Best of The Program | Guests: Matt Walsh & Gregory Rigano | 3/19/20

Welcome to the podcast.

It's another another coronavirus day.

It's kind of hard not to talk about it, but there was some really good news towards the end of the podcast.

We're gonna get to in a second.

Pat Gray is on, talking about how much we're looking forward here of spending and what is at risk with our economy.

The word quadrillion makes an appearance here on the podcast for the first time.

Matt Walsh has a new book, it's called Church of Cowards.

It talks about what's going on with the coronavirus as well, as what's going on with our churches and what is

going on with the idea of having a spine in your faith.

Is that something that's kind of a relic of the past?

And in an incredible sequence of events on the show today, we have a guest on in our third hour who talks about a potential cure for coronavirus in a very confident way.

And amazingly, he's pleading for the president to recognize what's going on and clear the way for this drug to come out.

As soon as he goes off the air, the president starts a press conference and actually says just that: that this drug is getting a clear path because of the potential to really curb the virus.

So, there's some real hope towards the end of the show.

You can get all the details on it as well.

Also, we'll be talking about coronavirus as well on Stew Does America tonight.

Make sure you check in.

If you have a second here, search for Stew Does America, subscribe on your podcast app, and make the world a better place.

Here's the podcast.

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

All right, so I got some good news.

I got some really good news.

According to scientists now out of London, some really good.

How are things going in your house right now?

Because we haven't had a meltdown.

Uh-uh.

No.

The kids haven't said, I can't do this.

Oh, yeah, really.

It's been four days.

Wait to see what you can actually do.

Anyway,

we're trying to flatten the curve.

That's what everybody's trying to do.

We're imposing social distancing to slow the spread of the virus so the number of people sick doesn't cause the health care system to collapse as it's threatening to do in Italy and elsewhere right now.

That means the pandemic needs to last at a low level until either enough people have had COVID-19 to leave most immune, assuming that our immune system actually will

leave a marker in us to say, oh, I recognize that.

I can fight that.

Last night I had an expert on said that she's 99% sure that this is going to happen, that we are going to have those markers in us.

But

we don't know yet.

We don't know.

This is going to last until we either get those markers in us or until there's a vaccine.

So how long...

Will that take?

How draconian are things going to have to get all right

we've been told that it'll be just a couple of weeks we're just gonna do this for a couple of weeks and I've been telling you

nope that's not it we're not gonna be doing this for a couple of weeks we're gonna be doing this for a long time

plan on eight weeks is what I said well scientists in London have just come out with some new numbers

According to a report yesterday, as long as someone in the world has the virus, breakouts can keep reoccurring without stringent controls to contain them.

In the report yesterday, researchers at the Imperial College of London proposed a way of doing this.

Impose more extreme social distancing measures every time the admissions to intensive health care units start to spike.

Then relax them when they start to fall.

Every time they rise above a threshold, let's just say, for example, 100 per week, the country would have to close all schools and most universities and adopt social distancing.

When they drop below 50, those measures can be lifted.

But people with symptoms or whose family members have symptoms would still be confined at home.

Now,

social distancing, something that we had never heard, but we're used to now all of these new words and phrases just being thrown at us.

What is social distancing?

Researchers define it as all households reduce contact outside of the household, school, or workplace by at least 75%.

Now, that doesn't mean that you don't go out with your friends once a week instead of four times.

Really?

Is that what you got, Stu?

Are you getting that from social distancing?

That, ah, you know, but Fridays are different.

No, apparently not.

That's not allowed.

Yeah.

Okay.

It means everyone does everything they can to minimize social contact, and overall, the number of contacts fall by 75%.

Under this model, the researchers conclude social distancing and school closures would need to be in force

some two-thirds

of the time,

roughly two months on, one month off, until a vaccine is available.

They say that will take at least 18 months.

Now,

I don't know about you,

but my kids are already starting to social distance themselves from me.

And

I can't imagine being locked in the house for 18 months.

I don't think that's something that we will accept.

Frankly.

I mean, that is the type of thing that we will just, we'll just say no.

We will just say.

Maybe I read the rest of this.

Yes, I know.

I know.

I know.

Maybe I read the rest of this crappy missive.

So surely there has to be some other options.

Why not just build a whole buttload of ICUs?

Well, it doesn't work.

The researchers' model, that didn't solve the problem.

Without social distancing of the whole population, they found even the best mitigation strategy, which means isolation or quarantine of the sick, the old, and those who have been exposed, plus school closures, would still lead to a surge of critically ill people eight times bigger than the U.S.

or U.K.

system can cope with.

