The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Glenn Beck Podcast | 5/27/19
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This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
How far will the left go to shut down voices and rights that it disagrees with?
I'll explore that and a whole lot more with one of the world's leading experts on economic warfare and financial terrorism.
Coming up in one minute, my conversation with Kevin Freeman.
Conversation is a bit of a lost art.
That's why this format and podcasts still matter.
It allows breathing room to explore ideas and this novel concept to actually listen and learn from one another.
With the summer travel season almost here, I thought it was a perfect time to catch up on the Glenbeck podcast episodes that you might have missed.
They come out every Saturday.
In recent months, I've had dozens of wide-ranging long-form conversations with people on the front lines of culture, politics, education,
and technology.
I'm going to share portions of some of these vital conversations today,
but you can find much more and the full conversations at glenbeck.com
or wherever you download your podcasts.
First, I want to jump into my conversation with financial expert
and host of the Blaze TV's Economic War Room, Kevin Freeman.
We are now entering a time where there is an economic war on speech,
on religion, on guns.
And when I brought this up three years ago and said,
this is how they're going to fight guns,
they're going to fight it economically.
They're going to go through the banks.
Don't worry about the Constitution.
They'll go through the banks.
They're doing that now with guns and speech and everything.
They'll go through amendments three, four, five, six,
but they're going after the Bill of Rights.
They are.
They are for control.
And so to your point,
on guns. There was something called Operation Choke Point. And recently, American Banker magazine,
representing the American Banker Association, admitted, yes, Operation Choke Point was real. The FDIC
really was encouraging banks to close accounts of gun sellers. It was illegal, and we have 900 pages
of testimony that proved that it was illegal. So this... When did that happen? When the American Bankers
Association say, or when did that? When was...
Choke Point was under the Obama administration.
And they literally, through the FDIC, they were encouraging.
All right, so you're a bank and you work with the FDIC.
You just want to get through your review as quickly as possible.
And the FDIC says, by the way, we think that those companies that sell guns,
they're a little shady.
It's going to make it a little harder for us to do the review if you're doing business with them.
If you want to just stop doing business and close the accounts, you can do that.
And so banks did.
If you don't have a gun seller, if you don't have the ability to buy a gun from a reputable
license dealer following the Second Amendment rights, how do you get a weapon legally?
Well, you get it through a private transaction, which they're trying to ban.
You get it through a gun show, which they're trying to ban.
So this was a methodology, and it was purposed, and it was said in the American banker article,
it said they were doing it based on their partisan beliefs or based on their predetermined
what they thought was right and wrong, their moral beliefs.
So that's Operation Choke Point.
Now, about a year ago, Andrew Ross Sorkin, who is New York Times columnist, he is also
the co-host of Squawk Box on CNBC.
Every morning I see him and I see Joe Kernan.
And Joe Kernan represents the conservative side and Andrew Ross Sorkin represents
the pleasant progressive side. And he's very pleasant about it. And it always makes good arguments,
even though I disagree almost. He wrote an article in New York Times and said, government will not
be able to solve the gun problem because we have this pesky Second Amendment. But you banks can do
it. PayPal, you can do it. All of the finance companies have more power than government. And he's
openly encouraged them to start canceling the PayPal accounts, the bank accounts, and so forth.
And it's not just with guns.
They're now doing it to people in my business.
They are silencing us one by one, and people are not seeing it.
You had Robert Spencer on a podcast here, didn't you?
Yeah.
He was targeted.
I know he was.
He was target.
It's Alex Jones and Robert Spencer, and they're going systematically across anyone who's speaking something contrary to what we find or deem.
acceptable and you wonder why are these people why aren't they on the air why aren't you know
why are they being silenced well they aren't able to make earn a living they can't even get a
bank account well we just saw um a few weeks ago that the paperwork has now come out and so now
we actually know the numbers but when we were saying facebook is crushing uh conservatives the algorithm
them was changed and it changed the traffic by 70% to conservative websites.
I mean, we're, we're, you know, when the Germans rounded up the Jews, they put them in
ghettos.
You can live your Jewish life.
You can do whatever you want.
We're building a wall around you.
Well, nobody saw them.
Nobody heard them.
No matter how loud they shouted, it just went into a brick wall around there and then
they could liquidate them.
Aren't we doing that virtually?
We are.
And we cover a lot of this in the economic war room.
So by controlling and silencing people or changing the algorithms or the search results
output, I think it's Dr. Robert Epstein.
He was published in USA Today.
He said, I'm a Hillary Clinton supporter.
I'm still supporter today.
But here's the fact.
The page results produced by Google had the potential to source.
swing the election, probably move independence by 10 points, which means that had they not done that,
I wonder what President Trump might have won by. I think that there are a lot of people who didn't
vote for President Trump, but they voted against Hillary Clinton. And when you do surveys of
Christians throughout the South and you're asking, why did you vote for this guy? Because he's got
this bad history here and he's with this porn star and all this. Why did you vote for him? They always say,
because she hates us.
And everybody knew who the she hates us was.
But they were silencing free speech, manipulating elections,
and they're doing it with search results.
And that is a silencing of free speech.
And in my mind, it's election fraud.
It's nudge.
It's nudge.
It's what Kass Sunstein talked about.
All you have to do is just nudge people.
Just alter the search results.
just a little bit here and a little bit there, and all of a sudden you're on a different
path.
And that's what we're...
That's when you talked about before.
Don't we kind of commonly agree?
And you say, don't we kind of?
I think we commonly do, but they've been nudged more than maybe we've been nudged.
And so there are people that may not be that far from us, but they've been nudged, and
that dividing wall has been built between us.
when we look at the issue with guns we see what's happening here and people tend to forget
Venezuelans had guns up until 2012 they took the guns from the citizens in 2012
that's when you can get away with literally murder as we record this
Maduro is still in he had just taken
Jorge Ramos as a reporter and held him captive.
Reports are showing that things are getting much, much worse there.
Russia is now saying we're going to go to war in Venezuela.
America is going to go to war in Venezuela.
Nobody is reporting the fact that Chinese have a warship off the coast of Venezuela,
right next hours.
What's happening in Venezuela, do you think?
Well, we've sent in aid, right?
And the Western nations have sent an aid,
and they shot people trying to get it.
We're seeing the natural result of a true socialist revolution.
It looks good for a while, and everybody celebrated it,
and you had Michael Moore and everybody come out and said,
look at how good this is, and then you run out of other people's money.
They nationalized stuff.
They ran out.
I mean, it's the natural outcome of a socialist revolution.
It has to always go to dictatorship, and it ends with the haves and the have-nots.
The worst of which is where you have Hugo Chavez's daughter sporting around the world with three or four billion dollars.
How does the communist dictator's daughter inherit three to four billion dollars?
How does a bus driver?
A bus driver, that's what people loved about Maduro.
He was one of the people.
He was a bus driver.
He wasn't rich.
Now look at him.
Now look at him.
They're flying bricks of gold that he claims are his out of the country.
What happens?
Well, let's start here.
The president wanted to build a wall.
Says it's a national emergency.
It's no more of a national emergency today than it was 10 years ago.
However, I think on the horizon, I don't know.
following what's happening in Mexico with the with the oil pipelines and how they shut it down and
now gas lines are everywhere they shut down the pipeline said we're going to start trucking
everything trucking isn't it's not effective um at least the way you know going back to that that's
why they built that pipeline that's a terribly inefficient way to move horrible yeah it's a horrible and
there's a shortage of truck divers in the west anyway so so you've got all these you've got
all these problems down in Mexico, just from that one thing, you have a president who will not
recognize anyone but Maduro. He's one of the few of Western countries that won't recognize him
outside of Cuba. If he is instituting the policies that, you know, Chavez or Maduro were,
it's already a thugocracy.
Is it that hard for people to think maybe we would have a huge
Colombian-style crisis on our hands on our border?
You know, this is as they're on the precipice of potential economic greatness
as a nation, because the Mexican people are phenomenal,
smart, hardworking people,
and China is collapsing as the low-cost producer.
we have an agreement with Mexico, they could be the next producer, manufacturer, or whatever
for the United States, the wages and so forth, they're on the precipice of this, and yet they have
from the thugocracy, from the drug cartel control, from the fact that we don't have a wall
and we have porous and open borders. I mean, if we had a wall, Mexico would benefit because
the drug cartels wouldn't get the massive amounts of money. They're on the precipice.
of something really great if they could get their act together.
That's the, I mean, that's where we are at so many areas of life.
So many.
Is it could be really great or really terrible.
I'm talking with Kevin Freeman, host of Blaze TV's Economic War Room.
In this part, we discuss publishers versus platforms and how to solve the Facebook problem.
Let's take a break from the doom and gloom and go to the really good stuff.
What, explain to people.
I don't think people understand.
When I say 2030, you will not recognize life as we know it.
It's going to be completely different just from technology and what it's going to do for disease and health care, all the good things that are coming.
