Best of the Program | Guests: Bill O'Reilly & John Ziegler | 2/15/19

Oh my gosh, what a wild ride this Friday podcast really is.

Uh, we start out with the

incredibly bad bill that apparently the president is going to sign.

We urged our listeners to write and call the White House go on social media.

Please go for a continuing resolution over this bill, and we go through it and why it's so bad.

Also, Bill O'Reilly, who has a completely different take on things, and then John Ziggler tells us the story, this amazing story,

about the celebrity that was accosted by Trump supporters in Chicago on one of the coldest nights of the year.

A star from Empire.

That one's falling apart and falling apart quickly.

We talk to John Ziegler all on today's podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the Glenbeck program.

Okay,

um,

I wrote to, um,

I wrote to a senator,

I wrote to a Silicon Valley guy,

and I wrote to

a military intelligence person,

and I said, the spending bill and the national emergency thoughts.

All three of them came back with a different answer.

All three of them.

But the one thing they had in common was: this is horrible.

Now, some of them said, do it.

Some of them said don't.

Some of them were really strong.

Do it.

Some were very strong.

Don't.

But they all agreed, this is a turning point.

This is a crossroads for America.

And this is a bad decision either way we go.

So let's first.

That's the opposite of a win-win.

We are in a lose-lose.

Yeah, we're in a lose-lose.

This is something that we cannot,

we need to debate, but we cannot point fingers at each other and call each other enemies if we disagree, because the left

will win on on that.

Again, you just described a lose-lose for conservatives, so I don't know how the left isn't winning already.

Because if they divide us even more, we won't be able to stand the onslaught that I think is coming.

We have to, you know, this, hmm,

I have tried to reach out, not across the aisle, but across the divide in the conservative movement.

And I have tried to apologize for past behavior, whatever, and just say, look, I'm going to be a guy who will point out the things that I believe are right and the things that I believe are wrong.

And I will support when I can.

I will stand up against when I must.

But I am not going to judge you or anyone else.

We must stay together.

We can disagree, but we cannot become enemies.

I don't know how many people really feel that way today because we are so polarized, but we have to reduce that polarization or we don't make the coming onslaught.

Before we get into this, I want you to know that

everything in me,

everything in me

says this is

the next phase.

I want to say final phase, but I don't feel comfortable enough saying that.

This is the fundamental transformation.

This is the change that came with all of this hope.

And I want you to know that we, I believe, are standing at the abyss.

We are standing at that cliff

that we dare not go over.

If we go over, we are lost.

And it's going to be very hard not to go over that cliff.

But if you look at the things that we are dealing with now, we are dealing with the,

I believe, and

I told you, if you're a longtime listener to this program, that I am trying to not use the word evil.

You know, too many times we will say, oh, that's just evil.

Those people are evil.

Well, no, they're not.

They disagree.

They have a different approach.

They think they're doing the right thing.

Most times.

Some are evil.

And they know that what they're doing is totally destructive.

And they have purposes that do not, and they know

they do not free people they enslave people

and I've tried to swear that word off but I will tell you what we are in right now is a battle between good and evil and there is evil on all sides evil begins with a spirit of contention

Nothing good happens when everybody is at each other's throats.

And and it fogs our view of the real evil.

But what we are fighting, let me give you just two examples, with abortion.

We are not talking about babies in the first trimester where I think God will look at us to judge us and go,

Okay, I don't know how you missed that one, but you honestly were looking at it and really had compassion or whatever it was.

And if there is justice after life,

it will be worked out.

I don't know how it's going to work out, but people who have that honest debate of, I don't know if it's life, you know, as soon as the, you know, the egg is fertilized.

We're not talking about that now.

We're talking about letting children die that we don't think are viable.

We're talking about killing a child after mom is dilated and she is giving birth because mom doesn't want to raise it.

Every expert will tell you in health,

there is no way keeping that child inside that mother dead for three days and then having her go through the three days that it takes to birth that baby is good for her physical health.

No way.

We're talking about the killing of children now.

That's evil.

We are also now in this bill, there is a provision that, in fact,

I would like to read it exactly so

you hear the actual

language in it.

