Best of the Program | Guests: Ken Paxton, Andrew Wilkow & Philip K. Howard | 7/11/19
Nobody Wants War - h1
Gay Woke Fading - h1
Taken Down Obamacare (w/ Ken Paxton) - h1
News of the Week (w/ Andrew Wilkow) - h2
Try Common Sense (w/ Philip K. Howard) - h3
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Transcript
Hey podcasters, welcome to Thursday's podcast.
We affectionately entitle it, Nobody Wants War.
And we look at what is happening with Iran.
They seem to be begging for war and what you need to know about that.
Also, there's a new poll out from the United Kingdom that
says gay wokeness is fading.
And another Harris poll that you probably didn't hear because it came out the day before Independence Day last week.
and it shows that Americans, millennials, are starting to say,
no, not so much with the LGBT thing.
Why is this happening?
The media is perplexed.
I think it's pretty clear.
I talked about that.
Also, Andrew Wilkow
is joining us, telling us how Jeff Bezos is probably the lawnmower man.
And a little on the U.S.
soccer team, the real scandal here that nobody's talking about.
And finally, Philip K.
Howard, he's the author of a book called Try Common Sense.
Everybody says burn the system down or reboot it or hope and change, but nobody's telling us change to what except the socialists.
This thing is going to have to be rebooted.
So after we unplug it or turn it off and on and reboot it,
How do we reboot it?
This guy seems to have the answer, the beginnings of one.
He's fascinating from the book Try Common Sense, all on today's podcast.
You're listening to
the best of the Blend Beck program.
There is a really, there's something happening with the acceptance of gay sex.
It's in decline in the UK.
That is the big story today.
But there was another story that came out in a study in the United States over the holiday weekend that I also want to share with you.
It's a new Harris poll.
Something has changed, and I think I know what it is.
And to me, it makes total sense.
The left is like, what is happening?
Those polls can't be right.
I think it makes total sense.
And I'll give it to you here in just a second.
What doesn't make sense to me today,
unless Iran wants war, is what's happening with Iran.
In the last few weeks, they have shot down a U.S.
drone.
We almost had war on that.
Thank goodness Donald Trump changed his mind at the last minute.
Then, before that, they had mined two
oil
tankers.
So they blew up two oil tankers.
Last night,
The British went and boarded a ship, took a ship
that they said was full of Iranian oil, which is illegal, to ship it to Syria.
So it's in the Strait of Hormuz.
The British, I think they had a frigate or a, was it a frigate
or battleship that came and blocked it?
30 Royal Marines boarded, took over the ship.
Iran said they're going to pay a heavy price for this.
We'll see.
What are they doing?
We have Jason Buttrell with us, and Jason
has the latest.
He oversees our research and
our foreign affairs and military affairs around the world.
Jason, what are they doing?
Iran's doing what they always do every time they deploy any kind of military asset, which is usually by the IRGC.
And they are a non-conventional force.
So I think it's very, very important to understand that Iran does not want war.
The United States does not want war.
General Wingmaster said it the best.
He said there's two ways to fight the United States military, non-conventionally and stupidly.
Nobody is going into a conventional war with the United States, not the United States Navy and not in that area.
And Iran knows this.
The IRGC knows this.
What they do want to do, the non-conventional things they do want to do, is they want to use elements like the IRGC or Hezbollah or all the little Shia militias to harass, to do whatever they can to make it so economically painful in that area that they want to force us to the negotiating table.
It's no coincidence that
the Iran, they collaborated with the North Koreans to get their nuclear program up to speed.
Now they are using the exact same strategy of, I'm the crazy guy.
You don't know what I'm going to do.
Khomeini is pointing at him.
Do they realize that that's the strategy of Donald Trump?
I'm the crazy guy.
I just might send the nukes over to you.
And I think,
yeah, he's the last guy you screw with.
For sure.
They don't know what he's going to do.
And that's kind of one of the geniuses of the Trump doctrine there: they have no idea.
I agree.
Like,
he's very unpredictable.
That's why they're doing a lot of probing right now.
They had no idea how Trump was going to respond to the downing of an unmanned drone.
Like, they had no idea.
So they probed.
They had no idea how he would respond to a couple of tankers with those ridiculous limpet mines where they stuck.
That was not meant to cause any real damage.
That was to cause.
So
what should he be doing, Jason?
Sanctions, sanctions, sanctions.
He's doing exactly what he's supposed to do.
Exactly.
Like,
this swarming attack was not serious.
It was not serious at all because the Iranians knew, just as we knew, that there were naval vessels all over the place out there.
They knew that they would be on them instantaneously, and that's exactly what happened.
What they're trying to do is they're trying to drive up the insurance costs of oil tankers going through that strait so incredibly high that the companies, that the world, that governments will say, look, Trump, please go to the negotiating table, get this under control.
That's what they want.
There's some facts right now that are coming out of the Iranian economy.
Their inflation rate just topped 50%.
Now, the last time they were forced to negotiating table, it wasn't even anywhere near 50%.
And then Rouhani was guaranteeing to the people that he was going to drop it below 20%.
But now it's topping 50% and the people are going crazy in Iran.
