The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Program | 7/1/26

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

Glenn monologues on the importance of the man with the pen, the man who authored the most important document in American history: Thomas Jefferson. Glenn shares why Americans need to be hopeful and confident in the face of darkness and uncertainty, knowing that after 250 years, America’s story is far from over. Another socialist has won, this time from the middle of America. Is socialism taking over?  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, today, what a great, great show. We start from Washington, D.C. We're in all week. We tell some things on the whole show about what's really happening here. You are not being told what the amazing things that are happening in Washington, D.C. I mean, wait until you hear about just the fireworks that are happening. That's on the full show. But this is the edited, so you get right to some meat.

Today, part two of the writing of the Declaration of Independence. I tell you who Thomas Jefferson really is. and what he was really going through when he wrote that thing. Also, I give you a little white pill for everybody who thinks, wait a minute, wait a minute, the Supreme Court just said, no, we can just let anybody in if they're born here. That's crazy. That's a suicide pack. And yesterday, socialism and the Democrats,

we had another DSA member win in Colorado. I talk about that. And I give you a white pill. Something that I think you need to know. We win. in the end. You'll understand after today's best of podcast. You're listening to

the best of the Glenn Beck program. I want to I'm going to give you some hope here. I want to talk to you about tonight I've got my special on immigration and

it's the truth on immigration and you know birthright citizenship yesterday. This is a poison pill for America. And it's really, really dangerous. And we don't survive unless somebody fixes this. And you know that. You know we are faced.

I mean, we had socialist win again. Deep, deep socialist. These are not like, hey, I think we should be more like Sweden socialists. These are deep socialists. I'll get into that next hour. They won last night in Colorado. That's in the center of the country, gang. But to give you hope, I want to take you back to,

I can't believe I'm saying this and I hate these things I'm going to take you to an opera which I absolutely hate opera I love this one song can you play a little clip of this I love this one song mainly because it's in every mob movie you know this song right

you don't know what it says you don't know what it means you're just like oh it's the fat clown right crying or is that a different opera I'm not really sure okay so listening to this song This song matters. This is from Turindot. It's Puccini's opera.

Never seen it. But apparently, you know, if you could read, if they would put subtitles on, maybe a few of us would go. But anyway, a prince named Caliph falls in love with the princess Turndot. And she has sealed herself behind fear and power

and impossibly cruel conditions. If she, if somebody wants to seek her hand, for marriage. He has to answer three riddles and failure means death. Okay. Well, Caliph succeeds. Yet, victory doesn't end the struggle. Instead, he offers her a challenge of his own. If she can discover his name before dawn, she can have him executed. I don't know, is she a lesbian? I don't know what the problem is with getting married in this thing. I didn't look that deeply. But the entire city is drawn into this search of who this guy is. And fear spreads through the streets. Nobody is allowed to rest. No one's

allowed to sleep. Find out who this guy is. That's the setting of this song called Nessendorma. None shall sleep. That's the name of that song. Now, standing in the middle of that tense and fearful night, Caliph sings alone. Everyone around him is consumed by uncertainty. But he is absolutely convinced that Dawn will bring not his death, but a different outcome. And the aria builds to, you know, one of the most famous climaxes in all of music where he says, Vincerro, Vinciaro, what does that mean? What does Vinciaro mean? It means, I will win.

The power of that song, the reason why it speaks to you, even though you don't know the story and you don't know what it says, speaks to you because the song is not found in triumph already achieved. It comes from the confidence maintained before the outcome is known. It's the sound of somebody standing in the darkness surrounded by absolute doubt by everybody, holding fast to the belief that morning is coming and morning is bringing a different outcome than everybody else thinks. That's why this aria has endured far beyond the opera itself. It speaks to something larger than romance. It's a conviction that fear doesn't have the final word.

