Sen. Mike Lee Is No Hypocrite | Guests: Sen. Mike Lee, Ian Bremmer & Mark David Hall | 1/9/20

All right, we've got a great show for you.

Mike Lee is going to be on, and Mike Lee was,

I think, as mad as I've ever seen him yesterday after leaving a briefing from the White House.

And I think he's being misunderstood.

He is supporting the president, and I think

he's supporting, right?

I mean, it seems what happened with the

Solomani and the way he's handled.

I think he's okay with that.

You know, he doesn't like this process.

And the process does seem to be a little bit heavy-handed.

And I think he's more concerned, really, about future activities here.

Yeah.

Well, it don't seem to be on the table right this second.

He's been saying this under Obama and everybody else.

All right, back in just a minute.

The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.

This is the Glembach.

Hang on just a sec.

We have to hit something really important, and I want you to hear it from her own mouth.

Elon Omar, can we play the audio, please?

Elon Omar is very upset.

She's having a hard time, and I think we really need to address this.

Here's Elon Omar yesterday.

I feel

ill a little bit

because of everything that is taking place.

And I think every time

I hear of conversations around war, I find myself

being stricken with PVSD.

Every time she's stricken with PTSD,

boy,

maybe she should take some time off, you know, especially when we have a congressperson who is

ill every time she hears about war.

War's part of the job, sweetheart.

Second, and I mean, sweetheart, with all the love and respect that you deserve.

The other part of this is

you're feeling sick because

we went after a terrorist from Iran?

Well, we wish you

a healthy recovery and all of the best and get well soon.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

I'm anxious to talk to Mike Lee.

He was mad as hell yesterday and I think misconstrued, but I don't know for sure.

I haven't talked to him, so we're going to hear it from him.

A lot of people are angry at him.

He's coming up in just a few minutes.

I want to talk to you about our sponsor for one minute, then right back to the show.

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So

I really want to understand where Mike Lee is coming from.

He's joining us in about 20 minutes.

Here's what he said at a press conference yesterday, and this is about as animated and angry as I've ever seen Mike Lee.

The briefing lasted only 75 minutes, whereupon our briefers left.

This, however, is not the biggest problem I have with the briefing, which I would add was probably the worst briefing I've seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I've served in the United States Senate.

What I found so distressing about that briefing was that one of the messages we received from the briefers was, do not debate, do not discuss the issue of the appropriateness of further military intervention against Iran.

And that if you do, you'll be emboldening Iran.

The implication being that we would somehow be making America less safe by having a debate or a discussion.

It is not acceptable for officials within the executive branch of government, I don't care whether they're with the CIA, with the Department of Defense, or otherwise, to come in and tell us that we can't debate and discuss the appropriateness of military intervention against Iran.

It's un-American.

It's unconstitutional, and it's wrong.

Okay, so

here's the thing:

they're both right.

They're both right.

The White House saying,

please don't debate this.

Don't take this because you will embolden Iran.

By having

a Congress or a Senate and

people

on the right, especially saying, well, I don't know if we should do this.

It will embolden Iran because they will see that as, oh, he can't hold this together.

However,

where Mike Lee is right is that's our system.

That's what we do.

That's what we have to do.

And that's what the Senate and the Congress is for.

The president can make a move towards a war.

He can make a move towards the war according to the Constitution for 30 days.

But in that 30 days, he's got to go and get a War Powers Act to continue it because they hold the funding.

And so they can just shut everything off.

Now, we haven't done a War Powers Act since 1942.

All of the other wars, always

War Powers Act.

But then we hit the progressive era, and the progressive era said you don't need that because we're not really going to do war.

We're going to do police actions.

And that's really the problem.

Because without a war, it can drift.

You don't, what is our,

what is our goal?

What's our goal right now in Iraq?

Do we know?

What's our goal in Afghanistan?

Do you know?

When does this war end?

These are all criticisms that Donald Trump has made

of this war.

Correct.

Many, many times.

Correct.

And, you know, Lee started off the press conference talking about his support for Trump, and he votes with him most of the time.

And seemingly, he supports the idea of taking this terrorist out, and we'll ask him that directly coming up here in a few minutes.

But, you know, the process is important too.

And if you're looking for potential approval of future military action in Iran, well, you need to make that case in confidence, right?

I mean, like, you need to make that case

at least

in classified settings to senators.

And, you know, that is, you know, I think Pence came out today and said, well, we didn't really give them all the intelligence because the really good stuff, we were worried about it, you know, whether it would compromise future actions.

It's like, well, I mean, that's obviously what a classified setting is for.

So at some level, that has to be done eventually.

But that, you know,

the administration cannot hold information back from Congress.

It's an equal branch.

And so if anything, it's superior.

I mean, you know, you know, because,

well, I mean, if the president wants to get rid of the weakest congressperson from some small town in New York, how does he do it?

He doesn't.

If a small-time congressman from New York wants to get rid of the president, he's got power to do that if Congress comes together and impeaches him and throws him out of office.

Correct.

So, I mean, you know, if anything, Congress has, and with war, as you point out, I mean, the Congress has the power to declare war.

So

it is an interesting part of this whole

back and forth that we have to make sure, just like we should always do, is being

diligent to support the actual system that has checks and balances against

these problems because we realize they do lead to problems.

This is the 100-year-old debate with progressives, and that is times have changed and things have

moved so fast now that

we can't wait for Congress.

We can't wait for these things.

That's why the progressives liked fascism before fascism ended up killing and murdering people.

