Best of the Program | Guests: Dave Isay, David Harsanyi & Sara Place | 2/12/19

Wow, it's Tuesday and what a great podcast lined up for you.

First of all, oh, the mistakes, the mistakes, the learning opportunities that are just ahead of you on this podcast.

This is going to be like you could just listen to this podcast and then have a degree from Harvard.

That's how much education you're going to find.

Yeah, you're going to learn a lot of things to not do.

And we start with Congresswoman Omar's apology.

It's a great apology.

Wow.

She was learning.

We really learned an awful lot.

Also, David Harsani is here to tell us about the Green New Deal

and then the panic on Brexit.

You know, they're stockpiling body bags?

They are.

Yeah.

And this is a conversation that you probably should be exposed to because we have some questions on the body bags and the horror of living in Portland today.

It's one of the most dangerous times to ever be alive.

If you live in Portland, it certainly is.

You will not believe what those poor souls have to go through right now, all on today's podcast.

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

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So Congresswoman Omar from Minnesota is.

There's a little misunderstanding.

There was a little misunderstanding.

Oh, she had no idea.

No, she didn't know.

She did not.

She did not know.

This happens from time to time.

People aren't perfect.

And people have to get time to be able to learn about different things in the world.

There's a lot of new concepts for people.

Right.

Did you know, Glenn, that in the past,

Jews have had some issues, and some people have not liked them?

This is all news to me.

Well, let me just read.

Anti-Semitism is real, and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-Semitic tropes.

Did you know?

I had no idea.

I had no idea there were tropes out there, like

Jews use money to influence people and control the world.

I had never heard of that before.

That's probably

one of the smaller tropes, don't you think?

Oh, I think so.

Yeah.

My intention was never to

offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole.

Oh, no.

We always have to be willing to step back and think through criticism, just as I expect people to hear me when others attack me for my identity.

This is why I unequivocally apologize.

Now, it's interesting because she

is using this opportunity of her own

anti-Semitism to point out that she's also a victim.

She's also a victim, Glenn.

She gets attacked all the time.

All the time she gets attacked.

And she hopes people listen to her.

Now, look, as a Palestini or as a woman who is, what's her background?

Because I'm getting control.

She's Muslim.

She's Muslim.

How could she possibly in her life have come up with someone saying something anti-Semitic?

No.

It's incredibly unlikely that at any time

in her background, would she ever come across someone else with an opinion like that?

It's just not, it's not

a thing.

She has nobody around her ever in her life.

She has never heard as a Muslim anything that might be anti-Semitic.

In fact, she skips the parts of the Quran where it's like, oh, rocks, cry out.

There's a Jew hiding behind me.

Oh, trees, cry out.

She avoids those things.

Good for her.

She doesn't know.

But she does say she unequivocally apologizes.

At the same time, I reaffirm the problematic role of lobbyists in our politics.

Wait,

didn't she say it was unequivocal?

Yeah, it was unequivocal, but she's quivocating here just a bit.

She just wants to point out that

Jews are influencing our politics with their money.

So basically, she's saying she apologizes for any possible offense.

She wants you to know.

Let me summarize.

She wants you to know, Stu, that anti-Semitism is real.

There are real problems.

She wants to point out that there are real problems.

Unequivocally, real problems with anti-Semitism, but perhaps they wouldn't be so bad if there weren't so many Jews.

That makes sense because it's true.

I mean, if there were less Jews, maybe the problem would be

slightly less.

It would be less.

You know what I I mean?

And here's Linda Sarsour to tell us more.

Now, Linda Sarsour.

This is unbelievable.

I mean, that is not the character witness you need at this time.

No, I love this.

Linda, a women's march leader, Linda Sarsour, rushes to Representative Omar's defense.

I'm thinking, with friends like this, who needs enemies?

Yeah, you don't know, Linda.

No, back away, back away.

Now, we remember Linda because Linda was the one in the women's march that we told you just recently as it was falling apart.

That, remember, she was meeting with some Jewish women at the very beginning of the women's march, and she was you know, she was

perhaps explaining some of these Jewish tropes, these anti-Jewish tropes

to the Jewish women there.

It sounded like she was being very anti-Semitic, but I'm sure she was learning.

Anyway, she said, I will not be silenced in the face of attacks, harassment, and targeted policing of speech.

So wait, Linda Sarsseur

is concerned about targeted speech.

