Best of the Program | Guests: Pat Gray, Brian Riedl & Jeffy Fisher | 7/29/19

Hey, it's Stu in for Glenn Beck, and today we dive into the latest controversy with Donald Trump.

Is he a racist for talking about a city?

Apparently, that's the way it's supposed to work now.

When you talk about Baltimore, you are a racist, so we'll get into that.

And all the media hypocrisy surrounding it.

We will also dive into the budget.

First, starting with how it seems like the Tea Party's kind of dead and does not care.

It seems like nobody cares about budgets anymore.

And then we end it with a little piece of candy as we talk about how much worse it will be if someone like Kamala Harris or Bernie Sanders get elected.

It's, I believe, in Brian Riedel's word from the Manhattan Institute,

it's almost incalculable how large the numbers get.

We have Pat Gray who stops by, Jeff Fisher, who stops by, and we tell you an incredible story about

a model who was critical of transgendered people, got fired, and it only gets weirder from there.

It's all today on the podcast.

You're listening to the best of the blend back program.

You know, I try not to be too demanding.

I try not to ask for too much in life because it's hard.

But today, I think I have

what I at least imagine is a simple request for the media.

A simple, basic request.

I'm not going too far.

I'm not asking for too much, but I would like you to at least try

to explain why Trump's Baltimore comments were racist.

I'm not asking you to convince me.

I'm not asking you to come up with an airtight case.

I'm not asking you to produce tapes that show Donald Trump talking about Baltimore in some racist way.

I'm not asking for any of that.

I'm not asking you for pictures of Donald Trump in a hood.

I'm not asking you for him burning a cross on somebody's lawn.

I'm asking you to at least attempt to explain why these comments are racist.

Not just put it in the story and say Trump's racist tweets about Baltimore.

I mean an actual attempt at explaining one time

why

these tweets and comments were racist.

Because that has not even been attempted from what I've seen from the media this weekend.

We're talking about an accusation of racism here.

Okay, racism, we all know, really, really bad.

We don't like it at all.

Okay, it's one of the most serious accusations you can make about another person, right?

It's like the most serious thing you can say about someone, this side of child molester.

Okay, we're talking about racism.

When you say that, you should probably have at least some sort of justification as to why.

The nearest I can take from the media right now is, number one,

Trump's comments were about Elijah Cummings and Elijah Cummings is black.

Well, that is not evidence of racism.

Okay.

Number two,

black people live in Baltimore.

Not all black people, it's not 100% of black people live in Baltimore, and it's not 100% of the population is black, but there are some black people who live in Baltimore.

So the fact that they have a black representative and there are some black people who live in Baltimore, apparently enough to conclude that Donald Trump is a racist.

It's enough for us to conclude that this guy is one of the worst things we can all possibly imagine.

In case you missed

the tweets that came from, you know, late

this weekend, Elijah Cummings has been a brutal bully shouting and screaming at the great men and women of Border Patrol about conditions at the southern border, when actually, his Baltimore district is far worse and more dangerous.

His district is considered the worst worst in the USA.

Trump went on to say his Cummings district is a disgusting rat and rodent infested mess.

If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous and filthy place.

If you're going to accuse someone of racism, it is on you.

to give the evidence as to why it's racist.

It's not on Trump to have to disprove your claim of racism.

It's on you to have to prove it.

When you accuse someone of what is essentially a crime in today's society, you have to be able to back it up with some level of evidence.

So we're going to come back and go through these comments step by step.

I want to know, will the media even take the time to attempt to explain it?

Because right now they're just putting it in the headlines.

Trump tweets racist things about Cummings.

Trump tweets racist things about Baltimore.

Why are they racist?

Are you going to try to explain it?

We're going to break this down in 60 seconds.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

It's Stu in for Glenn, who's on vacation this week.

So, the case for racism in Donald Trump.

What is it?

Number one, I guess it's that Elijah Cummings is black.

And whenever Trump criticizes someone who isn't white, the motivation is always assumed to be race.

He can't criticize anyone else

without

racism being the sort of core of it.

And what's fascinating about that is we're essentially creating a standard in which a black congressperson cannot be criticized.

That is an amazing superpower.

If you're in Congress, man, you want that.

Immunity by skin color.

That is something that every congressperson could use.

If you're a congressman and you can say whatever you want, you can do as good or as bad a job as you want.

You can blow every assignment you have.

But if you happen to be black, the president of the United States can't say anything bad about you because it's automatically race.

Is that a standard you're comfortable with?

I don't even understand.

If you read the tweets, you go back and look at it.

Donald Trump doesn't even allude to race in any of them.

You are not only assuming his intent to be race, but also inserting race into the conversation where it didn't exist.

At no point did he say anything about race.

Is it racist simply because he used the word Baltimore?

Is that really where we are?

I know it was racist if you brought up Chicago when Barack Obama was president.

Now it's racist if you just say Baltimore?

The country you live in is accepting that as a standard?

Referencing a city

is now racist?

Is it racist because

some of the residents of Baltimore are black?

That's what makes it racist?

Because some people who live there are black?

This is completely insane.

You do realize that.

The media has come to this place where they have built this long-form sort of case over multiple years that Donald Trump is a racist.

So, therefore, they are now free to apply it to any story.

They are free to say he is motivated by racism whenever they want.

Now, of course, to engage in this sort of nonsense,

you have to ignore something

that everyone in America knows.

Everyone who lives here knows the truth.

about what we're looking at here with Donald Trump and his tweets, which is Donald Trump says bad things

about people who say bad things about him.

That's what he does.

This is not a freaking sixth sense type of plot twist.

The guy, when he gets pissed off at you, says bad things about you.

It is absolutely known.

So if you are going to say something is racism, it is on you to explain why every time he has someone say something bad about him, he attacks them regardless of their race.

