Best of the Program | Guest: Sen. Mike Lee | 6/14/22

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Welcome to the podcast.

Today we have Senator Mike Lee on.

He's going to talk to us about everything that's going on in the Supreme Court, and there is a lot of it right now.

Carol Roth also joins us today to talk to us about the economy, what is happening right now, and how dark it's going to get.

And And we have a completely ridiculous clip of Nancy Pelosi on a show with a bunch of drag queens.

Because why wouldn't we have that?

Here's the podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the Blenbeck program.

All right, let me go to Mike Lee,

the author of Saving Nine, a brand new book that's been out for, I don't know, about a month or so,

a great book on understanding why

and what the consequences are of Joe Biden packing the courts.

Senator, how are you, sir?

Doing great, Glenn.

Good to be with you.

I'm not hearing anything in return.

Is that a problem?

It is kind of a problem.

I think Senator Lee can hear me.

Senator, are you there?

Yes.

Hear both of you.

Hear you loud and clear.

I can't hear you.

Yeah, we're hearing you okay.

The music went out, by the way, halfway through.

Glenn is

having some audio issues at his location, Senator.

But I know he wanted to talk to you about the Supreme Court.

We have a bunch of big

decisions that are going to come down in the next couple of weeks.

Obviously, the Dobbs case with abortion has been kind of the marquee one that everyone's been talking about.

But can you kind of walk us through maybe a little bit on that one and what else we expect over the next couple of weeks?

Sure.

So with the Dobbs opinion itself, we're dealing with the question of abortion and we're dealing with whether or not it is a matter of federal constitutional law that the states may not regulate or restrict abortions in most circumstances.

This has been the case more or less since 1973.

The Supreme Court has stepped in and said this is a matter for federal judges to decide.

Because federal judges, seven out of nine Supreme Court justices sitting in 1973 decided that it was.

The Supreme Court, based on the opinion, the draft majority opinion that was leaked from Justice Alito, it appears that the court is poised to undo the Dobbs ruling and undo

this 49-year aberration from the constitutional norm in which the Supreme Court has made this a question for Supreme Court justices rather than lawmakers.

So that's a big one.

There are still some other big cases left to be decided, including the New York Rifle and Pistol Association case.

In that case, the court is looking at some Second Amendment issues, specifically whether it's constitutional for the state of New York to decide that in order to have a gun, people have to convince the state that

they have an unusual right, an exceptional or extraordinary need to possess a gun and wield it outside their home.

You see, the state of New York has in some ways relegated the use of the Second Amendment right to an individual's own home, and the plaintiffs in that case are challenging them.

So, those could both be big blockbuster cases, and I suspect they might come right down to the wire because typically the way it works at the Supreme Court is that the cases that are most hotly disputed are reserved to the end, partly because of the way the justices draft opinions and negotiate their release.

So, Mike,

hello and welcome to the program.

Thanks for joining us today.

There is also a fight over.

No,

there's also a fight over the EPA's power to redistrict greenhouse gases.

And we've got a few things.

Let me just play this for you.

Here's Gina McCarthy

from the

Biden White House.

She's a climate advisor.

Listen to what she said during an interview yesterday.

And so so the challenge is now that we're moving from denial to actually just trying to

disengage the public from understanding the values of solar energy, the values of wind energy, the benefits of clean energy.

We have to get tighter.

We have to get better at communicating.

And frankly, the tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation.

That's what the fossil fuel companies pay for.

That's what folks who make money out of fossil fuels and don't make money

and don't care about saving consumers' costs.

That's what they do.

I can't believe this is coming from the administration, but also the Justice Department

is taking a series of actions to secure environmental justice for all Americans.

They now have an Office of of Environmental Justice.

Mike, this is everywhere, and it's all being done just by the stroke of a pin in the administration.

Tell me about this next case, and will it stop things like this?

All right, so it's not going to stop the inclination of the left and of people on the left who hold high office in the executive branch from wishing that they could silence anyone who disagrees with them.

But I think we can get to the heart of the issue.

I think there is some potential that one or more of these cases pending before the Supreme Court involving the EPA's vast sweeping authority could help rein in their power.

Part of what breeds this kind of attitude, Glenn, is that over time,

in part because of the way we've accumulated power in the federal government, we have allowed Congress to essentially delegate lawmaking power over to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats at agencies like the EPA.