You're already seeing.
Can you imagine,
Just for the average person, imagine a loaf of bread being 50% higher than it is today in less than a year.
Imagine the cost of everything that you have going up 50%
in less than a year.
People would be on the streets.
Now, they're not on the streets currently because the crackdowns are so bad.
But this is the kind of thing that helped the United States collapse the Soviet Union.
We pressured them, we sanctioned them, we drove them into bankruptcy, and then at the same time, we were helping the people on the streets of Poland through the church and also, because we had a great ally in Margaret Thatcher,
our operatives were also in helping those people organize and try to overthrow the government, which they did.
That's exactly right.
You're exactly right, Glenn.
Speaking of food prices, and that's one of the biggest things that always brings people out into the streets in Iran.
The jump in food staples is absolutely insane.
85%
increase since May.
Jeez.
85%.
That's why you're seeing all this aggression from Iran right now.
And I tell you what, it's going to get worse.
And the key thing for us is to be not hyperbolic about it.
The Trump administration needs to not respond overly aggressive.
The Iranians are being very, very careful, but it's going to get worse.
They're going to use people like Hezbollah, groups like all their different militias in Iraq, for instance, that are going to get very, very close to, let's say, the U.S.
Embassy, the Green Zone in Baghdad.
They're going to get very, very close to U.S.
troops in Syria.
But if there's ever a, this is where it could change.
If they mess up, if there is a loss of life
between U.S.
personnel, allied personnel, that's when this thing could escalate.
They're playing a very, very dangerous game with this escalation.
But as long as it doesn't, if it stays like it is now, like drones getting knocked out.
Okay, yeah, that sucks.
It's very, very expensive.
That drone that got hit
was that last a couple weeks ago was more expensive than F22 for crying out loud.
Those things are expensive.
But as long as they don't cause any loss of life or
if they don't sink a tanker,
then this will not escalate.
But the Trump administration needs to hold the line here.
Continue with what you're doing.
Keep those sanctions going.
The Iranian people will do this for him.
They really will.
Yes.
I think that cooler heads
prevailed.
And I don't think Donald Trump, I mean, you know, the left is trying to make him look like a warmonger.
He is always against war.
He's always been against interventionalist thinking.
Even though he has John Bolton, you know, I really believe that he is a guy that doesn't believe we should be involved everywhere.
He has a very long record of that.
And so I think
when he, you know, when he figured out or when somebody came to him and said, look, look, look, look, no loss of life.
This will be
just an endless bloodbath.
It'll not be good if we go in.
We're on the right track.
They're only doing this because we're on the right track.
I think
his true colors showed.
that he is not a guy that wants this kind of confrontation.
And it amazes me that they all say that he's such a warmonger and
he's surrounded by warmongers.
John Bolton is there.
Have you read anything about what John Bolton is saying about this?
What is his recommendation?
I haven't heard him say anything publicly on it lately, but I think John Bolton plays perfectly into, if this really is a strategy by
President Trump, then I think it's genius to put a guy like John Bolton at the head of the Pentagon.
It's absolutely genius because it plays into that unpredictability.
Now,
it has no weight if you have, I don't know, you know, if you have a pacifist up in there, you can't play the doctrine of, look, you don't know what I'm going to do.
I'm going to strike at any time.
You can't play that.
But everybody in the media, all of his opponents, everyone has been saying, oh, warmonger, warmonger.
He just wants to
go to war.
That's good.
That's great.
Exactly.
It's great.
It's good.
And we know by now
we have always said, for I don't know how long, oh man, why do we tell everybody exactly what we're going to do?
Why do we tell everybody in advance?
That doesn't work to our advantage.
That almost guarantees the conflict.
Where here,
you don't know where the line is.
You don't know what he's going to do.
His record shows that he is
somebody that
just does not want war, doesn't want us to be involved in the Middle East.
He's on record saying destabilizing the Middle East was exactly the wrong thing.
He's been against the Iraq war.
He was against the
surge.
He was against what we were doing in Benghazi.
He was against what we're doing in Syria.
He wrapped it up quickly with ISIS.
I mean, this guy has every bit of record saying, I don't want to do this.
And because he's surrounding himself with the best military minds, he is peace through strength.
Look, I want peace.
And I think this is a great example.
And Reagan, I think, was this way.
That it's a great example of, look, I don't want to fight a war.
But if we have to, oh, I'm going to fight it to win and we'll obliterate you in the first 10 minutes.
That's the attitude the American president should always have.
I don't want war.
I have a long record of having a very patient and long fuse on this.
Don't do it.
Don't do it.
But if you start killing our people, I'm going to turn your sand into glass in about five minutes.
And then I'm going to go home
and leave you with the message, don't screw with us.
We are your best friends, as the Declaration of Independence says.
We are your friends in peace and your worst enemy in war.
It's important.
Do you remember when John Bolton had that
supposed slip-up when he had a written when they were talking about Venezuela and it was written on the back?
Like 5,000 U.S.
troops or whatever.
So that's exactly proving our theory here.
There's no way that was a mistake.
That was a will he or will he not?
Because you know I'm you know the mustachioed one.
I'm John Bolton.
