Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and Riley Moore dissect Mark Zuckerberg's evasive handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story and criticize Rob Schneider's claims of liberal indoctrination on SNL. They allege a coordinated media suppression of Republican urgency while warning of a Biden-led government takeover via executive orders. The trio exposes the FBI's crumbling credibility regarding Mar-a-Lago and Ashley Biden, condemns the $700 billion student loan forgiveness scheme, and analyzes Texas's failed attempt to curb BlackRock's proxy voting power, linking these issues to a broader corporate agenda threatening personal autonomy. [Automatically generated summary]
Oh, today is a good example, kids, of why, you know, you prepare and then when something goes wrong, you can just, you know, you'll just ad-lib it.
You'll just go for it.
I mean, Stu, it was a work of art today, don't you think?
I think it was among the five shows that we did this week, and that's incredible.
It really is.
It really is.
Our computer system went down unbeknownst to the audience the whole time, of course.
And so we just winged the whole show today.
And you can tell.
And you can tell.
But it was funny.
It was a really funny, funny episode.
And we, you know, hid all the stuff we were supposed to.
But you'll love today's episode, so stand by for it.
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Why Fact Checkers Matter00:12:35
Here we go.
Today's podcast.
It's Friday.
This is the Glenbeck program.
Let's see.
We've got Bill O'Reilly talking about the news of the day.
We've got a couple of big stories today.
The rest of the affidavit part of the warrant on Mar-Lago is by a judge.
Must be released by noon today.
So we're waiting for that at any moment.
We will cover it and read it to you as we get it, assuming that we get it before this program is over today.
The second thing is Zuckerberg.
Could we please play cut one of Mark Zuckerberg in an interview with Joe Rogan?
Listen to this.
How do you guys handle things when they're a big news item that's controversial?
Like there was a lot of attention on Twitter during the election because of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The Neo.
Yeah, so you guys censored that as well?
So we took a different path than Twitter.
I mean, basically the background here is the FBI, I think, basically came to us, some folks on our team, and was like, hey, just so you know, like you should be on high alert.
We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election.
We have it on notice that basically there's about to be some kind of dump of that's similar to that.
So just be vigilant.
So our protocol is different from Twitter's.
What Twitter did is they said you can't share this at all.
We didn't do that.
What we do is we have if something is reported to us as potentially misinformation, important misinformation, we also have this third-party fact-checking program because we don't want to be deciding what's true and false.
And for the, I think it was five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false, the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it.
So you could still share it.
You could still consume it.
So when you say the distribution has decreased in the market.
How does that work?
It basically the ranking in news feed was a little bit less.
fewer people saw it than would have otherwise so it definitely by what percentage I don't I don't know off the top of my head, but it's meaningful.
But basically, a lot of people were still able to share it.
We got a lot of complaints that that was the case.
Obviously, this is a hyper-political issue.
So depending on what side of the political spectrum, you either think we didn't censor it enough or censored it way too much.
But we weren't sort of as black and white about it as Twitter.
We just kind of thought, hey, look, if the FBI, which I still view as a legitimate institution in this country, it's very professional law enforcement, they come to us and tell us that we need to be on guard about something, then I want to take that seriously.
Did they specifically say you need to be on guard about that story?
No, I don't remember if it was that specifically, but it basically fit the pattern.
It was interesting.
I listened to a good chunk of this interview last night because I wanted to get the context.
I've seen this all over the place.
First of all, it's interesting because you forget about the pressure they're getting from the other side, too.
A lot of times we talk about how we're all annoyed at Facebook and Twitter and all these places.
The other side is putting more pressure on them about making sure they do censor this stuff.
And he went through that pretty in an interesting way.
It's interesting when you listen to him, isn't it?
Yeah.
Because that's what he was saying to me when I sat at the table.
He said, Glenn, the pressure is just as heavy on the other side.
I don't want to get involved in any of it.
And he really goes into that.
He basically says, I don't want you could say he doesn't want any responsibility for this whatsoever is essentially his point.
Now, whether you believe him on that is another story.
Correct.
It was interesting to hear the lead up to this because Joe Rogan, I think five or six questions, 20 minutes before this question happened, he was leading to this question.
I really seem like he, I mean, he's, you could tell he wanted to get something on this.
He's turned out to be a good interviewer.
Yeah.
Interviewer.
Yeah.
He's really good.
