Best of the Program ｜ Guests： John Ziegler & Gad Saad ｜ 2⧸18⧸19
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
164.70491
Summary
Jussie Smollett was the victim of a vicious, racist, and homophobic attack in Chicago, and now police are investigating it as a possible hate crime. What will his punishment be? John Ziegler joins the show to talk about that and much more.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hey, welcome to Monday. It is, well, as you'll find out, it's Wieners Out Day, and we took that
00:00:07.740
every place you could imagine. So Wieners Out, we'll talk about that.
00:00:13.860
Yeah, and Cosby. We actually get into Cosby and Blackface and the little dog weather advisory that
00:00:20.520
is going on. That's kind of a confusing show, but that's not where we start. Where we start,
00:00:25.320
actually, is Smollett. Yes, Smollett and his story falling apart, of course, which will remind you
00:00:32.240
that tonight on television, Glenn will be going through all of the cases, not only Smollett,
00:00:36.040
but the dozens of cases of people claiming to have racial attacks perpetrated against them,
00:00:43.220
mostly inspired by Donald Trump, that turn out to be, you know, totally fake.
00:00:47.840
We have John Ziegler is joining us for the podcast today, and what will his punishment be?
00:01:08.940
You're listening to The Best of the Glenn Beck Program.
00:01:17.840
So here it is. This is the way the media works now. They find a story that confirms their bias,
00:01:23.940
confirms their narrative, and then they run it constantly, relentlessly. Then when the real
00:01:30.300
story comes out, they minimize the exposure of the correction, and then they repeat.
00:01:36.500
Look at the major stories that have broken recently that have been so very wrong, that have occupied
00:01:43.860
so much of our time. Kavanaugh. Was that true? Nope. Turns out, nope.
00:01:52.560
Then you had the Covington story. Was that true? Nope.
00:01:59.160
Look at how they corrected both of those. Just barely. Just barely. And I say,
00:02:06.940
well, both of them, would you even say barely, Stu? Because they were still saying they were guilty of something.
00:02:14.820
Yeah, I mean, certainly haven't corrected the Kavanaugh thing. I mean, they just say that it was,
00:02:21.780
I mean, I think they would still say that one's true.
00:02:24.020
Well, I mean, do you remember the FBI stories that came out afterwards and what the FBI had uncovered?
00:02:30.460
That it was bogus? That the people that were, you can't, you don't know for sure, because,
00:02:36.560
you know, we're still going off of people's memories, but it was her beach friends that kind of
00:02:41.480
helped shape this story? Yeah. I mean, I think all of these stories are stories that they would
00:02:47.100
still hang on to. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So they're not really corrected. They're not really corrected.
00:02:52.940
Let me give you the knee jerk reactions that the media had on this Jussie Smollett hoax.
00:03:01.840
This is from Insider Edition, CNN, E! News, Headline News, CNBC, TMZ, just to name a few. Listen.
00:03:08.600
Beaten with a noose around his neck and hospitalized. Empire star Jussie Smollett was the victim of a
00:03:15.460
vicious, racist, and homophobic attack. His attackers hurled racial and homophobic slurs.
00:03:21.620
Two people yelled racist and homophobic slurs. Racial and homophobic slurs.
00:03:26.780
Not only homophobia, we're talking about racism. We're talking about hate with steroids.
00:03:32.340
They are looking for two suspects who are apparently wearing Make America Great Again hats.
00:03:37.120
The offenders uttered, this is MAGA country. The hate crime went down early this morning in
00:03:42.400
Chicago. Officials are investigating the alleged assault as a hate crime. And now police say
00:03:46.700
they're investigating this as a possible hate crime. Anyone attacked in a hate crime like this
00:03:51.580
is an outrage. This is, this is stomach turning, mind boggling information. It's out of control.
00:03:59.880
It is out of control, isn't it? Isn't it out of control? Now these are just the reactions on TV.
00:04:06.480
It's just as bad, if not worse, in some cases in print and online. I'll give you one example.
00:04:14.120
You know, the situation is bad when TMZ is connecting the dots and seeing through a guy's
00:04:19.060
story. It's TMZ. Listen to this quote. The sources say there were red flags from the get go.
00:04:24.880
Cops were extremely suspicious when Jussie took them out to the area where they said he was attacked
00:04:30.060
and pointed to an obscure camera saying how happy that the attack was, that the attack was on video.
00:04:37.500
Well, it turns out the camera was pointing in the wrong direction.
00:04:42.080
Cops thought it was weird. He knew the location of that camera. And then there's this.
00:04:48.200
We're told investigators didn't believe the two alleged attackers screamed,
00:04:53.120
this is MAGA country, because not a single Trump supporter watches Empire, end quote.
00:04:59.520
Now, I'm sure there is one. Somewhere, maybe, probably not.
00:05:07.400
Here's the man himself in an interview just days after the alleged beating.
00:05:15.060
Here he is in an interview with ABC News complaining about people making stuff up.
00:05:20.540
That I had said that they were wearing MAGA hats. I never said that. I didn't need to add
00:05:25.720
anything like that. They called me a ****. They called me a ****. There's no which way you cut it.
00:05:34.240
I don't need some MAGA hat as the cherry on top of some racist sundae. I've heard that
00:05:40.980
it was a date gone bad, which I so resent that narrative. I'm not going to go out and get a
00:05:50.660
tuna sandwich and a salad to meet somebody. That's ridiculous. And it's offensive. Yes,
00:05:57.640
there's Grindr. Yes, there's Jack. Yes, there's all of these things, which I have not been on in
00:06:01.900
years. I can admit that I was on that back in the day. I was single. You know what I'm saying?
