Best of The Program | Guests: Bill O'Reilly & Sen. Tom Cotton | 4/10/20

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Yeah, aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

Welcome to the podcast.

It's Good Friday.

Today we try to bring some positivity and maybe a little wider thinking than just trying to analyze every little thing that goes on with coronavirus.

Also have Pat Gray on the program, Bill O'Reilly for an hour.

And we hear audio of what happens when you ask people, would they rather have millions dead or Donald Trump in office?

Shockingly, the answer was not particularly easy to come up with for a lot of these people.

And Senator Tom Cotton will also join us.

He's the senator who really called this early on, what might happen with coronavirus and why we needed to take it seriously.

We'll get to all that on today's podcast.

Also, we'll remind you on tonight's Stew Does America, we've found the cure for COVID-19, which is coming from the country of Turkmenistan who just banned the word coronavirus and now they have no cases.

So we're going to try that on the show today, banning the word coronavirus, a coronavirus-free program on Stu Does America.

That comes up tonight as well.

Make sure you subscribe on your podcast platform to not only Stu Does America, but also this program, and rate and review

and be generous.

I mean, you know, it's a holiday weekend.

Here's the podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the Blend Beck program.

It's Good Friday.

Would you open up your scriptures for a minute and just look at the book of Isaiah?

Because Isaiah saw this day.

He saw the hours that would lead into that dark night before the Sabbath.

That Sabbath we now call Good Friday.

Oh, yes, and a Good Friday it is, isn't it?

Who's feeling good?

Put your hands together.

Can I get an amen?

You know, I was thinking yesterday

about Good Friday, and I was singing, you know, that is as out of place as eggs and Easter bunny.

I don't understand Good Friday.

At the first glance, at first blush, Good Friday has nothing good about it.

Especially this Good Friday.

But if you look at the original, quote, Good Friday, it is a day of pain and humiliation and death.

I mean, profound shame.

I mean, here's the guy who we now know as the Christus or the Anointed One,

the King of Kings.

And

look at his Good Friday, not real good.

But when you think of

king of kings and the anointed one, the priest who's that sounds like something that you would want.

I mean, that would be like, hey, who wants to be the anointed one?

I do.

And then they're like, okay, here's what you need to do.

Now,

you know what?

Where's that Jesus guy?

He's pretty good.

Once you know the price,

it's something that none of us would want, none of us would do, none of us could do.

You know what?

I wrote a book called The Christmas Sweater,

and it's how I understand the sacrifice of Jesus because my mother sacrificed everything to give me one last Christmas present before she died, and it was a sweater.

And I didn't appreciate it at all and

I realized how poor we were on that Christmas.

And for a long time that sweater haunted me because

I understood what it meant to her and she noticed that it didn't mean anything to me.

And I carried that guilt around with me for a long time and I couldn't get past it.

It's weird how many times

what he did for us and how many times we still just reject it.

We can't,

we just don't think we're worthy.

We just don't think that we're good enough.

We just give up all hope.

You know, I love Handel.

I love the Messiah, but it's not a Christmas thing.

I mean, part of it is a Christmas thing, but the Hallelujah Chorus isn't Christmas.

You know,

I've been thinking this week about, and we, like sheep, have gone astray.

That's

that's leading leading up to Good Friday

if you look at Isaiah and chapter 53 open up your scriptures

chapter 53

we sing this thanks to Handel every Christmas but it

and we like sheep

have gone astray and we've each turned his own way

But he knew that.

He knew that in advance.

He knows it still.

And that's what makes Good Friday so incomprehensible to me.

He knew that most of us wouldn't be grateful.

Some would still reject him.

Those who knew chose his plan.

We would reject him.

We would despise him.

We would mock him.

We would nail him to a cross.

And we still do it today.

Look at our society.

Look at what we're doing in our society.

But he chooses us anyway.

Listen to what he signed up for in Isaiah.

For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant and as a root out of dry ground.

He has no form or comeliness, and when we see him, there's no beauty that we should desire him.

I mean, this is...

Who's signing up for this job?

This is a picture of a little fragile shoot that begins to bud.

