Glenn Beck is back with a brand new show on the Blaze Radio Network, on Demand. He's joined by the National Enquirer's Peter Thiel to talk about the Farm Bill, Google's leadership on AI, and much more!
00:15:14.460And I was terrified every day about the impending doom that was going to happen to me.
00:15:21.700And over the years, I really only experienced people being accepting and loving and careful and sort of fragile around me for most of my experience.
00:15:37.400And then, honestly, listening to—I started to explore you and Ann Coulter, and I realized that the foundation of my views leaned more towards libertarianism than progressivism.
00:15:51.640And I just sort of became a conservative by the sheer force of I had no other choice because I couldn't promote or accept progressive ideas.
00:16:04.400Yeah, and you can't change what you believe.
00:17:15.860Before you start there, you were a liberal when you came out.
00:17:19.460And so you didn't have any of the conservative hate on you because you were, you know, trying to destroy our society because you're a liberal and all of that stuff.
00:17:31.620Or, you know, none of the conservative hate that, you know, you're going to burn in the fires of hell and you should be destroyed.
00:17:39.040I certainly perceived it from watching, from reading LGBT media.
00:17:47.520And that's the reason why I started to explore conservative media because I really wanted to, I wanted to read your books.
00:17:53.840I wanted to read Ann Coulter books, Sean Handy, everybody, and debunk everything.
00:17:57.340I wanted to prove that the right was hateful and wrong and accidentally realized that I agreed with you.
00:18:04.740But the truth is, is that nobody treated me.
00:18:12.120I experienced people who disagreed with me.
00:18:14.140I experienced people who were ignorant, that didn't really understand.
00:18:17.980I've never interpreted religious disagreement as hatred because I've always seen it coming from a place of genuine concern and empathy.
00:18:26.460But you also don't deny that there are those people who are out there and, you know, I mean, the Westboro Baptist Church.
00:18:36.980There are a lot of people who have been gay throughout, you know, the human experience that have been, you know, deeply affected and hurt and persecuted because of their homosexuality.
00:18:52.600And, of course, in the world right now, outside of the United States, it is a very real danger to be a gay person or perceived to be a gay person.
00:19:02.760So what have you experienced now as a conservative?
00:19:07.280Well, the truth is, is that since I've been active online, as a conservative, I spend most of my time trying to explain to people that I don't believe or embrace what they think I do.
00:19:22.720And in doing so, attempting to prevent them from trying to harm me in some way.
00:19:27.840I've, of course, been physically threatened, as all conservatives online are.
00:19:32.700I've had to make sure that my personal life is very protected because people do actively try to get you fired.
00:19:39.440They will try to – they'll send police officers to your house.
00:19:43.140They will harass your friends and family.
00:19:44.900Early on, when my Facebook was opened, my friends and family received harassment from people based on things that I said.
00:19:54.440No one ever did that to me as a gay person.
00:19:56.660I never experienced people saying – finding out that I was gay and then treating me badly.
00:20:03.540The moment that people associate me with being a conservative, I'm instantly a Nazi, if not Jewish.
00:20:10.020I'm instantly a racist and a bigot, and I'm deserving of genuine hatred.
00:20:15.840And that's a startling experience to interact with people and realize that they genuinely hate you based on something that they genuinely don't understand about you.
00:20:30.220He wrote the article in The Federalist, The Stigma Against My Conservative Politics is Worse Than the Stigma of Being Gay.
00:20:36.920Tell me about Stop Flaunting Your Conservatism.
00:20:39.540So one thing that people say constantly, and you'll saw a lot of this when someone asked, is being conservative worse than being gay, was no, being conservative means you're a bad person.
00:20:55.860But I'm often told, well, if you don't want to experience the hatred, stop being a bigot or stop harassing people who you hate from their perception.
00:21:09.860And I always sort of associated that with, if I just stopped talking about conservative issues, if I just stopped correcting lies and inaccuracies that I see in media, if I just stopped talking back to the left, they would leave me alone.
00:21:25.840And that's exactly the advice that I got when I was younger, and I would tell people I was gay, and I feared negative backlash.
00:21:36.200People would say, well, why do you have to tell everybody?
00:21:52.040And there isn't an appreciation of what we actually do.
00:21:56.840They just assume that we're sort of complaining about the hatred that we're inviting on ourselves.
00:22:01.940And they don't really understand that we are fighting for something that we actually believe in, and that the hatred that we're getting for it is based on fighting.
00:22:13.560But they'll say that, you know, you're gay, you're born that way, you have no choice.
00:22:29.800It's, that's, I think that's a huge concept here, is people saying, well, you can stop being conservative.
