Best of the Program | Guests: Daniel Hannan, Bill O'Reilly, Gavin Edwards & Cam Edwards | 12/13/19

Hello, America.

It's Friday.

Great, great episode for you today.

Gee, the lessons that maybe the left here in America should learn from what happened in London and England yesterday, probably pretty important.

We have Daniel Hannan on to talk about that.

Bill O'Reilly joins us.

We talk about licensing and how important licensing really is.

We have Cam Edwards in the Second Amendment sanctuary cities.

What's happening in Virginia is crazy.

Also, Mr.

Rogers, new book out, Kindness and Wonder by Gavin Edwards.

Great conversation on that, all on today's podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the Blank Program.

Bill O'Reilly.

Bill O'Reilly is coming up in just a second.

Stand by for that.

You're listening to the Reverend Dr.

Colonel Beck program.

And I take all of those titles seriously.

All of them.

And you should too.

So

we have Daniel Hannon coming on.

We're trying to connect with him now on an overseas transatlantic cable.

connection.

We had him on 10 years ago

after he gave this great speech in the EU where he's like basically saying,

Europe, England, you should fire me.

I don't want this job anymore.

We shouldn't be here.

And it was such a compelling speech.

And then, what, three years ago, we had him on.

We're like, congratulations.

You did it.

You did it.

And he was like, yeah, well,

we think so.

But they tend to be a little sticky.

And now we're having him on after the second referendum.

And this was just a full election.

And Boris Johnson swept.

And you can give the credit to Boris Johnson, but really, it's Daniel Hannon.

This is his movement.

The Brexit movement is his.

Now, there's two sides of this.

Daniel Hannon is the guy who really we should talk to him about this.

There's this great show on, I think it was

Amazon where

who's what's his name?

Cumberbun.

Benedict Cumberbatch.

Yes.

He played

who was it?

It wasn't Hannan.

No, Hannan was in

portrayed in the movie.

You're talking, I think it was, I thought it was like a Showtime or HBO show or something like that.

I think Called Brexit.

Called Brexit, yeah.

And

I don't know any of the, you know, politics over there, but it seemed pretty fair and good.

And they portrayed

Daniel Hannan really well.

Really well.

And in fact,

at least, I mean, I'm sure for him, there may have been issues issues with it, but generally speaking, it was one of those that looked pretty good.

Yeah.

They actually treated him with respect.

Hang on just a second.

Daniel's on the phone.

Daniel Hannon.

Hey, Glenn, how are you?

Very good.

Congratulations, sir.

For a second time.

Thank you.

Well, no, don't congratulate me.

Congratulate the country that can still hold its head high, having rejected Marxism and anti-Semitism.

I mean, it is crazy.

It is crazy.

I heard one of the Labor Party leaders yesterday say, you know, you just can't go against democracy.

You just can't just not listen to the people.

I'm like, huh, what an an idea.

Maybe we should think about that here in the United States.

I actually think you have just unerringly put your finger on what the single biggest sentiment behind this vote was.

You know, we voted to leave the European Union three years ago.

We voted to leave in bigger numbers than British people have ever voted for anything.

And I think a lot of the kind of pro-Brussels elite thought we didn't mean it.

Thought that it was a kind of a joke and that

if they hected us and lectured us, we would do as we were told by our bettors.

And I'm very glad that I live in a stubborn, stiff-necked country where people just don't react like that.

And if I'm not mistaken, there were people that voted to stay in the EU last time that were voting this time saying, you know what?

No, you've got to listen to the people.

Is that true?

Yes.

I mean, I think

we all anecdotally know people like that.

We all have friends and neighbors in that category, and the figures bear it out.

This was a pro-democracy vote.

And it was also, I think it's really important to stress this,

it's a remarkably kind of mainstream and moderate vote

because

although his opponents have tried rather unconvincingly to paint Boris Johnson as some kind of fringe or far-right figure, he's actually very much in the political centre.

The only way you can call him extreme is if you regard Brexit as extreme, if you're calling a majority of the electorate extreme.

In other words, if you think that it's extreme for any country to want to live under its own laws and its own institutions you know something that the rest of the world takes for granted so the real extremists here were the uh the socialist revolutionaries on the other side and the country politely said no to them because he is really more of a populist i mean he kind of goes where the people are does he not

well i mean there's a so so so boris is uh

is is politically very much in the mainstream he's you know his his character is very large uh He has a very florid and colorful way with words.

He has a brilliant intellect, but his politics are fairly traditional, conservative politics.

Jeremy Corbyn, who is a much more kind of normal kind of guy in terms of his background and

his appearance and so on, is absolutely from outside the mainstream, something we've never really had,

an unapologetic Marxist leading one of the mainstream.

Right.

He's a Marxist.

He's a

virile anti-Semitic figure.

It seems to really hate Great Britain and what it stood for

forever, going way, way back with him.

