Best of The Program ｜ Guests： Alex Epstein & Mark Meckler ｜ 2⧸16⧸21
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
170.91713
Summary
Glenn and Pat are back in the saddle, and things are not so good in their home state of Texas. They talk about the impact of global warming, the problems in the state, and much more!
Transcript
00:00:00.000
hey we're back in the saddle it's glenn and pat because stew's uh house is underwater all of his
00:00:06.740
pipes burst uh i feel really horrible i mean i'd like to laugh you bet i mean we make fun of each
00:00:13.640
other all the time and probably we will maybe tomorrow pat do you think yeah we'll give it a
00:00:19.040
full 24 hours uh but things are bad in texas and you should pay attention to what's happening in
00:00:27.000
texas because this is what's coming to the rest of the world the problems in texas are caused by this
00:00:33.600
big green movement that texas has fallen prey to uh and it's going to be worse uh in your state we
00:00:40.540
talk about that uh and we we talk about uh with with a real expert on uh energy and what's really
00:00:48.780
happening and the impact of green energy we also uh we went into a washington post article
00:00:57.900
that will explain so much you are being called a radical but the real radicals are those in power
00:01:06.200
now they have flipped the paradigm entirely to where if you are standing for the bill of rights
00:01:13.420
you're now the enemy of the nation we talk about joe biden the first hundred days the push for
00:01:21.380
statehood for puerto rico also the push against guns and everything else that is on the plate
00:01:31.160
you're listening to the best of the blend back program
00:01:42.040
we welcome uh pat gray into the studio one of the brave that attempted to uh to weather the roads
00:01:52.620
which are not so bad the highways aren't so bad the problem with texas is we don't have any snow plows
00:01:58.960
we don't have any four well it's a good thing the size of i don't know delaware yeah from texarkana
00:02:06.840
texas down to brownsville uh texas is the same distance from texarkana texas to chicago so it's an
00:02:16.920
enormous state and we've got four snow plows which uh not really a help uh when you have snow all over
00:02:24.280
the state of course we know global warming or is it global cool it's global climate change it's global
00:02:30.860
something now disregard the fact that this happened 40 years ago you know when it was global cooling
00:02:37.880
um but it hasn't been this bad and texas is just not prepared for it we're expecting another four to six
00:02:46.660
inches of snow tomorrow uh and we don't have this weather ever the last time we had weather like
00:02:54.280
this was 10 years ago uh and we just got sleet and everything was iced over i mean nothing moved in uh
00:03:04.160
in portions of texas this is almost the entire state of texas the uh the electricity the we have
00:03:13.820
all these windmills they are all frozen frozen solid so we're not producing any wind energy
00:03:20.120
nuclear power plants offline uh we have our gas and coal plants that make uh energy they're also
00:03:28.600
offline because of they're frozen they're frozen solid we don't insulate things like they do up in
00:03:35.540
north up north because we don't ever have this weather i think maybe texas should reevaluate that
00:03:42.080
uh just a little bit uh like i said in my in my town same as yours right yeah uh the sewage
00:03:49.100
got a boil yeah the sewage treatment plant uh went down and i guess some pipes burst etc etc so now
00:03:55.680
our drinking water may be mixed with poop water which i love i love who doesn't yeah i like my water chunky
00:04:02.880
it is nothing better fortunately i i gave up on tap water a long time ago although you cook with it
00:04:11.460
you know so you brush your teeth with it yeah that's shower with it yeah i mean you know it's nasty
00:04:17.560
it is nasty uh so uh let's talk about the news outside of uh texas which quite honestly makes me
00:04:25.580
want to talk about the news inside of texas a little bit more puerto rican statehood yeah looks like it is
00:04:32.900
on its way to happening puerto rico has held six non-binding referendums on its status uh including
00:04:39.920
becoming a u.s state since 1967 however the residents there have most recently voted in favor
00:04:47.200
of statehood that was last sept sorry last november uh this has i guess a lot to do with uh hurricane
00:04:55.780
uh maria which caused over 3 000 deaths and the worst natural disaster to hit the island to date that
00:05:03.660
we know of uh also they have 72 billion dollars in debt uh they can't file for bankruptcy so why not
00:05:11.520
just push it into the federal government i don't mind paying for puerto rico do you no yeah i mean i
00:05:17.380
actually have less of a problem paying for puerto rico than i do for california i mean i have a real
00:05:24.360
problem paying for california if california and new york and illinois start pushing all of their
00:05:31.240
state debt into the fed i am really pissed off i'm really pissed off i didn't live there
00:05:37.300
when i did live in new york i voted against it because i knew it was insanity
00:05:42.660
anyway um it looks like the current governor who is part of the new progressive party that's not even
00:05:52.420
the democratic party this is the new progressive party uh is very very excited about this uh and it
00:06:00.620
it looks like the republic i mean the democrats are going to push it through so we've got that going
00:06:09.000
for us uh but don't worry congress could stop it and don't forget washington dc uh could also
