Best of the Program | Guests: Dr. Robert Epstein & Kevin Williamson | 8/21/19

Hey, welcome to the podcast.

We've got a great one for you today.

Dr.

Rebert Robert Epstein is going to be joining us.

He is

a guy that's been looking into Google.

He has been warning, we are in real trouble.

We are in trouble in 2016 because Google is manipulating algorithms and search results and it can change a large number of voters.

And he says 2020 is going to be even worse.

Well, now he's under attack only because Donald Trump tweeted

this guy is a Clinton supporter, and Hillary Clinton has come out against him, and now

he is quite concerned about what's going to happen to him.

Another one caught in the rat trap, if you will, of political correctness and the mobocracy of America.

Also, we're going to talk about the mobocracy of red flag laws and

and

some fundraising notices that are coming out from a political party on gun control.

And you'll never guess which political party is behind behind it.

Then you don't want to miss Kevin Williamson.

Kevin Williamson, one of the best writers, author of the new book, The Smallest Minority Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics, joins us all on today's podcast.

You're listening to The Best of the Bland Beck Program.

The numbers are beyond horrific.

Every day in the United States, 100 people are killed with guns, and hundreds more are shot and injured.

Is that true?

Hundreds of people are shot and injured by guns every day in America.

Is that true?

Hundreds?

Well, I mean, you have, what, 40,000 deaths per year from guns.

So

I guess it would have to be a lot of fun.

That, you know, of course, just means

that also includes suicides and all the disclaimer-related

over 100 are just deaths.

That's probably true.

You know, we should probably separate these out from violent criminal kind of things.

You know what I mean?

Oh, yeah.

These death numbers include a guy

about to

slit a woman's throat and a police officer shoots them.

Like, that's included in that number, right?

Like,

a lot of these are just, you know.

Can we separate those out?

Let's have a separate them out.

Because, I mean, you know, one of the main things here, well, let me just get back to this.

One of the main things is the next line.

Nearly two-thirds of all yearly gun deaths in this country are suicides.

Now, do you really think that taking away a gun, by the way, that's not an AR, two-thirds of all of the gun-related deaths, two-thirds

are suicides?

Yeah.

And if you think that that is a gun problem, you're going to have to explain why countries like Japan with no guns have a much higher suicide rate than us, or Russia, who has a gun ownership rate of one-tenth of the United States, yet has a much higher murder rate and a much higher suicide rate.

In Pennsylvania, gun violence claims over 1,500 lives every year, with gun suicides comprising 63% of all firearms desks in Pennsylvania.

65% of veteran suicides in our state involve a gun.

Oh, we should take our guns away from veterans.

Everyday toy.

Oh, what an argument to make.

I know.

Yeah, let's argue to the people who've been defending our country

and who have trained with these weapons and done everything that they could to

protect these liberties.

Let's take their guns away.

Let's take veterans' guns away.

Wow, what a wonderful idea that is.

The everyday toll of gun violence in America is utterly heartbreaking, and this violence routinely shocks the collective soul of our nation.

We look for solutions to end America's epidemic of gun violence.

One sure way to reduce firearms death is through the implementation of red flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection order laws.

To date, these laws have been enacted in 17 states and the District of Columbia.

Oh, well, then, that's a good idea.

Back on February 14th, there was a one-year anniversary of Parkland, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

My proposal, Senate Bill 90, would allow our judges to temporarily remove firearms from people in crisis who pose an imminent threat of harming themselves or others.

Red flag laws.

Now, which party

sent this out?

You're setting us up here.

This is Senator Tom Killian, the 9th district,

and a Republican in Pennsylvania, sending to all of his supporters,

Republicans, is this who you are?

I mean, there's a lot of support for red flag laws among Republicans.

Yeah, well,

not for you.

You are no longer a

constitutionalist.

You cannot consider yourself a small government constitutionalist if you believe in gun control and infringement.

We're not talking about...

Look, I have no problem if you are

deemed dangerous after you've had the chance to testify.

You are innocent until proven guilty.

We cannot cross this line.

You are innocent until proven guilty.

The red flag law says some accuser can go to court and say, you know what?

They're very, very dangerous.

They're very dangerous.

I've been, look,

I was married to them for a very long time.

And the threats, oh, you would not believe the threats that they're making.

You don't think vengeance,

just pettiness would get involved.

You don't think that there's someone in your family?

Perhaps, perhaps not.

Maybe you're lucky.

I know in

I know in my extended family, I would not count it out that somebody in my extended family or relations

would say,

oh, yeah, yeah, I was at a family reunion.

The guy's unstable.

Oh, he's absolutely unstable.

You could have people sitting at this desk with you that would make claims like that.

No, I don't.

Of course.

I mean, if you've ever been through a horrible divorce.

Oh, my God.

Go back to.

You don't even have to go.

