Best of The Program | Guests: Alex Epstein & Mark Meckler | 2/16/21

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Hey, we're back in the saddle.

It's Glenn and Pat because Stu's house is underwater.

All of his pipes burst.

I feel really horrible.

I mean, I'd like to laugh.

You bet.

I mean, we make fun of each other all the time.

And probably we will.

Maybe tomorrow, Pat, do you know?

Yeah, we'll give it a full 24 hours.

But things are bad in Texas, and you should pay attention to what's happening in Texas because this is what's coming to the rest rest of the world.

The problems in Texas are caused by this big green movement that Texas has fallen prey to.

And it's going to be worse in your state.

We talk about that.

And we talk about

with a real expert on energy and what's really happening and the impact of green energy.

We also...

We went into a Washington Post article that will explain so much.

You are being called a radical, but the real radicals are those in power now.

They have flipped the paradigm entirely to where if you are standing for the Bill of Rights, you're now the enemy of the nation.

We talk about Joe Biden, the first hundred days, the push for statehood, for Puerto Rico, also the push against guns, and everything else that is on the plate on today's podcast.

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

We welcome Pat Gray into the studio, one of the brave that attempted to

weather the roads, which are not so bad.

The highways aren't so bad.

The problem with Texas is we don't have any snowplows.

We don't have any We only have four.

Well, it's a good thing.

We're going to be the size of, I don't know, Delaware.

Yeah.

From Texarkana, Texas down to Brownsville,

Texas is the same distance from Texarkana, Texas to Chicago.

So it's an enormous state, and we've got four snowplows, which not really a help when you have snow all over the state.

Of course, we know global warming.

Or is it global cooling?

It's global climate change.

It's global something.

Now, disregard the fact that this happened 40 years ago, you know, when it was global cooling,

but it hasn't been this bad, and Texas is just not prepared for it.

We're expecting another four to six inches of snow tomorrow,

and we don't have this weather ever.

The last time we had weather like this was 10 years ago,

and we just got sleet, and

everything was iced over.

I mean nothing moved in in portions of Texas.

This is almost the entire state of Texas.

The electricity,

we have all these windmills, they are all frozen, frozen solid, so we're not producing any wind energy.

Nuclear power plants offline.

We have our gas and coal plants that make energy.

They're also offline because

they're frozen.

They're frozen solid.

We don't insulate things like they do up in north up north because we don't ever have this weather.

I think maybe Texas should reevaluate that just a little bit.

Like I said,

in my town, same as yours, right?

Yeah.

The sewage touch.

Yeah, the sewage treatment plant went down and I guess some pipes burst, et cetera, et cetera.

So now our drinking water may be mixed with poop water, which I love.

I love.

Who doesn't?

Yeah, I like my water chunky.

It is nothing better.

Fortunately, I gave up on tap water a long time ago.

Although you cook with it, you know, so you're brushing teeth with it.

Yeah.

Take a shower with it.

Yeah.

I mean,

you know, it's nasty.

It is nasty.

So let's talk about the news outside of Texas, which, quite honestly, makes me want to talk about the news inside of Texas a little bit more.

Puerto Rican statehood

looks like it is on its way to happening.

Puerto Rico has held six non-binding referendums on its status, including becoming a U.S.

state, since 1967.

However, the residents there have most recently voted in favor of statehood.

That was last September, sorry, last November.

This has, I guess, a lot to do with Hurricane Maria,

which caused over 3,000 deaths, the worst natural disaster to hit the island to date that we know of.

Also, they have $72 billion in debt.

They can't file for bankruptcy, so why not just push it into the federal government?

I don't mind paying for Puerto Rico, do you?

No.

Yeah.

I mean, I actually have less of a problem paying for Puerto Rico than I do for California.

I mean, I have a real problem paying for California.

If California and New York and Illinois start pushing all of their state debt into the Fed, I am really pissed off.

I'm really pissed off.

I didn't live there.

When I did live in New York, I voted against it because I knew it was insanity.

Anyway,

it looks like the current governor, who is part of the new progressive party, That's not even the Democratic Party.

