Glenn Beck is 1.3% Native American, but that doesn t mean he's not part of a tribe. Jussie Smolletten has a DNA test, and the results are in. Also, a guy from Venezuela has a story about socialism and the Democratic Party.
00:01:20.820Supreme Court made a good move on that, but it's just the beginning.
00:01:24.380Also, Jussie Smollett, we talked to the guy, the reporter, who is the brave enough guy to actually break this story and follow it from the beginning.
00:01:35.120We have Ben Sasse, who is, on Monday, putting a bill in front of the Senate, and it's going to be an on-record vote.
00:01:44.460The, what is it, don't kill our babies after they're born votes?
00:01:48.340I know it has a happier name than that, but that's basically what it is.
00:01:52.100Also, a guy from Venezuela, he graduated high school in Venezuela.
00:07:02.420Seems to be a little wasteful of energy for someone that loves the earth so much, where you'd open up the windows and run the air conditioning at the same time.
00:10:32.200See, that's, I'm only 1.3% Native American.
00:10:36.660So if you were a good 2.5%, the tier would just come down every time you thought of trash.
00:10:40.960Every time I thought of trash, it would just come right down off my face.
00:10:43.700Rafer Weigel is a, a journalist, a reporter from Fox 32 in Chicago.
00:11:01.640He was brave enough to do the work and actually report on the things that, it's my understanding, most journalists felt in Chicago, most police felt in Chicago, but no one was willing to really step up and pursue it because it was such a political hot potato.
00:11:19.100So, uh, uh, Rafer, welcome to the program.
00:11:26.840And I just wanted to tell you that this is a, uh, a personal, uh, personal coup for me having me on your show because, um, my girlfriend's family, they are huge fans of you.
00:11:37.680And given the fact that I work for the mainstream media, as it were, they've always been kind of looking at me with a side eye.
00:11:42.800So this is giving me a lot of street cred.
00:12:19.640And from the get go, it did not sound right.
00:12:22.200I mean, for one, you know, the area of the streeterville with, you know, guys in red hats and rope and bleach.
00:12:28.180And the fact that nobody would have stepped in, there would have been any, no witnesses, nobody would have pulled out a cell phone and taken some videos.
00:12:35.040So very early on, police went on the record with saying, this doesn't sound right.
00:12:38.680And we at Fox 32 were very careful to report that the headline was, Jesse Smollett says he was attacked.
00:12:46.320We didn't know if he was attacked or not.
00:12:49.300So, you know, for anybody who went with the headline, Jesse Smollett was attacked.
00:12:52.660I mean, I, you know, I'm no partisan as a journalist.
00:12:55.620We're supposed to keep it right down the middle.
00:12:57.240But, I mean, I did retweet at Joe Biden who said, you know, I just said, hey, it might be best to tone down the outrage until we know this actually happened.
00:13:04.560Because very early on, police said, you know, we've got no evidence that this actually happened.
00:13:09.380And given that location, I mean, you do have to give credit to the Chicago Police Department and the tech work that they did on that, you know, to now have this guy in custody.
00:13:18.700But, no, right from the get go, we were skeptical.
00:13:21.660Okay. So, why were you the, you know, one of the very few, if not the only one, that was really on this story telling the truth?
00:13:31.940Well, I can't speak for my colleagues.
00:13:33.760I can tell you that, you know, my managing editor also has a lot of contacts with police, and so do I.
00:13:55.160It was, I don't know, some would have said it was a risk, but I didn't consider it a risk because, you know, my sources are solid.
00:14:03.000I mean, they've never burned me before.
00:14:04.740So, you know, I think there was other skepticism in the media here in Chicago.
00:14:09.740I didn't read as much from my colleagues, but early on, you know, they were emphatic with me at TV, my sources, that, look, this is, we're not buying this.
00:14:20.620And, you know, they said, I can, you know, you can go on the record with me, but just, you know, quote me anonymously.