Now, let me give you a little... The reason why I know this story? I looked it up because I was curious, why does Donald Trump always end all of his rallies with that song? Because I didn't know this story. He ends these rallies with that song. It's a voice carrying a certainty that nobody else can see yet. Vincero. I will win. Now for a lot of politicians, that would be the whole message.

But I think for Donald Trump, it operates on two different levels at once. The first, clearly obvious. It's personal. Trump has spent his entire public life cultivating the image of a man who walks into impossible situations believing that he can prevail. Business setbacks, political opposition. criminal investigations, impeachments, election battles, relentless criticism, the Iran thing, all of it. And yet the central theme remains consistent. This fight's not over. You have no idea. The verdict is not final. The story is still being written. Tomorrow brings a surprise.

Now, that confidence, whether admired or criticized, is inseparable from Donald Trump. When the tenor reaches the summit and declares victory, supporters hear an echo of the quality they associate with Trump more than any other. They don't know it because they don't know the story. It's the refusal to concede psychologically before things are finished. But like I said, there's another layer, and I think it's a larger one. The song arrives at the end of his rallies because the rallies themselves

are not about one man. They're about a story. And it's the story his audience, the you that I believe about our country. It's a feeling that something precious is truly being lost here. Being lost. A belief our institutions have become distant

to us, to the people. A sense that the cultural confidence has been weakened. A conviction that decline is not natural nor inevitable. The crowd doesn't say, I will win. We hear a nation saying it. We hear our families saying it. Communities saying it. We're not done.

People who feel dismissed and ignored and pushed aside, I'm not done. This song gives voice to a hope that history is not finished. with us. The future remains open. Renewal is possible that dawn will follow even the darkest of nights. That's why this choice is so fascinating because the story of Turandot is not about force. It's not. It's endurance. It's about carrying conviction through uncertainty. It's about holding onto a belief while surrounded by doubt, while everyone else is saying, look at what they've done. Look at what they've done in the Supreme Court yesterday. We're done. We're not going to make it.

Yes, we are. Yes, we are. You don't know how this story ends yet. An entire city spending a night searching frantically for an answer. That was us yesterday. What's the answer? What's the answer? And somewhere there are many of us holding on to a certainty. I don't know how it works out, but I know it works out. And that is the contrast that matters. We are not a political movement that draw our energy from anger. We don't. Some draw it from fear.

We can't. Others draw it from resentment. We mustn't. What we must express is resolve. Persistence. The determination to continue standing when, everyone is saying collapse. The confidence that a frozen situation is going to thaw. What appears settled is going to change. What appears lost is going to return. And the music swells and

the crowd's cheer. And that final note hangs in the air. And for a brief moment, the distinction between the man and the movement becomes blurred. The victory being sung belongs to both personal and political victory. Cultural victory. A spiritual victory. Not a promise that success is guaranteed, not a claim that the battle is going to be won,

but a declaration, surrender is unnecessary. Despair is premature. sure. The future hasn't rendered its verdict yet. And so it closes with the message that reaches beyond the campaign and the policy in the elections. The message carried by a voice pushing through the darkness toward the morning. Hold on. Night's not forever. The story's not over. Vincereau. We will win. This is the best of the Glenn Beck program. So the most important words ever written about human freedom, the words that would go on to topple empires and free slaves and shamed tyrants for 250 years, were written by a man who did not want

the assignment. He didn't want to be in the city. Most people don't know. He was drowning in grief. He almost didn't even make it into the room. You know, we've turned Thomas Jefferson into marble, a face in the mountain, a face on the nickel, a powdered wig and a serene gray gaze and a quill held at the perfect angle. Take away the wig and the marble and all of that stuff because he is much more astonishing than the statue is. Start with this. He almost missed the whole thing. It's spring of 1776. History is about to be made in Philadelphia. He doesn't think it's going to be made. He thinks it's going to be made in Virginia, in the state house. And so he is staying at home. And he didn't, he didn't want to go. His heart was in

Virginia. The writing of a brand new state constitution was happening right then. That was the prize to him. Philadelphia was the duty. And he lingered for a while. He lingered at Monticello. he didn't leave Congress until early May, nearly missed his own immortality by sheer reluctance. And he had reasons to stay, nothing to do with politics. And reasons that honestly, if you're human, it almost breaks your heart when you stop and look at him. That March, his mother died. And his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, she was 57 years old. And he was devastated, devastated, very close to his mother.

