The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Program | Guests: Rep. J.D. Bernardy & Riley Moore | 1/19/22

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

Glenn exposes the World Economic Forum. West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore joins Glenn to discuss the state ending its use of BlackRock investments and the attempt to take over our banks. Author Alex Epstein joins Glenn to discuss BlackRock’s relationship with Texas, ESG Scores, and the future of energy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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great podcast today you don't want to miss a second we bring you the people who are actually doing something in their own states either state reps or state treasurers that are taking steps to stop the great reset this is a don't miss episode here it is you're listening to the best of the glenbeck program this is the glenbeck program it is truly a wonder to watch the global elites and the media and the politicians that have tried to push off the great reset as no big deal, nothing to see. It's, you know, it's just a conspiracy. It's from the World Economic Forum. It's no big deal.

They don't have any power. Really? When we first started calling this out, that was the first line of attack. We were conspiracy theorists. We believe the World Economic Forum was some master cabal that, you know, they're having star chamber meetings and none of those things are true. None of those things are true. None of those things are what we said.

They're not calling shots from some evil underground lair. They have connections with the most powerful people, the richest and most politically powerful people in the world. And they meet at Davos. It's just that. And they're like-minded. So all that people were saying at the beginning was that this is a conspiracy theory. It's not. This week from all over the globe, they are speaking at the Davos World Economic Forum.

And tonight, coincidentally, we are airing a commercial free special on the Great Reset. The same week, the Economic Forum is trying to sell their agenda. I'm going to show you what that agenda is really all about. And I find it interesting that it's the same voices that are still saying conspiracy theory or diminish what's going on. I want to give you a quote from Jack Dorsey from Twitter. Yesterday, he tweeted out, the amount of attention world economic forum receives is inversely proportional to the organization's usefulness.

It's useless. Really? If it's useless, why are you spending the time tweeting about it? If it truly is useless, I mean, you know, pigs in a blanket. really highly overrated breakfast food. They're useless.

Well, I'm not making that tweet because pigs in a blanket are really not an important breakfast food. Not everybody's talking about that. Deep thoughts by Jack. Eye boogers. They're pointless. They're annoying. They're useless. The World Economic Forum is not useless.

if you look just at who is speaking, Xi Jinping was the lead speaker earlier this week, the president of China. If you look at the number of prime ministers, central bank people, gigantic corporations, Black Rock alone has more money and holds more investment money

than any other anything on the planet makes the queen look like a, Popper. They are at the World Economic Forum and they are helping design the policy. Let me give you an example of what the World Economic Forum really is. Do you remember back in the 1970s there was something called the Heritage Foundation? It's still out. But in the 1970s, the Heritage Foundation came along and it was founded to redirect America's principles back to conservative principles and the founding. And in the 70s, the left ignored it.

They laughed. Oh, we got this in the bag. Jimmy Carter. I mean, we're fine. Something happened. These people were thinking, planning, strategizing, and connecting with people who had power and a new vision. Ronald Reagan won in a,

landslide much because of the Heritage Foundation. It kicked off 12 years of Republican control in the White House. That's the Heritage Foundation. Okay. That was well funded back in the 70s, but not like the World Economic Forum. It had connections, but not like the World Economic Forum. The World Economic Forum, a global think tank that is injecting 21st century fascism directly onto elected officials and global financial and corporate juggernauts. Imagine if the Heritage Foundation had the eyes and ears of every prime minister and president in the world, the vast majority of not only the corporate leaders, but the corporate boards, and all of the major financial institutes, including the International Monetary Fund,

the World Bank, the European Union. Central Bank, the Japanese Central Bank, the American Central Bank. Do you think that the world would be the same if the Heritage Foundation had that group of people in the 1970s? No. No, we would be a radically different country. So, Jack, as much as I appreciate your opinion, it's ridiculous to think that these people are worthless. Really? How come all of these billionaires and trillionaires are all making their way to the, do they just really love skiing together that much?

I don't think so. Jason's with us. He's our head writer, head researcher. And there's a couple of things I want to talk to you about. First of all, the special, because you hadn't read the book, you know, you weren't involved in the research. I mean, some of the research. but you weren't on the day-to-day, you know, working on the book.