So,

even if you set factories out to just turn out ventilators and beds and ICU farms, you still need more nurses and doctors to take care of everybody, and we just don't have that.

In all scenarios, without widespread social distancing, the number of COVID cases overwhelms the healthcare healthcare system.

Okay, all right.

How about just restrictions for one batch of five months?

Nope, not good.

Once measures are lifted, the pandemic breaks out all over again.

This time it's in winter, the worst time for the healthcare system.

Now,

I'm

as I'm looking at this,

isn't this, Stu, exactly what...

China is doing right now.

Isn't China in the midst of releasing the herds back out into the wilderness?

Yeah, so we're going to see whether this works or not because China is basically experimenting with it right now as we speak.

And, you know, the big news yesterday was supposedly, again, if you believe China's numbers and what they're telling us, supposedly China.

China even use the word.

You racist don't even use the word China on this program.

But the numbers are coming from China.

China.

Oh, my gosh.

They're coming from China.

All right, anyway,

what they found was zero cases for the first time since this started of community spread.

So that means they did have 34 new cases, but all 34 were people traveling into China from other areas, which might be another thing they may want to consider stopping.

And also, why would you go to China at this point?

This is not a good.

No, it's like.

Oh, man, the savings, the savings of seeing the Great Wall of China, and maybe me and the family could be buried inside the wall.

It'd be great.

Okay, so this,

what I don't understand is

why we're being told, and I, you know, and I

asked the doctor on our special last night, and I don't feel like I got a great answer.

Why is it that China

is releasing people and they're not experiencing this?

Why is it that China

stopped this dead in its tracks with a lot more people that already had it?

Ours are all just projections.

You know what, Stu, look into this.

I'll bet you the people who are doing the modeling on this thing are the same people who are telling us about global warming.

But

yeah,

why is it when we have an actual country where we had thousands and thousands and thousands of people infected, why didn't we have 100,000 deaths in China?

But we're supposed to have them here.

It doesn't make sense to me.

Yeah, especially when you think of the Chinese lifestyle, right, is giant, massive cities

where people are packed into very tight areas, working very closely.

And nobody blinks when you say, I don't know,

yeah, throw that bat in that soup.

Nobody blinks.

Yeah.

It's not a healthy lifestyle in many ways.

Yeah, especially for this type of thing.

For this type of thing, I mean,

there's a reason why we've had, you know, I was saying yesterday, like, we can't, I really do think it's inappropriate to call it the Chinese virus because they're going to release another virus in like a year, and we're going to have, we're going to have to come up with a whole new name for it.

So, like, it's just a virus inefficient.

Do you know what MERS is?

Yeah, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

I'm sorry, it's what?

Middle East Respiratory Syndrome.

Yes.

Middle East Respiratory System.

Wow.

Do you know what the West Nile virus is?

Yes, I do.

They come.

Yeah.

Spanish flu.

It's a virus.

Yeah.

Spanish flu.

I mean, Lyme flu.

This is what we call things.

I used to live two towns away from old Lyme, Connecticut.

Lyme disease.

Lyme, Connecticut.

That's where it's from.

I mean, this is so unbelievably rich.

I'll get into this in a minute.

Let me just finish this stupid thing.

All right.

So this is going to have a huge impact on people coming together.

Restaurants, cafes, bars, nightclubs, gyms, hotels, favors, theaters, movie cinemas, art galleries, shopping malls, craft fairs, museums, musicians, other performers, sporting venues, sports teams,

conference venues,

cruise lines, airlines, public transportation, private schools, public schools, daycare centers.

I mean, are you kidding me?

This is the entire thing.

Now, they say there will be some adaption, of course.

Gyms could start selling home equipment.

Oh, Oh, and online training sessions.

Oh, okay.

All right.

It's now being called the shut-in economy.

Shut-in economy.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

It sounds sustainable to me.

Now they're saying that we're going to have a better health care system at the other end of this.

Oh, are we?

Or are we going to have a nationalized health care system?

They say maybe movie theaters will take out half of their seats.

Meetings will be held in larger rooms with spaced-out chairs.

Gyms will require you to book workouts ahead of time so they don't get too crowded.

But here's the good news.

Governments all around the world, including Israel, have decided to use cell phone location data.

See if this matches what you've been saying is coming, Stu.

It'll match location data with its intelligence services that they use to track terrorists to trace people who've been in touch with known carriers of the virus.

Singapore does exhaustive contact tracing and publishes detailed data on each known case, all but identifying people by name.

To get on a flight, perhaps we're going to have to be signed up to a service that tracks your movement via your phone.

The airline wouldn't be able to see where you've gone, but it would be able to get alert if you have been close to someone that has been infected or in a disease hotspot.

