Best of the Program | Guests: John Lott, Bill O'Reilly, Ted Cruz & Eric Christen | 3/1/19

Alright, welcome to the podcast.

Today, Mr.

Glenn Beck will be live at CPAC.

You'll hear him talking

from the radio row there and doing the show from DC.

You can actually see the show and watch it back.

You can also see Glenn's speech that he had at CPAC this morning.

Subscribe to Blaze TV.

Go to Blazetv.com/slash Beck.

Use the promo code Beck and

you can get $10 off your subscription.

You see the show, see the TV show overnight.

You also get Steven Crowder and Mark Levin and Steve Dace and Pat Gray and all the big names.

So check it out.

Blazetv.com slash back.

Glenn has a couple of

interviews, talks to Blaze TV's own John Miller, our White House correspondent during the program.

Also talks to Ted Cruz, who comes on and discusses what to do with the border.

He's got a great idea what to do with the border and it doesn't require the Emergency Act.

So that would be kind of a nice improvement there.

We also have,

we're also talking about the debacle in California with the high-speed rail.

As they start pitching the Green New Deal and building trains everywhere, maybe we should look at California to see how that one's turning out, as we're about 10 times the projected cost already and almost none of it's built.

And we will also go through and talk about Glenn's message to CPAC: the future of this country and whether socialism is the right direction to go.

A little spoiler alert, he doesn't think it is.

That's all in today's podcast.

You're listening to the best of the Glen Back program.

All right, Glenn is down in CPAC right now.

Glenn, are you with us?

I am, Stu.

Thank you so much.

I'm very tiddly.

I wish you were here.

Oh, I.

Oh, I wish I was there too.

I really do.

Do you?

Actually, it's good to be be here because

the crowd is very young, dynamic, and I think wide awake.

You know, it was interesting.

I've never had to start a conference before and walk out where everybody's like, I can't believe I have to get up this early for this conference.

But people are here because they know the country is in real trouble.

They feel it.

And

the theme today, unbeknownst to me, is socialism.

That's what the CPAC started out with in

this opening video about socialism and how socialism is coming and what Ronald Reagan said about it.

And that's what my speech was about.

Did you get a chance to see it?

I did.

It seemed like it went really well.

It was well received.

You went through a bunch of, I mean, we're going to play a little bit of it coming up later in the program, but you really went into socialism.

And, you know, one of the things you've talked about for a long time is this sort of conversion of the left from people who deny their socialists and say you're a racist for calling them socialists.

And that conversion to taking the mask off and saying, you know what, capitalism doesn't work.

I am a socialist.

I'm proud of it.

I'm not denying it anymore.

Here we are.

And, I mean, that's America today.

That is what we're seeing with the Democratic Party.

Yeah, I remember saying that while I was on Fox, I remember saying there's going to come a time when they're going to take the mask off because they want to tell you.

They want, they're dying to tell you that capitalism doesn't work, you Cretan.

And really, if exactly what I had in my mind is exactly Ocasio-Cortez and

what she said, I think it was on 60 Minutes, where she's like, yeah, I'm a socialist, you know, because this isn't working.

This isn't working.

So if I guess being for, you know, a better system and justice and fairness,

you know, if that's what that, that's a socialist, then yeah, I'm a socialist.

Exactly what I thought that they would start to say.

And now they're saying it in droves.

But as I pointed out in the speech,

capitalism is about justice and fairness.

Socialism is about equality.

Now, equality sounds nice.

We're all for equality, but

therefore equality of outcome.

And equality of outcome does not exist in nature.

It's not like all lions are created equal.

No, some lions kill and eat other lions.

It is unnatural.

You got to remember,

progressives and socialists try to take man

and

perfect him into a God.

Because they don't believe in God, they have to

perfect man, and man can be a god.

Government can be a god.

And that's just not true.

Our founders understood, we're not gods, we're the farthest thing from it.

We're animals, and there's a natural instinct in us.

And so the systems that work are the ones that try to protect equal

justice, not equal outcome.

And

what's happened is we have social justice and equal outcomes.

Well, that's not going to do anything but provide misery.

Just misery.

Yeah.

And we're seeing it.

And you talked about it.

Socialism, as I said today, socialism works.

It does.

I know everybody says it doesn't, but it does.

It does exactly what it is

designed to do.

And you can see it in Venezuela.

What does socialism always do?

It takes those who are the ranchers, who know better than everybody else, and it puts them in charge of the farm or the ranch.

