Ep 90 | Why Corrupt Media Chose Joe Biden | Sharyl Attkisson | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Today's guest is a media war horse, a veteran reporter, when being a reporter actually meant something.

She's kind of turning into the Chuck Norris of journalism.

She started at a PBS station back in 1982.

Then in the early 1990s, she went and landed a job as a news anchor for CNN.

Then she went to CBS, her home for about 21 years, where she was doing all kinds of things.

She was the investigative correspondent in the D.C.

Bureau.

She then was CBS News regular substitute anchor for the CBS Evening News, and she eventually went to 60 Minutes.

A number of major events she has covered in her work.

It is remarkable.

Epidemics, pandemics, war, global politics, natural disasters, corruption, all three branches of government over the course course of four presidents, no, five presidents, and multiple Emmys and multiple Edward R.

Murrow awards.

She's on advisory boards, achievement awards.

She's literally written textbooks on journalism.

People don't realize it, but for years behind the success, she was the canary in the coal mine, and she details it in her latest book called Slanted, How the News Media Taught Us to Love Censorship and Hate Journalism.

Today, somebody who eventually should get the Presidential Medal of Freedom, I think, Cheryl Atkinson.

Welcome to the Glen Beck podcast.

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Cheryl,

I think I want to start with the frustration that I think most people feel.

They don't understand how a group of people can either be this

blind

or this corrupt, and

why there's just you and maybe a handful of others that have come out from the belly of the beast with real credibility.

That is saying, wait, this is insanity.

How is this happening?

Who are these these people in the media?

Well, I think it's a good question, but I think it's a transition that's happened over a period of years, maybe accelerated starting in 2016.

But I started writing about this in 2014 and noticing it, I would say, back around 2005, 2006, this trend that was coming.

And our industry, Glenn, has been transformed into one that many journalists no longer see themselves as reporters of fact and reporters of truth, but as those missionaries who are out there to put forth certain narratives and convince people to think a certain way.

And that's the transition that's happened thanks to political and corporate interests that you and I have talked about before, figuring out how to co-opt almost every information source we have, including the news.

Cheryl, can I ask you a question?

And this is an honest one

on

the role that maybe I have played in this.

Because I went into TV news.

I didn't want to do TV news, news, and I'm not a journalist.

I'm an opinion guy, and I'm an entertainer.

I know how to package things.

And

it was so successful when I was doing it.

And then I started seeing the media.

There was a time when journalists were journalists and you didn't know their opinion.

And then, right around the same time that I was doing stuff, these journalists started just blowing out through their opinion.

And some of them started to do, you know, some shtick at times for a while.

Did we accelerate that?

Did I, I mean,

is this just in my head?

No, I think you've noticed that as alternative forms of information arose, meaning Glenn Beck or whoever it may be,

then the political and corporate interests that were able to fairly well control the news narrative saw that they had to do something else.

And that something else included targeting and controversializing those who were not subjected to or not subject to this

co-opting or this takeover and so they use their partners in the media where they had already made inroads to attack those who are not on the narrative or who are off narrative and that gave rise to this whole other thing that I write about in Slanted which is media reporting on itself and each other kind of talking to each other in a way that doesn't inform the general public But we're now largely reporting because one narrative media outlet is trying to attack somebody who's off the narrative, and we're just sort of fighting amongst each other in some cases.

And that's replaced the news.

So I want to come back to this because I think people would like to hear

an informed decision on who can be

trusted, and where do you go

to get just some semblance of truth.

But I want to start with Hunter Biden.

This Hunter Biden story is absolutely incredible.

If we go back in the time tunnel, you had Facebook announcing that it would be suppressing the story because of its third-party fact-checker saying that it was misinformation.

Twitter shut down all the links.

They said that it was a story.

The story was dangerous and might be hacked materials.

Washington Post said it was Russian disinformation.

Wikipedia said that the New York Post is an unreliable source and it was just Russian interference.

CBS News said the laptop, allegedly full of Hunter Biden's old emails, is just trying to sow confusion in the final weeks of the election.

Fox News did the story, but they said that Rudy Giuliani can't be trusted.

MSNBC treated the laptop story as disinformation, said it was false.

New York Times, same thing.

They doubted the authenticity of the story.

They said the staff at the New York Post did, but they never bothered to dispute any of the facts.

Politico, Axios,

CNN, National Public Radio, all of them, on and on and on.

Now, this week, they've discovered that maybe there's something going on.

Well, I think the tell with a lot of these stories and narratives, like the Hunter Biden story is when someone is trying to tell you, member of the public, not to read it, not to believe it, not to watch it, instead of putting it out there and letting you decide or quoting other people and giving different viewpoints.

But another tell with the Hunter Biden story is there was a very similar story about the Biden family's alleged conflicts of interest that was unearthed about a year ago this time by the left-leaning press, probably at the time when some of them were infighting and didn't want Joe Biden to be the nominee.

So therefore, it was Politico and other, again, left-leaning press that did some very good investigations that were not called fake news and that were not censored on social media.

And then, all of a sudden, when Biden became the nominee, it's as if that was thrown down the memory hole.

And when conservatives started bringing it up or neutral parties started looking into this, then that was now characterized very similar to the reporting that had been done and not considered controversial months before.

And now this was all called debunked conspiracy theory, and it had to be censored on social media.

And, you know, people like us, we watch it, not just you and me, but a lot of people, and it doesn't make sense.

We know there's something amiss when we see trends like this.

So we are sitting again at a week where they are finding this to be true now.

Is there an honest one among the bunch?

I mean, do they

realize

what they're doing?

Is there any self-awareness at all that, oh, yeah, it looks like that's true.

And, you know, we just hid that

because we wanted Biden.

Is there any reality that enters their minds?

Well, there are honest people, of course, at all of these places.