There'd be similar requirements for the entrance of large venues, government buildings, public transportation hubs.

There'd be temperature scanners everywhere, and your workplace might demand you wear a monitor that tracks your temperature or other vital signs.

Where nightclubs ask for proof of age, in the future, they may ask for proof of immunity, an identity card, or some kind of digital verification via your phone, showing you've already recovered from or been vaccinated.

The intrusive surveillance will be considered a small price to pay for the basic freedom to be with other people.

Gig workers, again, this is this is a report from London.

Gig workers from drivers to plumbers to freelance yoga instructors will see their jobs becoming more precarious.

Immigrants, refugees, the undocumented, and ex-convicts will face yet another basic obstacle to gaining a foothold in society.

Bull crap.

Bull crap.

That won't happen.

Can somebody, this is another thing I'm going to take on today.

Can somebody please tell tell me why we're releasing prisoners?

Why are we releasing prisoners?

Isn't that the ultimate in isolation?

Isn't that, aren't we just quarantining them?

Why are we releasing people onto the streets?

Who came up with that idea?

I know.

It's rhetorical.

I know who came up with that.

Moreover, unless there are strict rules on how someone's risk for disease is assessed, governments or companies could choose any criteria.

You're high risk if you earn less than $50,000 a year, if you're in a family, more than six people, or you live in certain parts of the country, for example.

Oh,

another way to separate us, divide us, and keep us in our own little corrals.

This is great.

That creates scope for algorithmic

bias and hidden discrimination, as what happened last year with a

U.S.

health insurer that used an algorithm that turned out to inadvertently favor white people.

Oh my gosh.

All right, I'm going to take a break.

I want you to go get some duct tape and I want you to wrap it around your head as tight as you possibly can because I don't know about you, but my head's about to explode.

Now, you're not going to, it's not going to stop it from exploding, but when and if you can ever go outside to go to a doctor and say, Could you put my head back together?

You'll have all of the bone pieces, everything you need to assemble it right there on the inside of that duct tape.

Might take you a while, but I suggest you wrap your head because it's going to be a bumpy ride.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Hi, it's Glenn.

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Thanks.

Hey,

welcome to it.

We got a lot of things to do today.

I don't know where to start with Pat Gray from Pat Gray Unleashed.

I thought we'd have a rolling conversation.

And Pat, you can spin the wheel here wherever you want it to stop.

We can talk about whose idea was it to just release people from prison.

Isn't that kind of quarantine?

Isn't that social distancing?

Everybody stay in your cell.

Since when?

Who came up with this?

Why are we doing this?

Okay, we have that as topic number one.

Topic number two is China.

How dare you call this the Chinese virus?

How dare you call this the Wuhan virus?

Really?

The Spanish flu?

You know, it didn't even come from Spain.

Oh, God.

That's just where it was hit harder.

Yeah, or we could just talk about, come on, come on.

We could talk about

the GOP

that is with, they're willing to spend anything.

And

where are we getting these ideas?

Can you tell me what the metrics are here?

If you really want to help people, you're just going to send everyone a check for $1,000?

What are you talking about?

First of all, it's not everybody.

It's only people who have an income of, I think it's $100,000

or $150,000 as a couple and $75,000

and below as an individual.

Okay, well, that covers a lot of people.

But what are they supposed to do with that?

Where are they going with that?

And really, we're just, how about just no taxes for anyone?

Right.

That's the

less government thing to do.

We're doing the bigger government thing, and that's what we keep doing over and over and over.

How about this one, Pat?

How about this one?

How about you can't foreclose on anybody's home?

Can't do it.

Can't do it for the next six months or until this end.

I mean, that's not good.

No,

but it's not just printing money.

I do believe that is part of this.

I think they're going to do that for two months, right?

Isn't it a two-month process?

A start, yeah.

Yeah.

But you've got McConnell, Mitch McConnell, who's a supposed Republican.

And this is why we didn't like the guy so much in the first place.

We're going to go on and vote as soon as the Senate can get permission to vote on the bill.

Came over from the House, sent it down to the president, reassure the people.

He added, a number of my members think there are considerable shortcomings in the bill.

My counsel to them is to gag and vote for it anyway.

Oh, that's

very conservative of you.

Thanks.

Thanks, Mitch.

And then it's the,

I'm beginning to hate this phrase more than

the, more than poison.

Let's not let perfection be the enemy of good.

Shut up.

Shut up.

I can't take that.

I can't take it.

Do you know the CDC guidance of how far I have to be away from Pat when he's yelling like that?

