Ep 71 | ‘I’m Done Apologizing for Living in a Sea of Red’ | Lara Logan | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Hey, I want to talk to you.

If you're somebody who's losing your hair, I think everybody hates their own hair.

I hate my hair, and mainly because I don't know if you can see it, but it gets a little thin.

And when your hair starts to thin, that's all you think about.

I don't think women understand it, and I don't think guys understand what women go through when they're starting to lose their hair.

66% of us will experience hair regrowth if you go to Keeps.

Losing your hair sucks, so do something about it.

Go to keeps.com/slash save.

Keeps offers the generic versions of the only two FDA-approved hair loss products out there.

They're the generic versions that are going to save you a bundle of money.

So, what are you waiting for?

Just go to keeps.com right now.

You can save your hair without ever leaving your couch.

You just answer a few questions, take a few pictures of your hair.

A licensed doctor is going to review your information, recommend the right treatment for you, and then it's shipped discreetly to your door-like discreetly, like you're

ashamed.

Oh, the shame of hair loss.

It's the happy new hair deal.

Go to keeps k-e-e-p-s.com/slash save and get your first order of Keeps hair loss treatment for 50% off.

But you have to go to that web address, keeps.com slash save.

Do it now.

It takes a mixture of bravado and luck and cunning to be a war correspondent.

Most people are not suited for the job.

Most people could never do it.

Me, I'm out.

For good reason.

There are people who are hardwired to be able to short-circuit what we are wired to do, and that is stay alive.

We naturally run away from explosions and gunfire.

Trekking into a war zone requires a human to deny their most basic fundamental instincts.

To do it for news is even harder to imagine.

I don't know if you remember James Fully.

He was the journalist who was captured and beheaded by ISIS.

But the merit and the importance of that reporting is immeasurable.

Today's guest is not just a war correspondent.

She's one of the most impressive war correspondents in the profession.

And she's fought a war here in America as well.

She takes it to a whole new level.

She was a war correspondent in Afghanistan while she was eight and a half months pregnant.

Give you another example.

Following the 9-11 attacks, her instincts were to go to Afghanistan.

She got there, and she was there when I think 95% of the country was still under occupation of the Taliban.

Her accolades are impressive.

She's worked with some of the best networks in the world, Reuters, Fox, Sky, CBS News, ABC News in London, NBC CNN, 60 Minutes, CBS Evening News, The Early Show, Face the Nation.

She was chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News.

And then something happened along the way.

The most important or impressive thing about our guest is her personal accomplishments.

She has overcome things that I don't think any of us would dare to even imagine.

Nothing short of nightmare, one after another.

And yet, she persevered.

She found tremendous meaning in the darkness and emerged a much better person.

Today, Lara Logan.

You have had

a...

powerfully interesting life, to put it mildly.

My mother would love that.

Yeah.

I think I want to just start with

where you came from, how you got,

what your foundation was

to try to understand you because I really

admire you,

but I don't understand you.

I think you are one of the braver people on the planet.

So

tell me about your upbringing.

I would say my foundation is really has two pillars.

One is love

and the other is respect.

And I learned both of those

from my family, from where I was born.

You know, it begins in the home,

but also in the country where I was born.

I learned it from the people in South Africa, I learned it from Nelson Mandela, I learned it from my mother.

And

those are the two things I've carried with me, I think, that have been the strongest.

I was born knowing who I was.

Wow, what does that mean?

It means, it doesn't mean you don't learn, it doesn't mean you don't change, it doesn't mean any of those things.

It just means that when people say I'm brave because I, you know, I do this or I do that, I feel like a fraud.

I feel a little guilty because

I don't know any other way to be.

That's just who I am, And it's not even a choice.

My son was really afraid to do something at one point, 10.

He was afraid of doing his taekwondo class in front of people, getting his belt.

And he wouldn't do it.

And I brought him home, and in my office, I have all of these heroes, all these people

from history.

that are just

heroic.

And

I sat him down and I said, why do I have all these pictures?

And he thought I was going to say, because they're all heroes, they're all strong, they all did it.

And I said, and that's what he said.

And I said, no, because I think most of them were terrified,

but they did it.

They did it.

Do you have that other side where you're like, this is crazy?

I'm sitting here in a very vulnerable place.

Or do you just, does that not even occur to you?

no it always occurs to me where I am always matters because you don't do this kind of work and go to those places and make it to the other side if you don't think about that you have to take it into account you have to factor it in but so I think you probably share some of this DNA right when you're when you're trying to think it about sitting down talking to me,

nothing could be easier for you and yet you're still stressed about it because you want it to be the best it can be of you, and you

and you take that extremely seriously.

And it's not easy and casual,

in a sense, right?

It's that part of me.

And when I'm out there, I want to do the best that I can do.

I can never know enough.

I can never

learn enough.

I mean, I literally don't stop talking to people and engaging with people and

taking everything in

from the time I'm even, it starts even on the flight on the way in.

You can always meet interesting people heading into

if there's a flight, by the way.

And so, for me,

that's my focus.

I have to make smart decisions.

I have a lot of things to consider, and I have to do my job.

And

that's an eternally obsessive process and it doesn't really allow time for you to be scared but it doesn't mean that I don't get scared it doesn't I'm not immune to those things I'm not you know I know I'm not bulletproof I learned that

the hard way but

it just means that I don't allow the fear to guide me

or define me

so I want to come back to this I don't want to dwell on the article itself at this point because I do want to hear you talk about it.

But the article,

Benghazi and the Bombshell, which

the headline's not insulting at all,

if I read that alone,

there's no way I'd hire you.

No.

You were...

That was the point.

Right.

You were made to look

as somebody who's just really power hungry or hungry and you'll do anything for your career,

and everybody was worried that you were going to get everybody killed.

Reckless.

Reckless.

That's not what I just heard from you.

The reason why I say that here is because

if you were a man,

What you just said

would have been fine.

You know, you're going into a war zone.

You're a guy and you go in and I'm doing this.

But

is there a,

was there a problem

that you were

who you were

being aggressive, going in and doing these things, and it's a, it's because you're a woman?

No, it's not because I'm a woman.

It's because I'm a feminine woman.

It's because I'm a sexy woman.

That's the problem.

Not just being a woman.

There are,

look at the history of this.

I mean, when I started out, yes, I was told by the CNN Bureau Chief in London, no one with hair like that is ever going to be taken seriously as a war correspondent.

I was told my accent didn't work.

I was told all kinds of things, right?

And I

never let any of that stand in my way.

And I did, of course, run into it, you know, when I was in Iraq during the last months and then moments of Saddam Hussein.

And

I remember

the men on the crew who wanted to leave and I wanted to stay, saying, you know, you just want to get your face on TV, you just want to be famous.

And of course, you know, I'd spent years in Angola in the Civil War,

in the South African townships when they were on fire and people were being necklaced.

I'd been in Mozambique in the Civil War there.

I'd gone gone to places where that made the Afghan war look luxurious, okay?

Because they have supply lines from Pakistan.

And I was, you know, and I was treated as if I was this silly little girl who only cared about her ego and her fame.

And I never worried about those things because they weren't true.

And I know exactly who I am and what I'm doing and why I'm here.

And also because there were other men who didn't see it that way and who recognized and saw me for who I was and respected that.

So I've never been one of those women that likes to complain about how I was treated as a woman because

it never bothered me that I had to work harder.

I would have probably done it anyway.

I liked it.

As a conservative.