And when I worked at CBS, as I saw things kind of going down the tubes in the industry, I fretted a lot about stories that weren't mine, but I knew were not being covered honestly or appropriately.

And it caused a lot of heartache.

I tried to step in internally

in an appropriate way in some instances, but there's not a lot you can do.

And if you think of them, meaning the ones who are on the narrative and trying to convince the public of a certain thing and willing to do this dishonest coverage, they're almost like a defendant in a criminal case.

When you poke a hole or you've proved something that they've done that's inappropriate or wrong, they go into defense mode.

They don't go into self-reflection mode.

They don't say, oh, why did we get the facts wrong?

What should we do differently?

They simply try to poke holes in what you're doing or defend themselves by deflecting in a different direction.

They're not,

these people are not honest journalists that are concerned with reporting the facts accurately.

They're concerned with getting out the narrative and then trying to protect themselves if they're accused of, you know, getting the facts wrong.

So you're made president of CBS News tomorrow

and you want to fix it.

Define journalism and what would have to be fixed.

How do you fix this if you wanted to fix it?

Well, I would reestablish the semblance of a firewall that was pretty good for a lot of years in journalism.

At least, you know, there were flaws in it, but we tried to pretend or we were pretty good at keeping fact separate from opinions.

So the first thing I would do is say, let's make sure that in our hard news stories, we don't put the reporters' opinions in there and that we attribute things that are said by other people and that we reach out and be sure to establish both sides in a story, represent them fairly, and not draw conclusions on our own.

Usually they're drawing conclusions over things they can't possibly know.

And get in mind that your goal is not to leave people with the idea of what they must think, but your goal is to represent the facts on the ground and different viewpoints, not to censor, not to shape.

But get your own head outside of that.

Like, this is not about you trying to further a narrative.

So, you would have to establish, I think, a new set of tenets that are kind of like tenets used to be, although unwritten in journalism: objectivity, neutrality, completion when you're reporting on a story.

And you'd have to just really try to sever all of the things that have been happening, particularly in the last four years with journalism and reestablish the ethics and so on.

I don't think there's any

hunger for that inside the industry.

In fact, they're going the other way.

YouTube issued a statement yesterday.

This is remarkable to me.

The safe harbor deadline for the U.S.

presidential election, and enough states have certified the election results to determine a president-elect, given that we will start removing any piece of content uploaded today or any time after that misleads people by alleging that there was widespread fraud or errors that changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S.

presidential election, in line with our approach towards historical U.S.

presidential elections.

For example, we will remove videos claiming that a presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors.

We will begin enforcing this policy today and ramp up in the weeks to come.

Cheryl.

Cheryl.

It seems unbelievable.

I mean, this is Chinese.

This is what China does.

Well, I would never have guessed, you know, and I was looking pretty far ahead some years ago at these trends, and I would never have guessed that we would have seen such blatant censorship, you know, just open about it, contrary to really everything I think most of the American public wants and expects in terms of information, being able to make up your own mind, not wanting conflicted third parties to pretend to know the truth about things they can't possibly know, and therefore keeping us from seeing things.

I wouldn't have believed it.

It's 1984.

I don't know if people read that book anymore, but if you read

1984, it's just

very similar to what we're experiencing today.

The other day I did a TV show.

I'm a collector of old historic objects, and I have a radio that was built in 1939 by the German government.

You couldn't go out and buy just a radio anymore in Germany.

And it only picked up the radio stations that were approved by the Nazi Party.

So

you couldn't scan it.

You could turn the dial, but it would never pick up anything other than the government voice.

And I looked at that radio the other day and I thought, what is the difference?

Except it's not the government doing it.

It's a giant corporation that's doing it.

They're just deleting anything they don't want you to hear.

And remember, it's not just, I posit, big tech that got this idea to step in suddenly starting around 2016.

They had little interest in doing this sort of censorship prior to that.

They were convinced by the same political and corporate interest that controlled the news, in my view.

They saw that in 2016, particularly with the rise of popularity of Donald Trump, that people were still able to get unfettered access to information online, and they had to stop that.

So to do so, in 2016, these propaganda started to create very cleverly the impression that there was a market for curating and censoring our news, that there was so much fake news out there and that it's so dangerous that we couldn't really, we shouldn't see all this information.

We shouldn't access it ourselves.

We might not make the right decisions if we see it.

So, they spent most of the past four years creating this impression that there's a market for these curators so that they could step in as they have now, kind of in an invited way, using social media and big tech companies and make sure that they shape what we see, what we don't see, what we can access, much as they successfully did on the news the first decade and a half of this century.

And they've moved this operation online.

Have you heard of the

digital new deal?

Have you seen it?

Let me just give you a quick highlights.

It's coming from the German Marshall Fund, which started out as an economic thing,

and then it's just gone awry here.

They are proposing a digital new deal to create an internet that supports democracy

and

will tackle the Trojan horse outlets masquerading as journalism, extremist, and conspiracy peddling groups and channels.

That includes

Fox, Daily Wire, Breitbart.

They say that this poses a threat to informed democratic discourse and

oppositional to mainstream media, the so-called elite or conventional wisdom.

They want a PBS of the internet to fill the vacuum left

by

the decimation of journalism.

That sounds great.

Well,

what's most interesting, I think, about these trends is every time we recognize something bad is happening, the same people step in with a plan to supposedly make it better, and all they're doing is getting a stronger grip on the information.

And unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there.

I've been interviewed by some of them in the past few weeks who say, well, you know, there is a lot of bad information online, and people really shouldn't amplify that.

And my answer is, says who?

You know, in this country, you're allowed to pick up the National Enquirer in the grocery store without the manager stepping in front of you as you check out, without him saying, I don't want you reading the National Enquirer.

You might believe some of it, and some of it's not true.

That's none of his business.

In this country, you're free to make up your own mind.