Very concerned about it.

Now, sure, her entire organization exists to

get people fired for things that they've said online.

But, you know, though, she's very concerned about the targeted speech thing.

And she's a great character witness.

I know, like, if I

knew someone who was accused of sexual harassment, I would want Harvey Weinstein to jump right in and defend.

Right?

Right in there.

Please, Harvey, jump in.

Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on just a second.

I'm receiving a message from

beyond.

Hang on, I'm just trying to translate this as

A

D.

Is that a Ouija board?

O

L

F

H.

Okay.

I'm getting some sort of message.

Somebody wants to communicate from beyond that is telling us that she's okay.

Oh, good.

She's okay.

She's got support here in this life and beyond, according to the Ouija board.

That's good to hear today.

So, anyway,

she says she is not going to stand by and see attacks and harassment and targeted policing of speech

from a black Muslim woman elected official, our sister,

sister Omar, in the name of combating anti-Semitism,

we can stand up for Congresswoman Omar, knowing her record and what she stands for.

She's been in Congress for like several weeks, so her record is very, very,

very, very clear.

Yeah, she definitely has a record.

The record's not in Congress.

It's been the things that she's said over her lifetime, which indicate perhaps, maybe she has heard some of these tropes before.

Maybe, maybe, just the slight possibility that what she's saying now is complete bull crap.

There's a possibility of it.

No.

I know.

It's an outlandish possibility.

I mean, she's found humor in so many situations, Glenn.

So many wonderful situations.

Like when she was talking about Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah in 2013,

she was fantastic.

Let's listen to some of this.

A product of this sensationalized media.

You know, you have these sound bites and you have these words, and everybody says it with such an

intensity.

And so it must mean, it must hold a bigger meaning.

It sounds strange and weird.

I remember when I was in college, I took a terrorism class.

Is there a such thing?

Yeah, there was.

So you go, there is a lab for that?

There was a class that used to be.

Do you go to lab?

No.

For our field rabbit.

You learned the ideology of

how do you do that.

And so

the thing that was interesting in the class was every time

the professor said Al-Qaeda, he sort of like his shoulders went up.

And, you know, he's in command here.

Al-Qaeda, you know, hospital.

He's an expert.

And it was, you know, as

I said.

That is so funny.

That is so funny.

He was like freaked out by Al-Qaeda.

Like, he was an expert on Al-Qaeda, you know, or Hezbollah, like he knows what terrorists are.

Let's say where he lives.

That's a funny way to go with that.

Where does he live?

Oh, man.

She's hilarious.

Oh, she's great.

Hey, somebody else, you know, Tlaib?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Congresswoman Tlaib.

She has in 2006, a lot of people didn't know this, but she wrote an op-ed for the final call.

Oh, I love the final call.

You get the final call?

Oh, I think I do.

Is that the

farrakhan's yeah yeah newspaper so the final we all get it you got a lifetime subscription do you oh yeah it's really good yeah so uh you know how would any of these people come across anti-semitic tropes they couldn't it's almost impossible

she was talking about how israel has a delusional isis like ideology oh okay uh and that the creation of that country was a crime

but other than that other than that there's nothing here no no big deal there's not a long history here at all.

By the way, and I'm not making this up, David Duke also came in to tweet his support.

David Duke's a big...

He does not like the Jews.

People, you know,

in the front of his business card, it says, I don't like black people.

But if you really look at the resume, you notice he does not like Jews all that much either.

Not a fan.

Willie, but he's not using tropes.

No, he occasionally will use a trope.

No,

no, no.

No, he just talks facts.

Like

Congresswoman Omar said, you know, look,

I don't want to be anti-Semitic, but there's some real problem with Jews.

So, right, you know, that's what David Duke is doing.

He's like, I don't want to.

I'm sorry that I was using a trope.

I just need to tell you the facts.

If it wasn't for all these Jews,

you know, we wouldn't have all these problems if it wasn't for all these Jews.

And hang on just a second.

I'm getting another

message from beyond with the Ouija board.

This one's from H

I

M

M

L

E somebody.

I don't know.

I don't have time.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

It finally happened.

It's fixed.

We're done now.

Yeah.

I don't think we are.

No, we're cool.

Totally.

This is totally cool because they got $1.375 billion

to build a full 55 miles of border wall.

I mean, that's impenetrable.

Okay, hang on just a second.

You can't get around or over that on a 2,000-mile border.