I'll do it.
I'll do it.
Yep.
No, no, no.
Yeah, I want to do it.
Please let me do it.
I want to do it.
I want to send the troops.
So state.
John, I know John Bolton.
John Bolton is one of the most buttoned up guys ever.
Right.
Ever.
For him to walk in and have send 5,000 troops to Venezuela
on the back of a notebook that he's holding right directly towards the press.
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.
His podcast is available wherever you download your favorite podcast.
There's a couple of things.
A story that came out today from The Guardian.
Acceptance of gay sex is in decline in the UK, the very first time since the AIDS crisis.
30 years, this is a story, 30 years of increasingly liberal attitude towards gay sex may be coming to an end after the number of people who said they considered it wrong rose for the first time since the AIDS crisis.
In 1987, when every household received somber leaflets warning, don't die of ignorance, nine out of ten people thought that there was something wrong with sexual relations between two adults of the same sex.
Nine out of ten, this is during the height of the AIDS scare.
Every year since then, tolerance has increased, but now the British Social Attitudes Survey has found the number of people believing there is nothing wrong with gay sex has fallen, leaving a third of the population in some way opposed.
Now think of that.
It was nine out of ten said there was something wrong.
Then it
then every year it built more and more tolerance until it was in the vast majority said there was nothing wrong with it.
Now it's down to a third.
This is this is remarkable
and they don't know why.
Let me give you another story.
This came out last week on July 3rd, so you may not have heard it.
There is a new Harris poll out.
Now, understand,
there is a, he describes himself as pro-homosexual.
He's the CEO of the Harris Poll.
He says these numbers are really alarming.
Now, listen to this.
According to the new Harris Poll, Americans aged 18 to 34 are becoming less and less enamored with the LGBT lifestyle every year.
In 2016, 63% of millennials considered themselves allies allies of the LGBT movement.
That number fell the next year to 53%.
So it lost 10 points.
Then the next year, it was at 45%.
Today, 36% of millennials are not comfortable when they learn a family member is homosexual.
That's up from 29% just a year ago.
42% of millennial males are uncomfortable learning their child has had a lesson on LGBT history at school or as a homosexual teacher.
That's up from 27%.
Now,
here's what the pro-homosexual CEO of the Harris Poll says.
These numbers are alarming.
I believe the reason it's happening is simple.
Millennials have had a gay agenda crammed down their throats their entire lives, and 75% of them have at least one friend who is a homosexual.
Okay, so what's happening?
I honestly believe that this has nothing to do with people.
It has nothing to do with homosexuals that you may know.
This has everything to do with
two years ago, would you be uncomfortable that your teacher, your child, was being taught by a homosexual?
No.
Are you today?
Maybe.
Why?
Not because they're homosexual, but because you don't know what their agenda is anymore.
When we have trans people coming into the library and, as we have seen recently, are laying on top of these trans people
and reading them stories, you kind of say, what the hell is going on?
Why does my six-year-old or seven-year-old have to go through this?
What are they teaching?
You know, a few years ago, it was about love.
This isn't about love anymore.
This is not about love.
This is about,
you know, last night I saw Wicked with my daughter.
And I'm sorry, I've seen it before, and maybe I didn't notice it, but I'm pretty sure this is new.
The number of guys on stage from Oz that were dressed as women,
where they were wearing
the jacket of the men all the men and all the women were dressed similarly okay
but the there were some men that were wearing dresses and then they had the male jacket on top and they were clearly males now what the hell why are you doing that this is the thing that people are pushing against stop jamming it down people's throats.
I don't care how you live your life in your own time.
You shouldn't care about how I live my life.
But stop jamming it down everybody's throat.
And it's no longer teaching love because love would then teach: hey, you know what?
People who are married and who are heterosexual, they're just in love just as much.
And you know what?
The majority of people
feel that way.
But some people feel this way.
Okay, don't have a problem.
But when you're now saying, no, it's not a choice, I can't change my sexuality, it's absolutely not a choice.
That's what they used to say.
Now they're saying, it is a choice, and you should try it.
That's different.
That's different.
So I think that this, again, is a sign that they have massively, the left, massively overplayed their hand.
People like justice.
People like fairness.
But what we're seeing now is nothing like fairness, nothing like justice, and nothing like love.
This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
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Thanks.
Ken Paxton, who I think is one of the best attorney generals in the country.
There's another one I like an awful lot as well from Utah, but Ken is just tremendous.
And one of the first things he did as attorney general,
he formed a special unit dedicated to combating human trafficking in Texas, which we're on the border.
It's really bad.
If we have time, I want to talk to him a little bit about that.
But I really want to understand, Ken,
if you can explain.
Texas is arguing for an end of Obamacare,
and the White House now has joined, and I think there's another state involved, and it actually
could...
Take the ACA and throw the entire law out.
Is that correct?
Well, good morning, Glenn.
Glenn.
Yes.
It's 18 states.
We filed shortly after Congress passed the Tax Reform Act at the end of 2017.
The argument being
when they passed that, they eliminated the penalty associated with the individual mandate.
