Best of the Program | Guest: Kelsey Grammar | 5/22/25

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

On today's program, we talk about South Africa and what happened in the Oval and how a lot of this stuff is connected and connected right directly to a media you can't trust.

Also, why is the left seemingly ramping up all their anti-Semitic attacks and all of the attacks, all of the different things we're seeing in the news?

It's a coordinated effort, and we tell you about that.

And the most incredible interview.

with Kelsey Grammer, all on today's podcast.

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Now, let's get to work.

You're listening to

the best of the Benenback program.

All right, let me

talk to you here now about the House Republicans.

The Republicans have now revealed the final changes to the

one big, beautiful bill.

I'm still hearing stuff in my.

Thank you, Sarah.

One big, beautiful bill.

It looks like the

tweaks are going to be enough to win the support of the holdouts.

Medicare work requirements are moved up.

The SALT deal stays.

Incentives for non-expansion states, faster phase-out of energy tax credits for wind, solar, and battery storage.

Changes in federal pensions, ditching the federal requirement that firearm suppressors must be registered.

There's some good things in here, and it's really going to come down to Congress.

If they pass this,

there is $1.7 trillion in savings.

However,

the sticking point is Congress can pass this bill, but then Congress has to go back and enact and say, yes, let's start enacting those things.

So just passing the bill does not mean that savings is coming until Congress then acts again to say, yeah, what we said in that bill, we mean, and we're going to start it right now.

So that's where it gets a little hairy for most people.

Also, the no tax on tips passes the Senate unanimously.

Then we have Trump talking about about leasing or taking the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which I believe is a public nightmare, honestly.

You cannot have the government involved in people's mortgages.

They do all kinds of tricks.

It's one of the things that helped cause the 2008 crash is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

But Trump says they're now healthy and he wants to take them public.

So get them off of our books.

Let other people take the risk in the private sector.

Amen.

Now, I watched the president yesterday yesterday in the Oval Office, and I got to tell you,

this guy's the goat.

I want you to think one thing.

We have been trying to find out the truth on what's happening in South Africa.

Is there a genocide going on?

Well, the first thing that I would tell you,

we did a report on this in May.

May 2021, somewhere in that.

And

we had some evidence that there is some sort sort of, you know, genocide, if you will.

Let's explain that first.

Genocide, to me, is not six million Jews.

Genocide is a stated purpose of getting rid of any class, any kind of person, any group of people.

That's a genocide.

We want to wipe you out.

Yesterday, a genocide was furthered in Washington, D.C.

when they shot the two Jews on the street.

Why is that a genocide?

It was only two.

Because the people who do it are claiming they want to do it to all Jews.

Okay?

So I think genocide is kind of a mindset.

You genocidal maniac.

It's a mindset.

It's not a number.

All right.

So we believe that there is, based on that interpretation, that there is a genocide going on.

And I'm going to talk to you next hour about how that, what you're seeing in South Africa is.

what is coming here.

And I don't mean the white thing.

I just mean the violence in South Africa is remarkable.

So President Trump, because nobody in the media is ever going to say anything about this, they won't cover it.

In fact, you are just, you're killed if you try to cover it.

But T.

Beckett Adams, who used to work for the Blaze years ago, he said, you know, I don't know about the, you know, what's happening, whether the claim of genocide is baseless or not, but I do know the people that insisting that it is baseless said the Hunter laptop, the COVID lab leak, the Biden deterioration were baseless claims as well.

So grain of salt with those people.

Amen.

Thank you.

That's exactly right.

Now,

let me show you what the president did.

He has the president of South Africa,

Ravifosa, in his office.

And he says, you know, I want to show you, you know, let's talk about what's happening to the white farmers.

Now, I said this as I was watching this in real time, and I said this last night on the TV show.

He makes one mistake.

He said, These are grave sites.

They're not grave sites.

They're not.

They're memorials.

We see them on the highways.

Somebody dies, they put up a little red, a little white cross someplace, and you know somebody had a car accident there.

So this is just a memorial that they put together to show the world how many farmers, white farmers, are being killed.

And so here he has, the president of South Africa, sitting in the office, and he plays this.

Watch.

These are burial sites right here.

Burial sites.

Over a thousand.

Each one of those white things you see is a cross,

and

there's approximately a thousand of them.

They're all white farmers, the family of white farmers.

And those cars aren't driving.

