GLENN: Oh, yeah. Here's our here's, you know, the usual update for you. Third most listened to show in all of America. I'm, you know, basically a rodeo clown and I'm glad you're here. Welcome to it. It's the Glenn Beck program. That would make me Glenn. Jim Meigs is the editor in chief of Popular Mechanics. Popular Mechanics is obviously a very well respected magazine, and I first stumped across Popular Mechanics' debunking ability on the 9/11 conspiracy, and they did such an amazing job with that, I mean, they nailed that closed. Any of these 9/11 Truthers who I've been telling you for years are dangerous wait a minute, there's evidence now about the guy in Pittsburgh possibly being associated with just rumors being associated with 9/11 Truthers? Huh, that's weird.
Anyway, so Jim Meigs and Popular Mechanics did that. I think I snapped about, when was it, Stu, three months ago? About two months ago I snapped on the air and I said, can we stop with the FEMA camp thing. Well, my crew went to work on it and they said, Glenn, we can disprove this, this and this because those things exist, you know, here, here and here. And I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, what? You are telling me we can't prove it but we can't disprove it?
When I got to work the following day and we were supposed to have it on the TV show, I realized that we didn't have any film, we didn't have any pictures. And I said, no, no, no, no, no, it can't be just one man's opinion. I want pictures. I want proof. If they exist, I want pictures. If they don't exist, I want to know what those pictures that you see on the Internet actually are. That's when we called Jim Meigs, Popular Mechanics. He is with us now. Hi, Jim.
MEIGS: Hi, Jim, how are you today?
GLENN: I am really looking forward my staff has seen all of the pictures and the video that you have taken. You guys actually went out to one of these FEMA camps, right?
MEIGS: That's right, one of the most popular videos online showed the facility. And when you see the footage, I think you'll find it really eye opening how big the gap is in reality between what the claims are that are made online and what the much more mundane reality is in the real world.
GLENN: Okay. Let's I don't even know where to I don't even know where to start here. I know there's a lot you have stuff that we can't, obviously because we're radio we can't show you now, but all of these are going to be we're going to cover all of these pictures and the video tonight, right?
MEIGS: Yes.
GLENN: Okay.
MEIGS: And what we try to do is the same thing we did with the 9/11 conspiracy theories. We can't tell you every we're not trying to tell you everything that FEMA's doing. Instead what we're doing is we're taking the claims that the conspiracy theories themselves make and we're just saying you claim that this barbed wire fence hides a big FEMA prison camp? Well, let's look and see what this picture really is. Let's send a crew. Let's just really establish what the facts are. And so we take the examples that are most popular on the Internet and just look and see if they're true or false.
GLENN: Okay.
MEIGS: And we go into it with an open mind, but we often find that the reality that's being presented by these groups is so far from the truth.
GLENN: Jim, what I found just on my own initial, I finally said, you know what, it's worth looking into was that there are things that, you know, in executive orders and FEMA laws, et cetera, et cetera that if you push it to the crazy extent, if you push it to, well, yes, the whole world is breaking down and we've gone into martial law that they do have the ability to do some of these things. True or false?
MEIGS: Well, it depends what the things are that you're talking about. The
GLENN: Well, not gassing Americans.
MEIGS: Well, one thing you see picked up a lot on these sites is a lot of old executive orders going back to the Kennedy administration and those have been revised and tightened up over the years but specifically none of these executive orders can overturn the Constitution, and in fact under the Reagan in the Reagan years a lot of the executive orders were unified and specifically with a specific statement that nothing therein is intended to violate the Constitution.
GLENN: Okay.
MEIGS: So, you know, it's important to remember that even a president can't do that. I do think people worry sometimes about the abuse of federal power and power accumulating in various situations. I think that it's important for people to be vigilant about that, which is precisely why things that are dishonor are terrible exaggerations don't really help that cause. They make people who are worried about abuses of executive power just look silly and, in fact, these are important issues that we should always be vigilant about.
GLENN: And this is why I've been saying on the air that we cannot we've got to be very careful. Somebody sent me some stuff from Nancy Pelosi that Nancy Pelosi apparently said, you know, all these really we've got to seize property and everything else. And I said and I called this person back and I said, where did you get this? And they said, well, you know, it comes from a good source, it's from a friend of mine; he said he checks it out. And I said, I don't believe any of these. If they are, I'm leading television with these on Monday, but I can't believe. Send them to the brain room. None of them are true. None of them are true. So we have to be able to be reasonable and actually talk about facts. So I'm going to play a little bit, and you'll see all of this on television, but this is from one of the most watched YouTube things on the FEMA camps. It is a gated building. It runs about 30 seconds and I want to I'll play a little bit. You'll see this on television, but here's a little bit of what you see on YouTube.