You could go to one of the brothers or sisters or uncles or aunts or anybody else that just was angry.

Why was Barack Obama our president?

Why?

Well, he won a Senate race in Illinois.

Why did he win the Senate race in Illinois?

Well, he was in a very tight race against Jack.

I want to say Jack Ryan, but that's the character, right?

Yeah.

Who was the guy?

I can't remember his name.

Ryan was his last name, who went through a very nasty divorce with an actress

who, in the divorce proceedings,

accused accused him of all sorts of crazy stuff that somehow Barack Obama's people got unsealed, and then eventually his opponent, Obama's opponent, had to drop out of the race.

It is Jack Ryan.

Thank you.

Does it end up to be true?

I don't think so.

You know, obviously wasn't there.

And afterwards, you know, after the divorce happened, there was a cooling off period.

And, oh, well, he's not that person and blah, blah, blah.

You're going through a divorce.

This is all the time.

Your husband loves guns, loves guns, and you want to bilk him for everything, every penny he's got.

Okay.

That's not an unheard of

scenario.

And because you're being pushed by the attorneys, you're angry, whatever it is.

You're telling me that America, you can't see a husband or a wife, doesn't matter.

Yeah.

Say,

you know what?

You're going to give this to me, or I'm going to talk about your guns.

It's objectively worse the other way, right?

Let's say a woman is maybe having an affair, and the guy's very angry about it, and she has a gun to protect herself against an angry man.

And the man goes and says, you know what?

She's nuts.

She's been threatening people.

I think my children are in danger.

Go take her guns.

They go do that.

Then she's vulnerable from him, right?

I mean,

it's a terrible thing.

And we've tried this red flag law thing out recently on another issue.

It's called Me Too accusations.

Yeah.

Where we've just been like, you know what?

Yeah,

just take all their power away, take their jobs away, throw them out of society, and then we'll figure out whether they actually did it or not.

But then, this, what makes this worse is that's not involving the government or the courts.

That's right.

That's just public opinion.

This is public opinion.

And that's bad enough.

This one is saying, no, we deem you guilty before you even have a a chance to answer the charge.

Yeah, and it's it's and your reputation being of high quality is not a constitutional right.

People can say all they have all sorts of terrible opinions about you.

I don't know if you've noticed that some people have terrible opinions about you, even, Glenn.

Wait, what?

It's true.

But, you know, constitutional right is your right to bear arms.

So we're taking away a constitutionally guaranteed thing with no, I mean, because red flag laws already exist.

Red flag laws are when you go and you say, hey, you know, we need to get this person is really erratic and he's acting and we need to have him committed, right?

Involuntary commitment.

These things already exist.

The only thing that the new brand of red flag laws does is it makes it so they take the guns before they figure it out.

Yeah.

Right?

Like, this is like, I don't know if he's crazy.

Let's just take the guns and then we'll figure it out and see if it's true.

That is insane.

That's craziness.

That's upside down.

That is craziness.

That is against everything we stand for.

This is that you remember, you're taking away a person's right

to be innocent

before

guilty.

What you're doing is you're starting down this slippery slope that, look, things happen, so we've got it.

We're going to look at you as guilty, and everybody will know you're guilty.

And we're going to take your guns.

And good luck getting them back, by the way.

We're going to take your guns.

But if you prove yourself to be responsible,

excuse me,

this is, this is,

personally, I think that is civil war.

I think these red flag laws are very popular, though.

I mean, they

pull very well.

Then maybe not.

I don't think people understand exactly what they are.

I don't think so either.

You know, and it's like, you know, you have a situation where

the research on the red flag laws, where they've been implemented, shows no effect on homicide rate.

It shows a very slight effect on suicide rate.

And we've seen, you know, some of these states we're talking about, a third of cases are later found out to be frivolous.

A third?

You're taking away the constitutional right from a third of the people you're accusing.

You can't do that.

That is not an American principle whatsoever.

I know we really, like, we all have these people around us that are like, oh, man, that guy seems dangerous.

This is why.

Most of those people don't go out and shoot people.

This is why I I am not for the death penalty.

It's not because of life.

Innocent life.

I'm opposed to taking innocent life.

And that is why

I'm torn on the death penalty, but have finally come down on the death penalty.

I'm against it.

Because we can make mistakes.

And I don't want to be responsible for taking innocent life.

So

put them in jail.

Stop all this nonsense of, you know, racking everything up.

If you're going to do it, then do it.

But you better make sure you're right.

You want to execute somebody.

Look how many people just from DNA tests.

Now, we may get to a point to where you got it because everything's on camera, everything's, but then you've got deep fakes.

Are you sure?

You don't want to put an innocent man to death.

You don't want an innocent man in jail.

You're going to destroy people

just on what?

One person or one side of an opinion.

There's two sides.

And we must have the

presumption of innocence for American citizens, not the presumption of guilt.

