The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 199 | 'A Clamp-Down Is Coming': Walter Kirn's BIGGEST Fear About Elites | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Episode Date: October 21, 2023

With a struggling economy, interest rates through the roof, a constantly confused President Biden, and an intense GOP battle for the House speaker role, it’s hard for many Americans to feel hopeful about our nation. But that’s not the case for journalist Walter Kirn. In fact, the author of "Into the Air" tells Glenn he’s optimistic about the U.S. thanks to the small towns that fuel it. Kirn, who recently launched a podcast — “America This Week” — with Matt Taibbi, joins this episode of "The Glenn Beck Podcast" to hash out his thoughts on the world today: from the rise of post-COVID totalitarianism and his biggest fear concerning the elite class to the recent Hamas terror attack against Israel, which he says took his breath away. Kirn warns that America may soon witness firsthand the same kind of anti-Semitism that eventually culminated in the Holocaust, and he calls out college campuses for helping to fuel the fire. Plus, Glenn and Kirn examine the growing suppression of free speech, the increased censorship of dissenting voices, and why he’s "emotionally ready" for the apocalypse. SPONSORS: If you're one of the millions of Americans who suffer every day from pain, there is hope, and it comes in the form of Relief Factor. If you want a drug-free and natural way to get your life back, go to https://relieffactor.com or call 1-800-4-RELIEF to get the $19.95 3-Week QuickStart. Good Ranchers is the sure way to get 100% American, USDA prime and upper-choice cuts of beef, chicken, and seafood. Head on over to https://GOODRANCHERS.COM/GLENN and use discount code GLENN at checkout for $30 off and free express shipping on your box of America’s best meat and seafood today. The Jase Case from Jase Medical is a great way to keep yourself prepared for the worst. It's a pack of five different courses of antibiotics that you can use to treat a long list of bacterial infections. Go to https://JaseMedical.com and use offer code BECK at checkout to get a special discount.  "The Glenn Beck Podcast" has partnered with PreBorn with a goal of saving 70,000 babies in 2023. Every tax-deductible donation, big or small, helps to save the unborn. Get involved today by dialing #250 and saying the keyword BABY or donate securely at https://preborn.com/GLENN Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We'll say, in the phone, all the world can be a guy of the finance. Not to have a gross monger in gold, or to be a pro of the crypto. Not a business, no more.

In any case, you have always done with the appellee-titititre Td you'll add to to renuwee with your instinct of negotiation,

with the support 24-hour-pard-hour- per-jour, no amount of minimum, and fraymentuels. You're made for negotiating, and the apply negotiated titre t-D

is made to you need to Too many reporters are terrified to be exposed as a conservative or a centrist or even just unliberal, I guess. It's a creative industry. So, of course, it tends to lean left politically. But I can tell you that underneath all of the division in the media, there lies a pile of industry gamesmanship. And in this media hell pit, the true hero is the person willing to expose all of it, no matter what the cost. is. The Wall Street Journal

described today's podcast guest as Middle America's defiant defender, probably because of his work to examine the real America, a country that seems to have forgotten itself. He recently launched America This Week, a podcast with Matt Taibi,

where they perform an autopsy on the news of the day. His latest major project is as a founder and editor of large of County Highway. A newspaper, a newspaper, without any digital footprint at all. It is storytelling for the real America.

Like, you know, if the New Yorker didn't portray the middle of the country as a breeding ground for inbred morons and then also didn't have political cartoons that nobody understands. Ultimately, he's a rebel. Not because it's cool or fashionable, because it's in his bones. It's who he is. A rebel in a constant search for truth in an age when we need it most. Buckle in for this one. Walter Kern. I can't wait to get to the podcast.

I'm a big fan of Walters. And I hear he listens to the show. So we'll see what this could be very interesting. Every Halloween you hear about the dangers of candy your kids will get. But this year, the real tricks are in the meat aisle. Good Ranchers wants you to take the trick out of your meat. that they're throwing in, you know, whenever you go into the meat aisle, and they want to give you the treat. Lab-grown meat is growing more and more popular.

Foreign meat dresses up as a product of USA, the little label there. An M-R-N-A vaccine development is on the rise for agriculture. What's in your food and your meat? It's more important than ever before. Amidst these haunting truths, the real hero arises and it's good ranchers. as the number one place to get America's best beef, pork, chicken, seafood delivered. Good Rancher products are transparently sourced, all American, and delicious. When you shop at Good Ranchers.com, you don't have to question what's in your meat or where your meat's coming from.

100% American guarantee, transparent vaccination policy. You'll always know where your meat comes from and what's in it. Take the mystery out of the meat aisle. Visit Good Ranchers.com. Use a promo code, Glenn. save $30 and free express shipping on your box of America's best meat and seafood today. Good Ranchers.com promo code Glenn. I think you're one of the hardest people.

Ray Kurzweil was in your category of hard guest to book. I've waited for this interview for a long time. Well, that's the first case of playing hard to get that's worked for me. When I played hard to get with the ladies, they just moved on. I'm glad you persisted. I'm glad to be here. Yeah, glad to have you here. First of all, you are, you're a bit of an enigma in some ways just on the surface.

You're an absolute elite. Princeton, I think, is where you went to school. Princeton and Oxford. Yeah, and Oxford, yeah. But you're not an elite. In fact, you're one of the biggest defenders of the middle of. the country that is out there. Yeah, I'm a fierce defender because that's where I come from.

That's where my parents come from and that's where I live now. I mean, the excursion to Princeton and Oxford in New York City where I had my first jobs in magazines was kind of an aberration, it turns out. You know, I grew up in Minnesota and like F. Scott Fitzgerald, everybody dreams of going to the big city when they, you know, are out there on the farm. And I got there and I saw what there was to see. but it was like going to the fair. And now I live in Livingston, Montana, and I didn't last.

It's so funny. I don't know if you're like this, but I grew up in a very small town, Washington State, boring. I always wanted to live in New York, wanted to work at Radio City Music Hall and do radio there. And then didn't think I'd make it. I mean, you know, it was a dream, but, you know, lottery has to happen in many ways. I get there, and I love it. Mm-hmm.

but I don't live there anymore because I saw what was coming. But then I find myself going right back to the small little town like the town that I was from because it's, I don't know, everything just makes sense. Well, it's a scale that is coherent and explicable and understandable to me. You know, I like seeing the same people over and over. I like being able to hear their stories and then catch up on their stories a month later. That makes the narratives around me make sense, rather than seeing a strange face, never seeing it again, seeing somebody twice in a couple of years.