00:06:07.000
But I have not been on that in years. But aside from that, it's offensive. And I absolutely resent
00:06:16.380
that narrative because it's bull. It's bull. It's bull. And he knows bull, apparently.
00:06:25.600
Now, he starts out. Play the first 10 seconds of that for me again, please.
00:06:30.340
That I had said that they were wearing MAGA hats. I never said that. I didn't need to add
00:06:36.960
anything like that. Stop. Huh. Here's a story from USA Today. The headline, Empire star Jussie Smollett
00:06:45.600
attackers yelled, this is MAGA country during the beating. Chicago police, blah, blah, blah. You get
00:06:51.260
down to about eight paragraphs down. And it says, Sergeant Cindy Guerra confirmed to USA Today that
00:06:59.680
small yet said in a follow up interview the next day that his alleged tackers yelled, this
00:07:06.120
is MAGA country. So apparently there was some confusion on whether or not he said it. Now
00:07:13.080
he seems to be confused yet. And the Chicago police said, no, no, no, he didn't say that.
00:07:20.820
Then USA Today called and said, could you check on that? They checked on it, said, oh, yep.
00:07:27.280
You know what? The next day he did say that. So I guess he does need a little cherry on a
00:07:34.360
racist Sunday. The problem is, is he's the racist. Let me give you, let me give you a story
00:07:44.420
from, let me give you two stories from the press just this weekend. There is a story from the
00:07:54.080
Washington Post where the, the writer. Now this is a, this is an editorial writer, a, a writer
00:08:05.000
from the Washington Post, an editor said, she really needs this to be true. She needs this
00:08:14.480
to be true. What do you mean you need this to be true? I want this to be true. I need it
00:08:23.180
to be true. Does anybody remember after 9-11 when we started having copycats? Remember
00:08:32.340
when we started getting all kinds of powder sent to us and we were hoping, hoping, praying
00:08:38.740
that this was not an American copycat, that this was somebody that was doing this, that
00:08:45.160
we wanted to trust each other. Do we remember that feeling? Maybe it was just me who wanted
00:08:52.340
that, but I don't think so. You want to live in a country where this is true? I want to
00:08:58.460
live in a country where this is not true. Now she went on to say, because just think of
00:09:05.240
the damage that will be done. Which brings me to the second story. This one from the New
00:09:11.940
York Times. Republicans are already demonizing Democrats as socialists and baby killers.
00:09:17.980
Now this isn't related to the Smollett case, but yet it is. We don't believe the Smollett
00:09:29.220
case, so apparently we just all group all of it together. We don't believe this guy, so
00:09:36.040
we're not going to believe any racism exists. Well, that is a danger of crying wolf. However,
00:09:43.020
I don't think that's who the American people are. And look at how the New York Times story,
00:09:49.420
this is not an editorial, this is a story. Republicans are already demonizing Democrats
00:09:54.880
as socialists and baby killers. Well, I got news for you. If the baby is born and then you
00:10:02.580
kill it, what else would you be called? If you believe capitalism is a thing of the past
00:10:13.100
and you believe that the government can run things better, that's a socialist. What else
00:10:21.920
would you be called? Jussie Smollett wanted so badly to believe that Americans were just
00:10:37.400
homophobic racists, that he had to hire two Kenyans to perpetrate this hoax on us. I guess
00:10:51.840
there are jobs that Americans still won't do. Now, I don't, I don't know how he could
00:11:01.840
have possibly thought that one of them was named Cletus because they don't look like a Cletus
00:11:08.300
to me. He orchestrated this. I want to take a break and come back with just a list of all
00:11:20.660
of the stories where people have been orchestrating these things. Because that's exactly what's
00:11:27.060
happening. And the press doesn't get it. And it gets worse and worse and worse. And if the
00:11:35.960
press doesn't wake up, we're screwed. We're screwed. How's this going to fix any, how's this going to be
00:11:44.920
fixed? How are we going to come together if the press doesn't see their involvement? But again,
00:11:55.080
they don't want to see their involvement. Again, it's just confirmation bias. Others are doing this.
00:12:09.560
I'll give you the list of just the things that are directly correlated with this.
00:12:16.960
Donald Trump is to blame because this racist thing happened and it turned out to be a hoax.
00:12:23.160
Okay. Cyber stalking, making hoax bomb threats. Ann Arbor woman reported a hate crime.
00:12:36.620
She was suffering from depression and she said that she had been prompted. She had been attacked and
00:12:46.780
she told the, I don't know why they, they, they picked on me. She said, maybe it was a safety pin
00:12:55.960
that she was wearing. What does the safety pin represent? Do you have any idea? Okay. Well,
00:13:01.580
somebody out there apparently knew what a safety pin meant and didn't like that. And so it's a hate
00:13:07.400
crime. Well, it turns out, no, nope. She was just crazy. Uh, she had made a superficial scratch on her
00:13:13.640
face. Uh, and she was embarrassed about it. Um, and so she said a, uh, a stranger had done it to her
00:13:21.380
while she was walking and her friend said, you should report it to the police. And I made a big
00:13:26.660
mistake by doing that. Yep. Kansas state. Second time in two years, racist slurs at Kansas state was a
00:13:35.580
hoax. Officers received a report of a note using a racial slur posted on a door in an apartment
00:13:43.860
complex. Upon questioning the person who reported the incident admitted to creating and posting the
00:13:49.000
note to their own door. The matter will be addressed. They said, uh, but this was the one that
00:13:54.760
had the, uh, note beware and words live here. Remember that story? Yeah, that was, um,
00:14:03.300
that was a hoax. Uh, how about this one? Villanova, Villanova had a report of a black female student
00:14:11.660
allegedly knocked down by young white males yelling, Trump, Trump, Trump. But the student
00:14:18.340
doesn't want to pursue the matter, but wanted to make sure that it's hard to move forward.