00:06:20.180
become a state well yeah isn't that great so yeah that going for you now here's a state super democratic
00:06:27.060
uh state's about to be added here's a state that they're going to make sure doesn't become a state
00:06:31.680
and that is uh jefferson is jefferson the state of jefferson or jeffersonian uh i never heard of it
00:06:42.300
and i grew up in the west coast but there is a movement now in northern california that is saying
00:06:48.280
they want to break free they don't feel that they are being represented at all uh by the california
00:06:55.240
legislature and they are conservatives and they want to become their own state
00:06:59.940
do you remember pat were we still together in the 90s when i when i read some things from uh i think
00:07:10.880
it was dugan alexander dugan uh that said the united states was going to break up into five districts
00:07:17.260
and uh when he was asked why how do you how do you know that he said by 20 what was it 2020 or 2015
00:07:27.100
something like that the united states would be in a civil war and we would eventually break up into
00:07:33.500
five different districts and when asked why he knew that he said because we have people on the ground
00:07:41.340
meaning they have people pushing for that and i could see that happening uh quickly
00:07:48.640
yeah unfortunately uh we also have something really really great happening in the military now
00:07:59.780
the pentagon uh is not focusing on the islamic state or the threat from china or the threat from
00:08:11.000
any place else they are now uh doing everything they can to look at the threat from within
00:08:18.260
uh president joe biden uh is continuing to not focus on china in fact strengthen china uh while
00:08:29.620
promoting social justice inside the pentagon his first military related executive order order was to
00:08:37.700
overturn trump's transgender policy which i think we were all fighting for were we not we were like this
00:08:43.400
this fairness has got to has got to be upheld here uh and somebody needs to free all the transgenders
00:08:51.180
uh from the oppression in the military uh lloyd austin his defense secretary the first african american
00:08:58.960
to serve in that position austin vowed during his confirmation hearing to rid the military of racists
00:09:04.900
and extremists now i wasn't aware that there were racists and extremists in the military i mean i knew
00:09:13.600
that there were jihadists sure knew that but we weren't supposed to talk about it so he wants to get rid
00:09:20.880
of racists and uh extremists here's the problem uh pat when you go looking for something and you know
00:09:29.240
that it's there do you generally find it generally yes yes you generally you know it's like have you
00:09:35.520
ever worked at a place where a consultant comes in and the management hires a consultant and says
00:09:41.620
look here's what the problem is the problem is is we've got x y and z and all the employees are like
00:09:48.040
that's not the problem the problem is the management uh what do the consultants usually find
00:09:53.760
a b and c or x y and z they always find x y and z that's what's happening in the pentagon now and i want
00:10:06.100
any white extremists out i want anybody but what's happening now is uh uh uh the department of defense
00:10:15.840
uh was notified uh by the fdi 143 times of investigations of former and current military
00:10:26.660
members in 2020 68 of the times pertained to domestic extremist cases with the vast majority
00:10:35.300
former military many unfavorable discharge records uh and only one fourth or 17 had anything to do with
00:10:44.840
white nationalism so out of 68 times there were extremists 17 of them had to do with white
00:10:53.060
nationalism what's really interesting in this story is it doesn't tell me what the others were
00:10:59.660
um the the military still has not uh given even the house armed services committee the oversight
00:11:10.540
committee in congress a definition of extremists we don't know what they're even looking for
00:11:22.920
uh the the problem here is is that they are going to find what they want and we're now going to politicize
00:11:32.880
our military on another front the now president joe biden has pulled 65 pending trump administration
00:11:45.340
executive orders several of the withdrawals strike down orders that would protect american jobs by
00:11:53.360
tightening immigration restrictions eliminating proposed oversight regulations on how china-backed
00:12:00.340
confucius institute operate on campus this is this is obscene what is going on um right now under current law
00:12:11.580
outgoing aliens released from custody can seek legal employment this has now been withdrawn you can't
00:12:20.620
we we we were saying no you can't do that uh the trump orders were protecting american workers
00:12:28.340
um between what he's doing with china and what he's doing with immigration we have some serious
00:12:37.260
uh problems coming our way but the good news is the biden administration over the weekend uh said
00:12:45.420
quote this administration will not wait for the next mass shooting he is calling for universal background checks
00:12:54.180
we have that we have that um an assault weapons ban we did that it did nothing we did it in the 90s
00:13:05.020
it did nothing and legal liability for gun makers now what does that mean
00:13:12.660
that means if you use the weapon and you kill someone someone can sue the gun manufacturer
00:13:23.060
that's like using a car and suing general motors because you went on a walkway and drove over a lot of people
