Best of The Program | Guests: Bjorn Lomborg & Jason Whitlock | 2/24/21

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Great show.

Great podcast.

The best.

You bet.

It's all on today's podcast.

We have Jason Whitlock, Bjorn Lumberg, on with us to talk about green cars.

You may not like all the things he says, because he actually believes that, you know, we are all going to die at some point.

Oh, that's not what he says.

No, that's not what he said.

No, no.

What I really like about Bjorn Lumborg is that he goes, he plays on their battlefields, right?

Like, he looks at it and says, okay, here's all the science that you say is really important that we need to know.

I'm going to actually read it all and put it in perspective.

And he does a great job doing that today on the program.

And we also talk a little bit about cancel culture.

It is getting real with the banks.

And I'll share a personal story on today's podcast.

Don't forget to subscribe to Blaze TV.

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We go into many stories today that would, I think, convince you that a place like Blaze TV is really important.

But just for your own entertainment and enlightenment, we have the Studos America program starting at 8 p.m.

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You're listening to

the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Matt Taibi

is a journalist who has written for Rolling Stone.

He's kind of a Glenn Greenwald kind of guy, a guy that I don't agree with, you know, very often.

But he seems to be a classic liberal

in some regards.

Would you agree with that?

Yeah, maybe.

I don't know how I would.

I mean, I've always thought of him on the left.

And every once in a while, he writes things that you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, like absolutely.

like he's right on that.

And he's so he, and he, like Glenn Greenwald, has been pretty active in smacking down the sort of cancel culture, woke wing of the Democratic movement these days.

Two and a half years ago, he writes, when Alex Jones of InfoWars was kicked off a series of tech platforms in a clearly coordinated decision, I knew this was not going to be an isolated thing.

Given that people like Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy said the ouster of Jones, it was just a good first first step.

It seemed obvious the tactic was not going to be confined to a few actors, but corporate media critics insisted the precedent would not be applied more broadly.

CNN's so-and-so said, I don't think that we're going to be seeing big tech take action against Fox News anytime soon.

Well, that guy was wrong.

Just

a few years later, calls to ban Fox are not only common, they're intensifying with media voices from CNN to MSNBC and former Media Matters critic to the Washington Post columnists, yada yada, all on board.

The movement crested this week with a letter from California House Democrats Anna Eschu and Jerry McNerney written to the CEOs of cable providers like Comcast, AT ⁇ T, Verizon Cox, and Dish.

They demanded to know if these providers are planning

to continue to carry Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN.

I want to read point number seven from this congressional letter.

Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OAN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT ⁇ T TV both now and beyond any contract renewal date?

Have you or have you ever been a member of a company that is carrying OAN?

If so,

why?

This is

terrifying.

It should chill every journalist to the bone.

This sequence of events is ominous because a similar match set of hearings and interrogations back in 2017 when senators like Maisie Rono and Judiciary Committee hearing demanded that platforms like Google and Facebook come up with a mission statement to prevent the foment of discord, accelerated the content moderation movement that we now see on platforms.

Sequences like this: the government requests of speech reduction made to companies subject to federal regulation, make the content moderation decisions of private firms a serious First Amendment issue.

These things are happening.

This is not a figment of anyone's imagination.

This is coming.

And

we just have to be prepared.

And quite honestly,

please read Martin Luther King.

Why are those troops still in Washington?

Because they want you to react violently.

They need you to react violently.

It is

Tucker Carlson talked about it, I think it was last night or night before,

where he was saying, Look, you couldn't write this script better.

You couldn't be more

inflammatory than what Congress and the left is doing right now.

The steps they're taking

is fomenting

real

deep

feelings in half the country.

They need you to be violent because that way they can come in and they can take arms, they can stop banking, they can become dictators.

And it is,

you know, it was one thing to say

Barack Obama was, you know, he wanted to be a dictator.

And there's another thing to say, or Donald Trump, he wanted to be a dictator.

And it's a completely other thing to say, they they are taking the steps to ensure an authoritarian regime.

And that is happening now.

Steps are being taken to silence those who disagree, who are not in lockstep.

And it's not just being taken by the government.

It's being taken by large firms as well.

I'm going to give you one more piece of news quickly.

Amazon has decided that it's going to quietly end sales of books

that it labels hate speech.

Guys, this is book burning.

When we had physical stores,

they would have to go take the books off the shelf and destroy them.

