Best of the Program | Guests: Dr. Wilfred Reilly, Phillip Klein & Pat Gray | 3/28/19

Hey, welcome to the podcast.

Lot to talk about today.

We go back into the Jussie Smollett case with a guy who has studied hate crimes and found many of them to be hoaxes.

And what does this mean?

Also, Obamacare, what does this mean?

The president now says the Republicans have to be the party of health care.

What does he mean by that?

And is this just election talk coming from the right?

And

we also,

we have, you know, Helium Thursday.

Helium Thursday, that's right.

Which I think is very important because we looked at AOC and she wanted people to take this, you know, Green New Deal seriously.

And you sure did.

And you sure did.

We did.

And then I had an aneurysm towards the end of the podcast where we start talking about

taxes, local taxes, and the way people are spending local taxes.

I happen to live in a town that I found out a little too much about during today's podcast that just built a $15 million

fire house.

The grand opening, I think, cost more than my daughter's wedding.

And

nobody was pissed.

None of my neighbors were pissed.

They were like, isn't this great?

No, you paid for it.

Anyway, before I have another aneurysm, here's the podcast.

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

The guy who,

I mean, if we had a scale

and we could weigh the balls on a person, I would think that Jussie, which is a stupid name, Smollett, equally as stupid,

I think he might win.

I have a theory that that he would not be nearly in as much trouble if he would have not gone on ABC and said, yep, I mean, I'm just, you know, the police are looking and I'm just so beaten up about this.

And I think that just irritated the police and the mayor so much that this guy had the balls to go on television and say that when it wasn't true.

Acting like the victim after he already faked acting like a victim is really frustrating.

So really frustrating.

Then, when they dismiss the charges earlier this week, he just ratchets it up.

He's, if you were innocent, why did you pay $10,000?

That seems like a pretty bad deal for a guy who's been vindicated.

Okay?

So, he gives up his bail money of $10,000.

Then he goes out and says, again, I've been completely vindicated, which was not the deal.

I think he's even in more trouble.

And then

this is what his attorney says yesterday.

Listen to this.

Clearly, you think the police are not telling the truth about Jesse.

Are you going to sue?

We're weighing our options now.

For Jesse, what's really important is he really just wants his career and his life back.

Again, he did not ask for any of this.

He was a victim of a crime.

This has completely spiraled out of control and become a political

event at this point.

And his goal and focus right now is just getting his life back on track.

He has not even started healing from the initial attack because he's been dealing with everything that's happened since then.

Oh my.

Oh my.

Oh my.

So they're weighing their options.

We don't know.

We might sue the police.

You might sue the police.

Forget the bleach.

You are just putting gasoline all over yourself.

You're just, and you're in a match factory.

It's crazy.

I mean, they were lucky enough to get the whole case sealed at this point, even though the FBI is looking into it it and more may come out.

But if they were to actually sue and open themselves up to all of the evidence coming to it anyway, please.

Please do it.

Please do it.

Please.

Because there needs to be some justice here.

And, you know, again, I wasn't there.

We know that we know what he said happened didn't happen, however.

Right?

Like, we know for a fact two white guys

did not do it.

We know because we have video of the two people who were accused, the two brothers, with buying the bleach, buying the rope, buying the MAGA,

buying the masks, buying everything.

Everything.

What were they doing?

Were they, were, are they, are they, uh, some sort of profits where they bought that stuff because they were going to reenact it in their own home just for fun later?

But they saw this event coming.

I mean,

what is the other reason?

I want to know just that.

Guys, if this isn't true, which the brothers say it is, guys, if this isn't true, why did you go out in the middle of the night to a hardware store and buy all this stuff?

What did you do with that?

What crazy list

has those items on it,

except for let's go throw bleach on somebody?

throw a noose around their neck, shout, you know, this is Trump country.

What else?

Yeah, there's not a lot of them.

No.

You'd have maybe, maybe, well, because you had an incident similar to this recently in which you went to a yard sale and wanted to buy a blank canvas.

Right.

Well, no, I just, I look, he's one of the canvas.

He just wanted canvas.

Just want a canvas.

You picked up a painting, and it was very controversial.

Yes, you know me.

I'm into recycling.

I'm into reusing.

You're a big environmentalist, as you were just talking about.

huge environmentalist.

With a Green New Deal.

Yeah.

Huge.

And so you picked up this painting

at a canvas.

I didn't buy it for the painting.

I'm sorry.

I started seeing it after I got home, and I thought, okay, it's clearly unfinished, right?

It's clearly undone, unfinished.

And

it looks like the way German propaganda used to make Jews look.

It's like the artist wanted to make Hitler kind of look like that rat kind of guy that they used to make Jews look like.

The victim of his own propaganda.

Correct.

Then he's holding this piece of paper, and I'm guessing it doesn't say anything on it yet because it's unfinished.

I'm guessing.

But I'm thinking it probably was going to say,

you know,

infanticide,

not rejected by the Senate.

And so then there's this Hitler kind of looking down at this paper like, what?

And then up above, and it

looks like the artist artist was just like i'm just gonna throw this on here because i just i don't know if i this is gonna work and it says wait you mean i only had to call it planned parenthood right i mean an offensive uh controversial piece of art i i thought and you as

100th most important person in the world of art would know yeah that that's a very controversial thing but again you just bought it at a yard sale for the canvas correct nothing to do with this right perhaps these two brothers yeah

were looking to design a hat,

but had no blank hats.

