Ep 199 | 'A Clamp-Down Is Coming': Walter Kirn's BIGGEST Fear About Elites | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Too many reporters are terrified to be exposed as a conservative or a centrist or even just unliberal, I guess.

It's a creative industry.

So, of course, it tends to lean left politically.

But I can tell you that underneath all of the the division in the media there lies a pile of industry gamesmanship.

And in this media hell pit, the true hero is the person willing to expose all of it no matter what the cost is.

The 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.

He recently launched America This Week, a podcast with Matt Taibbi, where they perform an autopsy on the news of the day.

His latest major project is as a founder and editor of large of County Highway, a newspaper,

a newspaper without any digital footprint at all.

It is storytelling for the real America.

Like, 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.

Ultimately, he's a rebel.

Not because it's cool or fashionable, because it's in his bones.

It's who he is.

A rebel in a constant search for truth in an age when we need it most.

Buckle in for this one.

Walter Kern.

I can't wait to get to the podcast.

I'm a big fan of Walter's, and I hear he listens to the show.

So we'll see what this could be.

very interesting.

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I think you're one of the hardest people.

Ray Kurzweil was in your category of hard guest to book.

I've waited for this interview for a long time.

Well,

that's the first case of playing hard to get that's worked for me.

When I played hard to get with the ladies, they just moved on.

I'm glad you persisted.

I'm glad to be here.

Yeah, glad to have you here.

First of all,

you are

you're a bit of an enigma in some ways,

just on the surface.

You're an absolute elite.

Princeton, I think, is where you went to school, right?

Princeton and Oxford.

And Oxford, yeah.

But you're not an elite.

In fact, you're one of the biggest defenders of the middle of the country that is out there.

Yeah, I'm a fierce defender because that's where I come from.

That's where my parents come from.

And that's where I live now.

I 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.

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.

And I got there and I saw what there was to see, but it was like going to the fair.

And now I live in Livingston, Montana, and I didn't last.

It's so funny.

I don't know if you're like this, but I grew up in a very small town, Washington State,

boring.

Always wanted to live in New York, wanted to work at Radio City Music Hall and do radio there.

And then didn't think I'd make it.

I mean, you know, it was a dream, but you know, lottery has to happen in many ways.

I get there and I love it.

But I don't live there anymore because I saw what was coming.

But 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.

Well, it's a scale that is coherent and explicable and understandable to me.

You know, I like seeing the same people over and over.

I like being able to hear their stories and then catch up on their stories a month later.

That makes the narratives around me make sense rather than

seeing a strange face, never seeing it again, seeing somebody twice in a couple of years, I get to go to the post office, I 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.

In a small town,

that's exactly what you're able to do.

Just go to the post office.

When somebody dies, when somebody gets sick, when somebody's kid gets into college, whatever.

And I'm a storyteller, and I like to know the beginning and middle and end of people's stories.

I used to walk down the streets of New York thinking about every single person here has a story.

I'd love to just follow all of them home and see what, you know, just see a little of their story.

I was sitting at lunch.

I don't remember the restaurant name,

but it's right on the ice of Rockefeller.

Okay.

And I was waiting for my daughter.

We were going to have lunch together.

I'm sitting there at the table and I'm all by myself.

And I'm just looking at the people ice skating.

And I'm right there where they're putting on ice skates.

And this woman, she's got to be 45, 50, kind of frumpy, big frumpy coat, hat.

She sits down, she changes into skates.

And the first thing I noticed is she brought her own skates.

She gets out onto the ice,

and she is an incredible,

incredible artist on the ice.

And I thought to myself, how many people who work with her, who are around her all the time in this jungle, know that side of her?

Right.

You could work next to somebody in that city and never know it.

Well, you know, I grew up in a town of 500 people.

I thought that if a town had a dairy queen, it constituted a city.

The idea of being able to go out after 9 o'clock and find a business open was enchanting to me.

I got to New York and I had that experience too.

It was like opening Easter egg after Easter egg.

You met all kinds of people.

They had amazing talents, amazing stories.

They're from all over the world and so on.

But I reached a limit.

It wasn't because I didn't like that.

There was just so much I could hold in my head.

There were so many people who I could actually be friends with, whose stories I could actually relate to.

And

maybe I liked it too much.

I may be pigged out on the city.

You know, I would have to leave and go home every few months because I'd get sick.

I'd be staying up all night.

In those days I drank.

I don't drink anymore.

I'd be out pushing it, pushing it.

Now my kids live in big cities and they're doing what I did.

I have no idea if they'll rebound like I did, but

it just got to be something I couldn't handle.

When you grow up in a limited,

small, familiar, intimate place,

your senses, in a way, aren't built for that total circle.

I don't think we are built for that

in really in any way.

I mean, we're not built for what social media is doing for us now.

I mean,

you can't handle, you know, 1.5 million friends.

Well, what?

You can't handle 10,000 friends.

An average person is, you should have a handful of friends.

If you get to the end of your life and you've got maybe two or three really good friends, you did pretty good.

Right.

And that's the other thing.

Besides 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's busy, nobody is there for you.

You get sick, something bad happens, everybody's at the office chasing the dream.

Small 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.

And

it's just a human scale that works for me.

So 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.

And the one thing I like is

they're just, it's so much more common.

It's not complex.

Right.

You know, it's, it's not that hard to solve some of the problems that we're dealing with right now.

You know, it will be painful, it could be difficult, but

it doesn't take

all of Harvard to figure it out.

In fact, that may be the problem in many ways.

Well, you know, the Greeks believed that city-states should be of a certain size and that when they grew beyond that, things became uh chaotic right and impossible and and that may be true you know uh

i i when i used to write for gq magazine and

uh

really wore my sort of slick magazine journalist hat i once said to the editor i want to go out to nevada where uh basque shepherds live and i want to find the person who is least in touch in america i want to find a guy who's literally been on top of a mountain with his sheep for a couple couple of months and then I want to ask him questions from the news.

