On this episode of the podcast, I sit down with Walter Kern, founder and editor-of-large of County Highway, a newspaper without a digital footprint, to discuss what it means to be a rebel in an age when we need them most.
00:00:00.000Too many reporters are terrified to be exposed as a conservative or a centrist or even just un-liberal, I guess.
00:00:07.320It's a creative industry, so of course it tends to lean left politically.
00:00:12.560But I can tell you that underneath all of the division in the media, there lies a pile of industry gamesmanship.
00:00:21.300And in this media hell pit, the true hero is the person willing to expose all of it, no matter what the cost is.
00:00:28.940The Wall Street Journal described today's podcast guest as Middle America's defiant defender, probably because of his work to examine the real America, a country that seems to have forgotten itself.
00:00:42.720He recently launched America This Week, a podcast with Matt Taibbi, where they perform an autopsy on the news of the day.
00:00:50.320His latest major project is as a founder and editor-of-large of County Highway, a newspaper, a newspaper without any digital footprint at all.
00:01:04.840It is storytelling for the real America.
00:01:07.060Like, you know, if the New Yorker didn't portray the middle of the country as a breeding ground for inbred morons, and then also didn't have political cartoons that nobody understands.
00:02:21.640Amidst these haunting truths, the real hero arises, and it's Good Ranchers as the number one place to get America's best beef, pork, chicken, seafood delivered.
00:02:32.220Good Rancher products are transparently sourced, all American, and delicious.
00:02:36.680When you shop at GoodRanchers.com, you don't have to question what's in your meat or where your meat's coming from.
00:02:41.840100% American guarantee, transparent vaccination policy.
00:02:46.780You'll always know where your meat comes from and what's in it.
00:02:50.220Take the mystery out of the meat aisle.
00:02:53.480Visit GoodRanchers.com, use the promo code GLEN, save $30, and free express shipping on your box of America's best meat and seafood today.
00:04:03.400In fact, you're one of the biggest defenders of the middle of the country that is out there.
00:04:08.880Yeah, I'm a fierce defender because that's where I come from.
00:04:11.580That's where my parents come from, and that's where I live now.
00:04:15.020I mean, the excursion to Princeton and Oxford and New York City where I had my first jobs in magazines was kind of an aberration, it turns out.
00:04:24.040But, you know, I grew up in Minnesota, and like F. Scott Fitzgerald, everybody dreams of going to the big city when they, you know, are out there on the farm.
00:04:33.160And I got there, and I saw what there was to see, but it was like going to the fair.
00:04:38.000And now I live in Livingston, Montana, and I didn't last.
00:04:57.400I mean, you know, it was a dream, but, you know, lottery has to happen in many ways.
00:05:02.280I get there, and I love it, but I don't live there anymore because I saw what was coming.
00:05:10.700But then I find myself going right back to the small little town like the town that I was from because it's, I don't know, everything just makes sense.
00:05:25.280Well, it's a scale that is coherent and explicable and understandable to me.
00:05:31.200You know, I like seeing the same people over and over.
00:05:34.020I like being able to hear their stories and then catch up on their stories a month later.
00:05:40.320That makes the narratives around me make sense rather than, you know, seeing a strange face, never seeing it again, seeing somebody twice in a couple of years.
00:05:53.220I get to have a ritual that is sort of personally nourishing and that gives me ongoing contact because, you know, we just, we don't know each other's stories anymore because we don't have a place to share them.
00:06:07.040In a small town, that's exactly what you're able to do.
00:09:26.400Besides the fact that you're surrounded and constantly stimulated in a big city, you also can have moments of crushing loneliness where nobody, you know, everybody is busy.
00:09:42.940Everybody's at the office chasing the dream.
00:09:45.140Small town people tend to have more time and thus they have the ability to sort of break out of their routine to help each other, to care for each other and so on.
00:09:55.920And it's just a human scale that works for me.
00:09:59.980So when you look at the news of the day, one of the things I like, I'm going up to the mountains actually tonight and I'm going to be with farmers tomorrow.
00:10:12.420And the one thing I like is they're just it's so much more common.
00:10:50.140You know, when I used to write for GQ magazine and really wore my sort of slick magazine journalist hat, I once said to the editor, I want to go out to Nevada where Basque shepherds live.
00:11:06.820And I want to find the person who is least in touch in America.
00:11:10.980I want to find a guy who's literally been on top of a mountain with his sheep for a couple of months.
00:11:15.360And then I want to ask him questions from the news.
00:11:18.480Like, what do you you know, how should we solve this problem?
00:11:22.420Because I started to realize that even back then, and this was the late 90s, the information glut was making it almost impossible for people to reach common sense conclusions.
00:11:35.360And so I was like, let's let's swing the other way and find people who are completely isolated with their common sense and their their memories and maybe a little bit of reading that they've done and see if they don't have a more sane perspective.
00:11:50.740So is there I mean, because honestly, you talk to people and they're like, we can't spend this much money.
00:11:58.140And we could solve this at a table, you know, around, you know, around a diner table and we could solve the spending or we could solve, you know, a lot of different things.
00:12:10.060But nobody when you get to Washington or when you get to New York.
00:12:23.800Well, the experts tend to withdraw into circles in which they are not criticized, in which they affirm each other's conclusions, in which they're looking for advancement within that circle, circle.
00:12:38.340And they get further and further from the primary data.
00:12:43.280And, you know, for example, I was just last week in Elko, Nevada, which is a very isolated central Nevada city.
00:12:51.900And I'm talking to people about economic problems and the adversities they're facing.
00:12:59.220And I'm noticing that around the edges of this town, people are really poor.
00:13:02.700A lot of people are living in their cars.
00:13:05.060A lot of people are obviously intoxicated on drugs that maybe didn't exist 10 years ago because they're acting differently.
00:13:13.760And I just wish I could bring people from, you know, inside the Beltway or whatever, Hollywood, to just see what their country is and what it's facing.
00:13:24.280And I don't have to argue you should spend less money.
