but once you introduce scanning, you use that scanning for anything, the door is open. And I think that you should not be surveilled in a free country in there is some particularized suspicion about you. That's the spirit of the Fourth Amendment, and that's what we've been trying to do at Parliament. All right. So you agree with the speech that is plotting and planning violence, that that should be moderated and removed. You just believe it. Of course. It's the methodology that I disagree with. I mean, nobody, and, you know,

at Parlor, our goal has been to provide this nonpartisan town square for productive. discussions on the important issues of the day. And if anything stops productive discussions because it stops the thinking behind them, it is force or threat the force. So, of course, we disagree with that content being on our platform. We don't want it there. And what all of us, every platform, even the ones with the algorithms, have been struggling with, is this huge flood of content in this extraordinary time.

You know, on Twitter, we had hang Mike Pence on Saturday. On Saturday that was going on. And they have the algorithm, but it was fine for them. Yes. We have a report from Vice today that Parlor has been hacked into and 70 terabytes of information, including our driver's license, everything, has fallen into the hands of hackers. Is that true? Well, first of all, I know that it's.

in the policy of Parlor not to actually retain the driver's license, that once a verification process is done, that that is destroyed. The scan of it is destroyed. So, you know, yes, we did collect it, but we destroy it. So I don't think that that would be true. I don't know about any hacking. It has not been confirmed at all by our data, I mean, our tech team. So, yeah, I mean, we've had false accusations of hacks in the past. Okay. I haven't heard anything. So, that confirms this. Where does this stand? You're offline now.

Have you had, have you, has anyone reached out with an offer to, to host, uh, parlor? So many, so many people, so many people, right? But the thing you also have to understand is it's been this cancel culture, you know, rush. As soon as Apple did it, then Amazon sent theirs. And then after other people got the word of it, everybody just suddenly dropped service. And like you said earlier, and I'm not a tech person per se, but there's different pieces of the puzzle. And so we've had a number of different people who have come in and said, well, we've got server and cloud. And then there's other people.

And so we're trying to put the pieces back together because it's a multi-part structure that we need to rebuild. Let me ask you this question because you got your Ph.D. in philosophy, right? Yeah. I mean, I focused on the right to privacy. so I have a whole theory about the proper legal protection of privacy. Let me just ask you this question. You know, I said last week there's no excuse for the violence that happened inside the Capitol. No excuse.

But there are many reasons why it happened, and one of them is suppressing thought, suppressing people's questions. It forces people underground into private groups. it becomes, they can become radicalized easily. It's very dangerous. Let me ask you, isn't all of this censorship and all of the things to silence people, isn't that a big part of the problem? Isn't big tech actually making this much worse?

Definitely, there are people who feel that if they don't have any meaningful way of persuasion, that their options are few. right? And so that is, I think, the frustration that you see out there. You know, on Friday, when Twitter banned the president, a lot of people were flooding over to Parlor. So if you think about the fact that we have been blamed for not supposedly, you know, moderating to the extent of Twitter, although that's debatable because, again, the content's all over their site as well. you know, imagine that on Friday, where we had not expected this huge rush, this huge rush comes over. And it's precisely at that moment that we're told, get it under control in 24 hours or 48 hours, or you're gone.

It's exactly that time. And see if we went treated fairly by our suppliers. I don't believe we have been. Amy, we are in a mess. And we wish you all the best. And if there's anything we can do, and please stay. in touch with us. You know, as long as everybody is, is, understands freedom of speech with the common sense

you can't plot the overthrow of the United States. If everybody understands it. Exactly. Well, we are all, we are going to continue to do everything that we can to save civil discourse, free and open discourse on the Internet while respecting privacy. I promise. We're on it. What about the idea of these big tech companies being?

private companies so they have a right to violate freedom of speech? Certainly they have a right to do it. Okay. But right now what we have is we have a few players who are very established, who are dictating the terms. And in fact, Mark Zuckerberg was, you know, Facebook was taking out ads in the New York Times recently calling for improved internet regulation. And what that means is that he would like to see regulations that mandate the sort of content

moderation standards that Facebook uses. If they want to make that decision for themselves, that's fine. But they're even lobbying to have it put into law. Amy, good luck. Chief Policy Officer at Parlor again, we stand behind Freedom of Speech and we'll help you any way we can, Amy. Thank you so much. Thank you.