You can't.

Hold it just a second.

I thought we know that estimates, and they're always wrong, estimates are that it's going to take at least $20 billion to build a border wall.

I thought $25, but now we're

going to have to do it.

But we had $5 billion.

Yeah, we did.

Well, it was $20.

It was

$25.

They did offer the full amount just a year ago.

It did.

But

that's no longer available.

And then before the shutdown, they did offer $1.7 billion billion dollars.

And now after the shutdown, they're getting everything they need, the $1.5 billion.

Through deft and expert negotiation, they were able to get just a little bit less than the worst offer before the shutdown.

So here's the problem.

Here is the problem.

Seriously, here is the problem.

He blinked.

The great thing, the reason why Donald Trump is one of the best negotiators, and I mean this sincerely, my favorite Donald Trump story, you've heard it a million times, is how he built Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue.

They have air rights in New York.

People own the air.

Above your building, right?

Above your building.

So Tiffany's, which is on the corner opposite of Trump Tower and about half a block away, Tiffany's actually owns all of the air above Fifth Avenue for a couple of blocks.

And so you couldn't build anything over like, I think, four stories on Fifth Avenue in those blocks because of Tiffany's.

So he went to Tiffany.

It was either Tiffany's or Cartier.

I think it was Tiffany's.

And he said,

before he left, he talked to his architect and said, I want you to draw up two plans.

I want you to draw up the Trump Tower that we've been talking about, a beautiful tower.

And I want you to draw up plans for the ugliest building that is five stories, ugliest building you could possibly ever imagine.

And so he did.

And he brought them both to a meeting.

And he said, hey, I want to build Trump Tower.

And the owner of the air rights said, no.

well,

well, there won't be anything over five stories here because we own the air rights and we're not going to sell them to you.

We don't want some monstrosity here.

And he said, You know what?

You are so right.

You are so right.

Now, I've already bought this property with plans to build this, but I knew that you might be set on a small building.

So here's what I'm going to build if you don't sell me the air rights.

And he laid it out and he said, I'll leave it up to you, but I want you to know I will build that building.

He did not blink.

And he's a great negotiator because when he got back to the office, they were already on the phone saying, come back, we'll do that.

Because they knew that son of a bitch will do it.

He blinked.

He made a promise.

that he wasn't willing to keep and they knew that he wouldn't keep it.

All of his power goes away.

Remember, he is the president that I've been looking for for a while in this one category.

A guy with a twitchy eye.

I've said this for years.

You want your enemies

need to feel like the president has a twitchy eye, where they look at each other and go, that guy just might do it.

I think he's nuts.

So I preferred that that's way Russia.

looked at our president, not necessarily the people in our own country, but he has that twitchy eye.

And you never know what he's going to do.

Well,

he telegraphed that he was willing to cave.

We should clarify.

He hasn't done that yet.

No, he hasn't.

Right.

So this deal was supposedly struck up between Republicans and Democrats.

He still has not signed it or approved it yet.

He could still reject it.

Now,

I.

How lame are Republicans, though, for accepting talk?

How lame are they?

They've never had any intention.

No, they haven't.

They never had any intention.

55 miles of border protection is like finding out you have lung cancer and your doctor says, here's a throat lozenge.

Good luck.

Wait, that's it?

That's what I get for lung cancer?

Yeah.

That's what 55 miles of border is when you have a 2,000-mile border.

It's nothing.

It doesn't help.

The problem is.

It's not even worth doing.

I think where you can look at this and say there's a real problem is that Democrats know that this is all being blamed on Republicans if there is another shutdown.

So they have absolutely no leverage here.

And part of that is because Trump came out and said it was me.

Like, look, the shutdown is mine.

I own it.

And he thought he could stick with that.

But

I think he found out that didn't work for him because

he didn't make the case relentlessly.

And

he needed to make the case.

The American people could have been with him if he made the case.

Look at how Democrats do that.

They pounded it, but

they also have the press, which makes it really easy.

Yeah, but the president's got Fox News.

I mean, they'd help him with this.

President has Fox News.

He also has talk radio.

He has tons of outlets.

Remember what President Obama was doing.

Remember what President Obama was doing at the end of his term.

He was only talking to bloggers.

Yeah.

You know?

YouTubers.

YouTubers and bloggers.

Why the president isn't on,

you know,

Ben Shapiro's

show.

Why he's not on.