00:13:34.940
now if the car has automatic pilot and you couldn't turn it off and it caused you to drive
00:13:42.000
then you could sue gm but if you chose to drive on a sidewalk and kill a lot of people you can't sue gm
00:13:52.460
under uh biden you'll be able to sue the gun makers
00:14:00.140
they are going to make it um they are going to make it impossible
00:14:07.740
for americans to be able to defend themselves uh by the way uh swalwell has said in the wake of the
00:14:16.580
capital riot we need a 9 11 commission a white nationalism task force holy mother of everything
00:14:26.220
that is good and sacred we need a white nationalism task force
00:14:32.200
so now they're pushing for a 9 11 commission and the guy who is doing it is swalwell there's no
00:14:42.700
moving on january 6 is the day that we'll all sadly remember i think we have to take an approach
00:14:47.520
that we took after september 11th to root out white nationalism what about the ballpark
00:14:53.520
why didn't we have a 9 11 commission after they tried to shoot all of the republican congressman
00:15:04.700
why why didn't we do that by the way swalwell uh is uh he said that he is sure that uh god herself
00:15:15.240
god herself was proud of all of this so he knows that god is a female which i think
00:15:23.320
we can't say that he's a hypocrite on that because uh he was with christine fang and uh while he was
00:15:30.600
doing the fang bang we heard him scream oh god oh god oh god many times so maybe god's not only a
00:15:37.020
female but also chinese and a spy this is the best of the glenbeck program
00:15:45.000
the president and founder for the center for industrial progress the author of the moral case
00:15:55.580
for fossil fuels alex epstein is with us now hello uh alex how are you hey glenn great to be back on
00:16:02.980
your show it's great to have you um i wanted to uh talk to you a little bit about what's happening
00:16:07.940
in texas there is no way we should be having these problems in texas with the with our own power grid
00:16:16.800
with as much gas and oil as we have what the heck is happening
00:16:23.740
yeah so i mean this is something i've been warning about for a while in september 2020 so i live in
00:16:33.040
california when the california blackouts were happening i warned on twitter that there are
00:16:37.680
similar things happening in texas and so a blackout is an extreme event but this blackout is not
00:16:45.420
unprecedented texas has been having what i call industrial blackouts a lot they call it demand
00:16:50.580
management but it basically means when there's not enough power they have their industrial or they'll
00:16:55.740
call it curtailment they'll have their industrial uh projects stop you know they'll cut off power to
00:17:01.040
industrial people they won't cut it off to the home so what's happened here is the lack of ability
00:17:06.240
to meet demand has just been so extreme and there are some unexpected events that everyone is seeing
00:17:12.860
it but it's important that this is not an unprecedented thing it's just a more extreme thing and this is
00:17:17.780
something that's happened in california it's happening around the country and the fundamental reason
00:17:21.680
whatever else is going on is the insistence on using unreliable wind and solar energy instead of
00:17:28.560
reliable energy from coal nuclear natural gas well why is that coal we have just one thing yeah go
00:17:35.880
ahead we know that those sources because there's issues of failures in texas and we'll talk about
00:17:40.420
that but we know for a fact that coal gas and nuclear can work under any weather conditions around
00:17:46.800
the world so whatever is going on in texas it's not that coal plants don't work gas plants don't work
00:17:51.800
nuclear plants is a combination of specific mismanagement and non-preparation in texas
00:17:56.660
but the main thing is too much attempt to rely on unreliable energy and that takes away focus and
00:18:02.720
funding from the reliable energy and for making it resilient okay so i'm i'm kind of caught in between
00:18:08.680
some people are really really pissed some people are like well that's what happens i'm somewhere in
00:18:14.420
between uh there are times that i feel like i'm living in syria um however i don't expect the state to
00:18:22.060
spend oodles of money protecting for something that happens once every even you know when it comes to
00:18:27.920
salt trucks and everything else why spend the money it happens every 10 years this is something that
00:18:33.320
happened you know about every 40 or 50 years in texas so i cut some slack but i don't understand
00:18:41.240
uh why our coal plants are down they are down our natural gas plants are down why
00:18:49.700
well so there's i mean we i don't think the ercot's ercot is the so-called reliability council
00:18:56.940
of texas they haven't been totally open so it's not easy to tell exactly what's going on there are a
00:19:02.100
number of things that can happen so one thing that they'll tend not to talk about is it's possible
00:19:06.360
there's been some just mismanagement of supply and demand so when demand was exceeding supply they
00:19:11.460
didn't curtail demand early enough and that can cause things to trip up it can be that specific
00:19:17.200
plants aren't resilient enough it can be that the fuel infrastructure there's something off with
00:19:22.040
that in terms of of delivery of fuel and this is something that i think that will emerge but again
00:19:26.740
these are all things that are handled everywhere around the world they're not inherent in coal gas