I get to go to the post office. I get to have a ritual that is sort of personally nourishing and that gives me ongoing contact. Because, you know, we don't know each other's stories, anymore because we don't have a place to share them. In a small town, that's exactly what you're able to do. Just go to the post office. When somebody dies, when somebody gets sick, when somebody's kid gets into college, whatever. And I'm a storyteller. And I like to know the beginning and middle and end of people's stories. I used to walk down the streets of New York thinking about every

single person here has a story. I'd love to just follow all of them home and see. what, you know, just see a little of their story. I was sitting at lunch. I don't remember the restaurant name, but it's right on the ice of Rockefeller. And I was waiting for my daughter. We were going to have lunch together. I'm sitting there at the table and I'm all away myself.

And I'm just looking at the people ice skating. And I'm right there where they're putting on ice skates. And this woman, she's got to be 45, 50, kind of frumpy, big frumpy coat, hat. she sits down she changes into skates and the first thing i notice is she brought her own skates she gets out onto the ice and she is an incredible incredible artist on the ice and i thought to myself how many people who work with her who are around her all the time in this jungle know that side of her right you could work next to somebody in that city

and never know it. Well, you know, I grew up in a town of 500 people. I thought that if a town had a dairy queen, it constituted a city. The idea of being able to go out after 9 o'clock and find a business open was enchanting to me. I got to New York, and I had that experience, too. It was like opening Easter egg after Easter egg. You met all kinds of people. They had amazing talents, amazing stories.

They were from all over the world and so on. but I reached a limit. It wasn't because I didn't like that. There was just so much I could hold in my head. There were so many people who I could actually be friends with whose stories I could actually relate to. And maybe I liked it too much. I may be pigged out on the city.

You know, I would have to leave and go home every few months because I'd get sick. I'd be staying up all night. And those days I drank. I don't drink anymore. I'd be out pushing it pushing it and now my kids live in big cities and they're doing what I did I have no idea if they'll rebound like I did it but you know it just got to be something I couldn't handle my when you when you go up in a limited you know small familiar

intimate place your senses in a way aren't built for that total circus I don't think we are built for that in in really in any way I mean we're not built for what social media is doing for us now I mean you can't handle 1.5 million friends what you can't handle 10,000 friends

an average person is you should have a handful of friends if you get to the end of your life and you've got maybe two or three really good friends you did pretty good right and that's the other thing Besides the fact that you're surrounded and constantly stimulated in a big city, you also can have moments of crushing loneliness where nobody, you know, everybody is busy, nobody is there for you.

You get sick. Something bad happens. Everybody's at the office chasing the dream. Small town people tend to have more time. And thus they have the ability to sort of break out of their routine, to help each other, to care for each other and so on. It's just a human scale that works for me. So when you look at the news of the day, one of the things I like,

I'm going up to the mountains actually tonight, and I'm going to be with farmers tomorrow. And the one thing I like is they're just, it's so much more common. It's not complex. Right. You know, it's not that hard to solve some of the problems that we're dealing with right now.

You know, it will be painful, to be difficult, but it's, it doesn't take, you know, all of Harvard to figure it out. In fact, that may be the problem in many ways. Well, you know, the Greeks believe that the city, states should be of a certain size. Yeah. When they grew beyond that, things became chaotic. Right. And impossible. And that may be true.

You know, when I used to write for GQ magazine, and really wore my sort of slick magazine journalist hat. I once said to the editor, I want to go out to Nevada where Basque Shepherds live. And I want to find the person who is least in touch in America. I want to find a guy who's literally been on top of a mountain with his sheep for a couple of months. And then I want to ask him questions from the news. Like, what do you, you know, how should we solve this problem?

How should we solve that problem? because I started to realize that even back then, and this was the late 90s, the information glut was making it almost impossible for people to reach common sense conclusions. And so I was like, let's swing the other way and find people who are completely isolated with their common sense and their memories and maybe a little bit of reading that they've done and see if they don't have a more sane perspective on them. So is there, I mean, because honestly, you talk to people and they're like, we can't spend this much money. And we could solve this at a table, you know, around a, you know, around a diner table. And we could solve the spending or we could solve, you know, a lot of different things. But nobody, when you get to Washington or when you get to New York, you are not an expert in that. And so we defer to all of the experts.

And it seems to me the experts have really screwed things up. Right. Well, the experts tend to withdraw into circles in which they are not criticized, in which they affirm each other's conclusions, in which they're looking for advancement within that circle. And they get further and further from the primary data. And, you know, for example, I was just last week in Elko, Nevada, which is very isolated. central Nevada city and I'm talking to people about economic problems and the you know adversities they're facing and I'm noticing that around the edges of this town people are really poor a lot of people are living in their cars a lot of

people are obviously intoxicated on drugs that maybe didn't exist ten years ago because they're acting differently and I'm I just wish I could bring people from you know inside the Beltway or whatever Hollywood to just see what their country is and what it's facing. And I don't have to argue you should spend less money. I can show you that there is want, there is need, and there is difficulty. But just not being able to see that makes people go crazy, I think. They become abstract, 100 billion off to here, 100 billion off to their inflation rates and so on. But they need to see its toll, it's real world effects. And I think a lot of people, between the phone and between just

the isolation that comes and living in these sort of walled-off, paradisical places that are rather wealthy leaders live in, they're just missing what's happening. I think that's the problem with the society that's being led by the elites is they can't be bothered with the small little problems. They'll just have to deal with that themselves. We're building this new whole big world. Right. And so they don't actually see the effects that it has on regular people because they're going for this big abstract paradise.

Well, they're looking upstream at where the money is coming from, where the power is flowing from and so on. And they're not looking downstream at the effects of the decisions they make. And if they could see, hey, man, there's a flood down there. hurting people were trying to survive instead they're looking at where the money's being printed where the credentials are being handed out and they literally actually don't see their country anymore invisibility inability to to discern one another's true state and true predicament is I think the big

problem we face it's not ideological division necessarily because ideological division ends when you see someone who's living in their car correct you both want to do something about it you might have slightly different ideas but the first thing you want to do is remedy the immediate situation and we're not even doing that when you you tweeted recently you've been listening to talk radio back from the 90s yeah what are you searching for what do you look looking for work or what do you find well for various reasons I have to be somewhat triptic about this but I'm writing a movie about a famous talk show host oh wow

from the 90s I might be able to guess which one because he broadcast at night and and and and and in his show which was a open line show included callers from all over the country in which I listened to at the time I can't wait to see this. You got an incredible portrait of who and what was going on. But, but, but, but there was, well, in a different way. A different. You got it, you got it, you got the night side portrait of America. Right. Right. You got, you got, you got America after 11 p.m. Right. Which is not necessarily. America. A lot of truckers, you know, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of, maybe night watchmen or people with jobs that kept them awake.

And my point in that tweet was that they were all talking about the end of the world. This is the late 90s. I mean, remember Y2K, remember, you know, the beginnings of the global warming, scare when people thought, you know, there were going to be super storms with 300 mile per hour winds. They're still saying it. People aren't buying it as much as it used to. Right, right. But there were like 100 reasons.

reasons why we weren't going to make it to the year 2000. And this radio show concentrated all the fear and all the panic. And it even had fun with it. We're talking about Art Bell. And just out. Yeah, yeah. And in any case, when you listen to it and go, wow, these people as panicked, as panicked can be in many cases.