I mean,

I'll understand why he wasn't on our show.

It might be a little wounding for him or for me, either way,

but I welcome him to make his case here.

Of course, yes.

A lot of people know the case on the border, don't they?

I mean, people are aware that what's going on in the border, and they still don't know.

Did you see what people were immoral in all that?

Yeah, you see how it was.

Look at the poll numbers, even from Republicans, towards the end.

Right.

I mean, they're not good, and we've been talking about this for how long?

I mean, you know, how many years?

Well, yeah, 20 years, and Trump at least for four.

Yeah.

We're coming up on four years since he came down that escalator and made that speech.

The border has been the biggest issue in the country ever since.

Look, the problem is with the Republicans is they don't have any big ideas.

Yeah,

look at how.

Even if they did, they couldn't sell it.

I know.

Look at how the Green New Deal is being embraced by

millennials.

You can sell the Green New Deal to your base, but we can't sell anything to the stars.

Because we don't have anything new.

We're not reaching out for the stars.

Look at what we did yesterday.

He signed an executive order for AI, but it was not an inspirational AI

executive order.

It really did nothing.

It said, okay,

to the departments all in the United States government, you should look into AI and see if we can develop friendly AI, et cetera.

There's a moment here where he could have said, look, the world is on the edge of profound change and it's either going to be good or it's going to be bad.

We're going to be the leaders of good.

While everyone else is pursuing AI just to conquer the world, we are going to pursue AI to help us solve cancer and cure cancer and muscular dystrophy and multiple scleros.

We are going to cure things in the next 10 years because the United States is going to find a way to get AI and be there first.

Everyone else wants to have it so they can conquer the world.

We want to do it so we can conquer hunger.

We can conquer slavery.

We can conquer sex trade.

We can conquer cancer.

That's inspiring.

And it would cost you almost nothing.

What about flat tax reform?

You could

this would be the time to do it with all the extreme proposals on the left.

People want something new.

They want something new.

Or at least bold.

I mean, the flat tax isn't new, but at least it's bold.

Bullet.

It is new because

nobody's ever really seriously considered it and done it.

I mean, I think that was one of the issues with the speech, which was a good speech, I thought, generally.

I thought it was a great speech.

But there was not a bold, new idea there, right?

I thought there was at the end and the beginning, but it was all about coming together and uniting.

But you have to unite around an idea bigger than unification.

unification.

You know what I mean?

He started out great when he said, look, we united

against the Nazis for freedom of the world.

We united and put a man on the moon.

Yes, it does bring us together when there's a big idea.

And in a vacuum where there are no big ideas, a big idea like let's get rid of every car and airplane in the next 10 years, people like the sound of a new deal.

And they will run to it.

You'll notice the college campus reform just did a video that's really telling.

They said, Are you for it?

Oh, absolutely.

It's time.

It's finally.

It's a big idea.

I like these ideas where we're going to go take something off.

It's progressive.

I really like that.

It's progressive.

As soon as they start reading the details, they're like, Wait, no, that's stupid.

We don't want to do that.

No, that's no, that's crazy.

No, no, no, no, no.

Where are the big ideas?

Where are the things that we can all unite around?

They're too timid to do any of them.

That has to be the president's message.

He cannot spend the next year.

They are going to spend it on division.

You have to spend it on a uniting idea, a big idea.

And you can't just say the wall.

If you want to make it about the wall,

Mike Lee says there is a legal way, constitutional way, to build it

in some areas

without an executive order.

With an executive order.

And he said it would be constitutional.

Not all of it, but a good portion of it.

You want to pursue that as long as it's constitutional, pursue that, pursue that, but then add in things like: let's make this easier for people who really want to be here to come in.

Let's widen the door while at the same time we shut off the illegal immigration.

Just start on that.

Let's widen the door.

If you have a mind for AI, if you're one of the best AI people around, we want to use it to cure cancer, not to control people.

Come here.

We welcome you.

Your green card, your visa will be easy to get.

It'll be the easiest place to come in to research for AI.

He's got to start making, he's got to start showing progress on the future instead of digging into the past because the left is not digging into the past.

Well, they are.

It's the spooky 1940 past.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Hi, it's Glenn.

If you're a subscriber to the podcast, can you do us a favor and rate us on iTunes?

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Thanks.

Dave Isay is the guy who came up with the idea of StoryCorps.