And the other thing was I think you get from this, because it doesn't specifically say, he sort of avoids that part of it where he says, I don't know why it started.
You can understand them coming and saying, hey, there could be Russian influence.
There could be, and we all know that some of that stuff goes on.
Hey, be vigilant.
And they thought this was the part of this.
He's not saying necessarily the FBI came to him and said, you've got to stop this Hunter Biden story, but he doesn't deny it either.
Yeah.
And it fits, he said, at worst, or I mean, at best, he said, it fits the parameters of the story they were worried about.
Right.
You know what I mean?
So, and remember, the FBI had that story a year before.
And they had already, we found out yesterday, they had already told their FBI agents, do not look into it.
Yep.
It's, I mean, we're really blessed to have that computer guy save a copy and give copies out or that thing would have been gone.
We would have never heard of it.
And I think here, if you're looking at this with a critical eye, I think you're more concerned about the FBI than you are Facebook here, which is interesting.
I think we've been talking about the big tech platforms, which they're guilty of a million things.
I'm not letting them off here.
But at least the way this story is told, my suspicion is much more about the FBI and what they were telling Facebook rather than Facebook necessarily coming in and trying to make these decisions on their own.
Everyone talks about him as like an android.
He actually comes off as relatively normal in this interview.
You should sit in the same room with him.
He's either an accomplished sociopathic liar or he doesn't really have control of his company.
And I'm not sure which it is.
He might, I mean, he might be a sociopath.
I didn't come.
But he is, you listen to him.
He's very logical.
He's very heartfelt.
He'll look you in the eye and say these things and you're like, okay, well, he does have a point on that.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And I think.
But there's a level of this where these guys want to make a bunch of money.
They have some sort of idea of what they want the world to be, surely.
But like, they also want to make a bunch of money and they don't want to be in constant political controversies.
And they love for someone to take all of this off their table.
Like they'd love to not be able, like to not have to worry about it.
This is why they do the fact checker thing, right?
He even says this in the interview.
We do the fact checkers.
Like, who's who's looking at the fact checkers, right?
I mean, the fact checkers.
Rogan asked this.
Rogan asked this.
He said, why?
Well, how can we tell if the fact checkers are biased?
And his basic point was like, I mean, he didn't say this exactly, but his basic point was, I don't really care.
I just don't want to have to make the decisions.
I don't want to be, I don't want us to be responsible for it.
Like, it's just like, well, you are when you're in the middle of the fact checkers are.
The same thing with the algorithms, right?
Like, you know, you can say the algorithm is making the choice, but human beings have an impact on that.
But the bottom line is I think like what he wants is no responsibility, which unfortunately for him is not, that's not how this is going to work out.
I mean, people are going to come to him on both sides and say, you need to take responsibility for your platform.
Everyone, I want to play a cut from Rob Schneider.
He's on, you know, SNL, and we were talking about Saturday Night Live.
He is shockingly a fan of this program.
I'm always shocked when somebody who I know is a fan of the show and will admit it out loud.
He did.
Here's what he said about comedy and SNL.
Listen to this.
When Hillary Clinton lost, which is understandable.
It's not exactly the most logical person in the room.
And then when Kate McKinnon went out there on Saturday Night Live in the cold opening, and I was like, she started dressed as Hillary Clinton and she starts playing hallelujah.
And I said, I literally prayed to, please have a joke at the end.
Don't do this.
Please don't go down there.
And there was no joke at the end.
And I went, it's over.
It's over.
He's not going to come back.
It really is the end of.
It's gone.
You can take the comedy routines, the comedy routines.
You can take the comedic indoctrination process happening with each of the late night hosts and you could exchange them with each other.
That's how you know that's not interesting anymore because it's not an independent voice anymore.
It's just all indoctrination by comedic imposition.
You used to work in Saturday Night Live when a conservative and a liberal could work side by side and you'd hit both guys.
Well, that was the whole point.
We always leaned more left because we were more liberal because that's where all the girls were.
Let's be on the right side.
That was the whole thing I got in the show business.
And I realized, hey, look, I'm five foot five, barely.
I'm Filipino.
I look kind of weird and whatever.
And I said, I have to do something to get these beautiful girls because this ain't working.
And so you get wrapped up into this.
And I guess I am a liberal.
But we lean that way, but we also called it when it was necessary to be called.
I thought.
There's no way that you would have hit Barack Obama and Joe Biden as hard as at least Joe Biden because there was tons of funny things about Joe Biden.