You're free to believe fake news, by the way, if you want to.

But more importantly, a lot of that labeled fake news is actually turns out to be true and factual because you have the propagandists mislabeling things as conspiracy theories and fake news and fake studies when, in fact, they're accurate, but they're off the narrative of these powerful interests.

That's what's so important about being able to access information yourself so you can make up your own mind.

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You've been on this for a long time.

I've been seeing this.

That's why I created the Blaze in 2012 for a time when

we would have corporate interests, we would have sponsors and everything else taken from us, and we would have to be able to stand on our own and have a relationship one-on-one with the individual.

But even as I am watching this now,

as you just said, it's happening bigger, faster, more boldly than even I thought.

And as I'm looking at just how much movement has happened from Election Day to,

what, four weeks, five weeks from Inauguration Day, good God, what is coming our way in 2021?

Well, I think the same thing when there's a generation that doesn't know that prior to around me first noticing this censorship trend around 2005 or so, that the news didn't used to be about shaping shaping and censoring.

I mean, maybe they shaped in subtle ways.

I'm not saying we were perfect.

But the first time I actually heard someone argue a story should not air, that people shouldn't even hear that this allegation was being made or that this study had been done, was around that 2005 time period.

It was in relationship to a story the pharmaceutical industry didn't want out.

And I remember when I heard they wanted the story dropped entirely, not just their side to be heard, but the story just not to be told.

It was such a new thing.

Now we've all grown numb and used to the notion that, hey, that's what the news does.

They tell us what you're not supposed to hear.

They censor people they don't like, that they think are, that they accuse of peddling conspiracy theories.

They won't have them on.

They won't quote them.

This is a new reality that didn't exist 15 years ago.

And yes, you're right.

In the past four years, it's moved faster.

And since the election, once Twitter started just taking down accounts overtly, not just messing with the algorithms, but doing it in a way everybody saw right before the election.

It's sort of like, you know, Katie bar the doors.

Everybody's going at it similarly and not even trying to hide it.

So who runs this?

I mean,

who is Big Brother today?

Well, I think Big Brother is a conglomerate.

I don't think there's necessarily one guy at the top of all of this pulling every string.

But I described in my last book, The Smear, there's a propaganda industry, a smear industry, a multi-billion dollar industry of very well-connected, effective global law firms, PR firms, crisis management firms, LLCs, nonprofits, with people who know how this works and they can get their nose under the tent of news organizations.

They understand how to influence social media, who to go to, to make sure that

Adam Schiff, a congressman who no one elected to do this, but to make sure that he calls or contacts Google or some other company to make sure that certain things are excluded from their searches because he says, and probably I assume because of a donor connection, that this scientific study shouldn't be seen or this group should be marginalized online.

There are all kinds of ways they're able to step in and impact what we see.

And that whole effort, you know, in 2016 for big tech to suddenly start stepping in and doing what I call the fake fact checks, as you may know, Glenn, David Brock of Media Matters took credit for that among a group of donors, that this notion had never been discussed before or done.

But when Facebook started it, Brock said his propaganda group had been able to convince Facebook to do it.

So they're being convinced in different ways, and perhaps sometimes through politicians with the implicit threat of regulation if they don't do these things, which is why I call it true censorship.

If the government is intervening, a lot of people say it's not censorship because it's private companies.

I think there's a new definition of censorship when there's a connection or tie to government figures, and when they're being coerced to do something under implicit threat of potential regulation or other things, or and they're contributing to the politicians, meaning big tech companies, there's a symbiotic relationship that connects them in a way that leads to the things that we're seeing today, I think.

I think the biggest donation to the Biden campaign came from the media and came from big tech by suppressing stories.

Studies have already shown that people who voted for Biden after they found out about Hunter Biden, they said they would have changed their vote.

I think it's 10 or 18 percent somewhere in that, enough to change the outcome.

Isn't that an in-kind contribution?

It would seem, and you also look at in 2016, the biggest donor, among the biggest donors to Hillary Clinton was Google Alphabet, Eric Schmidt, so on.

Same thing with

Sanders, and same thing with Joe Biden.

Yes, they're all in for the one political party.

So

as we travel down this road, you said that the corporate interests and the political interests behind the news media.

Can you explain that a little bit?

Well, I'm talking about

me observing the fact that first the pharmaceutical industry, but then I saw the auto industry, the defense industry.

They have intermediaries that they pay very well, whether they're the PR firms and crisis management firms and so on, that understand how to contact somebody at news organizations to slant and shape and censor stories that are not to their benefit.

The same way they lobby members of Congress and give them donations to make sure hearings are not held or hearings go a certain certain way when it comes to topics they care about.

And then I noticed that political interests started using the same tactics.

Maybe they always had, but once I started seeing the heavy-handed, successful tactics of corporations, I saw that

various political interests were doing similar things.

And so that's why when I say political and corporate interests have understood how to use it, these intermediaries, the smear industry, they'll work for anybody.

And it's not always divided along strict party lines, some of these issues, because maybe a a corporation has an interest that leans left or leans right or crosses party lines.

So it's not always so easy to say this is a liberal bias or a conservative bias.

Aaron Powell, to

make the case for

letting the chips fall where they may.

Make the case to people who now think that freedom of speech should have limits.

You know, you can easily look at, I can look at the mainstream media and say, look at the bull crap they're peddling.

And if I wasn't a constitutionalist, I would say they should be shut down.

I don't think so.

Explain to the person who does think that freedom of speech has limits, what are the effects of where we're headed?

Why should they change their mind?

I would say read Orwell's 1984, but understand the term slippery slope.

It's not always about what you see today.

Maybe people like what's being censored today, or they like the fact that it's being censored.

But once you open the door to say somebody should come in or can come in and play that role in a country where this was never meant to be, at least according to our Constitution, then you're inviting that to happen in ways you don't like down the road.

