Best of the Program | Guests: Michael Shellenberger & John Ziegler | 10/31/22

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So, do you think we're any closer to the truth on any of this stuff?

We're getting there, I think.

You know, I mean, I do think there's a big piece that came out from, we didn't even talk about this today, a big piece that came out in Vanity Fair, along with ProPublica working together

to say that it looks like, yeah, more likely than not, it was a lab leak that caused COVID-19.

I was shocked by that because they weren't banned.

Yeah, they were not banned.

And so, it's okay to do this reporting in retrospect.

You can say, hey, you know what?

Wow, what an amazing time that was when we all thought that it was,

it was, it was, uh, it was, um, you know,

you don't even have to go there.

I have to fact-check you on that.

We all didn't think.

We all didn't think that.

That's the point.

There was a lot of people saying, wait a minute, this, this, and this does not add up.

What's the problem here?

And then we were all kicked off of social media, so no one heard it from us again.

We are in that window right now.

We're a week from an election, and they are not going to let anything come out that screws up this narrative.

After the election, things come out that we'll screw with the election, just not against the Republic or the Democrats.

What they want to be the narrative will be the narrative for the next week.

You got to be really on your toes right now.

Hey, tomorrow we start live streaming the first hour of this podcast on YouTube in case you want to watch it.

Sounds like fun.

Yeah.

And help us get to a million subscribers.

You know, we just started doing YouTube for me, what, two years ago?

Yeah, we never really focused on it, unfortunately.

Yeah, unfortunately.

Yeah, we kind of wish we had

done that earlier.

Well, I mean, Steven Crowder was just banned from YouTube until after the election.

Isn't that interesting?

This is what I'm talking about.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

So we'll see how long we last in the next five days.

But it's on YouTube.

And today's show is great.

We talk about Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi, what the real story is on that, and so much more, including the idea to nationalize America's oil and gas.

Oh,

I get the lion.

I get the lion.

When we're all eating the animals in the zoo, I get the lion.

Holy cow.

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the best of the blend back program.

Hello, you sick twisted freak.

Welcome to Mr.

Pat Gray from Pat Gray Unleashed.

Hello, Pat.

Hello, Glenn.

Oh, it's good to have you here.

Love your costume.

That is the best mask I've ever seen.

Thank you.

Scary as hell.

Yeah.

Really?

I know.

Yeah.

So.

It took eight hours.

Really?

Yeah, eight hours to do this mask.

Holy Holy cow.

Yeah.

Well, it's good.

It's good.

Don't know exactly who you're supposed to be, but it's really good.

So what are your thoughts on the Nancy Pelosi

shooting?

I think there's...

Wait, what story?

Are you breaking a new one?

No, no, no, no.

The Nancy Pelosi's husband being hammered.

I can't say that either.

That's a whole different story.

That's a whole month earlier.

The debacle that happened at the Pelosi compound.

Yeah, well, that's right-wing kooks for you, isn't it?

That's what they do.

That's what they do.

White supremacists and

MAGA Republicans.

That's what they do.

Mega MAGA Republicans.

Mega MAGA Republicans who are incredibly violent.

I think we're going to find,

I think there's some other things going on.

I mean, the guy, when you go to his house, Michael Schellenberger did a really good article on this.

He's joining us, by the way, in half an hour yet.

Oh, yeah, it's really good.

I mean, go to his house and take a look around, and then tell me the guy's a right-wing MAGA Republican.

Right.

He's living in Black Lives Matter.

He's living in a bus.

He's practically homeless.

He's, he's not that you can't be a MAGA Republican and be homeless.

I just don't know that many.

But

do you know a lot of homeless people?

A few.

A few.

Do you?

Yeah.

Huh.

And they.

Have you offered them maybe some help, a handful?

Yeah, a sandwich, but then I got fined for it.

You can't feed them.

All right.

Unless the

city

is homeless.

but then the LGBT rainbow flag is another telltale sign of MAGA republicanism.

The BLM sign?

The BLM sign, all of that is.

Well, and the hemp bracelet making that he made.

How many hemp bracelets have you made?

Right.

Between the necklaces and the hemp bracelets.

And the fact that he was,

I don't know if it was a traditional marriage, but married to the other girl

who had a nude wedding in San Francisco City Hall.