It is up to you to explain and

whittle this one out for us as to why when he attacks a person of color, you assume every single time it's race.

Every time he does it to a white person, you just assign his motives to something else.

But every time it's not a white person, you say it's race.

That is not analysis, and it's certainly not journalism.

I mean, it's one thing for a Rachel Maddow to go on television and say, well, Donald Trump's a racist, and I think he's a racist because Baltimore has black people who live in it.

I mean, that's not good analysis, but at least it's someone giving an opinion.

We're talking about journalists who are going on television and saying you are not a good journalist if you don't say it's racist without any qualifiers.

You can't say that there's racial tension around the comments.

You can't say they're racially tinged.

You have to say the man is a racist.

You know it.

You've journalistically discovered it.

You have somehow been able to dive into this guy's brain.

And despite the fact that he didn't reference race in any way,

you are able to decipher that he is motivated solely by race.

Some of these places that are saying this

have very clear information to know that it's not true.

For example, the New York Times has an actual running list of all of the people Donald Trump has insulted since he kind of got back into the swing of politics here in the past few years.

598 individuals and organizations which Donald Trump has insulted, in some cases, dozens of times each.

Why are so many of them white?

This guy is the crappiest racist I've ever seen.

He can't even figure out how to only insult black people.

What do they all have in common?

And what do they all have in common?

They've all said bad things about Donald Trump.

When you say something bad about Donald Trump, Donald Trump responds and he says bad things about you.

I mean, just go through the A's of this list.

Jim Acosta.

White, right?

I'm pretty sure he was white when Donald Trump called him crazy.

General John Allen,

pretty sure he was white when Donald Trump said he failed badly.

Anderson Cooper, pretty sure he was white when he called him a waste.

Michael Avenatti,

pretty sure he was white when he called him a total loser.

But Stacey Abrams is in the A's too.

He called her totally unqualified because she was black.

This is what you have to believe.

How about the letter O?

Tim O'Brien,

a white writer for Bloomberg, is dumb, really stupid, and dopey.

I don't know.

Maybe he didn't think he was white.

The words he types are black, you know.

How about Claire O'Connor at Forbes?

Was she white when Trump called her a dummy?

How about Danny O'Connor, who was, I think, running for Congress?

Was he white when he called him weak and a puppet?

Pretty sure he was.

Lawrence O'Donnell from MSNBC, was he white when Donald Trump called him a fool, dopey, and one of the dumber people on television?

Oh, yes, those were all white, but I can tell you this, when he insulted Elon Omar,

that

was racist.

He only did that because she was black.

Not because she's been out there calling him terrible names and accusing him of all sorts of terrible things for years.

It's because she was black.

This is nonsense, and they all must know it, right?

They all must know this.

We're all wildly aware of these issues, are we not?

Donald Trump, when you're a jerk to Donald Trump, he's a jerk to you.

When you're nice to Donald Trump, he's nice to you.

Do we not know this?

The guy, you know what would happen if Elijah Cummings came out tomorrow and said, you know what, Donald Trump should be the next head

on Mount Rushmore because he's the greatest president that has ever lived.

He would love Elijah Cummings.

He would say great things about Elijah Cummings starting tomorrow if Elijah Cummings started saying nice things about him and he thought they were legitimate.

He thought they, I don't even know if you need to say, you don't even know if you have, they have to be believable.

Elijah Cummings, if he reversed himself today, Donald Trump would reverse himself tomorrow.

Guys, the guy,

the guy did this with Kim Jong-un.

He is saying currently nice things about a North Korean dictator.

This is not rocket science.

This is not elite level physics.

When he says something bad about you, it's likely because you said something bad about him.

It doesn't matter what color you are.

It is nothing to do with race.

Nothing.

And if you're going to say, like, you look at the actual comments he made that don't have anything to do with race,

you have to ask yourself, can the criticism be applied to, let's say, a white person?

Can it, you know, if he says, oh, well, this is,

what did he say?

He said the state place was filthy.

He said the place was

dangerous.

I mean, can that be applied?

Can filthy be applied to a white person?

First of all, I give you Pig Pen,

who absolutely was white and was filthy.

And I don't mind saying it about Pig Pen.

His name indicates it, unless you're a pig.

And and then it's insulting to pigs.

It's not insulting to Pig Pen.

Pig Pen was white.

But would Trump use filthy to describe a white person?

Well, let me give you an example of that.

Do you remember the Red Hen?

Does the Red Hen

pop up any memories to you?

The Red Hen is a breakfast place, I think, or some restaurant.

And it's a restaurant that Sarah Huckabee Sanders went to.

It's owned

a white person.

And this white person doesn't like Donald Trump.

And apparently some of the patrons there didn't like Donald Trump.

And so when they saw Sarah Huckabee Sanders sitting down for some, you know, I don't know, pancakes or hummus or whatever the heck they were serving there,

they decided to ask her to leave.

It was kind of a minor controversy a few months ago.

Of course, Sarah Huckabee Sanders was like, all right, fine.

I don't want to eat here if you don't want to serve me.

And she left.

Donald Trump got wind of it.

You know what he said?

He said the Red Hen was a filthy establishment.

It's owned by a white person, but it was still filthy.

Why?

Because Donald Trump felt that would be the best insult at that moment.

He has no idea.

He's probably never been to the Red Hen.

He would probably never go to the Red Hen.

He has no idea whether it's filthy or not.

He just doesn't like the people because they don't like him.

This is not deep calculus.

And everybody in the media knows it.

It's got nothing to do with racism.

But I just love how deep the media has to go to go after Trump in these situations.

We'll go more into it here in about 60 seconds.

Hold on.

We're talking about the accusations of racism against Donald Trump when it comes to these tweets about Elijah Cummings in Baltimore.

