Bill Bonner, Doug Casey, Glenn Beck, John Stossel

Introducer: Chris Lowe: Glenn Beck: Chris Lowe:

Bill Bonner, Doug Casey, Glenn Beck, John Stossel Introducer, Chris Lowe,

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Next up we have our last panel for day one. And I'll tell you, this is the type of panel that's ... when we first started talking about this, Amber and I were in a meeting with some of the other folks, and we said, "Can you imagine what a panel of these minds would look like?" And we were talking about Bill Bonner, Doug Case, Glenn Beck, John Stossel. And at the time we weren't working much with Glenn, for example, or John. And said, "It's probably not gonna happen." And, sure enough, it did. I believe this is just the sort of libertarian ... Amber's not here for the Avenger's reference ... but it's certainly one of my favorite panels, as far as what it looked to me on paper. And so, now they're here, and we actually made it a reality. So, Chris Lowe will again moderate the panel for us, and I'd like a very, very big round of applause, please, for Bill Bonner, Doug Casey, Glenn Beck, and John Stossel.

[Applause]

Yeah. So we had a panel discussion. I don't think John and Glenn, you were there, but we talked at the beginning of the day about what's happening, particularly online in terms of censorship. We talked about this recent purge of about 800 publishers from Facebook. But we focused mainly on the technology side of it. So I think the purpose of this panel is to broaden that out and look at what's happening in general in America, in terms of the ability for people to have free discussions, and open discussions. So, Glenn, I'm gonna start with you. And I was reading your new book. I have it here, Addicted to Outrage. And you talk in that book ... you actually dedicate the book to people who are willing to step out from the crowd, to question, reason, and have the dangerous conversations. And I'm just wondering, are those dangerous conversations in danger?

Oh, I think they're in great danger. My crew spends too much time, almost, in the last probably four months thinking about how are things going to shake up? How do we ... Where do we go if we are behind some digital ghetto wall? We've been calling it the digital ghettoization because I think that's really what's coming our way. You can say whatever you want, but will anybody hear you? As the Germans put people behind a wall, so you were just forgotten and lost and not seen. I think that's what's coming our way, Adam. I'm gravely concerned about it.

Is this something, Glenn, that you ... 'Cause you've gone from the mainstream, that's the main ... CNN, Fox, and then you've set up theblaze, which is Internet subscription. Is ... Have you, personally, had the same kind of clashes with advertisers, say



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Glenn Beck:

Chris Lowe: John Stossel: Chris Lowe: John Stossel: Glenn Beck: John Stossel:

Bill Bonner, Doug Casey, Glenn Beck, John Stossel Introducer, Chris Lowe,

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Google and Facebook? Is that something you guys have come up against?

There's a couple of different things. A few ... If you followed my career at all, you know that I'm kind of the gateway drug for the left on destruction of people. And they learned how to really do that. And they've gotten better and better at that. And now Facebook is inviting people inside, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Media Matters as advisers on who to ban, who to kick off. That's terrifying to me. But there's a difference between an advertising ban ... which absolutely I have felt the effects of that forever ... and what's happening now. The real problem, I think, is that Facebook said, and so did YouTube, Google, "We're a platform. We're a platform. So you can't let those laws apply to us because we're not a publisher. We're just an open platform." And now they're acting like a publisher. And so they're getting both protections from the state, which is extraordinarily dangerous. As a private company, they can do what they want. As a company that is identifying themselves as both a publisher and a platform, it's unworkable.

John, you tweeted today, I was looking at your Twitter feed about this Gloria ?lvarez, this young, Ecuadorian woman who was also banned from Facebook. And you said, for expressing socialist ideas. So, what do you think is going on?

She was expressing anti-socialist ideas.

I'm sorry.

It's not clear. And she got back on because she had a friend who has a cousin who works for Facebook. But most of us don't have that cousin. And that is scary. But boy, Glenn, you're so scary. You got me all scared on the way here about the robots taking over.

Don't fear the robots, fear the goals.

It is a problem, it is a threat. But I've been ... Look, I used to get a million hits on my videos. Facebook changed the formula. Now, on Facebook, I get 600,000. They say they're just trying to appeal more to people whose ... so you see more of your family and friends. People think, when you post on Facebook, that all your friends see it. But they don't. Facebook, based on its algorithm, decides.