Yeah, there does seem to be some nudism going on here.

And

she also

got her older son to try to deliver love letters to this underage boy that she wanted to escape with.

I mean, if it's not the moral majority, I don't know what the moral majority is.

It's like I listened to, I can't even tell you how many

mainstream media podcasts this weekend to

try to understand the narrative and what they were telling us and what was true.

Because I'd like to know.

We have to know.

We have to know.

And

if the viewpoint is that this person was a left-wing hippie nudist for many, many years who over the recent future went through some sort of transformation and became a right-wing figure.

I don't blame the Democrats.

I don't blame the Democrats.

I don't blame the Republicans for that.

But I do blame the media because every single one of these stories went through the recent posting, including, well,

this person followed Glenn Beck at the Daily Wire.

Jordan Peterson.

That is just right-wing

people that he followed on his Facebook.

But just recently.

Yeah.

Just recently.

To not include, though, his entire left-wing

Jesus is the Antichrist.

No, no, no.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jesus.

Well, that's another thing.

You know, if you listen to this program how anti-jesus we are you can see why he's a fan um but he also believed he was jesus for it seems like over a year he believed he was jesus but like you how can if you are an honest media organization and i know i wasn't listening to them which is the problem here but like if you were honest you would mention both right you might mention okay look he has some conspiracy theories on there he had anti-semitism on there he had left-wing nudism stuff his he had a blm sign I mean, it's easy, I think, to come to the conclusion that this was not a story of political extremism.

It was a story of someone who did drugs for multiple decades and blew his mind up and was nuts.

But here's the thing: they're even saying, I don't remember which paper it was, one of the LA Times, New York Times, or The Post, but they're saying even if he was crazy, it's still that dangerous rhetoric that fed into his head.

Well, let me ask you this:

Did we ban Jodi Foster?

I mean, when Hinkley said, I just, I wanted to impress her because I love her and I watch all of her movies and I thought this would impress her and he tried to kill Ronald Reagan.

Was there one peep

of saying, this is Jodi Foster's, we got to put...

Pants and a big coat on that woman, make sure she looks very unattractive or ban her movies.

No.

No, there was no talk of that.

And of course, that would be the sane approach to a story like that.

Yes.

Just like, by the way, we did not blame Bernie Sanders for his own, his campaign volunteer trying to shoot 10% of all

elected Republicans in Washington, D.C.

By the way,

can I ask

why the concern here

about this guy and the guy who flew in, I think, from San Francisco to kill Kavanaugh?

Yeah.

Much more recently.

It was just like gone.

Yeah.

They didn't care.

No, it didn't happen to me.

He didn't cover it.

Nobody cared.

Do we...

Do you know that the Sunday news programs that week didn't even cover the Kavanaugh story?

Didn't even cover it.

Didn't even cover it.

Didn't mention it.

My God.

Didn't cover it.

Now, of course, the difference here is, number one, they get to blame the other side.

And number two, we are eight days away from an election.

And they will do anything

to get these seats to go the right way.

So they will not report.

We are in the Hunter Biden window here.

We learn about the truth of Hunter Biden from the mainstream media approximately one year after it's relevant to an election and one year before it's relevant to an election.

As far away from an election as possible.

Well, now that we're a week, we are in full-fledged Hunter Biden, the Hunter Biden window, where the media seems to have completely convinced themselves they can abandon all

appearance of journalism to try to win this election, to do anything they can to flip one or two seats here or there

in an area that might have gone red, make them go blue, anything we can do.

That's where they are right now.

So you really, the mainstream media never has a

sufficient bank of trust that we should all be believing exists.

But I will say, now you have to, you can't believe anything they say.

You can't believe anything they say for the next week.

You can't.

I have to tell you,

they say, you know, all these crazy conspiracies.

What?

Like the one that Hillary Clinton is currently pushing about the 2024 election, saying that it's all going to be stolen by the Republicans?

They're all saying this.

That there is this giant cabal of MAGA people out there that just want to destroy the country, that we're against a democracy, which in a way we are.

We're for a republic.

Not a democracy.

But that's beside the point.

All of these things that they have been saying, Russiagate, all of this, Joe Biden is clean.

