Best of the Program | Guest: David Volodzko | 7/31/23

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Hey,

There was no contribution from Stu of any value, but he is still recovering, honestly, from the jail.

Well, I don't want to get into it.

I don't want to get into it.

Maybe later on in the podcast.

Great, great podcast.

We start with what Devin Archer is supposed to say in front of Congress today.

Not sure.

We play all of the angles and the questions that should be asked.

Then we also go back into into our dark future and play some audio that has just come out in the last week, and it's pretty eye-opening.

If you think that ESG and that air travel, your food supply might be interrupted, wait until you hear today's podcast.

You don't want to miss it.

And also a Democratic socialist on the Glenn Beck program.

Yes, because even though I disagree with him, he was fired from the Seattle Times, and he was fired because the mob went after him.

He wasn't left enough, and he's pretty left.

Let me talk to him and give him our support of the First Amendment right on today's podcast.

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You're listening to the best of the Blenbeck program.

The Biden's family foreign business empire,

Devin Archer, is ground zero.

Devin Archer is the guy who knows where all the bodies are buried.

Perhaps literally.

We're not sure at this point.

However, he was supposed to testify last week.

He's been talking to the committee in Washington.

He is not a friendly witness, but he's not exactly hostile either.

He says he's just going to tell the truth.

I have no idea what he is going to say.

But apparently, the committee knows at least his opening statement.

And there are some things that he is going to say, apparently.

that will not go well for the Bidens.

Again, he knows everything that was going on.

Now, if I were Hunter Biden,

I would think to myself, hmm,

I know I'm not suicidal, but I could be committing suicide by the end of this week.

He says his family has been threatened.

It is really, I mean, we are in the place.

to where who do you trust to keep you safe.

Oh, don't worry.

The federal government will keep you safe.

We'll keep you safe, all right.

No, thank you.

Who keeps you safe at this point?

So who knows what he's going to say?

But here are the questions that can be asked.

Why did Burisma hire Hunter Biden in April 2014 on the eve of his father's vice presidency?

His dad makes his first major visit to Ukraine.

What did Archer believe the firm wanted from Hunter Biden being on its board and working as one of its lawyers?

It's a really good question to ask about the hiring of a crack and hooker addict.

I mean, I think that's fair.

He'll know.

What did Joe Biden know about Hunter's business dealings in China, Ukraine, Romania, and Russia?

Apparently...

There were several parties, apparently several board meetings

that

Devin Archer knows

happened and was there for those meetings.

Why did Joe Biden phone in to some of the Burisma board meetings and specifically phone in to the December 2015 meeting in Dubai when the firm was panicked that Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor, was escalating his probe of the Ukrainian firm?

That one is really important.

I have no idea of my son's business dealings, but I happen to call in to a barisma board meeting.

What, to say hi?

Hey, I hate to interrupt your board meeting.

Son, I just want to know, how are you?

Are you okay?

Is everything all right?

Are you

still making it with the hookers?

Do you need more money?

What was that conversation?

It's like one of those things that wasn't about the business dealings.

Those old school party lines, Glenn.

You remember you could just call in and you wouldn't know necessarily who was on it.

It was just a bunch of people.

And sometimes it's the Parisma board meeting.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Why did the Chinese approach Hunter Biden and Devin Archer in 2013

to form a joint investment firm?

And what did the Chinese say they wanted out of the relationship?

I mean, this one is important.

2013, they formed this new investment house.

And immediately, the Chinese are like, we are, look, where are we going to put all this money?

We have so much money.

We need somebody who's on the cutting edge of investing.

Somebody who has a really good track record.

Oh, I know.

How about

how about the Goldman Sachs?

No, no, no, no, no.

No.

We need somebody new.

Hey, how about a crack addict and his friend who have no experience at all?

There's a good idea.

Let's give them more access to our market than anyone, including Bank of America, Citibank, and all the others.