There wasn't.
They stayed away from it.
And truthfully, they just like, you know, and Lauren Michaels will say this.
And, you know, he'll say the liberals, they're just, they're most sensitive.
They can't take jokes, the Democrats.
And it's true.
But like, I will say, they were still doing great stuff.
The real genius of Saturday Night Live is Jim Downey, the head writer.
And he wrote this, and he's also a conservative.
He wrote a great bit, like the great, the last great political bit, was during when Obama and Hillary in the primaries and the press and how the press were deferential to Obama.
And he wrote this really funny thing.
He said, Hillary, so according to Syria and what's happening in Libya, and do you think that going against Assad and then also supporting and the Hamas's Hamas's with the creep of Hamas coming in in Lebanon?
And do you think that the process would be and they asked something very complicated?
And they said, So, Senator Obama, who's your favorite basketball team?
And I said, Well, that's brilliant.
And that's really funny because that's kind of the press.
The press was so great.
And so, and that's funny.
And I think at the end of the day, like all entertainers, including me when I'm going out performing, and I talk about all this stuff.
But my job is to entertain.
Funny is coming back, though.
I think so.
I've been ostracized from show business, you can probably tell.
You're here at no point in anyone's life has been, you know, I'm going up.
I'm going up.
I'm on the Glenn Beck podcast.
That's Rob Schneider, the podcast.
It releases tomorrow wherever you get your podcast.
It's very, very funny and insightful.
You know, I don't want to wait.
I honestly want to get access to it today.
There's no way to do that.
Wish I could give you some access to blazetv.com.
What would I do if I wasn't going to?
Well, if you go to blazetv.com/slash Glenn and use a promo code Glenn, you'll save 10%.
Now, not you.
I've banned you from being even a member.
Really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But if I show, it doesn't even air.
That's why I don't want you to watch the network because we just keep you busy just to keep you.
Well, that's actually quite nice.
But that's what you're doing.
That's a chair of black.
But I will say, you do get early access to all the podcasts, right?
With the Blaze TV subscription.
And this is really good.
You can watch it on YouTube tomorrow.
You can watch it now at Blaze TV, tomorrow on YouTube, and wherever you get your podcast.
This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.
Mr. Bill O'Reilly, cheese, where do you want to start the biggest story of the week?
Countering Progressive Madness00:15:10
Well, you know, I want to start in a more general capacity because you have the midterm elections, which could put an end to some of the madness.
And so the progressive left, which has made unbelievable strides under Biden, knows that.
And now they're working in conjunction with the media to put out these phony polls that show the Biden administration surging in popularity and the Democrats in the generic ballot beating the Republicans and all of this.
It's not true, but it could have an effect if it's not countered by people like you and me.
Because we live in a country where half of the voters don't know anything.
And I'm not being super silly, Espec, arrogant.
I'm not.
It's just a fact.
They live in a world of their own, a world they create out of cyberspace.
They don't pay attention.
They don't understand the big picture.
They don't understand anything other than gas costs me more and so does bread.
But that's all they understand.
And so they're subject to unbelievable propaganda.
But if Americans and the Republican Party don't start to really up the urgency of this.
Well, part of this is because of Mitch McConnell.
Mitch McConnell has been heard to say that all we're going to do is just keep pointing out how bad the Democrats are.
That way we won't lose anybody.
Are you out of your mind?
I don't know what Mitch McConnell says.
I don't care what he says.
There isn't a central force in the Republican Party now at all.
And really, there isn't in the Democratic Party either because Biden's not in control of his situation.
But the Democratic machine allied with the media out of K Street in Washington, where these political action committees operate, they are well organized and the Republicans aren't.
So there isn't this urgency of message.
I mean, when you get a poll in Los Angeles, it shows that a progressive left is well out in front of a guy who says, look, I'm going to clean up the town.
And you just look at, and that poll is probably accurate.
And you say to the people of Los Angeles, okay, if this is what you want, this is what you got.
You better get a gate.
And you better get a gun or security guards because this is totally out of control.
And you're voting for it.
You're voting for more of it.
So that's the big story.
I mean, it comes a point in history, and you know that I am the history guy, where a citizenry has to make a decision, a collective decision.
Correct.
And to you and me, it's so clear, right?
It's so clear.
There isn't two sides to the story like there might have been with a Bill Clinton or even a Barack Obama.