And now it seems quaint. I know. You shake your head and go, oh, my gosh. The problems that they had were nothing like the ones we have, but they believed them to be important. Right. You know, everybody from people who expected, you know, a religious style apoculah, you know, theological apocalypse to people who thought the weather was just going to turn on us. He's always talking about volcanoes and earthquakes and sunspots and, you know. I know, I know. I used to love that.

I'd get up in the middle of the night because I'd have to be. get up at, you know, two, three o'clock in the morning. And I listened to him and I just love it. I heard him do an interview once with a guy who swore that if he was safe in his house or in his car or somebody else's house. But the minute he stepped off his porch or anything that was over his head, it would begin to rain rocks. And it would only rain rocks on him.

And I remember Art just saying this. It was unclear. It was unclear. It was unclear what Art thought of his audience. You know, I know. Some nights he seemed to have total contempt for them. You know, they'd call in and they'd say they'd hit a big foot with their car. Or they'd found a hole on their ranch.

They dropped a rock down and it never hit bottom. You know, the alien abductees and so on. What's funny is, just as they thought the world was going to end back then, they were equally obsessed with aliens, UFOs, all the things that are still in the news now. So, can we go there for a second? Because I am, I've always been the guy you don't want to be on the Titanic with on the first half.

Because as it's going out, I'm saying, why are the engines running at full speed? We're producing way too much. Why are we doing that? We're headed towards icebergs. Have you noticed, have you counted the lifeboats? There's not enough life, but I'm that guy. Okay. I'm always.

Oh, I know that. I, I, I, I've bought food and extra water and maybe even gold on your advice over the years, you know. Right. So, you know, um, however, I don't, I don't think I fall for everything. Right. You know, all of the catastrophes. These things, though, I was beginning to question, maybe I was wrong about all those things, but they're all now happening.

We are getting into some serious crap that we have I've done radio for 50 years. We didn't we didn't have this right. This is everything in the crap hole. Do you wish you hadn't cried wolf back when? Do you think, oh, maybe I was, you know. No, I didn't cry wolf. I was way too early. Right.

You know, I have a real problem on timing. This is what my wife says about me to. She said, Walter, you tell me things are going to happen in your four years early. Yeah. And it actually isn't helpful because I've been stressed for four years, whereas everybody else has just been stressed for two weeks. Right. And now I'll say to my wife, honey, it's getting really bad. It's coming hard.

And she'll say, yeah, I know. I know. But you're always wrong on time. So I think we have time. Relax. I'm like, ah. But anyway. Are you, I'm an optimistic catastrophist.

I see catastrophe everywhere, but I believe in human, I believe in people in the human spirit that it may go dark for a while, but there will be flashes that will bring us into something new and great. Where are you? Yeah, I wouldn't say a catastrophist, but this all has to do with our story and may have to with my relationship to radio. When I was a kid living in Phoenix, Arizona in the mid-70s, there was a late-night talk show by a radio preacher called a Garner Ted Armstrong. And he had a kind of end-of-the-world show, which predicted that every little war or something was going to end a nuclear catastrophe and so on. And this was around the time my family converted to Mormonism.

And Mormonism in the mid-70s was very concerned with things. like stockpiling food, canned goods and so on. And between the two things, I became sensitized to the idea that things could change very suddenly. And maybe they didn't do that for a while. But when something like COVID came along, I had long been prepared. And in a strange way, it didn't affect me as seriously as it did others because I was emotionally ready. It was like, this has actually been delayed a bit. Oh, right. You know. Art Bell's talking about pandemics in 1997, you know. So catastrophe,

but I am optimistic in the sense that, you know, you started by saying you're a champion of the middle of the country. And I am in some ways because it needs a champion. It's definitely, you know, taking its knocks. It's used as the foil for every, Everything now, you know. And the middle of the country has survived economic distress, deindustrialization, opiate plague, forever wars that have inordinately taken its young people and sent them back, injured in the mind and the body, and it's still standing. That's a pretty stalwart set of people to go through all.

all this, I think. But in any case, I'm optimistic because when I get out among people and I drive around, I probably put 20,000, 30,000 miles on my car a year, I drive everywhere I can, I see a reservoir of goodness, I guess, charity, kindness, basic, you know, you can call them Judeo Christian values or you can call them human values, I don't care, that haven't been as disturbed by events as you would fear. Though I think that's fraying now. I think the American dream or the simple hope of owning a house, you know, someday paying off your car, putting your kids through college and so on, is escaping people even in the kind of sensible, stoic middle part of

the country. And that's heartbreaking to watch. Right. Want to go electric without sacrificing fun? That's the Volkswagen ID4. All electric and thoughtfully designed to elevate your modern lifestyle. The Volkswagen ID4 is fun to drive with instant acceleration that makes city streets feel like open roads, plus a refined interior with innovative technology always at your fingertips. The all-electric ID4, you deserve more fun. Visit vW.ca to learn more.

SUVW, German engineered for all. I've been talking to you about Jace Medical and for the Jace case for some time now. Well, it's needed now more than ever because there are critical shortages of essential drugs right here in the United States. You wouldn't think that this kind of thing could happen in America. normally it wouldn't, but these are not normal times we live in. This is why you need to have a Jace case on hand. It is personalized emergency medication kit that contains five essential antibiotics, which treat the most common and deadly bacterial infections.

It's customizable with dozens of add-on medications available, so you can choose the ones that best fit you and your family's needs. They even have Ivermectin as an add-on. Jase is simple. You just go online, fill out a form, and then you get a prescription. life-saving medication delivered right to your door. The Jace case gives you peace of mind, so you're not just hoping you have access to medication in emergency.

Go to jacemedical.com. Enter the promo code, Beckett, check out. Get a discount, jacemedical.com. What do you... I want to talk to you about Israel, but I first want to talk to you about the shocking amount of acceptance of anti-Semitism. Is that just on the campuses,

what is that? Where you can watch, I mean, it's one thing to say, for instance, Ukraine, I don't know, I think they're both kind of bad guys. One's really bad. Another guy's really bad,

you know, bad. I don't see a good guy in there. I don't want to pick sides. Yeah. This one, when you cross the line of going in and just executing men, women,

and children raping, kidnapping. That's not war. That's not war. That's terror. That's genocide or want to be genocide. And you, I'm seeing a shocking number of people dismissing it, claiming it's not real now, thinking that somehow or another it's justified. What do you think of?

What does that say about us and the world? Because it's happening all over the world. So I answer every question with a story because that's how I think. I grew up in rural Minnesota and the first time I met a Jewish kid was at Princeton. And I started to find that all my friends were Jewish. They had something in common. They were all Jewish. Why?

