Best of The Program | Guests: Ari Fleischer & Rep. Roger Marshall | 8/24/20

At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments, it's about you, your style, your space, your way.

Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right.

From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows.

Because at blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you.

Visit blinds.com now for up to 50% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost.

Rules and restrictions apply.

Hello, America.

It is Monday.

Great podcast in the works for you today.

We started with Jamel Hill.

Just a little, I mean, because I'm so appreciative of all of the things that she has taught me about America.

Aren't you used to?

Oh my gosh, she's taught me so much.

Yeah.

And I always listen to everything that she says.

Yeah.

Especially when she makes absolutely no sense, which is only all the time.

Right.

And she has come out and just said that America's worse than the Nazis because we taught the Nazis.

And I just wanted to give her a quick history lesson on the Nazis and who learned what from whom.

And

that's right at the top of the podcast.

Then, did you, you know, there's another asteroid coming to hit us.

This one before Election Day, the day before Election Day, according to NASA.

They say it's going to miss us, but I'm rooting for the asteroid.

Yeah, you made an endorsement in that race, and I like it.

I'm with you.

We talk a little bit about the convention.

Ari Fleischer is on with us to talk about the press and the convention.

We've got a lot on our plate.

Miss a minute.

Miss a lot.

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

Ari Fleischer, former Bush White House press secretary, president now of Ari Fleischer Communications,

joins us now.

Hello, Ari.

How are you?

Great to be with you, Glenn.

Yeah.

So you are,

I saw an interview.

Was it in the New Yorker or the Atlantic?

It was the New Yorker, wasn't it?

Recently?

There was an article.

Last year, you're talking about my criticisms of the press.

Yes.

Yes, yes.

No,

there was this

question and answer thing that you did.

I think it was the New Yorker, and

it was the most hostile interview

I have seen.

It was just everything

was, yeah, well, what about this?

Yeah, well, what about this?

And the left and the press in particular, they think they have a handle on the truth and what's going on, and they just don't even want to hear anything that disagrees with them.

Anything.

Isn't that right?

Yeah, you know, I've been in this business a long time, multiple decades dealing with the press.

I loved it.

I loved being a press secretary on Capitol Hill at the White House, what I do now.

And it used to be that the press was just liberal.

You knew ideologically they were coming after you, that Republicans always had to work harder than Democrats just to get a fair shake.

But now it's just resistance.

Donald Trump has made the press lose their minds.

And it wasn't hard for them to lose their minds.

And you see it almost every day you pick up the news.

You know, I tell you,

I was not in favor of Donald Trump when he ran the first time.

And because of the chaos that he, I think he loves, he loves to live in it

and the way he handled himself, but I will tell you, he has exposed the press in ways I would have never imagined.

He is like a cat and they're a mouse, and he just knows how to bat them, and they fall into that every single time, and they've gone crazy.

Yeah, you know, over the weekend, the first lady showed everybody the new rose garden.

Yeah.

She made a lot of improvements to it, put in a walkway to be compliant for folks with wheelchairs.

And it was beautiful.

Howard Feynman, who was a reporter with Newsweek when I was press secretary, who used to have some sway and some influence because he was a big voice.

Now he's an NBC analyst.

He said it was a neo-fascist parade ground.

This comes from a senior mature

reporter.

A neo-fascist parade ground.

The First Lady's renovations to the Rose Garden.

What's happened to the media?

How did they lose the limits?

It used to be that they would report, then they would opine.

Now they're just trolls.

Yeah, and they're trolls in bad taste.

And they're also,

I've never gotten to the point until recently where there's absolutely no reason for me to

read anything, if I'm personally interested, to read anything written in certain places.

Like,

I've always liked the New York Times.

I know that it's liberal, but I've always liked the coverage of the New York Times.

I can't listen to the daily

at all because all I'm getting is propaganda.

I knew this morning, if I listened to the daily, I'd be getting anti-GOP propaganda.

I knew if I listened last week, they'd be saying it was the greatest television event in history.

And they never surprised me.

Yeah.

No, that's exactly right.

And they really have crossed the line between

a one-stage opinion seeped its way into the facts, into

news reporting.

Analysis became what they did.

But now it really has crossed the line to resistance.

They can't stand Trump.

They want Trump gone.

Everything is done through a filter of getting rid of Trump on CNN.

And I watch CNN every morning.