Let's give them more access and more money than anyone else in the world.

Does that make sense to you?

What did

Betrina once the richest female oligarch and the wife of the former Moscow mayor reach out to firms associated with Hunter Biden, Devin Archer, and other business partners back in 2013 to 14?

And what did she get out of the relationship?

Was joe biden ever promised or sent any money from his son's overseas business partners or did hunter ever confide that he paid bills and expenses for his dad did hunter have any role in the tribal bond scheme or did he derive any direct or indirect financial benefits for the companies involved in it now this one is important because devin has said the bidens threw him under the bus this is why he's going to jail he was ripping off an Indian tribe.

Is there anything more politically incorrect today?

Something that you'd know,

gosh, if I get caught, this would be a big, huge scandal.

I mean, it's like stealing money from orphanages.

So he's stealing money from, and this is what he was convicted of, a bond scheme.

However, the speculation is that Hunter was involved in that too, and it's a giant cover-up.

We may find out today.

Did Hunter Biden have a strategy of targeting foreign oligarchs with legal troubles?

That's the last question that should be asked today with Devin Archer.

If now he is canceled several times and rescheduled.

However, they were pushing,

it was really,

it was quite interesting what they sent.

They sent a letter on Saturday, which the Justice Department, it is my understanding, never does.

They sent a letter that said, Hey, I just want to remind you, he should be in jail.

Now, people are reporting this as the DOJ was saying that they want him in jail before Monday.

The

DOJ has said that is not the truth.

So, on Sunday, they did something even

less familiar from the DOJ.

They wrote a letter to the judge, a follow-up letter to Ronnie Abrams.

This is the United States District Judge, Southern District of New York.

The government writes to follow-up on its letter dated yesterday, apprising the court of the Second Circuit's mandate, affirming the judgment of conviction in this matter.

The government understands that the defendant is scheduled to provide testimony to Congress tomorrow.

To be clear, the government does not request and has never requested that the defendant surrender before his congressional testimony.

As the court knows, to surrender and commence his sentence of imprisonment, the defendant

must be designated to a federal facility by the Bureau of Prisons, a process that can take several weeks or months.

Nonetheless, for the avoidance of all doubt, the government requests that any surrender date, should the court order one, be scheduled to occur after the defendant's congressional testimony is completed.

Now,

several speculations on why they did this.

Why would they go into the office on a Saturday and write a letter that they don't usually write?

It can't be a computer glitch.

It can't be, you know, anything that you could say, well, we were super busy.

And, you know, we're just burning the midnight oil.

We got these guys here in the DOJ that just won't sleep until justice is served.

Does anybody believe that?

It's the government.

Why didn't they just send it today?

Don't know.

Then they come out and they say, oh, no, no, no, I want you to know that's not what that letter meant at all.

Okay, so everybody was speculating that that's what that letter was about.

Then the next day they come out and somebody had to go into the office again and write another letter that never happens on a weekend.

Here's what I think they were doing.

I think they were reminding American Devin Archer is going to prison.

I think this was a discrediting thing that they were doing.

So everyone could talk about Devin Archer as a guy who is going to prison.

How many times do you trust a guy going to prison?

And is he just testifying because he wants his sentence lightened or anything like that.

That, I think, is as far as the conspiracy on this may go.

I think it was, it's just, does this sound reasonable to you still?

I think it's just to

get them to say, to have everybody in America put him in the right frame, and that is convicted criminal.

Right.

They have to give cover to the media to be able to dismiss everything that comes out of this.

Right.

And to look good on the right side, like, because they'll they'll say, and conservatives over the weekend said they didn't want him to testify, and that's why he was thrown to jail.

But that was nonsense.

In fact, the Justice Department had to come out and tell these crazy conservatives that that's not what was happening.

And as it turns out, you know, his testimony was either really bad, but let's remember he's going to prison for this.

Maybe he's looking to suck up, or it wasn't as bad as everyone said.