Because they shared my sense of humor. Why? Because they had a kind of skepticism toward power. Sometimes they were kept on the outside of some of the sort of fancy clubs in Princeton and so on. So I ended up with a lot of Jewish friends. And then I entered the media in New York, and I had even more. And it was strange to me coming from a small town. These were the greatest people in the world.

And I hadn't been exposed to anti-Semitism as a kid in the same way I wasn't exposed to racism just because there were no one different. Right. There were Lutherans and Catholics, Swedes and Norwegians. That's exactly the way I grew up. Yeah. And so I was kind of an innocent, you know, like in a Russian novel, something coming to the big city. And I love my Jewish friends. I had grown up in a family where my mother had been teased at school because she was thought to be Jewish.

She had dark hair and dark eyes. She'd grown up in Ohio. And I'd heard that story. And I saw actual anti-Semitism, I think, on the Princeton campus. And then I saw it at Oxford, definitely. And it was a kind of upper-class British anti-Semitism that, Americans maybe don't, wouldn't be able to recognize in any case. Explain it. What is it? Well, it's a kind of aristocratic condescension toward people who dirty their hands with business

and commerce and so on and haven't had, you know, lands in Scotland and Kent for 500 years and don't have these lineages, people who maybe were refugees from another place or who, you know, work trades or cobblers and you know traitors I mean I'm sure lots of wonderful people and everything but on the surface just what you said I don't even want to talk to you you sound so narrow boring and imbred right you know what I mean right right right so so in other words I was sensitized to anti-Semitism and and also I've got to say as a young man in the early 70s,

the wars of Israel against its neighbors, you know, Yom Kippur War and the Sixth Day War, were portrayed rather heroically, you know, as a little guy fighting off enemies that surrounded him. So that's where I come from, culturally, and in terms of my, you know, social life. when this war, I guess we could call it that already, broke out, my breath was taken away because it's not that this is modern terrorism.

This is some sort of medieval pogrom where, you know, where Cossacks come through a village and cut off heads and rape people and so on. I was with my son when it started and I said, Charlie, you're going to see a reaction from Jewish people that comes out of the deepest reservoirs of fear and memory here. This isn't just a horror in the moment. This is going to stir trauma from generations

and hundreds of years of, you know, of ostracism and violence. So I was shocked, and I'm still in shock, Glenn. I really am. It was the first major attack, too, that I've seen, where the thoughts of many immediately went to the victimization of the attackers. You know, I didn't expect it to turn so quickly into a referendum, referendum on Israel's treatment of Palestine. It took, it only took them responding.

As soon as Hamas said, we're done and Israel began to respond to it in an organized fashion it was over I mean that's when people started changing I mean in in with 9-11 it took what a month maybe before you started to hear some things where you know well America really is right this one happened that fast well I'm gonna I'm gonna kind of revise what I said because at the same time I was horrified. And at the same time, my heart went out to the victims and to all my friends who have family there, you know, who travel back and forth and so on.

I was afraid that the intense emotionalism that was being released by this would become the pretext for some giant mistake. You know, I wish after 9-11 I knew what I knew now. I don't think that we went to Iraq on real. We thought, I think there's a difference. I think the people think one thing, leadership may be on a completely different page. Yeah. And I don't know what our leadership is going to make of this. And my, and I'll just confess frankly, my education in the Palestinian predicament is not what it might be, okay?

And what it should be. And I'm still in a learning process about what a possible solution to all this might be or how to understand it. But I'm not in a learning process as a human being about the abhorrence of killing civilians of... Intentionally. Intentionally. Yeah. This wasn't collateral damage. This was absolute targeting of, in many cases, really vulnerable people.

people at a party, at a dance, you know, at a giant outdoor dance, in little isolated villages, children, taking hostages. The taking of hostages, the taking of civilian hostages itself is, is a horror. It's a war crime. Yeah, yeah. You haven't heard that, though. I don't hear people talking about war crimes. These were all, what you just described are war crimes.

if Israel would do it, if the United States was do it, Britain would do it, France would do it, it's a war crime. Well, it is. But at the same time, we've got this incredible passion going. And also, America is playing both sides here in some ways. I mean, or the administration. We have this relationship with Iran that I don't quite understand. And Hamas.

And Hamas. and whether this gets sorted out in any practical way, it may become the pretext for giant power moves that don't really reflect necessity. Correct. I mean... But really has... I mean, we look at World War II with Hitler

and we see that as a necessity to act against him, and it was. But really, it was a sense. setup from World War I and you know the peace so-called peace made by World War I and World War I was caused by a bunch of elites wanting to change the face of Europe I mean when this happened my first thought was okay we have Ukraine that wasn't going well people started to turn against Ukraine and now this and this one is viscerally going to get everybody involved on one side or another. This, I mean, we haven't talked about anything really nationally. We have so many things

that are on fire right now. All the focus has been there. This could easily spiral out of control into a global war. And global war is what you need to reset everything. Everybody just wants the war to end. And they don't really care if it doesn't go back to the way it was. You know, when I was in college studying in poetry in English literature, I read about an American poet Robert Lowell, who was a pacifist and who agreed to go to jail rather than fight in World War II. And that seemed crazy to me. I didn't understand. If ever there was a just war, at least as it was portrayed to me, it was World War II.

What kind of egotist in a way would sit it out for his principles? But I'm not saying I've become a pacifist in the meantime, but I'm starting to understand more and more that violence is not the answer to violence. I think if this had just been a normal attack, it would be possible to take that position a little bit more in a more untroubled fashion. But I saw pictures. I saw things that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. And to pretend that they didn't lodge deep and that they didn't inflame me is to lie. But at the same time, to know what the next step is and in terms of what I support and how I talk about it and who I listen to. See, it's funny because I think, Walter, that the answer, and it's not necessarily our answer, it's Israel.

Israel has a right to respond and defend itself in the way it feels. I think the answer is very clear. The problem is I don't trust any of the players, including us. I'm not sure. I don't either. I think all of the time, I think, all the world is but a stage and we are merely its players. We're watching stuff.

I don't know what's true anymore. I'm not a conspiracy guy. But, I mean, there's some things now. You're like, I don't know. I don't know. A rich Texan, a billionaire once said to me, conspiracies, how the hell else do you think things get done? And that's always stuck with me.

I mean, we know that people make agreements and meeting rooms and make deals above our head because they come out historically afterwards and we find out, you know, about secret treaties and all sorts of things that weren't apparent at the time. And all I know is that we're going to find out around this set of events that there are things we're blind to now. And they may cause us to regret moves that we make in a more, in a triggered, reflexive way now. In fact, we can be certain that will happen.

So I guess, knowing the extent to which Tamas went to inflame me. One of my ways of resisting their maneuver, their manipulation, is to not be driven into some panicked, angry response. I mean, it's weird. I just talked about this today about how there is, the president said, when we went in after 9-11, we made mistakes. We should learn from them.