00:19:33.240
and nuclear whereas what you see with wind and solar is they went completely out to lunch when they
00:19:38.720
were needed most so no matter how even if there had been no freezing of the wind turbines wind would
00:19:43.800
have still been useless during very large portions of the situation so the basic lesson
00:19:48.840
wait wait wait wait wait wait wait why why why would wind turbine when there was winds why were wind
00:19:55.480
turbines not useful well well there they were frozen some of them but well i know that wasn't wind though
00:20:02.300
there wasn't wind the whole time so even when there has it so a talking point for the other side has
00:20:07.240
been oh well not that many of them froze i got but if you look at the recent data over the last
00:20:11.260
several days there have been times when it's been one gigawatt out of 32 so that part of the thing is
00:20:17.320
they call the capacity they call the maximum possible wind the capacity which is ridiculous
00:20:22.040
it's just a lucky situation so they say oh we have 32 gigawatts of wind and everyone brags about that
00:20:27.240
but when the going gets tough you had one two or three gigawatts of wind so again they're always
00:20:33.520
people always like to talk about the peak but the real thing is where are they when you need them
00:20:38.260
and the point is they're not reliable they're they're basically reliable for zero and that's
00:20:42.340
why they add so much cost because you always have to have the unreliable infrastructure and the reliable
00:20:47.420
infrastructure so some greens are blaming not enough gas being online and that's because the green
00:20:56.340
screen is a scheme requires it to be offline so we can get more electricity from wind right
00:21:03.080
right everything is engineered around trying to maximize the amount of unreliable wind that you're
00:21:10.160
using so the whole way the grid is working normally that's very wasteful is you're cycling the gas up and
00:21:15.500
down to accommodate the wind if you had a reliable energy infrastructure which we used to have around
00:21:21.080
the country you just have a whole slate of reliable plants and then when you had a lot more demand you
00:21:26.440
could just ramp a lot of the reliable plants up but here what texas is trying to do is they're
00:21:31.960
trying to minimize the number of reliable plants to cut costs and this is why the you know one of
00:21:37.300
the public utility people said and i think in 2019 like hey we've got a serious issue our reserve margin
00:21:43.220
is very scary texas is notorious in electricity circles for trying to get away with the lowest
00:21:48.200
reserve margin possible which means the smallest margin for error possible it's gone down dramatically
00:21:53.740
because they've been trying to cut prices and use wind that's what all that's what happened in
00:21:59.560
california we didn't maintain our power lines enough because we didn't want to raise prices
00:22:04.820
even more after we had inflated them with green energy if you don't focus on reliability you're
00:22:10.240
going to lose reliability so in northern climates when it gets cold like this every single year how do
00:22:16.960
how do they avoid this problem are they doing less green energy than texas is
00:22:21.300
well there are two things i mean so one is just they have better specific policies for their plants and
00:22:28.180
that can take all sorts of measures but they just figured out i mean these are you know these
00:22:32.440
places texas even in bad weather is not as bad as places around the world i mean obviously if places
00:22:37.320
in russia they're using these kinds of places places in cold parts of canada now what's happening
00:22:42.920
though it's important with the on what i call the unreliable so the solar and wind it is possible
00:22:48.400
to have a certain amount of them along with the reliable so people in the midwest are saying hey look
00:22:54.160
our wind timbers are working and it's true that you can spend money and they don't necessarily ice
00:22:58.560
uh but the the point is they're adding cost and they don't scale because again you have to pay for
00:23:04.860
the unreliable energy infrastructure and the reliable energy infrastructure plus you have really
00:23:10.120
it's really inefficient to run a grid that way because it's like stop and go traffic for the
00:23:14.400
reliables plus you you wear them down a lot more quickly when you move them up and down but the
00:23:19.400
real thing to notice is you cannot rely on the unreliables they're parasites and what we have
00:23:24.100
as a country is a policy that's trying to get us 100 dependent on these parasites the real lesson of
00:23:30.920
texas is not that wind turbines froze it's that wind and solar cannot keep us warm and powered in the
00:23:37.340
winter and so these green new deal type plans are a complete fiasco and everybody should be asking
00:23:42.420
what the hell would texas do under your situation how the hell would they get power if you're going to
00:23:48.100
have nearly 100 wind and solar which were totally out to lunch when they were needed most jeez wow i
00:23:53.640
mean we're now buying the power i believe from mexico which is what uh so are these if when people say
00:24:04.180
the texas grid we're fine because we have our own grid in texas are have the progressive policies just
00:24:12.280
pretty much dismantled any positives we had with that yes so this is i i mean i was really scared of
00:24:21.300
what was going to happen with this storm and my fears unfortunately came true but one thing i thought
00:24:25.580