I don't think he personally, I want to be as fair as I can, I don't think he personally is anti-Semitic, but he is so self-righteous that he could not acknowledge or accept that his party had a problem with anti-Semitism, which comes out of this bizarre alliance between the extreme left and the Islamic jihadi types.

And because he's so convinced that where the left is, where the good guys, he just couldn't bring himself to accept that the problem existed.

So, who is, boy, that's very gracious of you to say that about him.

How much of this was

about him as well,

as the British people saying, we don't want

what he is selling beyond Brexit?

Yeah.

I mean,

I think that was a very large part of it.

Britain is unusual in two respects compared to Europe politically.

In modern times, we have never had an anti-Semitic party anywhere near power.

Of course, we have had individual anti-Semites down the years, just as you have, just as every other country in the world has.

But they've never before infiltrated one of the major parties.

That is new and was outside our experience.

Second, and again, this is very different from almost every country in Europe.

We never had any significant Communist Party.

There was never any parliamentary movement that was Marxist in its orientation until now.

And those two things came together in the last couple of years under this Labour leadership.

And, you know, I'm

a country which deep down is a commonsensical, level-headed,

fair-minded country, just thought, you know what, that is not the kind of people we are.

So I'm very glad that we've kept our record intact as a country that has nothing to do either with anti-Semitic conspiracy theories or with revolutionary society.

What should Washington and those in our parties here take as the lesson for America?

Well,

people are wiser than their leaders, and people

want

representatives,

legislators and elected representatives, who remember that they are servants and not rulers.

When we voted leave, you know,

it wasn't in a spirit of light banter we really meant it and

for three years we've been told by our supposed intellectual elites that we didn't understand what we were voting for we got it wrong and so on

and we can see first of all that all of their predictions of disaster have conspicuously failed to i mean the the the british pound

the pound sterling and the straight line up

beating the dollar the minute the bbc said looks like it's going to be the conservatives in a landslide i mean mean, it was straight line up.

Right.

And that proves something which, up until now, I was only able to argue, but I can now point as the rest of us can to some evidence, which is that the real problem holding back our economy and holding back saying,

we've done okay, but we could be doing even better, was not Brexit.

It was fear of a Corbyn-led government.

And now that that fear has been removed, I think that there will be a flood of pent-up investment into the UK economy because businesses that were holding back, not you know, do you open a restaurant, do you buy a house?

Do you you know, no one wanted to make those decisions as long as there was a prospect of a communist prime minister who was prepared to expropriate private assets?

So now that that has that that has been removed, I think the UK economy is now poised to take off.

Are you going to actually leave by the end of January?

Yes.

2020.

To be absolutely clear, I guess, fair point.

Yes, we will leave at

11 p.m.

6 p.m.

Eastern Standard Time on the 31st of January.

Daniel, the two main factors here, at least from the outsider perspective, are Jeremy Corbyn's an extremist, and the British people wanted to say, you know, democracy counts.

We know this vote happened, and we need to honor it.

If you had to give a kind of a split, what what was the bigger factor there?

Very, I mean, you're quite right.

Those were the two the two main factors.

And and and they're very linked because, you know, the refusal to acknowledge democracy kind of confirmed all the negatives people had about, well, hang on, is this a party that would ever

behave constitutionally?

There's one third factor, though, in this, which I think is only fair to nod at, which is the personal popularity of Boris Johnson Johnson and his ability to connect with voters in seats that had a cultural, hereditary, or tribal affiliation with Labour,

which almost made it impossible for them to look at a Conservative candidate because of all the connotations that they'd grown up with.

And Boris has swept all of that away.

And

the whole electoral map looks different now.

We had a better vote for the Conservative Party than we've had since Margaret Thatcher at her height.

Is he Thatcher or is he more like Churchill?

I mean,

he is politically much more within the Churchill tradition of sort of, you know, moderate patriotic Toryism.

You probably know that Boris wrote a book about

one of my favorite books.

Right.

It was written off by a lot of the critics who sneered at it.

And what they said was, Boris has kind of refashioned the great wartime leader into a prop in his own drama.

So Churchill, who emerges from the pages of his book, is this right-wing journalist and witty after-dinner speaker who is kind of cruelly overlooked by the party elites until the moment of crisis.

Now,

I actually don't think that criticism is entirely fair.

Boris is not comparing himself to Churchill, but I think it is probably true that he was inspired by elements of Churchill's story, and in particular, by the way in which the great man put all of the kind of

the boozing and the

unseriousness and the silly friends behind him and rose to the occasion.

And I think he very much sees this as his moment to rise to the occasion.

All right, so speaking of silly friends behind him, if you were in America, you were wondering when you heard him speak last night why Elmo and a weird Darth Vader was standing behind him and why you allowed Elmo to take his head off.

Isn't it just glorious?

Isn't democracy just the most wonderful thing?

What?

It was like...

When you are the sitting prime minister, you've got to go and defend your constituency against challenges by Elmo and Lord Buckethead.

