Best of The Program | Guests: Tom Fitton & Christopher Rufo | 9/15/20

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Well,

I'd like to call this podcast today

the Big Trouble at Home

and have my good friend Pat to thank for that.

Well, I mean, just trying to share happy news.

Oh, is that your wife?

So sue me for that.

Trying to share happy news, guilty as charged.

Oh, my God.

Guilty is charged.

You need to go to work for the DNC

or any media outlet.

Yeah, thanks for that help.

I'm in for a day of hell with my wife because of what happened on today's program.

And you will probably hear that unfold.

Oh, she was all nice about it, but I'm telling you, I'm afraid to go home.

In front of company, she was nice about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We have a great show for you.

We talk about what's happening at the CDC.

Big breaking news: we are in a constitutional crisis right now.

The CDC decided that they were just going to disobey the executive order from the president and just run not one, but 13 weeks

of critical race theory training at the CDC.

Even though last week the president said executive order, full stop on all of that, they said it was a health crisis and they knew better than the president.

That's a constitutional crisis.

Wow.

Who do they work for?

They're not elected.

Who are they working for?

We'll tell you about that.

Also, we have Tom Fitanon from Judicial Watch.

He also

talks a little bit about that in a different sense with a different department, this this time the Department of Justice.

All this and more on today's podcast.

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

Tom, welcome to the program.

Hey, Glenn.

Thank you.

We don't do Pfizers yet, although who knows?

Yeah.

Depends on who's in office.

Maybe you will.

I want to talk to you about several things.

First of all, Act Blue.

Are you following Act Blue at all?

We have been.

Certainly their fundraising for Black Lives Matter Global Foundation has been of interest to us.

ActBlue is a conglomerate of organizations.

They do the political fundraising for campaigns and candidates, and as you pointed out, that PAC activity.

But separately, they raise money through this charitable arm that then gets funneled to another third party, which is running Black Lives Matter as a fiscal sponsor.

So if you want to give money to Black Lives Matter, you can't.

You give it to ActBlue that has, I guess, a pinky promise with this Tide Center, which is a far-left group that is acting as a fiscal sponsor for Black Lives Matter.

You can't give a donation of Black Lives Matter, at least, and have it be tax-deductible.

It's an unusual set of circumstances that if a similarly situated, well-known conservative group was involved in, that'd be called for investigation.

Oh, my gosh.

And there should be investigations on either side that would do something as slimy as this.

Act Blue, I think the latest document that I saw shows that about 7% of what goes into Act Blue actually goes to Black Lives Matter.

So where's the rest of it going?

Where's the rest of it going?

I don't know.

I've never seen anything like this.

I've been involved in nonprofit work for 20 plus years, and the idea of a fiscal sponsorship, that's something the left has been doing, though, when you think about it.

Remember Acorn?

Yeah.

They kind of operated the same way.

They had all these allegedly independent groups that were run by one central organization.

In this case, it's the Tides Center, which is the incubator for the far left and their organizations.

Yeah.

I did a lot of work on the Tides Foundation and called many, many names.

Nobody did anything about it.

And now look at the juggernaut that

they are.

Any comment on

$200 million plus being

gathered from donations from homeless people or people that don't have a job?

It's an awful lot of money, isn't it, Tom?

It is a lot of money.

And again,

the area of political fundraising, they report what they report.

And unless someone's willing to get behind the numbers and get behind

the self-reporting, this is going to go on not only with ActBlue, but everyone else.

And

ActBlue suggests that the reason they have all these unemployed people is because they're homemakers or they're wealthy and they don't need to report anything other than being unemployed or self-employed.

But

it highlights the fact that a lot of money sloshes around in our political system.

And despite all these laws for transparency, which I really don't put much faith in anyway,

both on principle and in

practical issues, practically speaking,

it's hard to track where all the money is coming from.

And so all is concerned about foreign funding, you know, there are a lot of easy ways for foreign nationals to participate in our election system without getting caught in an improper way.

All right, let me change the subject.

There is a story that

I read,

well documented, well sourced, and I am not seeing it anywhere.

That the actual whistleblower during the impeachment was Vinman himself.

Lieutenant Colonel Vinman was the guy who was on the phone call, was disturbed, in his own words, because it was going against a policy that he

agreed with and

had worked hard on and wanted to see pursued.

And

he went and talked to Schiff, if I understand this right.

He couldn't be the whistleblower because he was on the phone call, so they needed another guy.

And he went and told someone about it and said, blow the whistle, go to Schiff, go to these people, and blow the whistle.