And I'll give one example.

When we have directed search results by Google to certain places, for example,

during the coronavirus start of this pandemic, they announced a partnership, at least they announced it so we knew it, to direct our searches on coronavirus to the World Health Organization, make it harder to find other material.

When we now know the World Health Organization, by its own admission, was wrong about a lot of important things, but we would have been sent there.

So let's go back to the 1950s.

Let's go back to cigarette smoking.

At the time when studies were first emerging in the 40s and 50s that showed smoking could be linked to lung cancer.

If that were today, we would never know, I posit, because the mainstream establishment in medicine said it wasn't true, because the powerful interest in the tobacco industry didn't want us to hear that information.

So, any studies that would have said that would have been debunked and taken off of search results on Google.

We wouldn't have been able to read them.

We would have been told either they don't exist or they're not true or it's junk science.

And in that environment, we would never know that cigarettes can cause lung cancer.

So extrapolate that to almost any issue, that if you can't find out the truth because someone has locked in the truth as they say they know it at a moment in time and it'll never be changed and it serves a powerful interest, if that's what you want to be spoon-fed on every topic in your life, I think you can see how damaging that could be.

How do you define truth?

Well, I don't use that word too much just because in journalism, you know, it's hard to arrive at truth.

It's a different definition than facts.

But sometimes there is a truth.

You know, there's a truth of something that is either one way or not.

But I guess more often than not, I would say there are facts and fact patterns that are often contradictory or in dispute or various sides on.

And one side may look right today, but as time goes on, the other side may have points or emerge to be the side that was correct.

And that's why I think in journalism, it's so important to approach a story with an open and flexible mind.

What you think you learn, be sure that you represent the other side of the other viewpoint.

How many things turn out to be different?

You know, almost everything turns out to be different when you learn more about it or it turns out to be something that changes.

If you as a journalist get so locked into the thought that you know the ultimate truth and you've got to convince people of it and you become vested in it, you're going to miss the accurate facts and perhaps the real truth because you've dug in.

But couple that with the notion that that's perfectly fine with the brand of journalists that are working in some organizations today because they're narrative pushers.

They're not out for truth or accuracy.

They want to get across a storyline on behalf of whatever interest is pulling strings.

And

that's, I think, by and large why we see what we do on the news today.

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And

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And we've experienced things we've never imagined.

And after this election, I don't know.

I mean, I think I would find it reasonable if vampire space bunnies, you know, came down and took over the world.

And I'd be like, meh, yeah, of course.

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Can I go down a

I hate to say a conspiratorial thing, but I think by silencing people and by immediately discrediting things and never putting any thought into it, it's just knee-jerk, bad, good,

it makes things worse.

It makes people go down a rabbit hole.

When you start to see somebody acting weird and they have a pattern of it, you immediately begin to think wild things.

You would do it in your own life with a friend, and it might be coming from you, but if they start to act weird, then you're like, no, it's not me, it's them.

The press is making

go ahead.

When your cognitive dissonance, as you call it, is going off, and that happens every day with people when they watch the news or read stuff on social media, you're right.

And that's why I think there's a huge lack of confidence in all of our institutions, whether you're talking about media, public health officials, Congress, you name it.

And we've caused it.

And then we look at the people who are feeling that way and say, you're crazy.

You know, like the government, let's just use the simple example.

They say, you know, don't wear masks.

Masks absolutely don't work.

You'll never know how to wear them correctly.

And then, you know, within one day, everybody wear masks.

You're crazy if you don't.

Masks work.

And then they look at the public and go, What's wrong with you that you're questioning us?

Right.

And we're just trying to figure out which was the lie.

Right.

And so they're causing that.

It's not a problem to say, you know what, we have new information.

But they just deny that any of that stuff happened.

And so you are left with, are you lying to me now?

Are you lying to me then?

What

there's no

process that you're allowed to go through.

And then they just become more draconian if you question.

I've never seen anything like it, at least in America.

Well,

I blame the media because I work in the media for a lot of it because when public health officials do that, instead of us, and this is what we do now for whatever reason, saying,

you know, don't ever wear a mask, masks are bad, that you can't wear them correctly, we should be looking at that rationally and providing counterpoints if there are counterpoints and saying this is what they say

Here's what we don't know and then when the information changes It's not such such a radical turn Where you're then left going well, what what happened and then again like you said Then they start calling names of the people that are using just rational logical thinking skills when this happens.

You're saying okay

A plus B equals C and then they're going what's wrong with you?

You're a conspiracy theorist, you're anti-science.

When they've caused the problem, Correct.

The same thing can be said about the way the media covers stories.

The same thing can be said about all kinds of things when it comes to our information.

And they're not,

I mean, if you look at the mask coverage in America, in all of the cities where there's real problems, it's 95, 96, as high as 97%

of people are wearing masks.

The lowest I saw in a major city was, I think, 91%.

Well, now wait a minute.

If that's true, why do you keep telling us that people aren't wearing masks and

that's why the numbers are going up?

Because you told us that if 80%,

just 80% would wear masks,

it would have a bigger impact than shutting everybody inside of their home.

So which is it?

And who's the problem?

And why do you say that

conservatives, half the country, don't get it if 90% plus are wearing masks?

Well, I hearken back to something Governor Cuomo said toward the end of their first big, big, horrible

bout with coronavirus in New York.

And he said,

almost all of the people in the hospital now with coronavirus, and it was some huge percentage, reported having been in isolation or self-isolation prior to this.

And he said, we got to figure out why that is.

Meaning, why are the people that are doing exactly as we told them to do the sickest ones that we're finding in the hospital?

And then, poof, you never heard anything else about it.