They needed a white hat to be able to design their incredible artwork on.

The only hat they could find was red, and the only way to get it to white was bleach.

Ah.

So they bought a red hat.

They bleached

the red hat.

And the rope was simply like, you know,

when you have like sunglasses, and some people put the little

piece of like you know string on the back so like they can hold it around their neck when they take them off.

Sure.

Perhaps it's Chicago.

It's a windy area.

Perhaps they were concerned this hat would blow off of their hats.

They can't put rope on the back of the hat.

They put rope on the back of the hat and tied it to maybe the

other one.

Well you tied it onto your waist.

It wasn't just like the glasses that just kind of hangs around your neck.

Well if you hung it around your neck,

the hat could still blow off.

So you have to tie it to like your belt.

That's a good fashion accessory.

First of all, it's sexy.

I mean, that's we could start there.

Okay.

We could start there.

That's fine.

I think that's very logical.

I think maybe we should reenact this.

We should get a hat.

We should bleach it.

Let's

use the rope.

Let's tie it around.

See if.

Because, I mean, did you watch Making a Murderer season two by any chance?

No, I did not.

It's on Netflix, of course.

And one of the big focuses of the second season is they try all these other scenarios out that that they think could explain the murder, and they just basically reenact it to see what would happen.

Can we do it tomorrow?

Can we do it?

Let's get the hat, let's get the bleach, let's get the rope,

and we'll the making of

the Jesse Smollett

non-hate-mongering friends that he had.

Right, right.

That's the

title.

I don't know if Netflix takes it, but maybe who

we're going to do that tomorrow.

By the way, the TMZ founder, let me play the audio here.

He said he's never seen anything like this.

This is not the way celebrities are usually treated.

I have never seen anything quite like this in my entire career.

Nobody understands what really happened here other than a few people in the state's attorney's office.

Here, exactly.

But this is bizarre, makes no sense.

I've seen celebrities being handled differently, sometimes more harshly and sometimes less, than the average Joe.

But this case is different from the way all celebrities would be treated.

There is something fundamentally different in this case.

I have never seen this kind of a disposition where the state's attorney secretly says, Go to Jesse Jackson's for the weekend, spend a couple hours, you know, working on camera shots, and then we'll call that community.

I've never seen anything like this

different from other celebs.

Hmm, hmm, hmm,

Well, you know,

that's not what I'm saying.

It's probably the bleach and the hat thing.

Right.

And the rope around the belt.

I think you might be on to something.

We'll pick that up on tomorrow's program.

Booker had a town hall yesterday.

That was pretty interesting.

He's, he's, I think, right now, you could just put him in the White House.

Why even have the election after that town hall?

It was so good.

Well, because we have to keep it Democrat.

Sure,

we're going to have socialism, but we want it to be democratic that's what we've read okay so we want to we want to at least have the did you read that article

did you read the article about how uh the nazis weren't socialist the national

socialists were not socialist i was as i was reading i was like they will literally do anything anything anything they will even say the words that you know mean things that they don't it's crazy it's incredible it is unbelievable yeah it goes to my snowball yesterday on the the uh the news and why it matters I talked about a snowball, and they've been making this giant snowball and rolling it up the hill.

And they're like, we're going to get it to the top, and it's going to roll down the hill and crush everything.

And it's just stopped.

And they keep pushing and they keep adding to it.

And it's stopped.

And I think it's about to roll back on top of them.

The best of the Glen Beck program.

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This is the Glenn Beck program.

For some reason, Glenn and Pat have decided to dedicate a segment once a week to Helium Thursdays.

This is a segment in which they discuss something

while sounding like they are on Helium.

This week on Helium Thursday, they discuss the Green New Deal.

Hello, Pat.

Hello, Glenn.

I want to talk to you about the serious issue of global warming and the new Green Deal, or the Green New Deal, whichever, right?

So, I don't know if anybody saw AOC's speech yesterday, but I believe that it needs to be taken seriously.

Oh, and we're treating it with the utmost seriousness.

So, may I quote, she said yesterday,

people

are dying.

People are dying.

And this is not an elitist issue.

This is a quality of life issue.

You want to tell people that their concern and their desire for clean air, clean water, is elitist?

Tell that to the kids in the South Bronx, which are suffering from the highest rates of childhood asthma in the country.

Tell that to the families in Flint, who accuse kids have their blood ascending in lead levels.

Their brains are damaged for the rest of their lives.

That didn't have anything to do with climate change, by the way.

Call them elitists.

You're telling them that those kids are trying to get onto a plane to Davos?

People are dying.

They're dying.

And the response from the other side of the aisle is to introduce an amendment for five minutes before a hearing in a markup.

Will no one take this seriously?

Can you take it more seriously than putting it up for a vote?

I don't

think you can.

I don't think you can.

I noticed that Daisy Harano, Yazzie Head Maisie, yes,

she was asked if she wants to have it both ways because she didn't want the vote, but she is a co-sponsor of the bill.

And so she was asked yesterday, even by Katie Tur

on CNN, if she's trying to have it both ways.

Yes.

And she said, no, this is an aspirational document.