It's definitely got me one of those feet, right?

a mile and a half.

No, that's, yeah,

that's why I'm in another studio.

There is no distance for Pat.

Try Cleveland.

We have eight conservatives left in the Senate.

Eight.

Marsha Blackburn voted against it.

James Inhoff,

Ron Johnson, James Lankford,

Mike Lee, of course.

Thank you, Mike.

Rand Paul, Ben Sass, and Tim Scott.

Those are the only conservatives, I guess, left in office.

Well, because they were hammering Rand Paul yesterday because he decided to propose an amendment.

And the amendment would say, hey, if we're going to give a trillion dollars away, let's come up with a way to pay for that.

And maybe we, for example, his idea was let's get rid of the war in Afghanistan.

Let's, and he suggested a couple of other things.

That would pay for it.

And they're like, how dare you?

Chuck Schumer's like, this is a crisis.

And this is wasting time.

Really?

Is the four hours you you had to wait to go through the voting process really going to be the difference here?

You know, it's not like you're going to guys are going to send out these checks today.

Like, we all understand this is going to be a little bit of time.

But, you know, they can't even have a conversation about paying for it.

And I understand this is a tough one.

Like, you know, to your point about the taxes, like, I love that, and I think that's a great way.

And I love the.

I would suspend all federal taxes.

Yeah.

And it's, Glenn's made a great point on this.

Like, it's almost an automatic sunset.

They can't keep all this power because they're going to to want to reverse the tax thing so badly that when it's time to reverse it, maybe they will.

But the issue there is, and I think

they absolutely will.

In fact,

they will end it.

They will end the, if you tie it to no taxes until this national emergency is over.

I can guarantee you at the very first opportunity that they have to declare this national emergency over, they'll declare it.

Next Tuesday.

They will do it.

Really?

Yeah, to be like,

a national emergency.

You know, I think we might have been overreacting a little bit.

It's a giant pile of bodies outside the hospital.

You think it's over now?

It's over.

No, no.

We have less bodies today than we did yesterday.

It's over.

It's over.

The only time your convictions and principles are tested are when there's a crisis, right?

There's no, you don't have to, I mean,

your principles don't have any sort of a trial.

It's easy.

If there's nothing going on, of course they're going to be tested in a crisis.

and that's when it's important to stick to them.

Yeah, it's just.

They won't.

It strikes me, too, like with the taxes thing, the one argument I think that has some value against just doing taxes is there are a bunch of people who are going to lose their job and then not have taxes to pay.

So they're already paying zero, and it's not necessarily going to help those people.

But we do have things like unemployment that maybe

it's a little bit easier to get.

Maybe it's a little bit more generous than it was in the past.

But there are things like that that are able to be done where

you can bridge that gap for people who really need it.

Just throwing $1,000 at everybody in America, I mean,

I understand Andrew Yang made that sound so appealing, but

it's a very questionable thing.

It's the type of thing that may not go away.

And obviously, as Mitch McConnell points out, nobody's putting thought into this.

They won't even take time to vote on an amendment.

They think that's the worst thing in the world.

And by the way, Mike Lee was, I think, one of three, along with Rand Paul, that actually voted for the Rand Paul amendment.

And, you know,

they don't want to even take time to figure out how to pay for it.

They don't want you, even if you have a problem with the bill, they just want you to vote for it anyway.

Like, that's how we always get time.

Right.

Always get time.

So I have some additional happy news.

Okay.

Okay.

Do we have any happy music or anything, Sarah?

Do we have anything that's like, oh, that'll make me feel better when I say this?

You have anything?

Oh, you know what?

Let's get that really moody.

Yeah.

Okay.

I like this.

Ladies, I'm not a meat puppet, okay?

No.

All right.

So, as we're sitting around here with our cocktails in our hand and just talking about the little people,

let me tell you about...

Do you remember, hey, Pat, Pat, come here for a second.

Come on over here for a second.

Do you remember when the people were talking in 2008 about this thing called derivatives?

Right?

Derivatives.

And the rural people thought, oh, this is a bad thing, these derivatives.

And the banks were,

of course, they were too big to fail because they had some money in derivatives and that caused the whole breakdown.

Do you remember those things?

Yes, yes.

Right, right, right, right.

The banks are now,

guess

how much the banks are sitting on in derivatives now.

Guess.

I want you to guess.

Oh, don't get rid of the music.

Please, I need that cocktail music.

I'm guessing more than back in 2008.

Guess a number.

Okay.

Guess a number.

Guess a number.

I know it's huge.

Do you want me to play my old game?

No, I don't.

No.

Well, yeah, go ahead.

Play your old game.

$50 trillion.