And Prager University has three million followers. And they



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Glenn Beck: John Stossel: Glenn Beck:

John Stossel: Chris Lowe:

Doug Casey:

Bill Bonner, Doug Casey, Glenn Beck, John Stossel Introducer, Chris Lowe,

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discovered that their videos were being seen by no one, for a week. And Facebook apologized. How do these things happen? Because somebody who hates conservative thought presses the button, says, "This is hate speech." And then a human content monitor, one of the company's, looks it over. And in this case he says, "Yeah. I agree. This is hate speech."

Prager is dignified lectures on conservative ideas that kids don't hear elsewhere. Again, after protest, Facebook apologized and said, "We're retraining that employee." And yet, [Laughter] with all these stories, we couldn't really find a pattern of conservatives being kicked off. Some people on the left have been kicked off. And yes, it's true, the Southern Poverty Law Center is involved, but so is the Weekly Standard. So, we just have to ...

[Inaudible comment] _____ [0:07:56] vigilant. Does the Weekly Standard get the raw data?

I don't know.

We have inside documents from Media Matters that says that they are now receiving the raw, real time data from YouTube and from Facebook. I can't imagine anybody being allowed to see that in any other place or any other position.

Well the Twitter CEO admitted that, "Look. Most of my employees lean left. But we have to be careful to police this."

Doug, I'm gonna bring you in. You've called ... you've been talking about political correctness for a long time. You've called it a termite eating away at western civilization. So is this really something new? Is this just a new version of what we've always been experiencing? Or is it really a kind of a something to be really worried about?

No, it's ... It's an acceleration of a long time trend. As far as I'm concerned, western civilization itself peaked about 1913, and it's been going downhill for a long time. And now, the trend is so long [Inaudible comment] _____ [0:09:23] and has become so big that it's accelerated. Personally, I think the battle is lost on every front. And you'll say, "Why take such a terribly pessimistic outlook on it? Isn't that counter productive?" No. I'm just observing the facts, and I'm calling the shots the way I see them. And so why do I bother saying anything about it? Because it's increasingly dangerous to do so. In point of fact, it's actually becoming dangerous to do so. Well, in my case, you have to fill those idle



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Chris Lowe:

Bill Bonner:

John Stossel: Bill Bonner: John Stossel: Glenn Beck:

Bill Bonner, Doug Casey, Glenn Beck, John Stossel Introducer, Chris Lowe,

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hours somehow. [Laughter] And I also believe in good karma, and I'd rather do things that I think are good than bad. So ... But no, no. We're on the slippery slope, and the battle's almost over. I'm eating into what I'm gonna talk about for half an hour tomorrow, so let me cut it off there.

Okay. Then, I'm gonna turn to you because you started this newsletter business, Agora, which is the parent company of Legacy, or one of the parent companies. And that was back in the last '70s, I think, very late '70s. And when you were doing that, you were sending out physical pieces of paper in the mail. You were going to the postal service and sending stuff to people's houses. So you didn't have to deal with the gatekeepers, these online gatekeepers back then. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how it was back then, and on whether you think the situation has changed radically.

Well, the situation has completely changed. When we started out, we would rent mailing lists, or trade mailing lists. And there were no gatekeepers, except the mailing list owners. And if you were sending out something that they didn't like, or they thought was too outrageous, they would stop you. But that was fine, because it was all very clear and rather simple about how it worked. And that worked pretty well. But now, I look at this from a business standpoint mostly. And now, we're up against the gatekeepers. And the gatekeepers don't like what we do. We're ... we've always been the alternative press. We started out, when I started out in the '70s, there were only a few people, and you would type on a typewriter and mimeograph it and send it out. And that was a newsletter.

But then, with the rise of the Internet, the scale got to be so much bigger, but the problem is much, much bigger now, so that now we need to pass through. The only way we can reach people is to go through these big gatekeepers. And the people who are in control of the gates tend to be people who don't like our kind of ideas. We've never been mainstream and never will be mainstream. That's not our business model. So we're in a tight spot.

We'll never be mainstream?

