The Glenn Beck Program - “Someone Has to Go First”: Glenn Beck’s Inspiring Speech from the USS Midway

Episode Date: July 4, 2026

On the 82nd anniversary of D-Day, Glenn Beck speaks aboard the USS Midway in San Diego, California, as part of Moms for Liberty’s “Sea to Shining Sea” event. Glenn asks a question we all must all answer: Do we still have the courage, bravery, and selflessness of the Greatest Generation? Because, as Glenn explains through historical stories about the Battle of Midway, D-Day, America’s founding, and the Gettysburg Address, someone always had to go first for the battle to be won. As America faces new challenges, Glenn asks, are you willing to truly stand up for what you believe in? GLENN'S SPONSORS: Byrna: Not every threat requires lethal force. Byrna's less-lethal launchers give you the ability to stop an aggressor from a safe distance. Protect yourself and your family by going to Byrna.com. Real Estate Agents I Trust: When you’re buying or selling a home, you need a real estate agent you can trust. Visit https://realestateagentsitrust.com/ to find the top-selling real estate agents in your area. American Financing: American Financing can show you how to put your hard-earned equity to work and get you out of debt. Dial ⁠800-906-2440⁠, or visit ⁠https://www.americanfinancing.net⁠. Patriot Mobile: Get a free month of service! Go to patriotmobile.com/beck or call 972-patriot, use promo code “Beck” and make the switch today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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our communities, our own safety. The founders understood this. It's woven into the fabric of who we are as Americans. And I want to share something with you. It's called Burna, B-Y-R-N-A, and it's changed how I think about personal protection. Here's the thing. Most people assume self-defense is complicated that you need training, licensing, you know, government approval.

But Burna is legal in all 50 states. No permit, no background check. Because your right to protect your family shouldn't require any. anyone's permission. The range on this is 60 feet. That's not pepper spray distance. That's real distance. It gives you time to think, to move, to get your family safe. It's simple enough that anyone can use it, anyone. And it's built in Fort Wayne, Indiana, right here in America, in American hands, American craftsmanship. And that matters to me, and I think it matters to you. I'm not here to scare you. I'm here to tell you being prepared isn't paranoia. It's love.

It's what we do for the people that you do anything for. So go to Burna, B-R-N-A-com slash Glenn. I've always been told not to follow children. I want to thank the city of San Diego for giving us a time limit. So I can now follow the big finale. California, it makes more sense every day, doesn't it? I would have reprinted. I was backstage, I was furiously to edit my speech. I was like, we've got to print it again.

All the printers are busy just printing up new ballots so they can count. So, oh, jeez. Well, hello. Thank you so much for coming. And thank you, Moms for Liberty. You are really, truly amazing. I said in 2008 or nine, I was on the air, and I said, you know, there's going to be two groups of people that save the world,

and it's going to be alcoholics, I mean, recovering alcoholics. Although I am pulling for the alcoholics at this point. And mothers, because how do you, how do you argue? with a mom. Now they've found a way to do it, but not very effectively. Our moms are the ones who raise us. We get so much from our mothers. We learn our values and our principles from our mothers. None of us want to disappoint our mothers. Mothers have played a huge role in all of history, and they are playing a huge role again. And Tina, thank you for you and your organization. I love history. Somebody asked me, there's probably the number one question people

asked me about history. Have you always loved history? No, no, actually no. Bored to tears with history as a kid. I love history because of David Barton. David Barton showed me history, and when I said that can't be true, he pulled out the document and said, well, you can argue with me, but here it is in their own handwriting. And I started to learn stories of history. And I started learning the men, not just memorizing the names and the dates of history. And that's what made me love American history.

So David, thank you sincerely and wall builders for everything that you do. And I want you to close your eyes here for just a second. And I want you to imagine that you are on a ship in the Pacific. Okay. you're so creative. Wow, it's almost like it's really happening. You're on a ship in the middle of the Pacific, and it's 1859, and it's endless and isolating, a little bit terrifying,

and it's an expanse of blue water that seems to go on and on and on, and you are thousands of miles in any direction away from any kind of civilization. And then suddenly you spot out on the horizon what appears to be an island. It's actually three little tiny islands. They just barely peek over the waves. There's no trees on them or anything else. It's in the middle of nowhere. This island has something moving on it as you get closer.