You liked working like that.

As a conservative, I mean, I came from nothing.

I'm the first one to go to college, and I never finished college in my family.

Had nothing, built it all from scratch.

Of course, as a conservative, have had roadblock after roadblock after roadblock.

Yeah, sure.

I don't really care.

I mean, I only say, you know, being a conservative sucks only because

they keep saying there's no, you know, we can't make it.

Oppression, oppression.

Are you kidding me?

Try to do what we do.

No lifetime achievement awards for you, Glenn.

Yeah, no, nothing.

Right?

Nothing.

No, no DuPonts or Peabody's or anything like that.

And

I don't care.

Emmys.

Right.

I don't live for that.

I don't really care about that.

So I appreciate the fact that

you don't

focus on, yeah, that's what was going on.

You're just trying to get the story.

And also, I just, one thing that I think is important to point out, that article, Benghazi in the Bombshell, that wasn't about my being a woman.

That was about, that was a hit piece.

It was an assassination piece designed to destroy me and my career.

That was the purpose.

I read it as somebody who's, I, you know, have run the blaze for years, mainly into the ground, but

run it for years.

And

if I didn't know better, I would have read that and said,

no way.

Now,

if I'm running an organization in New York,

absolutely not.

You're the last person I would have.

I at least can recognize the bias.

I don't think they see it.

I don't think they...

Well, you know, you don't have to look any further than the line in that article about what happened to me in Egypt, where Joe Hagen, the writer, describes it

as being groped.

And

that, you know, with all the things that they,

with all the dishonest things that he put in there to smear me, all the lies that he told, all the nasty, snarky, anonymous comments and everything else,

none of that mattered to me.

What I cared about was I felt like the moment I came out of that square and they put that black traditional shador, the rope on me, and I disappeared, that's what it felt like.

When you've been raped and in my case, gang raped and sodomized and 25 minutes.

It was more than that actually, but

it was more like it was closer to 40 minutes.

But when you've lived through that, the one thing that you have, any rape victim knows, any sexual assault victim knows, what you have is your word because you can't show all of your injuries, right?

And in that moment, that man and that magazine, they knew it wasn't in dispute what happened to me in Egypt.

There was a record of it.

There were witnesses that our security person, Ray, had written an eyewitness account, you know, for the parts that he saw.

And he wasn't even there for all of it because they tore him off me after 20 minutes.

So

for that magazine to stand there and to be lauded by the establishment as truth tellers and, you know, and warriors for what's right and just in our society and the fourth estate and everything else is to me absolutely unconscionable that they can write, that they can turn gang rape and sodomy into groping and nobody has a problem with it.

You don't hear a murmur.

Can we just can we spend a minute there

in the square or just right after?

I don't need the details.

I got it.

But the couple things that stood out.

You said you held on to your cameraman as long as you could because you felt if you let go, you would die.

Tell me about that.

Well, the week before, when we'd been there

and we'd been up in Alexandria on our way into Cairo,

we were detained and we ended up being held in an

Egyptian intelligence

facility and,

you know,

cuffed and hooded and interrogated and that kind of stuff.

And I had gotten very sick and

passed out unconscious when they stabbed me with a needle, threw me on a filthy couch in someone's office.

But we'd come home from that and

and gone back a week later.

Again.

Why?

Why?

Well,

because I knew that Mubarak was about to fall and that would change everything in the Middle East.

And it was such a big event.

And I wanted to be, you know, I have like a homing device.

I'm a homing pigeon.

And when there's something like that, that's, you know, sort of at the center of

many significant things, I just, I mean, that's where I go.

You know, when a bomb goes off, I'm typically not running away from it.

I'm running towards that scene.

You know, and you see all the people passing you.

It was happened when I went into Baghdad during the Iraq War.

I remember seeing, you know, lots of people leaving and people on the march out of Baghdad and the Iraqi army on the march with their artillery pieces.

I don't even know if any other journalists ever saw that because it was quite extraordinary.

And we were heading into Baghdad, you know, the oil fires burning and the planes, you know, the bombers flying.

And it was just, it was quite unbelievable.

But I knew that I was going the direction I was meant to go.

And so

for me,

when I went back to Egypt, it was for

specifically for the fall of Hostim Ubarak.

And he quit about 10 minutes after we landed in Cairo.

So we rushed to the square and we only brought a security person with us

because we'd been arrested the week before.

And we wanted to show CBS that we were being responsible and that we were taking our security seriously, you know.

And

in the end, actually,

Ray really did save my life because I thought when we were separated from the crowd and I thought at first that people were trying to help us, and then it turned out actually that wasn't the case at all.

They were among the people who raped me.

But

Ray was the only one that managed that I managed to hold on on to.

And he was the one.

I mean, he was, you know, I was holding onto his shirt.

So that's how far he was from me.

And he kept saying to me, Lara, don't let go.

Just don't let go.

If you let go, you're going to die.

Lara, get up, get up.

If you don't get up, you're going to die.

If you can't stay down, stay on your feet.

Stay on your feet.

And

then he would tell me, okay, they're...

they're beating us with sticks and they're taking our passports and they're doing this and they're doing that.

And of course at a certain point, you know, I mean, he didn't want to say what he saw.

And when I lost him,

I thought, this is it.

This is the moment now.

It's over.

I knew that I on my own, that I had no chance of surviving.

And

actually, it took me a few years to realize that that was really the moment.

Instead of the moment I died, that was the moment that I lived because Ray

fought his way through the mob to once they discarded him because that was all you know it was about what they wanted to do to me he

he found some Egyptian soldiers and he forced them to come and find me and that really is what I believe saved my life more than anything there were it were also the women that I fell onto in the square where I was dragged and you know at that point I didn't have the strength to get up anymore so I was down for the last time then.

And so

that was fortunate.

But the young men that jumped up to stand between the mob and the women, I think they did it in part for me, but in part also to protect their own women from what was happening.

And all of those things sort of came together

in a you know, in a moment that where I had a chance to live

instead of die, and that changed everything.

I worked at CNN

and I know how the Middle East desk works at CNN

and

it's, I think obscene

um

and I

nowhere did I hear

the real

outcry um

on

that at first they were crying Jew, Jew, Jew

and the the just the misogynistic

um culture that is supposedly just as nice as ours.

It's not.

It's not.

And

I don't understand why the media

is

will

kind of just dismiss this,

kind of just move past this,

allow somebody say you were just groped, and not at least stop and say,

somebody that we've all watched for a long time

just had this happen.

What does that say about this culture?

And what does that say about

the radicals that are there?

That's not all Egyptians.

We know that.

The radicals that are there and the radicals that are in our own country on the left that are okay with this.

They're excusing a lot of this.

There's never any reflection on something like this.

You know, well, you covered about a thousand different things there.

So

I have to pick which one is perhaps the most important.

I think you're not wrong

when you

when you put radicals on the left and radicals in the Islamic culture together, in a sense, especially when you look at how the propaganda of not just radicals in the US, but of mainstream politicians has served the interests of

radicals in the Islamic world.

And I want to be clear, I'm not saying everybody's radical.

I know that,

I mean, I know that myself.

I lived in Iraq for five years.

I lived in Afghanistan for years, and I loved being there.

I loved living there, and I loved the people that,

you know, the many people that I was close to and shared those years with.

But the perfect example of what you're talking about actually took place

today.

So, this is February 21st, because I don't want to date this.

Go to the New York Times and read the editorial written by Siraj Haqqani.