You read the book, and what was your takeaway? My takeaway was, I think back to, what, over a year ago when I first brought this in and we're like, what the heck is this? This is probably something we should look at. And we started like in little chunks, just exposing things in chunks, banks, ESG, corporations. Those were like multiple different shows. And after I read the book or while I was reading the book, I was like, this is the first time I've ever seen all of those pieces put together, but in an easy to understand way.

Because, I mean, we were trying. It's hard to explain this stuff easily. It's really hard. And it was about a year and a half ago when you first, I don't remember what you stumbled on, but you were like, have you ever heard of the Great Reset? And it was the time that I was questioning build back better going, what the hell? That's the worst slogan I've ever heard. And that is the slogan from the World Economic Forum that everybody's using all around the world. I do. didn't know that they were. I thought that was a Joe Biden thing. Yeah. And it wasn't. And I remember you, I don't remember what you brought to me, but I remember thinking, this is really important. This explains a lot. Do you remember that? Yeah, well, we were, I think it was probably when we were

looking through just a bunch of quotes because everyone was talking about the World Economic Forum Great Reset as being something positive. But then we would pull little quotes and it would say, we're redefining capitalism. Other quotes is you will own nothing and you'll like it. Right. happy and we're like what like redefining capitalism and then we started looking into stakeholder capitalism and what the heck is that even mean yep but the book really goes into explaining that in a very very easy way and tonight if you've already read the book you're going to you're going to watch the show and this is going to be almost like a clist version for that so if there's things that you didn't understand tonight you're going to fully understand if there's things that you wanted a little

bit more clarification on, like more examples. Like, for instance, tonight, you know, you talked about in the book a lot how ESG is, you know, being used to force companies and banks, you know, to, you know, to redirect money into places that they want or issues that they want. Tonight, we're going to show you exactly how. And we've showed you a little bit of this in other shows, but the context that it's in now tonight, it's all going to crystallize. You are going to completely understand what this is about. You are going to completely understand how they are doing it. It's a lot. It's It is vital to watch tonight. So tonight, like Jason just said, it is vital to watch.

We are doing this. I mean, you can't get the book. Amazon and everywhere else, they've taken the buy button off because they're so far behind in printing. You can't. The only way to get it is a digital copy through Kindle. I urge you, please get a copy of the book. I am not for digital copies. I don't like reading.

I read things on digital. but if it's important, I always have it because it's easier to remember when you have the tactile book in front of you. And notes. And notes. Yeah. So it's, I urge you to get the book, but please buy the Kindle book. We don't have time to waste. This is the worst situation we could have imagined where you can't even get it. But I noticed that this is taking off faster than anything else we have ever exposed.

Amazing. Yeah, it is. I mean, there are already things that are happening. I'm going to talk to the two people. One, West Virginia, I think it's the state treasurer who is now they're divesting from BlackRock. And next hour also I'm talking to somebody here in Texas because we already signed a bill. The governor signed it here in Texas to divest from BlackRock and now they're not doing it. I want to hold the politicians feet to the fire.

What the hell is happening there? But have you noticed a change in the Black Rock attitude even in the last week? Oh, just in some of the, that one instance you talk about in Texas, the way that they're wording things now, they're not as, they're not puffing their chest out as much before. Correct. Because they had no one to stand against them and no one was questioning anything. Correct. But now they're like, oh, no, no, we're not going to put you out of business. You know, this is just something that, you know, bull, crap.

Right. Bull crap. Right. Here's this, this came out, this just came out from BlackRock from Larry Fink, who's the head of BlackRock. So you know, and you'll understand this in the book and on the special. Black Rock is the biggest investment firm in the world. They have seven or ten trillion dollars under management just themselves. But when you add the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve, you're approaching

30 trillion dollars that they directly affect that that's massive nobody's ever been like that they're also the only western group to ever be allowed in to china to do investing as well it's a it's very bad anyway so he just wrote larry think just wrote when my partners and i founded black rock starting 34 years ago we had no experience running a company over the last three decades i've had the opportunity to talk with countless CEOs and learn what to distinguishes were truly great companies time and time again they all share what we have a clear sense of purpose consistent values and crucially they recognize the importance of engaging with and delivering for their key stakeholders this is the foundation of stakeholder capitalism

stakeholder capitalism is not about politics it's not a social or ideological agenda it's not woke. It's capitalism driven by mutual beneficial relationships between you, the employees, the customers, suppliers, and communities your company relies on to so they can prosper. This is the power of capitalism. This is an out and out lie. This is the happiest spin you could possibly put on this pig. This is this is lipstick that you're like, dude, man, you're still kissing a pig. It's still a pig. No, look how pretty she is.