would be good in terms of a lesson is texas does have this isolated grid and that can be an asset or
00:24:30.720
liability but it what it really illustrates is the problem of relying on unreliable energy because
00:24:37.940
in california even you know we import 25 of our electricity which at a given time can be 40 of
00:24:44.040
our electricity 25 is just an average so we're bailed out by nevada utah arizona but what happens
00:24:51.320
is they start trying to have more and more unreliables then we can't rely on them and that's
00:24:55.300
what happened in the summer it got hot wind went down the sun goes down every day people are shocked
00:25:00.520
and we didn't have enough electricity and we couldn't get it so everyone is trying to play this game
00:25:06.200
of get it of chicken with how much unreliable can i use and get away with it and the texas is a good
00:25:13.140
illustration because it's this self-contained uh world and so we need to learn that the whole u.s
00:25:20.040
cannot be like texas and again texas is something like 20 percent wind it's this tiny fraction of the
00:25:27.140
biden plan the biden plan says 100 percent carbon neutral grid by 2035 that's 14 years and he's
00:25:34.980
impossible he does nothing to support nuclear and the biggest lie the biggest giveaway is none of
00:25:40.920
these people support nuclear texas has not been increasing nuclear if you look at texas's plan
00:25:45.800
so i just i just wrote about this on on twitter it's just alex twitter.com slash alex epstein and
00:25:50.760
so i wrote the statistics this is listen to this glenn like what would you think texas has planned okay
00:25:56.600
so zero nuclear plants nuclear are the most weather resilient plants they store their food so zero plants
00:26:01.940
uh no new coal plants they're probably going to shut down plants 9.4 gigawatts of wind so the
00:26:08.720
existing 32 gigawatts it went down to one gigawatt when it was needed most so it's basically useless
00:26:13.240
and then 12 new gigawatts of solar and solar was almost completely useless so and then five new
00:26:18.920
gigawatts of gas which is basically to handle all the ups and downs of the wind and solar so this is
00:26:23.540
texas's plan and that is a mild day at the beach compared to what biden has planned so we need to
00:26:29.260
totally change direction all right so i i want you just to tell us what america looks like with
00:26:35.660
the biden plan and what states and and people locally should be should be doing uh because the
00:26:43.020
first thing that came to my mind was i am not sufficient i am not self-reliant at all i'm still
00:26:49.140
reliant on here in texas i'm reliant on way too much stuff way too much stuff and when you can't
00:26:57.040
uh when you can't weather a storm for three days four days without these these aren't rolling uh
00:27:05.700
brownouts or rolling blackouts they're not scheduled anymore they started scheduled now they're just
00:27:11.500
now we're just having full blackouts uh and uh that i mean that just is not in a in a you know 21st
00:27:21.260
century world that makes no sense whatsoever in my opinion so what does america look like
00:27:28.960
with the way the biden administration is heading even right now
00:27:33.900
yeah so it's important that because of the dynamics i mentioned this whole hundred percent
00:27:41.000
carbon free grid particularly without nuclear like that's not going to happen it's completely
00:27:44.620
impossible the whole net zero by 2050 thing is impossible but that doesn't mean we don't need
00:27:48.500
to worry about it because as we're seeing with texas even small steps in that direction uh are
00:27:54.000
disastrous so what you see is just more and more of these blackouts of these brownouts and one thing
00:28:01.240
i want to highlight is what happens to industry what lesson does industry take when they keep getting
00:28:06.640
blacked out and they get blacked out a lot more than much more than we do as consumers they're going
00:28:10.860
to go overseas they're going to go other places and i really want to highlight the strategic thing
00:28:14.840
that's happening right now with china because nobody's paying attention to it china uses five
00:28:19.460
times more industrial electricity uh than the u.s five times and the vast majority of it comes from
00:28:25.780
coal a lot of that electricity is used to build unreliable solar panels and wind turbines for us of
00:28:31.360
course we don't mostly build them here because they have to be built with cheap energy which means
00:28:36.220
they have to be built with fossil fuels they're not built with solar panels and wind turbines
00:28:40.100
obviously so you have china making this this very strong strategic move to get us to unilaterally
00:28:47.060
disempower and for them to empower and then they say oh we're going to go net zero by 2060 they get
00:28:52.600
praised by biden they get praised by this guy larry fink the head of blackrock who almost runs the
00:28:57.540
financial world right now and so you just see this amazing strategic play where they are using fossil
00:29:03.880
fuels to get ahead they have record oil imports they had a five-year high in coal production they're
00:29:08.920
building 100 plus new coal plants again five times more electricity than we are so they're
00:29:13.460
disempowering us empowering themselves and then selling us these almost useless solar panels and wind
00:29:20.240
turbines and biden is playing into it so unfortunately he is the expression is useful idiot for china i think
00:29:26.980
that security thing should scare us just as much as everything else so where do we where do we go
