Glenn Beck, Eric Bolling, and Helen Andrews dissect a Moscow luxury development deal involving Donald Trump, debating whether his lies about Russian ties constitute collusion or mere business protection. The conversation shifts to Helen Andrews' harrowing "shame storm" after her ex-boyfriend's smear campaign caused her job loss and relocation, highlighting how irrational mobs defeat rational argument before she found redemption through forgiveness. Finally, Eric Bolling details his opioid awareness tour following his son's suicide, underscoring a personal commitment to saving lives despite the emotional toll of addressing such tragedy. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to the Wednesday podcast of the Glenn Beck program.
We first want to start by telling you today, special guest, Eric Bowling, kind of an amazing conversation with Eric on a couple of fronts.
But one, we want to welcome him to another brand new three-year contract with the Blaze TV.
He's just upped.
So up yours.
No, he's just up to three years.
And you can find him on the Blaze TV four nights a week, very soon, three nights right now.
Yeah, but I wish there was just a website to subscribe.
How would I do that?
That's the problem.
It's actually blazetv.com.
Slash Beck.
Should I try that?
Maybe.
You put that in there.
And then if you use Beck Christmas, you could charge me more.
No, you'll save $20.
Whoa!
You mean if I type the extra letters, you're going to take money off the price?
Off the price.
That's incredible.
It's just a message.
It's just that simple.
Okay.
Go to blazetv.com slash Beck and use Beck Christmas, save $20.
All the biggest voices in the conservative movement are coming to Blaze TV.
All right.
On today's broadcast, we talked a little bit about Trump and Russia and this new, I guess it's letter of intent, but it's a signed deal with Russia.
We explain what we know about it, and then we asked Eric Bowling to come in and chime in and say, what does he think about it?
It's an interesting look at something that people took a long time and a lot of effort to hide and keep quiet, that now it apparently doesn't matter.
We also talked to Helen Andrews, who's a conservative, libertarian-leaning person who went through the ringer with a social media shame campaign several years ago when she kind of got in an argument with an ex- or ex-boyfriend sort of kind of went after her on national television and what that experience has been like.
It's been many, many years.
She's learned a lot.
She's really interesting and has a fascinating story.
And we talked to her as well as Andrew Heaton, who has a much less fascinating story about you.
If we have time, there's two things.
I don't know if we'll get to both of them.
There is Eric Bowling's story about his loss of faith at this holiday season and Andrew's story about organ grinding monkeys.
You decide on the podcast today.
You're listening to The Best of the Glenn Beck Program.
It's Wednesday, December 19th.
This is the Glenbeck Program.
Putin's Moscow Project Calculus00:13:51
A proposed development of a first-class luxury mixed-use to be known as Trump Moscow, or such other name as mutually agreed on by the parties located in Moscow City, now known the project.
Dear Audrey or Andre, this is a letter of intent, and it sets forth a summary of the basic terms of the license agreement to be entered into by the Trump Acquisition LLC or one or more of its affiliates and the IC expert investment company or its affiliates, blah, blah, blah.
This shows exactly what they are going to be building, what they are going to license out, who gets the money.
It is a 250 first-class luxury residential condominiums, one first-class luxury hotel consisting of approximately 15 floors containing no fewer than 150 hotel rooms, one first-class luxury spa fitness center, a commercial component consistent with the overall luxury level of the property, an office component, a parking component.
They will also help design, construct, equip, furnish, yada, yada, yada.
It's, I mean, the expense deposit, the deposits, the principal, the non-disturbance, the confidentiality, the currency, the governing law, the operation, the term, the management fees, the development standards, the maintenance and repair of the hotel, centralized service agreement, hotel technical service agreement, debt covenants, reimbursement of fees.
I mean, all of it, food and beverage, signed by Donald J. Trump.
Now, this was executed October 28th, 2015, and it ran all the way through the election.
In fact, Mr. Trump, we now know, was brought up to speed on at least three occasions by Cohen about the progress of this project in Moscow.
We also know that the guy who he denied even knowing is a signature of this contract.
He was the Moscow guy, and Trump said, when asked by the press, do you know this guy?
He said, I don't, I don't, I don't know him.
I'd have to think about that.
I don't even think I've ever heard that name.
He was a guy who was working on this project, And he had direct contact with Vladimir Putin's office about this project during the election.
So does this matter?
See, what happened during Monica Lewinsky is we would ask people, does it matter?
Did he do it?
And then they'd say, no, and we'd argue about that.
I've stopped arguing about did he do it.
I don't care.
Show me the evidence.
When you show me the evidence, then I'll know if he did it or not.
But until you show me evidence, I don't really care.