What a fantastic reminder, in practice as well as in theory, that we are all equal before the law and that the politician is the servant of the law.

So quickly, can you tell us, was that Elmo and who was the guy in the bucket?

We've had a tradition here going back about 50 or 60 years that a number number of eccentric and joke candidates stand against the main party leaders in their constituencies when there is a general election.

Shut up.

Yeah, yeah.

And one, in fact, there is a party,

the guy you're calling Darth Vader,

who's changed his name by default to Lord Buckethead, is the leader of quite an old party in Britain that began in the early 60s called the official monster raving loony party.

And it has contested every by-election and its leader has stood against the incumbent prime minister at every election since the mid-60s so they are they're actually older than our liberal democrat unbelievable unbelievable one last question uh the uh scottish national uh party uh did very well uh and it's funny because the people were like hey democracy means something and we're we're we want brexit well

that's really the message of the scottish Scottish National Party.

And I think it's been the same one since Mel Gibson put blue paint on his face.

Leave us alone.

We don't want a queen.

What's going to happen with that?

And how's Boris going to be able to...

With the difference, of course, that

when that was put to a referendum, unlike with Brexit, it was defeated.

Oh, it was.

So

why did the National Party do so well in Scotland?

Well, this is interesting.

So a lot of their voters are, in fact, against independence for Scotland, but they vote for the Scottish National Party as a way of maximising Scotland's weight in the Union, if you like, where I'm you know, sending a message to London that they need to be taken seriously.

It's a very common thing.

You get it in other places where there's a separatist feeling.

I can't see there being another referendum in the short run because we had one five years ago, and everyone said that that was it, and it was going to be it it for a lifetime and so on.

But I do think that we need to acknowledge the advance in the in the elections of the Scottish National Party.

And it seems to me that

the fairest thing to all sides, given that Scotland voted to stay in the UK, but not by a huge margin in 2014, the fairest thing would be to try and come up with some compromise where there is more devolution for Scotland, including tax raising powers, fiscal autonomy,

stops short of actually having separate embassies and so on, which I think is what the vast majority of people in Scotland say they want.

Daniel autonomy, but not complete breakaway.

Daniel Hannan, I have literally 10 seconds and I'm being screamed out in my ear.

10 seconds.

Does this mean does this push France closer to Brexit themselves or not?

I just need a yes or no question from

an answer.

I don't think with France, I think the next country to go will probably be the Netherlands.

God bless you.

Thank you very much.

Daniel Hannon, our friend from

the EU, he's the

ambassador to the EU, or the representative or whatever.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

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

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I'm going to start with this.

Bill O'Reilly, welcome to the program.

What is the biggest story of the week, in your opinion?

So I'm on now.

It's my turn.

It's your turn, yes.

Excellent.

Excellent.

Welcome.

The biggest story that I took out of all the chaos this week, there were actually two

very important stories for Americans that have implications going forward.

The first one is that it is clear to me that the FBI was out of control.

So the most powerful investigative agency in the world, not just in the country,

was basically running a bunko scheme.

Remember those old detective shows?

The jack whip bunko scheme.

And it is clear, there's no

denying it,

that they

basically colluded, love that word.

Where did I hear that before?

Colluded?

The FBI colluded

to get,

with quotes around get, Donald Trump.

So before and after the 2016 election.

That's the big, big story that all Americans should be very unsettled about.

Go ahead, your follow-up question.

So, my son said to me, now he's 15, and we were talking about it.

He said, Dad, what happened with the FBI?

And I told him, and

he sat there for just 30 seconds, and he said, well, well, the real question is, and I was shocked to hear this come out of his mouth,

who organized that?

Who was at the top of that?

Who allowed that to happen?

Who was calling the shots on this?

Yeah, a couple of weeks ago, I don't know whether you remember.

Stu may remember, but he might have been off because Stu's off a lot.

I told you about a K-S Street group called the Bonner Group.

Do you remember that?

I do remember that.

I do remember.

Okay.

So Americans don't know anything about this because it'll never be reported on in the media.

So every morning there is a conference call

that comes out of this group.

They have offices.

And they are basically attached to the Democratic Party, but far more than that, they are adherents of the secular progressive movement funded by George Soros.

Now, as soon as you mention Soros, then you're a paranoid nut or you're anti-Semitic or, you know, you know what the media does.

All right, but this is a true story.

So everybody in Washington who works in all of the agencies and all of the departments know about this crew.

And they know that this crew, they're activists and they tried to advance agendas.

And the agenda, of course, in 2016 was keep Donald Trump out of the overall office, right?

That was the agenda of the Bonner Group.

Before that, it was destroy Fox News.

And the reason I know about this is I got caught up in this.

They hurt me.

So that's how I know so much about them because we put our investigators and found out.

But anyway, the sole agenda in 2016 was hurt Donald Trump.

Get him.

And in those

campaign, James Comey and McCabe, who McCabe's wife, you'll you'll remember, ran for Congress as a Democrat in Virginia.