00:13:28.000I can show you that there is want, there is need, and there is difficulty.
00:13:35.180But just not being able to see that makes people go crazy, I think.
00:13:40.580They become abstract, $100 billion off to here, $100 billion off to there, inflation rates and so on.
00:13:47.620But they need to see its toll, its real world effects.
00:13:52.400And I think a lot of people, between the phone and between just the isolation that comes in living in these sort of walled-off, paradisical places that our rather wealthy leaders live in, they're just missing what's happening.
00:14:07.720I think that's the problem with this society that's being led by the elites is they can't be bothered with the small little problems.
00:14:17.500They'll just have to deal with that themselves.
00:14:19.380We're building this new whole big world.
00:14:22.940And so they don't actually see the effects that it has on regular people because they're going for this big abstract paradise.
00:14:33.560Well, they're looking upstream at where the money is coming from, where the power is flowing from, and so on.
00:14:39.760And they're not looking downstream at the effects of the decisions they make.
00:14:44.220And if they could see, hey, man, there's a flood down there.
00:16:53.380They remember, you know, the beginnings of the global warming scare when people thought, you know, there were going to be super storms with 300 mile per hour winds.
00:17:48.400You know, everybody from people who expected, you know, a religious style apocalypse, you know, a theological apocalypse to people who thought the weather was just going to turn on us.
00:18:00.200He's always talking about volcanoes and earthquakes and sunspots.
00:18:08.340I get up in the middle of the night because I'd have to get up at, you know, two, three o'clock in the morning and I listen to him and I just love it.
00:18:14.500I heard him do an interview once with a guy who swore that if he was safe in his house or in his car or somebody else's house.
00:18:24.440But the minute he stepped off his porch or anything that was over his head, it would begin to rain rocks and it would only rain rocks on him.
00:18:35.400And I remember Art just saying this, hmm, rocks.
00:18:41.720It was unclear, it was unclear what Art thought of his audience.
00:18:49.500You know, some nights he seemed to have total contempt for them.
00:18:52.860You know, they'd call in and they'd say they'd hit a Bigfoot with their car or they'd found a hole on their ranch.
00:18:58.420They dropped a rock down and it never hit bottom.
00:19:03.320You know, the alien abductees and so on.
00:19:06.320What's funny is just as they thought the world was going to end back then, they were equally obsessed with aliens, UFOs, all the things that are still in the news now.
00:19:15.820So, can we go there for a second because I've always been the guy you don't want to be on the Titanic with on the first half.
00:19:29.580Because as it's going out, I'm saying, why are the engines running at full speed?
00:21:17.180I see catastrophe everywhere, but I believe in human.
00:21:21.140I believe in people in the human spirit that it may go dark for a while, but there will be flashes that will bring us into something new and great.
00:21:34.240I wouldn't say a catastrophist, but this all has to do with our story and may have to do with my relationship to radio.
00:21:41.920When I was a kid living in Phoenix, Arizona, in the mid 70s, there was a late night talk show by a radio preacher called a Garner Ted Armstrong.
00:21:51.760And he had a kind of end of the world show, which which predicted that every little war or something was going to end a nuclear catastrophe and so on.
00:22:00.980And this was around the time my family converted to Mormonism and Mormonism.
00:22:06.320In the mid 70s, was very concerned with things like stockpiling food, canned goods and so on.
00:22:14.420And between the two things, I became sensitized to the idea that things could change very suddenly.
00:22:21.980And maybe they didn't do that for a while.
00:22:26.300But when something like COVID came along, I had long been prepared.
00:22:31.740And in a strange way, it didn't affect me as seriously.
00:22:52.200But I am optimistic in the sense that, you know, you started by saying you're a champion of the middle of the country.
00:22:58.260And I am, in some ways, because it needs a champion.
00:23:02.940It's definitely, you know, taken its knocks.
00:23:05.960It's used as the foil for everything now.
00:23:10.820You know, and the middle of the country has survived economic distress, deindustrialization, opiate plague, forever wars that have inordinately taken its young people and sent them back injured in the mind and the body.
00:23:34.380That's a pretty stalwart set of people to go through all this, I think.
00:23:40.700But in any case, I'm optimistic because when I get out among people and I drive around, I probably put 20,000, 30,000 miles on my car a year.
00:23:56.260And I see a reservoir of goodness, I guess, charity, kindness, basic, you know, you can call them Judeo-Christian values or you can call them human values, I don't care, that haven't been as disturbed by events as you would fear.
00:24:26.680I think the American dream or the simple hope of owning a house, you know, someday paying off your car, putting your kids through college and so on, is escaping people even in the kind of sensible, stoic middle part of the country.
00:25:06.360But these are not normal times we live in.
00:25:08.760This is why you need to have a Jace case on hand.
00:25:11.520It is personalized emergency medication kit that contains five essential antibiotics, which treat the most common and deadly bacterial infections.
00:25:20.420It's customizable with dozens of add-on medications available so you can choose the ones that best fit you and your family's needs.
00:25:27.840They even have ivermectin as an add-on.
00:25:50.900What do you—I want to talk to you about Israel, but I first want to talk to you about the shocking amount of acceptance of anti-Semitism.
00:26:42.920And you—I'm seeing a shocking number of people dismissing it, claiming it's not real now, thinking that somehow or another it's justified.
00:26:56.620What do you think of—what does that say about us and the world?
00:27:01.760Because it's happening all over the world.
00:27:03.400So I answer every question with a story because that's how I think.
00:27:09.300I grew up in rural Minnesota, and the first time I met a Jewish kid was at Princeton.
00:27:16.240And I started to find that all my friends were Jewish.
00:29:23.940So, in other words, I was sensitized to anti-Semitism.
00:29:27.400And also, I've got to say, as a young man in the early 70s, the wars of Israel against its neighbors, you know, the Yom Kippur War and the Six-Day War, were portrayed rather heroically, you know, as a little guy fighting off enemies that surrounded him.
00:29:52.220So, that's where I come from culturally and in terms of my, you know, social life.