I agree. Right. And he said, don't get angry. Don't let passion. Don't let your feeling get control of you. And I mean, I think that's amazing coming from the side that tells us that feelings are real. Feelings are everything. But he's right.

I don't. The worst thing that can happen is knee-jerk reaction. When you're angry, you never make. When you're afraid, you never make a good decision. But that doesn't mean that you don't fall back, watch. learn, and then if it's the right thing to do reason-wise and morally, execute it, do it. What I'm most concerned about, as we see here speaking, is the anti-Semitism in the United States that's flowing out of this. Because, I mean, I've got friends whose kids are in school or at college, Jewish friends, who wish their kid could come home now.

even kids in younger, you know, elementary schools where the teachers are espousing a certain kind of anti-Jewish rhetoric that's making them uncomfortable. So I'm concerned about my friends here and not just my friends, but their families and the extended community. because anti-Semitism as I studied it to college, and it was a big topic in the late 70s and early 80s when I went to college. How did the Holocaust happen? We studied the literature that came out of it. In many ways, we weren't able to understand it for 20, 30, 40 years. I still didn't understand it until the last 20.

Yeah. You know, how does Germany become that? Right. Well, we're actually, you can read about it. And then you can watch it. And it's a little disturbing. And we like to think that our hindsight on that event has something to do with the run-up, but they're very different. I mean, people weren't seeing concentration camps as they went to work regularly.

Yes. We didn't enter the war to save the Jews. And certainly in the 1930s, as the anti-Semitism was congealing and consolidating itself in Nazi party, some of the arguments that were being made against Jews were similar to ones that are being made now. Yes. And so I don't know that a lot of people who have a superficial education now would recognize that run up to the final solution if it hit him on the head.

It's a little frightening. Yes. But maybe it is hitting them on the head. Because the conspiracy theories that really... matter those racial conspiracy theories which take out entire group give them common characteristics but that isn't that what an evil history isn't that though what de i and and social justice and all of that is you're taking the white man i don't care if it's white black yellow it doesn't matter to me you're taking in this case the white man because of their history who they you know were related to even if they

weren't directly related, the things that happen, that makes them inherently bad and evil, and they have to be stopped. That's really what anti-Semitism is, except it's about Jews. Well, you know, German anti-Semitism came out of German scientific racism, which was a kind of late 19th century belief that the races were really distinctive. Language and heritage made them groups with specific qualities that could be discerned. Maybe they could be graded in terms of intelligence and other characteristics. And so it was this, you know, if you said trust the science in 1905 in Germany, racism was the science.

Eugenics. Yeah. And here in America. It was stronger here in America. I mean, this is Darwin than his cousin, what was his name, Galton that comes up with eugenics and going, hey, wait a minute. minute there are different races of people and some of them are farther behind maybe we can make the superhuman right that's and it i mean well you know recently someone someone i would call

left wing said to me uh this is all about israel oppressing brown people or this is part of the general trend around the world to oppress brown people and i said to this young person when I was young, Jews were brown people. They were the brownest of people. The idea that they're now the ultimate insiders, the colonists, the oppressors, really takes a big leap. What they were were the ghetto dwelling outsiders of Europe who barely had rights as people and were not top of the ladder.

And if they've managed somehow, if many Jews, because of Israel, and other reasons have, you know, have managed to live secure, prosperous lives and gain, uh, you know, wealth and influence and so on. That doesn't mean you're dealing with society's ever present winners. Right. You're in many cases, I know, at least with me, that a lot of people tell me I can't do this. You can't do that. You can't do this.

You'll never. Hmm. That's, that's not, that's a subtle form of oppression, I guess. Right. But I always took that as, oh, really? I mean, I think sometimes that the Jewish success can come from the fact they can't depend on anybody else. You've got to depend on yourself. You learn these things.

You educate yourself and you work hard. When that happens, success comes. Well, you know, I don't want to trade in even positive. stereotypes too heavily. And it's not an area of expertise, but I will say that I see the potential in the United States right now for an outbreak of real anti-Semitism. Not that subtle kind that's used to cancel people and so on, but actual violence. No Jews allowed. Violence. A Berlin synagogue was firebomb the other day. I believe a Tunisian synagogue too. And this can be a conflagration that gets out of control because I don't think young people in this country have been sufficiently educated

about what happened in the 20th century and how it happened. They may know what happened, but they don't know how it happened. And it happened because the state needed an enemy. It needed an excuse. Germany had been humiliated, had economic problems and all sorts of things after World War I. And it wanted a scapego. And the easiest one was the oldest one.

Right. And in this time of racial sensitivity in the U.S., it's probably hard to find an outside group to scapegoat anymore. You know, most of them have been, you know, there's been a campaign for understanding of all sorts of races, people of different persuasions and so on. But I don't know that it's been done very well for the Jewish population here. I think they maybe thought that never forget.

job was done. Or maybe we thought that was done. We have a museum. We have a Holocaust museum. We've got this literature. We all saw Schindler's list. But

vigilance on that front is imperative. 60% of the on Amazon come to vendors on independent, like sack magic. Hello, here Camille, of Sac Magic. Compress Chode Fraud are fabriced

here even, with the tissues that we're chisette and the avion and the avion to push to sign. Our presence

on Amazon enlarge our business of clientele to the world entire. Sac magic, is the compress that all the

world prefer. At this, we're grandes. Trouvey of little enterprises like the own own

onot on Amazon.ca. According to a recent study of hundreds of post-abort of women, 60% of

women report that they would have preferred to give birth had they received more support from others and had more financial security. Wow. That's where preborn steps in. Preborn is there for women

in their darkest hour deciding between the life and death of the precious child. The reality is women are being pressured to make this fatal decision and they're being told that their babies are just a clump of cells. Well, they're not. Preborn welcomes women with God's love and introduces them to the beautiful life growing inside of them, which doubles their baby's chance to live. When you support pre-born. You not only support women, you empower them. And your donation of $28 will help a woman make that choice because she doesn't want to regret it for the rest of her life. It gives her the ultimate blessing life. Dial pound 250. $28 buys an ultrasound. Gives it to her for free. Keyword baby at pound 250 or go to preborn.com slash Glenn. It's one thing to say that you don't see it

you know, 15 years ago. You start to see the rise in anti-Semitism and you're like, but when you are having people around the world and even here in America, UPenn just had a bunch of students that were holding a major Palestinian march, and they were chanting about the, there's only one solution for the, Jews. Well, that's the final solution. How do you not see it when you're chanting in Australia, gas the Jews, gas the Jews, or

you're talking about a final solution? Well, as I say, this all kind of took me by surprise. I would like more time to understand the situation. I would like more time to understand the situation. I would like more time to understand the potential solution. to what has been a problem my whole life. I mean, I'm expected to come up with an answer to a question that has been broiling my whole life and that they haven't solved, you know. I look at Gaza and I don't think it looks like a very good place to live. I don't think it looks like a happy way to live. No.