There's no, he's the cleanest, clean guy.

Fetterman is completely healthy and ready to serve.

This is incredible coming from these people.

And they wonder why conspiracy theories bubble up.

Well, because somebody thinks something's wrong.

And let me use...

Let me use the left or the right doing something wrong that causes conspiracy theories.

The 9-11 Commission

excusing,

what was his name that came out with the underpass, Sandy Berger, who went into the National Archives.

Now,

think of this, with what we've just gone through with Donald Trump.

Sandy Berger goes in, asks for the presidential archives for George H.W.

Bush and Bill Clinton, opens them up.

It's about Saudi Arabia, something about relationships.

We don't really know any more than that.

Puts it in his underpants, leaves, goes across the street, destroys a few by the time the National Archives run out to catch him and get the rest of the.

And

he only lost his security clearance for a year.

You want to know why there's a conspiracy theory around 9-11?

Because you didn't explain that.

You didn't come clean and explain that.

And so people fill in the blanks.

When something doesn't make sense, they try to make sense of it.

And anyone who is giving them lines of bullcrap and just doesn't say what we said earlier this morning, we don't know what happened.

But here are some questions that need to be answered.

Those people are not furthering conspiracy theories.

Those people who ask questions are the ones that create the conspiracy, or the ones who create the conspiracy theory look at people like us and say,

They're even questioning this.

How could they possibly question this?

We told you what it was.

Okay, show us, just show us the tape.

Just show us the tape of the guy getting in.

That would help.

Show us,

explain to us why he downloaded all of those posts, these crazy posts.

Why did he post them all in one day?

Can you explain that?

And that's fine if he did.

Maybe he did it that way.

But that seems weird.

Something that would be notable.

I mean, look, I think he is insane, and I think he has a massive drug problem.

There's the number one thing.

There's the number one thing.

Did you know that he was in the hospital and not jail?

I didn't know.

No.

Did you?

No.

Yeah, neither did I.

Neither did I till this morning.

He's in the hospital.

Well, okay, was he hurt or is that a psychiatric hospital?

Because that's some important information.

Where's the answer on that?

Right now, the only goal is to make sure that Republicans are blamed for this

so that votes can be cast in the right direction.

Well, here's the thing.

I think this makes people even more determined to vote.

You must end this madness.

It has to end.

It has to end.

And the first step is voting on Tuesday and not just

forget about just the national politics.

Look at your local politics.

I told my family the other day, for the first time in my life, Republican lever, all the way down.

I've never done that.

Never have I done that all the way down.

Well, you mean you've never voted like straight party,

hitting the lever that does all of them, basically.

Yeah.

And I tell you,

we need people in our states.

We have a chance of having, I think, 40 states or 37 states.

that would be all Republican, Republican governor, Republican, it's like in the 20s that it would be Republican House and Senate.

So the legislature and everybody involved would be a Republican.

That will stop the nonsense in Washington.

States have the power to do it.

And I'm thrilled to see that people are acting locally.

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Michael, how are you, sir?

Great, great to be back, Glenn.

Yeah, thank you so much for all your hard work on this.

Well, thank you for having me on.

I'm excited to talk about it.

Okay, so

tell me what you have found.

What's true, what's not true?

Well, look, what we know is that this is somebody who, according to multiple witnesses, including the mother of his children, was struggling with mental illness for over a decade.

We know he was homeless for a while.

We know there was extensive drug use.

You know, mental illness, serious mental illness like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are pretty rare, but we do see a lot of drug-induced mental illness, and particularly from methamphetamine use, but certainly other drugs over time can cause psychosis, which is, of course, the classic

insanity of not being able to tell the difference between reality and your imagination.

And so, what's obvious here is that the alleged suspect in the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband was in the grip of psychosis.

And

to blame political ideology is just what you said.

It's the equivalent of blaming Martin Scorsese for making the movie Taxi Driver on John Hinckley Jr.'s attack on Ronald Reagan.

The crazy ideas expressed in the blog posts of the alleged attacker of Pelosi are themselves symptoms of the underlying psychosis.

It's incorrect to point to them as the cause.

So

I heard this morning that he is in the hospital or was this weekend.

Were those for injuries or is he in a psych ward?