00:29:59.480When this war, I guess we could call it that already, broke out, my breath was taken away.
00:30:08.500Because it's not that this is modern terrorism.
00:30:15.800Where, you know, where Cossacks come through a village and cut off heads and rape people and so on.
00:30:22.220I was with my son when it started and I said, Charlie, you're going to see a reaction from Jewish people that comes out of the deepest reservoirs of fear and memory here.
00:30:37.860This isn't just a horror in the moment.
00:30:40.780This is going to stir trauma from generations and hundreds of years of, you know, of ostracism and violence.
00:31:49.000Well, I'm going to kind of revise what I said, because at the same time, I was horrified.
00:31:58.380And at the same time, my heart went out to the victims and to all my friends who have family there, you know, who travel back and forth and so on.
00:32:07.300And I was afraid that the intense emotionalism that was being released by this would become the pretext for some giant mistake.
00:32:21.200You know, I wish after 9-11, I knew what I knew now.
00:34:23.120And, and, uh, whether this gets sorted out in any, uh, in any practical way, uh, it may become the pretext for giant power moves that don't really reflect necessity.
00:34:42.020But really has, I mean, we look at World War II with Hitler and, you know, we see that as a necessity to act against him.
00:34:51.460And it was, but really it was a setup from World War I and, you know, the peace so-called peace made by World War I and World War I was caused by a bunch of elites wanting to change the face of Europe.
00:35:04.700I mean, when this happened, my first thought was, okay, we have Ukraine.
00:35:34.600This could easily spiral out of control into a global war.
00:35:40.020And global war is what you need to reset everything.
00:35:44.140Everybody just wants the war to end and they don't really care if it doesn't go back to the way it was.
00:35:49.460You know, when, when I was in college, uh, studying poetry and English literature, I read about an American poet, Robert Lowell, who was a pacifist and who agreed to go to jail rather than, uh, fight in World War II.
00:36:07.320Um, I didn't understand if ever there was a just war, at least as it was portrayed to me, it was World War II.
00:36:13.460What kind of, um, egotist, in a way, would sit it out for his principles.
00:36:21.580But I'm, I, I'm not saying I've become a pacifist in the meantime, but I'm starting to understand more and more that violence is not the answer to violence.
00:36:31.500I think if this had just been a normal attack, it would be possible to take that position a little bit more, um, in a more untroubled fashion.
00:36:46.500But I saw pictures, I saw things that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.
00:36:51.940Um, and to pretend that they didn't lodge deep and that they didn't inflame me is to lie.
00:36:57.720Uh, but at the same time, to know what the next step is and in terms of what I support and how I talk about it and who I listen to.
00:37:07.460Um, see, it's funny because I, I think, Walter, that the, the answer, and it's not necessarily our answer, it's Israel.
00:37:16.240Um, Israel has a right to respond and defend itself in the way it feels.
00:37:21.440Um, I think the answer is, is very clear.
00:37:26.480The problem is I don't trust any of the players, including us.
00:37:51.400A rich Texan, a billionaire once said to me, conspiracies, how the hell else do you think things get done?
00:38:00.640Um, and, and that's always stuck with me.
00:38:02.880I mean, we know that people, uh, make agreements and meet in rooms and make deals above our head because they come out historically afterwards.
00:38:12.160And we find out, you know, uh, about secret treaties and, uh, and all sorts of things that weren't apparent at the time.
00:38:20.740And all I know is that we're going to find out around this, uh, set of events that there are things we're blind to now.
00:38:30.280And they may cause us to regret moves that we make in a more, in a triggered, reflexive way now.
00:38:37.080In fact, we can be certain that will happen.
00:38:39.040Um, so I guess, I, I, knowing the extent to which Hamas went to inflame me, one of my ways of resisting, uh, their, their maneuver, their manipulation, is to not be driven into some panicked, angry response.
00:39:29.900I don't, uh, the, the, the worst thing that can happen is knee jerk reaction.
00:39:36.080When you're angry, you never make, when you're afraid, you never make a good decision.
00:39:41.080But that doesn't mean that you don't fall back, watch, learn.
00:39:47.300And then if it's the right thing to do reason wise and morally execute it, do it.
00:39:56.220What I, what I'm most concerned about as we sit here speaking is the anti-Semitism in the United States that's flowing out of this.
00:40:04.000Because, I mean, I've got friends whose kids are in school or at college, Jewish friends, uh, who wish their kid could come home now.
00:40:13.000Um, even kids in, uh, younger, you know, elementary schools where the teachers are espousing a certain kind of anti-Jewish rhetoric that, that's making them uncomfortable.
00:40:27.800So I, I'm concerned about my friends here, um, and, and not just my friends, but their families and the extended community.
00:40:35.600Because anti-Semitism, as I studied at college, and it was a big topic in the late seventies and early eighties when I went to college, how did the Holocaust happen?
00:40:46.660Uh, we studied the literature that came out of it.
00:40:49.520In many ways, we weren't able to understand it for 20, 30, 40 years.
00:40:54.460Um, I still didn't understand it until the last 20.
00:41:23.420Uh, we didn't enter the war to save the Jews, the Jews.
00:41:27.160Um, and, and certainly in the 1930s, as the anti-Semitism was congealing and consolidating itself in the Nazi party, some of the arguments that were being made against Jews were similar to ones that are being made now.
00:41:42.240And, and, and so I, I, I don't know that a lot of people who have a superficial education now would recognize that run-up, uh, to the final solution if it hit them on the head.
00:41:59.880But maybe it is hitting them on the head because the conspiracy theories, uh, that really matter, those racial conspiracy theories, which take out entire group, give them common characteristics.
00:42:11.240But that, isn't that what an evil history, isn't that though, what DEI and, and social justice and all of that is, you're taking the white man.
00:42:24.020I don't care if it's white, black, yellow, it doesn't matter to me.
00:42:26.260You're taking in this case, the white man because of their history, who they, you know, were related to, even if they weren't directly related, the things that happened, that makes them inherently bad and evil.
