The Glenn Beck Program - Best of The Program | Guests: Carol Roth & Jon Riches | 8/9/21

Episode Date: August 9, 2021

A new report about the 2020 riots paints a much different picture than the media. Author of “The War on Small Business” Carol Roth breaks down how the government used the pandemic to disenfranchise small businesses and what’s coming next. Attorney Jon Riches joins to discuss a Rhode Island mother being sued by a teachers' union for asking questions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, today is a really great broadcast. Pat tells me that it includes frivolity, which I don't even know what that is, but it's included in today's podcast. We spend some time with a woman who has written the book about how small businesses are getting screwed and how the little guy is losing his ability to actually control his life and grow wealth. You don't want to miss this today's episode. Also, we tell you about a miracle. A woman in a woman's prison in California has had, I guess, sex with another woman who is just transferred, yes, from the male facility because, well, she identifies it as a woman. So she's a woman. And the other woman is now pregnant. I mean, what would explain that?

We just don't know. And the answer to what we need to do. It comes from Ben and Jerry's. And I'll tell you that on today's podcast. You're listening to the best of the blend. I'll talk to you a little bit about what's happening on our streets. First in Minneapolis, they have looked at all of the donations that are coming from, you know, local. citizens to defund the police to support that movement.

And most of the donations coming from out of state, which is weird, and move on. org is providing a lot of that money. Who is funding all of this? Where? Why is move on. org doing this? And where do they get their money for this? And what is their intent?

I want to show you something that just happened. in Seattle. This is a video of a kid who goes by caliber visuals online. Don't know his name. He's a freelance photographer. He's 22 years old. He was in the Mount Baker section of Seattle. Do we have the video?

Here he is. Watch this, Pat. He's out on the street. There he's walking. And he sees another guy coming up to him. and he stops and the guy he puts his hand out, they shake hands. And then the guy won't let him loose. And then he just starts, he puts him down on the ground, throws him down on the ground violently.

And then just starts kicking him in the head. And I mean full force stomping on his head and then kicking him until he's down. Then he kicks him a second time. And then boom, one last time. Kicks him unconscious. Yeah. The kid is still coughing up blood today. He was, it was reported to police.

Somebody was watching this. So disturbing. But so far they haven't arrested anyone. That is, that's what you have in Seattle now. Let me show you a video from this weekend. A video in Portland. that happened as a group of Christians were gathered to pray on the waterfront, and Antifa showed up.

And they showed up dressed in black, and they were confronting the worshippers. Do we happen to have the video? Now look how many are dressed in black. Peace to you in Jesus name. Knock him out. Get back. Look at this. They're just asking for peace.

We're good, we're good, we're good, we're good. So look in all of the end of the people. So they threw a flash bomb into the group of Jesus, amen. So they threw a flash bomb into the group of kids who were out there. They started saying all sorts of things and following it in the name of Jesus. because that's what the people were, the Christians were saying. It is really bad.

By the way, police were there. They turned on the siren, but it had absolutely no impact on Antifa. Why would it? They're not afraid of the police. They know they're not going to do anything. And the police did nothing. There was no response.

from the police, no arrests made, and they said, the police had nobody reported any crime that we're aware of. So what's happening to us? What's happening to us? Well, if you really want to know, there is a report out that I think everyone should read, and no one is reporting on it. It is a report by the Major Cities Chiefs Association. This is a network of police chiefs all over the United States. And they surveyed all of the police chiefs for the nature of the 2020 riots. Now, this has just come out so you can understand why nobody's talking about it.

And when I say just came out, it came out in October. But it absolutely takes apart everything, the media, everything that, that the clowns in Washington, D.C. are trying to perpetrate and say that we are violent, and that was the worst attack on America, you know, in our liberty since the civil war. No. Why won't they look into the other protests? Well, we know why. One reason is because they helped fund it.

They helped enable it. Kamala Harris put bail money up for all of these people. Have you seen anybody on the right putting bail money up? No. I haven't. No. I am. Kamala Harris did.