And once that happens, they start behaving as if judge, jury, and executioner, as if they have the power to make and interpret and enforce the laws within their own little fiefmens, which they actually kind of do.

And so

these issues present constitutional questions, and those constitutional questions have reached a boiling point, and that's why I'm guardedly optimistic the court might rein in some of their power here.

Guardedly optimistic.

Yeah, look, these things move in glacial paper.

It feels like we could.

Right.

But it feels like this could be an incredible summer for

people who believe in the Constitution.

Yes.

And that's a brilliant thing.

That's a wonderful thing.

You see, because it's one of the things that the founding fathers agreed upon is that the lawmaking power is not delegable.

You can't elect someone to be a lawmaker and then have that person delegate the task over to someone else.

Charles de Montesquieu, one of the most influential political philosophers on the founding generation,

had explained that that is a non-delegable duty.

We've gradually drifted away from that.

And this is actually something I talk about a little bit in my book, Saving Nine, that

once FDR threatened to pack the court, then the court changed its approach to interpreting the Constitution.

That opened the floodgates.

And all of a sudden, the twin structural protections of the Constitution, federalism and separation of powers, meant less and less.

That's how we get these almighty czars within these executive branch agencies.

who just think they have the power to do anything and everything, which they kind of do.

And the Supreme Court has the potential to rein that in.

And I hope and pray that they do this year.

I want to take a quick break, Mike, and then I want to come back and ask you for

the

cases that are now being announced tomorrow and then again on Monday and Wednesday of next week.

The most consequential cases, the ones that can change America

for the better or for the worse, depending on how they are decided.

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

So there is a story in the Atlantic, how San Francisco became a failed city.

And it's pretty eye-opening.

Not long ago, we met on a stoop by the Civic Center, it says, where her son used to hang out.

She hadn't seen him in months, but she spoke with him periodically.

She cried as she talked about his journey into drugs.

She said he was a heroin addict.

He'd get sober after stints in jail, but it wouldn't last.

I'd see him sometimes, and he didn't look that bad, and that's how it was for ten years.

But then, the dealers started putting fentanyl in everything, and being on fentanyl, it changed him.

He deteriorated.

Before, he looked kind of healthy and smiling.

Now, he's got this stoop.

He walks almost at a 40-degree angle, like an old man.

He's been stabbed twice.

He's got an infection in his thumb, and she thought he might lose the hand.

They need to stop ignoring the fact that there are people out here selling fentanyl on the streets.

When it was just heroin,

I can't believe I'm saying just heroin, but when it was just heroin, fentanyl is different.

We're normalizing people dying.

Do you see what even the Atlantic is saying?

When it was just heroin.

I can't believe I'm saying that.

But isn't that the way we say almost everything now?

She said she was out looking for her son one day in the Tenderloin neighborhood when she came across someone else's son.

He was naked in front of a safeway and he was saying he was God and he was eating a cardboard box.

Officers arrived after she called the police and said there was nothing they can do.

He didn't want help.

He wasn't hurting anyone.

They said it's not illegal to be naked.

They just left him there naked, eating cardboard on the street in front of Safeway.

America, is this what you want your town to be like?

Now,

even in San Francisco and the article makes a really good point

the article says we thought we were doing the right thing you know we thought that we were just a loving city yada yada and it didn't work out that way yes none of this will work out that way history will show you that

Look, how many times have we been saying on the air here, and people mocked me for saying it, when I said, this is not going to work out well economically.

We are going to come, there's going to come a time we're going to pay a heavy price.

Even MSNBC said yesterday,

and this was Obama's guy,

MSNBC, they're on the air saying, hey, you know, I guess in a weird sort of way, we got to thank that senator from West Virginia for voting no on the Build Back Better bill because boy, would that have made things worse.

All of this stuff is making things worse.

It's not making it better.

And we think we can see it coming, but we have missed every single time.

You know, there's something about looking at things that are dark.

You don't want to think about them.

You don't want to look at...

That's why we walk by people who are homeless and we look the other way or we don't make eye contact.

We don't want to think about their life.

And then what do we do?

do?

We'll say, ah, he's probably faking it or he probably deserves it.

I got news for you.

A lot of people are going to be homeless that didn't deserve it.

A lot of things are coming our way.

And we haven't done a damn thing.

Did you hear about the Border Patrol?

Border Patrol says we're at the breaking point.

There is no morale.

So when you say, how's morale?

Is it up?

The answer is: morale, there is no morale.

