Glenn Blumberg joins us to talk about the Notre Dame fire, the Joe Biden update, the Duke anti-Semitism scandal, and much, much more. Plus, we discuss the crown of thorns and the True Cross.
00:00:00.000Welcome to the podcast. Oh my gosh, thank you. I appreciate you tuning in today. Well, I'm here. Well, not you. I've met the listeners. Oh, you're not glad that I am.
00:00:08.240Notre Dame fire, we start there today and talk about debunking the... There's already kind of social media, like, photoshops of, like...
00:00:15.660I think they have Osama bin Laden, like, coming in on a cable, like, he's in Mission Impossible. He crawled out of the sea.
00:00:21.200Like, it does not seem to be that at this point, although the final, you know, there's no final, you know, answer on what caused the fire.
00:00:29.700It does look like it was construction to do with this whole update they were doing there.
00:00:33.580I have a different take on this that I think maybe you will enjoy. I think this is a blessing in disguise, and we can talk about that coming up in the podcast.
00:00:43.760We also have the Joe Biden update that you did on TV last night, kind of walking you through part of that.
00:00:48.700I will say, you know, some of it's a little difficult to listen to and try to understand all these moving parts,
00:00:54.640because there's a lot of people involved in this with Joe Biden's actions in China,
00:00:59.740as well as some organizations you might not be familiar with.
00:01:02.380Easiest way to understand it is if you go to blazetv.com slash Glenn,
00:01:07.200and you can watch it on the chalkboard from last night's TV show.
00:01:11.620Now, you can sign up. You can use the promo code Glenn, save 10 bucks if you want to cancel during the free trial.
00:01:16.680I mean, I think you're evil and probably a communist, but go ahead and do that if you want.
00:01:21.840But you should watch this. You should know this information, because if Biden steps in, he's going to be the frontrunner.
00:01:26.560There's been four polls that have come out in the last few days.
00:01:29.280He's ahead in three of them, two of them by double digits over Bernie Sanders.
00:01:33.020So he is entering this race as the frontrunner. We need to know everything we can about him.
00:01:36.720Yeah. Also, we have Ami Horowitz on something that happened at UNC Duke that is really frightening.
00:01:44.640Truly, truly frightening, especially of how overt it was.
00:01:48.240Yeah. And no one is covering this anti-Semitism way beyond anything that I've seen in America
00:01:57.340that is all sanctioned by two universities.
00:02:01.700All that and more coming up on today's podcast.
00:02:05.160Triad Mobile is a phone service that will give you all of the great coverage that you want.
00:02:29.160They're just not going to take the money from you and then invest that in causes that you don't believe in,
00:03:26.840Then the wars started, and the emperors started, coming from Constantinople, now Istanbul.
00:03:41.040The crown of thorns and a relic of the true cross then went to Istanbul, where it stayed until 1238.
00:03:51.340Things started to get a little dicey for the emperor Baldwin in Constantinople, and he had already mortgaged everything he had, including the crown of thorns.
00:04:05.640That's when King Louis, in 1238, decided to see if he could buy the relics and bring them to Paris.
00:04:17.400He was looking to unite people, and he thought the crown of thorns would be the thing that could help him do it.
00:04:26.520He paid three times, three times what it cost to build the cathedral that it was kept in.
00:04:35.640It was not originally kept in Notre Dame.
00:04:41.120It was moved to Notre Dame after the relic barely escaped the French Revolution.
00:04:48.820In the French Revolution, they were collectivists, socialists, anti-capitalists, anti-religionists, anti-God, and they desecrated Notre Dame.
00:05:02.540They had sects on the altar and sacrifices.
00:05:07.560They said it was a temple of reason, not a temple of God.
00:05:12.840In the chapel where the true cross and the crown of thorns were kept, much of it was destroyed.
00:05:22.820Somehow or another, those two relics escaped, and they lay safe until after the Revolution and 1806.
00:07:21.900I had told my family and I had told you for different reasons that these churches and these cathedrals and these monuments will be lost in the coming years.
00:07:35.220All I could think of was, we had planned a trip to Paris just this last summer.
00:07:44.620And I canceled it because we were in the middle of doing business.
00:07:51.760And I had told my family, we have got to get to Paris before it burns down to the ground.
00:07:58.380And you won't see things like the cathedral anymore.
00:28:25.300It's been a labor of love, and it's been pushing a boulder up a hill, as they say in Hollywood, which is what it takes to get any movie made.