I don't care because I don't believe anybody on any side.
Show me the proof.
So I've been waiting for the proof.
However, if it exists, does it matter?
This is what happened during the Clinton problem.
Everybody argued that it never happened.
And then when it did have, we did have the blue dress, then it was, well, it doesn't matter.
Well, wait a minute.
Then why have we been arguing?
Why didn't you say it didn't matter right up front?
So the president, we now know, lied repeatedly to the American people about having a business deal and a significant business deal in Moscow that Putin's office was, I can't say directly involved with, but had involvement in.
He was courting Moscow and he was trying to get this done.
Now, you're reading of this.
He didn't do anything.
This is nothing illegal about this.
Nothing illegal.
Nothing illegal about this.
This is not the type of thing you get thrown out of office for, I don't think, unless he lied to the FBI or something about it.
I mean, unless he committed a crime in the cover-up or something.
He definitely did say to the media a bunch of times that he had no business dealings in Russia.
I think he said that to the American people.
Oh, I would agree.
I would agree.
But I mean, the media is probably more directly who he said it to at that time.
That's how we heard about it.
But yes, this is not a question of criminality or impeachment per se.
Like, they're going to work that in.
I mean, the media is going to talk about that all day.
Yeah, I don't really care.
I'm not looking at anything other than you have the president of the United States, while he was running, asked by the media, but also asked in debates, do you have any dealings?
And he repeatedly said, I don't, nor does anyone I know have any dealings.
I've only been to Moscow once.
Now, in the release documents, he was wanting to go to Moscow, and it was Manafort that said, no, you're not going to Moscow.
Was during because this deal, they wanted to see him.
They wanted to deal with him face to face.
And so he said, All right, well, I don't know.
Should we put it together?
Cohen was pushing for him to go.
And it was Manafort that finally stepped in and said, You can't go.
You can't go and negotiate this deal right now.
Okay.
So it shows you who Michael Cohen is.
It's like even Paul Manafort had more discretion.
Yeah.
I mean, it's when you're losing to Paul Manafort on a good decision-making contest, that's not where you want to be.
So, look, I understand the president not wanting to, for instance, I don't agree with it, but there wasn't anything illegal about it.
And presidents have done this before.
They've had sex.
They've covered it up, yada, yada.
This is different.
This is different.
The secretary, one of the secretaries in the office of Vladimir Putin, was involved in this deal.
There are now memos back and forth.
When Trump denied that this was happening, the press called Putin's office, and that secretary, that person who was involved, secretary of something or other, he denied that there was anything going on.
Okay.
We now know that we have the emails, and he has now come out and said, okay, yes, there was this exchange.
As soon as the White House said, yes, there was this exchange.
The Kremlin said, yes, there was this exchange.
I'm sorry, but this is not secret deals for the United States of America.
This is a secret deal benefiting one person.
And that person happens to be the president.
I don't want any secret deals going on between my president and Vladimir Putin's office.
I don't want any of them.
I want to know if you're going to do it, fine.
Let's have that conversation.
And I know that would be tough in the press, but at least we would know transparency.
Donald Trump did not turn over any of his business records.
Well, we can see now why this would have been found.
Okay.
Can you turn them over now?
Because are you hiding anything else?
We have to know that the president doesn't have any other idea that he is a slave to other than the Constitution of the United States of America.
And I don't think that Donald Trump hates America.
I don't think that he wants to destroy it.
I don't think he's in league with Vladimir Putin.
He is driven by his business.
And I don't want a secondary business thing on the table with the president of the United States, or at least I want full disclosure.
If we back up a little bit, it's not as shocking as the media is going to make it out to be today.
If you go back to 2015, when this letter was going on, Donald Trump is a business guy wanting to do a really great deal in Russia.
It is completely legal for him to do a big deal in Russia.
Completely normal in his normal business day, right?
Like this would be a very typical dealing for him to be engaged in.
At the time, he is an incredible underdog.
And most people, surely most people in his organization, you know, I don't know about him exactly.
I mean, you know, he's very confident publicly.
The reporting says he even kind of thought he wasn't going to win.
But at this point, surely no one in his organization thought he was going to win.
Remember, this is 2015.
This isn't even, the year of the election hadn't even begun yet.
We haven't even played.
We haven't even gone to Iowa.
We haven't gone to New Hampshire.
I mean, he's still, he's doing well on the polls, but no one gives him a chance of winning at this point.
So the fact that you pursue a deal like this would make sense.
And beyond that, when asked about it, when you're getting asked about it in the media, his calculus, likely, is the media is just trying to trap me on this.
Yes, I have this deal, but it's probably not going to happen anyway.