And I'll tell you that I've interviewed virologists on camera and off-camera, and government experts who are working on this problem for the government now, and academic experts who don't believe in or have different recommendations than what the government is saying or has said, but won't speak of it because off-camera, and they've said this not in the same room with each other, they're worried about either being portrayed as a coronavirus doubter, a narrative that was put out there in a very concerted way, or they're for fear of appearing to contradict Dr.

Fauci.

And I've said to them, well, what a sad place we're at where scientists who are working on this problem have viewpoints that differ to some degree.

from some recommendations that they're afraid to talk about.

Now, they're following their own recommendations in their households and in their workplaces and not telling us about it because we're supposed to only hear about the ones, you know, from certain people.

And this is, again, what happens when our information is controlled and you don't have access to a broader range, and you can make up your own mind, and we can figure out what's really going on.

We had Chris Cuomo, the doctor he went to,

is somebody that wanted to treat his astral body

because a lot of sickness comes from our astral body.

Fine, if that's what you want to create.

I haven't had my astral body checked in quite a while, so who am I to say?

But that person was fine, as should be.

If that's the doctor you want, go follow that doctor.

But the doctor in

Oregon that said this mask stuff is not good

lost his license.

What happens to a country that,

if you have a differing opinion from the authoritative source, you lose

everything.

What happens to that country?

Well, you become, I think, and I've thought a lot about this, like the countries we tried to not be like when this country was started.

We wanted things not to be that way, where these things were dictated by some power and where dissenting language and viewpoints and opinions and science were not not allowed.

But do we end up in the same place as these other countries and it just takes us 200-something odd years to get there?

I don't know.

I don't believe in star chambers.

I don't believe in, you know,

I don't believe in puppet masters.

I do believe in interests and power and money influencing those interests, especially over a long period of time.

You know, I've been talking a lot about the Great Reset, and it's coronavirus is not a conspiracy.

It's real.

Then there are people that take advantage of those things.

And as I see the plan from the World Economic Forum on their own website, which I guess they say is a conspiracy,

you should talk to them about it.

of these group of people that want to change capitalism, want to change the way we relate to each other, want to change the media.

I begin to understand that

perhaps Donald Trump wasn't just hated because he was outspoken.

He was hated because he could stand in the way of this global movement towards

the best you could describe it, I think, is

Chinese capitalism, where the very wealthy are kind of in charge and those who are connected have all the strings,

and

they pull them, and we're kind of left out in the dark, like the regular Chinese person.

Is that too far out?

No, I don't think so.

I mean, I think if Donald Trump had positions that were more establishment, party establishment, whether Democrat or Republican, that not only would the globalist people you're speaking of not have objected to his brash ways, nobody else would have objected to them so much either.

The only reason, in my view, that they've raised this fear about Donald Trump isn't really, that's just sort of a deflection, isn't really because of the things he tweets and the things he says.

It's because they have to find a way to controversialize and destroy him because of the things he will do, because he's not part of the establishment, the money structure.

He's not on board with these well-established power structures that have been in play for decades in this country, with the same people granting access and making sure that certain laws do or don't get passed, that certain things do or don't get addressed.

He came in and threw all of that up in the air, and everybody who is part of that system didn't like it and felt the need to try to stop it.

So, if he can't do it, who could?

There's the question.

I mean, I think he's the closest to being able to make inroads in this establishment if you're someone who thinks that the establishment is too strong and entrenched, and I think it's proven to be, and our intelligence community, for example, has too much power and corruption that persists from administration to administration.

He really, he was going to tackle that on the front end with Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, which is why Flynn was targeted, that they couldn't let that happen.

So if Donald Trump can't do it, I don't see anybody else on the horizon that has the ability and the wherewithal and the 10 ear to this criticism.

I mean, mean, Donald Trump didn't bend a lot of what he thought he should do based on this criticism that was coming, but most politicians do.

They don't have the stomach or the heart, or they're too beholden to the interests that want them to act a certain way to

do anything different.

Do you believe there's

a good possibility

that

he didn't lose the election?

I have not been able to find anything that rules out

that

he won the election and that it was somehow taken from him.

I have seen a lot of evidence that shows that might have happened, and certainly there have been a lot of experts who have said it didn't happen, and I have not been able to be convinced one way or the other.

So yes, I think it's a possibility.

Particularly if you look at, let's look at what we were told starting in 2016, that the Chinese and the Russians had tried to interfere, had interfered in our election, would do so again.

And that we already knew there were domestic bad actors that had done bad things involving politics, including some in our own government and intelligence community, including some who never got punished, and including an FBI lawyer who allegedly doctored a document to get a wiretap against a former Trump campaign associate, etc.

So, going into 2020, we as rational thinking people would have every reason to believe there'd be mischief.

And we should have been, the reporters who cover politics at elections, on the ground in these swing states looking for any anomaly or anything suspicious, whether it was on the part of perhaps foreign actors or the Biden camp or Trump supporters.

And instead, I find it very odd that at the conclusion of this election very quickly, we were just told there's nothing to see except it.

And I will also say I'm a bit skeptical because this was the oddest election perhaps we've ever had, at least the oddest one in our lifetime.

I say even more so than the Bush-Gore

debate.

Much, much more.

And we were conditioned by a propaganda campaign that makes me wonder to see this as normal.

If we had not been conditioned by people that six, seven months before the election started telling us

Trump will appear to be winning on Election Day, but that will be a red mirage.

They had a name for it.

And they started putting all that out on talk shows, and analysts started putting this out.

And then in the coming days, it will be clear.

You know, maybe it'll take weeks or months, but in the coming days, it will be clear that Biden actually wins.

And I remember thinking at the time, because I'm just a rational thinking person, how do they know that before the first vote has been cast?

They already know how this is going to be played out.

I thought that was odd, but nobody else on the news was saying, well, that's weird that you know that in advance.

So when the oddest thing in the world happened, which was Trump appeared to be winning by a landslide on election night.

