Best of the Program | Guests: Senator Mike Lee, Ian Bremmer & Mark David Hall | 1/9/20

Hey, welcome to the Glenbeck program.

It is the podcast today.

We got a lot.

We have very controversial Mike Lee on.

He's hoping not controversial, but he is today.

He was very upset about the briefing that he got in Congress.

We talked to him about that.

And also, where does he stand on President Trump?

It's not what you're going to hear from the rest of the media.

This is an interview worth listening to all the way through.

Also, Ian Bremer is with us.

The risks of 2020.

What are the things that he

sees over the horizon this year?

And was America a Christian founding?

Are we a Christian-based country?

A professor from Oregon actually chimes in.

Don't miss it.

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

We have Senator Mike Lee on the phone with us now, who is

either loved or hated by so many, and I think misunderstood in this particular case.

Senator, welcome to the program.

Thanks so much, Glenn.

Good to be with you, as always.

So, Mike,

you are not

saying that the President shouldn't have gotten Soleimani or that he hasn't handled this right.

That's correct.

Right?

You're for that.

I have not spoken out against the attack on Soleimani.

What I am concerned about is where we go from here.

Correct.

I want to make sure that any subsequent military action against Iran is carried out only through the constitutional formula, which is through a declaration of war or an authorization for the use of military force.

And this is the same thing.

I actually think the president wants the same.

I think the president wants to follow the constitution.

I commend the president.

I support the president.

This president has been actually the most respectful and the most restrained in his use of military power as commander-in-chief,

more so than any other president in my lifetime.

I agree with that.

And I respect him for that.

Unfortunately, some of those around him seem to be

coming from a slightly different place, and that worries me.

I was shocked because I felt exactly the same way about President Trump.

I was really proud of the way he has restrained himself.

He, you know, he didn't go and lob missiles after they took down our drone.

You know,

they've captured our sailors, et cetera, et cetera.

And he really didn't do any of the things that I think other presidents would have done.

And yet, he didn't look weak.

And he just drew the line of you kill our people, and that's a different story.

He drops the bomb.

This all goes fairly well as of today.

It goes fairly well.

But I was shocked, Mike, to hear on television all of the people from the right that were saying, we got to bomb their oil fields.

We've got to go after them.

No, no, no.

No.

We don't want that.

We don't want that, and President Trump doesn't want that.

And look, this is

one of the many reasons I have endorsed his reelection.

One of the reasons why I'm the co-chair of his re-election campaign in my home state of Utah is because I think he has shown tremendous restraint as commander-in-chief.

And it's one of the things I love about him.

He wants desperately to not get us involved in unnecessary, unconstitutional, undeclared wars throughout the world.

And so it worries me when I see some people around him.

making arguments that are consistent with those that have been made over the course of many decades that have driven a wedge between the American people and the war power.

The war power is supposed to belong in the people's branch, which is Congress, because it's the branch of government most accountable to the people at the most regular intervals.

Okay, now wait a minute.

I want to make sure that we're talking about the same thing because it's my understanding that the way the world works, it is so fast, and it's like this in the Constitution.

The president has the right to strike, but then he's got to go to Congress within 30 days and get

war powers

act passed so we have a declaration of war.

Otherwise, all the military have to come home and everything else because you hold the purse.

Yeah, that's right.

The president has the power inherently under Article 2 to order a strike that is discreet and that is necessary in order to repel an actual or imminent attack.

But, you know, further actions, a sustained military effort, something that would qualify as an act of war, does in fact require congressional authorization.

And that's what they need to obtain.

I think the president agrees with me on that.

I just think some of those surrounding him, advising him, and advising Congress on behalf of the executive branch yesterday are not adequately taking that into account.

Yeah, I think the American people need to be very careful because we hear everything in black and white now, and there are extremists on both sides.

There are people in Washington that I hear, and I think they are actually, their hatred and their politics against Trump are so strong, it's almost like they want us to lose.

They want us to,

I mean, they're standing behind terrorists.

It's crazy.

And on the other side, there are extremists that want us to go to war with Iran.

I think the average American person is like, look, if you kill our people, you hit them, you hit them hard, you move on, and we don't have to go to war with Iran.