Oh.

It's aspirational.

I thought you wanted

it to pick up policy.

Well, why would you put the bill together with all of the policies in it if it was just aspirational?

Because I do know an aspirational document that they seem to hate.

It's one that says something like, uh,

all men are created equal and endowed by their creator, or something like that.

If this is just aspirational, why don't you take that document and stick it up your aspiration?

That's my question to Daisyhead Maisie.

Well,

we talk about cost.

But we're going to pay for this, said Ocasio-Cortez, whether we do the New Deal or not.

Because towns and cities are going underwater.

Which ones?

I missed that report.

Oh, there's lots of them.

There is Malibu.

Is underwater?

Pretty sure.

Huh.

Huh.

There is

Miami.

Miami?

Miami's got to be underwater.

Atlantis is underwater.

It's true.

So there's lots of them.

Anyway, she says we're going to pay for them.

And we're either going to decide if we're going to pay or react.

We're going to react and pay or be proactive and pay.

She says, I'm very sad that the government knew that climate change was real back in 1989 when NASA was reporting this.

And the private sector knew it even before.

They knew it back in the 1970s.

So we had to wait around until the time I was born to address this issue.

Well, but in the 1970s, it was global cooling, right?

We were going into an ice age.

I know that, so we're just taking it.

Please, Pat, are you taking this seriously?

I am.

I am.

Very concerned.

I wish it didn't have to cost so much, but

I'm going to turn 30 this year.

And for the entire 30 years of my lifetime, we did not make substantial investments to prepare our country for what we know is coming.

So we have a choice now: lower the cost now

and pursue the new the green new deal

or realize

that it will cost far more if we do not pass it

this has been Helium Thursdays on the Glenn Beck program.

I think it's

I think it's much more powerful.

It is.

It is.

At least you can deal with it.

It gave that story the gravitas it deserves.

Yes.

Don't you think?

Yes, because they're always saying that we just won't deal with things and we should deal with them.

We should deal with them seriously.

I think it is incredible that these clowns actually put a bill together and then, okay, let's pass it.

All right.

We'll give it.

When was the last time the Democrats said, okay,

you guys created a bill.

You did the border wall.

Go ahead.

Pass it.

Let's vote on it right now.

Right.

They've never done that.

No.

Never done that.

I wish they would.

I do too.

Okay, great.

Let's put everybody on record.

Let's put everybody on record.

Go ahead.

And what does Ocasio-Cortez say?

She says that she told everybody how to vote.

She said she told everybody that they had to vote present.

That was the way to do it.

So are you telling me, all you people running for president of the United States, that Ocasio-Cortez is telling you how to vote?

That's what she's saying, Democrats.

Oh, my God.

She's saying that she's telling you how to vote.

God, I can't wait for this.

I can't wait for this fall.

Oh, man.

This is going to be so dreadful.

Have you heard my snowball theory yet?

Yes, that the snowball has gotten so big and they're pushing it uphill and it's about to roll back on.

Yes.

Yes.

Because it's collecting all kinds of stuff where it's becoming, you know, I talked yesterday about the creepy valley or the uncanny valley.

Do you know what the uncanny valley is?

No.

Uncanny Valley is a thing in CGI and animation, and we all have experienced it.

For instance,

you know, when you went to see

the Polar Express, it was good, but it wasn't, it was just a little creepy.

The Tom Hanks character was just a little creepy.

Not creepy, but just a little bit.

It wasn't off-putting.

It was off-putting.

It wasn't warm.

It wasn't, you didn't want to embrace it.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

It's because they were trying to make him look too human.

That's why Pixar and everybody else, when they do CGI, they will make their eyes really big.

They will distort the human features.

Because as you get closer to looking just like a human, there's something innate in us that says, ick.

When it's not exactly right, we say, ick, there's something wrong with that.

And that's called the uncanny valley.

So as you get closer and closer to, you know, having this human, as CGI gets better and better and goes up this hill, all of a sudden it reaches a point to where it's too close, but not right, and it plunges down and it creeps people out.

That's what's happening with the Democrats right now.

They are,

the American people, are compassionate.

They're fair.

They don't want people to be racist.

Nobody wants to be around Nazis.

Nobody wants people to have sexual harassment.

So they've done all these things and they're getting closer and closer to like, you know, the heart.

And they're like, yeah, this is, this is, this is us.

This is us.

This is us.

And it's going up.

And then all of a sudden, it goes too far.

And you're like, oh, wait a minute.

There's something really wrong here.

And even if you can't put your finger on it, it's just in all places with abortion, it went compassion, compassion, compassion, compassion to, uh-oh, there's something wrong here.

I don't feel good about where this is headed.

Same thing with Jesse Smollett.

And we saw it with

the Me Too movement with

what's his name,

the Supreme Court Justice.

Kavanaugh.

People were like, okay, though, this is a really good thing, the Me Too movement, then it started to get really creepy, and then it hit Kavanaugh, and it fell apart.

They are standing behind this giant snowball of social justice, green energy, all of this stuff.

They've made this snowball.

It kept getting bigger and bigger and they're just about up at the top and they're thinking, we are going to roll it down into that valley and we're going to crush everybody.

But the snowball, I firmly believe, has stopped.

It's not rolling back yet.

but it's stopped.