00:28:31.620But this one particularly, so I think we had to push a boulder up a hill wearing swimsuits in the snow, frankly, to get this movie made.
00:28:38.200But it has been kind of wildly successful and has exceeded our expectations.
00:28:43.340And more than anything, it's been really successful in changing people's minds and at least opening them to the possibility of looking at some critical issues in a new way.
00:28:51.320So I will tell you, Steve, I didn't want to see this movie because I thought it would be, you know, the same crappy fare of a Christian movie that was preachy and everybody who was not on the right side was evil.
00:29:04.360And you guys did such a great job of making this not that kind of movie, where I think it does reach a wide audience.
00:29:15.440I just talked to somebody last night who came up almost in tears and said, I have to thank you.
00:29:20.380I brought my family to see Unplanned, and I would never have gone.
00:29:27.500And I took the kids and, you know, they're teenagers, and they said, our conversations about this are completely different now.
00:29:37.420And I think, you know, so much of the credit goes to Abby Johnson because her amazing true story, which is the foundation for this film, is just incredible because she's someone who actually lived this story.
00:29:52.240And over time, she evolved and she sort of saw what was happening.
00:29:56.000And, of course, the filmmakers, Cary Solomon and Chuck Consulman, are just incredible writers and directors.
00:30:01.880And, you know, you mentioned earlier that so many of the films in the faith-based space tend to be not all that great.
00:30:07.120And, you know, I've been involved in productions on both sides.
00:30:09.520But what you find in the faith-based space especially is you'll get, you know, people who believe, you know, have the beliefs, but they don't really write well.
00:30:17.980And on the other hand, you'll get people in Hollywood who see an opportunity, you know, just to make money.
00:30:22.340And they might be good writers, but they don't have the beliefs.
00:30:25.620And with Cary and Chuck, you sort of get both.
00:30:28.240So, Steve, I want to talk to you a little bit about, you know, if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to see it, did it really fall?
00:30:35.560Well, we have a situation to where, and it was really apparent with Unplanned, you could not have advertising on entire networks, Lifetime, UpTV, Hallmark, HGTV, USA Food Network, Travel Channel, DYI, Cooking Channel.
00:31:09.800You know, Glenn, I think that people, frankly, are just afraid of this topic.
00:31:14.700And they're afraid of being, they're afraid of being tarnished, and they just don't want to touch it.
00:31:21.980Frankly, we don't buy that argument because Hollywood embraces those sort of ads for, you know, pro-abortion movies all the time.
00:31:30.080And as we understand it, Sandra Bullock now has a property that she's going to be doing where she's going to play Wendy Davis, the, you know, Texas state legislator who ran for governor.
00:31:39.860Does anyone really think that Google or, you know, Twitter will not be running ads for her film?
00:31:47.380Then what happened with Twitter on the opening weekend?
00:31:50.980Yeah, so what happened with Twitter was we had had the account up for seven months, and we had had up to, I think, about 100,000 followers or so.
00:31:58.620On opening weekend, the account was taken down on Saturday morning.
00:32:03.420All of a sudden, the account's not there.
00:32:05.180So what happened was our lead actress couldn't even follow her own movie on Twitter, and it caused an uproar.
00:32:10.820And to their credit, a lot of people, I think Shannon, Brady McFox, and others started, you know, tweeting Jack Dorsey saying, hey, what's going on?
00:32:17.460So they ultimately restored it a number of hours later, and, you know, the excuse that they gave us just doesn't hold water.
00:32:24.820What they said was that they thought the account may have been linked to someone who was a bad actor and had a different account taken down, and so I have an abundance of caution.
00:32:37.320But that really sort of smells because the account had been up for seven months, and it's just not a coincidence that they take it down on opening weekend.
00:32:45.120So you had to go to Congress, did you not, and testify?
00:32:49.120Our co-director, Chuck Cosman, went to Congress.
00:32:52.060He spoke before a Senate hearing with Senator Cruz, and the topic was big tech censorship of conservative ideas.
00:32:59.200And by the way, it's not just Twitter.
00:33:00.860We try to run banner ads on Google, and Google advertises, you know, the banner ads as a service that's open to anyone for any viewpoint, any legitimate viewpoint.
00:33:09.440And they simply refused to accept our banner ads.