It gives them all of the benefits.

They create fences because the cattle and the sheep,

they're just too stupid.

They're going to hurt themselves.

And I know what's best.

And so

they will milk the cows and slaughter the sheep and get richer and richer, take all of the benefits and keep all that cattle just breeding, just consuming so they can live off that fatted calf.

And then what?

If there is a bull or a cow or a sheep that just will not remain in the fence, they got to kill that one.

They got to slaughter it.

If it won't play by the rules, if it doesn't understand that the rancher is in charge, they got to get rid of it.

And meanwhile, what is socialism doing for the elite?

Right now,

Maduro is taking gold and shipping it.

Another eight tons of Venezuelan gold has been shipped away.

For who?

For who?

For him.

And Chavez, his daughter is a multi-millionaire.

How?

What did she do besides being the daughter of the leader of Venezuela that raped the country

so all it does it accomplishes everything that it is set out to do make the elite rich and in control control the masses and let them all be equal equally miserable equally poor and eventually equally dead

you you mentioned something you kind of described this in a way I hadn't heard you describe it before

with socialism and this idea of equality and how socialism targets equality,

you know, but it makes us all equally poor.

You mentioned holding up the socialist yardstick to

measure capitalism, and how we've kind of given in to that over time.

We've given in to this idea that we're supposed to say, well, yes, we swear it will make you equal eventually, when that's not really the idea of what capitalism is supposed to provide at the end.

Right.

We say, oh, you know, capitalism creates inequality.

Yes.

Yes.

And it's time to just say it.

Yes, it does.

And that's a good thing.

Inequality of outcome.

Because if you try to use the socialist measuring stick, which by the way, has no numbers on it, I'd like to say that it's a metric

measuring stick, but it's not even that.

There's no measuring stick.

This system has never worked as they described.

It's never been implemented.

It doesn't exist, nor can or will it ever exist.

It's like measuring things against the fantasy unicorn.

Well, your horse can't do what my unicorn does.

Well, where's your unicorn?

Well, I'm going to get it in a minute.

If I could just get your horse out of the way, maybe I could find my unicorn.

You can't.

Unicorns don't exist.

And so we're comparing our horses, if you will, to their unicorn, which doesn't exist.

Why are we playing this game?

Why are we comparing ourselves to a system that is a fantasy?

I'll compare this system to Venezuela.

I'll compare this system to Russia.

I'll compare our system to Cuba.

But what they'll say is, well, that's not really, I mean, they didn't do it right.

Okay, show me where they did it right.

Sweden, that's not socialism.

That's a capitalist system with a giant welfare state.

That's what that is.

So again, give me the socialist utopia that I can compare it to.

You can't produce one because it's a unicorn.

No, I mean, you can, everyone can sit here and say, let's measure this against the perfect thing.

The only fair thing to compare American capitalism is to is every other nation in the history of the earth.

And if you do that,

American capitalism looks pretty damn sweet.

When you look, Stu, and we've talked about this before, when you look at

the actual stats that because of the free market system,

because of the free market, we now have

fewer children dying before the age of five than ever before.

In fact, the death of children under the age of five has dropped by half since 1990.

Now,

what caused that?

Sweden?

Or the American and free market ingenuity that Americans and the American system has unleashed?

When you look at everybody, you don't hear that stat.

You don't hear that people are living much longer, much healthier all around the world.

You don't hear that capitalism has, yes, made

the world more unequal because we have lifted billions of people out of poverty.

And there are still people in poverty.

And there are more rich people than ever before.

But we can work on the people in poverty.

Why tear down the rich?

When you know that 70% of the people believe health care and poverty has gotten worse, but just because of the life-saving improvements that have happened just in the last two decades, it is the equivalent of averting 27 major plane crashes full of children every single day.

Why are we focused on the plane crash?

Because there's no bad news in the free market.

When you look at it and step back, when you're looking at, well, look at this, this is a problem.

Yeah, yeah, he's got a bad hangnail.

Yeah, he might have even a broken foot.

America and capitalism has lost its moorings for sure.

But

it is still the best system.

And if we would just recognize that and come back to our center, the whole world changes.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

Like listening to this podcast?

If you're not a subscriber, become one now on iTunes.

And while you're there, do us a favor and rate the

Where is John Lott?

Let me bring John Lott in.

John is here.

Thank you, Phoenix.

John, come on in.