And there needs to be a better way, and I'm not sure what it is, but it's not. pair gliding into music festivals and killing people it's not you know slaughtering mothers and children and I sometimes feel like we are in the 1930s in which we are watching a kind of escalation and a madness take hold that demands a climax and I don't know what that climax is going to be and I I wish we could step back from it. I'm no military expert. I don't know how Israel

isolates this group, isolates the guilty, rescues its hostages, if that's possible, and creates a secure situation into the future, you know. But I wish, I hope that that's possible rather than what becomes a domino

series of other powers getting there, seeing an advantage for themselves, you know, trying to get leverage using this with their own populations, you know. Iran keeps its people down too, man. I know. And it had them in the streets.

And there were, we weren't. And until COVID, once we stopped paying attention because of COVID, all those people marching in Hong Kong, all those people in Iran, they just disappeared. Yeah. They just disappeared.

We were insufficiently supportive of that democracy movement in Iran. And here we are, you know. The problem is that the time to be calm, the time to be reasoned never seems to come when violence stalks the land. Everybody wants to get their licks in first before they sign that peace treaty. As we speak, Israel has not yet really responded in any large-scale way. So I don't know what's coming. Every one of us is poised every day to open the newspaper in the morning or turn on our phones

and see a conflagration that they didn't. expect and don't want. What's frightening in a completely different way is, um, my company is Mercury Radio, uh, arts. Orson Well's company was Mercury Radio Theater. Loved him.

Uh, and I, I often have wondered how could people have fallen for war of the world? The father of fake news, Orson Wells. Yeah. How could they have done that? Um, we're kind of in that period,

just in a different way. We're more, you know, we have too many sources for one source to fool us. But now with AI and the complete lack of belief in any institution, you can see, I mean, we are in the 1930s again in many ways. So politics in some ways always reflects the dominant technologies of the moment. And I remember watching a speech of Hitler at one of the Nuremberg rallies and thinking, Hitler isn't possible without the megaphone, without the loudspeaker system. There was no way for him to address tens and tens of thousands of people without loudspeakers and Kleglites. And he was the master of those two technologies.

He is sort of the dark master of them. Now we're in a different technological age. And there are some that tell us that, you know, social media and free Internet are luxuries we can't afford because they can be manipulated by by tyrants, disinformation agents and so on. I tend to think, though, that they may be protecting us somewhat. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think we've learned more about our leaders and learned more about the deals that get done. And, you know, the truth, not that we've gotten to it, about COVID, would never have come out without social media.

My fear is that the clampdown is coming. Yes. And the powers that be that want to wage war, you know, whether it's warranted or not or in ways that, you know, we might not wish, we'll get total control of this thing and engineer the conversation and the way they want. de-amplify the voices of critics, skeptics, and others. They are, but I mean, real control of it is terrifying. And Glenn, as we, as we sit here, that is my biggest fear for this country, other than the real world problems that are going on, you know, there'll be a crisis and so on.

But you see, everything else is downhill of freedom of expression. See, once that goes, you no longer have the ability to see, even see your own problems clearly. You're a pure captive of propaganda. And so just this week, the New York Times reports, oh, Israel bombed a hospital and there are 500 dead. Well, a day and a half after that, we know that that wasn't exactly the story. And the reason we know that is because there are other sources.

Correct. And almost immediately, we got skepticism about those claims and we got other reports. and we got other reports and so on. And we've kind of worked out what happened now pretty close to the truth two days later. That's a tribute to the freedom of the Internet and the freedom of social media and independent media especially. If we were to lose that, though,

maybe the New York Times or whoever's on the top of the info, he wouldn't have wanted to admit error in that. And maybe they wouldn't have had to. So if we lose this complexity and this multifarious source that allows people from all sides to chime in, even the worst sides, we may not be able to process events and we'll just become the captive of masters who will whip us this way and that way. And they're going to use this as an excuse. because whatever the right or wrong of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is, there are people who see it as an opportunity to gain control. Sure.

I mean, in the weirdest event ever, the New York Times gets this story wrong. And then I see people calling for the Internet censorship because there's too much disinformation out there. Well, in other words, the most trusted sources get things wrong. and that becomes a pretext for censorship. It's only the places like the New York Times that really deserves scrutiny because little people on little accounts saying weird things don't cause major protests across the world. Correct.

But they get a story wrong and maybe a capital city burns down or an embassy is stormed. And every news room in America. follows the New York Times. Sure they do. I've worked for them. I've written for them. One of my, you know, out of all my issues, and I'm not really a political person by background.

You know, I've written novels. I've been a literary critic and so on. I like to bring the legacy of human wisdom to bear on the moment. And the great wisdom of the ages is that people are proud, arrogant, self-centered, often wrong, unwilling to admit mistakes, and tragedy happens when they commit themselves to egotistical pursuits rather than check themselves using traditional basic wisdom. And I'm very glad that at the moment we have a relatively free Internet that can even show the extremists involved. I mean, when, when this BLM chapter in Chicago put the paraglider on their

social media, I want to see that. I do too. I mean, I don't want to be, I don't want to be saved from these expressions of extremism. The notion is that if I see them, I'll somehow imitate them, that's, that's kind of the rationale behind censorship that we are all. monkey see, monkey do. It's the elitist mindset. I'm educated. I can handle it. They can't.

Exactly. Exactly. But I think that woke more people up to the potential for organized anti-Semitism in the country than anything else. Say that had been censored. You know, somebody said that an extremist view that could cause violence, whatever their usual rationales are. We're going to keep that out. I think because people saw that, they got a snapshot of what's possible. I also think that, you know, I've gotten heat for so long for, you know, you're just stirring people up.

I don't view myself as that. I view myself as a safety valve. If you express it, you get people to express it to take positive steps, prepare, whatever. you're less likely to have a blow up. If the government shuts everybody up and shuts everybody down, you just stuff it down and stuff it down and stuff it down, that's not healthy nor healthy for a republic. Well, absolutely.

Suppression and authoritarian control are always recipes for outbursts later. and people would take the Palestinian side of the Israeli conflict would say that right now. You know, Gaza is pent up and something had to explode. Well, let's take a lesson from the fact that America is getting pretty pent up in some ways. And I'm a little upset with conservatives who so recently were on the business end of censorship, getting their accounts canceled, or maybe libertarians who were trying to say something about COVID or their resistance to vaccination and so on. And now they're suddenly, you know, they're pro-Israel and they're suddenly taking the side of

censorship against. No. You know. No. Yeah. I mean, they're all. You cannot pick and choose. Yeah.

You know, the only stuff that deserves protection. is the stuff that people don't like. Right. And it depends on who's in power on, you know, I don't like this, I don't like that. If you can't stand in front of the person who is being told to shut up and say, I so agree with you that this is abhorrent. Hands off. Hands off.