That is what leads to Stalin, Nazis, Mussolini, Mao, whoever you want.

When they can scoop you up or take your stuff or you lose your job through a court system

that says, yeah, well, we're going to, we'll get back to you.

We'll fix your life if we were wrong.

Really?

Where do you go?

Where do you go

after the sheriff or the FBI are at the front of your house taking out your stuff

because you've been deemed unstable?

Where do you go to get that reputation back?

Where do you go in this time where there is no forgetting because of the internet?

Where do you go when you when you go in for a job interview and they Google your name?

Oh, and they see the pictures of the guns leaving your house because you might be unstable.

Where do you go to get that erased?

Where?

So

The Washington Post has just written an article.

Anthony Scarmucci and the nine biggest 180s on Trump ranked.

Number 10 is Scarmucci, I think.

Number nine is Ann Coulter.

Yeah, because she's the

I was for him, now I'm against him.

Yeah, no, no, no.

She wrote a book in Trump We Trust.

And you know what?

I think he's been pretty decent on the border.

He hadn't been great, and he hasn't done the border wall, but he's, I think he's tried.

She reportedly, at least, co-wrote his initial border proposal.

So she was very tight into the details of that.

And so she's maybe not excited that the wall has not been able to get that across the finish line.

Well, she says he deserves to lose re-election.

Okay.

Mike Pompeo is the next one.

Jason Chaffetz is number seven.

Coming in at number six, Mick Mulvaney.

Number five, Andrew Napolitano.

I didn't know that because he was very anti-Trump, wasn't he?

He's a libertarian, right?

So he's not going to like the executive sort of actions.

But I have not heard him flip on that.

I mean, he's not.

Has he changed that?

Oh, actually, no, he's gotten worse.

Oh, I think he's gotten worse.

Once purveyor, Deep C.

Sarah Greg, he

recently accused Trump of unleashing a torrent of hatred in a FoxNews.com op-ed.

Trump claims this is because he declined to nominate Napoleon Tunnel for Supreme Court.

Then Anthony Scarmucci,

coming in at number three, Glenn Beck.

Hey!

Listen, you did well on the list.

Or did I.

This is no way to win

in either direction.

No.

You don't win win in either direction.

No.

However, if you remember right, it was just, I was only saying things because I was failing.

Yeah, it's weird how that's happened.

Now, now you're now Glenn Beck staked out, this is from the Washington Post, Glenn Beck staked out principal ground against someone.

I love this.

Really

retroactive admiration.

Where was the principal ground support of Glenn Beck in 2016 from these people?

None.

As someone who said, quote, he could be one of the most dangerous presidents to ever come in the Oval Office, end quote.

Yeah,

he could have been.

He hasn't been.

Wow.

He could be in the future, but he hasn't been.

You know, when we had no evidence of what he would do in office,

yeah, he could have been.

I was very nervous.

Based on his past performance, he hasn't been.

After Trump's election, he pulled out Hitler comparisons, saying he saw the seeds seeds of what happened in Germany in 1933.

Still see them.

See them in the Republican Party, see them in the Democratic Party, see them everywhere.

If you're not seeing fascism, communism on the horizon,

well, you're blind.

You're blind.

You can go anyway, any direction with any of these people.

They call every Republican Hitler every day.

I know.

That's a problem.

Today, even as Trump has stoked racial divisions and split the country in a way Beck once decried, no, I still decry that.

I still think racial division is really bad.

I still think the way the president says things, I'm like, oh, please, don't, don't say that.

Please, don't say that.

But look at the media.

Trump is the one doing it.

I know.

When you're calling literally every one of his supporters, if they support him, a racist, who's stoking?

Who's stoking for?

I mean, that's incredible.

Beck now says if Trump loses in 2020, I think we're officially at the end of the country as we know it.

Yes.

Have you looked at the other side?

Have you looked at who the Democrats are running?

Yeah, I think when they say, yeah, we're going to get rid of the free market system,

you know, and I'll just do executive orders on the Constitution.

Sounds like the end of the republic to me.

The best of the Glenn Beck program.

Hey, it's Glenn.

And if you like what you hear on the program, you should check out Pat Gray Unleashed.

His podcast is available wherever you download your favorite podcast.

We have Robert Epstein.

He is an author, editor, longtime psychology researcher and professor, distinguished scientist who is passionate about educating the public about advances in mental health and behavioral sciences.

Former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today.

He is now the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and contributing editor for Scientific American Mind.

Yeah, he sounds like a dope and turning the crazy level up to 10.

Dr.

Robert Epstein, how are you, sir?

Well, it's been a rough couple days

to be honest with you.

Yeah.

So, I mean, here's a I mean, here's a group of people that you probably politically would agree with more than not.

You're getting trashed by the person you voted for on Twitter.

Well, I think Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of herself.

