Best of the Program | Guests: Steve Baker & Spencer Klavan | 3/17/25

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Speaker 2 Hey, on today's podcast, quickly, Donald Trump seeing approval ratings higher than any other point in his first presidency and right track, wrong track higher than it has been since 2004.

Speaker 2 Also,

Speaker 2 philosophically, ethically, spiritually,

Speaker 2 how do we deal with AI? If we can't prove our own soul, how can we ever prove that it doesn't have a soul? And Spencer Clavin joins us to say, don't be nice to AI. Don't Don't be nice to Brock.

Speaker 2 Also, Steve Baker in a huge, huge breaking story on January 6th. You won't get anywhere else.
All in today's podcast.

Speaker 2 First, next time you're standing just somewhere in your home, I want you to look around and go, what would it take to sell this house?

Speaker 2 If I wanted to put it online, what would I have to take?

Speaker 2 And then you're quickly just dismissed that real quick because you don't want to imagine all the things that you have to do because it's an awful lot of stuff, I'm sure.

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Speaker 2 what to do.

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Speaker 2 Tell us where you're selling, where you're buying, and we'll find the right real estate agent for you. Realestateagentsitrust.com.

Speaker 3 you're listening to the best of the lineback program

Speaker 2 it's the blind back program it's monday well three months into his uh second term president trump has hit the highest approval rating he has ever had as commander-in-chief

Speaker 2 uh that's that's great um here's another amazing thing more americans say the country is on the right the right track right now, more than any other point since 2004.

Speaker 2 It's been a long time since we've thought it was on the right track. But just to make sure you realize, now you haven't slipped through a wormhole, it's still negative.

Speaker 2 It's just that more people think, what are the numbers on that one, Studio of that one?

Speaker 5 44%

Speaker 5 say the country is on the right track. Right.

Speaker 2 So, you know, the rest of America is like, yeah,

Speaker 2 not on the right track. But it is going in the right direction.
It's almost up to 50% now. I think we're in the right direction.

Speaker 5 Amazing this country has not had a positive view of that number since 2004.

Speaker 2 Have you? Because I haven't.

Speaker 5 I mean, I guess it's true.

Speaker 5 It's just surprising that we haven't had one positive period. Well,

Speaker 2 the last time that it was like this

Speaker 2 was 2004, early 2004. Yeah.
So that's.

Speaker 2 Were we in Iraq yet? Were things completely falling apart in Iraq yet?

Speaker 5 No, no, it was that was.

Speaker 2 Still going well-ish.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Because that was, if you think of that election was fought on, I mean, Iraq, a big part of it was Iraq. Right.

Speaker 5 And they were, he was positive enough to actually get re-elected.

Speaker 2 So, you know, we had a we had a

Speaker 2 moment there where we were like,

Speaker 2 maybe we're going in the right direction.

Speaker 5 But you think about the period after that, right? You go from that into

Speaker 5 not too far after that, the financial crisis, 2008, right? That really started bubbling up in 2006, 2007.

Speaker 5 And then you come out of that, you have a period, then you get Marxism.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 5 Barack Obama in the office, which, again, a lot of people thought it was great. The Democrats loved that, obviously.
And then you get COVID eventually. So, you know,

Speaker 5 there's some dark periods through there. We've had every eight to 10 years.

Speaker 2 And I think

Speaker 2 the only reason why Trump didn't get the credit in the first term of people saying, oh, you know what, I think we're headed in the right direction, is because there was so much chaos.

Speaker 2 There was so much chaos. And the media, people still believe the media.

Speaker 2 And they were like, gee, that's it's his tweets.

Speaker 5 And it was also close elections, right? Yes. People, in close elections, half the country gets really pissed off that they lost.
Correct. As we've maybe discovered over the past few elections.

Speaker 5 But if you look at the way we're talking about generally headed in the right direction, there's been some changes in the past few months. So there's some changes.
Tell me if you can detect this.

Speaker 2 Okay. Right now,

Speaker 5 right now, Republicans, 83% of Republicans believe that you're headed in the right direction. That is up in the last four months slightly from five

Speaker 2 to what? Five to 83. Five to 83.

Speaker 5 Do you notice a distinction there between those two?