Because if there was ever a radical terrorist leader, one of the most lethal

of our time, it's Siraj Haqani, who is the leader of the Haqqani network in Afghanistan, as I'm sure you know.

And the Haqqani network has rarely functioned as the Afghan al-Qaeda.

This man

was given the platform by the New York Times to write an op-ed

that casts him as some kind of dove of peace.

I mean that to me if you want to talk about not just radicals in this country but if you want to talk about why liberals liberal people the left whatever you want to call them I hate those words because they make them they make it they sound so judgmental and I don't mean it in that way but how else do you explain why a newspaper like the New York Times gives a voice to someone like Saraj Haqqani?

Are they that desperate to get out of Afghanistan that they really don't care what happens in their wake?

That they're going to legitimize a terrorist leader?

I guess they are because this is the same publication that tweeted on the 10th anniversary of 9-11 that this is the day planes attacked the World Trade Center, right?

We're just going to remove the people who flew those planes and plotted that and financed it and etc., etc.

I could go on forever.

So I guess

the important thing there for me is that I didn't understand how this could happen.

And all I did was reporting from the ground up through the bush years,

I wrongly assumed, I wrongly assumed that all the problems happened because Rumsfeld was bad and Cheney was evil and

etc., etc., etc.

And if we could just get the good guys back again,

then all those problems would go away and people would stop lying and people would

stop serving their political interests before the truth and et cetera, et cetera.

And boy, was I wrong.

I stayed the same.

I kept doing my job the same way.

And under Bush, I was a heroic figure

of the media.

And when I continued to do it under Obama, I quickly found out

that I wasn't the golden girl anymore.

I said the same things about George W.

Bush.

I had real problems with him.

At one point, I talked, well, I was at CNN, talked about

you want something impeachable.

Here's what you look at, you know, because everybody was talking about impeaching him.

And I had real problems with the way he was running the war, etc., etc.

And I was a supporter at the beginning, less so towards the end because I thought we really screwed up, you know.

Look, war is about killing people.

Kill them quickly and end it.

And end it.

Take it.

Are you loitering on the objective?

Yes, please.

But then I went to Fox and I said the same things, except it was about another guy, Barack Obama, and I was the Antichrist.

That's how it works.

Yeah, it is.

And it's refreshing to see

journalists, and there are very few of them, that will actually look at the facts.

I came into, I'm not a journalist, and I came into that world

from doing radio for years and years and years.

And

then I come into television, and I don't want to do television.

I hate television.

And

I walk into it

naively thinking, oh, well, as long as I have the facts, as long as I can prove it, as long as I can show you, hey, look, don't you think putting this and this and this and this together shows a picture that we should all be concerned about?

We're talking about.

We're talking about?

No.

There was no curiosity.

There was no one that was really willing to go,

I hate that guy.

But you know what?

You mean kind of like with the whole Russia collusion thing,

there's nobody that's going to say, oh, by the way, by the way,

wow,

if you're using the criminal justice system as a political weapon,

that's bad for all of us.

All of us.

And now, it's so ironic, of course, because now you hear that with everything happening with Bill Barr and Trump and Roger Stone, and

you literally hear the very people, the very people that have been doing this for years

saying, oh, this president has to go because he's weaponizing the criminal justice system.

I love how the word weaponize suddenly became part of our lexicon.

When?

Nobody asks when.

When did we all start hearing people and using the word weaponize?

That is a strategic tactical

term used in disinformation campaigns.

It comes from the programs this country developed to use against its enemies.

And it's become part of our lexicon because that's what you call shaping and normalizing, right?

Normalizing.

That word, I wish people would take a look at

the strategic document put out by

the propagandists from Media Matters for America right after Trump's election, that they would resist the normalization of this president.

New York Times can normalize Sir Raja Khani,

but no one, no journalist is allowed to normalize Donald Trump.

And if they do, they'll be punished is the word they use.

Punished.

And they've got millions and millions and millions of dollars.

They've targeted me, they targeted you.

And

they call themselves a watchdog.

And the media, the New York Times and others calls them a watchdog.

Liberal media watchdog.

They get the email.

I've seen it happen.

They get the email, read it, it must be true.

Let's do a story on that.

That's like taking a story from Alex Jones.

And Alex Jones, at times, may be more accurate than Media Matters.

No, it's far worse.

I tell you why.

Because what's the difference?

What's the difference?

Media Matters has an information infrastructure.

They have a propaganda infrastructure.

And they have a research arm.

They have a news media arm.

They call it the American Independent.

It was ShareBlue.

They have Media Matters, which is their propaganda arm.

And it goes on from there.

They produce books, they produce data, they have artificial intelligence algorithms and apps.

They search everything that you've ever said.

And then beyond that, they partner with groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center.

So they have

Google,

YouTube.

It's not just.

No, they allow them to help them write the algorithms that determine what's hate speech and what's not.

So, and when you add into that, so now all of these civil society organizations, groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center that have such

enormous history in this country, that appear to represent one thing, how can they be working with a propaganda organization?

How can that happen?

And they give themselves titles like Senior Research Fellow.

I'm a senior research fellow at Media Matters for America, which is what?

A propaganda assassination organization, right?

Where all they want to do is assassinate not just journalists, but according to them, right?

I'm using their words, to go after any politician that normalizes Trump, whether they're on the left or the right.

And by the way, if they're on the left, they're taking them out too.

They want to make sure that no one on the the left, no Democratic politician, dares to normalize this president or vote with him or work with him or anything, because that's a threat to them as well.

Meanwhile, they say nothing about Antifa, the Bernie bros.

Bernie, in the debate, the last debate, said,

you know, these people that are threatening people online,

those are Russian assets that Russia is,

right?

That's

crazy talk crazy talk it was one of his supporters that went and tried to shoot all of the members of the Republican Congress in Virginia the guys two of them on his staff currently that hold that same position

same position

they both are on tape saying

they pretty much like to do the same thing one wants to burn milwaukee down to the ground

the other one says it's it's time to get your rifle, learn how to use it, and start taking people out.

The campaign issued a memo that said, just keep your head down.

This will blow over.

How is how, where is, where is the press?

Where

it's really interesting because it's reminiscent

for anyone who knows a little bit of Nazi history, of the brown shirts, right?

That's exactly right.

That's what it reminds you of, those kind of tactics.

Nobody can have guns except our guys.

And I actually saw someone online, I was researching the other night, was actually calling for, we need Antifa at our rallies.

Where is Antifa to protect us?

So really interesting to see that kind of

attitude really coming from the left, which is supposed to be anti-gun and anti-violence, right?

And of course, the media narrative on this, fueled by people like Media Matters, is that Antifa are the anti-fascists and they're fighting the fascists.

Therefore

they are good and their use of violence is good because they're going after the bad people.

But as someone much smarter than me actually on this subject pointed out to me, take a look at their platform.

Look at their manifesto.

Look at what they actually believe in.

It's not a democratic liberal philosophy.

No.

It's not, it's actually,

are they in favor of freedom of speech?

No.

Freedom of association?

No.

No.

Free markets?

No.

In fact, they're against all of those things.

So, in fact,

aside from immigration,

their platform is pretty fascist.

If you look at the Nazi, the American Nazis, you look at their platform, talk to, what's his name, Richard Spencer, I think is his name, the head of it.

Oh, you're really getting me in trouble now.

You really are.

Thanks, Ken.

I didn't have enough targets on my back.

Just add alt-right, neo-Nazi.