And if I say yes to it, they're just going to go in and they're going to investigate and they're going to chase me around and accuse me of all these things.
Screw them.
I'm not going to give him the nugget.
Now, I don't think that's the right way to handle it, but you can understand in that moment how he thinks just brushing off those questions might be the appropriate thing to do.
So we are down to where we were with Barack Obama, where half of the country didn't believe Barack Obama was a guy who had America's best interest at heart.
You know, he was slave to another idea as well as being president of the United States.
We didn't trust his motives.
Now half the country doesn't trust this president's motives.
We said we wanted full transparency.
We wanted to know how did these guys get into office?
Who are they?
What do they actually believe?
And we can deal with that.
Now we're saying, well, no, we don't need to do that because we trust Donald Trump.
I don't know why we should trust Donald Trump.
And it's not that you're going to get Hillary Clinton now.
You're going to get Mike Pence should he be removed.
And I'm not even talking about that.
I'm just saying we're crossing another line now.
We're crossing a big line.
There is evidence that he now lied to you repeatedly about something pretty important.
Does it matter to you now?
That's the question.
The best of the Glenn Beck program.
I was reading a story about how it's from FiveThirtyEight talking about, you know, like how media kind of shapes our view of things.
And I get so frustrated as a conservative and, you know, you complain about media bias in the time that it's going on.
And it's not until decades later do you get the actual admission of what actually happened in these old timey situations.
Like at the time, they never admit they're being biased.
You know, the lie of the year is after Obamacare's passed, right?
Listen to this paragraph.
Take the 1992 election.
At the time, everyone thought the economy was in shambles.
The recession had technically ended in 1991, and there was some evidence the economy was expanding again.
But the media painted a picture of economic woe.
Political scientist Mark.
I remember being on the air saying that.
Really?
The recession's over.
And it was technically even.
I know.
They found a strong disconnect between the media's negative reporting on the economy and how the economy was actually behaving.
In fact, with the benefit of hindsight, we now know that the economy was growing by more than 3% annually by late 1992, roughly the same pace it was growing in 1996 when voters rewarded Bill Clinton with a second presidential term.
Hetherington's research suggests that the relentlessly bad coverage of the economy affected voters' perceptions at the ballot box.
George H.W. Bush substantially underperformed in his second presidential bid and became the first Republican since Herbert Hoover to be denied a second term.
Well, yeah, they made it sound like everyone was going to die tomorrow and it was George Bush's fault.
30 years later almost, we all can look at this and say, well, what they were saying at the time was completely ridiculous.
We weren't in a recession.
We were growing at a healthy pace.
And, you know, George H.W. Bush should have been re-elected in that campaign.
You know what?
It was Facebook.
It was Russia getting involved with Facebook.
Oh, that's right.
Yeah.
Vladimir Putin at that time.
Bush's Real Estate Dealings00:15:46
Well, it was.
It was amazing.
You didn't need Facebook.
You didn't need Vladimir Putin.
You had the mainstream media doing it for you.
I mean, people are like, oh, it's getting worse.
No, it's not.
It's just different.
It's just different.
That's the only thing.
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Like listening to this podcast?
If you're not a subscriber, become one now on iTunes.
But while you're there, do us a favor and rate the show.
Eric Bowling, for a period of time, played professional sports until he was injured.
Then he went in, became a stock trader in Wall Street, then went to television.
And we know the rest from there.
Eric Bowling on the Blaze TV.
Welcome to the program.
How are you, Eric?
I'm doing great, Glenn.
Thank you for having me.
I'm honored to spend some time with you on this very interesting day.
It's a very interesting day, isn't it?
So here's the great thing.
There's a lot of demand for bowling to explain some stuff coming out of the White House.
Right.
So here's the great thing about Blaze TV is we are a collection of people that we don't interfere with each other's show or opinion, and we like each other and get along, and we can disagree.
And I think we're going to disagree on this, but it doesn't matter.
I really want to hear your opinion on the memo that came out from the Trump administration.
Well, as Donald Trump himself said, and I agree with wholeheartedly that he had a business, he had a real estate business that was doing, making hotel deals around the world.
When he ran for president, no one gave him a chance, including the New York Times on the night of the election, had Hillary Clinton with a 98% chance of winning as the returns started to come in.
I'll never forget seeing that meter, the New York Times meter of likelihood of your next president going literally pinned to Hillary slowly and slowly and slowly.
We got around 10 o'clock at night.
It just flipped way over to the Trump side.
Why would he stop doing any sort of business if he wasn't sure he was going to be president?
That's insane.
We would have no one running for elected office if that were the case.
