Best of the Program ｜ Guests： Dr. Wilfred Reilly, Phillip Klein & Pat Gray ｜ 3⧸28⧸19
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Summary
Jussie Smollett is back in court and fighting for his life. Will he ever get a fair chance to answer the charges against him? Or will he settle for a plea deal and go home to his family.
Transcript
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Hey, welcome to the podcast. A lot to talk about today. We go back into the Jussie Smollett case
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with a guy who has studied hate crimes and found many of them to be hoaxes. And what does this
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mean? Also, Obamacare. What does this mean? The president now says the Republicans have to be
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the party of health care. What does he mean by that? And is this just election talk coming from
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the right? And we also have Helium Thursday. Helium Thursday, that's right. Which I think
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is very important because we looked at AOC and she wanted people to take this Green New Deal
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seriously. And you sure did. And you sure did. We did. And then I had an aneurysm towards the end
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of the podcast where we start talking about the taxes, local taxes, and the way people are spending
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local taxes. I happen to live in a town that I found out a little too much about during today's
00:00:59.960
podcast that just built a $15 million firehouse. The grand opening, I think, cost more than my
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daughter's wedding. And nobody was pissed. None of my neighbors were pissed. They were like,
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isn't this great? No, you paid for it. Anyway, before I have another aneurysm, here's the podcast.
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The guy who, I mean, if we had a scale and we could weigh the balls on a person,
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I would think that Jussie, which is a stupid name, Smollett equally as stupid. I think he might
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win. I have a theory that he would not be nearly in as much trouble if he would have not gone on ABC
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and said, yep. I mean, I'm just, you know, the police are looking and I'm just so beaten up about
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this. And I believe it. And I think that just irritated the police and the mayor so much that
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this guy had the balls to go on television and say that when it wasn't true. Acting like the victim
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after he already faked acting like a victim. Correct. Is really frustrating. So really frustrating. Then
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when they dismiss the charges earlier this week, he just ratchets it up. He's, if you were innocent,
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why did you pay $10,000? That seems like a pretty bad deal for a guy who's been vindicated.
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Okay. So he gives up his bail money of $10,000. Then he goes out and says, again, I've been completely
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vindicated, which was not the deal. I think he's even in more trouble. And then this is what his attorney
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says yesterday. Listen to this. Clearly you think the police are not telling the truth
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about Jesse. Are you going to sue? We're weighing our options now for Jesse. What's really important
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is he really just wants his career and his life back again. He did not ask for any of this. He
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was a victim of a crime. This has completely spiraled out of control and become a political
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event at this point. And his goal and focus right now is just getting his life back on track. He has not
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even started healing from the initial attack because he's been dealing with everything that's
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happened since then. Oh my, oh my, oh my. So they're weighing their options there. We don't know.
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We might sue the police. You might sue the police. Forget the bleach. You are just putting gasoline
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all over yourself. You're just, and you're in a match factory. It's crazy. I mean, they were lucky
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enough to get the whole case sealed at this point, even though the FBI is looking into it and more may
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come out. But if they were to actually sue and open themselves up to all of the evidence coming out
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anyway, please do it. Please do it. Please do it. Please. Because there needs to be some justice here.
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And, you know, again, I wasn't there. We know that, we know what he said happened didn't happen,
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however, right? Like we know for a fact, two white guys did not do it. We know because we saw,
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we have video of the two people who were accused, the two brothers with, you'd be buying the bleach,
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buying the rope, buying the red hat, buying the masks, buying everything, everything. What were
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they doing? Were they, were, are they, are they, uh, some sort of profits where they bought that stuff
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because they were going to reenact it in their own home just for fun later? But they saw this event
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coming. I mean, what, what, what is the other reason? I want to know just that guys, if this
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isn't true, which the brothers say it is guys, if this isn't true, why did you go out in the middle
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of the night to hardware store and buy all this stuff? What did you do with that? What, what,
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what crazy list has those items on it except for let's go throw bleach on somebody, throw a noose
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around their neck, shout, you know, this is Trump country. What else? Yeah. There's not a lot of
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them. No, you'd have maybe, maybe, well, cause you had an incident similar to this recently in which
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you went to a yard sale and wanted to buy a blank canvas, right? Well, no, I just, I look,
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he's one of the campus, just one of the campus and you picked, you picked up a painting and it was
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very controversial. Yes. You know, I'm into recycling. Right. You're a big environmentalist
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as you were just talking about with the green new deal. Yeah. And, uh, so you picked up this
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painting. Yeah. I didn't buy it for the painting and then I started seeing it after I got home and
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I thought, okay, it's clearly unfinished, right? It's clearly undone, unfinished. And, uh, it, it looks
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like the way German propaganda used to make Jews look. It's like the artist wanted to make Hitler
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kind of look like that rat kind of guy that they used to make Jews look like. The victim of his
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own propaganda. Correct. Then he's holding this piece of paper and I'm guessing it doesn't say
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anything on it yet. Cause it's unfinished. I'm guessing, but I'm thinking it probably was going
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to say, uh, you know, uh, infanticide not rejected by the Senate. And so then there's this Hitler kind of
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looking down at this paper, like what? And then up above, and it looks like the, looks like the
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artist was just like, I'm just going to throw this on here. Cause I just, I don't know if I,
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this is going to work. And it says, wait, you mean I only had to call it planned parenthood?
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Right. I mean, an offensive, uh, controversial piece of art. I thought, and you as the 100th most
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important person in the world of art would know that that's a very controversial thing, but again,
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you just bought it at a yard sale for the canvas. Correct. Nothing to do with this. Right.
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Perhaps these two brothers were looking to design a hat, but had no blank hats.
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Okay. They needed a white hat to be able to design their incredible artwork on. The only hat they
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could find was red. And the only way to get it to white was bleach. Ah, so they bought a red hat.