And

a lot of the things you'll see is he's criticizing a majority black district.

That's one of the big ones.

They keep phrasing it that way.

Now, look, it's 53% black.

So yes, technically, it's a majority black district.

But, you know, there's very,

it's a diverse population.

There's people of all sorts in this particular district.

Some of it's urban, some of it's not so urban.

There's farms, there's inner cities, there's all sorts of things in this district.

Somehow, Trump has actually found a way to get in trouble for criticizing minorities, though, when they're actually the majority in the district, which is kind of a an interesting gymnastics trick there.

But he's not criticizing the district.

He's not criticizing the people of the district.

He's criticizing the incredibly crappy job its representative has done representing it.

And we should point out with Elijah Cummings, it's not his district.

I hate that.

I hate that wording.

It's this sort of thing where we're putting this governmental supremacy that is all in our heads for some reason.

It's not his district.

Cummings doesn't own the district.

He works there.

He works for the people there.

The congressman does not own his district.

And

I know that's kind of linguistics there, but we keep turning politicians into kings and we need to stop that.

But Trump isn't just some random white guy.

Donald Trump, I know this is weird.

I know he used to see him on the whole, you know, the reality shows and stuff, but he's the president of the United States.

He's not just some old white guy that you don't like.

I mean, it's just as much Donald Trump's district as it is Elijah Cummings' district.

Donald Trump has responsibilities for the outcomes and the way it's run, just like Elijah Cummings does.

Elijah Cummings is obviously more local, but I mean, Donald Trump has talked a lot about changing things in the inner cities, and he's had some really good results to argue there.

I mean, we can talk about the economy and the way it's affected with

minority unemployment rates, which are at all-time lows.

We talk about things like criminal justice reform, which were high priorities for many of these communities.

But I don't think this is an argument that Elijah Elijah Cummings wants.

He's been there for 20 years.

Things have not gone well in those two decades.

What is clear is that what Elijah Cummings is doing in this district is not helping.

And honestly, what the voters of the district are doing isn't helping either because they keep sending this guy back over and over and over again despite zero results.

You want to criticize voters for their decision-making process?

That's a good place to start.

You know, it's sideshow Bob walking around in a field of rakes.

Every place you step, another rake comes up and bashes you in the face.

And they keep doing the same thing over and over and over again.

Of course, the part of this story, which is always fascinating to me about how, despite the fact that pretty much everyone acknowledges, at least acknowledged until this weekend, that Baltimore had a real

problem,

they just continue to keep voting people like Elijah Cummings in.

And, you know, our system does allow for people to continually vote for their own destruction.

That is something

our system does allow for.

That's democracy.

And it's the reason why we have a constitutional republic that is not completely dominated by democracy, because we are susceptible to making incredibly stupid decisions sometimes.

And that's something that we all have to think about and probably solve.

But many of these cities, if you look at the records, who's been running them and the the results they've been coming out with,

the cities really need to be thinking about this and should examine their voting patterns.

Pat Gray joins me from Pat Gray Unleash, the incredible program on Blaze Radio, television, and of course, podcast.

Immediately precedes this one, as a matter of fact.

So, you know, get up early and stay late.

Anyway,

the

most racisty

racist who's ever raced

is in office right now, and and he's he must be stopped thank you i i find it incredible that they've just dropped any form of journalistic uh integrity by calling it just flat out racist his racist when there's not a racist thing in his tweet show me what is blatantly racist that you can absolutely just flat out call racist there's nothing no so that's a judgment call on the part so they're not even using alleged assumed supposed no none of those words apply i do think i think that's the most fascinating part of this to me.

In that, you know, because again, this isn't Lawrence O'Donnell.

It's not, you know,

Rachel Maddow doing this.

It's not only journalists doing it.

They're actually like saying you're not a good journalist if you say racially tinged or alleged racism.

They're calling out journalists.

It's like the tough guy thing.

If you can't funnel a beer,

you're not going to be in this fraternity.

It's like, if you don't call him racist with no qualifiers, you're not in our fraternity anymore.

It's crazy.

That's an amazing development.

It is because they are just guessing at his motives, guessing.

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

And it's not like he hasn't tweeted about white people.

He's just a decent, equal opportunity offender.

And it's, you know, how many times has he called out others who are, you know, losers or dummies or whatever?

And they are.

Yeah.

Many times.

In many cases.

Yeah.

I mean, the New York Times has a running list.

They have, as of, I think the last time they updated it was last month, 598 individuals and organizations in which he's insulted, some of them dozens of times each.

And you go through it, and I did not count all 598 because I have a little bit of a life.

But I mean, to me, it seems like the overwhelming majority are white people.

Oh, I think so.

Yeah.

You know, again, so it's the same thing in the country.

You'd expect it.

But again, the opposition, right?

He's almost exclusively tweeting about people who don't like him.

So a lot of them are Democrats.

Did you see the Victor Blackwell from CNN

comments?

First of all, Victor Blackwell?

Who is this guy?

Victor Blackwell?

I have now heard of this guy, and I guess he's got a show on CNN on the weekends.

And he felt pretty strongly about it.

Here's what he said.

The president says about Congressman Cummings' district.

Uh-oh.

He's fighting back the tears.

Oh, man.

Oh, bite that lip.

Oh.

Come on.

That no human

would want to live there.

You know who did, Mr.

President?

I did.

You, you did?

From the day I was brought home from the hospital to the day I left for college.

Well, you didn't have any choice when you were.

A lot of people I care about still do.

There are challenges, no doubt.

Wait, but now that he has a choice,

now he has a choice, he's gone.

I don't want to sound self-righteous.

Okay, then don't.

When people get up

and work there, They care for their families there.

Nobody said that.