This is the new progressive party,

is very, very excited about this.

And it looks like the

Democrats are going to push it through.

So we've got that going for us.

But don't worry, Congress could stop it.

And don't forget, Washington, D.C.

could also become a state.

Well, yeah.

Isn't that great?

So you've got that going for you.

Now, here's a state.

There are some super Democratic states.

Here's a state that they're going to make sure doesn't become a state.

And that is

Jefferson.

Is it Jefferson?

The state of Jefferson or Jeffersonian?

I never heard of it and I grew up in the West Coast.

But there is a movement now in Northern California that is saying they want to break free.

They don't feel that they are being represented at all.

by the California legislature, and they are conservatives, and they want to become their own state.

Do you remember, Pat, were we still together in the 90s when

I read some things from, I think it was Dugan, Alexander Dugan,

that said the United States was going to break up into five districts.

And when he was asked,

how do you know that?

He said, by 20, what was it?

2020 or 2015, something like that, the United States would be in a civil war, and we would eventually break up into five different districts.

And when asked why he knew that, he said, because we have people on the ground, meaning they have people pushing for that.

And I could see that happening quickly.

Yeah.

Unfortunately.

We also have something really, really great happening in the military now.

The latest on the Pentagon.

The Pentagon is

not focusing on the Islamic State or the threat from China or the threat from any place else.

They are now

doing everything they can to look at the threat from within.

President Joe Biden

is continuing to not focus on China, in fact, strengthen China

while promoting social justice inside the Pentagon.

His first military-related executive

order was to overturn Trump's transgender policy, which I think we were all fighting for, were we not?

Where we're like, this fairness

has got to be upheld here,

and somebody needs to free all the transgenders from the oppression in the military.

Lloyd Austin, his defense secretary, the first African American to serve in that position, Austin vowed during his confirmation hearing to rid the military of racists and extremists.

Now,

I wasn't aware that there were racists and extremists in the military.

I mean, I knew that there were jihadists, sure,

knew that, but we weren't supposed to talk about it.

So he wants to get rid of racists and extremists.

Here's the problem, Pat, when you go looking for something and you know that it's there, do you generally find it?

Generally, yes.

Yes, you generally, you know, it's like: have you ever worked at a place where a consultant comes in and the management hires a consultant and says, Look, here's what the problem is.

The problem is we've got X, Y, and Z.

And all the employees are like, That's not the problem.

The problem is the management.

What do the consultants usually find?

A, B, and C or X, Y, and Z.

They always find X, Y, and Z.

That's what's happening in the Pentagon now.

And I want any white extremists out.

I want anybody.

But what's happening now is

the Department of Defense

was notified by the FDI 143 times.

of investigations of former and current military members in 2020.

68 of the times pertained to domestic extremist cases, with the vast majority former military, many unfavorable discharge records,

and only one fourth or 17 had anything to do with white nationalism.

So out of 68 times there were extremists.

17 of them had to do with white nationalism.

What's really interesting in this story is it doesn't tell me what the others were.

The military still has not given even the House Armed Services Committee, the Oversight Committee in Congress, a definition of extremists.

We don't know what they're even looking for.

They won't

define the word.

The problem here is that they are going to find what they want, and we're now going to politicize

our military.

On another front,

now President Joe Biden has pulled 65 pending Trump administration executive orders.

Several of the withdrawals strike down orders that would protect American jobs by tightening immigration restrictions, eliminating proposed oversight regulations on how China-backed Confucius Institute operate on campus.

This is obscene what is going on.

Right now, under current law, outgoing aliens released from custody can seek legal employment.

This has now been withdrawn.

We were saying, no, you can't do that.

The Trump orders were protecting American workers.

Between what he's doing with China and what he's doing with immigration, we have some serious

problems coming our way.

But the good news is

the Biden administration over the weekend said, quote, this administration will not wait for the next mass shooting.

He is calling for universal background checks.

We have that.

We have that.

An assault weapons ban.

We did that.

It did nothing.

We did it in the 90s.