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They bleached the red hat. And the rope was simply like, you know, when you, um, uh, when you have
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like sunglasses and some people put the little, little piece of like, you know, a string on the
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back. So like they can hold it around their neck when they take them off. Sure. Perhaps it's Chicago.
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It's a windy area. Perhaps they were concerned this hat would blow off of their heads. So you put rope
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on the back of the back of the hat and tied it to maybe the waist. Still, I think you're onto
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something. In case it blew away. Well, you tied it onto your waist. It wasn't just like the glasses
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that just kind of hangs around your neck. Well, it's hanging around your neck. It would, you know,
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the hat could still blow off. So you'd have to tie it to like your belt. That's a good fashion
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accessory. First of all, it's sexy. I mean, that's the, we could start there. Okay. We could start
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there. I think that's, I think that's very logical. I think maybe we should, we should
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reenact this. We should, we should get a hat. We should bleach it. Let's try it. Use the
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rope. Let's tie it around and see if, because I mean, if you, did you watch making a murderer
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season two by any chance? No, I did not. Uh, it's on Netflix of course. And one of the
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big focuses of the second season is they try all these other scenarios out that they think
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could explain the murder and they just basically reenact them to see what would happen.
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Can we do it tomorrow? Can we do it? Let's get the hat. Let's get the bleach. Let's get
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the rope. Uh, and, uh, we'll, uh, the making of the Jesse Smollett non hate mongering friends
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that he had. Right. Right. That's the great title. I don't know if Netflix takes it, but maybe
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who, right. We're going to do that tomorrow. Uh, by the way, the TMZ founder, uh, let me
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play the audio here. Um, he said he's never seen anything like this. This is not the way
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celebrities are usually treated. I have never seen anything quite like this in my entire
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career. Nobody understands what really happened here other than a few people in the state's
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attorney's office. You're exactly right. This is bizarre. Makes no sense. I've seen celebrities
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being handled differently, sometimes more harshly and sometimes less than the average Joe. But
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this case is different from the way all celebrities would be treated. There is something fundamentally
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different in this case. I have never seen this kind of a disposition where the state's attorney
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secretly says, go to Jesse Jackson's for the weekend, spend a couple hours, you know, working
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on camera shots and then we'll call that community. I've never seen anything like that. It's different
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from other celebs. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Well, you know, it's probably the bleach and the hat
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thing and the rope around the belt. I think you, you might be onto something. We'll pick
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that up on tomorrow's program. Booker had a town hall yesterday. That was pretty interesting.
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He's, he's, I think right now you could just put him in the white house. Why even have the
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election after that town hall? It was so good. Well, because we have to keep a Democrat. Sure.
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We're going to have, we're going to have socialism, but we want it to be democratic. That's what
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we really want. Oh, okay. So we want to, we want to at least have the appearance of a vote. Did
00:11:05.060
you read the article about how, uh, the Nazis weren't socialist? The national socialists were
00:11:11.860
not socialist. As I was reading, I was like, they will literally do anything, anything, anything.
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They will even say the words that you know, mean things that they don't. It's crazy. It's
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incredible. It is unbelievable. It goes to my snowball yesterday on the, uh, the news and
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why it matters. I talked about a snowball and they've been making this giant small snowball
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and rolling it up the hill. And they're like, we're going to get it to the top and it's going
00:11:38.620
to roll down the hill and crush everything. And it's just stopped and they keep pushing and
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they keep adding to it and it stopped. And I think it's about to roll back on top of
00:12:00.320
Like listening to this podcast. If you're not a subscriber, become one now on iTunes.
00:12:05.460
And while you're there, do us a favor and rate the show.
00:12:08.080
This is the Glenn Beck program. Um, for some reason, Glenn and Pat have decided to dedicate
00:12:14.100
a segment once a week to helium Thursdays. This is a segment in which they discuss something
00:12:22.540
while sounding like they're on helium this week on helium Thursday, they discuss the green
00:12:30.580
Hello, Pat. Hello, Glenn. I want to talk to you about the serious issue of global warming
00:12:38.100
and the new green deal or the green new deal, whichever. Right. Right. So I don't know if
00:12:45.720
anybody saw AOC speech yesterday, but I believe that it needs to be taken seriously. Oh, and
00:12:54.540
we're treating it with the utmost seriousness. All right. So may I quote, she said yesterday,
00:13:02.260
people are dying. People are dying. And this is not an elitist issue. This is a quality of
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life issue. You want to tell people that their concern and their desire for clean air, clean
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water is elitist. Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx, which are suffering from the highest
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rates of childhood asthma in the country. Tell that to the families in Flint, whose kids
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have their blood ascending in lead levels. Their brains are damaged for the rest of their
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lives. It didn't have anything to do with climate change, by the way. Call them elitists. You're
00:13:48.260
telling them that those kids are trying to get onto a plane to Davos? People are dying.
00:13:56.080
They're dying. And the response from the other side of the aisle is to introduce an amendment
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for five minutes before a hearing in a markup. Will no one take this seriously? Can you take
00:14:15.900
it more seriously than putting it up for a vote? I don't, I don't think you can. I don't think
00:14:21.860
again. Uh, I noticed that, uh, Daisy Harano, Daisy Head Maisie. Yes. Uh, she was asked if
00:14:32.040
she wants to have it both ways because she didn't want the vote, but she is a co-sponsor
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of the bill. And so she was asked yesterday, even by Katie Tourer on CNN, if she's trying
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to have it both ways, yes. And she said, no, this is an aspirational document. Oh. It's aspirational?
