Best of The Program | Guests: Jason Whitlock & Amy Peikoff | 1/11/21

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hey podcasters it's Monday and it still reminds me halfway through this podcast this is only day six of our broadcast year day freaking six amazing it's an insane year

and uh if you feel the way we do uh whoa you should listen to today's show again you always say why did they waste all those blackouts back in the day you could have said if i didn't become an alcoholic 25 years ago now is the time to start drinking in fact I think that should be, that might be the message on tomorrow's podcast.

Just, hey, if you're not an alcoholic yet, start drinking.

Now's the time.

Now is the time.

Great podcast for you for a Monday.

Here it is.

You're listening to

the best of the Blenback program.

I think you feel it.

you don't,

if you don't, maybe you're not paying attention.

And I know a lot of people that are just disconnecting from the news and disconnecting from what's going on.

And they tell me, and with a

with complete understanding, I listen to them.

I feel better, Glenn.

I feel better when I don't listen to the news.

I understand that.

But now is not the time to disconnect from what's going on because the world is changing quickly.

Something noteworthy and historic has occurred over the last couple of days.

It is something historic, but it is also something terrifying.

And I'm not talking about the Capitol riots.

Those were perhaps terrifying for a brief moment.

but they are being made historic by the type and scope of media coverage that they are getting.

But anyone trying to make the claim that American democracy almost died that day or a small handful of violent thugs represent some existential threat to the U.S.

Constitution has quite simply lost the plot.

It is important to realize that the world we live in after the Capitol riots is not the world we were in on Tuesday.

We have crossed a threshold and we now live in a very different nation.

And it's not because of the riots themselves.

Those could have been nothing more than a minor blip in the grand scheme of things.

But in case you don't feel or haven't realized it yet,

we now officially live in a united nation

in in name only

and that is because of the way the left

and even some of those so-called centrists

have decided to respond

we now have two distinct countries inside of one nation

We have two distinct peoples, two distinct cultures, two distinct economies,

and one economy

is truly under attack.

We are way past now being just politically or ideologically divided.

The leftist coalition now includes governments, media, and big tech.

And

they have declared war, although a Cold War,

they have declared a Cold War on us.

It's economic warfare, designed to remove

the ability

for half the country to communicate ideas, communicate with each other, even be able to make a living.

We have seen hints of this in the last few years, where credit card companies and banks have refused to do business with firearm companies, where single individuals were targeted to be deplatformed for what social media companies deemed to be hate speech.

Those were trial balloons.

Those were probes to see how we would respond, to see how the courts would respond.

They have been laying in wait, ready for a catalyzing event that they could use to justify open economic warfare.

And the capital riots foolishly have given them that event.

I actually, I know I might sound

tense today,

and I am.

Because every word that any of us speak, live,

unscripted, most of the time,

is going to be monitored, scrutinized, and twisted.

And the

responsibility

to keep a voice that can be heard

is overwhelming on all of us.

Dennis Prager,

Rush Limbaugh,

Dave Rubin, Mark Levin.

This morning, they have officially deplatformed Parlor from Amazon.

Over the weekend, it was Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, but now the Amazon web services have shut them down.

They are no longer able to you can't find them on the internet anymore.

They're gone.

Now these companies, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, they did it all at the same time.

I want you to know this is not about Trump.

This is about them.

The far left has talked about breaking up these companies for a long time.

Elizabeth Warren, even I think Kamala Harris was talking about breaking them up too, wasn't she, during the primaries?

They've talked about breaking these companies up.

They know that the power structure has totally changed.

They must find a way to be on the side of the left.

This is something I warned you of four years ago, that there would come a time when unemployment and the beginning of this transition and the economy would change and people would begin to lose their jobs and you wouldn't be able to replace them because a profound technological change is coming.

And I told you at the time, high-tech will need the government and the government will need high-tech.

And they will work together

to preserve their power.

and their position.

This is what's happening today.

Donald Trump and the riots are an excuse.

And it is extraordinarily difficult to swallow the hypocrisy.

It's extraordinary to hear about all the hate that was on parlor.

When things like

Kathy Griffin She reposted the picture of her with the beheading of Trump.

Trump's bloodied head.

She reposted it on Twitter

on Wednesday of last week.

No one has said anything about it.

Still,

still from slate is the tweet.

Non-violence to protest

has always been important, but so is violence.

It's very difficult to swallow.

But we're the people that understand life is not fair.

Let's not become all that we despise.

This is not

the end of this.

This is where the left is starting.

Today they say they're deplatforming people because they're inciting violence or for hate speech.

But after that will be anything they decide is fake news, anything they decide is anti-science, anything they believe may lead to the next Trump.