If you'll remember what Justice Roberts said, he joined the four conservatives and said, yes, the individual mandate that orders you, Glenn, and every one of us to have health insurance, and it orders you to participate in commerce, was unconstitutional.
However,
he switched sides, joined the four liberals and said, but because this is a penalty associated with that, that's a tax.
And under the taxing power of Congress,
they can do this whole individual mandate thing.
So they eliminated the penalty in 2017.
We filed a lawsuit and said, hey, the penalty is gone.
Therefore, the taxing power is gone.
Therefore, the individual mandate falls.
That's our argument.
It was successful in federal district court.
We got an overwhelming win.
The court declared it unconstitutional in full.
And we just argued this week that it was at the Fifth Circuit the very same thing.
How do you think this is going to be decided?
And will it get to the Supreme Court?
And will John Roberts
contort and do all kinds of gymnastics to save it again?
You are asking the million-dollar question that we're all wondering.
We have gone through this whole process.
Feeling like, well, knowing that we are right on the law, that we are right on the Constitution.
Congress has never had the authority to order you to buy a house, a car, food, whatever.
That's what this does.
It is an exception to this rule that they can't make you buy anything.
So, Justice Roberts.
That's the amazing thing: that Roberts took the stance, and while Congress was saying it wasn't a tax,
he went and he made sure that it was known as a tax because he knew that constitutionally that's the only way it could work.
Right?
There's no doubt legal contortions to get to this result is where Roberts went, and that's why it was so disappointing that he made this decision.
But we've now stripped that away from him, and we're going to put it back on his plate and say, hey, your rationale for the case, your only rationale, is gone.
Now go back and do the right thing.
Strike this down
and get rid of this unconstitutional control of our lives.
Which would then take everything that has been done, the entire law, and return us to a somewhat free market.
We would return to where we were, kind of, before Obamacare, correct?
Well, so there's this other argument.
If the individual mandate is clearly in Constitution and that's struck down, does that mean that the entire law is struck down?
California is arguing no, the rest of it, some of it stays in place, so we'd still have vestiges of Obamacare running around.
It doesn't make any sense to keep it in place because one, Congress didn't put a severability clause in there.
What that means is typically if Congress wants a law to stay in place,
if some part of it struck down, they'll put a clause in it that says, hey, if part of it struck down, that doesn't mean the whole law is struck down.
They didn't do that.
As a matter of fact, six times in the language of the bill, they said the whole bill is essential.
The individual mandate is essential to this entire bill.
And it is.
It is the guts of the bill.
So if you strip out the individual mandate, why would you leave the rest of it alone?
We're arguing the whole thing should fall.
California is saying no,
keep the rest of it in place.
It would be great if we could do this and the insurance company.
I'm not sure the insurance companies are on the side of the free market, but if we could get the Republicans to say, now let's strengthen the free market.
With this, we are going to remove the barriers where you could buy insurance across state lines.
that would actually be a real boom for the American people.
We'd be able to shop around and get better prices.
Do you agree with that?
Oh, absolutely.
This is exactly part of the solution to making health care work is eliminating these.
Because every state has individual insurance rules that make it hard for
insurance to cross state lines because
you have to have different products for every state.
So if we could eliminate those, if Congress wanted to eliminate those, I think that would be great.
It would open up the market and we would move away from this government control that drives up cost,
pushes doctors out of the market and offers less choice to consumers to more of an American model, which is free enterprise, competition, lower costs.
Is it perfect?
No, but it's a whole lot better than what we have now.
Sarah, how much time do I have left?
I think I only have about a minute.
Two minutes?
Two minutes.
Ken, I know you're on a tight schedule here.
Can you give me an explanation of what's happening on the border and what Texas is doing?
We've seen a 43% increase in illegals
into Texas.
It is an absolute mess.
Is Texas doing enough to stop this themselves?
So Texas, from what I can see, we have a legislature that has put, I think, over $600 million every biennium into border control, border security.
However, we can only do so much
with that.
We can assist, we can stop people from violating our state laws.
But when it comes to violating federal law, if they're crossing the border illegally and it's just a violation of federal law, there's nothing we can do.
There's a case called Arizona v.
U.S.
in which Arizona tried to step in the place of the federal government and do some of this stuff, and they were told, no, you can't do that, even if the federal government advocates their responsibility.
So it's really frustrating because the federal government can create laws, not enforce them, and then push the states out of of doing what they otherwise would have done.
But they are also dropping these people into our communities, and many of our border towns are on the verge of collapse.
Our churches are on the verge of collapse, and nobody's talking about all of the kids that we're trying to save from being sex trafficked.
And that sex trafficking has gotten much, much worse.
Only 40 seconds to answer, if you can.
So you're exactly correct.
People are not addressing the cost of this.
And part of the cost is not not just to our country, but also to the people that are being brought through here.
And trafficking in Texas is number two, we're the number two trafficking state in the country.
We are the Houston's the worst.
This is a huge problem that the media never talks about.
Ken, please keep up the good work.
I'd love to have you back on when you have more time.
Have a great say hi to your wife.
I will.
I'll see you in a few minutes.
You're listening to the best of the Glen Beck program.
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Andrew Wilkow.
Andrew Wilkow is heard on XM Sirius.
all around the country.