$50 trillion.

$50 trillion.

$50 trillion.

$50 trillion.

Now, for anybody who doesn't know Pat's old game, Pat's old game is he guesses some crazy number, and then he's like, and I'm disappointed if

you're a surprise.

Right, yes.

Correct, correct.

Okay.

Okay.

Well,

if we were playing the game

closest without going over,

you would lose.

Wow.

Unless we were playing it for individual banks.

For instance, JP Morgan Chase, they now have derivatives sitting on $48 trillion.

One bank.

Citigroup has $47 trillion.

And Goldman Sachs, $42 trillion.

Would you like another drink and try to play again?

Oh, my God.

Guess the number of derivatives.

Guess it.

Guess.

So the total number?

Total number.

48 quadrillion.

And I'll be disappointed if it's a dollar word.

That's hard.

48 quadrillion.

I think he got over it that time.

Yep, you did.

It's only $1.5 quadrillion dollars.

That

is.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

What?

That's the first time I've ever heard it five in a real story.

The quadrillion.

I said to my kids last week, this is going to be an amazing week.

By Saturday, you will see and hear things that you have never seen before.

That is the same thing I said last night when I found that number, Pat.

I've never

heard the word quadrillion used in a real sentence.

Wow.

$1.5 quadrillion dollars of derivatives.

Remember, derivatives, the bad thing.

Yeah.

The thing that the banks were too big big to fail.

Wow.

1.4 quadrillion?

No, 1.5 quadrillion.

I mean, that's unthinkable.

You can't even...

I mean, the only time I've actually ever heard it, and I've never seen it in a story, you know where I saw the, I think it was in the movie

Passenger, the Passenger.

Did you see Passenger?

With

Jennifer Lawrence and Chris, what's his face?

Oh, mayhem, yeah.

Remember that?

Yeah, Chris Pratt.

Okay, so they're traveling, and this is a future movie, obviously, and they're traveling to some other distant place because the Earth is dying or whatever.

And she's talking about how much money the company is making on

relocating humans to this other planet.

And it was, I think it was something like four quadrillion dollars.

And that was the only time I'd ever, and it was like a number.

Okay, well, we're not going to get to that probably even in that year.

Here we are in 2020, and we've gotten to that number in bad debt.

Yeah.

That's not good.

That's not good.

Yeah, that's not good.

As Stuart says, that's suboptimal

by about $1.5 quadrillion dollars.

I'll give you the rest of this.

The reason why I came across these numbers, I'll give you the rest of it next hour.

You don't want to miss it.

you might want to prepare because $1.5 quadrillion dollars in derivatives.

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

Mr.

Matt Walsh,

podcast host of the Matt Walsh Show.

He's as clever as I am with

the Glenn Beck podcast.

We didn't work hard on the name of it.

We work on the content.

He's also the author of a brand new book called The Church of Cowards.

Hello, Matt.

How are you?

Hey, Glenn, doing well.

How about you?

I'm fantastic.

I'm fantastic.

Anything on your mind you want to hit first before we get into the church of cowards on the coronavirus?

Like, you want to make sure that we're not calling it the Chinese virus or the Wuhan virus or anything else?

I mean, because

I'm sure you agree with that.

Yeah, that's, of course, the most important issue.

I mean, when you're in the media and you're at a press conference with the president of the United States during a pandemic, and we're looking at a possibility of a global depression, you know, and you have a chance to ask him a question, obviously you should ask him about why he's doing a big knee head to China.

I mean, that's obviously the most

disgusting right now.

Right.

I mean, we haven't had a depression in, I don't know, at least a couple of years.

Well, I think it's been since the 1930s that we've been in a depression.

And that, I mean, how posh is your life if that's the thing that you're worried about?

How out of touch are you?

And meanwhile, I mean, in all seriousness, there are people, many people in this country who are worried now about how they're going to feed their families next week because they're not making any money.

So

I don't think that those people really care what we call this damn thing.

I think they're more worried about what's the end game.

Where's this?

Okay, we all have to stay in our homes.

Is this going to be over next week?

Is it going to be over in two months?

It kind of makes a big difference.

I think most people want to know

what's out here.

What does it look like?

What's the point?

What is this supposed to, how are we going to know that it's okay to go outside again?

I don't think that's articulated or explained.

And I think that's just

more anxious.

People keep saying in Washington, well, we're going to do this until this emergency is over.

Can you tell me what the metric is that we're going to use to decide when this emergency is over?