And they're pushing harder and harder and pushing more snow on it, more things on it.

And they don't realize that that snowball, because they keep doing this, is going to roll back and crush them.

What do you think of that?

I think it's a pretty good analogy.

I think that could happen.

I hope it happens because otherwise we're doomed.

If that snowball goes over the top and down the other side, we're done.

It's a real problem.

Yeah, we're done.

One way or another,

it's going to wipe one way or the other.

It's going to wipe everything out.

It's either going to wipe out all this social justice, you know,

there is no difference between male and female.

There is no right and wrong.

It's all about social justice.

Reverse the power pyramid of the most

intersected, being the most powerful, all of that.

If it rolls down the hill towards us, they get to the top and it rolls down.

That's the world we will have.

But I have a feeling the American people are being creeped out by it.

It's really hard to get anything meaningful out of this conversation without helium.

Right.

See, that's exactly right.

Exactly right.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

I want to pick up a conversation that I was having with Dr.

Will Riley yesterday

about

hate crimes.

Tell me about quickly your search on hate crimes and

what you write about in Hate Crime Hoax.

How did you come up with this?

What was your methodology?

And what did you find?

Well, in a sentence, the pitch line, good to be back on with you guys, by the way.

Thank you.

In a sentence, yeah, the pitch line for hate crime hoax is that very many, probably most, of the high-profile, widely publicized hate crime incidents that we've seen in the recent past have turned out to be hoaxes.

So we recently saw the complete collapse of the Jussie Smollett case.

Just a bit before that, my last appearance, we discussed Covington Catholic, where the claim was that this group of prep school athletes had surrounded this elderly Native American guy.

They chanted Build the Wall, odd thing to say to an Indian.

They tried to take his drum away.

But Eastern Michigan, there was allegedly graffiti all over the campus targeting African-American students.

Air Force Academy, where Jay Silveria literally came to the campus and spoke out against racism, one of our top top generals.

Grand Rapids, where a young black woman claimed that white men urinated on her.

University of Virginia, where the fraternities were accused of holding these sort of underground story of O style rape rings.

Duke La Crosse, Tawana Brawley.

I mean, you could go back for decades with this.

All of the cases that I just mentioned turned out not to have been real.

And a couple of years ago, as a graduate student in Chicago, I became aware of this trend because I was actually involved in a hate crime hoax case.

The bar Velvet Ultra Lounge, Velvet Rope Ultra Lounge, which was a very trendy, it was built as a hipster bisexual nightlife experience, if I recall correctly, very Chicago.

But this trendy bar that a couple of my friends and one of my ex-girlfriends would attend from time to time burned to the ground.

This was, I believe, in 2013.

And the claim of the owner was that throughout the bar, there were written these horrendous anti-gay slurs.

You know, gasoline or some accelerant had been used to set the place on fire.

He had been targeted with hate.

So I sort of casually followed that case like most young professionals in Chicago at the time.

And as I did that, I became aware of another case, which involved a guy named Derek Coccaline at the University of Chicago.

This was a student activist, a typical cliché Guevara type campus radical.

But he claimed that his Facebook and Twitter page had been hacked.

And these very violent messages threatening him with things that are never okay, brutal rape and so on, had been sent to him by conservative students.

So I was paying attention to both these cases, and there were a few others going on in the Midwest at the time.

At Grand Valley State, a young black woman claimed that during Black History Month, someone had broken into her room, I believe, and written anti-black epithets on kind of the whiteboard that college students keep.

At Michigan Tech, a white student was suspended for allegedly initially saying he was going to shoot all the black people on campus.

It turned out he said he was going to shoot them a smile on Twitter that was photographed using screenshots.

It was missed cropped to make him look like a racist.

But as I follow these local cases, they all collapsed.

I mean, four or five big-name high-profile cases you can still find.

In the Velvetge Ultra Lounge case, you had a bizarre situation where the owner apparently owed a lot of money to, in Chicago, perhaps people you wouldn't necessarily want to owe money to.

He'd racked up a lot of debt and he just set the place on fire, burned it to the ground, and then claimed it was a hate crime.

So held a fundraiser where he raised something like $30,000, paid off his debts, and opened a new business.

So the story that actually emerged was kind of a circus.

As I understand, he owns a bar called Bonsai Bar in Chicago today.

But following these cases and watching them collapse as they did, as I said at Michigan Tech, the student Matt Schultz turned out to be a complete anti-racist Christian guy, as I recall, no racial prejudices.

He had actually said, I'm going to shoot everyone a smile tomorrow to tone down these racial tensions.

And a campus activist had taken that message, screenshot it, and cropped it to make him look like a shooter.

So after these cases all collapsed, I decided to use modern empirical methods, which I had access to at that time, Stata, the more advanced SPSS programs, data crunching computers, as I was a grad student at a good university, and see how frequent this stuff was.

And as I graduated and I went into academia, I compiled a full list of these cases.

I have 516 cases of hate crime hoax, and I put the book together.

And that recently was published on February 26th with Regnery, a large conservative publisher.

And I mean, you asked about methodology.

A lot of it's simply looking, really using Google Scholar,

Bing Advanced, JSTOR, any of these resources to look for, you know, hate crime 2016, 2017, pick up the cases that you see, and then see how many of them survive to the end.

