Andy Ngo warns that viral conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk's assassination, despite police findings of no foreign involvement, risk sabotaging justice by tainting jury pools and harming reputations. Meanwhile, Glenn Beck critiques the potential Supreme Court ruling on FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter's firing as a threat to the administrative state, while mocking Jasmine Crockett's tax plan and commercial strategy. The episode concludes by contrasting these political anxieties with skepticism toward modern experts and AI tools, highlighting a broader distrust of established institutions ranging from the judiciary to policy advisors. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, on today's podcast, this is the best of, and you're going to get a few things.
You're going to get the highlights from the show.
The Supreme Court weighing in on, you know, what could be the end of the fourth branch of government started in 1935.
The founders, I went to George AI and I asked what in their writings, the founding of the country would support or disagree with any of this.
It's amazing what came up and what came out of George AI.
Also, Stu, very satisfying segment on Jasmine Crockett running for the U.S. Senate.
I think we can all say, yay, unless it works out for her to actually win.
Then we're torturing Stu.
Also, Andy No on the conspiracy theories that could mean no justice for Charlie Kirk and his killer.
All this and more on today's podcast.
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Let's get back to the table.
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You're listening to the Best of the Glenn Beck Program.
Welcome to the Glenn Beck program from Glenn AI.
Christmas.
I have to tell you, I have been experimenting now with Glenn AI as it is growing and getting stronger every day.
And I have to tell you what CNN said about it and everything else.
It's crazy.
But I have to tell you, as long as you use AI as a tool and you do not lose yourself to it, it is the greatest tool man has ever come up with.
It really is.
I mean, I'm working on stuff for 2026 right now that I think is going to blow your mind.
I think it'll just blow your mind.
It's blowing my mind.
And we just, we have to know that it is a tool and keep it under control and make sure that it doesn't reflect what we want it when we're talking about truth and history, not reflect what we want it to be, but what it actually is.
So it can help us regain our knowledge and our desire to learn more and more.
Speaking of Christmas, I think the greatest Christmas gift ever given to Stu is Jasmine Crockett running for Senate.
Yes.
I don't think there's anything I could have gotten you for Christmas.
You're welcome, Stu.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
It doesn't get any better than this, Glenn.
You know, all the stuff that's going on is wrong in the world, but my girl is there to rescue all of us and entertain all of us on a day-to-day basis.
The rollout was exquisite.
Everything I could have possibly hoped for.
She's getting other candidates to drop out of the race already.
It is, you know, it is, I'm under, I'm opening presents under a Christmas tree every single morning.
It is, it is the top.
Have you seen her campaign video?
Oh my God, I love it.
Okay.
Her campaign video, the number one response on X is, this is the type of campaign video that only a low IQ person would approve of.
Here's a bit of it.
Please.
Here's her video.
There are a lot of people that said, you got to stay in the house.
We need our voice.
We need you there.
And I understand.
But what we need is for me to have a bigger voice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's her.
That's her introducing yesterday.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think we do also have a clip, a clip two of the actual ad.
And it's, I, struggle with this for everyone listening on the radio.
And it's, you know, it's my favorite medium.
But at certain times that you, you do need to see the visuals and associate.
Can we read the text?
Um, white screens are so small, I can't see them.
Yeah, sure.
Let's play it.
Go ahead.
How about this new one they have?
Their new star, Crockett.
How about her?
She's the new star of the Democrat Party, Jasmine Carcass.
They're in big trouble.
But you have this woman, Crockett.
She's a very low IQ person.
I watched her speak the other day.
She's definitely a low IQ person.
Crockett.
Oh, man.
Oh, man.
She's a very low IQ person.
Wow.
Somebody said the other day, she's one of the leaders of the party.
I said, you got to be kidding.
Now they're going to rely on Crockett.
Crockett's going to bring him back.
Oh, my gosh.
Oh, my God.
I love it.
I can't describe.
So you didn't want to interrupt President Trump, but she's just in profile, standing there and listening.
And then she turns and she looks at the camera and she's listening.
And then she folds her arms.
I'm not going anywhere.
And then she smiles.
It's actually for what she's trying to appeal to, probably pretty smart.
Making herself the number one target of Donald Trump.
That's why I love her so much, because everything, every stupid thing she does is perfectly incentivized by the Democrat Party.
Like they, you know, you can be a Democrat.