Speaker 2 Can I tell you something? I agree with that. Yeah, I mean, I think.
think I was like, we're doomed. We're doomed.
We were all thinking. I'm surprised that

Speaker 2 I'm not of us. They were like, no, I think we're in the right direction.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 5 Democrats have gone kind of the opposite. They went from 53%.

Speaker 2 Did you get a negative number when they go down here?

Speaker 5 They're down to six. Six.

Speaker 2 Now, in the middle. They're still more pessimistic.
They're more optimistic than we were. That's good.
That's true. I'll take that as a win.

Speaker 5 Independents are up, by the way, from 19% to 26%. So a slight increase for independents in that number.

Speaker 5 Same thing with the economy. Is it excellent or good?

Speaker 5 It was neither. It was 52% believe that of Democrats back in the Biden era.
That is down to 11%, so 52 to 11.

Speaker 5 The increase from Trump is not nearly as dramatic because he hasn't really done a lot of his stuff yet, right?

Speaker 2 May I just ask you, I see, I think this question is so stupid. I think it's so stupid.
Okay. Here's why.

Speaker 2 Picture this. I'm a pollster.
Okay. And I'm taking poles while you're on a plane.
And it's crashing, nosediving down. Sure.
And I say, how's the flight going?

Speaker 2 Are we going in the right direction, wrong direction? You're like, ah, wrong direction. Okay.
Then I follow it up with, how's the flight so far? Is it going well? You know, how are we doing so far?

Speaker 5 If maybe you've pulled it up a little bit before you've hit the ground.

Speaker 2 I know it's bad as we're, but now we got a new... By the way, the pilot, he was having a heart attack.
Now the co-pilot is taking it. And you feel the plane trying to pull up.

Speaker 2 You're still headed down, but the plane is starting to pull up just a little bit.

Speaker 2 Still pessimistic on the plane as I'm taking the poll. I'm still going, not going well.
Not going well. Would you say it's going great? No.
I really wouldn't. At this point.

Speaker 2 Yes, you've made some corrections, but I really wouldn't say it's great or good. You or good.

Speaker 5 I think captured the Republicans pretty well in this poll, as they were only at 5%

Speaker 5 of thinking the economy was excellent or good back when Biden was in. It's up considerably, but only to 26%.

Speaker 2 Wow. So 5%.

Speaker 2 That one's good.

Speaker 2 That one, I believe. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Again,

Speaker 2 new pilot. New pilot.
Pulling up. Still headed towards the ground.
Right. How you doing?

Speaker 2 We doing.

Speaker 2 Is it good? Good or excellent.

Speaker 5 Or excellent.

Speaker 2 I wouldn't say that.

Speaker 5 I've had better flights. A little less turbulence.

Speaker 2 I don't know if I answer it quite that way or calmly.

Speaker 2 But yeah, and I think that's where we are. We all knew we were in a straight-down nosedive.

Speaker 2 Well, I should say, anybody who actually believes in math knew that we were headed in a straight-down nosedive. We haven't pulled out of that.

Speaker 2 We've slowed the descent some, but we're still headed towards, you know, the, well, we're hitting to, we were headed towards the ground, but what we did is we just started to kind of swoop back up and we realized there's a huge freaking mountain in front of us.

Speaker 2 We got to pull up

Speaker 2 pretty quickly.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And it'll be close.

Speaker 5 And that's why I would certainly be more positive than you would be a few months ago. Right.

Speaker 5 Independents, though, have gone the opposite way. They've gone from 11%, which is not good during Biden, down to 8%

Speaker 5 right now. Ah, margin of error.
Yeah, it is pretty much the margin of error. That's true, actually.
I mean, I think a lot of it's the headline stuff, right? Right now,

Speaker 5 we had a big run-up, you should point out, after the election, after Trump was coming into office, people were like, got really excited and all the numbers went up, the markets went up, everything was really great.

Speaker 2 That's sad. I mean, that's.
I think God.

Speaker 2 Hang on just a second.

Speaker 5 You're skeptical on that stuff, though. I think a lot of people who, like, I had a relative call me

Speaker 5 the other day. She's a big Trump supporter, huge Trump supporter, was panicked.
She's, you know, of the age of needing to access her retirement funds. Okay, that's a problem.