It's not the right idea.

I think that's where the average person is.

But the politics in Washington, which brings me to this question.

How can

you said yesterday, which I completely agree with you,

you said,

you know, it's our, we have to debate.

It's un-American.

And the people that were advising Trump and advising you and informing you on what was going on, you said, came in and said,

don't debate this because it will empower Iran.

And I agree with them.

However, I also agree with you that that's your job.

You have to do that.

We're not a dictatorship.

We have to have that debate.

However, in this particular time period,

Do you really think, Mike, we could get honest debate on the floor?

I mean, I'm not saying we stop stop debate, but I just don't think that

there's honest debate now, anything that Donald Trump does.

Look, we could, and we should, and under the War Powers Act, we can, and we must have that debate.

The Constitution requires us to have it.

And if we ever get to the point where we can get mired into a global conflict or a war of any kind, and Congress says, oh, we can't possibly handle that, then we've got a major problem with Congress.

I agree.

But look, we do have procedural mechanisms through the War Powers Act to advance debate on this issue.

There are some people who are fond of saying, well, the War Powers Act is unconstitutional.

Look, the War Powers Act doesn't fundamentally change the balance of power between the executive branch and the legislative branch.

All it does is provide a schedule, a timeline by which members of Congress can advance certain arguments for an up-or-down vote on signaling our approval or lack thereof of a particular military action.

That's exactly what the Constitution expects of us, and we should do it.

The problem is people are hearing you today, and we are living in such a black and white world.

You were saying this under Obama, and you were saying this privately about the War Powers Act

under Bush.

This is something that is not about Donald Trump.

You were leading the fight

on

Yemen.

We're in Yemen.

What are we doing in Yemen?

Fighting a war.

Barack Obama got us involved in Yemen through executive action without bothering to go to Congress.

That has continued for several years,

notwithstanding the fact that it was never declared by Congress, notwithstanding the fact that it's unconstitutional to do it that way, notwithstanding the fact that the American people have no national security interests.

They are not made safer by our involvement as a co-belligerent in the Saudi-led coalition effort against the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

And so that's what I'm saying here, is that I was consistent in previous administrations on this.

I'm being consistent under President Trump.

And President Trump himself, I believe, agrees with us.

That is that the president himself shouldn't be free to get us involved in a war.

He does.

That power belongs to the people's branch in Congress.

He is so anti-war, he's barely a conservative

or a Republican on that front.

It's a important distinction there, by the way, Glenn.

Because one is anti-war because one is a conservative.

Being anti-war means one is a conservative.

It doesn't undermine it.

Unfortunately, the Republican Party has at times deviated from that standard and has drifted more toward the direction of Woodrow Wilson.

Show me a war so that I can get involved in it, so that I can build government.

That's wrong.

So, Mike,

where is this headed?

The House votes today

on restraining the President from doing things.

And I believe that that is mainly political in the House.

So you said that you wanted to know which way to vote and you were looking at yesterday and

the people who came over to brief you were the worst that you've ever seen.

And were they saying that you had to vote with them?

or just not discuss it or what was it that they said and and what do what are you planning on doing?

The most important and the most troubling thing that they said

was that they refused to commit to any set of circumstances in which they would be required to come back and seek authorization from Congress before undertaking additional acts against Iran.

They wanted to hold open the possibility that almost anything,

even right down to taking down the Supreme Leader, might be authorized either under their inherent authority under Article 2 or under the 2002 authorization for the use of military force or otherwise, and that they might not necessarily have to come back to Congress.

I think that's inexcusable.

And there was a suggestion in there also that we shouldn't be debating it, that we shouldn't have this discussion, because that might embolden Iran and it might make us look weak.

Look, this is the whole reason the Founding Fathers put this thing in Article 1, Section 8, the whole reason they put it in Congress.

They didn't want to have the executive capable of getting us into a war.

President Trump doesn't disagree with that.

In fact, I believe he agrees with the Founding Fathers' decision to do that.

And that's why I think he was ill-served yesterday by those briefing the Senate.

So, Mike,

I really do agree with you.

I just want to play devil's advocate here

one more time.