You can be slaving away, working on healthcare policy, trying to turn the world around from a 0.9 temperature rise in a century, all the important things they really care about over there.
Right, sure.
And you will never get invited on a show.
You will never sit across from Stephen Colbert.
You will not have Charlemagne the gods speaking your praises on every appearance when he's talking about the Democratic Party.
And you know what?
You know who gets that?
It's her.
Her, with absolutely the IQ of a bagel.
She will go out there and she will appear on every one of these shows.
And in each one of them, she will prove once and again that she knows nothing about what she's talking about.
And she will say five impossibly stupid things.
And then she will get off the air and answer the next text for her next booking.
And it is utterly perfect.
She is the perfect encapsulation of the modern Democrat Party.
And I love every second of it.
She's so entertaining.
She gives us things to talk about and to laugh about.
She brings joy into my life on a daily basis.
And I love her.
I want to apologize for the bagel comment.
We don't mean to offend Einstein, his bagels, or any of the everything bagels with that comparison.
She's in nothing.
Here's her tax plan.
Can we go to Cut 13?
This is Crockett's tax plan.
Just this past week, I saw, I don't remember which celebrity, but it was actually a celebrity.
And I was like, I don't know that that's not necessarily a bad idea, but I'd have to think through it a lot.
One of the things that they propose is black folk not have to pay taxes for a certain amount of time.
Then again, that puts money back in your pocket.
But at the same time, it may not be as objectionable to some people about actually giving out dollars.
But obviously, then you start dealing with the different tax brackets and things like that.
And that's one of the reasons that, you know, we argue the reparations make sense because so many black folk, not only do you owe for the labor that was stolen and killed and all the other things, right?
But the fact is, like, we end up being so far behind, right?
And so it's like, how do you bring forth people exactly?
And so it's like, if you, if you do the no tax thing for people that are already, say, struggling and aren't really paying taxes in the first place, it doesn't really exactly.
They may want those taxes.
I mean, this is a lunatic.
I can't even, there's no way to state how much I love this person.
Like the fact that she would present that in a campaign in Texas as a legitimate idea that just black people stop paying taxes.
It's if you put it on a sketch comedy show, like people would die laughing at it.
And she's presenting it as a serious issue and being rewarded from the person she's interviewing who's nodding the entire time as if that's constitutional in any way or possible in any way or it would be appealing to Texas voters in any way.
Oh, God, she's the best.
So, dude, she's being interviewed by somebody who doesn't understand that when she talks, she has to move the microphone back towards her mouth.
So it's not.
Go ahead and give her a break.
I'm surprised she wasn't holding it upside down.
I wouldn't have been surprised if the entire interview was done with it not plugged in.
It's like the fact that you could hear her at all is a miracle.
She's like, oh, yes, I absolutely think that, you know, only tax, tax rates by race has just been proposed in a state like Texas, a red state, you know, that occasionally can produce a relatively close race.
But here's the wonderful thing.
Not with her, not with her in the race.
I don't know who's going to win the primary and the Republican side.
I have preferences there.
But what I will say, it seems to me legitimately impossible that a person with these sorts of crazy ideas could possibly win a state like Texas.
Look at what happened in Canada.
When Donald Trump interjects himself into something, it doesn't matter.
I mean, Canada, the Canadians, they had that thing sewn up.
The conservatives are going to win.
That's true.
And then he said, 50 seconds, you know, you need to be our 51st state.
He was joking.
Then he just kept joking and they didn't take it as a joke.
People hate him so much that that's why her spot, her commercial is so effective, I think, so brilliant.
She doesn't talk.
She doesn't say anything.
There's no policy.
There's nothing.
It's just her being a strong black woman against Donald Trump.
Who's calling her?
In many places.
Yes.
That's all it's required.
Many places, that is all that was required.
One of those places is not Texas.
And that's, I think, the issue here.
In Canada, your baseline is they hate Donald Trump.
And it's, you know, probably 70, 75% of Canadians have a negative view of Donald Trump.
And when, you know, when he's not in the race, the people who are maybe left-leaning, but would consider conservatives in Canada, if the possibility presents itself that things are going so poorly that they want to switch from a true dough, you know, and that sort of arrangement.
That is something where Donald Trump steps in and kind of like slaps the Democrat back into their world where they're like, wait a minute, no, I hate him.