00:14:55.020
I thought you wanted, I thought you wanted it to be a policy. Well, why would you put the bill
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together with all of the policies in it if it was just aspirational? Because I do know an
00:15:06.920
aspirational document that they seem to hate. It's one that says something like, uh, all men are
00:15:14.340
created equal and endowed by their creator or something like that. If this is just aspirational,
00:15:21.020
why don't you take that document and stick it up your aspiration?
00:15:28.800
That's my question to Daisy Head Maisie. Well, we talk about cost, but we're going to pay for
00:15:37.620
this, said Ocasio-Cortez. Whether we do the New Deal or not, because towns and cities are going
00:15:45.860
underwater. Which ones? I missed that report. Oh, there's lots of them. There is Malibu? Is
00:15:57.620
underwater? Pretty sure. Huh. And there is, um, um, um, um, um, is Miami? Miami? Miami's got to be
00:16:09.180
underwater. Atlantis is underwater? It's true. So there's lots of them. Anyway, she says we're
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going to pay for them, and we're either going to decide if we're going to pay or react. Are we going
00:16:23.760
to react and pay or be proactive and pay? She says, I'm very sad that the government knew
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that climate change was real back in 1989 when NASA was reporting this, and the private sector
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knew it even before. They knew it back in the 1970s. So we had to wait around until the time
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I was born to address this issue. Well, but in the 1970s, it was global cooling, right? We
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were going into an ice age. I know that, so. We're just taking it. Please, Pat, are you
00:17:07.140
taking this seriously? I am. I am. Very concerned. I wish it didn't have to cost so much, but I'm
00:17:14.020
going to turn 30 this year, and for the entire 30 years of my lifetime, we did not make substantial
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investments to prepare our country for what we know is coming. So we have a choice now. Lower
00:17:28.680
the cost now and pursue the Green New Deal, or realize that it will cost far more if we do
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not. This has been Helium Thursdays on the Glenn Beck Program.
00:17:46.840
I don't know about you, but I think it's much more powerful. It is. It is. At least you can deal
00:17:59.180
with it. It gave that story the gravitas it deserves. Yes. Don't you think? Yes, because
00:18:04.000
they're always saying that we just won't deal with things, and we should deal with them. We
00:18:09.840
should deal with them seriously. I think it is incredible that these clowns actually put
00:18:17.200
a bill together, and then, okay, let's pass it. All right. We'll get it. When was the last time
00:18:24.900
the Democrats said, okay, you guys created a bill. You did the border wall. Go ahead. Pass it. Let's
00:18:34.640
vote on it right now. Right. They've never done that. No. Never done that. I wish they would.
00:18:40.840
I do, too. Okay, great. Let's put everybody on record. Let's put everybody on record. Go ahead.
00:18:47.200
And what does Ocasio-Cortez say? She says that she told everybody how to vote. She said she told
00:18:55.140
everybody that they had to vote present. That was the way to do it. So are you telling me,
00:19:00.920
all you people running for president of the United States, that Ocasio-Cortez is telling you how to
00:19:08.460
vote? That's what she's saying, Democrats. Oh, my gosh. She's saying that she's telling you how to
00:19:14.420
vote. God, I can't wait for this. I can't wait for this fall. Oh, man. This is going to be so
00:19:18.420
dramatic. Have you heard my snowball theory yet? Yes, that the snowball has gotten so big,
00:19:24.040
and they're pushing it uphill, and it's about to roll back on. Yes. Yes. Yes. Because it's
00:19:28.480
collecting all kinds of stuff where it's becoming... You know, I talked yesterday about the creepy
00:19:33.920
valley, or the uncanny valley. Do you know what the uncanny valley is? No. Uncanny valley is a thing
00:19:40.220
in CGI and animation, and we all have experienced it. For instance, you know, when you went to see
00:19:48.660
the Polar Express, it was good, but it wasn't... It was just a little creepy. The Tom Hanks character was
00:19:56.600
just a little creepy. Not creepy, but just a little bit. It wasn't off-putting. It was off-putting.
00:20:01.860
It wasn't warm. It wasn't... You didn't want to embrace it. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's
00:20:06.620
because they were trying to make him look too human. That's why Pixar and everybody else, when
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they do CGI, they will make their eyes really big. They will distort the human features, because
00:20:17.420
as you get closer to looking just like a human, there's something innate in us that says,
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ick. When it's not exactly right, we say, ick. There's something wrong with that, and
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that's called the uncanny valley. So as you get closer and closer to, you know, having
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this human, as CGI gets better and better and goes up this hill, all of a sudden it reaches
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a point to where it's too close but not right, and it plunges down and it creeps people out.
00:20:46.420
That's what's happening with the Democrats right now. They are... The American people
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are compassionate. They're fair. They don't want people to be racist. Nobody wants to be
00:21:00.620
around Nazis. Nobody wants people to have sexual harassment. So they've done all these things,
00:21:06.740
and they're getting closer and closer to, like, you know, the heart, and they're like,
00:21:12.120
yeah, this is us, this is us, this is us, this is us, and it's going up, and then all
00:21:17.800
of a sudden it goes too far, and you're like, oh, wait a minute. There's something really
00:21:24.460
wrong here. And even if you can't put your finger on it, it's just in all places. With
00:21:31.500
abortion, it went compassion, compassion, compassion, compassion to, uh-oh, there's something wrong
00:21:36.760
here. I don't feel good about where this is headed. Same thing with Jesse Smollett.
00:21:41.280
And we saw it with, with, um, the Me Too movement with, um, uh, what's his name? Uh,
00:21:48.320
the Supreme Court justice, uh, um, Kavanaugh, Kavanaugh. People were like, okay, no, this is
00:21:55.560
a really good thing. The Me Too movement. Then it started to get really creepy, and then it
00:21:59.480
hit Kavanaugh and it fell apart. They're standing behind this giant snowball of social justice,
00:22:06.060
green energy, all of this stuff. They've made this snowball. It kept getting bigger and bigger
00:22:11.260
and they're just about up at the top, and they're thinking, we are going to roll it down
00:22:15.000
into that valley, and we're going to crush everybody. But the snowball, I firmly believe,
00:22:20.500
has stopped. It's not rolling back yet, but it's stopped. And they're pushing harder and harder and
00:22:26.720
pushing more snow on it, more things on it, and they don't realize that that snowball, because they
00:22:32.620
keep doing this, is going to roll back and crush them. What do you think of that?
