Best of the Program | Guest: Sohrab Ahmari | 8/17/23

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Hey, we have a pretty amazing update on Maui that I don't think you're hearing everywhere.

We also give you the update on...

Are we on today on Apple, the podcast?

I think so.

Yeah, they've put our whole catalog back.

Well, with an exception of about 1,500

podcasts.

But on that, it's fully restored.

Why is that happening, Apple?

What exactly was the reason yesterday?

Because they said in Variety Magazine, well,

there was a copyright dispute.

No, you let us know on June 28th and on June 28th, three hours after you identified the problem, we solved the problem with your people.

So what?

What was the problem exactly?

Hmm?

And why aren't all 3,300 podcasts back?

Well, we'll continue to follow that story.

Also, we have Sorab Amari on with us.

He is the author of Tyranny Inc.

He's a guy who I usually agree with, and I agree with him on the problem.

His book, however, is offering a solution that I don't agree with at all.

I don't know if you do, but it's a conversation that we on the right need to start having, or we're going to go down a path that

I don't necessarily think is a good one.

That's Tyranny Inc.

Also the latest on Maui.

We'll tell you the story on Maui.

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Here's a podcast.

You're listening to the best of the blend back program.

All right, so we talk about Apple.

Apple.

Here is what's happening with Apple.

Apple restored the episodes to their platform yesterday.

In case you haven't heard, Apple totally deplatformed me yesterday at about noon.

They removed every last episode from Apple Podcasts.

It was removed with no explanation why for several hours.

As soon as I heard the news, I posted a video to Twitter or X or whatever.

I'm never going to get used to that.

Is anybody really going to start calling it X?

I don't think so.

They're really doing the Prince thing with it where it's really artists formerly known as Prince.

Every article is like X, the artist for the social media site formerly known as Twitter.

It's like, oh, great.

So you've taken us, you know, a six or seven letter word, whatever,

T-T-E-R, seven-letter word, whatever it is, and you've shortened it to one and then added three sentences on to explain what it means.

Thanks a lot, Elon.

Appreciate it.

Anyway, I got into X yesterday and I asked you to join me in demanding answers from Apple.

Well, thankfully, a lot of people came out in force.

Yeah.

We were trending on X all day with people on both the left and the right calling Apple out.

I was so happy to see so many people on the left who would post.

I totally disagree with him, but

this is wrong.

Yes,

thank you.

Thank you for that.

So thank you if you did any of it, because after six hours of you raising all kinds of ruckus online, Apple restored my show to their platform.

Well,

1,915 episodes of 3,000 plus catalog.

catalog.

Hmm.

So

they removed at least a decade worth of content yesterday without explanation.

At least until we started making noise about it.

Today, I read an article in Variety that said the podcast was removed because of a trademark dispute.

And quote, it has since been resolved.

Really?

Really?

A trademark.

Wow, over 3,000 episodes all over a trademark issue.

That is

weird.

Not going to get into the weeds over this, but there was a trademark dispute on one episode.

They let us know on, I think,

on June 29th.

It was resolved within hours.

We're like, not really.

Now,

if that is the reason, that's one episode.

We resolved it with them within hours.

Why would you remove over 3,000 episodes for a dispute with one?

It's a great question.

Unless you were the one filing a dispute saying someone's using my name, there's no real reason to pull the episodes.

No, you don't pull those.

Yeah, no, of course not.

It doesn't explain why they would remove the entire catalog.

At least to me, it doesn't.

Apple still has not responded to that.

Yesterday

is a prime example where I learned firsthand

why the blaze is so important.

I've learned the power of these middlemen.

If you're a conservative, the threat of deplatforming is always there,

even in the background, like a

like the sword of

Damlocles.

Is that how you say his name?

Damlocles.

You remember the guy who's holding the sword over the head?

This is why we built the blade.

The Blaze.

I'm not going to have a sword over my head.

Not going to do it.

The show is always available on Blaze TV.

I've told you in the past we need a direct relationship with you.

I ask you, please subscribe if you haven't already.

We have built a pirate ship.

Get on the ship.

I'm a bit easier.

Companies like Apple and Google and Meta can shut down your speech, our speech, literally with a keystroke.

The elites have always wanted to control what you see and what you hear.

Now big tech is giving them the means to do it.

They have done this to several of us.