It's crazy because they are now starting to defend themselves. It hasn't happened before. The, the things that the opposition will do, there's what, there are trillions of dollars at stake. I'm not suicidal. I am at a very good mood. I'm I'm a very good driver. My brakes work. There's trillions of dollars at stake and they are not going to sit idly by. But I will tell you, local is the only thing they cannot beat. Local. I'll explain more of that tonight. Get the book, Get the Kindle version right now. The Great Reset.

You just go to glensnewbook.com, click on the Kindle version and download it and read it now. Tonight, full commercial free episode on Blaze TV. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. So I was very excited yesterday to see that the West Virginia State Treasurer has said that they are divesting themselves from any any investment of state funds in Black Rock, if this happens and takes hold across the country, that will hurt Black Rock and it will stop some of their crazy stuff that they're doing. For instance, trying to stop all gas, oil, and coal. They are going to cripple these industries.

Texas, as you'll find out here in a few minutes, Texas has already signed the bill, passed it, and then signed it, the governor signed it, but they're not doing anything. Black Rock is doing a tap dance, and they're not doing anything. West Virginia, the state treasurer there, Riley Moore, announced that the investment from the Treasury

no longer going to Black Rock Investment Fund. We have Riley Moore on the phone with us now, the state treasurer for West Virginia. Riley, how are you, sir? I'm doing great, Glenn, and thank you so much for having me on and allow me to speak to you and your audience about this really important issue. It's a real honor and privilege to be on here. Well, thank you very much.

I saw this news, this, what was it, Monday or Tuesday, and I was thrilled to see that you guys were taking real action. Tell me what you've done and why you did it. Well, what we have done is we have desisted. the state treasury completely out of Black Rock. And our inflows and outflows with that Black Rock fund was about $1.5 billion. It was an overnight sweeping account that we had had with them. And we decided, look, these people are diametrically opposed to our industries.

We want to do business with people that want to do business with us. Look, we are an energy state. We do coal, we do natural gas. We're not going to pay BlackRock to destroy our industries, right? I mean, they have this crazy net zero goal out there, and they are hurting our industries incredibly, along with a lot of these other financial institutions, which I can go into, because at one point on your show, I do listen. You touched on the letter that we had sent out to all the big banks here in the United States.

states as well. So this, we are putting words into action, which is what more elected officials need to do in this country and people need to look to the states to stand up and fight or we are going to get buried by this. And we're not going to be able to dig ourselves out. I can't tell you how happy I am to hear this from you, Riley. Tell me, tell me, let's start with the banks first, because you sent that letter. out to the banks. Tell people what you've done and what their state should also do. What we have done is we have, there's 15 state treasures, and this is on my website, by the way, more for wv.com if you want to see the letter. And 15 state treasures, we formed a coalition,

which I am leading that coalition, and we are reforming our banking contracts in all of our states. here in West Virginia, when we go through that process, a bank is going to have to certify that they are not boycotting the fossil fuel industry. If they cannot meet that certification, they will be ineligible for a banking contract here in the state of West Virginia. The other states on that letter, they're going through their processes to do the exact same thing and put the screws on all these people. I mean, this is multi-layered in terms of the threat that it causes, not only to the citizen, because the end of the day, without coal and gas, your utility bill is going up. The companies aren't paying this. You're going to pay for it.