You know, Thomas Jefferson, this is a guy, fountain of language. This is a guy who could spin a sentence like silk. He would write volumes of words on things and all of them beautiful. Do you know how he recorded the death of his own mother? In his own little pocket account book, one line, one flat line. My mother died this morning. Time of day, her age, nothing else. No grief on the page.

He was bottling it all up. If you've ever lost somebody and you find yourself unable to write a single feeling down just the cold facts because the facts are all you can survive, then you know who Thomas Jefferson was in this moment. That flatness isn't coldness. That flatness is a wound that is way too deep for any kind of words. So that happens and then he gets sick. He's prone to migraines and he's got a blinding migraine headache. And it was triggered by the grief and the strain of what was happening not only with him,

but there was something else. His wife, Martha, the love, I mean the love of his life. You want to read something really beautiful. His wife eventually dies. He goes over to Paris and he is, he falls in love with this girl and he he still feels promised to his wife and so he doesn't know what to do he loves this woman wants to go off with this woman but he doesn't and he writes this letter to his heart and then his heart writes a letter to his head and it's this argument from the heart

to the head and the head to the heart it's just this amazing letter he's trying to figure out what do I do well his wife is still alive and this is the love of his love of his life. Her health had always been fragile, broken again and again by pregnancy after pregnancy after pregnancy, she keeps having miscarriages and every time she's gravely ill. She's now recovering from another miscarriage. And the letters he was, I mean, he was desperate to receive any word from her health telling, is she getting better or worse? They weren't coming while he was in Philadelphia. So throw out all the crap that you learned in the school book about, you know, the image of this calm genius at his desk, you know, and replace it with the truth. This guy was in deep angst and mourning.

And Congress comes in and hands history to him. He wants to go home. He's afraid his wife is going to die at any minute miles away. No word from home. Homestick, down to his bones, helpless to do anything about it. all. That's who wrote the Declaration of Independence. So now the committee of five meets and somebody has to actually put pen to paper. And the obvious choice is not Jefferson. The obvious choice is John Adams, but John Adams, I mean, he's a nightmare. He's the firebrand. He's an, he's the engine

of all of it. He's been called the Atlas of Independence because he carried the whole cause on his back, but nobody liked it. Nobody liked him. By every right, the pen should have been his, and the fame that went with it. The man who wrote the declaration would be remembered forever, and John Adams knew it, and John Adams said, I can't write this. I can't write it. Why? Because for as bullish as John Adams was, to his everlasting credit, he knew exactly who John Adams was. 46 years after the fact, Jefferson remembered it simply.

He said the committee just asked him and go read both versions for yourself and judge. But Adams does not play it down. Jefferson tried to hand him the pen. Adams refused. Jefferson said, you should write it. Adams said, I'm not going to. Why? Then Adams gave him three reasons. And there's some of the most self-aware words,

any powerful man has ever spoken. Reason one, you're a Virginian, and Virginians ought to stand at the head of this business, because Virginia is the largest independent colony, so we have to have Virginia. We need your face on it. Reason number two, and here's a guy looking in the mirror without flinching at all. Quote, I'm obnoxious. I'm suspected. I'm unpopular, and you are very much otherwise. And reason three, you can write 10 times better than I can. Now, think that's the most powerful voice in the room. Hand the chance to be immortal. And he knows it. He knows it. But he says, nobody likes me. And I always see Ben Franklin in my head standing behind him because Thomas Jefferson was really polite.