00:14:24.580
It's hard to move forward. Well, yeah. And it was hard for the university to move forward,
00:14:32.640
uh, because, uh, it was fake. So they couldn't find anybody, uh, that had done that. New Jersey
00:14:41.000
man arrested 58 years old. He was, uh, arrested in connection with racist and politically charged
00:14:49.340
messages that appeared spray painted on a property in South Philadelphia on the day after the Trump
00:14:55.540
election. He was, um, uh, he was arrested, um, because he wrote Trump rules and Trump rules,
00:15:03.900
black, uh, B words, uh, and the letter T. I guess that's just, I have no, I, uh, uh, uh, no idea.
00:15:13.440
Could have been a tea party. Uh, could have been, there's a lot of things that could be good.
00:15:18.140
Yeah. Low, low, low T. Yeah. Low testosterone issue. Uh, a report of a racist note on a black
00:15:24.900
student's windshield. This happened in, uh, Minnesota, a racist threat against, uh, St. Olaf
00:15:31.480
student that touched off campus wide protest and forced the college to cancel classes earlier this
00:15:37.060
month was a fake. According to this story, a threat, an anonymous typewritten note was fabricated.
00:15:44.480
It was, uh, it was, uh, a strategy to draw attention to concerns about the climate, the
00:15:51.380
campus climate. Uh, it was not a genuine threat. It was, the note was tucked into the windshield of a
00:15:58.680
black student's car. Uh, and, uh, it, uh, it, it apparently, uh, you know, well, they were just trying
00:16:05.700
to show that, you know, this is something, something good has got to come out of such a bad thing. Uh, but it
00:16:12.140
was, uh, full of, uh, racial epithets and, uh, and, uh, and of course, Trump woman told police she was
00:16:20.740
driving home when four teens confronted her yelled Trump 2016 and told her she didn't belong here to
00:16:27.100
go home. The woman who told the police she had a hateful note on her car after a group of teens did
00:16:33.600
this to her said, uh, yeah. Okay. I made the entire story up. Muslim woman. She reported a hate crime
00:16:44.680
on the subway. 18 year old Muslim woman claimed that three men attacked her on a Manhattan subway.
00:16:51.500
She, they tried to pull off her hijab and, uh, turned out to be completely fake. She was making that up.
00:16:58.700
Long Island man, Nassau community college said he couldn't sleep at night because somebody had drawn
00:17:08.920
swastikas several different times at various different locations on the campus. Three swastikas
00:17:16.080
were found inside of a man's bathroom and he couldn't, uh, sleep at night. I don't know how people sleep
00:17:24.660
at night when they're the ones who do it. Uh, police found out he was the perpetrator. I'm,
00:17:30.040
I'm not even a third of the way through these stories that have come out in the last year.
00:17:35.220
And the Washington post has the guts to say that we're going to use this one to say that people
00:17:41.540
are making things up. No, no. Do you not yet get it? This is why we don't believe the news.
00:17:49.940
John Ziegler is, uh, with us. He is, uh, an independent, uh, voice and writes for
00:18:07.280
Mediate and he is one of the guys, uh, and I think the first to really take this, uh, Jussie
00:18:14.160
Smollett case on, uh, and, and say, wait a minute, something's not right here. We talked to him
00:18:19.800
on Friday as this was starting to fall apart. Uh, and he laid the case out that John, I'd like
00:18:25.840
you just to lay the case out again, real quick, just in case somebody doesn't, isn't familiar
00:18:30.680
with the case. Sure. Uh, a couple of weeks ago, uh, empire actor, Jesse Smollett, uh, claimed
00:18:36.740
that at 2 AM in Chicago, in the middle of a polar vortex that he had been attacked by two, uh,
00:18:43.900
Trump loving goons, uh, who, uh, yelled among other things, uh, at him, uh, racial epithets,
00:18:49.980
uh, insulted his sexuality and declared Chicago to be MAGA country, uh, sprayed him with bleach,
00:18:56.820
uh, tied a rope around his neck, I guess, which was supposed to be a noose. He was the victim of
00:19:02.760
a horrible hate crime. Uh, and the media, of course, uh, shockingly, uh, lapped this up,
00:19:09.200
uh, as, as if, uh, this was, uh, obviously true and that there was no other scenario that could
00:19:15.240
possibly be the case because after all, uh, in their minds, no one ever, uh, lies or exaggerates
00:19:20.620
about any of this kind of thing, even though the, the end result, as you well know, Glenn,
00:19:25.440
and many of your listeners know, is that many of these stories end up being false. And, uh,
00:19:31.220
this one never made any sense. And the way that it fell apart over a couple of period of time to me
00:19:37.640
is fascinating. And, you know, I appreciate you giving me the credit because I, you know,
00:19:41.740
I don't get credit for any of these types of stories. I haven't, I have made literally hundreds
00:19:45.580
of dollars over the years, uh, going after these stories. Let's not, let's not stretch it.
00:19:54.120
It's not fun because by the way, even when you're right, you still end up taking more grief than you
00:19:59.220
get, uh, credit in most cases, but I feel like all I was, was the, the kid in the emperor with
00:20:04.440
no clothes. You just go, wait a minute. The emperor has no clothes here. This is an obvious
00:20:09.860
story. So what was fascinating about this real quick was fascinating to me was I did a series
00:20:15.220
of interviews in Chicago very early on in this story where, you know, I'm being used by Chicago
00:20:20.940
radio hosts, radio hosts who are not supposed to be afraid of anything. Right. Because they,
00:20:25.760
they don't want to be the ones to say this is false. So they bring me on because I've written
00:20:29.580
for media and say, uh, and tell them what they already are thinking, but no one wants to say.