They love their children.

They pledge allegiance to the flag, just like people who live in districts of congressmen who support you, sir.

Okay.

They are Americans too.

So who wants to live there?

I do.

The guy left at Utopia the very second it was his choice.

The very second.

As soon as he's out of high school, he gets the hell out of Baltimore and doesn't look back.

Come on.

I mean, come on.

The gymnastics they will go through

to criticize Trump.

And like, you know, to the point of, they're like now saying basically

Baltimore is Disneyland.

In fact, it's actually better than Disneyland because they have a lot more mice.

Whereas Disneyland, we only have the one big one.

They've got millions.

Glenn and I lived and worked there in

89 through 92.

When we first got to town, the station set us down to do these publicity photos.

And so we're looking for the place.

This was before GPS, obviously.

And we're looking for the place.

And we go down this alley in Baltimore.

And it's really one of those wide alleys.

And

it's paved.

And on every post is a sign that says, warning, rat infestation.

Which you already knew because you see all the squished rats on the pavement that car after car after car drove over.

And why?

Because Baltimore is rat infested.

And has been.

For a long time.

At the time, they estimated.

Rats outnumbered people

in the inner Baltimore area.

Let's see, there were 20 million rats to 2 million people.

So it was only a 10 to 1 ratio.

I mean, don't give them voting rights.

I mean, geez, you'd have a rat president in moments.

Did you also see the on the blaze they posted a woman who lives in the area, and she went through the neighborhood showing you

of the garbage where some of these neighborhoods are subject to dumping, and people just drive in and dump their garbage there.

And, you know, there's mattresses and washing machines and

I don't know, all manner of trash in everybody's yards and fields and abandoned row house buildings where there's been a tree growing inside of it that is now taller than the building.

So this isn't something that happened overnight.

It's been going on for decades.

And everybody knows it.

Everybody knows it.

It also has the highest murder rate in the country of large cities.

It's second overall.

Second only to the mean streets of Helena Montana, of course.

I don't think it's Helena, but

it's actually second.

I mean, it's 56 deaths, murders per 100,000 people.

That is skyrocket high.

Oh, yeah.

It's very high.

And it's been getting worse recently.

In fact, you know, the part when you say you were there 89 to 92, after that, it went through a little bit of a rebirth

and kind of came back and has gone, unfortunately, has slid back down the other way.

Well, they've been trying for a long time to make Baltimore nice.

That's why they built the inner harbor and I think spent, I don't know, one or two billion dollars on it.

And that was in the 80s.

That was a long time ago.

So they've been trying really hard, and there are nice spots.

Yes, absolutely.

There are.

But we all know there are parts of Baltimore you do not want to

visit, let alone live in.

No question.

We all know it.

I mean, The Wire was a series all about it.

We are all 100%

deep in the knowledge of the problems of Baltimore.

And yet Trump is so far in the heads of the media that they will actually come out and defend Baltimore like it's paradise.

I know.

Like it's basically a sandals, an all-inclusive place to just go and you swim up bar on every corner.

That is not what Baltimore is.

Sure isn't.

It isn't.

I mean, this is a city.

I mean, even the Orioles suck.

The Blue Jays are going to lose 100 games this year and still finish 10 games ahead of the Orioles.

That's how bad it is in Baltimore right now.

This is, I may be going to sports just because I know football's around the corner and I know you're the only person around here.

I usually have to sit in this room with Glenn.

Yeah, and he's not excited.

You're the only person I know who's actually excited

about football returning.

Yes.

I'm more excited about that than I am rats in Baltimore.

Really?

Yes.

And again, what's the Oriole to rat numbers in Baltimore?

I got to believe.

Or the Ravens.

Hundreds of thousands to ones.

Right.

Just name them the rats and go for it.

I think you do that.

I was fascinated by this.

I know you're a big Peyton Manning fan.

This story is fascinating to me.

It's a column written about Peyton Manning, and here's the title.

Everybody loves Peyton Manning,

but for how much longer?

Uh-oh.

And it goes into, okay, you know, Peyton Manning's the guy.

Everything he can go, he can see the sponsor of any product.

People want him to, every big broadcasting opening that comes up, he's always the first guy mentioned.

People talk about him, trying to get him for money, senator, football, for governor, for president, right?

Like, this is Peyton Manning.

He has that sort of profile.

Here's the question, though, as the column reads.

In a culture that seems hell-bent on savaging its icons, how long can it last?

America's in full teardown mode right now.

Nobody gets to skate on I was young and stupid, or those are my beliefs.

I stand by them anymore.

Fair or not, and we all think of reputation shattering overreach, even if we can't all agree exactly which reputations were unfairly shattered, that's the way the world is now.

This isn't limited to either political party or ideology.

Both sides want to claim their stars and demonize the other side.

Manning has thrived because he has kept his beliefs tucked close.

He is, to coin a phrase, sticking to sports.

Still,

we can rough out the edges of his ideology.

Uh-oh.

Number one,

he's a frequent visitor to and possible member of

Augusta National.

No.

So, right there, this guy.

Wait, he's a possible member of.

We don't even know.

We don't know who he is.

We don't know he's a member.

Huh.

Now, I thought the way that reads, you think he's going to say the KKK is going to be under that member.

No.

No.

It's Augusta National.

Augusta National.

It's a golf club.

Wow.

So we know he's a golfer.

Okay.

He's donated to Republican figures.

No, he hasn't.

Including the recent presidential campaigns of Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush.

Wow.

Now how much do you hate him?

More recently, he's played golf with Donald Trump and spoken at Republican events.

Bastard.

Now it does say this is an observation, folks, not criticism.

I don't think he's even trying to make the case that this should happen to Bayton Manning.