VOICE: This small building is the only way into a particular fenced area. Inside this building we see more of the motion activated detectors, electronic turnstiles and prison bars. All of the renovations to this property have involved putting in new fencing, electronic turnstiles, concrete flooring in unused warehouse buildings and putting in large gas furnaces on buildings that were never heated anytime in the past 20 years.
GLENN: Putting in large gas furnaces. Holy cow, Jim. So this place exists.
MEIGS: Yes.
GLENN: You found it.
MEIGS: Yes, we did.
GLENN: You saw the footage, you went back and went into those same buildings that they went into and what did you find?
MEIGS: Well, we didn't find Auschwitz which is the implication of that video. And I think it is what we found is that it's a train repair facility just as the sign on the gate says. But, you know, if you look at the world from a certain perspective, any chain link expense is going to look suspicious to you and
GLENN: Well, my neighbors didn't like one.
MEIGS: But sometimes if you just knock on the door and ask to be let inside, they are happy to let you in and show you around. That's exactly what we did. It's an ordinary Amtrak facility. What's particularly interesting, that video is almost 15 years old and
GLENN: This has actually come out during the Clinton administration, right?
MEIGS: That's exactly right. And what we see often is that nothing really goes away on the Internet and something can be debunked, disproven or just be totally out of date and yet someone will pull it up, they will reedit it, they will put it into new context and someone will come along and see it. And these things often look very credible. They look like they are produced by news organizations or, you know, if you go to these websites, they have lots of facts and figures and maps and things that look very legitimate and so it takes a little bit of effort sometimes to dig down and say, okay, what is the source of that and in some cases you need to go pick up the phone and go visit a facility and see for yourself and see that the reality's really not as scary as it it's being portrayed.
GLENN: They had scary gates, we'll show you the deal. They had prison bars and these turnstiles that were leading right into what they claimed were gas chambers.
MEIGS: Yes, actually those turnstiles aren't there anymore but that was a, it was a work facility and that was there. They had some kind of magnetic pass cars or something like that to let people around.
GLENN: When you say work facility, that was for the Americans that were taken when they were to work?
MEIGS: That was for the people who were repairing the trains and if you think about it
GLENN: Why would they need prison bars and turnstiles like that?
MEIGS: Well, the turnstiles to me look a lot like the turnstiles they have to get into the New York subway.
GLENN: Trains. Interesting that that happens to be a common theme here, also used by Hitler, trains.
MEIGS: If you want to look at the world that way, you know, everything leads back to Hitler. But if you also think about it
GLENN: My vegetable garden doesn't.
MEIGS: But if you also think about it, a train facility actually is a fairly highly ought to be a fairly highly secure environment. There's a lot of expensive equipment in there and, you know, we know today that terrorists have targeted public transportation around the world. So the notion that they were controlling access to the workers coming in and out isn't really so strange.
GLENN: Tell me. There's two other camps that you've covered. One is a camp that we have photographic evidence of.
MEIGS: Yes.
GLENN: In Wyoming.
MEIGS: Yes.
GLENN: Tell me about that.
MEIGS: The yeah, this comes up on a number of websites and there's some satellite imagery showing of various buildings and identifying them as a prison camp somewhere in Wyoming and
GLENN: May I, may I just ask, Jim, is it true that this is a prison camp, it is a concentration camp where most likely horrors are going on?
MEIGS: That is absolutely true. And as you often see in conspiracy theories, there is a grain of truth to this. But they left out one detail. The prison camp is not in Wyoming. It's in North Korea.
STU: (Laughing).
MEIGS: And the pictures were
GLENN: Okay, all right. Stop Meigs, stop with your spin. Is it true that there are horrors going on in this camp most likely? It is run by "The government" and it is a concentration camp.
MEIGS: It's all true.
GLENN: It's all true. It's all true. Okay, North Korea, Wyoming, they got one thing wrong. But the rest is true!
MEIGS: And Glenn, I guarantee you the segment of dialogue between you and me right there will be clipped and excerpted and the rest of our conversation will be cut out and that will be on a website by tomorrow.
GLENN: Exactly right. That's exactly right.
MEIGS: Because we've seen this happen again and again where people will make a statement, it gets edited down so that it seems to mean the exact opposite of what the people were trying to say. And that's recirculated endlessly on these conspiracy websites.