Do I have that right?

I think it's close enough.

It became pretty clear during the impeachment hearings themselves when he was questioned on it that Vinman Vin had talked to the alleged whistleblower that Schiff colluded with improperly in my view.

And my concern has always been that

just because someone else is has a national security clearance, it doesn't mean you can tell them everything

anything you want just because if it's classified.

They have to have a need to know.

And if he was improperly sharing the contents of that classified call, A, with his brother or B, with his buddy over at the CIA, evidently, that was the actual whistleblower, who had worked previously in the White House, both under Obama and Trump, that would have been inappropriate.

And

I've always been, I've been highlighting the need that Vinman should be criminally investigated, the whistleblower should be criminally investigated, and to the degree Schiff was involved in the sharing and properly classified information and his staff, that criminal investigation should extend into the House.

So here's my frustration.

A A lot of this stuff, Tom, we've had for months now.

We've known a lot of really damning stuff, and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

And if it is, it's going to happen during the election, and then what happens after that?

Yeah, the Justice Department has been asleep as a switch on virtually every major corruption issue here.

And Durham was appointed, for instance, in April of last year.

And it's now, what, 17, 18 months later?

I could use my fingers to count.

We've had one

plea agreement that was kind of half-baked.

It was handed to him on a silver platter by the IG

late last year.

Nothing else.

No report.

Maybe someone's being targeted.

Maybe Strzzok gets indicted.

I don't know.

But in many ways, it's too late.

If he does it now,

politically, it's going to cause a maelstrom, which is unnecessary.

And then, B, as you point out, after the election, depending on who wins, it either lives or dies.

So what happens?

I mean, we have a horribly corrupt system that I wouldn't want a Democrat or a Republican to have to go through.

I don't care who it is, but it is, we have seen now a deep state.

We're seeing it with the CDC.

The CDC, yesterday, we found out, is going forward with

their critical race race theory education, even though the president has signed a directive that no one in the administration, no one in our government is supposed to be holding those things.

They just thumb their nose up.

I mean, we have a constitutional crisis because there's no one that is

answering for any of these things.

Who's in charge?

That's right.

I've been highlighting the crisis.

It's called the problem we have is we don't even have self-government anymore.

You know, is it consent of the government when we elect Congress and they don't do anything and just write checks and then keep their eyes closed the rest of the time?

No.

The agencies don't think they're accountable to either the president or the American people.

And depending on who's the president, the president doesn't act like he's accountable.

We saw that with President Obama.

And in terms of the CDC and these other agencies,

there's this casual sedition that goes on.

It's really quite dramatic.

And it's happening virtually every day.

I'm sure the president's frustrated by it.

But if I were him in terms of like the Obama gate and all the corruption, I would just go declare a transparency emergency.

Tell the agencies, release everything you have.

Stop with the stonewalling.

For instance, we just got

the documents about the wiped phones by Mueller's team, 27, 31, however you count it.

I don't know if you've been able to wipe your own phones, but I've never figured out how that could be.

No, I don't know how to to do that.

Yeah, DOJ has had the document for a year.

A year.

We actually first asked for the information back in December or

the end of 2018.

We sued a year ago.

So let's say the clock began went then.

Let's be generous.

They sat on it for a year.

They are still hiding struck page documents.

They're still hiding text messages.

We just sued for Fauci emails.

I don't know.

It's not

necessarily because Fauci did anything wrong.

We wanted to know CDC communications with WHO in China in the early days of

the virus to see what the lies were that we were being told.

They're telling us they can't get to them until at that, only at a rate of 500 pages a month, which means 8,000 pages will be reviewed, and that means we won't be getting them until do the math, 2022.

What's happening?

What's happening to us?

Contempt for the rule of law.

It's a contempt for the rule of law within the agencies, and the president's appointees don't give a rat's tail about this transparency.

They don't.

And it's resulting in, as you point out, a rule of law crisis.

So

what is going to happen?

We can't continue as a nation.

We have no trust in anything.

We see people getting away with it.

I see reports.

FBI is looking into the funding of Black Lives Matter and TIFA and these protests.

Guys, it's not that hard.

It's not that hard.

And it feels like we're looking and looking and looking, and then nothing happens.

When is,

I mean, how do we survive, Tom,

if nothing is done?

Well, it's a challenge.

And

I say that judicial watch is one way forward.

We kind of keep the government, it seems like it's completely out of control, but we bring it back down to earth using the rule of law and the accountability of free information, the Freedom of Information Act.