I deliberately watch CNN in the morning.

I watch Fox in the afternoon.

I like a little diversity in my news.

But CNN jumps down the throats of any Republican guest.

I watched a Republican congressman from Georgia on there this morning, and the anchor Jim Schudo kept interrupting him, badgering him.

They never do that to the Democrat guests.

Every little bit about it, from the way news is made to the decisions about what is news that makes it on the air, to the way the anchors behave now, is done through the eyes of anti-Trump resistance.

And the press is just killing themselves.

That's the problem.

Every survey from Gallup, from Pew, shows that people's trust in the press to tell the news fully, fairly, and accurately is at almost all-time lows.

They're only hurting themselves.

So do you think they're, you know, I called people like Chuck Todd and everything when they were like, you know, what happened

after the 2016?

And I said to them, if you really want to know,

there are people that can explain it to you, but I'm not sure you really want to know.

But if you do, you know, give me a half an hour and I can tell you where I went wrong and what I learned.

There was no interest at all.

There still isn't.

And I wonder if they're not making exactly the same mistake.

They just bet the house on it this time.

They've just said, we're all in.

That's right.

That's right.

And it'll be a worse mistake if Trump wins in 2020 because they won't accept it.

They just can't acknowledge that they're wrong.

Here's the fundamental problem with journalism today, and it's cultural.

The people who go into journalism school, who become the next generation of reporters, and this has been the case for decades, are almost all cut from the same college-educated, well-to-do, Democratic liberal cloth.

I have twice addressed students from Columbia Journalism School, once in 98 and the other actually in March of this year.

In both cases, I asked the students, it was about 12 in each group, in the last election, how many of you voted for the Democrat, how many for the Republican?

In every one of those instances, all 24 hands voted Democrat.

Every single one.

The one exception was one guy in 1998 when the election was between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton.

11 hands went up for Bill Clinton.

So I said to the 12th guy, so you are the only one who voted for Dole?

He looked at me and said, no, I voted for Ralph Nader.

Oh, my gosh.

You can't have newsrooms that are 24-0 and think they're fair, think they're not biased, think they're neutral.

They, by culture, line up on one side.

There's nobody there to check their thoughts.

There's nobody there to say, wait a minute, there's another side.

Let's think it through.

So what they do instead is look for diversity in terms of orientation, gender, or race.

But ideology, that which matters the most, a worldview,

is diminished.

So let me ask you this.

You know, I used to give people the benefit of the doubt, and then I actually worked in those places.

And I realized, no, they're just hardcore in their belief, and they don't have anyone in their circle to challenge them.

And so they just, they think monolithically.

Now I am really wondering

because of

things like the post office.

What's happening right now is the Democrats and the press are setting up a scenario that is very dangerous,

saying that there's no problems with mail-in voting.

It's riddled with problem.

Look at what just happened in Detroit.

It's so screwed up.

I don't know if you'll ever know the answer.

And yet they are pushing this narrative that Donald Trump is somehow or another screwing with the Postal Service, and they're going to challenge the ⁇ if they don't win, even if he won in a landslide, they would be challenging this.

And I think they're part of the problem.

I think they know what they're doing now.

Do they?

They do.

I mean, this is such anti-Trumpism.

But I do have to say on this one, the President has framed this issue wrong.

The threat from mail-in voting is not fraud.

The threat from mail-in voting is that the system can't handle it.

Mail-in-voting, historically, if you cast a vote by mail, absentee or otherwise, it is three times as likely to get rejected as when you vote in person.

Correct.

Voting in person is perfectly safe, even in the COVID environment.

We've been proving it with all the primary elections.

So the switch to massive mail, number one, is not warranted by safety.

But two, unless a state is like Washington state that has been doing this for a considerable amount of time and did it in a bipartisan fashion, the state's not ready for it.

So what happens is, and the Washington Post has done good journalism on this, in the 2016 election, you had some 500,000 ballots get thrown out

because of errors, because it wasn't postmarked, because a person didn't sign it.

It's going to be more than a million ballots thrown out this time.

So it's not fraud.

It's going to be close elections.

Ballots are thrown out.

Democrats cry voter suppression.

And then we're going to be arguing about should that ballot count without a postmark.

And it's going to be voter suppression all over again.

That's what they're going to allege.

Shoot, in the Democrat

New York City, where Democrats lost narrowly to each other in primaries, they were alleging voter suppression against each other.