And StoryCorps is this really cool service, if you will, that is recording voices for our National Archives.

And they're recording our stories.

And they do this all over the country in many different ways.

But we wanted to talk to Dave on Valentine's Week about the people who they have found that are deeply, deeply in love.

Welcome to the program, David.

Glenn, it's great to be back.

Thank you.

So tell me about Danny and Annie.

Sure.

This is the story you were mentioning a little bit earlier.

Danny and Annie,

and as you said, StoryCourt is this project where we have booths all across the country.

We're a nonprofit, and you come with a loved one for the most part, and you sit for 40 minutes and record your story with each other just in audio.

And then you keep a copy, and another goes to the Library of Congress so your great, great, great, great-grandkids can get to know you through your voice and story.

So this is a love story that goes back to the first week of Story Corps when we launched 15 years ago in Grand Central Terminal.

Back then, like, nobody understood what we were doing, and very few people actually came.

We've now had half a million people participate.

But Danny and Annie happened upon the booth.

He, they're from Brooklyn,

and Danny was a betting clerk.

And

Annie was a nurse, and they came to the booth to tell the story of their first date that had happened 25 years before.

Now, they have thick Brooklyn accents, so you have to listen very carefully.

Okay, so here they are in 2004.

She started to talk, and I said, listen, I'm going to deliver a speech.

I said, at the end, you're going to want to go home.

I said, you represent a 34-letter word.

I said, that word word is love.

I said if we're going anywhere, we're going down the aisle because I'm too tired, too sick, and too sore to do any other damn thing.

And she turned around and she said, of course I'll marry you.

And the next morning I called her as early as I possibly could.

And he always gets up early.

To make sure she hadn't changed her mind, and she hadn't.

And

every year on April 22nd, around 3 o'clock, I call her and ask her if it was today, would she do it again?

And so far the answer has been the same.

Yeah, 25 times yes.

You see, the thing of it is, I always feel guilty when I say I love you to you, and I say it so often.

I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am, it's coming from me.

It's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio.

And it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house.

If I don't have a note on the kitchen table, I think there's something wrong.

You write a love letter to me.

And the only thing that could possibly be wrong is I couldn't find a silly pen.

To my princess, the weather out today is extremely rainy.

I'll call you at 11:20 in the morning.

It's a romantic weather.

And I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

When a guy is happily married, no matter what happens at work, no matter what happens in the rest of the day, there's a shelter when you get home.

There's a knowledge, knowing that you can hug somebody without them throwing you downstairs and saying, get your hands off me.

And

being married is like having a color television site.

You never want to go back to black and white.

So, David, this is Danny and Annie, and in listening to that, it makes me want to start the tradition far too late of writing a note to my wife every day.

Yeah, I mean,

they were really in love.

Danny.

Danny was not,

you know, if you saw a picture of him, you can almost get it from his voice, but he was about five feet tall.

He was bald.

His eyes were extremely crossed.

He had one little snaggle tooth.

And the guy had more romance in his little pinky than all the phonies in the Hollywood put together.

And, you know, he was a guy like, you know, people used to laugh at him walking down the street because, you know, he talked funny and he looked funny.

And I think that coming to Story Corps with Annie and having a lot of people respond to that first story, we're going to play another story later, just, you know, it's about reminding people that they matter and they're important and they won't be forgotten.

And Danny and those, you know, that was the first week of Story Corps.

And, you know, it speaks to he was what Story Corps is all about.

It's about the grace and the poetry and the eloquence and the beauty in the stories of us,

of all around us, hiding in plain sight if we just take the time to listen.

So they became big hits with the Storycore audience, and everybody loved them, as you can imagine.

But then, just a couple of years later,

Danny and Annie

received some news, and they came back to Storycore

to talk about the fact that he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and it was a very fast-spreading cancer.

And he wanted one to record one last interview with Annie.

He couldn't come out to you.

You guys had to go to him.

That's right.

Danny had come back to Storycore with Annie to to read their love letters over and over again over the years, and he brought every character he'd ever met in his life to Storycorps, undercover narcotics detectives and major league umpires, and he'd have a cataract operation and want to come in and document.

They were like family.

And when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, stage four end stage, we actually that week named, renamed our original booth, the Danny and Annie Parasa Story Corps booth.

And then the next week he said, will you come up come, I'm too sick to get to the booth, but I I need to record one last interview with Annie.

Will you come to our house in Sunset Park in Queens?