00:22:36.440
I think, I think it's a pretty good analogy. I think, I think that could happen. I hope it happens,
00:22:41.380
because otherwise we're doomed. They always, that snowball goes over the top and down the
00:22:45.460
other side. We're done. It's a, it's a real problem. Yeah. Yeah, we're done. One way or another,
00:22:49.600
it's going to wipe, it's going to wipe one, one way or the other, it's going to wipe everything out.
00:22:54.440
It's either going to wipe out all this social justice. You know, there is, there, there is no
00:23:00.380
difference between male and female. There is no right and wrong. It's all about social justice,
00:23:06.540
reverse the power pyramid of the most, you know, intersected, being the most powerful, all of that.
00:23:14.120
If it rolls down the hill towards us, they get to the top and it rolls down. It, that's the world
00:23:20.580
we will have. But I have a feeling the American people are being creeped out by it. It's really
00:23:26.740
hard to get anything meaningful out of this conversation without helium. Right. See,
00:23:31.500
that's exactly right. Exactly right. This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:23:50.520
I want to pick up a conversation that I was having with Dr. Will Riley yesterday about,
00:23:56.740
uh, hate crimes. Tell me about quickly your search on hate crimes and what you, what you write about
00:24:04.860
in a hate crime hoax. How did you come up with this? What was your methodology and what did you find?
00:24:12.000
Well, in a sentence, the pitch line, good to be back on with you guys, by the way. Thank you.
00:24:16.000
In a sentence. Yeah. The, the pitch line for hate crime hoax is that very many, probably most
00:24:21.640
of the high profile, widely publicized hate crime incidents that we've seen in the recent past have
00:24:27.640
turned out to be hopeless. So we recently saw the complete collapse of the Jussie Smollett case.
00:24:33.560
Uh, just a bit before that, the last, my last appearance, we discussed Covington Catholic where
00:24:37.300
the claim was that this group of prep school athletes had surrounded this elderly native American
00:24:42.980
guy. They chanted build the wall, odd thing to say to an Indian. They tried to take his drum away.
00:24:47.920
Uh, but Eastern Michigan, there was allegedly graffiti all over the campus, targeting African
00:24:52.980
American students, Air Force Academy, where Jay Silveria literally came to the campus and spoke
00:24:58.640
out against racism. One of our top generals, uh, Grand Rapids where a young black woman claimed that
00:25:03.740
white men urinated on her, uh, University of Virginia, where the fraternities were accused of
00:25:08.200
holding these sort of underground story of O style rape rings, Duke lacrosse, Tawana Brawley. I mean,
00:25:14.040
you could go back for decades with this. All of the cases that I just mentioned turned out not to
00:25:18.640
have been real. And a couple of years ago, as a graduate student in Chicago, I became aware of
00:25:23.300
this trend because I was actually involved in a hate crime hopes case. Um, the bar Velvet Ultra
00:25:29.900
Lounge, Velvet Rope Ultra Lounge, which was a very trendy, it was billed as a hipster bisexual nightlife
00:25:36.140
experience, if I recall correctly, very Chicago. But, um, this trendy bar that a couple of my friends
00:25:42.120
and one of my ex-girlfriends would attend from time to time burned to the ground. This was,
00:25:46.120
I believe, in 2013. And the claim of the owner was that throughout the bar, there were written
00:25:51.520
these horrendous anti-gay slurs. Um, you know, gasoline or some accelerant had been used to set
00:25:58.280
the place on fire. He had been targeted with hate. So I sort of casually followed that case,
00:26:02.860
like most young professionals in Chicago at the time. And as I did that, I became aware of another case,
00:26:08.300
which involved a guy named Derek Coquelin at the University of Chicago. Uh, this was a student
00:26:13.220
activist, a typical cliche Guevara type campus radical, but he, uh, claimed that his Facebook
00:26:19.680
and Twitter page had been hacked. And these very violent messages threatening him with things that
00:26:24.600
are never okay, brutal rape and so on, had been sent to him by conservative students. So I was paying
00:26:29.340
attention to both these cases, and there were a few others going on in the Midwest at the time.
00:26:33.140
Uh, at Grand Valley State, a young black woman claimed that during Black History Month,
00:26:37.940
someone had broken into her room, I believe, and written anti-black epithets on kind of the white
00:26:42.620
board that college students keep. Uh, at Michigan Tech, a white student was suspended for allegedly
00:26:48.440
initially saying he was going to shoot all the black people on campus. It turned out he said he
00:26:51.820
was going to shoot them a smile on Twitter that was photographed using screenshots. It was miscropped
00:26:58.080
to make him look like a racist. But as I followed these local cases, they all collapsed. I mean,
00:27:02.800
four or five big name, high profile cases you can still find. Uh, in the Velvage Ultra Lounge case,
00:27:08.940
you had a bizarre situation where the owner apparently owed a lot of money to, in Chicago,
00:27:14.040
perhaps people you wouldn't necessarily want to owe money to. Uh, he'd racked up a lot of debt
00:27:18.180
and he just set the place on fire, burned it to the ground, and then claimed it was a hate crime.