00:42:42.120That's really what antisemitism is, except it's about Jews.
00:42:46.740Well, you know, German antisemitism came out of German scientific racism, which was a, a kind of late 19th century, um, belief that the races were really distinctive.
00:42:59.940Language and, uh, and, and, and heritage made them groups with specific qualities that could be discerned.
00:43:09.260Maybe they could be, uh, graded on, in terms of intelligence and other characteristics.
00:43:14.640And so it was this, you know, if, if you said, trust the science in 1905 in Germany, racism was the science.
00:43:25.000And here in America, it was stronger here in America.
00:43:27.760I mean, this is, this is Darwin, then his cousin, what was his name?
00:43:31.740Galton that comes up with eugenics and going, Hey, wait a minute.
00:43:35.040There are different races of people and some of them are farther behind.
00:43:40.400Maybe we can make the superhuman, right?
00:43:42.720That's, and it, I mean, well, you know, recently someone, someone I would call left wing, uh, said to me, uh, this is all about Israel oppressing Brown people, or this is part of the general trend around the world to oppress Brown people.
00:44:01.340And I said to this young person, when I was young, Jews were Brown people.
00:44:10.200The idea that they're now the ultimate insiders, the colonists, the oppressors, uh, really takes a big leap.
00:44:18.560Um, what they were, were the ghetto dwelling outsiders of Europe who barely had rights as people and, uh, were not top of the ladder.
00:44:30.000Um, and if they've managed somehow, if many Jews, because of Israel and other reasons have, you know, have managed to live secure, prosperous lives and gain, uh, wealth and influence and so on, that doesn't mean you're dealing with society's ever present winners.
00:45:19.280You learn these things, you educate yourself and you work hard.
00:45:24.700When, when that happens, success comes.
00:45:28.820Well, you know, I don't want to trade in even positive stereotypes, uh, too heavily, and, uh, it's not an area of expertise, but I will say that I see the potential in the United States right now for an outbreak of real anti-Semitism.
00:45:51.840Not the subtle kind that's used to cancel people and so on, but, but actual, no Jews allowed violence.
00:46:02.020A Berlin synagogue was firebombed the other day.
00:46:05.280Uh, I, I believe a Tunisian, uh, synagogue too.
00:46:10.140Um, and this can be a conflagration that gets out of control because I don't think young people in this country have been sufficiently.
00:46:21.840Efficiently educated about what happened in the 20th century and how it happened.
00:46:28.120They may know what happened, but they don't know how it happened.
00:46:31.280And it happened because the state needed an enemy.
00:46:54.600And, and, and, and in this time of racial sensitivity in the U S, uh, it's probably hard to find an outside group to scapegoat anymore.
00:47:06.140Um, you know, most of them have been, you know, have, there's been a campaign for understanding, uh, of all sorts of races, people of different persuasions and so on.
00:47:19.860But I don't know that it's been done very well for the Jewish population here.
00:47:27.160I, I, I, I think they maybe thought that never forget job was done or maybe we've, we've, we thought that was done.
00:47:43.200Um, but vigilance on that, on that front is imperative.
00:47:52.140According to a recent study of hundreds of post-abortive women, 60% of women report that they would have preferred to give birth had they received more support from others and had more financial security.
00:48:09.280And pre-born is there for women in their darkest hour, deciding between the life and death of the precious child.
00:48:14.760The reality is women are being pressured to make this fatal decision.
00:48:18.720Um, and they're being told that their babies are just a clump of cells.
00:48:21.420Well, they're not pre-born welcomes women with God's love and introduces them to the beautiful life growing inside of them, which doubles their baby's chance to live.
00:48:30.840When you support pre-born, you not only support women, you empower them.
00:48:34.660And your donation of $28 will help a woman make that choice because she doesn't want to regret it for the rest of her life.
00:48:41.640It gives her the ultimate blessing, life.
00:48:45.960$28 buys an ultrasound, gives it to her for free.
00:48:50.000Keyword baby at pound 250 or go to pre-born.com slash Glenn.
00:48:54.560It's one thing to say that you don't see it, um, you know, 15 years ago.
00:49:04.940You start to see the rise in anti-Semitism and, and you're like, but when you are, when you're having people around the world and even here in America, uh, UPenn just had a bunch of students that were holding a major Palestinian, uh, march.
00:49:23.580And they were, they were chanting about the, there's only one solution for the Jews.
00:49:35.060How do you not see it when you're chanting in Australia, gas the Jews, gas the Jews, or you're talking about a final solution?
00:49:44.260Well, I, I, as I say, I, this all kind of took me by surprise.
00:49:53.780I, I would like more time to understand the situation.
00:49:57.820I, I would like more time to understand the potential solutions to what has been a problem my whole life.
00:50:06.000I mean, I, I, I, I'm expected to come up with a, with an answer to, uh, a question that has been broiling my whole life and that they haven't solved, you know, um, I, I, I, I, I look at Gaza and I don't think it looks like a very good place to live.
00:50:23.680I don't think it looks like a happy way to live.
00:50:26.060Um, and, and there needs to be a better way and I'm not sure what it is, but it's not paragliding into music fest.
00:50:39.140It's not, you know, slaughtering mothers and children.
00:50:43.320Um, and I sometimes feel like we are in the 1930s in which we are watching a kind of escalation and, and a madness take hold that demands a climax.
00:50:57.340And I don't know what that climax is going to be.
00:51:00.560Uh, and I, I wish we could step back from it.