Strangely, they still like the other fascist

regime of communism.

So

that's a bizarre thing.

But that's why they originally embraced both communism and fascism, because it allowed a dictator, which didn't have a bad

ring to it around the time of the First and Second World War.

People didn't think a dictator was a bad thing, an authoritarian.

He was just in charge and he would make the decisions and we can make them faster because science is involved now.

And, you know, now communication, it just happens so fast.

We just have to have somebody be able to make this decision.

Well, no.

No.

As clunky and as awful as it is, we've got to go through Congress.

Now, that has nothing to do, in my opinion, with whether or not we hit this guy.

The law is very clear.

When we went into Iraq, the president has a right, the military has a right to kill people in Iraq that are killing our soldiers.

You have the evidence.

You know who this guy is.

We've known about him for a long time.

He's been killing our soldiers.

So they had the authorization to do that.

It was clear.

Now,

did Obama have the authorization to go in and

kill

Muamar Gaddafi?

Because we went in and destabilized an entire country.

We overthrew that country.

We supported people dragging him in the streets to his death.

Then Hillary Clinton celebrated.

And then the press said it was no big deal when our consulate was taken.

and our ambassador was killed.

I mean, think of that.

Think of that.

All of the repercussions that we're talking about.

You know, I said yesterday, I don't believe this is over.

And last night, the militias that are backed by Iran tried to lob some missiles over into our embassy.

Okay, no harm was done, but that's what they did.

And I told you yesterday, this could turn ugly quickly.

in some other place because I don't believe that the military of Iran is going to do any more strikes.

I think they're going to have these militias or the surrogates, if you will, of Iran who are all over the world kidnap an ambassador, kill an ambassador, kill somebody, blow up an embassy.

Well,

the press didn't think that that was a problem with Benghazi.

They didn't think that was a problem.

They didn't think overthrowing a president, a leader of a country, and then cheering while his body is being dragged in the streets.

I mean, I have no love for Gaddafi.

But where was the authorization for that?

And quite honestly, that's the kind of stuff that Congress does need to be able to reel back in.

Did you vote to go to Yemen?

Because we're in Yemen.

We're fighting a war in Yemen.

I don't know anything about it.

I mean, I do, but as an average person, you don't.

Do you want that?

So, this isn't about Donald Trump.

This is about any of these presidents, all of these presidents.

I give the president the benefit of the doubt, and we have to have somebody that can respond quickly.

But you have 30 days to get a war authorization act from Congress.

Now, the problem is, Congress is so politicized that I don't even know if you can

get a fair ruling from Congress on an act of war.

They're practically cheering

the other side.

They've made martyrs out of these horrible monsters and made our military and our president into a monster for killing a monster.

I mean, the hatred of Donald Trump is so deep now in the Senate and and in the House that I don't know if you could get, you know, a declaration of war on Japan in 1942.

And by the way, don't give me all of the crap about Japan or that Iran is we're just going to get a bunch of people who just hate us.

Look at what happened with Japan.

We turned their soil into glass twice,

twice,

and

Japan is one of our best friends.

I mean, the main justification for the big problems in Iran is that Iran and Iraq are going to work together.

Now, that did not seem like familiar territory to anyone who's grown up over the past 30 or 40 years.

I mean, that war was known to be between Iran and Iraq, one of the most brutal that's happened in the past century, right?

And here it is now.

We're like, oh, gosh, they might work together.

Well, because we didn't stop them from bleeding over.

And then we allowed them to help with ISIS.

And they have packed the parliament with Shia people.

That's the big, yeah.

Yeah.

So you've got the parliament, and that means about half of the people.

This would be like, you know, the United States government, you know, we re-elect,

we put

Bernie Sanders in, and he aligns us, not with the NATO powers, but he aligns us with Venezuela and Cuba.

Okay, well, the president can do that.

And you'd see a lot of people on the streets cheering about it.

But half of the country would say, that's not me.

And that's what's happening right now in Iraq.

Mike Lee, coming up in just a second.

This show is not for the timid and not for those who want to question intellectually everything.

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We break for 10 seconds station ID.

All right, you then.

Welcome to the program.

Hello, Stu.

Mr.

Beck, how are you?

Now, 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...

There's not 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,

I don't care about what they spend.

You know what I mean?

Oh, well, you're spending, wow, $3 million for that wedding.

Oh, and $3 million to

remodel their house.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

I don't really care.

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.

To me, it's just a, well, 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

and I come at this as a person who watched every single episodes episode of suits I love suits 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 there's 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 and the upper class were still dressing for dinner.

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

Yeah.

That's the level of interest that we have.

Exactly right.

I mean, I just

suppose

Buckingham Palace go 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.

It improves almost any game.

Yeah, right.

But the problem 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 actually getting the crown, which is crazy.

Camilla, nobody likes the two of them.

Then you have Andrew with Epstein.

I mean, there's nobody liking it.

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

I don't think he's getting

the.

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

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 after Charles.

Well, Markle has broken up their relationship.

I mean, the two brothers of Princess Diana, 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 going to 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.

You're listening to Glenn Beck I'll explain that if you're interested I'll explain it's not like what you think it is I think I told you the other day

judge me by my language

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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

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 something 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, 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 reelection 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 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 a

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 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 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 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.

When you look at...

There's a big 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

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 II 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.

It does, and that is precisely the point of the war power being put in Article 1, 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 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.

And 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.

Thank you, Glenn.

You bet.

Bye-bye.

That's a hard job.