So there's an ability to petition the government under our Constitution that we have to exercise more forcefully and more regularly.

The left is quite adept at

getting information out to destroy their political opponents from the government.

Here, we want to figure out about the corruption of the government, and Judicial Watch is often alone in pushing for it.

Congress has got to reform and restore restore itself, and certainly the agencies have got to be curtailed and cut back.

Because the abuses will increase and metastasize the bigger and bigger the government gets.

In my view, it's

taking a 50,000-foot view: big government, big secrecy, big corruption, big oppression, they all go hand in hand.

And you've got to pull it all back.

You've got to curtail the government, ensure transparency, reform and restore the Congress, and have a president and cabinet agency heads who take this seriously.

In my view, IGs

are like

a waste of time if the cabinet agency heads are doing their jobs.

That's what they should be doing.

The heads of the agencies should be the IGs.

Well,

I don't know if I trust.

I'd like as many eyes checking on these guys as possible.

Yeah, I hear you, but the IGs

are a creature of the deep state and our experience used to both suppress information and target whistleblowers.

That's what they are.

Remember, they weren't put in there by the good guys.

They were put in there by the radical left who thought they needed to control the, quote, presidency to keep the bureaucracies free to do what they wanted to do.

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

All right, so a new face, at least on the national scale,

that I am aware of, a guy who has been doing amazing work in the last few months and needs to be known by every freedom-loving person.

His name is Christopher Ruffo.

He is a filmmaker, a writer, a policy researcher.

He has directed four films for PBS, including his latest America Lost, that told the story of the three forgotten American cities.

He is also the director at the Discovery Institute Center on Wealth, Poverty, and Morality, and a contributing editor at the City Journal, where he covers poverty, homelessness, addiction, crime, and other afflictions.

Really smart guy and relentless.

And people are starting to go to him now and say, I've got documents.

And he is posting them online.

And what he posted yesterday should chill all of us to the bone.

Christopher, welcome to the program.

How are you?

Very well.

Good to be with you.

So tell me what you dumped yesterday.

Yeah, yesterday was a big day because as many of your listeners know, the president passed this executive order abolishing critical race theory trainings from all federal agencies.

But unfortunately, the CDC, operating in direct violation of this order, announced to their employees that they were moving forward with a very kind of inflammatory critical race theory training that spanned 13 weeks.

I was able to obtain documents from inside the CDC as well as an external PowerPoint that gives more content of the presentation.

The content was truly horrific.

It's talking about trying to destroy the system of meritocracy, trying to destroy the idea of American exceptionalism and trying to weaponize the CDC to fight white supremacy.

But even more horrifically is that this was a direct violation.

And actually, Glenn, this is breaking news.

I heard actually two minutes ago, the director of OMB, Russ Vought,

just announced on Twitter, he retweeted me with a message saying that these things have been canceled, suspended indefinitely.

And, you know, I imagine the White House was pretty upset, but this is actually a victory.

The CDC has now been kind of beaten back from its plan of continuing critical race theory training.

So

the bad thing here is that the response from the CDC was, hey, look, we have to do this because

this is a health crisis.

Racism in America is a health crisis and it's getting people killed on the streets.

And so they just decided on their own.

I will believe that something is actually being done when people start to clean house.

I mean, this was, I mean, did you get your,

was your source, can you even say, inside the system?

Yes, my source was inside the CDC.

So I had direct access to the internal emails that were circulating about this training.

Did you talk to them?

I agree.

I think this is a good first step to

cancel this training, but there's really two problems.

One is that there has to be some more severe consequences.

I know that if you were in a private company and you directly violated the CEO's order on something in a big big way like this, you would be out the door within a couple hours.

I think the same standard should be held here.

But also, I'm just one person with one set of sources.

How many other agencies across the federal government are violating the president's order?

I've had some unconfirmed reports that I'm working on now that it's happening in multiple agencies, including Customs and Border Patrol.

Oh my gosh.

And I'm working on this

today and tomorrow to confirm.

But my sense is that it's the tip of the iceberg, that actually there are probably hundreds of these trainings continuing to happen in direct opposition to a presidential order, which raises the question, what's the point of having a president if he doesn't have control over his own administration?

So this is the deep state.

This is what is meant by the deep state.

Unelected officials.

that think they know better than the duly elected officials that they are supposed to work for.

They believe, ah, presidents come and go, congressmen, senators, they come and go.

We don't have to do what they say.

Just keep it quiet.

Just keep moving forward.

And they don't follow the directive of the duly elected officials.

We do live in a fascistic state if that is true.