It's grown off the edge of a stump that's cut right to the ground.

The huge tree is gone.

There's nothing nothing there.

There's this tiny little tender sprout that could so easily just break away and die.

And to make it even worse,

the stump with its tender shoot is located in a dry desert.

The chances of surviving the burning heat, the scorching noonday sun, no soil,

no water, the chances of survival are slim to none.

Hey, who wants that job?

He's the opposite of the majestic oak that everybody's like, we cannot cut down that historic oak that has provided shade for our family for generations to come.

He's a little shoot.

He's got all the odds going against him.

And yet,

when we look at it, we still don't see any beauty.

It's not there because it doesn't conform to what the world says is beautiful or desirous.

Isaiah says he's despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

And we hid our faces from him.

He was despised and we didn't esteem him.

You know what's amazing is reading that?

Take the Jesus part out of it.

We haven't changed a bit.

It's easy to look at the people back then and go, yeah, look, they despised him

to the least of my brothers.

Lord, when were you in prison?

When were you hungry?

When did I not give you to the least of these?

Take that line and listen to that line again.

Let me paraphrase it.

But think about those people that we pass every day.

Those people who are invisible to all of us.

They're despised, rejected by everybody.

They're people of suffering, familiar with pain.

But we turn our face.

We look the other way.

They're despised.

And we don't care.

That's what Isaiah is saying here.

That's the way Jesus was.

We didn't care.

We're no better than those in the past.

And it's not to shame us.

I really want to point out

why Good Friday is good.

Because it is truly a miracle.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.

Yet we didn't esteem him.

Stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

You see, surely he is born of grief.

It was our weakness that he

carried.

It was our sorrows that weighed him down.

It's the thoughts

we look at him and go,

it's what he did.

If you were back in that time, is this a punishment from God or a punishment for his own sins or a punishment from the law?

It's him.

Yet he took on our sickness, he carried our pains,

and we regarded him as a criminal, a nobody, or worse, cursed and struck down by God, afflicted by God, because somehow he was.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, our rebellion.

He was bruised for our iniquities, our sins, our thoughts, our deeds, our broken promises, our greed, gluttony, cruelness.

The darkness that we all hide, the things that we just don't care about, the people that we just are invisible, the people who are suffering right now in our own neighborhood, perhaps in our own house, but

we don't do anything about it.

I love this line.

The chastisement of our peace was upon him.

What does that mean?

The chastisement of our peace was upon him.

The brutal crucifixion, the

punishment that he took, the beating, the whipping,

it was the punishment for our peace.

And I don't mean peace like, oh, peace on earth, I mean peace inside.

The thing, you know, how at least it's me, I think about things that I've done in the past or things that I've said or failed to do, and I'll be driving in my car, and the radio won't be on, or I'll taking a shower.

And I'll, I, there are times that I'll have to go la la la la la just to stop myself from thinking.

Maybe it's just me.

That is peace.

When that voice stops that tape, that's peace.

That's why he was punished.

So we wouldn't have to stand in the shower and go, la la la, so we could stop thinking about the stupid things that we did.

With his broken skin, his bruises, his broken bones, his pierced flesh, with his stripes we are healed.

We're forgiven.

And the ugly, the invisible, the shame, the horror is all turned into something beautiful.

A day of death and blood, the darkest day,

becomes the brightest.

It becomes Good Friday because nothing could ever surpass this good.

I'm going to share this with you today because it's the best news I could share you.

Because

none of our stuff means anything.

Honestly.

All of the arguments on politics, man, are you done with that?

Because I am.

All of the worries that we currently have right now, all of the worries about our neighbors and about our children and what's going to happen with school and what's going to happen, all of that is meaningless.

It really is, if we don't have peace.

And I know from experience.

The hardest one to forgive in our lives is us.

It's me.

It's you.

It's easier for me to forgive you for something than it is for me to forgive me for something.

And we're all the same, but we never talk about it.

But we're all the same.

Oh, if people only knew what I've done or who I really am, they wouldn't like me.

We hide.

We hide.

And I think...

We hide from ourselves many times because sin convinces us that we're not complete.