And if he likes the conservative, I don't want that person.
That's very effective in Canada.
And Texas and Texas does not have the same kind of problems that like New York has.
You don't have the same.
Texas is growing.
Jobs, people are moving in.
Housing is expensive, et cetera.
But why is housing expensive?
It's not Donald Trump.
It's not the economy.
It's that California has moved to Texas.
Same thing with Florida.
Why is it so expensive to live?
Because New York has given up on New York and is moving to Florida.
So the jobs are being created.
And so maybe, maybe that will, hopefully that will go the way because otherwise I'm going to have to fire you, Stu.
What do you mean?
Trump's Political Strategy in Texas00:02:33
Because you're bringing her.
You're bringing her to the table.
If she wins, and I don't think she's going to.
No one's ever going to talk to me again.
Oh, I'm going to hate your.
And it will be legitimate.
I will say.
I do worry because I think the Democrats had a very similar take on Donald Trump in 2015.
So I will say, I am very nervous about my take here, but I'm being honest with you.
This is just the inner joy shining through.
That's all it is.
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You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Okay, so President Donald Trump fired the Federal Trade Commissioner, Rebecca Slaughter.
Federal Trade Commission is an administrative position.
Okay.
This is under, I mean, the head of the Federal Trade Commission sits as a cabinet member.
And if the justices uphold Trump's firing of slaughter, that will overturn a precedent that was horrible that was set in 1935.
Remember, 1935, we're flirting with fascism.
You know, everybody thinks, because they haven't seen the horrors of fascism yet, everybody thinks fascism is neat, blah, blah, blah.
Experts Who Don't Answer to Anyone00:14:58
And so what they do is they say that this is an independent person and the president can't fire them because they're, you know, independent agency.
Well, wait, that would make a fourth branch of government.
Our Constitution is really clear.
There is no such thing as a fourth branch of government, right?
So that's what they're deciding.
Now, here's Katanji Brown Jackson, who is talking about how we really need to listen to the experts.
Cut for.
Because presidents have accepted that there could be both an understanding of Congress and the presidency that it is in the best interest of the American people to have certain kinds of issues handled by experts who, and I think you were in your colloquy with Justice Hagan, you identified the fact that these boards are not only experts, but they're also nonpartisan.
So the seats are actually distributed in such a way that we are presumably eliminating political influence because we're trying to get to science and data and actual facts related to how these decisions are made.
And so the real risk, I think, of allowing these kinds of decisions to be made by the president, of saying everybody can just be removed when I come in, is that we're going to get away from those very important policy considerations.
It will get away from those policy considerations and it will create opportunities for all kinds of problems that Congress and prior presidents wanted to avoid.
Risks that flow inevitably, just given human nature, the realities of the world that we live in.
Okay.
Now remember, what she's saying here is we have to have experts.
We have to have experts that don't really answer to anybody.
Okay.
They're appointed and then they're just there.
This from a, quote, judicial expert who cannot define a woman because she's not a doctor.
She's not a scientist.
She needs an expert to define a woman.
That's how insane her thinking is.
Okay.
Now I'd just like to ask the Supreme Court, when you want things run by experts, do you mean things like the State Department or the Council of Foreign Relations that have gotten us into these endless wars for 100 years?
Because these are the things that Woodrow Wilson wanted.
He wanted the country run by experts.
Okay.
So is it like the Council of Foreign Relations that keeps getting us in these endless wars?
Or is it more like the Fed that directs our fiscal policy that has driven us into, well, $38 trillion of debt?
We have all-powerful banks that strangely all belong to the Fed and endless bailouts for those banks.
Are those are the experts that you're talking about?
Or are you talking about the kind of experts that are doctors that gave the country sterilizations, lobotomies, transgender surgeries, you know?
Or should we listen to the experts like the ones that are now speaking in Illinois to get us death on demand like Canada has with their made assisted suicide, which is now the third largest killer in Canada, MAID, assisted suicide, third largest killer in Canada.
Experts are saying we now need it here and they're pushing for it in Illinois.
Or should we listen to the experts?
And I think many of them are the same experts, strangely, that brought us COVID.
Yeah, that was an expert thing.
They were trying to protect us because they need to do this for our protection.
So direct from the labs in China with the help of the American experts like Fauci, we almost put the world out.
Should we listen to those guys?