I mean, you know,

I really just gotten caught in the crossfire

here between Trump and Hillary.

And, you know, the president sometimes, as you know, his tweets are not exactly entirely accurate.

And he did get a couple things slightly wrong when he tweeted about my testimony before Congress,

which was in July.

And so, yeah, I can tell you, you know, what he did is slightly wrong.

But what Hillary did is reprehensible, especially since I've been a strong supporter of the Clintons for 20 years.

I mean, I have a signed letter from Bill

up above my desk here.

Wow.

And what she did is it's shameful.

It's shameful.

What did she do?

What did she do?

Well, she was replying to the president.

The president

said that according to some guy, you know, some researcher,

Google shifted between 2.6 and 16 million votes to me in 2016.

Well, I'm the researcher.

Yes, I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee

in July.

And

yes, I gave estimates of between 2.6 and 10.4 million, not 16 million.

And also Trump said that

I said that Google manipulated the election.

I have never said that.

I've said I found pro-Clinton bias in their search results sufficient to impact undecided voters

in a way that would shift that many votes.

I've never said they manipulated the election.

I found what I measured was the bias, which I mean was indisputable.

Hillary replied to him saying that study has been debunked, which is absolutely false.

And then saying, and the whole study was based on 21 voters.

What I actually studied, what I actually captured and analyzed, which no one has ever done before, is I captured 13,207 election-related searches on Google, Bing, and Yahoo, and the 98,000 web pages to which the search results linked.

That's what allowed me to measure the bias that people were seeing in search results.

And there was substantial bias in favor of Clinton, whom I supported,

in all 10 search positions on the first page of Google search results, but not any bias in Bing or Yahoo.

So, you know, I found the bias, and now, based on experiments that I've been doing for six and a half years, I was able to estimate with that level of bias how many votes could be shifted.

I know that from, again, extensive experimental research.

which now has involved tens of thousands of participants, five national elections in four countries.

I know precisely how bias can shift opinions and votes, and that's where I got those numbers from.

So again, Trump got things slightly wrong, but what Hillary did was outrageous.

My research has never been debunked at all.

And then this slew of stories that have turned up.

I mean, they're literally, I'm not kidding you, there are hundreds of them all over the world.

And a few unconservative sources basically just kind of report the facts.

And then all the mainstream sources are basically saying

I'm incompetent, which I've never been accused of being my whole career.

That, again, this is my study was debunked, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, it's terrifying that

there could be so much bad information out there.

This is

it is.

I think this is is why we are

things are slowing down not towards socialism not even towards nationalism those I think are going to speed up still but the the mob mentality that you have to be all in on somebody or you're a traitor I think that is actually starting to swing back to a normal kind of feeling because average people are feeling what people like I have felt and others like Tea Party.

We have been feeling this for about 10 years and it is terrifying.

Me too.

It is a, it's a, a good goal.

It's a terrifying

witch hunt.

And

you don't, where do you go to get your reputation back?

Bob, where do you go?

I don't know.

And, you know, you know, and what I, what I really accomplished in 2016 was setting up the first ever monitoring system to see what big tech companies were showing people.

No one's ever done that before because tech's power to shift opinions and votes and purchases and attitudes and beliefs around the world derives from what they internally call ephemeral experiences, like search results.

They're generated on the fly.

They have an impact on your thinking.

They disappear.

They're gone.

They're not stored anywhere.

That's called an ephemeral experience.

That's what Google people call it.

And it's extremely powerful in shifting votes and opinions.

I've shown in multiple experiments and, you know, published in peer-reviewed journals, you can easily shift 20% or more of undecided voters up to 80% in some democracies.

So

how would they do that if they are doing it?

How would that happen?

Explain that to the

average person who has not heard this before.

Okay, first of all, it can happen just because they're not paying attention to their algorithm.

And their algorithm, of course, always puts one dog food ahead of the other, and one vacation spot ahead of the other, and one candidate ahead of the other.

It has no equal time rule built into it.

And once it puts one candidate ahead of the other, then that starts to have a dramatic impact on undecided voters.

And as more undecided voters shift, the bias in search results gets stronger.

That shifts more undecided voters, et cetera, et cetera.

It's a bandwagon effect, what I call a digital bandwagon effect.

And I've measured these things very precisely.

And again, 2016 was a tremendous milestone year for us because we actually built a Nielsen-type system to look over people's shoulders with their permission and see what these companies were showing them.

Then we built the bigger system in 2018.

And in 2020, we're trying to raise money to build a much bigger monitoring system because will never know

why the next presidential candidate wins unless there has been extensive monitoring of all this ephemeral stuff.

News feeds, email suppression, shadow banning, search suggestions, search results, et cetera, et cetera.

And I'm the only person in the world who's ever built such systems.

And we have to have these systems or we will not understand

what is going

and why somebody won or lost an election.

All right.

So

Dr.

Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist, American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, he is talking about Google and these algorithms that are changing the way we behave, the way we look, the way we think, all underground and how they impact our elections.

Is it mygoogleresearch.com where people could donate if they wanted to

donate?

And yes, and Glenn, and you have been more helpful to me in that regard than just about anybody.

You've actually raised, without you knowing it, just because you keep giving out that link, you've raised a lot of money

for this research.

I want you to know that I believe this is one of the most important things that we can do.

You are actually, and I think you'll agree with this, you're actually way behind where you should be, but you are light years ahead of anyone else on the planet.

Would you agree with that?

Positively.

And I've been slaughtered now by mainstream media, which is my media.

That's my media.

I'm not a conservative.

This is an incredible story.

Okay, we have some detailed questions, and then I want to talk to you a little bit about

what Google may be doing

not only during this election, but also

with ICE.

We'll get into that.

I'd just like to pick your brain on theories, if you had

You can donate, and I urge you, I urge you in the strongest of terms, if you have money that you can donate five bucks or you know $100,000,

that you would consider this project.

There is nothing more important than getting your arms around the algorithms at Google, mygoogle research.com, mygoogleresearch.com.

Every day, it seems, somebody pops up in my world like what Dr.

Robert Epstein just said.

This is, wait, they've turned the guns on me.

Yeah.

And this is my side.

Oh, look at what they've turned the guns on here.

Peer review?

Yeah.

Now peer review doesn't matter.

I thought that was the all end-all-be-all.

We're supposed to now peer review those studies, they're gone.

How about the fact that all of a sudden we're supposed to trust gigantic companies making decisions for us?

I mean, I thought this was the exact opposite of what the left wanted.

You want companies controlling all this information?

Well, it benefits them in this particular moment.

Ignoring peer review benefits them in this particular moment.

So they'll take out a guy who voted for them, which, you know, doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter.

Doesn't matter.

Apparently, he's garbage now.

It's really horrible, reprehensible.

I urge you to donate at mygoogleresearch.com.

Okay.

May I call you Bob or Robert?

Robert, if you like.

Sure.

Okay.

Robert.

So, Robert, we have some questions.

We went through the Vanity Fair article.

And if you read this article, if that's the way you were doing the research, it's crazy.

It's crazy.

Would you agree with that?

I can't even read these things.

There are hundreds of them.

Okay, so

we're going to go through it piece by piece.

And you just tell us: is this how you do it?

If not, tell us how you do do it.

Go ahead.

The first accusation in here, Robert, is they basically say that the reason why you're going after Google is because you have a vendetta against them.

Because in 2012, they warned visitors to your website that it had been hacked and serving malware to people who are reading it.

Okay, I have no vendetta against Google.

I am probably Google's biggest admirer in the world.

I have friends at Google.

Yes,

my website was hacked in 2012, as everyone's is eventually.

And I got notified of this by Google, and that caught my eye.

I said, why is Google notifying me and not a government agency or a nonprofit organization?

And then as a programmer, I got intrigued too because Google was now blocking access to my website, not just through Google.com or through Chrome, which they own, but even through Safari, even through Firefox, which is a nonprofit-run browser.

And I got curious about how is that happening?

How can that be?

How can Google block you through Apple Safari?

And so I started to kind of just look at Google more seriously.

I have no bandana against them.

That's absurd.

And then later that year, there was research, early marketing research on the power of search rankings, that the power that search rankings have to influence people's clicks and purchases.

And that made me think, well, if that's true, then maybe

search results could be used to shift opinions or even shift voting preferences.

And so I started my first series of experiments looking at that.

And

it's not like you're Glenn Beck doing this.

You are the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today.

You are also the senior research psychologist of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.

Your job

revolves around how people make decisions and what causes people to behave in certain ways.

So, of course, you would be curious about this.

Of course, you would investigate it because this is probably, I think,

correct me if I'm wrong, Doctor, but I believe that in maybe five years, but in the next 10 years, we're going to have to have a serious discussion on

if you actually have free will because of what they're doing in nudging and how they will use and manipulate data.

Well, we're past that, Glenn.

You know, in looking at

Hillary's horrendous tweet attacking me and telling blatant lies about me.

I mean, we're way past that point of having any free will left because you have to understand Hillary's tweet by understanding how dependent she has been for years and years for votes and money from Google.

Google was her largest

donor.

Her chief technology officer, Stephanie Hannon, was a former Google executive.

I mean I could go on and on and on and on about that relationship.

And she got that information that she tweeted from Google.

Wow.

That's a great point.

Wow.

It's

a little circuitous.

There's a little bit of incestual feeling here to some of this.

Do you have a yes or no question?

We have about 35, 40 seconds.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think we can get into any of those in 30 seconds.

Okay, so we want to get into

a couple more.