None of the funds provided by this act or any other act, this is section 224A,

or provided from any accounts in the Treasury of the United States derived by the collection of fees available to the components funded by this act.

So, in other words, no money that comes from the treasury or any money that is collected through any kind of tax can be used by the Secretary of Homeland Security to place in detention, remove, refer for a decision whether to initiate removal proceedings or initiate removal proceedings against a sponsor, a potential sponsor, or member of a household of a sponsor or potential sponsor of an unaccompanied alien child as defined in section 462G of the Homeland Security Act of 2002.

So, what does this mean?

This means if you have a child with you,

you have amnesty.

No one is going to stop you.

They cannot stop you.

And this is a permanent act.

Now, let me ask you: if I'm a drug dealer,

I'm a dealer in anything nefarious,

there is a call for young children on the sex slave trade.

We already know that the border is a horrible place for the sex slave trade, both directions.

This now allows somebody just to kidnap, forget about sex slave, just kidnap a kid.

You pay me enough, I'm going to kidnap a kid

and you walk across the border with a kid.

Or forget kidnapping the kid, paying the kid to go across the border and then come back to Mexico and go across the border with somebody else.

That's what this bill does.

We are enslaving children.

We are looking the other way.

This is an open invitation to corruption with children.

And anyone who said,

anyone who says they are a progressive,

what was one of the first things the progressives did?

The reason why the progressive movement originally took root

is because it was for women and children and stopping the what was called at the time work, but it was really slavery of children.

Children and women were almost damn near enslaved by workhouses.

And so, what did they do?

They passed all kinds of laws to protect children.

This law does the exact opposite that any fair-minded progressive would want.

We are on the cliff of insanity.

The same day this is happening.

Capitalism is on the run.

Amazon is being told, we don't want you in New York, but it's not New Yorkers.

It's not the governor.

It's not even Bill de Blasio.

Polling overwhelmingly shows New Yorkers want the Amazon facility.

Correct.

25,000 jobs.

But socialists...

have raised such a stink that Amazon has no place to go.

And Amazon says we cannot be bogged down by a bunch of protesters all of the time.

So they're looking at Chicago, but they're afraid the same thing will happen there.

They're looking in New Jersey.

They say the same thing will happen there.

The third one is Dallas, Texas,

which I would have said,

come, you're going to find a very, very happy group of people that will take those 25,000 jobs.

And that is true for the most part today,

but it is not true in Texas tomorrow.

The righteous in Germany and Poland didn't suddenly become righteous.

They just refused to go over the cliff with everyone else.

They were not

warriors in the street.

They remembered what they learned was truth from their childhood, and they refused to bow to any new truth.

And they soldiered on.

It is critical that we keep our cool and we keep holding to the truth.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

We're just, I, can I just say to you, can I say on the air?

Should I say on the air what I just said to you?

If you feel led to, yeah.

I will tell you that I am, I am overwhelmed right now, overwhelmed

by the feeling, I must tell you,

this is the beginning.

Prepare yourself.

This is the beginning.

Things are going to change.

I don't know.

I will tell you that

when I'm going to be so ridiculed.

Why stop now, though?

Why stop?

You've had 20 years of this.

We have five people listening, then those five people,

you know, the blood is on your terrible news.

There's a lot more than five people listening.

I know.

Okay, so, you know,

when I talk about things like the caliphate and things like that, I know

what I have come up with in myself by doing my research.

And I know when it's not me, it's more information than even I have.

And quite honestly,

I have had very little of that up until the summer.

And I

understand it now

because

everything that I had already said, it took like five years to catch up.

That's now done.

And since this summer, things have just gone

and just are falling into place again.

And I'm seeing it.

And

I am telling you, I see things as a flat wall.

I don't see how much time it's going to take.

I see it as a flat wall.

I see what's coming.

And it's in me, it is like right now.

But I have learned through time

that

might as well go all the way.

Here's a full money.

God doesn't have time like we have time.

He sees everything as now.

And so if he is showing me anything, he's showing it to me now.

And it's for me and you to understand this is not now.

This is all coming.

But I am overwhelmed and have been.

This has been building in me for a while.

And if you're a longtime listener, you've heard me when I say to you, you know, things like, please grab your family, please make sure that all the things that we've ever talked about are done.