Or the experts that brought us masking and Home Depot is absolutely safe, but Ace Hardware wants to kill grandma.
Which are the experts that we want, that we want to make sure that we have in our life that they don't answer or can't be fired by anybody.
I just, I, because I'm pretty full up on the experts myself.
I don't know, but, you know, you're right.
These experts would keep the president in check and they would keep Congress in check and you in check in the Supreme Court, which would be really great, you know?
And you know who else they keep in check?
The people.
So, wow, it seems like we would just be a nation run by experts and our Constitution would be out the window because that's a fourth branch.
And if you don't believe me that, you know, these experts never pay a price, can you name a single expert?
Give me a name of an expert that gave us any of the things that I just told you about.
Give me the name.
Give me, I mean, give me the name of one of them.
Give me the name of one of them that went to jail.
Give me the name of one expert that has been discredited, you know, where your name is going to be mud in this town.
Do you know where that came from?
Your name's going to be mud.
It's not MUD.
It's M-U-D-D.
It comes from Dr. Samuel Mudd.
Okay.
He was a doxter.
He was an expert.
He was the guy that set John Wilkes Booth's broken leg.
He made crutches.
He let him stay there for a while.
He claimed he didn't know him, but he did know him.
In fact, one of the reasons why they proved it is because when he pulled the boots off, which he pulled both of his boots off right there in the back, you couldn't have missed it.
It said John Wilkes Booth.
He's like, I had no idea who he was.
Yeah, well, you knew him in advance.
This was a predetermined outpost where he could stay, and it's clear you knew him.
The guy was so discredited, we still use his name today.
Your name will be mud in this town.
And we think that it's like dirt mixed with water kind of mud.
No, it's M-U-D-D, Dr. Mudd, the expert that was so discredited, went to jail, paid for his part of the assassination of Lincoln.
Give me the name of one of the experts in the last 100 years that has brought us any of the trials and tribulations, the things that have almost brought us to our knees.
Give me the name of one of them.
Can't.
Because once you have an expert class, they don't answer to anyone.
So they never go to jail.
Wow, doesn't that sound familiar?
People never going to jail.
So what the Supreme Court is weighing now is whether the founders thought they, you know, had something the founders thought they had settled forever.
You know, can the elected president, elected by the people, remove the people's unelected rulers or those kings?
Have we quietly granted power to a fourth branch of government, a branch that no one voted for, no one can fire, and no one can hold accountable?
The answer is yes.
Now, the case about the FTC isn't just about one commissioner or one firing.
This is about whether the American people still own their government and their life, whether the government has slipped its leash.
We've warned about this forever.
Has it slipped its leash or are we going to now take the Constitution and put the government back in the chains that are owned by the people?
Madison warned that power cloaked in expertise and shielded from the people would someday become the very definition of tyranny.
Those are his words.
I was amazed.
I started looking at George A.I. and I'm looking, you know, what would the founders say about this?
What's in the Federalist Papers?
There's nothing in the Federalist Papers that actually speak directly to this case.
However, Madison warned in the Federalist Papers that, quote, power cloaked in expertise and shielded from the people would someday become the very definition of tyranny.
I don't know.
It seems pretty clear to me.
It's the same thing.
Hamilton argued that executive power must be vested in one elected president so the people know who's responsible, who to praise, who to blame, and who to punish.
So the answer is really super clear.
Okay.
Leaders answer to the consent of the governed.
In other words, you get to vote them out.
Now, what happens to that system when an independent agency wields the power to regulate business, punish citizens, rewrite the economic rules, effectively legislate?
Yet the president, the only officer elected by the people, cannot remove those people in charge.
That doesn't sound like a government of the people and by the people.
That's not independence.
That's insulation.
That is the birth of something entirely new, an unaccountable power center, a fourth branch of government.
All of the branches have checks and balances.
They all check on each other.
Okay, so none of them can get out of control.
But if there's a fourth branch and no one can fire them, how are they not the all-powerful branch?
America has filled the government with tons of these people.
The FTC, the SEC, the NLRB, the CFPB.
Do you even know what those are?
These are fiefdoms of power.
They make the rules.
They enforce the rules.
They adjudicate disputes.
They punish violations.
And they do it without ever standing for election, without ever answering to you.
And if this stands without any meaningful presidential oversight, you don't have a country that responds to you at all.