We're not worthy that's that is the lie that was nailed to the cross that was it that we're not complete we're not worthy he knew us

he knows us

he knew what we would face he knew what he would face and he still did it

I want you to listen to me.

If you are having struggles in your life right now,

if you are at all feeling unworthy at all,

if you are feeling that you are under this dark cloud, you are listening to this broadcast for a reason.

I am speaking directly to you.

You are worthy.

Your life doesn't have to be this way.

Your life is not going to change necessarily.

I've been there, brother.

I was down on my knees and I was ready to end it all.

And I decided, no, you know what?

I'm going to stand up.

And I wish I could tell you the very next day was different, but it wasn't.

But today is,

10 years ago was, 20 years ago was.

This happened to me 20 years ago.

And I'm a completely different person.

It takes work, but man, is it worth it?

And it all revolves around what happened today

and Sunday.

He's there just to say,

you're my man.

You're here for a reason.

I've already done, don't worry about any of that.

I've already paid for all of that.

It's all fine.

Let it go.

I'm here to help you.

This power is real.

I know it to be true.

And it is beyond what, no matter what you think, no matter how far down you are, it is more powerful than that.

It has power beyond your need.

And it will heal, it will make you whole, it will change your life

because you're worthy.

Because

he knew

he knew you,

and we like sheep,

and we like sheep.

The best news I could give you today

is this too shall pass.

The sun's about to come out,

and we get to witness it.

Share that good news with your friends today.

This is the best of the Glenbeck program.

All right, Mr.

Bill O'Reilly, you sick freak.

Welcome to the program, sir.

Yes, I heard the words

humility and jocularity.

I really appreciate that kind of an intro, Bill.

No, that's what, that's not what I...

Fun and frivolity, not two words that I think of with when I think of Bill O'Reilly.

But

maybe that's just me.

Not one that leaps right to the top.

No, not necessarily, but I'm sure it's in there somewhere.

No, no, no, no, no.

So, Bill, I read your review of the Tiger King, but I want you to give it here on the air at some point.

So we can either start there or whatever you think is

newsworthy today.

What's the big story that we have?

Let's end with the Tiger King, but I have a question for all your listeners.

They can think about until we get there.

What is America's fascination with the low-rent district?

I mean, why are we watching the real housewives of...

Oh, I can tell you why.

Really?

You don't know?

Why?

Really?

Because we feel better about ourselves.

We feel better about...

We look at social media and everybody's posting these beautiful lives and everything else, and it's all lies.

It's all lies, but we feel bad about it.

Then we watch the Tiger King and we're like, oh, we're better than everybody in this show.

This is fantastic.

I am finally better than someone.

That's what it is.

You know, that's not bad, Beck.

I mean,

I'll buy into that a little bit, but,

you know, how many tattoos can we see in one

phone?

I can't wait for your review.

All right, Bill O'Reilly, what are the big stories of the week?

Well, I think it's the emerging war,

and again, this always goes back to the same thing, between the far left, which lost their leader Bernie Sanders this week, and trying to destroy the American system.

It's not just a hate Trump thing.

It is for the New York Times, Washington Post, the media.

It's almost exclusively a hate Trump thing there.

But for the far left, George Soros cadres,

it's about really destroying and then remaking America.

And they're trying to find a way to do that within the pandemic.

So if they can destroy the capitalist economy,

which in the short term is being badly battered, as everyone knows, but if they can really damage it in a long-term way, it's going to be a lot easier for the next Bernie Sanders to get this socialism

into the system.

So I think that's the emerging story that most people are not aware of.

I will tell you, Bill, that

I'm really disgusted by so many people and how they are using this pandemic to try to,

as you said, destroy America.

You have people now talking about 18 months of quarantine.

There is absolutely no way on God's green earth any country can survive 18 months of quarantine.

It's insanity.

And they're doing it because this is the fastest road to socialism.

This is it.

This is it.

This is the thing that I've worried about and warned about for so long.

It just came in a package of a virus.

Yeah.

And,

you know, you and I are Sympatico.

or the Day for Stu

on this.