He is also, I think, one of the founding people on the Blaze.
You were pretty early
at the beginning, and it's good to have you back at the Blaze TV.
Welcome.
Thank you.
How are you?
Fine, how are you?
I'm good.
I'm good.
You're killing me with the thing about the deplatforming and the Patriot Mobile and all that, because
we've been doing this forever.
And I think these companies and the activist groups they work with know that we go on the everyday and say, you know, private companies and capitalism, We don't like boycotts, right?
Conservatives don't want to be in the streets.
We have more important things to do.
And
they've played on that for so long, for so long that they have gotten away with this because we've been like, capitalism, private property, get your hands off the internet.
We don't want the government in the internet.
And they've been like, ooh, how nice.
Conservatives aren't going to fight us.
Let's do our thing here.
And you know what's amazing is
they are now in a position to where they are so powerful.
You know, every time I go up Silicon Valley, I am both horrified and thrilled about what is on the horizon.
And they all say the same thing.
Anybody who's up at the top of echelons, they always say the same thing to me.
Glenn,
you're thinking things, you're not thinking things of the way they're going to be.
Nation states are a thing of the past.
And that really finally, I started to understand that in about the last year.
I was trying to
get a handle on, well, so how does it work?
And it's all, you know, we're just going to have free trade and blah, blah, blah.
No, no, no.
That's not what they're saying.
What they're saying is corporations are the new nation's.
But again, conservatives and what
you conservatives with your corporate love affairs,
your oil companies.
I know.
I think they dialed us in.
They zeroed in their scopes and they got us.
They knew that we would stick by our principles because we're always talking about principles.
We're always talking about not being like the left or imitating the left or trying to do what the left does.
And they said, hmm, where are our friends?
Ah, on the left.
Right.
So here's the thing that I think, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
I think to retain our principles and to win this war, we don't break them up.
We make them live by the law that the rest of us have to live by.
And that is, you're not a platform.
You're an editor.
You're a publisher.
The minute you start editing content, you're a publisher, which means you're going to have to deal with all the lawsuits and the litigation that come your way.
As a platform, you're protected from all of that.
Their stock price would go to about three bucks overnight
if the government took their platform status away from them.
and charged them with, you are now a publisher.
And you get all of the fun stuff that comes along with that.
That would change their dynamics overnight.
You don't have to break them up.
One of our colleagues, Dennis Prager, is going to be speaking before the Senate subcommittee chaired by Ted Cruz on this.
And President Trump is now really paying attention to this.
And, you know, I'm old enough to remember when some of the Silicon Valley people want to be friends with you, right?
I remember that they said, okay, well, maybe we should bring some conservatives in here.
Maybe we should talk to Glenn Beck and guys like Lenn Beck.
I don't know if that was a May to December, right?
That was just one of those short romances like, hey, look at us.
We're not biased.
We hung out with Glenn Beck for an hour.
It really.
What's scary to me about this is the more they do it, the more they try to convince us they're not doing it, right?
The more they are manipulating the algorithms, deciding what we see, deciding who we don't see,
claiming that it's just a glitch in the system when a video magically disappears that was supposed to be monetized.
And it's got to kill some of these companies to hand over money to conservative, upstart filmmakers, and even established personalities.
And the more they try to give off the impression that they're neutral, the more we know they are putting their thumbs on it.
Oh, yeah.
And, you know, but they're very good at it.
I mean, I learned my lesson on Zuckerberg that fast.
Not stupid people.
I gave him the benefit of the doubt because he was,
he seems so genuine in person
and he makes good business cases for why it would be crazy for it to happen
and I know somebody who's in the conservative movement who just had a private meeting with him one of the smartest guys I know in our business
and he called me right after and he said
I said how'd that go And he said, you know, he's really surprising.
I really believe.
And I said, don't, don't.
You're falling into exactly the same trap I did.
He's very, very smart.
And he makes a great, believable, passionate case.
The guy is a total fraud.
The guy is a total fraud.
Either that or he has absolutely no control of his own company.
Well, and that's the second layer of this because.
We did a whole episode on Blaze TV of all the tech sector money going to the very candidates that want to break them up.
So they're giving money to Elizabeth Warren Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Bernie's out there in the stump telling you that if he gets elected, he's going to break these companies up.
And yet
their employees, the people they pay, are giving those people money.
But
you know history well enough to know that's exactly what GM, that's exactly what Ford, that's exactly what B.F.
Goodrich and Goodyear Tire did
during the FDR administration.
They said, you got to regulate us.
And so who did FDR go to?
The experts in that industry help us come up with regulations.
That's another conservative thing.
You know, we don't like the idea of professors who write term papers on environmentalism regulating oil companies.
They don't know anything.
They think they know something.
Let's say we got a peer-reviewed study here by a bunch of other people who are trying to get their stuff peer-reviewed.
Don't like oil companies.
So, we say it's nice when people have actual experience.
And there's another trap that we just fell right into, our principles.
Exactly right.
That's why we just have to enforce the laws that we have and make it an even, I mean, they're going to, right now, they are so big, they're gobbling up any competition.
Something that Ray Kurzweil said, that would never happen.