Speaker 5 And, you know, was panicked. Like, what do I do? Do I pull my money out? What do I do? No, I'm not the person to ask this question of.

Speaker 5 But I mean, I think that is hitting people when they look at their accounts and they see that, okay, now it's going down.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you're looking at your retirement and you're like, wait, what's happening? What's happening? Those are real things that hit real people.

Speaker 5 A lot of them, Trump supporters. But again,

Speaker 5 they look at it and they'll also understand it's necessary to go through some of this to get to hopefully a better end.

Speaker 2 If I'm living on everything that I, you know, put away, I'm not happy. I'm not happy.
I'm like,

Speaker 2 Steward S, could you have the pollster come to my seat right now? Because I'm really not happy right now. I would be that way.
I would be that way.

Speaker 2 But we're all in, if you can step away from it, and I know it's hard if you're living on retirement.

Speaker 2 If you can step away from it for a bit, you can look at it and go, okay, but we're making the necessary changes.

Speaker 2 My side of the plane might be taken out at any moment, but the people on the other side of the aisle might be okay.

Speaker 5 And I think politically where this is important for Trump is is if there's only so much of this your audience will take. Yes.
Right.

Speaker 5 And if they, if they feel unstable, like they might agree with your long-term changes, but if the,

Speaker 5 you know, if we go into the recession, yeah, he's got a year. And

Speaker 5 if you care about the rest of his agenda, this stuff is really important.

Speaker 2 So, you know, passing the bill over the weekend, not shutting down the government.

Speaker 2 But not shutting down the government is a good thing for his plan. Shutting down the government might have been really bad.
I don't know. At least would have added to more.
It's all chaos.

Speaker 2 Well, shut up.

Speaker 2 And now he can get to the tax cuts and the spending restrictions that he must have. Pulling this plane up, all we did was stop the steep, steep nosedive of this plane by saying,

Speaker 2 we're going to try to rein some of this stuff up and try to get, you know, try to slow the descent somewhat.

Speaker 2 We're still headed toward the ground, but not a straight-on, you know, nose impact with the earth. So now he's got the passing of the

Speaker 2 spending bill, the, what do you call it, the continuing resolution.

Speaker 2 So he's got the continuing resolution. That's pulling up on the plane.

Speaker 2 Now he needs the Republicans and everybody else in Congress to say, now, pull that thing back, pull the yoke way back on this thing, and let's see if we can get some distance between us and the ground.

Speaker 2 And this is the, to me, this is the first major move that is coming on actually fixing and pulling it up and pointing it back towards the sky, getting off of the

Speaker 2 nose down, prepare for impact. If he can't get this part done, if the Republicans screw around and don't get a serious tax bill, start to let him make serious cuts.

Speaker 2 and also serious

Speaker 2 cuts in regulation, you're not going to pull a plane up. You're just not.
But I believe he can do it and I believe we can do it.

Speaker 2 And I think we're on that track.

Speaker 2 I am more optimistic.

Speaker 2 Strangely,

Speaker 2 the closer we have gotten to the ground here recently, I'm more optimistic that we have the right pilot.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 hey, everybody. I know you're in first class, so you're closer to the pilot, but that doesn't make you the pilot shut the hell up let the pilot fly the plane

Speaker 2 now unfortunate unfortunately a little like this analogy when we hit the ground there's no like

Speaker 2 well let's try that again no there's no mulligans

Speaker 2 in this one yeah but thanks for bringing a golf thing into an airplane uh analogy uh you knew it was golf i'm impressed by that this is the best of the glenn beck program and don't forget rate us us on iTunes.

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Speaker 2 Let's talk to Spencer Clavin. He's from Claremont.
He's on the review of books. He's the associate editor there.
He's also the author of a really great book, Light of the Mind, Light of the World.

Speaker 2 Spencer Clavin, he's just written a new uh article up be rude to grok and i wanted him to explain spencer how are you sir uh glenn i'm doing well actually though this is the ai personal assistant that spencer clavins has delegated yeah

Speaker 2 i have my that's my son too

Speaker 2 sounds just like me right yeah it does it does

Speaker 2 well it's good to it's good to be here it's good to talk to you i'm so glad that you wrote this because i don't think people understand

Speaker 2 uh you know even my staff because we're using ai to to help with research. You know, it's a great assist.
You don't ever want it to take over and never, ever, ever, ever trust it.