They're in that circle.

They know all these people and they know what comes out.

So early on, and I don't believe that it was

explicit, I don't believe Comey and McCabe had a meeting because they're way too smart for that, and told their agents, led by Peter Strzok, the infamous mistress guy with the text, get Trump and that's our policy.

That's not what they do.

It's implied.

Implied.

And when the opening came from the bar conversation in London between Papadopoulos and the Australian guy, that was the opening that the FBI needed.

Aha, now we have a legitimate way to go in and try to surveil the Trump campaign because we believe they're dirty.

It's like, you know, they know who all the organized crime people are.

They know they sell narcotics, but they need an opening to get in and tap them.

This was the opening.

And then from there, it cascaded into illegality, where they made stuff up, they falsified texts between the CIA and the FBI, they do all kinds of things to get the FISA warrant.

So that's what happened.

So let me ask you this.

Why did Horowitz, the IG, come out with this, I think

the headline is Mamby-Pamby?

Because he calls them inaccuracies.

But listening to his testimony, he knows those aren't inaccuracies.

He knows that is a forgery,

set up,

lying outright to the FISA court.

He knows that.

Why was the language?

You and I, and this is absolutely true,

and Beck and O'Reilly are

one of the two of the few who have pointed out that Horowitz was disingenuous, word of the day, in his testimony.

And the reason he was is he doesn't want to be attacked by the Washington Post,

which is uber powerful in D.C.

But Horowitz did tell you what you just raised.

He did say that, but he said it in such an oblique way that you'd have to be right into that swap to know.

He said there was never an explanation for the FBI's conduct.

Now, what he should have said was, in all my years being in the Justice Department, I have never seen anything like this, and it strains credulity, another word of the day, to think that it was an accident, to think that these mistakes, all 17 of them, were accidents, just bad judgment.

It's not only impossible to have 17 or 19 mistakes all fall in the one direction.

The actions of changing an email and reversing it, you know, cutting out language.

He's referred and he will be charged.

Right.

He will be charged.

All right.

That FBI agent who did that.

Now, did he do it on his own?

Again, why would an FBI agent put his whole career and life at stake for one?

It doesn't make any sense.

No.

So, Michael.

None of this makes any sense.

But what your audience has to understand is that this Horowitz, powerful man, Inspector General of the Justice Department, did not want to put himself

at risk by telling the American people what really happened.

So he did the dance.

He told you, but he didn't really say it.

The dance is what they all do.

It's getting frightening because as Ben Sasse said, he said, I was ashamed that I have to sit two people down from Mike Lee because I've had this argument for four years and I believe in the FISA system.

I believe in the FBI.

And he said, I told Mike for five years this doesn't happen.

And he said, now I have to hear this, that it is happening.

And it's happening in a case where they knew this would get sunlight.

They knew this would be seen.

So if they're doing this now,

what does the average American have in store with a FISA court?

I mean, Mike Lee came out and he was ass.

I don't think that they knew they were going to get caught because the press covers for them.

So you've got to understand the big picture.

The only way you get caught doing corrupt activities at the federal government level is if the press uncovers it.

Because the watchdogs aren't going to do it.

You saw Harwick.

He's not Elliott Ness.

Right.

All right.

So when you have the press in the tank,

whatever harms Donald Trump is good, and we don't really care whether you break the law to do it.

This is the American press.

All right.

The FBI, they didn't fear exposure.

Who's going to expose them?

So

this is so terrifying.

You know, Mike Lee.

That's the right word.

Mike Lee said we should suspend all FISA courts until we know exactly what's going on.

I.G.

Horowitz said that they are conducting

an investigation in all of the FISA warrants, but this should terrify people, and it goes so far beyond Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff.

This is a, this is, the Fourth Amendment does not exist today in America.

But, but I don't, I'm not buying into that the whole system,

the FISA court system,

we should remind your audience.

The reason this was put into place was to protect Americans from foreign terrorists coming here and blowing us up.

That's the reason that this was put into place during Bush the Younger's administration, to give the federal agencies.

FBI, CIA, NSA, more latitude to surveil people who might harm harm us.

But Bill, this is the same kind of thing that Schiff was doing when he went into the SCIF and said, hey, I'm going to do these three phone numbers.

Well, those were.

But ATT could have said no, and Schiff would have lost in court.

That's ATT.

And who does ATT own?

CNN.

Okay, so

what what's what's happened here is corruption, number one.

But I believe the corruption was directed by James Comey and Andrew McCabe.

And I believe they will be indicted when the Justice Department wraps up its investigation, Durham.

But between now and Durham Barr putting people in handcuffs, which will probably be in July, okay, you're going to see attacks on both Barr and Durham like you've never seen by the press,

which wants to harm Donald Trump.

All of this, and I don't even know if Trump knows it, I think he does, is going to help

him get reelected, Donald Trump.

Because even the dimmest of Americans know the fix was in.