I don't know.

It could be both.

You know, I think if he's,

you know, if he

wouldn't, he wouldn't be hospitalized long-term if he's in the hospital.

He'll be held, he'll be diagnosed by a psychiatrist.

And we'll find out soon.

I mean, I think that the the good news is that the truth gets out.

It was obvious to me, because, of course, I'm very close to this.

I wrote a whole book about this.

It came out last year.

It was obvious to me as soon as I heard about who he was and started talking to his neighbors and his family members that this was somebody that was unwell and this was a result of a sickness.

I was disturbed by how quickly even so-called mainstream journalists were to basically go and blame conservatives, blame Republicans, blame Trump.

You know, if somebody were to be like, I read Michael Schellenberger's book, and that's why I committed this crime, it would be inappropriate to blame me for that crime.

And I think everybody knows that, but in this toxic political environment, I think it's important to remind people of that.

We never blamed Bernie Sanders ever.

In fact, we were clear on day one.

that it wasn't Bernie Sanders' fault that one of his supporters went and tried to kill all the Republicans in Congress.

It's ridiculous.

Of course, of course.

Yeah, I mean, I was sorry to see it.

I mean, basically, I had one episode in particular.

There's a reporter who supposedly focused on disinformation at NBC News who came out and he tweeted at my reporting and said, oh,

my reporting had been debunked because there's all these blog posts showing that the suspect in the attack had written crazy things, including some right-wing things, but also things about fairies and demons.

And

I found it very disturbing because I have a hard time believing that that journalist didn't know that what was driving the suspect was

mental illness or psychosis.

It really appeared that he was deliberately misleading people in order to engage in partisan political behavior just 10 days before an election.

And

it's not just on Twitter.

I mean, if you watch Meet the Press yesterday, Chuck Todd's program on NBC, the whole program was basically dedicated to this topic.

And at no point in any of the program did they even discuss the fact that the suspect was clearly in a psychotic state, suffering from delusions, under long-term drug use.

Instead, Chuck Todd made the whole show about political radicalization and ideas.

And I just think that's terrible reporting.

I think it's very partisan.

I won't speculate as to the motives of the journalists, but it's either bad journalism or it's motivated by politics.

Is it worse that they did that or that when Kavanaugh, the guy from California, came to kill Kavanaugh, they didn't even report it on any of the Sunday morning shows?

Well, I mean, that's the other thing, and I wrote a post about this yesterday, Glenn, and you're absolutely right.

I mean, it's disturbing.

I didn't really, I saw when the Kavanaugh assassination happened, of course, I paid attention to it.

But I'll say this, there are many progressive and and liberal people in my life who still do not know that there was a serious assassination plot against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh because it was not covered in anything close to this.

So, just as you said, three days after that assassination plot was revealed, none of the Sunday talk shows wrote about it.

The New York Times buried the story on page A20.

The Pelosi assassination, alleged assassination attempt was on the front page of the New York Times two days in a row.

You know, and I'll tell you the other thing about it is that

the suspect in the Kavanaugh killing was clearly motivated by his pro-choice and his pro-gun control views, and his own lawyers last week said that he was mentally fit to stand trial.

In other words, it appears, and again, there's still more information to come and I don't want to get ahead of it, but it appears as though the suspect in the Kavanaugh plot was genuinely motivated by political fanaticism, not by mental illness.

Whereas in the Pelosi case, he clearly was driven by psychosis, mental illness, drug-induced or underlying, we don't know.

But the media basically reversed those two stories and did not, and covered the Pelosi plot attempt as though it were driven by political fanaticism rather than by psychosis.

It really is incredible.

You are from the area, Michael, and you were down there, right?

Some of these interviews we've seen,

you were there, right?

I was.

I was.

I mean, I think it's,

you know, I'm a journalist at heart, and so it's not that far from my house, and I went down there and I interviewed all the neighbors.

I mean, I'll tell you a couple of shocking things.

I won't name names, but I was not impressed by the reporting of the other journalists.

Good journalism is that you go and knock on all the doors, and you interview as many people as you can.

I was the only one doing that.

There was a lot of laziness here.