00:20:35.140
And that's, that's really what happened here. It's really frightening. Uh, so John,
00:20:39.060
I think one of the reasons why the average person may have been caught up on this and just accepted it
00:20:44.780
is because, um, uh, at first he had gone to the hospital and you got the impression that he had to
00:20:54.060
stay there for a day or two. And so he was really hurt. That all, that's all bogus too.
00:21:00.220
Well, yeah. I mean, you look now who, who it was, these two Nigerian brothers who are bodybuilders,
00:21:06.460
who were the ones who were involved in this, uh, if they were going to beat, uh, Jesse Smollett up,
00:21:12.220
uh, he would have had more than a scratch underneath his eye and he would not have been able to, uh, go to
00:21:17.600
Los Angeles almost immediately to, uh, to do, uh, I guess you would call it a concert where he was
00:21:22.980
dancing, uh, within a couple of days. I mean, that part didn't make a lot of sense. There were a lot
00:21:29.160
of things that didn't make a lot of sense. Well, the fact that he held onto his subway.
00:21:33.040
Well, I mean, that's a love, that's a love of a sandwich, man. You're like, I'm fighting off two
00:21:38.320
guys who are trying to beat me up, pour bleach on me, but I am not letting go of this sandwich.
00:21:43.600
Well, I have to say, and I, I, I was, and, and by the way, the police were, uh, both of us were,
00:21:50.480
were essentially wrong in our original theory about what happened, because I'm told from my
00:21:56.720
sources, which have been very good on this story from the beginning, that originally the police,
00:22:00.480
and I thought this made sense because I'm not a conspiracy guy. I despise conspiracies. I believe
00:22:04.880
in incompetence, but even the police were, were convinced that this couldn't have been a total hoax at
00:22:11.200
first because it was so poorly done. So incompetently done. Apparently they even re they even
00:22:18.000
rehearsed it. Uh, and, and so I presumed, and again, the police thought this too, that this was
00:22:24.960
some sort of a domestic dispute, a relationship he had had with one of these two actors that went
00:22:30.480
wrong. And then he created the hate crime allegation afterwards. I am told that their state police still
00:22:36.400
believe that there was a relationship between Smollett and one of the two of them, but they
00:22:41.360
now believe that it, that what happened here was that Smollett paid them to be part of this. One of
00:22:47.520
the more interesting things I'm looking forward to as this goes along, which I'm sure is not going to
00:22:52.000
happen is, is Smollett going to get, uh, the me too treatment? Because if the police are right,
00:22:57.200
that he had a relationship with one of these two guys, he forced them, right? Using his power as an
00:23:02.400
actor in a romantic relationship to engage in a crime. Now that's a me too violation.
00:23:09.280
This thing, this thing is, is absolutely fascinating. I saw it this morning that the
00:23:13.360
police said one of the, one of the things that immediately said, wait a minute, this may not be
00:23:18.640
right. Is he took him to the scene where it happened and he immediately pointed out the video
00:23:25.200
camera and said, I am so glad that that camera is up there. Cause you caught all of it on video.
00:23:32.080
And, and it was so obviously pointed in the wrong direction. And they were like,
00:23:37.760
Hey, we've never heard that from a victim. Who's like, and I saw right away that there's a video
00:23:43.920
camera right here. And it was so obvious that it was not going to pick this up. They went,
00:23:49.440
uh, Oh, something's wrong. Well, Glenn, you make a really great point, which, uh, I, uh,
00:23:54.960
underestimated the police at the beginning of this. Uh, you know, I think the police played possum
00:24:00.240
here. I think, I think that they made it seem as if they had no idea what was going on. They
00:24:05.280
released the photograph of those two blurbs, those blobs that they were the persons of interest.
00:24:10.160
And at that time I perceived, and I think Smollett perceived that was a sign of weakness that
00:24:15.280
the police had nothing. They had no idea what was happening here. It is now,
00:24:19.280
very clear. They knew immediately what was going on. They, they had been able to chart
00:24:24.640
those two blobs, which turned out to be the Nigerians all the way from the scene of the,
00:24:30.000
of the alleged hate crime into an Uber. They identified them. Apparently they have video
00:24:35.440
of them buying the rope. So they knew their identity from very early on. And of course,
00:24:39.440
they immediately know they're Nigerian. They're black. One of the works on empire. This story is
00:24:44.640
clearly false. And, you know, to use what, what I'm sure the left will think is a bad metaphor.
00:24:49.280
They essentially gave Smollett enough real rope to hang himself because he identified and ends up
00:24:55.200
identifying them on good morning America, which of course was ridiculous to me. You couldn't identify
00:25:00.480
the people when you were being attacked, but you're identifying two blobs in a grainy photograph.
00:25:05.360
So, and that's the incredible thing is he went on good morning America to say he doesn't appreciate
00:25:12.000
how this is just, uh, you know, how he's being treated and called a liar by some. It's just like
00:25:16.880
those Trump people. Uh, and they put up the two blobs and it's really like the back of two guys,
00:25:23.120
isn't it? I can't even tell again. I don't know. I just, because I, I, the, the faces were so dark.