We'd have no one with business experience and backgrounds running if they had to drop their prior businesses in the likelihood or unlikelihood of them being president, no less, and then all of a sudden try and pick up the pieces where they left off.
That would be crazy.
So I agree with you 100%.
However, he denied the business dealings with Moscow long after the 2010s.
Rudy Giuliani denied it.
Rudy Giuliani denied it.
I don't know that Donald Trump ever denied it.
I think he said, of course, I'm an ongoing business concern.
Multi-billion dollar international real estate business can't stop.
I love you, Eric.
I love you.
But I can't let you get away with that.
He denied it relentlessly.
He said he had no business dealings with Russia multiple times.
And he said, I don't know anybody who does have any business dealings.
Well, I don't recall.
I swear to you on my life, I don't want to call him saying specific no business dealings with Russia because we know there are other properties that in fact, he sold a property that he owned in Florida for one that I think was at the time, the largest real estate deal in the history.
That one he admitted to.
That one he admitted to.
He said the only business dealing.
He was a lot of business deals.
Right.
He said, the only business deal I have with Russia is I sold a property a few years ago in Florida.
So he admitted that one, and he was straight up about it.
My question is, why do this?
The press has no credibility.
People trust Donald Trump, who voted for him.
And, you know, he did it.
And you can say the same thing about with Bill Clinton, this was a personal thing.
It was about sex, et cetera.
But he stood on the plane and he looked at the reporters and he said, I had nothing to do with it.
I had nothing.
I didn't even know about it.
Okay, well, we find out that he did know about it.
Okay, we can dismiss it because that one's a personal thing with his wife.
All right.
Now this one comes out.
Why wouldn't he just stop all this?
Why wouldn't he just come out and just say, yeah, and here's the contract?
Well, because I'm not sure that they had consummated the deal at that point.
I think there's an ongoing concern.
I saw his signature on the memo as well.
Honestly, Glenn, I'm being 100% honest with you.
I don't remember him saying I have no business whatsoever with Russia with the exception of that real estate dealing in Florida.
Okay, so I don't want to get it.
But if I take your word for it, I could only say that he'd have to circle back and say, explain the signature because you do know.
However, I don't think it's a problem.
There's no emoluments clause violations whatsoever.
Let's go back to the reality.
Okay, so if in fact he said, I have no business dealings with Russia and he had a letter of intent, not a deal.
You and I, Glenn, we go way back.
We know letters of intent don't necessarily mean a deal is done.
It means we intend to do a deal.
It's not a legal binding matter by any means.
That may be where he gets around it.
He may say, look, it's a letter of intent.
We sign letter intents around the world all the time for everything.
I've signed, how many letters of intent have you signed and or received that end up not being a deal?
Tons.
So maybe that's the little cork to it, but let's take it.
Let's bring it through the machine and find out what it really is.
It's really a businessman continuing to do business in the way he was until he was elected president, and then things changed.
He gave the business and the dealings off to Eric and Don Jr. and to a certain extent, Ivanka as well, less so Ivanka, but Eric and Don Jr.
Okay, because it seems to me really the underlying issue is not an issue.
He's running a business that talks about international real estate, and he's in the middle of an international real estate deal.
There's nothing there.
Again, and it's kind of dawning on me because I've got how many, what, 40 years in business under my belt?
And it's just dawning on me as we speak right now that a letter of intent is not a binding contract.
No, I know.
No, no, it's true.
No, no, no, I know that.
I know.
He was dealing with them.
He was attempting to get business.
He kept saying, you know, I never had any business with Russia.
You know, the closest I ever came to Russia, I bought a house a number of years ago in Palm Beach, Florida.
You know, the New York Times has him on 23 occasions, and I don't know that all of these, a lot of them are, I have nothing to do with Russia, which isn't necessarily touching business dealings, but he did say, I had no business dealings with Russia, I had no business with Russia.
You know, he, again, I think, you know, in his defense, right, he's in the middle of getting attacked constantly by the media.
And probably he knows if he says he did have a deal brewing with Russia, everyone would accuse him of a million different things, and he didn't want to deal with it.
And I can understand why he tried to push it off.
I just feel like he, it's, you know, it's the whole Nixon thing.
It's really not the crime, it's the cover-up.
And I don't think the crime in this case is a crime at all.
It's his normal business dealings.
I just wish he would be a little more upfront.
That's that's all I would ask.
Well, and again, and I'm sorry I started the interview off not really understanding it, but as I as I talk to you and talk it out, a letter of intent literally is like a handshake.
It's nothing more like, hey, you know, let's circle back, see if we can come to terms.
So technically, he had no business deal done.
Dealings, a letter of intent dealings.