It did nothing.

And legal liability for gun makers.

Now what does that mean?

That means if you use the weapon

and you kill someone,

someone can sue the gun manufacturer.

That's like using a car

and suing General Motors because you went on a walkway and drove over a lot of people.

Now, if the car has automatic pilot and you couldn't turn it off and it caused you to drive, then you could sue GM.

But if you chose

to drive on a sidewalk and kill a lot of people, you can't sue GM.

Under Biden, you'll be able to sue

the gunmakers.

They are going to make it impossible for Americans to be able to defend themselves.

By the way, Swalwell has said in the wake of the Capitol riot, we need a 9-11 commission, a white nationalism task force.

Holy mother of everything that is good and sacred.

We need a white nationalism task force.

So now they're pushing for a 9-11 commission.

And the guy who is doing it is Swalwell.

There's no moving on.

January 6th is the day that we'll all sadly remember.

I think we have to take an approach that we took after September 11th to root out white nationalism.

What about the ballpark?

Why didn't we have a 9-11 commission after they they tried to shoot all of the Republican congressmen?

Why?

Why didn't we do that?

By the way, Swalwell

is, he said that he is sure that God herself,

God herself was proud of all of this.

So he knows that God is a female, which I think we can't say that he's a hypocrite on that because he was with Christine Fang, and while he was doing the Fang bang, we heard him scream, oh God, oh God, oh God, many times.

So maybe God's not only a female, but also Chinese and a spy.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

The president and founder for the Center for Industrial Progress, the author of the moral case for fossil fuels, Alex Epstein, is with us now.

Hello, Alex.

How are you?

Hey, Glenn.

Great to be back on your show.

It's great to have you.

I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what's happening in Texas.

There is no way we should be having these problems in Texas

with our own power grid, with

as much gas and oil as we have.

What the heck is happening?

Yeah, so, I mean, this is something I've been warning about for a while.

In September 2020, so I live in California.

When the California blackouts were happening, I warned on Twitter that there are similar things happening in Texas.

And so a blackout is an extreme event, but this blackout is not unprecedented.

Texas has been having what I call industrial blackouts a lot.

They call it demand management, but it basically means when there's not enough power, they have their industrial or they'll call it curtailment.

They'll have their industrial projects stop.

You You know, they'll cut off power to industrial people.

They won't cut it off to the home.

So, what's happened here is the lack of ability to meet demand has just been so extreme, and there are some unexpected events that everyone is seeing it.

But it's important that this is not an unprecedented thing, it's just a more extreme thing.

And this is something that's happened in California, it's happening around the country.

And the fundamental reason, whatever else is going on, is the insistence on using unreliable wind and solar energy instead of reliable energy from coal, nuclear, natural gas.

Well, why is that?

Just one thing we can say:

we know that those sources, because there's issues of failures in Texas, and we'll talk about that.

But we know for a fact that coal, gas, and nuclear can work under any weather conditions around the world.

So, whatever is going on in Texas, it's not that coal plants don't work, gas plants don't work, nuclear plants is a combination of specific mismanagement and non-preparation in Texas.

But the main thing is too much attempt to rely on on unreliable energy.

And that takes away focus and funding from the reliable energy and from making it resilient.

Okay, so I'm kind of caught in between.

Some people are really, really pissed.

Some people are like, well, that's what happens.

I'm somewhere in between.

There are times that I feel like I'm living in Syria.

However, I don't expect the state to spend oodles of money protecting for something that happens once every, even, you know, when it comes to salt trucks and everything else, why why spend the money it happens every 10 years this is something that happened you know about every 40 or 50 years in texas so i cut some slack but i don't understand

uh why our coal plants are down they are down our natural gas plants are down why

well so there's i mean we I don't think the ERCOT, so ERCOT is the so-called reliability council of Texas.

They haven't been totally open, so it's not easy to tell exactly what's going on.

There are a number of things that can happen.

So one thing that they'll tend not to talk about is it's possible there's been some just mismanagement of supply and demand.

So when demand was exceeding supply, they didn't curtail demand early enough, and that can cause things to trip up.