00:27:23.320
So held a fundraiser where he raised something like $30,000, paid off his debts and opened a new
00:27:28.600
business. So the story that actually emerged was kind of a circus. As I understand, he owns a bar
00:27:33.580
called Bonsai Bar in Chicago today. Um, but following these cases and watching them collapse
00:27:40.060
as they did, as I said at Michigan Tech, the student, Matt Schultz turned out to be a complete
00:27:44.960
anti-racist Christian guy. As I recall, no racial prejudices. He had actually said, I'm going to shoot
00:27:49.960
everyone a smile tomorrow to tone down these racial tensions. And a campus activist had taken that
00:27:54.620
message, screenshot it, and cropped it to make him look like a shooter. So after these cases all
00:28:00.480
collapsed, I decided to use modern empirical methods, which I had access to at that time,
00:28:04.980
Stata, the more advanced SPSS programs, you know, data crunching computers as I was a grad student at
00:28:10.400
a good university, and see how frequent this stuff was. And as I graduated and I went into academia,
00:28:16.600
I compiled a full list of these cases. I have 516 cases of hate crime hoax, and I put the book
00:28:22.180
together, and that recently was published on February 26th with Regnery, a large conservative
00:28:27.020
publisher. And I mean, you asked about methodology, a lot of it's simply looking, really using Google
00:28:33.780
Scholar, Bing Advanced, JSTOR, any of these resources to look for, you know, hate crime 2016, 2017,
00:28:43.700
pick up the cases that you see, and then see how many of them survive to the end. So I defined a fake
00:28:50.300
hate crime as a case where there's a serious report, either mass media coverage or police
00:28:56.300
report, about 93% of the time it was both, that turns out to have either never occurred or to have
00:29:02.360
been staged by the quote-unquote victim, or to have been committed by people very, very differently from
00:29:07.400
those originally alleged to have committed it. And they're not infrequent. Kind of last point here,
00:29:14.400
but I will say I'm not the only person ever to research this. It just until this book had been almost
00:29:19.520
an underground thing. So you had www.fakehatecrimes.org. That's a great resource, but that's just an
00:29:26.380
internet site hosted by a couple of independent researchers. You have the fake hate map, but that,
00:29:32.060
as I recall, is on Reddit, or it's taken off Reddit, now it has its own site. But again, that's not affiliated
00:29:36.540
with the university. But I looked through those resources, and I compared them to my list, and I found
00:29:40.840
that most of the cases on those lists were also real. They were hoaxes that had occurred. They
00:29:45.560
just hadn't been widely documented. So using all those tools, basically in a sentence, I put the
00:29:49.540
book together, I sold it, and the response to it has been good. Okay, so how common are these?
00:29:56.700
What is the percentage of hate crimes that are hoaxes? It's actually a bit, I'm going to give an
00:30:02.960
estimate, but it's actually a bit difficult to estimate that. So over, most of my cases are concentrated
00:30:09.280
in a period of about five years. I did a lot of research in 2017. I started in grad school around
00:30:14.580
2012. So you've got 516 cases concentrated very heavily between 2012 and 2017. What an opponent
00:30:21.720
would say, someone who argues that there are a lot of hate crimes, is, well, there are 7,000 hate
00:30:27.220
crimes reported every year. So that's still only 5% or whatever it might be of the cases. There are two
00:30:33.580
issues with that. First of all, only about one in 10 hate crime cases is nationally reported to the
00:30:39.980
extent where a researcher like myself could ethically see a story where it begins and a story where it
00:30:45.020
ends and put it in the data set. So I'm really looking at about 700 cases a year, not 7,000 that
00:30:50.980
would even be available to me, where you've had that kind of media coverage. So, I mean, first of all,
00:30:55.640
the most baseline estimate would be, okay, 516 out of, you know, seven times five out of 3,500.
00:31:01.320
But that brings in some other questions, though. When you look at hate crime reports, in the case
00:31:07.940
of most crimes, if you're talking about murder, it's hard to ignore a corpse. If you're talking
00:31:12.140
about burglary where there's someone in your house, the number of reports is pretty much equivalent to
00:31:17.060
the number of crimes. With hate crimes, that doesn't really seem to be true. So there's 7,000 reports
00:31:25.580
in a typical year, but the rate of conviction in hate crime cases seems to be between 5% and 10%.
00:31:31.300
So in California, in the most recent year on record, which is 2016, you had 931 reported hate
00:31:39.860
crimes, most on college campuses, which I think is interesting. But of those, only 220 were shot
00:31:45.740
along by the police to the prosecution, which is a very basic standard that means we have a suspect,
00:31:51.900
and we believe this wasn't a hoax. We have any kind of suspect, and this probably happened.
00:31:55.340
Of those, only 51 led to a conviction, and that includes all plea bargains. So I guess my numbers
00:32:01.300
would be over five years, you're looking at 3,500 nationally reported cases. I've got, say,
00:32:07.020
because they're not all in this period, 450 hoaxes. That's the rate of, say, 15%. But the real
00:32:11.960
comparison to me would be between hoaxes and convictions. So I mean, if those 3,500 cases produce
00:32:18.980
350 convictions, the final number would be you have 350 convictions and 450 hoaxes. So there's
00:32:27.260
a very high rate of hoaxing in this field. I don't think anyone, the numbers there are a little
00:32:32.820
estimated, but pretty much on point. Like, I don't think anyone could dispute. There are a large
00:32:37.260
So I'm going to take a one minute break, and then I'm going to come back, and I want to talk to you.
00:32:40.680
Is there any tell that happens in these fake hoaxes? Do they have anything in common? But also,
00:32:52.500
what, I'm going to bring it back to Chicago, and I'll start here. The Jesse Smollett case,
00:32:57.760
with him being, he says, vindicated, and with half the country, I don't even think half the country,
00:33:05.980
with 20% of the country, they'll look at it as vindication, and the other will not. What are
00:33:11.940
the ramifications of that? And what does that tell somebody else who is prone to be a hate crime
00:33:20.320
hoaxer? We'll continue the conversation here in just a second. This is Dr. Will Riley.