So what do you find? Well, in this Chiefs report, they found clear evidence of nationwide coordination for violent protests. I want to, in fact, I want to read right from the report on what they found because it is it's interesting about the weapons about you know what the percentages were of violent and nonviolent because remember that's what we're supposed to believe that this was all really non violent non violent well was it the weekend of may 29th to the following monday june first was by far the most violent for any major city law enforcement agencies these events had

thousands of people in attendance, including groups with suspected violent extremist ideologies. Prepared and coordinated resistance was reported by some agencies and similar tactics, such as the use of arson, looting, barricades, caravans, and specific types of weapons were seen in major cities nationwide. Protesters seemed to coordinate their movements and actions on these days as if the violence and tactics were pre-planned. For example, across the U.S., major city law enforcement agencies reported peaceful protests beginning in the early to late afternoon and violence beginning once it became dark. The report confirms the presence of the far-left violent extremists and notes that 78% of surveyed police agencies identified such actors among

the protests. Fifty-one percent of agencies also identified far-right actors at some protests. Unfortunately, the report offers no details that would let analysts examine how the authors determined violent actors' ideological tendencies. No specifics are included in the report. This is incredible that this report is even out there. that it clearly shows. Do you know how many people were arrested during those protests for felonies? How many people were arrested for felonies? Can you guess?

For felonies? For felonies. None. 2,735 total number of arrests that were for felony charges. Wow. Uh-huh. Wow. total number of persons arrested 16,241.

How many have been arrested for Washington, D.C.? And they're not felony charges. Only a couple are... Almost all misdemeanors. Yeah. I think it's in the 400 range. Yeah. Most misdemeanors.

Some felonies. 2,735. The highest number of felony arrests for a single police troop. in a single city was 639 people arrested for felonies. Wow. For felonies. I didn't hear that. No, I didn't either.

The agencies that found protesters with violent far-left ideologies, 78%. 78%. If you look at how many people encountered, how many agencies encountered people that were not? not from the town. So out of all the protests, how many police officers said this group over here, they're not even from around here. They're bust in.

Oh, I bet a lot. 90%. Yeah. How many were paid to be there? I'm going to say a lot again. 29%. That's a pretty good percentage. Who's paying?

Who's paying? Yeah, because we were told that was ridiculous. No one was being paid. Of course. These are grassroots protests. Are they? Are they now? Are they?

If you want to look this up, I think it's really important. The major cities chief association, the Intelligence Commanders Group, and it is the report on the 2020 protests and civil unrest. It is amazing to read. amazing to read. How many are peaceful? How many are violent? Mostly peaceful? Nope.

No. Not mostly peaceful. Not mostly peaceful. What kind of weapons did they have? It's all in this report. How many are belonging to some organization like an Antifa? All of it is in this report. Why is it the media is not interested?

More importantly, why is the federal government not interested in this at all? But remember, we owe our lives to the policeman. That's what Joe Biden said. We owe everything to the policeman. Then maybe we should read what the police are saying in their own reports. Hmm. I wonder why we're not. The best of the Glenn Beck program.

My surgeon told me last week I've been having face surgery because of cancer on my face. And he said to me last week, I think we're going to get to know each other quite well. And he called over the weekend. He said, I got to go back in. I'm like, oh, you ready for another round? Okay. Bring it on, brother. Let's see how your face looks after this round.

But I feel the same way without the scalpel, the knife, or the fight, or the can't. answer about Carol Roth. I think we're going to be seeing a lot of her and we will become close friends. She is somebody who I absolutely believe gets it on what's coming our way and a voice that needs to be heard. Her book is called The War on Small Business. She's here with us now. Carol, welcome. Glenn, thanks so much for having me back and I feel exactly the same way and I promise I may bring a scalpel, but it's going to be a scalpel on what is going on in financial markets and with the government and decentralization. I had two very powerful Washington, D.C. people write to me this weekend and say, I've never heard of Carol Roth before. She makes everything makes sense. So let's talk about what you know. Where do you want to start?

Well, let's just start with the overarching theme of what's been happening over the last, call it 16 to 17 months, because we have seen the government use the excuse that one person's plight is going to justify disregarding the rights of others. That's what they've been doing. They have been picking winners and losers. They've been deciding who is essential and who is quote unquote non-essential, the most horrible thing, a government entity could tell a person or a business. And they've been doing this not based on data or on science, but based on political clout and connections. And that has enabled the biggest transfer of wealth that we have ever seen in all of history.