00:29:34.020
because it honestly um you have bank of america saying that they're not going to uh you know they're
00:29:41.320
going to start looking at loans if you're not green uh you may not be able to be fitting into their portfolio
00:29:48.340
of businesses they can loan money to you have blackrock pushing this you have uh the great reset pushing all
00:29:56.200
of this and jaguar just came out and said they'll be uh fully electric cars by 2025 and nobody's talking
00:30:05.060
about the increase in electricity that is needed if we all go to electric cars
00:30:11.220
yeah so i think that these it's crucial to have these moments as teaching moments so this this is maybe
00:30:20.260
the crucial teaching moment of 21 2021 to change uh the narrative on this and i mentioned that on
00:30:26.820
on twitter i posted a very comprehensive explanation more broadly recently i created a website called
00:30:31.300
energy talking points.com that takes all of these issues and gives you very quick well-referenced
00:30:36.520
statements on everything and that's part of my overall goal of just changing the narrative where we move
00:30:41.680
from this focus on unreliable energy and climate catastrophe to one where we recognize that if we use the best
00:30:48.780
sources of energy namely fossil fuels and nuclear we can keep making the world a better and better
00:30:53.480
place to live we i do believe we impact climate but we're talking about one degree in 170 years
00:30:59.160
climate related deaths are at all-time lows fossil fuels are making the world a better and better
00:31:03.640
place to live that the facts are on the side of that and mandatory government controlled green energy
00:31:09.740
is making the world the worst place to live so those are the two narratives i just keep hitting over and
00:31:14.380
over and over and eventually people are going to see that narrative corresponds to reality
00:31:18.600
and the other narrative uh is just unreal and destructive thank you so much give me the uh give me the name
00:31:25.460
of that uh website you just created again it's called energy talking points.com energy talking
00:31:32.560
points.com thank you so much i appreciate it alex epstein the president co-founder for center for
00:31:39.820
you're listening to the best of the glenn beck program
00:31:45.980
mark meckler is with us he is the interim ceo of parlor uh which we know now is a website of
00:32:03.840
real danger and real extremism mark how how are you uh you know i don't feel like i'm very dangerous
00:32:12.060
or extreme but that's certainly how it's been portrayed well do you believe in the constitution
00:32:17.460
and the bill of rights absolutely fundamentally and unequivocally yeah there you go i i just i just
00:32:24.620
did a monologue last hour about how extremists um are the ones who are trying to get rid of the bill
00:32:31.900
of rights in the constitution but the media and politics in washington are trying to make those
00:32:39.100
people seem like the americans and we're the extremists yeah they are fundamentally anti-american
00:32:46.100
they stand against everything that this country was founded on and for and frankly those people right
00:32:51.360
now they occupy the white house and they're in control of both houses of congress we're in real
00:32:55.460
danger okay so you are the interim ceo if you if you recognize the name mark meckler it's because
00:33:00.940
he's the convention of states guys uh and he's been talking about that with us for a long time
00:33:06.420
what was it about four weeks ago we were talking about the convention of states and i mentioned parlor
00:33:11.900
going under and or going out being taken out uh and uh and we talked about cloud services we talked
00:33:20.320
about there has to be somebody that is building the infrastructure for the right to fall into
00:33:26.380
and you talked at the time about being a part of a movement to do that now you're the interim
00:33:31.640
uh ceo of parlor did that play a role what you're doing behind the scenes yeah it did actually so i've
00:33:38.420
been thinking about this problem as we talked about for a long time and i've been working on finding
00:33:42.560
alternative service providers and and folks who are actual real patriots who would stand in the fight
00:33:47.900
in the event that they were attacked and so i had a little bit of a head start in thinking about this
00:33:52.260
i knew the primary owners of parlor they're long time friends of mine and so when i saw it go down
00:33:58.320
i just reached out to see if there was anything i could do to help literally didn't expect to end up
00:34:02.840
being the interim ceo that's just the way things have worked out over time right uh but yeah i think
00:34:07.960
a lot of it was my thinking in advance i gotta say though when all the credit for getting it back
00:34:12.220
up goes to the staff these guys have been absolutely incredible it is taken however a month i'm not
00:34:17.660
blaming this on the staff by any stretch it's taken a month to get over a month to get back
00:34:23.120
in the public square is there any lawsuit that i know you're an attorney is there any lawsuit that
00:34:30.700
can be had for the destruction of business by amazon and the collusion with all of these companies that
00:34:39.060
we now know happened yeah there absolutely is there is a lawsuit that's already been filed we're working
00:34:44.320
on an amended complaint on that that lawsuit is against aws amazon web services and i do think
00:34:50.060
there's liability i think there's all kinds of antitrust stuff i think there's business damage stuff