and you realize they're birds, they're albatross, and you think, I've struck gold. That's what happened in 1859. There was Captain Middlebrook. He found, he was a seal hunting captain on his vessel, and he's out in the middle of nowhere, and he sees the albatross on this just blue, sleek island. And the reason why he thinks this is a great find is because it's full of crap,

bird crap. And in 1859, we were having a shortage of fertilizer. And when he found the islands, he thought, I claim it in the name of the United States of America. That's exactly what happened. And they named that island, those three islands, Midway. because it was midway between California and Asia. Nobody could have known at that time that some seal hunting captain would find an island full of crap, and that island would change the course of the world. But that is exactly what happened. Sixty years after, nothing happened except birds, pooping and removing it.

and putting it on our corn. After that, it's now the late 1930s. Don't I tell history in just a really, very scientific way. You'll see the show on PBS soon. The late 1930s come. Nothing has happened on this island. But now growing tension is happening with the Japanese,

and so we decide we need to take that two and a half square island. island and build airstrips on it. We need to put gun boxes on it. We need to have a seaplane base there at Midway in between Asia and California. Few months after the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, the Navy codebreakers, they realize they're coming for our bird crap. We can't let the Japanese have that.

And they find out that they're attacking, they're going to take Midway from the United States. And so Admiral Nimitz sent three aircraft carriers out, the only three that the U.S. had left in the Pacific, and they was going to surprise them at Midway. So now it's 1942. It's early in the morning. It's in June, June 4th, 108 aircraft from Japanese carriers attacked the base at midway. Heavy damage, except on the runways. So I don't know what they killed or what they did, but they missed the runways.

Good for us. Meanwhile, on our side, the carriers, the Enterprise, the Hornet, and the Yorktown send 41 torpedo bombers. What people don't realize is how good we are right now, how accurate we can be, and what war used to be like. We send out 41 torpedo bombers. They are low-flying, they are lumbering, and they don't have any protection. There isn't a fighter around. And they are supposed to go out and take out the Japanese aircraft carriers.

The night before, John Waldron, he's 41 years old. He's the commander of the Hornet Squadron. He was a naval academy graduate. He had two children back at home. And he said this, my greatest hope, men, is that we encounter a favorable tactical situation. But if we don't, and worse comes to worse, I want each one of us to do his utmost to destroy our enemy. If there is only one plane left to make that final run in, I want you to be that man to go in and get that hit.

May God bless all of us. Good luck, happy landings, and give them hell. The next morning, they found themselves right before they took off being served, steak and eggs for breakfast. And all of the pilots looked at each other and said, we're condemned men. 35 out of those 41 planes were shot out of the sky. They all dropped their bombs.

They missed everything. Some of them had enough fuel to turn around and try to get back to the aircraft carrier. Most of those had to ditch in the middle of the ocean. ocean, shark-infested waters, 33 of the 41 pilots of the first wave were killed, including the commanding officer. As they were then mopping up, the Japanese were mopping up what was left, and we were wiped out. 47 other bombers suddenly arrived. These dive bombers had come

from three other U.S. carriers, and they all left at different times. and they all came from different routes. You want to talk about divine providence. Each group was on a separate mission to attack and search for those Japanese carriers. And suddenly, they all came to one place and just beneath them were the Japanese carriers. At the same time, at the same point. When the Battle of Midway was over, Japan had lost four air. aircraft carriers, 275 planes, and 3,000 men, including almost all of their most experienced

pilots. The Americans had lost one carrier, 132 planes, and 307 men. It was the turning point in the war. We had won the Battle of Midway. One Japanese officer who saw it, he said, they were describing this as all of these planes, remember these beautiful silver plains in the sky, he said it looked like a silver waterfall. He said he saw all these planes up above and suddenly they started to dive down one after another and it was as if it was a waterfall coming down to the carriers.

He said the American dive bomber's success was only made possible by the earlier martyrdom of those torpedo. planes that failed to hit anything. I want you to take that first story here and just remember, someone always has to go first. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer.

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The name says it all, real estate agents, I trust.com. The first group of people we should remember and salute tonight are the 41 American pilots that had to ditch their plane and didn't hit anything. But they were first. Also today, June 6th, 82nd anniversary of D-Day. I want to talk to you a little bit about D-Day.

160,000 Allied troops, 5,000 ships, 13,000 aircraft, 9,000 allied troops killed or wounded on D-Day. Largest operation, amphibious operation in the history of the world. Nobody in my family served in World War II. My father tried to join right after World War II. He had flat feet. And then I met my wife, Tanya. And her family is Italian. Very Italian.

And I was sitting at a wedding. I was dating my wife for probably about six months. And her Uncle Leo, who is like right off the boat Italian, used to call me Michelangelo. Every time I'd see him, he'd be at the house and I'd come over and I'd walk in and he'd say, Michaelangelo. Six months into it, I said, Uncle Leo, why do you call me of Michelangelo? And he said, ah, look at her. Look at it to you.