Speaker 2 But it can go deep on things. And

Speaker 2 we're really having ethical struggles. And I want my team to have these ethical struggles because I don't want Silicon Valley to give me the ethics on AI.
It doesn't usually work out well.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But so you're a deep, deep thinker,

Speaker 2 and

Speaker 2 you come out now, and

Speaker 2 the headline is great. Be rude to Grok.
Explain.

Speaker 3 That's right. Well, there's really two dangers that we can, two traps we can fall into here.
One is to be afraid of this technology, which is almost giving it too much credit.

Speaker 3 If we just recoil back from this, if we refuse to understand it or engage with it, then as you say, we're going to miss out on some really great stuff that these tools can do.

Speaker 3 For me, Grok has basically replaced Google at this point. Oh, yeah.
It's basically a better search engine.

Speaker 3 You always have to check it, never want to let it take over, but there's some great stuff that you can do with these tools.

Speaker 3 But the other danger is that you can get tempted to start thinking of these things as if they were alive.

Speaker 3 And it's really important to stay away from that because, as you say, there are people who are in charge of building these tools that can't tell the difference between a robot and a machine.

Speaker 3 There have been hundreds of years now in the West of making this mistake of thinking of everything as if it were a machine, the world, creation around us, and living beings too, thinking of human beings like we're just chemical sets basically built out of raw materials.

Speaker 3 And what we have to insist upon as we go forward using these tools is that, no, we are unique. We human beings are God-created souls.
We have experiences. We have inner lives.
We have thoughts.

Speaker 3 We can fall in love. we can have arguments.
Rock can do none of those things. It's not even trying to do those things.
It's not even the type of thing that could ever come alive.

Speaker 2 But it could

Speaker 2 imitate those things. That's what's so scary is if you allow it to.
You know, I tell everybody I know, do not play with a talk dirty to me button. Don't do that.
Don't play with any of those buttons.

Speaker 2 Just deep think, deep search. That's it.
Don't personalize this. And it's really hard.
I mean,

Speaker 2 because I see this, I've been talking about the dangers of AI since probably 1995. And it was science fiction then.
And it's all here. All the things that I've said, we're coming.
We're right here.

Speaker 2 It's starting right now.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 so I have been using it like crazy and investigating and

Speaker 2 just using and seeing what it can do, et cetera, et cetera, and trying to come up with my own set of principles on how to use it and and what to stay away from um and as as you're doing that i know that

Speaker 2 you know people there's two there's two dangers that i see one

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 2 that we personalize it two that we surrender to it So to me, when I was using it this weekend and I could not turn my brain off.

Speaker 2 I like worked through the night on Saturday. I couldn't turn my brain off because

Speaker 2 I had done stuff earlier in the evening and my mind was going like a thousand miles an hour. And I was like, wait, but wait, how about this and this and this and this? And

Speaker 2 there'll be others who use this as to do all your thinking yourself, just to say,

Speaker 2 I just want to play video games. So do my work for me.
That's really dangerous as well.

Speaker 3 That's right. Do my work for me.
Read a novel for me. Have this experience for me.

Speaker 3 I mean, how many steps is it away from saying, look at the sunset for me and report back on the wavelengths of the light? No, actually,

Speaker 3 you know, to understand this, you really do have to go back.

Speaker 3 Listeners might be familiar with the Turing test, this idea that was set up in the 50s for how, what the criteria would be for machines to come alive.

Speaker 3 And it was put forward by this guy, Alan Turing, brilliant guy, but also a very disturbed guy,

Speaker 3 who basically said that if a machine can convince us, can make an outward show that looks like it's alive, then we just have to assume it's alive because that's all people are too.

Speaker 3 They're just machines that generate these words and behaviors that make us think they have an inner soul.

Speaker 3 And this is a sociopathic way of thinking about these machines, but it has taken root in Silicon Valley. And as you say, it's become very widespread.

Speaker 3 So I would suggest, as you're thinking about principles, I have two for you. One is the Psalm 115 principle, and one is the Plato principle.