And the Justice Department knew that.

They weren't trying to

bring him into prison.

They were very clear that they said, you know, it'll take months.

You just happen to issue this letter.

Trying to cover themselves on no matter which way this goes.

And of course, the pressures are still there, right?

Like they still want him to do, quote unquote, the right thing in their view, which is to protect.

Whether that's still a legitimate possibility at this point, I don't know.

I mean, it seems like it's gone down that there's too much evidence.

There's too much coming out here, but that's basically their goal here, is to still try to

manipulate the levers of power however they can to stop all of this.

Well,

you know, he's...

He has been, apparently, he and his family have received serious death threats.

He has said several times that he is concerned about the safety of himself and his family.

You have a skeptical look on your face.

Why?

No, it's

these things are very, very important.

And, you know,

they always,

this is always the excuse, right?

There's always something like this that is bubbling under.

There's always pressures from the evil outside that are always conservatives.

These things don't typically ever come to pass, but we always hear about it.

Oh, I don't think...

Really, you think that, because I've not read that it's conservatives.

I haven't read which side it's coming from.

But

I got to believe.

I mean, if I'm going to jail and I'm testifying against the president and the first son, and I know that,

you know, somebody else that had the goods on powerful people just hung themselves strangely and cameras stopped working,

I'd be very concerned.

I would worry about my life and my family's life as well.

Oh, I'm sure in reality, that's what's happening.

The reason it's being reported, though, is usually the opposite of reality.

But we'll see.

We'll see.

I mean, I would certainly be scared.

In this scenario, with all of this that's going on, if what we believe is true, right?

And man, there's so much evidence now at this point.

There's so much smoke that it's hard to dismiss.

This is the type of stuff that you see happen.

This fuels movies.

Movie stuff.

This is the stuff that you see.

This is house of cards stuff at this point.

And the house of cards is a good analogy because it does feel like we're a couple cards breaking down from the whole thing collapsing.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

For anybody who says credit scores, social credit scores are not going to happen here in America and they're not so bad.

I have nothing to hide.

Let me show you how they are being used.

This is if you get a phone call from an undesirable caller, somebody who has a low social credit score, for instance, in this case, owes more money than the state thinks they should owe.

Instead of getting a phone, just a regular ring, and you look down and you see the name, this is what happens to your phone in China.

Listen.

Now, this is an undesirable caller.

The caller has a

lower social credit score than yours.

Also, just maybe somebody who owes debt.

If you take the call, you risk getting a lower social score.

If you do take the call, you're told to tell that person, you got to change your score.

Okay?

That's what's happening in China.

Now,

think of the effect that that would have on chilling conversations.

Then I played last hour a piece of audio from John Kerry.

I need you to understand the WEF

is working on

social justice and social control, social credit scores through ESG.

That comes from the World Economic Forum.

You just heard that play out in China.

They're also looking for a net zero world and to get there we have to completely change their words, not mine, our entire food system

from seed to fork.

Wow, and we have to do that by 2030.

Hurry.

What could possibly go wrong from an entire food industry throwing out everything that it has taken millennias to learn, throwing it out, giving it to a bunch of governmental eggheads, and they take it from the planting of the seed to fork.

Here's what John Kerry, the representative from the United States of America, said at the Agricultural Innovation Mission for Climate Summit.

Listen.

Agriculture contributes about 33% of all the emissions of the world,

depending a little bit on how you count it, but it's anywhere from 26 to 33.

And we can't get to net zero.

We don't get this job done unless agriculture is front and center as part of the solution.

But with a growing population on the planet, we just crossed the threshold of 8 billion fellow citizens around the world.

We just crossed that in this last year.

Emissions from the food system alone

are projected to cause another half a degree of warming by mid-century on the current course that we are today.

A two-degree future

could result in an additional 600 million people not getting enough to eat.

And you just can't continue to both warm the planet while also expecting to feed it.