So there is a powerful segment, well-funded,

that has

co-opted some in the media to get the message out that our health care system is evil, which is, of course, isn't true.

If you look at deaths per million of population, we're far below all the socialized.

We are leading the world.

We are leading the world.

The cure will come from us.

The tests have come from us.

Everything that socialized medicine stands for, Italy and Spain are collapsing.

They're collapsing.

We didn't.

That's right.

And the other thing is that the speculation,

and I keep telling my listeners and my viewers, why are you watching these cable news programs and network news programs when all you're getting is speculation?

Just as you said, well, we're going to be quarantined for 18 months.

Do you know, and do your listeners know, that on Monday, the day after Easter, Austria is sending its children back to school?

Did you know that?

I did, yes.

Okay, okay.

But most people don't.

Would you see that most people don't know that?

Oh, yeah, no, most people have no idea.

Okay, because it isn't reported.

So Austria,

just north of Italy, sharing a border with Italy, okay, is saying, all right, we believe we have this thing contained.

We're sending the kids back to school and we're opening the shops.

So if you want to get a little chocolate

on Monday in Austria, you can.

But that's not reported here.

Same virus, okay?

Same transmission in Austria as in the United States, but nobody reports this because it doesn't fit in to the wall of tomb mosaic.

I have to tell you, Bill, I think it's actually worse than just not reporting on things.

For instance, the governor of South Dakota, I'm sure you've seen her talks that she's been giving on the Constitution and how she's not going to violate the Constitution for this.

She's keeping the state open.

There are about five governors in the country that are refusing to go along with any of this nonsense.

She's leading the pack, and they are hammering her.

They are just bullying her.

Sure.

Because this

pandemic offers the opportunity to remove Trump.

So if he doesn't get a handle on it by summer, then

the odds are that he would lose.

Because the way Americans vote is emotional.

It always has been that way.

It's always an emotional vote for president.

And the rationale is, well, we'll give the other side a chance.

If the kids can't go back to school by September, oh my god, the Trump administration's in trouble.

They know that.

If there are just millions and millions of workers who can't pay their bills, my God.

So they're rooting, they're rooting

to get Trump out.

If you could lie to Tector Beck, if you could lie to Tector, the media, the national media, and ask them a very simple question, because I am a very simple man.

Which is worse, the pandemic or four more years of Trump?

What do you think you would get?

What answer do you think you would get?

Oh, four more years of Trump.

Okay.

Oh, absolutely.

You have those people,

and this is the New York Times, Washington Post, NBC News, CNN, that are going to spin everything about the pandemic.

It's Trump's fault, and it's a wall of doom.

And then you have the other people that we just cited, the Soros socialist people, that are saying, okay, now we can suspend all civil liberties.

Now we can tell people what to do.

Now we can change the economy.

Now we can do all this.

Under the guise of protecting Americans.

Under the guise.

And, you know, it's the Reichstag fire on steroids.

I'm not going to go into that, okay?

But that's what this is, if you know your history.

And so those of us who love our country, who admire the nobility of it and the opportunity that it affords hardworking and honest people,

I'm appalled at what's going on.

But I'm also appalled that American consumers continue to go in and watch this garbage.

My TV is black.

And the final thing, and this is self-serving, and I'm sorry, I have had millions of views.

I don't know whether you saw the New York Post this week.

Millions of views on billorilly.com.

Millions

since this pandemic began.

Because I don't do speculation.

This is a no-spec zone, like the no-spin zone.

I just give you the facts as far as we can ascertain them.

But that's not what's happening in the media in America.

And people are panicked.

People are acting crazy in some cancers because of all this garbage.

Well,

there are two Americas now.

There are the ones that are buying into this snitch on your neighbor kind of thing.

And I want the government to tell me everything and what to do.

And then the rest of America, which is

this is ridiculous.

I actually think, Bill, that this

pandemic is real and it is dangerous.

But I think the way we've handled it

by shutting everything down and going, you know, as you say, Reichstag fire and

in some places, really very totalitarian, where you're sending police door to door.

I think that is going to spook many Americans.

This is exactly what happened under Woodrow Wilson, as you know, when he sent out his stormtroopers.