Please do it.

Please do it.

I am overwhelmed with the feeling we are now officially at the cliff, and

there will be no bystanders.

You have to engage

peacefully, peacefully, calmly, lovingly with everyone.

Please.

Okay, I've said it.

Now the blood of everybody else.

It's on you, not on me.

I've said it.

Let me

ask a question.

So

the border wall.

What we're seeing here now is that we are going to theoretically get some of the border wall

through a national emergency.

Forget all the legal problems and the questions about that, whether it can go through or not.

There's people on both sides of that, or whether it's a good idea or what their ramifications would be later on.

Forget all that for a second.

If I were to say to you, Glenn, you are going to get what appears to be

approximately maybe 20% of the border wall.

through a national emergency, which is about what we're, if he's going to get to the full $5.7 billion, we don't know yet how that's going to go.

But you're going to get that 20 of the border wall that trump is trying to get and in exchange for it this is what will happen no longer will tax dollars be able to be used to arrest or deport any child who is is is an unaccompanied child illegal alien or the person with them the person who's taking care of them or any person who lives in any of their homes or someone who could potentially take care of them at any time or someone who could potentially live in the home of someone who could potentially take care of them at any time.

Would you make just that trade?

No.

No way would I make that trade.

And that's just one part of that spending bill.

It's the

answer on this bill is a continuing resolution.

That is horrible.

Please, Mr.

President, reject this bill.

Don't declare an emergency.

Continuing resolution.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

Bill O'Reilly, the country is at a crossroads here.

I don't know if you've had a chance to read the bill, but Congress certainly didn't have a chance to read it before they signed it and passed it.

But it is,

dare I use the word today, abortion.

And the Congress is shouting their abortion.

Meanwhile, the president's about to speak to declare a national emergency.

Make sense of this.

Well, I'm curious,

as far as the spending bill is concerned,

what troubles you about just the actual spending from the federal government until September?

Well, it adds a whole bunch of spending.

I have focused very little on the actual spending.

You don't like it because it's permissive and no discipline.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

It adds a lot of new spending.

But in this bill, let me see if I can find it real quick.

It has things in it.

For instance, we can hire new border agents, but they have to help people find a place to live.

You are not allowed to

use any of these funds.

You can now, let's see, none of the funds by this act or any other act

or provided from any account in the Treasury of the United States derived from the collection of fees, blah, blah, blah,

can be used to place in detention, remove, refer for a decision whether to initiate removal proceedings or initiate removal proceedings against a sponsor, potential sponsor, or member of a household of a sponsor, or a potential sponsor of an unaccompanied alien child.

So you can no longer use tax dollars to arrest or deport anyone who lives in the same home as an unaccompanied child that's an alien, or could be a potential.

I mean, that is a any,

you know, MS-13, they say 30 to 40% of arrests of MS-13 members are quote-unquote unaccompanied alien children.

So, I mean, this is.

Look,

I'm not so worried about this minutia because what I see is the long game,

and that's what President Trump is doing today.

What is the long game?

Please tell me the long game.

Make me feel better.

Re-election of Trump.

That's a long game.

So Trump says, look, they got me in a corner.

They kind of outsmarted me in the sense that they shut the government down.

Americans overwhelmingly don't want that.

They don't want that as a solution.

So I got to get out of this.

And I'll get out of it by signing the stupid bill

and then finding money elsewhere, which he has.

Well, in 2009.

In the bill, it also says he can only build in the Rio Grande Valley, and it is intentionally.

Yeah, but only under the bill it can.

He's going to declare a state of emergency, which is going to override the bill and basically say, I'm going to bill where I want, and I got $9 billion more to do it.

And here's where it comes from.

He's already got it.

He's already got the $9 billion.

So

the state of emergency that overrides

the dopey bill.

Everybody has to understand that.

It overrides, or he's adding on top of it.

No, it overrides it because an executive action by the President of the United States declaring a state of emergency where the bills in place can be superseded to deal with that emergency.

That's what a state of emergency is.

That's why everybody hates it.

They don't want to give the power that the president that much power to override the legislature.