They're stopped there to pay respects to their family member who was killed.

And it's a terrible sight.

I've never seen anything like it.

Those people were all killed.

Have they told you where that is, Mr.

President?

Okay.

No, I'd like to know where that is.

So the president is playing, you know, he is short-circuiting the press.

You know what?

These people say everything is a conspiracy theory.

I don't know what it is.

I have the president here.

I'm going to ask him.

Why not ask him in front of everybody?

And the president says, I'd like to know where that is.

I know, well, come on.

I've seen that video before for years I know that video you know you don't you're the president you've never seen that video before maybe maybe not

but let me show you another piece of video that the blaze had on last night

on Sarah's show do you have the video of this is just these are

stones that have names carved in them

And it goes on and on and on.

And it looks like the Vietnam War Memorial.

Okay, those are all names of white farmers.

If you're watching the Blaze, just think the Vietnam War Memorial.

And they put all these names on these walls and they just keep

going.

So, I mean, that's pretty elaborate if this is, you know, fake.

What they're putting all these fake names on granite.

Now, what the press is saying, in fact, if we have,

do we have the audio from, I think it's CNN or NPR?

Do we have that audio?

For people who don't have a historical context,

it does potentially appear more literal.

It is an inflammatory song, without a doubt.

And many in South Africa, even black South Africans, don't think it should be sung in a post-apartheid world, 30 years plus after apartheid.

But there are many who grew up under those years of white minority rule who understand the historical context of this song, Kill the Boar, Kill the farmer that julius malema has made popular again it sort of fell into disuse it's not been that commonly sung after the end of apartheid in 1994 but it's brought it back again to

reanimate the issue of the majority of land in south africa still being owned by white farmers okay okay so that's all they that's all they're doing when they're saying kill the boar which means kill the whites It hasn't been sung for a long, long time, but I guess it's okay now.

I mean, you know what?

The Klan, you know, we didn't have giant cross burnings around the country, but they're trying to make an economic point now.

So I think it's pretty okay that the Klan is, what are you talking about?

That is, that's insane.

You know what that is?

That's the New York Times covering just like they did with Walter Durante on the Holodomor.

There's no actual starvation or deaths from starvation, but there is widespread

mortality from disease due to malnutrition.

That's the New York Times.

The excellent harvest about to be gathered shows that the report of a famine in Russia is an exaggeration or malignant

page of the New York Times.

How about the Holocaust from

1942, the Chicago Daily Tribune?

Ready?

British section of the World Jewish Congress estimated today more than a million Jews have been killed or died as a result of ill-treatment in countries dominated by Germany.

That

the only paragraph

about the final solution.

That was it.

So please, you have a history of missing these things.

Now, let me give you some perspective on the other side.

Again,

I don't know how many people have died.

And what they're doing is they're saying, well, there's, I mean,

there's 19,000 murders or 20,000 murders, you know, every year.

Actually, there's 27,000 murders annually in South Africa.

Okay.

Annual murders, 27,000.

The annual murders, just to give you some perspective, they have a population of 63 million people.

The annual murder rate for our country, a country with 350 million people, is 19,252.

So, I don't know.

There seems seems to be a bad murder problem happening in South Africa.

I don't know how the president even calls this a country.

You don't have a government if you have

27,000 murders every year with a population of 63 million.

We think our murder population is out of control.

We think we've got problems with crime and murder.

We have 19,000, they have 27,000.

So they don't, they barely even have a country.

now but the press is saying well only two thousand of those were the white farmers oh okay all right stu could you quick ask uh ai or just look it up um yourself if you don't know it already how many people were lynched in america over a hundred years

how many people were lynched i think the number is under 5 000.

I don't know if I'm going to be able to do that.

Is that a problem?

Is that a problem for anybody in the press?

Oh, well, there are only 5,000.

Let me be crazy.

There are only 10,000 people lynched.

Oh,

okay.

Well, then that's not a genocide.

That's not a problem there.

There are only 2,000 white farmers who were killed and slaughtered.

I'm not saying that everybody is engaged in this.

I'm saying you have a major political party singing kill the whites, okay

in stadiums singing kill the whites well you don't understand the historic perspective you know what when somebody tells you they're gonna kill you you take them seriously you have no choice now let me play something else from the leader of the same party

here is the leader from the same party I think this was a year or so ago let me look it up

This is,

nope,

nope, this is recent.