We had a quarter of a million people that had badges, and they were working for the Justice Department.

They were to open your neighbor's mail, listen to your neighbor on the phone, find out who our enemies are that don't want this war.

And they arrested 145,000 145,000 Americans in about a two-year period.

It was disgraceful and

it sent

the left packing because regular Americans saw what this was turning into and went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

This is not who we are.

And that might happen this time.

I mean,

this could

very well backfire.

And you saw

English blow up.

You saw him blow up.

I mean, this maniac

screaming that we can't have a private health care system here and the stats are right in front of you, right in front of you, you can see how much more effective as you just pointed out our health care system is than that in Europe.

You can see it.

Yet this maniac Sanders still won't concede.

Still, because that's a way to control the population through their health care.

If you're dependent on the government for your health, you've got to do what your government tells you to do.

But getting back to the pandemic, I mean, we have people, I was walking the Terra Dog, Holly the Terror Dog, who has 3 million Twitter followers, if you can believe it.

So I'm walking Holly the Terror Dog, and then across the street, there's a lady with a mask walking some doxilin or something.

So I'm about 12 feet away, not 6.

I'm fine.

I don't have a mask other than when I rob a 7-Eleven.

I do use the mask for that.

But I say to her, madam, how are you?

I'm fine.

And then I hear a muffled, what the fuck is the fuck?

All right.

And I go, can I ask you this a question?

What is that protecting you from in the open air on a lane where there's no other people?

And it was like silence.

What is it protecting you from?

And of course, the lady doesn't know.

And the lady is so scared to death that she feels she has to wear a mask to walk the docks when there's nobody around.

But if you say that, you're going to be crucified unless you say this is a vicious disease, and it is.

Because nobody knows how it spreads.

It's not defined.

No one knows.

I have people who've gotten this thing.

They have no blank and clue how they got it.

They stayed inside.

They did what they could.

They sprayed themselves with Lysol all day long.

And they still get it.

They still get it.

So

that's fear.

When you don't know.

All right,

when it's going to hit you or why.

That's fear.

So we have to take that.

But Beck, here's the headline for the Glenn Beck program on Good Friday.

Are you ready?

Yes.

The Disney Corporation, which controls most of America.

People don't know that.

But the most powerful entity in America isn't the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.

It's the Disney Corporation.

They signal this week what's going to happen.

Iger, on his way out with, what, three billion dollars, said, you know what we're going to do?

We're going to take everybody's temperature that comes to our park.

So when you go to Disney World or Disneyland, you're going to buy your ticket, and then there'll be a guy, just like there is with the airlines, checking your bags and you, with a little thermometer thing.

And if you have a fever, you can't come in.

If you don't, they'll let you in.

That's going to be everywhere.

Everywhere.

Even your local restaurant.

Yeah, Microsoft, Microsoft has already developed something that will set off alarms.

It just will scan you as you walk in through the door, just like a camera, and it'll scan you.

If you have a fever, it'll set off an alarm.

They've also developed something where if you're not wearing a mask, it will set off an alarm.

And they're using those now.

Right.

Disney sticks.

It's coming.

Yeah, we're going to open our parks, and this is what's going to be.

The problem is you pay so much money for your ticket in Disney, that'll give you a fever.

I know, I know.

You're paying so much money.

It's $2,000 to get in, so

your fever is $105.

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

One of the guys who saw this pandemic for what it was early on was on our program, among other programs,

trying to ring the bell, is Senator Tom Cotton, and he is joining us now.

Senator, how are you, sir?

Hey, Glenn, it's good to be on with you again.

Thank you for having me.

You bet.

So you're getting credit from a lot of places as being the guy who saw this coming.

But is it because you're such a genius or because you take China for what we

what we know China is, not for what we hope China is?

Well, Glenn, it's certainly far from any claim that I'm a genius, but it does have a lot to do with the clear-eyed view of the Chinese Communist Party going back many years leading up to this pandemic outbreak.

Specifically, in January, as I began to see information in public news sources, not in classified

intelligence briefings that I received, just in public news sources, sometimes obscure or foreign sources like East Asian news outlets or medical journals.