00:33:27.820
He has written a great book called Hate Crime Hoax.
00:33:35.980
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck Program.
00:33:49.620
So part of my job in this time when everybody seems to be running for something all the time,
00:33:55.820
and so you don't know what people really mean until they do it, and you can't really trust anybody,
00:34:01.380
what anybody says, in a run-up to an election, because they'll run any direction that they want.
00:34:07.320
Look at the Democratic Party running so far left. They will eventually, when they coalesce around
00:34:13.760
somebody, then they will run to the right. Who do you believe? When you can't believe the media,
00:34:20.560
and you don't really know what the hell is going on, what is really happening? And when it comes to
00:34:29.140
health care, this is costing us so much money as individuals. Businesses are struggling. People
00:34:37.600
are struggling. There is real pain. And our health care system is so screwed up now that it's far worse
00:34:45.920
than it's ever been. And we're, I think, the people in Washington are going to kill it.
00:34:52.600
Now, there's a story that came out earlier that showed that Donald Trump said, hey, we've got to
00:34:58.400
be the party of health care. I don't even know what that means. We should be the party of the free
00:35:04.560
market. That's the way to fix it. Really open up the free market. But I don't think anybody's really
00:35:12.040
talking about that. And there is a court case that I'm not sure if people are just hyping this because
00:35:20.220
they think it'll get votes or if it's real. But Texas has decided to sue and say, you know, the individual
00:35:28.960
mandate, you said, the court said it was not a fee. It was a tax. And because it was a tax, it's
00:35:37.440
constitutional. The Obama administration said, and by the way, if you get rid of the mandate,
00:35:43.460
then you get rid of the entire health care system because it doesn't work and the whole thing
00:35:48.660
collapses. So Texas is saying, well, there is no tax because it's zero. So there is no mandate.
00:35:57.040
We should abolish all of it. California, of course, is coming out, blah, blah, blah. Donald Trump has said
00:36:02.740
that he is not going to go to court and defend Obamacare. Is this a big deal? What does it all
00:36:10.680
mean? The other part of my job is to try to figure it out and and bring in the people who actually
00:36:16.360
follow this for a living and know it. Philip Klein is an expert on this. He's executive editor at the
00:36:22.540
Washington Examiner. He's also an author of Overcoming Obamacare. What is really happening, Philip?
00:36:30.260
Well, there are a few things happening. I think it's pretty clear that that what happened is that
00:36:37.580
Republicans, through four election cycles, promised that they were going to repeal and replace Obamacare.
00:36:44.080
And when they had a chance to do it, they couldn't. At the time, I said this was the biggest broken
00:36:50.020
promise in American history, because never before had you had a promise that office holders in one
00:36:57.120
party at every level of government, state, local, federal, said, we're going to repeal this thing.
00:37:02.940
And then they had a chance and they didn't do it. And now that President Trump is in re-election mode,
00:37:10.280
he recognizes that this is a big problem that he didn't deliver on his promise to repeal and replace.
00:37:18.140
And so because Democrats control the House, there's not much you can do. So now he's looking to the
00:37:27.620
courts. I think that this particular case, and I've written a lot about it, I was a big proponent of
00:37:36.560
the challenge to Obamacare in 2012, and I was outraged by Chief Justice Roberts' decision. But in
00:37:46.800
this case, I think the argument is much weaker. And I don't think that it really has a chance at the
00:37:54.680
Supreme Court, because of the fact that they need John Roberts to sign on to it. And if he refused to
00:38:05.880
overturn Obamacare, when the mandate had a penalty attached, and it was more, it had more coercive
00:38:14.440
power, and even he found a way to rule that that's constitutional, now that the tax is zero dollars,
00:38:22.760
it's very doubtful that he's going to somehow revisit that and say he wants to overturn it,
00:38:32.080
particularly because in 2012, when the Supreme Court originally heard the case, nobody had benefited
00:38:38.480
from Obamacare yet. There was, you know, the exchange didn't open until 2014. So at that point,
00:38:45.180
they could have struck down Obamacare, and it wouldn't have harmed anyone. Whereas now,
00:38:51.920
if the Supreme Court were going to strike it down, then millions of people who receive benefits would
00:38:58.440
lose those benefits. Now, you and I have a different view of what government's power should
00:39:03.800
be. But the reality is that that's going to weigh on John Roberts. He found a way to save Obamacare
00:39:09.880
the first time. He's not going to destroy it now that millions of people depend on it for a case that
00:39:19.160
What do you think, Philip, about the way he handled this? There's a story now that's come out
00:39:23.400
that John Roberts. I mean, he contorted himself into a pretzel and changed his mind. All the things
00:39:32.260
that we had heard rumor of now been verified that he was looking at the image of the court
00:39:40.200
and not the actual law. He just wanted to save the and protect the image of the court that that to me
00:39:47.980
is impeachable as a Supreme Court justice. Go ahead.
00:39:54.360
Yeah, there's this new book out, and I wrote something on it because it's a biography of John Roberts
00:40:04.840
and his time on the Supreme Court, and there's a chapter on his deliberations in Obamacare.
00:40:10.780
And what was pretty revealing to me is that if you read the book, if you trust this account,
00:40:17.200
then effectively he treated the Supreme Court like a legislative body.
00:40:26.480
And there are many points in the book where it says he was conflicted between his head and his heart,
00:40:31.560
what his head said, you know, the law said versus the idea of overturning a law that was meant to address
00:40:39.840
the health insurance crisis. And when they first voted on the law, according to the book,
00:40:47.280
Roberts voted to overturn the individual mandate and actually uphold the Medicaid expansion.
00:40:54.900
And the actual decision ended up being the opposite because of all the horse trading that went on.