Since the Republicans have had Congress, they've been a little more shy.

But I will tell you, yesterday would have been a loss of about 3 million views

if you're not getting the podcast from Apple if that's where you normally go there's about 3 million people that do that every day

that's a problem that's a real problem if we lose touch with 3 million people

please

Join our ranks.

We become stronger and we have more ability to resist big tech censorship and deliver the truth to the American people.

We want to be everywhere, everywhere anyone can possibly listen because our target audience is everyone.

But our subscribers allow us to be truly independent.

So if you're already a Blaze TV subscriber, thank you.

You are what, honestly,

when that happened yesterday, there was no warning.

There have been no strikes.

There was nothing, just gone.

And everybody started pouring into my office going, Glenn, you're off Apple.

What happened?

And I'm like, I don't know what happened.

What are you talking about off Apple?

Completely deleted the entire library.

Kind of your life flashes in front of your eyes.

And you're like, holy cow.

Are we going to be able to get messages to our audience?

Thank God Elon Twitter.

Elon is at Twitter or X.

I like what he's doing with the censorship stuff, just not as much, the naming stuff.

Yeah, I know.

But I mean, it it is important.

Like, you know, yesterday, this one is pseudo-resolved.

I mean, again, I put pseudo in there because only about half the episodes seem to be there.

But okay, maybe who knows what that is.

My point, though, is that there's going to be a time where these things come off and they don't come back.

They don't come back.

And if we don't have contact with you,

you won't know.

You won't know.

You won't know what happened to us if we don't have a direct line to you.

So please, this is the biggest discount we've offered ever.

It will not be censored.

It'll save you $30 off your one-year subscription when you use it at checkout.

We need you with us now more than ever.

I will tell you that I think something is, there's just a lot of things in my life.

It's always a trend.

You know, when you're getting close to doing something really, really big.

And I don't know what that is, but when you're getting close to doing something big, there's all kinds of problems that keep cropping up.

And we're in that kind of a period right now.

And

I just said to a friend of mine who is coming in to work with me today, I said,

I have a feeling we're on the verge of something.

I don't know what it is, but my gosh, look at this string of coincidence.

Now, yesterday, I don't know if this had anything to do with it, but yesterday's podcast was who's the real crime family, Trump or Biden?

We are over the target on this

and we're not going to let it go.

So please join us.

By the way,

when they restore the show in its entirety, then you can let up on Apple on X.

That's when you can go and say,

all right, Apple did the right thing.

But so far, 1,915 podcasts have been restored, and we are over 3,000.

It's about 33 in change.

So what's happening?

Now,

this is something

that

I talked about in Dark Future.

And I want to read what I wrote just recently.

Because it applies directly to this.

This is the example of what I was talking about in Dark Future, and it applies to you.

Important question coming in from our listeners, Glenn, here is, why is Glenn talking about his podcast in the voice of Count Chocula?

And I thought that was an interesting question.

There will be no questions here.

From Dark Future, chapter 5.

In the future, you will own nothing.

This is from my new book, Chapter 5.

To most, the idea of not knowing anything probably seems like a far-off concept, especially when you think about it through the lens of capitalistic consumer-centric culture that we now live in.

How could we possibly shift toward a society like the one that's described in the You'll Own Nothing article?

The answer is gradually, then all at once.

I say this with confidence because we already see this trend playing out in a number of industries.

For example, one aspect of our economy where the idea of owning nothing has developed the fastest is in the entertainment industry.

Technological innovation has dramatically altered the way we access movies, television, short films, podcasts, music, and other forms of entertainment.

I then highlight the dangers in the book of not owning physical media by talking about the rise of popularity in streaming services like Netflix and Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

And I write, the data printed onto a disc or recorded on a cassette are there permanently.

If the physical media remains undamaged, I'll have access to that data forever.

This is not the case when dealing with streaming services.

The data for the movie as it exists on a streaming service servers, like those owned by Netflix, are fluid.

At any time, Netflix could take down Top Gun.

Its copyright owners could alter the movie, and then Netflix could upload it, re-upload it without any warning to the consumer at home.

They can do this because you don't own the content.

They do.

You are just renting access to the film.

Later in the same chapter, I wrote, the music and podcast streaming service Spotify also has moderated content due to the social pressure.

