Best of The Program | Guest: Dr. Benjamin Merkle | 7/15/20

Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless.

And if you haven't made the Switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should.

One, it's $15 a month.

Two, seriously, it's $15 a month.

Three, no big contracts.

Four, I use it.

Five, my mom uses it.

Are you playing me off?

That's what's happening, right?

Okay, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, $15 per month equivalent required.

New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available.

Taxes and fees extra.

See Mintmobile.com.

Welcome to the podcast.

Today we find out why Plymouth Plantation has now changed their name because that's just what happens.

There's a new movement out to change our national anthem as well.

We give you the odd choices that we can select from.

We also go into the nuclear family.

This is something that's being opposed by Black Lives Matter.

And by the way, that is in their documentation, not something I'm just speculating about.

And we talked to the head of a college who has decided to take a strong pro-life stance.

You don't see this very often.

It's an amazing one to hear.

And is Texas and other southern states going the wrong way on coronavirus?

What is life like?

Where is it going in the future?

We'll get into that as well.

It's all on the podcast today.

And tonight we have back-to-back Stu Does America at 8 p.m.

Eastern, followed by Glenn Beck and his wonderful program at 9 p.m.

Eastern, only on Blaze TV.

Go to Blazetv.com/slash Glenn.

If you use the promo code SaveTheFamily, you can get 20 bucks off.

We'll get into that as well.

You can also subscribe to this podcast and rate and review it.

We'd really appreciate that.

Makes a big difference because, you know, the algorithm robots like to fight against us unless people rate and review the program.

So please do that so other people can

find the show and the word can be spread.

And also do the same on Stu Does America's page.

Here's the podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the benefit program.

Pat Gray joins us now with another fact of history that has just been changed, and

most people don't even know.

Yeah,

just violent.

By the way, glad to see you're rocking the ascot again today.

It's comforting.

It's somehow comforting.

It's a mask.

It's a mask.

Yeah, I was saying the COVID era.

Does it double?

That's very common.

Is that what you use it for?

Little bandana situation.

We were wondering.

We were thinking, okay, it's an ascot, but is it also a mask?

And I guess the answer is yes.

No, no,

it's a bandana, actually.

I know you have a hard time with those, but

go ahead.

I do.

I have an even harder time with this.

Plymouth Plantation changed their name.

Not that they're changing their name, it's already been changed.

The Plymouth Plantation Living Museum, 400 years old,

changed to be more inclusive and respectful, and it is now Plymouth Patuxet to include the Native Americans that live in that region or lived in that region at the time of this.

Okay, okay, so wait a minute.

Hang on just a second.

Wait a minute.

The pilgrims

They happened to find the land, and if you find this coincidental, they happened to find the land that was abandoned by the Native Americans because the Native Americans felt that that land was cursed because a tribe had been wiped out with some disease years before.

And so it was completely abandoned.

So how does that

what?

How we're changing it to an Indian name?

Yeah, what are you talking about?

And by the way, the Patuxet people have been extinct since 1622, so they're not even around to realize this honor that they're being given.

This was that

right.

I mean, this is nuts.

This is absolutely nuts.

And they are changing everything.

Next hour, we're going to show you.

There's an effort now to get rid of the national anthem as well.

It's a big effort, too.

And it's got some momentum.

It's huge.

Yeah.

Yeah, it does.

And, you know,

the 1619 project,

do you know that Oprah Winfrey is now producing a movie that's going to come out based on the 1619 project, which is a lie.

Wow.

It's a verifiable lie.

And she's pushing that.

I mean, second tower gang, when are you going to have your second tower moment?

We are under attack, and it is happening rapidly.

So fast.

So fast.

I mean, things that you couldn't have imagined six months ago are already done now.

Not only are they not opposed, it's already been done.

And you don't even know that it's happened.

You know, the Star Spangled Banner, the statues that are being removed or being discussed to be removed, the founders that are disparaged now, and you can't even say anything good about the founders.

All of, you know, how many times do you have to play the Michelle Obama thing?

They've changed what they say.

Hang on, Michelle.

Hang on.

What was it that Barack knows?

And Barack knows that we are going to have to make sacrifices.

We are going to have to change our conversation.

We're going to have to change our traditions, our history.

We're going to have to move into a different place.

We are 10 years past the fundamental transformation of America.

This is what,

in all of the warnings that we gave you when we were at Fox.

I mean, Pat, you were part of that research team.

Stu, you were as well.

All of that, can you name anything that we said was coming that isn't now here?

No, and I think in then some,

there were things that I don't think we could have imagined back then that have already transpired.

And we put a very little fight on any of it.

It's just.