There's a lot, and it's also the partisanship and the laziness are related because if you have the idea that this was, you know, a Trump supporter who went after Pelosi, then you don't want to go and get to the bottom of the other stuff.

You don't want to go do those interviews.

You want to stick with your little story.

So

that was part of it.

And then, you know, like, there's just, it's a really, you know, when you get into it, Glenn, as you might imagine, it's a tragic story.

I mean,

it's drug use, it's pedophilia.

The mother of his two kids is in prison for basically child molestation.

She was a crazy person.

So she herself is something I think she probably has a personality disorder and also long-term drug use.

The kids are in that house.

They apparently weren't going to school.

I mean, this is a real you know, it's basically a symptom of exactly the problems I described in San Francisco, which is that we've stopped enforcing basic laws.

And when you stop enforcing laws against people that are suffering mental illness or addicted to hard drugs, they don't get the help they need.

And I think that's part of the lesson here is that this tragedy could have been averted if we enforced basic laws and mandated drug treatment and psychiatric care for the people who need it.

You know, it's not that every time someone, you arrest somebody for breaking a law that they have to go to prison or they have to be punished.

Certainly some people do, but other people are just sick.

And

I think what we'll discover as time goes on is that the suspect in the Pelosi attack was somebody who was very ill and needed to get treatment mandated many, many years ago, but didn't get it because we're in the grip of, frankly, some pretty radical left political ideas.

Did you see the op-ed

by,

gosh, who was it?

Shoot.

lost his name.

The guy

who just wrote this weekend about the

op-ed about Tom Cotton at the New York Times and how, yeah,

he's an op-ed columnist and he even didn't say anything about it.

He said, because we were afraid to.

When you said a minute ago that

they don't want to find it,

how many are afraid to do their job

in journalism?

Well, I was afraid.

I mean, I think there's a lot of, you know, you know my story.

I mean, I came from the radical left.

I consider myself a moderate.

I'm an politically independent but yeah I mean I was afraid on everything and you know partly you worry about losing your friends you worry about upsetting your family you worry about no longer being able to make a living and you know what you're describing is a column by Washington Post reporter Eric Wempel who writes a media column and and he basically to his credit

There was an ambivalent reaction to it, interestingly enough, but basically to his credit, he came out and said it was wrong for the New York Times to fire its op-ed page editor editor, who ran, of course, this op-ed by Senator Cotton arguing for the use of

the National Guard and U.S.

troops to put down the riots.

Well, he was, not only did the New York Times, because of the outrage by its woke journalist staff, they basically denounced the op-ed.

They fired the op-ed page editor.

Everybody watched this happen and knew it was wrong.

And, you know, so to his credit, whatever it was, like two years ago now,

this columnist of the Washington Post said that that was wrong.

You know, I think it's good that, you know, it's better late than never.

And he's one of the first people to say it.

But yeah, I mean, it's almost a, it's a kind of,

yeah, it's social fear.

You're worried about your friends and your family, but it's also a financial fear, like, am I going to get fired from my job?

You know, this is.

This is really serious stuff.

And I think that the partisanship, and you always emphasize this, I think it's so important.

You know, we need to allow disagreement in our society.

We need to appreciate and reward it.

I always kind of, I'm always shocked by how many people, instead of being like, oh, I disagree with you, they're like, you should stop saying that.

Right.

There's this desire to get people to be quiet.

Right.

We're with Michael Schellenberger.

I think, Michael, because you have experience in your family with schizophrenia, I think it was your aunt.

Yes.

Yes.

So you've seen it firsthand.

Can you?

Well, yeah, I mean, it's interesting.

Of course, you know, when you're a a child,

you know,

and

she would say crazy things, you know, and so your parents have to explain to you what that what's going on.

And it is a little scary.

Of course, it helps to have your parents there to kind of talk you through it.

But yeah, she thought that the President of the United States, I think at the time it was Ford or yeah, I think it was Ford and Nixon, that they were communicating with her directly through the television set.

You know, so I think that there's a reaction that people have to this case where they go, okay, maybe he was psychotic, but there's all these terrible conspiracy theories out there, and those need to stop.

Well, no.

First of all, there's like we have freedom of speech, and that means that we actually let people have conspiracy theories.

We let people believe all sorts of things.

That's the point of a free society.