Podcasting giant Joe Rogan had more than 100 episodes removed by Spotify because of an alleged instance of misinformation, which included dangerous things like interviewing Dr.

Robert Malone, a scientist who helped develop the mRNA vaccines.

Don't expect the censors to stop there.

Later, I wrote in the book, the point of all of this is to say, when you don't own physical media, That media is susceptible to change.

The corporations that do own the media can do whatever they want with it.

If a show contains a joke that is considered too cruel or tasteless by current societal norms, delete it.

If a movie's depiction of a person, gender, orientation, or race is no longer socially acceptable, change it.

If you hold a movie,

show, or even a piece of music near and dear to your heart, you might want to consider owning a physical copy, because nothing is stopping the corporation that owns it from altering or destroying it completely if the political winds blow hard enough.

Now,

you might be thinking as the reader of this book, Glenn, why are you spending so much time talking about movies and streaming services?

I picked up this book to read about the future in the World Economic Forum.

What does this have to do with property rights and private ownership?

Think about what control these corporations have over your media when you don't own it.

Then imagine what they could do in a world where you don't own anything and the corporation and governments own everything.

What happened yesterday with the Apple podcast on my program is exactly why ownership matters.

It is exactly why elites in the Biden administration, Davos, Wall Street firms like BlackRock want to consolidate property.

That's why

They need ownership.

It's why the government is so eager to work hand in hand with giant corporations.

If you don't own the platform, the media, the news, or opinion product, then you don't control it.

It can be altered without any warning like it was yesterday, deleted from history, thousands of episodes, over a decade of my work.

For no real reason,

they can cancel it.

This is the future that is being imposed on the world.

And if you don't understand it, the day will soon come when the only voices you hear are approved by the ruling class and corporate elites.

Please join us at Blaze TV.

Please join us.

By the way,

I just have to say thank you to a couple of people.

It was really remarkable, all of the people that are

that came out yesterday to help.

Looks like I may have to go elsewhere to listen to podcasts if Apple is going to remove Glenn Beck's program from the podcast.

A whole lot of us are going to say, we found an issue with Apple from Mike Lee.

He followed it up with Glenn Beck having such a large audience, you'd think Apple would be reluctant to take this step.

Sometimes such behavior can be observed with companies that face so little competition in a particular field that they don't fear alienating millions of customers.

JD Vance also said, need some answers from Apple ASAP.

This looks like an awful lot like a major American corporation engaging in election interference.

Donald Trump Jr.

said big tech censorship is the biggest threat to free speech and free expression in America.

Apple's now engaging in open election interference by censoring Glenn Beck for telling the truth about Joe Biden's corruption.

Jeremy Boring from the Daily Riar wrote, this must be a mistake.

Glenn is one of the best men in the business and perhaps the greatest living broadcaster.

Well, he said living.

So

he said that.

I was like, good God,

that's really sad.

I saw that comment.

I was like, oh, that's crazy.

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

Ed Krassenstein, who noted he disagrees with me much of the time, said, conservative commentator Glenn Beck has reportedly been banned from Apple iTunes without any explanation.

First, I must say I completely disagree with so much of what Glenn Beck has to say, and I think a lot of his politics are absurd.

With that said, if Beck actually has been banned merely for voicing his free speech, I think it's wrong of Apple to do.

It'll be interesting to see what reason Apple gives for this banning or if it was done by mistake.

I'm unaware of any recent major controversy or hateful over-the-top message that Beck has spread over the airwaves.

Yeah, we haven't had one of those in like two weeks.

I know.

So, I mean,

what's the problem?

But thank you for that.

We have to turn to the country that my father always held up to me and said, you know, I so disagree with what you're saying, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.

This is the best of the Glen Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.

I want to start with a story that is up in Glenbeck.com, and it is all about you.

The wildfire that raged across Maui became the deadliest fire in U.S.

history, claiming more than 100 lives.

I think that number is going to go up.

As search and rescue missions continue throughout the burnt remains of the historic town, Lahaina, in times of profound tragedy, Glenn's audience has rallied around those enduring profound need and suffering through generous giving.

On air this week, Glenn rallied the troops again to support the grieving communities in Maui, challenging his audience to raise more money than the U.S.

government aid package.

And you're doing just this.

I want you to listen to this.