Secondarily, it hurts our energy independence and makes us more reliable on foreign resources. Why would we want that in America? We had energy independence. So all of us are coming collectively to push back on this. this Black Rock announcement, I'll tell your audience, this is just step one. You're going to hear a lot more of this coming out of my office in the coming months of other contracts. We're going to move on. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for taking this seriously and actually taking concrete steps. It is going to take people like you and people that vote in West Virginia to actually take. take a stand. There's no way to fight this on the international level. It is so far gone. But if you start hitting them in the pocket and you also, and I want to ask you about this with the banks, you're specifically talking about the planet and Green New Deal and everything else. That's only the E out of ESG. Are you concerned about the full package of social justice and governance as well.

Absolutely we are. And as I said, this is step one. These are our first steps. Right now, we got to do everything we can to save these industries because I will tell you I've had coal operators, not only in West Virginia, but all over this country. And natural gas guys as well come in and say, we're losing access to capital.

I would urge your listening audience here, go Google the top biggest banks. and look up their ESG policy frameworks. This isn't hidden now. It is out in the public, and it's in black and white, and it says we are going to deny loans a presumptive denial to any industry that is involved in the fossil fuel extraction industries. That is an outright denial in this.

And that, in the end of the day, what is it about? Control. They are trying to control us in West Virginia and around this country, and we're not going to take it anymore. And I tell you, this has been going on for decades in West Virginia. This is a state. Just think about this. These are the same folks that sold us on globalization. Hey, listen, you're going to get all your goods cheaper and it's going to make your towns and cities better.

Well, guess what? Globalization happened. and these long stretch supply chains, we lost our jobs. Walmarts came in and took over all our small businesses, got decimated in all of our towns. And now they're coming back for our jobs. The last jobs that we have, they're coming back for our jobs. And if they come and take these coal mining and gas jobs, what are we left with?

Working at Walmart, it's like we're indentured to these people, and we're not going to take it anymore. I love you. I will tell you that West Virginia is one of my favorite, one of my favorite states and also because of the history you guys have a a history of standing up for what is right i mean you were part of virginia and the civil war starts and you are like i don't want anything to do with that and you went and became west virginia um you guys have stood the test of time and you also are the quintessential when you think of the hard,

working, hard, living American worker, it really is embodied in West Virginia. I can't believe that West Virginia has taken it for this long. It's like Texas. We're still screwing around in Texas. I don't know why, but we're still playing footsies with black. Rock. We should be divesting. I saw they passed that bill, and we have an additional, because I want more coming out of here, we have a bill that just passed out of Senate Energy. We're actually in session here right now

in the state legislature. Bill passed out of centered energy. We're going to have a bill that is going to publicly list these financial institutions that are prohibited from banking in West Virginia. Because the people of West Virginia, they want to know, they're asking me, what banks are you talking about? Now, obviously, for liability purposes, you know, I'm not necessarily going to name all of these banks right now. Here, I tell you what, I'll do some work for you. Name the five biggest banks in America. The five biggest banks in America, we know that the Federal Reserve is just a coalition of the five biggest banks.

They're the biggest banks, the ones that cannot fail. Don't take my word for it. Just go, do your own homework on their own websites. and look up their ESG policies for environmental social justice and governance scores. They all have them. If they have them, divest, get out of those bank and go to a local bank. And I will tell you, there are banks that I have talked to. They're not the top five, but they're not too far down from there that are saying,

thank you for doing this. Now we can go back to our board and our shareholders and say, listen, there's risk on the other side of this, too. And the end of the day, all we want is a bank to act like a bank. Assess risk, assess capital. If it's a bad loan, don't make the loan. But if you go all the way down the road here on this, where we're going to potentially end up, what could potentially happen is, let's say you go in for a home loan 10 years from now or whatever, and it says, well, here's one interest rate if you have solar panels on your house. Correct. Here's another interest rate if you don't. They are trying to control our behavior. And look, we don't want

what they want. And what we want is to be free to make our own decisions, work our own jobs. And you touched on it, these hardworking folks in West Virginia, the average coal miner is making nearly $90,000 a year. These are great paying jobs. People don't realize that. They think we're throwing people down a mine shaft somewhere. No, they love it. these jobs. You know what are bad jobs? Working over in the Democratic Republic of Congo and mining cobalt for the electronic batteries that go in the electronic cars. They got slave labor essentially going on over there and China's running those mines, by the way. You know, that's really interesting you bring this up, Riley. We're talking to Riley Moore, West Virginia's 25th state

treasurer. He was elected in 2020 and is taking a hard stand against ESG scores of the Great reset and Black Rock in particular. It is fascinating to me that people will say, well, if you're not going to invest in Black Rock, I mean, they're the biggest ones out there. I mean, they're making money hand over fist, yada, yada, yada, but they're also empowering China and literal slavery. And it doesn't seem to matter to 81. No, you don't hear the left talk about this at all.