All of this stuff was contrived.

It was based on nothing but getting President Trump.

And when you have an apparatus, a federal apparatus devoted to getting a president, that's corruption beyond anything that we've seen.

Okay, I'm going to take a quick break.

We're with Bill O'Reilly from billo'reilly.com.

You can watch his show and get all of his

get all of his opinions every day at billorilly.com.

I want to pause here because I want to come back and ask you about

what do you think the Senate is going to do?

How are they going to investigate?

Because people do belong in handcuffs, and people need to pay a high price because if not, we have a banana republic right now.

There's a banana republic that is happening.

And if we don't get control of this, we all lose our freedom.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

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This is one of my favorite resumes of all time.

New York Times best-selling author of nine books, including The Tao of Bill Murray, Last Night at the Viper Room, the successful Excuse Me While I Kiss This Guy series of misheard lyric collections, longtime contributor Rolling Stone.

He's written for the New York Times Wired Billboard Details and GQ.

And has moonlighted as a game designer, photographer, and a demolition derby driver.

I love this guy.

Lives in North Carolina, in Charlotte.

Welcome to the program, Gavin Edwards.

How are you, sir?

I'm very well.

How about yourself, sir?

I'm very good.

So,

Mr.

Rogers,

he is, he has always been an amazing man.

Anyone who ever paid attention to him,

he's been an amazing man.

Now he's gone, and

he is an icon, an absolute icon, surpasses anything Sesame Street ever did.

This is the guy that you look at and go, that doesn't exist.

Why is he suddenly so popular and everywhere?

Well, I think there's two reasons.

One is he was the real deal.

You know, sort of like Mr.

Rogers would have still been a lot of good in the world if like offstage he was driving fast cars and chomping cigars.

Like, if that show would have still helped people.

But everyone knows that, like, he was that authentic guy.

Like, if he was out, you know, sort of like and he saw a kid on the edge of a room where he was having lunch, like, looking distressed, he would get up from his meal, he would walk over, get down on one knee, and talk to that kid and make sure that kid was okay.

So, that was what it was about.

So, Gavin, at this point in our history, I don't think that guy could exist because everyone would go, I think there's something wrong with that guy.

There's something wrong with him.

You know, people said there's something wrong with that guy when he came out.

Like, there's people who said, you know, sort of like

people would get cheesed off.

They would take his patience with kids not as perverse necessarily, but kind of as an insult.

You know, there was this guy in a Chicago newspaper who wrote, you know, any self-respecting father just wants to punch Mr.

Rogers in the nose.

So,

you know, like it really

challenges people.

Like they take

his gentleness and his caring to be sort of like an implicit, why aren't you doing better?

Which is not what he's trying for.

But if it does, in fact, challenge you to do better, to tap into your inner Mr.

Rogers, then

you're going to be better off.

I have found

just like watching the show once a day and

saying to myself now and then, hey,

can I be a little more patient with people?

Can I listen better?

Can I get in touch with these very basic messages that like he taught me when I was a kid that I've like forgot about and put away?

Like it improves my life.

But he wasn't, I mean, he wasn't like Sesame Street.

He wasn't a runaway smash.

Was he?

Well, I mean,

Sesame Street got even bigger, even faster, but he was in fact, you know, sort of like he took off.

That, you know, it was a show that started off on like like a you know sort of like local public television in Pittsburgh and then it went to other cities and they would pretty soon they would just be getting thousands of fan letters when there was early on when they didn't have necessarily have enough budget to do the show

you know sort of they found out that you know sort of like mothers in like different areas were just like going door to door raising money for the show and they would show up in like Boston, Chicago, and Los Angeles and say, oh, like Mr.

Rogers is making a personal appearance, and the stations would be overwhelmed because thousands and thousands of families would show up.

So, pretty quickly, you know, sort of even if he's not on adults' radar, kids connected with him.

They're like, Oh, this is the guy who cares about me and is looking at me and telling me that, you know, sort of like he's happy that I'm there and I made today special.

And that's just something magical.

So, you look at him, and the way he spoke

was just

very different.

And you'll hear people say, Don't talk talk to your kids as if they're, you know, morons.

Now, I know

he was going for a

younger audience, obviously.

Right.

But

was that tone that he spoke to the kids about, is that the way he always

was

with adults and natural cadence?

That's the way he was with adults.

And you can see, if you've seen the new movie with Tom Hanks, like, who does in many ways a very nice job, but you can see he's fighting to slow down his natural speech pattern.

It's not how most people speak, but that was what he did.

And he was very comfortable with silence.

He would take out the radio in his car because he just wanted to be alone with his thoughts.

One of my favorite sequences on the show ever was just he fills up a fish tank with water.

It's about three minutes, not much happens, but just like, you know, he's just hanging out with the kids and the camera.

And, you know, it's sort of like, we're just going to be here and watch the fish tank fill up.

He is

obviously very mentally healthy individual that likes silence.