John is probably the leading expert on weapons and guns and

all the stats off the top of his head.

John,

it's been a disturbing, really week with what just passed in Congress

with H.R.

8 and I think it's HR 11-12.

But this is just the beginning, isn't it?

Right.

Well, I mean, these are just ways to make it very costly for law-abiding citizens to be able to own guns and to deny it.

And it's going to make people less safe.

I mean, we're here in Washington, D.C.

It costs $125 to privately transfer a gun in Washington, D.C.

That may not stop you or I from being able to go and do it, but there are poor people, the very people that my research indicates benefit the most, who are most likely to be victims of violent crime, poor minorities who live in high-crime urban areas.

It may be great if the police were there all the time, but they're not.

And if, and the system that they have, we keep on hearing this week that there have been three and a half million dangerous, prohibited people that have been stopped from buying guns because of background checks.

That's simply not true.

What they should say is there have been three and a half million initial denial, and that something around 99% of those are mistakes.

Wow.

And the thing is, it primarily hurts minorities.

So here's what I'm concerned about because I think all of those are valid, but I think they're doing this, and at the same time, they're taking a back door by going in through the financial system and telling Citibank and others, don't do business with gun manufacturers or gun stores.

If they close down and say, you have to transfer at a gun store and then make it impossible for gun stores to operate,

how are you ever going to be able to obtain a gun, sell a gun, buy anything?

No, I mean, I agree.

There's many faceted ways that they're trying to make it costly for people, particularly poor people, to be able to go and get guns to own.

And it's also, I think, a step towards registration that they're going to be setting up where if, you know, right now the bills that they have say that they can't put together a registration list, but the dealers have to keep records of all the transfers as well as the sales that they make.

Five years or six years from now, if Democrats have control of Congress and the presidency, they could change the law that says all those records that you digitize, send into the federal government, and they have an instant national registration list.

That is exactly what happened.

For law-abiding people, anyway.

That's what happened in the Weimar Republic.

Well, we've already seen California and New York and Connecticut and Chicago places where they've used registration lists that they've already had in order to demand that people turn in guns that they had in those places.

So it's,

you know, I, look, I've unfortunately come to the belief that they really don't want people to own guns.

And you can see this in lots of ways.

Socialists never do.

Venezuela lost their rights to a gun in 2012.

Right.

And you can see what happened to crime rates afterwards.

And of course, now people aren't able to defend themselves against the government that's there.

But I'll give you a couple examples.

A few years ago, when Colorado was passing its background checks on private transfers, I got a call from some state legislators asking me what amendment I would put up.

And my suggestion was to put up an amendment that would exempt people below the poverty level from having to pay the new state tax on transferring guns.

You think that would be a no-brainer.

But with the exception of two pro-gun Democrats in the state House, every other Democrat voted against exempting people below the poverty level from paying the new state tax.

How many taxes can you think of where Democrats will fight tooth and nail against exempting people people below the poverty level from having to pay it?

Look at the bill that they just passed.

You have to do a background check on each gun that's transferred.

Let's say I leave somebody 10 guns.

Rather than just paying one $25 background check and do it all in one lump moment there, they make you have to spend 10 times that.

You have to spend, like, if you're doing a transfer in D.C., you'd have to spend $1,250.

What's that?

That's craziness.

What's the point of counting a separate background check on each gun?

You're doing it on the individual.

Not that.

And so, you know, it's just all these little things when you read through there, it's pretty clear that they're just trying to make it costly.

Look,

do you think, John,

the mask has come off of the progressives on

socialism?

You know, when I said socialism, you know, the people in the White House are socialists.

I was called a racist.

And I said at that time, there's going to come a time where they'll take the the mask off and say, You damn right I'm a socialist because this doesn't work.

Do you think we're close to the time when

socialists now in the Democratic Party will stand up and say, You damn right I'm trying to take your gun because guns are dangerous and it won't work.

Right.

Well, I mean, you go and you talk to these people and you say every law that they have makes it more costly, and there's like no end to the number of laws that they would be willing to push for this.

And,

you know, you have things like red flag laws that are getting passed.

I don't know, it's like 14 states now that have these laws.

It's kind of like the old movie Minority Report, the Tom Cruise movie, where they're trying to predict whether somebody's going to commit a crime.

But they don't even list in many of these laws specific things.

They just, it's kind of like the old definition of pornography.

I'll know it when I see it.