I mean, there is a literal genocide going on with the Uyghur population over. in China. If people have not read about this, they are in concentration camps, essentially, working and building all the components that get sent back here to the United States. Meanwhile, by taking our jobs, we have to get away from it. And the scariest thing is the U.S. and the Chinese economy are decoupling right now. But China is decoupling faster from us than we are them. China knows what time it is. They got a plan. We don't have a plan. Did you, one last question.

When I first started talking about this about a year ago, year and a half ago, I was immediately, you know, conspiracy theorist, et cetera, et cetera. The banks denied it. Are you having any problem making this case now, Riley, because it's so transparent. It's all out in the open now. You know, it's becoming easier now because of programs like yours, but I will tell you, not everybody is talking about this. And people really need to tune into this and be aware of it because you can vote with your money. You can vote with your money, whether it's your 401k or otherwise, talk to your money managers. There are also companies out here, money managers that are coming up with these portfolios called X China,

where they're invested in emerging markets that are not China. People, the market is actually speaking. It's the people that are speaking because they don't want this anymore. So because of programs like yours, it's added, thank God, validity to what I'm doing because when I first started talking about this, people thought I was crazy. You know, I got the tinfoil hat on and I'm a conspiracy theorist. And then as soon as Biden got elected, it was one month into it, coal companies and gas companies coming in and saying, we are in trouble, we're going to lose access to capital.

We don't know what we're going to do. And then we heard that John Kerry is going around and pressuring banks to divest at the same time. So there's this extra legal channels being made to pressure them. And who are they pushing on the Googles, the Facebooks and all of them? If you, if this bank doesn't divest, then we'll get Googles and Facebook to leave. It's entirely coordinated effort going on out there. and how soon will it be where we as individuals, like in China, get ESG scores? When will ESG be part of your credit score?

Soon. To be able to buy a home, credit card, anything. If we don't stop it, it will happen soon. Riley Moore, the West Virginia State Treasurer, I wish I was in your state, live there so I could vote for you. You're fantastic. Riley Moore, West Virginia State Treasurer, thank you. Please let us know anything we can do to have. The Best of the Glenn Beck program.

Tonight, 9 p.m. Eastern on the Blaze TV channel. You can find this only online, but you can also find it several different places, including Roku and what's that other place? Pluto TV and YouTube. And that's as far as I can go. That's a lot. Yeah. It's a lot of availability. I'm a subscriber.

So if you're a subscriber, watch tonight 9 p.m. an hour commercial free on the Great Reset. We're going to talk to you about what it actually means to you, not just corporations. Also, Glenn, your wish is my command. Oh, I love that. This particular case, the state of Texas is. Oh, exactly. That's there.

Have they responded? They have responded. We just got a response in about this. It's long and detailed. but to sort of boil it down, there are two parts of what they're saying is going on. One is incoming new contracts, so like new deals that they're working on,

and then the existing ones that are there. The new ones, they're saying this is already in place. They're already running all this through and trying to avoid, particularly as based on oil and gas, these sorts of restrictions. So new business has already, this is already taking place.

The existing stuff that was going on, they are still looking for suitable candidates to divest into as they point out the law doesn't specifically just talk about Black Rock it talks about correct of different things correct and so you can't just and then you shouldn't be able to just target one company in a law that's not a good no and it's and it also shouldn't just be targeting for oil and gas yes it should be ESG right and so that's the real that's the real problem so they're trying to come up with a longer term a solution so that they can catch all of this stuff.

So that's ongoing. They have not announced the details on that yet. Let me go to Alex Epstein. He is the president-founder center for industrial progress. He's the author of the book Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. Alex, did you just hear what Stu said? We just got a note from the state of Texas saying, we're working on it. It's just taking us a while.