00:14:26.460And, you know, we've always heard the debate about anonymous sources, but at the end of the day, anonymous sources are the backbone of journalism.
00:14:31.300And, you know, there's a lot of criticism from both the right and the left when there's an article coming out quoting anonymous sources, but it works both ways.
00:14:38.840And in this case, my sources, you know, are reliable.
00:18:14.140And, you know, I don't know if this is an example of that or or or political bias, but it was incorrect.
00:18:21.480So, I mean, I just hope that, you know, other of my colleagues and I'm not trying to get on a soapbox here and act like I'm, you know, I feel bad talking this way.
00:18:31.260But, you know, at the end of the day, you got it.
00:18:33.540You got to check the facts before you run to the headline.
00:18:35.760Sorry, Rafer Weigel of Fox 32 Chicago.
00:18:38.380Rafer, I think, is there a possibility that this combined with several other cases in recent memory where the initial narrative had changed so quickly and we see something that couldn't possibly be a hoax turn into a hoax potentially here?
00:18:54.040I think there was a there's been a pattern over the past few years where we've we've used that, you know, journalists always will use the word allegedly or at least are supposed to in a case like this.
00:19:03.080But it almost becomes like a disclaimer.
00:19:05.660It's like you throw it in there because, you know, you have to.
00:19:09.340Shouldn't we be approaching every story?
00:19:11.860This is whether a conservative says it, whether a liberal says it, white or black, anything with a real sense of skepticism or at least an inquisitive sense?
00:19:20.360Because if we don't, we can get burned like so many in the media did.
00:19:23.300But this is journalism 101, what you described.
00:19:26.620I mean, and that's the journalism that I was taught is you have to be skeptical.
00:19:35.220And, you know, I mean, it's like we don't need any more knocks on my profession for being perceived as being, you know, biased when things like this happen.
00:19:44.400You know, yeah, you have to show restraint.
00:19:46.300You just have to stick with the who, what, when, where, why.
00:19:48.720I don't know if it's because now there's so many different media outlets and with social media and so forth that people are I don't know, maybe they're fishing for clicks.
00:20:13.620I'm, you know, I just hope that people are a little more responsible kind of going forward, you know, as far as this stuff goes.
00:20:19.880So, Rafer, let me ask you one quick question.
00:20:22.680I take a break and then I'd like to get an update on the other side on what the latest is.
00:20:26.260But is there any truth to the idea that the police knew who these two guys were and they either they were they were waiting for Jesse to to walk into the trap or they were going to just kind of let this go until he went on Good Morning America and said, yes, that's them.
00:20:48.980And I don't know why everybody's calling me liar, but we have heard that Rahm Emanuel was outraged by that and everybody in Chicago was outraged by that, that really we're just going to kind of be cool about it.
00:23:18.620He came in at 5 o'clock this morning, was processed, fingerprinted, and now is being held by the Cook County Courthouse by the Cook County Sheriff.
00:23:30.120As they said, that's common for high-profile detainees.
00:23:33.300The Chicago police are coming down really hard on this guy.
00:23:35.700I mean, the superintendent, Eddie Johnson, just says, you know, what the guy did essentially was shameful.
00:23:41.180The police are describing how, I mean, these two men who allegedly, you know, whatever, these two Nigerian brothers who were in on this or somehow, you know, met with Millett at the time,
00:23:51.740they were able to track their every move on security cameras to the cab they got into, and they were able to follow the cab to their home.
00:24:00.200I mean, they combed through every single hour of video and tracked a cab, and this was a good two-mile ride for this cab, and they got it.
00:24:11.120I mean, that's how they found out where these guys live.
00:24:13.040That's how they found out who they were.
00:24:15.080So, I mean, they have a mountain of evidence against Jesse Smollett.
00:24:20.020Now, what they don't have is the attack.
00:24:23.320I mean, that's the irony of it is that, you know, if he did do this and he wanted to get it on camera, they did it in the one place where there was no video surveillance of it.