Hmm.

Hmm.

So boy, that sounds dark, doesn't it?

I mean, that sounds like maybe we should get rid of people, too.

And if we just starve a few people to death, will it be that bad?

It's for Mother Earth.

Now, they're not saying they're going to starve people to death.

I'm saying their incompetence will starve people to death.

I'm also saying that

we're starting to see a lot of information come out now about what they did and didn't know about the virus and the vaccine.

Are you that concerned, really?

Are you that concerned about killing that many people?

I mean, you know, the climate is at stake.

And if we could just, as Kamala Harris has said, reduce the population, that would be much easier.

So we're going to control people by...

controlling what they eat and how much they can get.

We're going to control people through their social justice credit scores.

And also, if we can control the money, we'll be better off as well.

Here is the latest from the WEF on a CBDC.

Now, I want you to know what a CBDC is.

That is a central bank.

So that's the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England.

A central bank.

digital currency.

It is completely unlike Bitcoin.

Bitcoin and everything like Bitcoin is not controlled centrally.

It has no ability to turn on and off.

A central bank digital currency does.

This

is from the WEF in their meeting about the benefits of digital money.

Listen.

And the one final note I will make is that if you think about the benefits of digital money, there are huge potential gains.

It's not just about digital forms of physical currency.

You can have programmability, you know, units of central bank currency with expiry dates.

You could have, as I argue in my book, a potentially better, and some people might see it or a darker world where the government decides that units of central bank money can be used to purchase some things, but not other things that it deems less desirable, like say ammunition or drugs or pornography or something of the sort.

And that is very powerful in terms of the use of a CBDC

so whatever it deems

undesirable okay

so now let's see what we have here we have a climate emergency We had Blinken come out this weekend and say our climate emergency is just as bad as a full-out nuclear war

okay

so climate emergency is just the same.

We have a government that is trying to control people how they think, how they feel,

where they move,

what they buy,

all of these things to change the social structure.

We also have ESG changing the small business relationship with big business and big banks and small banks.

We have a system being built unlike anything the world or America has ever seen.

So let me give you two stories that came out this weekend.

You can read all about this in my new book, Dark Future.

But two new stories have broken this weekend.

One,

a new study, this is from CNN, a new study published earlier this week that showed that both the European and North American heat waves would have been all but impossible with climate change.

Stu, you're a climate change guy.

All but impossible?

What does that mean?

All but impossible.

All but impossible without climate change?

Or you said with climate change?

Without climate change.

Okay.

We couldn't have had these temperatures without climate change.

That's the new study.

The plague of heat and fires that our world is experiencing today is one of consequence of a 1.2 degrees degree Celsius hike in the global average temperature compared to pre-industrial times.

A two degree Celsius rise, which we are currently on target for,

exceed by the end of the century, would see the average number of heat wave daves increase sixfold across southern Europe.

So that one in 100-year heat waves could happen every other year.

Even northern Europe, blah, blah, blah.

The reality is that ongoing heat waves and wildfire fires provide us with glimpses of worse to come.

All right.

So what is this story all about?

I thought it was about vacations.

No, first, we're setting the stage.

It's horrible.

And extreme weather is now endangering much of the world.

The events of last week in the Greek islands should then give us pause for thought, not only about whether we should any longer be flying on holiday to places that may threaten us and our loved ones, but the whole point of having a holiday.

For many of us, jetting off every year to a foreign break has almost become instinctive, just something we do without really thinking about it.

If southern Europe is out of bounds due to increasing heat, then the tendency for us, many, will find somewhere else that looks, or on the face of it at least, less risky.

But this isn't the answer.

Climate breakdown is now set to become all-pervasive and affect every aspect of our lives and livelihoods and already extreme weather can happen pretty much anywhere.

So what do you do?

Well we can't go on.

It can't go on nor should it both for the peace of mind holiday makers increasingly worried about growing extreme weather or for the good of the planet.