But the long game is that he knows that if he just wimped away and didn't do anything, he'd lose.

Because that

15%

of the Ann Coulter right would turn on him.

And he needs to.

No, you know, I disagree with you here, Bill.

I'm watching Twitter, and this may change, but I'm watching Twitter, and I'm watching the usual, you know, Porter, Trump, you know, suspects that are, you know, mad at him if he does anything like that.

And they're not for this bill either.

He does have another out, and that's pass a continuing resolution.

Veto this and pass a continuing resolution.

I think that, again, we'll go on to the long game.

Number one, the Twitter mob are activists, so they don't reflect his support crew.

What the Trump administration and the Obama administration, everybody does, is internal polling, okay, that we don't see.

And the internal polling, I can tell you for a fact, showed that, number one, Americans do not want another government shutdown.

And number two, as long as the president starts to build some of the wall,

that they're likely to vote for him for reelection.

So that's what the internal polling showed.

So that the decision was made by the Trump administration to go this way to try to get as many people in his base to basically they don't like it, but they're not going to turn on him.

So that is the long game.

I want Stu to ask you a question that he asked me.

And I want to hear your reaction.

Well, Bill, it looks like

the national emergency would get potentially about 8% more of the wall built, which is a significant amount on a 2,000-mile border, plus the 2% that's in the bill.

So

it's not insignificant.

And I think the border wall is a good idea.

Taking out the whole thing about the precedent that the national emergency sets and everything else, this thing that we talked about briefly a minute ago, which basically says

you no longer can use tax funds to arrest illegal immigrants in almost every situation, I think it encourages.

No, no, not almost every situation.

Only when minors are involved.

Involved.

It's a minor-driven thing.

Right.

That's true.

I will tell you that it's going to be used

for smugglers.

Oh, it'll increase.

Wouldn't you?

Because, you know, every kid they can find will be stapled to an adult.

Yep.

You know, you know that's going to happen.

Of course.

It incentivizes human trafficking.

It's a chess game here.

So you look, you have to step back and you have to say, what is the most effective way to defeat the permissive forces on the left who don't want any border?

Okay, so they want an open border.

So wait.

I wrote a message of the day on billorilly.com that laid out what happened in California when the Hispanic population, Latino population,

went from 3 million to 15 million.

The whole state became a Democratic precinct because of that five-fold jump in Hispanics living in California.

That's what happened there.

It's provable.

So now you have in the largest state, one-party state.

That's what the Democratic Party wants to do in Arizona, in Texas, in Florida, flood the zone with as many Latinos as they can, get in here by chain migration.

Remember, you get in here and you establish residency legally, you can take in 30 people.

Okay?

That's chain migration.

So if Trump gets doesn't get re-elected and someone like Biden or Michelle Obama wins,

then

our country is essentially going to change dramatically.

Yes, I agree.

Demographically, politically,

economically, everything's going to change.

So that the game that the Trump people are playing now is we have to stop that.

Okay, so

if you're building a wall, if you're building a wall, I know you say this is minutiae.

If you're building a wall

with this bill,

it accomplishes everything the Democrats want, even if...

There's no other alternative.

Yes, there is.

A continuing resolution.

This is a symbol of the fight.

It's a symbol of the fight.

It's like Rubicon.

Expensive symbol, though.

We have to make our stand here because there's nowhere else to make the stand.

Where would you make the stand?

Say Trump

signs the bill, as you suggested, and then does something else.

No, no, no.

I don't want him to sign the bill.

My problem is with the bill.

My problem is with the bill.

No, it doesn't.

A continuing resolution.

We've had one since George Bush left office.

Why this push all of a sudden for this spending bill when you can just do what we've done since George Bush left office?

We don't have a budget.

We have a continuing resolution.

So sign a continuing resolution.

He has to basically go to the Congress and either put his name on a bill or not.

If he doesn't, as you suggest, then chaos breaks out.

I mean, it's just all over the place.

And he can't even govern

because every single day is going to be more litigation.

It's going to be this, that.

He's overstepped his authority.

We want this.

Nothing else will get done.

The whole government will be paralyzed.

What happened in Great Britain with the Brexit thing?