As of 8.52 8.52 p.m.

yesterday, you, Glenn's audience, raised $472,824

for the people of Maui via Glenn's nonprofit Mercury One.

That's nearly half a million dollars raised within the first couple of days to our call of action to match the government's aid package, which has now been raised to a whopping $2.3 million through FEMA.

That means this audience alone has done one-fifth of the lifting the entire FEMA and United States government has done.

One-fifth.

All of those proceeds, every single penny, will go towards the residents as they grieve and rebuild in the tough days ahead.

Through your

committed support, we are well on its way, our way to surpassing the government's package.

This is something that I said when I first started Mercury One.

If we want the government to do less, then we have to do more.

I would love

if this audience will never be recognized for it, but it doesn't matter.

We're not doing it for that.

I would love to be able to say that this audience raised more for Maui than the federal government did.

Why do we need the federal government involved in all of our lives?

Now, yesterday, so you know, our website was hacked into and Apple dropped my podcast.

So all of this was done yesterday just on the power of the radio program or people listening on other things other than Apple, the radio, Blaze TV, and other than Apple podcast listeners.

We can do so much more.

And I want to tell you how bad things really,

truly are.

I got a note yesterday from somebody

and they said, Glenn, I just got this about 10 minutes ago.

Things are deteriorating rapidly.

We have a corporate accountant who does a lot of business in Lahaina.

I sent him a clip of a girl talking about what was happening there.

Here was his response.

Total disaster in every way.

Fire hydrants did not work.

No one was evacuated.

No police or fire crew helping evacuate.

I can't even file insurance claims for 20 businesses as the area is locked down by National Guard so insurance ingestors can't even observe the ruins in person.

Question mark, question mark, question mark.

No claim can be filed, question mark.

I've been dealing with this all week and I'm told they're bodies everywhere and for a week they've been hiding the death toll.

No local leadership.

Maui now taken over by the feds.

None of these people will have enough money to rebuild.

Too expensive as everything has to be new building codes.

That'll mean rich people will buy the land and will be even less housing for locals.

It will end up being the worst natural disaster in our history.

95% of the island is untouched by this.

A rebuild of Lahaina will take 10 years.

The cleanup alone will take two to three years as there is no infrastructure or labor to do it.

That's the note I received last night.

I want you to know that because of you, we are already doing amazing things.

We have Operation Barbecue Relief, Samaritan's Purse, Operation Blessing, IT DRC,

Harvest Church, which that's Greg Lori's church in California, but he also has Sister Church in Maui.

Drew Friedrich, chief operating officer, I got a note from him from Operation Blessing.

He said, I want you to know you are the first organization on the ground to provide aid.

Operation Blessing,

we have helped them to get there.

Let's see.

Samaritan's Purse, they wrote in.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for the generosity of your audience, Mercury One, which has helped us airlift 17 tons of

supplies to Maui in the wake of the deadliest fire.

Supplies on that DC-8 cargo aircraft include hygiene kits, solar lights, cooking kits, plastic tarp, equipment needed for us to help in the aftermath of this disaster as residents are allowed to return to their communities.

Samaritan's Purse volunteers will help homeowners sift through the ashes for any sentimental seat keepsakes that may have survived the flames.

Also, Operation BBQ Relief is there, and they provide food, hot food, for any of the workers and also any of the families who have been displaced.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

The attack on our website did not slow you down yesterday.

And I find it interesting that

two things happened yesterday.

As I just said,

We want to raise more money than the federal government because we want them to do less.

As I was in that commercial, I went into that commercial break, hackers hacked into

mercury1.org and took the entire site down.

Luckily, we have a very good security team, and it went right back up probably within an hour or so.

But our staff over at Mercury One just started taking phone calls, people making donations.

This is one that we really want to to be

helpful with because these are not rich people on Hawaii.

This is a local

historic town.

And what's being done to it, I think you can find in Dark Future, the book that I wrote.

But let me just give you the facts of what happened

because it is not what's being reported.

So I want to give you something from the

von Mises

people.

This is from Mises.org.

I think it is such a great article that I should read it verbatim.

The most destructive natural disasters are never 100% natural.

Human choices, land use, and government policies play a big role in how harmful hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, flash floods, and wildfires are to affect communities.

Though the details are still emerging, it has become clear that government failure did much to make this disaster worse and possibly even started it.