The founders, when they did this,

could not be heard in the capitals of our enemies live, and also

did not have a world that was controlled by a State Department

and

manipulated in the media as it is today.

You do see the point that,

and I'm not saying we don't debate, but you do understand the point that the debate, especially if it becomes political,

does

send the message that we are not all on the same page.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: It does, and that is precisely the point of the war power being put in Article I, Section 8, and being a power of Congress.

It's a feature, not a bug, to require debate and careful deliberation in the public eye before going to war.

The Founding Fathers never wanted or intended it to be easy to get involved in a war.

It's part of how we stay out of war.

There are, moreover, more than adequate means of dealing with the modern realities that you describe without thwarting the Constitution.

The President has inherent power to repel an actual or imminent attack on the United States.

The President also has certain power to order special operations teams to go in outside the War Powers Act process and strike in a more clandestine fashion.

Neither of those is impaired by this kind of debate and discussion about whether we should go into war.

We haven't had a war declaration since 1942.

That's right.

It's a problem.

It is a problem.

And it shows this gradual decline over the last 80 years away from the constitutional framework and in a direction that allows for the consolidation of power.

I've been against that in previous administrations.

I'm against that in this administration, which is headed by a president who agrees with me.

Senator Mike Lee, thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

And I commend you for your bravery of standing up and being consistent no matter where the arrows come from.

Keep up the good work, Mike.

The best of the Glen Beck program.

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

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

It's available wherever you download your favorite podcasts.

Hello, Stu.

Mr.

Beck, how are you?

Nail, I'm a little upset about Megan Markle and Prince Harry.

I don't know what to do.

You're oddly interested in that story.

I am because of tradition, because of history.

I think history is about to change.

I think when the queen dies, I think the royal family is probably over.

And that might be a good thing, but I just, you know,

I'm a conservative.

I like to conserve the best parts of things.

There's not a

any argument for me, at least, to conserve the monarchy like let it go i mean forever yeah i mean because it's not my country yeah i can i don't care about what they spend you know what i mean like oh well you're spending wow three million dollars for that wedding oh and three million dollars to uh to remodel their house oh wow okay i don't really care i mean i if i was over there i'd be absolutely against this monarchy yeah i would want the whole thing gone though but their actions i don't know how i like to me it's just a well, where we have a giant sinkhole of money that we're going to throw, we're going to throw a bunch of money into a pit every year so we can say we have a queen, right?

Like, that's essentially the entire part of this.

Like, none of it doesn't mean anything anymore.

Um, and I come at this as a person who watched every single

episode of Suits.

I love suits, it's like my favorite show.

And Megan Markle was on suits, and I still don't really care about what she's doing right now.

Well, okay, I mean, that's I agree.

That's a high bar,

That's a high bar.

It's hard to pass.

I've watched every episode of The Crown.

Ah, see.

This is what happened.

Yeah, this is what happened.

I actually like Elizabeth a lot.

I hate the rest of the family, but I like Queen Elizabeth a lot.

I think she's an amazing woman

who's done an amazing thing.

I mean, think of this.

She is the longest-running monarch in all of English history.

And she has weathered this.

I mean, when she grew up, people in England England and the upper class were still dressing for dinner.

You know, now everybody's going to McDonald's in the upper class, you know.

And she's weathered this storm and hasn't been chased out on a rail or people screaming for their heads or a bloody revolution.

She's remarkable on what she's done.

And maybe the time for monarchies are over, and I think so.

I like it as a tourist.

Right.

You know what I mean?

I like it just to...

We like it like we, hey, I want to make the guard laugh at Buckingham Palace.

That's the level of interest that we have.

Exactly right.

I mean, I just

suppose

Buckingham Palace goes away and then we can't make faces at the guard.

What happens when she dies?

I'm pretty sure it turns into a mall and they throw a cinnabon inside, which is, it improves almost anything.

Yeah, right.

But the problem is, is I just don't.

When you see, I'm really torn on this because you got Prince Charles, who looks like he's going to be be actually getting the crown, which is crazy.

Camilla, nobody likes the two of them.

Then you have Andrew with Edstein.

I mean, there's nobody liking.

I feel like Andrew, he couldn't even get a birthday party put through on Friday.

I don't think he's getting it.