It's hard if you actually care about the Constitution or you want to be consistent over multiple administrations.

It gets hard then.

It's not hard if you disagree with whatever you're...

I mean, you know, he was...

I mean, here's the guy who's running the re-election campaign in his own state for the president.

And I think partly because of the press not being honest,

they're making him look like he's against Trump.

He's not against Trump.

He's

for it.

He was running a campaign, and he's also for

the action that he took.

He's just not,

he just is consistent on we can't get mired into all these wars and sucked into the war.

And, you know, I don't even think it's the president.

I think it's the State Department.

I think who's running this show?

Who's running our foreign policy?

Yeah, I mean, Trump's, as Lee pointed out multiple times, that definitely seems to be what Trump ran on.

And, you know, a lot of people are saying Pompeo is the guy.

He's been, you know, hard on or hard line on Iran for a long time, and he's the one pushing this.

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You're listening to Glenn Beck.

Hey, we have a really good television show

tonight that you don't want to miss.

Tonight we have one of the guys whose life has been completely ruined by the Steel dossier.

He's been accused of a million different things.

None of them were true.

He had a good name at one point, and now

nothing.

Where do you go, CNN?

Where do you go to get your life back?

By the way, speaking of that, Nick Sandman,

we failed to mention because of the war yesterday.

He's the kid that was accused of being a racist a year ago on the steps of Lincoln Memorial with the Indian beating the drum.

He just settled for an undisclosed amount with CNN.

I bet it's over $100 million.

He was suing for $275 million.

You're listening to Glenn Beck.

Hillary, go home.

You look terrible.

I know.

Something happened.

Oh, yeah.

Your voice has gotten deeper and wow, you look bad.

Yes.

I'm fast.

I'm glad Hillary went home.

I know she feels fine, but boy, that just hurt.

Just hurt to to listen to.

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So, Iran is not turning over the black box for the Ukrainian airliner that crashed during the hours of conflict.

Why wouldn't you turn over the black box?

Well,

now there is speculation, and I

give you that it's speculation, that it was a Russian missile strike.

Now, not by Russia, but a Russia missile system.

that somebody got panicky and pushed and they shot this airliner down in a moment of operator error

we go into that and so much more in one minute this is the Glenbeck program

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Ukrainian officials said this morning

that they are now considering a Russia missile strike as one of the several

possible causes for a Ukrainian passenger plane crash that happened shortly after the flight took off from Turanz International Airport last Wednesday.

A strike by a missile, possibly a Tor missile system, is among the main theories.

As information has surfaced on the internet about elements of a missile being found near the site of the crash, that's not going to go well.

Ukraine is waiting for permission from Iran

to go look for missile debris at the crash site, but Iran is there like, no, we're cleaning everything.

We'll just send you everything.

They also said that the black boxes that belonged to the plane have been damaged and some parts of their memory was lost.

This is according to Iranian investigators.

The crash at the Ukraine International Airlines flight that was bound for Kiev on Wednesday raised concerns about Iran's transparency during the investigation.

Iran first blamed mechanical failure, but some have speculated that Tehran's earlier missile assault on Iraqi bases housing American troops played a role.

All 176 people on board died.

The plane's black boxes were found amid the wreckage, not from Imam Khomeini International Airport, but Iran is refusing to turn them over to Boeing or the National Transportation Safety Board.

Quote, we will not give the black box to the manufacturer or the Americans.

The Ukrainians are like, okay, give it to us.

But for some reason, they're not getting access to the black box either.

What's

truly remarkable is the pilot had to know that

they were going down and they were crashing.

And

as they were on fire in going down, it looks now like this heroic pilot steered that plane out of

dense populated areas so he could do the least damage on the ground,

even though most likely knew they weren't going to make it.

Yeah,

it was really ugly, and it seemed almost impossible that it would be a coincidence that, in the middle of firing rockets all over the place, that

this plane just goes down with a hundred.

I mean, it's certainly theoretically possible it was a coincidence, but this would be a good day to be like the Alex Jones of Iran, like you're hosting a show and just blaming everything on a false flag.

Like, you got a really good argument on this one.

You got a good one.

This is a good one.

Yeah.

I mean, it doesn't seem like,

I mean, I don't know how good your chemtrails points would be that particular day.

I don't know what side you would take in that.

If you're the Alex Jones of Iran, what side would you be taking?

Well, you're immediately saying that it didn't crash for

mechanical reasons.

There was fluoride on that flight.

And they were shipping off the recipe to make all the frogs gay.

And they were going to make all the frogs in Ukraine gay.

And we only wanted the gay frogs.

And so they shot it down.

Well, that's a great point, too.

Not the gay frogs part, but the Ukraine point, too.

It's like every giant news story, a major intersection in one.

Like, you could blame things.

This is their way of getting rid of X, Y, and Z about Ukraine.

Yeah, I mean,

there were people on board that knew and had information about Donald Trump, and they made us look like

we shot it down, but that was their whole thing.

They were waiting for coverage.

That guy was going back to Ukraine.

They had to kill him.

I mean,

that's solid.

I mean, you hate to hear about terrible stories like this, but this is what fuels the entire industry.

And I got to assume there's got to be an Iranian, there's got to be an Iranian Alex Jones over there broadcasting on the film.

Oh, yeah, it's called the Ayatollah.

And it's a very point.

Except for them, nothing ever is a false flag.

No, no, it's all.

There's all...

Yeah, it's always that way.

It is a fascinating story, though.