It can be that specific plants aren't resilient enough.

It can be that the fuel infrastructure, there's something off with that in terms of delivery of fuel.

And this is something that I think that will emerge.

But again, these are all things that are handled everywhere around the world.

They're not inherent in coal, gas, and nuclear.

Whereas what you see with wind and solar is they went completely out to lunch when they were needed most.

So no matter how, even if there had been no freezing of the wind turbines, wind would have still been useless during very large portions of the situation.

So the basic lesson.

Wait, why?

Why?

Why would wind turbine, when there was winds, why were wind turbines not useful?

Well,

they were frozen some of them but

there wasn't wind there wasn't wind the whole time so even when there has it so a talking point for the other side has been oh well not that many of them froze but if you look at the recent data over the last several days there have been times when it's been one gigawatt out of 32.

so they part of the thing is they call the capacity they call the maximum possible wind the capacity which is ridiculous it's just a lucky situation so they say oh we have 32 gigawatts of wind and everyone brags about that but when the going gets tough you had one two or three gigawatts of wind.

So, again, they are always people always like to talk about the peak, but the real thing is, where are they when you need them?

And the point is, they're not reliable.

They're basically reliable for zero.

And that's why they add so much cost because you always have to have the unreliable infrastructure and the reliable infrastructure.

So, some greens are blaming not enough gas being online, and that's because the green

scheme requires it to be offline so we can get more electricity from wind, right?

Right.

Everything is engineered around trying to maximize the amount of unreliable wind that you're using.

So the whole way the grid is working normally that's very wasteful is you're cycling the gas up and down to accommodate the wind.

If you had a reliable energy infrastructure, which we used to have around the country, you would just have a whole slate of reliable plants.

And then when you had a lot more demand, you could just ramp a lot of the reliable plants up.

But here, what Texas is trying to do is they're trying to minimize the number of reliable plants to cut costs.

And this is why

one of the public utility people said, and I think in 2019, like, hey, we've got a serious issue.

Our reserve margin is very scary.

Texas is notorious in electricity circles for trying to get away with the lowest reserve margin possible, which means the smallest margin for error possible.

It's gone down dramatically because they've been trying to cut prices and use wind.

That's what happened in California.

We didn't maintain our power lines enough because we didn't want to raise prices even more after we had inflated them with green energy.

If you don't focus on reliability, you're going to lose reliability.

So in northern climates, when it gets cold like this every single year,

how do they avoid this problem?

Are they doing less green energy than Texas is?

Well, there are two things.

I mean, so one is just they have better specific policies for their plants and that can take all sorts of measures.

But they just figured out, I mean, these are, you know, these places, Texas, even in bad weather, is not as bad as places around the world.

I mean, obviously, you have places in Russia that are using these kinds of places, places in cold parts of Canada.

Now, what's happening, though, it's important with

what I call the unreliable, so the solar and wind.

It is possible to have a certain amount of them along with the reliable.

So people in the Midwest are saying, hey, look, our wind tempers are working.

And it's true, you can spend money and they don't necessarily ice.

But the point is, they're adding costs and they don't scale.

Because, again, you have to pay for the unreliable energy infrastructure and the reliable energy infrastructure.

Plus, it's really inefficient to run a grid that way because it's like stop-and-go traffic for the reliables.

Plus, you wear them down a lot more quickly when you move them up and down.

But the real thing to notice is you cannot rely on the unreliables, they're parasites.

And what we have as a country is a policy that's trying to get us 100% dependent on these parasites.

The real lesson of Texas is not that wind turbines froze, it's that wind and solar cannot keep us warm and powered in the winter.

And so these Green New Deal-type plans are a complete fiasco.

And everybody should be asking, Biden, what the hell would Texas do under your situation?

How the hell would they get power if you're going to have nearly 100% wind and solar, which were totally out to lunch when they were needed most?

Jeez.

Wow.

I mean, we're now buying the power, I believe, from Mexico, which

is like

what?

So are these

when people say the Texas grid, we're fine because we have our own grid in Texas.