And so you can have a neighbor or a friend or a relative or somebody else go and lodge a complaint and without any experts, without just simply on the basis that somebody feels that you might possibly be a danger, the judge can go and take away your guns for up to 21 days, depending upon the state.

And all they have to do is meet what's called reasonable cause or probable cause, which reasonable cause is just a little bit more than a hunch that you would have it in terms of a standard.

Or they could take away your gun for a year after a hearing.

But it used to be that you'd have to have some experts.

Yes.

And now it's just kind of feelings that people have whether or not I predict.

And I was on a panel for

uniform state laws.

They were considering putting together a model law for this, and they'd have people who are running these laws in different states come in.

And I was saying, well, so how do you predict whether somebody's going to go and commit a crime?

And they'll say, well, we look at their past criminal history and say, well, you already have laws on that.

If you're a felon, even if it's a non-violent felon, you lose your right to have a gun.

What they do is they don't want to have specific things.

They want to say, well, if you're arrested but not convicted, or a complaint but not even arrest.

Yeah.

And they want to make it so you don't even have to have an

adjudication that you were guilty of something before they can take away your guns.

John, thank you for everything that you do.

Thank you for everything you've done.

You were instrumental in the book, Control.

Well, it's because you're out there and you're able to get this type of information out to people.

That's so you have it all in your head.

Well, I just feel so frustrated because there's so many of these rules that I don't think even a lot of the congressmen that are voting on this understand the implications for these laws.

I agree, John.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

You bet.

We'll talk again.

In fact, we've got to do another special on guns, and John will be the first that we'll need to invite.

This is the best of the Glenbeck program.

Bill O'Reilly.

Hello, Bill.

Beck, you're in D.C., huh?

I am in D.C.

Gave a speech at CPAC earlier this morning about socialism.

And I can't believe, Bill, where we are.

I made a list yesterday on the air of all of the things that these socialists and Nancy Pelosi and the people who are running for president, I can't think of

something that they haven't wholeheartedly embraced that

America has never been for, with reparations being the latest.

Yeah, because the media used to criticize people who were loons,

and now it doesn't.

So you can,

that's why I said they're out of their closet and in your face because they don't,

if you are an extremist, and certainly the progressive movement has gotten to that territory, 10 years ago, you were,

but not anymore.

So they can say what they want, do what they want,

no criticism from their team, and that's what you're seeing.

And I think the media is doing them such a grave disservice.

I mean, you know, the media is in on it.

They want it.

But they're doing them such a grave disservice because

no one is checking them.

So I think they believe that they're in touch with the average American.

But when you talk about slave reparations, you talk about killing a baby shortly after birth, you talk about a tax of 70%,

you talk about

universal health care.

I mean, ending capitalism.

The American people are not for that, are they?

No, but you're making a mistake in the sense that you think the media supports all this crazy stuff.

They don't really support it.

The six companies that are running all of the information flow in America, they don't want socialism.

They don't want...

Disney doesn't want

Mickey to pay 70%

of their ticket receipts.

at Disney World and Disneyland.

They don't want that.

Okay, but

they have no

problem

embracing this crew

because of Trump.

See, if Trump weren't president, if there were another Republican who wasn't quite as flamboyant, I don't think you would be seeing all this.

But because Trump's in the White House, this has opened the door to madness.

Madness.

And

the American people don't want any of this, and that's why this is actually helping President Trump.

So

I am,

in a way, I'm thrilled that the masks have come off, and they finally will just say what they're actually for.

I think that's really good.

The problem, though, is, Bill, if you're right that this is really about Trump, if Trump loses, if the economy goes down or if something happens during the election and he does lose this election, we then

have a group of politicians.

I mean, mean, anyone so far that is announced will take us straight line to socialism.

And if they control the House and the Senate and the White House, they will move on these things.

And

it's lights out in two years.

I can't imagine

happening.

I can see Trump losing, but he'd lose to somebody like Biden,

not to somebody like Camilla Harris.

But

you don't think Biden would move that ball?

But But

I think if you look at the abortion poll, for example, after the craziness of Andrew Cuomo and the governor of Virginia, it just flipped.

Most Americans say, you know, enough.

I'm not supporting any of this.

And I think that's what you're going to see.

And if Trump can discipline himself a little bit more, he's now, you know, really, really getting it now.

But just float above it and then run your campaign in a methodical way,

got a good chance to win.

I talked to some leadership of some of the biggest voices

out there today.