So then you have, I don't know, the older one who's not hairy.

Do you mean physically or you mean name-wise?

Name-wise.

And maybe physically too.

I don't know.

But he's not hairy.

The hairless one.

Yeah, the hairless one is he's he's after charles well markle has broken up their relationship i mean the two brothers of princess diana uh you know are the two sons they're broken up megan markle's just finishing the job we started back in 1776 all right we're gonna break down she really is

almost like an american colonial coming in and breaking the whole thing up.

Get ready.

You let it happen, Great Britain.

Yeah, and I feel sorry for Harry because nobody's noticing that what he's seeing is that his wife is becoming his mother.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

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Thanks.

Love this.

Democratic Insiders are now telling the frontrunners, hey, can you guys stop looking like you're Iran's lawyers?

They said

they want to avoid any sense that they are looking like they are in favor of Iran.

Horses out of that barn.

And they also need to explain what they would do differently.

It can't simply be just rejoin the Iran deal.

It can't be come home America.

Come home America wasn't a great theme for George McGovern in 72 and it's not likely to work any better in 2020.

I think they're facing another George McGovern kind of loss.

I really do.

I just don't.

At this point, everything could change.

But at this point,

I can't imagine Americans saying, yeah,

yeah,

we got to go with these people and the socialist and radical ideas that they have.

Because I don't think America lives there.

Yeah, maybe.

I mean, it seems like the McGovern-style victories have only occurred with

presidents with incredibly high popularity ratings.

I mean, you know, Nixon's

approval ratings were incredibly high before Watergate.

Reagan was coming into the real meat of the success of his administration, the morning for America,

against Dukakis.

You have that sort of background, and that seems to be sort of the pattern for that.

Trump has had a lot of success with the economy.

This most recent incident with Iran is, I think, worked out well.

The ISIS thing was, there's been a lot of success stories, but still his approval rating is 41, 42%.

And polling kind of shows a very close race.

Sometimes he's behind.

Every once in a while, he's ahead, but it's a pretty tight race.

Very polarized public.

Almost nothing that's happened, all these big stories has moved his approval rating more than two or three points his entire administration.

He's had the most consistent approval ratings of any president.

That's crazy.

In a really long time.

And you think of the way that the coverage has been against him.

It's amazing they haven't been able to knock that down.

But that doesn't necessarily,

at least the science right now, I don't think, you know, points towards a massive victory.

Yeah.

I don't even know if that's possible today.

I think we almost are too polarized for it even to occur.

Maybe.

Or with anybody.

Maybe, but I just sense Democrats are tired of this too.

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Ian Bremer is with us now.

He's the president and founder of the Eurasia Group, leading global political risk research and consulting firm.

The economist says he's a rising guru in the field of political risk, and we're glad to have him here.

And Ian, I have to tell you, I'm a fan of Mike Lee, and

Mike Lee was against the president when he was running, and then he was for him after he did a few things.

Yesterday, he came out and said it was a horrible briefing, and that no president should have just war powers unlimited.

And he's being branded today as anti-Trump.

No, it's a thinking human being.

I can be for some things and against other things.

And I appreciate that about you coming out yesterday and saying, I don't, I'm not a Trump supporter, but good job on this Iran thing.

Thank you.

You'd think that that would be a fairly sensible position to be able to take.

But as you know, and as you just said,

it's becoming more challenging.

I was heartened that actually the interview that I did on CNN

that was, you know, sort of as all this was coming down the pike on Monday morning

was then picked up and promoted and talked about on Fox News.

And it's just so rare that that actually happens in a sensible way.

Yeah.

Because there's just so much of two completely separate countries and two completely separate bubbles

in digesting different information and news and deciding that they have a team.

And if you're not on the team, it doesn't really matter whether you do something that's smart or good.

You know, I mean, like, would I have supported Obama if he had had the same, if he had killed

Soleimani and the Iranians had responded with nothing and let's please talk?

Of course I would have.

It had nothing to do with who the president is.

Right.

Right.

Good for you.

It is shocking that I have to thank you for that, but

let me point out that you're a thinking human being still, and those are rare.

So looking at the report that was released on Monday from your group,

you're looking at the top risks for 2020.