Have the progressive policies just pretty much dismantled any positives we had with that?

Yes.

So this is, I mean, I was really scared of what was going to happen with this storm, and my fears unfortunately came true.

But one thing I thought would be good in terms of a lesson is Texas does have this isolated grid, and that can be an asset or a liability.

But what it really illustrates is the problem of relying on unreliable energy because in California, even, you know, we import 25% of our electricity, which at a given time can be 40% of our electricity.

25 is just an average.

So we're bailed out by Nevada, Utah, Arizona.

But what happens is they start trying to have more and more unreliables.

Then we can't rely on them.

And that's what happened in the summer.

It got hot, wind went down, the sun goes down every day.

People people are shocked, and we didn't have enough electricity and we couldn't get it.

So everyone is trying to play this game of get it of chicken with how much unreliable can I use and get away with it.

And Texas is a good illustration because it's this self-contained

world.

And so we need to learn that the whole U.S.

cannot be like Texas.

Again, Texas is something like 20%

wind.

It's a tiny fraction of the Biden plan.

The Biden plan says 100%

carbon neutral grid.

By 2035, that's 14 years.

And he's supposed to nuclear.

He does nothing to support nuclear.

And the biggest lie, the biggest giveaway is none of these people support nuclear.

Texas has not been increasing nuclear.

If you look at Texas's plan, so I just wrote about this on Twitter.

It's just alex twitter.com slash alexepstein.

And so I wrote the statistics.

Listen to this, Glenn.

Look, what would you think Texas has planned?

Okay, so zero nuclear plants.

Nuclear are the most weather resilient plants.

They store their food.

So zero plants,

no new coal plants.

They're probably going to shut down plants.

9.4 gigawatts of wind.

So the existing 32 gigawatts, it went down to one gigawatt when it was needed most.

So it's basically useless.

And then 12 new gigawatts of solar, and solar was almost completely useless.

And then five new gigawatts of gas, which is basically to handle all the ups and downs of the wind and solar.

So this is Texas's plan, and that is a mild day at the beach compared to what Biden has planned.

So we need to totally change direction.

All right.

So I want you just to tell us what America looks like with the Biden plan and what states and people locally

should be doing.

Because the first thing that came to my mind was, I am not sufficient.

I am not self-reliant at all.

I'm still reliant on, here in Texas, I'm reliant on way too much stuff, way too much stuff.

And

when you can't weather a storm for three days, four days, without these aren't rolling brownouts or rolling blackouts.

They're not scheduled anymore.

They started scheduled.

Now we're just having full blackouts.

And

that, I mean, that just is not in a

21st century world.

That makes no sense whatsoever, in my opinion.

So what does America look like with the way the Biden administration is heading even right now?

Yeah, so it's important that because of the dynamics I mentioned, this whole 100% carbon-free grid, particularly without nuclear, like that's not going to happen.

It's completely impossible.

The whole net zero by 2050 thing is impossible, but that doesn't mean we don't need to worry about it.

Because as we're seeing with Texas, even small steps in that direction

are disastrous.

So, what you see is just more and more of these blackouts, of these brownouts.

And one thing I want to highlight is what happens to industry?

What lesson does industry take when they keep getting blacked out?

And they get blacked out a lot more than, much more than we do as consumers.

They're going to go overseas.

They're going to go other places.

And I really want to highlight the strategic thing that's happening right now with China because nobody's paying attention to it.

China uses five times more industrial electricity than the U.S., five times.

The vast majority of it comes from coal.

A lot of that electricity is used to build unreliable solar panels panels and wind turbines for us.

Of course, we don't mostly build them here because they have to be built with cheap energy, which means they have to be built with fossil fuels.

They're not built with solar panels and wind turbines, obviously.

So you have China making this very strong strategic move to get us to unilaterally disempower and for them to empower.

And then they say, oh, we're going to go net zero by 2060.

They get praised by Biden.

They get praised by this guy, Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, who almost runs the financial world right now.

And so you just see this amazing strategic play where they are using fossil fuels to get ahead.