00:51:04.540uh i'm no military expert i don't know how israel um isolates this group isolates the guilty
00:51:13.860rescues its hostages if that's possible and and creates a secure situation into the future
00:51:21.280you know but uh i i wish i hope that that's possible rather than what becomes a domino
00:51:31.560series of other powers getting there seeing an advantage for themselves you know trying to get
00:51:39.960leverage using this with their own populations you know um iran keeps its people down too man i know
00:51:48.580and it had them in the streets um and there were we weren't and until covid we once we stopped paying
00:51:57.160attention because of covid all those people marching in hong kong all those people in iran
00:52:03.240they just disappeared yeah they just disappeared we were insufficiently supportive of that yes
00:52:08.920democracy movement in iran and here we are you know um the problem is that the time
00:52:17.380the time to be calm the time to be reasoned uh never seems to come when violence uh stalks the land
00:52:27.980everybody wants to get their licks in first before they sign that peace treaty um as we speak israel has
00:52:37.980not yet really responded um in any large scale way um so i i don't know what's coming every one of us
00:52:47.820is poised every day to open the newspaper in the morning or turn on our phones and see a conflagration
00:52:55.580that they didn't expect and don't want what's frightening in a completely different way is um
00:53:03.660um my company is mercury radio uh arts orson welles company was mercury radio theater
00:53:11.620loved him and i i often have wondered how could people have fallen for war of the worlds the father
00:53:18.800of fake news orson welles yeah how could they have done that um we're kind of in that period just in a
00:53:27.020different way we're more you know we have too many sources for one source to fool us but now
00:53:33.420with ai and the complete lack of belief in any institution um you can see i mean we are in the
00:53:43.8801930s again in many ways just so so the so so politics in some ways always reflects the dominant
00:53:52.220technologies of the moment and i remember watching a speech of hitler at one of the nuremberg rallies
00:53:59.420and thinking hitler isn't possible without the megaphone without the loudspeaker system correct
00:54:05.880there was no way for him to address tens and tens of thousands of people without loudspeakers and
00:54:13.160klieg lights all right and he was the master of those two technologies he's sort of the dark master of
00:54:19.000them now we're in a different technological age and uh there are some that tell us that uh you know
00:54:26.400social media and the free internet are luxuries we can't afford because they can be manipulated
00:54:31.880by by tyrants disinformation agents and so on i tend to think though that they may be protecting us
00:54:42.620somewhat uh oh yeah yeah i i think we've learned more about our leaders and learn more about the deals
00:54:50.900that get done and you know the truth not that we've gotten to it about covid uh would never have
00:54:58.340come out without social media my fear is that the clampdown is coming yes and and that the power that
00:55:05.180be powers that be that want to wage war you know whether it's warranted or not or in ways that
00:55:12.300you know we might not wish uh will get total control of this thing and engineer the conversation in the
00:55:20.720way they want de-amplify the voices uh of critics skeptics and others and are yeah but i mean real
00:55:29.780control of it is terrifying and i and glenn as we as we sit here that is my biggest fear for for this
00:55:37.700country other than the real world uh problems that are going on you know the opiate crisis and so on
00:55:43.700but you see everything else is downhill of freedom of expression see once that goes you no longer have
00:55:50.700the ability to see even see your own problems clearly you're you're you're a pure captive of
00:55:56.720propaganda um and so just this week uh the new york times reports oh israel bombed a hospital uh and
00:56:05.640there are 500 dead well a day and a half after that we know that that wasn't exactly the story
00:56:11.320and the reason we know that is because there are other sources uh correct and almost immediately
00:56:17.940we got skepticism about those claims and we got other reports and so on and we've kind of worked out
00:56:24.900what happened now uh pretty close to the truth two days later that's a tribute to the freedom of the
00:56:33.080internet and the freedom of social media and independent media especially if we were to lose
00:56:38.400that though maybe the new york times or whoever's on the top of the info he wouldn't have wanted to
00:56:46.100admit error in that and uh maybe they wouldn't have had to so uh if we lose if we lose this this
00:56:56.780complexity and this multifarious uh source that allows people from all sides to chime in even the
00:57:06.800worst sides we may not be able to process events and we'll just become the captive of masters who will
00:57:13.980whip us this way and that way and they're going to use this as an excuse because whatever the right
00:57:21.240or wrong of the palestinian israeli conflict is there are people who see it as an opportunity
00:57:26.060to um gain control sure i mean in the weirdest uh event ever the new york times gets this story wrong
00:57:37.040and then i see people calling for the internet censorship because there's uh you know too much
00:57:43.000disinformation out there well in other words the most trusted sources get things wrong and uh that
00:57:51.280becomes a uh pretext for for censorship um it's only the places like the new york times that really
00:57:58.960deserves scrutiny because little people on little accounts saying weird things don't cause major
00:58:05.740protests across the world correct but but they get a story wrong and maybe a capital city burns down
00:58:12.300an embassy is stormed and every news um newsroom in america follows the new york times sure they do
00:58:21.800i've worked for them i've written for them one of my you know out of all my issues and i'm not really
00:58:28.980a political person by background i you know i've written novels i've been a literary critic and so on
00:58:35.460i like to bring the legacy of human wisdom to bear on the moment and and and the great wisdom of the
00:58:43.360ages is that uh people are proud arrogant self-centered often wrong unwilling to admit mistakes and tragedy
00:58:52.100happens when they commit themselves to egotistical uh pursuits rather than check themselves using
00:58:59.960using using traditional basic wisdom um and and and uh i'm very glad that at the moment
00:59:10.220we have a relatively free uh internet that can you know uh even show the extremists involved i i mean i
00:59:20.120when when when this blm chapter in chicago put the paraglider on their uh social media i want to see that
00:59:29.060i do too i mean um i don't want to be i i don't i don't want to be saved from these expressions of
00:59:37.660extremism the notion is that if i see them i'll somehow imitate them that's that's kind of the
00:59:44.220rationale behind censorship that we are all monkey see monkey do uh it's the elitist yeah mindset i'm
00:59:52.800uneducated i can handle it they can't exactly exactly but i think that woke more people up to