00:24:31.480So, at this point, Smollett is not disputing that there was an attack.
00:24:35.400Because of the leaks in the Chicago PD, he knows his defense.
00:24:38.260He knows what he needs to be going against, and it's his word against theirs now.
00:24:41.160They're saying, you know, that he put them up to this, that he orchestrated this hoax.
00:24:45.260He's saying, no, these guys just randomly attacked me, and I didn't put them up to anything.
00:24:48.780So, that's kind of where things are going to go.
00:24:52.440And Smollett's legal team, you know, they released a statement.
00:24:55.400They're mounting an aggressive defense.
00:24:57.140They're going to fight this thing, you know, and go 12 rounds.
00:25:01.240I mean, the police, you have to put a stop to this, or the police are going to spend all of their time chasing down fake claims.
00:25:08.560There has to be a heavy penalty paid for this kind of stuff.
00:25:14.000And too many times, people are just let go, or they pay a fine.
00:25:16.960This is, I personally, I think this is a hate crime.
00:25:21.440He obviously, he obviously hated people so much that he wanted to smear them, whether that was Donald Trump or whatever.
00:25:28.620But is there any truth to the fact that this was motivated by his career, that he wrote the letter, that original letter, that, you know, was hateful towards him?
00:25:41.260And I read last night that he was upset that there wasn't more of an outcry just on that letter that he allegedly had sent.
00:25:51.420Now, I mean, I couldn't begin to speculate into Jesse Smollett's motivation if he did orchestrate this whole thing, why he would have done it.
00:25:58.740You know, obviously, it was an attention-grabbing, you know.
00:26:02.600If, in fact, he did orchestrate this hoax, it was obviously an attention-grabbing thing.
00:26:06.920As far as the letter, though, that's key.
00:26:08.800And a lot of people are losing sight of that.
00:26:10.480See, the FBI and the U.S. Postal Service, they are investigating that separately.
00:31:34.120Condemning infanticide should be done that way.
00:31:36.740It shouldn't need a recorded vote, but we need one now because a Democrat from Washington state has decided to block us from a unanimous consent passage.
00:31:45.220But this is sort of triggered in the public mind by what happened in New York and Virginia over the last month, where in New York, Governor Cuomo lit up the World Trade Center site in pink to celebrate pro-abortion legislation that repealed protections for an infant that had been born alive during an abortion.
00:32:03.340So at the moment of birth, they were stripping away protections and New York decides to celebrate it by lighting up the World Trade Center area in pink, which has historically been the color to celebrate the persistence and grit of women who beat breast cancer.
00:32:18.160I mean, literally, the color was a symbolic color celebrating life.
00:32:22.200And now they decided to reverse it and use it to celebrate death.
00:32:27.080And then in Virginia, the disgraced governor there, Northam, obviously has massive problems with human dignity across a whole bunch of dimensions.
00:32:35.720He's been on the radio defending infanticide.
00:32:39.160And so it became an opportunity to try to focus the public mind a little bit.
00:32:42.800And happily, we've been able to get through all the procedural hurdles that we get a floor vote next Monday night.
00:32:47.760So what do you think is going to happen?
00:32:49.400I think that the abortion zealotry industry has decided to try to intimidate a bunch of Democratic senators.
00:32:59.620And I honestly don't know what the vote's going to be.
00:33:01.920I know we're going to have a bunch of people opposing it now.
00:33:04.400A number of quasi-public health organizations, many of them really just abortion advocacy groups, have put out a letter condemning this Born Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act as getting in the way of private health care decisions.
00:33:22.900We're talking about babies that have actually been born alive and are on a table fighting for life, trying to cry and breathe and want food and warmth.
00:33:31.100And they're saying that's a private decision, which is truly bizarre.
00:33:35.980So I can't tell you what the vote's going to be.
00:33:38.440But the decision you made was to kill it.
00:33:41.960Okay, now it's no longer in your body.