Well,

there's some good news

first of all voters and according to a new poll majorities of almost all demographic groups measured to see cancel culture they see it as bad just under half of the voters under 45 hold that view among the voters 46 percent see cancer cancer cancel culture.

I don't know why because it is a cancer

see it as bad 26 percent say it's it's a good thing.

Now, that is astonishing to think that 26% of Americans think this McCarthy era that we're living in is a good thing.

But if you look back in the 1950s, this is what we went through with

communism.

It was just the opposite.

You'd lose your job,

you were convicted if accused.

You know,

it was a witch hunt then, and it's a witch hunt now.

Only 17% of voters see cancel culture as a good thing

the the problem is

is

the

very liberal voters very those who say that they're very liberal

31% see it as good thirty seven percent see it as bad thirty two percent aren't sure you know if you're not sure you should probably do something to get sure one way or another there's there's no There's no place for you.

I don't know,

rounding people up and just making them disappear.

Good, bad.

I'm not sure.

It's so hard to decide on matters like that.

And what do you guys think?

Do you figure that stuff out before or after you vote?

Is there a specific order you need to do these things in?

Like, do you learn and then?

I would say figure it out.

Yeah, I would say figure it out now.

You know who's figuring it out?

Are the Christians in California?

I just said yesterday, churches, you better wake up and you better stand up.

I believe I condemned people to hell yesterday.

I think you did.

Which,

well, I didn't actually.

I didn't condemn them.

I just know that they're going to hell.

But you're not their judge.

I mean, all you're saying is they're going to burn in the fires of hell.

That's all.

I mean, that's

everlasting and eternal fire.

Yeah.

That lake of

ever-burning fire.

Yeah, they're there.

But I'm not their judge.

Anyway,

yesterday I was talking about churches waking up, and it looks like in California it is starting to happen.

Some of the church leaders are saying they are not going to shut down again.

San Francisco and the American Russian Orthodox Archbishop wrote an open letter to Governor Newsom, said

that

his ban singing is open discrimination,

reminiscent of the era of the godless persecutions in the USSR.

It's about time somebody starts using this language.

We now observe the contradiction that in mass protests that are taking place, which

at which absolutely all precautions are violated with impunity,

adding the church

into saying that you have to close down, they said they will defend their rights of the members to continue to worship.

And there are lots of churches that are starting to rise up, and that's in California.

And they need to.

You can't lose the right of your religion and your faith and to worship.

That is a protected right.

And I love the fact that all the politicians are saying, you know what?

Protest.

That's a First Amendment right.

So is my house of worship.

And you need to stand together as Christians, as Jews, whoever

we need to stand together.

Because, you know, we can argue about theology for a long time, and we'll all be destroyed doing that.

What do you say?

We stand together now and stand up for the things that we all believe in.

And then we can argue about the other stuff later.

I'm just saying.

And they're so blatant about it.

We had this speech from de Blasio, was it last week or the week before, where he was asked, well, hey,

how can you say?

Because there was a BLM protest coming up, and he was perfectly fine with that, but he didn't want people going back to church.

And so they asked him about that disparity.

And he said, well, oh, you can't compare the two.

Those are apples and oranges because the BLM people are doing something really important.

Wait, what?

Oh, my God.

Oh, my gosh.

So they've just, oh, my gosh.

They don't care anymore.

It's like you said, said, the mask is off.

Obviously, figuratively speaking, it's on, literally speaking.

But they've taken off the mask about how they really feel about religion, about capitalism, about this country, and everything it stands for.

Our founders, it's just all out there in the open.

And if this doesn't alarm us to the point of taking a stand, nothing will.

Nothing will.

Nothing will.

I read an op-ed pace yesterday

about

the two-tower kind of philosophy, that have you had your second tower experience?

And I was really just struck by, that is so right on the money.

But when are people, when is the average American, or have they, and they're just being quiet?

I don't know.

When is the average American going to have their second tower kind of moment?

You know, my second tower kind of moment was when I realized that when wearing a face mask, I cannot unlock my iPhone with a stupid face thing.

It is a

travesty, a sham, and a mockery.

It's a travish sham mockery, and it must end.

Stupid Apple, get a program that reads through my face mask and will recognize me so I don't have to type in my freaking code, which takes seconds.

Oh, they will.

Be careful what you want to do.

Can I tell you something?

Probably already in the mail.

I I lost my glasses someplace here.

My wife is like, where did you put them?

I'm like, I don't know.

I lost them outside.

So

someplace where the cattle and the antelope roam.

So I put my old glasses on and I tried to open up my computer.

It didn't recognize my face.

And I'm like,

Maybe Clark Kent was...

I mean, maybe that was true.

Apple can't recognize my face face with a pair of glasses.

Oh, that's not bad at all.