So I defined a fake hate crime as a case where there's a serious report,

either mass media coverage or police report, about 93% of the time, it was both, that turns out to have either never occurred or to have been staged by the quote-unquote victim or to have been committed by people very, very differently from those originally alleged to have committed it.

And they're not infrequent.

Kind of last point here, but I will say I'm not the only person ever to research this.

It just until this book had been almost an underground thing.

So you had www.fakehatecrimes.org.

That's a great resource, but that's just an internet site hosted by a couple of independent researchers.

You have the fake hate map, but that, as I recall, is on Reddit or was taken off Reddit.

Now it has its own site.

But again, that's not affiliated with the university.

But I looked through those resources and I compared them to my list, and I found that most of the cases on those lists were also real.

They were hoaxes that had occurred.

They just hadn't been widely documented.

So using all those tools, basically in a sentence, I put the book together.

I sold it, and the response to it has been good.

Okay, so

how common are these?

What is the percentage of hate crimes that are hoaxes?

It's actually a bit, I'm going to give an estimate, but it's actually a bit difficult to estimate that.

So, over most of my cases are concentrated in a period of about five years.

I did a lot of research in 2017 as I started in grad school around 2012.

So, you've got 516 cases concentrated very heavily between 2012 and 2017.

What an opponent would say, someone who argues that there are a lot of hate crimes, is, well,

there are 7,000 hate crimes reported every year.

So that's still only 5% or whatever it might be of the cases.

There are two issues with that.

First of all, only about one in 10 hate crime cases is nationally reported, to the extent where a researcher like myself could ethically see a story where it begins and a story where it ends and put it in a data set.

So I'm really looking at about 700 cases a year, not 7,000 that would even be available to me where you've had that kind of media coverage.

So, I mean, first of all, the most baseline estimate would be, okay, 516 out of, you know, seven times times out of 3,500.

But that brings in some other questions, though.

When you look at hate crime reports, in the case of most crimes, if you're talking about murder, it's hard to ignore a corpse.

If you're talking about burglary where there's someone in your house, the number of reports is pretty much equivalent to the number of crimes.

With hate crimes, that doesn't really seem to be true.

So there are 7,000 reports in a typical year, but the rate of conviction in hate crime cases seems to to be between 5 and 10 percent.

So in California, in the most recent year on record, which is 2016, you had 931 reported hate crimes, most on college campuses, which I think is interesting.

But of those, only 220 were shot along by the police to the prosecution, which is a very basic standard that means we have a suspect and we believe this wasn't a hoax.

We have any kind of suspect, and this probably happened.

Of those, only 51 led to a conviction, and that includes all plea bargains.

So I guess my numbers would be over five years, you're looking at 3,500 nationally reported cases.

I've got, say, because they were not all in this period, 450 hoaxes.

That's the rate of, say, 15%.

But the real comparison to me would be between hoaxes and convictions.

So I mean, if those 3,500 cases produced 350 convictions, the final number would be you have 350 convictions and 450 hoaxes.

So there is a very high rate of hoaxing in this field.

I don't think anyone, the numbers there are a little estimated, but pretty much on point.

Like, I don't think anyone could dispute.

There are a large number of these.

So I'm going to take a one-minute break and then I'm going to come back.

And I want to talk to you.

Is there any tell

that happens in these fake hoaxes?

Do they have anything in common?

But also, what I'm going to bring it back to Chicago, and I'll start here.

The Jesse Smollett case, with him being,

he says vindicated, and with half the country, I don't even think half the country, with 20% of the country, they'll look at it as vindication, and the other will not.

What are the ramifications of that?

And what does that tell somebody else who is prone to be a hate crime

hoaxer?

We'll continue the conversation here in just a second.

This is Dr.

Will Riley.

He has written a great book called Hate Crime Hoax.

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

So part of my job in this time when everybody seems to be running for something all the time, and so you don't know what people really mean until they do it, and you can't really trust anybody, what anybody says, in a run-up to an election because they'll run any direction that they want.

Look at the Democratic Party running so far left.

They will eventually.

When they coalesce around somebody, then they will run to the right.

Who do you believe?

When you can't believe the media, and you don't really know what the hell is going on,

what is really happening?

And when it comes to healthcare, this is costing us so much money as individuals.

Businesses are struggling.

People are struggling.

There is real pain.

And our health care system is so screwed up now that it's far worse than it's ever been.

And

I think the people in Washington are going to kill it.

Now,

there's a story that came out earlier that showed that Donald Trump said, hey, we've got to be the party of healthcare.

I don't even know what that means.

We should be the party of the free market.

That's the way to fix it.

Really open up the free market.

But I don't think anybody's really talking about that.

And there is a court case that I'm not sure if

people are just hyping this because they think it'll get votes or if it's real.

But Texas has decided to sue and say, you know, the individual mandate, you said, the court said it was not a fee, it was a tax.

And because it was a tax, it's constitutional.

The Obama administration said, and by the way, if you get rid of the mandate, then you get rid of the entire health care system because it doesn't work and the whole thing collapses.

So Texas is saying, well, there is no tax because it's zero.

So there is no mandate.

We should abolish all of it.

California, of of course, is coming out, blah, blah, blah.

Donald Trump has said that he is not going to go to court and defend Obamacare.