And then with all of these mail-in votes and with Republican observers blocked and huge dumps, everything turns in the next day or two, next couple of days.

Instead of us saying, well, that's really odd, we better be sure to look at this rationally and skeptically and check everything out, we say, we knew that was going to happen.

We were told there was going to be a red mirage as if it's all normal.

So I think that was brilliant on the part of whoever put out those talking points and understood.

It starts to look like a plan to me

that understood that this was where we would be.

Yeah, it was a plan.

It came from the Transition Integrity Project,

which

we're still following that plan.

I mean, if you look at it now, you can still see everything's right on schedule.

Any doubt in your mind that if things were reversed, the media would be screaming for their day in court and this isn't over?

Absolutely.

I mean, I've said if in 2016 Hillary Clinton had appeared to be winning by a landslide on election night, and then over the course of the next couple of days, Donald Trump pulled into the lead on almost landslide status himself, including in places that seemed very improbable, the press would never have let that go easily and shouldn't have.

You know, that should be something that would be looked at.

It's an anomaly.

And I even say that if this were being covered differently, and you know the press has I'll use the word conspired because we've seen them talk about not giving much air or oxygen to the Trump side of things post-the election.

If the press were covering it differently and neutrally, there'd be an entire different impression, I believe, among the viewing public as to what's going on right now and what had happened.

Because some of these state legislative hearings would be taken live on the news, you know, not just some channels that some people watch

on the news.

President Trump, when he called into a state legislative hearing, I can't believe that.

I had to hunt for that.

That should have been live on television, on the cable channels, but even perhaps on the regular news.

That's never happened before.

And I had to really hunt to listen to that.

They're suppressing the coverage of what's happening in a way that makes it, you know, be a closed case and over and a debunked conspiracy theory.

But if the press simply covered it honestly, I'm not saying there was enough fraud to overturn the election.

I'm not on the ground covering these things, and neither are the reporters who are claiming to know.

But if the press were covering it differently, I think we'd have a more accurate picture of what's going on, and it wouldn't look like what it looks like today.

Right.

It's made it worse.

It's put me in a position to where

I don't know what happened, but I don't think we're ever going to know what happened.

And I find myself becoming stronger and stronger of, I just don't believe he lost it, but I can't prove it.

And it's, I had a phone call today from a listener who said, Glenn,

the Texas court case.

Now we have all these states states joining in.

If the Supreme Court doesn't even hear it,

or if they go against it, they're going against Bush v.

Gore,

then what?

Then what?

And I don't have an answer for that because I think some people are thinking, look,

we can tolerate a lot of things, but if we can't trust the ballot box and no one will honestly look into these things and at least explore them.

What do we have?

Well, I'm very concerned.

Let's take this election aside since you and I don't know exactly what happened, but let's look at 2024 and let's say there is some semblance of widespread fraud.

I think what we've learned now is there would be no way.

to prove it unless the right interests in the media got interested.

There would be no way to do anything about it it in the time frame expected.

And one example I'll give that explains that is: normally, if there's voter fraud or a voter fraud accusation, a criminal law enforcement body would step in and investigate.

And this would take weeks, months, or sometimes years.

One of the Trump campaign lawyers made this point in court to gather evidence.

But with the help of a law enforcement body, you could at least get access to forensic evidence.

You could confiscate machines.

You could go on private business property.

you could compel depositions under oath.

With no law enforcement bodies expressing any interest that we know of in any significant way, the Trump camp has been left to pursue this civilly without any of those tools, really, and a truncated timeline that makes it virtually impossible to turn the kind of proof that the courts would expect or that they're saying they expect.

So it's sort of a

how can you do it?

And that's why the press was, I think, very ill-informed or dishonest when early on they kept saying, where's the evidence?

That's not how it works.

You know, if there's evidence to be gathered, it doesn't knock on your door and present itself to the people claiming it.

And it's almost like asking a murder victim's family without the help of law enforcement to say, where's your fiber evidence?

Prove your forensics the day after the crime.

They don't have the ability and the access to that.

That's something that law enforcement can do.

You can't do that by yourself.

So

I think we've seen that even, let's take this year aside, if there's fraud in the future or foreign interference, how are you going to prove it?

So then what do we have?

We don't have a belief in our justice system.

The DOJ

looks pretty darn dirty to me.

That's new for me.

We don't have faith in our State Department.

They appear to be very dirty and involved in things they should not be involved in.

Our intelligence community, good God, I mean, how corrupt is that?

I don't know, but I don't trust them.

You don't trust anything anymore.

You don't see anyone

standing up and saying, that's wrong.

They're going to pay for that.

They're going to go to jail because that's wrong.

There is no justice.

When you can't trust the ability to throw the bums out,

what does the person,

what does the American public, what do they do?

Who do they run to?

I think it's a great question.

I mean, the media was supposed to be the great equalizer if stuff like that happened, but we're part of the same problem.

Congress, there's, you can name any institution we have today, and I feel like there's a similar lack of trust and confidence.

And when that happens, people start to, as you said,

believe very little of what they see, even that which is true.

You know, even if public health officials are giving good advice, or the media is telling the truth, or the Department of Justice is doing something properly, or Congress is making decisions in the best interest of the public.

Even when that happens, because of this dynamic we're talking about, people don't believe it.

So they've created this, they, we, have created this lack of trust in ourselves and the institutions.

I don't know how you dial that back.

I don't know who does it or how you can turn it back.

This is something that's been taking hold over a period of a long period of time.

Aaron Powell,

Nobody really treated your case seriously, except the fringe media.

Nobody really took that seriously.

That was terrifying, what happened to you.

And now we're seeing that that kind of stuff has happened to the most powerful man on the planet.

You know,

I look at this and I was talking to a farmer friend of mine and he said, you know what?

We just got to shut the whole thing down and reboot it up.

Everybody should be fired and we should just shut the whole thing down.