00:33:45.000If you don't want that baby because you said kill it, that is an individual now that should be mandated to go to an adoption agency.
00:33:54.760I mean, you have to preserve that life.
00:34:46.840It's one of the main things that happened with the Romans and the Christians.
00:34:50.500The Christians looked so bizarre because Romans would have babies, and they'd throw them on a garbage barge, and they would just die from exposure.
00:34:57.900And the Christians felt that was wrong, and they would go get those children out of the garbage barges and take them and care for them.
00:36:12.040But the distinction they're trying to draw is that you don't need a bill to prohibit infanticide because we already have laws to prohibit murder.
00:36:18.840And so the distinction they're trying to weasel around is saying nobody is taking a baby that survives an abortion and taking a pillow and putting it over her face and actively suffocating her to death.
00:36:29.920We're just backing away from the table and allowing the baby to die on her own.
00:36:34.400Under this logic, you can kill 12-month-olds the same way.
00:36:37.120And you can also kill people like Terri Schiavo the same way.
00:38:17.420You can hear it, you can look at it on videos and I can tell it to you from first-hand experience that I suffered constant blackouts.
00:38:28.000I had to make lines for hours of food.
00:38:30.320I had to, well, don't even think about getting sick.
00:38:33.160Thankfully, I was young and healthy, but many of my friends who got sick, then they got terrible treatment in the hospitals because there was just no medicine to treat them with.
00:38:41.480Now, people will say that this is just Maduro because he's not doing socialism right, that things were different under Chavez.
00:40:06.980And let me tell you what is a very, very key difference between what would be Sweden's and their proposals of the Democrat socialists here.
00:40:15.440They want to expand the welfare state in America, yes.
00:40:18.820But they want to expand it even beyond what Sweden has.
00:40:21.560They want to increase taxes even beyond what Sweden has.
00:40:24.400And even worse, they're not even going to be able to raise enough tax revenue for all their proposals.
00:40:30.060Sweden is a very fiscally responsible country, Glenn.
00:40:35.800They don't have a large budget deficit like the United States.
00:40:38.520So if the Democrats really don't want to turn the United States into Venezuela by having to print money and create hyperinflation, then they will have to tell Americans the truth.
00:40:49.060They want to tax poor people at 50, 60, and 70 percent rates, not just the rich.
00:41:01.220I imagine that you meet a lot of young socialists.
00:41:06.960That is the, that's the rage right now.
00:41:10.200Can you tell us what the attraction is to people your age, to socialism?
00:41:16.220And when you talk to them, what is the aha moment?
00:41:19.700What is the thing that you say or start to discuss where they listen and go, oh, wait a minute?
00:41:25.700Yeah, they, they do understand what's going on in Venezuela once they hear from somebody who's actually from, from Venezuela, in my experience.
00:41:36.080I think that they believe that, you know, the Chavez, like you were saying, was a good person and Maduro was not.
00:41:42.740But when you actually explain them what's going on, they do change their minds.
00:41:46.060Most of them, some of them are just, I would say, lost.
00:41:48.900But most of them do change their minds and they're not radicals.
00:41:53.140And I don't think most Americans are radicals, but that's why we need to, to spread the word this way.
00:41:58.060And, you know, that's why I think that Venezuelans and victims of communism around the world are playing a very key role in the United States to fight against these lives of the Democrats.
00:42:09.520If we didn't have people who experienced socialism, how would we be able to, to fight it here, you know?
00:42:15.120But are you making a difference in your age group?
00:42:18.460I mean, what are the things that you say that, and if there are any, teach us how to speak to a millennial about socialism?
00:42:28.980I tell them about the facts in Venezuela.
00:42:33.780That socialism doesn't lead us to equality, which is what they want.
00:42:37.920And you have to speak to people relating to their goals.
00:42:41.120It's going to be basically impossible to change somebody's values or inherent goals for their society, for their perfect ideal society.