Now,

you just digitally remove them and it's like it never happened.

If they were actually dumping these books, if they were actually destroying or burning these books, you would have the image in your mind.

Remember, we live in a time no longer of words.

We live in a time of images.

There was a guy who set himself on fire in Tunisia months before the other guy did that is credited, in a way, of starting the

Tunisian riots, which led to the Arab Spring.

Another guy had done that.

Same exact reasons.

He was also a pushcart vendor.

Why one and not the other?

Because there were no images of him setting himself on fire.

It's the image.

Images have real power.

Why is it we can, we are not all up in arms

with our local school boards and our teachers and the teachers' unions just based on the number of suicides that we've had from kids?

You don't ever see those pictures.

You don't ever hear those stories.

MSNBC right now is running almost as a backdrop.

Look at at they're doing it right now

of the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

They're running those pictures almost 24-7.

They're running that videotape because they know that's what their audience wants and they are trying to stir their audience into hatred.

That's what's happening.

You know what you're not seeing?

You're not seeing pictures of the kids who who have died.

You know, Emmett Till, his mother was really, really smart.

Emmett Till, if you don't know who Emmett Till was, look him up today.

And you're going to see, when you look him up, you're going to see a picture of him in his coffin, horribly, horribly disfigured.

He was a black man who was in the South, but he was from Chicago.

He was killed, brutally killed.

When he was returned to his mother in Chicago in the coffin, she insisted on having an open coffin because she said she wanted everyone to see what they had done to her boy.

And she was right.

We know Emmett Till's name because once you see that picture, you can't unsee it.

And it stirred people into action.

Where are the pictures on TV of people who have lost their jobs?

Why did we are the world and Michael Jackson and all these people, why did that happen?

Why did that happen?

For Ethiopia, Ethiopia is probably starving still today.

I don't even know.

Why all of a sudden?

Because we, if you lived at that time, you'll never forget the news reports of these terribly malnourished children with the bloated stomachs sitting just dying

for just any rice.

You'll never forget those pictures.

You are being fed pictures

of hatred.

You are not seeing the pictures of suffering.

Right now, millions of Americans are suffering.

Are they showing the pictures of those people in Texas that are suffering, that lost everything,

that didn't have any power?

How about the people who froze to death here in Texas?

You're not seeing those.

What you are seeing are pictures of

Ted Cruz

leaving the state to keep his family warm.

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

Bjorn Lomborg.

He is the author of False Alarm, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and visiting fellow of the Hoover Institute.

Welcome, Bjorn.

How are you?

Hey, Glenn, it's good to be back.

I'm good.

How are you?

I'm good.

I'm a little concerned

how

things are starting to be censored here in America, and things are,

you know,

they're starting to call people with a different point of view, you know, dangerous radicals and terrorists.

And

I wonder how far this is going to go.

We just saw Amazon ban another book yesterday.

They said they're going to start deleting all books they consider hate speech.

I don't know if that's to gill a mockingbird, you know, or Mein Kampf or what.

I just I've never lived in a country where we ban books.

And I wonder if you've thought of, I mean, this is not what I had you on for, but I wonder if you've ever thought of

you're you're an extremist.

You don't buy into

the answers and the solutions for climate change.

Yeah.

There's a there's a lot so look, uh m my basic point is global warming is a real problem, but it's often vastly exaggerated in impact and

a lot of the rhetoric around it make people panicky and it makes us make bad decisions, and that's what I'm really challenging.

I've had a lot of people tell me they would love to see me deplatform.

They'd love to not see my

or hear my arguments being voiced clearly.

But I also think that most people recognize that's not the way to run a democracy.

Actually, I think Jon Stuart Mill already, you know, like almost 200 years ago,

pointed out that listening to people whom you don't agree with is a good idea.

Part way, if you're right, they'll prove you right and they'll show you why you're right.

And if you're wrong, of course, you actually want to find out that you're wrong.

So listening to dissenting voices is a really good thing.

It makes democracy stronger, and it's also likely it'll make your decision better.

Only if we are rooted in, you know, this, the scientific theory that, you know, show me the evidence and I'll respond to the evidence.

We're no longer doing that.

We're just going off of what people

want everybody to believe.

I believe in global warming.

I can read a thermometer.

What I don't believe in is a lot of the things that they say, for instance, the Green New Deal.