And it's been going from Main Street to Wall Street, and the power has been consolidated from the little guys to the big guys and the clays. club and I feel like that is the overarching thing. So let's break that down a little bit. By picking winners and losers, they said, don't go to your Ace hardware store. Don't go to the local hardware store. Don't go to the local paint store, whatever.

You've got to go to Home Depot. They left these giants open while they closed all of the local businesses. Absolutely. They were the very first, if you look at the, very first mandates that came out in Ohio led the charge on this and a bunch of others followed suit. They were all the small entities. They were small retailers. They were gyms. They were restaurants. And lo and behold, as you said, the big guys were able to be open. The one that I found just so completely absurd was that you could get your dog's hair and nails groomed, but you personally

couldn't get your own hair and nails groomed. And there's no data or science to say that that was okay. And then they doubled down on it. So it wasn't like they did this for the 15 days to slow the spread that we're now like 500 days into. They continued to double down on that messaging. And it got so absurd that later in the year as they started doing reopenings, you would have places like New York saying, oh, if you're a bar, you need to serve food.

But, you know, if you have chips, that's not good enough. you need to serve dip with it. So like, what's the science behind the fact that the dip protects you from COVID? So what is your theory on why they did this? This is all about decentralization versus centralized power. If you think about the economy and you kind of divide it right down the middle, you have half of the economy that is decentralized. It looks a lot more like a free market.

This is the small business side. And this before COVID was about. 30.2 million small businesses that really exemplified the free markets. The other half of the economy is in the hands of about 10 to 15,000 big businesses. And this goes for GDP and jobs. So if you are a politician who is trying to consolidate power, you're trying to get more under your purview, you're trying to get lobbying dollars, you're trying to get more support maybe for your own campaign, it's much easier for you to deal with 10 or 15,000 big companies than it is to try to corral the 30.2 million small businesses.

So I think that that is the driver. But whether you think it's nefarious, intentional, or incompetence, the fact of the matter is that the big government has gotten so big and so out of control that the result would be the same, whether or not the intention is that the small businesses are too small to matter or too hard to control. So what's interesting to me is in 2008, they said these banks are too big to fail, which implied we should make sure we support the smaller banks to get these other banks to, A, pay for

their own mistakes and grow the, uh, grow the, um, the, the banking sector, if you will, grow it out, not up, and it would provide some stability. But that's exactly the opposite of what they did. And it seems like they're doing that again, this time with small businesses. Yeah, I'm so glad you brought this up. This is the perfect example. So back in 2007, 2008, the banks took on too much risk, and that created these horrible consequences for the economy, not just here in the U.S., but worldwide.

We all paid the price, but as you said, they were too big to fail. So they got a taxpayer bailout. The slap on the risk that they got was in the terms of legislation. Dot Frank, and they said, ha, ha, we are going to rain in these big banks, even though they're too big to fail, we've got to make sure that we make room for the little guy. But the effect, the outgrowth of that legislation, is it stopped the formation of small and community banks. It put a bunch of smaller players out of business,

and it completely killed off small business lending. At the same time, the big businesses now had no competition. They also had basically free money from the Fed being pumped into the system. And so the big businesses got bigger and big business lending went through the roof. So what was meant to rain in the big banks actually gave them free reign. And now contrasting that to what's happened this time, small businesses didn't take on too much risk. It's not that they needed a, quote-unquote, bailout.

They were mandated shut. So compensating them is basically eminent domain. Their property was taken, quote-unquote, for the good of society under the Constitution. And so that's not a bailout. That's due compensation, but they were told they were too small. They were told they were non-essential, too small to matter. I've never been I'm not a lawsuit guy

I hate lawsuits but if there is one case that the United States government should be sued and pay out unfortunately it would be all of us at the bottom of the ladder that would be paying it

so it would just end up hurting us but it is for closing all of these businesses you put all of these businesses out of business. You had no right to do it. They only did it under duress. At first they did it for the first 15 days. Fine. But once they started to say, we're not going to make it, they would try to open up. They couldn't. They went out of business. Whose fault is it? It's not theirs. It's not their fault. It is the federal government's fault. Nobody's even really talking that way.