They have record oil imports.

They had a five-year high in coal production.

They're building 100-plus new coal plants, again, five times more electricity than we are.

So they're disempowering us, empowering themselves, and then selling us these almost useless solar panels and wind turbines, and Biden is playing into it.

So unfortunately, he is, the expression is useful idiot for China.

And I think that security thing should scare us just as much as everything else.

So

where do we go?

Because honestly,

you have Bank of America saying that they're not going to,

you know, they're going to start looking at loans.

If you're not green,

you may not be able to be fitting into their portfolio of businesses they can loan money to.

You have BlackRock pushing this.

You have the Great Reset pushing all of this.

And Jaguar just came out and said they'll be

fully electric cars by 2025.

And nobody's talking about the increase in electricity that is needed if we all go to electric cars.

Yeah, so I think that these tech, it's crucial to have these moments as teaching moments.

So this is maybe the crucial teaching moment of

2021 to change the narrative on this.

And I mentioned that on Twitter, I posted a very comprehensive explanation.

More broadly, recently I created a website called energytalkingpoints.com that takes all of these issues and gives you very quick, well-referenced statements on everything.

And that's part of my overall goal of just changing the narrative, where we move from this focus on unreliable energy and climate catastrophe to one where we recognize that if we use the best sources of energy, namely fossil fuels and nuclear, we can keep making the world a better and better place to live.

I do believe we impact climate, but we're talking about one degree in 170 years.

Climate-related deaths are at all-time lows.

Fossil fuels are making the world a better and better place to live.

The facts are on the side of that.

And mandatory government-controlled green energy is making the world a worse place to live.

So, those are the two narratives I just keep hitting over and over and over.

And eventually, people are going to see that narrative corresponds to reality, and the other narrative is just unreal and destructive.

Thank you so much.

Give me the name of that website you just created again.

It's called energytalkingpoints.com.

EnergyTalkingPoints.com.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Alex Epstein, the president and co-founder for Center for Industrial Progress.

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

Mark Meckler is with us.

He is the interim CEO of Parlor,

which we know now is a website of real danger and real extremism.

Mark, how are you?

You know, I don't feel like I'm very dangerous or extreme, but that is certainly how it's been portrayed.

Well, do you believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

Absolutely, fundamentally, and unequivocally.

There you go.

I just did a monologue last hour about how extremists are the ones who are trying to get rid of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, but the media and politics in Washington are trying to make those people seem like the Americans, and we're the extremists.

Yeah, they are fundamentally anti-American.

They stand against everything that this country was founded on and for.

And frankly, those people right now, they occupy the White House and they're in control of both houses of Congress.

We're in real danger.

Okay, so you are the interim CEO.

If you recognize the name Mark Meckler, it's because he's the Convention Estates guys.

And he's been talking about that with us for a long time.

What was it, about four weeks ago, we were talking about the Convention Estates, and I mentioned Parlor going under

or going out, being taken out.

And we talked about cloud services.

We talked about there has to be somebody.

that is building the infrastructure for the right to fall into.

And you talked at the time about being a part of a movement to do that.

Now you're the interim CEO of Parlor.

Did that play a role, what you're doing behind the scenes?

Yeah, it did, actually.

So I'd been thinking about this problem, as we talked about, for a long time.

And I've been working on finding alternative service providers and folks who are actual real patriots who would stand in the fight in the event that they were attacked.

And so I had a little bit of a head start in thinking about this.

I knew the primary owners of Parlor, they're longtime friends of mine.

And so when I saw it go down, I just reached out to see if there was anything I could do to help.

Literally didn't expect to end up being the interim CEO.

That's just the way things have worked out over time.

But yeah, I think a lot of it was my thinking in advance.

I got to say, though, Glenn, all the credit for getting it back up goes to the staff.

These guys have been absolutely incredible.

It has taken, however, a month.

I'm not blaming this on the staff by any stretch.

It's taken a month to get over a month to get back in the public square.

Is there any lawsuit that I know you're an attorney?