Tell me what you see as good things that are possible now if we would just get our crap together.
Well, science is expanding.
I'm a board member of a biotechnology company that's working on liver disease, and we've completed a phase two trial.
Over the next 10 years, our health care can improve dramatically from things that we're learning and continuing to advance in science.
If we can, as a nation, get our act together on the free speech issue, which I think is maybe the most important one, and by the way, there is a Louis Gohmert came in the economic war room and gave it a real.
real good suggestion or he's got a bill that would, I think, solve the Facebook problem and
Facebook control problem.
What is it?
Basically, we gave Facebook and all social media pass and said by congressional mandate,
you all are not going to be subject to lawsuits.
Because you're just an interplay of, you're like a telephone company and people pick up
the phone and they call and we can't hold you accountable for what people say on your phone.
they violated that.
So if you want to be the phone company and not be subject to suit from people that are on here, then fine.
But you can't throttle, you can't use the algorithms.
It's the platform versus publisher.
I know this because of the blaze.
I'm a publisher, meaning I have a say who's on and off the platform.
I have a say on we're going to publish this.
we're not going to publish this.
So I'm held responsible.
Somebody sues us because someone is making the decision.
But Google, YouTube, Facebook, all of them said, no, no, no, we're a platform.
We're not going to have a say.
It's run by the people.
And now they're having a say editorial.
Correct.
So now they're getting the protection from the government in places that no one should have protection
from the government unless you are completely.
Switzerland. You are neutral on what is being published. Oh, well, it's being used over here for bad
things. Oh, well, I'm a platform. So he's introducing a bill to stop this? He is. If you, if you are a
publisher and not a platform, if you're doing the editorial and the throttling, then you have no
government protections from suit. I think it's a brilliant answer. We can get that adopted. It's in
Free speech happens that changes election trajectory.
It changes so many things.
And that which we have in common can be brought back together.
If we don't adopt something like that, we'll just continue the vulcanization.
And I keep looking at the things that we agree on.
There's so much.
There's so much that we agree on.
And yet we're not allowed to agree on it.
For instance, the border.
I don't want an entire wall across the whole border.
I want it where it makes sense.
And I want, you know, censors.
or surveillance of some sort where that makes sense.
You don't just put a wall up across the whole border,
but it's got to make sense.
And the left just will not give in.
They're just telling us this is hyperbole, this is ridiculous.
Just looking at the opioid deaths,
our heroin and low-grade opioid come across the border.
high-grade opioids come from China.
Yeah, China.
And as I was thinking about that the other day, I realized,
wait a minute, isn't that what the opium wars were about with England and China?
Didn't the English know that if they went to India and bought up a bunch of opium
and sold it across their border, it would weaken them from the inside?
China knew what was happening and said to England, stop doing this to us.
But that's what they were doing.
Isn't that what China is doing to us right now?
Yeah.
The whole thing.
But keep in mind, while they're doing it, we're also passing marijuana laws.
You can use whatever you want.
This is a serious problem.
It's an addiction problem that our nation has.
And it is a, I want to tune out and not tune in.
We're trying to fill that.
that emptiness or whatever with, whether it's fentanyl or opioids or marijuana or whatever.
It's a problem.
So we, on the border thing, though, we just had a guest in.
It's named Phil Midkiff.
He's got Blue Servo.
And we opened the show on an economic war, and we opened with the idea that 10 years ago, the Democrats,
Paul Krugman and Barack Obama, we had quotes, you know, you've seen the YouTubes on them
where they were stronger on the border than they are today.
It's all political.
Again, I think that problem is solved if you allow a free and fair exchange of speech.
I think people will see the logic and see and understand it.
So I think Gohmert's solution has an immigration implication.
Has an implication for just about every issue in the face.
To get every episode of the Glenn Beck podcast, just subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you download your podcast.
One of my goals on the Glenn Beck podcast is to have a...
of in-depth conversations with people that I don't necessarily agree with.
My guest, this half hour, Greg Lukianoff, is probably somebody that maybe I disagree here
and there on things, but we have strong common ground and an alarm about the massive attack
on free speech that is plaguing the nation.
Lukianov is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
And last year, he co-wrote a New York Times bestselling book with Jonathan Haidt,
height called the coddling of the American mind, how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a
generation for failure. For more of my conversation with Greg, you can listen to the full podcast at
glenbeck.com. To get every episode of the glenbeck podcast, just subscribe on iTunes,
Google Play, or wherever you download your podcast. For now, let's get to the boogeyman of hate speech,
Google and the right to be forgotten, my conversation with Greg Lukianoff.
You know, I obviously was not for Barack Obama.
And I get into people on the right are like, how could you possibly say this?
Barack Obama made me a better man.
He absolutely made me a better man.
I am glad in some ways that Barack Obama was there because he threw me up against
the wall and challenged what I thought I knew. I had to, I learned about anti-colonialism.
I learned about the progressive era. I learned about the Constitution deeply. I've learned so
much. Same with Donald Trump. You know, we can either look at this as a bad experience or a good
experience that you learn from, you know, learn from it, learn from it. But are we? Yeah. I mean, I have a very
expansive, you know, view of freedom of speech that comes down very simply to it's important to know
what people really think, period. And I say this and people, you know, they're kind of like,
because a lot of the way people try to challenge freedom of speech is by saying, well, what if they
have terrible ideas? It's like, do you think you're safer for not knowing those?
terrible ideas. Do you think that? And also, I'd want to live in my kids were, we're living
next door to somebody who was a real racist. I don't want him saying all the politically correct
things. I want him, I want my son going over there and have coming dad and dad, you know,
he was just saying good, great, we know who he is. Don't go there anymore. You know what I mean?
I'd talk about censorship as being a little, a little blue, but like taking Xanax for syphilis.
where essentially you're just taking something that makes you feel better,
but you're just getting sicker by the minute.
And it takes a little bit of like the looking at things a little bit more,
sometimes like an anthropologist.
Oh, yeah.
So I went on Smirk Anish's show,
and I was there to talk about why,
to talk about the disinvitation of Steve Bannon from the New Yorker Festival.
And, you know, a lot of celebrities got up in arms
that they were going to do an interview with Steve Bannon
at the New Yorker Festival.
Festival of Ideas.
And I was there to festival of what?
Of ideas.
Okay.
Yeah, ideas.
And I was there, you know, of course, with my First Amendment technical hat on, I'm like, well,
of course, the New Yorker can invite whoever it wants.
But with my marketplace of ideas, sort of like knowing what people really think had on.
I was like, okay.
And then the response that I got on Twitter were the funniest.
People were like, so you're saying you would have on a hearing an interview with someone
from ISIS?
And I'm like, I would love to hear it.
Yes.
It would be one of the most interesting interviews you can imagine.
You know, you're staring into the face of evil.
That's great.
And then the other stream that people were going for was, but now he's irrelevant.
And I'm like, he was arguably the second most powerful person in the White House, like two weeks ago.
You're kidding.
And now he's talking to all these groups in Europe.
So it is this, you know, we talk about this, me and Pamela Pratsky, she was our chief researcher for the book.
And John, we talk about more.
pollution a lot.
Basically just the idea that once you get super tribal, it becomes this much more kind
of superstitious idea that if I'm in the presence of, if I shake the hands of, if I'm
anywhere near the bad man, it's somehow like it's going to rub off on you like some kind
of evil pox.
I think one of the most vile voices out there is Louis Farrakhan.
I'm glad I can hear exactly what Louis Farrakhan is saying.
You know, and I don't want him silenced.
You know, you could invite me here by Mitzza, and you'd be like, oh, my God.
Yeah.
I thought you were a great guy.
I had no idea.
Right.
Are you, how concerned, let me just take a quick offshoot here.
Yep.
How concerned are you about the growth of Google with its algorithms now being taught what to recognize hate speech?
Yeah.
How, I mean, what hate speech is.
At first, I don't believe in hate speech.
hate speech. But what hate speech is to one person is not hate speech to the other person.
Right.
What are you concerned about the loss? I mean, the colossal overnight loss of, it would call it a digital
ghettoization. Yeah. Hate speech has always been kind of the boogey man that you have to deal
with when you're dealing with free speech on campus. And the first thing you have to explain is there's
a whole generation of students who largely believe that hate speech is protected. Sorry, he's
unprotected speech.
They think it's a special category of unprotected speech.
And that's just not true.
It's too vague.
It's too broad.
It wouldn't fit any of the First Amendment analyses.
But then you have institutions like Google, you know, who I've always had a great
deal of respect for.
But then you look at cases like what happened to James DeMore, you know, who wrote something
that was, you know, I think Haight wrote about it saying it was, you know, wasn't
perfectly right on everything.
But it was also a not dismissive.
It was a dispassionate, you know, argument of what what the stats say about gender differences, including preference.
For some reason, like the taboo around saying that men and women might actually be drawn to different fields.