And those who persist in standing for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to assemble, freedom to keep and bear arms, those people will be targeted for deletion.

You will be hounded, boycotted, fired, ostracized, and deplatformed.

And the louder and the more significant and effective your voice is, the bigger the target is on your back.

First, let me say this.

I will never stop standing for freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom to assemble, freedom to keep and bear arms, and all of the rest of the Bill of Rights.

That is the American thing to do.

And I don't care what you do to my voice.

I don't care.

I don't care if you imprison me.

I will continue to stand because I know the truth wins in the end.

I believe Nelson Mandela

was a hero.

and he too went to prison for what he believed.

This is the best of the Glen Beck program.

Jason Whitlock.

Jason is

a sports writer.

Why the heck is he on the Glen Beck program?

Well, because he is a deep-thinking man who

has been making a lot of waves in his own life to his own career in many cases for speaking what he believes is the truth.

And he just wrote a new op-ed.

It's up on the blaze.

Ignoring the concerns of Trump supporters will destroy America.

Welcome, Jason Widlock.

Thank you, Glenn.

Thanks for having me.

You bet.

How are you, man?

I'm awesome.

Well,

hold on.

That was a, I'm actually not.

I'm concerned.

I'm literally what the events going on in America the last week have shaken me.

I got to be honest.

Yeah, you know, I said today that

I hope the audience doesn't interpret, somebody who's been listening for 20 years.

They might interpret how I sound today as afraid or whatever.

I'm not.

I have, I have, I know

who leads my life.

I know what I need to do.

But it is concerning deeply.

If you're not a little afraid of what's going on,

you don't understand what's going on.

Yeah,

I mean, for just me personally, my brand, my career has been based off of being an outspoken, independent thinker.

That is clearly under attack.

I've always thought of journalism, other than military service, as the most patriotic thing you could do.

Journalism under attack.

We don't have a free press.

We don't have free speech right now in America, or not the free speech that I'm used to, not what Thomas Jefferson and our founders intended.

This is a scary time.

I don't believe in being afraid.

I believe in being fearless.

I believe in leaning into God.

But wow,

what is going on in America right now?

The attack and

the groupthink and the big tech takeover of speech

is one of the most disconcerting.

It is the most disconcerting thing that's happened to me in my lifetime.

Well, they have, you know,

Apple and

Amazon and Google, they decided they were going to delete Parler from their app stores.

But this morning, Amazon has taken them off the internet.

You can't find them anywhere on the internet today.

That's stunning.

Yeah, that is...

That's just not good.

And

I don't get Parlor's crime because

let's say that Amazon and Jeff Bezos and whoever's in his ear have said Parler's to blame for what happened at the Capitol.

It was plotted, and there are threats that are being made over Parlor.

Is that not true of cell phones?

Do you think the people, whoever did whatever was done at the Capitol, you think they didn't use a cell phone to help execute that?

Do you think there haven't been threats made or promised over cell phones?

Are we going after the iPhone?

Are we deplatforming the iPhone?

I don't, I just don't, the logic here and the justification is so flimsy,

just outrageous that

I just, I'm at a loss.

But Glenn, I have, and this isn't to beat my chest, but it's four or five years ago, I started talking about, hey, man,

Silicon Valley, Northern California, has way too much power in America and is now in control of the media.

And this is not a good thing.

The liberal from New York is completely different than the liberal from Northern California.

And to have this concentration of power in Northern California, where that's a very revolutionary,

disruptive mindset in Northern California.

It is

Again, I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush, but they just don't believe in traditional American values.

And

I just, we've turned over this power, and I just never understood why our lawmakers and people, well, I do understand.

They were all getting checks and money, and big tech has bought off everybody.

And now they need each other.

Now one needs the protection of the other.

Yeah, yeah.

It's

so let me talk a little bit about what you wrote in your op-ed piece.

You say there are two Americas.

There's two American realities.

Can you go into that a bit?

Yeah, there's a reality for the elites, progressive elites,

who live in a fantasy world of disreality, unreality,

false narratives.

And then there are those of us

that live in reality.

And I'm watching people, I mean, again, when they twisted this capital thing into a racial incident, that's an example of like the progressive elites in Hollywood, in the sports world, in politics,

they live in a world where

that was some sort of racial incident that happened last Wednesday.

Those of us that live in the real world

and in reality are like, no, that's an example of what happens when you tell 74 million people they're unworthy of living here in this country, they have no rights, they're all racist, they're Nazis.

When you tell 74 million people that for four straight years, And you're the worst people on the planet, you don't have a voice here in America, and the one voice you have, which was a powerful voice, the president, we are silencing and removing from office.