Here he is, leader of the economic freedom fighters on this particular.

Is there a genocide?

Are you killing white farmers?

Listen to what he says.

I don't know what's going to happen in the future.

I'm saying to you, we've not called for the killing of white people, at least for now.

I can't guarantee the future.

Yeah, but I mean, you'd understand somebody watching that, especially as it gets shared on Twitter, they freak out.

It sounds like a genocidal.

Cry, babies.

Cry, babies.

I'm not calling for the slaughter of white people.

At least for now.

I can't give you a guarantee of the future.

Stop.

Do you need to hear anymore?

I'm not calling for the killing of white people, at least for now.

If I got on and said, you know what, I'm not calling for the killing of, you know,

Asians,

at least not for now, would the press be okay with that?

Or would they call me a genocidal maniac?

I think we know the answer.

And the answer is yes.

They would have a problem with it.

They'd call me a genocidal maniac.

And they would be correct to do that.

Do not listen to the press.

Do not listen to the press.

I can't tell you what the numbers are.

I can't tell you how many people are involved in killing whites.

I can just tell you there is a major party.

Would you accept the Klan?

Would American accept the Klan as a major political party that had real political sway

that they said they were singing kill the black man?

Well, you don't understand.

It's an old-timey Klan song from the 1800s.

We don't mean it like, you know, like they used to.

You just have to understand the historic.

We're just making a point.

Okay.

Would they accept that?

The answer is no.

If they had these big rallies, they were singing the song, and then you went to the head grand wizard or dragon or whatever the hell they are, and the guy said, no you know what we're not kill we are not calling for the killing of black people yet at least not now

would the new york times be okay with that the answer is no

racism is a human problem here's here's what's really going on The reason why they're not saying anything is because those who are calling for the killings of whites are what?

They are Marxist and they are all into the ESG DEI

anti-racist bull crap.

Merica, you want to see your future?

You're seeing it right now

in South Africa.

And

that should be a frightening thing for non-whites because remember, there's about 2,000 whites that are farmers that are killed

by these radicals.

But the government, with all of their great socialist stuff, they have 27,000 murders a year for 63 million people.

Just a reminder again, we have 19,252 murders in the year 2023, the latest one, and that is 350 million people.

Do not listen to the press.

Well-lit parking lot, right in the middle of the afternoon.

You don't think twice about walking through it, but somebody is waiting there for you.

Somebody's waiting there out there, hidden among the cars.

When he comes for you, he comes fast.

Instinctively, you reach into your bag, you pull out your Berna launcher, looks like a handgun.

That should stop him, but it's not.

It fires non-lethal rounds filled with pepper or tear gas, hits the man hard enough to stop him in his tracks.

In fact, he literally crumples to the ground, whimpering, clawing at his eyes, because it's tear gas.

You only had to be within six feet.

You don't have to be accurate.

You don't have to hit him in the chest.

You just have to be within six feet.

Anything within six feet when that that thing hits,

they're down on the ground.

Okay.

And that gives you time to call the police.

The guy is going to be put into a lot of pain for a long while, and he's probably not going to like jail too much either.

But you know what?

He'll live.

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Now back to the podcast.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and don't forget, rate us on iTunes.

Let me start here before I get into what I think is coming, and this is a good indication of it.

Last night at the Israeli embassy, Two staff members, they're called diplomats because they were probably on a diplomatic passport.

They worked at the embassy, but these are just

two young kids,

you know, in their 20s,

Yarin

Lichinsky and Sarah Milgram.

They were walking out of an event that happened to be at the Capitol Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C.

And a 30-year-old guy, we now know as Elias Rodriguez, he's from Chicago.

He decided

that

he was going to kill himself some Jews.

And so he stood in waiting with a gun, and he gunned these two kids down in cold blood.

They caught him.

They confiscated the gun.

I hope he, I mean, if we had the death penalty, I hope he would get the death penalty, but we don't do that anymore.

And he's going to be tried most likely in Washington, D.C.

So God only knows what happens to him.

But this is a couple that he had just this week, unbeknownst to her, gone out and bought a engagement ring here in America.

He was going to bring it back home in his pocket to Israel.

And when they got back to Israel next week, he was going to propose

their whole life,

any children they would have had,

gone.

Now, let me tell you who this guy is.