The founders would have looked at this structure and said, you've created exactly what we designed the Constitution to prevent.
a government within the government, a bureaucracy above the ballot box, a system where experts rule because they believe they know better than the people.
Look, if this were so constitutional, if this was the right thing to do, why did Woodrow Wilson work so hard and the progressives work so hard from the 1900s, late 1800s, 1900s, to about 1935 to get it done?
Why didn't they just do it?
Because at that time, people knew the Constitution and they knew you couldn't do it.
And yes, there is a place for expertise, but there is no place in the American system for unaccountable authority.
The argument being made in court now by the defenders of this administrative state is unbelievable.
They say if we allow the president to remove any of these officials, he might replace them with people he trusts, loyalists.
Okay, that means the presidency is the problem.
No, I'm sorry.
That means the will of the voters is the danger.
Get that?
It's not the president, it's you.
Take Trump out of this.
Well, the president, if he can fire people, if he can fire people that are making laws, enforcing laws that don't answer to anyone, if he can do that, that means you can vote for a president and say to him, I want this crap to stop.
What is this?
These people don't answer to anybody.
I don't even know who's making the rules.
And if he can fire them, then the government answers to you.
But if he can't fire them, they don't have to worry about elections.
As if democracy has to be shielded from the people.
And you know that's exactly what progressives believe.
That argument exposes the rift in our worldview.
One side belongs, believes that sovereignty begins with a citizen.
It belongs to you.
The other believes sovereignty belongs to the bureaucracy.
And the citizen is an inconvenience that has to be managed.
This is the argument.
It's been going on for over 100 years.
So this is what we have to decide.
The truth is really, really simple.
You cannot have executive power without executive accountability.
And if accountability disappears, liberty disappears right after it.
Even Chief Justice Roberts called the old precedent a New Deal artifact that is a dried husk.
Even that guy knows.
Because the world that created it is gone.
The administrative state that grew out of it is now something the founders would have seen as a threat to the republic itself.
We know what fascism does.
It's bad.
And that's the beginning of fascism.
That's why it came out in 1935.
The justices asked a really critical question.
If Congress can invent more of these agencies, give them long terms, shield them from removal, and then turn them loose on the American people, what stops Congress from turning the executive branch into a museum piece?
Right?
Just a powerless showpiece.
The real rulers will operate behind thick glass and procedural walls, right?
And the answer to that question is nothing.
Nothing but the Constitution.
Now the question is, do we have the courage to still enforce it?
Do we have the understanding of the Constitution to insist that happens?
This is not about Donald Trump.
This is not about any single commissioner.
It's about whether the American experiment still remembers its first principles.
If sovereignty flows from the people, then the people must be able to correct the system.
But if government power is placed beyond your reach, beyond accountability, beyond elections, then you are no longer sovereign.
Conspiracy Theories vs. Open Investigation00:14:47
You are simply a subject managed by experts, ruled by committees, supervised by a permanent clerical class whose careers outlast everybody you've ever voted for.
That's not a republic.
That's an empire of administrators.
This is the best of the Glenn Beck Program.
I want to tell you how investigations go.
Okay.
This is how an investigation goes.
Something happens and police and federal officials get everybody into a room and they say, all right, what do we know?
What evidence do we have?
What do we know about what just happened?
Is there anything that this evidence is saying it leads to?
Or what could, what should we be looking at?
Is there anything that is off the beaten path that we should look at?
For instance, an inside job, foreign influence.
Is there anything like that?
Then, after that conversation, you make a list of all those things and you say, okay, here's the plan.
I want you, you, you, to look at that.
I want you, you, and you to look at that.
I want you to go out, everybody, go out, divide this list up, bring back what you can.
If somebody has some evidence that leads us to believe anything, these are correct, get it to me right away.
We'll then direct our resources and focus them some more.
As the investigations move, you find evidence and some ideas are scratched off.
Other ideas are pursued until you have the person.
Let me talk to you about Charlie Kirk.
When Charlie Kirk died, within hours, I received a phone call and I and my team were briefed that I, Tucker Carlson, and Megan Kelly, were possibly on a foreign terrorist hit list and that we might be targets and that we should take all precautions until they could rule this out.
Okay.
That's what happened.
We were targets, possibly, of a foreign hit list.
Take the precautions until we can rule that out.
We understood that.
I called Megan Kelly immediately.