And now we're coming for you, you 74 million people, anybody that supported Trump.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

And so you can't demonize 74 million people.

You can't

dismiss.

Every one of their complaints with, oh, you're racist.

Oh, you're sexist.

Oh, you're a Nazi.

That is unfair.

It will not stand.

I'm not trying to defend the people that stormed the...

No, no, no.

I said last week, there are really important reasons why this happened.

There are no excuses.

There are important reasons.

And until the left and the media understands their role in it, it's not that you just said, you're bad people, you're racist, you have no place here, and we're coming after you.

They also at the same time have done everything in their power to destroy their own credibility.

The media and the government has lied, has twisted, has done everything,

everything

that

destroys any kind of honest give and take, any kind of trust that you've had.

So when you don't trust them at all and you say, hey, wait a minute, I think there might be a problem.

and then on top of it then you say I'm shutting everything down shut up sit down this is of course they're surrounded the left surrounds themselves with behavioral scientists they know exactly what caused this

they they know exactly what Glenn I hate to sound this naive or this uninformed but yesterday I had to ask someone what Q Anon was.

I keep hearing it talked about in the media, but I didn't understand it.

And then someone explained it to me.

It was actually Gaston.

He explained it to me.

And I said, hey,

the reason why something like QAnon can grow in popularity and take root is because of the failure of the media.

If the media did its job,

there would be far less conspiracy theories.

Yes.

Yes.

When you have Jeffrey Epstein and all of the records and all of the stuff that he had, all of the very powerful people he was involved in, go to jail, he's killed under unusual circumstances, and then it just goes away.

Of course conspiracies are going to come out of this.

Of course.

Because no one is saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

That shouldn't have happened.

That never happens.

And we're still going to pursue exactly what did happen and who was involved.

But they don't.

And so conspiracies grow out of that.

When you sit on powerful television platforms and media outlets and say that Russia

colluded and Trump colluded with Russia and they undermined the election and it was all bogus BS.

But they did that for years.

People built television audiences off of that for years.

And then boom, it goes away.

But your conspiracy theory, which has been proven is bogus, just goes away.

There's no repercussions from it.

There's no deplatforming of people because of it.

But on the other side.

Your theories are all evil.

You must be destroyed.

We must shut you down.

The hypocrisy is too easy to spot for rational people living in reality not to react and say, hey, man, this is just unfair.

This isn't America.

We're the free speech country.

That's one of our founding principles, and we're destroying it in a power, political power grab.

And the free speech that is guaranteed is the free speech to question and petition your government for answers.

Let me give you another one.

You know about the solar winds hack that happened, what was it, a month ago, where the government was hacked into and it looks like it was Russia that did this big hack.

Do you remember this?

Vaguely.

Okay.

Well, it was everywhere for about a day.

Everywhere.

It's a really big story.

Well, guess what was released at 2 o'clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, last Wednesday?

Quote, the U.S.

Justice Department has released information now that they are the latest federal agency to say that it was breached by hackers in the Russia-linked cyber attack that ripped through the government agencies.

So a month later...

They come out and say 3% of the Justice Department's Microsoft email accounts were potentially accessed in the attack.

It happened on December 24th.

It has eliminated the identified method by which the actor was assessing Microsoft email accounts.

They were looking at and

going through email accounts that contained sensitive information about investigations and national security-related issues.

Why didn't you say this when everybody else was

announcing that they were attacked.

They were attacked and hacked in the same day and the same times as all of the other departments that already released this.

Why would you release this on the day when you know the news is all going to be about what?

The electors actually being verified by the Congress and then an extra gift.

Of this, that's the time and day they release this?

This is the kind of stuff that leads to conspiracy theories.

Why didn't you release it before?

Why then?

And Glenn, for

the

less sophisticated, the people that don't track the news as closely as you do

or others do.

But the Hunter Biden story.

Yes.

Yes.

People can understand that.

A baby can understand, like, wow, that makes no sense

anything about trump it's covered to the nth degree here's hunter and potentially president-elect joe biden compromised

and no coverage of it until after the election right and it's still going to not really get coverage or an investigation is my guess uh is my guess we have uh jason whitlock with us now

jason i I am going to sound like an idiot to you because I don't follow sports and Outkick and everything else.

But I read a story that you are leaving Outkick.

Didn't you just join Outkick?

Yes.

Listen, I'm not,

I don't want to

go into too much detail.

Okay.

But look, I'm just someone that

you got to deal honestly with, and

you got to do what you say you're going to do.

Or,

you know,

I'm a rational person, but

I wasn't dealt with in an honest fashion.