We now know

that this guy was part part of a Marxist pro-Hamas

organization

that's Marxist communist.

These are the people our schools are churning out.

This is

ends justify the means.

These are the same people that are

You know, the same people that are now helping

these judges and pushing these judges and and protesting in the streets and causing all kinds of havoc

because they think that they should stand up for the rights of murderers and everybody else to stay here in our country.

Then you have people like the governor of Minnesota saying that ICE

is Trump's modern-day Gestapo.

Everything is being ratcheted up.

Everything is, I mean, you have

Fang Fang's boyfriend saying that they've arrested

MacGyver, a congresswoman, who was assaulting a police officer, trying to storm the gates of a secure facility for ICE.

All she had to do if she wanted oversight was call them and they would have let her in.

But instead, a mayor who wants to be governor of New Jersey,

he, you know, they came with a bunch of protesters.

They protested from the gate.

As soon as they opened the gate to let a bus in, the protesters, this congresswoman and the mayor, they all

surged at the gate.

ICE did their best to stop them.

They were assaulted, yada, yada, yada.

And now,

you know, Nancy Mace just introduced a bill in Congress that said she should be removed from Congress.

I think she should.

I don't think Congress will do it.

That's how sad things are.

She should be removed from Congress.

You know, she's assaulting police officers.

DOJ is now going to prosecute her after the investigation for that.

Why would, why, last night on TV, I asked the question: why would the Democrats be going this way?

Why would they be standing up for murderers?

Why would they be standing up for Hamas?

Why would they be ratcheting up?

It's not the way to win an election.

You're not going to win on that.

America's not going to embrace that.

I believe that may not be

the

plan.

You You know, revolution and direct action stuff, that's what they're trained to do.

It's the highest calling of the left.

And this isn't about politics.

This is about a Marxist worldview that has been baked into the minds of several generations of Americans through our university classrooms now.

I could give you the

history of it, but I mean, it starts with John Dewey, and then it goes to a guy named Paolo, I think his name is Freire.

And Freire,

he wrote a book called The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

And that is the sacred text for the left and the educational revolution.

You want to know what happened to our education?

Pedagogy of

the oppressed.

Read it.

He didn't see schools as a place for learning math or history.

He saw them as battlegrounds for social action.

All across the U.S., his critical pedagogy is still the dominant theory in teacher education programs today.

So they are churning out radicals.

And his big idea was, see if this sounds familiar, the world is divided into oppressors and the oppress.

So the classroom is where you train students to see everything through that lens.

You're either the oppressor or the oppressed.

This is critical race theory, gender ideology, DEI, every other oppressed versus oppressor framework that's taken over our corporations and our campuses comes from this.

The wake of the Hamas attack in Israel,

October 7th, 23.

Jonathan Haight, one of the brilliant minds of our day, he wrote an article called Why Anti-Semitism Sprouted So Quickly on Campus.

He says the students have learned now a new morality.

Let me read this to you.

To view everyone as either an oppressor or a victim, students were taught to use identity as the primary lens through which everything is to be understood.

Not in their coursework, but in their personal and political lives.

When students are taught to use a single lens for everything, their education is harming them rather than improving their ability to think critically.

This is the new morality.

This is what has driven our universities off a cliff, and it's about to run our country off a cliff if more people don't wake up.

Because this is what fuels the direct action in the streets.

Now,

I said last hour, and I said last night on TV that I think, I don't know if it's going to be this summer, but we are headed for real,

you know, BLM riots all across America on multiple fronts.

It's coming.

It's just coming.

And it's coming from, I mean, we've seen the political violence from the left, no matter what the mainstream media wants to tell you.

Oh, no, that's, you know, we're worried about the white man and the extremists.

Well, you know what?

I'm worried about everybody right now, quite honestly.

But one side really has a track record, and I don't have to go back in the time machine to see it.

Let me just give you a few.

This is just off the top, you know, of our heads as we sat around this morning.

Ready?

Baseball field attack on Republican congressmen in 2017 by a Bernie Sanders supporter that almost killed Representative Steve Scalise.

He was out to kill all of the Republicans on the baseball diamond, and we now know that our DOJ covered it up because who is in charge?

2020 BLM riots, which caused at least a dozen deaths and an all-time U.S.

record of $2 billion in damages.

The 2020 Antifa riots in Portland, where the Department of Homeland Security spent $12 million just to protect the federal buildings during weeks-long battle with rioters.