I mean, we're going to parse, you know, the meaning of is, is here again, but I don't know.
Maybe we want to.
But again, there was no deal done.
There's no deal consummated.
And, you know, the difference is like when you do a deal, you sign a contract and you do a press release.
That's true.
I mean, it's again, it is six.
What is it?
I'm laughing because it's literally, there's literally thousands of letters of intent drawn up and they're worth the paper that they're written on.
And that's about it.
Yeah, no, it's true.
I mean, it's a detailed letter of intent, right?
I mean, it's 16 pages of all the different, you know, going down to like how they're going to figure out concession splits.
I mean, it's pretty, it's relatively detailed.
But I think to your point, Eric, it's true that the media is going to kind of obsess over this, and they're going to say this is proof of collusion about the election.
I mean, it really has nothing to do with that at all.
They're just going to try to conflate these things.
This is the problem.
This is the problem that they are conflating absolutely everything into this collusion with Russia and the election.
And I just don't see it.
I don't believe it.
They would have to show me the evidence of it.
And I have not seen any evidence that there was collusion for the election.
It just, it's so frustrating because the president.
You know, you know, the media.
You know, these liberal hack media that if they can make something up, they can take a seed and call it a tree.
They will.
There are no seeds.
And if there were, and if they're, if Mueller is sitting on something, it would leak by now.
It would leak.
We would know that there would be something that they've got him tattooed to the wall.
And there's no secrets in DC.
So Eric, I'm just to the point to where I don't really care to speculate.
I don't want to speculate on what they have, what they don't have, because I'm tired of it.
I watch CNN.
It's not a news show.
It's like a psychic hour that they're saying, well, I'm looking in the crystal ball and I think this is what they've got.
And I don't care.
I don't care.
I just want to talk about the things that we do know they have.
So if they've got something else, they'll come out with it.
Until that time, I don't even want to talk about it because it makes no difference to anybody's life.
And it just confuses things and pits us against each other on what?
On speculation coming from people I don't trust?
I'm not interested.
Well, but it rates, Glenn, and that's what the left does.
And you're watching MSNBC's ratings in primetime creep up.
In fact, even past Fox's ratings in prime time, it's what the left and the anti-Trump crowd wants to hear.
We're getting close to nailing the president.
It's almost an anticipatory viewer waiting to see what they got.
And they keep getting disappointed.
He's gone almost now.
They've been saying that every time something new breaks, they're like, we got him this time.
No, you don't.
No, you don't.
It's not going anywhere.
So anyway, the most common phrase on CNN is the walls are closing in.
And they just keep saying it over and over again.
I know.
He must be living in a matchbox by now.
So Eric Bowling, I want to switch topics to you.
And there's a couple of things.
First of all, what do you have coming up?
And what are you going to be looking at and doing on the Blaze TV in the next year?
So I think we're going to continue to do what we do.
By the way, Glenn, we just did a big press release this morning that I signed with Blaze TV for three years.
And I'm looking forward to working with you and Mark and some of the other conservative hosts that we're delivering probably the premier, actually the premier conservative content in media right now, opinion content.
So I'm looking forward to that and inviting as many other conservative, smart conservative voices to join me at Blaze TV.
It's going to be a great venture.
I'm looking forward to it.
So that announcement just went out.
That's great.
I'm thrilled.
We are going to do what we've been doing.
Our show America is just, it's unbelievable.
We're in congressmen's offices.
We are in the Senate Rotunda talking to senators.
I spent the day yesterday at the White House with Kellyanne Conway.
I spent last week with the president in the Oval Office.
So I'm bringing high-level advisors and elected officials, opinion and ideas, and just policy to the forefront.
And then we talk about it.
And we're doing it three days a week right now.
I think we're going to increase that to maybe four days a week.
And we deliver it live at 5 p.m. every night.
So it's going to be a great year and we're going to continue to do what we did.
And I'm looking forward to working with you, Glenn, and the Blaze.
Maybe we can talk regularly.
That'd be a lot of fun.
I'd love that.
I'd love that.
As far as the show is concerned, but I'm also doing this opioid awareness push.
Now, I've teamed up with Sinclair Broadcast on the TV and broadcast side.
And probably for the next four months, I think through April of 19, we're traveling around the country, different cities.
We'll be in Dallas, we'll be in San Antonio, we'll be in Columbus, Ohio, Northwest, all over the country.
And we're talking opioids.
We had the First Lady last time at Liberty University with Kelly and Conway yesterday.
So we're getting the opioid awareness message out to people.
It's an important message.
It's a deadly killer that we need to really, really attack as a country.