And so

I got to move on.

Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but you are now carving out your own career path.

And because you've been at ESPN and and you really helped ESPN and

then they looked at you and are like, yeah, we don't agree with you politically, so beat it.

You are,

I assume, you're building something that is

as bulletproof as possible in today's world.

Today and this weekend must have scared you a little bit.

Yeah, certainly.

But

again, as I said in the previous segment, I've always believed journalism, other than the military, is the most patriotic thing you could do.

And so,

and even in the sports lane that I have been in, if people have followed my work, I've always included themes that were larger than sports and tried to explain America to sports fans.

And so, I want to continue down that path.

I believe journalism is my contribution to this country and trying to wake people up and give them the facts and uh from my point of view uh

and give them the information so that they can make better decisions.

We have a very uninformed public right now because the mainstream media has completely failed them.

That's why there's so much confusion and chaos.

That's why, again, when you just talk about this false reality that people live in, LeBron James and other influencers that are currying favor with China keep explaining to people, oh my God, if that were black people that had stormed the Capitol, what would have happened?

They would have all been slaughtered.

And I'm like, hey, man, have you not watched what went on this entire summer with Black Lives Matter and Antifa, burning buildings, murders of police officers?

As you said in your Blaze editorial, there are two Americas with two separate realities.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and don't forget, rate us on iTunes.

Amy Peekoff is the chief policy officer at the social media platform Parlor, which you're going to have a hard time finding today because Amazon has removed them.

Amy is,

she has her B.S.

in Math Applied Science, her JD at UCLA.

She served as an editor on the UCLA Law Review.

After she got her law degree, she went to USC where she earned her PhD in philosophy.

She has taught at Southwestern Law School, Chapman University School of Law, and the United States Air Force Academy, also the University of North Carolina and University of Texas.

So she really hasn't done a lot with her life.

But we're going to cut her some slack today.

Amy, welcome to the program.

Thanks, Glenn, for having me on.

It'd be better if it was under good circumstances, right?

So this is terrifying, what is going on.

And I think you guys are only the first.

You're not the last.

Tell me what happened, what's been going on,

where this whole thing stands.

You know, so basically, let me make one thing clear, which is that everybody agrees that all of this violence-inciting content, or if people are organizing to have an insurrection, et cetera, that this content is wrong and doesn't belong.

Correct.

But that content has been everywhere in the last weeks, and this is a very extraordinary time that we're living in.

If I may say, Amy, it's not only everywhere.

On the left, it is still online at Twitter.

Still online.

Yes, yes.

And so in this context, we feel that, of course, we are being treated unfairly.

We were given no notice.

On Friday, we were told first by Apple and then by Amazon that if we didn't meet their expectations as to the handling of this huge flood of content, then they were just going to drop us completely.

And we have a philosophical model at Parlor that we both were nonpartisan, that we believe in freedom of expression, but at the same time we want to respect privacy of users users so that

in the spirit of Section 230, the people who post the content are the ones who are responsible for the content.

We are responsible for the content so long as we're taking reasonable steps once we become aware of the content.

And what's happening in the market, because you have the established players of Facebook and Twitter using these algorithms to scan content constantly, 24-7, whether you have any particularized suspicion about a particular user or not, your content is scanned, that's becoming the standard of what's reasonable on the Internet.

And we say, no, we think that's an Orwellian standard, and that we should go back to the model of the public square, where if you become aware that somebody is engaging in criminal activity, you take the appropriate action, which would be banning or

reporting to law enforcement or both, right?

And humans are actually involved.

Let me ask you: first of all, Apple did this, Amazon did this.

They kind of all dog-piled on you.

Is this a violation of any antitrust laws?

You know, that is unfair, and I'm not an antitrust law expert about this, so I'm going to leave that.

You know, I am an academic lawyer, and I did a lot of research into the theoretical foundations of privacy, and I have a whole theory about that.

And that's why I'm at Parlor, right?

Because I share their affinity for privacy and for trying to implement it on the internet and prevent 1984 from becoming reality, right?

No.

So vice is...

That we're being pressured, right?

We're pressured to conform to the exact same standards of content moderation and also data mining and

algorithm scanning that our competitors use it, these entrenched big social media are using.

So they told us that

if we would just

build our own platform, that'd be fine now it's not build your own platform it is build your own platform create your own cloud lay your own fiber I mean

you we're not welcome on anything

anything you know we're gonna have to have our own banks credit cards and processing for everything it's not reasonable

No, exactly.

It's not reasonable.

And the people who have been the biggest detractors and the ones who are really trying to take us down, I think they need to ask themselves the question.