So this is the risk here.

It's not fraud.

And I wish the president wouldn't talk about it only in terms of fraud.

The risk is that the system just can't handle it.

Well, when you say the system

I think I would correct you there.

It's not the system.

It's not the post office.

It's the Board of Elections.

Correct.

We are headed towards the hanging Chad, which I know you remember seeing that picture of that guy with the glasses, and he's like looking at that Chad.

Is that a dimple?

What exactly is happening with that Chad?

That's what we're headed for.

And then on top of it, you're exactly right.

They're going to say two million people or a million people, their voices weren't heard.

They disenfranchised the voter, which just plays into all of this.

Even if a vote comes in without a signature, let it count.

Even if a vote comes in three days later, let it count.

Now, here's where fraud can come in.

And I just wish the president was more careful and precise with his words.

If there is a really close election, whether it's for the president or for the senate or the governor or the dog catcher, and you allow to have a ballot come in without a postmark up to three days after the election, particularly where ballots were mailed to everybody and there's vote harvesting.

People can collect 100, 200 ballots, take a chance, send them in the next day, deposit them into one of those boxes if you can deposit it three days later, and influence the course of the election.

And particularly if there's no voter signature match.

I mean, that's where the fraud can kick in after the election.

And again, I go back to fundamentals.

Voting in person is safe.

You can socially distance.

We've proved that.

Every day you walk into a Walmart, you see how safe it is to do things in gigantic places.

We can have safe work.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

He was a firsthand witness to the debacle that was the questioning of our...

of our postmaster general on Friday.

It seemed like a pretty open and shut case to me.

Welcome, Congressman Marshall.

How are you?

Glenn, good morning from sunny Kansas.

Yes, this is another Nancy Pelosi manufactured hoax to attack the president.

The post office is fully funded for a year.

They have access to another $10 billion if they need it.

You know, I've always been the believer that we can do two things at once.

We can have a safe and fair election and at the same time rehab the post office as well.

So both these things need to happen and it's just a crime shame that Klosi wants to make this a political shootout.

So, sad day for America.

Okay, hang on just a second.

Let me play a little audio here, specifically what happened on Friday.

You will give us your word today, under oath, that you have not taken any action whatsoever in your capacity as Postmaster General for any political reason or at the suggestion of any administration officials.

Sir, I will tell you my first election mail meeting, what I instructed the organization, the whole team around us, and out in the field, whatever efforts we will have, double them.

I was greatly concerned about

all the political

noise that we were hearing.

And

we have had, I've had weekly reviews on this since before

all the excitement came out.

We are very committed, the board's committed, the postal workers committed, the union leadership is committed to having a successful election.

And

the insinuation is, quite frankly, outrageous.

So, here's the thing.

I find it really

the post office is screwed up, needs to be fixed.

I'm glad he's there fixing the post office.

I don't think the post office is going to be the ones that screw this up.

What this is, is nothing more than

a way to cause riots in the streets and protests because if you up the number of ballots that are going through the mail you are going to up the number of ballots that are rejected and if you reject a million or two million votes because of the rules that have always been in place it's very easy to say this is voter suppression this is nothing more than a setup is it not you're you're right

first of all I just got to mention law and order.

My dad was the chief of police for 25 years in my little hometown of El Dorado, Kansas, and this country was founded on law and order.

Those riots are now spreading like a virus, and we need those local people to stand up.

But yes, every time we're being set up for failure, here's what's happening.

Every time a human or a machine has to touch this polling ballot is an opportunity for fraud.

We saw what happened in the last House election.

And goodness, I think eight or nine of my colleagues on the House were winning on election night, and the Democrats kept harvesting ballots.

People need to realize is that we are randomly sending ballots out.

I even got two for my children at my house, applications, thank goodness, for two of my children that have not lived at my house for 10 years.

So

the whole system is rotted with fraud.

And as Republicans, we've got to keep our eye on it.

The Democrats think about doing things.

I just never would have imagined this ballot harvesting is one instance.

So they're setting us up for failure.

The post office should be able to handle this situation.

Every day they handle 450 million pieces of mail.

We're asking them to handle an extra $150 million at most over a couple weeks' time.

They just did the census, right?

I'm not sure how many census applications went out in the mail, but it had to have been, I suppose, close to 200 million, maybe 300 million more.

So they should be able to handle the situation.