Is this a big deal?

What does it all mean?

The other part of my job is to try to figure it out and bring in the people who actually follow this for a living and know it.

Philip Klein is an expert on this.

He's executive editor at the Washington Examiner.

He's also an author of Overcoming Obamacare.

What is really happening, Philip?

Well, there are a few things happening.

I think it's pretty clear that what happened is that Republicans through four election cycles promised that they were going to repeal and replace Obamacare.

And when they had a chance to do it, they couldn't.

At the time, I said this was the biggest broken promise in American history because never before had you had a promise that

office holders in one party at every level of government, state, local, federal, said we're going to repeal this thing, and then they had a chance and they didn't do it.

And now that President Trump is in re-election mode, he recognizes that

this is a big problem that he didn't deliver on his promise to repeal and replace.

And so

because Democrats control the House, there's not much you can do.

So now

he's looking to the courts.

I think that this

particular case, and I've written a lot about it, I was a big proponent of the challenge to Obamacare in 2012, and I was outraged by

Chief Justice Roberts' decision.

But in this case, I think the argument is much weaker, and I don't think that it really has a chance at the Supreme Court because of the fact that they'd need

John Roberts to sign on to it.

And if he refused to overturn Obamacare

when the mandate had a penalty attached and

it had more coercive power,

and even he found a way to rule that that's constitutional, now that the tax is zero dollars,

it's very doubtful that he's going to somehow revisit that and say he wants to

overturn it.

Particularly because in 2012, when the Supreme Court originally heard the case, nobody had benefited from Obamacare yet.

There was the exchange didn't open until 2014.

So at that point, they could have struck down Obamacare and it wouldn't have harmed anyone.

Whereas now, if the Supreme Court were going to strike it down, then millions of people who receive benefits would lose those benefits.

Now, you and I have a different view of what government's power should be, but the reality is that that's going to weigh on John Roberts.

He found a way to save Obamacare the first time.

He's not going to destroy it now that millions of people depend on it for a case that

has a weaker legal argument.

What do you think, Philip, about the way he handled this?

There's a story now that's come out

that John Roberts, I mean, he contorted himself into a pretzel

and changed his mind.

All the things that we had heard rumor of now been verified that he was looking at the image of the court and not the actual law.

He just wanted to save the and protect the image of the court.

That, to me, is impeachable as a Supreme Court justice.

Go ahead.

I mean, the thing was, yeah, there's this new book out,

and I

wrote something on it because it's a biography of John Roberts and his time on the Supreme Court, and there's a chapter on his deliberations in Obamacare.

And what was pretty revealing to me is that if you read the book, if you trust this account, then effectively he treated the

Supreme Court like a legislative body.

And there are many points in the book where it says he was conflicted between his head and his heart, what his head said, you know, the law said versus the idea of overturning a law that was meant to address the health insurance crisis.

And when they first voted on the law,

it according to the book, Roberts voted to overturn the individual mandate and actually uphold the Medicaid expansion.

And the actual decision ended up being the opposite because of all the horse trading that went on.

The other conservatives on the bench thought that all of Obamacare had to go.

If the mandate went,

he was Roberts was uncomfortable with that, so he went to the liberals and said, okay, if I say that it's okay as a tax, will you sign on to the overturning the Medicaid portion?

So effectively, the way it seems as though he decided that he wanted to overturn part of Obamacare, but substantially keep it intact.

And then he reverse-engineered a legal argument to get to that point and negotiated with the various justices to get agreement on that, as opposed to just narrowly being dictated by what does the law say and what is this allowable under the Constitution.

And I think that's very worrisome.

When you look at the future, and

the reason why I think, my personal opinion, the GOP didn't get rid of Obamacare is because they didn't have it a replacement.

And they are looking at repeal and replace.

I don't want it replaced.

I want the free market opened up.

I want the laws that have made this a very profitable game for

some people to go away.

Let me buy insurance across state lines, et cetera, et cetera.

Just open up the free market.

Donald Trump, when he says we have to be the party of health care, what do you think that means?

And what do the people, is there anybody that is looking at the free market?

Is that a chance of ever coming back in your opinion?

I think it's very unlikely.

Look,

in 2015, I saw all of this coming and I wrote my book, Overcoming Obamacare.

And what that did is it said, right now, the rights divided on Obamacare.

There's plenty of plans out there, contrary to the myth that Republicans don't have a plan.

In actuality, there were a lot of plans.

There were too many.

Nobody could agree on one single approach.

So I said, okay, here are the three basic approaches, ranging from reforming

Obamacare to make it less restrictive to what you're saying, which I said, let's restart and move in a purely fear market direction and completely scrap it, right?

And I said, here are basically the three different paths you can choose.

And Republicans have to decide on this and fight this out among themselves now so that

when they're in a position to do something, they can hit the ground running.

Obviously, they didn't take my advice, and all of the fights that I predicted several years in advance played out and nothing was agreed on.

And so I think it's a real problem, and it continues to be the problem.

Because say what you want about the Democrats, they know what they want to do.

They want to take over everyone's health care.

They want the private insurers out of it.

They want one single government insurer.

And they want that insurer to dictate prices to doctors and hospitals and everyone to be on the same plan.

We know what they want, and they're very clear about it.