So the idea that we're going to get rid of certain ideas is a very bad road to go down.

But the other thing is just that psychotic people will always find some justification for their behaviors.

That's different than suggesting that those are the motivations.

I do think this is something that people can get, but they have to think about it for a minute, which is that, and we know this is true for everybody, right, is that like

you have a motivation to do something, but you might give a different reason for why you did it.

Well, people that are psychotic, they give crazier reasons often.

But in many cases, like I look at this case and I suspect, Glenn, that what we'll discover is that this is somebody who was, you know, he's lost, he lost his wife and kids,

he wasn't able to hold down a good job, he was using heavy drugs.

His motivation was probably to somehow make his life better, as crazy as that sounds, to be a hero or something like that.

He had some story in his head about how he was going to become a hero for this is how often these guys think by making this attack.

And that's ultimately what was driving it,

not like, you know, not some political radicalism.

But

there are a few things about the story that I don't know if they're true or not.

I look at these things, and the reason why we have a plethora of conspiracy theories is because we no longer trust the media.

We no longer trust the government to tell us anything close to the truth.

And then there are these things that just kind of hang out in the air and nobody explains them, and it doesn't fit in with

the storyline that the media is

going for.

First of all, does that make sense to you?

You think that's right?

Yeah, sure.

I mean, look, here's here, you know, the media,

they're partisan now, right?

And maybe it's maybe they've always been, although I do think there's no doubt that it's gotten worse.

Yeah, much worse.

A rush to make this a story about why you should not vote for Republicans.

The best of the Glen Bank program.

John Ziegler is with us.

He's got a new podcast out, which is fantastic.

I listened to it this weekend, The Death of Journalism.

He is the co-host there, and we have several things we want to talk to him about that

come about with the death of journalism.

Hello, John.

How are you?

I'm doing well.

Happy Halloween.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, you sound like you're in the mood.

Well, I got two young kids.

It's a big holiday.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I know.

Okay, so, John, let's start in San Francisco with Paul Pelosi.

What is your take on this?

You know, being a guy who, when given a bone, never ever releases it,

what is really happening here?

Well, I have a pretty unique take on this one.

I think everybody's wrong.

As your guest in the last hour said,

there's no question that the initial left-wing narrative that this was some sort of a MAGA attack is utterly ridiculous.

I do not believe in that at all.

I am very suspicious of the where's Nancy comment, and that could have been either not said or been said in a very, very different context.

I think that

there's a lot of unanswered questions here.

I totally get the skepticism, and the skepticism, Glenn, on the right on this story, is off the charts.

I've been spending most of the last three days on social media interacting with people about this, and there is absolutely no trust at all in the official version of events.

And I understand.

I mean, there's no question that the 911 call should be released, the body cam footage, security footage.

I understand

why people are asking questions about this official narrative because the official narrative is utterly hilarious.

But

you do have to

recognize at some point, the media has to, that they're the ones causing the conspiracy theories by not just laying the evidence out.

Glenn, what you just said there is the most important point of any and all of this.

It's way bigger than what really did or did not happen with Paul Pelosi, and it's a large part of our podcast, The Death of Journalism.

And for instance, you know, the election conspiracies, I blame the news media for a large part of that because of the way they treated, you know, and you know how I feel about Donald Trump.

They treated Trump horrendously for four years.

So it's not a shock that his supporters don't trust you when you tell them that the election was.

So that's the media's fault, not entirely, but in large part.

But let me go back to Pelosi for a second.

So prefacing my

answer to your very good question with, I totally get the skepticism and I totally get, I really get the deep, deep desire of people on the right, for the left to eat it on this because of their rush to judgment that this was a MAGA guy.

But what Elon Musk did with the tweeting of the gay sex gone wrong theory and Dinesh D'Souza and some other very prominent right-wingers jumping all over that, I think was a huge mistake because I don't think that theory makes any sense either.

really strange things happen.

Sometimes Jeffrey Epstein really kills himself in prison and somehow is able to do that.

Sometimes OJ Simpson kills his wife and a friend who just happens to be coming by at that moment.

I mean, that's the way life is often very weird.

Now, I'm not saying, again, we shouldn't be asking questions.

We should, especially this close to an election.