So

here's

my

he is going to announce a continuing resolution, and he's going to sign this bill.

The bill will be implemented because everyone will be looking at the massive fight that's coming over the

state of emergency.

And they're going to hold that wall up every step of the way through courts.

It will go to the Supreme Court.

Marco Rubio just said he's not sure he could support that.

I mean,

it's going to be, that's all we're going to be talking about.

Meanwhile, more ICE agents will be employed because they can employ another

1,200, but none of them can actually work on detaining people.

According to this bill, they have to be hired to help relocate people from the border into the center of the country, wherever it is they want to go, and just catch and release.

But now we're a travel agency.

Now, ICE is a travel agency.

Yeah, where do you want to go?

We'll drive you.

I mean, it's and that's and so so.

So, my thought is that you're taking it way too literally.

I don't think any of this stuff's going to happen.

I don't think any ICE agents are going to help anybody relocate into the United States.

They're basically going to try to wall it up in the sense that they're not going to let anybody in, just like they did with the caravan.

All right, so the caravan shows up in Tijuana, now they're in Texas, and there's thousands of people living in tents.

Well, they're not getting in here.

They're not getting in here for asylum.

They're not getting in here anyway because they walled it up.

They basically said we're not taking you.

You're not coming in and just for the press.

We'll take 25 a day.

And we'll process them.

That's what's going to happen here.

It's the same thing.

But I think that the larger picture is that Americans have a decision to make.

What kind of country do you want?

All right.

And that's what the Trump people are playing.

They're playing, look at these crazy Democrats.

Look what they want to do.

All right.

So you can't give them power.

And that's what they're gambling on in the White House.

That message will get through.

And I think that I'm hopeful that that message is going to get through because

we are at the end of the Republic.

Okay.

Bill, one quick question for you, because you are the author of 975 number one New York Times bestsellers.

And you have another one that is sure to be number one coming up about the president.

You know him better than anybody.

Every time you talk to him all the time, you always add really interesting perspective about the way he thinks.

At least that's what I think.

I don't know what anyone else thinks.

But when it comes to this, we know the fight, it's going to be a crazy fight.

Why didn't he stand like this when Republicans had control for two years?

Because they couldn't get

a full caucus in the House because of the freedom people

to support

what he wanted to do.

So the freedom, what is it, the

freedom caucus.

Okay.

So they basically said, look, we're hard guys, and you're blaming this what we want.

And Ryan, the speaker, couldn't coalesce.

They couldn't get it.

And then in the Senate, McConnell kept saying to him, look, I'm not going to get 60.

So

no matter what I do, whatever proposal I put out,

we're not going to get 60.

We're not going to be able to vote.

So he stymied in both houses.

Okay, so

I think it's more likely now, right?

Like now the Democrats have control.

At least then the rest of the country is not going to be available.

Yeah, but now what he's going to do is not even listen to them.

So I can't impress upon you enough that a state of emergency gives a president tremendous latitude to do exactly what he wants to do.

Oh,

I am very well aware of that.

But you say, okay, the Democrats are dancing around saying, okay, now when we get power, we're going to do the gun thing.

But they're going to run up against constitutional issues.

On that one, they will.

That will be difficult.

But

global warming, they won't.

Because

I wrote a really brilliant column that I hope somebody read to ban.

I did not.

And I didn't ask anybody to read it.

What is this Green New Deal all about, really?

It's about totalitarianism.

Yes.

In every single country that has gone from a ruler to a dictator,

the dictator phonied up some panic thing that threw the population into this

frenzy that we'll give away our rights and you can make it better, Mussolini.

Every single one.

Throughout history, there's never been an exception where people voluntarily said, oh, we'd like a dictator.

Come on in here, Franco, Franco, and tell us what to do.

This global warming stuff, this is where we're all going to die.

We're all going to die.

So we have to do Green New Deal where we, the Democrats in Washington, tell you what to eat.

All right, we're going to tell you what to drive, what what medical uh procedures you can and cannot have.

We're going to take your stuff.

After you die, we're going to take everything you have.

Okay?

This is totalitarianism.

This isn't democracy.

So

they want to control the lives of Americans on every single front.

And they're using

climate change to frighten

people in Berkeley, California, who can barely find their way to the facilities.