00:41:02.300
The other conservatives on the bench thought that all of Obamacare had to go if the mandate went
00:41:09.180
and he was – Roberts was uncomfortable with that. So he went to the liberals and said,
00:41:16.300
OK, if I say that it's OK as a tax, will you sign on to overturning the Medicaid portion?
00:41:23.900
So effectively, the way it seems is though he decided that he wanted to overturn part of Obamacare,
00:41:32.060
but substantially keep it intact. And then he reversed engineered a legal argument to get to that point
00:41:39.880
and negotiated with the various justices to get agreement on that, as opposed to just narrowly being dictated by
00:41:48.060
what is the law to say and what is this allowable under the Constitution. And I think that's very worrisome.
00:41:54.800
When you look at the future and, you know, the reason why I think, my personal opinion,
00:42:03.560
the GOP didn't get rid of Obamacare is because they didn't have a replacement. And they are looking
00:42:09.480
at repeal and replace. I don't want it replaced. I want the free market opened up. I want the laws
00:42:17.120
that have made this a very profitable game for some people to go away. Let me buy insurance across
00:42:27.480
state lines, et cetera, et cetera. Just open up the free market. Donald Trump, when he says,
00:42:33.020
we have to be the party of health care, what do you think that means? And what do the people – is
00:42:39.400
there anybody that is looking at the free market? Is that a chance of ever coming back, in your opinion?
00:42:44.380
I think it's very unlikely. Look, in 2015, I saw all of this coming, and I wrote my book,
00:42:53.100
Overcoming Obamacare. And what that did is it said, right now, the right's divided on Obamacare.
00:42:59.280
There's plenty of plans out there. Contrary to the myth that Republicans don't have a plan.
00:43:04.540
In actuality, there were a lot of plans. There were too many. Nobody could agree on one single
00:43:10.560
approach. So I said, okay, here are the three basic approaches, ranging from reforming Obamacare to
00:43:18.680
make it less restrictive, to what you're saying, which I said, let's restart and move in a purely
00:43:25.840
free market direction and completely scrap it, right? And I said, here are basically the three
00:43:31.340
different paths you can choose. And Republicans have to decide on this and fight this out among
00:43:38.300
themselves now so that when they're in a position to do something, they could hit the ground running.
00:43:45.480
Obviously, they didn't take my advice, and all of the fights that I predicted several years in advance
00:43:53.960
played out and nothing was agreed on. And so I think it's a real problem, and it continues to be
00:44:01.500
the problem, because say what you want about the Democrats, they know what they want to do. They
00:44:05.940
want to take over everyone's health care. They want the private insurers out of it. They want one
00:44:11.600
single government insurer, and they want that insurer to dictate prices to doctors and hospitals and
00:44:18.120
everyone to be on the same plan. We know what they want, and they're very clear about it,
00:44:23.140
and the only argument on the left is how quickly they can get there. On the right, there is this
00:44:30.440
sort of disagreement, because you have people that are trying to be Democratic-lite, and they're
00:44:35.580
trying to say, well, let's expand Medicaid a little less. Let's provide a little fewer subsidies.
00:44:42.820
And the argument I made during the whole repeal debate is, look, the bill that you're writing that's
00:44:48.780
trying to make all these accommodations to the left is a 20% support. It's getting attacked by the left
00:44:56.780
and, you know, the media. So why not go to an actual free market plan that's going to reduce
00:45:03.300
people's premiums? If you said that we're going to have a plan that allows people to purchase the type
00:45:09.000
of health insurance that they want, it would be a totally, you know, we'd have a totally different
00:45:14.720
system. And that's the problem, is that we have a system in which people think either the government
00:45:20.560
or their employer are picking everything up. So the normal free market mechanisms that work in
00:45:26.500
every other part of the free market, you know, aren't applicable to health care for that reason.
00:45:34.140
And the, you know, I make the example in my book, like, look at the, you know, look at an iPhone,
00:45:42.580
right? In, you know, 20 years ago, there was this famous meme on the internet a few years back where
00:45:48.480
it showed a Radio Shack ad from the 1990s. And it had a video camera and a answering machine and a
00:45:57.920
telephone and an alarm clock and all of these things that you could now carry around in your
00:46:03.660
pocket because there is competition for people to make, to innovate and to find a way to bring
00:46:14.540
down prices and increase quality over time. And, you know, the power of what I carry around in my
00:46:22.000
pocket is drastically different from, you know, what existed within my own lifetime. And there's no
00:46:29.320
reason that that type of innovation can't happen in health care beyond the fact that we have a system
00:46:34.460
in which everything is rigged from the top down and where government sets all the rules or everything
00:46:41.800
has to be rigged through the employer. People don't have any choice over what type of insurance they
00:46:48.060
have. And, you know, if Republicans don't rally around the plan, I could tell you exactly what's
00:46:54.600
going to happen. You're going to have Democrats take over, if not in 2021, then in 2025, someday,
00:47:00.700
and they're going to want to go in the direction of single payer. They may not get there overnight,
00:47:06.140
but they'll try to, you know, they'll expand Obamacare, they'll end what's, you know, a government
00:47:12.080
plan to Obamacare and rig the game so that millions and millions of people shift over to that. That's what
00:47:18.400
the argument is on the left right now. Philip Klein, executive editor of Washington Examiner,
00:47:23.000
also the author of Overcoming Obamacare. Thanks. Thanks so much for talking to me. I want to play
00:47:28.360
something because what he just said is in 2021 or 2025, they will take over. And the way he said it
00:47:34.620
reminded me of the Trojan horse audio. Now, this is, this is such important audio. This is what we
00:47:43.060
played at Fox and it was inside the left. Who was, who was this? Stu, do you remember?