I said, Ray, let's just play this out.
Why would
a company that is putting together AI, knowing that whoever has AI, real AI,
when they have that, they rule the world.
If you are collecting information on me and you know everything about me, and I happen to be a scientist that's working on AI, and I'm going to beat Google,
you're telling me Google would never do anything, they would never manipulate anything on me,
they wouldn't come after me.
They made this movie, The Net, with
what's your face, Seder Bullock.
Yeah, that was like the first movie out of the gate.
Right.
And that was the story.
And he said to me, Glenn, they would never do that.
And I said, why do you say that?
Because it's just against our corporate culture.
I said,
have you seen real people?
Have you seen life in history?
I mean, it happens historically the same way over and over and over again.
I fear at some point Jeff Bezos is just going to become the lawnmower man.
He's just going to, he's, you ever see that movie?
I think it's a Stephen King book where he becomes like electricity.
Like he just, Jeff Faye, he is this, is this slow kind of dim-witted guy and Pierce Barasnan runs these experiments on him by trying to use this like nascent, it's before we called it the internet, it's like 1992.
And all of this brain power starts going into the Jeff Fahey character, and he becomes this like, like electrical, like non-human entity.
person
who can like travel through computers and stuff.
And I feel like Bezos is just going to be some like Bond villain in like a giant armor suit that we can't stop.
You know, he's just going to go around, you know.
Right.
I will tell you the guy who would do that is Ray Kurzweil.
I mean, Ray Kurzweil, I mean, he's on the cutting edge of all of it.
He's with Google.
He's the head of their singularity project, and he believes in upgrades.
And he will be
the first guy that is saying, upgrade me.
He'll be the scientist in the lab where everybody's like, no, no, no, we can't do that yet.
It's unethical.
It stays at night.
And he's like, I'm doing it myself and becomes
part of the machine.
You know, what scares me the most about this is right now,
this is good for progressives, right?
They're on the winning side here.
They're on the winning side of the equation.
And
there's very few progressive voices.
I'm sure there are some that are saying, hey, are we sure?
We like this?
You know, you do see a little bit of liberals saying how
the anti-free speech sort of heretic movement is illiberal, right?
That we don't have to like these people, but let's be smarter than them.
Let's be better than them.
Let's debate them.
Let's not burn cars and beat people with antifo because we don't like this guy.
So there are some liberals that realize that the antifa shock troop, I don't like what you're going to say dynamic is kind of illiberal.
It's very illiberal.
I'm waiting for them to recognize that when this is bad for us, it's going to be bad for everyone.
It's not going to be, they're not going to stop and go, we've defeated the conservatives, we defeated Trump,
we've got our little utopia, everybody's, riding on Google trains to Amazon jobs.
Everything is great now.
Look at what's happening with Nancy Pelosi and AOC just yesterday.
And Nancy Pelosi has to bring all of them in and saying, look, stop eating your own.
Get off of Twitter, AOC, and stop eating us alive.
They've already lost control of
the real radicals that they were using as fuel.
You and I both said 10 years ago, you don't want to open that can of worms because they're going to eat you.
You think you're using them.
They're using you.
And
you're going to lose control of this and they're going to wipe you out first.
And that's exactly what they're doing.
I don't think these companies want anyone getting in their way.
That's the bottom line.
They don't want anyone or anything getting in their way.
It is.
They live.
It is obey and consume.
It is do not think.
And, you know,
that's scary that liberals think for a short-term victory, this is a good bandwagon to be on.
You know that to be true when you actually read what Bill Gates said in the launch of his Common Core curricula.
He talked about how they're going to use the cameras to read kids' eyes.
And he said, that way we'll know early on what they should do for a living, and we can put them in there.
It's only about consuming and just being put into a little mold, and you're a little cog and you go do this and you'll obey
and you'll consume
right that's what they're doing all right we are sitting with uh andrew wilkow we're talking about freedom of uh freedom of speech i've got a couple of other things wait till you hear what he has to share uh about the women's soccer team we'll get to that here in just a few minutes first i want to just switch over to tommy robinson because you had him on yesterday yeah we played a clip of it uh earlier on the program He is a hard guy to get a hold of, and he's a hard guy to get a handle on because of the misinformation and disinformation.
And I haven't wanted to take a firm stand on him until I've talked to him myself and have some sort of a gut feeling.
Now you've talked to him.
Who is he?
Let me just say this.
And if you're in this business, there's a lot of people that make you look good, right?
Producers, camera people, production people.
are our staff down in dc
just threw it out there right they were just it was they threw it out there not knowing if he would get back to us and while we were in the midst of doing a bunch of other things like he's on skype right now you need to get into this studio and get this done so i went running into the studio and um
he was sitting there and we were talking off camera and he was I could tell you he was as emotional just as we were lining up the shot as he was when we went to record with him.
He is somebody that is begging this country.
And I started very sarcastically.
I said, we got a million people at the southern border.
Why should we give you asylum?
And the story that he told us was that ever since speaking out about
these gangs of men who have given over to the belief that non-Muslims are
the kafir,
they are the non-believers, they are the infidels, that they have begun to take liberties with young women, mostly in small towns.