Holidays abroad need to be decoupled from flying.

Vacations need to return to their roots or at least move in that direction.

In particular, holidays abroad need to be decoupled from flying, which means, as far as Europe is concerned, train, car, or coach.

There are issues, of course.

Just published Greenpeace analysis revealed that traveling by train around Europe is on average four times more expensive than flying.

Traveling by road takes longer and is likely to involve hours of frustrating queuing at ports.

But on the plus side, if the journey itself becomes part of the holiday, airport scrums and delays are avoided.

And most importantly, for the climate, carbon emissions are massively reduced.

So, I wrote in the book about how flying will become a thing of the past.

I told you just a few weeks ago that airports are being reduced in England already.

Not the private ones, just the ones that you would fly into and I would fly into.

Now, let me give you another story from England.

Want to jet off to Italy, Spain, or France?

Starting in 2024, that's next January, all travelers going to European Union countries will not only have to book their flight and hotel and bring their passport, but they also must fill out an online application before traveling on their trip.

The online application requires authorization and to pay a fee through the European Travel Information and Authorization System.

The system is expected to be operational in 2024.

Travelers will be required to fill out personal information including date, place of birth, home address, parents' names, phone number, email, nationality, education, occupation, planned travel destinations, and criminal history.

Niall Gardner, former aide to the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, said this is Orwellian.

I see this as a big government overreach here.

It's quite Orwellian with the amount of information that the EU officials are requesting.

Most applications are expected to clear in just a few minutes, but some applications could take four days and possibly up to 30 days to process.

Once approved, your authorization is valid for three years.

U.S.

travelers that wish to travel through a European Union will have to go through this application process.

It is intensely bureaucratic.

So what is this really about?

Is this truly about...

What, safety?

Is that what they're saying?

This is going to provide safety?

Wait, to a country or a group of countries that just open up their borders for anybody to come in,

they're now doing this for safety?

No, they're not.

They are going to make

your traveling on a plane such a hassle.

You going over to Europe so incredibly expensive, so time-consuming, such a hassle that you will give up.

And and eventually they will ban it.

That's what's really happening here.

The vacations are a thing of the past because of global warming.

That's not true.

It's to decoupalize us and degrowth the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world.

This is so

unbelievably Malthusian.

This is a communist tactic.

Wait a minute, you're going to, I have to do what?

For every country I'm flying to, I have to what?

Well, you can just drive.

Oh, well, I can't drive across the ocean.

You're going to take a vacation on the eastern seaboard if you live.

in Washington state.

Nope, probably not.

This takes us back to the time of about 1960, 1950, 60, or 70.

I remember in 1969, I was five years old and I was going to Disneyland.

And I remember very little of it, but I remember it from the pictures.

We had a dress in a suit.

I had a little suit and a little Frank Sinatra kind of hat.

And we got dressed up.

My sisters wore gloves on the plane because it was so rare.

And it was something very, very special.

That's what we're going towards.

We're going towards you not being able to go anywhere.

Now, by the way,

all of this, all of this will be purchased through CBDC, a central bank digital currency.

Not Bitcoin.

a central bank digital currency.

And if I might remind you what was just played a second ago,

the benefits of central bank digital currency is the programmability

with expiry dates.

That way they can limit less desirable purchases.

Notice he said what we deem to be less desirable, like drugs.

Well, aren't they now saying that air travel is less desirable?

Aren't they now seeding that ground to tell you that beef is less desirable?

That the food you eat is less desirable than protein-rich insects?

The answer to that is yes.

Find out all about it in the book, Dark Future, available now.

You're listening to the best of the Glendeck program.

David Velotzko is a journalist formerly with the New York Times, Times, and I want to just read something that he wrote just last week that I shared with you last week.

I was fired from my job at the Seattle Times after defending Hitler.

The only problem is I never defended Hitler.

In fact, my family was hunted by the Nazis.