00:25:29.440
I just thought that they were, I don't know, wearing a hoodie or something and walking the
00:25:32.880
other direction. There's no way you can tell anything about these two guys, except it's two
00:25:37.760
big people walking or standing up. Uh, and, uh, and he got, he gets on and says,
00:25:44.160
I know these are the guys. Well, how do you know? I was there. I saw it. I know these are the guys.
00:25:49.600
Right. Which to me felt like desperation. Like he's just latching onto anything that will
00:25:54.480
substantiate his story. Also under the belief that the police will never be able to identify
00:25:59.840
these guys when they already had. And of course it's a couple hours after the, the good morning
00:26:05.200
America interview finally airs when they apprehend them, they questioned them, they get them to flip
00:26:09.920
on Smollett. They don't charge them. And now of course we're waiting for Smollett. I'm told the
00:26:15.440
police are hoping that Smollett will turn himself in. Uh, the, I'm, I, I, I'm still very skeptical,
00:26:22.400
Glenn, whether Smollett is going to suffer any severe legal consequences over this.
00:26:27.600
The state's attorney in Cook County, I'm told is very corrupt. Uh, they're going to be under a
00:26:31.840
lot of political pressure to give him a sweetheart deal and let this just go under the rug. Uh,
00:26:36.960
I told you on Friday, which I think was a key part of this, that Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago,
00:26:40.960
was pissed off and that may have, he may have unleashed the dogs on Smollett when he went on
00:26:45.040
Good Morning America, but he's not in charge of this anymore. This is a state's attorney's issue.
00:26:49.360
And so I'm still skeptical whether the left will ever really be forced to eat the crow that they
00:26:55.600
should on this. And I also think this is important for your audience. I hope that we don't just look
00:27:00.880
at this as the left wants us to as an isolated incident. This is somehow unique. This is an
00:27:06.400
epidemic. This is an epidemic, especially in the, in the realm of, uh, hate crime, uh, situations.
00:27:12.240
And it's also, I think, and maybe I'm sure people, I know I've already driven people on the left
00:27:17.280
crazy for, for raising this issue, but, but let's go back to Kavanaugh for a second,
00:27:21.200
Brett Kavanaugh, because we were told, we remember we were told that even though Christine
00:27:25.600
Ford story had no corroboration, by the way, Jesse Smollett story at least had a time and a place
00:27:31.280
and a picture of two blobs, two blobs and a contemporaneous report. I mean, but in comparison,
00:27:36.800
Jesse Smollett story was fantastically corroborated in comparison to, to cut Christine
00:27:42.160
Ford. But we were told the reason we believe Christine Ford is that a prominent person would
00:27:48.320
never tell an untruth about an allegation like this. That would never happen. What do they possibly
00:27:53.840
have to gain? No one would ever do this and put themselves through this. Well, now we know that's
00:28:00.080
bull crap because Jesse Smollett has done that for whatever reason he did. I don't fully understand
00:28:05.360
why he did it. Uh, I mean, we may never know, but people do very strange things. And the other thing
00:28:10.160
that's related to this is the number one misconception, especially the left has is we
00:28:15.440
now live in a world where being the right kind of victim is the American dream. It is. That's the,
00:28:22.000
the biggest false premise of the whole thing. People presume we're still living in 19, whatever
00:28:26.880
it was when being a victim was, was somehow, uh, uh, an item of shame. It's not an item of shame
00:28:33.520
anymore. And by the way, maybe it never should have been, but the pendulum has swung so far in the
00:28:37.760
other direction. People want to be a victim. You get adulation, you get attention, you get money in
00:28:44.080
certain search situations. Uh, I believe Colin Kaepernick figured this out and, and, and did it
00:28:50.160
more beautifully than anyone has ever done and creating himself into being a victim. And now,
00:28:54.320
you know, he's made millions and millions of dollars out of it, uh, what his football career
00:28:58.160
should have been over by now. Uh, so I mean, that's the number one premise being the right kind
00:29:03.200
of victim is the American dream today. When I come back, I want you, because you work for media,
00:29:08.160
I would like to talk about the media and what the media should pull from all of these stories that
00:29:15.520
they've done. What's the real problem here. Part of it is us. The free market is like, who's buying
00:29:22.400
stories about victims? Everybody. I've got a victim story. That's, that's part one. But the other part
00:29:29.440
is journalism and, and media today. And quite honestly, you touched on the beginning fear,
00:29:38.400
John Ziegler. So what does the, what is the media, uh, going to pull out of this or should
00:29:45.760
pull out of this? And what, what role do they play in all of this? Great question, Glenn. Uh,
00:29:53.040
those are two very different things, what they, they shouldn't likely will. Uh, first of all,
00:29:57.360
I think that they, they, they're an unindicted co-conspirator and the Jussie Smollett story.
00:30:01.920
Uh, and I mean, without them, uh, I don't think Smollett would have ever thought,
00:30:05.840
one, that he could get away with this or that he would get adulation for it. Uh, that's,
00:30:10.800
that's number one. Number, number two, what they should take away from this is let's not be so damn
00:30:15.760
gullible. Let's not take everything at face value. Uh, and I, you know, I, I mentioned on Friday,
00:30:22.320
I have an equation that's really pretty simple. You just take the, uh, the, how implausible a story
00:30:27.520
is, how little corroboration it has. And then you divide it by, uh, how hesitant the media or
00:30:33.520
the authorities would be to this, to debunk it because of political correctness concerns. And
00:30:37.360
if you get a number less than one, the story's probably not true. And that formula has worked
00:30:42.080
for me on many, many occasions. And on this, on this occasion, it was as clear as day that the
00:30:48.080
story's probably not true. But the problem here is the business model of the media is broken.