All right, they're that dense into supporting totalitarianism and one-party rule, which is exactly what they have in California.

One party rule.

And that's what's happening.

And it's frightening because it could succeed with the decline of our educational system.

And by the way, the Green New Deal will tell the teacher what the teacher can teach and not teach.

It extends into every single thing America has.

And that's why I've sold 987,000 books, million books, because I figured this stuff out first.

All right.

Well, only because you were listening to this program about four days ago when we said the same thing.

Look, here's the thing.

Bill, here's the thing.

You're absolutely correct on that.

There is a growing

fascistic

or communistic, whatever it is, totalitarian

view.

However, it shapes up, there is a totalitarian view.

And the one thing you left out is the economy.

If the economy, if Brexit goes horribly, which I think I'm hoping is kind of like the hype on, you know, Y2K, but if it goes horribly and Europe goes into the abyss, so do we, and everyone will be clamoring for a bigger government,

and then

we see it go away.

No, I just disagree with that analysis.

Okay, good.

Well, hang on, hang on.

We're going to come back with more from Bill O'Reilly here in a second.

I do want to tell stations

that we're waiting for the president to give this speech to declare a national emergency.

If he comes out during the break, go ahead and take that, and we will join it already in progress on the other side with Bill O'Reilly, but we will be taking it live.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Hi, it's Glenn.

If you're a subscriber to the podcast, can you do us a favor and rate us on iTunes?

If you're not a subscriber, become one today and listen on your own time.

You can subscribe on iTunes.

Thanks.

President Trump is talking in the Rose Garden.

Go ahead and bring this up.

He hasn't said anything of substance yet, except he has to build a wall

and hasn't gotten any of the specifics yet.

Let's go ahead and bring him up.

much of it coming from the southern border.

When you look and when you listen to politicians,

in particular certain Democrats, they say it all comes through the port of entry.

It's wrong.

It's wrong.

It's just a lie.

It's all a lie.

They say walls don't work.

Walls work 100%.

Whether it's El Paso, I really

was smiling because the other night I was in El Paso, we had a tremendous crowd.

And a tremendous crowd.

And I asked the people, many of whom were from El Paso, but they came from all over Texas.

And I asked them, I said, let me ask you, as a crowd, when the wall went up, was it better?

You were there, some of you.

It was not only better, it was like

100% better.

You know what they did.

I think far more than anybody registered.

All right, this is the President of the United States.

He has stated here that he is going to declare a national emergency.

This is the best best of the Glenn Beck program.

John Ziegler,

one of our favorites,

one of my favorite hosts

because he tells it like he sees it and to hell with the consequences.

And he is a guy who has been out on the edge of stories like what's happening in Chicago before.

And I think he's right.

And this one,

this story in Chicago had no one willing to do the work,

at least in the national media.

And he has been, it looks like, as of last night,

it looks like he's right about this.

John, welcome to the program.

How are you?

All right.

Always good to talk to you, Glenn.

Yeah, so John, tell everybody the story if anybody

hasn't been following it.

Well, a couple weeks ago, Empire actor Jussie Smollett claimed that he was the victim of a heinous hate crime at 2 a.m.

in Chicago, where the show is filmed,

that was directed at him because of his race, his celebrity, and his homosexuality, and that this occurred in the middle of a polar vortex, which is totally normal

for two people who apparently were Donald Trump supporters who yelled at him, this is MAGA country, because again, that's totally normal, because everyone knows how well Trump did in Chicago,

and

how big a MAGA country Chicago really is.

And this story also came to the police in a rather odd way.

There was a delay in calling 911.

There were details added after the original version of the story.

Like the MAGA part, right?

That wasn't initially reported.

Right, which is important, as I think we'll get into later on, as to interpreting what really did happen here, because there's really two stories.

Whether what he said is true, and if it's not true, what really happened.

And to me, Glenn, debunking these super PC stories, as you've already suggested I've done numerous times before, is really a pretty simple mathematical equation.

I mean, I mean, it's really...

It's totally math.

What I do is I take the plausibility of the story on its face, which in this case is probably about a 10 on a 100 scale.