GLENN: I mean, do you think it's responsible for the editor in chief of Popular Mechanics to be calling for an arms insurrection like you just did?
MEIGS: Right, and when did you stop beating your wife.
GLENN: Okay.
MEIGS: This is a particularly interesting one. Actually there's some evidence that these pictures might have originally appeared online as part of a hoax, but again nothing ever disappears on the Internet and so what happens is they get picked up, they get reprinted, they get passed from hand to hand. So somebody just digging into this you know, a lot of people are interested in this for perfectly valid reasons. There's nothing wrong with being concerned about the direction of the political situation. There's nothing wrong with being suspicious about FEMA or any other branch of the government. That could be healthy.
GLENN: Yes.
MEIGS: But when people dig in and look at this information without subjecting it to any kind of scrutiny and without being
GLENN: But, you know, Jim, nobody has, nobody has the time. I mean, I look at stuff and you have to use common sense and say, okay, well, this doesn't sound right. But most people don't can't call the editor in chief of Popular Mechanics and say, hey, can you find and track down these prison camps.
MEIGS: That's true to some extent. But you know what? There have been cases where ordinary citizens have looked at these lists and they said, hey, that one, that's near my house. And one case up in Maine, a guy drove over to one of these sites that was near his house and sure enough, it was an old Air Force base that had been decommissioned and now it's run by the fish and game department and you can get in there and go hiking, you know, fishing. I mean, it's
GLENN: So hang on just a second. You are saying that you are saying that live, organic life is caught with hooks on these campsites?
MEIGS: It's I know the outrages never cease.
GLENN: It never, it never does. And next I'm going to hear that you say this same life is, you know, hit sometimes in the head and killed with a hammer.
Okay. So Jim, who is the woman that made the tape and we heard her voice a minute ago where she said spooky stuff and it scared me.
MEIGS: Yes.
GLENN: Who is she?
MEIGS: I believe her name is Linda Thompson. I've got to double check that last name. I've got it in my notes here.
GLENN: Okay.
MEIGS: Linda Thompson. She was one of the leaders of the militia movement. You remember the militia movement, you know, the black helicopters and the idea that, you know, our
GLENN: This is right after Timothy McVeigh if I'm not mistaken.
MEIGS: It led up to Timothy McVeigh. He was certainly a part of that and it continued into the Nineties and among other things that she promoted was the idea that her followers needed to go to Washington and start shooting senators. And a lot of people in the militia movement even kind of renounced her as being too extreme. But again no one
GLENN: Hold just a second. Wait, wait. Wait, wait. I just want that to sink in. So the lady making the tapes on the FEMA camps.
MEIGS: Right.
GLENN: Is a woman that was kicked out of the militia movement that said go kill senators because she was too extreme?
MEIGS: I don't know if anybody can really be kicked out of a loose movement like that but, yes, there was some
GLENN: Right, yes, okay. We want to get our facts right that she wasn't excommunicated. They just kind of went, yeah, don't really talk to her; shun her a little bit because she's crazy.
MEIGS: Right. But what's interesting is here's this video she made ages ago, and a lot of this is actually kind of repurposed. A lot of this fear about prison camps originally started when the UN was going to come and do this. Well now after Katrina we've got a new villain. You know, FEMA is the all purpose villain and certainly FEMA has plenty to answer for, but the but you'll see the same things reemerge with kind of in new bottles. And so here you see this fear that there's going to be some kind of takeover of our government. A lot of it honestly goes back to the movie Red Dawn. Do you remember Red Dawn?
GLENN: Yes, I do.
MEIGS: And it's a very enjoyable movie but it's a movie. And I think sometimes you see it's maybe shaped people's world views a little more than any movie should.
GLENN: Isn't there, isn't there one of these FEMA camp things that actually has footage from that movie?
MEIGS: There may be. I haven't seen that clip yet but, you know, people will take this stuff, they will reedit it. So people might be looking at listening to Linda Thompson's voiceover from this footage that she made and think it's a newscast or they don't exactly know where it comes from. And again it can sound credible if all you do is just look at a video on YouTube.
GLENN: Okay. From Popular Mechanics, Jim Meigs. And he is going to be with me tonight and you are going to see the A/B comparison. You are going to see what they say and then you will see Popular Mechanics cameras going out to verify, either say yes it is or no, it's not. So much more tonight on the Fox News Channel at 5:00 Eastern time. Jim, thanks a lot.
MEIGS: Thanks, Glenn.