My grandfather was a Nazi killer who almost later died in a concentration camp.

And some of my best journalistic work has been exposing neo-Nazi lies.

But if you want to hear a story about intolerance in our country's most tolerant city and the erosion of civil discourse in American life, read on.

He moved to Seattle.

He's lived all over the world.

He has been a journalist that has covered everything,

all of these grabs for power.

He was living in Georgia.

He was offered a job at the Seattle Times to be an editorial board member and a columnist.

He said, I only knew Seattle by reputation.

The great outdoors of the Pacific Northwest, a vibrant Asian community, strong Latino community where a son or daughter could grow up with Spanish-speaking friends, and residents who routinely approve tax hikes to ensure that those in need help receive it.

I should mention that our politics fit the bill of Seattle.

I'm a Democratic socialist, and my wife is a DEI trainer.

Suffice to say, the city felt like a great fit.

I'm sure it did.

He thought to himself, what a beautiful new home.

How inclusive.

How tolerant.

How naive.

He joins me now.

David, welcome to the program.

Thank you for having me.

You bet.

You know, coming on this program is not going to help you with a lot of people in Seattle

or

who generally might be on your side.

But I don't know if you heard any of the broadcasts from last week.

I think that what is happening to you is absolutely un-American.

I mean, I engage people as far right as you can imagine, as far left as you can imagine.

I believe in talking to people.

I think that that belief is partly what landed me in this situation I find myself in.

I was on Twitter.

I was having a conversation.

You know,

I've covered a variety of issues that have had communists come after me in the the past, neo-Nazis have come after me in the past.

Generally speaking, you ignore these people online.

And generally speaking, your bosses don't even care to hear about it.

They're trolls on Twitter.

But I wasn't I was I was

brushing aside the ones who are trolls, the tankies, obviously that's what you do in these situations.

There were a few people who seemed to be to some degree of good faith.

And

I don't know, maybe it's my Achilles heel.

I believe in civil discourse, good faith dialogue, and

even in listening to your harshest critics to see if there's a point to anything that they have to say.

And that is what I was doing in this situation.

I was engaging people who seemed to...

I said something on Twitter that was poorly phrased, and people were asking me, well, what exactly do you mean by this?

What are you saying here?

And I was responding to them, and I was engaging them.

And people were accusing me of,

you know, we can get into it, but people were accusing me of being a Nazi,

of

defending Hitler, of supporting Hitler,

of being a Holocaust denier, all of this stuff.

I ignored that, and I tried to focus on people who seemed to have genuine questions, who seemed to want to have a conversation.

You can't do that anymore.

I don't know where you've been living, David, but

I have been doing this forever, and I happen to agree with you that

people

aren't really looking for the truth anymore.

And even my harshest critics,

I listened to them for quite a long time and really did soul searching.

Wait a minute, how can so many people say this about me?

What am I doing that maybe is causing this?

And so you can clean up what you can clean up that, you know, you're like, okay, I see how they see that.

But there's a good portion of America now, and I think more on the left, but some on the right, that just don't care.

You're either with them or against them.

And,

you know,

there's no place for actual Bill of Rights unless you agree with me.

And that's death to our republic.

No, I agree.

There is a contingent of individuals who

so there was something different about this experience I noticed in my past with tank.

You know, I used to cover China and North Korea, and you get tankies coming after you.

For those who may not know the term, you know, those are basically communists who defended the use of Soviet tanks in the Hungarian Revolution.

These are people who are pro-violence communists.

Basically, they're the worst sort.

And they're on a lot of them on Twitter.

Who knows to what degree they actually believe in

enacting violence, but you ignore them.

And usually their attacks are in the form of

You know, they'll look at your account.

And for instance, mine, I have

a Ukrainian flag.

So they'll say, oh, you know, they'll make some argument about that.

Or they'll look at my last name and, or they'll attack me.

They look at David Joseph and they assume that I'm Jewish.