Very few people like and can handle silence.

Nobody who is,

you know, nobody who is struggling with things will take the radio out of their car.

Yeah, I mean, the term in your business is dead air, you know, sort of like, and if you think about it, you know, sort of like that's obviously a judgment.

It's not, you know, sort of quiet time or like contemplative time, dead airs.

You know, like people say that's death when, you know, there's not something filling every second.

So, um, who owns the rights to Mr.

Rogers?

Does his family still own it?

There's a non-profit foundation which

now does the show

Daniel Tigers Navy.

Okay, so

somebody is paying somebody for all of these

portrayals of him and everything else.

Because I'm wondering,

it's almost so far out of the blue.

And maybe that's why it's so successful, because he's the anti today.

Or was it kind of like, you know, it's a wonderful life.

Oh, there's no copyright on this.

We just play this all the time.

People are really, really responding to this.

And you can see just in the last couple of years, and I think, you know, like whoever you are or like, you know, like however you feel about like sort of politics in the world, you can see things are getting louder.

And they're getting like nastier and cruder.

And you like look at reality television, you look at how people interact with each other.

And it just feels like in our lifetimes, you know, like the dial keeps going up and there's just more hostility in the air than there used to be.

And so I think people just like crave Mr.

Rogers.

It's like a glass of cold water

that

you say, oh, it doesn't have to be like this all the time.

I can actually, you know, even if I don't control the mass culture, I can control what's going on in my family and in my neighborhood and how I react to people.

And that's, I think, why there's so much interest in him and renewed love for him in the last couple of years.

So

he's a pendulum swing that we hope will catch on bigger than just going to see him at the movies or reading about him in your book.

He's a pendulum swing that we're we hopefully will go

and sometimes pendulums swing not just because of like one big apocalypse but because lots of people decide to push just a little in the same direction.

You know, sort of if more people just like take a moment to sort of like be kind, to sort of like slow down and like listen to their kid and stuff like, we gotta go, we gotta go, we gotta go.

Then you know like that's to the good.

Do you think that show could exist today?

It barely was able to exist then.

Like, it was this weird, fluky thing that, you know, sort of like he got into public television,

you know, sort of at just the right time when they had, you know, sort of like hours that needed to be filled.

And he had these gifts of, you know, sort of like he would have been a puppeteer and he had, you know, like he wrote the music himself.

And he knew all these things.

He knew how to do a show.

But, you know, and just

because, like, well, there's nothing else.

It's that or dead air.

So I don't think you could ever get that show on the air right now, but I do think that somebody like him could come on, and he was such a natural communicator.

He would find a medium, and he would still find a way to connect with people.

Any explanation on the name Mr.

McFeely?

Ah,

so that is actually, you know, sometimes people raise their eyebrow and it's like, is that a double entendre thing?

Well, I mean, it's not, I mean, it's a kids' show.

The guy is really soft-spoken, and the mailman who comes in and talks to the kids from time to time is Mr.

McFeely.

It's one of those things like when you look at Michael Jackson and you're like, keep it in the closet.

Maybe we should have thought about that.

He was telling us something.

So McFeely was Fred Rogers' middle name, but more importantly, it was the name of his grandfather, grandfather McFeely, who, you know, sort of one of the reasons like Fred had such a connection with kids was that he had kind of an unhappy childhood.

He grew up in privilege, but he was chubby, he was asthmatic, he was awkward,

he was sort of just kind of shy and in many ways unhappy.

But somebody who just really showed him

love a lot of the time was his grandfather who would encourage him, like, hey, you want to go have an adventure?

Go climb these stone walls on the farm.

Go do that.

It's going to be okay if you rip your pants.

And he was the person who told him, you know, sort of, you made today special just by being here.

And that was something that meant so much to Fred when he was a kid and something that he was able to pass on to kids.

So when he needed to name, like, it was a tribute to his grandfather.

So what's his family like?

Did he have children?

What are they like today?

So he married his college sweetheart, Joanne Rogers, a concert pianist,

who, you know, sort of like

they apparently had

great good times together.

She is,

you know, sort of like a good human being, but less patient than Fred Rogers, because who is as patient as Fred Rogers?

Yeah, nobody.

So she'll talk about, like, oh, you know, sort of like

I was out at, you know, like getting the car fixed, and the guy was just like no good at all.

I don't even think he knew what he was doing.

And he would say, well, maybe he was having a bad day.

And

I don't care about his bad day.

Why not me?

So,

and they had two boys

who,

you know, sort of are basically private people.

They're not particularly in the public eye, but they do an interview now and then in tribute to their dad.

And decent people, I mean, it seemed to have worked.

Was he there for them?

Yeah, I mean, he was

what people say is that he was like a very loving, attentive father, and, you know, sort of like in some ways even training to be a father all his life.

He was not very good at disciplining them.

He was very good at communicating,

but found it hard to be the authoritarian, and that turned out to be

mom's job in that household.