And I don't want to, it was private conversations backstage, and so I don't want to say who said this, but they are concerned that it is going to be nothing but investigations and smears from here on out,

and which will weaken people from the ability to be able to actually stand up and fight.

Beck, I'm going to ask you a few things that I think you have to pass along to your CPAC pals.

All right?

Okay.

Here's the first thing.

And I said this on billorilly.com last night.

If I were President Trump, I would tell all my children and any employee of the Trump organization to take the Fifth Amendment if called in front of Congress.

That is not a fair and impartial body any longer.

It is not a court of law, but you can be prosecuted if

they can trap you into perjury.

Do not say a word.

Sit there like they did in The Godfather and just say, we're not talking because we don't believe this is a fair proceeding.

That'll shut down all of the hysteria off

Cohen.

Secondly, if CPAC does not organize a counter group to the boycotters of Move On, Media Matters, Bonner Group, all of these people, they will lose the culture war.

They've got to be an organized conservative group that can come out and say to Mercedes-Benz, if you pull your sponsorship because these people are threatening you on the far left, we're going to tell our people that you're doing it.

There has to be a central organization from the the conservative side in this country to fight the George Soros-funded groups that are running wild, threatening freedom of speech in this country.

I will tell you, Bill, that I will tell you that that is already, I'm beginning to see that already in action.

People don't know about it yet, but I see that force already

in the late stages of being put together.

It is good.

We're going to going to take a.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

I love your idea of El Chapo paying for the wall.

Love it.

Well, it is simple common sense.

It is: let's use money criminally forfeited from El Chapo, from other drug lords, the billions that they made illegally trafficking across the border, and let's fund and pay for the wall doing that.

He could pay, really, his assets would pay for all of it, wouldn't he?

Potentially, if we could track them all down and find them, they would.

How much do you think we could actually track down?

Well, where the idea came from is this is a little over a year ago when we were debating the wall, and Democrats were complaining it costs too much.

Right.

Now, set aside, I think Democrats have never in the history of the universe thought anything cost too much.

I know, I know.

But at the time, the estimates for the cost of the wall were between $14 and $20 billion.

At the very same time, the Department of Justice estimates that El Chapo's global criminal net worth is about $14 billion.

And so I saw a natural and even elegant symmetry.

Well, that's what asset forfeiture is supposed to be for.

Right.

And mind you, this is criminal asset forfeiture.

It's not civil forfeiture, which has been abused many times.

This is after, in El Chapo's case, he has 10 criminal convictions.

And look, it's just like if

a drug dealer in Dallas has a Ferrari and he gets convicted of being a drug dealer, they seize the Ferrari.

That's criminal forfeiture.

In this case, El Chapo's got a lot more than a Ferrari, and there's a justice to using the billions that he made trafficking across our border illegally to prevent the next narco-trafficker from doing the same.

So Mike Pence was just speaking here, and he just said, we are going to build the wall.

Mark my words, the wall will be built.

You agree with that?

I do agree with that.

It is going to happen.

We're going to get the job done.

And I commend the president for standing up and leading in this issue.

How is he going to do it?

Well,

so there's a lot of focus on the emergency declaration.

And your stance on that is...

Well, let's take it one at a time.

I don't know what's going to happen in the Senate on that.

It is going to be a vigorous discussion the next couple of weeks.

But the good news is, regardless of what happens on that, the wall is going to be built.

Why?

So the president said, and DHS said, they need $5.7 billion.

Well, let's do a little bit of math.

And I'm sorry, I know math is terrible for radio, so I don't know.

I know that's all.

But let's do a little bit anyway.

Congress appropriated $1.4 billion.

Available free and clear.

Nobody disputes to build the wall.

That can build about 50 miles worth of wall.

Beyond that, the president has announced that he is going to take about $600 million in drug forfeiture money that he has and use that to build the wall.

That takes you to $2 billion, and nobody disputes.

He has clear, indisputable legal authority to do that.

Beyond that, there's a second provision.

It's called 10 U.S.C.

Section 284

that gives the Defense Department the ability

to

expend funds to stop narco-traffickers, to stop drug trafficking, and in particular, and it explicitly says in statute to build fences and border barriers.

And so that's in the U.S.

Code.

So

why are we even debating this national emergency thing?

It is a very good question.

The fund that that statute applies to has about $4 billion in it.

The administration has announced they're going to take $2.5 billion from that.

So that takes you to about $4.4, $4.5.