It's like, is that really the end of the world?
Right.
But anyway.
But yeah, the idea of a handful of institutions having so much power over what we can read and what we scares me.
and if they start actually policing hate speech,
I get worried that the work that I do,
where we're, you know,
and I always have to be clear,
99 out of 100 cases that we're dealing with
are more like the guy getting in trouble
for reading a book or for, you know, cracking a joke
that anybody off campus would be like,
I don't even understand what was offensive about that
is going to get in trouble.
Meanwhile, though, I do have some sympathy for Google
and for Facebook, because they're being pushed towards this by some really idiotic laws coming
out of the European Union.
You know about this whole right to be forgotten thing, right?
Right.
Right to be forgotten.
Forgotten?
Yeah.
Is this like transgender naming?
No, no, no.
Okay.
This is much, much worse than that.
That is forgotten.
The European, one of the European courts issued a decision talking about you people, individuals have
a right to be forgotten. And there was a law passed that tried to make this controlling law for
the entire EU that put it on Google. If someone came to you and said, that article about me is old
and irrelevant. So you have to remove it or face a huge fine. Yeah, face a huge fine unless Google for
some reason decides to actually put up a fight to keep it. So it's like it's all downside for Google.
subsequent decisions say that it can't just be for Google Europe.
It has to be for Google for the entire world.
And it comes from this kind of ridiculous idea that, you know, like if, you know, so what, you know, so what if I, I murdered somewhat 20 years ago, I have a right to be forgotten.
And it's just so, it's among numerous dunderheaded laws that I see coming out of Europe that are actually having spillover effects to the whole rest of the world.
So in some ways, you know, I am worried about the internal politics of Google, but I'm also worried about how different, you know, governments are sort of taking advantage of every opportunity to limit them.
That's the thing I love about our Constitution.
Yeah.
It doesn't, you don't have a right to be forgotten.
Yep.
You know, 18th Amendment is, is it, the 18th was prohibition.
No, yeah, 18 is still there.
Yep.
But 21st repeals it.
Yep.
But that scar is still there.
So you learn.
Yeah.
You know, perhaps you read it all and you go, hey, we did that once before.
Yeah.
Let me take, let's go through the three bad ideas.
Oh, sure, sure, yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, so basically there was a certain point where we were studying.
I'm sorry, I'm so riddled with ADD.
Oh.
I just keep looking at your shirt.
And something came to me that I've never thought before and I feel like the dumbest man on the planet,
unless you didn't mean this.
What?
You were talking and I thought, well, the argument.
that I keep hearing on free speech is, well, you can still yell fire.
You can't yell fire.
Is that what that, did that play a role in that at all?
I wasn't there for the original deciding of the name, but both of the founders bring it up all the time.
Okay.
I think it might have occurred 15 seconds after they.
Right.
Because one of the founders is Harvey Silverglade, who's a big First Amendment attorney.
And every First Amendment attorney in the whole country, every time you say, you can't shout fire in a crime.
crowded theater. We're like, oh, God, that again.
Like, it's... Answer it. So everybody
knows how to answer that question the right way.
The problem is it takes like an hour and a half to explain all the reasons why that's wrong.
Go to Popat. Go to Popat's website.
He has videos on why this is so wrong.
There's like 15 different reasons why. And also people misquote it.
It's falsely shouting fire. It's before Oliver Wendell Holmes became good on freedom of speech.
Rosencranston-Gildenstern her dead shouted fire in a crowded theater.
every single night out of tens of thousands of it.
It has no legal meaning other than generally for people to show that they don't actually
know the law very well.
That's great.
That's great.
So, yeah, but it's amazing.
We joke that every time someone invokes that a First Amendment, Laura dies somewhere.
Every time a bell rings, an angel get its wings.
You're listening to just a little part of my podcast conversation with Greg Lukianoff.
He is the co-author of the New York bestselling.
a book called The Codling of the American Mind.
In this segment,
Lukianoff walks us through three of the worst possible pieces of advice
that you could give to younger generations.
Okay, so three bad ideas.
Three bad ideas.
So part of the idea of the book was to kind of recreate sort of what we did
in the original article.
And basically saying it's as if we are giving a generation of people,
of kids,
of younger people,
the worst possible advice you could ever imagine.
So we create this situation of going up to this, you know,
supposedly wise man.
And he tells us three pieces of what he thinks are wisdom.
What doesn't kill you makes you weaker?
Always trust your feelings.
And life is a battle between good people and evil people.
And we do this as kind of a joke in the beginning of it.
And we have, it's me and John going,
that's like, those are like the worst ideas.
We've heard in our entire life.
And so the first one,
What doesn't kill you makes you weaker?
It's obviously a play on Nietzsche.
What doesn't kill you makes you stronger?
And of course, we recognize it's like, yes,
there are things that are short of killing you
that can still, you know, leave you in worse shape.
But it stands for a great truth,
which is, you know, both.
So we try to make all the great untruths,
things that were both bad in terms of modern psychology,
what modern psychology would tell you,
and bad in terms of resilient ancient wisdom.
which is surprisingly coherent on a number of issues.
One of them is that people need challenge.
You're going to see that in practically every culture.
It would be absurd to say people don't need challenge.
But what we see on campuses that we dub safetyism is, and also for parents these days,
you know, K through 12, this idea that kind of like there's no limit to how safe you can be.
And they also expand that into that weird kind of definition of safety that means
like emotionally unperturbed.
Right.
So it,
it,
the concept creeps in two different directions,
that there's no amount of physical safety that's,
that's too much or it comes with no bad side.
And by the way,
let's add an emotional safety too.
And of course,
you know,
what we talk about in the book is Nassim Taleb's idea of anti-fragility.
Human beings aren't,
uh,
we're not fragile and we're not merely resilient.
We're actually creatures that need stressors.
We need to be challenged or we atrophied.
and die or we grow healthy and strong.
You know, probably best represented by, you know, astronauts.
If you send them up to, send them up into no gravity, their joints start decaying really
quickly.
But on the other hand, you know, if you run every day and you lift a little bit of weight,
it's amazing how much you can improve.
I think it's interesting they're doing studies now on what, what they think the effects
will be on living on Mars.
Yeah.
And they believe that after, I think it's 20 years of living.
on Mars, that you actually won't be able to mate with an earthling because you will no longer
be technically what we call human. Wow. So you're actually, you're changing. Uh-huh. And I think it's
interesting that part of being human is having the pull and the drag on you. Absolutely. And so what we
see with this obsession of safety is that there wasn't really meaningful push back saying that
listen we can take this too far it can actually be harmful um but of course it can be harmful uh it's just the
same way we tell people you know um you don't overcome phobias by uh you know bubble wrapping the world
from your phobia right um so that's great truth and number one the second one i actually like
because it sounds so darn romantic um which is uh although your feelings luke your feelings are always right
And every, you know, a lot of, not every, but, you know, movies and sci-fi and the last stuff that I love does a lot of times have this idea of your feelings are always right.
And in one sense it is correct to say that your feelings are always telling you something.
Just it's not always what you think it is.
Susan David has this great quote where she used to take me paragraphs to say that.
You run into that where you feel like you took a book to explain something and someone gets it down to like a paragraph.
pithy phrase. She says, feelings are information, not directions. Why you're angry, why you're
jealous, why you're guilty. Without interrogating those things, we could be way off base on where
they're actually coming from and what they're trying to tell us. This is the Glembeck program.
What is the creepy line, quote end quote. And why does it matter? Find out in one minute my conversation
with Peter Schweitzer.
Today I'm sharing some vital conversations from the Glenn Beck podcast.
If you haven't heard the podcast, they are 90-minute interviews, uninterrupted, and they're
really very different.
This half hour, I'm going to play just a little bit of a talk I had with Peter Swizer.
Now, he is the best-selling author of Secret Empires.
And we discuss his new documentary about power and the peril of Google and Facebook.
the creepy line.
You can hear more of the podcast at glenbeck.com.
And to get every episode,
all you have to do is subscribe on iTunes,
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or wherever you download your podcast.
It is well worth your time.
Once a week,
you'll get a new podcast.
For now,
here's a piece of my conversation
with Peter Swizer.
I did a show recently
on the difference between
disinformation and misinformation.
Mm-hmm.
Fascinating topic.
Right.
Yeah.
Can you explain the difference between the two?
I mean, one is one, the disinformation is when it is, is planted into what you think is a credible source.
Right.
Okay.
If it comes from Pravda, you're like, oh, it's Pravda.
But if it comes from the New York Times, right?
Then it's disinformation.
In a way, Google is engaged and, you know,
Facebook, knowingly or not, in a disinformation campaign.
Yes, I think that you could certainly classify that.
And I think the issue becomes, why are they doing this and how are they doing this?
You asked earlier about Zuckerberg and your interaction with him.