I shared with her.
We started, my security team was working with her to make sure that she was secure.
Tucker was secure.
Everybody is fine.
And they ruled that out.
Within a couple of days, they ruled that out about three days later.
Okay.
I don't think there was a conspiracy.
I think they were being wise and saying there might be something going on until we can rule it out.
You guys need to stay safe so we don't have another one of these.
Got it.
I appreciate them thinking of that.
I appreciate them exploring that option.
But once you have that on and you're pursuing that, you have a team pursuing that, when you find that that's not true, you scratch it off.
Once it's scratched off, normal people understand that's an investigation.
That's how it works.
But there's all of these conspiracies now that were on, you know, on the list of things to check that once they were disproven and checked off and like, okay, that's not happening.
It's not that.
Conspiracy people are keeping those things on the list and saying, why didn't they do that?
See, they knew, they knew, but they're hiding it.
No.
No, that's not the way it works.
That's not the way it works.
And here's what I'm really afraid of.
And Andy No has just written a column that is absolutely dead on.
Conspiracy theories might sabotage justice for Charlie Kirk.
This is the thing I worry about.
Are we going to have justice?
Have we tainted the jury pool so much that you're not going to get anybody to believe anything anymore?
Andy No joins me now.
Andy, thank you so much for coming on.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me on.
So what caused you to write this?
My frustration with how I'll just be direct.
I think the podcasting space has been praised a lot in recent years because it's opened up discussions for people who have been shut out, ideas that have been shut out.
But I think we're now seeing the dark side that can come with that when kind of anything can go and that clickbait and perhaps financial motives may be at the forefront of the minds of some unethical podcasters.
And in the case of the Charlie Kirk assassination, he was somebody I knew personally.
I know you knew him.
And so it disturbs me to see conspiracy theories go so viral and for people to treat it as if it was just like this is okay to be a sideshow just to have discussions when there's an open investigation and the conspiracy theories that are being propagated are meant to not just ask questions.
This isn't just about asking questions.
It's about actually planting seeds of doubt into people's minds about the integrity of the entire investigation, even though they know very little about it.
And what's worse is impugning the reputations of people that Charlie loved, clearly, with suggestions and innuendos of misconduct or even worse.
So I had to speak out.
I could no longer sit back.
And, you know, I spent my entire journalism career writing about the violence of the far left and Antifa.
And I saw that all of the focus that had been on that temporarily after Charlie's murder was nobody was discussing that anymore.
And it's a real threat.
And so the threat of left-wing violence had been completely diverted into nonsense.
I really have to emphasize the nonsense.
All these threads that people think they're polling have led to nothing.
And instead of realizing that they're wrong, they double down and say that lack of evidence is evidence for something else.
And so like this, this can't continue, you know?
And the danger of it really is it may be really difficult in a year's time or years' time to find a jury pool that's not tainted by all of these conspiracy theories and lies that have been propagated now for months.
And you're seeing a lot of this.
You know, ex-Elon Musk, I tell you, I don't know if we'd have a country today if it wasn't for what Elon Musk has done to Twitter.
But, you know, he started saying, this is where this is coming from.
This is a bot, and it's out of Russia or wherever.
And so you're starting to see the foreign influence.
But a lot of these conspiracy theories, they are being hyped up by bots and by foreign actors that do not wish us well.
And it doesn't seem like what's happening is, like you, I'm not afraid of questions.
I embrace questions.
We should ask honest questions.
And we should not be afraid to ask honest questions.
The problem is, as you said, we're not just asking questions now.
We are now dividing ourselves.
If you don't agree with the question or the answer that they want to provide for that question, then you somehow or another are an enemy that has sold out.
That's extraordinarily dangerous and doesn't seem to be coming from any place good.
I mean, it screams for an actor or somebody who wants to destroy America and the Republic.
Does it not?
Yes, I've been receiving a lot of hate messages since publishing my writing.
I've been so-called compromised, that I'm being paid to say these narratives.
And I don't know this is poison that's been put into the minds of the right, like the audiences of the podcast right.
And you can see how it's eating away at this movement, is breaking apart this brief moment of unity we had after we came together in unity after the assassination.
And if you give me a moment, I would like to address sort of some of the biggest misconceptions I see about the investigation.
So one, a lot of people think that there's some evidence of a federal conspiracy because a Utah County judge had issued a gag order.