If they took another $1.2 from that fund, we'd be at $5.7, we'd be done, and you wouldn't need a penny from the emergency declaration that's causing this big fight.

How do you feel about the emergency declaration?

You know, At this point, I'm still, I'm reviewing the legal authorities.

I'm reviewing the arguments from the administration.

I agree that the border is a crisis.

I've seen it firsthand.

You and I have been down on the border together.

It is a crisis.

People's lives are being taken.

And all of the Democrats and media folks that are saying, oh, it's not a crisis.

It's not a big deal.

They claimed it was a

humanitarian crisis when Obama was in.

It is.

Yes.

That being said, as you know, I'm a constitutionalist.

I believe every president, Republican or Democrat, has to follow the Constitution and follow the laws.

So I'm studying the laws carefully on that.

And we're having right now in the Senate a vigorous debate.

My hope of where we end up in the outcome is: number one, we build the wall and we get every penny of the 5.7 billion that the president says we need to build the wall.

But number two, I hope we don't set a precedent for the next Democratic president to abuse executive power and declare emergencies.

Global warming and gun control and health care and what have you.

So I was just talking to Bill O'Reilly last hour, and he said, I said, Bill, we are on the edge.

Everything that you've talked about, everything I've talked about for the last 15, 20 years, it's here now.

And we could see a socialist

president,

Senate, and

House.

And they'll take it.

They will shut it down.

It's their turn.

They believe in what they're talking about.

Correct.

And they're that nutty.

I mean, what has happened to the Democratic Party is both frightening and really dangerous for this country.

It's not good for one of the two major parties in this country to get so extreme and so out of touch with the American people.

I've never seen anything move so fast.

If we don't get the destruction of life,

we're not talking about abortion anymore.

We're talking about infanticide.

We don't get that right.

The creation of life through AI

and this socialist thing, its lights out.

Look, the Democratic Party, they are now the party of late-term abortion and infanticide.

They are now the party of open borders.

Not only do they oppose security in the border, they're now, their presidential candidates are saying, tear down what border walls we have.

And abolish ICE.

Abolish ICE.

They're now the party of socialism and 70%

tax rates.

Right.

Plus, reparations now they're talking about.

They're seriously talking about reparations.

They're now the party that chased Amazon out of New York City because they didn't want 25,000 jobs, and then they attacked Amazon on the way out the door.

This is unhealthy.

This is extreme.

You take this Green New Deal, which every one of the Democratic presidential candidates is falling all over themselves to support.

The Green New Deal, it's incoherent on its face, but if you actually take it at face value,

it would ban every airplane on Earth.

It would ban every automobile on Earth.

It would kill every cow.

But beyond that, though, if you actually read the bill, which I know you have, it says clearly to change our financial structure and our system to a system that is revolved around social justice.

Well, that's the end of capitalism.

That's the end of the free market.

And look, all of this is driven fundamentally.

The Democrats are a party.

of hatred right now.

The unifying theme in the Democratic Party is they hate Donald Trump.

And that burning, blinding emotion has driven out common sense, it's driven out reason.

Everything is justified because Trump.

Yeah, that's dangerous for our country.

It is.

It is.

Ted, great to see you.

Thank you very much.

The best of the Glenn Bank program.

This sort of popping up of socialism in a time where you're seeing the results of socialism so clearly in Venezuela and other places.

And I always find that to be very strange, how something can become popular right at the moment it's being shown it's a failure.

Another example of this is the Green New Deal.

Part of the literature around the Green New Deal includes this: totally overhauling transportation by massively expanding electric vehicle manufacturing, building charging stations everywhere, and building out high-speed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.

Create affordable public transit available to all with the goal of replacing every combustion engine vehicle.

Now, I can't even describe.

I don't even know.

There's not even a number of trains.

that would no there's no number of trains on earth that could make air travel uh stop becoming necessary.

It's just air travel is better than train travel in every way, in almost every single circumstance.

But it's amazing to see that now they're pushing for high-speed rail all over the country, while at the same time, sort of the marquee attempt at giving high-speed rail to an area that can use it was already approved many years ago and is in the middle of one of the most catastrophic collapses in public history.

In California, they promised a high-speed rail to take you, I think it was from what, Los Angeles or San Diego, all the way to San Francisco.

And we've seen it's become a huge disaster.

I want to walk you through how this has gone so far with Eric Christian.

He's the executive director of the Coalition for Fair Employment.

Eric, welcome to the program.

Stuart, good to be with you again, brother.