I mean, the fact that that that happened in the middle of all this.

You know,

if you're the Ayatollah, and this shows, I think, that they don't want war,

you know, they are, at least, at the very least, protecting themselves because they could easily have blamed that on the United States.

And you've got to imagine 90% of the people in the country would have believed it.

You know what I mean?

Like, you're in the middle of

you just had who you apparently is the most respected person in the history of Iran, if you believe the media.

Everyone's out there mourning, and there's millions of people out there.

They fire back some missiles for the retaliation, which they claim killed 30 American soldiers, killed zero in reality.

And then all of a sudden, one of your passenger jets goes down, which is tied to the country that

the president of the United States is currently being impeached over.

Like, they could make a case easily if they wanted to fire up that population to go to war.

What are you doing?

I mean, now you're just now you're just trying to be the Alex Jones of Iran.

I'm trying to get a gig.

It does seem that.

Well, do you work for NBC?

Well, I think it's a good indication.

I think it is a good indication that

they are not trying to escalate this.

And this is a lot because

of this message sent.

For years and years and years, we said, if you do it by proxy and kill a few of our people, look, we'll look the other way.

We don't want to get in trouble.

We don't want to get you in trouble.

Let's not get into arguments, guys.

That was our position on Iran.

Oh, let's have an agreement here.

We're going to send you a few billion dollars in unmarked bills.

Let's just be nice to each other.

President Trump has sent a message that that's no longer the case, right?

You, even your proxies, even if your name's not on it, even if there's no flag flying behind the attack, if you do this, because we know you're behind it, if you do it, we're going to take out a major target.

If you kill our people, there are going to be real consequences, not the fakey, fake ones we've been promising for years and years.

And Iran, while still having to justify to their people, and

there's reporting now saying that they actually alerted us before the attack came.

I told you that yesterday.

So that they could be

through Oslo and

there's two countries.

Oh, God, was it Norway or Sweden?

And one other

Qatar?

I can't remember the exact.

They're interchangeable.

Yeah.

There you go.

You can say that because those people are white.

And so because if you said that, oh my gosh, about another continent, that would be the worst thing in the world.

But, you know,

the idea being that they, through intermediaries, actually told us these rockets missiles were coming.

We had our guys clear out

places where we were storing equipment.

So those buildings were hit.

I mean, it was a show, right?

A show largely for the Iranian people to say we did something,

but they do not seem to want to escalate this any further, and it seems like they got the message.

Again, we said this yesterday.

I think this is

what Mike Lee was saying today is very important that going forward, we make sure we do this the right way.

It seems to be very well aligned with what Donald Trump ran on and what he actually believes.

He has

stopped the progress of military intervention many, many times since he's been president and has been very restrained on that front.

And so it does seem that all that stuff is aligned.

However, up to this point, forgetting what it is going forward, this has been a complete A-plus for the president.

We have sent a message.

We took out a terrible terrorist who killed 600 American soldiers and tortured God knows how many people in the region.

And the retribution for that was basically nothing.

Basically nothing so far.

Could escalate.

There are other groups that are proxies for Iran that are saying, well, we see Iran got their revenge.

Well, now we're going to get ours.

We may very well see more, but this is as good as one of these things can turn out in the very short term.

So, I mean, it seems like

nobody in the press seemed to care when it was Benghazi when we did this in Libya

under Obama and Hillary Clinton.

And, you know, Hillary Clinton, everybody, I saw these people, you know,

saying, Hillary Clinton, she wouldn't, I was right.

She wouldn't have done this.

She's on record saying that she would have gone in and bombed Iran.

We came, we saw they died.

Yeah, that's

Libya.

That's Libya.

I know, but I mean, this is a far

crazier action than anything that Trump has done.

In the number of strikes out in Iraq without congressional approval between Iraq and Syria during the Obama administration was 2,800.

Oh, my gosh.

2,800 attacks.

Now, the only thing that's different here is the fact that this guy was a high-level

Iranian from another country.

It's legally justifiable.

We've talked about that before.

However, like,

that's totally, like, they took out Gaddafi.

I mean, Gaddafi is the biggest guy you can talk about here.

He was actually the leader of the country, and we were bragging about it on television.

You know,

she was laughing about his death.

And then Benghazi came and destabilized Syria, and we got ISIS from it.

And you have to be careful because these things could happen.

It could happen.

A similar company could very well happen here from one of these proxy groups.

But

what Trump seemingly is saying is get your people under control.

You know what?

These proxy groups are you.

So if they do this, you do this, and you're going to see real consequences.

That is a different approach in the way

this has occurred over the years.

And it's hard to not see this as basically the best case scenario so far.

We have Ian Bremer coming up next hour.

And he's not, I wouldn't call him a Trump fan,

but he has said that almost exactly.

This is a huge win for the president.

And when you judge it, I think on its merits and you're able to say, well, when the president does good things, it's good.

And when the president does bad things, it's bad.

You're not CNN.

You're not Lou Dobbs.

If you can get somewhere in between those two things, you can say that this was a huge win.

This is a really big positive for the president, at least as it stands right now.

And if this is the message that the Middle East gets, that you can't do these things or you will face real consequences, that is an incredible positive

situation going forward.

I think what he said in his speech to the rest of the world was some of the best stuff I have heard from a president, perhaps ever.

I mean, he put the world on notice.

And, you know, when I was growing up, You never harmed an American.

If you had an American passport, you were golden.

Nobody was screwing with you.

And I think part of that came from our credibility,

but also part of it came from World War II.