00:47:49.360
Uh, Jacob, uh, something from the Tides Foundation? Yeah. And he was talking to a group
00:47:57.160
of leftist and, and policymakers, and he was talking about Obamacare and how we are going to
00:48:03.160
do Obamacare, but don't worry about Obamacare. Come together. Now, where are the secret meetings of
00:48:08.880
us saying, okay, we're going to do this, but don't worry. It's a Trojan horse to get us back to a free
00:48:14.640
market. Are there any, anybody that actually believes in that anymore? Listen to what they
00:48:19.660
said. We played this. We talked about it almost every night for almost a year and it was dismissed.
00:48:27.540
Listen to it. I, someone once said to me, this is a Trojan horse for a single payer. And I said,
00:48:31.860
well, it's not a Trojan horse, right? It's just right there. I'm telling you, we're going to get
00:48:36.580
there over time slowly, but we'll move away from reliance on employment-based health insurance as we
00:48:42.360
should, but we'll do it in a way that we're not going to, to frighten people into thinking they're
00:48:47.120
going to lose their private insurance. We're going to give them a choice of public and private
00:48:50.340
insurance when they're in the pool. And we're going to let them keep their private employment-based
00:48:53.800
insurance if their employer continues to provide it. There it is. This is the best of the Glenn Beck
00:49:12.460
So Pat, who gets a speeding ticket every time he crosses into my town.
00:49:19.860
I paid for that firehouse you're talking about.
00:49:28.440
I'll show you my, I'll show you my property tax. No, you didn't. You maybe bought the stove,
00:49:35.700
but I bought the movie theater. I bought the end suite, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, live in quarters
00:49:45.320
I mean, how much did just this coin cost that Tim got at the grand opening?
00:49:51.780
I mean, just sending this to 800 or 900 residents of your town.
00:50:02.100
There's something like 900 residents of your town.
00:50:38.480
We have a $15 million firehouse for 900 and. . .
00:50:44.660
But the good thing about that is it's only $15,000 per person.
00:50:55.680
On the other hand, though, when you look at it, it is 6.7 square miles.
00:51:00.940
So, that is only $2.14 million per square mile.
00:51:27.180
We are six square miles, and we have a $15 million firehouse?
00:51:55.360
They were scoping these houses when we first moved here.
00:52:00.680
They were so sophisticated that they stayed in one house for almost two days to rob it completely.
00:52:12.680
Didn't they remove the safe from the foundation?
00:52:19.460
These guys, the police department, boom, they got them.
00:52:31.360
We don't have to build a new police station, too, do we?
00:52:35.620
Because this is not a police station fire station.
00:52:39.340
And by the way, again, in case you missed it, there's only three currently used fire trucks for the town.
00:52:51.120
And, you know, there is a lot of open space in this town, I will say.
00:53:03.120
Could they be serviced by my town's fire department?
00:53:12.100
I'm not putting a scratch on those fire trucks.
00:53:14.600
Not to help the riffraff like you in the next town hall.
00:53:17.740
No, you're not going to the slums with your beautiful fire trucks.
00:53:24.300
There was a town hall meeting about this firehouse before it was constructed,
00:53:29.660
which happened just a couple of weeks before the 2016 election,
00:53:33.240
when everyone was super focused on local fire truck issues.
00:53:40.680
No, you're not involved in local government, and therefore this is your fault.
00:53:46.740
Honestly, you know, now that I know there's only 900 of us,
00:53:50.380
I'm just going to have to start having more children,
00:53:52.140
and then we'll just all attend because I could change this town.
00:53:58.540
And I tell you, we have one of the nicest schools,
00:54:02.460
literally one of the nicest schools in the nation.
00:54:05.560
People will move into my town, which I thought was strangely much bigger.
00:54:12.360
But they move into the town just to be able to attend this school.
00:54:16.140
And I mean they'll move anywhere from the country into this town
00:54:22.900
I'm not sending my kids to the academy because I went to it.
00:54:34.420
It has a gigantic, beautiful fireplace in the lobby of the school.
00:54:45.680
And if you live in town, you get to go, that's your public school.
00:54:49.120
As long as you like a U.N. world curriculum, it's like the Little Red Schoolhouse.
00:55:13.180
Has anybody but us complained about the firehouse?
00:55:17.380
Tim and my daughter, who also live in town, Tim and my daughter, they were the ones that
00:55:24.240
You're going to have an aneurysm when you actually go inside of this place.
00:55:29.440
But I haven't heard anybody say anything but, oh, isn't this great?
00:55:35.440
Nobody needs stone archways outside a fire station.
00:55:42.300
Every time we drive by, and I drive by twice a day, I look at the stone archways outside
00:55:55.200
And there's no house as nice as this fire station.
00:55:58.580
I swear to you, it is nicer than the houses that the 900 people apparently own.
00:56:22.580
You know, that is so far down on my priority list because restaurants will have wolf stoves.
00:56:41.100
The screen comes down from the as the curtains come down and they all sit in these plush leather
00:56:48.840
chairs that have the shield embroidered on the back of each chair.
00:56:56.080
And if you're a fireman, like you may have a long shift where you're staying there and
00:57:01.860
To have like some like little room to watch television comfortably.
00:57:07.400
You don't need the lines, you don't need the electric screen, you don't need the movie
00:57:09.960
seats, and you certainly don't need the embroidery in the movie seats.
00:57:27.700
I mean, do we have like Arnold Schwarzenegger coming to use the gym every day?
00:57:36.800
And I feel bad because I don't, I'm not saying anything bad about the fireman.
00:57:40.640
In fact, if you're a fireman, I know, if you're a fireman, you need a job in my town.
00:57:47.640
This is the sweetest, I don't think we have any fires, but you, I've never heard of one.
00:57:55.440
You need to apply to my town and do not tell me what they're offering for salaries.