I know. I mean, they're gaslighting us. These are the two big myths that are out there right now is one that we had these full lockdowns and we were all in this together. We were not all in this together, as we talked about at the top of the hour, the big companies were allowed to continue. Wall Street was propped up. If you had let Amazon get closed down, if you had had Walmart closed down, if you had your local liquor store closed down, And if you had let the stock market, you actually act like a market and react to what was happening, this wouldn't have lasted, maybe even two weeks, maybe three on the outside. So we were not on this together.

And then in terms of the compensation, people say, oh, well, they got PPP relief. People don't understand that the amount of PPP relief was not only a fraction of the overall, like, $6.6 trillion that had been spent, on relief, but also a fraction of what was needed to shut these businesses down for months and months on end. And the real tragedy of this entire thing, in addition to obviously the subjugation of the rights, is if they wanted to do this right to begin with, they could have done compensation right out of the box, two small businesses, let people stay on the payrolls, stay employed. It would have cost them about a trillion to a trillion and a half dollars.

I project based on the numbers, and they could have bought themselves several months to figure out mitigation strategies, but no, that's not what they did. This was not something that they just gathered in the middle of the night and said, we've got to close everything down. This is something either the Fed or the Treasury walked in to the Oval Office when President Trump was the president and said, here's the plan to do it. Can you talk to me a little bit about how much of this was just? you know, throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks and how much of this was planned? And why would

you plan something like this? So I always like to follow the markets as a signal. And if you look at what happened at the beginning of 2020 and, you know, kind of January into the beginning of February, you had the stock markets hitting all-time highs. So even though this virus was going on in China and there was a little bit of spread, you saw that the markets here in the U.S. said, you know, we're not really that concerned about it. At the very end of February, all of a sudden the market took a nose dive and just, you know, went off a cliff. And so, you know, at the time, we were trying to get our heads wrapped around it. In retrospect, we found out through an article that there was actually a leak, that there was a think tank discussion, and members of the administration had basically

said, yeah, you know, things are starting to trend in this direction in terms of what we're planning to do. And so the market got a whiff of this and the insiders were able to sell off before Main Street, of course, because that's, you know, what always seems to happen in our, quote, unquote, free market. And so you had the Fed then come in and say it was going to stabilize the market and started providing support to the market before anything else was done. And I thought that that was fascinating. The most important thing, they felt, felt was to provide support to the market. So that kind of tells you all that you need to know. And then the administration came out with this 15 days to slow the spread plan, which was

absolute lunacy because it gave the blueprint to all of these governors to make these decisions. And Ohio was really early on, and each governor thereafter kind of said, well, this provides us covered to do the same thing. And it started like with this slow. power grab, almost like testing the water, like, can we really get away with this? And then they just said, oh, really we can? Okay, we're going to do more and we're going to do more. And that sort of ballooned up. And then the government had an opportunity at the federal level to throw a lifeline. So they were the ones that could have said, well, if you're going to do this, you know, we're going to backstop it and make sure that it's constitutional and make sure that we save these small guys because that's what we're here to do. and they just chose absolutely not to do that.

And anybody with half a brain cell could have figured out what was going on. I had raised the issue in March of 2020 before we even knew the numbers because it was so transparent. But the way they structured the program, the first tranche of the PPP didn't even make it to the tiny small businesses. It went to Kanye West and Tom Brady employed Mayweather because of the way the government structured it to begin with. So it was just kind of, you know, slow burn, could we get away with it? And every time they got away with it, you know, it's like the slow creep. It's like this blob that spreads and takes over everything. How much of this is related to the Great Reset?

Yeah, it's interesting. So there's this concept out there from the World Economic Forum and it's their projections for 2030, so not that far in the future, saying things like, you will own nothing and you will be happy, which as you as somebody who's very focused on property rights scares the bejes out of me. And we would only have renters. And so, you know, that kind of ties into everything that's going on with the CDC moratorium on evictions, which again makes so much sense that a health organization would be setting economic policy outside of Congress, right? And that you've got to.

these small landlords who are basically being thrown to the side, making it very difficult for them to keep the places or even want to keep the places and keep renting, knowing that the government can interfere in this direction, at the same time that you've got all of this money going to big professional investors who are coming in and buying up housing. So I don't know if this is happening at a global level on a coordinated business. basis, or if they put this idea out there and others acted upon it here in the U.S. or if it's just a coincidence because at the end of the day, big entities want to grab power, and that's human nature, and that's why we resist central plan.