Greetings from the People's Republic of California, where no dream is too big and no cost is too great to achieve that dream.

It's true.

Whether the dream is a nightmare or not is not material in this particular conversation.

It's about the intention, yeah, absolutely.

Eric has been basically the guy who has been fighting against this train from the very beginning.

Can you take us kind of through how this thing started and all of the cost estimates?

And take us through this story because it really is an amazing journey.

Well, just to be clear, I have been a guy fighting this, not even close to being the guy.

There are a group of farmers and citizens down in the Central Valley that have really

been fighting this with their wallets, with their daily, you know, lives devoted towards stopping this government grab of their land, of their businesses,

fighting it in violation of the law that was passed by the people of California in,

you know, 10 years ago that approved an initial $10 billion in funding for the concept of what would be known as high-speed rail taking people from San Diego to San Francisco in 3.2 seconds

actually it was about two hours

it passed narrowly and since then it's been all downhill

it's it's basically been all downhill since then And what we have now is a project that has grown from what they estimated would be about $60 billion.

It's now approaching $100 billion.

We know it'll be much more because all these projects always are, as studies have shown.

And what we're finding out is happening is it's receiving, in just the past two months, it's received three significant

blows.

The first was the Gridley Warren

report that showed that instead of actually paying for itself, the reason you don't have any private investment, which the authors promised there would be if we approved this, is because they understand there's not going to be

this isn't going to be a money-making operation.

And sure enough, this Grinley Warren report shows that in fact it's going to have to be massively subsidized because nobody's going to want to sit in a train for nine hours from Merced and head over to the Bay Area or from Bakersfield to the Bay Area, spend nine hours of their day on a train doing that.

Nobody's going to do that.

And since they've already admitted that it's not going to be going from San Diego, let alone Los Angeles, up to the Bay Area, they're starting it in the middle of the Central Valley because who doesn't want to take a train from Madeira to Fresno?

I mean, that's really where the population of California is.

If you look at travel books, I mean, that is the ultimate dream of any traveler.

That trip does.

That's about the ultimate California dream, right up in Central Valley.

But since nobody's going to want to do that, this report showed that it's going to have to be massively subsidized, which is in violation of the law that was passed.

The second thing that happened was that Governor Newsom, as liberal as he is and as far left as he is, he had a moment of honesty in his state of the state speech,

which he called to question the whole concept of a San Diego to San Francisco line.

He said, look, let's be real.

This isn't going to happen.

There aren't the resources for it.

It's already massively over budget, behind schedule.

So let's just finish up what we've started and then we'll see where we are.

Well, he immediately got blowback from the trade unions, which have a project labor agreement on this, making it a union-only project, of course, because nobody benefits from government large S like special interest groups do.

They know how to latch on.

And in California, there's nobody at the tit of government like labor unions.

They really take the cake when it comes to that.

So they gave him some blowback, and he was forced to backtrack a wee bit, but he did have a moment of clarity there.

The third thing that happened was on February 19th the Federal Railroad Administration sent the state of California a letter saying and listing out in four succinct bullet points exactly why they were revoking their cooperative agreement that they had with the state

because it's violating the law that was passed by the people in any number of ways.

It's over budget.

It's behind schedule.

It's not in fact going to adhere to the time

the timeliness that it said it was going to get people from place to place.

So they're essentially taking almost a billion dollars back now and threatening to withhold it four days from now.

Four days from now,

California is going to lose that billion dollars that's very much needed just to keep the current scheme that they have going, going.

So these are three big blows to something that, again, was initially approved by the voters because it sounded really super,

really super duper.

And it's gone downhill since then because as we've learned, you know, in Texas, you're doing it the right way.

You're doing it with private investment where you have market forces being brought to bear that cuts out the nonsense and the lying and forces people to have to be accountable.

Here in California, we're doing it where it's a government-only project and

it's getting government-only results.

It's like the DMV and the post office on steroids and the results are predictable.

So that's kind of where we are

in a nutshell.

And by the way, most Californians are showing opposing this now.

Of course.

Of course.

And this is the problem

with the way that this happens.

You know, 51% of people vote for something, whether it's realistic or not, and it gets approved.

I mean, going back to this, because

the initial approval had

certain requirements that had to be met by this train.

I think it was two hours or so from San Diego to San Francisco.

Correct.

They have now admitted, right, that there's no chance that that's possible.

They also said it was going to cost about $60 billion.