00:33:12.840And to make the situation worse, and this is really kind of incredible, the day after Chuck testified, Google, when you did a Google search on the film, Unplanned, it brought up the poster, and next to it, it described the film as drama slash propaganda.
00:33:30.040This is the day after he testified before the Senate.
00:33:32.600And, you know, we immediately then, you know, started checking to see what they were doing with other films.
00:33:38.320And if you can believe it, the classic Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will by Lenny Reifenstahl, they didn't mark that as propaganda.
00:35:07.240And it's just so rife with hypocrisy, because when you think about how even to this day, so many voices on the left continue to lament the blacklisting of the 1940s.
00:35:16.740And they lionize people like, you know, Dalton Trumbo and Paul Robeson, who were denied a platform and denied the opportunity to work because of their opinions.
00:35:26.360And so many of these same people on the left are doing the exact employing the exact same tactics today.
00:35:31.400And it's like, why, why are you afraid to engage in these battle of ideas?
00:35:35.800So what do you what do you think we do?
00:35:43.260Because we're really only playing to our own tribe.
00:35:45.620If we can't, if you're only hearing about it on Fox News, CBN, the Glenn Beck program, you're you're playing, you're preaching to the choir.
00:35:55.040Well, you know, it is an uphill battle, but I think we have to kind of remain steadfast.
00:36:00.100And I think, you know, look, victory is for the bold.
00:36:04.900And the good news is in this day and age with the technology, it's never been easier for somebody to create a message and get it out there.
00:36:13.400Now, the flip side of that is because it's never been easier, there's a proliferation of stories and film.
00:36:19.800So it takes more to rise above and get noticed.
00:36:23.240And that's where you do need the marketing.
00:36:24.680But, you know, you can I will say this Facebook actually has been very even handed and fair with us.
00:36:32.300Yeah, the page has been up for, you know, for months and we've had 17 million trailer views.
00:36:37.040And I've had some friends say to me when I told them that the film was on on Facebook, they were like, oh, my God, how did you manage to keep that up?
00:36:44.280So, you know, look, I don't know if we slip through the cracks, but, you know, when Ted Cruz has these hearings, when we continue to put pressure on, I think that's what we have to do.
00:36:54.040And, again, I just think that we have to we have to not be afraid to push for what we want and make sure, you know, stories are told on both sides.
00:37:02.820What are you going to do with the film now?
00:37:21.180Did you at any time worry that this thing would be either a dirge or it would be one of those things where people would think, oh, geez, I should go see that movie, but I just don't want to go sit through an abortion movie.
00:37:35.580I mean, you hit the right balance to where you actually feel good leaving the audience or leaving theater.
00:37:42.740You know, it's an interesting question.
00:37:44.140I don't know whether we considered that possibility.
00:37:46.620I think the filmmakers just made the movie that they thought needed to be made.
00:37:51.180And they trusted that, you know, if they did it right, people would come, and they have.
00:37:56.680So, you know, we opened in fourth place, defying all expectations, opening weekend.
00:38:01.380We were in seventh place last weekend.
00:38:03.400And now in our third weekend, we were in tenth place, yes, on Sunday.
00:38:08.180And, you know, we're competing with big studio tentpoles like Shazam and Captain Marvel and Dumbo.
00:38:14.600So, you know, the next step is going to be DVD and streaming.
00:38:17.980And we've had a lot of people approach us because they want to get those right.
00:38:22.160So we're in the midst of discussing those deals now.
00:38:24.240So hopefully, you know, in the next three to four months, we'll be out there on DVD and more people will have access.
00:38:37.460You know, if they really represent all of America, you would think that they would want to have this movie on and they would want to show both sides.
00:51:22.840Now, I'm not saying this is going to lead to a pogrom, although it did lead to a, you know, when I released that video, there was that one,
00:51:29.940I mentioned the incident where they were printing swastikas in some dormitories, but in the days that followed the release of the video,
00:51:38.640this actually has increased and there were anti-Semitic posters put up in the library.
00:51:43.500But these are the kind of events that lead to significant problems for Jews.
00:51:48.820And what's so important to point out here is this did not happen, I know this is obvious, but I think it bears repeating.
00:51:56.620This did not happen in some kind of Ku Klux Klan rally that happened to have caught, right?
00:52:01.220This is at one of our, two of our most prestigious universities in this country.
00:52:05.080And, you know, we're used to the usual suspects of anti-Semitism coming from neo-Nazis, radical Islamists, right?