He has a right to say it, not to incite violence and all of that, but he has a right to his opinion, no matter how wrong he is. I think the progressives and the left, they are so mentally weak because no one has ever thrown them up against a wall intellectually and said, defend that. You can't, you, when you spend your life, I was a much better Christian in New York than I am in Texas.

Because I'm in a sea of Christians here. Right. I had to defend it. And I was more of a, oh, you call you, call yourself a Christian. So you watch yourself, you think about things so much more when you're challenged, you know what I mean? The problem is that across society, groups move into the spaces in which they won't be challenged. And if you're on a major university campus right now in the last few years.

You are in a pretty monocultural political zone. You know, people who might come on from the conservative or libertarian or dissident side can't even speak on campus anymore. I mean, or it's turned into some zoo with security and so on. so people going on challenge for a long time seems to be a hazard of the age it happened but it happens on it does happen on every side oh yeah you know it's just this time is is on conservatives but conservatives and bigots and everything else but having been on the outside and having been the subject of i think a lot of censorship and suppression.

If they turn around and say, oh, but this time... It'll go to your favor. It'll go to my favor. I don't want it. They're wrong. They're absolutely wrong. This is a weapon that can be turned at anyone. The censorship, speech suppression, disinformation, industrial complexes, some reporters have called

it, can be... is a cannon that can be swung at whoever they need to sling it. when they do. And if people haven't realized that by now, they're not just naive. They're morons. And frankly, if you are a supporter of the Palestinian cause right now, you also face the possibility

if policy makers should decide you're on the outs of being silenced. you know um so i i i like to think that i extend to my adversary the same courtesies i wish them to extend to me and i just want to live in a country where we all agree on the bill of rights that's it right can we can we just agree on those things because i don't it doesn't force me to agree with your opinion or disagree with your opinion or do anything about it so my dad was a patent attorney an intellectual property attorney. He worked for the 3M Corporation.

He patented things like post-it notes and scotch tape. And in the 80s, it was thought by American industry that Japan was going to eat our lunch. It was going to take over. And a lot of the patent fights my dad was fighting were against Japanese infringement of American patents. They were stealing our products. And I remember asking once,

I said, Dad, is Japan going to take over the world? you know, is all our industry going to collapse and move to Japan? And he said, Walt, it won't happen. And they were making movies, you know, that sort of portended that. And he said, we've got a creativity, a spontaneity, and a kind of argumentative, creative nature in America, where people don't move with the pack. And that's where inventions come from.

And as long as we have that sort of, inventive, skeptical, creative, slightly chaotic nature in America, we're all going to be fine. And he framed it in terms of industry and in terms of economics and so on. But I think that's true socially as well. We still have it? You know, yeah, as long as we're fighting, fighting fair, challenging ourselves, challenging one another, striking sparks. we are, you know, there's hope for us. But once we start trying to figure out which line to get in,

according to which authority and who to be afraid of and what to shut up about, and when not to speak out, we're going to slowly, probably economically, contract to because that fear of being different can either, you know, that fear of fear, it can shut you up, but can also shut down the mind finally. Just let the AI answer the question. Right.

You know, I'll ask the AI and then find out what to say. Right. And I mean, there are people who do that now. It's never too early to plan your summer story in Europe with WestJet, from rolling countryside to cobblestone streets. Begin your next chapter. Book your seat at westjet.com or call your travel agent. WestJet, where your story takes off. Remember in the day when you could do all the normal things you wanted to do in a day

without feeling like you were made entirely out of broken glass? Remember when you didn't have to decide whether or not it was worth something to do something. Is it going to be worth it tomorrow? Well, living with pain is no joke. And it's the kind of thing that can ruin your life. I know. I've been there. I discovered relief factor.

My wife made me take it. And if you have been dealing with pain in your life and you feel like you've tried everything, that's where I was. I wasn't going to try this. This is all natural. It's, you know, inflammation. I'm sorry, I've just never seen, you know, any kind of ibuprofen that has ever worked for me. And that's what I thought this was. It's not.

If it works for you, you get your life back. Three-week quick start. Try it now. 1995. It's not a trial pack. Or it's a trial pack and it's not a drug. hundreds of thousands of people have ordered relief factor about 70% of them go on to order more month after month so try it please relieffactor.com or call 800 the number four relief 800 the number

for relief factor.com let me talk to you about conspiracy theories sure because I'm questioning everything I mean we went to the moon I believe that I know that but I think we're entering a time where that could go away should we lose our fight for civilization in the west um we i i i woswald killed kennedy was somebody else involved i don't know um but now that i see that the cia knew about oswald i don't know now i'm starting to question it were they involved nine 11 it was al qaeda um George Bush didn't blow up the World Trade Center. However, something's not right. They keep too many secrets.

Something's not right just because of Sandy Berger going in and stealing documents from both Clinton and the Bush records. I don't know what that was, but they didn't blow up the World Trade Center. COVID happened when I could investigate and had the resources to investigate my. myself and that thing is dirty as it gets, how much of our history is that? Or is this a, on this scale, I mean, millions of people died. Well, I tend to look at conspiracy theories as folklore first. they're usually a sign that people can't make sense of an event or a sign that the official story is lacking in some way. Right.

That's not necessarily the case, but it means that the official record reads as somehow suspicious. And people have every right to use their minds and their knowledge and their sources. and gossip to connect the dots as they see fit and then put their thought or their theory into the arena and see if it survives scrutiny um every journalist has a before they have uh fully reported a story has a theory as to what the real story is and it may be disproved in the reporting or it may may or that theory may survive or maybe something even more outlandish may turn out to be true so the basis, I can't criticize people for having theories, novel theories about things, especially about

stories where common sense tells us suppression is taking place. And I talk about my dad again. He died at 82. He had Lou Gehrig's disease, yeah. And it was a very painful death. And one of the last things he wanted to talk about hours before he died was the Kennedy assassination. He'd been a young lawyer in Washington, working as a clerk in a court that was down the hall from the AP, the Associated Press. And he remembers when the assassination happened, all of a sudden, all of the teletypes going, going in the AP office and going in there. And the most catastrophic event of his young life,

he was 25, had just happened. He died at 82. That was 1963. He died at 82. And he looked at me, and this was an educated man. He himself had gone to Princeton. And he was a chemical engineer, a rationalist, a corporate lawyer all his life. And he said, we still don't know what happened. I can't believe I'm dying without knowing what happened that day. And he said, all I know is that we didn't get the full story. And I've spent a lot of time as a journalist and talked to people over the years who might have some insight into that story. And I don't think we have either.

I mean, I know we haven't. I don't have a substitute theory. I knew. When you come to things like Epstein, I mean, Christopher Ray is the one with a black book now. The power. There is a black book? Well, I was told that it is with the FBI and it is with Christopher Ray.