But

the gay sex gone wrong theory, I have huge problems with.

And I think that in a way here, conservatives should have focused on debunking the MAGA myth and making this a crime issue and basically turned, you know, to use a sports analogy, a field goal into potentially going for on fourth down and throwing a pick six.

I just I don't like that conservatives are doing what liberals are doing, which is rushing to judgment without all the facts.

And that's, I think, very troublesome.

This is a problem on both sides, but the left clearly started this.

So let's go through a couple of things that don't make sense to you that you think need to be explained.

Well, I think a large part of what's happening on the right is that the fog of war is being interpreted in a way that they want to see the story go.

And Glenn, you know, I've become very well known for debunking these types of stories.

Right.

And I have a rule.

I have a rule that if I want an outcome to be the case, I am requiring two or three times as much evidence

to push me in that direction.

You have to do it that way because you have to adjust for your own biases.

And instead, conservatives or people on the right on this story are going in the other direction.

They're taking fragments of stuff that happened in the middle of the night in an initial report.

And let's be clear.

Let's blame the media again.

The news media is not just terrible because they're biased.

They're terrible terrible when it comes to getting details right.

All right?

They're just awful.

And so

there are elements of the original reporting that are still being used, like, for instance, that there was a third person that opened the door, that

Pelosi referred to the suspect as a friend.

Well, that the suspect may have been totally either naked or his underwear.

All those things are now in dispute, and they're important parts of this counter-narrative.

Hang on just a second.

The one that says he was a friend is, I don't believe, in dispute.

I think that's actually on the tape.

And I think it actually works to say that the story is

as

you believe it is and as I believe it is, this nut job comes in the house.

I think Paul Pelosi was

speaking somewhat in code

because he said,

yes, he's waiting for my wife.

He's going to wait for my wife and and he's a friend

and I think he was I think he was playing that to the police because they were just gonna do regular dispatch but the lady felt the the woman who was at dispatch

felt something

was really wrong and hit the I don't know what you call the red alert but had everybody race to the place because she knew he didn't sound right.

That's a good, that's really good analysis there, Glenn.

And

so, what, you know, and you're using the kind of thought process I use.

I go through: okay, what's the official story?

And is there a plausible explanation for everything that we have been told?

And that is a very plausible explanation because we know this guy was nuts.

Okay, we know that.

So, how, but can you be nuts and

take a website that's been there for 15 years and dormant

and all of a sudden hop on a few days before and post stuff that looks like you've been posting for a year or so.

Right.

And it's all crazy stuff.

Well, that's a very good question.

And I totally agree that that should be investigated fully and that there should be high suspicion towards anything that points towards the MAGA attack theory on this because that is a situation that very much like I already excoriated the right for, that the left desperately wants to be true.

That's always that's always one of the key points in evaluating any of these stories.

How much does the media want it to be true?

And they desperately, ten days before an election, want the MAGA attack story to be true.

So I guess I'm saying epox on both on all sides here, but I you know, the I I wish why can't we just wait?

Why can't we just wait for the facts now and and and demand that the footage be released, the 911 call be released?

I mean, this is a clearly a very politically charged story just before a major election involving the husband of Nancy Pelosi.

Look, I get that for conservatives, it's very, very difficult to believe that a straight man could be married to Nancy Pelosi for all these years.

I get it.

I get it.

But I happen to know people who have known Paul Pelosi since his days at Georgetown.

I went to Georgetown.

My father went there.

There's no rumors about him being gay, okay?

There's also, you know what else there isn't, Glenn?

In the last three days since this story broke, there's nobody coming forward to say they've had gay sex with a suspect, which you would expect would be the case, right?

With all the media coverage

as

created.

Unless Hillary Clinton had them all killed.

John, Glenn, I forgot about that.

Yeah, right.

John, I haven't seen as much, because I have seen a couple posts about

this theory you're mentioning.

You know, I haven't seen as much coverage on that, so I don't know much about that part of it.

But I do think that part of the reason why we don't get the facts on this one right away is

the election's eight days away.

We can't know the whole story here, which appears to be just a lunatic doing something crazy.

We can't have that whole story because they need to use it for eight days.

After eight days, we'll have the same thing that we're getting now with, like, let's say COVID, right?