There's nothing wrong with Manning or anything else or anyone else voting the way they wish and associating with whomever they wish of course but you don't have to work hard to see how manning like everyone else who believes in something more than kicking back and watching netflix could end up in the middle of it the us versus them kickball team picking that america has become

Returning to the public eye means surrendering control of your image, and Manning guards and nurtures his image as closely as any athlete ever has.

If he steps back into the live spotlight, he'll make sure to do it in a way that keeps everyone happy.

Otherwise, he'll just keep doing what he's done for the the past few years, showing us exactly what he wants us to see and nothing more.

It's fascinating because they go into

the accusations from his time in college where one woman said that he made sexually sort of

suggestive jokes and gestures and may have had contact in some way.

And basically, they're saying, like, if he comes out and he starts, if he turns into an out-Republican, where he may be,

he will then be, is it it me too'd or whatever, and all of a sudden those things will become serious.

Like, we are at a time now where even when you go your entire life trying to avoid being a figure in these sort of culture wars, they will suck you in

sort of against your will.

Oh, for sure.

And that is a weird world to live in, isn't it?

That is.

Especially for somebody so beloved as Peyton Manning.

Is there anybody who doesn't like him?

I don't know if I've run across anyone.

I can't think of anybody.

The guy was great at the Hall of Fame career.

He's great at all these commercials.

He just seems to be fun.

And the reason he didn't take the

Monday Night Football gig was because he didn't want to analyze his own brother.

He's just, he's a great guy, seemingly.

It does seem that way.

Yeah.

So why not destroy him?

They will.

Especially since he's a Republican, apparently.

Oh, no.

You can't have that.

Can't have that.

That'll be bad.

Do you think Peyton wants his Jeb Bush money back, though?

You got to believe.

Yeah, I mean, he's thrown some bad interception in his life, but that's one you definitely want back.

All right, Pat Gray, I get the podcast every day.

And you're gonna be joining me this week, too.

We're gonna be doing some

Pat and Stew here for Glenn for the rest of the week.

So we're excited about that as well.

Get the podcast at Pat Gray Unleashed and follow him on Twitter at

Pat Unleashed.

Follow me as well at World of Stew.

The best of the Glenn Beck program.

Hey, it's Glenn, and if you like what you hear on the program, you should check out Pat Gray Unleashed.

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This is the best of the Glenbeck program.

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

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The news and why it matters.

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Brian Riedel is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and he joins us now.

Wrote a story for National Review.

New budget deal puts the final nail in the Tea Party coffin, which made me have a wonderful day the day I read it.

Thanks for the optimism.

I appreciate that, Brian.

But you're completely right, right?

We've completely given up as a, I guess as a conservative movement, we just seem to no longer care about debt or deficit.

That's the conventional wisdom in Washington.

You know,

I've lived in Washington 18 years, forgive me.

And I've worked in the Senate for six years recently.

And so I talked to a lot of lawmakers, and I know them very well.

And the conventional wisdom in Washington is that you, the voters, the conservatives, no longer care about spending and deficits.

And so why should they say, why should we put up with the angry media and the angry liberals when conservatives don't really care?

And as evidence that conservatives don't care, A lot of them generally cite, frankly, the election of Donald Trump.

President Trump called himself the king of debt.

He said he will not touch Social Security and Medicare.

And in doing so, he defeated people like Ted Cruz, who ran on issues like less spending.

So the lesson that was taken by lawmakers is, all right, if you guys don't care about if you voters don't really care about spending and deficits, then we don't either.

And I think that is I think they're reading that generally accurately.

I mean, I think maybe people are more focused on, you know, whatever cultural issue is going on, and this is a big problem, and it never seems like to get, you know, all the effort we put into it during the Tea Party era, did we get anything out of it?

I mean, you can kind of understand how people get there.

Yeah, well,

the challenge is a lot of the Tea Party movement, and this was focused a lot on the stimulus and the Wall Street bailouts,

and to then later Obamacare.

The issue was eventually

much but not all of the stimulus expired

and the Wall Street bailouts were mostly paid back.

So what happened is what was left was the real underlying driver of 30 of the 30-year deficits, which is Social Security and Medicare.

If you look at the numbers for the next 30 years, this is amazing.

The Congressional Budget Office

forecasts $80 trillion in new deficits over the next 30 years.

They say that Social Security and Medicare will run $103 trillion shortfall, and the rest of the budget will run a $23 trillion surplus.

That's how they get to $80 trillion.

That is an amazing statistic.

$103 trillion in deficits for Medicare and Social Security.

But the rest of the budget, and I feel like this is not actually realistically how these things play out, is a $23 trillion surplus to get to still $80 trillion in new debt in the next 30 years.

That's amazing.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And the issue, I think, what a lot of people in Washington will say is, okay, once we got past the stimulus and the Wall Street bailouts,

addressing the deficit means addressing Social Security and Medicare.

And they've concluded that Republican voters do not want to reform Social Security and Medicare.

Therefore, there's nothing left to do but spend.

I mean, that is, I mean, it's, again, I can understand how they get there,

but that is

an amazing thing to essentially admit.

Let's, before we get back, because I want to go over some of the Tea Party stuff and how we kind of got here, but can you guys walk us through the latest budget deal?

Is it something where we've completely abandoned all responsibility, or is it worse than that?

We've abandoned all responsibility, Stu.

You know, the crown jewel of the Tea Party was the 2011 Budget Control Act.

This

lowered discretionary spending by $2.1 trillion over 10 years.

Well, pretty much as soon as the ink was dry, they started weakening it.

Republicans wanted more defense spending.

Democrats wanted more non-defense spending.

So they just kept raising the cap.

Each two years, they would raise the caps more and more.

Since 2014, they raised the caps by $770 billion.

And this time around, they essentially just repealed the caps and went back to what discretionary spending would have been had there never even been a Budget Control Act.