There aren't two sides to the story.
This is a massive government takeover of everything in this country to diminish your personal freedom.
That's what this loan thing is all about.
I know.
The government wants to run education pre-K to post-graduate.
They want to run it all so they can indoctrinate, just like you did with the Total Twins Ed, the students from cradle to when they're out.
This is a massive step toward that.
We will pay if you go along with us, if you agree with us, we'll pay for a lot of your education.
They want to run personal protection, Second Amendment.
They don't want you to have personal protection.
This is the federal government.
But most of all, they want to run the economy to tell you, the American citizen, what you can and can't have.
This is all tied in to the progressive vision.
I'm not a conspiracy guy.
I mock most conspiracies.
But you can see how this has happened in the past to other countries and how it is now being attempted in the United States.
Yeah, I've never really liked this the most important election of our lifetime because I've heard it my whole life.
This could be the last midterm election under the United States of America as we know it.
The Constitution by 2024 could be gone if there's no speed bump in Congress.
We've got to stop this.
The executive orders, Bill, I've always been against executive orders when they are just there.
I mean, we're writing, we're not legislating anything anymore.
And I don't like executive orders.
Now, I think executive orders have to be stopped.
They just have to be stopped because we are in a dictatorship.
When a president can do what he's trying to do, that's a dictatorship.
But you're not going to stop it unless you have a Republican president elected in 24.
Correct.
So there's no mechanism to stop it.
So the founding fathers, they wanted a certain type of government, but they realized, all of them in their personal letters and papers, that this might not happen.
Okay.
Let me go to talking about personal papers.
The redacted version of the Mar-a-Lago search warrant affidavit is supposed to be made public.
Now, redacted.
Are we just going to see a bunch of pages with nothing but black bars over it?
Yeah, I mean, look, what you can expect to see is a generalized rationale for the search.
You're not going to get any names.
You're not going to know what the person told the grand jury that Trump took.
You're not going to know any of that.
I don't even think you'll get specific documents that they were looking for.
Don't think you're going to get that.
Then there's nothing here.
That's a nothing problem.
Look, there's nothing in this whole thing.
I know.
All right.
This is just another example of a government trying to destroy an individual, in this case, Donald Trump.
So the government, the Biden administration is trying to destroy the man because they know that he still has a massive amount of support.
And the Republicans who hate him are siding with the Democrats, which is really, look, I know Trump better than anybody knows him, and I understand the eccentricities of the man and that he did do damage to himself and the country by being immature and undisciplined.
And I told it to him more times than you can even imagine.
But he governed the country well.
He didn't.
And that is not in dispute if you look at the border, if you look at the economic deals that he made.
Again, it can't be done by executive order.
I mean, we wouldn't be having this problem if we would have had Republicans with a spine.
Let me switch topics here.
The FBI is losing credibility so rapidly.
We have now the FBI not only with the Mar-a-Lago thing, but we also have FBI agents, whistleblowers at the highest levels, according to Grassley, saying that the FBI was ordered not to talk about Hunter Biden.
They were ordered not to look at any of that.
Mark Zuckerberg was on Joe Rogan, and he talked about how the FBI came to him and said, you know, there's going to be some Russian disinformation coming out.
You know, don't run with it.
So we have that.
Plus, we also have the story that the people who stole Ashley Biden's diary, which I'm all for them being arrested, they stole her diary, but this has really damning information in that diary.
They arrested those two people, but nobody's looking into the Hunter Biden thing.
No arrests have been made on this at all.
What is the game plan of the FBI?
It doesn't really matter, does it, Beck?
So when, and I do believe this will happen, the House becomes Republican in November.
And when that happens, and they're all sworn in in January, the first thing the Republicans will do is hold hearings on the FBI.
And then these whistleblowers will come in and they'll say what they are going to say under oath.
And that will be the end of the FBI's reign of power, okay?
Because it'll then be destroyed and charges, actual charges, might come from that.
That's number one.
I have to tell you, Bill, I'm concerned that I think we're a country, the United States of blackmail.
They have been monitoring these congressmen and everything else.
And, you know, these congressmen are not the best moral character.
Are you sure that the intelligence agencies and look at the power that the FBI had under Hoover?
Yeah, I mean, I know it because I wrote Killing the Mob and everything is in there about it, but it's that different age now.
So that's the FBI.
But here's the worst FBI thing.
You ready for the worst, Beck?