Thank you so much.

You listen to him.

He doesn't believe in the Constitution.

He doesn't believe in freedom of property.

He doesn't believe in any of these things.

He believes in universal health care.

He believes in all of the social.

They agree.

They agree.

They agree.

They actually have more in common than they want to admit.

They're an alternate to the right.

They're an alternative to the right.

Let's see.

That's what it means.

That's crazy.

Wow.

Isn't it?

Wow.

So let me ask you.

We're not allowed to have those conversations, by the way.

Just the fact that you had that conversation makes you a neo-Nazi.

You know that.

Yeah, I do.

Yeah.

I do.

You know, and I

have a daughter who has cerebral palsy.

And

back in the late 80s, early 90s,

I became very sensitive to what people would say and how people would react.

And

I did a lot of volunteer work for Special Olympics and everything.

And I became

dangerously soft

because my heart was leading me.

And I think this is an American trait.

I hope it's a human trait, but Americans generally,

they don't care.

Just live your life the way you live.

You know what I mean?

I don't want to hurt you.

Don't hurt me.

Live and let live.

Just live and let live.

Okay.

So when you say,

you know, hey, handicap, that kind of really hurts.

And people are like, I'm sorry, I didn't.

But it's gone so far now to where I think of the words of Hitler where he says, oh, and the bigger the lie, the better.

We are now to a place to where society has beat people up and bullied people so much that you will actually say, not you, not me, but a lot of people will either say or just remain silent on a man can have a baby too, man can have a menstrual cycle.

No, they can't.

And if you're buying into something that big and that you will stay silent, all the rest of it is nothing.

It's so interesting because society doesn't beat us up.

People

beat us up, right?

And

there are people hiding behind things like society or it was a mistake or it was an accident.

And

that's the frustrating part for me is that

the real bad guys, the people behind all of this driving this, they know how to exploit what is already there.

Right?

They know that most journalists are liberal.

It doesn't mean all journalists are bad and nobody reports the truth.

What it means is there's a sympathy there.

There's a natural shared common ground that can be exploited.

And that's exactly what they're doing.

And so human nature is...

Nobody wants to be alone on the 50-yard line at the Super Bowl, right?

Oof, that's uncomfortable.

There's only a few people that are really built for that.

And

so what does everybody know?

It's easier to go with the crowd than not.

And so they count on that and they use that.

And

they don't need to have an army of, you know, 10 million people.

They just need to have enough to trigger that behavior.

And the most effective weapon they have is when we police and censor ourselves.

We do it for them.

That's the silence you hear, right?

That's what it is.

That's us policing and silencing and censoring ourselves so that we don't pay the price that that we see others pay.

So

nobody's paid more of a price than you.

Oh, there's always someone.

You can always find someone.

Everybody gets their price.

We all pay for it.

Everyone pays the pie price, my mother used to say.

Correct.

We all pay a price, especially if you're willing to stand up against the other side or your own side.

Just say, look, I'm just trying to tell you the truth.

You pay a heavy price.

I've never been a cool kid, ever.

I was never a cool kid at school.

I was never cool.

And I always wanted to be cool, but I never was cool.

And you,

it's a natural drive to be accepted, to want to accept an Emmy, to have somebody go,

Good job.

Oh, yeah.

How does the average person, I asked

a woman who's one of the righteous among the nations.

The sea of righteousness is in all of us.

That courage is in all of us.

How do you water it?

And she said, you misunderstand.

The righteous didn't suddenly become righteous.

They just didn't go over the cliff like everybody else.

So how do you

how do you water, or are you just unique?

Are we just freaks of nature?

There are always going to be just a few people that are willing to do it.

How do you get people to say, it doesn't matter what they say about you.

It doesn't, your job is not

as worth as much as your word.

Your name.

Nobody wants to be alone.

It's terrifying in a sense.

So

we all need that in some way, in some form or another.

We can say we don't, but we're not being completely honest with ourselves, right?

Because a little part of us does want that or need it.

So what you do, you know that when you stand up,

you're letting everyone else out there know you're not alone.

I can do it.

If I can do it, you can do it.

That's what all of these people have done.

Look how Nelson Mandela was a little kid in the middle of rural TransCon, the wild coast of South Africa, mostly dirt roads and cattle.

And that man changed the world.

He didn't start out thinking, I'm going to go change the world.

He just followed what he knew in his heart.

He knew the difference between right and wrong.

And he was never going to run from that.

It was always going to be worth it to them.

That man at his trial for terrorism, do you remember that, the Ravonia trial, all the way back in the late 60s?

His friends, his family, the leadership of the ANC, his party, they begged him not to give the speech that he gave.

And I go back to it because it's burned into my soul and into my memory.

But also it still leads me.

That's the thing about principles.

They endure everything.

They endure through time.

Why is Shakespeare relevant today?

Because the principles.

And Melcon Mandela wrote

these words.

He said, among many other things, but the ones that stuck with me, he said, freedom is an ideal for which I would like to live

but it is also an ideal for which I am quite prepared to die

and everyone thought everyone close to him thought that would be perceived by the South African government as a challenge and that he would extinguish any chance he had of not being executed and he said it anyway He didn't know when he said it that he would have the next 27 years behind bars.

He didn't know that.

He was quite prepared to die.

So that is,

that's the spirit that guides

me.

You know, that's all I know.

So you're from, you're from South Africa.

You grew up with that.

You saw things that Americans have never seen.

We have not seen these.

I mean, oh my gosh, the poor here.

The poor here?

Go anywhere else in the world.

We are poorest, are still one of the richest 10%

globally.

So we don't have that experience.

It's like times you just want to shake America and say, would you just open your eyes and look what you have?

Yes.

How do we, and I don't mean stuff, I mean...

The freedom, the ability.

Somebody can come here from Afghanistan or from,

you know, the occupied territories, if you care to call it that, anywhere and if you apply yourself if you are good if you're sharp you can succeed where other nations other societies will squash you down it may not be

utopia but it's still the best in the world and we are just dismantling it if the american dream were not so powerful would it really be something that people talk about all across the world would it really be something that people chase They come from all kinds of life.

So being from South Africa,

seeing us, from what you've probably thought of us when you lived there,

to what you felt,

what did you think then?

What did you think when you first came here?

And where are we now compared?

Well,

for me, I think one of the things that

many Americans don't understand is that this country is defined by the coasts.

The media and publishers, books, all of that,

where does most of it, the vast majority of it, and the centers of power, where do they reside?

On the East Coast, New York City.

And

the West Coast, Hollywood, defines America in the entertainment world and music, right?

So, and look at, so those two things, that's our view and our vision of America from the outside.

Nobody has any concept of the middle, the flyover states, right?

The place that's the heart.

When you're here, that's the heart.

No, not according to New York and LA.

I know.

Not according to Hollywood and the media.

And so,

One of the things that for me I think is left out of the narrative that most people don't understand

is that the American dream is built on hard work.

It's extraordinary how hard people actually do work.

There are a lot of people who don't, but rarely, the average American works very, very hard and often more you know, more than a couple of jobs.

I live in flyover country.

Okay, I live in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere in the hill country in Texas.

And I'm done apologizing to all the people that I know and my friends and people that I meet on the East Coast for living

in a sea of red, as people have said to me.

And I'm done pointing out, which is not honest because I'm pointing it out now, that every

city in Texas went Democrat in the last election.

You know, every big city.

So

I have learned that visiting those places, glimpsing them, is not the same as actually living there.