And then I want to ask you, I don't know if you saw this,

the Google employees yesterday, they don't have a problem with China apparently, but Google employees were protesting in front of Google.

They want them to stop helping and working with ICE and the Border Patrol.

And my first question

was:

wait, what is Google doing with ICE?

And are they providing information to the government?

Because I don't think that's kind of in the game plan for anybody, is it?

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

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A man who began his journalism career

in the Bombay-based Indian Express newspaper group.

I don't even know how you would go about doing that.

Kevin Williamson is here.

Hello, Kevin.

How are you?

It helps to have a friend in college whose family lives there and introduce you to some people.

Yeah, I ended up there.

Okay.

I didn't know the first thing about it.

So

you started there in Bombay.

Yeah.

Had you ever been to Bombay?

I'd never been outside of the United States, except for Mexican border towns growing up in Texas.

Yeah, so it's a little different than Texas, the U.S., or Mexico.

Yeah.

You know, when I got there, no one even knew what the population of Bombay was at that point in the 90s because it was such a crazy, chaotic place.

They thought maybe 20 million, maybe 25 million.

But it was a great place to be a newspaper guy because everyone read newspapers there.

You know, a typical household would get four or five newspapers a day.

So it's a tremendously fun place to start a newspaper critic.

Yeah.

And then you became a theater critic.

Some years later, yeah, when I was living in New York, I wrote the theater column for the new criterion for a while.

But aren't you, I mean, don't you have to be an old, cantankerous bitter man to do that?

Or are you?

I've been an old, cantankerous, bitter man since I was about 11.

And so

I'm kind of growing into it.

Right, okay, yeah.

Your body is starting to catch up with your body.

Unfortunately, I've been waiting for my hair to turn gray for years.

Yeah.

Don't wish for that because I always wanted my hair because everybody in my family, by 30, they're white.

Yeah.

And it took me to 50.

And now I was like, well, everybody's got the great white hair.

And now I have it.

And I'm like, good God, you look like you're a thousand years old.

All right.

So

you've you've written a new book, The Smallest Minority.

By Borderline Unpublishable, Angry Profane Book.

So I

just.

You can't read from this book on the radio.

Oh, yes.

There's one paragraph.

There's one paragraph that I'm not going to read, but I'd like you to read.

Oh, dear.

Because

it is one of the greatest screeds of all time.

Oh, no.

I don't know if I can find it here.

It was.

describing people

that you, you know, you had a

oh, here it is.

Here it is, here it is.

Pick it up right here.

Let's see.

This is like testimony.

You're like, actually, did you write this?

Everyone knows I'm a monster.

Can I give this book to you?

Do everyone I know

to a monster to the end of that paragraph on the next page.

I would much rather you read it.

No, no, no.

I would.

No, it's got words in it.

I can't pronounce it.

It's strange to read your own work.

No, it's not.

This is like when you're reading.

You got to read it the way you meant it, too.

Well,

I should sometimes tell you the sentences that got left out.

They edited this thing?

Are you saying?

Oh, man, you wouldn't believe the original version.

Oh, my gosh.

This is after edit.

This is the boulderized version of the page.

Oh, my gosh.

Because this is the first paragraph.

Listen to this.

So it starts, everyone knows I'm a monster.

And by everybody, I mean all good, decent, serious, newspaper analog reading people.

And by all good, decent, serious newspaper analog reading people, I mean you sad, atavistic, masturbatory specimens out there in the woolly wilds of America, by which I mean you putt-pounding nobodies in Brooklyn or Guyman, Oklahoma, depending on your tribe, obsessively following intramedia squabbles on social media, cheering for what you imagine to be your side, like a bunch of marginally employed and pass-through-time NFL cheering leg-tattooed douche rockets at some ghastly observant sports bar, and enjoying a nice bottle of the warm and comforting illusion of solidarity as though Tom Brady or Levian Bell would have taken a voluminous equine piss on you from a great height if you were smoldering and crackling on the sidelines like a sizzling plate of Kansas City burn am

no the question is that would have taken me a week to write that it's just brilliant how long did that take you to write did that just as long as it did to read

so okay funny thing about this book is you know it's got a bunch of footnotes in it yeah and um

most of the book is sort of halfway like a normal political book.

And then the footnotes, which are about maybe a quarter of the book, are the kind of running commentary of what I'm actually thinking as I write this stuff.

And the footnotes were the part that were

problematic for some of the editors, I think.

There are a few of them that didn't make it in.

I'll share with you off the board.

Yeah, maybe you could share in our podcast.

I don't think I could even share on your podcast.

Really?

Wow.

Did you think that it would go in, or you were just like, I don't care?

I figured I would just give it a shot.

You know,

Regnery, I like working with Regner, but when they put out the press release for this book, they called it, you know, hilarious and profane.

This was before the book was done.

Yeah, I figured they're going to put profane in the press release.

That's licensed, right?