00:42:49.780Well, the reality is that socialist societies are not equal at all.
00:42:52.980They're even more unequal than capitalist society.
00:43:41.340But I'm saying that it's, it's very hard to, to persuade somebody on one conversation and tell them that, you know, they need to change completely their worldview.
00:43:52.800So what I do think is that you can persuade millennials, and that's what I've done, by telling them the truth.
00:43:59.820Nobody will ever implement your ideas perfectly, just like there are still subsidies, just like there's still government intervention in free market societies like the U.S. or Hong Kong and any other country.
00:44:12.180So if we want to live in a near livable world, then we need to live in a country of freedom and that still allows for inequality.
00:44:20.740What does, what does this mean to you and to your family when you see America teetering this close?
00:44:32.760We have never, ever been this close to losing the free market from the inside.
00:44:44.140I came to the United States specifically because of my university that sponsored me, of course.
00:44:49.340But I could have gone to, you know, to Spain with my parents, but I didn't because I think that the United States is a country where I thought, and I still think, though, that it is less likely for socialism to be implemented in the U.S.
00:45:03.160and in any other country in the world.
00:45:05.080It is like Ronald Reagan said at The Shining City on a Hill.
00:45:08.860And the only way to keep it that way is for us to fight against this murderous ideology, not just here in the United States, but everywhere around the world,
00:45:19.480because Venezuela is exporting this ideology by funding socialist movements abroad, in Europe specifically.
00:45:25.680You have several Dallas Cowboy Stadiums full of people listening to you right now.
00:45:33.380What should Americans know that you think maybe we don't know or understand?
00:45:40.360That the only—no country is safe from false promises and the lure for false promises,
00:45:48.900and that not every measure that the left will propose will take us to Venezuela,
00:45:55.780but little by little, taking away our freedoms, they are going to eventually lead us into a terrible society,
00:46:03.060a society that is stagnated like in Europe, or even worse, a society that is in decline like in Venezuela.
00:46:08.860So we need to do everything we can to vote, to protect, to speak out in favor of freedom.
00:46:15.260That means lower taxes, that means responsible government, that means freedom to immigrate, freedom to trade,
00:46:24.120all these freedoms that are necessary for a country to stay free.
00:46:29.540When you hear people talk about, in America, oppression and, oh, my life has been so tough,
00:46:35.620is that hard for you to sit through and listen to?
00:46:40.280It's a little laughable, to be honest.
00:46:42.240I understand that some people—like, everyone goes through very difficult things.
00:51:07.260The more they try and fight back, the more they were attacked by these people so-called doing the teaching.
00:51:13.400So what this has amounted to is that the Santa Barbara Unified School District has hired a group called Just Communities Central Coast.
00:51:22.640And they've been working with this Just Communities group for several years now, paid them more than a million dollars in taxpayer funds.
00:51:30.460And this group goes in and indoctrinates the teachers and the students.
00:51:34.320And their programming is just outrageous.
00:51:36.520So a nonprofit called Fair Education Santa Barbara was formed by these concerned parents.
00:51:45.480And we recently filed a lawsuit on their behalf in federal court here in Los Angeles against both the school district and this Just Communities outfit.
00:51:55.000It is amazing, Eric, is it not, how things have flipped?
00:51:59.100It's like we're back in the 1950s, except white is black and black is white.
00:52:09.300And one of the ironies of our cases is that we are bringing the case based on constitutional or statutes based on the U.S. Constitution that were put in place to protect minorities such as blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc.
00:52:27.900Now we're relying on those statutes to protect white people.
00:52:32.740When you talk about inclusivity training, what exactly are they teaching?
00:52:39.440Because they would make the argument, well, of course, it's good to be inclusive.
00:52:46.500Well, just just stepping back a second, this this this so-called implicit bias training is being taught all over the place now.
00:52:54.400It's it's required sort of education for federal workers ever since sort of a an executive order came down during the Obama administration as being taught more and more in schools.