And he had to have said, no, no, no, that's not true. And I can see Ben Franklin standing behind Adams. going, oh, yes, it is. They don't like him. Nobody likes him. I don't even like him. Okay. My name's on it. Men are going to resist it just because it's me and they resist me. Give it to the quiet kid who can write. He gives away the most famous writing assignment in the history of the world because he loved the cause more than he loved his own glory. When was the last time you saw any powerful man do that? And then the quiet kid was quiet. This is the detail that, I ponder for a while.

Adam said that in all of his time that he set beside Jefferson in Congress, he never heard him utter three sentences together. Three sentences. The man who would write the document that defined a civilization, Western civilization, could not or would not speak up in a meeting because he was shy. He was a homebody. He hated the cut and the thrust of the debate,

shouting and the performing, he hated it. Put him on his feet in a crowd and he's frozen. Put a pen in his hand and alone in silence and he could reach up and pull thunder out from the sky. There's a lesson in that that I don't think we should walk past. Every quiet person who ever sat in a loud room feeling useless, every person who knew they had something true inside of them but couldn't win the shouting match,

Thomas Jefferson is your founding father. He's your patron saint. The revolution didn't need him to be loud. It needed him to be right on paper when it counted. Your gift might not be the one that wins the room. It might be the one that wins the century. So how does he do it? Let me take a quick break and pick a story up there next.

So Thomas Jefferson has to sit down now all by himself and put this together. Where does he go? He rents out two bedrooms, a bedroom and a parlor. It was on the second floor of a new brick house. It was owned by young bricklayer, bricklayer named Jacob Graff. Center of town, it's at seventh and market. That's actually at the edge of the city at the time. And he sits down and he pulls out this little portable writing box. It's a lap desk. He designed it himself, the guy was unbelievable, a little clever little folding thing of his own invention. He designed the very desk on which he would invent a nation. Now, here's the question everybody gets wrong in both directions.

How much did he already have? Did he pull it out of thin air or did he just copy other people? The answer is neither. And the truth is probably the most interesting thing about him. That's the thing I love about history. The truth is much better than everything that you've learned in school. on both, it cuts both ways, good and bad. Just days before George Mason's Virginia Declaration of Rights had been printed,

and it opened by declaring that all men are by nature equally free and independent with inherent rights. You read that, then you read Jefferson, and you can hear it humming underneath the lines. He had his own earlier writing to draw from, a pamphlet that he printed in 1774 that he had first, that first really made Thomas Jefferson famous. He had the whole inheritance of English liberty and John Locke deep in his bones, but he didn't open a single book while he wrote. He didn't look at any other paperwork. It just was coming from him and explains the genius of him better than anything else.

He said he never intended it to be original. He said, I just wanted the declaration to be an expression of the American mind. he wasn't trying to invent a new idea he was really i mean it's it's a lot very much like thomas pain in common sense he was trying to use common sense he was trying to find the words for the thing three million people already felt inside but they they hadn't said it yet so he reaches into the common air of his own time and he pulls down language that has been waiting inside of him for years some of these words and waiting for somebody just to be clear enough and brave enough and wounded enough to finally write it down. And he did. He did it all

alone, grieving his mother, terrified for his wife, homesick, sick himself in 17 days. The fate of a continent, the weight of his own neck pressing down on that little folding desk. And the thing I want you to carry out, he had no idea. He really had. He really had. had no idea. He thought he was writing a committee report. Imagine how worthless you thought that was. Your mother just died. Your wife is dying. You don't have any word and you're stuck in a room by yourself writing a committee report. He thought this was routine paperwork that would be forgotten in a month. He really didn't have any idea. He never dreamt his name would outlive the empire that he was defining.