Sure.
They didn't even look into who leaked the Alito memo.
Do you know that for sure?
Yeah, because if they had, they would have made an arrest.
There are only maybe 20 people possible.
I know.
And probably out of those 20 over maybe six or seven.
But doesn't that also fall to John Roberts?
Because they do have their own at least security force that can hire out to investigate.
I guess I don't know, but I do know that if Trump were president and this happened, you would have had an arrest already.
Yeah, you would have.
Okay?
So when you see something that simple, all right, that blatant, that you have a person inside the Supreme Court, not a lot of them, all right?
And they can't find that person who leaked that memo in a historical fashion, which makes us a banana republic.
If we can't even keep secrets at the Supreme Court level, we're a banana republic.
And so it is a terrible thing, but there is a resolution to this if the House goes Republican.
Bill O'Reilly, a guy who knows how inflation works, too many dollars chasing too few goods.
So you want to, the economy is overheating.
We've got to slow down the economy.
How do you do that?
You make sure that people don't have the money to spend.
What Joe Biden did with this bailout of people's student loans is absolutely incredible, Bill.
Talk to me a little bit about the fallout of this, what you think if it's going to stand, Nancy Pelosi flip-flopping, and what it's going to do to the economy.
Well, I can't predict the economy.
Nobody can.
We still have a big consumer engine here in this country.
People are out.
I was at Yankee Stadium for the Mets Yanks on Tuesday, 50,000 people there spending money and buying $8 hot dogs.
So I can't predict the economy.
The loan forgiveness thing will be obliterated if there is a Republican president in 2024 that will go.
It's a 10-year expenditure.
I estimate the expenditure if the Democrats continue to hold power to be at about $700 billion.
The country cannot afford, obviously, to keep running up this kind of debt.
Biden's not going to stop.
The only reason they do this is to buy votes anyway.
Most of the money is wasted.
It's so complex.
People don't understand who's going to get the loan, how it's tied into the Department of Labor.
I mean, it's just unbelievable.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
You say that this is going to have to wait until the next president.
Do you not think this is going to go to the Supreme Court?
No, I won't get there.
Biden will veto any attempt to rein it in.
So, but, you know, it's only really two years away now.
This is how fast time goes.
I want to tell your audience back because I know you have a very smart and big audience around the world.
A couple of things.
I did an interview with Newt Gingrich this week on billorilly.com.
Everybody should watch that interview.
The way I interview these people is totally different than anybody else, and you know that.
And I got a lot of micro information about really what's happening because Gingrich, he went through this.
All right, the whole thing in the contract for America and all that.
So if you really want an astute analysis and get away from the propaganda you see on television and newspaper news, watch that.
The second thing is that people are getting hopeless now, and they shouldn't.
So yes, there are states like mine, New York and California and Illinois, almost irredeemable at this point.
But also states like Florida and Texas and other places that are rising up, that are saying, you know, we want our freedom.
We want to hold on to our personal freedom.
I mean, people in California and New York, I'm shocked.
They don't seem to respect their own personal freedom.
They want a government to tell them what they can and can't do every single facet of life.
I've never seen anything like this ever.
Why do you want to sacrifice your personal autonomy to an incompetent boob like Joe Biden?
Why would you ever want to give Nancy Pelosi power over you or Donald Trump or any other politician?
You know, you've got to fight for your independence.
And we're not there because that message is being suppressed.
Well, that message also, you know, Newt Gingrich had the contract for America.
I have been ringing the bell in Congress and Senate for a year.
Contract for America.
West Virginia Liberty on the Line00:14:13
How about a new one?
And they won't do it.
It's not going to happen.
It's not going to happen this time around because there's no central leadership like Gingrich brought to the House.
Yeah, well, then Kevin McCarthy should definitely not be the guy in the House.
He should definitely not.
If he can't get that done, then he should definitely not be the leader of the House.
Period.
Whatever.
I don't follow that very closely because I don't, I know the games that are played.
I want the American people to rise up, to see what is happening in a non-paranoid way and to discuss it with their children, their families, their friends, and say, you know, this is bad.
This is way worse than you think it is when the powerful corporate media allies with the progressive left as it has is trouble.
Bill O'Reilly from billo reilly.com.
If you watched his no spin zone for years, he's still doing no spin news every night, billoreilly.com.
The best of the Glenn Beck program.
Riley Moore is with us.