00:30:54.080
It is badly broken. Every single element of the media is broken, which means the two things,
00:30:59.760
everyone has to lunge after every story that looks like it might get, uh, clicks or traffic
00:31:05.680
or, or trend on Twitter immediately, which means that of course, there's no time for introspection.
00:31:11.840
There's no time for research or investigation. Uh, and then of course,
00:31:16.400
the other part of the broken business model is that the people within the business have no job
00:31:21.440
security. And when you have no job security, you can't do real journalism because real journalism
00:31:26.960
requires saying things often that are unpopular or dangerous. Well, in this day and age, if you
00:31:32.720
say something that's unpopular or dangerous, when you have no job security, guess what's going to
00:31:37.200
happen to you? Especially if you have to be a white male, you're, you're in a story like this,
00:31:42.480
you're done. You're it's over. And there's no place to get another job. So that's where the fear
00:31:47.520
comes in that you already referenced. So there's way too much fear. And by the way, no one ever gets
00:31:53.200
fired for jumping on these types of stories. You only, you only get in trouble if you, if you
00:32:00.480
contradict them and don't get vindicated immediately because you're pissed off the wrong people.
00:32:05.760
So, so John, here's the, here's the thing about this is, is as we're looking at this story, nobody's
00:32:12.800
buying a story. Nobody wants to run a story that the narrative is counter to this one. Um, and so
00:32:21.600
you're, you're, you're not incentivized in any way. Everybody wants to be first or wants to be in the
00:32:28.400
stream. Nobody is actually, uh, trying to be right over first. And the last thing is there isn't
00:32:36.800
anybody in the media that really doesn't want to believe this story. This is what they believe
00:32:44.320
anyway. So it's, it's massive confirmation bias. A hundred percent, especially that's, and that's why
00:32:51.040
the liberal media gets these things wrong so often. But I think your point about incentivization is so
00:32:56.720
incredibly important because there's still a lot of people who believe that true truth is the coin
00:33:01.840
of the realm of the media and journalism. I don't know if that was ever the case, but it's definitely
00:33:06.400
not the case now. It's popularity. That's what that is, what matters. And oftentimes the popular
00:33:12.480
narrative is inherently faulty because of what you mentioned about confirmation bias. And of course,
00:33:18.080
you and I have talked many times about the Penn State, Joe Paterno, Jerry Sandusky case. To me,
00:33:22.320
this is the patron saint of all of these cases where the, what the, what the truth is, and I've
00:33:26.960
investigated for six years, I know with every fiber of my being to be 180 degrees different
00:33:33.600
than what the popular narrative was. But the narrative that was popular was so overwhelming
00:33:38.160
that it was a tidal wave over the truth. And the truth is never going to win in that case. And it's not
00:33:43.760
close. And this, and this is not an isolated situation. That's just the most dramatic one I've seen.
00:33:48.560
Okay. John Ziegler, you can find him at Zygman Freud, Zygman Freud, and also with the media.
00:34:12.560
Hi, it's Glenn. If you're a subscriber to the podcast, can you do us a favor and rate us on
00:34:17.280
iTunes? If you're not a subscriber, become one today and listen on your own time. You can subscribe
00:34:24.160
There has been a time in the past where that was not the way people thought about it. I mean,
00:34:30.320
certainly some did, right? Like we know that there have been really bad examples of, uh,
00:34:34.480
of this over the past, but I thought myself, Soul Man was a movie released by a major studio
00:34:42.960
in which the plot of the movie is a white guy goes into blackface to get into Harvard.
00:34:50.400
And it's a hilarious comedy about a white guy who puts on blackface to go into Harvard. Now,
00:34:56.640
we would all say now that would not be something that would be released and no one would act in it
00:35:02.960
if offered. However, in this period, was it that crazy? Again, it was before Soul Man came out,
00:35:09.120
like what, six years previous to this, he supposedly wore blackface, okay? And in 1986,
00:35:15.040
the movie Soul Man came out. And I thought to myself, self, what was the New York Times saying
00:35:23.360
about Soul Man in 1986? Because were they out there saying like, this is a relic from 1884?
00:35:32.480
They said, now they're saying it's a party like in 1884. Here's their review of Soul Man,
00:35:38.160
the in the New York Times from 1986. I love you, Stu. I just love you.
00:35:43.680
There's nothing, again, I want you to understand this, Glenn. There's nothing automatically funny
00:35:48.560
about the story of a rich white college boy who masquerades as a black. There's nothing,
00:35:53.840
it's not automatically. Automatically. It's not automatically. You gotta work into this one a
00:35:58.480
little bit. We're gonna make you work for that laugh. It's more than just putting the blackface on,
00:36:02.880
which, of course, funny, but not automatically. Not automatically. That's not automatically a hit
00:36:08.000
comedy, okay? Right, okay. You guys gotta go deeper. There's nothing automatically funny about
00:36:12.000
the story of a rich white college boy who masquerades as black in order to collect a
00:36:15.600
scholarship to Harvard Law School. That's putting it mildly. But Soul Man, which opens today at Lowe's
00:36:20.960
State and other theaters, has a breezy, unapologetic manner. And it also happens to be funny,
00:36:27.120
which goes a long way towards making up for any of the underlying obtuseness or insensitivity.
00:36:34.080
The director has arrived at this cheerful frat house version of Tootsie. A cheerful frat house
00:36:43.120
version of Tootsie. Yeah, hang on just a second. Hang on just a second. Could Tootsie even be made today?
00:36:50.800
I don't think. Probably not. Probably not. Because wouldn't that be a...