I just want to go over what you just said, because I don't think people really understand. Right now, prices have gone up through the roof, 25, 26 percent for a new house. and that's not just because all of a sudden we're buying again, it's because the Fed is making money so easy for big people to get that these giant hedge funds are taking the money with no real risk, and they're buying up entire neighborhoods, entire neighborhoods. Yeah, there's actually a great article in the Wall Street Journal that came out in April talking about this, and I believe it was a DR Horton neighborhood that instead of selling them to individual investors,

they sold the entire neighborhood to a hedge fund at twice the price that they would have made, selling it to the individuals. Why would they do that? Why would they do that? You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. Several stories I still want to hit. the teacher's union head. Randy Weingarten has said they've got to get the kids back into school.

And she has worked hard to, she's pledging that the kids are going to come back to school. You know, as soon as they negotiate the vaccine mandates and other COVID-19 mitigation strategies. But as soon as they do that, they are ready. You know, she says the combination of vaccines, I think, are a big game changer. And it's good. But so many kids aren't able to get the vaccine. So they have to have the mask mandates, you know, in schools, in schools. Then there has to be, you know, test and trace and track.

And we have to have good ventilation. We can't be expected to go back to work like the rest of America and do that. And she says, you know, I, you know, our teachers just want to see more proof. on these vaccines and they want to hear from their doctors. And that's why we have to negotiate these. Also, you know, she reiterated her union's commitment on teaching political agenda, you know, called history. She said the history that, you know, they're now producing is patriotic.

It's patriotic for students to analyze truth from propaganda. And we're just giving them context to analyze what's going on these days. and they'll have their own opinions, but they need to know what slavery was. They need to know why we have the 13, 14, 15th Amendment. You know, we need to know the reasons for the causes of the insurrection on January 6th, and it's our obligation to teach the causes of January 6th. So let's just teach them honest history and accurate history and let them draw their own conclusions.

And by the way, stop trying to bullying teachers to keep them from teaching the truth. critical race theory is not being taught in K through 12 students. That's weird because that's the opposite of what she said several times. In Virginia, an elementary school shared on its website and then removed a radical educational video during the summer that suggests police are dangerous to be around. Now, again, this is an elementary school. This was for kindergarten classes. and students.

And in the clip, woke kindergarten safe. I feel safe when there are no police. That's weird. That's weird. Now, a lot of people are standing up against it. In Virginia, they've just about had enough of it. And we're watching those parents and what's happening in Virginia. But there's also a mom that is in.

Rhode Island and she just wanted to know what the teachers were going to teach her daughter. Well, it has been interesting to watch. We've had her on before and, you know, they said, well, we can give you all of that information, but I think it was $75,000 to be able to get all of that information. They had to charge her that just to tell her what they were going to teach. She didn't do it. And now the teachers union is now suing. this mother for asking questions about CRT, the curriculum, at her daughter's school. We decided we would talk to her attorney, General Counsel from the Goldwater Institute, John Riches. Hello, John.

Hey, thanks so much for having me on. So I can't believe this story. It gets more and more bizarre and completely out of control. She asked for some documents. They first sent her documents said she has to pay $9,000 for them, all almost entirely blacked out, like it's a Pentagon paper. Right. Yeah, I mean, this is truly one of those. This can't be true types of cases.

Yeah, as you said, at first, all she did was ask her superintendent, what are you going to teach my incoming kindergartner? And is it going to include things like critical race theory? Instead of just answering her questions, they channeled her into this formal legal problem. process where they stonewolder told her they were going to charge her thousands of dollars. And then, as if that wasn't enough, the NEA, the National Education Association, a $300 million a year organization filed a lawsuit against her simply for requesting these records. It's just an astonishing assault on open government, on parents' right to know what their kids are learning.

So this isn't, John, I don't know how you look at this, because this is much much more than a lawsuit against a, you know, a mom. This is game-changing if this is allowed to stand, right? I view it that way. I mean, look, I mean, just on the legal side, this is nonsensical. It turns the public records law in its head. These laws were meant to open government up. They're meant to protect the public.

They're not meant to be used against the public. But, yeah, I mean, this is a real brazen assault. on parents everywhere. I mean, and I think what it shows, Glenn, look at, this group has so much money.