00:34:54.400
but we'll we'll be putting out more on that probably in a week or so when we amend that complaint good did
00:35:00.020
you see the uh just just so you have it in your coffers i'm sure you do the story that came out that
00:35:04.860
showed that uh there were there were many more people organizing on facebook uh for january 6th
00:35:13.300
than there were on parlor you had i think six and they had maybe 70 yeah absolutely i mean in fact
00:35:20.060
there's been a couple of great stories on that one was an independent review by forbes yeah they found
00:35:24.200
the vast majority of violent and insightful stuff that took place on facebook youtube and instagram
00:35:29.300
were close second and third we barely made the list and so look there's always going to be bad content
00:35:34.180
on every platform of that size but the bottom line is this was just a hit job it was a political hit
00:35:40.340
job but i would also add that it was a business hit job they see parlor as a real threat to their
00:35:45.280
monopoly on on the business market and on free speech and they're going to come after us there is
00:35:50.140
no place according to them for somebody who disagrees with the uh with the current cabal uh there's no
00:35:58.740
place for them is there i mean it's not enough being kicked off of the other platforms
00:36:03.780
when you start and you go on another platform they'll shut down the platform yeah that's exactly
00:36:10.140
right and and look i think there's there's two measures to this though one is no speech outside
00:36:15.660
what they agree with remember that uh mussolini said that uh the definition of fascism is everything
00:36:22.800
inside the state nothing outside of the state and nothing against the state so that's now being enforced
00:36:28.260
by our government but also by the tech oligarchy and working with the government and then i think the
00:36:33.380
second thing is a business model at parlor we believe in free speech so if you can say it in
00:36:38.440
the public square you can say it on parlor we believe in privacy and data sovereignty meaning
00:36:42.680
we're not monetizing the data of our users we're here for our users as a service to our users not to
00:36:49.380
use them and use their data and we have an advertising model that doesn't use their data and
00:36:54.800
so i think that's very threatening to facebook and twitter and all the others so how are you going to
00:36:59.200
make money when the advertising cabal comes after you guys i mean at the blaze we have worked
00:37:07.500
on building our own advertisers uh and they're you know as close to bulletproof as possible
00:37:14.200
because they believe in us and they believe in the work that we do um have you guys are you at that
00:37:20.860
place with your advertisers yeah absolutely looking at the same types of people that advertise in the
00:37:26.380
blaze or or have advertised and will be advertising again on parlor these are people who believe in the
00:37:32.160
same things that you and i believe and they're not going to fold to the kind of pressure that the woke
00:37:37.360
media and the woke mob put on them so tell me about the infrastructure and and how stable it is now
00:37:45.300
can this happen to you guys again yeah look i i'm very comfortable with the infrastructure and
00:37:51.820
again this is where my head was at as you know before i went to be with parlor what we did is
00:37:57.520
we went out and we found providers who shared our values but were also big enough to handle the kind
00:38:02.720
of load that we put on them and what we did to be sure and this is really important glenn for anybody
00:38:07.760
who's operating in this space we made sure that there were multiple redundancies so we don't have
00:38:12.820
what i would describe as any single points of failure i'm very certain i've talked to the ceos of
00:38:17.620
all the companies that we're working with i'm very certain they're going to stand with us and not
00:38:21.760
cave to the woke mob but even if they do we've built in multiple redundancies and we're going to
00:38:26.720
continue to have layers of redundancies so that we know we're bulletproof in the future so let's talk
00:38:32.720
about let's play devil's advocate here um the the problem that they will say is that we are living at
00:38:40.140
a time where conspiracy theorists and and crazy things and white supremacists and all kinds of
00:38:48.280
terrorists can be online and you don't want to add fuel to that you should you should make sure that
00:38:55.040
you have an algorithm that stops all of that kind of hate speech tell me why that's wrong if you do
00:39:03.380
think it's wrong i do think that's wrong because that runs first of all it runs contrary to just our
00:39:09.360
philosophy at the founding and our philosophy through most of american history really until
00:39:13.720
recently we believe that if you don't like somebody's speech uh bad speech should be countered
00:39:19.100
with good speech should be countered with more speech not with less speech when you start camping
00:39:23.900
down on free speech you start creating well you've read about this you talked about this george orwell's
00:39:29.320
view the 1984 view of the future which is this idea that the government will control all that we will
00:39:35.640
have overlords and overseers now i do agree by the way that there are far too many out people out there
00:39:41.160
pushing conspiracy theories and many of them are in the democratic party in congress they're on cnn
00:39:47.000
they're on msnbc abc cbs all the others and yet at the same time i think we should just debunk their