Can you give me any, I've been asking for weeks

for my own company, I've been asking, I need to see what the tripwires are how is the government measuring things so when they know you're going to go from phase one to phase two no one has tripwires now somebody's making the decision but based on what there's there's there's we're we are printing trillions of dollars and just giving them away

Does anybody have anything that they're basing this on?

Is it anything other than, no, well, he wants to give less, so I want to give more.

What is all of this based on?

There's no reality.

There's no fact.

There's nothing.

Yeah, it makes it.

The hard thing is that even the scientists and the doctors

don't know everything about this virus because obviously it's new.

And the rest of us, I know for me, I don't know a damn thing about viruses or pandemics.

It's not something I've really thought about up until now.

I'm not an expert.

So, you know, we're looking for, we need to know who we can trust on this and who we can listen to.

And of course, we know

we can't listen to the media in the disinformation age that we live in.

So

where do you go?

Who's the next person?

So who has their,

Matt, who has their credibility?

Because you've written a book, The Church of Cowards, and in the very first chapter, Christians Not Worth Killing.

I mean, that is quite a statement, and I think it's right.

I think it's true that they don't have any credibility either, many of them.

Yeah, that's the thing you hear.

I hear this from Christians all the time, how they're worried about

the possibility of some real violent persecution happening in this country the way that it's happened, as we know it.

It is happening now in so many other parts of the world.

But the point is that

there's no reason for it to happen here.

Anybody who wants to persecute the church here, there's no reason to go to that level because Christians are just abandoning their faith on their own.

They are very happy to do it without much encouragement.

And so

that's why I say not worth killing.

We're not worth, in this country anyway, we're not worth persecuting.

I don't think we've earned that in a sense.

Well, I think we're kind of like where Germany was.

Germany, you know, the church was strong in Germany, but they sold out to the Nazis and replaced the pictures of Christ on the mantels.

Within, I think it was a year of

his becoming chancellor.

most of them had already just said, oh, I give.

Okay, you're right.

And they were holding meetings as a greater German church to

talk about and seriously discuss the getting rid of the Old Testament in the Bible because of all of the Jewishness of it.

I mean, there weren't, well, there wasn't a great

persecution of

the German churches in World War II.

There was

a persecution of some Christians, but the churches, by and large, kind of went right along with it.

Yeah, I think that's a good analogy because that's what you see in our culture as well

with so many churches that are, you know, it's not about going along with a dictator figure like Hitler, but it's more about going along with the culture and the culture of death.

and not wanting to resist or fight back because, number one, I think

we've lost that sort of warrior spirit that used to be, has always been historically a part of Christianity from the very beginning.

And also, we've been told that things like tolerance are these great virtues.

And so we can go with the flow and be apathetic and then dress and be cowardly and dress that up as tolerance.

But of course, we know that tolerance is not a virtue at all.

Tolerance can be fine depending on what you, but it all depends on what you're tolerating.

And even if you're tolerating something good,

the thing about tolerance is that you can do it from your couch with Cheeto dust all over your chest or you're sitting there watching TV.

It's really easy to tolerate things.

It just requires you to literally do nothing and allow whatever it is that's happening to continue happening.

So it's not virtuous.

And we know that

as Christians, there are so many things that we should not be tolerating to the best of our ability.

We should be resisting and fighting back against.

And that's what...

If you look, pick up the gospel sometimes and read them.

I think people need to actually do that, especially if you're a Christian.

And you're going to find that Jesus Christ,

when he was walking around on earth, was confrontational.

He was not a hippie piecemeck figure going along to get along.

He was confronting constantly and aggressively.

Well, I have to interrupt.

May I interrupt you, Mr.

Matt Walsh?

It's a Joe P.

Reporter from MSNBC.

In your book, you describe the hangout Jesus, the idea that Jesus hung out with sinners and prostitutes, and that's exactly what he did.

You're saying he was not a tolerant man, but he was hanging out with them all the time.

He was having dinner with them, probably partying with them,

you know, just hanging with the common folk.

And

this Jesus you're describing, I don't recognize, sir.

Yeah, well, I mean, it's easy not to recognize Jesus

if you haven't read the accounts of him in the Bible.

That's the thing.

He was not hanging out.

I mean, he hung on the cross for sinners, and

that's very true.

But that's the point.

It was the exact opposite of hanging out the way that we think of it.

It wasn't just hanging around

and powing around.

This was about leadership and

ministering to sinners.

And I think those are the words we should be using.

So are you seeing a Christian response right now to COVID-19?

Are you seeing the churches doing what they're supposed to?

Well, I don't know because, you know,

the churches, of course, across America, I know my church is shut down as so many churches have.

I guess most of them have.

And

I'm not going to call that a manifestation of a church of cowards and say they're being cowards for doing it because

I'm not in a position of having to make those choices, thankfully.