Gavin, thank you so much.

Great talking to you.

You follow Gavin Edwards.

I've enjoyed that.

Me too.

Mr.

Gavin Edwards is where you can follow him.

The name of the book is Kindness and Wonder, Mr.

Rogers.

It is well worth your time to read.

And I have not seen the movie.

I saw the documentary.

I think I saw half of the documentary.

And I haven't seen the movie yet, but I want to.

And he is somebody that we should all be looking toward right now.

Because if we could just listen to each other, be a little kinder,

maybe the world would be full of a little bit more wonder that we would notice.

Thank you so much, Gavin.

Appreciate it.

Thank you, Glenn.

I really appreciate it.

You bet.

The best of the Glenn Bank program.

Welcome to the program.

Mr.

Cam Edwards, who's part of the podcast, the Blaze podcast network.

We're glad you're here.

Cam

has been a First Amendment

rights guy ever since I can remember

and has his podcast about it.

And I really want to talk to him, Second Amendment, and I really want to talk to him about what's happening in Virginia and this movement in Virginia that is really getting very little attention in the mainstream, and that is the Sanctuary Cities movement.

Cam, the way I view this, now I haven't been there, so I haven't seen it.

I don't know if you have, but I think this is more powerful

than the Tea Party turnouts that were happening, even at its zenith.

You know, Lynn, I think that you're right, and thanks so much for having me on the program.

And we now have 91 localities in Virginia, most of which are counties, that have adopted these Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions.

And I have been to about eight of these County Board of Supervisors meetings where the resolutions have been discussed, and I've never seen anything like this.

I mean, you have thousands of Virginians who are showing up with their neighbors, with their friends, with their family, to urge these supervisors to pass a measure that says we don't plan on spending any county funds enforcing unconstitutional gun control laws.

And you say, you know, this has got more energy than the Tea Party movement.

I think it has at least as much energy.

And this is so hyper-local.

This is, you know, not a top-down movement that it really is incredible to see.

So what is the state of Virginia doing?

What are the Democrats doing?

First of all, is this a right versus left issue or is this bipartisan, these turnouts?

You know, I think it is largely a right versus left, but I do know that there are Democrats who are showing up and Democrats who are voting in support of these resolutions, particularly in rural Virginia.

You know, I think it's a pro-gun, anti-gun split, honestly.

And the Democrats in the state, quite frankly, they're flipping out.

They don't know what to do.

Congressman Donald McEachin, who represents Virginia's fourth congressional district, talked about how Governor Northam should send out the National Guard to enforce these new gun control laws in counties that refuse to

enforce gun bans or magazine bans.

Governor Northam has promised that there will be some sort of unspecified consequences for counties that do not capitulate.

But so far,

that doesn't seem to be having any effect on the movement whatsoever.

So what do you suppose the people of Virginia will do

if they send out the National Guard?

to enforce something that is, I mean, it kills me.

You know, sanctuary cities are known as cities that are breaking the law and saying, and defying the law.

This one is saying, no, no, no, it's a Bill of Rights issue, and we're standing by the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and not letting you in.

What do the Democrats think would happen

if

they enforce it with

some sort of National Guard?

I guess they assumed that folks would comply, but I just don't see that happening.

There are so many county sheriffs.

We're now seeing Commonwealth attorneys, which are local prosecutors in Virginia, that are also saying, you know what, we're not going to go out and we're not going to arrest anybody for having a 20-round magazine or we're not going to go out and seize anybody's guns.

And ultimately, I think that's what this comes down to.

The governor and these anti-gun lawmakers can put these laws on the books, but they've taught us, Glenn, how to resist over the last few years.

And we're taking pages from their playbook.

We're doing exactly what they've done.

You know, even in the state of Virginia, there was a Commonwealth attorney earlier this year in Portsmouth, Virginia, who announced that she would be dismissing every misdemeanor marijuana case that was brought to her office.

Right.

And Governor Northam didn't complain.

He didn't threaten her with sanctions or said that there would be consequences for her ignoring state law.

So why would it be any different if we're talking about

not enforcing, quite frankly, a lot of these laws are unenforceable anyway, but not enforcing universal background checks or not enforcing a magazine ban.

I just don't see the difference there.

And I think the Democrats have kind of painted themselves into a corner.

Look, everybody says that

we have to have universal background checks.

I don't understand this.

It's the most popular thing you can say as a Democrat.

It's popular with the Republicans, the Independents, and Democrats.

Cam, we have those, don't we?

We have those.

We've got background background checks on every retail sale of a firearm.

And what they want to do is they want to expand that to private transfers, even between family and friends.

So even though, you know, I think you and I met for the first time back in 2003,

it would be illegal for me to even loan you a firearm if you came to visit me in Virginia.

It's absolutely absurd.

And, you know, Glenn, as far as the practical effects go, it sounds good on paper.

It polls really well.