If you read the gag order, and by the way, this is not a federal case.
It's being handled by the state of Utah prosecutors in Utah County, by the way.
So all this focus on feds, this, feds, that, people are misinformed.
The judge, Judge Tony Graff, had issued a gag order on witnesses who had been identified in the case, investigators, counsel, obviously, from making extrajudicial statements because he wants to keep control of the case from it turning into a whole circus.
Like, do people not remember what happened in the case of Derek Chauvin, the officer in Minneapolis who was accused of killing George Floyd?
Like, there was no gag order on that.
And that was a complete, I do not think that that trial was fair given that level of media saturation and how out of hand it got.
And so this judge was really wise to put this gag order on.
You can't have investigators or potential witnesses going out to media and making a whole bunch of comments that would bias one party or the other in an ongoing case.
Another misconception is people are saying, why aren't the FBI releasing more information?
Why haven't they since September?
Well, a suspect was in custody within less than 48 hours of the murder.
And it's in the pre-trial phase now.
And the process leading up to the trial and the trial itself is sacred.
And I think our civic education in the United States has really failed the public.
They don't seem to understand that.
They think that the evidence should be released as soon as it comes out.
Everything and anything can come out.
Like, no, like investigators don't release that because this type of stuff goes to the accused side and then, of course, to the prosecutors.
And you keep that evidence preserved so that it's not going to push the public in one way or the other to be biased in any particular way.
And so there's just ignorance, I would say, about how criminal investigations and the criminal justice system works in the U.S.
And there are podcasters who are really exploiting that and thinking that there's something there when there's nothing for a number of accusations that they've lobbied.
Andy, you're not for, I mean, I hope that this trial, when it comes, is put on television.
I think the people have a right to see the trial.
We don't have a right to see everything leading up to the trial, but we do have a right to see the trial, like we did with O.J. Simpson.
Would you agree with that?
I think given the public interest, the international interest in this case, that it's for the best for it to be reported so that the public can see.
Otherwise, only a very, very small number of people who can make it physically inside the courtroom.
And I don't think that that would be for the interest of justice, in my opinion.
No.
And it wouldn't be healthy for the Republic.
We must be transparent in everything we can be.
But when it comes to the trial, that should be completely transparent because that is how our system works.
That's the verified information on both sides.
And we should be able to judge that one way or another.
And I personally think that's critical.
And I hope that Utah is making the decision or will make the decision to make sure that that is seen by everybody.
But I stand with you, Andy.
I mean, I've heard so many things about me lately about how I've just taken money from Jews, which is crazy.
I wish I knew where all that money was going because I'd like to spend it, especially around Christmas time.
But it's amazing to me how I was on the list possibly for foreign, you know, if there was any foreign terrorist, except they're making the case that it was the foreign terrorists were actually Israel.
Why would they kill somebody who they were supposedly paying?
It makes no, I mean, it takes two seconds of logic and realize, okay, well, that was a theory and that just didn't work out.
That's not true.
None of that is true.
Andy, what do you think needs to be done from here?
What do people like you, me, and others need to do?
Ethical Responsibility in New Media00:02:05
Podcasters, I think, have a responsibility to be ethical in their work.
I mean, the reason why new media, why there's been so much support for it when it became a thing that emerged, is we saw the deficiencies in legacy media or mainstream media.
And I just asked, like, what's the point of independent or new media if the content that is being produced by those very powerful voices is slop and junk?
Like this whole space exists because we want better content that is more informative, accurate, and honest.
But you're not calling for a ban of anyone, are you?
No, I'm not.
I'm calling for people to recognize that there's that responsibility really matters.
And I'm concerned that those people who are fully independent, who are not accountable to any editors, do not center ethics at the forefront of their works.
That really has to sort of exist as a personal on a personal level.
And it's how I conduct my work.
I'm independent.
And I think older podcasters who are wiser, have experience, knowledge about how the criminal justice system can work, can hopefully try to inform the public about this is a really slow and long process.
And it's not going to be like a true crime new episode every week where here's the latest updates.
And people have been watching this so much TV that they have that expectation.
I know.
I know.
Andy, that's why I had you on today because I wanted to make sure people heard this because your article is spot on.
Conspiracy theories might sabotage justice for Charlie Kirk.
Andy No is the journalist.
He is also the author of Unmasked Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.