While the so-called experts are blaming climate change and in the process demanding that government grab even more power and authority to someday give us better weather, the destructiveness of this fire was the product of an all-powerful and all-incompetent regime.

The specific origins of this fire are still being investigated, but there is much we already know.

The city of Lahaina sits on the west coast of Maui, Hawaii's second largest island.

It's surrounded by grassland, much of which is owned by the state.

This is really important.

Nearly a decade ago, Hawaii Wildlife Management Organization, a research nonprofit, warned the Hawaiian government that the area around Lahaina was extremely fire

due to frequent downslope winds, steep terrain, and dry grass.

Little to nothing was done by the state government to address these risks.

A subsequent report in 2020 added that an invasive species of exceptionally flammable grass was prevalent in the surrounding fields and that passing hurricanes created strong winds known to fuel wildfires on the islands.

Early last week, week, Hurricane Dora crossed the ocean south of Hawaii.

By early Tuesday morning, August 8th, winds as fast as 60 miles an hour were blowing down the slopes of West Maui Mountains into Lahaina.

Around

sunrise, a large fault was detected in the power grid, indicating a downed power line.

20 minutes later, the first reports of fire came in from an area around the road, uphill and upwind from the city.

The area where flames were first spotted is full of electrical infrastructure, mostly operated by Hawaiian Electric, the state's monopoly electricity supplier.

This included a substation and a multitude of power lines.

Most of the land in the area is owned by the state of Hawaii except for a parcel belonging to the estate of one of Hawaii's last princesses.

This parcel housed on a solar farm supplying electricity to the Hawaiian Electric Substation.

Early last year, NPR published a glowing article about the solar project

praising it as the direct result of government regulation crafted to help transition Hawaii to 100% renewable power by 2045.

But on the morning of August 8th, as winds hammered the old wooden utility poles, this highly electrified area in the dry grasses above Lahaina was quickly becoming dangerous.

Yet no formal procedure was in place to shut off sections of the grid in the face of severe fire risks.

As a result, 29 fully energized poles fell across West Maui that day.

Say that again.

29 fully energized electrical poles.

Have you ever seen one of those go down?

They tend to throw sparks.

Even with the down poles in the way, the first firefighters on the scene met with some early success.

Around 9 a.m., the county fire department declared the fire 100% contained.

But the message to residents included an ominous request.

The county's water pumps were powered by electricity, much of which was frantically being turned off to deactivate the down lines.

Officials asked the public to conserve water to preserve water pressure.

But by mid-afternoon, a flare-up brought the fire back to life on the Lahaina Bypass, a major road that heads straight into town.

The flames moved swiftly into Lahaina at 4.46 p.m.

one minute after the county government finally set out an alert to warn the city's population, largely without power, about the flare-up that had occurred over an hour before.

To make matters worse, county officials failed to activate emergency sirens, leaving residents unaware of the danger bearing down on them.

And as firefighters heroically rushed toward the flame and trying to save their own community, they found that there was little to no water pressure in the fire hydrants, which quickly ran dry.

So far, I haven't heard anything about global warming.

With a single backed-up highway leading out of the city, many residents of Lahaina had nowhere to go.

Some scrambled into the ocean to escape the smoke and the flames, but in the end, many couldn't get out.

At least 99 people have been confirmed dead, and as of this writing, making this the deadly American wildfire in over a century, in addition, 2,207 buildings were destroyed with property damages expected to reach $5.5 billion.

To review, a power company shielded from competition by the state placed electrical infrastructure among highly flammable state-owned grass fields above the historic city of Lahina.

which the government was twice warned were highly susceptible to fire.

And once fire broke out, a combination of defective water infrastructure, terrible communication by government officials, and only one escape route doomed the people of Lahaina to the worst wildfire experience in this country in over a hundred years.

This was government failure through and through.

In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises explains that on the market, the ultimate source of profits is foresight, the ability to anticipate future conditions.

And economic loss occurs when market actors fail to anticipate the future.

The possibility of riches if one succeeds and the guarantee of painful failures if one doesn't forces producers and service providers on the market to constantly weigh risks and opportunities.

Government, however, immunizes immunizes itself from the profit and loss system and therefore from much of the need to weigh risk.