I don't know that Mark Zuckerberg, I'm not suggesting that Mark Zuckerberg is sitting around saying,
how can we deal with conservatives on Facebook?
I don't think so either.
But the problem is, there are lots of people employed by Facebook.
Facebook who maybe they're in their mid-20s. Maybe they were woke, you know, on campus. And they are now
involved in the news feed. I mean, we had a, you know, a Facebook employee who was involved with
their trending section that came out a couple of years ago who said, oh, yeah, we sunk conservative
stories and we boosted liberal stories. So I don't think it's, it's a question of the
executives of these companies, you know, in kind of a James Bond villain moment.
saying here's how we're going to rule the universe,
I think it's a question of they've created these powerful companies,
and they've created a culture within these companies
that for all the talk of tolerance is actually very intolerant.
And it reflects in the product that they are producing.
So did you touch on it all?
I have a document from a meeting with Media Matters on inauguration day.
It was a meeting that happened with far left donors with media matters on the election day in Florida.
Not on election day on inauguration day.
And they said, here's where we went wrong.
And here's what we're going to do.
And it talks in that document about how they are going to go to Facebook and Google and they are going to advise.
Right.
Okay.
And in that document, it says, we have already been given access to all of the raw data in real time.
Yeah.
Peter, I don't think they'd give that to me or any organization that I know of.
No, they would not.
They would not.
And this is the problem.
I mean, the problem is the way that they are trying to deal with this is they're, you know,
we're being criticized by conservatives. So we'll go meet with conservatives. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, by the way. I think that's a good thing. But that's not really the issue. The issue is not, you know, saying nice words. The fundamental issue comes down to, you know, what is this company doing? And the whole debate now that's arisen about fake news, I think is a huge problem because it's allowing essentially these liberal groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and media matters to,
essentially say to Facebook and Google, no, no, no, we want you to engage in more censorship.
We want you to classify.
And the, and the Facebook could respond well, but we have others. We have, I don't remember
it's Heritage Foundation, but we have, we have others that are doing it on the right.
I don't want either side. That's exactly. I don't want either side shut up. Yeah. It's, it's
the, the problem that develops is that nasty word, cronyism. And cronyism is a problem where
you give concentrated power or you give special access or favors to certain people.
And invariably, it's going to be misused.
And this is really the question, I guess, Glenn, is does Facebook and does Google so much distrust the American people that they believe the American people are incapable of looking at a news story and saying, that's totally yes.
I'm not buying that.
And they don't.
They don't have confidence in the.
American people to do that. They feel like they have to somehow be the arbitrators and they don't.
So here's, let's be clear. Just a new study came out. Goldfish, goldfish have an attention span of
nine seconds. Americans have seven seconds. Okay. So let's be very clear. We're not doing our job.
Right.
Right.
And that has changed dramatically because of Facebook and all of the interaction that we do.
However, because I was just asked this question, well, don't they have a responsibility?
Shouldn't they be?
No, they have a responsibility to be transparent and be a platform.
Correct.
A platform.
Correct.
I don't believe that you should censor anyone on a platform.
Right.
It's the battlefield of ideas.
To say that now, what people will say is, well, that's crazy because there's a lot of crazy people.
Yeah, there are.
There are.
Thomas Jefferson said, believe the people.
Trust the people.
Right.
Okay.
The key to that sentence was, comma, they will usually get it wrong.
But eventually they'll get it right.
Right.
Right. Exactly. So we're going through this period right now. The worst thing we can do is put a babysitter on top of us forever. Yes. We have to learn. Fire is hot. Yes. No, you're exactly right. And this is further evidence that I think they don't really understand the dynamics at work in the country today. The dynamic at work in the country today is a rejection of sort of this elite view of how,
society should be organized. It's one of the reasons why you have in financial markets,
conservatives, people on the left don't trust the large banks. They don't trust Wall Street.
It's a rejection of that. It's the same reason conservatives, liberals, independents have a
distrust of Washington, D.C. It's not because they want tax policy to be slightly different.
It's they don't fundamentally trust them to reflect their interests and to look out for them.
and they also know that elites generally look down upon them.
So, you know, my challenge to Silicon Valley is for all their talk of egalitarianism,
for all their talk about we love democracy and everybody having a voice,
do you really?
Do you really?
I mean, the point is, we all remember as a kid.
I grew up outside of Seattle, Washington, and I remember going down to a place called Pioneer Square.
You probably went there too.
There were all kinds of people wandering around saying strange things.
Well, those people today may have blog sites, and they're going to say some crazy stuff.
I didn't pay a lot of attention back then.
I'm not paying a lot of attention now, and I have enough trust that most people aren't
going to pay a lot of attention to them.
And that's, I think, what we have to embrace, because otherwise, it's we are going
to have intellectual policemen that are trying to tell people, here's what you should think,
here's what you should not think.
Not only that, but please don't even look in this direction.
You can't even look in this direction.
If you look in this direction, it might somehow infect you.
It's ridiculous.
The battlefield of ideas is such that the best ideas win.
And I happen to believe that the ideas of the American founding were the best ideas.
And they are going to win.
And we ought to be confident in that.
And the kind of monitoring and everything else, honestly, goes against almost every single article in the Bill of Rights.
That's right. Almost every single one is violated. Now, it's not violated by the government, but it is the same principle, especially the bigger they get.
Yes. And that, by the way, goes on to what you were saying earlier about Huxley and Orwell. You know, the traditional view is the government was going to use technology to control our lives. It's really corporations now. I've always, you know, I've always, always made fun of.
You know, Blade Runner, the corporation.
Please shut up about the corporation.
It's the government.
No.
Right.
No.
We are now entering the time where the liberal concern about corporations is actually accurate now.
Right.
You know?
Yeah.
And it's weird that they're so in love with Apple and Google because these are the guys you've been warning us about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know?
So let me take you kind of to that Orwell place.
But first, explain Gmail is free.
Google searches are free.
Right.
Right.
They are free, but they come at a high price.
No, I'm not paying anything.
Well, you're not paying anything in terms of monetary.
That's true.
They're free.
But the question is, what is going on?
because all these servers, all this capacity, is expensive.
So what Google is doing is they have a product here.
You're not buying it.
You are the product.
They're selling you.
You're selling you.
And they're selling all kinds of secrets about you.
And Gmail is a perfect example of this.
I use Gmail up until I started on this project.
And now I don't use Gmail anymore.
And what people have to realize about Gmail is they're scanning every email that comes in.
They're scanning it.
They know what's in it.
they are scanning every email that you send out.
And if you draft an email, you know, you're, you're upset with your cousin about something.
You had a, you know, debate over Thanksgiving and you thought they were rude.
And you said, you know, cousin Chris, I think you're rude and you're terrible and you're this and that.
And you say, you know what?
That's really kind of nasty.
I shouldn't send it.
And that draft, they're scanning that draft.
I want to make it clear.
You're not saying the draft that you save and put into drafts.
Correct.
It's the keystrokes.
It's recording the keystrokes.
Even if you delete all of it, it's still there.
All right.
What's important here is, again, to distinguish, when you say they're scanning, it doesn't mean they're reading it.
Correct.
And why are they scanning it?
Well, they're scanning it because let's say you send an email to your friend.
Golly, I'm really tired of work.
I'd sure love to be on a beach in Mexico right now.
They're scanning it because they're scanning.
They're looking for beach in Mexico, and you're going to probably see ads on your Google feed for apartments or condos in Mexico.
And lo and behold, the next morning, someday you wake up and they say, Mr. Switzer, I've already booked two tickets.
That's right.
Would you like to go to Mexico today?
I know you're tired and you've been thinking about it.
Right.
That's right.
And that's where it's headed.
And again, there's certain amazing conveniences that come with us.
I mean, you know, you use Google Maps.
There are all sorts of great benefits to that to Google search.
The thing that people have to keep in mind, though, is it's not a one-way street.
It's not just these wonderful good things they're doing for you.
It's the capacity they are developing to do things to you.
So when I say that they're scanning your g-mails, it's not that there's a,
person sitting in Silicon Valley saying, oh, look what Glenn just sent in Gmail.
Correct.
But they have the capacity to do that.
Yes.
And they have the capacity if they don't like what you're doing to shut you off from
Gmail.
And Dr.
Jordan Peterson,
we highlight him in the film.
That's exactly what happened to him.
He's a psychology professor at the University of Toronto.
And he took a position against compelled speech where there was a debate in Toronto about
an ordinance that would require you to a university.
address somebody by their preferred gender. Peterson's position was, I always address people by
their preferred gender, but this is compelled speech. You should not force people to do this.
He took this public position. The next day, Glenn, he was shut out of his Gmail account. He was
shut out of his YouTube account. Everything Google owned was shut down. Now, you would think,
why is this going on? I think probably what happened is somebody connected with Google, maybe mid-level,
saw this, you know, is maybe in favor of this policy position and sort of in a juvenile way,
said, I don't like this guy.