It was just $10 billion when they voted on it, but then it was $60 billion.

It was then up to $100 billion, and it's going to be even higher than that.

It was promised that there would be no subsidizing once they got the thing built.

We now know it's not going to pay for itself.

There's been no private investment

that was

promised.

It seems like California writes these laws and these initiatives, and they think if they write it in the form of a law, it will become reality.

Like there's some magic trick that happens to physics

when a legal thing is passed and the state says it's going to happen.

That mindset is got to be just killing the budget of California.

Well,

my wife has a saying.

My wife commands 5 Air Force Squadron.

She's a colonel.

And

she

is in charge of a lot of people who are the tip of the sword right now in in the fight against terrorism.

And she has not a lot of time for bovine scatology when it comes to ES, as we like to call it, when it comes to,

we need to get the job done.

How do we do it?

And one of their operating principles is,

okay, you have a plan.

You have a step that you wish to take.

But what are the second and third and fourth order effects?

What is going to happen as a result of that?

You know, don't just say we're going to do this and this is going to be achieved.

You have to understand, you know, when they plan this, do you really think the airlines are not going to adjust their fares and lower them in order to keep the market share that they have to keep people from riding trains?

There was no assumption of that based in the model that the government created in developing this.

And that's the problem with government planning: there's never any understanding of second and third-order effects.

There's never any contemplation that the market will somehow bend and adapt to try and keep their market share, in this case, the airlines or car makers who are going to still want to sell cars in the state.

And all of their assumptions, as soon as Penn is put to paper, are out the window because they just aren't based on reality.

They aren't based on real market realities.

And that's what's so frustrating about living in California is, as I kind of quipped when I opened up your segment,

no dream is too big and no cost is too great to achieve those dreams.

And

it really is the fact.

fact.

One thing I don't understand, and you mentioned this before, that, you know, look, it's approved largely because it sounds cool.

It would be cool to have a cool train and we could take that up the coastline.

That would be great.

But I mean,

they're fine, right?

But if you watch the documentary series, Back to the Future, they go on a train in the one they go in reverse in time.

It's 1885 when they're on a train.

We have planes.

Planes get you faster from a big location to another big central location.

Cars get you faster and buses even get you there to a specific location more efficiently.

Why this obsession with trains, this old technology, that yes, it moves a little bit faster than it used to, but it's still tying two

set locations to each other.

When populations move, there's very little you can do about it except spend another $100 billion to go to the new place.

It just is completely inefficient and we have this weird fascination with trains.

Isn't it weird how progressives seem to always view the future as having to go back to 19th century technology, be it solar or be it, well, in the solar's case, let's early 1 BC technology.

Yeah.

Wind power, trains.

It's very, very strange.

Newer technologies to keep, give us power we need, like nuclear, which would do away with essentially CO2 output.

They don't want to have anything to do with that.

Nope.

But they want us to be on solar and wind, which if it's cloudy and there's no wind, wind, you're in trouble.

And when it comes to transportation, let's be honest, and this is getting, you know, from a more macro thirty thousand foot level why, the question why.

And I really think at the end of the day, it's about control.

It's about wanting to control people's movements.

The automobile really ushered in an area of freedom.

It's only been about a hundred years where this has been something that humans have been able to do.

Because our country's so large, it's been unique to America in the sense that we really have these vast wide open spaces that we're able to travel around freely.

You know, it's like for the line from Red October where,

you know, the captain is speaking to a second in command and he's talking about when they defect.

You know, he wants to live in Montana and he says,

you know,

I want to travel from state to state.

No papers required, right?

And Ramos,

the captain played by Sean Connery, goes, no papers needed.

Because

in the Soviet Union, of course, they needed papers to travel everywhere.

And I think the left, ultimately, it's about control and trains.

You can control your point A to point B.

Of course, the second and third-order effect question is: okay, when I get to point B, how do I get to where I'm going?

How do I get to my house?

How do I get to my place of business?

Horror copper?

It really is amazing.

You know, Eric, I've never thought of it that way from a control perspective.

That's really interesting.

I wish we had more time.

We're out of it.

I want to get, you know, we should also at some point get talk again about what the Trump administration is trying to do, taking back a bunch of this money as well.

But we'll get into that next time.

Eric Christian, the executive director of the Coalition for Fair Employment and Construction.

Thanks so much, Eric.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

I never thought of it that way.

That is a great point.

The Blaze Radio Network

on Demand.