He's the West Virginia State Treasurer.
Hello, Riley.
Hey, Glenn, how are you?
Thanks for having me back on.
You bet.
I wanted to ask you if my feelings are valid here, and you may not want to get involved, but I think Texas, what they did, sucked.
And I think because, if I'm not mistaken, Texas, at least in school books, Texas is a lot like California.
What Texas does, a lot of the red states do.
What California does, the blue states do.
When Texas just decided to take on BlackRock alone and only the E, so they're protecting energy, but not the people, and then only took on BlackRock and not the banks.
Is that a good thing?
You know, Glenn, I laughed Texas for putting BlackRock on there, but I hear your sentiment.
I'm disappointed.
I'm disappointed because you look at the list of those other banks, European banks.
I don't really care about credit suites that much here in the United States.
I don't care about UBS.
I mean, certainly I do because they're part of the movement.
But in terms of the entire ESG movement in this country, it's our own financial system that is doing this to us.
Yes.
I mean, this is why you have to, yes, the E is the way that we can really fight this, but they're all doing the S and the G, right?
Whether you're talking about JP Morgan Chase paying for abortions, the rest of these financial institutions, we've got to list these folks to stop this nonsense.
Because they can just shift their money around.
And it outrages me that only BlackRock, as you said, all the other banks are foreign banks, nothing about U.S. banks.
Why would they have done that?
What deal did they make?
I am not sure.
You know, I don't know.
I've not gotten any insight into what happened there, but I got to say it's disappointing.
And to the listening audience around the country, we have to, in these other states where this bill has passed, this cannot be the bar.
We've got to move beyond this.
Or if we're just looking to check a box, we all lose, and now we're all under control.
God, it is.
I mean, I just don't get it.
I'll sit there and I'll talk to congressmen and senators and states and the nation all over.
And, you know, you'll see those who roll their eyes.
You'll see those who deeply get it.
And those who are just starting to hear about it.
And it's like, wake the F up.
Wake up.
Our liberty is literally on the line.
And I just don't get it.
I don't get it.
No, no.
And we let this go on for a long time.
This didn't start last year.
This didn't start two years ago.
It didn't start three years ago.
To get to the point we are right now where they're able to use our own capital against us, control our economy, control policy through that capital.
I mean, they're setting the policy in this country, not through the ballot box, because they can't get it done at the ballot box.
We have to turn this back.
We have to stand up and fight.
And this certainly falls short in my view.
Yeah, and I'm concerned just about, I mean, Texas, I don't know what's wrong with us.
I really don't know what's wrong with us.
How is Florida?
Florida's really good on ESG, are they not?
They are.
They are.
And, you know, each state is set up differently.
And as I recall correctly, the governor has more authority over banking contracts and the pension boards and things of that nature.
Every state's set up differently.
And Governor DeSantis has been doing a tremendous job because he's taken back control of those proxy votes.
That's something we're doing next year here in West Virginia in our legislative session.
He's able to do it through executive authority.
We need legislation to do it.
Explain what the proxy vote is.
This is so ingenious on the left.
It's beautiful the way they've done it.
It's elegant, simple, and deadly to freedom.
Explain what the proxy vote thing is.
It really is.
It's unbelievable.
You couldn't write a better story.
So the proxy votes, and this is part of the problem.
You have a duopoly.
There's two proxy vote advisors out there, ISS and Glass Lewis.
Pension boards look to those advisors on how to vote.
They control roughly 97% of all proxy votes.
They advise on 97% of all proxy votes.
When we contract, let's say, the state of West Virginia or Texas or Florida with BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, whoever it might be, in the contract, they control those proxy votes, right?
Because we're in passive investment vehicles like an index fund or things like that, where there are votes attributed to that.
They control those votes.
Then they accumulate those votes as asset managers and then vote against our own interest here in this country or in the state of West Virginia, like you had happened with ExxonMobil, where they were able to accumulate enough votes to say, you know what?
You're an oil company.
Good idea would be, let's vote to reduce oil production by 20% last year.
Bet we could use that right now, but that's not part of their agenda, right?
So State Street, Vanguard, BlackRock control 25% of all votes cast, publicly traded companies in this country.
20% of all votes cast in every major company.
45?
Or 25.
25, okay.
25% of all major companies in the U.S. Think of that.
Power.
It's all publicly traded companies, 25%.
It could be a little bank in West Virginia.