Do you put Iran in the top risk at all?

We put it, we had a broad risk about what we called Shia crescendo of challenges to stability in both Syria, Iraq, and Iran as risk number eight towards the bottom of the list.

But Iran itself was considered a red herring, that actually it was going to be talked up a lot.

People are going to say we're going to war, and we didn't buy any of it.

And we got a lot of pushback.

I changed my New Year's resolution as a consequence to just trying to convince people that World War III is not imminent.

And,

you know, here we are.

I mean, look, there's no question Iran is still a very serious

adversary of the United States in the region.

That's not that that didn't change overnight,

but we have now established a real deterrent.

They have now backed down, and there is a window of opportunity for negotiations.

I mean, so much so that the likelihood of negotiations being pursued between the U.S.

and Iran directly this year, in my view, are greater than a resumption of military conflict directly between the two sides.

And I think that's quite something to say.

So you say the number one risk for 2020 in the U.S.

is who governs the U.S.?

Quoting, in 2020, U.S.

institutions will be tested as never before, and November election will produce a result many will see as illegitimate.

If Trump wins amid credible charges of irregularities, the result will be contested.

If he loses, particularly if the vote is close, it will be the same.

Either scenario would create months of lawsuits in a political vacuum, but unlike the contested Bush-Gore

2000 election, the loser is unlikely to accept a court-decided outcome as legitimate.

That's frightening.

You know, it's not the end of democracy.

It's not like the United States is about to become Hungary or Turkey.

It's not like our institutions are going to break.

But I do think that we're going to...

I mean, the equivalent is Brexit, right?

And

not the Brexit reality that's coming at the end of January, but rather what happened after they voted, which is that the people that lost said, no, we want another vote.

This wasn't acceptable.

You didn't tell us what this was all about.

This was illegitimate.

And so for three years, you had the Brits tearing each other up at the exception, at the expense of getting any legislation done, of actually governing, of actually leading.

And I fear that we're entering a period like that in the United States.

Again, the UK institutions are still there.

The Royals took a beating over the last few days.

But leaving that aside, the institutions are still there.

They're still a democracy.

They still function.

But my God, they showed themselves being completely incapable of governing for a period of time.

And I think that coming out of the 2020 elections, we're likely to have that kind of a broken election process.

But that wasn't...

Brexit wasn't broken because there was a big scandal of possible rigging of an election one way or another.

What they were saying was, well,

we're just not going to do that because,

you know, that's just not the right thing to do.

They weren't listening to the people.

And that was the real problem in Brexit.

If there is a scandal that goes along with this in one way or another, that's different than the Brexit thing, isn't it?

Yes, yes.

Certainly how we get there is completely different.

I was just talking about what it would feel like in the United States.

So we weren't talking about revolution, you know.

No, how we get get there in the United States is we have an impeachment.

The president has been impeached.

He will be acquitted.

And he will be acquitted despite having, in my view,

having committed crimes, abusing power, to swing the election in his favor.

So impeachment will be broken as a restraint on the president as he seeks re-election.

So here.

So, Ian, let me ask you this.

We disagree

the crime thing.

I think

there are crimes that were committed,

but not necessarily by the president.

But if he did commit them, I want to know them.

I want to hear all of the evidence.

I want it fair, and I want it out in the open.

And if he did, he's out.

Or if anybody else did,

do you think that we live in a world that

Washington will give us a fair trial and call everyone to the witness stand?

Oh, no.

No, no, no, of course not.

Because, I mean, again, you know, the Democrats, this was a party line.

Right.

The vote was a party line vote.

And in the Senate, the same thing's going to happen with the Republicans.

I mean, so there's no possibility that impeachment could proceed in the way that our founding fathers had intended it to.

So doesn't that.

The impeachment is clearly broken as a process.

Right.

And doesn't this breakdown, I think, is happening in Washington.

I'm not sure that it is happening as much as it

in the middle of America and the non-political America.

I'm not sure that it's happening as strong as it is on TV and in Washington.

I think both Democrats and Republicans see this entire thing as

this, but neither side is being right here.

Again, I think that the sclerotic partisanship, the capture of our political process by big money and special interests on both sides,

has led to an awful lot of angry people.