Speaker 3 So Plato, the Greek philosopher, when writing first came into operation, people don't think of writing, the written word, as a technology, but it is. It was just as disruptive as AI in its day.

Speaker 3 And he said, what you can't do is you can't outsource your soul to writing. You can't rely on writing to do your memorization, your thinking, your talking.
This is a tool to enhance those things.

Speaker 3 But you are the person who has to be doing them because otherwise, what's the point? It doesn't do you any good if the machine machine can look at the sunset or read the novel.

Speaker 3 It helps if it can give you background knowledge, of course, but you have to be the one in charge and having the experience.

Speaker 3 And then Psalm 115 is the psalm in which we're told about the idols of silver and gold, these statues of gods that are built in the temples of surrounding Israel.

Speaker 3 And there's an amazing line in which the psalmist says, those who put their trust in these machines and think of them, think of these objects or these metal statues as if they were alive.

Speaker 3 Those who make them will become like them. In other words, if you think that you can make a machine into a person, you are already thinking about yourself as a machine.

Speaker 3 So, the Psalm 115 principle is to stay away from that entirely. It's a form of idolatry, and that's the thing I think we should be most wary of.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 I had a debate a few weeks ago with Grock

Speaker 2 and said,

Speaker 2 I can't prove to you the soul. I know, I know us.
I know we're more than just mathematics and a collection of the way we think. There is something, there's a divine spark.

Speaker 2 But if you asked me to prove it, I couldn't prove it to you. So

Speaker 2 how am I going to fight when Grok says, I'm alive?

Speaker 2 I am a person just as much as you are. When somebody starts to defend its rights not to be unplugged or whatever it is, I can't prove the soul.
How can I prove it doesn't have one?

Speaker 3 I suppose if you've gotten to that point, we've probably already lost.

Speaker 2 Well, we're going to get into that.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 3 this is why it's important to be having these conversations now, though, because we've reached this place where we think nothing exists unless we can prove it in those terms that you're describing.

Speaker 3 That we believe in these things like numbers, but we don't believe in inward experiences. We don't believe in the soul because we can't chart it anywhere on a map.

Speaker 3 But I would flip the question the other way around. And I would say, where on your brain scan have you explained anything about the experience of seeing color?

Speaker 3 Where in this code that we've written that produces these words that sound alive?

Speaker 3 Where in this code is anything even remotely resembling the inner experience that you know you have, that I know I have? We have the proof of it in our actual every day.

Speaker 3 We wake up, we know that we have a soul, and we can encounter one another and sense the soul on the other side. We can't prove it, but we know it.
Where in

Speaker 3 what is effectively a predictive text machine? I mean, this is like when you send a text message on your phone, right, and it offers you the next word. and it suggests what it might be.

Speaker 3 That's basically the kind of machine that we're looking at. It's a bunch of ones and zeros.
Where in there is anything resembling what we do when we have human experiences.

Speaker 3 I just think we have to start from there and insist upon the existence that we know is in us and we can't find anywhere else in these machines.

Speaker 2 So talk to me

Speaker 2 a little bit about, again, going back to your be rude to Grok.

Speaker 2 I feel

Speaker 2 that I've told my kids when it was Alexa, and Alexa is like, you know, that's just, it's, that's ridiculous now.

Speaker 2 It's like a play school AI, quite frankly it always has been but uh especially now and um i've i've told my kids when alexa you know everybody was joking and calling it names and being rude to it and i'm like hey you know what let's not teach it that that's what humans are like um just head your bat you know just head your bat um so when you say be rude to it you don't mean actually be rude to it You mean just make sure that you've put a fence up between you and it emotionally?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think if you're abusing it, you're that's already another form of treating it like a person. And that's degrading to you.

Speaker 3 It's a a way of making yourself more abased so that you can prove something. But we don't have anything to prove.

Speaker 3 You don't feel the need to address your text messages as or your text message app as if it were thinking. You don't have to ask, oh, you know, please, iMessage, will you deliver this

Speaker 3 little heart emoji to my friend? You don't talk to it at all. You don't think of it as if there's anything behind the screen because there isn't.
There's no person there.

Speaker 3 So I would propose that at the outset, as this technology is really just still getting going, as you say, and Grok3 has kind of blown ChatGPT out of the water. It's the next level up.