00:22:35.760Or they assume that I'm conservative because I am self-hating or because I'm ignorant in some way or because I haven't been exposed to the right type of people, that I will get better and become progressive.
00:22:49.420And the reason that I used that analogy, that I didn't choose to be conservative, is based on my personal experience of, I fought it every step of the way.
00:23:06.060Because you are intellectually honest.
00:23:09.680And the biggest problem that we have in America is it's, a lot of people will not explore because they'll start to, and if they start to see that maybe their side is weak, and I mean on both sides, any side, they start to see that they're, maybe they're not right.
00:23:25.980They'll stop because they instinctively know if I find out that this is true, then I've got to change everything, and my life is going to be much different, and they don't want to do it.
00:25:15.880The stigma against my conservative politics is worse than the stigma of being gay.
00:25:19.920And it didn't identify in the headline that you are actually gay.
00:25:24.140And what it led to, at least what I saw online, was an army of straight liberal people trying to teach you a lesson of what it means to be gay and what it's like for people who went through that experience.
00:25:34.980What is it like to get hit up by a bunch of straight liberals and giving you lessons on being gay?
00:25:56.300And so it's become a running joke that I will simply respond by saying gay Jew.
00:26:01.160Because people just, they make the, they come in with the assumption, the only people who are bad fall into this category.
00:26:13.080And the only people who think like this are bad, therefore you must be one of those people.
00:26:16.900And I constantly, you know, we talk about identity politics as a negative thing.
00:26:20.920I actually use my privilege as somebody who is a minority to sort of force many on the left to realize that they are closed-minded on this.
00:26:32.520That this isn't a worldview that is exclusive to ignorance or that's exclusive to any particular race or religion or anything.
00:26:41.360That this is, you know, me being gay and Jewish does not impact my views on, you know, tax policy.
00:26:47.500And that they have to address their own prejudices and realize that they simply disagree with what's, the reality is they disagree with what I'm promoting.
00:27:02.220But it has nothing to do with who I am.
00:27:04.520And that's what I'm trying to get across when I do that.
00:27:06.700You also said lumping Milo in with typical conservatives.
00:27:14.040Oh, well, you know, to every gay conservative and every conservative, Milo's is controversial.
00:27:21.120I appreciated him early on because he was kind of the Lady Gaga, the Madonna of our movement.
00:27:29.080And, you know, if we went back a decade or so ago and he were a liberal, he'd be a media sensation.
00:27:36.140His type of flamboyance and comedy is what South Park and Family Guy and liberal humor was.
00:27:45.300And I appreciated that he pushed the boundaries of the freedom of speech limits, and he kind of exposed the fact that colleges were growing more intolerant.
00:27:56.000But I don't always find him to be principled as a conservative.
00:28:02.940I find him to be more of a contrarian, and that's fine.
00:28:06.480But the reality is that I am compared to him, and every gay conservative is.
00:28:12.000And we are, in a lot of ways, the concept that we are valid to begin with is based on him as a template, and they view him as a scam artist.
00:28:24.000So one of the stereotypes that I fight all the time is that I'm doing this for attention or I'm doing this as a scam or a con, that this isn't really – I don't know what they think I'm gaining from it.
00:28:35.140But that I'm doing this in a provocative way just to be provocative.
00:28:51.320And it's frustrating because we spend so much of our time trying to dispel a lot of the mythology around that.
00:28:59.300And you know what's interesting is this is what happens.
00:29:02.500This is the difference between conservatives, hopefully conservatives and progressives.
00:29:06.340One is a group hive mind that everybody has to be in a bucket and everybody is alike and there's no differences.
00:29:12.600And hopefully libertarian conservatives, no, no, we're all different.
00:29:16.620I don't answer for him and I don't agree with him, but we're kind of on the same side on this particular issue and we're not on this issue.
00:29:23.360I applaud your article and your courage to say it.
00:29:26.600You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:29:33.040Leon Wolf is the managing editor for TheBlaze.com and he's in to talk to us a little bit about Michael Cohen.
00:29:55.960And also, if we have time, China and Canada, because this is this is extraordinarily revealing.
00:30:02.920And I think China just caught on to what Donald Trump and America may actually be doing with this trade war.
00:30:17.560And what is the important part of this to you?
00:30:21.120The important part is is is not just Cohen, but of course, the company that produces the National Enquirer also basically entered a plea agreement.
00:30:29.240So you have two two people now, both friendly to Trump, previously very loyal to Trump, who have admitted basically in sworn statements and plea agreements that they were ordered by Donald Trump to commit felonies.
00:30:42.540Now, the National Enquirer came out and kind of changed their story a bit.
00:30:46.660And it's my understanding that this one is we were working with the campaign, not necessarily Donald Trump directly, which changes it and makes it even more significant.