Or let's just take this first.

Electric cars.

Well, that's wonderful.

They're all electric.

But where are we getting the power to charge them?

Am I wrong on thinking that way?

Well,

you're certainly right in your intuition that we need a lot more than just getting cars to be electric.

Because let's face it, as long as they're still powered by coal power, they will emit almost as much.

Remember, electric cars use a lot of energy typically in China and elsewhere, where it's mostly produced with coal to produce their batteries.

And so once they get to you, you can feel all virtuous and green and drive around and feel really, you know, like, I'm doing something for global warming.

But the reality is you've just emitted a lot of CO2 in China.

And so you have to drive your car, you know, 40,000, 60,000 miles before it's actually free and you can actually start saving.

Now, that depends a lot on how much of the power that you use come from fossil fuels, but you also need to decarbonize the whole electricity grid.

And that turns out to be really, really hard.

And so again, we need to recognize that, sure, electric cars are

great for some purposes.

I have a friend who has a Tesla and I've been driving and I love it.

It's fun.

But first of all, it's incredibly expensive.

So it's mostly fun for the upper classes and secondly it doesn't cut all that much CO2

so you know when when Biden and many others are suggesting we should give subsidies in the tune of seven and a half thousand dollars maybe ten thousand dollars you're basically paying an extraordinarily high price to cut a little bit of co2 you could have spent that money much, much better either cutting carbon emissions or remember there's a lot of other problems that you want to fix both in the U.S.

and around the world.

So, again, this is a question about getting our priorities right.

It's a question of getting a sense of what is the impact of what you try to do, not just feeling virtuous, but actually doing good.

So, Bjorn,

I put my trust in the free, not the corrupt capitalism that we have now, but in the actual free market to solve these things.

And we're just not there yet.

We are going going to solve these things.

But look at what happened to Texas.

Now, it's not entirely because of, you know, we're cutting back and cutting back on, you know, fuels that we

have grown to trust

and gone all to windmills, but it's partially because of that.

And I have no problem.

I own a farm.

It's completely green energy.

It's completely off the grid.

It's solar and it's wind power, and it's backed up by natural gas if we have to.

I'm all for it.

But A, only the rich can afford it.

And B,

I've spent, I can't tell you how much money getting this to be stable.

It's not ready yet for prime time.

No, and certainly most people, I was actually very curious to hear that you have backup from gas because most people, of course, just get the backup from the electricity grid, which, of course, simply means that they get all the subsidies and they push on all the cost of still driving the rest of the electricity system to typically the poor rate payers.

So, in some sense, you're absolutely right.

Most of this is something that supports rich people a lot and supports a lot of virtue signaling, but actually does fairly little to cut carbon emissions.

And you're right about the idea that what the Texas,

terrible incident in Texas last week, I think shows most clearly not, you know, was it windmill's fault or was it the gas or the coal power fire plants or even the nuclear plant that dropped off for a while.

It's much more a question of saying, without stable power, you're really upcreek.

As a society, you need stable power.

That's what makes us rich.

If you go to many developing countries, one of the things you see is they all have a diesel generator because they know they can't trust the power system.

And that is one of the reasons why they're trapped in poverty, because you don't want to invest in a place where you don't have sustainable power.

That's why we cannot imagine ourselves run just off of wind and solar, although people love to say that, because what are you going to do when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing?

And remember, people then, you know, sort of

facilely, I'm not sure whether that's an affair, but you know, they very easily say, oh, we'll just have batteries.

remember you need a lot of batteries right now the u.s have batteries enough to support 14 seconds of u.s electricity consumption oh my gosh nowhere near being able to have that for hours days or even seasons

and i will tell you they're wildly expensive uh they i mean you still have to replace those batteries over time uh and they don't hold as much as anybody thinks they do i mean it's you know i am on solar and i put it all into batteries, but I'll tell you, we go a week without sunshine.

We ain't using that.

I mean, we have these gigantic batteries.

They're out.

Yeah.

They're out.

There was a wonderful story

in a little northeast Indian village.

It was the first Indian village that went all solar, supported by Greenpeace.

And, you know, they got lots and lots of PR.

And everybody was very excited in this village because they didn't have any electricity.

So clearly, getting some solar electricity was better than nothing.

But what happened when they turned it on was, of course, after two hours at night,

everybody had depleted it.