I have learned so much about what it's really like to be in rural America where there's, you can't just call and get your washing machine repaired.

I mean, sometimes, you know, my bosses or colleagues will say with exasperated, well, how can you not, you know, have done this or have done that?

And I'm like, well, because it's, it's, it's taken two months to get someone to come here who thinks they might be able to repair the dryer.

You don't know.

I mean we put salt in our water.

We pull it out of the ground.

I mean I can't begin.

I will come home at three in the morning from interviewing a world leader and I'll be doing laundry and on my hands and knees cleaning the floor because I cannot bear the thought of waking up without it being done and there's nobody else to do it.

Okay,

besides us.

We're doing it.

And so I've learned about that, but I think also living in the U.S., as opposed to when I was living in Iraq for years and working in the U.S., you know, working for an American company, living in London, working for an American company, visiting, being married to an American, that was not the same as coming to understand the principles of this country.

That democracy here works because of equal representation.

I've seen democracy fail.

I've seen it succeed and I've seen it fail in all kinds of places.

Democracy will always fail.

True democracy.

A representative republic.

That's right.

And that's missing from the conversation.

I didn't understand that.

So I'm mystified why nobody has asked Pete Buttigieg about eliminating the Electoral College.

Does it not register that?

Well, does it not register that?

You're from Indiana.

Right.

Why would anyone from Indiana ever vote again if you get rid of the Electoral College?

It won't matter.

None of your votes will matter.

And all of these places, you know, even South Africa, even Nelson Mandela made a deal for the first South African election, the first democratic election in South Africa.

He traded away votes of his own party so his majority wasn't too big.

And he gave them to his main rival opposition, you know,

on the black.

political front.

And because he knew that if they were humiliated by the election result, that he wouldn't be able to deliver anything.

He wouldn't be able to build the country.

He wouldn't be able to bring people together.

I don't know if anybody is willing to.

I I don't know if anybody wants that.

I think

there comes a point to where people have been shoved up against a wall in their corners for so long and belittled and that

I fear that there is

and maybe hopefully we're moving past this, but I fear there's a point to where

I just want to win.

I want to shut you up.

You know what I mean?

That's deadly.

That's what's happening on the left.

Just shut them up.

Well,

that's not just happening.

That's orchestrated.

That's deliberation.

You sound like the biggest conspiracy theorist ever.

You are they that are orchestrating.

I'm only playing.

No, I know.

I know, I know.

Well, this is.

It's easy to see the patterns.

And when these patterns emerge, they lead you to strategies and to tactics.

And none of those things just happen on their own.

That's not how real life works.

So, yes, conspiracy is a conspiracy theorist is a label that is used to silence people and shut people up.

And you're only a conspiracy theorist, by the way, if you're conservative or you're on the right, or what you're saying is something that echoes on the right or that people on the right agree with.

It hurts the left.

It hurts the left.

Well, and particularly hurts the progressive movement.

Yes.

Because

I think

there are a lot of people in the middle, there are a lot of people on the left, on the right, who would want to have these conversations, be willing to have them if they could.

We should define,

I look at the left as

the scary group of people that don't, that are not looking for a new American

chapter.

They're looking, America is bad, shut it down.

I say that's left, then from that is the progressive, autocratic kind of left, then the liberal

medium.

So that's to me, that's my spectrum.

That's why I use that.

So,

what I find when I go

to different places in this country, they can be cities, they can be towns, they can be big, small, it can be, you know, it can be in California, it can be in Nebraska, it can literally be anywhere.

I find that actually, if you're civil and you're honest, most of the time you can get past just about anything.

There are, you know, I do have my red lines and my red lines are real,

right?

But

when the conversation just

disintegrates into

emotion, that's when you know that you're not dealing, yes, it's over.

You're not dealing in the realm where someone wants to have a conversation of substance.

And look at that.

Look at that in the context of a smear campaign and pressure tactics and propaganda, right?

Look how that happens all the time.

You know, go back and read the document produced in,

I think it was 2012, about gun control and how to guide people through

that movement to make your case.

It literally says in there, don't take on this argument, don't take on the Second Amendment argument, don't take on this because that doesn't work.

Use the emotional argument.

And that's the playbook.

And it's the playbook across all different kinds of platforms.

And

you know how I can prove this isn't a conspiracy?

Because those documents

exist.

Read

the strategic plan for Media Mass for America in the wake of Donald Trump's election.

Look at their editorial priorities.

Terrifying.

Thank you for reading that.

Well, and I wish, I don't understand how so many people affected by this haven't read it and familiarized themselves with it because look at the editorial priorities.

They line up with every single thing that

has dominated the news media since Trump's election.

There's his conflicts of interests, his collusion with Russia.

He's got the legal mandate but not the popular mandate.

He won the popular vote.

He's not the legitimate president.

He's the least popular president in history.

I mean, one after another after another, you can see all of these stories.

You can see where they originated.

This happened before any of these actions were taken.

The Supreme Court is in there.

Supreme Court nominees opposing everything this administration does in the courts.

Look at what's happening in the courts.

Why isn't that being talked about?

So,

you know,

you look at these things, and

to me, it's becoming more and more obvious.

To me,

I'm now going,

oh, come on, dummies.

You're not this stupid America.

You're Democrats.

I know you.

I live next door to you.

You're not a stupid person.

You love the country.

I'm seeing people like Bernie Sanders, and I'm seeing the audience in the debates boo capitalism.

stand against all of the things that are fundamentally American that I know you as a Democrat, you're not a communist, you're not a socialist, you don't want to get rid of Wall Street,

you want some reforms, you want to clean things up, but that's not who you are.

When are they waking up or do they or are they?

Do you see anybody waking up?

You know what I see from my experience?

I mean,

yes, capitalism offers many opportunities, but what was I just saying?

It's also about hard work, right?

And anyone living the American dream knows what a struggle it can be, right?

And it's exhausting.

And

for me, you know, I at least have a lot of great things in my life that make up for that struggle, that make it worthwhile.

Not everybody does, right?

I can see light at the end of the tunnel.

I get to do amazing things.

Not everybody does.

So what I see is that these ideas, they're incredible ideas.

Who wants anyone

to die because they can't afford medical care?

Who wants any child to go to school hungry?

Who believes that being saddled with extraordinary amounts of debt and an education that makes you unemployable, that renders you almost useless, and no ability to pay?

Who thinks that's a good idea?

Who wouldn't give free health care, free college tuition?

Wouldn't you want all of that?

Yes, as ideas, of course they catch fire, especially with the youth, because they're great ideas.

And

I believe in all of those things, but there's a moment when reality comes up against ideas, right?

And that's what you're talking about.

And that's not what many people who escape into that world want to address

because it's just hard.

What's the other thing that those ideas really do?

They take responsibility away from the individual.

And personal responsibility is one of the most exhausting and important and powerful things ever.

In fact, if anything defines this country and Western civilization, in a sense it's personal responsibility.

Taxes,

not a big thing, not popular across the Middle East and

Afghanistan and places like that, right?

And in many parts of Africa.

I mean, people just look at you like, you know, of course, of course, you know, anything we can do to not pay taxes.

I don't, nobody likes paying taxes, but, you know, in this country, you accept that, you know, paying your taxes is a critical part of, you know, of funding

the country and the lifestyle and, you know, the values that you believe in, right?

Not so much, right?

You try, in Afghanistan, it's a badge of honor to get out of paying any possible tax of any description.

description.