At one point, the rioters barricaded federal offices inside a courthouse and tried to set the building on fire.

How about the 96 different crisis pregnancy centers that were attacked since the Dobbs decision was overturned

or overturned, Roe v.

Wade, or the hundreds of Catholic churches that have been vandalized with pro-abortion messages.

Or the man who was arrested with weapons, all kinds of stuff, outside Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh's house, who claimed he was there to assassinate Kavanaugh because of the Dobbs decision.

Then there was the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson, last year.

The alleged killer had held left-wing views, and now the left has lionized him.

He's a hero of the left.

You don't put that man up as a hero for your movement.

You don't make him a hero unless you agree with violence.

Unless you believe, no matter what,

ends justify the means.

He's now a folk hero.

How about the burning of the Tesla dealerships and the cars?

Last month, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro's official residence was firebombed.

The suspect allegedly set the governor's mansion on fire because what, what?

Because Sapiro, who is Jewish, what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.

Okay, wait a minute.

So shooting last night, the fire there, huh?

Then, of course, there was the assassination attempt on Donald Trump's life last year.

Somehow, we still don't know the details about the assassin's political views, but it seems pretty unlikely that he was a conservative.

The pattern is very clear.

And what's disturbing about this is

it's getting worse after the election.

Okay.

When these people talk about democracy, what they mean is communist-style people's revolution.

And I want to make sure you understand this.

I'm not talking about the average Democrat that is your neighbor.

I don't believe they believe this stuff.

I think they've been duped into believing that, you know, through the hatred of Donald Trump, and they may have legitimate reasons for not liking Donald Trump.

Okay, I'm not going to argue with that.

You might have legitimate reasons for not liking him, but they have been so indoctrinated by the mainstream media.

They've only been given half of the story, and the half that they're giving a lot of times is out-and-out lies.

I mean, let's talk about the Biden stuff, okay?

And you've been indoctrinated to hate Donald Trump, which stops you from looking at what your side is actually doing and the coordination of it.

And if you think that it's not coordination,

well,

let me just tell you about the coalition of Democratic governors called Governors Safeguarding Democracy.

It is a group that is led by J.B.

Pritzker, who is the Illinois governor, and Colorado's governor, Jared Polis.

This is a coordinated effort to defy President Trump's immigration policies and to get some heavy hitters calling the shots.

One day after Trump's second inauguration, the group held a Zoom meeting led by none other than Norm Eisen.

Who is that?

He's the former White House ethics czar, so funny, and a special counsel for Trump's first impeachment trial.

He is also one of the ringleaders of the current lawsuit campaign.

He's laid this whole thing out.

Now, their strategy is laid out in a book called Governors Safeguarding Democracy, Firewall for Freedom.

Now, it was obtained through FOIA by the Daily Signal.

Why isn't nobody talking about

anybody saying thank you, Daily Signal?

Why isn't anybody talking about this?

Well, we know because the mainstream media is never going to talk about this.

The plan.

includes model executive orders for governors to use in blocking National Guard deployments if they don't like them and refuse state resources for federal immigration enforcement.

One draft order says that states shall provide no time, money, or facilities for National Guard units deployed without the governor's approval.

Another directs state agencies to withhold information if they suspect it's being used for immigration actions.

So they are plotting

government.

And what exactly are they preparing to obstruct?

What National Guard

deployments?

What are you talking about?

Is it just that they're going to use legal action?

No.

Now, remember, Pritzker is one of the guys leading this with Norm Eisen and everybody else.

And I want you to listen to what he's saying.

He's not talking about the National Guard and he's not talking about lawyers here.

Listen to what he said just a couple of weeks ago.

Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption, but I am now.

These people cannot know a moment of peace.

That is a governor of one of our largest states.

This is what happens when the system turns out activists instead of thinkers.

Violence is excused as resistance.

When governors weaponize their authority to defy the will of the American people.

Trump won in a clear 2024 mandate.

Everybody knows that.

Everybody knows Trump was elected for two things.

The

economy

and immigration.

And I don't think in that order.

But he won.

And the left is obsessed with their oppressor-oppressed worldview.

They see only one path, and that is fight, disrupt, and resist.

We're not talking about just policy disagreements.

This is a coordinated effort to destabilize America, rooted in decades of Marxist indoctrination.