Is there any any lawsuit that can be had for the destruction of business by Amazon and the collusion with all of these companies that we now know happened?

Yeah, there absolutely is.

There is a lawsuit that's already been filed.

We're working on an amended complaint on that.

That lawsuit is against AWS, Amazon Web Services.

And I do think there is liability.

I think there's all kinds of antitrust stuff.

I think there's business damage stuff.

But we'll be putting out more on that probably in a week or so when we amend that complaint.

Good.

Did you see the just so you have it in your coffers?

I'm sure you do, the story that came out that showed that

there were many more people organizing on Facebook for January 6th than there were on Parlor.

You had, I think, six, and they had maybe 70.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, in fact, there's been a couple of great stories on that.

One was an independent review by Forbes.

Yeah.

They found that the vast majority of violent and insightful stuff, that took place on Facebook.

YouTube and Instagram were close second and third.

We barely made the list.

And so, look, there's always going to be bad content on every platform of that size.

But the bottom line is this was just a hit job.

It was a political hit job.

But I would also add that it was a business hit job.

They see Parler as a real threat to their monopoly on the business market and on free speech, and they're going to come after us.

There is no place, according to them, for somebody who disagrees with

the current cabal.

There's no place for them, is there?

I mean, it's not enough being kicked off of the other platforms.

When you start and you go on another platform, they'll shut down the platform.

Yeah, that's exactly right.

And look, I think there's two measures to this, though.

One is no speech outside what they agree with.

Remember that

Mussolini said that the definition of fascism is everything inside the state, nothing outside of the state, and nothing against the state.

So that's now being enforced by our government, but also by the tech oligarchy and working with the government.

And then I think the second thing is a business model.

At Parler, we believe in free speech.

So if you can say it in the public square, you can say it on Parler.

We believe in privacy and data sovereignty, meaning we're not monetizing the data of our users.

We're here for our users as a service to our users, not to use them and use their data.

And we have an advertising model that doesn't use their data.

And so I think that's very threatening to Facebook and Twitter and all the others.

So how are you going to make money when the advertising cabal comes after you guys?

I mean, at the Blaze, we have worked on building our own advertisers,

and they're, you know, as close to bulletproof as possible because they believe in us and they believe in the work that we do.

Have you guys, are you at that place with your advertisers?

Yeah, absolutely.

Look, the same types of people that advertise in the Blaze or have advertised and will be advertising again on parlor these are people who believe in the same things that you and i believe and they're not going to fold to the kind of pressure that the woke media and the woke mob put on them so tell me about the infrastructure and and how stable it is now can this happen to you guys again

Yeah, look, I'm very comfortable with the infrastructure.

And again, this is where my head was at, as you know, before I went to be with Parlor.

What we did is we went out and we found providers who shared our values, but were also big enough to handle the kind of load that we put on them.

And what we did to be sure, and this is really important, Glenn, for anybody who's operating in this space, we made sure that there were multiple redundancies.

So we don't have what I would describe as any single points of failure.

I'm very certain.

I've talked to the CEOs of all the companies that we're working with.

I'm very certain they're going to stand with us and not cave to the woke mob.

But even if they do, we've built in multiple redundancies, and we're going to continue to add layers of redundancies so that we know we're bulletproof in the future so let's talk about let's play devil's advocate here um the the problem that they will say is that we are living at a time where conspiracy theorists and and crazy things and white supremacists and all kinds of terrorists can be online and you don't want to add fuel to that you should you should make sure that you have an algorithm that stops all of that kind of hate speech Tell me why that's wrong if you do think it's wrong.

I do think that's wrong because that runs, first of all, it runs contrary to just our philosophy at the founding and our philosophy through most of American history really until recently.

We believe that if you don't like somebody's speech,

bad speech should be countered with good speech, should be countered with more speech, not with less speech.

When you start tamping down on free speech, you start creating, well, you've read about this, you talked about this, George Orwell's view, the 1984 view of the future, which is this idea that the government will control all, that we will have overlords and overseers.

Now, I do agree, by the way, that there are far too many people out there pushing conspiracy theories, and many of them are in the Democratic Party in Congress.