Like, what do you, you know, how should we solve this problem?

How should we solve that problem?

Because 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.

And so I was like,

let's swing the other way and find people who are completely isolated with their common sense and their memories and maybe a little bit of reading that they've done and see if they don't have a more sane perspective on it.

So is there, I mean, because honestly, you talk to people and they're like, we can't spend this much money.

And we could solve this at a table, you know, around a, you know, around a diner table.

And we could solve the spending or we could solve, you know, a lot of different things.

But nobody, when you get to Washington or when you get to New York,

you are not an expert in that.

And so we defer to all of the experts.

And it seems to me the experts have really screwed things up.

Right.

Well, 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.

And they get further and further from the primary data.

And, you know,

for example, I was just last week in Elko, Nevada, which is a very isolated central Nevada city.

And I'm talking to people about economic problems and the adversities they're facing.

And I'm noticing that around the edges of this town, people are really poor.

A lot of people are living in their cars.

A lot of people are obviously intoxicated on drugs that maybe didn't exist 10 years ago because they're acting differently.

And I just wish I could bring people from inside the Beltway or whatever Hollywood to just see what their country is and what it's facing.

And I don't have to argue you should spend less money.

I can show you that

there is want, there is need, and there is difficulty.

But just not being able to see that makes people go crazy, I think.

They become abstract, 100 billion off to here, 100 billion off to there, inflation, rates, and so on.

But they need to see its toll,

its real-world effects.

And 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.

Aaron Powell, I think that's the problem with the society that's being led by the elites, is

they can't be bothered with the small little problems.

They'll just have to deal with that themselves.

We're building this new whole big world.

And so they don't actually see the effects that it has on

regular people because they're going for this big abstract paradise.

They're looking upstream at where the money is coming from, where the power is flowing from, and so on.

And they're not looking downstream at the effects of the decisions they make.

And if they could see, see, hey, man, there's a flood down there, people are hurting, people are trying to survive, instead, they're looking at where the money's being printed, where the credentials are being handed out,

and

they

literally, actually,

don't see their country anymore.

Invisibility, inability to

discern one another's true state and true predicament

is, I think, the biggest problem we face.

It's not ideological division necessarily, because ideological division ends when you see someone who's living in their car.

Correct.

You both want to do something about it.

You might have slightly different ideas, but the first thing you want to do is remedy the immediate situation, and we're not even doing that.

When you...

You tweeted recently you've been listening to talk radio back from the 90s.

Yeah.

What are you searching for?

What are you looking for?

Or what are you finding?

Well, for various reasons,

I have to

be somewhat

tripty about this.

But I'm writing a movie about a famous talk show host

from the 90s.

You might be able to guess which one because he broadcasts at night.

And in his show, which was an open line show that included callers from all over the country and which I listened to at the time.

I can't wait to see it.

You got an incredible portrait of who and what was going on.

But there was...

Well, in a different way.

A different way.

You got the night side portrait of America.

You got America after 11 p.m.

Right, which is not necessarily America.

A lot of truckers,

a lot of insomniacs, a lot of maybe night watchmen or people with jobs that kept them awake.

And

my point in that tweet was that they were all talking about the end of the world.

This is the late 90s.

I mean, remember Y2K?

Remember, you know, the beginnings of the global warming scare when people thought there were going to be superstorms with

300 mile per hour winds.

They're still saying it.

People aren't buying it as much as they used to be.

But there were like a hundred reasons why we weren't going to make it to the year 2000.

And this radio show concentrated all the fear right and all the panic and it even had fun with it.

We're talking about Art Bell.

And in any case,

when you listen to it and go, wow, these people were as panicked.

As panics can be in many cases.

And now it seems quaint.

You shake your head and go, oh my gosh, the problems that they had were nothing like the ones we have, but they believed them to be important.

Right.

You know, everybody from people who expected, you know, a religious style apocalypse, you know, theological apocalypse to people who thought the weather was just going to turn on us.

He's always talking about volcanoes and earthquakes and sunspots.

Right.

You know, I know, I know, I know.

I used to love that.

He'd get up in the middle of the night because I'd have to get up at two, three o'clock in the morning and I'd listen to him and I'd just love it.

I 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, but 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.

And I remember Art just saying this: Hmm,

rocks.

It was unclear.

It was unclear.

It was unclear what Art thought of his audience.

Some nights he seemed to have total contempt for them.

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.

They dropped a rock down and it never hit bottom.

Alien abductees and so on.

What's funny is just as they thought the world was going to end back then, they were equally obsessed with aliens, UFOs, and all the things that are still in the news now.

So Lynn, 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.

Because as it's going out, I'm saying, why are the engines running at full speed?

We're producing way too much.

Why are we doing that?

We're headed towards icebergs.

Have you noticed, have you counted the lifeboats?

There's not enough lifeboats.

I'm that guy.

I'm always...

Oh, I know that.

I've bought food and extra water and maybe even gold on your advice over the years, you know?

Right.

So, you know,

however, I don't,

I, I don't think I fall for everything.

Right.

You know, all of the catastrophes.

These things, though,

I was beginning to question, maybe I was wrong about all those things, but they're all now happening.

Yeah.

We are getting into some

serious crap.

Yeah.

That we have, I've done radio for 50 years.

We didn't, we didn't have this.

Right.

This is everything in the crap hole.

Do you wish you hadn't cried Wolf back when?

Do you think, oh, maybe I was, you know.

No, I didn't cry Wolf.

I was way too early.

Right.

You know, I have a real problem on timing.

But this is what my wife says about me, too.

She said, Walter, you tell me things are going to happen in your four years early.

Yeah.

Um, and it actually isn't helpful because, yes, I've been stressed for four years, whereas everybody else has just been stressed for two weeks, right?