You add to that the amount of evidence corroborating it in comparison to what the evidence should exist, which was in this case, I don't know, maybe 20 out of 10.

And then you divide it by how hesitant the media and the authorities are due to political correctness to debunk the story.

And in this case, that's 100 because this guy has a political correction force field that's impenetrable.

Okay, so hang on.

I just want to make sure that I understand

because

what the claim is, is that he was targeted, right?

Right.

So he goes out of his apartment at 2 o'clock in the morning, and I don't think he sent out a press release, that he was going to walk to go to Subway.

So we have to first believe that two people in, what, 10 below zero temperatures?

Something along those lines, yeah.

10 below zero temperatures were waiting for him to cross their path on the way to getting this Subway sandwich at 2 o'clock in the morning with bleach and a rope.

Right, because he got the rope hung around his neck, which bizarrely he kept around his neck for like 45 minutes afterwards.

By the way, this rope, from what I understand, is barely a rope.

I'm not sure it would be correct to call it a rope, but you're exactly right.

I mean, this, and of course, to me,

obviously it's 2 a.m.

It's dark.

He's not a real celebrity.

I would not have recognized him.

And by the way, how many Trump supporters are big Empire fans?

I mean the whole thing is absurd on its face and and there's no evidence to back it up and the first time that I well the it wasn't the first time but the first time I thought this thing might fall apart was when the police

who do not have any incentive to debunk this because you know of the political correctness oh my gosh yeah especially in Chicago when they started to leak things like for instance we've gone through hundreds of hours of of surveillance tape which all of this area has video cameras everywhere and they couldn't find anything to support the story.

And I'm like, wait a minute, hold on.

There's no way that the police would be even leaking that on background unless there was some real strong suspicions about what happened.

And then

I, and I have to say, even though I believe I'm right in the big picture here, I was wrong in interpreting one piece of evidence that I think the police may have schnookered Smollett on.

At least that's my current interpretation.

And that is they released a few days after this

a photograph of two quote-unquote persons of interest.

And when this got a lot of hype because, oh, they found the persons of interest.

This story is real.

And, of course, then they released this photo.

And it's basically two blobs who are not even close to where this thing happened.

And supposedly, they were walking away from it before it even occurred.

And I thought that was laughable.

I thought, there's no way these two people have anything to do with this.

Well, I now believe from my media sources, and it's important to point out, that part of the reason I got involved in this, Glenn, is because the media in Chicago doesn't believe the story.

The police don't believe the story, but there's censorship going on because no one wants to be the first to debunk it because they will be vulnerable to attack.

And so they've been basically saying to me, hey, Zig,

here's what's really going on.

And what I now believe happened is that through using incredible modern technology, the authorities have known who these two guys were from very early on on in the investigation and not telling us that.

And it was only after Smollett won on Good Morning America and actually ID

those two people laughably as, yep, I know they're the ones that did this, that we find out, lo and behold, guess what?

The authorities know who they are, they're questioning them, and they have been extras on the T V show Empire.

Bum, bum, bum.

And now we know that the Schmollette story, we don't know what for sure.

I have a couple of theories that are being, and what the police I think are debating about, two different theories about what happened here.

But we now know that Smollett knew his attackers.

And that destroys the whole story.

There's no way this was a Trump-related hate crime.

And then you go from there.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Is it possible, John, that they, that, A, did these people who worked on the set of Empire have a beef with him and

want to take him on?

Or is it possible that maybe the attackers wanted to make this happen to make Trump supporters look bad?

And Jussie is not actually involved in this.

Well, that's the, in my opinion, in the opinion of my sources, that is the debate that's going on in the police department right now.

And that's why last night the police department put out a statement that, of course, the media latched onto.

It was, oh, see, this isn't necessarily a hoax.

No, no, no.

Read that statement carefully.

Don't read it like a kindergartner.

Read it like somebody who's lived life.

And the reality is, they didn't deny that there's a major problem with Smollett's story.

Here's what it breaks down to.

Was the story a premeditated hoax or was it a domestic dispute gone bad that got post-med

meditated into a hate crime?

ABC, the local ABC reporter who's been on this from the beginning, has done great work.