Go read his draft in his own hand. That's what I'm going to talk about on the mall here in a little bit. Two o'clock this afternoon. I'm in Washington, D.C., and I'm going to speak on the main stage here in Washington, D.C. on the mall. And I'm going to bring the copy of the original draft in Thomas Jefferson's own hand. And you look at the crossouts. You look at what he printed. There are five words that are.

printed, not incursive, United States, America, there are three, and then Christian and men, he added two more. Those two would be deleted by two colonies. But you look at the crossouts, you look at what was changed, and who changed it? It's amazing. You'll see crossed out and you'll see something changed, and then it'll be in the hand of Benjamin Franklin, and it will say B Franklin, the edge and then in the margin a little farther down i'll say j adams and there'll be another change in john adams hand but very few changes but you can see it's not god writing scripture it's a frightened brilliant heartbroken young man doing the best he could and reaching by accident and grief and genius reaching all the way to forever

The progressives have made the Declaration of Independence something that was meant to be just for their time. But that's the genius of it. It's not just for their time. It's for our time. That is the argument that Woodrow Wilson started, Woodrow Wilson started, turn of last century, that the Declaration of Independence is irrelevant. That's why Independence Day is so important. important. You know, that's not the founding of our country. That came later after the war.

This is the 250th year anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the most important document, I think, in all of human political history. I'm going to tell you part three of the story, how it was passed and what it was like for Jefferson to hear it butchered tomorrow. This is the best of the Glenn Beck program. Hello, America. You know we've been fighting every single day. We push back against the lies, the censorship, the nonsense of the mainstream media that they're trying to feed you. We work tirelessly to bring you the unfiltered truth because you deserve it. But to keep this fight going, we need you. Right now, would you take a moment and rate and review the Glenn Beck podcast? Give us five stars and lead a comment because every single review helps us break.

breakthrough big tech's algorithm to reach more Americans who need to hear the truth. This isn't a podcast. This is a movement. And you're part of it, a big part of it. So if you believe in what we're doing, you want more people to wake up. Help us push this podcast to the top. Rate, review, share. Together, we'll make a difference.

And thanks for standing with us. Now let's get to work. You're listening to the best of Glenn Beck. Need a little more? Check out the full show podcasts. Anywhere you download podcasts. Milot Cairo. won yesterday.

And she won in the Democratic primary. Now, I don't know how this is going to turn out, but I know that I saw her speech. She is a Democratic socialist. Yesterday, in fact, let me see if we have this audio. Yesterday, we had Mom Donnie. Yeah, cut two.

Listen to this. Listen to this. This is Mom Donnie. And we raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers, instead of taking more from those with the least. Throughout this process, I have been reminded of the words of the Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek. If socialists understood economics, they wouldn't be socialists. These past months have shown us anything. It is that socialists not only understand economics, just as well as the capitalist who came before, but that we can solve their years of mismanagement through an embrace of our principles.

They've been in office for what? Less than a year? We've proven it. Every single socialist experiment fails, fails. So Milot wins yesterday in Colorado and she says, We're taking our system back and we're taking our country back. What do you mean you're taking your country back? Because that's what everybody was saying about the Tea Partiers.

What do they mean by we're taking our country back? What does that mean? Well, I know what it means. It means we're returning to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. When you're talking about getting rid of capitalism, you're not taking it back. So the question is, is this, is this just the edges of the party? Or is this going to be, is this a death knell for the next election? Because that's what they always say about the Republic. When you have somebody who's a constitutional, he's an extremist, he's crazy,

he hates the government. He's, he's totally on the edge. He's a danger. These guys are not getting that rap from the press, of course. But have they gone too far for the average Democrat? I don't know. I don't know. One of the biggest mistakes Republicans could make right now is believing we've seen this movie before. We haven't seen this. People are like, this is a Democratic Tea Party.

No, it's not. It's really not. The Tea Party. I was part of that. You may have been part of that. What was it? We were asking America not to become something new. we were asking America to do something traditional, to become something old again, okay?