We're going to sort of cut him off.
But Jordan Peterson lost his Gmail.
He lost his Google calendar.
The point being, you rely on these products.
It's going to give them an enormous capacity over your life.
And if they choose to, sometimes in an arbitrary way, they may just shut you out because they don't
like the position that you've taken.
And the problem is Google does not have a customer service department you can call to say, why did this happen?
They have no customer service department.
And they make clear, we can choose to do this to you any time we want.
This is the best of Glenn Beck.
I'm talking with Peter Swizer, bestselling author and producer of a new documentary called The Creepy Line.
So I've been asking the question of everybody who I think, um,
is paying attention to Silicon Valley or is involved in Silicon Valley.
The answer comes back exactly the same way every time.
Because it's been a plea of mine, I'll say to them,
this might sound crazy.
However, politicians are politicians.
Economies are economies.
They usually repeat the same mistakes.
Okay?
Right.
We are at a, we're at an economy that,
I don't care who's in office.
At some point, it's going to crash.
It always does.
We are going to feel real pain.
And the longer this one goes, the deeper the pain is going to be.
We have politicians that tell us, I'm going to bring those jobs back.
Okay.
Well, you have people in Silicon Valley right now that are not celebrating a four-point, whatever, unemployment rate.
because their entire job is to figure out how do we have a 100% unemployment rate?
Because that's the world of the future as they see it.
But no one is talking to people about this.
Bain Capital said about eight months ago, by 2030, the United States of America will have a 30% unemployment rate permanent.
And it will only go up from there because of the things Silicon Valley is doing.
So here's the scenario.
People start to lose jobs.
This starts to kick in around 2020.
People start to lose jobs.
They're not coming back.
The politicians have to blame somebody.
We're going to, you know, I'm going to bring those jobs back.
I'm going to bring those jobs back.
At some point, the people say, no, those jobs aren't coming back.
They have to have another story.
It's them.
It's the people in Silicon Valley that are taking your livelihood away.
They have manipulated you.
They have, and it is torches to Silicon Valley.
Unless the politician says, how about we work together?
That's when Orwell happens.
Yeah.
Everyone I have said, does that sound crazy?
crazy. Let's see if they respond the way you respond. Does that sound crazy? No, it sounds very
realistic. And if I were a titan of Silicon Valley with sort of their worldview, that's
precisely what I would do. And if I was part of what I call the permanent political class in
Washington, Republicans or Democrats, doesn't make all that much difference. That's exactly what I would do.
That's exactly what I would do. And you will then have this, in a sense, unholy alliance between
the political leadership and high tech.
And, you know, we know who's going to get the short end of the stick when those two entities get together.
And that's going to be the American people.
To get every episode of the Glenn Beck podcast, just subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you download your podcast.
Two guys walk into a bar, an atheist and a devout Christian.
Now, at this point, you might be thinking, this joke isn't going to be very funny.
Or, B, it's probably going to be very insulting.
and maybe even a little bit hostile.
But it was not hostile,
and it was fun and funny.
My encounter with the godfather,
or as I like to call him,
the gadfather,
one of the intellectual darkwebs founding members.
I'm a puzzlement to many Christians
because I like to go to different services.
I like to see how people are worshipping.
I just love it.
You should come to our synagogue.
I would love it.
Arabic Jews.
That's tribal.
That's, yeah.
That's,
I love it.
That precedes Jesus by a few thousand years.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, and I love it.
I've been all over the world.
I've, you know, been in Buddhist temples.
I've been in the great synagogue and went on Shabbat.
So love it.
Where I have a.
problem and I think we you probably have the same problem except in reverse is how let me say it this
way I think if we would just stop saying no I have the full picture I have the full picture your
picture is wrong and if we would all just shut up and sit our pictures down on the table they might
snap into a puzzle and we'd see the whole picture you know what I mean but we can't do that you for
me to be right. You must be wrong. It's a zero-sum game.
Right. And the people I respect, and I mean, you are the father, the grandfather of the
intellectual dark web, or dark intellectual, yeah, dark web. And what I like about that
is you don't have to agree on everything. You just have to be cool with other people
thinking differently.
And as a matter of fact, I think most of the people who are
part of that group
actually disagree on quite a few
very serious.
I mean, Sam Harris and I are
in perfect disagreement when it comes to Donald Trump.
He thinks he's ushering nuclear
Holocaust. I don't.
So there are many, but
what we do all share
is a commitment
to intellectual conversations,
a disdain for intrusions
against freedom of speech, a disdain
for political correctness.
So that's sort of the bedrock on which all else can be built.
Except, and I want to get into your story, because you're not like this, I don't think.
Bill Maher, Sam Harris, they, I mean, they talk about religious people like they are, you know.
The scourge.
The scourge of the world.
And, you know, I happen to agree with Gandhi.
You know, I love this Jesus of yours.
I just, I'm not so, such a big fan of his followers.
Right.
You know, they're good people and bad people in, in all of it.
There are good things that come out of it, bad things that come out of it.
I actually know a few good Muslims.
Now, they're the first to be killed by radical Islam.
But, you know, they say they're Muslim.
I believe that they, you know, follow the path of Islam as they defile.
behind it.
Right.
And they're great.
And they tolerate me and I tolerate them.
Right.
There are others, Christians, Jews, atheists, all of them that just demonize.
And that's the thing that sets, I think, sets you apart, at least in our interaction.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
With others.
Look, I absolutely don't mind that people are very religious because I truly appreciate the functional
utility of the religious mind.
I get that there are endless benefits that can come from being a believer.
What bothers me is when religion becomes intrusive.
You understand what I mean?
It could be intrusive in that you better be...
The difference between Islam and an Islamist.
Right.
Although, although, just to be clear, that there is no codified way by which Islam is
different from Islamist.
An individual might decide to ignore the seven,
73,000 tenets that are part of Islam, there is no book of Islamism that is distinct from
Islam.
Correct.
It's a lack of a reformation to codify.
Exactly right.
Yeah.
But there are those who are not Islamists.
In that, they don't take seriously all the content of their book.
It's not that they're praying to a different book called Gentle, Sweet Islam, right?
So, so from my...
my perspective, and it doesn't have to be as intrusive as when Islam comes in to try to kill
everybody else, if you try to make claim as a religious person in science, you're being, in my
view, intrusive. Stay in your lane, right? Don't have the lack of epistemic humility to try
to explain why that rock looks like it is four billion years old, but it's really young earth
creationism. Now you're being intrusive against the truth. That pisses me off. So I'm
perfectly willing to tolerate
lit up, live everyone,
including the most
religious, as long as you don't intrude
on other people's rights.
But the way I define intrusion...
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Intrude on other
people's rights.
Including truth.
Right.
The example that you used
and you said, stay in your lane.
If,
for instance, the guy
who invented radar, I can't
remember his name, but he was a weatherman.
Okay.
And everybody in England, you know, that was in power, you know, they're very hierarchical.
No, you, you're a weatherman.
You're a weatherman.
No, I'm telling you this idea will work.
Right.
He created it.
He proved that it worked.
And then the government stepped in and said, okay, we're going to have real people work
on this now.
Oh, okay, I get it.
I get your analogy.
There is.
I don't mean stay in your lane in that.
I'm an elitist, only an intellectual should say this and not a common person.
To the contrary, I'm a professor of the people, as I always say.
Not at all.
What I'm saying is the epistemology of religion does not provide a workable framework for understanding natural laws.
That's not its domain.
Therefore, it shouldn't pretend that it could contribute to scientific truths.
Maybe it can help you understand how to behave or not.
We can debate that, and that's fine.
Maybe it has a place to play in terms of moral codes,
and we can disagree or not with that.
But it doesn't, there is no way to study natural mechanisms
either through the epistemology of religion or the epistemology of science.
Science is the only game in town when it comes to studying natural phenomena.
You're not happy.
No, no, no, no, I think I agree with you.
The Bible is not a science book.
But it does make science claims.
It does make very clear scientific claims that are disproven.
Anyone, I think any thinking human being will look at the scriptures and say,
what were they trying to explain in their language?
What were they saying?
And you can look at the arc of the story and go,
okay, the arc of the story I get.
Did God create in seven days?
That's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
Now, you could say his days are different than my days.
Fine.
That's where the Olympic mental gymnastics start.
If you want to say that a book that is written 5,000 years ago,
those guys had an idea of, you know what I mean?
but Olympic gymnastics are not,
you can look and say,
okay, well, his days aren't the same as mine,
but science will tell me how old this planet is
and, you know, the Big Bang.
I don't have a problem with the Big Bang.
Don't know if that's the way it happened.
Looks like it, but okay,
what I'm concerned about is,
what caused the Big Bang?
Right.
What happened?
A millisecond before the Big Bang.
But it's almost the last place now where God can hide, right?
You've heard of the God of the Gap's argument.