You know, we dropped two bombs on Japan.

Then they became our allies and our friends.

But they knew don't screw with the U.S.

And that faded over years.

And so now you, a U.S.

citizen, you're more likely to be targeted.

But But that's because the U.S.

doesn't respond like it used to.

The U.S.

responded in the old days like Donald Trump did.

I'm not going to get you for

blowing up a drone.

But if you kill one of our people,

we're going to hit you and hit you hard.

And then we're going home.

And then we're going home.

How different would the world be if we would have bombed

Afghanistan and just really, just

destroyed the Taliban quickly and then continued the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

But that's what we did.

And then we went home.

How different would the world be?

We are not going to nation build.

We're not going to build you back up.

We are going to kill you.

And then we're going home.

And then we'll be your friends.

Just don't screw with us.

And the president said last night, we're energy independent.

We're oil independent now.

We're the biggest exporter of oil and a biggest producer of oil in the world right now.

So we don't need this.

So England and Germany and everybody else, you better step to the plate.

And I think that was a really good message.

The other good message that he gave was, we've restored our military.

We have, you know, railguns and hypersonic missiles under development about to be deployed.

And our strength comes from not using them.

But you should know we will use them if you screw with us.

He restored our place in order

yesterday.

What makes the world go around

is peace through strength.

And then the kind of restraint that this president has shown on using any of those weapons.

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There's

a couple of stories here that I think

are worth mentioning.

None of the view ladies are speaking to Megan McCain anymore.

Can you imagine being the conservative on that show?

I mean, and she's not even that conservative.

Yeah, and this pattern just plays out every single time.

They bring in someone who's, you know, it's never conservative, but it's like a Republican figure who will actually argue for things that can be conservative at times and, you know, moderate at other times.

And you just get lit up and berated all the time over it.

It doesn't make much.

I don't know why they even bother.

No one believes that the show is balanced.

You know, I don't know why they even bother.

Can I ask a question?

And I mean, when I say I don't mean, I mean, I don't know why they bother airing the show anymore.

Just please, how is it on?

How is Whoopi Goldberg still on television giving her opinion?

And Joy Behar?

I mean,

she's been banned from the Cat Skills.

Is that why there's just no.

Yeah, no, there's nothing.

There's nothing.

McDonald's

is changing.

Well, let me just read the headline.

The new McDonald's CEO targets the company's hard partying culture.

Now,

I didn't know they had a hard partying culture.

I did not either.

But when you think about it and you think about the McGriddle,

that was probably somebody that was high or drunk.

You know, they were like, hey, wait a minute, dude, what if we put like some eggs and bacon and we put them between two pancakes?

Make the bun pancakes.

Do it.

That's great.

That is.

That is.

I mean, that probably would lead to some invention and innovation.

You know what?

We should be open all the time.

Because at 4 o'clock in the morning, I might go and

I might be still awake, so we should be open 24 hours a day.

And out who feels like a lake among them offer right now.

Yeah.

that's true.

I will say the breakfast all day thing was almost specifically directed towards the increase in legalization of marijuana, I believe.

I think they were like, you know what?

They're going to legalize pot.

Let's get ahead of it.

What do you mean it's three o'clock in the afternoon?

I want the eggs with the pancakes on each side of it.

Yeah, and it is the best.

Have you seen the new donut sticks they have now?

What?

Donut sticks?

No.

At McDonald's?

At McDonald's, yeah.

So they're so that salad is long.

Oh, God.

No,

the donut sticks are in the the salad.

They're the croutons.

No, the donut sticks, they have them.

They're kind of like, I mean, they're sticks of donut, but they have a dipping sauce, like a chocolate dipping sauce, I think a caramel dipping sauce, and they've got like sugar on the outside.

It's basically, it's basically broccoli.

I mean, it's health food.

If I may say a Florida woman has just been arrested for threatening to get McDonald's sauce, quote, by any means necessary.

Now they're 20 cents package, so you could pay for them.

That means

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The FBI and Department of Homeland Security has issued a warning against an Iran cyber threat.

I don't think that takes anybody by surprise,

but just prepare yourself

just in case, and don't panic.

The media

has been pretty shocking, but CNN's boldness and its unwillingness to even look at its own mistakes is a little breathtaking.

And I'm wondering

who owns it now?

Is it just Time Warner?

Is it still Time Warner

that owns CNN?

I don't remember.

I get confused.

I don't know how they...

Are they AT ⁇ T?

Yeah, it might be AT ⁇ T now.

When is someone going to say, okay, enough?

Just enough?

The media critic at the Washington Post is doing something.

I'm not really a fan of this guy, but he's doing something that I have not seen a media critic do.

He is not only taking on CNN, but he took on the Washington Post and he even took on himself.

He said, in my column, I said this, this, and this, and that was wrong.

I mean, it's quite amazing that

there are a few people

that are trying to say, okay, wait a minute.

And CNN is becoming the target for a lot of journalists outside of CNN who are saying, it's not us, it's them.

Now,

that's not what Eric Wemple did.

He said it was us, too.

Yeah, he called himself a

pathetic media criticism failure.

Yeah.

Which, you know, probably, I mean, those words may have been described to use him in the past

about him in the past, but not usually by himself.

So that's pretty significant there.

So the article that he wrote for the Washington Post, Dear CNN, what parts of the Steel dossier were corroborated?

I mean, listen to how

they stood on this steel dossier being cooperated.

Here's an audio clip.

Parts of the now infamous dossier on Trump have proven to be true.