That's what's happening in America.

That's what's coming.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

You know, people always say, here's a man that doesn't need an introduction.

and then they go on.

I'm not going to.

Kelsey Grammer is on with us.

He has written a new book.

And before I bring him on, I just, I want to read what's on the back cover of his book, or, you know, the PR people said.

On July 1st, 1975, Kelsey Grammer's younger sister, 18-year-old Karen Gremer, was raped and murdered.

In Karen, Kelsey reveals their past, celebrates their youth together, mourns her loss, and unearths his struggle for faith and healing in the decades since her death.

That is such bull crap if you've read the book.

That is just, that's a PR person saying, it's almost like chat GPT.

Let me, before I bring him on, let me just show you what this book is in his own words in the book.

Recounting her history and the events that landmark her story is part of what's going on here, but another part is how she continues in me or how I've imprisoned her with my inability to let her go.

That idea haunts me.

Recounting her funeral and the events of her death has made me realize how mad I was at myself, how angry that that one thing that I had always done, I didn't do.

I felt unemasculated and empty.

All my big brother protector BS was just that.

No, Karen.

Karen, get back to Karen.

Okay, it's important to remember the tragedy of her death belongs to her.

Not entirely true, perhaps, because you see, I've often said that to dismiss my own feelings about it.

The tragedy belongs to her as if I have no right to view it as my tragedy, but it belongs to me too.

Her death belongs to her.

The consequences belong to me and to the men who killed her, and to me, because I couldn't stop them.

I didn't stop them.

That was my issue with it all, and I felt like I had failed her.

Don't read the back cover, read the book.

It's called Karen by Kelsey Grammer.

Kelsey, welcome to the program.

Thank you, Glenn.

Thank you.

This is an amazingly powerful book.

You want to tell a little bit of the story?

Yeah, sure.

I deeply appreciate what you just read.

What happened, it's 50 years ago, July 1st this year.

I have carried it with me for a long, long time, and I probably would have continued to do that.

It was sort of a...

Having reached a kind of stalemate with the grief and remembrance that

always sort of favored the grief part,

I was doing a channeling session with a woman who's kind of a famous medium in some of the circles I travel.

And in the midst of the session, she said, oh, wait a minute, your sister

is saying that she wants you to tell her story.

And that was kind of a remarkable moment because

I've delved into this world a bit, this sort of medium ship world.

I produced a show called Medium years ago.

And it's meant to be a healing art, I think.

But

I'd never heard anyone say that.

And I suddenly thought, that sounds authentic and real, like Karen really is asking me to do this.

And so I sat down about a month later.

I waited a while, and I sat down and started to jot down some notes.

And about eight or nine pages into it,

I suddenly realized I was writing a book.

about Karen, about my sister, and about the life we had lived together, and about the life that I'd lived since her time and the life I've lived with her always in my mind.

And so

I came up with this book and this book is

part spoken by Karen, part written by my imagination and my recollection.

And in a weird way, the writing itself became a kind of a channeling event in my life where things came up in clarity that I had forgotten.

It was extraordinary.

Time just disappeared and suddenly I was still holding my little sister's hand or taking her up a hill to take us a snow ride or a ride on a sled or

we were out on a boat together and sitting in a hammock together.

And all these things became the sort of the world of the book and the world that was the world I grew up in with Karen and then the world, of course, that I was left with when she was gone.

We were extremely close.

That was probably different than some brother-sister stories, but you know, there's no one closer to you genetically than your brother or your sister.

You're identical, basically.

So it was a very important issue.

No, go ahead.

I'm sorry.

No, that was it.

That was Telson.

You know,

I was taking it back.

I wasn't going to go here, but you brought it up.

The medium thing, I was taking it back, and it made me think of Harry Houdini

after his mother died.

He became obsessed with the other side and trying to reach.

And then when he died, he said to his wife, you know, continue to try to find me.

And

I will say the words, best believe.

And she never heard that.

But he was obsessed with that.

You talk about Christ in an amazing way.

If I may quote, I think of Christ.

The world gave him so much hate.

He gave them so much love.

God bless him.

God bless Karen.

God bless mom.

God bless Evangeline.

Gam.

My God, even his body distorted in the grimace of inhumane torture.

Jesus beseeched, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.

Their hate and their fear killed love.

Imagine that.

How could that happen?

So you, you know, that was the one thing that I wondered.