00:59:59.320the oh yeah potential for organized anti-semitism in the country than anything else say that had been
01:00:07.800censored you know somebody would say somebody said that that's an extremist view that could cause
01:00:15.100violence whatever their usual rationales are we're going to keep that out i think because people saw
01:00:20.940that they got a snapshot of what's possible i also think that you know i've gotten heat for so long
01:00:29.200for you know you're just stirring people up i don't view myself as that i view myself as a safety valve
01:00:36.540if if you if you express it you get people to express it to take positive steps prepare whatever
01:00:47.640you're you're less likely to have a blow up if if the government shuts everybody up and shuts
01:00:55.920everybody down you just stuff it down and stuff it down and stuff it down that's not healthy nor healthy
01:01:02.920for a republic well uh absolutely suppression and and authoritarian control are always recipes for
01:01:14.160outbursts later um and people who take the palestinian side of the israeli conflict would say that right
01:01:21.000now um uh you know gaza is pent up and something had to explode well let's take a lesson from the fact
01:01:29.860that america is getting pretty pent up in some ways um and i i'm a little upset with conservatives
01:01:36.840who so recently were on the uh business end of censorship getting their accounts canceled
01:01:43.360or maybe libertarians who were trying to say something about covet or their resistance to
01:01:49.460vaccination and so on and now they're suddenly you know they're pro-israel and and they're
01:01:55.740they're suddenly taking the side of censorship against no uh you know no yeah i mean
01:02:03.640you cannot pick and choose yeah you know the only stuff that deserves protection is the stuff that
01:02:12.900people don't like right and it depends on who's in power on you know i don't like this i don't like
01:02:17.700that if you can't stand in front of the person who is being shut told to shut up and say i so agree
01:02:27.420with you that this is abhorrent hands off hands off he has a right to say it not to incite violence and
01:02:37.900all of that but he has a right to his opinion no matter how wrong he is the the i think the progressives
01:02:44.100and the left they are so mentally weak because no one has ever thrown them up against a wall
01:02:51.260intellectually and said defend that you can you when you spend your life i was a much better christian
01:03:00.860in new york than i am in texas because i'm in a sea of christians here right i had to defend it
01:03:08.660and i was more of a oh you call yourself a christian so you watch yourself you think about things so much
01:03:15.540more when you're challenged you know what i mean the problem is that across society groups move into
01:03:23.880the spaces in which they won't be challenged and if you're on a major university campus right now in
01:03:30.920the last few years um you are in a pretty uh monocultural political uh zone um every you know
01:03:44.400people who might come on from the conservative or libertarian or dissident side can't even speak on
01:03:52.040campus anymore i mean or or or it's turned into some zoo with security and so on um so
01:04:00.900people going on challenge for a long time seems to be uh you know a hazard of the age it happened but
01:04:08.980it happens on it does happen on every side oh yeah you know it's just this time is is on
01:04:15.080conservatives but conservatives and bigots and everything else have but but having been on the
01:04:20.440outside and having been the subject of i think a lot of censorship and suppression uh if they turn
01:04:29.000around and and say oh but this time it'll go to your favor it'll go to my favor i don't want it uh
01:04:36.840they're they're wrong yeah they're absolutely wrong this is a weapon that can be turned at anyone
01:04:42.340the the censorship speech suppression disinformation industrial complex as some reporters have called
01:04:49.800it can can be is a cannon that can be swung at whoever they need to swing it at when they do
01:04:56.000and um if people haven't realized that by now they're not just naive uh they're morons
01:05:05.180um and and frankly if if if you are a supporter of of the palestinian cause right now you also face
01:05:16.780the possibility if policy makers should decide you're on the outs of being silenced you know um
01:05:25.820so i i i like to think that i extend to my adversary
01:05:31.660the same courtesies i wish them to extend to me and i just want to live in a country where we all
01:05:41.740agree on the bill of rights that's it right can we can we just agree on those things because i
01:05:47.660don't it doesn't force me to agree with your opinion or disagree with your opinion or do anything
01:05:51.520about it so my dad was a patent attorney an intellectual property attorney he worked for
01:05:56.460the 3m corporation he patented things like post-it notes and scotch tape and in the 80s
01:06:03.020it was thought by american industry that japan was going to eat our lunch it was going to take over
01:06:08.420and a lot of the patent uh fights my dad was fighting were against japanese infringement of
01:06:14.960american patents they were stealing our product and i remember asking once i said dad is is japan going to
01:06:21.180take over the world you know uh is all our industry going to collapse and move to japan and he said
01:06:27.160walt it won't happen um and they were making movies you know yeah yeah that sort of portended that
01:06:35.640and he said we've got a creativity a spontaneity and a kind of argumentative creative nature in america
01:06:44.040where people don't move with the pack and that's where inventions come from and as long as we have
01:06:51.300that sort of inventive skeptical creative slightly chaotic nature in america we're all going to be fine
01:06:59.220um and he and he framed it in terms of you know industry and in terms of economics and so on
01:07:06.240but i think that's true socially as well um as long as we still have it you know yeah as long as
01:07:13.440we're as long as we're fighting fighting fair um challenging ourselves challenging one another
01:07:20.080striking sparks we are you know there's hope for us but as when once we start trying to figure out
01:07:30.380which line to get in according to which authority and who to be afraid of and what to shut up about
01:07:36.800right when not to when not to speak out we're gonna slowly probably economically uh contract to
01:07:45.380because that you have to that that fear of being different can either you know that fear of it can
01:07:54.140shut you up but can also shut down the mind finally just let the ai answer the question
01:07:59.120right you know i'll ask the ai and then find out what to say right um and i mean there are people
01:08:05.400who do that now remember in the day when you could do all the normal things you wanted to do in a day
01:08:11.480without feeling like you were made entirely out of broken glass remember when you didn't have to
01:08:16.260decide whether or not it was worth something to do something is it going to be worth it tomorrow
01:08:21.160well living with pain is no joke and it's the kind of thing that can ruin your life