And I know that so many churches,

they have a lot of older people.

And so you have a responsibility to them, and you don't want to put them in a position where they're going to be harmed.

So I understand.

But

church is not really

four walls.

Church, what happens inside of those

four walls is the least important thing

when it comes to being a Christian.

It's what you do outside of those four walls.

So the building may be closed, but the church isn't closed.

Right, that's exactly right.

And I think that one of the really important things that the church needs to do now, and Christians need to do now, is respond.

I think people are having, we already know there's a crisis of faith in this culture as it is, and then you throw something like this into it, and people are asking, I get questions like this, and I'm not, you know, I'm nobody, but questions like, well, how could God allow this to happen?

Why would God allow something like this?

Where is God and all this?

You know, the classic questions that humans have been asking through the ages.

And

it's a question that Christians need to start taking seriously and trying really hard to answer.

Because that's another thing that I think there are people in our culture who are losing their faith.

And it's not always because they want to go run off and sin and because they're weak.

It's really because they haven't been raised in the faith, maybe.

They have legitimate questions.

They're scared or confused.

They need someone to come and take their questions seriously and address them.

And oftentimes I think we're afraid to do that.

You say,

you know, when is when are American Christians willing to lay down their smartphones, let alone their lives, for the faith?

How do you

think that the churches are not providing, as you just said, any real answers and really any real direction?

It seems like you're telling a bunch of old stories that we've heard a million times, even though we haven't.

We've heard a million times.

I know the Jesus story.

And they're not relating it at all to real life at all.

And so people

get more out of their smartphone, and they think that church and the Bible and everything else has nothing to do with them and their life because the church has failed on that front.

Absolutely.

And I think, I mean, mean, you want to know the thing that's responsible, I think, for leading millions, especially of young people away from the faith.

It's YouTube.

And what I mean by that is

they're young people, especially they go to college, they find that their faith is attacked.

They're being told all these things, presented all these arguments, presented a lot of information, much of it's false about the Bible and the history of the Christianity.

And so now they have questions and

they need to turn somewhere

and ask someone.

And they try to turn to their pastor and all they get is just silliness and platitude.

So they go to YouTube and they just start perusing and trying to find an answer somewhere in there.

And

then they get the wrong answers.

And they get they stumble on all these other videos, and that's how they end up losing their faith.

Because again, it's just there's not any real moral and also intellectual leadership happening in the church in so many cases.

And I think you're right that so many people go to church and they find that for what it seems like to them, they're getting old stories and they're getting a little pep talk that has no connection to their actual everyday life and the moral struggles that they face.

And if that's the case, then we're just going to continue to lose Christians in this culture.

So what is the what's what's your prognosis?

Well, I think the you know, first of all, what we need, as we've been talking about from the church and church leaders, is a willingness to lead on a on a you know to show moral leadership and to engage with the culture and to speak to people on the level where they are and about the things that they're actually struggling with.

But then also, I think we as Christians need to do,

need to analyze ourselves and we need to think, you know,

there's a lot of extraordinary claims that we make, a lot of things that we claim to believe that are quite startling, honestly.

And we have to think, do I actually believe those things?

And if I do, well, that reality,

that belief should infiltrate every aspect of my life.

I mean, there should be no part of my life that is immune from this belief.

And so then it's just

a difficult thing to do.

I've tried to do it and I've realized that I'm failing in so many ways, but there are so many parts of my life that I've tried to kind of put in the box and say, well, faith has nothing to do with that.

That's separate.

And it's just, that's not, that's not the case.

So I think that's a test we have to run for ourselves.

The subtitle of the book is A Wake-Up Call to Complacent Christians.

I think that's what coronavirus is as well.

I think we can use this opportunity to get closer to our family.

And I joke a lot about, you you know my family and and

you know being trapped help me Matt please dear God help me I'm trapped in this house with my children and they're teenagers

I joke a lot about it but it I will tell you that if we can use this time to

to explore our faith and expand our family relationship it is it will be a time well spent.

A great place to start just on examining is Matt Walsh's new book, Church of Cowards, A Wake-Up Call to Complacent Christians, a church of cowards.

Matt, thank you.

As always, good talking to you.

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

So we have Gregory Ragino.

He is a Stanford Advisor, SPARC.

He is the project lead of the clinical trials for COVID-19 prevention.

Last night, he made a pretty remarkable announcement, and we are keeping our fingers crossed that it is true.

Greg, welcome to the program.

Thank you for having me on, Glenn.

Sure.

So tell me what you've discovered, what you have, what it means, and how fast can it get out?