You're doing that because of the tragic loss of your son that we have talked about.
And you spoke about it in a very raw and real way.
And it was just, I think it touched a lot of people, Eric.
This is coming up now in your second Christmas without your son.
How are you doing?
I'm not well.
And I'll be honest with you.
One of the things you'll know about me, and maybe your audience doesn't, but we'll learn quickly, is that there's no on-air persona versus an off-air persona.
It's what you see on TV is who I am.
And so I'd be lying if I said I'm doing well or my wife and I are doing well.
It's a rough time of year.
We lost our son in September of 17.
A couple weeks later, it was Thanksgiving.
The empty chair was happening and we were about to all fall apart as a family.
And President Trump called and it meant a lot for me that he called on that moment because he knew it was the first holiday.
And he's subsequently called on many holidays since.
It doesn't make it easier.
It just makes you feel like he cares.
And so the point is that because he showed so much empathy and compassion about this topic and my loss and my wife's loss, I'm really pushing to get the message out so other families don't have to deal with this.
Interestingly, last night we finished a show at Sinclair in DC here, WGLA, and we came off the hour on opioids.
And the producers came up and said, oh, that was amazing.
That's great.
Let's start working on San Antonio on January 10th.
We're going to be there.
And they're like, this is going to be a great.
And I just looked at them and I go, do you know how hard this is for me to do an hour on the loss of my only child, my son?
And they realize at that moment that this is really, really hard for me to do.
But I swear to you, Glenn, the only thing I have to hold on to that there's any sort of positive tip that can come out of it is that we save one family from this utter hell.
And it really is a hell.
So that's what gets me up in the morning.
If it weren't for that, I'm not sure.
My mother committed suicide, and I remember when I did the tour for The Christmas sweater, which is a fictional telling of that.
The Pain of Online Shame00:17:08
And I felt so compelled to do it.
I remember I got off the stage every night, and I was just, I said, I can't do it another day, just cannot do it another day.
It's sometimes when you hit these personal moments where it is a cause, yours being opioids, mine being suicide, it takes every ounce of strength you have to get through it.
And I commend you for doing that.
I'm telling you that feeling you felt I can't do another day is what I felt last night after the first one.
And, you know, it's a great message and it's a great broadcast partnership with Sinclair.
They blanket the country on local stations and they're happy to announce 12 more.
I just looked at them like, okay, 12 more.
You know, I mean, it's going to be rough, but listen, if you can get the suicide message out, help people who are contemplating and maybe make the phone call to the suicide prevention hotline.
Or if I can get the message out to families, parents, talk to your kids.
No one's immune.
Your kid's not too smart.
Too popular, too athletic, too white, too black, too gay, too straight, too rich, too poor.
They'll all be touched.
Or the kids, one pill can kill.
And maybe we save a life of two Glenn.
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
It was October 2010 when our next guest appeared on a panel to promote a book of essays by young conservatives.
Proud to be right, voices of the next conservative generation.
The moderator was Jonah Goldberg.
One of the other panelists was my ex-boyfriend.
During the question and answering, Todd, the boyfriend, launched into a rant about Helen's personal failings.
He accused me of opposing Obamacare on the grounds that it would diminish human suffering, which allegedly I preferred to increase, of wanting to appeal laws against fist fights for the same reasons, of being sadistic and scheming, a heartbreaker in his own personal life, and generally living according to a disturbing and brutal set of values.
For three minutes and 45 seconds, which unfortunately for me were captured on film for broadcast two weeks later on C-SPAN, he made an impassioned case that I was a sociopath.
It stuck.
Helen Andrews is that woman that was on C-SPAN.
Welcome to the program.
Thanks so much for having me, Glenn.
Wow, Helen, you've been through the ringer and back.
Are you back yet?
Yeah, yeah.
It's been eight years since that happened.
But, you know, just the week or the very day that I sat down to write this essay, my husband came home and said, honey, you won't believe what happened.
I was at a conference and we were talking about bad breakups in the conservative movement.
And one guy pulled out his phone and said, oh, my goodness, if you want to talk about bad conservative breakups, you have to see this C-SPAN thing.
The poor guy had no idea that he was talking to my husband.
So, you know, I think after eight years, it would have faded away.
But no, it still pops up.
That's the thing.
The internet is forever.
Yeah, so I want to talk to you a little bit about there's something in Europe that they're trying to push through, and that is the right to be forgotten, which is very, very human.
I mean, we do forget things and things fade.
But with the internet, it's permanently there, always, and you never can escape it.
So tell me what happened that day, and tell me your journey here in the last eight years.
Sure.
Well, as soon as the video went up on the internet, those three minutes and 45 seconds were instantly clipped and posted on YouTube.