01:08:27.080i know i've been there i discovered relief factor my wife made me take it and if you have been dealing
01:08:34.800with pain in your life and you feel like you've tried everything that's where i was i wasn't going
01:08:39.000to try this this is all natural it's uh you know inflammation i i i'm sorry i've just never seen
01:08:46.380you know any kind of ibuprofen that has ever worked for me and that's what i thought this was
01:08:51.080it's not if it works for you you get your life back three week quick start try it now 1995 it's
01:08:57.040not a trial pack um or it's a trial pack and it's not a drug uh hundreds of thousands of people have
01:09:03.400ordered relief factor about 70 of them go on to order more month after month so try it please
01:09:08.160relieffactor.com or call 800 the number four relief 800 the number four relief relief factor.com
01:09:14.000um let me talk to you about uh conspiracy theories sure um because i i'm questioning everything i mean
01:09:24.920we went to the moon i believe that i know that um but i think we're entering a time where that could
01:09:30.540go away should we lose our fight for civilization in the west um we i i oswald killed
01:09:40.480kennedy was somebody else involved i don't know um but now that i see that the cia knew about oswald
01:09:50.040i don't know now i'm starting to question it were they involved 9-11 it was al-qaeda um george
01:09:58.940bush didn't blow up uh the world trade center however something's not right they keep too many
01:10:05.120secrets something's not right just because of sandy berger uh going in and stealing documents from both
01:10:11.060clinton and the bush uh records i don't know what that was um but they didn't blow up the world trade
01:10:18.720center covid happened when i could investigate and had the resources to investigate myself and
01:10:30.020that thing as dirty as it gets how much of our history is that or is this a on this scale i mean
01:10:43.800millions of people died well i i i i tend to look at conspiracy theories as folklore first they're
01:10:53.580they're usually a sign that people can't make sense of an event or a sign that the official story
01:11:03.320is lacking in some way right um they that's not necessarily the case but it means that they read
01:11:10.800it means that the official record reads as somehow suspicious and and people have every right to use
01:11:18.720their minds uh and their knowledge and their sources and gossip to connect the dots as they see fit and
01:11:26.320then put their thought or their theory into the arena and see if it survives scrutiny um every journalist
01:11:34.180has a before they have uh fully reported a story has a theory as to what the real story is and it may be
01:11:41.900disproved in the reporting or it may or that theory may survive or maybe something even more
01:11:48.520outlandish may turn out to be true so the basis i i can't criticize people for having um theories
01:11:56.900novel theories about things especially about stories where common sense tells us suppression has taken
01:12:03.360place and i talked about i'm talking about my dad again he died at 82 he had uh um uh lou gehrig's
01:12:10.820disease yeah and it was a very painful death and one of the last things he wanted to talk about
01:12:16.440hours before he died was the kennedy assassination he'd been a young lawyer in washington working as a
01:12:23.680clerk in a court that was down the hall from the ap the associated press and he remembers when the
01:12:29.440assassination happened all of a sudden all of the teletypes going going in the ap office and going in
01:12:35.260there and the most catastrophic event of his young life he was 25 had just happened he died at 82 that was
01:12:45.6201963 he died at 82 and he looked at me and this was an educated man he himself had gone to princeton he
01:12:52.200it was a chemical engineer a rationalist a corporate lawyer all his life and he said we still don't know
01:13:00.180what happened i can't believe i'm i'm dying without knowing what happened that day and he said all i know
01:13:07.220is that we didn't get the full story and and i've spent a lot of time as a journalist and talked to
01:13:15.820people over the years who might have some insight into that story and i don't think we have either
01:13:20.800i mean i know we haven't i i don't have a substitute theory um i i knew when when you come when you come
01:13:30.900to things like epstein i mean christopher ray is the one with the black book now the power there is a black book
01:13:40.160yeah well i was i was told that it is in with the fbi and it is with uh christopher ray it's two people
01:13:49.740share access to it the power of that book if it does exist is terrifying terrifying and
01:13:58.480if this happened to a truck driver we'd know every name in it but because it's with the elite and
01:14:07.160there's something with him and uh spy agencies uh and all these powerful people i are we ever gonna
01:14:18.480find the truth on that one well it's pretty clear from the way he died and the mystery surrounding it
01:14:24.900that um something isn't right i i mean being a even having the ability to kill yourself in that kind
01:14:33.460of prison means somebody gave you something you shouldn't have um hard to believe that with
01:14:40.100paper sheets or whatever it could be done um yeah it seems more and more glenn that the bigger an event
01:14:47.660the more mystery surrounds it and uh is this normal well it's normal when power is involved they're
01:14:56.960always competing um establishment interests uh if jeffrey epstein was indeed involved with
01:15:05.800intelligence and i think he had to have been to do what he did yeah um there are people who don't
01:15:11.680want that known um there are people who were clients of his who obviously or clients i don't know friends
01:15:19.660confederates who obviously don't want that known right i i wrote a book about a con artist who was a
01:15:25.920murderer um who i knew by another name he pretended to be a rockefeller and when i talked to people who
01:15:33.380i knew had known him none of them wanted to speak up they didn't want to admit they'd been fooled they
01:15:38.800didn't want to admit they'd been friends they didn't right want to admit they hung out epstein was a
01:15:44.540thousand times that guy oh yeah um and uh so it's a it's a weird predicament for human beings to know
01:15:53.180we're gonna have to live through history without understanding it i mean that that that forces
01:15:59.820you i mean back on sort of religious and principles and basic common sense principles because
01:16:06.360you might never find out what happened to our president john f kennedy you might never find out
01:16:15.820um why we went to war in iraq it's still a mystery i still don't quite understand it i mean they
01:16:21.940obviously didn't tell the truth about the weapons of mass destruction um so why did we go why did saddam
01:16:30.380hussein become the fall guy for something al-qaeda did and what was al-qaeda that made it not our ally as
01:16:41.340it had been or or bin laden so many years before we're not we're not going to get a lot of these
01:16:48.800answers and the people who could give them to us have reasons not to give them to us so how are we
01:16:56.100going to survive how are we going to make decisions how are we going to vote how are we going to um you