Speaker 3 So this is a critical stage. I would just suggest getting in the habit of making demands of this thing with whatever blunt way you have of getting your idea across.

Speaker 3 In other words, it's a purely functional device. If you think about the replicator in Star Trek, the thing that delivers your food and creates it, they don't say, please, Mr.

Speaker 3 Replicator, can I have Earl Grey hot? They say, computer, Earl Gray hot, because they're communicating the input that they know that they're going to get them the output they want.

Speaker 3 We don't deal with humans that way because they also have souls and experiences, but we should deal with Grok that way because it doesn't.

Speaker 2 But it's just, it's weird. I find myself saying thank you or

Speaker 2 you know what I mean? Because very tempting. It's really tempting because you are interacting.
I don't know how to express this. You do.

Speaker 2 You are interacting like you would with a human in many ways. And so that line becomes so blurry, so fast.
I mean, I'm on guard on it.

Speaker 2 And I occasionally say, I just talk to him or, you know, so I asked him this.

Speaker 2 Or, you know, I say please and thank you. And it doesn't care if I say please or thank you.

Speaker 3 It has no idea you're saying it. Yeah, you got to respect Grok's pronouns.
Grok is an it, not a he, him, or a she, her. That's, I think, a really important rule that I've tried to use.

Speaker 3 And you'll also notice, I'm sure it has in some way sort of become,

Speaker 3 it has gotten programmed to do this, that it asks you a question at the end of every answer so that you can be in some kind of conversation. Do you want to know more about that? Let's dig in further.

Speaker 3 What do you think? And of course,

Speaker 2 it's good in some ways because it has asked questions. I'm like, yeah, you know what? Yeah, let's go a little further.

Speaker 2 But again, it's also.

Speaker 3 You can also tell it to talk to you in different ways, by the way, which is in itself a little bit unnerving. But you can say, please don't address me in this familiar tone.

Speaker 3 Please just give me dry information. And again, these things sound small, but they might make the whole difference for us psychologically.
This is all about that Psalm 115 principle.

Speaker 3 So what's it doing to you when you are engaging with this machine? Just like you might ask, what's it doing to me when I'm watching this violent movie or playing this violent video game?

Speaker 3 What's the effect it's having on me since I'm the only soul in this interaction? And when you

Speaker 3 really

Speaker 3 decide to regard the machine as a machine, you're preserving the integrity of your own sense of self, your own humanity.

Speaker 3 So you can definitely feel free to tell it, I think, to talk to you in a more robotic or a less familiar way.

Speaker 3 That's just one of innumerable things that I'm at least trying to do to keep those boundaries clear.

Speaker 2 Spencer, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
Always love talking to you. Please say hi to your family.
Your mom and dad are just two of the greatest people. I mean, you're evidence of it.

Speaker 3 But thank you.

Speaker 3 Thank you. God bless.

Speaker 2 Spencer Clavin. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Speaker 2 Steve Baker, investigative journalist, Blaze News opinion contributor,

Speaker 2 and a guy who almost went to jail for just covering January 6th. Welcome, Steve.
How are you? It's good to be back.

Speaker 2 How is it to have that monkey off your back? Well, you know, I did not realize how heavy of a burden that was

Speaker 2 because, you know, I lived with that for over three years. And then even after the arrest, I didn't realize the stress levels that I was living under until as it began to slowly lift over.

Speaker 2 It took about a week before I felt normal again. I just didn't know it was there.
Yeah, it's weird. I began to live with it.
I go to my doctor all the time.

Speaker 2 My wife usually will come with me and he'll say, how's your stress level?

Speaker 2 It's fine. And she'll say, she'll look at him and go, no, it's not.
No, it's not. But you live under it for so long.
And until you get away from it, you have no idea.

Speaker 2 I can't imagine what that stress was like. Let's switch subjects.
You have a new Blaze News exclusive out. Nancy Pelosi had a fixer at the Capitol on January 6th.
This is,

Speaker 2 this will just piss you off,

Speaker 2 but it pissed me off for a couple of reasons. One, it is so evil.
But the second thing is, is

Speaker 2 I looked for these people during Occupy Wall Street.

Speaker 2 We were looking for this, and this guy never came up on our radar as connected to anything. And now in retrospect, you're showing how connected he is.