They're on CNN.

They're on MSNBC, ABC, CBS, all the others.

And yet, at the same time, I think we should just debunk their conspiracies as we've largely done, as opposed to seeing them shut down, which I'm not interested in doing.

Yeah, I've not asked for people to be shut down.

I've supported people who have been attacked by the woke mob, even and especially when I vehemently disagree with them.

Freedom of speech means freedom of speech.

Talk to me about the person who says, yeah, but now if I go over to parlor, there's going to be all these people because usually when it is, when there's one place to go,

you know, all these places that are pushing the boundaries are going to be there.

And I don't want to be a part of that.

You know, that's the beauty of Parlor.

And one of the things that makes it so different from all the other social networks, this big, scary word at the social networks is algorithm.

And I think people should be scared of that big, scary word because what it means is if you go over there and you like certain things, they're going to start pushing other things at you that sort of they think fit.

And this creates what I call the echo chamber effect.

And it does put a bunch of stuff into your feed you might not want to see.

At Parlor, you 100% design your own feed.

There's nothing that you're going to see that you haven't requested to see.

You can easily remove anything from your own feed.

Again, we believe in data sovereignty, and we believe that our users are prime.

That's who is in charge of their experience at Parlor.

We want them to see only the people that they want to see and hear from only the groups and people that they want to hear from.

So, tell me now about the people that did belong.

How long is it going to take before you're fully running with at least the people that you had before?

So, the platform is fully up and running right now.

We have the capacity to handle everybody who wants to come back and log on.

There are some limitations right now.

One of the limitations is we're having folks having trouble with the Apple iOS.

I believe that's a technical limitation we're going to get around here today.

Part of the problem with that is that we can't update the Apple, the app that's on the App Store right now because we got removed from from the App Store.

We're working on that.

So folks can't update it.

And if there are problems in there, we can't fix those problems.

So that's one of the things we're working on right now, trying to fix that.

I bet Apple is bending over backwards to help you with that, too.

Well, I'm not going to comment on that right now, Glenn, because we'd really like to be back in the App Store because so many users want to

download the app.

I know.

So the second piece of that is that

we are seeing every day more and more functionality come back.

Folks need to remember that this thing, when it went down, it's not just a website.

I think if you're not involved in technology and it works, it's seamless, we don't think about what's involved in it.

There's so many different layers.

I'm so proud of the staff at Parlor for literally 16 to 20 hours a day they've been putting in for weeks to get it back up.

But we expect to see glitches over the next few days.

It's better today than it was yesterday.

It's going to continue to get better throughout the week.

And I expect that we'll be back to full functionality sometime next week.

This week, by the way, we're not even taking new subscribers.

We're focusing only on the existing parlor family, make sure everything's up and stable and running well, and I expect to be accepting new users next week.

Is everything that you may have posted before, or do you have to start from scratch

if you're

an old subscriber?

If you go there right now, likely you won't see any of your old stuff.

All that data has been preserved, and we will start loading that.

We didn't want to load the system with old data when we first went up, but all of that stuff has been preserved, and it's all going to come back.

Okay.

Mark, best of luck to you.

And congratulations to everybody who didn't give up and fought the battle behind the scenes.

I know what it is like when you're running a digital company and you come under attack like that, especially when you're you're not one of the you know, you're not Facebook or Google.

It is all hands on deck.

And I

got to tell you, it's remarkable that you are back in the first place.

And you've you've got to be proud

of all of the people that are working behind the scenes because I know what it takes, and you guys just pulled off a miracle.

Congratulations.

I appreciate that, Glenn.

Thank you very much.

And you're right, it's the staff.

I don't get any of the credit.

I come in, I get to go on the radio and talk to guys like you, but they're an incredible, hardworking team all over the country.

These guys have worked day and night, and they get all the credit for pulling this off.

Thank you so much, Mark.

Appreciate it.

Thanks, Glenn.

God bless you.

All right.

You bet.

You should should have him on next week.

Remind people that they can join if you're a new user next week at Parlor.