So it's easy to see how people, it's not that people are standing up saying, I reject everything that America is.

It's more that this idea is like a lifeline in a way.

I think

we homeschooled our children.

Good God almighty.

That's a lot of people.

Yeah, can you coat me some slack?

And I had very little to do with it.

It was mainly my wife.

But good heavens.

I think

when people say I can't homeschool, there are some who can't.

They really can't but I think there's a lot of parents that don't

they don't want to and they don't and they they'd rather just this idea of having your kids having them taken and they're they're in school for a few hours you know eight hours a day I can do my thing somebody else is teaching

they don't

they think there's a partnership there.

They don't see that as a possible adversarial role the school is playing.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And they're kind of, and it's a relief.

I don't have time to do it.

I don't know if I'm qualified to do it.

So just take them, educate them, and bring them back.

And we have this naive trust

that, well, we're all on the same page.

We all believe the same thing.

They're not going to teach them anything harmful.

And we're sending them into the lion's den now.

Well, it's a very interesting point.

You know, the way you put it it like that.

I mean, I will say we homeschooled my son.

I say homeschooled, that's so dishonest in a way, because actually I found a fabulous woman to teach my child for a year

until she said, okay, I've reached the end of what, you know, they talked and they agreed it was time he wanted to go back to school because he wanted that social part of it.

And my son is

incredibly smart,

off the charts, but also severely dyslexic.

So he's always been in that difficult place where he's so far beyond his peers in many respects, but also so far behind.

And he's painfully aware of it.

So he was, you know, we were very

worried about him and doing the right things for him, not, you know, messing it up from the start.

But I can honestly tell you that if I was the one homeschooling him or my husband, I mean, that child would not be reading right now.

Because it's just, I mean, we just love Bill to be able to do it.

However, I agree completely with you that this idea of a partnership is misplaced in many respects and I see

under the system that we have now

it's better with private schools because private many private schools are forcing the parents to come in no no no we're not here to babysit you you got to come in you have to volunteer you have to be part of it you know there's that partnership but public school is

i fail on all of those counts i just want to say but I do my best.

But, well, the thing that I find so staggering is, you know, to have my children at age six talking about sexuality and gender.

And I'm like, wow, I mean, I haven't even had a chance to talk to them about that.

You know, it's sort of, and then you start to realize

that that partnership is really not

just a partnership.

It's something else.

But, you know, the world that they live in, that's also the world that they live in.

So I try really hard with my children just to be

as brutally honest as I can and not hide away from things.

And we get into it sometimes, even though they're 9 and 11 and 15.

No,

I think kids now are much more wise,

much more

aware

of things.

Not wise.

Not necessarily wise.

World-wise.

My son rescued a baby bird, and you know, we did all the things with it, and then he wanted to give it a name.

And he said to me,

I said, What are you going to call it?

And he said, Well, I don't know, mom, but it'll have to be a transgender name because we don't know if it's a boy or a girl.

And I said, For crying in a bucket, child.

This bird is either a boy or a girl.

Pick it.

Pick one.

Can we go back to politics and Ukraine?

What was that all about?

Sure.

Well,

there's still a lot we don't know.

And so I hesitate.

I don't want to sound like I'm stating things definitively.

The signs are all there, though.

One of the big indicators that I've learned to recognize from experience is that

the louder the protest,

the stronger the cry,

the bigger the crime.

You really

have to wonder

why it's so important that we don't have a conversation about this, that we don't talk about this,

and that we look somewhere else.

There's two, it's it's if you have if you take the politics out of it, and I know that a lot of people

just don't won't see it that way, but for me, what are the principles that you're looking at here?

And

there's an overwhelming amount of evidence and indicators

that what was happening there was worth looking at.

You said at one point, I don't remember which podcast you were on, but you were on a podcast, a conservative, and

I think you took on Barack Obama and you you questioned Afghanistan, I think, as policies or the Taliban, I think.

And uh, you stated,

Well, this is you know, this is the end of my career, being a Yes, this is uh, this is professional suicide.

That wasn't that wasn't just um, taking on that, that was where I where I talked about journalists, journalists, most journalists being, you know, liberal or Democrat.

Um,

maybe kind of just gotten past that now.

Are you, I mean, you talk about,

should a journalist talk about politics?

I mean, if I asked you what you think about Donald Trump, should you answer that?

Well,

my answer to that has always been when I'm when I'm reporting and I'm in my role as a journalist,

I have a responsibility to make sure that I separate opinion from facts.

Because there's only one truth, there's only really one set of facts.

We either sat here and had this conversation or we didn't, right?

And people like to say, no, the truth depends on where you come from or what the color of your skin or whatever.

No, actually, it really doesn't.

Your perception of it, you know, how you feel about it, that is affected by those things.

But the truth itself, there's only one.

Right?

And so.

So it's a misunderstanding of the advertising,

the advertising idea of

reality,

what is it, perception is reality.

No, it's not.

It's not.

In advertising, it might be, but in truth, it's not.

You can make it feel real, but it's still not real.

And that's our refuge as journalists, right?

That's what protects us from our own bias, is that that's the thing that we're working to find.

And if you stick with that and just go wherever that thing, called the truth, wherever it takes you, that's what to me defines us at our core.

I mean, the best of us, right?

That's what a journalist, at your best, that's what you aspire to be.

And

so, that's how I got into trouble because I'm not a political operative and I'm not a political activist.

And in fact, I'm not an activist.

I'm a journalist, right?

And I'm not a lawyer in a court of law trying to prove something is true or not true.

And I'm, you know, I'm not a strategist.

I am a journalist.

That's what I do.

So,

and that's so, it's so important

because

I've always said that everything I've done in my career, no matter who I've worked for, whether it was at a newspaper in South Africa or at 60 Minutes, I do my job the same way.

I'm still looking for the same thing.

It's called the truth.

And I have enormous respect.

And

I'm very grateful to have worked where I have worked, have been at 60 Minutes.

But at the end of the day, I never really worked for 60 Minutes or CBS.

What I worked for was that thing that I was pursuing that every journalist who's looking for that and cares about that wants to find.

And what people want us to believe is that there's two separate sets of facts.

There really aren't two separate sets of facts.

There's only one truth.

And if you separate your opinion from what you know to be true, then I think that that's fair enough as a journalist.

We do it all the time.

At 60 Minutes, what we would say, we'd do things like we'd say, you know,

over the week we spent with so-and-so

what we noticed was or in all the time we've been covering the war in Afghanistan 19 years now

we'd never encountered anything like this right so so you're the audience can tell the viewer knows you're giving your opinion your observation I love how people say journalists are not supposed to ever give their opinion I was savaged for it when I made a speech in Chicago at the Better Government Association and the speech actually I spent spent an hour and a half talking about the return of al-Qaeda to Afghanistan, which is a story I'd just done on 60 Minutes.

I made a passing reference to Benghazi.

It was brief.

I said, you know,

I think I said something like, I hope we're doing more about Benghazi than we say we are.

I hope there's something we don't know about, because if you're not, you're sending a message of weakness to your enemies, not one of strength.

And considering that that was the first U.S.

ambassador murdered in over half a century,

that was the basis on which I was saying that.

And the basis, the context was that the administration at the time was saying al-Qaeda was finished and done and diminished and over, created this false thing called, what is it, core al-Qaeda, as if the core of al-Qaeda was only in Afghanistan and that's the only thing that mattered, except there was no core.