Everything they say they're fighting, well, we got to fight fascism.

We got to fight with these police officers.

Everything that you're saying you're fighting, you're doing if you are part of the administration or the government and you are defying the orders of the president.

And help me out on this, Christopher.

I said a while ago that this is akin to when Barack Obama said

the just war theory has to be taken out of the teachings and we have to shut down the classes of the just war theory

at West Point.

I was wildly against that.

Just war theory is what has stopped us from becoming the Nazis.

I think it should be reinstated.

But if the Pentagon would have said, sorry, Mr.

President, we're going to teach it anyway, I would have been on the side of the president.

You can't do that.

Otherwise, you don't have a presidency.

You don't have a system of government.

You have unelected people doing what they want.

And unfortunately, I think that that's exactly what we have.

I think that there is a kind of permanent administrative state that operates on its own ideology that really never changes depending on who's in office.

And unfortunately, for those of us on the right, their ideology is kind of technocratic in nature, is progressive in nature, is kind of scientistic in nature.

It very much dovetails nicely with a progressive administration.

So I think what happens is that we may score these tactical victories like shutting down a training session, shutting down many training sessions, But the problem of the permanent bureaucracy remains.

How do we make politics meaningful if the largest organ of our politics, the federal government, which has

more than a million employees,

if the president, who's duly elected under a constitutional system, cannot control the bureaucracy.

And in the past, they had a spoil system, which had its problems.

But one advantage of that is that the bureaucracy was political.

The bureaucracy is no longer political.

It operates independently of our political forces.

And I think that is a true constitutional problem that we'll have to grapple with for the years to come.

Well, this is something that the Obama administration and what was it, something 2.0, Society 2.0

with Clinton and Soros that they had developed.

This is what they developed, and a system that operates on its own no matter who.

That's why the president was targeted with Ukraine.

That's why they made that such a big deal.

That's a hill to die on.

And that's why I keep saying if the president doesn't do something about that, if charges aren't brought up and real people fired because of what happened, nothing's going to change.

If he just says, you're stopping these, and he doesn't fire the head of the CDC, if he doesn't fire all of the people that were involved in this, this is a cancer and it's going to continue to spread.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

I think that it's important that there be some sort of repercussion because if the only consequence is that the training gets canceled,

any other agency around the government will say, well, you know, we can go forward with it.

What's the worst that could happen?

We'll get our training canceled.

But I think the attitude would be quite different if all of a sudden you have kind of civil service members losing their jobs immediately, you raise the stakes, you create a disincentive to continue with this, because an executive order is only as good as much as you can enforce it.

So I'm hoping that this first step that was just announced by OMB Director Vought

is only a first step, and I'll be advocating for some more severe consequences.

So will we.

And if

you're exactly right, if they don't,

it's deep trouble.

If they do, you will empower the whistleblowers as well.

Because whistleblowers are right now sitting there watching and saying, I've got something that everybody should know.

But if I blow the whistle and the top people don't get fired, then I'm screwed.

I mean,

they'll just screw with me.

They'll go on a hunt to find out who it was.

It will empower whistleblowers if they see justice being done.

And I commend you, Chris.

I think what you're doing is just tremendous.

Just tremendous.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

You bet.

Christopher Ruffo, you can find him and follow him on Twitter at RealChris Ruffo, R-U-F-O

on

Twitter.

This

is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

You still have an opportunity to be my friend.

No, No, I am being your friend.

You are not.

I'm telling you right now,

this might go well on air.

It's not going to go well for me at home.

I can't believe you haven't shared it with everybody.

You are.

Including Tanya.

Up to this point.

It's

exciting.

Tanya's on the phone.

Tanya.

We were just talking about Netflix.

Thank you.

Are you there, honey?

Yes, I'm here.

Thank you.

Okay, are you busy?

We should let you go.

You know,

she's got plenty of time, I'm sure.

Okay.

Hey, we were just talking about Netflix, and I think we should cancel our Netflix.

Yeah, we weren't talking about Netflix.

What we were talking about was this exciting new purchase at another, yet another auction.

But it's a really important piece.

I think you'll agree.

Oh,

I forgot to tell you yesterday.

I forgot.

I did.

I actually did.

I did.

And,

you know, it's something that I think is a really important you know, piece of history.

And

we won it at auction yesterday.

And when he did, because there was somebody else who was really trying hard to get it.

So, you know, he got it at a basement bargain price.

That's the best.

Pat wasn't there.

He didn't know.

He didn't know.

And what price do you put on a one-of-a-kind?