They'll attack me for that.

Things of this nature.

It's odd hominem.

It's very simplistic.

But what was happening in the neo-Nazis that come after me, they do the same thing.

But what was happening here

was different in that there was a lot of attempts to take what I'd said and then warp it and then claim that I was saying the opposite.

So people even dug up into my past.

They went back years.

One individual, a journalist in fact, found a thread that I had written, which was basically arguing it was a gay rights argument.

And they were insinuating that I was homophobic by using...

And I'm thinking, well, anybody that clicks on this and reads it is just going to see that you're lying.

But of course, many people will not know it.

They'll just...

And

this was happening.

So there was another example where somebody was arguing, you know, I was going back and forth and somebody said,

we were having this discussion about

Hitler versus Lenin, Hitler versus Stalin.

And somebody said, well, you know, Stalin did a lot of good things.

And I responded.

Well, Hitler built the highways.

Oh, my gosh.

Well, no,

in fact, what I responded was, really, so Hitler had environmental protection policies and some kind of food aid program for children.

So what?

That was my response.

People took that response and said,

look, look, he's defending Hitler.

Look at him.

He's talking about how Hitler had environmental programs.

This guy loves Hitler.

That's what they did with that statement.

And I'm like, I finished it with so what?

I mean,

wasn't I clear enough?

Obviously not.

I guess I had to write a paragraph afterwards explaining exactly what I meant.

But the point is, you realize very quickly that there's a

this wasn't your basic ad hominem attack.

This was a sort of coordinated effort to spin everything I said into the most bad faith interpretation you could possibly imagine.

I mean, the crux of it comes down to the statement that I made, which listeners can see

if they read the free press essay that I wrote, I quote the full thing, but it was basically saying that, I was basically arguing that

I believe that in a psychological sense, Lenin was more evil.

He wanted to kill more people.

I believe that more killing is more evil.

I clearly said that Hitler was more evil in terms of how many he actually killed.

Let's not be confused about that.

But I think that psychologically, if Lenin had had the military machinery of 1920s, Russia wasn't 1940s Germany.

And if he had had that at his disposal, who knows what he would have accomplished.

My argument was poorly phrased.

I will say that.

I wish I had been more careful.

But it's tantamount to saying that, you know, if I had said, hey, look, killing my family, entire family, is worse than killing my sister.

This does not mean that I am defending the murder of my sister.

It's absurd.

This is the logic that people were coming at me with.

Oh, oh, you think that killing your whole family is worse than just killing your sister?

Then you, you, you are pro-sister killing.

This is the, you know, this is, this is what was being thrown at me.

And I'm a Nazi now, and I, and I, uh, I am pro-Hitler.

You know, and the

thing about this, that, look, go ahead.

No, no, no, go ahead.

No, go ahead, finish.

I was, I was just going to say

another aspect of this was the, the,

the point was made to me that, well, look, you can't get into these comparison arguments in the first place.

You can't be comparing who was, you know, so I agree that

you, you weren't saying, you weren't defending Adolf Hitler.

I mean, my God,

but maybe you shouldn't be comparing these things.

Nobody, you know, it's a bad idea.

And

I thought about that.

I was like, but there's a rich and very well-respected 70-year tradition of historical scholars doing exactly that.

I mean, Hannah Arendt wrote an entire book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is basically all about comparing Hitler and Stalin.

I mean,

Yale history professor Timothy Snyder recently wrote an article.

I think it was in the New York Review of Books, and the title was Hitler versus Stalin, Stalin, Who Was Worse?

And I read this article, and his argument is essentially my argument that,

but I'm saying, you know, Hitler v.

Lenin, not Hitler v.

Stalin.

And nobody called him a Nazi.

Nobody said, oh, look, Timothy Snyder is defending Hitler.

Nobody even thought to make that accusation.

So clearly something else is happening here.

And I think what was happening here was...

What do you think that was?