A lot of Americans that feel that the system is broken, that it's disenfranchised, that it's rigged.

And, you know, that is about Washington.

It is about the political system.

But, you know, there was a story last year that one piece of data that, I mean, I think articulated this for me, that had nothing to do with Washington, but my God, it feels the same way for everyone, which is, you know, around this varsity blues scandal with all the parents, the wealthy parents buying their way into universities.

So it turned out that last year in Greenwich, Connecticut, 50%

of the high schoolers taking the SAT, 50% of them had notes from psychologists allowing them to take the test unmonitored over two days as opposed to four hours.

Oh my gosh.

And I mean, so you talk about the average American, right?

The average American looks at that and they say, yep, exactly.

That's the problem.

I knew it.

I can't do a damn thing.

I mean, I'm powerless.

These people are screwing me.

And so is that Washington?

Well, Washington is complicit, but it's more than just Washington.

You can't say it's just Washington, the media.

That's not right.

That's not fair.

Let's talk a little bit about China.

What's coming our way with China?

Because China is not Iraq.

I mean, we're not...

We're not going to be able to do anything with China and have them react the same way.

But they seem to really be hurting by these sanctions.

What's coming our way?

Well, I like the way you put that because, you know, I mean, Trump,

two of his biggest foreign policy wins have been the same basic strategy.

They've been what he just did with Iran and then what he did with Mexico when he said, I'm going to destroy your economy.

Literally, your head's going to spin if you don't actually tighten up the borders.

In both cases, Trump's like this guy at the poker table with a massive stack of chips in front of him.

It doesn't really matter if he's holding a 2-9 or a pocket ACEs.

He just put all of his chips in, and you're going to fold, right?

But China is not going to fold.

China's ability to say no to the United States is actually quite robust.

And so we are going to get this deal signed on January 15th, this Phase 1 trade deal.

The Chinese are sending Lu He to Washington, D.C., the lead trade negotiator.

And it will get signed, and the markets will be pleased, and and tariffs, some tariffs will be reduced as a consequence.

But that's as far as it goes, in my view, Glenn.

This year, we're going to have U.S.-China relations deteriorate on a host of fronts.

We've got this woman from Huawei that we haven't been talking about for months, but she's about to go through her extradition hearing in Canada in just a couple weeks' time, the week after the Phase I deal is signed.

That's much more meaningful for the Chinese than the Phase I deal, if you talk to their leaders.

You've got Taiwanese elections this weekend, going to move in a more nationalist direction on the back of their solidarity with the demonstrators in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong, the Chinese just appointed

a new liaison to manage the region, much more hardline and senior than the one they had previously appointed.

That's clearly not moving in any good direction.

You've got the Uyghurs,

the ethnic minority, Muslim minority, 1.5 million of them in re-education camps

and forced labor inside China in Congress, bipartisan, believe it or not, one of of the few things that they agree on in Congress right now is we need a harder-line policy on China.

And Trump signed it, even though he didn't really want to because he thought it might screw up his trade deal.

So, I mean, I think on all of these different issues, the U.S.-China relationship, the world's two largest economies in the world, are actually heading towards more confrontation this year.

And do you see that becoming

a Cold War kind of scenario?

Or, I mean, you know, if Hong Kong falls, Taiwan is next.

And do we just let that happen?

Or is it a Cold War or a hot war possibility that is on the horizon in the years to come?

We're not going to intervene in Hong Kong at all.

And I think we're still very far from a military confrontation over Taiwan or over the South China Sea, for example, where we all have a lot of military assets and territories contested.

But there is a Cold War that's already here when we talk about technology technology and even the language that Xi Jinping uses, this idea of a long march that they are now on

in building AI supremacy by 2030.

The Chinese have decided to decouple their technology systems, their algorithms, their big data, their cloud from that of the United States.

And you know, if you listen to Bill Gates or Steve Pinker or any of the people that are more optimistic about the future of the world, the reason they give you for that optimism fundamentally fundamentally is globalization.

It's because ideas and people and goods and services have moved faster and faster across borders over the last generations,

really post-World War II, right?

And suddenly, we're taking a very significant step in the other direction.