I know the pain of the dossier, but it hasn't been discredited.

In fact, it's been the opposite.

It's been corroborated.

Much of the dossier has been corroborated.

This discredited dossier.

It hasn't been discredited.

Your Intel community has corroborated all of the details in there that meeting.

Some of the substance content of the dossier we were able to corroborate in our intelligence community assessment, which from other sources in which we had very high confidence.

We know that with the FISA application, the relevant parts of Christopher Steele's dossier were corroborated.

If the application included information from the dossier, it would only be after the FBI had, in fact, corroborated information through its own investigation.

We also know that as time goes on, more and more parts of the Steele dossier get corroborated.

So when the president just refers to it to speak dossier, that is false.

I don't think

that is an accurate characterization for the entirety of the dossier.

Investigators have corroborated part of the dossier.

Dossier has been corroborated by the intelligence community.

U.S.

investigators have corroborated some of the allegations in that dossier.

We do know that parts of it have been corroborated.

It's not been corroborated, but it hasn't been disproven either.

Is there anything in the dossier that has been disproven?

No.

But not one thing has been disproven.

No major thing from the dossier has been conclusively disproven.

To date, none of it has been disproven.

And whole big parts of it are holding up.

The dossier holds up well.

None of it has been disproven.

All of the allegations in it, I don't know that anything has been disproven.

It's a fact that none of it, not one word, has been disproven.

In fact, a lot of it turned out to be right on the money.

Former high-ranking intelligence officials have told us on the record that there is nothing in the Steel dossier that they know to have been disproven.

Much of the dossier has been corroborated.

Do you not accept that?

I don't agree

this is our reporting and this is what um this is what crime fighting agencies have said that the fbi would not have just taken a dossier to the fisa court and used that as their predicate for the surveillance they had to corroborate it themselves that's how they operate yeah well as we found out that's not how they operated uh and so cnn is holding the line and uh The Washington Post, their ombudsman, said, at the time, the White House press secretary Sean Spicer said, we continue to be disgusted by CNN's fake news reporting.

It's now, with some hindsight, assisted dossier accountability,

falls on the Eric Wempel blog.

That's the author's blog.

After Spicer's blast, we wrote a post criticizing the White House for its authoritarian response to the CNN story.

Though the White House's conduct was typically Bush League and anti-democratic, the Eric Wempel blog should have spread some skepticism to CNN for its vague story.

We did not.

That is a pathetic media criticism failure.

I will say this Stuberge host gives the Eric Wempel blog some real credit there and admitting how pathetic they have been on this particular issue.

Well, the Glenn Beck blog and broadcaster

did not say anything at the time.

So he's not a pathetic.

No,

he didn't take a a stand either way.

Okay.

So

I just, first of all,

stop with the third-person nonsense.

But secondly, I mean,

it is important that mainstream media calls out mainstream media from time to time when they've been this bad, this consistently on this issue.

And CNN has been the main culprit on this.

You know, they, they really came out and tried to give this thing credibility.

And, you know, first of all, you get the, it's been corroborated, which the only thing that was corroborated in the dossier were things that were publicly available through other sources that had been reported in other places.

So basically, there was nothing in there that was actually corroborated.

Secondly, they try to introduce this ridiculous standard as nothing has been conclusively disproven, which is an impossible standard.

And no

journalist should report anything based on that.

It has not been conclusively disproven.

How do you disprove these things?

Well, shockingly, now they actually have been conclusively disproven as they went back to the sources who basically said they were joking.

We now can conclusively disprove these allegations in the dossier.

So even with the ridiculous fake journalistic standard of things need to be conclusively disproven or we're going to report them,

even with that standard, they've failed.

Yeah.

And here's where they did.

Here's where a lot of their failures came.

According to the Washington Post, the CNN story also pads the dossier with this claim.

Another allegation that's proven true, Steele's sources noted that the Russian government had indirectly paid Michael Flynn to travel to Moscow, a reference to his attendance at a gala honoring the state-run broadcaster R.T.

Well, says the Washington Post, Flynn's gala participation in December 15th was promoted by R.T.

and drew some coverage in the media well.

So the trip itself was no secret.

As for the payment, payment, Flynn himself confirmed it during an interview with Michael Iskoff in Yahoo News in July 2016.

Top Trump advisor defends payment for Russian-speaking engagement, read the

Yahoo news headline.

So by July 2016, the world knew that Flynn had traveled to Russia for a gala and that he'd been paid by Russians for it.

The dossier memorandum containing this same claim about Flynn and others is dated August 10, 2016.

Therefore, Steele's claim about Flynn appeared just to be an aggregation job.

So the ones that

they made it into more than it was,

they said it was in the Steele dossier, and they're confirming these things now with the FBI.

The ones that you could confirm were already out in the media, and and no one was denying those things.

But because it was in this dossier that said Trump was deeply in bed with Russia and all of this, it made it look like those things that had already been out in the media and admitted to

that those things were part of this conspiracy.

Now, I don't know how much Sandman got, Nicholas Sandman,

for

his lawsuit against CNN,

but

I hope it was a lot.

He was suing them for $275 million.

Stu would be surprised if it was into eight figures.

I'd be surprised if it wasn't in eight figures.

I'm hoping that it was nine figures.

Oh, yeah, I mean, I hope he got a lot.

I think a lot of times these things wind up being settled for a lot less.

And we mentioned this before, the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that took down Gawker as a company and no longer exists, he got 30 million.