Sure, some county officials may resign because of this, and the share price of Hawaiian Electric may dip, but the people of Maui will be forced to keep compensating the very organizations that have failed them, and there is nothing natural about that kind of a disaster.

Now,

I want you to take this beyond Maui.

Why are we still in the financial troubles that we were in in 08?

Why are we still looking at banking collapses?

I'll tell you why.

Because the banks weren't held responsible.

No one felt the actual pain except you.

Why are our

schools failing us?

Because the teachers' unions are in bed with the Department of Education and no one is held responsible.

Nobody pays the price for this education except you and your children.

Afghanistan, why did all those people die?

Don't know because no one was held responsible.

Inflation, it's the government in bed with the Fed and no one is held responsible.

Crime on the streets, no one is held responsible.

Crime and corruption in DC.

No one is held responsible.

The media lies and lies and lies and no one is held responsible.

All of these things is the government in bed with private corporations or unions.

And they don't have to pay a price because the government is in bed with them.

The government never has to pay a price because they can just print more money.

The only one that pays a price is you, and in this particular case, the poor people of Lahaina in Maui.

Where are they going to go?

Because I can guarantee you, if Dark Future is right, the government is going to take that land and make it into a national park or something like that.

Please.

Help the people in Lahaina today.

Any donation is welcome.

but let's raise money and show the average person, the people who actually lost their homes and their lives, that we actually care.

Go to mercury1.org, mercuryone.org and donate now, a disaster relief fund at mercuryone.org.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

Now, Saurab,

not often do I have a friend that says, you know, Woodrow Wilson was great,

but I'm making the exception with you.

And I really want to go through your book.

I've enjoyed reading it.

Well, thank you for having me back, Glenn.

I'm happy to talk about old Woodrow.

Okay.

So, first of all, outline the problem that you see.

Yeah, sure.

It's a problem of economic coercion that ordinary people face in in daily life.

We as Americans, but especially as the conservative movement in the last two generations since Goldwater Reagan have come to think of coercion and unjust coercion as only what government does.

In recent years, we've come face to face with a new mode of coercion, which is

either directed exclusively from the private sector, from large corporations, banks, et cetera, or some combination of those types of businesses in collusion with government.

So there are really like big headline-grabbing cases that I talk about in the book, like

the censorship of the Hunter Biden story by Twitter and Facebook, where I was at kind of the eye of the storm when that happened.

And I came and spoke with you on the show about it just as it was unfolding.

And did the debanking of people who are, you know, whose political views aren't acceptable to the liberal left, et cetera, et cetera.

But there are also more, less visible kinds of this, right?

So for example, and this will get us into the weeds, and I won't go too far into the weeds, but the use of commercial arbitration in the workplace, just to give one example.

Arbitration is good.

It's a kind of a neutral mediator comes between two merchants of relatively equal bargaining power.

They agree not to go to court if they have a dispute, but to privately resolve it.

That's fine.

That's been around since 1925 with the Federal Arbitration Act.

But in recent decades, increasingly workers' complaints are corralled into these types of courts, privatized courts where like Ernst ⁇ Young or Bank of America get to set the rules, and you as the worker are far less, you don't have the same bargaining power where you can say no to this or dispute this, and it means that you can't vindicate rights that you otherwise have.

I don't know, like the Fair Labor Standards Act or whatever kind of economic rights you might think of become blocked.

And so that's the problem.

I talk about the kind of high headline-grabbing cases like Amazon, you know, making a lot of money out of the pandemic because they were deemed essential, whereas lots of small businesses weren't, and then oppressing their own workers and their kind of hellish Dickensian warehouses.

I talk about those, but much of the book is about these less visible kinds of private coercion, where, for example, the Fackler family of notoriety associated with the opioid crisis was able to use the coercive elements of U.S.

bankruptcy law to shield their assets

from states and from hospitals, from insurers and ordinary Americans who'd been harmed by the opioid crisis.

So I just suggest that, and here where the kind of the bit that you mentioned about Woodrow Wilson comes in, that conservatives used to actually be more attuned to this problem.

In other words, Wilson was not the only one.

There was a kind of tradition in the GOP, figures like Teddy Roosevelt, then especially after the New Deal, figures like Eisenhower and Nixon, who recognized that there is such a thing as private tyranny, and the way to take charge of it or to tame it is by greater democratic control and sort of political response to giant market actors that otherwise get to set their own prices, their oligopoly, so that their prices that they set, how they treat their workers and stuff is not that kind of free market

arcadia, that paradise that was described by Adam Smith in the late 18th century.