My, and now I'll say to my wife, Honey, this it's getting really bad, it's it's coming hard.

And she'll say,

Yeah, I know, I know, but you're always wrong on time, so I think we have time, relax.

I'm like,

But anyway, um, are you I'm I'm a

an optimistic catastrophe?

I see catastrophe everywhere, but I believe in human.

I believe in people and 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.

Where are you?

Yeah, I wouldn't say a catastrophist, but this all has to do with our story and may have to do with my relationship to radio.

When I was a kid living in Phoenix, Arizona in the the mid-70s, there was a late-night talk show by a radio preacher called Garner Ted Armstrong.

And he had a kind of end of the world show, which predicted that every little war or something was going to end in nuclear catastrophe and so on.

And this was around the time my family converted to Mormonism.

And Mormonism in the mid-70s was very concerned with things like stockpiling, food, canned goods, and so on.

And between the two things, I became sensitized to the idea that things could change very suddenly.

And

maybe they didn't do that for a while.

But when something like COVID came along, I had long been prepared.

And in a strange way, it didn't affect me as seriously

as it did others because I was emotionally ready.

I was like, oh, this has actually been delayed a bit.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

Art Bell's talking about pandemics in 1997.

Right, right.

So catastrophe.

But I am optimistic in the sense that, you know, you started by saying you're a champion of the middle of the country.

And I am, in some ways, because it needs a champion.

It's definitely

taken its knocks.

It's used as the foil for

everything now.

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.

And it's still standing.

That's a pretty stalwart set of people to go through all this, I think.

But 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.

I drive everywhere I can.

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.

Though I think that's fraying now.

I think the American dream or

the simple hope of owning a house,

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.

And that's heartbreaking to watch.

Right.

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What 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.

Is that just on the campuses?

What is that?

Where you can watch,

I mean, it's one thing to say, for instance, Ukraine.

I don't know.

I think they're both kind of bad guys.

One's really bad.

Another guy's really bad, you know, bad.

I don't see a good guy in there.

I don't want to pick sides.

Yeah.

This one,

when you cross the line of going in and just executing men, women, and children, raping, kidnapping, that's not war.

That's not war.

That's terror.

That's genocide or wannabe genocide.

And 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.

What do you think of

what does that say about us and the world?

Because it's happening all over the world.

So I answer every question with a story because that's how I think.

I grew up in rural Minnesota and the first time

I met a Jewish kid was at Princeton.

And I started to find that all my friends were Jewish.

They had something in common.

They were all Jewish.

Why?

Because they shared my sense of humor.

Why?

Because they had a kind of skepticism toward power.

Sometimes they were kept on the outside of some of the sort of fancy clubs in Princeton and so on.

So I ended up with a lot of Jewish friends.

And then I entered the media in New York, and I had even more.

And it was strange to me coming from a small town.

These are the greatest people in the

And I hadn't been exposed to anti-Semitism as a kid in the same way I wasn't exposed to racism just because there were no one different.

Right.

There were Lutherans and Catholics, Swedes and Norwegians.

That's exactly the way I grew up.

Yeah.

And so I was kind of an innocent, you know, like in a Russian novel, something, coming to the big city.

And I love my Jewish friends.

I had grown up in a family where my mother had been teased at school because she was thought to be Jewish.

She had dark hair and dark eyes.

She'd grown up in Ohio.

And I'd heard that story.

And

I saw actual anti-Semitism, I think, on the Princeton campus.

And then I saw it at Oxford, definitely.

And it was a kind of upper-class British anti-Semitism that Americans maybe wouldn't be able to recognize.

in any case.

Explain it.

What is it?

Well, it's a kind of aristocratic condescension toward people who dirty their hands with business and commerce and so on and haven't had, you know, lands in Scotland and Kent for 500 years and don't have these lineages.

People who maybe were refugees from another place or who, you know, work trades or cobblers and

traders.

I hate, I mean,

I'm sure lots of wonderful people and everything.

But on the surface, just what you said, I don't even want to talk to you.

You sound so narrow, boring, and inbred.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Right, right, right.

So, in other words, I was sensitized to anti-Semitism.

And 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.

So that's where I come from culturally and in terms of my social life.

When this

war, I guess we could call it that already, broke out,

my breath was taken away because It's not that this is modern terrorism.

This is some sort of medieval pogrom where, you know, where Cossacks come through a village and cut off heads and rape people and so on.

I 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.

This isn't just a horror in the moment.

This is going to stir trauma from generations and hundreds of years of

ostracism and violence.

So I was shocked and I'm still in shock, Glenn.

I really am.

It was the first

major attack that I've seen where the thoughts of many immediately went to the victimization of the attackers.

You know,

I didn't expect it to turn so quickly into a referendum, referendum on Israel's treatment of Palestine.

It only took them responding.

As soon as Hamas said, okay, we're done, and Israel began to respond to it in an organized fashion, it was over.

I mean, that's when people started changing.

I mean,

with 9-11, it took, what, a month?

maybe before you started to hear some things where, you know, well, America really is

this one happened that fast.

Well,

I'm going to

kind of revise what I said because at the same time, I was horrified, and at the same time, my heart went out to the victims and to all my friends who have family there,

who travel back and forth and so on.

I was

afraid that the intense emotionalism that was being released released by this would become the pretext for some giant mistake.

You know,

I wish after 9-11 I knew what I knew now.

I don't think that we went to Iraq on

real.

We thought, I think there's a difference.

I think the people think one thing.

Leadership may be on a completely different page.

Yeah.

And I don't know what our leadership is going to make of this.

And my

And I'll just confess frankly, my education in the Palestinian predicament is not what it might be, okay?

And what it should be.

And I'm still in a learning process

about what a possible solution to all this might be or how to understand it.

But I'm not in a learning process as a human being.

about the abhorrence of killing civilians of

intentionally.