For the first time, really, in your and my lifetimes, we're seeing that happen,

where

the future of the global economy is being divided into two, a U.S.

sphere and a Chinese sphere.

And that clearly does have elements of real Cold War because in trade, we can fight with the Chinese, but ultimately we do want to trade more with them.

They want to trade more with us.

They want to buy more treasuries.

We want their economy to succeed because it's good for us.

When we decouple our tech systems from each other, we want their tech system to fail.

It becomes a security-type competition between the two.

And so for me, when I think about Cold War, it's when two major powers literally are pushing for the collapse of

collapse of the other.

And I think that's the definition.

I think that's where we now are in technology.

We weren't there a year ago.

We were heading in that direction, but we're there now.

Ian Bremer, political scientist, author of Us versus Them, The Failure of Globalism and his top risks for 2020.

It's a fascinating read.

You can find it at IanBremer.com.

You can also follow him at Ian Bremer.

Thank you so much, Ian.

Appreciate it.

Always good to be with you.

Glenn having you.

Bye-bye.

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

Even if you are one of those people that, you know, work on roofs in Phoenix in the summer, or you are a construction worker or dig in ditches for a living, I think you will agree with me that being

an American political

scientist and a professor that believes in God and the founding of our nation, and you're centered at a university in Oregon,

I might at times

think he has a worse job than the guy on the roof in the middle of summer in Phoenix.

His name is Mark David Hall.

He's a political science professor at George Fox University.

His research and writing focuses on American political theory and the relationship between religion and politics.

He is not afraid to say, in fact, he's published a new book called Did America Have a Christian Founding?

The answer to that is.

Absolutely, yes, it did.

Yeah.

How did this get so distorted over the years?

When did this really start to...

People now believe that our founders were deists but a deist believes that there is a god but he's like a watchmaker and he built the watch set the watch and now he doesn't he doesn't care he has nothing to do with it anymore but our founders all of their

washington he writes about miracles he writes about divine providence how is that

how is that misunderstood you know that's a great question i think these debates began in the 19th century but really in the 20th century when we started getting a bunch of secular progressive academics, they just wrote book after book saying most of the founders were deist.

They created a godless constitution.

They wanted a wall of separation between church and state.

And they just kept repeating these same lines so many times that people have come to believe it's true.

So where was our founding?

Was our founding in Jamestown or was our founding in

Plymouth?

That's a great question.

So I began by looking at three different possibilities.

One is the early colonial settlements.

And if that's what we mean by founding, then I think indisputably we had a Christian founding.

The Puritans came here, of course, to create Christian commonwealths.

But even if you look to the South, the Virginia laws of 1610 say everyone must go to church, blasphemy will be punished by death, and so forth.

So I think all the early colonial settlements were very concerned with the things of God.

When you move up to what we usually think about, the late 18th century, the war for American independence, the creation of our constitutional order, there the case becomes a little more difficult.

So most of my book focuses, in fact, on the late 18th century.

So where did that come from and what were we based on?

What were they really trying to do?

Well, that's a great way of phrasing the question.

Sometimes people look at this and they say, okay, what I want to do is argue that all of America's founders were good, godly, pious Christians.

I don't take that approach.

First of all, we know some of them were heretics, that Jefferson and Adams and Franklin departed from the basic tenets of Orthodox Christianity.

But then in many cases, we simply do not have the records.

We might know that someone was a member of this church, maybe even that he attended church, but that really doesn't tell us much about his heart or about even his orthodoxy.

So what I look at instead is the ideas that influenced the American founders.

And I argued that they were influenced by Christian ideas or ideas developed in the Christian tradition of political reflection.

And they drew from these ideas when they broke from Great Britain, when they created our constitutional order.

And so therefore, America had a Christian founding.

Do you believe in the covenant?

Do you believe that there was a covenant made in Plymouth and one with Washington and Lincoln?

Oh, I don't imagine how you could look at America's founding from the early colonial settlements to the late 18th century without understanding the importance of covenants.

These folks all believed in the importance of covenant.

A covenant, of course, is an agreement between two parties with God as a witness.

And these folks almost solely thought in terms of covenants,

from the Mayflower Compact on really to the late 18th century and then into the present day.