It's so far gone now.

And

I hate saying this because I really didn't like the language that he used when he used it.

But the press has become an enemy of the people because they were the defender.

They were supposed to not be sleeping with the politicians.

They were supposed to be holding them accountable.

They were the last line of defense.

Otherwise, it's pitchforks and torches.

Well, I don't disagree with you, and I feel like even I've played this out in my mind.

Let's say you fire everybody in government.

Let's say you start over with the media somehow, which isn't going to happen, but just for the sake of fantasy, let's play that out.

The interests that we're talking about that are so good at controlling the narrative and our information, I don't have any confidence they wouldn't be able to repopulate with whoever you replace these other people with.

Correct.

Let's talk a little bit about

what's happening to our country that the press is not covering.

You don't seem to hear anything about

the average business owner that we are putting out of business.

I mean, the press I grew up with

would have been teeming with stories of, here's Joe Schmo, here's Sally Muckinfutch, and here's what's happening in their life.

They would have personalized these stories.

You don't see any of that.

And

the entrepreneur, the average working man, is being decimated by these shutdowns and nobody saying anything.

What's happening

there?

Well, it's the same dynamic where that's off the narrative.

It fights what whoever the powerful interests that are pulling strings fights what they want us to think and believe.

So you're not going to see that.

But I will tell you a couple things.

Local news, which people trust slightly more than national news, according to polls, local news is covering stories like that.

They are not quite as co-opted or controlled by the same people that we're talking about.

But another example of that, Glenn, do you know there are protests all over the world, tens of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of people protesting the lockdowns and the mask mandates and perhaps the idea of mandatory vaccines?

I haven't seen that covered anywhere on the news.

And I've had to hunt to find the information, the news stories, and the videos.

There's a blackout, I'm convinced, of those videos and of that, because if we see that, we, the public, understand that we're not alone.

I mean, that's part of controlling this information landscape.

You're supposed to think you're an outlier or you're alone if you have certain viewpoints, or thoughts, or opinions, or you believe a certain study.

But if we saw what's happening in many other countries, where people are taking to the streets and protesting these things that we're talking about,

There's a blackout of that news here in this country as far as I can tell.

That's just another way that this is being controlled.

I talked about it on radio, that that is the goal.

Make you feel alone.

If they can shut down, I mean, think of this.

You could go on Twitter and you could get where these protests were going to happen from Antifa.

They would tell you, and by the way, bring a brick.

It was all there.

So you knew what was going on.

If they shut down the people who are standing up for basic God-given rights,

you're going to feel totally alone.

You're going to feel like it's just me because there's no way to organize except what through pamphlets.

There's just, you will feel isolated and alone.

And then there's no movement.

I spoke of this, I think I did a TEDx talk maybe three years ago, and I spoke of this in the last book, The Smear,

almost exactly what you said, that the point of controlling, particularly

media, is a very controlled environment.

Don't believe, you know, you can use that for entertainment and sharing information if you want to, but what you see in there is a very carefully managed environment.

It's not real.

With the goal of what these powerful interests have done, as I say, making you feel like an outlier when you're not.

Making you feel like you're the weirdo if you still think a certain way or you hold an opinion or you believe a study.

You're supposed to feel isolated, bullied, in the minority, somebody that shouldn't speak, somebody that shouldn't be heard.

And it's pretty effective, I think, to a lot of people.

But we have to remember all the people that have joined the alternative Twitter, I guess I'll call it parlor, and all the people that voted for Donald Trump, whether you like, support him or not, the idea that tens of millions of people voted for Donald Trump when all of these forces we're talking about and virtually all of the media and internet told you not to because he's uniquely dangerous and he got what 11 million more votes than he did last time i think that's a good sign that shows people recognize this and they know they're not alone and they know they're getting spoon-fed narratives and they're not buying it i had a person write to me um last week their subscriber to the blaze and they said

i'm too afraid i'm going to be destroyed my business is going to be destroyed and i'm on a list because I'm a subscriber to you

and I just can't take that risk.

Somebody told me on the air today that the majority of people never stand up because they're too afraid.

How do you break that cycle?

How do you

teach people like Martin Luther King did, stand up?

I think in

an incremental way, there's help on the way.

And I know this because I get called every maybe a couple of weeks by someone in one of three groups of people that's working on a solution.

There are investors who are looking not to make money, but looking because they have money and they believe in the things you're talking about.

They're saying, where can I spend my money that will help the free flow of information and help people not be deplatformed for sharing viewpoints or factual studies that someone doesn't like or whatnot.

The second group is the people of technical note who are looking to solve this problem online where they're trying to create solutions with blockchain technology and other things for platforms that if you tell the truth or the facts or give accurate information, or even if you want to give inaccurate information, quite frankly, as long as it's not illegal, how can you not be de-platformed?

They're working on the technical aspect of it.

And then there are journalists.

And by the way, one of the technical people is Larry Sanger, former co-founder of Wikipedia, who parted with that project because he understands it's been taken over by political corporate corporate interests and agenda editors?

He's working on this problem, he's thinking about it.

And then there are journalists who call me, people kind of like me, who are saying, How can I have a forum that will not be deplatformed where we can report honestly?

So I think those groups are getting together and will come up with something in the next four years that will have, that will be alternatives for people, for thinking people, and hopefully break this log jam.

I just don't know exactly what it will look like.

Does it get

much worse before it gets better?

I think so.

I don't think we're quite yet at the breaking point.

I think we're getting there, particularly with that YouTube announcement that you read.

You know, Congress keeps holding hearings with the big tech companies and making threats and doing nothing.

You know, the big tech companies, they're giving to Republicans as well as Democrats.

They may give more.

to the Biden camp, but they're giving to both.

And sometimes I wonder, are these just dog and pony shows?