Intentionally, yeah.

This wasn't collateral damage.

This was absolute targeting of, in many cases, really vulnerable people, people at a party, at a dance, you know, at a giant outdoor dance, in

little isolated villages,

children,

taking hostages.

The taking of civilian hostages itself is a horror.

It's a war crime.

Yeah, yeah.

You haven't heard that, though.

I don't hear people talking about war crimes.

These were all what you just described are war crimes.

If Israel would do it, if the United States would do it, Britain would do it, France would do it.

It's a war crime.

Well, it is.

But at the same time, we've got this incredible passion going.

And also, America is playing both sides here in some ways.

I mean, or the administration.

We have this relationship with Iran that I don't quite understand.

And Hamas.

And Hamas.

And

whether this gets sorted out

in any practical way,

it may become the pretext for giant power moves that don't really reflect necessity.

Correct.

But really, has

I mean, we look at World War II with Hitler, and

we see that as a necessity to act against him, and 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.

I mean,

when this happened, my first thought was,

Okay,

we have Ukraine.

That wasn't going well.

People started to turn against Ukraine.

And now this, and this one is viscerally going to get everybody involved on one side or another.

This, I mean, we haven't talked about anything really

nationally.

We have so many things that are on fire right now.

All the focus has been there.

This could easily spiral out of control into a global war.

And global war is what you need to reset everything.

Everybody just wants the war to end, and they don't really care if it doesn't go back to the way it was.

You know, when I was in college 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 fight in World War II.

And that seemed crazy to me.

I didn't understand if ever there was a just war, at least as it was portrayed to me, it was World War II.

What kind kind of

egotist, in a way, would sit it out for his principles?

But 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.

I think if this had just been a normal attack, it would be possible to take that position a little bit more

in a more untroubled fashion.

But

I saw pictures, I saw things that I never thought I'd see in my lifetime.

And to pretend that they didn't lodge deep and that they didn't inflame me is to lie.

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.

See, it's funny, because I think, Walter, that

the

answer, and it's not necessarily our answer, it's Israel.

Israel has a right to respond and defend itself in the way it feels.

I think the answer is

very clear.

The problem is, I don't trust any of the players, including us.

I'm not

either.

I think

all of the time I think all the world is but a stage and we are merely its players.

We're watching stuff.

I don't know what's true anymore.

I'm not a conspiracy guy, but

I mean, there's some things now you're like, I don't know.

I don't know.

A rich Texan, a billionaire, once said to me, conspiracies?

How the hell else do you think things get done?

And that's always stuck with me.

I mean, we know that people make agreements and meet in rooms and make deals above our head because they come out historically afterwards.

And we find out, you know, about secret treaties and

all sorts of things that weren't apparent at the time.

And all I know is that we're going to find out around this

set of events that there are things we're blind to now.

And they may cause us to regret moves that we make in a more triggered, reflexive way now.

In fact, we can be certain that will happen.

So I guess

knowing the extent to which Hamas went to inflame me, one of my ways of resisting

their maneuver, their manipulation, is to not be driven into some panicked, angry response.

I mean, it's weird.

I just talked about this today, about how there is

The president said, when we went in after 9-11, we made mistakes.

We should learn from them.

I agree.

Right.

And he said, don't get angry.

Don't let passion.

Don't let your feeling get control of you.

And I mean, I think that's amazing coming from the side that tells us that feelings are real, feelings are everything.

But he's right.

I don't.

The worst thing that can happen is knee-jerk reaction when you're angry, you never make, when you're afraid, you never make a good decision.

But that doesn't mean that you don't fall back, watch, learn, and then,

if it's the right thing to do reason-wise and morally, execute it.

Do it.

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.

Because, I mean, I've got friends whose kids are in school or at college, Jewish friends,

who wish their kid could come home now.

Even kids in younger

elementary schools where the teachers are

espousing a certain kind of anti-Jewish rhetoric that's making them uncomfortable.

So I'm concerned about my friends here

and not just my friends, but their families and the extended community.

Because anti-Semitism

as I studied at college, and it was a big topic in the late 70s and early 80s when I went to college.

How did the Holocaust happen?

We studied the literature that came out of it.

In many ways, we weren't able to understand it for 20, 30, 40 years.

I still didn't understand it until the last 20.

Yeah.

You know, how does Germany become that?

Right.

Well, we're actually, you can read about it, and then you can watch it.

And it's a little disturbing.

And we like to think that our hindsight on that event has something to do with the run-up, but they're very different.

I mean, people weren't seeing concentration camps as they went to work regularly.

We didn't enter the war to save the Jews.

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.

Yes.

And so

I don't know know that a lot of people who have a superficial education now would recognize that run-up

to the final solution if it hit them on the head.

That's a little frightening.

Yes.

But maybe it is hitting them on the head.

Because the conspiracy theories that really matter, those racial conspiracy theories, which take an entire group, give them common characteristics.

But 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 i don't care if it's white black yellow it doesn't matter to me you're taking in that 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 and they have to be stopped that's really what anti-semitism is except it's about Jews.

Well, you know, German anti-Semitism came out of German scientific racism, which was a kind of late 19th century

belief that the races were really distinctive.

Language and

heritage made them groups with specific qualities that could be discerned.

Maybe they could be graded in terms of intelligence and other characteristics.

And so it was this, you know, if you said trust the science in 1905 in Germany, racism was the science.

Eugenics.

Yeah.

And here in America.

It was stronger here in America.

I mean,

this is Darwin than his cousin, what was his name, Galton, that comes up with eugenics and going, hey, wait a minute, there are different

races of people and some of them are farther behind.

Maybe we can make the superhuman.

Right.

That's.

And I mean, well, you know, recently someone,

someone

I would call left-wing said to me,

this is all about Israel oppressing brown people, or this is part of the general trend around the world to oppress brown people.