So really, this is the key item here is that we don't have time.

This disease is growing at an exponential rate of 10x.

So we need to proceed immediately.

We do not have time and we need to shut this disease down right now.

It's a matter of national security.

So specifically, I just want to lead with this: that the President of the United States of America, our Commander-in-Chief, has the authority to authorize the use of hydroxychloroquine against coronavirus immediately.

He has cut more red tape at the FDA than any other president in history.

And for example, in 2017, the FDA approved a muscular dystrophy drug based on an uncontrolled trial of less than 15 patients.

That's one five.

And the drug was approved by the FDA.

So what I'm here to report

is based on a well-controlled, peer-reviewed clinical study out of the south of France by the most eminent infectious disease specialist in the world, Didier Raoult, MDPHD.

He enrolled 40 patients, which showed a 100% cure rate after taking two generic drugs, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, 100% cure rate against coronavirus within six days.

The study was released yesterday morning on my Twitter account, ReganoESQ,

and also on COVIDTrial.io and was recently accepted into the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents by Elsevier.

We are in contact with hospitals across the country and around the world, and they're implementing this protocol immediately.

So what is it that

you have?

I mean,

do we have to have more trials?

You say the President needs to open this up.

What is the next step?

Do you have the finished product and can it be mass produced?

The finished product

are generic drugs that have been around for over 50 years.

So, hydroxychloroquine is an anti-malarial drug that was developed in response to American soldiers coming back from World War II in the Far East that had contracted malaria.

It has a high-quality safety profile and has never come off the market since

about 1955.

It is used on a regular basis

to treat autoimmune diseases

as well as rheumatoid arthritis.

So this is in literally every pharmacy in America and this can be implemented today.

It's very inexpensive.

It's a generic drug.

The data is unrefutable and the president can proceed immediately.

Again, the FDA has approved drugs based on clinical trials with less patients

and in only one clinical trial.

This can happen right now.

Well, this doesn't seem like it's a hard thing.

I mean, you know, you're not making, these are both generic drugs, aren't they?

I mean, zithromycin's been around forever.

Correct.

I mean, who has not heard of a ZPAC?

Right.

So it's not like you're standing or this doctor is standing to make a lot of money on this, correct?

It has nothing to do with that.

It really has to do with we're in a global crisis right now.

The world is shutting down.

The airline industry is having significant difficulties.

People are getting fired from their jobs.

There's massive layoffs.

The infection rate is growing at an exponential rate.

ICU rooms

are getting overfilled.

And most importantly, the doctors and nurses on the front lines,

that's who is at the biggest risk.

And we need to to take care of them right now.

And this can happen immediately.

This protocol needs to be disseminated through the scientific community.

Any human being that is listening right now, please disseminate this protocol, which can be found at covidtrial.io or my Twitter account, Regano ESQ.

Disseminate it to any scientific medical doctor or nurse that you know

have you talked talked to the White House?

We have a direct line to them, and we're waiting for them to reach out.

It's remarkable that you haven't heard from them, because I think this is kind of the shot that was heard around the world last night.

It's nothing new.

These drugs have been tried separately.

There's no indication that these drugs used together have any kind of ill effect.

So

the trial showed that there was a one hundred percent cure rate in six days.

Both of these drugs have a very high quality safety profile.

Again,

please submit this protocol to all scientists, medical doctors and nurses throughout the world and let them make the peer-reviewed decision.

And with respect to the White House reaching out, so we know that President Trump received our white paper within 24 hours after it being published.

Dr.

Fauci is doing an excellent job, and we know that they're going to make the right decision.

This is a matter of national security, and again, it can be implemented right now.

And the scientific evidence here is really unrefutable.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

It's Regano ESQ, that's R-I-G-A-N-O, Regano E-S-Q,

or you can find the information

at the web address.

I'm just looking for it.

It's covidtrial.io.

covidtrial.io thank you so much I appreciate it

I just have one last point you have 30 seconds

yeah sure do

so so in addition to this what's most important is that we stop the transmission of the virus so it's great that we found a cure that works but we must stop transmission so there's strong scientific evidence that hydroxychloroquine will function as a preventative to stop the transmission.

And we're starting that trial immediately.

And we are asking the government for their support, both financially and scientifically.

And if we start this trial today, which we have already done, we will have results within one to two months guaranteed.

We're in active discussions with Elon Musk on Twitter.

Please follow along the conversation.

And again, any doctor or nurse that wants to

participate, please go to covidtrial.io.

Thank you.

Hey, it's Glenn, and I want to tell you about something that you should either end your day with or start your morning with, and that is the news and why it matters.

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