That's right.

I can do what I want.

Right, right.

And you did.

Kind of, yeah.

Yeah, and you did.

So, so take me, take me through it.

I'm going to, we're going to talk about it.

We're going to do a podcast today for broadcast in a couple of weeks, but and we'll go through all of it.

But take me through the premise of

the book.

Yeah, I started writing the book.

And don't leave out any of the acerbic or.

I started writing the book in 2015 after witnessing a number of these dumb kind of Twitter mob freakouts.

A lot of them weren't really exactly political or political people.

You know, the Justine Sacco business and the guy getting canned from Google and all that.

And there was something to me that seemed weird and kind of ritualistic about this stuff.

It was a kind of public ceremony.

It wasn't really something that was about the issues that it pretended to be about.

And so I wrote part of the the book at that time in a book proposal, and I sent it around, and nobody wanted it.

And then a couple of years later, I went to work for the Atlantic for three days and got fired.

And my phone started to ring before I got to the airport, literally.

And I was waiting on the plane to come home to Texas, and people were suddenly interested in the book.

So I'm going to go figure.

It's an

ill wind that blows me into some good.

So the book is about some of the social and political reasons for why people have become so hysterical and theatrical in terms of their political engagement.

And what I really ultimately argue is it's not really about politics.

It's that people have a certain emptiness in their lives in a sense that they lack connectedness.

And these media mob phenomena and social media, you know, this kind of performative theatrical, hysterical politics gives them a false sense of having been involved in something important.

It gives them a sense that they've been involved in something meaningful when they're not,

But it kind of feels good.

And so people go to it in this weird, addictive, compulsive way.

So it's not really politics that's happening on Twitter.

It's this weird, embarrassing public group therapy session.

And that's essentially what the book is about.

But it is, it's being used by politics.

Sure, yeah.

We just had, I said this too, almost every day now I meet somebody.

And usually now from the other side that has just been affected, lost their job, lost their career.

We We just had a really brilliant psychiatrist on with us a few minutes ago, and

he's now being targeted by Google and Clinton, who he voted for.

Yeah.

He's a fan of Google.

I mean, he has respect for Google.

And Clinton, he said, I've got a letter from Bill Clinton hanging above my desk, and now they're taking me out and saying that I'm a monster.

Yeah.

There's a bit in Corey Alanis about that, how, you know, you're the favorite one day and the villain the next day, and that's, that seems to to be the case of it.

One of the things I get into the book a lot is the emergence of that very thing of the use of employment as a weapon of political coercion.

And I think that's a really interesting subject to follow up on because this phenomenon of the demand for homogeneity and conformity is not really so much a problem for people like you or me.

I mean, we're in the controversy business.

It's what we do.

You know, maybe you lose an advertiser here and then, maybe you lose a gig here or there.

But, you know, that's kind of what we do.

It's a much, much bigger problem if you're someone who's trying to manage a Starbucks in Philadelphia and you're going to lose your job because you're enforcing company policy, but it becomes this viral Twitter phenomenon.

Or if you're a programmer at Google, or you're someone who works at a bank, or you're someone who's a hairdresser,

and make examples of these people, and that kind of psychic terrorism is effective.

And now people know just not to voice opinions in the first place if they're any way afraid that it might be unpopular or non-conforming.

I will tell you, I think that

I would have agreed with you just a few years years ago but i believe my voice and that i didn't feel this way at fox okay and they were coming after me like crazy i do believe my voice could be silenced i could be erased now from history and just not you're just gone you think yeah you don't ah i think you well not to flatter you sell an awful lot of books and have an awful lot of listeners i think it'd be hard to do that

but a lot of that and i think maybe um will you remind the the navy seals when they turn dark and they're working for the the corporations and come to visit me at night

but a lot of this stuff when it comes to people like you though i think i think you saw this really in the roseanne barr case where the public twitter mob phenomenon is really a pretext for things that are going on inside the company you know no one at abc is making multi-million dollar programming decisions based on what at caitlin321 vegan on twitter has to say

about you know roseanne barr right right right um i didn't lose my job at the atlantic because people were freaking out on Twitter.

I lost my job at the Atlantic because of things that were going on on staff and in the company.

And that tends to be the case, I think, more for people like us.

And you've seen this in the positive outcomes, too.

I'll say a kind word for the New York Times, which has had several of its writers and people targeted in this way.

And they said, no, we're the New York Times.

We hire who we like.

And we're going to keep Brett Stevens on the staff until we don't like it.

That's the way Premier Radio is.

That's the reason why we're still on radio, is because of iHeart is an amazing company that just is like, I don't care.

We'll put any voice on.

And as long as they don't lose our license and they're generally responsible, we don't care what their opinion is.

We'll put them on.

And we don't care what the mob says.