Do they want to live in the world in which every single piece of content that you put on the Internet is scanned by some algorithm for so-called wrong think 24 hours a day, seven days a week?

Now, mind you, I agree that this activity is illegal, but once you introduce scanning,

you use that scanning for anything.

The door is open.

And I think that you should not be surveilled in a free country unless there is some particularized suspicion about you.

That's the spirit of the Fourth Amendment.

That's what we've been trying to do at Parlor.

All right.

So

you agree with the speech that is

plotting and planning violence, that that should be moderated and removed.

You just believe in that.

Of course.

Of course.

It's the methodology that I disagree with.

I mean, nobody, and you know, at Parlor, our goal has been to provide this nonpartisan town square for productive discussions on the important issues of the day.

And if anything stops productive discussions because it stops the thinking behind them, it is force or threat the force.

So of course we disagree with that content being on our platform.

We don't want it there.

And what all of us, every platform, even the ones with the algorithms have been struggling with is this huge flood of content in this extraordinary time.

You know, on Twitter, we had Hang Mike Pence Pence trending.

I think on Saturday.

On Saturday, that was gone.

And they have the algorithm, but it was fine for them.

We have a report from Vice today

that

Parler has been hacked into and 70 terabytes of information, including our driver's license, everything,

has fallen into the hands of hackers.

Is that true?

Well, first of all, I know that it's been the policy of Parlor not to actually retain the driver's license, that once a verification process is done, that that is destroyed, the scan of it is destroyed.

So,

you know, yes, we did collect it, but we destroy it.

So I don't think that that would be true.

I don't know about any hacking.

It has not been confirmed at all by our data, I mean,

our tech team.

So, yeah, I mean, we've had false accusations of hacks in the past.

Okay.

I haven't heard anything that confirms this.

Where does this stand?

You're offline now.

Have you had have you has anyone reached out with an offer to

host Parler?

So many people, so many people, right?

But the thing you also have to understand is it's been this cancel culture

rush.

As soon as Apple did it, then Amazon sent theirs.

And then after other people got the word of it, everybody just suddenly dropped service.

And like you said earlier, and I'm not a tech person per se, but there's different pieces of the puzzle.

And so we've had a number of different people who have come in and said, well, we've got server and cloud, and then there's other people.

And so we're trying to put the pieces back together because it's a multi-part structure that we need to rebuild.

Let me ask you this question because

you got your Ph.D.

in philosophy, right?

Yeah, I mean, I focused on the right to privacy.

So I have a whole theory about the proper legal protection of privacy.

Let me just ask you

this question.

You know, I said last week there's no excuse for the violence that happened inside the Capitol.

No excuse.

But there are many reasons why it happened.

And one of them is suppressing thought, suppressing

people's questions.

It forces people underground into private groups.

They can become radicalized easily.

It's very dangerous.

Let me ask you, isn't all of this censorship and all of the things to silence people, isn't that a big part of the problem?

Isn't big tech actually making this much worse?

Definitely.

There are people who feel that if they don't have any meaningful way of persuasion,

that their options are few, right?

And so that is, I think, the frustration that you see out there.

You know, on Friday, when Twitter banned the president, a lot of people were flooding over to Parlor.

So if you think about the fact that we have been blamed for not supposedly, you know, moderating to the extent of Twitter, although that's debatable because, again, the content's all over their site as well, you know, imagine that on Friday, where we had not expected this huge rush, this huge rush comes over, and it's precisely at that moment that we're told, get it under control in 24 hours or 48 hours, or you're gone.

It's exactly that time, and see if we've been treated fairly by our suppliers.

I don't believe we have been.

Amy, we are in a mess, and we wish you all the best.

And if there's anything we can do, and please stay in touch with us.

You know,

as long as everybody

understands freedom of speech with the common sense you can't plot the overthrow of the United States, if everybody understands it.

Exactly.

Well, we are all on the same page.

We are going to continue to do everything that we can to save civil discourse, free and open discourse on the Internet while respecting privacy.

I promise we're on it.

What about the idea of these big tech companies being private companies so they have a right to violate freedom of speech?

Certainly they have a a right to do it.

Okay.

But right now, what we have is we have a few players who are very established, who are dictating the terms.

And in fact, Mark Zuckerberg was, you know, Facebook was taking out ads in the New York Times recently calling for improved Internet regulation.

And what that means is that he would like to see regulations that mandate the sort of content moderation standards that Facebook uses.

If they want to make that decision for themselves, that's fine.

But they're even lobbying to have it put into law.

Amy, good luck.

Chief Policy Officer at Parlor, again, we stand behind freedom of speech and we will help you any way we can, Amy.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.