But where there's opportunity, there will be fraud by the Democrats.

So

tell me about

why there seems to be no appetite

to shut down Antifa.

And I mean, if they're not the definition of domestic terrorists as they go through

neighborhoods at 3 o'clock in the morning with guillotines telling people to give them their houses,

that's not a political statement.

That is a fear statement.

It's in the middle of the night.

You're being woken up.

Your kids are looking out the window.

They're worried about what's going on.

This is a domestic terror tactic.

When is somebody going to stand up and do something?

Well, I certainly hope that

the Attorney General is finding a path to do just that.

But certainly, I think it all starts at the local level, that we, first of all, as Americans have the right to protect our families, and this is one more reason we need a Second Amendment and why it's so important to be able to protect ourselves when you can't get the police.

And then beyond that, we need local county officers, local governors, if they can't handle it, to reach out to the president.

And America needs to realize that.

President Trump cannot send the National Guard there without an invitation.

But hopefully that local folks will hold those local officials accountable and elect somebody that will stand up to all these hostile groups because we are a nation of law and order.

And Glenn, what we asked our police officers to do now is just incredible.

I remember remember growing up, what my dad had to do.

You know, we expect him to be a traffic cop, an expert marksman, a detective, but they also had to be a social worker and a family counselor, a marital counselor to take care of the homeless.

We expect an awful lot of our police.

They need more funding, not less funding.

But you're right.

We need to declare some of these groups as terrorists and let the FBI and the Attorney General go after them.

And there's nothing the federal government can do on voting, if I can just bring you back to that one just this one last time.

There's nothing the federal government can do, although Nancy Pelosi

put

ballot harvesting in the last stimulus, which I don't understand how the federal government has anything to do with that.

But if you look at just Detroit, 72% of Detroit's absencee ballot counts were off.

72%,

when they went back and

looked at it again,

their record ballot counts weren't so record.

They don't match the number of voters in Detroit.

And they're saying it's so screwed up that

they don't know if they'll ever really have the answer.

Is this what we're facing in these Democratic states?

Exactly, Glenn.

I just hope that America realizes the hoax, that they realize that Nancy Pelosi has once more fabricated an entire hoax,

a false crisis, and they'll just go right up the chain and they'll say, look, if this was a hoax, then the Russian situation was a hoax as well, and the whole impeachment process was a hoax, and that House of Cards comes caving in.

We have to get President Trump re-elected.

We have to keep the majority in the Senate.

We've got to flip the House back, that this truly is a crossroads in history for the United States.

Do we want a socialist government or do we want the Donald Trump economy of less regulations and lower taxes?

So I hope America wakes up, smells the roses, and this November gets President Trump back in there.

Thank you very much for

taking time out of your day and joining us.

We appreciate the work of anybody who is in fighting for the Constitution and common sense and against socialism right now.

Congressman Roger Marshall from Kansas, thank you so much for being with us.

Appreciate it.

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

Apparently, another asteroid is headed towards Earth.

the day before the election.

And I am pulling for the asteroid.

Are you endorsing?

I am endorsing, I am officially endorsing the asteroid.

It's the day before the election.

They say it is 6.5 feet in diameter and not potentially dangerous.

No, they consider it to be potentially dangerous.

So it's 6.5 feet.

They found it 13 days ago.

It's coming towards us.

The day before election, it's supposed to either near

us or hit us.

How did they find one

like this, but they missed the, what was it?

It was like the size of a bus or something.

It was much bigger.

It was much bigger.

And that one is the closest call we've had in decades.

And they didn't see it till after it passed.

Yeah, they're like, whoa, what was that?

How did you find this one?

This is the size of a pee.

And I mean, what?

It just feels right that we would get hit by an asteroid right now.

It just feels like the thing that

would happen.

Doesn't it feel, honestly, would you be surprised?

And I mean this sincerely.

I would have in the past if aliens appeared.

I would have been like, whoa, didn't see that coming.

Not really.

No, I wouldn't be surprised.

Jesus.

10 years.

Jesus is here.

How could you be surprised by that?

How could you be surprised?

I mean, there is nothing that would shock me anymore.

Gulags.

Ah, you know what?

The IRS said that you didn't pay your taxes.

No, here's my tax.

I paid them.

Here's the canceled check cashed by the IRS.

Yep, gulag for you.

I wouldn't be surprised.

No, no, no, no.