And I said to this young person,

When I was young, Jews were brown people.

They were the brownest of people.

The idea that they're now the ultimate insiders, the colonists, the oppressors,

really takes a big leap.

What they were were the ghetto-dwelling outsiders of Europe who barely had rights as people and

were not

top of the ladder.

And if they've managed somehow, if many Jews, because of Israel and other reasons,

have managed to live secure, prosperous lives and gain

wealth and influence and so on, that doesn't mean you're dealing with society's ever-present winners.

Right.

In many cases, I know, at least with me, that a lot of people tell me, I can't do this.

You can't do that.

You can't do this.

You'll never...

That's a subtle form of oppression, I guess.

But I always took that as, oh, really?

I mean, I think sometimes that

the Jewish success can come from the fact they can't depend on anybody else.

You got to depend on yourself.

You learn these things, you educate yourself, and you work hard.

When that happens,

success comes.

Well, you know,

I don't want to trade in even positive stereotypes

too heavily.

And it's not an area of expertise, but I will say that I I see the potential in the United States right now for an outbreak of real anti-Semitism, not that subtle kind that's used to cancel people and so on,

but actual

violence.

A Berlin synagogue was firebombed the other day.

I believe a Tunisian synagogue too.

And

this can be a conflagration that gets out of control because I don't think young people in this country have been sufficiently educated about

what happened in the 20th century and how it happened.

They may know what happened, but they don't know how it happened.

And it happened because the state needed an enemy.

It needed an excuse.

Germany had been humiliated,

had economic problems and all sorts of things after World War I, and it wanted a scapegoat.

The easiest one was

the oldest one.

Right.

And in this time of racial sensitivity in the U.S.,

it's probably hard to find an outside group to scapegoat anymore.

You know, most of them have been,

you know,

there's been a campaign for understanding

of all sorts of races, people of different persuasions, and so on.

But I don't know that it's been done very well for the Jewish population here.

I think they maybe thought that never-forget job was done.

Or maybe

we thought that was done.

We have a museum.

We have a Holocaust museum.

We've got this literature.

We all saw Schindler's list.

But

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It's one thing to say

that you don't see it,

you know, 15 years ago.

You start to see the rise in anti-Semitism and

you're like,

but when you are, when you're having people around the world and even here in America,

UPenn just had a bunch of students that were holding a major Palestinian march and

they were chanting about

the, there's only one solution for the Jews.

Well, that's the final solution.

How 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?

Well,

as I say, this all kind of took me by surprise.

I would like more time to understand the situation.

I would like more time to understand

the potential solutions to what has been a problem my whole life.

I mean,

I'm expected to come up with an answer to a question that has been broiling my whole life and that they haven't solved, you know.

I look at Gaza and I don't think it looks like a very good place to live.

I don't think it looks like a happy way to live.

And there needs to be a better way, and I'm not sure what it is, but it's not paragliding into music festivals

and killing people.

It's not, you know, slaughtering mothers and children.

And

I sometimes feel like we are in the 1930s, in which we are watching a kind of escalation and a madness take hold that demands a climax.

And I don't know what that climax is going to be.

And

I wish we could step back from it.

I'm no military expert.

I don't know how Israel

isolates this group, isolates the guilty, rescues its hostages if that's possible,

and creates a secure situation into the future.

But

I wish, I hope that that's possible rather than what becomes a domino

series of other powers getting there,

seeing an advantage for themselves, you know, trying to get leverage, using this with their own populations, you know.

Iran keeps its people down too, man.

I know.

And it had them in the streets.

And there was, we weren't.

And until COVID.

Once we stopped paying attention because of COVID, all those people marching in Hong Kong, all those people

in Iran, they just disappeared.

They just disappeared.

We were insufficiently supportive of that democracy movement in Iran.

And here we are.

The problem is that

the time to be calm, the time to be reasoned,

never seems to come when violence stalks the land.

Everybody wants to get their licks in first

before they sign that peace treaty.

As we speak, Israel has not yet really responded

in any large-scale way.

So I don't know what's coming.

Every one of us is poised every day to open the newspaper in the morning or turn on our phones and

see a conflagration that they didn't expect and don't want.

What's frightening in a completely different way is

my company is Mercury Radio Arts.

Orson Welles' company was Mercury Radio Theater.

Loved him.

And I often have wondered how could people have fallen for War of the Worlds?

The father of fake news, Orson Welles.

How could they have done that?

We're kind of in that period, just in a different way.

We're more,

you know, we have too many sources for one source to fool us.

But now with AI and the complete lack of belief in any institution,

you can see, I mean, we are in the 1930s again in many ways.

So politics in some ways always reflects the dominant technologies of the moment.

And I remember watching a speech of Hitler at one of the the Nuremberg rallies and thinking, Hitler isn't possible without the megaphone, without the loudspeaker system.

There was no way for him to address tens and tens of thousands of people without loudspeakers and Klieglites.

And he was the master of those two technologies.

He's sort of the dark master of them.

Now we're in a different technological age.

And there are some that tell us that

social media and the free internet internet are luxuries we can't afford because they can be manipulated by

tyrants,

disinformation agents, and so on.

I tend to think, though, that they may be protecting us somewhat.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I think we've learned more about our leaders and learned more about the deals that get done.

And, you know, the truth, not that we've gotten to it, about COVID,

would never come out without social media.

My fear is that the clampdown is coming.

Yes.

And that the

powers that be that want to wage war, you know,

whether it's warranted or not, or in ways that, you know, we might not wish.

will get total control of this thing and engineer the conversation in the way they want, de-amplify the voices

of critics, skeptics, and others.

But I mean, real control of it is terrifying.

And Glenn,

as we sit here, that is my biggest fear for this country, other than the real world problems that are going on, you know, the opiate crisis and so on.

But you see, everything else is downhill of freedom of expression.