So, when you think back to 2011, all that work, all the grand negotiations, the talk about defaulting on the debt limit with President Obama,

they did all that work to get the Budget Control Act caps, and then they just ignored it.

In terms of the cost moving forward, here's what's really scary.

They're raising the caps by about $160 billion per year for two years.

But the way it's scored, that's going to permanently raise raise the baseline, which means in two years, they're going to start from that higher level.

Right.

And therefore, according to the Congressional Budget Office, this is going to cost about $1.7 trillion over the next 10 years because they're just going to keep starting from the higher spending level every year going forward.

So when you say, how bad is this?

It's that bad.

That's really because every dollar you spend is really $10

because

there's no way anyone ever goes down from where they are.

It's always an increase off of the most recent year.

So each dollar you spend is another $10 over a decade, and that adds up really fast.

That's exactly it.

And two years, and

that's why one of the reasons we got this level is they raised the caps a couple years ago.

And then when they got to now, said, well, we're not going to go back down now.

We raised the caps a couple years ago.

We're going to keep raising them.

And so it's exactly it.

So this is going to be $1.7 trillion over 10 years because

they're going to use the new higher level as their starting point next time around.

Now, when it comes to spending this new money, at least some of this, in theory, you're getting something for.

We're getting to a point now where the higher and higher percentage of the budget is just us paying interest on money we've already previously borrowed.

What is the how big how much of the budget is is just interest at this point, and how big does that get going forward?

This is scary.

Right now, it doesn't look bad.

Right now, about

10% of the budget is interest on the debt, which doesn't look that bad.

It's projected

to triple in nominal dollar terms over the next decade, and as a percent of the budget, more than double to about 20% of to about 20%,

and then over the next couple of decades, get to about 30%.

Here's what's scary, though.

All of these numbers I just mentioned assume interest rates stay at record lows.

And the scary thing is every point that interest rates go up will cost $13 trillion over the next 30 years

or $1.5 trillion over the next decade.

Every point.

So if interest rates go up,

let's say they return to 1990s levels, which we don't think of as being a particularly high interest rate era.

If interest rates return to 1990s levels, you add $4 trillion over the decade and $40 trillion over three decades because the debt is so big

that

even small movements in interest rates will bury us.

So the numbers are bad as it is.

In fact, even with low interest rates, interest becomes the biggest part of the budget within three decades, and that's with record low interest rates.

If interest rates rise, we get buried.

You're write in National Review, I thought this was amazing because you talk about how people don't care about these cuts and they don't actually want them.

I mean, listen to the

effort by conservative House Republicans in 2017 and 2018 to trim the growth rate of entitlement spending from 5.9%

all the way to 5.8%.

So again, we're not talking about actually cutting anything.

We're cutting the increase from 5.9 to 5.8.

That was rejected.

And a bill that was going to reduce unnecessary spending by 0.002% of the budget.

Not 2%, not 0.2%, not 0.02, but 0.002% of the budget.

Even that was said to be,

there's just nothing left in the cupboard.

We can't cut anything.

I mean,

these are not exactly,

this is not austerity we're talking about here.

These are very minor, minor changes.

And I mean, it really does enforce that there is, it feels completely hopeless, Brian.

Yeah, I mean you know I I start to wonder what what exactly do Republicans come to Washington to do?

I mean if you can't even cut the growth rate of government from one-tenth of one percent not cut spending but just have it grow one-tenth of one percent at a slower annual rate Why are you even here?

And and and and let me tell you how that relates to this bill.

Uh I did some math and I and I have been blasting this out to my friends in the House and Senate for the last couple days.

We could pay for at least the first two years of these caps, not the $1.7 trillion over the decade, but the short-term $320 billion.

We could pay for that by just cutting the growth rate of entitlements again by one-tenth of 1%.

Basically, you know, like I said, from 5.9 to 5.8,

that would actually pay for the spill.

Members of Congress, the Republican Party, will not even cut the growth rate of entitlements from 5.9 to 5.8% in order to pay for the first two years of this bill.

They will not even do that.

It's incredible.

All right,

I want to ask you about your perspective on what the Tea Party actually was.

Talking to Brian Riedel of the Manhattan Institute, I want to get through a couple quick things here in our couple minutes remaining, if we could, Brian.

The Tea Party, do you think, and there's kind of a competing analysis here,

is it when these focuses on spending, on government growth, was it one of those things where, you know, most people never really meant it as far as budget controls, but it was the closest weapon around.

Someone broke in, they grabbed the lamp because it was the closest thing there.

It was at the time the thing everyone was talking about, and the Tea Party used it to try to push back into power.

Or was it one of those things where people really did mean it?

They did connect with the Constitution, but they felt like they did everything right.

They pushed as hard as they could, got nothing out of it, and have basically just kind of given up.

Well, I think I can say I I was there when the Tea Party started.

At the time, I was running budget policy at the Heritage Foundation.

A lot of the Tea Party meetings would circulate my data.

I think that it was legitimate concern about debt and deficit because there was such sticker shock

about the deficit rising to $1.4 trillion in 2009.

The challenge, I think, with the Tea Party is

there was a lot of concern about the deficit to the extent it was driven by the Wall Street bailouts, the stimulus, and Obamacare.

And once we got past some of those policies expired, or we weren't able to repeal Obamacare,

and it became that, well, actually, much more of the deficit is based on policies that we benefit from, Social Security and Medicare primarily, that's when a lot of the Tea Partiers lost interest.

So I think it was, you could say that it was kind of convenient that a lot of Tea Partiers were concerned about the deficit when it was based on what they considered programs they didn't benefit from.

But once you got back to their own benefits, it kind of faded away.