We want to make sure that we have it broad enough. you buy that. What exactly are they working on? Let me say. Let me read it to you. We are currently working to establish suitable candidates for the divestment list related to

SB 13. We have been tasked with examining an extremely large universe of financial companies and it would not be appropriate to comment on a single firm prior to releasing the full initial list of company subject to the divestment provisions in SB 13. Comptroller Hagar is committed

to safeguarding the Texas economy and Texas jobs, but that cannot be accomplished by narrowly focusing on one entity. Texas lawmakers could have singled out one company, but they understood the approach would not have the impact needed to address this alarming trend. Additionally, this issue of long-term concern for Comptroller Hagar with increased promotion of the ESG investment trend. He has noted when discussing other efforts, including divestment lists related to companies boycotting Israel or doing business with Iran, the agency is focused on creating a transparent

and defendable process that not only reliably identifies current, suitable candidate companies, but also creates the framework for highlighting potential future candidates. Sounds reasonable. Yeah, I do think that's reasonable. I mean, there's a lot to discuss in terms of this legislation, which hasn't been what I'm commenting on, because it's challenging to do something about that. But what I'm really focused on with BlackRock is they're really trying to have it both waste. They've gotten an enormous amount of status, prestige, and money by leading the movement to

eliminate fossil fuels, aka the net zero movement. And if you look at what they say in their letters, they say this requires emissions to go down by 8 to 10 percent per year. And that, by the way, was starting in 2020, where emissions were a lot lower than now. So it'd have to be an even faster right now. And they're saying that, but they're also saying, oh, no, we love oil and gas. We're long-term investors in oil and gas. And my point is those two things are contradictory. If you want to eliminate emissions, then you are going to rapidly eliminate oil and gas, and you should take responsibility for the shortages and high prices that have occurred because of what you've done. I'm concerned that, I mean, I think targeting BlackRock and getting people to understand

if you're investing with them, you are investing in the Great Reset and the ESG system, but it's also not just BlackRock. It is any banking institution, any investment firm that is using ESG scores to be able to score companies and investors. Is it not? Yeah, 100%. Inside this website, I set up called EnergyTalkingPoint.com, and if you just search ESG on that site, you'll get the information about why I think ESG is anti-development,

anti-freedom, and ultimately anti-America. And it's because it's really targeting the energy industry. And what it's doing is it's opposing low-cost reliable energy from fossil fuels as well as usually nuclear. And it's promoting unreliable solar and what this does is it reverses the function of finance, which is supposed to be to invest capital efficiently. It's making energy capital inefficient and energy of the industry that powers every other industry. And so that means everything is going to be more expensive because of this ESG movement. So I agree 100% it's bigger than BlackRock.

BlackRock just happens to have a leadership role that they're being particularly evasive of. Correct. And it is bigger. than just oil and gas. It is the E. The S and the G. I mean, right now we're seeing, because Davos is having their meetings

on the Great Reset this week, and we've already heard Fauci speak about how they have to figure out a way to silence speech that they say is misleading. He said, I don't know how we do that. Well, one easy way is to use an ESG score. They can arbitrarily say you are presenting misinformation and that your company is now posing a risk to the stability of society and we can't support you. We can't give you loans. We can't

do transactions. That's what's coming. Yeah, I agree with that and it's important. I put this in that website. I mentioned energy talking points.com. If you search ESG, but I'm reading from it now, ESG was a movement cooked up at the UN, not exactly a leading expert and profitable investment to impose moral and political agendas, largely left-wing ones, on institutions that would not adopt them if left to their own devices. So it's really taking all these leftist ideas and is trying to impose them via corporations, often because the people are dissatisfied with the ability to get voters to support these policies. That's the biggest thing that is so disturbing as they talk about democracy, which we're not

Republic. But as they talk about democracy, this undercuts democracy. This is, this is the elites having their voice because they can't get the people to sign on to what they want to do. Exactly. And they will put it as, oh, we're so rational and the people are irrational. So that's why we envy China. We want to be able to impose whatever we want. But my view is with most of these things, they don't have any good arguments. And certainly on energy, they don't have any good arguments for why you should rapidly eliminate fossil fuels, not support nuclear, promote unreliable solar and wind. These things just don't work. They're not cost effective, and that's going to make everything more expensive and life worse. And what we're seeing right now is just a mere taste of it. If you look at the European energy crisis, rising prices here, this is just a taste of what these green policies mean.