This makes Jeffrey Epstein look like he's a great guy.
I mean, what's happening over in England with the Muslims and what they're doing to young girls, it makes him look like he's done nothing.
It's so bad over there.
What he has said is that it's not the threats that are coming from the gangs.
It's the fact that he is making these judges and police officials look really bad.
And one of the questions I had for him was, when these sexual assaults occur, as they've been, we've read about them in Germany since the migrant crisis, this has been plaguing Europe for quite some time.
I said, has any member of government or upper echelon of the police department had any of their daughters subjected to this?
He said, no.
It's almost as if they know to target lower working class, you know, right?
So this is something that's being done to to you know working class British citizens with the
with the government kind of looking the other way so he got in trouble for Facebook living a court case where some of these men were being released on very you want to talk about the Epstein yeah they got sweetheart deals and he embarrassed the judge right so now his fear is not the threats the death threats that he's getting from these gangs which he says he was informed that six of them were on the way to his house to murder him at one point with bombs and guns and knives.
He says we can't even buy guns for ourselves, but they got them.
He says, I genuinely believe my government wants me to go away, that I'm the problem with the politically correct
society that we have built in Europe.
And he said, I'm begging America to see this, that my life is in danger from both these gangs and my own government at this point.
He's dead if he goes to prison.
And let me add this.
I said, you are lucky we have a Republican president because there's no way a Democrat president would insult your government that way.
Because if we give him asylum, it's like we're acknowledging, we're saying, and when we think of asylum, we think of really terrible places on earth, right?
We think of dissidents and activists and religious minorities in the Middle East.
If we actually acknowledge that Tommy Robinson's life is at threat from the British government, we are saying to the British government, we're going to give someone asylum because we don't think you are going to protect them.
I think things might change, though, if Boris Johnson becomes the prime minister.
We'll continue our conversation next.
This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Philip K.
Howard is
a leader of
government and legal system reform in America.
He's written a new book called Try Common Sense, but he's also the guy who wrote the death of common sense and the collapse of the common good, kind of a theme that he's been working on for a while.
You might have seen his TED Talk.
I didn't know this until after we decided to book him, but
he was the chairperson of the Tribute in Light for the 9-11 memorial.
That is, I was here at the time.
It was one of the most stunning things and moving things I have ever seen.
It's an honor to meet you, sir.
Great to be with you.
Yeah, thank you.
Okay, so I want to go through some of these things.
You say the profile of a practical society.
And let me just run through these quickly, and then we're going to come back and dissect.
Profile of a practical society features the following characteristics.
Regulators, police, unsafe conduct, not correctness.
Regulation will be more effective, less disruptive when regulators and citizens alike focus on avoiding actual harm.
How politically incorrect of you.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, how basic.
I mean, that's the role of law is to prevent harm.
It's not to tell us how to live our lives.
It's not to replace freedom.
Washington basically has written so many rules.
They're trying to replace our freedom.
They're suffocating people.
Right.
They think that their job is to
protect people from, in many cases, from themselves or whoever they deem as the bad guy, where,
wait, they're making us all into bad guys in many ways.
Yeah, that's right.
No one can comply with thousands of rules.
You know, it's interesting.
They lost the idea of law.
Law is supposed to be outer boundaries, protect against people breaching your contracts, committing crimes, polluting.
Well, that's fine.
And the whole point of that is to make everybody feel more free and to define the field of freedom where people can get along or not, have disagreements, and follow their star on a field of freedom.
And what happened beginning about 50 years ago is they got the idea that they would tell people how to do everything correctly.
And so they reached like vines reaching in from the outside.
They started wrapping around our toes and our necks, telling us how to how to teach a classroom and what forms to fill out, even though nobody read them for making clean apples at the orchard or whatever.
You know, and it made no sense.
And it drives people nuts and it doesn't work.
So which is, which, where's the, which is the chicken and which is the egg?
Because part of it, when you have,
you know, when you buy a lawnmower and it says on the lawnmower, do not use on roof.
You know that's because somebody used it up on the roof and then tried to sue them.
So is it, was it the attorney?
I mean, far as I'm concerned, I want those people who see a lawnmower and go, I could use that on my roof.
I want you to use it on the roof because it's just survival of the fittest in some ways.
But was it the government or was it the attorneys going and suing everybody?
It's
well,
basically, if you have the idea that you want to warn or prohibit against anything that might go wrong, you have some
dweeb in a back office somewhere writing every rule and writing every warning,
not realizing that if you have too many warnings, it's like crying wolf.
It's like no warning at all.
It's like white noise.
I was at the,
I think it's at the South Rim.
Is it the South Rim or the
I don't remember.
It's the Native American rim of the canyon.
And you can walk up, I mean, to the edge.
Okay.
It is a terrifying.
Your butt is clenched for like a week after that that experience.
And I said to one of the guys, I said, how many people die here?
And he said, funny, we don't have any problem.
And I said, what, really?
And he said, no, you guys in America is a Native American telling me.
You guys in America, you have so many warnings and so many walls and so many gates.
People actually climb over your walls because they think they wouldn't make a wall that I could climb over if they they didn't really want me to do it.