I don't need to learn your name. be around lung. Yeah, true story. So we're at this wedding and it's me and Uncle Leo. And we're sitting off to the side and I said to Uncle Leo, Uncle Leo, tell me the story of the family. How did you get here? He said, I was born in America, lived in America until I was two. family moved back. And they lived in Italy. And then the war came. And the family, they were afraid, would be completely wiped out. And so somebody had to keep the family going. And I was the only American. So I went to America. He was 18 or 19 years old. Went all by himself. I said, oh, yeah. So did you experience Mussolini? And he said, Mussolini, a good man. And I said, keep it

down Uncle Leo, keep it down. But when he got to America, he joined the military. He wanted to serve. But because he was right literally off the boat, they thought he was a spy. So he was one of the first people whenever there was danger, his commanding officer said, Leo, you go first. He was one of the first people on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. He told me a harrowing story of courage of not just him, but all of those around him, telling me exactly what it was like on the beaches on that day, running for the cliff, trying to stay alive, seeing all of your friends, his best friend, couldn't swim. They had these huge backpacks on.

They were ill-designed, and they actually floated and forced when they would float, it forced you face down, not face up. All the way over, his friend kept saying, I can't swim, I can't swim, I can't swim. It didn't matter. When the gate came down, he and Uncle Leo got off the ship. And his friend went down and never came back up. somebody has to go first. I don't know how many of us have seen the D-Day Memorial.

I don't know how many people even know where the D-Day Memorial is, but it's tucked away in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Why would it be there? It's there in a small town in Virginia called Bedford. It's located there because the town of Bedford in proportion of the population, no community lost more people than Bedford, Virginia, on D-Day. It lost dozens of people.

If you saw saving Private Ryan, that was Company A. Company A was from Bedford. There were 34 men that went out of the 34 men that landed on almost, Omaha Beach that day, 23 of them died on the very first wave of attacks. Six weeks after D-Day, the young telegraph operator at Green's pharmacy in Bedford was overwhelmed at the news. She's there in the pharmacy and she also works the telegraph and the telegraph kept going off. And it was the deaths one after another of all the people in her town that she knew. There were so many telegraphs that were coming in. She couldn't deliver them.

And so she asked the customers that were in the store, this one is for this family. You live right by them. Can you deliver this? This one is for this family. And the whole town delivered the news. Name after name, all of the people in the soda shop in Bedford. Among those that were killed in action from Bedford were Bedford, the name, and Raymond Hoback. They were brothers. Bedford was the older brother, kind of rambunctious. He had a fiancé that was home waiting for him to come home.

Raymond was the quiet one. He was more disciplined, and he was the one that could usually be found quietly reading his Bible at home. He had just fallen in love with a British woman that he had met before D-Day. They were planning on getting married. This episode is brought to you by L'Oreal Group. Beauty is a powerful force that moves us. That's why L'Oreal Group has built a business that is inclusive at its heart with 100% of its brands.

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average savings based on borrowers who save over $200. Bedford and Raymond barely made it out of the ramp, off the ramp of the boat as a swarm of bullets came and cut through them. There was also Ray Stevens and his twin brother, Roy. They were on separate boats that morning. They had plans to meet up after they made it to shore on the beach. Roy's boat never made it to shore. It was struck by an artillery shell. Roy was dumped into the English Channel.

He was later rescued. He was picked up. He fought for several weeks in northern France until shrapnel from a landmine took out his shoulder, parts of his jaw, parts of his neck. It ended the war for him. He lived, but he carried the wounds and the scars with him the rest of his life.

But his greatest loss with his brother, Ray. Like the Hoback brothers, Ray never made it off of Omaha Beach that day. Bedford and Raymond Hoback's mother, Macy, learned about her son's death, the first one on a Sunday, and the next son the next day. Their younger sister Louise, or Lucille, I'm sorry, said, mom was devastated, and dad just went out to the barn because he didn't want to see. He didn't want anybody to see him cry, and he wept in the barn. These are the people that we celebrate and we forget about all too often.

Without those 41 torpedo bombers, there's no perfect timing. There's no perfect anything. But without those 41 bombers at Midway, we lose to the Japanese. Without the Higgins boats and all of those men from Bedford that died, We don't march into Paris. We don't stop Nazi rule. Somebody has to go first. The qualities that these men have, do we have those qualities anymore?

Are we willing to do these things? Selflessness, bravery. You know, not all of them wanted to go. Not all of them wanted to die. I'm sure most of them didn't. They were men, mostly in their 20s. But in the heart of the battle, when asked, they were willing to give their life. Are we that selfless now?