Yeah, and it's going to be up to institutions to stand up to this kind of thing because individuals, even ones that have some outlet like I do,

really rely on institutions to be the ones who are going to stand and run guard on this.

But that's what I mean.

I think that you could erase because Google is quickly becoming every outlet.

It's becoming the, I mean, if you're not with Google, you're not around.

And that's one of the misunderstood things about this.

You know, like that freak out about James DeMore at Google was not about some nobody programmer that no one cares about.

It was about Google.

It's not about we can get this fired.

It's we can make Google jump when we say jump.

And we can make Facebook jump when we say jump.

And we can make the New York Times rewrite a headline when we say the New York Times is going to rewrite a headline.

So the people involved in this who, you know, get fired or otherwise are really just sort of instruments.

They're props for this great active theater.

It's more about controlling the institutions.

And that's where institutions really have to stand up for themselves.

And that's the shame of particularly the university culture, where you've got a bunch of academics who depend on intellectual honesty and intellectual freedom but will not stand up for it in their own institutions.

So, I'd like to may I change subjects a bit here, Kevin, with you, and go to red flagging.

Sure.

I just got a

listener sent in a

fundraising piece from a

senator in,

where was it, Pennsylvania, that was making the case that we must have red flagging.

Your thoughts on what's happening?

I don't understand the basic case for red flag laws.

So David French at National Review and I have debated about this a little bit on the corner.

I kind of distrust the whole premise of it.

But what's used as the example is that we have these laws for involuntarily committing people for mental care when they seem to present an immediate threat to themselves or others.

And there's a process there by which a judge and a doctor are involved, and we've got this way of doing it.

So they want to use that as the basis of the red flags laws, or the red flag law.

I think that ought to be the red flag law, that if you think someone actually is a danger to himself or someone else,

rather than messing around with whether this person can buy a gun, then we should probably ensure that this person

is under mental health care.

So I think to that extent, we've already got the red flag law that we need.

And people will say, well, it's very onerous and it's hard to get through this process and it's hard to do.

It should be.

Yeah, exactly.

That's how we want it.

We're talking about the Bill of Rights here.

And

I'm always pretty queasy about the idea of suspending anyone's civil rights when they haven't been charged with a crime or convicted of a crime or even arrested for a crime.

We're taking, look, if somebody comes in and if I, you know, I come in in the day and I say,

I got Pop-Tarts in my pants.

I I have Pop-Tarts in my pants.

And I'm eating Pop-Tarts from my pants.

You might say, Glenn, you might, you know what?

Why don't you take the day off?

You might call Tanya and say, he might need to see a doctor.

But if I'm coming in with a gun or I'm dangerous, then you might call police and I should be taken to the doctor.

And a doctor and a judge should decide with my wife if maybe I, you know, have more than Pop-Tarts.

I may have guns and maybe that's a danger.

That's the way you deal with it.

What they're trying to do is with this red flag law,

nobody will take it that far.

Nobody will take it that far.

But I'm telling you right now,

you can't tell me that there aren't a lot of people who have been divorced, that in that divorce proceeding, somebody might say, you know what?

And he's dangerous and he's got a lot of guns.

Yeah, one other thing about having been a small-town newspaper editor is you spend a lot of time reading court records of those very things, you know, divorce cases, custody cases, stuff like that.

And probably half of the death threats I ever got in my life were editing a small town newspaper and writing a DUI story about some guy who's in a custody dispute with his wife and thinks he's going to lose his kids because this thing comes up.

And the sorts of accusations that are made in those situations tend to be often irresponsible, and there's not much of a downside for doing it.

We don't really retaliate against people for that sort of thing.

I don't have as much faith as a lot of conservatives do in the law enforcement and prosecutorial apparatus, although I think that the prosecutors are a bigger problem than the police officers are for the most part.

And I don't really trust them with the power they already have and to give them additional power on top of that to essentially make an end run around the Bill of Rights.

I'm going to take some convincing.

I'm going to take a little convincing.

But

I don't think a lot of America is needing a lot of convincing.

The really maddening thing about this is that if you look at, say, the U.S.

Attorney's Office for Illinois, they will not prosecute a straw buyer case.

They just won't.

They don't think it's worth their time unless it's part of a big organized crime investigation.

The current conviction rate for illegal handgun cases in the Chicago area is about 14%.

We've got laws on the books that we ought to be enforcing.

We really ought to be going after straw buyers.

We ought to be going after people for minor weapons charges before they become homicides.

We've got a lot of things that we could be doing on this front that we'd simply refuse to do because law enforcement is basically lazy.

If you look, all of our gun control proposals are targeted at licensed gun dealers and the people who do business with them.

They've got addresses and business hours and records.

They're really easy to police.

Whereas guys who are selling, you know, Glocks out of the trunk of their car off the interstate somewhere are a lot harder to catch.

All right, more with Kevin Williamson in

the Blaze Radio Network.

On demand.