Remember what those rallies look like? The pocket constitution guys, my son turned into one yesterday on the airplane. He had a pocket constitution. I'm like, I'm not going to tell you, but in my day that made you really super nerdy. But pocket constitution, the don't tread on me flags, the people quoting the Declaration of Independence dressed up as Ben Franklin and George Washington, I mean, wow, that's radical. They were not demanding that Washington sees industries or redistribute wealth. They were not saying, eat the rich.

They were arguing that Washington had forgotten its own limits. Whether you agreed with them or not, their argument was restorative. You could say, I don't want to go back there, but they wanted less government, lower debt, a return to constitutional principles. They were like, let's do it the old way. They're extremists. Now those same voices are calling democratic socialism the future. Think of that.

One movement wanted to get the government to shrink. The other believes the government should regulate more, spend more, own more, forgive more, guarantee more, direct more of the economy. these are not mirror image. They are opposites. And here's something else that nobody seems to notice. Every successful socialist movement in history claim to represent the workers. This is so important.

Where are the workers today? Where are they? Today's movement represents the graduates. Look where all the energy comes from. the elite universities, the prestigious media, the non-profits, the government bureaucracy, the professional advocates, the activists, the commanding height of culture, Carl Marx predicted the revolution would come from the factory floor. Instead, it seems to be coming from the faculty lounge.

So now here's the question. and we don't know the answer to this. We'll find out in November. Will the average Democrat buy it? Maybe. Maybe not. I don't know. I was looking at some polling last night from Gallup, found something fascinating. Americans still view capitalism more favorably than socialism,

54% to 39%. But that's crazy socialism. People are actually talking about communism now. But here's what's more interesting. Take capitalism out of it. The free market. Do you support small businesses and the free enterprise? 95% have a positive view of small business with the free market.

81% say free enterprise is good. 81% it's language. The anger here is not directed to the local hardware store. It's directed at concentrated corporate power and that matters. the average Democrat is not sitting around dreaming about nationalizing industries. They're trying to buy groceries. They're trying to make rent. They're trying to pay for child care.

They don't want a revolution. They want relief. They want somebody actually standing up for them who's listening to them. That is an incredibly interesting split inside of the Democratic Party. The activist class is talking about restructuring everything. The average voter is like, I just want my eggs to come down in price. These are two entirely different conversations. And even the Democrats themselves know it.

They know it. Recent polling found large majorities of Democratic voters wanting new leadership. They want their party focused on kitchen table economics, not cultural battles. And this is where it gets even more interesting. Socialism has always promised equality. but eventually every socialist movement runs right into the same wall. What is that wall? This is why the Common Core was so important. The wall is math. It's math.

Somebody has to build. Somebody has to invent. Somebody has to risk failure. Somebody has to create wealth before somebody can take it away from them. The bill always comes due. So I don't know if the Democrats have jumped the shark or not or they're just way ahead of the curve. I don't know. That's the right question. Maybe a better question? Has the activist class become so convinced of its own moral certainty that it no longer knows how ordinary people actually live?

I was walking around Washington, D.C. last night, and they have the president in a cage now. I mean, you can't get within two blocks of the White House. Now, it's only for this weekend, I found out. But I'm looking at what we're turning into our political class with the violence and everything. You're not going to get near this stuff. I remember you could walk in. I could just walk in to the Capitol building.

You just walk in. You're not doing that now. We have a bell in our history vault. We have a bell that used to sit at the front door of the White House where you could walk in and hit this bell. This is Lincoln's time. Hit that bell and say, I want to see the president. and somebody would come down and say, okay, yeah, sit down here and he'll see you in a minute. We have the bell, the service bell, now serving number 23.

You can't, you can't get within two blocks of the White House. These guys are going to become more and more elite. But history offers this warning, and it's this, political parties usually don't collapse because the other side defeats them. They collapse because their leaders begin speaking a language. that their own voters no longer recognize. Why have you fallen away from the Republican Party? Because they're speaking a language that you're like, that's not what I'm saying.