I saw a clear contrast between two things.

On the one hand, you had the rhetoric of the Chinese Communist Party, which was designed to minimize the threat, soothe over fears, tell everyone everything was okay, don't worry, we've got it under control, this can't be transmitted from humans to humans.

Contrast that with the Chinese Communist Party's actions, which were extreme and draconian, shutting down a city that is larger than New York City, literally boarding up doors or welding doors shut on high-rise apartment buildings, allowing the Hong Kong local government to shut down all air travel from the Chinese mainland, shutting down schools, not just in Wuhan, but across the country, all 1.3 billion people worth.

The contrast between that rhetoric and those actions told me that the Chinese Communist Party understood just how grave this virus

could become and is therefore the reason why I started sounding the alarm in mid-January and urging the president to shut down travel with China, which thankfully he did by the end of January.

So, so, Senator,

I have been concerned about this coronavirus because, for the same reasons, watching what China was doing, thinking this is nuts.

They don't ever do stuff like this.

But I, and I think we're going to be proven to be accurate on this.

I was less concerned about the death toll that it would take on the rest of the world

than I was the toll on the free market system.

I mean, we are facing a possible depression,

and we've got people in Congress that are, I think, cheering for this.

They are

looking to

hurt the economy in any way to change

the capitalist system into a socialized system.

I think we are at a place where our Constitution and our way of life is on the ropes mainly because of the people in Congress.

Well, Glenn, I would put the responsibility for what we're going through first and foremost at the feet of the Chinese Communist Party.

They had a chance to keep this virus a local health problem in Wuhan.

Instead, they allowed it to become a global pandemic.

And to give you a sense of the extent of Chinese treachery, on January 23rd,

the Chinese Communist Party shut down

all travel by airplane out of Wuhan inside of China.

So you couldn't fly from Wuhan to Shanghai or to Beijing or anywhere else inside China.

But they allowed international air travel from Wuhan to continue.

So you could continue to fly from Wuhan to other places in the world to include New York and San Francisco.

That gives you a sense of their treachery in this matter.

Now,

your more fundamental point, though, is very important, and I share your concern about what this virus has done to jobs and our economy, not just here in the United States, but in all of our allied countries as well across Europe, in Japan, in Singapore, in Taiwan, in South Korea, what has happened across the civilized democratic world.

And that's why it is so important that we give our people the confidence that the virus is under control, that they're less likely to get it, and that if they do get it, the health care system will be functioning for them.

Because that is ultimately what has caused the economy across the Western world to come grinding to a halt.

You know, Donald Trump didn't shut down the economy.

The president doesn't have that authority in our system.

Even our governors and mayors, who in many cases have been aggressively saying what kinds of activities will be permitted, are more or less just reflecting reality.

If you look at where the state of the economy was in Europe and the United States in the first half of March, before many governments were taking this action, you'll see that our people were voluntarily and spontaneously starting to stay home.

If you look at, like, say, open table bookings for restaurants or airline travel or so forth.

So it's not so much a government dictate that has caused the economy to grind to a halt.

It is our people's understandable fears of the virus.

That's why it's so important.

Senator, I think that there are governors that are taking, I mean, the governor of Michigan just banned advertising for products that aren't essential.

What is that?

I mean, I think there are those who are

taking their powers, so to speak, way too far.

Yeah, so there's no doubt, for instance, that some governors, I think, have made mistakes.

Don't get me wrong.

You know, I have not heard about the ban on advertising for any so-called non-essential activity, but someone might say a Lego set is not essential.

Well, if you've got a four-year-old friend at home or three-year-old kids that I do, I can tell you it's pretty essential to have Legos for them.

Likewise, in Virginia, the governor extended the stay-at-home order until, I think, mid-June.

Maybe that'll end up being necessary, Glenn, but we don't know that now.

We don't know it in Virginia.

We don't know it in Arkansas.

We don't know it in any other state.

That's why President Trump has only suggested it continue until the end of April.

We can take stock in another 10 or 15 days about where we stand.

So there's no doubt that some governors and mayors have made bad decisions.