So it's safe.
We are actually doing great damage because people
don't think for themselves.
They don't think for themselves.
They're not alert.
There are lots of studies of this.
It's counterproductive.
The warnings are counterproductive.
I mean, my favorite warning was on a five-inch fishing lure.
It said, caution, harmful if swallowed.
And he said, if it's go into it, because it turned out that the hook had lead in it or something but you know nobody's going to swallow it it's like completely it's completely idiotic and if you did swallow it everyone would know that's harmful right let me let me uh go to point number two government is accountable
Really, really important.
The whole basis of the Constitution was to give people, not tell people how to do things, but to give people in government responsibility and to have a mechanism for accountability.
That's what democracy is supposed to be.
It's a mechanism for accountability.
You don't like the people in office, they're not doing a good job, you elect new people.
But that requires that they be in charge of the people who work for government.
So now nobody's in charge.
So I wrote an essay, and I'm arguing this in Try Common Sense.
The civil service system, federal civil services, without any question, violates Article II of the Constitution because
because Congress subjected the president to collective bargaining in a law in 1978, which means he can't fire anybody, basically.
Well, there's a lot of learning, a lot of discussion by Madison early on.
Even the FDR was against that.
Yes.
If there's any power inherent in the executive, it's the power to hire and fire.
If you break that link in the chain, there is no accountability.
And you wonder why it doesn't matter whom you elect.
You keep electing new people, expecting things to work differently, and it's just the ship just sails on.
You know, it's like this democracy is run by dead people, right?
It's run by all the people who wrote all these laws 40, 50, you know, regulations 40, 50 years ago.
And you can't even fire the people for badly enforcing them.
You know, I think there was one place where I think the founders didn't see the future.
They didn't see a future where greedy, power-hungry people would gladly give their power up because they didn't want accountability.
Yes, and these these
divisions now, these giant bureaucracies where the Congress says, okay,
you guys make the laws.
No, that's your job.
You guys make the laws.
There is no accountability because who the hell do I complain to?
Right, right.
Ask yourself anything, any stupid thing.
Okay, who's responsible for that?
And the answer to that is nobody.
Correct.
Nobody.
Because, oh, the rule made me do it.
You know, it's that.
That's a system of democracy that's no longer functioning.
That's why it's got to get rebooted.
The third one, public schools have similar freedoms as charter schools.
What does that mean?
Oh, boy.
I mean, we have so bureaucratized public schools.
Over 20 states now have more non-instructional personnel than teachers.
So there are a bunch of people filling out forms.
That's where your tax dollars are going.
They're filling out forms instead of teaching the kids.
I mean, it's literally, combine that with special ed, and you've basically probably wasted about a third or more of the money
of the budget.
There's no reason in the world why local communities can't run their local schools the way they want to go.
Exactly right.
There's no reason in the world.
And by the way, there is.
Department of Education.
Right, right.
Well, the Department of Education needs to go.
And actually, the Trump administration has proposed merging it with the Labor Department, which I think actually makes a lot of sense.
But even if you have any role for the federal government, it ought to be as a distant trustee, making sure they don't
discriminate or something.
It shouldn't be getting involved in daily choices where the principal of one school in Brooklyn told me last year, she spends all Friday afternoon filling out forms.
saying that they did things they didn't do in order to protect the teachers from having to worry about all this bureaucracy.
And she has a very effective school.
So her job as an effective principal is to lie to the bureaucracy.
You know,
I have a collection of items from history, and one of my favorites is a shooting target of a teddy bear that was put out by Theodore Roosevelt, okay?
And
it's an engraving of a teddy bear,
and it's got targets all over him.
And he used this as a way to try to convince the schools all across America he wanted to have a shooting range in every school.
Now, to show you how much America has changed, they were not upset about the government saying you should have a shooting range and we should teach kids how to use guns.
They were outraged that the federal government thought that they had a role to tell them anything that they should be doing in their local community.
Can you imagine how much better people would feel about their local communities if they had actual input into how the schools ran and where bad teachers could be fired?
There was a teacher just this week that
said,
you know, I can't tell you that the Holocaust is even factual or real history.
They weren't fired.
They were just transferred to another job.
You know,
can we talk about accountability for one second?
Accountability in an organization, people think of it, and we naturally think of it as, let's get rid of the bad people, right?
And you do want to get rid of the bad people.
But the reason you need accountability in government and in schools and such is for a positive reason, which is that it's only when you know everybody else is in your group, your school or whatever, is going to be trying hard, that you feel good about trying hard yourself, that you have pride in your school, that you have the energy.
And if you know that job performance doesn't matter
in government or in school or stuff, what does that do to the energy?
It's like putting a hole in a balloon.
Every American has worked at a job where we have said, I don't know if that person has pictures of the boss with sheep or what it is.
but they should have been fired long ago.
And when they're not,
morale goes down and you never accomplish anything.
Um, we're going to come back in just a second.
Um, a fascinating uh conversation, I think, a great book that everyone should read: Try Common Sense: Replacing Failed Ideologies of the Left and the Right, Tri-Common Sense, it's by Philip K.
Howard.
More in just a second.
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