00:53:07.420So implicit bias training in and of itself is is basically becoming the norm, whether you like it or not.
00:53:14.440The problem with this group is it goes way beyond the pale of your standard implicit bias training and is here.
00:53:24.820Let me read you something right from one of the documents that these parents gave us, which we've attached our complaint.
00:53:32.980And it's a it's a chart and in the left column, it says form of oppression and it uses and it says underneath that racism.
00:53:40.700And then just to the right of that, there's a column says privilege group says white people in the target group.
00:53:47.020It says it says people of color go back to the form of oppression column.
00:53:51.860It says religious oppression, privilege group, Christian people, target group, all others.
00:53:57.960So this is the kind of this is the kind of insanity that's being taught to the kids of the Santa Barbara Unified School District.
00:54:05.940And most of the parents out there we've spoken to had no clue this was going on in the schools.
00:54:10.660Wow. How your kid would have to come back if you're talking to your kid, they would have to come back and say some of this stuff to you.
00:54:19.200Well, that's how some of these people have been finding out about it.
00:54:23.700And and I've spoken to one parent and he had I thought it was a great suggestion.
00:54:28.560He said, you know, we have to sign a permission slip for our kids to go on a field trip and we should have to sign a permission slip.
00:54:38.500If we want our kids, our young kids to sit through this kind of training.
00:54:44.860But of course, the school district basically keeps it under wraps.
00:54:49.840They'll say they don't keep it under wraps, but but they basically do.
00:54:54.780And and so now thanks to our lawsuit, thanks to the attention this is getting in Santa Barbara, people are becoming aware of it.
00:55:02.300Another thing that we learned in this case that people are also becoming aware of is the the school board up there, which hires which hires this group and is so enamored with this just communities group is is made up mostly of of the same what I call, you know, alt left social warrior types.
00:55:24.580And this is just another example of how this creeping, you know, Alinsky esque kind of programming has been going through the schools.
00:55:34.360And and and and this is this is what the kids are learning growing up.
00:55:38.480Eric, it would be bad enough if this stuff was just being taught to kids in school.
00:55:42.860But this is actually costing the taxpayers a lot of cash, too, isn't it?
00:55:47.300That's correct. Over the course of the last several years, this school district has has authorized a payment of more than a million dollars to just community center coast of taxpayer funds.
00:55:59.300And the latest contract that was just entered in October is for another three hundred thousand dollars for the next school year.
00:56:07.420And, you know, it's remarkable. And all of this is being brought to the attention of the federal court.
00:56:13.040So, you know, we've got some some really important claims.
00:56:17.460It's a strong case. And we just hope we we get the right ruling.
00:56:21.440Who is that group? Who makes up that group? Who sponsored that group?
00:56:27.260This just community central coast? Yes.
00:56:29.320You know, it started, I believe, in St. Louis and it's these these sort of social justice types, very left wing and and basically like a it can't like a cancer.
00:56:45.480It has spread out to California and they created a base in the Santa Barbara area.
00:56:50.520And now they're trying to spread this orthodoxy throughout the state of California.
00:56:55.600It's it's very troubling. And, you know, one thing about one thing you learn about people on the left is they are great at organizing.
00:57:04.820They're much better at organizing than the conservative folks I know, you know, conservative people I know are much more independent, believe in liberty, believe in in free speech and want the government out of our lives.
00:57:18.200But these groups on the other side are just the opposite. They want the government to take over everything.
00:57:23.720And they they're they're just passionately organized to do what they're seeking to do.
00:57:29.720So, you know, they're putting up a fight. They're using their their, you know, typical tactics have started to try and silence us.
00:57:38.060But we won't be silenced. And and I you know, and along those lines, we have a few people that started this Fair Education Santa Barbara that are really brave people, because in this day and age, if you make these kind of arguments,
00:57:50.620I'm sure most of your listeners know the kind of attacks that we become subject to.