And what does that mean?

What makes that different than a contract?

I think a contract, of course, still should be binding.

But the way we treat contracts, if you're a football player with a good season, you might throw your contract out the window and renegotiate.

The idea of a covenant, a marriage is a great example, right?

Right.

When you join, when a man joins with a woman, you make a promise before the eyes of God.

And really, this thing should not be ripped asunder, or at least it's a very, very serious thing

before one would even contemplate breaking that covenant.

And so, when our pilgrims came,

I'm fascinated.

I've just found an old map

that was

made by

the Librarian of Congress in, I think, 1870 or 1865.

And

it was the roots of Jamestown that brought slavery and brought

corruption and

division.

And the pilgrims founding and that tree gave us, you know, humility and honor, et cetera, et cetera.

And it's my understanding that they were arguing back and forth before the Civil War,

which one are we?

And I think we're having that same argument now, aren't we?

I think there's a lot of truth in that.

Although I do argue and push back a little bit that I think the southern colonies were more concerned with the things of God than oftentimes 19th and 20th century historians give them credit for being.

But indisputably, New England was the center of American intellectual life.

Our best colleges were there.

Many of our best leaders came from there.

And I think you cannot understand America, as Alexis de Tocqueville found when he came to America in the 1930s, without understanding the Puritan influence.

So, we're more broadly the Reformed or the Calvinist influence.

And the arguments that even we have today were happening back then, just on different topics.

Theirs was slavery.

But our founders get such a bad rap.

Many of our founders were religiously bound to end slavery.

That's exactly right.

In the initial draft of this book, I addressed that briefly in the conclusion.

And my publisher and I agreed to pull that section out.

And I'll have a sequel to this book coming out that will have a whole chapter on the founders in slavery.

And I think it's, you know, we need to be critical of our own tradition.

Sure.

And we can be critical of slavery.

It was a horrible, unjust institution.

But you're exactly right.

Many founders were coming to recognize that it's incompatible with the basic Christian idea that all humans are created in the immago dei, the image of God.

Many were already working for its abolition.

Many states voluntarily abolished slavery between 1776 and 1804.

The direction was definitely heading towards abolitionism.

Unfortunately, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and gave slavery a lease on life.

So

if the founders could come back, I've always believed that the founders would come back and they would say, huh, so how long did the Constitution last?

Because I don't think they'd recognize us now at all.

Do you think that they would be,

how would they react today?

They would be absolutely flabbergasted.

I think since the 1930s, of course, the Congress and the Supreme Court have allowed federalism to be tossed out the window.

The national government can pretty much do anything it wants.

I think literally all the founders, with the possible exception of Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson, would say this is insane.

You are giving far too much power to the national government.

We must rein things in, things like education and the punishing of crimes and the promotion of virtue.

These things belong at the state level or the local level.

The national government should have nothing to do with these things.

Do you see us turning around?

As a historian, what's it going to take to turn us around?

You know, I tend to be an optimist, and I'm not very happy with the direction we've been heading since the 1930s, but I'm hopeful.

And one of the things I do in this book is I say that we need to look at the basic principles that motivated America's founders, and this should encourage us to return, maybe slowly.

I'm a Berkeley and Conservative, so I would say we don't want to overturn things tomorrow, but slowly and surely we should start turning things back to the states.

And then, of course, even more importantly, Americans should turn back to God.

And I think that's where our real hope lies.

Do we make it without that?

Could we become Europe and still be America?

You know, that is an excellent question.

I think America's constitutional order does assume, for instance, that humans are sinful, and so we have important checks on power, including power checks that remain today.

And so it's an open question in my mind, but for sure, America's founders embrace a

syllogism that if you're to have a Republican form of government, you must have a moral people.

And if you're to have a moral people, you must have a religious people.

And by religion, they all meant Christianity.

There's no question about that historically.

Mark David Hall, good luck surviving Oregon.

Mark David Hall, the author of a new book that everyone should have in their library, Did America Have a Christian Founding?

It is answered.

It's a legitimate question and answered by Mark David Hall.

You can find him at his website at markdavidhall.org.

Again, the name of the book, Did America Have a Christian Founding?

Thank you so much, sir.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

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