And the only argument on the left is how quickly they can get there.

On the right,

there is is this sort of disagreement because you have people that are trying to be democratic light and they are trying to say, well, let's expand Medicaid a little less, let's provide a little fewer subsidies.

And the argument I made during the whole repeal debate is, look, the bill that you're writing that's trying to make all these accommodations to the left is a 20% support.

It's getting attacked by the left and the media.

So why not go to an actual free market plan that's going to reduce people's premiums?

If you said that we're going to have a plan that allows people to purchase the type of health insurance that they want, it would be a totally you know, we'd have a totally different system.

And that's the problem, is that we have a system in which people think either the government or their employer are picking everything up.

So the normal free market mechanisms that work in every other part of the free market

you know,

aren't applicable to healthcare for that reason.

And the, you know, I make the example in my book.

Like,

look at the, you know, look at an iPhone, right?

In,

you know, 20 years ago, there was this famous meme on the internet a few years back where it showed a Radio Shack ad from the 1990s.

And it had a video camera and an answering machine and a telephone and an alarm clock and all of these things that you could now carry around in your par pocket because there is competition

for people to make, to innovate and to

find a way to bring down prices and increase quality over time.

And

the power of what I carry around in my pocket is drastically different

from

what existed within my own lifetime.

And there's no reason that that type of innovation can't happen in health care beyond the fact that we have a system in which everything is rigged from the top down and where government sets all the rules or everything has to be rigged through the employer.

People don't have any choice over what type of insurance they have.

And

if Republicans don't rally around the plan, I could tell you exactly what's going to happen.

You're going to have Democrats take over, if not in 2021, then in 2025 someday, and they're going to want to go in the direction of single-player.

They may not get there overnight, but they'll try to.

They'll expand Obamacare.

They'll end what's a government plan for Obamacare and rig the game so that millions and millions of people shift over to that.

That's what the argument is on the left right now.

Philip Klein, executive editor of Washington Examiner, also the author of Overcoming Obamacare.

Thanks so much for talking to me.

I want to play something because what he just said is in 2021 or 2025, they will take over.

And the way he said it reminded me of the Trojan horse audio.

Now,

this is such important audio.

This is what we played at Fox, and it was inside the left.

Who was this, Stu, do you remember?

Jacob

something

from the Tides Foundation.

Yeah, and he was talking to a group of leftists and policymakers, and he was talking about Obamacare and how we are going to do Obamacare, but don't worry about Obamacare.

Come together.

Now, where are the secret meetings of us saying, okay, we're going to do this, but don't worry, it's a Trojan horse to get us back to a free market.

Are there anybody that actually believes in that anymore?

Listen to what they said.

We played this.

We talked about it almost every night for almost a year, and it was dismissed.

Listen to it.

Someone once said to me, This is a Trojan horse for a single payer.

And I said, Well, it's not a Trojan horse, right?

It's just right there.

I'm telling you, we're going to get there over time, slowly, but we'll move away from reliance on employment-based health insurance as we should.

But we'll do it in a way that we're not going to frighten people into thinking they're going to lose their private insurance.

We're going to give them a choice of public and private insurance when they're in the pool, and we're going to let them keep their private employment-based insurance if their employer continues to provide it.

There it is.

This is the best of the Glen Beck program.

So, Pat,

who gets a speeding ticket every time he crosses into Mike Town.

I paid for that firehouse you're talking about.

No, you didn't.

The Paccaray dividend.

You know, that's what they call it.

No, you didn't.

No, you didn't.

I'll show you my

my property tax.

No, you didn't.

You maybe bought the stove, but I bought the movie theater.

I bought the en-suite

live-in quarters for everyone.

I mean, how much did just this coin cost that Tim got at the grand opening?

I mean...

Just sending this to 800 or 900 residents of your town.

Wait, wait, wait.

Yeah.

Wait, wait.

Wait, what?

There's something like 900 residents of your town.

900.

No, my town's bigger than that.

And that's why you need.

Is my town bigger than that?

Everything

here kind of bleeds into itself.

How big is my town?

We have a $15 million firehouse.

How big of a firehouse does this town need?

You're telling me it's smaller than I thought?

I thought we were like 20,000 people.

Oh, no.

Nowhere to go.

Well, it is.

We are 15 million.

What is the population of my town?

It's definitely bigger than what Pat's saying.

It's not 900 people, but it is 992 people.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

It's 992 people.

We have a $15 million firehouse for 99 people.

But the good thing about that is it's only $15,000 per person.

And that includes children.

Oh, that's not bad at all.

That's not bad.

That's good value.

Now, I will say, it is.

On the other hand, though, when you look at it, it is 6.7 square miles.

Oh, wow.

So that is only 2.14 million per square mile.

Are you guys trying to kill me?

I will explode.

I'm going to explode.

My town is only six square miles.

Six square miles.

Six square miles, and I have a 15 million.

I am going to town council meetings right now.

I am going to the next town council meeting.

Are you kidding me?

We are six square miles and we have a $15 million firehouse.

It's only 2.14 million per square mile.

That's not bad.

That's not bad.

And I will tell you this: it's a well-policed 6.4 square miles.

Yes, it is, Pat.

It is.

I will tell you.

I will tell you, this is the only town that I've ever lived in.