So they had to start telling people, oh, you can't use this, you can't do that.

Oh, God, no, not a refrigerator.

And suddenly, there's a lot of things you can't do.

And then

when the minister came to

inaugurate this whole project, the villagers was actually protesting.

They said they didn't want fake electricity.

They want real electricity.

And because he was democratically voted in,

they actually got a new power line from the main grid, mostly powered by coal, in a couple of weeks.

And the prices dropped by two-thirds.

And again, this is not to discourage the fact that, yes, solar and wind have a space, and they are sometimes really good.

In California, if you have little,

if you have have some solar, it can actually cut off the very top peak usage

around noon when you need it for air conditioning.

That's great.

But don't believe that you can run an economy off of this.

This is the best of the Glenbeck program.

Jason Whitlock.

Welcome to to the program.

How are you?

Awesome.

Thanks for having me.

You bet.

I know that Tiger Woods was

kind of a big deal growing up with you and your dad, right?

Absolutely.

Tiger is my favorite athlete of all time.

Me and my dad, it, you know, just brought us closer together, talked about Tiger more than any other athlete.

Tiger, when I think of sports and just happy moments, it's Tiger Woods and Maggie Johnson when he was with the Lakers.

Yeah.

Tiger Woods, I think, was that way for all of us, especially when his dad was alive

because of their relationship and what they accomplished together.

And, you know, I think his

spiral into trouble,

it appears to be, I don't know because I don't follow these guys at all, but it appears to be tied to the death of his dad and him making it kind of on his own in a different way.

Is that accurate at all?

Yeah, I think it's accurate.

Look, and Glenn, I'm glad you started out by letting me establish I'm a huge Tiger Woods fan.

Right.

But I'm going to be honest,

you know, when I look at Tiger's life, I say, wow, he was really super prepared for golf.

And I'm not sure if he was super prepared for anything else.

Yeah.

And that kind of fame and fortune, too, is also

really bad, especially if you lose the anchor

that's been guiding you the whole time, that steady hand.

So, do we know there were no drugs or alcohol involved in this accident?

Do we know if he was asleep at the wheel?

How did this happen?

And what happened?

I think we know based on the police that there was no alcohol involved.

Tiger recently had another back surgery.

And so, and we, you know, it's been part of his history to

take painkillers because he's had so many different surgeries and he's he's struggled with that problem.

I'm not sure if we'll ever know what was in his system at the time of this accident.

Maybe they took his blood and we'll examine it.

Maybe they won't.

I mean, Tiger's a huge brand for Nike,

and I'm sure

they're going to try to protect his privacy as much as they can.

Sure, and if they were prescription drugs and he wasn't abusing them, I mean, you know,

you take some of these drugs for pain now at night.

This happened at 7 o'clock in the morning.

You're groggy still at 7 o'clock in the morning.

I mean, you could easily fall back to sleep, and not because of the drug, but because of the after effects of the drug.

Here's what I'll say, Glenn, and I'm a huge Tiger Woods fan.

I mean, Tiger Woods can make me cry.

But what I would say is where I would somewhat disagree with you is like if I'm taking prescription drugs and I'm worth a half billion dollars or more, I have a driver.

Yes, true.

I take that precaution of like, hey, because of my injuries, because of my surgery, I take these prescription drugs.

Maybe it's best for me not to drive.

I'm not worth nearly the money that Tiger Woods is, but I basically gave up driving four years ago.

I take Uber.

I went three straight years without ever getting behind my car.

I moved to Nashville, drove here, drove my car here, and did some driving.

And now I haven't driven for three months, I don't think.

And why is that?

Because of all the drugs you're taking?

No, no, no.

No, it literally, it started in L.A.

just because I wanted to walk more.

And I wanted, you know, I had a real,

the drug, my drug of choice is like potato chips and payday candy bars.

And I had a really bad habit of eating those while driving in a car.

And so I just wanted to give all that up and walk more.

And just, I just felt like I had bad habits driving a car that I don't have.

You know, Uber, they don't want you to eat or drink in there.

And just, I just, I just don't like driving that much.

And in like in 2002,

I was doing radio, I was writing for the newspaper, I was doing T V.

And I fell asleep at the wheel of my car, and a friend of mine was a passenger in the car, and he was a dad, and we were going to some press conference, and I was overworked, I was doing morning radio, and I fell asleep at the car just very briefly, maybe five, ten seconds, woke up.

and you know, saved us or, you know, got control of the car and blah, blah, blah.