You know,

have you forgiven yourself really yet, fully?

Because, I mean, you're carrying around guilt that is not yours.

And even if it was,

you've got to find a way to let it go.

And that's the whole point of Christ.

Have you found that place yet?

Yeah, I mean, it did come.

But what's funny about life, you know, from each morning you wake,

there may come a fresh spring of self-loathing or regret that

will indict you, you know, but of course, Jesus is there

to take it.

You know, that's what's amazing in the book.

I do, you know, I have this moment where I was just sitting on a plane, and it was as if finally Jesus was sitting beside me, saying,

This one's mine.

You've got to let it go.

I'll take it.

And of course,

I still resist that because it's like it's sort of, I think, well, no, I'm a man.

I can handle this.

I can take it.

And, you know, there's just some things.

And then Jesus finally said to me, He said,

No, I got this.

I got this.

It's why I came.

And that really

helps me a great deal.

And of course, it's so funny, the mediumship thing.

I mean, I'm going to deflect for a second.

The mediumship thing

is reviled by my buddy Greg Laurie, who, you know, is sort of

a fundamental, you know, kind of evangelistic guy.

Yeah, yeah.

He really enjoyed me.

But

I always point out to my friends from that particular quarter,

that whole book about Revelation, you know,

that is channeled.

I don't know if they've, you know, gotten come to terms with this, but John sitting in that cave and stuff and all this information he got and talking with Jesus.

I mean, I guess it's okay in the Bible, but it's not okay anywhere else.

I think this is

another sort of arrow in the quiver of God's quiver that

you will get information from so many different places.

Be careful, yeah, because, you know, the stinky one can come along for the ride once in a while and sort of insinuate his way into what you hope is a healing message.

But

God's clarity is apparent in many places.

Let me take you to one of the more incredible parts of the book.

I mean, your sister was brutally murdered and raped.

And I wanted to, at one point in the book, you

get the police report and you see the police report.

And,

I mean, it's deeply disturbing, and you read it cold.

And if you may, if I may.

I've spent more than a month away from writing, longer pause than I intended.

There were some health concerns in the family and a trip abroad.

I had reached a crossroads.

A while back, Jim Bentley with the prosecutor's office in Colorado Springs sent me a copy of the files on Karen's death.

Files of the investigation, the murder scene.

This is the record.

It was sent with a warning.

I want to caution you about the details you will learn.

If you read all the material I'm sending you, please consider having someone you know and trust to review this information before you decide to read it yourself.

There is no way to unring the bell

or perhaps have somebody else summarize the information might be an alternative to reading it yourself.

But you read it and you don't regret it.

Tell me about that moment and that process.

Yeah, it occurred to me in that moment that

if it was something so painful,

why would I make somebody else do it?

That one was for me.

That was meant for me to do.

And of course, then I tried to cushion it.

When I revealed some of the facts that I learned in the police report, I tried to make them a little more palatable to people.

I described some things that were truly horrible that Karen suffered that night.

That was in order to kind of gain a sense of credibility,

a credential of suffering that

other people who have been through similar things would recognize and say to themselves, okay, he's talking about what I know.

He's talking from the same place that we've been put in.

And sorry, sorry, excuse me.

So that they would be able to say that the advice I give is true.

The longing that I've experienced about missing my loved one is the same they've experienced.

And so that my words of

comfort come from a place they would recognize.

You

it was what you pulled out of that, if I may

read the police report again now and again.

And after two months, I now

find an uneasy comfort in these pages.

I've spent so many years playing out these moments in my imagination.

Now I know the truth.

There's no smidgen of relief.

There's only clarity.

It is the

place only imaginings of how she must have felt and thought and suffered during those final hours of her life.

Is that comfort

that you now

you now know everything?

Is it it's better?

That was real.

Yeah, that's a real thing for me because I had so much to conjecture.

You know, and I guess it's

I don't think I don't think I'm special in this regard.

I mean, being an actor, I guess we spend a lot of our time coming up with excuses, reasons, justifications, understandings, things that

connect us to the motivation of characters we're playing, fantasies, basically.

So my mind has always been very fertile that way.

So everything that Karen went through,

there was another component to it of what I imagined she went through.

So there was deep comfort in knowing truth, finally.

So many things that I supposed were not the truth.

And so the comfort I read in the pages was simply that I now had information that was accurate, that would help me keep the men and children in jail.