And so this should clue us into these experts don't really know what they're talking about. If they knew what they're talking about, they would just try to persuade us and let free markets develop these amazing solutions that they claim are amazing. Well, but they've also they've also taken things out of the mix. For instance, the safest energy, the safest energy, the cleanest energy is nuclear. France has it. It's run. It's fine. Now they're shutting down.

I think, what is it? the 30 or 40% of their power plants in a test. And it's going to cause energy prices in France to raise, they say, 40% in the coming months. I mean, there's no reasoning with anyone. They're not taking reasonable steps at all. And instead, they're going to jack with people's lives, with their safety, and also with all of their money. The nuclear thing, I think, is a very revealing example because it doesn't involve the issue of CO2. Nuclear doesn't emit CO2.

And as you said, it's the safest form of energy. It's the cleanest form of energy ever devised. And so people claiming to be concerned about CO2, you'd expect them to love nuclear. But they don't. And they often oppose large-scale hydro as well. And the core of this is really philosophy slash religion. They really believe in the idea whether they know it or not that our goal should be to eliminate human impact on Earth, not to advance human flourishing on Earth. And so they look at everything from that perspective.

They think, oh, nuclear is unnatural. It has too much of an impact. Hydro is unnatural. It impacts free-flowing rivers. And they're totally willing to sacrifice civilization for the god of unimpacted nature. But that's not Black Rock. That's not these banks. Well, I mean...

Well, it is. That's the interesting thing is how do you sort of integrate a bank like this with these ideals? And I think what happens is whenever you have a certain wrong moral idea or even a right moral idea, the financial world follows it. So we have this core moral idea in our civilization that we should be eliminating our impact on Earth. And above all, we should be eliminating our impact on climate. That's the most important thing. And so a Black Rock has done whatever their exact motives is they're cashing in on that and saying,

okay, we're going to be the leader of eliminating our impact on climate. So regardless of what Larry thinks convictions are and how corrupt or not corrupt he is, he's pursuing an ideal that almost everyone agrees with on some level. And I think that's why it's so powerful. I think except the people who really believe it. I mean, what was the guy's names, too, he had on the air? He used to work with BlackRock. He was the guy who was, you know, he put the E and ESG.

And he came out and said, this whole thing is a scam. This is all about money. This is not about actually doing something for the environment. Yeah, well, I think that's true for a lot of people. There's a lot of cynicism. And you see there's a lot of lying, like companies claiming them 100% renewable. I'm going to be net zero. This is all nonsense.

You know how energy works. But still, what I'm focused on is there's still this moral monopoly on the idea that it's evil to impact nature. It's evil to impact climate. And so our focus should be eliminating our impact. And what I'm just saying is that these profiteers, they look at that debate. They look at that framing. And I say, I'm going to make money off.

And that's why I'm focused on the philosophy and the framing versus just trying to go after these individual people. BlackRock just happens to be so influential. I thought it would be a good, they would be a good company to make an example. So, Alex, last question. I mean, I feel like there is real, starting to be real movement on the great reset and some of these things. And I know we are a million miles away because we're so far behind. But if people wake up to it and you start speaking with your money and speaking to these institutions as states, locals and individuals, I think it's, I think you can beat this. I think so, and I call it the great regress. I think it's very important to put it as a progressive phenomenon.

It's really anti-progress, and I hate the idea that regressives get called progressives. I think what's needed is to have a clear idea that this is evil, that it's statism, that it's a regress, but also to have an idea of progress, you know, being pro-liberty, having a vision for how more liberty will lead to more human flourishing. I just mentioned that website, energy talking points.com. If you search on that long-term value creation, I put forward a positive alternative to ESG where companies are focused on the long term without sacrificing to these leftist gods.

And I think that that's one attempt to give a positive, not just to pose the negative. Alex Epstein, thank you so much. God bless you. Thanks for all of your hard work. You bet we'll talk to you again.