And the number three in Al-Qaeda was in Yemen and had never been in Afghanistan, never been based there.

So, I mean, it was all just a pack of

political

dishonesty and deceit.

And they focused on that comment about Benghazi and used that to smear and target me later when I covered Benghazi and say, you see, she was biased and right-wing and a conspiracy theorist from the start.

And she should never have been able, she should never have reported on that story.

Well, good lord, if that's the standard, what about all these journalists being asked for their analysis?

We call it analysis, and we check the box and say, okay, we're still objective journalists, not giving our opinion.

We're just giving our analysis.

And that is, you can give analysis based on your reporting.

And that can be separate from fact.

But

that's a real gray area there.

And to say those are mutually exclusive concepts is

that's giving yourself a free pass to me, right?

And if you look at newspapers, they have opinion pages.

In fact, the Washington Post's opinion pages have exploded, right?

They've expanded the number of them.

There's just about as much opinion in the Washington Post today as there is news.

And in fact, then if you add the fact that the news reporting is infused with opinion that's presented as fact, then

you're getting into crazy numbers.

It's almost all opinion.

And what could be more dishonest than to present your opinion as a fact?

Correct.

Cars today are computers on wheels, from electronically controlled transmissions to touch screen displays to dozens of sensors.

But all of this tech is really expensive to fix when it breaks.

And that's why I am covered with CarShield.

I have a couple of old trucks that are not covered by warranty anymore.

And I have Car Shield because it's affordable protection that have saved me literally probably $13,000 between the two trucks for covered repairs, computers, GPS, electronics, all of it.

You can choose your favorite mechanic.

I take it to the dealership when something goes wrong.

CarShield takes care of all of it.

They get you back on track in no time.

They have 24-7 roadside assistance, a rental car while yours is being fixed.

They've helped so far over a million customers drive with confidence knowing that you have coverage from America's number one auto protection provider.

So whether you have 5,000 miles or 150,000 miles on your vehicle, it's going to break.

Don't wait until your check engine light comes on.

Get covered today by CarShield.

1-800 CAR 6,000.

800-CAR 6,000.

Mention the promo code Saturday or visit carshield.com and use that promo code Saturday.

You'll save 10%.

That's carshield.com.

Promo code Saturday.

Deductible may apply.

What's the future of the media?

I always say I'm not a prophet when I get asked questions like that.

What's the future?

What's going to happen in the war?

I don't know.

I'm looking at Crystal Ball.

What the future I know, Glenn?

I don't know.

I'm not a prophet.

I mean, when I say that too, I'm also not a visionary.

I don't, I, I'm, I'm the guy you send in when you want to know what the hell's going on.

That's me.

So let's approach it that way.

Back in 2005, I started seeing real signs of division and trouble coming in the country.

And I started to do my homework.

And I read up and studied as much as I could on revolutions in countries and how they start and how they're fomented and

what

things do you need to control to be able to do it.

And I've just been checking the list.

And I can tell you where we are, you know, based on that.

That doesn't mean I know what's going to happen.

It's just I can see this progression.

And by watching it, if I were in the belly of the beast, I would know even more.

You're in the belly of the beast.

Is there a sense that,

because what has to happen is a great humbling for all of us, a great humbling.

Is there a sense of,

gosh, I mean, are we part of the problem?

Is there any sense of do you see it?

I don't.

I'm asking you, you.

But do you see it?

I mean, if it was there, you would see it.

If it was there, then

everyone who published false accounts of what happened at the Lincoln Memorial with Nick Sandman and Nathan Phillips,

they would not have revised their stories and doubled down and then looked at other

ways to criticize privileged kids and Catholic kids and Catholic schools and this and that.

Oh, and don't never don't even, you know, don't even go to the red hat, right?

So, where you would see that accountability.

You would see news organizations that took, that, that were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for their reporting on Russia, Russian collusion, the non-existent collusion.

You would see news organizations standing up and saying, you know what?

We're not okay with this.

We're not okay with this anymore.

You would not see John Brennan and Clapper being paid to comment on the things that they have a vested interest in shaping and steering and lying about.

You would not see

You would not see the same thing happening with Ukraine that you saw happening with Russian collusion.

You would not see Adam Schiff be given a platform across the media space without being challenged.

How, how can you not challenge him when he says things that you now know to not be true?

How can you allow Maxine Waters to go on and still talk about Trump as if he is

a Russian agent for Vladimir Putin and as if the entire Mueller investigation never happened and Horowitz's report never happened and still see people cite Carter Page as if he's a Russian spy when he was actually an American spy.

Right?

How can that be happening?

Now I'm just, oh, I'm burying myself once again as I think about

the story I'm doing on,

that is about the way people who believe and feel that they've been left out of the media conversation in this country for the longest time because their views don't fit with the liberal worldview that most journalists have.

I'm doing a story looking at the media from their point of view.

It's their story.

The media's point of view or the people who've been left out.

So

I hit just about every

possible

nuclear issue that you can think about.

I mean, from anti-abortion or pro-life,

whatever you want to call it, to Russia, to Ukraine, to

Antifa.

I mean if I

know

I know the attack is coming and this one has to be bigger and it has to be worse and it has to be more effective and

they don't, when they come for you, they don't just want you to lose your job.

They want you to lose everything.

Everything.

Everything.

Your reputation, your future, your ability to feed your children, to keep a roof over your head.

They want to annihilate you.

I think they call it cancel culture.

So

I know it's coming and this is treacherous ground and it's hard.

I'm very uncomfortable reporting on

my own profession.

And as, you know, especially my opinions out there on this, I've said a lot about it.

And so I have to take that into account.

And it's fraught with conflicts of interest.

And the new smear, right, have you seen it?

They're using it on John Solomon.

He didn't properly disclose his conflicts of interest.

So it's not enough to disclose it.

Someone Someone is going to make a subjective judgment about whether it's properly disclosed or not.

And he wasn't.

And he did some journalistic things like calling for calling sources and no, but that doesn't count.

No, but

what document?

No, I don't know.

Don't look at the document.

Solomon is compromised

and he's not disclosed his conflicts of interest and he's toxic and you don't want to touch him.

I'm doing to you what you did to me.

I know, but the Hill is actually saying that because he did that, because he actually

was stepping into the circle of a journalist and saying, this is not just my opinion.

I reached out and I talked to this person and this person and this person, and here's what they said.

That was a compromise.

Oh, wait, so what they're saying is, if you don't do any journalism and you just write whatever you want, that's okay, apparently.

You're good to go.

Right, but you're you see Sarajevani giving your opinion in the New York Times on their editorial page.

Wow.

I mean, that's like, well, see, it's that.

I always say, this is one of my rules:

when one plus one doesn't equal two,

something's up.

Because if it conflicts with the way you know it works in the natural world, it's not natural.

You said something at the beginning of the the interview that

stuck with me.

I'm an alcoholic, and I remembered when my whole life burned down, and I had nothing.

And

the only thing besides my family, the only thing that I wanted back

was my name, my word, to be able to look somebody in the eye and go,

This is true.

This is what I believe.

Alcoholics lie themselves into everything.

And so you find yourself and you realize you could take

everything away.

Everything.

But if I lose my word,

I have nothing.

You said at the beginning of the interview

that you

I don't remember exactly how you phrased it, but you felt in the square that you didn't die.

You

won,

you lived that day.

And you spoke about,

in a way, your word, that you have an extraordinary life.

That's all you have.

That's all you have.