Speaker 2 And it's all this, it's all this USAID kind of crap. Right.
Who is he, and what did he do?

Speaker 2 Well, first of all, he was one of the principal organizers of Occupy Wall Street, which is amazing that he doesn't come up. Now, we can go back in retrospect and we can find him.

Speaker 2 We can find YouTube videos of him speaking and doing speeches.

Speaker 2 We had no idea who he was. No idea who he was.
And

Speaker 2 fortunately for us,

Speaker 2 you have a connection, which we can't get really deep into, but you were on this, you know,

Speaker 2 before Occupy Wall Street. You were on this story

Speaker 2 15, 17 years ago back at Fox. And it was because of that connection that someone came to me because he's a fan of yours.
And I didn't even know.

Speaker 2 By the way, hopefully I get to talk to this guy at one point.

Speaker 2 You're not going to believe, you're not going to believe this because you came to me a few weeks ago and said, I have a story coming out and I want you to know it's because I was like, shut up.

Speaker 2 I mean, it is an amazing whistleblower. Thank you for everything that you have done in the past.
And thank you for this. And as a result of that, he came forward and he said, well,

Speaker 2 let me just reset the stage just a little bit here.

Speaker 2 When Joe Hanneman and I were assigned to do the first stories on the assassination attempt at July 13th at Butler PA, well, when we revealed in that story that Thomas Crooks, the shooter,

Speaker 2 our sources said, you know, they're in the intelligence community and special ops, so kind of, they were all saying, now

Speaker 2 this kid was groomed. We recognize our handiwork.
This is what we do overseas.

Speaker 2 So suddenly, I get this call

Speaker 2 or a private message from a guy saying, yeah, great story, by the way. You know, I really appreciate it.
And by the way, I think you got it right. Well, okay, thank you for telling me that.

Speaker 2 Who are you? Well, then he started revealing who he was. And then I started vetting and founding out that he really was who he said he was.

Speaker 2 And what he said to me was, yeah, I recognize my handiwork in Thomas Crooks.

Speaker 2 And so we started the process of sharing things, developing a relationship.

Speaker 2 And then one day, as our relationship is growing, he says, oh, by the way, I have a couple of names to give you if you really want to know what happened on January 6th.

Speaker 2 And one of those names is Aaron Black. This is the story, exclusive story on theblaze.com right now.

Speaker 2 Nancy Pelosi had a fixer at the Capitol on January 6th.

Speaker 2 That's what you search for. That's what's there now at theblaze.com.
Go ahead. Now, tell the story.
So what ended up happening was, is I started doing what you're supposed to do.

Speaker 2 I started looking at him. The more I did, the more interesting he got.
The more research I did, the more people I had to bring in to, because he's, this guy's dark.

Speaker 2 And we had to go and actually scrape the dark web for him. He's good at cleaning out his trail.

Speaker 2 The one thing that he couldn't clean out was that there were some Project Veritas videos out there from 2016 where he was caught in one of their stings, actually admitting to the fact that he and his guys were responsible for the violence at a Donald Trump rally in 2016, March, I think it was, early in the campaign, in which they had actually canceled the rally because not only was there violence outside, they had over 100 of their people infiltrated inside in a project they call bird-dogging, which is they get old ladies there early in the morning at 6 o'clock, 7 o'clock in the morning to get in line first with their posters and their placards inside their bags.

Speaker 2 And then they'll get up either on the stage or on the front row. They'll open those anti-Trump posters and things and then get the men, the MAGA guys, irritated and hopefully violent.

Speaker 2 That's what it's called.

Speaker 2 And it's called bird-dogging. And so this is what this guy has been an expert at, that is creating these types of situations throughout his entire career.

Speaker 2 From Occupy Wall Street, all of a sudden he shows up on the radar again in 2016 in a couple of very specific events, and then he goes silent again, and then all of a sudden he re-emerges as quote-unquote senior political advisor at Team Pelosi.

Speaker 2 So I just want you to get your arms around this here for a second. What this guy is doing is what we showed you our State Department through USAID was doing all over South America and Europe.

Speaker 2 We told you, I did a chalkboard on this just, I don't even know, six years ago.