I think

a couple of things.

One of the things I think, no, I'm speculating, so for whatever this is worth.

Yeah, I know.

But

in Seattle, the political spectrum runs from essentially Leninist to Democrat.

The Democrats are the right-wingers of

Seattle.

There are some conservatives, but I've got family up there.

You're pretty right.

Broadly speaking, you're right.

As I wrote in my essay,

the Seattle Times editorial board is seen as arch-conservative, and I think that's an unfair characterization, but that is

a perception.

I had experiences introducing myself to people for an interview or for information on background research, and some of them were

they were quite rude because when as soon as they heard I was on the board, they were, oh, oh, what are you are are you you must be pro-Trump?

And I thought, well,

well, wait, I, why would you assume that just because I work, just because I'm on the board?

I thought the board, I mean, this is a liberal paper.

This is like a very, this is like a traditional, sort of a Democratic pro-Biden, I would argue, type, you know, not a pro-Trump.

But that's the, anyway, that's the perception.

And so

here

you have this contingent of individuals on the left who

and it includes, includes journalists, who see the board in that way, fairly or unfairly, and

they have it out for the board, and then they see this journalist who's saying something inflammatory, and there's not really an effort to have a meaningful, good faith engagement with this person.

It's more just, oh, there's a window of opportunity to attack this entity that we oppose.

We can leverage this to go after the board.

And I think,

I mean, I understand the sort of political machinations there, but

I think maybe if

the situation had just been paused for about a week,

these types of Twitter mobs, they tend to move on to the next target.

Even in my experience, when I've said things and riled up the pro-North Korean tankies, they come after you, and then they're gone in five days.

David Velotsko is a journalist in Seattle.

He was just like, oh, by the Seattle Times.

And David,

I have to tell you, I have heard this story from

people that I would deem on the left

and sometimes on the far left, but generally not.

And I just kind of, I just, it's, it's hard to listen to because I'm like, I know, I know.

I've been saying this for 20 years, but nobody would listen to me.

And then they experience.

what they experience and generally speaking, they start to look at things completely differently.

What is it that you have learned from this?

Well, I mean, I've seen these types of experiences play out, obviously, I'm in the media, so I've paid attention to these in the past.

And, you know, it runs the gamut from, I guess, what you would say, reasonable quote-unquote cancellation to,

you know, you can't even believe that somebody

was penalized or even lost their job over those examples.

It just boggles the mind.

And I suppose mine falls into the latter category but so I'm not someone who is suddenly waking up and and like whoa this is so unfair because now it happened to me I've been thinking that this is a serious problem for some time

but I was largely outside of America for the better part of two decades so kind of looking at it from a distance and I think the trend that I noticed is,

you know,

there's really a lot of these examples are, it's the same, you see the same pattern with a sort of a reputable institution caving to what amounts to nothing more really than a Twitter mob

that should be ignored.

They should be ignored.

They should be relegated to the dark corners of

Twitter, essentially.

Nobody should pay them any mind, but I see it happening.

I see the sensitivities over perceived

negative

reputational damage getting getting higher and higher and the funny thing about that is that you know these these groups for instance in my case

the idea that that by firing me perhaps there would be some appeasement of these individuals these individuals many of them exist they exist to hate the Seattle Times they're never going this is the this is the equivalent of trying to pet a rabbit dog you're never going to

you know, don't do that.

And so I think what I've, what I feel now, or what I've felt for a while, but perhaps more

strongly now, is

there needs to be, I hope there would be,

a stronger

stiffness in the reaction to this.

Just ignore it.

Don't react to it.

Don't throw

good journalists to the wolves to lighten your sled, essentially.

And then you see a transition, of course.

This plays out many times where these journalists, they move over to Substack or something.

I will tell you, David, I wish you the best of luck.

What I hope comes from this is a strengthening of the spine for the Bill of Rights from all side.

David, thank you so much for being on the program.

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