And they got half a million hits in the first 48 hours.
Oh, my God.
All the cable news networks did a segment about it.
It even made the local network news here in D.C., it was written up on Gawk, Washington Post, you know, guy mental on ex-girlfriend at C-SPAN panel.
So all of my coworkers saw the video.
All of my friends saw the video.
It just became a huge story.
How old were you when you sat down for that interview?
And you were, because you were 22 when you dated this guy, right?
Yeah, and I think I was 24 when the video went big.
So, you know, I, yeah, I was 24 years old and basically thought, well, that's my life over now.
And you admit that you were pretty, you were pretty brutal to him.
Oh, yeah.
Well, and, you know, that's where I eventually arrived.
You know, I thought about, you know, Todd's talking for four minutes about what a bad person I am.
Well, you know, honestly, he could have gone on for four hours about what a bad person I was to him and not said anything untrue, you know.
So who am I to say that I didn't deserve being embarrassed, you know?
So after you had, you know, half a million hits in 48 hours, how did your life begin to change?
I think I didn't realize at first just how permanent a part of my life this thing was going to be.
I thought it would just be a week of bad news coverage and that would be embarrassing, but then I would move on.
It started off with little things like I would be walking down the street on one occasion with my parents and people would stop and point and say, hey, C-SPAN girl.
About a year after the incident, I decided I wanted to move on from my job at National Review.
And funniest thing, no matter how many resumes I sent out, I couldn't get a job interview, which made sense.
I put myself in the shoes of a prospective employer.
And I figured, yeah, if I were trying to hire for a position and somebody's first Google result was some rant about how she's maybe a psycho, you know, yeah, I might look at other things.
But, you know, that's easy enough for them to say.
But for me, it was a pretty serious blow to not be able to find a job.
And eventually, as you mentioned, I moved to Australia, moved to the other side of the world.
And even there, because that's the thing about Google, it's completely global.
It followed me to another hemisphere.
And so when you were looking for a job there, you couldn't find a job for like 18 months because people, the first thing they would do is Google your name.
That's right.
And then once I did find a job at a think tank, it still followed me there.
You know, I put out my first report on nonprofit regulation, right?
Like the way charities are regulated in Australia.
A pretty benign topic.
But the minute the report was released, an Australian MP tweeted a link to the video and said, I don't trust this person's views on charity regulation.
Not even some schmo on the internet, but an elected official has decided to use that as ammo against any public statement I might want to make in the future.
So it's going to be an all-purpose rebuttal.
I have to ask the obvious question here from the right, and that is, do you think it would have been the same if you were a liberal and not a conservative?
No, I don't think so.
You know, people always say, don't read the comments, and that is definitely my advice to anybody else that this ever happens to.
Don't ever read the comments.
But I couldn't help myself.
And the thing that I noticed over and over again is that these people would say, well, you know, gossip is bad, and we shouldn't make fun of people for bad things in their personal lives.
It's none of our business.
But in this case, this chick is obviously some kind of Christian right-wing nut job.
So therefore, that makes her a hypocrite.
And that's why it's okay for us to talk about it.
That's something that a lot of people do psychologically when they join in on these internet pile-ons.
You know, they come up with a reason for why, no, it's actually okay in this case.
You know, it's justified.
When really, it's just they're joining in because it's fun.
Is there any difference, do you think, between, I mean, other than the final outcome, is there any difference between this and the mobs that used to dunk the witches or burn the witches?
That a lot of people just joined, didn't, you know, just didn't have anything else to do?
Oh, yeah.
And the way that you know it's completely irrational, you know, that it has no basis in actual justice or truth or logic is that arguing back never ever helps.
You know, if anybody who finds themselves in the middle of one of these storms, your first instinct is always going to be, oh, well, I'll just explain my side of the story, and then everyone will understand.
But because nobody in one of these pylons is interested in the truth, anything you say is just going to be twisted out of context or made to make it sound worse, or it's going to be like, you know, crying when a bully attacks you in the schoolyard.
You know, nobody's listening.
So rational argument isn't going to help anything.
Holy cow.
How you survived this is beyond me.
And that's, I guess, where I want to go next.
How did you survive it?
What did you take from it?
How should you fight these things?
And we're talking to Helen Andrews, a conservative writer.
She wrote a piece in First Things called Shame Storm.
Helen, you brought up something I think is really interesting about how people won't react to rational thought in these moments.
And it strikes me that when these things start, when these sort of online shame trains begin, we in ourselves wind up excusing a lot of awful behavior in an attempt to pile on.
You use a great example, which was Kevin Williamson.
We love Kevin.