It could be, you know, Boeing, ExxonMobil, whatever.
They control 25%.
Now, you think about like majority shareholders in some of these publicly traded companies.
We're not talking like 50%, 30%.
I mean, it's smaller percentages because obviously there's so many shareholders involved in publicly traded companies.
So it doesn't take much to have a rich in power.
Yes.
Riley, who are the best states on this?
Who do you think is well, first, before I ask that?
Did we put into any legislation?
Are you seeing anybody put ESG or any entity or program like that because they're going to change the name ESG because we've made it very unpopular?
That's right.
You know, just how woke doesn't exist now and critical race theory is not real.
Right.
Yes, there will be, you know, they control language, obviously, in this country.
So they will change that as well.
You know, I think there's good legislation that has been passed in Kentucky, in Oklahoma, in Tennessee.
I think they have a good bill in Texas.
Now, they do have the ability in that bill in Texas.
Maybe this is just their first cut at it.
He has the ability, the comptroller, to go back and revisit that list every year at his discretion.
I think the bill is good.
It could be strengthened.
I understand Texas state legislature is looking at doing that again.
I hope so.
I'm hoping they do.
But, you know, there's a multifaceted approach to this.
It's dealing with the banks, the asset managers, proxy voting.
I mean, we have to fight this on all fronts.
And then you have the attorney generals that are coming in on this SEC role from the government side where they're trying to control emissions all the way down to company supply chains where they're going to have to report this, which is total insanity.
And so you have the federal push that's also happening.
Congressman Andy Barr has been a real leader in this.
Congressman out of Kentucky, he's been doing a great job.
If we can get back control of Congress, I think that will go a long way in the White House to bringing us back to where we need to be in our pension funds in particular with his bill.
It just says all you can do is assess risk and return.
That's it.
And then I want to see some antitrust lawsuits out there on the Zoom.
Well, that's one thing I'd like to ask you.
This just seems like if somebody would get the information and track, I know the ESG funds are tracking lower than the S ⁇ P 500.
I don't know what the threshold is, but there's got to be a class action suit against all of these people for taking my retirement money and then telling me I should expect lower returns for a few years.
That's not what I asked you to do.
I didn't ask you to put your money into something that is an ideological argument.
I asked you to make me money.
Why is there not a class action lawsuit being thought of?
I know that there is one being thought of.
And there has been discussions, I know, amongst attorney generals and other people within the federal government, our elected officials there in Congress, about the idea of an antitrust violation going on here.
not only with the asset managers, but don't forget that duopoly that you have in terms of proxy advisors, Glass Lewis and ISS, 97%.
I mean, is that not a monopoly?
I don't know what that meant.
I don't know what you just said.
What does that mean?
So Glass Lewis and ISS, who are the proxy advisors on all of these pension boards, they do the advisement for 97% of the money.
Oh my gosh.
Oh my gosh.
I mean, this is brilliant.
I mean, Riley, this is really, I mean, this is the crime of the century.
What's happened?
Maybe the crime of humanity.
The way the progressives have put this whole thing together, it is going to be admired.
I mean, hopefully for, you know, for years, like we admire the Nazis being so evil and so brilliant in the way they put that thing together.
They dupe people for so long.
I think this is akin to that kind of stuff.
This is brilliant planning, really brilliant planning.
Well, you mentioning the Nazis brings me to a great point here.
We've sent out a letter with 17 other state treasurers on Morningstar.
Morningstar rates all the college 529 savings plans in the country.
Sounds like a good thing.
Well, they have an ESG scoring arm in this, and they've decided to add in BDS, boycott, divest, sanction Israel as part of their scoring system.
So they're bringing in the anti-Semitic aspect of this as well.
And so if you don't think this is about the great reset in the new world order that these people want to put into place, I got news for you.
Didn't a lot of states pass bills that they wouldn't invest if you were a BDS participant?
Yes, we have that in West Virginia, and many other states have anti-BDS legislation.
So our attorney generals have sent letters as well to them saying that they are going to look at this to see if this is a violation of our law.
And if it is, then we are going to have to break contract with them.
Good.
I got to tell you, this is the problem you got.
They get.
They got us in a box, right?
Because everybody who looks at a college savings plan looks at Morningstar's ratings.
They have a monopoly on it.
We've just boxed ourselves into a corner, and it's time to get out.
It's time to get out.
And I thank you, Riley, for really being one of the good guys and leading on this.