The markets are much more complex, much more concentrated, so it requires greater state efforts to protect us from being debanked by a large bank the way Nigel Farage was in Britain.

So

here's my question to you, because this is the debate that I think

we're having now.

Are we going to go back to a constitution that really hasn't been used in a hundred years?

And are we going to reset back to its factory settings?

Or are we going to develop something entirely new?

And the left has already made their choice.

They are, and I think you would agree with me, I think,

that we are right now

a pretty fascistic kind of country where the government is in bed with these corporations

and they're doing the bidding for one another so they can get things done.

And if you play ball, then you get money and you get all kinds of perks.

If you don't play ball, you're out of business.

Would you agree with that?

Well, I actually do want to go back to our constitutional tradition.

I would only suggest that our constitutional tradition is more complex than some, I would say, doctrinaire libertarian free market types suggest.

In other words, our constitution was shaped by men like Alexander Hamilton, and it was very much

seen as a developmentalist state, right?

Because Hamilton and John Marshall, very influential Supreme Court justice early on, they were determined that the United States wouldn't become like a backwater for Britain where all they get is natural resources here and they treat us as a

captive market for Britain's own industrial development and industrial manufacturing products.

So they did all sorts of things like setting in place a First Bank of the United States to ensure a steady supply of credit that was disciplined and wasn't like kind of wild.

They created

internal improvements and import substitutions and tariffs and so on and so forth.

This was all within

the founding generation or within living memory of the founding generation.

So the idea of a state that

kind of takes charge of the economy for the general welfare

wasn't alien to the founding generation.

No, and of course, then you have like you have like the Jacksonians come around because then they noticed that that bank now had become the second bank of the United States had sort of become a vehicle for the wealthy.

So Andrew Jackson waged war against it and sort of said, hey, we need greater political control over these institutions that kind of

can shape the lives of yeoman farmers and workers and so on and so forth.

So it's, you know, because the economy and politics can't be so neatly ever separated, they never, the American tradition never thought of the economy as this autonomous zone of perfect freedom and competition.

They realized that it's all bound up with what government does or chooses not to do.

So here's arguing for a more complex reading of the American tradition.

So here is the issue, and I think our founders came down to this:

where are the better angels now in Google, Facebook,

Apple?

Where are the better angels in Washington?

Where are the better angels in the media?

Where are they?

Well, you know, unfortunately, I would just say that the founders could be

pretty cynical about human nature.

And so they had, you know, as Madison famously wrote, you know, if men were angels, you wouldn't need government.

But as it is, men are not angels.

And so

although Lincoln was obviously

the

better angels guy,

he expressed that as a sentiment to call forth, you know, the best of us.

And that was his inaugural one.

He was somebody that was very, very alone

and really an aberration.

You know, the

man

is an animal.

He is an animal, and he is driven by many things.

At the very bottom, it's food and water and survival.

But as he becomes more and more powerful, he is driven by money, power over people, fame, and those things all corrupt.

They all corrupt.

And our problem is, is that we have everybody, it seems, at the top, has been corrupted one way or another.

And the reason why it is corrupt, I believe, is because the government can be bought off by giant corporations and little people don't have the money to buy them off.

So there's no representation.

The people who are running for office, they don't care what the people do.

They'll say whatever they have to to get them to vote for them.

But they don't actually care or like those people.

They're not representing.

They're representing themselves.

So everything that is happening is a corruption of

us not putting the shackles on a powerful government, but letting, quite honestly, the Woodrow Wilson administrative state, where no one answers for the wrong,

just letting it grow.

Yep.

So first of all, the bit that I quote from Wilson is just to say that during wartime, during World War I, whether you agree in the U.S.

entry into World War I or not, he showcased that you can bring government, labor, management, businesses together to say, how do we build up the whole economy and put it on a war footing and be able to deliver material to Europe and men and so on and so forth, logistics.

And

that model

is now woven through the American tradition.

And it finds its fullest flowering in the New Deal.

But then as I said, like Eisenhower went even further on some of this kind of logic of government, labor, workers, and then management and business all coming together to make decisions for the general welfare of the whole, which, again, because of that Hamiltonian streak in the founding is not some obnoxious and weird thing.