Never.

I'm not giving up yet.

I think I want to be on that side of the ... I'm between the two of you and ... [Laughter] Suicide runs in my family. Please stop me.



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Bill Bonner:

Glenn Beck: Bill Bonner: Chris Lowe: Glenn Beck: Chris Lowe: Glenn Beck:

Bill Bonner, Doug Casey, Glenn Beck, John Stossel Introducer, Chris Lowe,

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You know what happens is that we're always exploring the fringe of the idea spectrum. And out there, that's where you find the good investments, the things that people don't know about or don't think about or don't want to think about. And out there, there are all these ideas. And remember Dr. Atkins. He had the idea years ago that eating sugar was bad for you, and you should eat more fat. And the American Medical Association wanted to take away his medical license for that. But he came to us, and we thought that was a pretty interesting idea. So we published his newsletter for years. And it was not mainstream. Later on it became mainstream, and, of course, it was not our business model anymore, so ... He died, of course. But we ...

I don't know. It's worked for me. [Laughter]

[Inaudible comment] _____ [0:13:34] He slipped on the ice, by the way.

Glen, I was just, again, going through your book and you do touch on some controversial ideas. And one of the places you touch on is President Trump. And President Trump has called the media the enemy of the people, kind of dictatorial language. And I'm just wondering, do you think that kind of backdrop is ...

Helpful?

[Laughter]

Unhelpful?

Yeah, it's unhelpful. I don't ... There's a good Trump and a bad Trump. And good Trump does some good things. The bad Trump tweets a lot of crap. Don't pay attention to the bad Trump. I'm hoping, I'm hoping, before he was elected and he didn't have anything except buildings, which is a lot different than being President, I was very skeptical that he actually believed in things other than trade barriers. He has done some very good things. When it comes to the press, I think the press completely ... if you really want to hurt him, don't pay any attention to him. That'd drive him out of his mind. Don't pay any attention to him. He's like ... You know, at three o'clock in the morning, he's sitting on the crapper and he's like, "Oh, they're gonna love this. They'll be talking about this for a week." That's what he's doing. So you gotta ...



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Bill Bonner, Doug Casey, Glenn Beck, John Stossel Introducer, Chris Lowe,

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Selena Zito is a friend of mine, and she said it best. "The press took him ..." this is in the build up to the election. "The press took him literally but not seriously. The people took him seriously but not literally." I think he says some things that are very concerning. Even with Google and Facebook he has talked about utilities. That would be the worst thing we could possibly do. I don't know if he's serious or not. I hope he is not.

Could I address a little bit of hope? Because I agree with you. 1913, Woodrow Wilson ... I hate that guy ... so I agree with you that we are at this turning point. But what's happened is, post modernism came in like 1968 and it was turned, because they realized with the Paris riots in '68, we can't beat with just having the culture. We can't destroy the western way of life. We need a lot of it. We need all of the positions. And post modernism came in intentionally to destroy what was built for the enlightenment, or through the enlightenment. That's why, if you read a headline and the stories ... and people like me are reading and you're like, "What does this even mean, that math is racist?" What they mean, and this is really important to understand, this is post modernism that is teaching that anything that created the world we now live in has to be destroyed. It has to be racist, because it's created this racist atmosphere.

So the entire post modern movement now has been sheltered and put inside of this ... excuse me, I ... well, if you disagree with me, oh well. Social justice, it is a ticking time bomb, and it is sheltering social justice, which is trying to take apart the western way of life. The way this happens is to create chaos. So the more people are angry, outraged, yelling at each other, "Forget your principles. Forget your principles. We gotta take 'em on." You're actually adding fuel to the fire and harming the western way of life. The only way ... 'cause I do agree with you that we're at either the end or a glorious new beginning. I hope that there's enough people that will look at the opportunity and look at the facts and say, "We're at a glorious opportunity to begin again, and we must do it through our principles."

I'm gonna talk a little bit about the way out of this tomorrow, but I've talked to Jonathan Haidt and some other really brilliant scholars about this, and they all look at me and say, "It won't work." Why? 'Cause not enough people will do it. I think when push comes to shove and people start to realize you're about to lose the west, you'll have a choice. And it only takes 10 percent, 20 percent of the American people or the people of the west to stand up.