00:30:59.180And so people people struggle to understand this.
00:31:01.800And I was I was talking with with Jason Buttrell about this just before I came on here.
00:31:06.180People don't understand why is this a campaign finance violation?
00:31:09.900Can they prove that it came through the campaign?
00:31:11.720It's actually the fact that the money didn't go through the campaign is what makes it a campaign finance violation, because it's a legitimate campaign expense to spend money to protect the reputation of the candidate.
00:31:22.860But that's the purpose of the money expenditure.
00:31:24.920If you're going to do that, you have to either declare it as a campaign expenditure or the people who make the expenditure have to report it as a contribution in kind.
00:31:33.420One of those two things has to happen.
00:31:58.440I did campaign finance for over two years.
00:32:00.300OK, that's almost exclusively what I did.
00:32:02.020So when it comes to this, it's a felony, because if I told Stu, hey, go kill this person, I'm being held just as culpable for the for the murder as he is.
00:32:18.920And, you know, look, in any any campaign, any presidential campaign in particular, they're so large of a general election candidate.
00:32:25.400You know, a serious candidate is going to probably have some campaign finance violations just just because it's such a difficult thing to keep up with and maintain 100 percent compliance.
00:32:34.140But if you have a willful violation, as this appears to clearly have been, that's what brings into the level of out of, oh, we're just going to find you X number of dollars and people have to go to jail.
00:32:44.600OK, so so let me give you let me take you through a couple of things.
00:32:47.940First of all, Dinesh D'Souza, that was clearly a political hit.
00:32:58.960So, I mean, if you're going to put Dinesh D'Souza in prison, Rosie O'Donnell should have gone to prison as well.
00:33:03.060She was much worse, did basically the same thing, except she knowingly was doing it, admittedly saying, you know, I'm using different names and everything else.
00:33:30.400I mean, I think the expectation is that in the in the course of handling all the various different donations and in recording all the donations in kind, you almost always miss some.
00:33:59.620So the difference is between, oh, I had a good faith belief that I could claim this as an exemption and I hid $150,000 worth of income intentionally from the IRS.
00:34:11.540So what is the Trump explanation for this?
00:34:17.500So Trump's Trump's explanation is is it's a plausible one.
00:34:22.060OK, I wouldn't laugh it out of court if I were a judge is that, you know, the money was not spent to protect his reputation as a candidate.
00:34:28.060It was spent to protect his reputation with his family, prevent his wife and his kids from being embarrassed.
00:34:53.040Now, ultimately, that was part of his argument to the jury, which was successful, at least in hanging the jury, was, you know, look, this is this is, you know, a it's a legitimate campaign expense because it's protecting my reputation as a candidate.
00:35:05.420And B, you know, it's not a campaign finance violation because I have other interests that were involved that I'm trying to protect with that.
00:35:12.300So, unfortunately, that one we didn't get like a court ruling on, like a judicial decision that sets a precedent as to whether that's a valid argument or not.
00:35:19.860But there's at least an argument that a jury and look, John Edwards is not a sympathetic, was not a sympathetic guy.
00:35:27.120OK, the jury had every reason to hate him and come down like a ton of bricks on him.
00:35:30.800But for whatever reason, enough of them bought that on the jury that he ended up walking.
00:35:34.580So I think it was a Washington examiner that kind of did a story on this and made the point of when a presidential candidate, for example, their example was goes to get a haircut.
00:35:44.880You have to get a haircut to to, you know, to look good on camera.
00:35:47.700And so he goes and he pays for his own haircut.
00:35:50.020In theory, you could say that's a campaign finance violation because he's spending money to improve his candidacy.
00:35:55.600But, of course, that would be completely ridiculous.
00:35:57.740And if you go down that same line, is there a kind of a line of defense there?
00:36:01.540Like, yes, he's he's spending money that will help him as a candidate in theory.
00:37:53.780I I'm handicapped because I came and got off a plane and got right here.
00:37:58.000So I don't know the particular but it's another it's a fairly low level.
00:38:00.820It's not anybody who's on the level of the one that the Canadians, you know, snatched from the Chinese.
00:38:05.180It's not like the CFO of a major company.
00:38:07.760It's still more, I think, on on level of message sending than actual retaliation.
00:38:12.320So what what happened is we said we there's a there's a Chinese official in Canada.
00:38:19.320Sorry, his her father is high up in the Communist Party, but she runs a company that has been known to be dirty for a very long time, stealing all kinds of stuff from America.
00:38:30.980Yeah. And so Donald Trump said we want to extradite it into the United States.
00:39:36.600I think that's that's a good first step.
00:39:38.220But what we're seeing is that this is a very dangerous game to play.