But if you look at states where these laws have been put on the books, Colorado, for example, passed their Universal Background Check Law in 2013, violent crime is up more than 25% in the state of Colorado since that background check law was put on the books.

So if this is about public safety, it doesn't work.

If it's about targeting legal gun owners, and I think that's what it's really about, then that's enough for these gun control advocates to push it.

So if the governor decides to call out the National Guard,

which I do you think that's realistic?

That that's even a realistic question?

I don't.

Okay.

I don't.

I would be shocked.

I think it's much more likely that the government or that the governor would try to use the Virginia State Police, that the Attorney General would maybe use his office to come in and prosecute in counties and take cases

with the Commonwealth's attorney or not.

But

I would be shocked and

really, really

bitterly disappointed if the governor actually tried to do something like send out the National Guard.

And I think that would fail, by the way.

I think that, you know, again, the National Guard is made up in Virginia of Virginians.

Yeah.

And I don't think those members of the National Guard are any more enthusiastic about enforcing these gun control laws than the county sheriffs and a lot of local cops about it.

I mean, this is something that people have talked about for a long time.

You know, if the Army was ever turned against the American people, would they shoot?

This is even harder to believe because, as you said, those are Virginians and they would be enforcing a law on Virginians.

And most of those people are probably Second Amendment right people.

And I just, I mean, that's a big test

to lose, especially.

It is.

But again, like I said, I think they've painted themselves into a corner here.

I mean, even if you get into prosecuting individuals for violating these new gun laws that they want to put on the books, you know, there were, I think it was Rockingham County, there were about 3,000 people who crammed into a high school gymnasium and about another 3,000 who couldn't fit who were outside the other night.

I'm looking at that and I'm thinking, you know, are any of those people, if they they serve in a jury pool, are they going to convict their neighbor?

Are they going to convict the person who owns the hardware store that they visit on a weekly basis?

I don't think that they will.

And so whether it's through, you know, a jury nullification, whether it's through the Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions, whether it's through the discretion that law enforcement already has,

I just don't see a way for these gun control laws to be fully enforced across the state of Virginia.

I think they're going to be enforced in deep blue areas.

I think we're going to see exactly what we've seen in places like New York State, for example, after they passed the SAFE Act.

The majority of prosecutions under that gun control package take place in two boroughs of New York City, the Bronx and Brooklyn.

And the vast majority of people who are prosecuted are young black men with no violent criminal history who are sent to prison for three and a half years for simply possessing a farm without a license.

And I think it's going to be young minority men in low-income neighborhoods who are primarily going to be impacted by these gun control laws in Virginia.

And I don't know that that's the legacy that Governor Blackface Northam really wants to leave.

Kim, have you heard the case in Illinois of the woman who is trying to

defend herself?

She was in her car.

She had a gun.

She has licensed to have a gun, not licensed to carry, but she had it in her glove box.

Her ex comes, is threatening her life, trying to get into the car, trying to hurt her.

She takes her gun out.

She shoots.

He gets, what was it, a $10,000 bail?

She has a $75,000 bail.

Where is the common sense here?

There is none, unfortunately.

And yeah, I'm very familiar with this story.

I've actually learned a couple of additional pieces of information, including the fact that this guy apparently has been convicted of battering this woman in the past on a couple of occasions.

I did learn that the woman was able to bond out, thankfully, so she's back out.

But again, it's absolutely egregious that the state of Illinois and the state's attorney in Illinois would look at this case and decide that this woman who acted in self-defense, and police say she acted in self-defense, that this woman should face a higher bond than the guy who beat her in her car.

It's

the holiday, and I just want you to know we're praying for you and Miss E.

How's she doing?

She's doing she's doing okay.

She's enjoying the holidays right now.

She's actually not on any form of treatment at the moment.

She was in a clinical trial for her non-small cell lung cancer, but she had some side effects, so she had to get off of it.

So her oncologist said, you know, look, let's take a couple months.

Let's see if any clinical trials open up.

And she's got an appointment next week.

And

hopefully she'll be back, getting some treatment soon.

But her spirits are good.

She's in the Christmas spirit.

She's busy

knitting and crocheting little corny goat critters that she's putting up for sale in her Etsy shop.

And we're just just trying to enjoy the holidays.

You know, we're trying to make every day count.

How are you holding up?

For the most part, I'm good.

I appreciate you asking.

You know, it's my job to be her rock.

So I let her, you know, put all of that on me.

And then occasionally I'll, you know, wander outside.

Thankfully, we live on 40 acres, and my neighbors can't hear when I yell and scream at the moon or the sun or the clouds.

And I get it out of my system, and I go back, and

I do what I can to, again, make sure that her every day is as good as it can be.

Cam, you're a good man.

Say hi to Miss E.

Forrest, and

blessings, this holiday season.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Glenn.

Cam Edwards, BearingArms.com.

He is also 40 Acres and a Fool, which is a podcast on the Blaze Podcast Network.

The Blaze Radio Network.

On demand.