Additionally, some interest was lost just because the Republicans couldn't do that much to cut the deficit with President Obama in office.

I mean, Paul Ryan, you know, people criticize him.

He did everything he could, but as long as President Obama was in office, you can't repeal Obamacare.

And I think that kind of led to some, you know, why-o-we-bothering views among Tea Partiers.

One more thing here, if we could.

How much time do we have left?

Because

I would love to,

we're down to about a minute.

Do you have a couple minutes on the other side, Brian, or do you need to run?

Okay, because I would love to ask you about

particularly Kamala Harris's policy when it comes,

for lack of a better term, quote-unquote policy, when it comes to her Medicare for all proposal, where she seems to be saying she wants all the stuff from from Bernie Sanders policy, but without any of the middle-class tax increases, which to my eyes seems completely impossible.

But I'd love to get someone who's a lot smarter than me to talk about that for a second.

By the way, Brian's a great follow on Twitter at Brian underscore R-I-E-D-L.

He's from the Manhattan Institute.

And if you care about the budget, I know a lot of people in this audience really do care.

He's a great follow, and you get lots of real information about it.

And one of the things that I'm fascinated about is this idea of Kamala Harris, who wants to give everyone all the bells and whistles that people like Bernie Sanders want to give.

Give you the full socialist palette here.

But she's not going to raise taxes on anybody unless they make a billion dollars a year or more, is pretty much how I understand it.

Can you get any sort of rational sense as to what she's claiming to be able to accomplish here?

And can she pay for this program or even come close to it?

Kamala Harris did something remarkable.

She got the Bernie Sanders campaign to say that she's living in economic fantasy land.

That is

even the Sanders campaign says you've gone off into la la land.

You've accomplished something special.

You know, Medicare for All would cost, in the best case scenario, an additional $32 trillion over the decade.

In a more realistic scenario, probably about $40 trillion.

Let's just do the math.

I mean, basically, that nearly doubles the size of the entire federal government.

Because the entire federal government is projected to spend about nearly $50 trillion over the next decade.

So you're nearly doubling the government.

If you took every Democratic tax the rich proposal, the wealth tax, the 70% tax rates, higher capital gains, financial taxes, higher corporate taxes, higher estate taxes,

they add up to at most $3 trillion,

and that's using the left's own numbers that assume that these policies actually work, you know, that people keep working and paying the taxes.

Even according to their own math,

you could not pay for more than one-tenth of this program, even if you did every single tax the rich plan proposed by every single Democratic candidate.

It is mathematically impossible to do what Kamala Harris is proposing.

And

this is what brings you back to what Bernie Sanders is saying

in a moment of honesty, I guess.

The bottom line is you have to raise taxes massively on the middle class.

It's not just rich people.

It's not just executives.

It's not just financial transactions.

This is regular people making regular salaries, and their taxes are going to go through the roof to pay for this.

You could confiscate 100% of the income of everyone earning $500,000 or more, and it wouldn't pay for Medicare for all.

I mean, and let's assume they all keep working.

You know, like, even if you confiscated 100% of of their income, it still wouldn't pay for this.

Now, the Sanders people have nothing to brag about, because Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All bill, um, actually has the revenue section as T B D.

We'll figure out the pay for it later.

There there actually is no no pay for section in the Sanders Medicare for All Bill, the one that members of Congress keep saying we need to pass.

Yeah.

Sanders can't actually come up with the taxes either.

But at least he admits that y you can't increase spending by thirty two trillion dollars by taxing the 1%.

I mean,

this is so comical that

it should be laughed at.

And let me end in the actual padded room here for a moment, because Medicare for All is just what one tiny slice of the Green New Deal, which I don't know what it has to do with being green at all.

But I mean, go beyond this.

And when you get to the AOC sort of territory, I mean, this is

almost an in incalculable cost as to what they're actually proposing.

Well, I mean, they have a universal basic income for everybody,

free income for everyone, quote, not willing to work.

They're going to rebuild and retrofit every house and building in America.

They're going to take every place airplanes fly and replace it with high-speed rail.

So imagine every place in America where there's a little bit of regional airport.

We're going to instead spend billions on high-speed rail.

We're going to replace every car in America that runs on gas.

I mean, I have been scoring bills in Washington for 18 years.

You can't even score this stuff.

It's incalculable.

There's no way to even estimate how much it would cost to rebuild and retrofit every house and building in the country.

I mean, essentially what they're saying is we should tear down the entire country and build a new one.

That is, you know, in many ways, that is exactly what they are saying.

Brian Riedel, I am starting a movement to get Brian Riedel as a moderator of a Democratic debate.

I want this to happen.

This would be entertaining.

People would tune in for that.

Brian Riedel, that would be fun.

I would have to watch it, though.

Oh, yeah.

Well, you wouldn't have to.

I think they're asleep most of the time, anyway.

Brian Riedel, Manhattan Institute, at Brian underscore Riedel, R-I-E-D-L on Twitter.

Brian, thanks for joining us.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Jeff Fisher from the fabulous podcast.

I was going to say the Fisher files.

That's the old school one.

That's the old one.

Yes.

It is Chew in the Fat with Jeff Fisher.

It joins us now.

Does this stuff scare you at all?

Look, they just want to spend everybody's money and remake the country.

Why don't you want that, Stu?

Yeah, I know.

Just tear down the country and build a new one.

Speaking of tearing down the country, though, can we kind of get by the what did Trump call Baltimore the hellhole, progressive democratic Democratic hellhole that it is?

What's that?

I forget what he said in his tweet.

But you mentioned The Wire

critically acclaimed on HBO for six or seven years.

Did it paint the picture of a wonderful suburb where everything runs perfectly and there's nice manicured lawns?

No, it did not.

No.

It painted a picture of corruption and drug abuse in a city hellhole.