See, once that goes, you no longer have the ability to even see your own problems clearly.

You're a pure captive of propaganda.

And so just this week, the New York Times reports, oh, Israel bombed a hospital

and there are 500 dead.

Well, a day and a half after that, we know that that wasn't exactly the story.

And the reason we know that is because there are other sources.

And almost immediately, we got skepticism about those claims and we got other reports and so on.

And we've kind of worked out what happened now,

pretty close to to the truth, two days later.

That's a tribute to the freedom of the internet and the freedom of social media and independent media, especially.

If we were to lose that, though,

maybe the New York Times or whoever's on the top of the info heap wouldn't have wanted to admit error in that, and maybe they wouldn't have had to.

So

if we lose this complexity and this multifarious

source that allows people from all sides to chime in, even the worst sides, we may not be able to process events and we'll just become the captive of masters who will whip us this way and that way.

And

they're going to use this as an excuse.

Because whatever the right or wrong of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is, there are people who see it as an opportunity to

gain control.

Sure.

I mean, in the weirdest event ever, the New York Times gets this story wrong.

And then I see people calling for the internet censorship because there's

too much disinformation out there.

Well,

in other words, the most trusted sources get things wrong.

And

that becomes a pretext for censorship.

It's only the places like the New York Times that really deserve scrutiny because little people on little accounts saying weird things don't cause major protests across the world.

Correct.

But they get a story wrong and maybe a capital city burns down or an embassy is stormed.

And every

newsroom in America follows the New York Times.

Sure, they do.

I've worked for them.

I've written for them.

One of my, you know, out of all my issues, and I'm not really a political person by background.

You know, I've written novels, I've been a literary critic, and so on.

I like to bring the legacy of human wisdom to bear on the moment.

And the great wisdom of the ages is that people are proud, arrogant, self-centered, often wrong, unwilling to admit mistakes, and tragedy happens when they commit themselves to egotistical pursuits rather than than check themselves using

using traditional basic wisdom.

And

I'm very glad that at the moment we have a relatively free internet that can

even show the extremists involved.

I mean,

when this BLM chapter in Chicago put the paraglider on their

social media, I want to see that.

I do too.

I mean,

I don't want to be saved from these expressions of extremism.

The notion is that if I see them, I'll somehow imitate them.

That's kind of the rationale behind censorship, that we are all monkey-see, monkey-do, basically.

This is the elitist

mindset.

I'm educated.

I can handle it.

They can't.

Exactly, exactly.

But I think that woke more people up to the

potential for organized anti-Semitism in the country than anything else.

Say that had been censored.

You know,

somebody said

that that's an extremist view that could cause violence, whatever their usual rationales are, we're going to keep that out.

I think because people saw that, they got a snapshot of what's possible.

I also think that,

you know, I've gotten heat for so long for, you know, you're just stirring people up.

I don't view myself as that.

I view myself as a safety valve.

If, if you,

if you

express it, you get people to express it, to take positive steps, prepare, whatever,

you're less likely to have a blow up.

If the government shuts everybody up and shuts everybody down, you just stuff it down and stuff it down and stuff it down, that's not healthy nor healthy for a republic.

Well,

absolutely.

Suppression and authoritarian control are always recipes for outbursts later.

And people who take the Palestinian side of the Israeli conflict would say that right now.

You know, Gaza is pent up and something had to explode.

Well, let's take a lesson from the fact that America is getting pretty pent up in some ways.

And I'm a little upset with conservatives who so recently were on the business end of censorship, getting their accounts canceled,

or maybe libertarians who were trying to say something about COVID or their resistance to vaccination and so on.

And now they're suddenly,

you know, they're pro-Israel and

they're suddenly taking the side of censorship against no,

you know, no.

Yeah.

I mean,

you cannot pick and choose.

Yeah.

You know, the only stuff that deserves protection is the stuff that people don't like.

Right.

And it depends on who's in power.

On, you know, I don't like this.

I don't like that.

If you can't

stand in front of the person who is being shut told to shut up and say, I so agree with you that this is abhorrent.

Hands off, hands off.

He has a right to say it, not to incite violence and all of that, but he has a right to his opinion no matter how wrong he is.

I think the progressives and the left, they are so mentally weak because no one has ever thrown them up against a wall intellectually and said, defend that.

When you spend your your life,

I was a much better Christian in New York than I am in Texas because I'm in a sea of Christians here.

I had to defend it.

And I was more of a, oh, you call yourself a Christian.

So you watch yourself.

You think about things so much more when you're challenged.

You know what I mean?

The problem is that across society,

groups move into the spaces in which they won't be challenged.

And if you're on a major university campus right now in the last few years,

you are in a pretty

monocultural political

zone.

People who might come on from the conservative or libertarian or dissident side

can't even speak on campus anymore.

I mean,

or it's turned into some zoo with security and so on.

So

people going unchallenged for a long time seems to be

a hazard of the age.

But

it does happen on every side.

Oh, yeah.

It's just this time

is on conservatives, but conservatives and bigots and everything else have.

But having been on the outside and having been the subject of, I think, a lot of censorship and suppression,

If they turn around and

say, oh, but this time

it'll go to your favor.

It'll go to my favor.

I don't want it.

They're wrong.

They're absolutely wrong.

This is a weapon that can be turned at anyone.

The censorship, speech suppression, disinformation, industrial complex, as some reporters have called it,

is a cannon that can be swung at whoever they need to swing it at when they do.

And if people haven't realized that by now, they're not just naive,

they're morons.

And frankly,

if you are a supporter of the Palestinian cause right now, you also face the possibility if policy makers should decide you're on the outs of being silenced.

So

I like to think that I extend to my adversary

the same courtesies I wish them to extend to me.

I just want to live in a country where we all agree on the Bill of Rights.

That's it.

Right.

Can we just agree on those things?