The God of the Gap's argument is basically whenever there is an explanatory gap in our scientific knowledge, that's where God goes to hide, right?
So there used to be a time when an eclipse was God.
But now he could no longer hide there.
Then thunder was God.
Then he can't hide there.
That's a scientist.
There is nothing.
There is nothing.
I don't believe
I don't believe
it's going to get me in so much trouble
I don't believe that the waters
parted
okay I do believe the Jewish
oral tradition
that the winds might have swept
and swept the water
to leave a path
but not like this
right okay
Velikovsky
theorized that maybe
the asteroid belt was
from a, and he was wrong on all this, but maybe there was
maybe a moon spun off, caused some gravitational pull,
something came, made the water stand up. I don't believe that,
but at least it's a scientific way of looking for what is
happening. You know, faith,
people will say, well, that wasn't a miracle. Well,
I don't know. I think a cat scan is.
I think that's a cat, I think that's a, I think that's a
miracle in any other time that would have been called a miracle.
Now, we're just learning how to do things.
And what brought about the cats?
Science. Yeah. I have no problem. Science.
But by the way, if God comes and he says, no, two plus two equals five, he's not God.
That's called postmodernism, by the way. Yeah, I know it is.
The best of the Glenn Beck program.
If I could put a finger on one of the worst ramifications of this new era in technology and social media, it's how we become so tribalized into our own little safe spaces.
We're not interconnected anymore.
We've become cocooned and separated.
We're surrounded by opinions that agree with us rather than open us up to, or at least considering those things that we don't want to hear.
We don't talk to one another anymore.
We don't engage in respectful debate.
We don't actually listen.
And it's one of the reasons why I started doing podcast every Saturday.
They're available at glenbeck.com or wherever you get your podcast.
The one you're about to hear is, I think, crucial.
Gad sad, a guy I'm not supposed to like and I'm a guy he's not supposed to like.
But we ended up loving each other.
He's one of the original intellectual dark web thinking.
He is an atheist and someone whose opinion I value greatly.
Here's part of the conversation we had about religion and God.
Spoiler alert.
No one gets insulted or hostile.
You said earlier, God is a scientist.
I actually wrote an article where I argue that God is a Darwinist.
And let me make the argument here for you.
So there's a great paper written by a Darwinian historian.
So this is a historian who studies historical patterns using the evolutionary lens.
And she did a content analysis of the Old Testament.
So this is a way where you can study scientifically the Bible with an evolutionary lens.
And here's what she did.
So there's a lot of research that shows that with higher status, men have more access to women, right?
So the reason why men fight the other men for status is because the downstream consequences is I get more women, right?
And so what she wanted to do is test this exact idea by looking at characters in the Bible.
And so what she did is she coded each individual in the Bible, his rank.
So, for example, he's a prophet, he's a king, he's a general, he's a slave, he's a farmer,
and then counted the number of women mates that are associated to him.
And it was the exact prediction that you would expect from evolutionary theory
with greater status of men in the Bible.
Bible comes greater reproductive benefits.
And so therefore I call that God as a Darwinist.
So again, the Bible does contain certain universal truth, certain evolutionary truths.
But those truths can exist from my viewpoint simply because they are a manifestation of human
beings having written those things, not of a supernatural agent.
Last question on this.
Then I want to get to your history.
But last thing on this, can we agree on maybe two out of the four?
Ben Franklin was asked, what is the American religion?
And they were trying to trap him.
And he said, well, the American religion is that there is a God.
He's going to judge us.
So we should serve him, and the best way to serve him is by serving our fellow man.
If that's what religion did, is it good?
Yeah.
Yeah, is it good?
Yeah.
The only thing, though, is I would say, my God, is it more impressive for me to serve you
without it being an exhortation from God?
Exactly.
In other words, if I am good to Glenn Beck simply because I am innately virtuous and I think
it's the right thing to do without worrying whether a sky daddy is judging me or not,
that's a more pure for that.
And it's more pure.
It's when you, you know, people try to go baptized.
people. I've got to get you baptized in the faith.
Oh, would you stop? So you're not baptized?
Yeah, I am baptized.
But I despise the push
to get people into the waters of baptism.
I believe in this, et cetera, et cetera.
I believe what I do. However,
how about I just love somebody?
Right, exactly.
With no ulterior motive, I just want to love you
because anything else is crass.
anything else does not come from well that's more impure because it has an ulterior motive
and that's what we were talking doesn't god's not like up there going you know if we prefer
this guy then this guy will do that it's not going it doesn't work that way if there is a god
he's not doing that right he's like he can you guys he is come to me like a child he is very child
like guys just get along right love each other this is the glenbeck program no matter how you get
your news today, whether it's from a newspaper or cable TV or a smartphone, there's not a whole lot
to be optimistic about. Most times, it can be downright discouraging. I think what we need right now
is a little old-time country perspective. My conversation with Phil Robertson, he's about as
old-time country as it gets. It begins in one minute. Back before customers at coffee shops got their
information from actually talking to a person sitting across the table from them, rather than
ignoring them while scrolling through their Twitter mentions, things were a lot simpler.
There was wisdom in a good conversation.
A friend, a family member, or a pastor was usually the first to be consulted when advice was
needed.
I thought we needed to get back to a little bit of that.
My podcast available at glenbeck.com or wherever you get your podcast is a good mixture of
modern day technology and old-fashioned communication one-on-one thoughtful and practical application
that you can actually use my recent conversation was with phil robertson and it goes right to the
heart of this concept here's a small portion as things become more and more insane in our world
yeah uh i thought of the poster that uh that churchill put out in the second world war keep
and carry on.
Right now, none of us are keeping calm.
We're all freaking out.
All we have to do is keep calm
and then do the things that you know are right.
Just pay no attention to that.
Just keep calm and carry on.
You're quoting some great scriptures.
Look, I urge your brothers,
in view of God's mercy,
offer your body as living sacrifices,
holy and pleasing to God.
Offer your body.
That's 24-7.
which is your spiritual worship.
Don't conform any longer to the pattern of the world.
You just mentioned the pattern of the world back.
It's insane.
If someone had told me that we would end up by 2020
with the mischief and the sinful, the murder,
the lives, love.
They shoot up churches, concert.
You're like, what?
Jesus said, the devil is the,
father of lies.
Just look at the news media
and what they keep
coming out of their
mouth. And you're like, and the
scary party is,
I think they believe the lie.
You too. And it's not just
the news media. It's the
Jesus said the devil is behind
the whole thing. Yeah, it's
advertising. Think of the lies
of, to sell somebody a product,
I have to tell you you're not
complete without this.
that's the biggest lie there is.
I know it.
That's why I haven't gotten into the cell phone and computer business.
I'm on the computer, but I never.
Look, there's different gifts.
Here's worship.
Love must be sincere, 24-7.
Hate what is evil, cling to what's good, all the time, 24-7.
Be devoted to one another and brotherly love all the time.
Honor one another above yourselves.
all the time.
Don't be lagging in zeal.
Keep your spiritual fervor serving the Lord all the time.
Be joyful in hope, patient and affliction.
My prostate acted up here about two or three weeks ago.
You said, did you go down, down on the ground?
I asked the Almighty to take it from me.
It took about a week of 10 days.
I actually went to see a doctor for the first time in 50 years.
You say, patient and affliction.
and the last time I've been in the hospital is when a tick bit me and gave me rabbit fever.
You say, you haven't been back to a doctor since.
But I went the other day because the old prostate got to act up.
You're like, was it rough?
Was it rough?
So look, patient and affliction, I weathered it, faithful in prayer, share with God's people who are in need,
practice hospitality, have them over for a meal, bless those who persecute you.
That's why I told you, I don't, don't curse them.
Bless them.
They're all right.
Bless and don't curse.
Rejoice for those who rejoice, mourn with those who mourn, live in harmony with one another.
Don't be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position to poor, the downtrodden, the redneck, whatever.
Don't be conceded.
Don't repay anyone evil for evil.
This is worship.
This is how we worship.
Be careful to do what is.
right in the eyes of everybody, you're like, be careful to do what is right, no matter who's
looking, do what is right. Be careful to do what's right. Heather or not, do what's right
before them. Let them see that. If it's possible, which is amazing, as far as it depends on you,
live at peace with everyone. I live in a redneck neighborhood. You say,
You try to live at peace with them.
Yep.
They were stealing my fish, the rednecks, back when I was fishing to survive,
before the duck called took off.
Out a lot of nets in the river, hoop nets.
Catfish go in them.
Buffalo.
Buffalo, you get 30 cents a pound.
Catfish, you get 70.
Add all these nets out.
Add floats on them.
You could see them.
Everyone around there knew there were my nets.
I would notice that I'd hear an outboard
when I trained myself to go down there right quick
and looking through the bushes
and I'm looking over there
and every once in a while
some of these guys would pull up on one of those floats
and then start coming up with it
they're going to steal my fish
but I did at first
I was young in the faith
I took a shotgun with buckshot
and I tore out there
and I would threaten them, scare the daylights out of them.