00:39:54.100
conspiracies as we've largely done as opposed to seeing them shut down which i'm not interested in
00:39:59.180
doing yeah i've i've not asked for people to be shut down i've supported people who have been uh attacked
00:40:05.280
by the woke mob even and especially when i vehemently disagree with them uh freedom of speech means freedom
00:40:13.620
of speech talk to me about the person who says yeah but now i if i go over to parlor there's going to be
00:40:21.580
all these people because usually when it is when there's one place to go uh you know all these places
00:40:29.380
that are pushing the boundaries uh are going to be there and i don't want to be a part of that
00:40:34.580
you know that's the beauty of parlor and one of the things that makes it so different from all the
00:40:39.180
other social networks this big scary word at the social networks is algorithm and i think people
00:40:44.540
should be scared of that big scary word because what it means is if you go over there and you like
00:40:49.120
certain things they're going to start pushing other things at you that sort of they think fit
00:40:53.240
and this creates what i call the echo chamber effect and it does put a bunch of stuff into your feed you
00:40:58.680
might not want to see at parlor you 100 design your own feed there's nothing that you're going to see
00:41:05.060
that you haven't requested to see you can easily remove anything from your own feed again we believe
00:41:10.480
in data sovereignty and we believe that our users are prime that that's who is in charge of their
00:41:16.080
experience at parlor we want them to see only the people that they want to see and hear from only
00:41:20.880
the groups and people that they want to hear from so tell me now about the people that did belong
00:41:26.620
how long is it going to take before you're fully running with at least the people that you had before
00:41:33.460
so the platform is is fully up and running right now we have the capacity to handle everybody who wants
00:41:40.520
to come back and log on there are some uh limitations right now one of the limitations
00:41:45.680
is we're having folks having trouble with the apple ios i believe that's a technical limitation
00:41:51.240
we're going to get around here today part of the problem is with that is that we can't update
00:41:55.680
the apple the app that's on the app store right now because we got removed from the app store we're
00:42:00.720
working on that so folks can't update it and if there are problems in there we can't fix those
00:42:05.140
problems so that's one of the things we're we're working on right now trying to fix that i bet apple is
00:42:09.440
bending over backwards to help you with that too well i'm not going to comment on that right now
00:42:14.860
glenn because we'd really like to be back in the app store because so many users want to i know
00:42:19.960
yeah i know so the second piece of that is that um we'll have we are seeing every day more and more
00:42:26.700
functionality come back folks need to remember that this thing when it went down it's not just a
00:42:31.480
website i think if you're not involved in technology and it works it's seamless it's we don't think about
00:42:36.580
what's involved in it there's so many different layers i'm so proud of the staff at parlor for
00:42:41.660
literally 16 to 20 hours a day they've been putting in for weeks to get it back up but we expect to see
00:42:47.620
glitches over the next few days it's better today than it was yesterday it's going to continue to
00:42:52.100
get better throughout the week and i expect that we'll be back to full functionality sometime next
00:42:56.760
week this week by the way we're not even taking new subscribers we're focusing only on the existing
00:43:01.940
parlor family make sure everything's up and stable and running well and expect to be accepting new
00:43:06.960
users next week is everything that you know you may have posted before or do you have to start from
00:43:12.760
scratch if you're an if you're an uh an old subscriber if you go there right now likely you
00:43:19.140
won't see any of your old stuff all that data has been preserved and we will start loading that
00:43:23.740
we didn't want to load the system with old data when we first went up but all of that stuff has
00:43:28.520
been preserved and it's all going to come back okay mark best of luck to you and and congratulations
00:43:34.440
to everybody who didn't give up uh and fought the battle behind the scenes i know what it is like
00:43:40.620
when you're running a digital company and you kind of come under attack like that especially when you're
00:43:46.380
you're not one of you know you're not facebook or google uh it is all hands on deck and i i i gotta
00:43:53.980
tell you it's remarkable that you are back in the first place and uh you've got to be proud and of
00:44:02.040
all of the people that are working behind the scenes uh because i know what it takes and you guys just
00:44:07.620
pulled off a miracle congratulations i appreciate that glenn thank you very much and and you're right
00:44:12.400
it's the staff i don't i don't get any of the credit i come in i get to go on the radio and talk to
00:44:16.960
guys like you but they're incredible hard-working team uh all over the country these guys have
00:44:21.900
work day and night and they get all the credit for pulling this off thank you so much mark appreciate
00:44:27.460
it thanks glenn god all right you bet you should have him on next week remind people that they can
00:44:31.840
join if you're a new user next week uh at uh at parlor