Now, he was, they published a sex tape of him.

They published him having sex with someone who wasn't his wife on the internet.

And they had Peter Thiel's lawyers behind Hulk Hogan, a major public figure, and they still only got $30 million.

So, I don't know.

I mean, he probably was never getting $275.

Everyone asked for a hang of a lot of people.

He wasn't going going to get $275.

I think Melania Trump, when she sued over her issue with the Daily Mail, asked for $150 million and I believe got three.

I think this is different.

I hope.

You could be wrong.

You could be right.

I think you're right.

It's different, but I think it's different in a sign that would point to less money, not more.

Oh, I don't think so.

Because Sandoman is not, you know, look, he got.

Remember, these things aren't decided necessarily solely on the idea of how mean or how bad the coverage was.

It also has to do with, did you ruin,

future earnings potential?

If you're a major

person who's making millions of dollars a year and you destroy a reputation, you're going to get a lot more money than someone who is making less.

Look, I think sentiment deserves morally every dime CNN has.

They were terrible at that.

And I also think that punitively,

CNN needs to be taught a lesson, and so does the rest of the media.

They took steps that were dishonest, intentionally dishonest.

And, you know, overall, he's suing for $800 million.

I hope he walks away with $1 to $200.

I hope he walks away with $850 million, but he won't.

But I hope with all of the media sources that

it is closer to $200 million that he walks away with

than

not, because I think he deserves it, and I think the media needs to be punished.

And a $5 million, $10 million settlement means nothing to cnn i mean even even if you got a hundred million dollars out of him i'm sure they have uh libel insurance that goes oh sure sure sure i mean john oliver was sued for uh a fortune by a um a coal uh company uh head who was criticized on the show and he's you know tried to sue him for you know hundreds of millions of dollars i think now hbo won that suit um but even with that the legal costs were largely covered by hbo's insurance anyway.

I mean, this is, you know, they had, it's not like it's nothing.

I mean, it's certainly going to be a pain in the butt for CNN.

And it also makes your insurance more expensive.

Yep.

And you better be a little more careful on everything else you report.

So it may not have hurt them financially, but it did hurt them.

It hurt their reputation, too.

And rightly so.

I mean, they were just one of them.

I mean, the Washington Post really led the bandwagon on that thing, even more than CNN, I think.

I mean, CNN was really just reporting on the back of what the Washington Post initially

pair up next.

Yeah, and they're going to, I think they've got an even tougher case than CNN had.

So this will be interesting.

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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 that 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, you know, 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 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

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.

With anybody.

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

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All right.

Nancy Pelosi is on TV still talking about.

Well, we're going to.

We will send those over as soon as we get them.

John, impeachment.

I mean, seems like a million years ago now.

We have Ian Bremer on.

He's a political scientist

and he's got the biggest threats of the next year.

We're going to talk to him next.

Hey, I've got something exciting coming up.

In a minute, we're going to talk to a guy who's an actual human being.

No, no, no, seriously, you don't find them very often, especially if they're going to talk about politics or, you know, the globe or anything else.

They either are all for Donald Trump or all against Donald Trump.

No,

this guy is an actual human being.

Whoa.

He can say good things and bad things, and he can tell us what he thinks the real threats are to

the next 12 months to the entire planet.

It's an interesting conversation with Ian Bremer, political scientist.

In one minute, this is the Glenbeck program.

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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 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 the Saran 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 Fox News.

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

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.

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 with nothing and let's please talk.

Of course, I would have.

I 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.

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 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 U.K.

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 as 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 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 on

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 is 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 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 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

around this varsity blues scandal with all the parents, the wealthy parents buying their way in the 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 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 Phase 1 trade deal.

The Chinese are sending Liu He to Washington, D.C., the lead trade negotiator, and it will get signed, and the markets will be pleased, 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 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 military confrontation over Taiwan or over the South China Sea, for example, 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 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, 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 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 two, 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 forward, the collapse of the other.

And I think that's the definition.

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

And 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 do it, Ian having you.

So you've seen the price of gold.

As we become more unstable, gold will continue to go up.

It's at the highest it's been in I don't know how long.

And that's because, hmm, look at the news.

And

depending on who gets the nomination for the Democratic Party, it could go through the roof.

Now, I don't buy it as

a

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I buy it as a hedge against insanity.

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We break for 10 seconds.

Station ID.

I'd love to have him back because he talks a lot about technology.

And I think, you know,

I've wondered lately, why are we even talking about socialized medicine right now?

Why are we really talking about even overhauling anything?

Because medicine entirely is going to change in the next 10 years.

By the time we implement all of the stuff that anybody would want to do,

the whole system is going to change.

We're all going to have a like a Google doctor or an Amazon doctor.

We will.

And you'll have your health appointments.

You won't have to go to the

local health center.

You'll have

a system in your house that will be able to diagnose most things and be able to say, you should go to the hospital now.

And in 10 years, I believe you're going to ask your favorite doctor, if it's something serious, okay, yeah, that's great.

Okay, you think I have cancer and you think I can survive.

What does the AI say about it?

Because this is going to be faster and better.

better.

Well, and if you're right, it's really a question of what you're trying to get done.

If you're right, and you are concerned about universal health care for reasons more about control than you are about actual health, you better get it done right now.

Correct.

You better get it done.

Because you free up everybody.

You free up everybody.

They don't have to depend on you anymore.

No, I mean, we will have AI surgeons, and they will be more accurate than...

it's crazy.