He reported, and that broke the story open last night, that it was a premeditated hoax, and that's what police were believing.

I have never believed that because there's certain details in this that don't make sense.

If this was a premeditated hoax, it was incredibly poorly done.

Like, who decides to do this at 2 a.m.

in the middle of a polar vortex?

I mean, there's a lot of different ways you could do this.

Plus, the details,

not putting forward the MAGA detail right off the bat to me eliminates the idea this was a premeditated hoax to try to create a hate crime because why would you withhold that from police?

So,

I personally believe in the domestic dispute gone bad,

post-meditated, let's create a hate crime, and that may have been planted in Smollett's head because there was this threatening letter that was sent to the show about a week beforehand, and it got it spun out of control.

So when you say a domestic dispute, are you saying that

these are two lovers of his or one lover who got somebody else?

There is a segment of the police who have been telling their media sources from the beginning that they believe that one of the two guys that are in that photograph and are being spoken to by police right now was in a relationship with Smollett, that Smollett cheated on him, and that this was a revenge attack on him for what I'm referring to as politely as possible as a domestic dispute.

And then that Smollett, in a panic, started to go down a different path.

It spun out of control.

He added the Trump thing because he's a very anti-Trump person, and he knew the media would laugh that up.

And of course, they did.

And now it's much bigger than he ever expected now he's trapped and now the story is falling apart because it turns out he knows his attackers and here's here's the key part this is part of why the police are confused I am told that those two guys are changing their story that their story is evolving and that that's why there is a conflict within the police department of Chicago as to whether this was premeditated hoax or post-meditated panic hate crime and so that's why I think we're seeing a hesitation right now as to where the police are going on this but the bottom line is the story is not true.

He was not attacked by Donald Trump supporters in a hate crime.

That did not happen.

Do we know the race of these two guys?

They're Jamaicans.

Which, you know, of course, Trump is very big in Jamaica.

And

I'm sure that, I mean, of course, you would never recognize a Jamaican accent either at 2 a.m.

in Chicago.

No, not if they're talking to you.

It's like a Chicagoan accent.

Right, exactly.

So, I mean, the whole story makes perfect sense, right?

I mean, and I think the most important part of this whole thing, folks, is that this is a perfect example of how the news media, the entertainment industry, and sometimes even the authorities have become so politically correct.

They're so willing to buy into these BS stories, whether it's Brett Kavanaugh or Jim Jordan, or you remember the story that we talked about a couple years ago with the Santa who faked the boy's death.

The Air Force Academy had one of these stories last year that I called them on.

Turned out to be a fake hate crime.

And you and I I have talked many times about the Penn State Joe Paterno Jerry Sandusky case.

The more politically correct a story is, the more likely it is not to be true because there's no incentive for anyone to debunk it.

Because the media is not about the truth.

It's about protecting the gig.

All right, that's the most important thing.

The truth gets lost in all this because popularity is the coin of the realm and no one wants to do anything that's unpopular because you might get fired, especially in a case like this.

So, john tell me what you think is going to happen we are you are you claiming that this story is absolutely not true and the police are going to come out with it's not true this was not a hate crime this is one of these two things

I think they had to pick a lane, and I also think there's going to be a lot of pushback politically.

And so I still think this may end up going down the memory hole.

Now, the people close to this day know, and interestingly, they say Ron Emmanuel, the mayor of Chicago, is going to be the one who forces this thing to get solved because he apparently, I am told, secondhand, but reliably, he is pissed.

And I think that they were willing to let this go down the memory hole until he went on Good Morning America.

And then they decided, all right, let's unleash the dogs.

And I think that

in the real world, this story is going down.

Whether or not anything happens to him, you know, I am a cynic, so I will reserve judgment on that.

When do you expect to hear more?

Well, I mean, they have 48 hours from last night to charge the two guys that they're currently questioning.

So I think we'll know a lot more within that 48-hour time frame, which is about another 36 hours or so.

So, can we get you back on the air on Monday?

I'd love to hear an update.

Let's do it.

Okay.

John Ziegler, thanks so much.

Zigmund Freud, C-I-G-Man Freud, is where you can follow him.

Also, he writes for Mediite.

John Ziegler, thanks so much.

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