What are you doing stealing from me?
But they kept stealing.
I'd run that bunch off, and three weeks later, there's another bunch.
I read this text that where I'm reading now,
don't take revenge, my friends.
Leave room for God's wrath.
It's written.
It's mine to avenge our repay says the Lord on the contrary.
If your enemy is hungry, feed him.
if he's thirsty, give him something to drink.
I said, young into faith, I said, that won't work.
These rednecks, if I'm good to them, if I give them what they're trying to steal,
you're telling me, Lord, they'll quit stealing.
I said, that won't work, but it occurred to me, Beck.
I said, how would I know?
I've never tried it.
I'm just trying to spook them.
And these are dangerous people anyway.
Of course, you're in the South.
You eat Yankees.
Yeah.
So I said, well, I'm going to try that, Lord.
I'm going to test you right here on this.
So the next bunch I catch, I tear out there with my motor.
I have my gun just in case my faith gets a little weak.
But it's not in my hand.
it's in the bottom of the boat.
I pull out there,
these guys look around
and they're dropping my net in the river,
acting like they were fishing.
I said, guys,
looks like you've had trouble
catching some fish
and decided to get mine in my nets.
I said, good times have come your way.
I'm going to give you the fish.
And they're looking at me,
and the look on their faces,
they looked at each other.
I said, I'm going to give you what you.
I want you to have a fish fry.
How many are coming?
They said, well, let's see, there was my cousin.
And I said, you know, you start frying fish.
People are come out of the woodwork.
Ken, folks you haven't seen in years.
I said, listen, I'm going to keep your boat right there.
I said, calm down now.
I'm not going to hurt you.
I said, I'm going to give you what you would try.
Let's see what you've fixed to catch.
Well, I'll pull the net up at a lot of fish in it.
I put him in my boat.
I put the net back out.
I said, bring your boat over here.
They said, no, so we'll just go on down.
I said, come on over here.
They were scared of me.
So they were thinking, wait a minute, we're stealing from him.
He's giving us what we were trying to steal.
He's crazy.
So look, they get their boat over it,
and I start throwing fish over in their boat.
I said, when you think you have enough for the fish fry,
you can say so.
And they told me one time, well, ah, ha, ha,
You know, I think that'd be enough, Mr. Rogers.
I said, no, let me give you a few more.
So I threw them some more.
I said, now, you have what you wanted to steal.
I'm giving you what you were trying to steal.
I said, I'd do this for a living.
This is how I make money.
I said, I would appreciate it if you didn't steal from me.
I said, now listen, I live.
See up there on a hill of that house on that hill?
Yeah.
I said, the next time you want a fish fry,
if you can't catch any fish, just come see me,
and I'll give them to you.
All the way up and down the river for years after that,
they all quit stealing from me.
What I didn't know was, young in the faith,
I appealed to their conscience if they had one,
and I wanted them to say,
good night the guy would give them to us.
I mean, the old guy gave us the fish we was trying to steal.
Can you believe that?
Well, once that goes around in the red,
neck circle, they say, we send food with that old dude. That's a good old dude. God was right
all along. I just never had, I was too weak to see it. So I will tell you, I find, I read the
scriptures and I find answers to everything, everything that you're doing, just like you did with
the fish. I find answers everywhere in it. And it's amazing because every time I tried,
it works too. Is there a problem with people of faith in America?
today because they
profess they believe it
but then they don't do it
the answer is
these are not enemies
of yours they're enemies of mine
I have the right
for vengeance you don't
I am commanding you
to love them
remember we're not wrestling
against flesh and blood
that's not where the battle is
but we're wrestling
with the rulers of this age, the authorities, the evils of Darga, the princes of Darnees,
the spiritual wickedness.
Yeah.
You say, our battle is with the evil one.
That's why when I wrote that book, it says, the theft of America's soul, I'm putting it
on the evil one.
The humans are just caught up in it.
Correct.
But if they're delivered from Satan, they're ready to go.
But he's the problem.
So where are all the Christians that don't want to, that will say,
you know what, I have plenty.
Let me give you my fish.
Just don't steal from me.
They would say, and I mean this for everybody, but I'm hearing it from Christians,
I'm, you know, but I know everybody is this way.
They would say that is weakness.
That will show weakness.
They're going to steal from you, blind if you do that.
You can't do that.
You've got to show power and you've got to stand up.
Yeah, yeah.
Let me show you another thing on where they would do the same thing.
Be angry, but sin not.
Okay, so someone sins against you and you're angry.
You're good.
Anger is a healthy emotion.
However, vengeance is not.
That's right.
be angry, but don't sin.
You're like, well, how could I be angry not sin?
Well, if you lash back out verbally, they curse you, you start cursing them, and then you
have a, and it escalates.
So we both are cursing each other.
You know, good, you know, two neighbors, one mowing the grass, one the other side of the
fence, and they're sitting there cursing each other.
You're like, you can't lash back physically.
You're sinning.
You have to keep your mouth shut.
You don't pick up something either and begin to.
to beat them half the death with it or pull out your pistol and shoot them.
Be angry, but don't sin.
Okay, they sin against you.
You don't retaliate verbally.
You don't retaliate physically.
You just walk away.
However, a lot of times when you walk away, you didn't sin, not yet, but you're bitter.
Because they curse you.
You're like, they've still got their talons on you.
They're still causing you harm.
they're still controlling you
because you're bitter about taking the cursing for no reason.
You say, well, what's the way out of that mess?
What's the strong person to do?
Just forgive them.
Don't be bitter.
Don't lash out verbally.
Don't lash out physically.
Just forgive them.
And move on.
You say, who's the stronger person?
The one that can't take a cursing,
without cursing back, that's weak.
You say, pick up something because somebody cursing,
you're going to beat them out of the death.
You say, that's weak.
You're bitter for the next 20 years over what someone,
you're like, they've controlled your life for 20 years.
You're still mad about what they did back.
You see it all the time.
Or just forgive them and move on.
You say, forgive them.
That's true.
There's the strong person.
So we just get it out of whack.
This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
I'm talking to Phil Robertson, the granddaddy of Duck Dynasty.
Phil breaks it down as only Phil can break it down.
So I think forgiveness is the, I think that's the first step.
I think the deeper step of it is profound empathy.
I know I've been in situations where I've had to forgive and I could forgive.
And then I've been in situations that I've prayed a lot about that I knew I was going to have problems with.
Yep.
And my whole heart felt their pain.
And all of a sudden, no matter what they said to me, I could just feel how much pain they were in.
Yep.
And it brings you to tears.
And that is, that's even more.
When you can, to say I forgive you and mean it is hard.
Yep.
To feel the other pain.
Very difficult for human beings.
Very difficult for human beings to get that.
That's why the greatest commands of the Bible,
love God and love your neighbor, you say,
in spite of the mistakes,
how many times, Lord, shall we forgiven?
Seven?
He said, 70 times seven.
Seventy times seven.
They're like, 70 times seven.
If Glenn Beck and Phil Robertson added up every violation
where they broke God's one of his laws.
If we added them all up,
you say there would be probably thousands.
That's why Jesus said,
you be forgiven to them 70 times seven.
Be ready to forgive.
Look how many sins I'm forgiving of you.
So if you look at it like that,
you say, whoa, what's this?
Leave no debt, remain,
Outstanding. Let no debt remain outstanding. Pay your bills. Except one debt we owe back the continuing
debt to love one another. For he who loves his fellow man, watch how this works, has fulfilled
the law with all that don't do this, don't do that, don't lie, don't steal, don't care, don't. You're like,
how do you, how do you fulfill that? Love your neighbor. Watch.
The commandments do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet,
and whatever other commandment there may be are summed up in this one rule.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Love does no harm to its neighbor.
You're like, I don't get up in the morning and say, I got to make sure that I don't steal
somebody's, you know, money or their billfold, or I got to make sure that
you know, that I don't have any evil thoughts,
and I got to make sure that I'm, you know,
I don't lash out at that.
Just love them.
Just love them.
If you love them, you're certainly not going to shoot them.
If you love them, you say,
you're not going to be unkind to them.
If you love them, you're not going to mess with their woman.
You love them too much.
She's your sister.
She's a fellow human being.
You say, love would take care of every bit of that.
but boy, is that a hard lesson?
To get every episode of the Glenn Beck podcast, just subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or wherever you download your podcast.
Her parents dropped out of school at a young age.
She lived in absolute poverty with no electricity and no running water.
But Carol Swain refused to be defined by all of that.
I sat down with Carol a little while ago for a podcast.
It's available at glenbeck.com or wherever he gets your podcasts.
And I was blown away by her story.
Former professor at Vanderbilt.
Her work is now been cited by two Supreme Court justices.
But here's the part of the conversation on race and immigration.
That was fascinating.