But I mean, it's the same thing of like, we would have said 15 years ago: hey, you're gonna get in a bunch of strangers' cars, you're gonna go on your phone and press a button, and then a stranger's car is gonna pull up, and they're gonna drive you wherever you want.

You'd say that was insane, completely nuts, right?

And now, Uber and Lyft and everything else, like it, it does happen really fast these days.

You just, you just, I mean,

the AI doctor is already here, it's already in practice.

No, I shouldn't say in practice.

It's already running parallel in practice in places like New York just for cancer.

And when you have the ability to input all of the cases of cancer eventually all over the world,

it's already, I think, 15, I think it's like 75% accurate, where the average doctor is

maybe

55% accurate.

It's catching it faster.

It is the future.

You're listening to Glenn Beck.

Well, we don't have AI doctors quite yet, and maybe it won't be uncomfortable to talk to AI doctors about some of the more difficult health things that go on, whether it's hair loss or ED or whatever it is.

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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 in 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 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 influence the American founders.

And I argue 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 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?

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...

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 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 1830s without understanding the Puritan influence, or 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 and 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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This is the Glimbeck program.

Welcome to the program.

I want to let you know that we are restoring the covenant that we were just talking about in Gettysburg, July 4th.

Now, this is going to be a July 4th that you won't forget, your kids won't forget.

It's going to be very, very different.

I'm designing the music and the fireworks myself, working with a composer now.

I mean, it's going to be really amazing.

Not your typical American 4th of July,

but it's going to have all the fireworks that you could possibly want and

just a great crowd and food and everything else.

So just join us in Gettysburg, July 4th.

Now, I urge you to go to glenbeck.com/slash restore

and sign up so we know you're there, so your space is reserved, because there's only, I think, about 30,000 that are able to go this time around.

It is a free event however it's a three-day event if you want and you can buy tickets to the different things we can help you out with your hotels or your rv or if you want to camp and put a tent up we can help you through all of it just go to glenbeck.com slash restore but let's start a new tradition of fourth of july gonna be a really cool event really cool and i know you with fourth of july and you designing fireworks i can't even imagine it's going to be great it is going to be great it's going to be great It's going to be very cool.

Yeah.

A couple breaking stories here as we

talk.

CBS, Newsweek, a few other sources are reporting that the U.S.

is now confident that

Iran shot down the Ukrainian jetliner in the hours after the missile strike,

and 176 people were killed, including 63 Canadians, by the way.

Pretty significant

percentage there.

So they are now, they now, I mean, it seemed to me to be the most logical explanation, honestly.

And now, U.S.

officials believe that that was

actually what happened.

And by mistake, they think it's by mistake.

Yeah, of course it was.

Of course, it was.

I mean, here's this Ukrainian airliner that goes out.

It's 10 miles or 10 minutes, eight minutes away from the airport.

It's leaving the airport.

And you see the videos now where it's on fire and then it just blows up

and

crashes and everybody dies.

It's horrible.

Now, I'm going to give the Iraqis the benefit of the doubt.

They should be held responsible.

Iranians, they should make reparations, et cetera, et cetera.

But it's in the fog of war.

Now, nobody would give us that doubt.

If we had missiles flying in at us and

there was a jetliner that was coming our way,

and in the fog of war, somebody's like, I don't know what that is.

It's not the radius.

Close, close, close, close, close.

Launch.

That's probably what happened.

And that kind of stuff does happen, and it's horrible.

Somewhat of a test for Canada's blackface-wearing prime minister, who's now going to have to figure out what to do in this situation.

Now, why do you bring up the fact that he is blackface?

I'm fascinated by Oliver Peck, who was apparently on Inkmaster, a judge, for 13 seasons.

He's leaving now because he's had a blackface scandal.

Oh, no.

After 13 years,

pictures

surfaced from his old MySpace account, apparently.

When did that close down?

I don't know.

2009?

And they had it.

I thought everything got wiped out from that page.

I thought so, too.

Somehow it resurfaced.

And there are pictures of him dressed as maybe a Lakers basketball player in Blackface, apparently a superhero of some sort in blackface.

That's not the same as

a couple different Halloween costumes was basically the explanation.

And I was fascinated by, you know, because this is what you do when you're writing stories.

You just include a bunch of tweets from random people who have opinions on it.

But listen to this tweet.

How dumb and racist can people be?

Let's find out.

Incmaster star Oliver Peck is learning the same lesson Justin Trudeau learned about Blackface.

Why?

Is Oliver Peck going to be Prime Minister of Canada too?

Does he get re-elected?

Is that what happens?

Because

that's the lesson they've learned.

If you're liberal enough, if you're Democratic enough, if you're progressive enough, you can become Prime Minister of Canada and then get re-elected.

Or you can become governor of Virginia.

That's all fine.

No problem at all.

You keep that job without any issues.

Yeah, so the only thing that Peck has learned from this is I got to be progressive.

And if I'm really, really progressive, I'll skate by.

I'll ask Jimmy Kimmel.

He's no politician, but he's progressive enough to get away with dressing the exact same way in a Lakers uniform, except on national television in blackface.

That was totally fine.

Now, I don't know about you.

What company was he working for?

They were on Blackmaster.

What is that?

Paramount Network.

Fascinating.

Because Paramount, I know America is like, hey, I want my tattoo artist

to be, you know, somebody that is above reproach, because that's what you think of when you think of tattoo artists.

And so above reproach that they can't even make themselves into a superhero.

A super, a black superhero.

No, that's

this is this is insane, the double standard.