But the problem is that I think that the conservative movement has, because it's, especially, again, since Goldwater Reagan says, I reject the administrative say, all of that.

We don't take part in it.

We don't actively try to shape it.

So

it only comes down like a boot on our faces.

And the frustration is understandable.

I mean, I'm no fan of vaccine mandates, and I'm on the record about all of that.

But

the bottom line is that

already by the 19th century, we had an unbelievably complex economy.

And

if left to its own devices, you would have...

very few people concentrating power and wealth to the detriment of the farmer, the debtor, the worker, and so on and so forth.

And that complexity requires equally complex government because Congress can't

regulate the minuche of the railroad business.

It can just broadly say, well, the railroads should be this and that.

But to deal with the railroad business at the granular level,

you need the complexity of the administrative state.

And I think a lot of conservatives who say, well, this is just all unconstitutional.

I don't want any of it.

I invite them to take the first flight after the Federal Aviation Administration has been abolished or to

see what their neighborhoods are like once police is abolished, right?

All of this sort of service.

Police.

Nobody's talking.

Nobody in the conservative side is talking about abolishing police.

Well, I mean, I hear about like, you know, FBI abolition.

Oh, yeah.

I'm fully on board for that.

Fully on board.

So, totally.

I agree.

Insofar as the FBI has become this sort of lawless agency that's used to...

Again, Glenn, remember, I'm on the right.

I know, I know, no, no.

So, Rob, I'm not.

You know, there are things that the FBI does besides persecuting, you know, Trumpians that is actually pretty valuable.

So we're not prepared to give that stuff up.

So even like Vivek Ramasfani, who's called for abolition of FBI, is calling for some other agency that would do the things that the FBI is supposed to do.

So the point is that the administrative state is to some extent unavoidable.

It's a sort of extension of Congress's will in a complex society and economy.

How do we deal with this complexity?

Well, you got to delegate it to these experts.

But if we don't take part in it on the right, if we don't try to shape it,

then we get so, Rob, we are having the same conversation that our founders had with Hamilton.

This is the same argument, and it will never go away because it's the original argument.

Let me just ask you this: it is great.

I'm enjoying having you on.

I hope you don't feel otherwise.

I know, I know.

How do we avoid centralizing power to the extent that

it causes us to be vulnerable to the bad guy grabbing the reins?

Yep, so I mean I think that one way that certainly the book, which as you can tell from what I'm saying, is heavily focused on the economy, is we need to promote a high-wage manufacturing economy like we had

in the mid-century or in the mid-20th century era.

And we were told that, oh, it's it's inevitable.

We all can only either do services or financial industry or these like apps, like porn apps.

Right.

And we deliberately gave up our own manufacturing system.

When you have a high-wage economy

where workers are dignified and they're paid well and they're skilled, like we did, again, we did in the mid-century era, they're not so at the mercy of the government either.

They're not so powerless.

So, what the problem right now is we have

a low-wage, high-welfare economy.

What that means is not that the welfare net is all that generous, actually can be kind of miserly because you have to pass all these tests and so forth.

But the point is that the typical worker, the working poor or like the bottom half of the country in many ways, in order to make ends meet, they have to rely on a high share of all kinds of welfare that

doesn't come from their job, it comes from their taxpayer.

And that puts you at the mercy, not just, of course, of the boss, because you're very vulnerable, anything that happens, you get fired, but also puts you

at at the mercy of the welfare administrator and more broadly of the administrative state.

So if we, I mean, I think conservatives are coming around to this, that, hey, we didn't have to ship off manufacturing to like Vietnam and China.

Right.

It's not like, it's not like

China's brutal labor laws and

horrible government are a natural competitive advantage.

It's just how they run their country, and we made a choice to ship off our jobs.

I think here where we can agree on is the importance of restoring a manufacturing high-wage economy.

Limits on immigration help with that, you know, because

if there's always a reserve of poorly paid laborers willing to do things for less, then that's, you know, it weakens our workers.

The book is called Tyranny Eek.

And so, Rob, I hope we continue our conversation.

I disagree with you

pretty wholeheartedly, but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.

And I hope we can have more conversations with this attitude on the program with you.

Thank you.

You're very kind, Gwen.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

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