Because if you talk to staffers on the Hill, they'll tell you that much like the media, they're now very shaped and manipulated as to what they're allowed to do by both political parties, not allowed to do certain oversight hearings, not allowed to do oversight hearings on certain interests that give them a lot of money or they have to come out a certain way.

Or they can do, this is the third option, a show hearing with no follow-up.

They're allowed to do a hearing that makes it sound like they're getting tough, but then they're supposed to kind of let it go away.

So I don't think we've reached the point where, I don't even know that Congress can do anything, by the way, that changes the course of this.

I don't know that I trust them to do that, quite frankly, trust the government to intervene.

So I think we're just going to see some more of the same, but I think something else will be born of it down the road.

I hope so.

Has capitalism failed?

Has the Constitution failed?

Or have we failed it?

I'm a little out of my depth when you're speaking about that sort of thing, but I have thought to myself for what it's worth that

is this just an experiment that ends up like everybody else?

Maybe it takes a while, but ultimately, you know, the whole adage, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts, absolutely.

Do corporate and political interests figure out no matter what the intentions are, what your Constitution says, or what laws you try to make to avoid it, do they end up understanding ultimately how to get control of pretty much any system, or in this case we're talking today,

control of any information landscape so that they have the power?

I don't know.

I wonder if

that's the case.

I've been wondering it myself, and I've wondered,

but I feel like it's happening.

I've often thought you can't put the freedom genie back into the bottle.

Once man understands he can rule himself, but

this is a flash in time

and

we're still very unique for the rest of the world.

Freedom of speech does not exist elsewhere like it does in America.

But I feel like they're just trying to, I feel like the news media had their three networks.

and PBS and they liked it and they could control everything.

Then the internet happened and it was about to destroy destroy them.

So they've repositioned themselves and grabbed all that back and they're trying to stuff that back into the bottle.

I don't know if it works.

And I feel like that's what's happening that America had freedom and those who like to rule over serfs

they're trying their best to grab it all back and jam that back into the bottle.

Can they?

Well, here's what worries me.

I think there are plenty plenty of people out there that, like you say, would be hard-pressed to allow freedom to be put back in the bottle or the gene to be put back in the bottle.

But look at still more people, perhaps, that are saying, I don't think all speech should be allowed.

You know, I interviewed someone from the ACLU, the American Civil Liberties Union, about two years ago, who confessed that she herself was shocked that she was regularly having conversations with students who thought hate speech either is illegal in this country or should be illegal in this country, and that she was finding herself with the ACLU having to explain why all speech, virtually all speech in this country, is protected.

There are people that don't view things that way anymore because of what they're being taught or what they're being inundated with in popular media and online.

And as we've discussed, there are people now inviting censorship into their lives.

They're happy to let curators in big tech come between them and the free flow of information.

They're inviting it.

And that's what concerns me: the notion that there are people not having this forced and hoisted upon them in some cases, but welcoming it and defending it.

That brings me back to the

digital new deal.

Listen to this.

They want big tech to adopt a new code of conduct that would show, and I'm quoting, deference to expert bodies.

For instance, civil and human rights groups should define hate groups and behavior, and scientific and public health bodies such as the World Health Organization should guide the definition of sound science.

End quote.

Well, that's basically what they're already doing with their fake fact checks on Facebook.

If you look at the board of appellate experts that they've convened to make decisions, almost all of them aren't expert in anything.

that they're litigating.

They're human rights advocates and activists.

Nothing wrong with that, but certainly they come from a particular viewpoint that doesn't necessarily get you to the accurate facts or, as we would say, truth.

And I think that's super harmful to decide that these are the experts that get to determine where things go and what we see and how we view them.

Let me ask you this last question.

Put yourself a year from now.

What's America look like a year from now?

Gosh, I can't say.

I don't even know what's going to happen in a couple of weeks.

I love these people who say, I can't wait for 2020 to be over.

And I'm like, you think 2021 is going to be better?

It's a good point.

Might not.

Right.

I feel like what we're going to see pitched battles continue to play out,

particularly if Donald Trump does not win his election battle.

And I would say if I had to put money on it with no inside information, he's not going to win.

So you're going to have a strong contingent of tens of millions of Americans who feel like they didn't get a fair shot or that something went wrong, or at least the media didn't cover it fairly, and the government's

on the take.

And I think that bubbles up, and we'll have to see if a new movement starts, either with Donald Trump outside of the government or with some other figure.

And at the same time, we will see these efforts I mentioned trying to make information flow more freely and more like we envision it in this country.

There will be technical solutions, but those will be fought out with people being deplatformed and controversialized and attacked.

You know,

I think it'll get worse, like you said before, it gets better, but I do hope it gets better.

Do you think the Senate is held by the Republicans in Georgia or not?

Well, I'm not a political expert.

I really, I have no idea.

I'm shocked at how close that race is.

I mean, I just, I can't believe I live in a country where, as you said just a few minutes ago, so many people are cool with it.

They're like, oh, yeah, Marxism, you know, fewer freedoms.

I'm good with that.

Well, as an outsider, that, as I said, I'm not a political expert.

It looks strange to me.

It's something that if I were covering elections and politics, I would want to dig deeply into if there were allegedly election mischief.

And Georgia has quite a bit, some of it proven, some of it not, some of it alleged.

But is it enough that that could have impacted what a coincidence?

The only two Senate races in this whole country that are still at play like that are two in the state of Georgia where they had all these other alleged anomalies.

I mean, everybody's just accepted that those races, the outcome of those initial votes, I guess, were accurate and true.

I don't know that that's been thoroughly vetted.

I don't know that it matters at this point, but I think that's a little strange.

Cheryl, I hope someday you receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom because I think you deserve it.

You're very brave.

And

yeah, I'm a big fan.

Thank you so much for being on with us.

Well, Glenn, thanks for having me.

I appreciate it.

You bet.

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