Where we're getting, oh, well, maybe those lockdowns of the schools weren't such a good idea.

we'll get those after the fact right we we they cannot give us anything other than this was January 6th related at least for the next eight days I agree with that totally and it's frustrating as hell and I we should fight back against that with everything we have that's I've already mentioned the Elon Musk thing and see that to me is what put that the gay sex gone wrong theory into the stratosphere and and may have caused great damage because obviously Musk is under a microscope right now and he is being destroyed for having shared

a link that I never would have even dreamed of sharing

and

here he is you know obviously of great prominence and being looked at with great scrutiny and I think he lost a lot of sway that he may have had previously with people that are in the middle and now the media is making him into an enemy all over a story that not only wasn't credible, I don't, you know, is not true.

And I'll be shocked if it turns out that this is anything close to what that theory entailed.

And like I said, there were other prominent right-wing commentators who jumped all over it.

But Stu, your point is really well taken.

The time continuum with the media is a real issue because we're now living in an age where you've got to get the story out immediately.

Social media reacts.

We've come up with our own narratives that fit our own priors.

And that's the story.

And we're sticking to it.

The truth doesn't matter, and then by the time it does come out, no one cares anymore.

Yeah.

Can we spend a couple of minutes here on James Gordon Meek?

He's the guy who was an ABC journalist working on a book about the disaster in Afghanistan, was picked up by somebody in black vans in front of his house back in April.

There's witnesses to it.

He was thrown into the van.

And then he hasn't been seen since.

And I was in a meeting yesterday, and

my guys were like, we're not getting anywhere on this.

And I'm like, oh, I know somebody.

I know somebody who won't sleep until he figures this one out.

You've done an initial look into this James Gordon-Meek disappearance.

And what have you found?

Well, you know, the reporting on this I find to be very interesting

because there have been two major stories, one by Rolling Stone, one by The Daily Beast, which kind of contradict each other

and in critical ways.

And again, it's hard to determine, all right, what's incompetence by the news media, which I'm always first, that's always where I go first in the modern news media, is incompetence.

And I frankly think that the Rolling Stone story may have been greatly incompetent.

You know, it's a shame, though, Glenn, that we don't have a news outlet that would have a special entree into this story.

I don't know, like ABC News?

where the guy worked for years and was very, very prominent.

And, you know, apparently they're scrubbing from news stories that he was the producer for David Muir, you know, because we're going to pretend that this guy never existed before.

This is one of those classic stories that exposes a lot of what we talked about in the previous segment, that the lack of trust in all institutions, the media, the FBI,

you know, all all elements of our government is so low, so catastrophically low, that all bets are off now.

And that all questions are relevant.

And even sometimes things that end up being conspiracy theories come from very rational people because that's the world we're now living in.

We no longer have any reason to trust what we are being told.

And that's the really scary part.

As far as what really happened here, you know,

the theory that this didn't have anything to do with his ABC work, I think, makes some sense because

there's no evidence that he went to ABC and said, hey, protect me here, because that would make some sense, right?

If you're working at ABC and, you know, you're being accused of having classified information related to your work, the first thing you're going to do to protect yourself is go to the giant ABC, use their lawyers, what have you.

That did not happen here.

So I wish we had more information.

This is a story that I think we absolutely should keep an eye on, but I don't currently have an answer to

the question, what really happened?

There's too many things here that just are just

wrong on it.

It needs some answers.

And it might be non-nefarious.

It might be the guy just

freaked out and is living, but

it's just too weird.

John, before you go, I want to tell you, I listened to your podcast.

Who's your co-host?

What's her name?

Liz Habib.

She's a former news anchor and sports anchor here in Los Angeles and a professor of journalism at Syracuse University.

She told the story about

losing, was it her parents?

Her mom?

Her mother.

Yeah, her mother with COVID.

And it was so powerful.

And that's where you're beginning, the death of journalism, is on COVID and what journalists did and didn't do.

Powerful stuff, John.

It's right up your alley.

Really great podcast.

Thanks so much, Glenn.

Hope people check out The Death of Journalism.

Appreciate your time.

You got it.

John Ziegler, The Death of Journalism, wherever you get your podcasts.