00:39:41.660Right. Because the Canadians, you know, Trudeau has got to go to his people and say, I have a reason for holding this CFO of, you know, China.
00:39:50.800And Trump has got to come to the American people and say, we have a reason for this person we've arrested.
00:39:54.920The Chinese government doesn't have to explain this to their own people.
00:39:58.400They can snatch as many of our people and Canadians as they want and just disappear them off the street.
00:40:02.740And they don't have to go and say, oh, you know, well, here's why.
00:40:06.100There's just there's somebody's just gone.
00:40:07.680And that's the concern is that there are a lot of American Canadian nationals over there.
00:40:12.380If we start engaging in this tit for tat, who knows where that could end up?
00:40:41.240I don't think I don't think we're going to see impeachment proceedings in the House unless something else major comes out.
00:40:46.420I don't think this campaign finance thing is going to be enough for the Democrats to roll the dice on that because you have to know Republicans are not going to buy this.
00:40:52.460They have to know it's a dead end in the Senate no matter what happens.
00:40:55.240If some other damaging information comes out, if Trump's approval rating dips down into the 20s, if the economy goes sour, maybe we see a different analysis.
00:47:16.800And my mom wouldn't keep sending my niece back if she didn't get that assurance from people that she's worked with before.
00:47:23.860And the main bullying kid, he was suspended for bullying earlier, was he not?
00:47:31.460Now, I don't know about suspension, but I do know he was put in in-school suspension.
00:47:36.620Well, you know, in-school, the ISS, not completely suspended from school, which is what he needed to be expelled from school.
00:47:43.180But he was put in in-school suspension, yes.
00:47:45.900And with that came documentation, which my mother does possess, a carbon copy of that information where that incident took place when he was put in in-school suspension and my niece was wrote up for standing up for herself.
00:48:02.940So, um, I can't, I just, I, I, you know, I have kids and, uh, at nine years old, I mean, I'm worried about my, you know, my, my 14 year old son and my 12 year old girl.
00:48:19.400Uh, and I see the rate of suicide going through the roof and something is happening with our kids, but at nine it's, it's, this is just, it's stunning.
00:48:31.580Um, and I've, I've been thinking about you guys and praying about you and your family, but I also feel so, uh, I'm so worried about her friend who, I mean, how is it?
00:48:49.400Do you have any idea how the family is dealing with this?
00:48:53.540So he doesn't feel like my friend, just because I was white or just because we were friends or whatever, the reason that she's dead now.
00:49:01.460I, I just, this, this is such a tragedy.
00:49:07.300They, uh, I don't, I'm not sure if they're going to return him, um, which I highly recommend.
00:49:13.280And that's my recommendation for any parent that really feels in their heart that my mother did what she said, which was went to the school and reported it.
00:49:23.120That if you feel in your heart that my mother did what she said, cause you know, my mom, everybody in this area knows my mom and my dad, their respective individuals in this County, um, to move your kids.
00:49:34.740Um, because if this is what they want to say, what more will they do?
00:49:40.060If it was your child, if your kids are feeling threatened at school, please move them.
00:49:46.160Please move them because sending your kids out of your home from your protection to give them to someone that it will fail to protect them.
00:50:05.060When you have allowed your kids to leave your home and come into my possession, they're now my children and I'm going to protect them in every fiber of my being.
00:50:16.540I am not scared of these kids that think that bullying is okay.
00:50:20.020I stand up to these kids just as I did in high school.
00:50:22.480When this happened, an outpour of people that I had protected from, I honestly have a guy because it was my heart to do that.
00:50:29.560If I saw somebody being mistreated, I would step up for them, but I was also one of the popular kids.
00:50:35.100So I was in band and cheerleading and different things like that.
00:50:37.640But that was my duty in my position, just as I have one now in media in Atlanta to stand up and be this voice for those people that seem that can't do that.
00:50:47.200And those individuals like you're doing, I don't know how this happened to your niece when all you did was took care of me all through high school, all through middle school or whatever the time frame it was that I protected those individuals.
00:52:06.560Well, when this happened, some of those guys that I did go to school with and some people I didn't know, they said, well, Edwin, I just want to be honest with you.
00:52:18.040And the reason I'm telling you is because I trust you.
00:52:20.420But I also read where the person that I used to bully in school was stating a story how their life is still in turmoil because they have been bullied for so long in school.
00:52:32.420So it doesn't stop when you're an adult.
00:52:35.380These things live with you for the rest of your life.
00:52:38.300So said so many people that I've been reading that have been inboxing me.
00:52:42.280So I want to bring in those people that have opened up to me and there was a bully.
00:52:47.380Right now, I'm talking with them to see what was happening in your life at this time that made you feel that coming to school to bully someone else was okay.