I mean, the police are, they are on it.

Remember when we had this string of robberies, and they were sophisticated robberies.

They were scoping these houses when we first moved here.

They were so sophisticated that they stayed in one house for almost two days to rob it completely.

Didn't they remove the safe?

They removed the safe from the foundation.

Yes, from the foundation.

I mean, it was that these guys, the police department, boom, they got them.

I mean,

they are good.

They are really good.

Sure.

They probably should be.

Please,

we don't have to build a new police station to do it.

Oh, of course.

Because this is not a police station, fire station.

This is just the firehouse.

And by the way, again, in case you missed it, there's only three currently used fire trucks for the town.

No, they're not used.

They're not even used very often.

Yeah, they are beautiful.

And, you know, there is a lot of open space in this town.

And I've never heard of a fire in the town.

Has there ever been a fire there?

Did they need any fire department?

Could they be serviced by my town's fire department?

At least my town has 45,000 people in it.

You know, 900 people.

We are not helping your town.

I'm not putting a scratch on those fire trucks.

Not to help the riffraff like you and the next town.

No, no, you're not going to the slums

with your beautiful fire trucks.

They're not coming my way.

That's unbelievable.

By the way, that was incredible.

There was a town hall

about this

firehouse before it was constructed, which happened just a couple of weeks before the 2016 election when everyone was super focused on local fire truck issues.

Is that when they did it?

That's when it happened.

And you didn't attend, did you?

No.

You're not involved in local government, and therefore

you know what?

Honestly, this is what happened.

Honestly, you know, now that I know there's only 900 of us, I'm just going to start having more children.

And then we'll just all attend because I could change this town.

900 people, we could change this town.

I thought it was much bigger than that.

And I tell you, we have one of the nicest schools, literally one of the nicest schools in the nation.

People will move into my town, which I thought was strangely much bigger.

So I don't know how people do it, but they move into the town just to be able to attend this school.

And I mean, they'll move anywhere from the country into this town because you get full access to the academy.

I'm not sending my kids to the academy because I went to it.

It's beautiful.

There is a.

Have you been to the academy?

I drive by the academy all the time too.

I've never been inside.

It has a gigantic, beautiful fireplace in the lobby.

Of a school.

Of the school.

I've never seen that before.

Crazy.

And if you live in town, you get to go, that's your public school.

Well, that's fantastic.

As long as you like a UN world curriculum,

it's like the little red schoolhouse.

It is.

It literally is.

It's the little red schoolhouse.

And I'm like, what?

I'm living in Texas.

I know my neighbors.

How is this happening?

How is this happening?

And all the neighbors say the same thing.

Oh, isn't it great?

No, it's not great.

No, it's not great.

What happened?

Has anybody but us complained about the fire?

I have not heard anybody.

Thank God.

Tim and my daughter, who also live in town, Tim and my daughter, they were the ones that went.

And they were like, this is insane, Dad.

You're going to have an aneurysm when you actually go inside of this place.

But I haven't haven't heard anybody say anything but, oh, isn't this great?

No.

No.

No.

Nobody needs stone archways outside a fire station.

I don't understand that.

Every time we drive by, and I drive by twice a day, I look at that.

There are stone archways outside a fire station.

Have you ever seen a house that nice?

No, no, not.

Certainly not in, not in.

And not even.

I live in a pretty nice area.

I live in a very nice area.

And there's no house as nice as this fire station.

No houses.

I swear to you, it is nicer than the houses that the 900 people apparently own well just the stove if it's a wolf stove what are those ten thousand dollars yeah twenty thousand dollars i don't

it yes you could get cheaper stoves

yes yes yes yes i know yes i know i know lg yeah they're very nice and they would do the same thing they would heat the food the same way

i am you know that is so far down on my priority list because restaurants will have wolf stoves okay it's not just rich people restaurants industrial well

stoves.

That's a private business.

Yeah, I know that.

I know that.

But it's industrial.

I just get the movie theater?

You're talking to me about the screen?

I didn't know there was a movie theater.

When there's a movie theater in it, that's insane.

The screen comes down from the

as the curtains come down and they all sit in these plush leather chairs that have the shield embroidered on the back of each chair.

It's insane.

That's crazy.

And if you're a fireman, like you may have a long shift where you're staying there and like it's somewhat standard, right, to have like some little room to watch television comfortably.

You should

have a lot of money.

But you don't need electric lines.

You don't need the electric screen.

You don't need the movie seats, and you certainly don't need the embroidery in the movie seats.

Guys, you should see the gym.

You should see the gym in this thing.

Oh, there's a gym in it.

There's a gym.

Wow.

It is a fully

the best freaking gym.

I mean, it's like, it's like, what?

I mean, do we have like Arnold Schwarzenegger coming to use the gym every day?

This is a beautiful gym, and it's insane.

And I feel bad because I don't, I'm not saying anything bad about the fireman.

In fact, if you're a fireman,

if you're a fireman, you need a job in my town.

Okay.

This is the sweetest.

I don't think we have any fires.

But you.

I've never heard of one.

Wait till you see the firehouse.

You need to apply to my town.

And do not tell me what they're offering for salaries.

Do not tell me

because my head will explode.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, let me find out.

Take a quick commercial break, and we'll come back and blow Glenn's mind again.

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