And when somebody tries to take that from you, you know, especially,

I mean, everybody knows

that with sexual violence and sexual crimes and rape,

that that's what it's about.

Everybody knows that.

It's the basis of the entire Me Too movement.

But isn't that also

what is happening?

When you said they don't want to just destroy you, they want to take everything you have.

The fastest way is to betray yourself.

Oh, they want you to betray yourself.

Oh, because that's the biggest prize of all.

If they can bury you with your own words and your own actions,

that's the Olympic gold.

Or get you to come along.

Just get you to come along and say,

you know what, I thought this, I think this.

Play along.

Isn't that take you?

Doesn't that, doesn't that crush your soul in who you are if you just, if you know?

Oh, no, you know what it's called?

There's a tactic.

I'll tell you exactly what it is.

When they have you on the ground, in the dirt, on your back, with nothing, and their foot is on your throat,

they reach forward with one hand.

and they see if you take it.

And if you take it, you're theirs forever.

You can have it all back.

You can have the glory, the recognition.

You can be, you know, wined, dined in Washington.

You can get every award that your industry has to offer.

You can have it all if you take the hand.

And if you don't take it, they never stop coming.

That's the story of Jesus in the desert with the devil, with Satan, where I'll give you everything at his most broken place.

I'll give you everything.

You can don't have it all.

Just do this one thing.

Just say this one thing.

So you know who didn't take the hand?

Mike Flynn didn't take the hand.

You can see who did.

Just name him among his peers.

Who did?

Who took the hand?

There's a few of them, right?

And I will say full disclosure here.

Mike Fryn, I've known Mike Flynn for a long time and I love him and respect him and his family.

He is a great man.

And

without ever knowing any of the details, I knew from the very first moment that Mike Flynn never lied.

That man

doesn't have that DNA.

He has that most underrated quality.

of consistency.

He is always the same.

And he

must have been the greatest threat outside of Donald Trump because they went for him first.

Can I just ask you about your husband?

Yes.

Tell me about him.

Who did you marry?

Who did I marry?

I mean, you don't have to give me the name, you know, just tell me about it.

It's so funny that you ask about him because

the Daily Beast just tried to smear him and target him.

Oh, my God.

And there was a celebration on Twitter.

This article is ridiculous.

It's just a total joke about it.

How do you handle that?

My wife.

If somebody came after my wife, I would go out of my mind.

Oh, well, there's not a single thing in there about my husband

besides his name that's actually accurate.

Not a single thing.

It's just a joke.

And

they've been going after my husband for a while.

But, you know, he's a big boy.

He can take care of, he can take care of.

Public life?

He was

in the Army for 23 years.

And

he's retired.

And all he does is get on my nerves.

Oh, and wait, and get in my way.

Yeah.

Oh,

no, I'm just kidding, of course.

You know that.

My husband has been at my side through thick and thin, through everything.

He picked up the pieces pieces of the, you know, the

out of the dirt of Tahrir Square and through breast cancer and through

my father is very ill and he's, you know, my husband and through all the through all the children and he's committed to his family and he is he is a decorated

veteran.

actually, who spent many, many years deployed.

I met him in Afghanistan and we didn't,

you know, we didn't fall in love until my last few months of being in Iraq.

They tried to say that my husband, they tried to discredit my work by saying that my, you know, suggesting that my husband was feeding me stories in Iraq.

And of course, you know, I lived there five years and he was there for about the last eight months.

And I hadn't seen him for years or even talked to him.

You know, it's just such a joke the way they do this.

But my husband is the recipient.

He'll hate this that I'm talking about this.

He's the recipient of the Soldier's Medal, which I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it is the highest award for valor

in peacetime.

Wow.

And it's the least awarded medal of all.

And you have to have put your own life at such significant risk of dying in order to save someone else's life.

And that other person has to be

inescapably...

on the

in peril that were it not for your action that person would be dead

That's the sort of the standard for it.

You know, it's funny,

he was asked that once by a group of sergeant majors

when he was being interviewed for a position in their unit.

And

what he said was, well,

you know,

I don't remember a whole lot.

And so they were like, well, you know, tell us what you remember.

And he said, well,

he was in a subway in D.C.

at the time he was working at Fort Belvoir.

And he was in uniform uniform because he was on his way home.

And a woman fell onto the tracks and cut her head open as the train was coming.

And he said, basically, I don't remember anything after that.

And obviously what people witnessed him do was to get down in front of that train.

And nobody knew, nobody understood how he survived.

She was, I think, not able to, you know, she couldn't move.

And so he picked her up and gave her to the people, passengers on the platform and made it, barely made it out of there.

But actually, people in the subway

reported that to the Pentagon, and they spent a few weeks tracking him down.

And his mother was, his mother, my mother-in-law, Phyllis Anne, was at home in, I think, Curlville, Texas, when she got a phone call saying, you know,

is this person your son?

And was he, you know, in this place?

And she had no idea.

I don't know.

They had to find him, to let him know.

And he didn't tell anybody

in the family.

No.

You know, people act these days as if

there's no such thing as any respect or regard for secrecy or classified information.

And

that's something that people like my husband take very, very, very seriously.

I don't know most of what he did in his career.

It really doesn't matter, you know?

Roger Ailes was interviewing me for Fox.

And I had had dinner with him a couple of times, but we never talked about business.

And

he says, I want to meet with you.

I want to talk to you about a job.

So I went and had dinner.

I think I lost 15 pounds that night.

Why?

It was the craziest damn interview ever.

The first question he asked me was, what do you think of the 1972 peace accords with Nixon in China?

And I'm like, I don't know.

And I said,

not up to speed on that.

And then he said,

tell me what you think the greatest achievement of the Eisenhower administration was.

And I looked at him, I sat there and I thought,

and I said, Roger,

I could play this one of two ways.

I could bluff and talk about his farewell speech,

but I know you'd know I'm bluffing.

I could do that and roll the dice, or I could just say,

I don't know.

I've never thought about it.

Never thought about it.

And probably destroy the interview.

And he said, what are you going to choose?

And I said, well, I've already chosen it.

I'm going for option number two.

And he sat there and he said nothing to me for 10 minutes.

Dead silence for 10 minutes.

Wow.

He pushed me up against the wall on everything.

I mean, just.

And I thought, I'll never see this man again.

And he got up and he said, what I would like to say to you,

it is

really, truly rare to sit down with someone who knows what they believe, knows who they are, willing to admit what they don't know.

it's a pleasure speaking to you.

Thank you.

That was very classy.

It's true.

Thank you.

It is rare.

Shouldn't be.

But it is.

It is.

Only people who are truly comfortable in their skin are willing to do that.

You only get one skin.

You only get one.

So, you know, there's a few things I change.

I always used to say I want to be taller.

Now I'm, you know, older and fatter, and I can't see anything unless I've got a spotlight on it.

My children tell me I'm not fat.

You're not fat, mom.

My children tell me I am.

I pay mine.

I bribe them relentlessly.

I keep telling them they're only going to get my best regards and my will.

So you know what, Mike?

You'll love this.

My son says to me a couple days ago, hey, mom, mom, who's this guy?

Mike.

Mike, what's his name?

Bloomberg or something.

He said, That guy gets shit done, mom.

I said, What?

He said, Oh, no, I get his ads all the time.

Let me tell you, Mike gets shit done.

You're 11.

And my 15-year-old's like, Who?

Mike?

Classic, right?

Thank you.

Thank you.

Just a reminder, I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.