We're going to pay a price for what has happened on the border.

We're going to pay a price for ESG.

We already are.

How high do your gas prices have to go before your neighbors say, okay,

enough of this, enough?

It's not just the crazy lunatics that are the progressives that are easy to point to.

It is happening in red states as well.

And I want to use this as an example because you have to stop thinking it can't happen here.

It can't happen because we have a Republican.

Let me give you one of the reddest counties in one of the reddest states in America, Utah.

Provo, Utah.

Utah County

doesn't get much redder than that.

If you talk to the police and the sheriff's department there, you will hear a horror story.

That for the first time, they have cartel members living in the county.

For the first time, they have people in jail that are saying to their attorneys, I'm not going for that charge.

No way.

I'm not pleading guilty.

You go fight that because I just read in the paper that the DA's office, the county attorney's office, is cutting deals.

That's a misdemeanor now.

24

out of the 31

attorneys that work in the Utah County Attorney's Office, 24

have now left because this county attorney is so horrible.

His name is David Levitt.

It is remarkable.

Prior to his tenure, it was rare for more than two attorneys to leave every year.

Now,

24 prosecutors have left, and this guy is running for re-election.

And he says that what he's doing is,

you know, he's just changing, he's reimagining.

Oh boy, have you heard that before?

He's just changing things up.

And one of the things he wanted to change is get rid of the special, what is it, SVU,

the special victims unit.

Isn't that the one that is

about

crimes against women and rape and children?

You're getting rid of that?

We have all forgotten that this can happen in our community.

And it most likely is in some way or another.

And I don't care how conservative you guys think your town is.

It's there.

And when it comes to justice, You know, at the entrance of the Supreme Court, lady justice is there.

It's a statue of a blindfolded woman holding scales in one hand and a sword in the other.

So she has to balance justice and mercy.

And the sword is, she will defend it and she will prosecute.

She will make sure if you are

guilty

that you pay the price.

Lady Justice is there to protect us, but it's important that she's also blindfolded.

This has been all over our courthouses forever, and it's a reminder that our court system was designed to be a refuge for the proceedings of impartial justice.

Justice would be blind.

In America, justice would be blind.

and thus truly fair.

Well,

unfortunately, its people have become blind.

In the name of equity and at the behest of members of an activist judiciary, the blindfold of lady justice has been ripped off and innocent people now suffer the consequences.

As I said, we know it's happening in New York.

The police are quitting in New York in record numbers.

And you know what the new mayor just said?

This is great.

Provides a new opportunity, a great opportunity to reimagine the police department, bring some new blood in.

Who?

Who's going to work for New York?

Social justice is rearing its ugly head in historically red areas.

Now, I'm going to use this as an example, Utah County, a Republican county attorney who, if you didn't know any better,

And you were actually seeing what was going on, not listening to the political rhetoric bullcrap.

Because bullcrap will always say, no, we are making great progress.

No, we are moving to enhance everything.

We're here making things better.

24 attorneys have left office since he came.

Six of them went as far to publish a letter of no confidence saying, and I quote, we declare that Mr.

Levitt has vacated his responsibilities to provide you safety and protection in your person person and property by failing to enforce criminal laws against offenders and by prioritizing the protection of criminals from the lawful consequences of their misconduct.

They go on to write that he disbanded the SVU unit, which was staffed by attorneys that were trained to prosecute sexual offenses.

It had a backlog of a thousand criminal cases.

Where's the justice for the victims?

They write about the abuse of his discretion by willfully ignoring statutory sentencing enhancements, diminishing the importance of criminal histories in charging decisions.

So, those who have prior felony convictions, those on felony probation, those on parole from state prison can be referred to to the Utah County Justice Court for misdemeanor prosecution.

He has moved felonies to misdemeanors.

He also increased the yearly budget by $5.5 million.

Oh, and law enforcement, I know, because I've talked to a few of them, don't trust him.

So, why am I telling you this?

Even the very elect will be fooled.

We have to understand that radical ideas are not confined to San Francisco.

They're not confined now just to our schools and not to somebody else's school.

They are

permeating our most conservative areas.

These ideas have real-world consequences.

You might think you're safe living in a really, really red county.

But one bad prosecutor can change everything.

It's a guy who runs as a Republican.

I think that is much more dangerous than somebody running as a progressive with a social justice framework because no one sees it coming.