Yeah.

There was a show prior to that on television that was critically acclaimed called Homicide, Life on the Streets, that was based in Baltimore.

The same thing.

And it was also, that was, both shows were based on a book from a Baltimore Sun reporter called Homicide A Year on the Killing Streets.

So, I mean, it's not like a big secret.

Yeah, and the Baltimore Sun is one of the big newspapers coming out being critical of Trump and saying, like, you can't criticize us.

What are you talking about?

I mean, sure, we have a couple issues, but you shouldn't be talking about it.

Let us talk about it.

Right.

Well, you know what?

He's the president of the United States.

I think talking about a major city and its massive problems does fall under his purview.

It does.

And it's been, you know, look,

Elijah Cummings has done such a great job in his 80 terms as

a congressman that somebody,

can anything be done with it now?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I mean, I guess.

I mean, you can't give up, I guess.

No, it does feel, I mean, you know, Detroit is another thing.

The Democrats are talking about Detroit, obviously, this week.

And,

you know, you look at Detroit.

It has had certain areas have come back

in

a hilarious development.

A big part of the comeback of certain areas of Detroit has to do not with giant government programs, but rich white executives dumping billions of dollars into a city that they love.

That they earn because of

capitalism.

Yeah, that's right.

That's the word.

Yeah, I'm sure that'll be covered this week.

It's just agonizing.

Now, look, some of the things that we can talk about today, you know, I like to do a few headlines that that I love the headlines, but you don't want to delve into the story.

Right?

I mean, you just want to live with the headline.

Don't bog me down with facts.

No more information.

You don't need any more than that.

Like the study that says eating ice cream for breakfast helps improve mental health.

Good.

I don't want to read anymore.

I don't want to know anymore.

I just want to live with that headline.

Right.

Sounds good.

It's good.

It's too good to check.

It is.

It's just, I don't want to know the information.

Sure, the background probably says you'll die of something else, but your mental health is better.

I'm sure the background says something about probably not.

But don't, no, just go with the headline.

Just read the headline and move on.

We also have health officials are warning McDonald's customers to get vaccinated amid a hepatitis outbreak in Arkansas.

I don't want to know about it.

Well, I don't live in Arkansas, thankfully.

No, and it doesn't have anything to do with McDonald's.

And sure, McDonald's customers are firing guns at employees because they got an order of cold fries.

Sure, that's happening.

I don't want to know why.

I don't want to know where it was.

Pretty

understandable on on that one, though.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That's one of those, I think everybody can understand.

What movie was that?

Was it Falling Down with

Michael Douglas, right?

Remember that?

And I remember that was one of those things where he came up and wanted to get breakfast, and it was like two minutes after the breakfast deadline, and he just starts threatening everyone.

And it was one of those movies that's like, that's definitely a crime, but I'm rooting for him.

Everyone's for it.

I'm rooting for him.

Everyone's for it.

Just like we're getting a petition now that I think I'm for.

I'm almost for this petition that wants to change the date of Halloween.

They've got almost 100,000 signatures now.

They want to change it to

the last Saturday in October instead of October 31st.

I think I could be for that.

That's interesting.

I think I could be for that.

Obviously,

the people that are starting the petition are hawking their Halloween wares and want people to buy all their Halloween stuff.

But I kind of like the idea of it being on the last Saturday of the month,

just in the middle of the week whenever October 31st falls in.

You know, having kids, too.

I mean,

that would be a nice little change.

Even with or without kids, I mean, I don't like going out during the week.

I'd rather do it on Saturday.

You are the creepy guy that shows up at everybody's door begging for candy, aren't you?

I will say this.

As someone who I have a six and a seven-year-old kid,

and they

go out trick-or-treating every year.

And the decrease in the percentage of or the amount of kids that are out on the streets trick-or-treating from when I remember going out as a kid, I mean, it's got to be 70% less people.

I mean, I remember.

It does, it does seem less.

It seems like it's way less.

Now, I know they have more of these events like the trunk or treat thing, and maybe that's where kids go now more often.

But, I mean, I want to take them out old school, trick-or-treating.

You're walking door to door.

I want you tired.

I want that bag on your shoulder.

I want you to, by the end of it, like you're passed out in a candy coma.

Like, I want that whole experience.

Plus, I've raised my children on how to to get more candy than all the other children.

If you want to talk about Halloween, you have a secret to Halloween.

Now, I hate to say this on the air, man, because it gives us, this is a good plan.

This works every time.

You always bring an extra bag as a parent

to carry.

So when your kids go up to Trick-or-Treat

and they have a little bit of candy, oh, did you guys just get started?

And they give you more.

So when your kids come back to the sidewalk, you take the candy and put it in your bag.

So the kid only has a little bit in theirs.

So every door they go to is trick-or-tree.

Oh, did you guys get just get started?

And they give you more.

That is brilliant on multiple levels.

Because, first of all, you're, of course, counting people into extra candy.

No, I'm just helping my children so they don't have to carry such a weight of candies too.

Sure.

And the second part of that is you've now apprehended all of your child's candy.

So now you can just sit there and eat your fill while they think they're getting extra.

And they come back and they're like, that's actually less than I got last year.

That's a shame.

That's a shame.

It's a a sad outcome.

I will say, the best Halloween costume I ever had when I was a kid was a three-headed skeleton.

So my head is the middle skeleton, and then the two on the shoulders are inflatable skeletons.

So it's a three-headed skeleton.

And that doesn't sound like any amazing

costume until you walk up.

And you're with someone who's dressed in some other costume.

They give them one candy bar and they say, hey, you got three heads.

I guess I got to give you three.

And they do

in front of the other people.

It's amazing.

This is a sort of innovation.

That's a good plan.

I mean, I wonder how we're both overweight.

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