Well,

there is a price, unfortunately, that you can put on it, and you paid that price.

Which is great because now you have the item.

Yeah, yeah.

So, and I'm sure Tanya sounds excited, right?

There's no doubt excited about that.

Can't wait to hear about this one.

Tell her what she's won.

Now, this is a really important piece of history

because it, I mean, it tells the story of the press and

the way the press hit it.

Spit it out.

You are the proud owner

of

FDR's wheelchair.

Yay!

I'll say it for you, Tony.

Ding, ding, ding, ding.

Wow.

Yeah, so congratulations.

Let me just ask you a question.

Let me ask you a question.

Yeah.

Does that

arrive

along with

what?

I'm just, you know, just ask.

Oh, no, no, there was nothing.

Pretty sure there was nothing else.

No, there's nothing.

Nope, there was nothing else.

Best of my recollection, nothing.

The best of your recollection.

Pretty sure there was nothing else.

It was just that.

So there was nothing else in the auction that caught your eye?

No, and it doesn't have to come home.

I mean, somebody did ask me yesterday after I got it, they said, where are you going to put that?

And I said,

I don't know.

And then somebody else said, you can put it right next to the

German Nazi interrogation chair.

And

so they were fighting again.

I mean, it was the same time, you know, two chairs, two nations, you know?

So, all right, sweetheart, I love you.

I love you too.

I was just wondering if it would come with maybe a dozen scrumptious cookies.

Oh, wow.

You might be happy.

Oh, wow.

I'm trying to finagle some cookies that make the whole thing better.

Right?

Yeah.

I have a connection.

What do you mean, maybe?

What do you mean, maybe?

You owe it to me.

I love you, honey.

I love you, too.

Bye.

Whew, that wasn't as bad as I thought.

Yeah.

Unless it's a ruse because she knew she was on the air.

And she also don't know what you paid for it.

So that helps a little bit as well, I'm sure.

She might be thinking that's a really inexpensive chair.

Well, she would be wrong then, wouldn't she?

She would.

That's probably not a chair you're going to do wheelchair races with.

No, I generally don't do wheelchair races anyway.

Really?

No, you do.

Yeah.

You do, really?

All the time.

Yeah.

No, this one will not be used for that.

Yeah.

But

remind me when you're going over to the museum.

It is honestly interesting because

he did have the help of the press.

No, no, no, not the help of the press.

They were complicit.

He could not walk at all.

He could not walk.

You'll see him with the with the you know the leg braces and the and the

crutches.

Yeah.

But he had to have his son on one side and somebody else on the other side actually lift him.

He would just swing his leg so he could walk, but he had no power in his legs at all.

They would build.

How long a time period was that?

Forever.

Yeah, from the view.

Yeah.

I mean, he was.

The whole time.

The whole time.

And they would build ramps in front of buildings where his car could pull up.

If there was a big federal building with all the stairs,

they would build a giant ramp so his car would drive up to the very top step and he didn't have to worry about steps.

I mean, and no one in the press ever took a picture of it.

That That is incredible.

That's incredible.

You want to talk about fascism?

That's fascism.

Wow.

That's fascism when nobody in America really knew that.

The reason why the

desk, the president's desk, the resolute desk, that was built by Queen Elizabeth as a gift to

our nation and given.

FDR would sit behind that desk.

It wasn't in the Oval Office.

I think it was in the map room.

And he would sit behind it, but people would come in for interviews.

That's the reason why the little door is on the front.

Remember John F.

Jr., John F.

Kennedy Jr.

has that picture of him peeking out underneath his dad's desk?

That door was put there by FDR to hide the wheelchair from the press.

Wow.

So there would be no pictures taken with him in a wheelchair.

Wow.

Isn't that incredible?

It is.

It is.

It's hard to imagine in this day and age of the press and

how rabid they are, especially with Trump.

But I mean, any president wouldn't get away with that today.

No president.

No.

No president.

And it was a good thing.

It was a good thing.

Here, the Germans are executing people that are handicapped, saying they're of zero worth, and they're being conquered by the guy who's in a wheelchair and can't walk.

Yeah, I mean, this is a really, really good thing.

The Trump administration is coming for us.

Slashing funding for critical education programs impacting black students.

Dismantling the Department of Education, including the Office of Civil Rights, cutting health care for millions of California children and families, and firing hundreds of thousands of federal employees, disproportionately affecting black workers.

But Prop 50 is our chance to fight back against Trump's political power grab to steal congressional seats.

Vote yes on Prop 50 on November 4th.

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