It's two people share access to it. The power of that book, if it does exist, is terrifying, terrifying. And if this happened to a truck driver, we'd know every name in it. But because it's with the elite and there's something with him and spy agencies and all these powerful people, are we ever going to find the truth on that one? Well, it's pretty clear from the way he died and the mystery surrounding it that something isn't right. I mean, even having the ability to kill yourself in that kind of prison means somebody gave you something you shouldn't have. Hard to believe that with paper sheets or whatever it could be done. Yeah, it seems more and more, Glenn, that the bigger an event, the more mystery surrounds it.

And is this normal? Well, it's normal when power is involved. They're always competing establishment interests. If Jeffrey Epstein was indeed involved with intelligence, and I think he had to have been to do what he did, there are people who don't want that known. There are people who were clients of his who obviously, or clients, I don't know, friends,

confederates who obviously don't want that known right i i wrote a book about a con artist who was a murderer um who i knew by another name he pretended to be a rockefeller and when i talked to people who i knew had known him none of them wanted to speak up they didn't want to admit they'd been fooled they didn't want to admit they'd been friends they didn't right want to admit they hung out epstein was a thousand times that guy oh yeah um and uh so It's a weird predicament for human beings to know we're going to have to live through history without understanding it. I mean, that forces you, I mean, back on sort of religious and principles and basic common sense principles because you might never find out what happened to our president, John F. Kennedy. You might never find out why we went to war in Iraq. It's still a mystery.

don't quite understand it. I mean, they obviously didn't tell the truth about the weapons of mass destruction. So why did we go? Why did Saddam Hussein become the fall guy for something Al-Qaeda did? And what was Al-Qaeda that made it not our ally as it had been or bin Laden so many years before? We're not going to get a lot of these answers. And the people, who could give them to us have reasons not to give them to us. So how are we going to survive? How are we going to make decisions? How are we going to vote?

How are we going to form our personal philosophies? We're going to have to shrink back to very basic standards because the information sphere is especially occluded when it comes to big stories. we learn about little stories we learn the gossip about movie stars lives and so on but we don't know why our wars are fought how our pandemics start and things like that i mean just since just since covid i've heard from very good sources people you could usually rely on about 10 different stories about where covid came from including top scientists just assuring me it's this or it's that um i'm no real i'm not any closer to understanding it than i'm not i'm not any closer to understanding it than i'm

I was. I knew it didn't come from back cave, but did it just leak from a lab? Maybe, maybe there are stories underneath that. But how do we live with this level of doubt and uncertainty? We keep digging, but at the same time, we can't spend our lives as detectives. We have to reduce the influence of the gigantic governments on our personal lives. So we can still go about our day-to-day life and not have to worry about all of that. Right. You know what I mean? Right.

I think the closer we get, you know, to a federalist sort of system. Do you have, are you finding more people waking up? I mean, you do a podcast with Matt Taibi. Yeah. And I don't know. It seems like you might be red-pilling him just a little bit. Well, I can't. Or is it just the times?

Okay. So Matt and I It would probably be wrong to say I'm red-pilled in a traditional sense Because I kind of have a certain angle on things I'm not the kind of guy who says vote for this guy Or don't vote for that person I've I've given money to two candidates in my lifetime

Both were Democrats who appealed to me at the time I don't I've written for magazines like Harper's and New Republic, which were really Democratic Party establishment mouthpieces. In some ways, it was around the time of Russiagate that I started to become less orthodox, because I knew that the mega story about Donald Trump and Russia was not true. And I became offended that I was asked to subscribe to it as a right-thinking person. And it sort of put a wedge in my relationship to the media that I had always worked for. And that's grown.

And it grew through COVID particularly. I saw the ways in which mainstream outlets were being used to whip up what I believe was hysteria. And so I'm more of a press critic or a gadflyer and a cultural skeptic. than I am a traditional political person. You won't see me on the campaign trail. You said you listened to me a lot for years. Yep. Why?

Why did I listen to Glenn Beck? Yeah. Okay. I mean, when I was a kid on a farm, my dad, we lived on a farm in Minnesota, even though my dad worked for 3M company, he was kind of a back to the land guy

who had us living 50 miles out of the city. We had a radio in the truck, and we listen to Paul Harvey every day. And then as time went on, Rush Limbaugh came and Art Bell and Glenn Beck. And I loved radio. I mean, I can't, it was for a lonely kid out in the Minnesota countryside, it was always a comforting connection to the bigger world.

Yeah. And, you know, you're quite a talent, man. And you were doing something new, and it was arresting. I loved listening. And, you know, I told you earlier, my family converted to Mormonism when I was a teenager. I'm no longer an active Mormon, but I have a lot of affection for the church and a lot of ties to people who were much better Mormons than I ever was. Me too. And so that aspect of your life.

your personality appealed to me too. Where else was I going to hear somebody like me? You'd had exposure to that. The great age of talk radio probably has passed. I'm not sure what you think about that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But I don't think the great age of the spoken word has passed.

I think it's about to renew itself even in bigger and better ways. Yeah. Yeah. You know, spoken word is spoken word. word, you know, I know you're a writer, so you'll understand this. You know, you try to read, you try to read Huck Finn or Edgar Allan Poe in your head. Right. It's not the same as reading it out loud. It was made to be read out loud. Right. And there's something about the, the storytelling ability of one individual. It's the, it's the only medium where,

if you're just listening and not watching, where it requires you to put as much into it as the storyteller, that's how, that's how you see the story. Right. Is if you're engaged, because then you're working it in your head, that doesn't exist. Yeah, I mean, the podcast, the renaissance of the podcast is a wonderful thing as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I wonder how people have the ability to take in that much human speech. And I'm not one of those people who likes to turn up the speed to 1.5. I don't want to hear people talking like Chinunks. You know, I want to hear the richness. But I listened to you for the same reason. I listened

to Paul Harvey back when or Larry King late at night when he had a show. And then Art Bell. for company. The human voice creates a sense of intimacy, especially when experienced alone in the dark or out in a car or out in the country. And, you know, our politics probably had a lot to do with the rise of talk radio. In other words, you know,

I remember Trump bringing Rush Limbaugh out not long before Rush died and thinking like that guy's probably responsible for the president being there. Oh, yeah. You know, I wouldn't hesitate to call myself a populist. I love the people. It's not the kind of populism that means huge rallies of torchlit, you know, nationalist, really, socialist.

It's the populism of people doing ordinary things spread out around the country. and and you know you'd hear you go into a garage to get a tire fixed and you'd hear rush Limbaugh you know and and the elites weren't paying attention you know they were like unaware I think largely of this grassroots movement that was building and it found fruition in this outsider presidential candidate and then president and I don't think that would happened without radio radio is a very democratic medium um and and i've always loved it and and i haven't loved it necessarily for the ideology of the personalities but you know you're a pretty wacky guy in a somewhat and what had become a somewhat stale medium yeah or a predictable medium

yeah yeah yeah it is a pleasure i hope it doesn't take this long to get us back together no i love come back. Yeah, good. Thank you. Okay, thanks, Glenn. Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.