00:36:55.760
Because it was a... Cross-dresser. A cross-dresser. And he was pretending to be a woman
00:37:01.360
to be near his children. I probably not. Well, I know that. You're confusing that
00:37:06.720
with Mrs. Doubtfire. Oh, yeah. Okay. That's right, I am. This is another one you couldn't make.
00:37:12.720
I don't think you could make that one either. You're right. So wait, what's Tootsie about?
00:37:15.600
Tootsie is the actor that couldn't get a job. He was a great actor. Yes. Couldn't get a job.
00:37:21.200
He needed to be a strong woman is what they were looking for. And everybody's saying he was a bad
00:37:27.860
actor. And he's like, okay, I'll show you. It's a brilliant, funny, funny movie. Funny movie.
00:37:33.780
I mean, not automatically funny. Sure. But funny. It's a good point. It's not automatically funny.
00:37:42.080
It's important to point out. Just a guy in a dress isn't automatically funny.
00:37:45.620
Mm-hmm. Now, I will say, I will ask this question, Glenn. Is it, as the New York Times
00:37:50.600
called Soul Man in 1986, a blithe, silly, good-natured movie? And of its kind, quite an
00:37:57.980
enjoyable one. Now, hang on just a second. The governor of Virginia is in trouble. Now,
00:38:04.900
if he was the one, well, if he's either one in the picture with the Klan, okay, he's in
00:38:11.320
trouble. But he denies that that's him, either the Klan or the blackface guy.
00:38:16.900
Right. And, you know, again, this is not something you want to push back on. But, I mean,
00:38:21.640
what's the point of the Klan black guy photo? Like, the only thing I can think of is why this
00:38:27.880
photo would exist is the odd pairing, right? Like, it's an odd couple, like, two people going
00:38:32.660
to a party. One's a Klan member and one's a black guy, right? Yeah.
00:38:36.140
That's probably the quote-unquote joke. Again, not that I'm defending it. Right. But, I don't
00:38:42.160
know. Is that any more or less offensive than being Michael Jackson in blackface previously?
00:38:49.160
I don't know. Yeah, I think it actually is. It may be. It's kind of like, you know, a Jew
00:38:54.280
in, you know, prison guard going with Hitler. Right. Yeah, that's not a good look. Not a good
00:39:00.100
look. Not funny. However, Michael Jackson, I bet that was a breezy performance.
00:39:06.140
It goes back to what Megyn Kelly was saying. Yeah. Is this so bad? Yeah, I think the, you
00:39:13.100
know, I'm not going to shun anybody, you know, from business 30 years after their life because
00:39:18.420
they did that. However, when you are, when you are doing a tribute to someone like he was
00:39:28.200
doing with Michael Jackson, is that so bad? Right. The theory being that if you're trying
00:39:34.160
to compliment someone as dressing up with them, like, you know, it's the same controversy you see
00:39:37.540
every Halloween now, where if you dress up as a Native American, right, you're taking their culture
00:39:43.120
and it's offensive. But if the person is saying, well, I'm not doing it to be offensive. I'm doing
00:39:47.640
it because I like that culture. Is that a problem? And today, absolutely it is. In 1980, was it?
00:39:54.100
I don't know. In 1986, the New York Times was praising a major studio release about blackface.
00:40:00.900
You had, for the first time in American history, you had a bunch of white kids wanting to be black
00:40:07.880
like Michael Jackson and your star who was black changing his face to try to be white.
00:40:14.960
Or a woman. Or had a very rare disease. Not sure what that was about. Of course. The New York
00:40:22.980
Times goes on to talk about his phony looking afro in the movie. And this is what actually
00:40:27.980
reminded me of this when you said Cosby. This is one of the quotes from the movie. This is from
00:40:33.200
the white guy in blackface saying, these are the 80s. This is the Cosby decade. America loves black
00:40:39.000
people. This is the hilarious joke they quote in the movie. They're praising. Mark's manner remains
00:40:45.240
unchanged after his physical transformation. His attitudes could not help but be affected. In
00:40:49.740
the end, a Tootsie-like learning experience emerges from this adventure. He finds, for example,
00:40:54.980
that he can no longer stand listening to the Beach Boys. That's your learning experience?
00:41:00.300
This is your learning experience. If this seems speedy and superficial course in conscious
00:41:04.960
raising. And it comes relatively late in the film. It's better than nothing. And the pretty
00:41:09.940
actress named Meloda Hardin does what little she can with the role of a white girl who wants
00:41:14.660
to sleep with Mark simply because he's black. Quote, something about 400 years of oppression
00:41:20.660
and anger as she explains it. This isn't a positive review. So is that still available? Do you
00:41:27.840
know? What? Is that, is that, can you still rent that? Can you still find that? Because you
00:41:32.820
can't get Song of the South, which is one of the most endearing stories of all time. You
00:41:38.440
cannot get Song of the South. It's not available on YouTube. The zippity-doo-dah. No, no. Cannot
00:41:44.600
get it. But you can get this one? I don't know. That's a good question.
00:41:53.380
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:42:02.820
We had Gad Sad on. Now, Gad is a guy who is a university professor from Canada.
00:42:14.940
He is a guy who just loves the truth and is very concerned about what's happening to the truth in
00:42:22.300
universities and all throughout society. And we talked about everything.
00:42:26.720
One of the first people, Jordan Peterson, reached out to when he was having his troubles initially.
00:42:31.560
Yeah, because he's like the godfather of telling truth, you know, and always getting in trouble
00:42:35.760
for it. And he doesn't care. And I just, I love this guy. You're going to fall in love with him
00:42:40.780
when you listen to him. But check it out. Here he is talking about, you know, we say it's Trump
00:42:48.700
derangement syndrome. He calls it something else. Listen to this.