Holy cow.

The worst one is

when you realize you've gotten so fat, it no longer thinks you're the same person.

That is a bad realization.

That legitimately happened to me.

Wow.

And it's like, oh, no.

Who the hell are you?

What fat version of that?

That's what it is.

Hey, that's what it is.

Man,

I went in.

I spent like 12 hours in the hospital this last weekend because I had kidney stones.

Oh, my gosh.

Pat, you know what that's like.

And we can only hope that Stu joins us on this very soon.

Yes.

Very soon, very soon.

But that was incredible.

But they pumped me full of so much

water

that I got out.

They put, I think,

I said, a gallon and a half.

I can't remember how much water they pumped into me, but they pumped in so much fluid, I got out, and

I looked like I had gained 30 pounds.

and they were like, you got to keep drinking water.

And I'm like, not if it makes me look like this, dude.

Oh, wait a minute.

I was just going to say, did you do it again this morning?

Because

shut up.

Sure.

The best of the Glen Beck program.

Hey, it's Glenn, and you're listening to the Glen Beck program.

If you like what you're hearing on this show, make sure you check out Pat Gray Unleashed.

It's available wherever you download your favorite podcasts.

And

in other news, today that makes

an awful lot of sense:

the city of Chicago has

been under a

shadow that

was cast by the

corona,

the

flu pandemic, and a surge in violence.

Well, we still don't know what caused the violence,

probably,

probably white people, but Mayor Lori Lightfoot is calling in a hero to tackle a different problem in Chicago, the low response rates for the U.S.

Census.

Apparently, her goal was to have at least

70% of the of the people fill out the census.

It's now being filled out by only about 40%

of the people of Chicago.

So yesterday in a press conference, which I think was very, very brave of her, she said,

when I was a kid, I loved the Batman TV show.

And when the city of Gotham had a real difficult challenge,

one of the things that the mayor did was he called out and sent out a distress signal to Batman.

I'm not sure if the mayor

Lightfoot knows that Batman isn't real,

but she went on to say so i'm doing something similar for the census i'm i'm i'm happy to report i'm calling out this

the c

the census cowboy

i mean

who in the inner cities of chicago Don't love cowboys.

I mean, first of all, cowboys were killing indians cowboys are

are part of the problem with america right

so if the census she said if the census cowboy comes into your neighborhood that's not a good thing

of course not is a cowboys are bad

she said that means you gotta step up and and do your part and and fill out the census and that's all the news uh that makes sense if you're completely hammered out of your mind.

This is the best of the Glenbeck program.

So last week, we played

a video that went viral online.

I want to play it again and I want you to listen to this.

Hey, wokey McWokeface.

Quick question.

This black life mattered, but doesn't this one?

We know this black life.

But why doesn't this one?

George Floyd.

We believe that all babies' black lives mattered.

And tens of millions of others too.

Murdered in the most dangerous place in this country for any black life.

A womb.

Murdered and dissected and sold.

We believe that each and every human life matters because every human life, regardless of culture or color, is crafted in the sacred image of Almighty God, which is the only possible reason why any life could matter at all.

We believe that secular progressive white supremacists have been running a vile and genocidal population control campaign against blacks in America that has straddled centuries, trying to keep them from life, from adulthood, from power, from stable families and communities.

And that matters.

We believe that the organization Black Lives Matter, registered trademark, is a Marxist front that doesn't care about black lives even half as much as an average white pro-life flyover Trump voting evangelical.

Every single black life matters.

from conception to the grave and beyond into eternity.

That is God's truth, and it's a hell of a lot more than BLM can say.

This shouldn't be hard, but clear thinking is rare these days, especially on college campuses.

All lives matter.

All black lives matter.

All.

Behind a badge.

On the street,

in the womb.

Philosophy matters.

Theology matters.

History matters.

Thinking matters.

Learn to think in unthinking times.

New St.

Andrews College.

Clear thinking, clear teaching.

In person this fall.

Geez.

Dr.

Ben Merkel is with us.

He's the president of New St.

Andrews College.

Ben, how are you, sir?

I am well.

Thanks so much for having me on.

So,

how much heat did you get for that?

You You know, it's gotten considerable.

We had our mayor pretty upset at us and

say something in a local paper.

And we've had

but to be honest, actually, I have to say the positive response has been outweighed it by about 95% to 5% because I think a lot of people are so sick of being told that they're racist because they don't support BLM.

And I think that we were able to say what a lot of people sort of intuitively felt, but weren't hearing anybody articulate it clearly.

And who came up with this idea?

Whose

brain child was this?

Our marketing team here, we've got some friends that we hired to put this together, but they're all graduates from our college.

So I've never heard of New St.