Do they have nothing better to focus on, like maybe perhaps educating our students, than harassing and intimidating parents? It's a pure harassment technique. This union doesn't care about kids. They don't care about the parents. They care about driving a radical political agenda. So they're saying that they had to sewer

because of the sheer volume of requests and concerns about teacher privacy. So they're saying they're protecting the teacher's privacy. Well, yeah, I mean, here's what's interesting about that. That's not the way the public records law works. I mean, typically what happens is a member of the public will submit a records request, and then the government entity, in this case, the school district, will review the request if there's anything in there that involves private information. And by the way, she didn't request any private information.

She requested public information about public teaching duties. But if anything is in there that's included in an email string or something like that, the government entity redacts it, takes it out, and produces the records. Here you have a third party that's not even part of the public records process coming in and saying, no, no, I'm going to sue to stop you records requester from getting public information. If this is allowed to stand, it completely inverts the presumption of transport. transparency and the way public records processes work. So you, I mean, this is the kind of stuff you do for a living.

Odds that this actually even makes it to court? I do not see this getting very far in court. I mean, we are going to immediately move to get this, this offensive case thrown out. And then what? How do we, I mean, how do we get access to our own children's information? If we're still pursuing, so we have sort of some parallel options as well, we're still pursuing the underlying records. And we're going to get answers to Nicole's questions. I mean, she has a right to know what her daughters would be taught.

And we're going to find that out. So, you know, we're going to do that through the public records law, through the open meetings law. We're going to hold this district accountable. And we're not going to stand for this union special interest. How, how, I mean, this is so pervasive now. We have the CDC writing laws about, you know, renters and landowners. This is, if that's allowed to stand, the Department of Education can write its own laws. Every administrative office can start to do that.

And it doesn't seem to be getting better. I mean, how convinced are you that our courts are going to handle these things the way they should? Well, we spend a lot of time thinking about this problem, Glenn, this problem of the administrative state of unelected bureaucrats, creating the law, interpreting the law, enforcing the law. Look, I don't know about you, but when I was in high school civics, I learned that we got three branches of government, the legislature creates the law, the executive enforces it. But when you have things like the CDC creating rules, investigating the rules, enforcing alleged violations, you have one branch of government making all the decisions.

And that's not the way separation of powers works. I think there's all sorts of legal opportunities out there to challenge this sort of overreach. Many of these cases are moving through the process. I think we have a very good U.S. Supreme Court that gets the problems of administrative law. And I think there's going to be a lot of positive developments in this area. The optimistic set of me believes that this is an area that's very ripe for reform. We're talking to John Ritches. He's General Counsel for the Goldwater Institute that was started by Barry Goldwater, if I'm not mistaken.

trust that he started. And John, you know, you say there's a lot of opportunity, but are there the attorneys out there that are looking for this fight? I mean, I've talked about it on the air before. We had one of the best First Amendment right attorneys. I've had them for 20 years. They just dropped us because it will cause too many problems with other clients that they have. Yeah.

I mean, that is an unfortunate case where that comes up frequently in private practice. Look, if we want to look on the bright side of this, Glenn, there are an enormous amount of public interest groups. So private organizations like the Goldwater Institute, like the Institute for Justice, Pacific Legal Foundation, you name it, that have lawyers on staff that take cases specifically dedicated to limited government, protecting individual liberties. I think that that that is a very positive development. But look, we need more than that. We need private sector lawyers willing to take these cases on and not be afraid of the consequences to clients or whatever misperceived public appearance issues they think might exist.

This kind of stuff where you're being sued by the NIA, that scares regular parents and makes them go, I don't want to get involved in all of this. I just want to keep going. What advice do you have? Well, I mean, that is exactly why the NIA did it, right? It's the process is the punishment. My advice, and it's, I think it's difficult, but it's to be tough to stand up, to ask questions.

We all deserve a right. We all have a right to know what our parents are going to learn. We all have a right to know what our government is up to. Nicole Solis, our client is an incredibly tough, dedicated person. she's not going to take no for an answer. She's going to keep the fight going, and it requires actively engaged citizens like that to get these sorts of answers and to hold our government accountable.

John, thank you very much. John Riches, General Counsel for the Goldwater Institute.