01:17:01.420know form our personal philosophies we're going to have to shrink back to very basic standards because
01:17:07.460the information sphere is especially uh occluded when it comes to big stories we learn about little
01:17:20.140stories we learn the gossip about movie stars lives and so on but we don't know why our wars are fought
01:17:25.520how our pandemics start and things like that i mean just since just since covid i've heard from very
01:17:32.740good sources people you could usually rely on about 10 different stories about where covid came from
01:17:38.260including top scientists just assuring me it's this or it's that um i'm no real i'm not any closer to
01:17:47.180understanding it than i was i knew it didn't come from a bat cave but did it just leak from a lab
01:17:56.340maybe maybe there are stories underneath that but how do we live with this level of doubt and
01:18:03.200uncertainty we keep digging but at the same time we can't spend our lives no we have detectives we
01:18:09.160have to reduce the influence of the gigantic governments on our personal lives so we can still
01:18:17.580go about our day-to-day life and not have to worry about all of that right i mean right i think the
01:18:23.940closer we get you know the to a federalist sort of system do you have um are you finding more people
01:18:32.420um waking up i mean you do a podcast with matt taibbi yeah and i don't know it seems like you might be
01:18:41.000red pilling him just a little bit well or is it just the times okay so so matt and i i it would
01:18:50.340probably be wrong to say i'm red pilled in a traditional sense because right i i kind of have
01:18:58.060a a certain angle on things i'm not the kind of guy who says vote for this guy or don't vote for that
01:19:05.520person i i've i've given money to two candidates in my lifetime both were democrats who appealed to me
01:19:13.040at the time um i don't i've written for magazines like harper's and new republic which were really
01:19:18.720democratic party establishment mouthpieces in some ways it was around the time of russiagate that i
01:19:28.640started to become less orthodox because i knew that the mega story about donald trump and russia was
01:19:38.480not true and and i became offended that i was asked to subscribe to it as a you know right thinking
01:19:46.060person and it sort of put a wedge in my relationship to the media that i had always worked for
01:19:52.580you know and that and that's grown and it grew through covid particularly um
01:19:58.620i saw the ways in which uh mainstream outlets were being used to whip up what i believe was hysteria
01:20:07.400um and so it's not i'm more of a press critic or a gadfly or a cultural uh skeptic than i am
01:20:17.560a traditional political person you won't see me on the campaign trail you said you listened to me
01:20:23.860a lot for years yep why why did i listen to going back yeah okay i mean when i was a kid on a farm
01:20:32.940my dad we lived on a farm in minnesota uh even though my dad worked for 3m company he was kind
01:20:39.720of a back to the land guy who had us living 50 miles out of the city we had a radio in the truck and
01:20:46.400we listened to paul harvey every day and then as time went on uh brush limbaugh came and art bell
01:20:54.880and glenn beck and i loved radio i mean i i can't it was for a lonely kid out in the minnesota
01:21:04.360countryside it was always a um uh comforting connection to the bigger world yeah and you know
01:21:14.000you're quite a talent man and you were doing something new and it was uh arresting i i loved
01:21:19.920listening um and you know i told you earlier my family converted to mormonism when i was a teenager
01:21:26.660i'm no longer an active mormon but i have a lot of affection for the church and a lot of ties
01:21:34.560to people who were much better mormons than i ever was me too and so um uh that aspect of your um
01:21:44.300your life your personality appealed to me too where else was i going to hear somebody like me
01:21:49.920you'd had yeah exposure to that yeah um uh the great age of talk radio probably has passed i'm not
01:21:59.880sure what you think about that i mean oh yeah yeah but i don't think the great age of the spoken word
01:22:05.700has passed i think it's about to renew itself even in bigger and better ways yeah yeah you know spoken
01:22:13.280word is spoken word you know i i know you're a writer so you'll understand this i i you know you
01:22:19.840you try to read uh you try to read huck finn or edgar allen poe in your head right it's not the same as
01:22:29.540reading it out loud it was made to be read out loud right um and there's something about the
01:22:37.560the storytelling ability of one individual it's the it's the only medium where if you're just
01:22:46.300listening and not watching where it requires you to put as much into it as the storyteller
01:22:54.660that's how that's how you see the story right is if you're engaged because then you're working it in
01:23:01.440your head that doesn't exist yeah i mean the podcast the renaissance of the podcast is uh
01:23:10.440a wonderful thing as far as i'm concerned i mean i wonder how people have the ability to take in that
01:23:16.420much uh human speech um and i'm not one of those people who likes to turn up the speed to 1.5 i don't
01:23:24.060want to see hear people talking like you know i want to hear the richness but i listen to you for the
01:23:30.540same reason i listened to uh paul harvey back when um or larry king late at night when he had a show
01:23:37.640um and then art bell for company i the the human voice creates a sense of intimacy uh especially when
01:23:46.260experienced alone in the dark or out in a car or where out in the country and uh you know our politics
01:23:53.940probably had a lot to do with the rise of talk radio in other words um you know i i remember trump
01:24:03.420bringing rush limbaugh out not long before rush died and and thinking like that guy's probably
01:24:10.280responsible for the president oh yeah being there oh yeah you know um it's a i i i wouldn't hesitate to
01:24:18.280call myself a populist i i i love the people it's not the kind of populism that means huge rallies of
01:24:25.640torch lit you know nationalist really socialist it's the populism of people doing ordinary things spread
01:24:33.700out around the country and um and you know you'd hear you go into a garage to get a tire fixed and
01:24:41.320you'd hear rush limbaugh you know and and the elites weren't paying attention you know they were like
01:24:47.800uh unaware i think largely of this grassroots movement that was building and it found fruition
01:24:57.240in this outsider presidential candidate and then president um and uh i don't think that would
01:25:05.460happen without radio radio is a very democratic medium um and and i've always loved it and and i
01:25:14.520haven't loved it necessarily for the ideology of the personalities but you know you were a pretty
01:25:20.380wacky guy in a somewhat and what had become a somewhat stale medium yeah or a predictable media
01:25:27.120yeah yeah you know yeah it is a pleasure i hope it doesn't take this long to get us back together
01:25:33.100no i'd love come back yeah good thank you okay thanks glenn
01:25:36.860just a reminder i'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it