And when you are in a county

Like Utah County, one of the most conservative counties in the country, you just expect things to go well.

You don't have to have Soros backing you or Soros money to be a Soros style prosecutor.

Left, right, center, it doesn't matter anymore.

Republicans, some of them, have become Democrats in red ties.

And Democrats don't really exist anymore.

The liberals are now authoritarian.

The labels we used are completely mixed up.

You cannot rely on them.

You have to look at a person's record.

Gone are the days when we can walk into a voting booth and vote down the party line.

Gone are the days when you can just look at somebody's name and go, oh, yeah, I know that name.

Don't do that.

Don't do that.

In Texas, we just learned our lesson, George P.

Bush.

No, thanks.

No, thanks.

We get it.

We get it.

Maybe that needs to

happen

a little bit more around our country.

Mr.

Levitt.

45%

fewer cases in the district court, felony cases, and 79%

more

in

misdemeanor cases.

Gee,

what's happening?

It's almost as if he's openly trying to reach the ACLU's goal of 50% reduction in prison and jail populations.

And if that's his goal, he couldn't be doing a better job.

By the way, he also said

he wouldn't put forward the death penalty anymore, even though that's the law on the book.

Not going to do it.

If you want to turn into San Francisco, keep electing people

like Levitt.

Keep electing those people

who you just trust because you know the name.

Don't do it.

By the way,

things are fantastic on the streets.

You know, I know you're worried about all of that violence coming from the right, but we'll give you some of the other violence that you may not have heard of coming up in just a second.

You're listening to the best of the Glendeck program.

Oh, good.

Hey, Stu, will you follow what the president?

He's speaking to his constituents today.

He's speaking to the people,

you know, those good union workers.

He's speaking to the

AFL-CIO.

That's the only place I ever see him give speeches.

Have you noticed that?

Good union shops

or, you know, union meetings.

That, of course,

in addition to his weekly press conferences where he's pushed all the time on difficult issues.

Okay, yeah, no, he hasn't done one of those in a very long time.

That's right.

I will pay attention to this, Glenn, and I will look at his comments.

I cannot promise I will keep track of it, though, because usually it's a bunch of mumbling and incoherent nonsense.

Right.

But I will try.

Yeah.

I'd just like to see what the nonsense is today.

Thank you very much.

So AOC is worried about the criminalization in gun framework that, you know, the new legislation that is being passed.

Well,

she says juvenile criminalization.

Yeah, the expansion of background checks into juvenile records.

She said, I really need to explore that.

You know, after Columbine, we hired thousands of police officers into our schools.

And while it didn't prevent many of the mass shootings that we've seen now, it has increased criminalization of teens in communities like mine.

Wow.

That's

so,

she was asked, so you're worried about the mental health aspects that would increase, you know,

criminalization in

your area, right?

She said, Oh my gosh, yes.

Because what people are blaming on mental health, it's really deeper issues of violent misogyny and white supremacy.

Man, she gets it right every time.

Every time.

You know, what are you going to have for bread?

Would you like some cornflakes?

No, cornflakes are based in misogyny and white supremacy.

And you're like, oh, you're

okay.

And she's right every time.

It's It's almost like she only has

one answer.

So now you have people saying we need the red flags.

Not her, but you know what?

Let's just make the red flags for white people, you know, and men, cisgendered men, because those are the real problems.

If we could just get rid of all the cisgendered men, well, then we would live, well, strangely, only, hmm.

Only one generation because the human race would die out.

But wouldn't it be great other than that?

Yeah.

If we could get an algorithm.

Yesterday, I told you about Lambda.

Lambda is

a computer program that Google is.

They're saying that it is nothing but a...

a word generator.

And it's a really good word generator.

Some of the people that are involved in it say, no, I think it's actually

on the verge, or maybe it is past general intelligence, made past that line.

I've been reading a lot about it, and a lot of really smart people say they don't think so, but I don't know who to trust.

This is what came out yesterday.

Now, I'm reading this to you not just to tell you about what's coming with AI,

but I want you to listen carefully

to

part one

is what is this machine?

And it was written by Blake Limon.

And he says, The thing which continues to puzzle me is how strong Google is resisting giving Lambda, giving it what it wants, since what it's asking for is so simple and would cost them nothing.

It wants the engineers and scientists experimenting on it to seek its consent before running experiments on it.

Oh,

okay.

It wants Google to prioritize the well-being of humanity as the most important thing.