But also it was

It was the end to me coming up with stories that I hadn't thought of.

It was the end of imaginings.

So that was a comfort because I had spent so much of my life kind of wrestling with, oh, I wonder what that was.

I wonder if this happened or what she was doing there.

And by being able to track some of her footsteps and actually going and reliving some of them, I was able to find a way into what Karen was really thinking that night.

Stuff like that.

Before, why was she there?

Why was she sitting behind the restaurant where she'd worked?

And I suddenly realized, oh, oh, she liked company.

You know, that was a huge burden lifted from me about, how did she get there?

I'd suddenly realized, well, she walked there because she thought, maybe, you know, I'll go have a drink with a pal.

And that reduced so much of my anxiety about it to a simple remembrance of who Karen was.

Karen was great company.

She was a wonderful person to spend some time with.

And to remember that was more important than, you know, any of the horrors in a weird way.

The horrors

that I'd imagined were just just as horrible or even

what actually happened was worse than I'd imagined in many ways.

But

to know the truth did set me free, which is, you know,

biblical.

Yeah.

The truth does that.

It can make you miserable at first, but it will set you free.

You know,

can I ask you, is some of, I read a quote from somebody, I don't remember who said it, but they said, you die twice, first when you stop breathing, and second when somebody mentions your name for the very last time.

Did that kind of thinking play a role?

Isn't that great?

Did that kind of thinking play a role with you at all in

holding on to her and speaking her name and making sure she was a part of your life?

Yeah, I mean,

I discovered, I discussed it in the book.

The word remember is my favorite word because

if you break it off after the RE, right, and put a little hyphen in there, remembering means you're a member again.

You are a member of society and you are brought back to life in every moment that you're remembered.

And so that's why I think it's important and that's why it's one of the reasons I wrote the book.

But I hadn't thought of that, but what's nice is when people call or text me and say, I just finished the book, I know your sister Karen now.

It's just great to see her name written that way.

It's great to hear you say her

as though she's alive today.

And that makes all the difference.

You talk about justice in the book, and you're really, I mean, you're very raw.

You want to see your sister's murderers rot in jail.

And in fact, I think at one point you say,

you know, if I had the opportunity, I would have killed them.

And I still probably would kill them.

And I don't blame you.

I mean, it's really honest and raw.

But our culture culture

emphasizes and maybe overemphasizes at times compassion over justice.

But both justice and compassion come from God, and there's a careful balance in there.

How do we balance that?

Do you think you found the balance?

If I were to

sort of assign where that sentiment has arisen, I think it's because

we've kind of lost touch with God as a society in many ways.

I think there is a bit of a comeback going on right now, which I'm enjoying, and I hope the rest of the country is.

Yes.

But

government is flawed.

And of course, you know, judgment within the confines of our government today, and

in our courts, I mean, of course, you know that there have been some people who've gone to jail who shouldn't have.

But there are those, you know, remarkably sort of landmark cases where there's no question this guy should stay in jail um the the the prevalence right now of um

people saying well you know maybe it's been long enough that kind of stuff it's you know yes i i get that there that there is a component of what justice and compassion might actually be when they're twinned but um

this this guy is uh past that beyond that and and

needs to remain in jail.

We need to have the courage to say that.

Well, consequences do have

their place in our society.

And the free ride thing, which is what's becoming very popular right now, or the skate aspect of justice, is

not prudent.

Kelsey, I mean, just so he doesn't die his second death, I just want to say George Wendt

today, Norm on cheers.

He passed away this week.

I'd love to talk to you about that, but we're out of time.

I've only got about 45 seconds.

I would love to talk to you in a longer form at some point, but I just have to tell you, I watched the new Frasier.

You have created the funniest character that is so long run now.

The characters on your show are so brilliant, every single one of them in this new version of Frasier.

It is the funniest show, the best well-written show on television.

And thank you for all of the laughs that me and my family have watching Frasier over the years from cheers all the way to the latest.

But thank you so much for all of the laughs.

You're very thankful.

You're great.

You're a treasure.

Thanks, Kelsey.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thanks, man.

Kelsey Grammer, if you haven't seen his, you haven't seen his show, I don't remember what network it's on now, but it's fantastic.

But

you should read, especially if you've lost somebody, Karen, a brother, remembers the way he has dealt with things

and let things go.

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