Andrews College.

You're in, of all places, Moscow, Idaho, right?

That's right.

Yeah, we're the other Moscow.

Yeah, we're a

very small private Christian college in North Idaho.

So a very small little school.

So it's understandable.

A lot of people don't know about our existence.

And how long have you been around?

We started in 1994.

We grew out of the classical Christian education movement.

It started in 1980, and then we're a college that tends to pull from kids who have done classical Christian education.

So,

man,

you know, we're looking at our colleges now, and none of them seem to have a spine.

I mean, I just told the audience about Penn State, where

they took conservative off of the you're welcome here

because of backlash from their students and faculty.

What's really happening to our university system?

And

is there,

do we survive this?

Well, I think we could survive it, but it would take a really bold change for us to do it.

I mean, I don't think Americans, we complain a lot as conservatives about what we see as the deep state, the sort of unelected mechanism that seems to run our country but can't be held accountable.

And I don't think we realize how much education is the ultimate deep state.

Both K to 12 and colleges,

the faculty and staff of most colleges, including your Christian colleges, are dominated by progressive left ideology.

Every teacher votes Democrat.

It's really total how much the left has taken over education.

And I think that's why, I mean, I was listening to your show earlier and you were talking about how swiftly everything seems to have changed.

But I think think that's because we have slowly had

basically an entire generation indoctrinated in a way that we didn't really realize was happening.

And now we're seeing the fruition of it.

But it's also, I mean, there are other elements in education.

I think that the way education is funded is a big part of it.

The federal money

has such big strings that are attached to it and steer you in terms of your ideology.

And then the way accreditation and other things like that work, it really cultivates a leadership class that is all about demonstrating compliance.

Like, you just, you're not going to see college administration make any kind of bold move because they got there by demonstrating compliance over decades and decades of their professional life.

So, they're allergic to those kinds of decisions.

It's also

unreasonable to think that

a school system funded by a federal government is going to teach, don't trust a federal government.

Don't trust the government.

You have to think independently.

You have to think for yourself.

There's no way how we expected that to happen is beyond me.

But they haven't been teaching that for a long time.

Yeah, all real true government begins with self-government.

It has to start there, and then your own self-discipline, your own self-government then makes possible other real government.

But yeah, our institutions really depend on compliance with a larger state.

So that's not going to be something that they're going to inculcate in our students.

For

the person who is thinking, well, I've got to send my kid to college

and they're going into college this, you know, this fall.

What do you say to that parent?

You know, I think you've got to ask some hard questions.

I think that a lot of parents,

they have the impression that, okay, I know that the colleges are generally liberal, but they remember going to the college in the 80s and the 90s, and they remember bumping up against those kinds of things.

And they assume that everybody is talking about the same kind of college that they went to, and they don't realize how radically transformed the college campus is.

It's nothing like what we went through.

So you need to ask some hard questions.

And I think that I'm torn because I go back and forth.

On the one hand, people are paying exorbitant amounts of money for an education that gives them

no real education whatsoever and hardly any actual professional skills.

And so in a lot of ways, I see the movement for like, we'll just go to a trade school and learn a trade.

That's a much quicker way.

to get into a job and to avoid the debt and the indoctrination.

But at the same time, the reason why we're at the place that we are right now, it's not because we haven't learned how to employ professional skills, it's because we haven't learned how to think.

And I think that

we need to reprioritize critical thinking at the college level because that's what we have lost.

And now

it's not that we can't get a job, it's that we have

destroyed our entire economy.

Well, you can't

you can't learn to think from wokey McWoke face, as your ad put it.

You can't learn critical thinking if

you are told there are things that you can't think, can't say, and things are bad.

I mean,

I don't understand how academia doesn't realize they have become the old church in the dark ages, where where we'll lock you in a tower if you disagree with us.

That's what's happening to us now, and they don't seem to see that.

Yeah, well, I think a lot of it has to do with just that ultimate rejection.

Well, the rejection of ultimate truth.

So when you reject ultimate truth, and what you have, everybody reverts to their own personal truth.

And then what happens is that you're dominated by personal emotion.

And

so, like, if you try to interact with somebody at a BLM protest, you're not going to get an actual argument.

What you'll get is them sort of vomiting up their emotion because

that's what they've been trained thinking is.

But

in the traditional West, we understood that there was a transcendent truth that we all answered to.

And argument was about understanding these transcendent principles that we then looked to apply consistently in our lives and in how we treated others.

And that's where logic comes from.

That's where philosophy comes from, that's where theology comes from.

So, you have this larger transcendent truth that you live under, and it provides the kind of

cultural success that the West has had for millennia.

But they're rejecting all of that, and so all they can do is burn it down.