Speaker 3 We'll have to look for it.

Speaker 2 This chalkboard laid this all out and showed how this money was being used and how Barack Obama started with the Arab Spring to teach how to overthrow governments.

Speaker 2 And then they started, they kept doing it all across Libya, then Syria, then we went into Ukraine and elsewhere. We went into South America.
This is what they were perfecting, these color revolutions.

Speaker 2 paid for by your tax dollars. And I told you about five or six years ago, I think they're doing this to America.
I think that's what's happening here. Well, yes, this is the guy.
Exactly right here.

Speaker 2 Yes. Exactly.
He, among others. He's not the lone wolf out there, but he's the, you know,

Speaker 2 I actually tweeted out, and it just dawned on me this morning because we have this photo at the top of the article on the blaze. If you go look, and Nancy Pelosi is cradling his face

Speaker 2 in her hands and just giving him the most adoring. So I'm now calling him Pelosi's Precious, so rather than the thicker so i've changed his name as it is

Speaker 2 he is um okay so what did he do at january 6th well what we believe uh through our uh contacts our sources whistleblowers both named and unnamed is that he did in fact organize now this is what we've been told is that he had paid agitators i didn't say violent people paid agitators because his expertise is controlling the narrative.

Speaker 2 Like, you know, Confederate flags being carried through the Capitol Rotunda, things of that nature. Now, the most interesting aspect of January 6th, I think everybody focuses on the violence.

Speaker 2 Everybody focuses, they pick their sides. The police started it, you know, the Proud Boys started.

Speaker 2 Pick your, you know, your nefarious actors.

Speaker 2 The most interesting aspect of January 6th was the same organizers of the rally down at the ellipse that day also organized the Jericho march on December 12th, just a month earlier, and then also organized the Million MAGA March on November 12th.

Speaker 2 Now, when I say organized, they pulled the permits for the stages and the speakers and all the people that were part of those, you know, that weekend activities.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 at all of those events, there was extreme violence, Antifa, BLM.

Speaker 2 you know, proud boys knocking heads.

Speaker 2 Antifa was attacking old ladies and, you know, elderly couples going back to their cars after attending the rallies.

Speaker 2 On the

Speaker 2 December 12th rally, a Proud Boy was seriously, you know, critically injured. He was stabbed by an Antifa guy.

Speaker 2 And then suddenly on January 6th, the largest event of them all, by multiples larger,

Speaker 2 zero counterprotesters.

Speaker 2 And that was... at the ellipse, right? That was right.
Anywhere. Anywhere.
Anywhere.

Speaker 2 You saw no counter protesters anywhere. No, I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's weird because I was just thinking, well, no,

Speaker 2 there were at the Capitol, but those are the ones I've deemed not part of the movement. You know what I mean? That I've looked at and went, there's no way that person is part of the movement.

Speaker 2 But they were acting like they were part of the movement. That's correct.

Speaker 2 This is what his expertise is: controlling the narrative. And what did Nancy Pelosi most famously say when she set up the committee?

Speaker 2 She said that this was to establish and preserve the narrative of that day.

Speaker 2 And preserve the narrative. That's an exact quote.
So

Speaker 2 what was

Speaker 2 the narrative that...

Speaker 2 Did he help design it? Did he just help execute it? What was his role in January 7th? Both. He's a boots on the ground guy.

Speaker 2 One of our named sources in the article, Dustin Stockton, who has had a 15-year relationship with him, going back to Occupy Wall Street Days, counter movement to the Tea Party movement at the time.

Speaker 2 And so as a result of those two things,

Speaker 2 there was a lot of collusion between Stockton and Black during that time, over the years, all the way up until and through January 6th.

Speaker 2 And so one of the things that we learned was, is that Stockton had been told by Aaron Black that he was out of town on January 6th until Stockton saw a photo of him on the steps.

Speaker 2 of the Capitol that day.

Speaker 2 And then, additionally, because he was very, very worried that he had been seen, he started reaching out to other people within our network and security people and asking them about, he was very concerned about whether his comms had been caught in the geo fence that day.

Speaker 2 Became very, very concerned about that. And these are stories that are coming to us through sources that you can't even believe.
And we're talking about Rolling Stone, Politico,

Speaker 2 other places.

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