But in the end, what is more important than what any governor or mayor does is that we have the techniques and the practices in place that we can stop the population-wide measures we have now and return to traditional public health control, which is case-based measures.

So, rather than saying everyone needs to stay at home, we can just identify those people who are sick and those people who have been around them and tell them you individually need to stay at home.

And the president outlines that at his press conferences and what we're doing in terms of getting testing up on a rapid basis, getting antibody testing, producing masks, not just for doctors and nurses, but for people at the workplace, and so on and so forth.

That's how we give people confidence to get back to something like normal life.

And do you have confidence that we are taking the steps right now?

I know we ordered 500 million masks for the stockpile.

We're ordering all kinds of medicine, et cetera, et cetera.

Hopefully these tests come online.

But

are you

comfortable that if this thing comes back with a vengeance in the fall, we're not going to have to go and shut down again?

We'll have the tools to make sure that our medical system won't collapse on us.

Well, first off, Len, because there's so much unknown about the virus still, I don't want to say I have total confidence in that.

There are no guarantees right now.

But

we're taking the steps that we know.

You feel we're taking those steps that we should be taking?

At this point, after a false start or two related to testing at the CDC and FDA in early February, we are rapidly scaling up our testing capacity as quickly as we can.

The world's very best medical researchers and scientists are looking into every angle for possible prophylactic drugs, therapeutic drugs, and vaccines.

We are producing the kind of, again, personal protective equipment, not just for doctors and nurses, which we of course must have, but for people to get back to work.

So if they're working out the factory line, they can have the masks that they need.

Because ultimately, it's those steps that will allow us to get back to something like normal so we can get out of the situation we're in now, which is buying time through population-based measures to produce all those things.

So, Senator, we're talking to Senator Tom Cotton, the guy who was leading the charge on the coronavirus.

Let me take you back to China for a second.

What they've done, you could argue, is an act of war.

I mean, they've killed more people than died in World War I

by far.

They have disrupted our economy.

Anybody who would do this as a terrorist strike,

it would be war.

I don't want war, and I'm not suggesting war, but

our relationship with China cannot go back to the way it was where

we just believe what they say and we ship all of our business over to them.

Agree or disagree?

That's exactly right, Gwen.

I can already tell you that public opinion in this country ran very strongly against China, no matter what business or financial or media elites believed.

I mean, that's because a lot of Americans have a lot of reason to be hostile towards China.

If you work in a factory and your job has been outsourced to China, if your industry, like rice farmers in Arkansas, have seen their proprietary intellectual property stolen or their computer systems hacked, if you're appalled by the way China forces women to have abortions or harvests organs from political prisoners or smashes Christian churches or interns religious minorities in mass gulags.

And now to top it off, they've unleashed a pandemic on the entire world.

So things are going to change.

They're going to change rapidly, not just in the United States, but all around the civilized world.

Because I can tell you, public opinion in America, and not just America, views China as a pariah state.

Well, I will tell you, what they're doing to France, where they're saying, hey, we'll send you some gowns, we'll send you some PPE stuff, but you're going to have to take our 5G.

Boy, I think think

if the public really understands how they're trying to profit off of this and extort business out of countries,

I think China will be the pariah of the world.

Yeah, and Glenn, they're doing that all around the world.

They're trying to exploit this crisis that they created.

And in many cases, what they're sending is a reflection of Chinese quality control turns out to be defective anyway, as you saw in the Czech Republic or in Spain or elsewhere around the world.

So I think, again,

the peoples of the democratic West, no matter what some of their leaders may think right now, will increasingly view China as a pariah state.

And that means that we're going to have a fundamental reassessment of our relationship with China.

So for instance, I think one of the very first things we have to do, starting now, is to bring back manufacturing of basic pharmaceuticals and medical devices and medical supplies to this country.

We cannot continue to allow China to control the market worldwide for items that are essential to life and to health.

Agree.

Senator Tom Cotton, thank you so much.

You can follow him at TomCottonAR, or you can find him at tomcotton.com.

Senator, always good to have you on.

Thank you for your good work.

We'll talk again.

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