But that kind of changed my point of view on driving.

I, you know, fell out of love with driving.

I just, just not a responsibility I want to take.

So

what have you heard about the surgery?

And I know they put a rod in.

Is

he going to walk again?

And do you have any idea based on what happened?

in sports, do you come back and play golf?

I don't think he comes back.

I mean, this total speculation on my part.

I think the guy's had like five back surgeries and was just recovering from one just now.

So I would imagine his back

won't allow him to compete at the highest level.

I think that his ankle getting crushed and, you know, having to be rebuilt, they said they put a rod in his leg.

I can't imagine, let's say the recovery is a year or two.

You know, Tiger will be 47 at that time.

47.

When did that happen?

Yeah, he's 45 now.

So I just can't see him competing at the level that he wants to compete at, which is at the highest level.

And so I think, you know, if I were guessing, you know, his career is over.

That's a huge blow.

Yeah, that's, look, even at Tiger, at, you know, half of his powers, he's still the most compelling television.

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe in sports, but certainly in the world of golf,

you know, he's the only thing that would, you know, he trumps everything for me.

Football is my favorite sport, but if Tiger were in contention at a major or, hell, maybe just any golf tournament, I'd watch Tiger over football.

And I think a lot of people were that way because we thought we were witnessing history.

And even with Tiger's personal problems, I think most people just kind of like Tiger.

Yeah.

And

He's hard not to like.

I mean, I went through a period where, I mean, again, I don't follow this stuff, but, you know, the golf club and the car and the wife was a really horrible scene.

But it's hard not to like him.

Yeah, I think that,

again,

good-looking guy.

I think people can relate to his...

He was competing in a sport where no one that looked like him had ever had that kind of success.

And I think everybody in America loved what Tiger's success in golf represented and said about America.

And,

you know, he didn't take big, huge political positions.

And so everybody could kind of wrap their arms around Tiger Woods.

And we did.

And, you know, that's...

I have so much.

Well, maybe you did.

Maybe you did because you're black, but all of the white people in America, of course, are racist.

And we secretly hated him.

And somehow, all of you that hated Tiger never went to the golf courses he was playing at because it would be a sea of white humanity

cheering this guy on and celebrating every moment.

And,

you know,

let me ask you one more question on this.

Do you know enough about Tiger Woods

to know how a guy who was built from the beginning of his childhood to compete and to play golf and

then become

such an icon at 47 years old, 45 years old, just to kind of not be able to do that anymore, not command that spotlight for his athletic abilities, how is that going to affect him mentally?

Do you have any idea?

I think he's been prepared for that over the last few years because he's had so many injuries and missed large chunks of time, a year off, year and a half off for this injury or that injury.

I think that Tiger has authentically transitioned into being really into his kids.

And I think you would think he's sitting in a hospital bed like, oh, my God.

If I can just walk again and play with my kids and help my son with his golf game and my daughter with her golf game, that will be fulfilling enough for Tiger.

I want to add one thing, Glenn, before we transition to something else.

But the other thought I've had about Tiger and this, just the way the last 10 years of his life has gone, it's kind of starting to remind me of like Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson was a big part of my childhood and memories, and I was just a big Michael Jackson, Jackson 5 fan.

And then he got involved in controversies and

identity issues and skin, you know,

all of that.

Children.

Yeah.

And I just, it's like my memories of Michael are blurred.

I remember him as much for the tragedies and controversies as I do for his singing career.

And I just think Michael's weirdness or whatever it was that was going on with Michael, I just he was a prodigy like Tiger whose dad drove him.

Correct.

Whose dad, you know, made him music, music.

And I just, it makes me like, wow.

As much as I love Tiger and what he was accomplished, I don't think I would want his life.

And as much as I love Michael Jackson's music, I certainly wouldn't want his life.

I wouldn't want to be a prodigy.

Well, you get all the Jesus juice you want if you were Michael Jackson.

But you know what?

I think you're exactly right.

And I think that's why people are paid so much money in the end is you give up an awful lot I mean it's one thing to be a star especially at their level

but if you're at their level from childhood you you do not have a normal life at all and

you kind of demand it in a you know pound of flesh or you know a pound of gold uh but it doesn't buy back all the things that you lost

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