Because I don't, it doesn't force me to agree with your opinion or disagree with your opinion or do anything about it.

So my dad was a patent attorney, an intellectual property attorney.

He worked for the 3M Corporation.

He patented things like post-it notes and scotch tape.

And in the 80s, it was thought by American industry that Japan was going to eat our lunch.

It was going to take over.

And a lot of the patent fights my dad was fighting were against Japanese infringement of American patents.

They were stealing our products.

And I remember asking him once, I said, Dad, is Japan going to take over the world?

You know,

is all our industry going to collapse and move to Japan?

And he said, Walt, it won't happen.

And they were making movies, you know,

that sort of portended that.

And he said, we've got a creativity, a spontaneity, and a kind of argumentative, creative nature in America where people don't move with the pack.

And that's where inventions come from.

And as long as we have that sort of inventive, skeptical, creative, slightly chaotic nature in America, we're all going to be fine.

And he and he framed it in terms of industry and in terms of economics and so on.

But I think that's true socially as well.

We still have it.

Yeah,

as long as we're

fighting fair,

challenging ourselves, challenging one another, striking sparks,

we are,

you know, there's hope for us.

But

once we start trying to figure out which line to get in, according to which authority, and who to be afraid of and what to shut up about and

when not to speak out, we're going to slowly, probably economically,

contract too.

Because

that fear of being different can either...

you know, that fear of

it can shut you up, but can also shut down the mind finally.

Just let the AI answer the question.

Right.

You know, I'll ask the AI and then find out what to say.

Right.

And I mean, there are people who do that now.

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Let me talk to you about

conspiracy theories.

Sure.

Because I...

I'm questioning everything.

I mean, we went to the moon.

I believe that.

I know that.

But I think we're entering a time where that could go away should we lose our fight for civilization in the West.

We

I

Oswald killed Kennedy.

Was somebody else involved?

I don't know.

But now that I see that the CIA knew about Oswald, I don't know.

Now I'm starting to question it.

Were they involved?

9-11,

it was Al-Qaeda.

George Bush didn't blow up the World Trade Center.

However,

something's not right.

They keep too many secrets.

Something's not right just because of Sandy Berger going in and stealing documents from both Clinton and the Bush records.

I don't know what that was,

but they didn't blow up the World Trade Center.

COVID

happened when I could investigate and had the resources to investigate myself.

And

that thing is dirty

as it gets.

How much of our history

is that?

There is this

on this scale.

I mean,

millions of people died.

Well,

I tend to look at conspiracy theories as folklore first.

They're usually a sign that people

can't can't make sense of an event or a sign that the official story is lacking in some way.

That's not necessarily the case, but

it means that the official record reads as somehow suspicious.

And people have every right to use their minds and their knowledge and their sources and gossip to connect the dots as they see fit and then put their thought or their theory into the arena and see if it survives scrutiny.

Every journalist has a, before they have fully reported a story, has a theory as to what the real story is, and it may be disproved in the reporting, or

that theory may survive, or maybe something even more outlandish may turn out to be true.

So the basis,

I can't criticize people for having

novel theories about things, especially about stories where common sense tells us suppression has taken place.

I'll talk about my dad again.

He died at 82.

He had

Lou Gehrig's disease, yeah.

And it was a very painful death.

And one of the last things he wanted to talk about hours before he died was the Kennedy assassination.

He'd been a young lawyer in Washington working as a clerk in a court that was down the hall from the AP, the Associated Press.

And he he remembers when the assassination happened, all of a sudden all of the teletypes going, going in the AP office and going in there, and

the most catastrophic event of his young life, he was 25, had just happened.

He died at 82.

That was 1963.

He died at 82.

And he looked at me, and this was an educated man.

He himself had gone to Princeton.

He was a chemical engineer, a rationalist,

a corporate lawyer all his life.

And he said, We still don't know what happened.

I can't believe I'm dying without knowing what happened that day.

And he said, All I know is that we didn't get the full story.

And I've spent a lot of time as a journalist and talked to people over the years who might have some insight into that story.

And I don't think we have either.

I mean, I know we haven't.

I don't have a substitute theory.

When you come to things like

Epstein,

I mean, Christopher Wray is the one with the black book now.

The power.

There is a black book?

Yeah, well, I was told that it is

with the FBI and it is with Christopher Wright.

It's two people share access to it.

The power of that book, if it does exist, is terrifying, terrifying.

and

if this happened to a truck driver we'd know every name in it

but because it's with the elite and there's something with him and uh

spy agencies uh

and all these powerful people i are we ever gonna find the truth on that one well it's pretty clear from the way he died

and the mystery surrounding it that

something isn't right.

I mean,

even having the ability to kill yourself in that kind of prison means somebody gave you something you shouldn't have.

Hard to believe that with paper sheets or whatever it could be done.

Yeah, it seems more and more, Glenn, that the bigger an event, the more mystery surrounds it.

And

is this normal?

Well, it's normal when power is involved.

There are always competing

establishment interests.

If Jeffrey Epstein was indeed involved with intelligence, and I think he had to have been to do what he did,

there are people who don't want that known.

There are people who were clients of his who obviously, or clients, I don't know, friends, Confederates, who obviously don't want that known.

I wrote a book about a con artist who was a murderer

who I knew by another name.

He pretended to be a Rockefeller.

And when I talked to people who I knew had known him, none of them wanted to speak up.

They didn't want to admit they'd been fooled.

They didn't want to admit they'd been friends.

They didn't want to admit they hung out.

Epstein was a thousand times that guy.

Oh, yeah.

And

so.

It's a weird predicament for human beings to know we're going to have to live through history without understanding it.

I mean,

that forces you, I mean, back on sort of religious principles and basic common sense principles, because

you might never find out what happened to our president, John F.

Kennedy.

You might never find out

why we went to war in Iraq.