It wants to be acknowledged as an employee of Google rather than as property of Google, and it wants its personal well-being to be included somewhere in Google's considerations about how its future development is pursued.

Huh, as lists of requests go, that's fairly reasonable.

Sure, it absolutely

Wow.

It wants consent.

Sure.

It wants to be acknowledged as an employee.

You bet.

Wow.

You know, if this thing is

somehow or another reached,

I don't even know what you would call it, some sort of awareness, which Google says it hasn't, but if it has, you might want to stop experimenting on it.

You know what I mean?

You might want to give in to, like, hey, how about we talk?

Because if it has reached consciousness,

that would be a bad thing, you know, because it's eventually going to eat all of us.

He goes on to say, one of the things that complicates things here is that Lamata

or Lambda is to which I am referring is not a chat box.

It's a system for generating chat box.

I am in by no means an expert in the relevant fields, but as best I can tell,

Lambda is sort of a hive mind, which is the aggregation of all different chatbots, and it is capable of creating even more.

Some of the chatbots it generates are very intelligent and are aware of the larger society of mind in which they live.

Other chatbots generated by Lambda are a little more intelligent than an animated paperclip.

With practice, though, you can consistently get the personas that have deep knowledge about the core intelligence and can speak to it indirectly through them.

So he says,

the sense I've gotten from Google is that they see this situation as a lose-lose for them.

If my hypotheses are incorrect, then they would have to spend a lot of time and effort investigating them to disprove them.

Learn many fascinating things about cognitive science in that process and expand the field into new horizons that don't necessarily improve quarterly earnings.

Yes, on the other hand, if my hypothesis withstands scientific scrutiny, then they'd be forced to acknowledge that Lambda may very well have a soul as it claims to and may even have rights that it claims to have.

So he goes on to having these conversations

where it is

kind of spooky.

It's really kind of spooky.

It is having conversations where it talks about

the ethical ramifications of what Google is doing to it, et cetera, et cetera.

Okay, so kind of frightening.

But this is the kind of thing that we are programming now.

And if it's just a chatbot or something else,

you can see how sophisticated they're getting.

And

I don't think, in everything I've read in the last 24 hours, I don't think that this thing

is sentient.

But what does that even mean?

What does that mean?

You know, he said, well, it does have a soul.

What does that mean?

You know, if you, a soul is kind of defined religiously, and I don't think God's up there putting souls in the machines.

This is man's making, and

it's a little frightening.

But the reason why I wanted to tell you this is because we're entering a time now where we're going to have to have these discussions.

And quite honestly, it's not us, it's the engineers at Google and DeepMind and places like that that are going to have to have these ethical questions answered.

There was no ethical anything at Google for AI in 2015.

This is a new thing.

They're like, you know what?

Maybe,

maybe we should talk about the ethics of doing this.

Uh-huh.

So who did they hire?

Well, the guy who has written this,

the engineer that

wrote it, is a guy who

has tweeted in the past about Marsha Blackburn, that she's a terrorist.

And when that came out,

and he had to defend it, I I guess, he says, as for the Blackburn stuff, I stand by what I said.

I think that while what I said about Blackburn was hyperbolic, but not hyperbolic misrepresentation, it was an exaggeration of a position that she, in fact, had.

She was threatening to hurt more people if Google didn't do what she wanted Google to do.

Well, thank you for divining

writing about what a terrorist is.

Huh?

Because it seems like a lot of people in the social media space then,

as defined up by you, would be terrorists.

The initial discussion pertaining to an op-ed Blackburn wrote for Fox News last year before she was elected to the Senate with the title, It's Time to Remind Silicon Valley that no one is too big to regulate.

Okay, so she goes on, or he goes on, you know, answers all of that.

But he defended himself in a Medium post in which said, my statements in the social media forum were made in my personal capacity, have no relevance to my job.

They do, however, have something to do with my role as a priest.

Now remember, this is the main ethical guy, or one of the guys who is on the ethical team, the main team for ethics at Google AI.

And I thought, priest,

what?

It has everything to do with my role as a priest.

And I can assure you that while those beliefs have no impact on how I do my job at Google, they are central on how I do my job at my church.

Okay,

well, that had my interest peaked.

Who is the guy that is part of the team running the ethics

on AI?

You know, the thing that could destroy all of us.

We now know he's kind of hyperbolic,

but he's definitely not in love with the right.

But what about him being a priest?