He's been on the show before.
He went to the Atlantic.
People don't remember the story.
And they unearthed some comment that he had made about abortion.
And the controversy really wasn't about the comment.
Afterwards, people started saying, I'm fearful to work with Kevin Williamson.
25%, he might want to kill 25% of the women who work here.
And you point out correctly, no one actually believed Kevin Williamson was a threat to anyone around them.
They had justified in this moral sort of crusade the idea that they could say anything about this person and lie about their own feelings because this was so justified.
Did you feel like you were kind of at the other end of that going through this process?
Sure.
You know, I would read in comments or blog posts people saying things about me that were just not true, you know, that were just factually, easily, checkably false.
And I kind of wondered, how is it that these people who have never met me care so much about ruining my life?
What did I ever do to make them so angry with me?
And eventually I realized that they're not angry at me.
They don't care all that much about me one way or the other.
They've got their own reasons.
They're angry at women or they're angry at conservatives or they're just angry in general and like lashing out or they just enjoy the rush of feeling outrage.
You know, you really, once you read enough of the comments or follow enough of these shame storms, you realize it's not about you.
It's not about the person at the middle of it.
It's just about there's just a pattern to the dynamic of the way these things always go.
It's like a wave or an avalanche.
So how do you deal with it?
Because I would imagine you tried all of the, you know, argue, let it go, don't read it, be nice.
I mean, what works?
You know, it's funny.
It took me a long time to get to a place where I'm okay with it.
But once I did, I realized I was actually grateful that this, I truly believe it was part of a bigger plan that this should happen to me.
That, you know, I was a pretty rotten person when I was 24.
I was selfish and careless and very proud.
And I don't know if anything short of this kind of knock upside the head could have done it for me.
You know, I was raised in a very secular household.
You know, the only church we recognized was the church of NPR.
But it was only in college and after going into conservative journalism that I met any Christians at all.
And one of the things that one of them said to me after this whole C-SPAN thing happened was, you know, Helen, there is no humility without humiliation.
And gosh, was that true?
You know, I was just a very proud person.
My instinct was always to think that I don't deserve this bad thing that's happening to me.
But that saying that just stuck in my head, there is no humility without humiliation, led me to some self-reflection and realizing that, you know, yeah, the only solution here is to try and become a better person.
So that was my lesson.
So let me ask you, because I think that's a great lesson to learn and one I have learned through the years.
Sure have.
Shut up.
But it's important that we recognize that, you know, that, you know, recognize our place in the universe and time and space.
However, it also seems that no matter how much you change, it's not, they're just going to say you're only doing that because of X, Y, and Z.
So you never escape that.
Does that make sense to you?
Have you experienced that?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
That there's no, you know, there's no way to indicate that you've changed or reformed, which, you know, as the only thing that, you know, there's nothing you can do to change how other people think.
You know, they're not your problem.
You only have control over you.
But one thing that I've certainly taken away is that when I see other people who have been through these kinds of shame storms or I hear rumors about somebody, oh, he did some kind of bad thing in the past or she's guilty of this.
If it's been a while, I always start from the default of assuming, unless they indicate or prove to me otherwise, that they have changed and that they have become a better person.
Give people the benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, it seems like we're living in a society that just doesn't ever forgive.
Yeah, well, you know, I've gotten a lot of feedback ever since this essay was published.
You know, some people, some people whose names I recognized and have seen on TV reached out and said, something like this happened to me.
Thank you for, you know, including a ray of hope at the end of your story.
But the messages that got to me the most were from people in a small town who nobody had ever heard of, who aren't that famous, but whose lives have been wrecked or overturned by events like this.
You know, they say I was the worst person on the internet for 48 hours, and then everybody else moved on, but I'm still here living amidst the wreckage.
I could spend so much time talking to you, Helen.
One question before we go.
We've got about one minute.
You wound up eventually reconnecting with your ex-boyfriend where this whole incident started, and you've talked to him since.
What's your relationship like now?
How does he see this?
Yeah, no, it's quite positive.
Because he suffered just as much as I did.
He eventually lost his job over this incident.
And he's kind of, people made fun of him on the internet.
He finds it hard to get gigs now.
And so we've both kind of learned a lesson.
I asked him if he would do it over again if he had the choice.
And he said, absolutely not.
Not a chance.
So, yeah, no, and I forgive him and he forgives me.
And that's really the moral of this story.
Finding Redemption and Forgiveness00:00:30
Helen, thank you for having the guts.
First of all, for not giving up and then finding the positive message in it and changing your life of redemption that's not going to go viral, but it should because it's important and I think it's going to happen to all of us in one way or another.