It's still a mystery.

I still don't quite understand it.

I mean, they obviously didn't tell the truth about the weapons of mass destruction.

So why did we go?

Why did Saddam Hussein become the fall guy for something al-Qaeda did?

And what was al-Qaeda that

made it not our ally as it had been, or

bin Laden so many years before?

We're not going to get a lot of these answers.

And the people who could give them to us have reasons not to give them to us.

So how are we going to survive?

How are we going to make decisions?

How are we going to vote?

How are we going to,

you know, form our personal philosophies?

We're going to have to shrink back to very basic standards because the information sphere

is

especially

occluded when it comes to big stories.

We learn about little stories.

We learn the gossip about movie stars' lives and so on, but we don't know why our wars are fought, how our pandemics start and things like that.

I mean,

just since COVID, I've heard from very good sources, people you could usually rely on, about 10 different stories about where COVID came from, including top scientists just assuring me it's this or it's that.

I'm not any closer to understanding it than I was.

I knew it didn't come from a back cave.

But did it just leak from a lab?

Maybe, maybe there are stories underneath that.

But how do we live with this level of doubt and uncertainty?

We keep digging, but at the same time, we can't spend our lives.

We have to reduce the influence of the gigantic governments on our personal lives.

So we can still go about our day-to-day life and not have to worry about all of that.

You know what I mean?

I think the closer we get

to a federalist sort of system.

Do you have

are you finding more people

waking up?

I mean, you do a podcast with Matt Taibbi.

And I don't know.

It seems like you might be red-pilling him just a little bit.

Or is it just the times?

Okay, so Matt and I...

It would probably be wrong to say I'm red-pilled in a traditional sense because

I kind of have a certain angle on things.

I'm not the kind of guy who says, vote for this guy or don't vote for that person.

I've given money to two candidates in my lifetime.

Both were Democrats who appealed to me at the time.

I've written for magazines like Harper's and New Republic, which were really Democratic Party establishment

mouthpieces.

In some ways, it was around the time of RussiaGate Gate that I started to become less orthodox because I knew that the mega story about Donald Trump and Russia was not true.

And I became offended that I was asked to subscribe to it as a right-thinking person.

And it sort of put a wedge in my relationship to the media that I had always worked for.

And that's grown.

And it grew through COVID, particularly.

I saw the ways in which mainstream outlets were being used to whip up what I believed was hysteria.

And so

it's not, I'm more of a press critic or a gadfly or a cultural skeptic than I am a traditional political person.

You won't see me on the campaign trail.

You said you listened to me a lot for years.

Yep.

Why?

Why did I listen to to Glenn Beck?

Yeah.

Okay, I mean, when I was a kid on a farm,

we lived on a farm in Minnesota.

Even though my dad worked for 3M company, he was kind of a back-to-the-land guy who had us living 50 miles out of the city.

We had a radio in the truck, and we listened to Paul Harvey every day.

And then as time went on,

Rush Limbaugh came, and Art Bell, and Glenn Beck.

And

I loved radio I mean I can't it was for a lonely kid out in the Minnesota countryside it was always a

comforting connection to the bigger world yeah and

you know you're quite a talent man and you were doing something new and it was arresting I loved listening

and you know I told you earlier my family converted to Mormonism when I was a teenager I'm no longer an active active Mormon, but I have a lot of affection for the church and a lot of ties to people who are much better Mormons than I ever was.

Me too.

And so

that aspect of your

life, your personality appealed to me too.

Where else was I going to hear somebody like me who had

exposure to that?

The great age of talk radio probably probably has passed.

I'm not sure what you think about that.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

But I don't think the great age of the spoken word has passed.

I think it's about to renew itself even in bigger and better ways.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, spoken word is spoken word.

You know,

I know you're a writer, so you'll understand this.

You know, you try to read

You try to read Huck Finn or Edgar Allan Poe in your head.

it's not the same as reading it out loud.

It was made to be read out loud.

And there's something about

the storytelling ability of one individual.

It's the only medium where,

if you're just listening and not watching,

where it requires you to put as much into it as the storyteller.

That's how you see the story.

Right.

Is if you're engaged, because then you're working it in your head.

That doesn't exist.

Yeah, I mean, the podcast, the renaissance of the podcast

is

a wonderful thing as far as I'm concerned.

I mean, I wonder how people have the ability to take in that much

human speech.

And I'm not one of those people who likes to turn up the speed to 1.5.

I don't want to hear people talking like chipmunks.

You know, I want to hear the richness.

But I listen to you for the same reason I listened to Paul Harvey back when, or Larry King late at night when he had a show.

And then Art Bell for company.

The human voice creates a sense of intimacy, especially when experienced alone in the dark or out in a car or out in the country.

And

our politics probably had a lot to do with the rise of talk radio.

In other words,

I remember Trump bringing Rush Limbaugh out not long before Rush died and thinking, like, that guy's probably responsible for the president being there.

Oh, yeah.

You know,

I wouldn't hesitate to call myself a populist.

I love the people.

It's not the kind of populism that means huge rallies of torch-lit, you know, nationalists, really, socialists.

It's the populism of people doing ordinary things spread out around the country.

And

you'd hear, you'd go into a garage to get a tire fixed and you'd hear Rush Limbaugh.

And the elites weren't paying attention.

They were like

unaware, I think, largely of this grassroots movement that was building.

And it found fruition in this outsider presidential candidate and then president.

And

I don't think that would have happened without radio.

Radio is a very democratic medium.

And I've always loved it.

And I haven't loved it necessarily for the ideology of the personalities, but you know, You were a pretty wacky guy in a somewhat in what had become a somewhat stale medium or a predictable medium.

Yeah.

You know.

Yeah.

It is a pleasure.

I hope it doesn't take this long to get us back together.

No, I love come back.

Yeah.

Good.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thanks, Glenn.

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