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Chris Lowe: Glenn Beck: Chris Lowe: Doug Casey:

Chris Lowe:

Bill Bonner, Doug Casey, Glenn Beck, John Stossel Introducer, Chris Lowe,

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And Doug, you wrote ...

[Applause]

Thank you. Thank you. I'll be here all weekend. Try the veal. Tip your waiters and waitresses. Thank you.

Doug, you've written about how a lot of this started on university campuses. I'm Irish, so I didn't grow up here, but it surprises me that in universities in the US you have these free speech zones. And this is probably quite normal for people here. But for an outsider, it's not very normal. So, is that where this gestated?

Oh, yeah. No question about that. When I had my hour on the Phil Donahue show back in 1980, one of the times that the audience booed me was when I said that it was a misallocation of time and money to go to college, and that I wouldn't have gone again if I ... And I said that way back then when it wasn't nearly as bad as it is now. But the entire educational system in this country is a cesspool, where all of the teachers, all of the professors, all of the administrators, all believe the same general socialist welfareite neo-Marxist, as it's being called now, party line. And you send off kids, under their tutelage, and they're in a position of authority, and this ingrains itself in kids' minds. These kids in high school don't know anything.

And it's just like what the Jesuits said, "Give me a child for the first seven years," and it's what Lenin said. Same thing, slightly different quote. And it's true. They can't unlearn these things, because then once they get out of college, they're exposed to the same crap from government officials, authority figures, the media, entertainment. No, it's a battle of minds, and it's totally been lost. And the colleges are part of it, a big part, a huge part.

[Applause]

And Bill, I was gonna go back to you because earlier today, Amber introduced today, and she talked about what had happened with Legacy. And Google had soloed out your diary, your e-letter issue about Baltimore. You remember that one, where you talked about how federal programs are hollowed out, and you parodies Trump's shit-hole countries line. That's not a left/right thing. It's not a particularly left/right thing. Why do you think that kind of essay gets a ...



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Bill Bonner: Glenn Beck: Bill Bonner:

Chris Lowe: John Stossel:

Bill Bonner, Doug Casey, Glenn Beck, John Stossel Introducer, Chris Lowe,

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You know what? I was confused about that. Of all the things that we publish, that seemed to me to be the least controversial. Baltimore is a hell hole. [Laughter] And it's a ...

More rats than people.

And more abandoned houses than lived in houses. It's an amazing thing. How do you create a hell hole like that? How do you do it? And I thought it was worth looking at federal policy, and then you find out how they did it. They did it by destroying the family. They did it by destroying work. And what was left was this area, which is now a no-go zone. You can practically not go in there. But I thought ... I was just citing studies and research and things that seemed to me to be pretty non-controversial. But I think what happened was that there are parts of it, when you mention the family in today's world, you're entering politically incorrect territory, because a lot of people say, "Well, why do you need a family? I don't have to get married. I don't have to ... if I don't want to have children." That, to me, I don't understand that, really. Emotionally I don't understand it. Intellectually I'm lost. But I think that's what triggered that reaction, because it shouldn't have caused anybody any real concern. And yet the were going to ban it. It was amazing.

John, have you had, the people banned in this recent Facebook event, a lot of them were libertarian types. Have you had any interaction with these folks with your online TV channel that you feel the atmosphere changing?

No. And I'm known as a pessimist, normally. But in this crew, [Laughter] I want to say ... yes. The post modern stuff at universities is awful. And what you see on TV when they shout people down is awful. But we in the media make awful things seem even more awful, because we pick those because I'll get more clicks, 'cause I'm outraged. I want you to see this. But just as the press has always made things seem scarier than they are. [Inaudible comment] _____ [0:23:44] my speech. We're scaring people about plane crashes, electromagnetic radiation, getting cancer from the cell phones, all this stuff happening. And yet, we're living longer, there's less crime, there's less war worldwide. From what I observe of young people, they're nicer to each other. There's less bullying in school.

It's our job in the media to point out the horrible things. But nobody's out by the back fence gossiping about who's faithful to their spouse. This is the ... When Trump said the media is the



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