That's not what any of my friends are saying. My friends aren't for any of that stuff. What are you talking about? That's what's happening to the Democrats. The Democrats, I think, I could be wrong, but I think they have gone so far. They are speaking like, they're giving this message. that sounds like a graduate seminar. And all you're saying is, can somebody help me with the price of eggs?

You got a real problem if that's who you are. And that's the real test. Not whether socialism excites activists on social media. Of course it does. The real thing is, does a dad who's working overtime or a mom balancing two jobs believe another layer of government control is actually going to make tomorrow better than today. And what they believe about small business and the free market, that's a hard sell.

But the answer to that is going to determine not just the future of, you know, the Democratic Party, but whether America remains a country that rewards those who build or one that increasingly rewards those who promise to divide what others have already built. And I want to get into that at the bottom of the hour. I want to take a quick break here. And I want to tell you, you know, you don't know. Everybody says, we got to be more like Europe. Really?

Do we? That's working out. We got to be more like Sweden. You have no idea what Sweden has done since the 1990s, do you? They have no idea what Sweden has done. Let me set the record straight on Swedish and Norwegian socialism, because it's not what you think it is. When they say, we're taking our country back, they're not taking their country back. are saying at the same time they want to fundamentally transform. This is what Obama used to say,

five days away from the fundamental transformation of America, and they have transformed us. That is, let me give you this. Let me give you this. Picture going into a museum. And I want you to, picture you're in the Louvre. And there's a guy standing there, two guys stand in there. One has traveled a thousand miles, maybe the other side of the earth, to come see his favorite painting, a painting he adores. He loves. the Mona Lisa. And he's standing there for a long time and he's studying every brush stroke, every shadow, every tiny little detail that survived more than 500 years and he's looking at the curator. It's like, I just love this. And the curator smiles like, I know, I know. It's great,

isn't it? But says the guy, I love this, but I think it could be better. I mean, the smile should be bigger. I'm thinking about buying it. How much, somebody from Texas, how much for that, up there on that wall because I can change it. I can make it better. You know, the background kind of feels a little dated. Let's put a modern skyline behind her. Maybe lose the dark clothing. It's a little out of date. Let's give her something more current that she's wearing and make her smile because that smile sucks. But I love this painting. By the time he's finished, the curator is looking at him like, dude, are you kidding me? And the man looks at him. It's like, what's wrong? I told you I love that painting. No, no, no. No. You didn't love it.

that painting. You loved your idea of what that painting should be. If you love the painting, your first instinct would not be to erase everything that makes it what it is. The first thing you wanted to change was her smile. There's a difference between restoring something and replacing it. And everybody understands that. You know, an old church begins to crumble. If you love the church, You repair the stone. You don't bulldoze it and build a casino in its place. Your grandfather's watch stops running. You fix the gears.

You don't melt it down and make earrings out of it. Can you imagine saying to your wife, honey, I love you. Try this. Honey, I love you so much. I love everything about you if I could just fundamentally transform everything about you. I mean, what would your night be like? You don't love her and she'd know it. You love the person you wish she would become.

Love begins with accepting the identity of the thing you claim to love. You help it grow. You help it heal. You call it back when it loses its way. That's what the Tea Party was trying to do. You've lost your way. We love you. We know who you are.

We know what you are. We don't want to transform you. we want to restore you. You don't erase the character and then congratulate yourself for saving it. Obviously, I'm not talking about a painting. I'm talking about America. We keep hearing politicians on the left fundamentally transforming the United States. We're calling our country back.

You're not. You're fundamentally transforming it, not to improve, not to restore, not to renew, but to transform. Those are very different things. Restore and renew. and transform. America has an identity. It has a beginning.

It has first principles. It has a reason for existing. And the reason's not hidden. It's right there. Our founding fathers put it in the Declaration of Independence. That's our country. Just be honest. You want to transform it.

You want to get rid of that mission statement and replace it with something else. We know who you are. Does America know who America is? That's the question we're going to find out, I think, in this next election.