The heroes at Midway and D-Day? Some of them believed, and some of them didn't. But God surely was not a foreign concept at the time. God played a huge role. He always, it kills me when people say our founders were deists, A deist believes God is a watchmaker. He makes the watch, sets the time, and then puts it away, and never looks at it again, and is completely uninvolved. Every one of our founders talked about the miracles that they saw.

You don't believe in miracles if you're a deist. You only believe in miracles if you believe the truth that God is God. active then, now, and in the future. The day after D-Day, a soldier from West Virginia, not from Bedford, but from West Virginia, was walking along Omaha Beach, and he saw something jutting out of the sand. He picked it up.

It was exactly what David showed you earlier. It was a heart shield Bible. It was stuck in the sand. He reached down to pick up. it up. It clearly didn't save this soldier's life. It apparently had fallen out of his backpack as he fell. The inside cover said, Raymond S. Hoback from Mom Christmas, 1938. He wrote a letter and took the Bible. He packaged it up. And he sent it to Raymond's mom in bed for. Macy, it was her most cherished possession and the only personal belonging that she ever got back from her son.

There are no atheists in a foxhole. Miracles happen. But here we are in a different time and a different age and in this black hole of globalized technology. Atheism seems to be thriving right now. Or worse yet, maybe you do believe in something, but it is the ultimate darkness. We are now more connected than man has ever been connected before, but we're plugged into the wrong things.

We need to be plugged into something much, much bigger than our internet, our devices. We need to plug in to God. So how do we honor the men of D-Day? and Midway, and those like them who served on this ship and that plane, and those ships now just across the water from us, how do we honor them? The first thing we have to do is remember. How many times in the scriptures does God say, remember, remember. It is a commandment to us over and over and over again. And he instructs us from Adam and Eve all the way along to construct an altar, to build a monument, to remember. We live in a society now that's tearing down

our monuments, tearing down our statues, tearing down the things that help us remember. And if we don't remember and we don't remember the stories, we forget who we are, where we came from, and where we're going. By remembering, we become better citizens, better people, and we can be the caretakers of freedom. World War II has a unique time in our history. And that generation, there are very few left. I don't know about you, but I went back to say thank you to the two guys that unfolded the flag. Coe, the older gentleman, the shorter gentleman, was truly remarkable. I wanted to hear his story.

I just said thank you. And he saluted me. We talk an awful lot about rights now. We were just at Ellis Island with a statue of liberty and everybody was talking about rights. It's time that we start talking about our responsibilities. Right now, we are in the first time in human history

can actually be entertained every waking hour of our life. There was a book out in the 1980s, amusing ourselves to death. He was worried about television. Look at what we're facing now. What has technology done? done to us. It has made it very hard for us to look at our responsibilities, to look at sacrifice. We're all owed something. It can all be better, even though I'm not going to work for it,

and I'm not willing to sacrifice for it. Our founders lost everything, many of them. Sam Adams lost everything. He wrote to his family after they lost their house, their belonging We all have to be content to suffer the loss of all things in this life rather than tamely surrender the public liberty. It is our 250th anniversary. How many of us remember what we're even living in today and the value of this freedom? The things that we see, the things that we're able to accomplish, the God we can. And praise or not praise. For the first time in human history, men live like they've never lived before.

And most Americans say, meh. Remember where we have come from. Remember what it is taken. Remember those who have sacrificed so we can say, meh. This episode is brought to you by Activia. You might already be eating yogurt, but not all yogurts are crudes. created equal. Activia contains over one billion probiotics per serving to survive and reach the gut alive.

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and the sanctity of life, the Second Amendment, and America's future. Patriot Mobile is not sitting on the sidelines, there and the front lines. Join the movement today. Go to patriotmobile.com slash back or call 972 Patriot. Use a promo code Beck, get a free month of service. It's Patriotmobile.com slash back or call 972 Patriot. Make the switch today. Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg address,

he gave us his marching orders, our marching orders today. It is rather for us here to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave their last full measure of devotion. That we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth. This, he said in the 1800s, this, I beg of you today. Let us all here highly resolve. Let us be the first to remember in honor the past. Let us resolve to prepare the next generation for the future just ahead. A future that is brighter than today, is better than today, is more glorious than you.

today. We're only defeated when we believe we're defeated. We're only defeated when we can't see a better chapter that is about to be written by Americans who will once again change the world. Let us resolve to be that next generation. Let us persevere. Let us sacrifice gladly, serve on the front line. Let us all say someone has to go. So first, let it be me as we will write a new chapter, as the country that is, was, and will be again tomorrow, the last great hope on earth. Thank you for coming. Good night. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair.

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