Look at how long the government was shut down and didn't seem to be a problem with most people.
there is a
contempt
I mean this border wall thing
I think the average American
on the border wall
says look I just want to know who's here
I want to make sure MS 13 is not in my neighborhood
I want to make sure that bad guys aren't here
I want to make sure the good people
that just want to make us better and want to become American
can come through the front door
but make that easier I'm fine with that
but I just don't want people here
the reason why they're demanding a wall
is because they don't trust government.
They say, I want something permanent because you'll pass it.
You won't build it.
And if you do build it, you'll stop doing whatever it was you said you were going to do the
minute we turn around.
That's why people want a wall.
So we're looking at this time where I think somebody like Donald Trump could say,
you know what?
You know why this border wall
is in the mess that it is?
Because nobody in the Republican Party
actually mean it when they tell you
border wall. Nobody in the Democratic Party
actually mean it. They were fighting for it
10 years ago. Now it's immoral.
And I think he could make the case
to both sides. This has to stop.
My
latest, most recent academic book is an edited debating immigration. And it was released August
of last year. So I've given a lot of thought to immigration. Immigration has not been reformed
since 1986. And we've done piecemeal. And there's no incentive by either political party to make
the reforms that we need. And so we're talking border wall when immigration itself,
the whole thing needs to be reformed.
And the wall, I believe, is needed because, I mean, there's another caravan coming from
Honduras on its way to the U.S.
And, you know, they do get across the fence.
And you may have seen the photograph of someone, they know how to drive cars.
They have tracks where they can drive a car over the fence,
which means we need to make our fences better.
But we definitely need something so that you just can't have, you know,
thousands of people that just walk across the border or rush the border.
Or they are in one group where as you're focused on the 2000,
when the 200, you know, a mile down walking across the border.
So I think the border wall, all of our attention is on that
when it should be on comprehensive immigration reform.
And by comprehensive, I don't mean, you know, amnesty as a code word.
I mean comprehensive in that you look at the whole picture, legal as well as illegal immigration.
And it is impacting American citizens in adverse ways.
And the ones that are coming here are being released in Texas and cities.
They have to be housed somewhere.
That's housing that American citizens are not going to get.
because they tend to, in some cases, have more benefits,
able to get more benefits from certain parts
than American citizens that are struggling.
I find it insulting that the country that was built by immigrants,
we're all immigrants one way or another,
most of us are all immigrants one way or another at some point.
we saw the the racism against the Chinese against blacks against the Irish white black didn't matter
if you were different you were bad right but we saw the America that it built and it built
a country because those people came here wanting a promise to be Americans to be Americans
I don't know, and I'm sure there are tons of them.
I shouldn't say tons.
Maybe 5% of the American population is somebody who said,
I don't want any of these foreigners here.
Maybe there are.
Maybe it's 10%.
I don't know.
But 90% aren't like that.
Right.
If you come here and say, I can make you better.
It's to accuse conservatives or to accuse people who say,
look, I need people to watch this border because there's bad things happening.
Right.
To say that they are racist somehow or xenophobic.
When you're talking to a group of people who say books and people are the same, I want diversity.
I want a diversity of ideas.
That's more important than skin color.
I know.
I mean, I want people coming in.
Right.
It makes us better.
I know, but as long as epithets can be used to intimidate people and silence them,
then they'll be hurled.
And I think that in some cases, the reaction should be to embrace the epithet,
just laugh at it and keep going with the conversation.
I thought, I saw somebody, I won't address who the two candidates are,
but I saw somebody and they had such a natural sense of humor.
They were just natural and a really natural almost,
infectious laugh.
And somebody who didn't.
Right.
And one person is looking and saying, they're saying, oh, that person's going to, that person
will do well against Donald Trump because they'll bash him.
The other person is, they're not talking about.
And I thought if the other person runs against Donald Trump and Donald Trump does what
Donald Trump does and he, you know, he makes up a name for everybody and everything else,
If they are honest, if it's not, if it's their personality,
you are a kind, gentle, thoughtful woman.
There's no way you can't see that in you.
If this is the kind of person they are and they laugh and go,
aha, that's me, it could diffuse it and that could win.
That is a problem that we're all taking things.
so seriously, and we're getting so mad, and stop calling me that, it doesn't matter what they say.
It doesn't matter, does it?
Not to me.
Life.
Not to me.
I refuse to be silenced because America means a lot to me, and I think about my children, my
grandchildren, and when I say my children, I'm not thinking just about my biological children.
I'm thinking about all of those thousands of students that I've been.
taught over the years and it troubles me what I see taking place and it troubles me when I see
racism against white people. The argument is that, you know, that white people can't be victims
of racism because racism only applies to people that don't have power and all whites have privilege.
Well, that is really, I'll say hogwash because I don't want to say the other word.
I think that we need to stand for principles, and if the principle is non-discrimination on the base of race, gender, national origin, then it includes everybody.
Non-discrimination has to be against every group, and so it can be one group that is safe to discriminate against, you know, that they have less right.
I think that if...
Isn't this what King really was talking about?
about. I think so. I think so. And we have lost this message. I mean, he's out of vogue nowadays,
and people would prefer to embrace other leaders that are more divisive. And if we don't start to
turn things around in America, I think that we will see our nation fall and maybe in our
lifetimes. If I had to ask you what the thing that keeps you up at night, because we started with
urgency. You had a sense of purpose and a sense of urgency. So if I said to you, Carol, it's your last week,
and this is your last interview, and you have a chance to talk to Americans and they're actually
hear you, what would your message be? My message would be that we need to return to our Judeo-Christian
values and principles. I think that a lot of the confusion that we have in America, a lot of the
violence and the hopelessness has come as we have become increasingly secular. I think that America
is a nation that was founded on Judeo-Christian values and principles. We had the civic religion,
you know, that many people, they were not necessarily deeply religious, but there were certain values and
principles that made us Americans, we've lost that. And if we don't regain our footing,
you know, spiritually, which ties into truth and knowledge, then I think we're doomed.
I'm talking to Carol Swain, one of the top academic minds today analyzing race and immigration.
Here's another part of the conversation from the Glenn Beck podcast, where we talk about slavery
and Christianity.
So let me play, let me just push back.
Let me play devil's ever.
Play the average person that is, that hears that, and they're like, oh, geez, well, those
Judeo-Christian values created slavery.
Those Judeo-Christian values were on display with fire hoses and dogs.
Those Judeo-Christian values have slaughtered people all over the world.
I would say that that is, again, I mean, I can't find the word, a ladylike word to say what my reaction would normally be.
There were always Christians that fought for abolition, that protected the slaves and helped them, you know, get to freedom, that educated, set up universities back in the 1800s.
And if you look at all the billions of dollars, the philanthropy,
that has come from white people throughout the ages.
Specifically Americans, I think.
I'm talking about Americans.
I'm talking about Americans.
You know, there have been universities going back to the 1800s.
They were educating blacks.
And there were universities in New England that never discriminated,
and they were educating blacks.
And so a lot of the positive things that have taken place in America,
we have always been a nation that we eventually,
acknowledged their wrongs, but even when those wrongs were there, there were always
Christian people who were fighting for what's right. And they, and so for me, I'm glad that I'm
an American, and I'm a descendant of slaves on at least one side of my family. I'm a
descendant of slaves. And when I look at divine providence, you know, we don't know why things
happened the way they do, but I'm glad that my ancestors made it to America because I believe
America is the greatest country in the world. Blacks in America, whether they know it or not,
are better off than blacks anywhere else in the world. It's a blessing to be an American.
And so if I look at white people, I see people that have always tried to improve the lot of people
around the world. And they've sent missionaries. I go to a church where wealthy white people
work in the inner city ghetto, that they spend that time and their resources, working among
in neighborhoods where I would, I am uncomfortable to go at times, but they're not. And so
I just think that when you have secularism and a devaluation of human life that we see in abortion,
the fact that we don't value as Americans' life in any stage.
We don't value the life of the unborn or the lives of the elderly
or the lives of people that are born with some type of handicap.
I mean, that makes us, we know better than the people doing, you know, Hitler, you know, and the Nazis.
Because a lot of what we do is very similar.
If you haven't got into the podcast yet, I highly recommend that you start. It's a return to the lost art of informative conversation, something that social media and clickbait media has slowly taken away from us. You can start by going to glenbeck.com, iTunes, Google Play. There's no shortage of where you can find the Glenn Beck podcast. What you heard today was just a very small sampling, but you can already see the variety of discussion. I've talked to intellectual dark web members.
leaders in the high-tech industry, cultural icons, and even the man who helped capture
Che Guevara.
Some of my guests are not always guests that would agree with me.
I've not always agreed with them.
But we're doing something different, something that is almost lost now, respectfully
listening and learning from one another.
We've got to get back to that if we're going to survive.
Thanks for listening and see on the podcast.
You're listening to Google.
Glenn Beck.