00:42:53.000
So Munchausen syndrome is where someone feigns a medical condition so they can garner empathy
00:42:58.440
and sympathy. Oh, poor me. Look at me. I'm sick. Munchausen syndrome by proxy is where you take
00:43:03.940
someone who's under your care, your biological child, your pet, your elderly parent, and you
00:43:08.980
harm them so that you can get and garner the sympathy and empathy by proxy because they're
00:43:14.800
damaged, right? So this is called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. And by the way, the ones who
00:43:18.700
suffer most from that are usually women who harm their biological children to garner the
00:43:23.340
sympathy. So I had written a paper, you know, talking about the psychiatric disorder. And
00:43:28.120
then when I started seeing the full victimhood, the screaming, the fake hysteria associated
00:43:34.060
with Trump, that's when I coined the term collective Munchausen because it was a way for people to
00:43:39.880
seek attention in grotesque ways and truly what seemed to me in false sounding ways, right?
00:43:45.960
I mean, I would see on my Facebook page, people sort of testifying to their looming
00:43:51.040
victimhood. I am a woman of color. I attend the University of Maine. Will it still be safe
00:43:57.260
for me to go to college now that Trump? Well, what do you think? There's going to be roadblocks
00:44:02.440
and the Trump storm patrols are going to be ushering you to gang rape centers? I mean, what
00:44:09.120
can justify this level of idiotic hysteria? And so that's why I called it collective Munchausen
00:44:14.220
because it truly was a confabulation of faux hysteria. What upsets me is that it's one thing
00:44:21.180
for this idiot on my Facebook page to write this stuff. It's another thing when many of
00:44:25.280
my supposedly sophisticated intellectual friends were succumbing to the same hysteria. That's
00:44:32.980
what upsets me is when you, so I won't mention any names, but one of my good friends whom you
00:44:37.760
probably know is one of the type who will say things like, you know, there's going to be
00:44:42.100
food shortages now that Trump, there's going to be, to be a nuclear Holocaust. He's the worst
00:44:46.320
thing since Hitler. And this is a guy who otherwise you would have thought is a terribly sophisticated
00:44:50.920
and dispassionate thinker. And so it's a real mystery to me why they are.
00:44:55.980
What causes that? What caused that in him? I think I know who you're talking about. Very
00:45:02.900
Very. I mean, he's sort of the model of the very dispassionate, right? So I, I pitched an idea on the
00:45:11.720
Rubin report as to why I think this is happening. I think that the intellectual class views Trump
00:45:18.120
as a, what I call an aesthetic injury, right? He lived, I mean, you know how this, this beautiful
00:45:24.840
place that you're in, I mean, it's gorgeous aesthetics, right? You have a, you have a nice
00:45:27.960
aesthetic sense. Well, academics and intellectual types have a sense of the types of aesthetics
00:45:33.040
that they seek in their leader. Barack Obama exemplar fit that he's tall. He's got a beautiful
00:45:40.020
smile. He speaks with a certain cadence of a Southern Baptist preacher. He seems noble and
00:45:45.300
majestic. So it doesn't matter what he says that most of it is complete, but he, my God,
00:45:50.600
he sounds noble and intellectual. Donald Trump is an ogre. He speaks in an ugly way. He's
00:45:57.880
grotesque. He's a brawler. He's a New Yorker. He's swearing. He's grabbed this, right? So
00:46:03.380
on every possible aesthetic metric, he offends my sense of aesthetics. And so I think they
00:46:10.940
are disgusted by him. They are repulsed. It's visceral.
00:46:14.460
He is a remarkable man. His name is Gad Saad. Uh, and, uh, he's just remarkable the way he thinks
00:46:22.600
we cover all kinds of topics, really almost everything. Uh, and he, at one point we started
00:46:30.680
talking about freedom of speech. Listen to this. So much has a syndrome is where someone feigns
00:46:36.240
a medical conditions. Free speech absolutist. Yeah. I believe that anything short of a direct
00:46:45.160
exhortation to violence, libel and defamation, everything goes. And the way that I demonstrate
00:46:52.420
my commitment to those principles is I picked the most grotesque possible instance, which
00:46:58.260
is Holocaust deniers to a Jewish person, right? What could be more offensive than taking the
00:47:04.260
historical event that is probably the most documented in history where people were systematically,
00:47:09.480
you know, exterminated and allow someone to say, no, it never happened. But if you are
00:47:16.640
a free speech absolutist in a free society, then you have to tolerate the most grotesque.
00:47:21.620
So I tell people, I am a Jewish person and I support the right of Holocaust deniers to reject
00:47:27.120
that the Holocaust ever happened. So I walk the walk, talk the talk. So your hurt feelings,
00:47:32.080
frankly, I don't give a blank about life is anti-fragile to use the term of Nassim Talib, right?
00:47:39.220
You grow by being, that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger, correct?
00:47:45.520
Therefore, postmodernists say that which doesn't, uh, that way, how, how is this the turn of the
00:47:51.540
phrase on this? Um, uh, that this part out of this for the love of me, I've never heard
00:47:59.960
the postmodern. Okay. Yeah. There's a, they've, they've twisted and turned it, turned it around.
00:48:03.960
So, so it really, I find it very frustrating because it is a perfect way to stifle discussions,
00:48:09.420
right? Don't criticize Islam because that's my religious faith. That hurts me. What do you mean?
00:48:15.700
In a free society, you, you can go on Twitter and say what a bunch of crock Judaism is.
00:48:20.780
If I'm strong in my beliefs, I shouldn't worry about what Glenn Beck thinks.