And we did.

And here is a clip of that.

The illness is not hard on me.

It's just, you know, the finality of it.

And him, he goes along like a trooper.

Listen, even downhill, a car doesn't roll unless it's pushed.

And you're giving me a great push.

The deal of it is,

we try to give each other hope, and not hope that I'll live.

Hope that she'll do well after I pass.

Hope that people will support her.

Hope that if she meets somebody and likes him, she marries him.

You know, he has everything planned.

You know.

I'm working on it.

She said it was her call.

She wants to walk out behind the casket alone.

I guess that's the way to do it because when we were married, you know how your brother takes it down, your father takes it down.

She said, well, I don't know which of my brothers to to walk in with.

I don't want to offend anybody.

I said, I got a solution.

I said, You walk in with me, you walk out with me.

And the other day, I said, Who's going to walk down the aisle with you behind the casket?

You know, the supporter.

And she said, Nobody.

I walked in with you alone.

I walked out with you alone.

There's a thing in life

where you have to come to terms with dying.

Well, I haven't come come to terms with dying yet.

I want to come to terms with being sure that you understand

that my love for you up to this point was as much as it could be and it'll be as much as it could be for eternity.

I always said the only thing I have to give you is a poor gift and it's myself.

And I always gave it.

And if there's a way to come back and give it, I'll do that too.

Do you have the Valentine's Day letter there yeah

my dearest wife this is a very special day it is a day on which we share our love which still grows after all these years now that love is being used by us to sustain us through these hard times all my love all my days and more happy valentine's day

I could write on and on about her.

She lights up the room in the morning when she tells me to put both hands on her shoulders so she can support me.

She lights up my life when she says to me at night, wouldn't you like a little ice cream?

Or would you please drink more water?

I mean, those aren't very romantic things to say, but they stir my heart.

In my mind, in my heart,

there has never been,

there is not now, and never will be another annie.

He died just a few days later.

He was 67.

She's just turned 71,

and she came in to record one more story core to thank everyone and

tell everyone that she's doing fine.

She has all of his love letters,

and it keeps her going.

Yes, she

she

got after

the last interview with Danny was broadcast on the radio, on public radio, and Danny actually heard it and then died about an hour later.

Annie got thousands and thousands and thousands of condolence letters.

And still to this day, many years later, she reads one of those letters instead of the love letter she would have gotten from Danny.

She buried a copy of those letters with Danny in the casket because she wanted to let him know that his life did matter.

And

she's hanging in.

Dave, thank you so much for sharing these

with us.

Thanks for having me on, Glenn.

And thanks for doing such

great work.

Appreciate it.

And happy Valentine's Day to everybody.

Thank you, Dave Issei from StoryCorps.

No,

I wasn't ready for that yet.

it's Valentine's Day tomorrow.

Is it tomorrow?

Thursday?

I know.

Maybe nervous.

And uh,

you know, there is young love,

and then there's real love.

And young love is all about

how somebody looks,

how hot they are, how, how,

how

whatever shallow thing

I'm just thinking of they're all just so shallow love at the start is just so shallow usually

And if you do it right

it grows into something

as he said

when she says, Put your hands on my shoulders so I can

get up out of bed or have some more water.

He said, Those aren't romantic things.

But they are with a mature love.

The things

that you will do for your spouse or your spouse will do for you as you grow old together

are the things that

make all the difference, and they're the things that

inspire the next generation.

It is the couple

that still holds hands.

It's the couple

that

still just hugs each other in the kitchen.

I always wanted to be

that guy who grew old with his wife,

and I am so blessed

to have that in my wife, Tanya,

who has

just been a remarkable woman.

This Valentine's Day,

it doesn't take chocolate and it doesn't take,

you know, it doesn't take anything special.

It helps, you know, to remind,

but it is everything else that goes around Valentine's Day that really makes the difference.

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

David Harsani, the author of Freedom First, a guy who is a senior editor at the Federalist and a dear friend.

Welcome to the program, David.

Thank you for having me, Glenn.

You bet.

I know you've done a lot of work work on the Green New Deal,

which on its surface seems absolutely nuts.

But you've really, you know, you've put the hood up on this thing and you've really looked at it to see

using the facts of the actual deal to see what's in it.

And you've found that

nuts.

Well, I should say it's not really a lot.

I wouldn't consider it work because it was actually a lot of fun to read through in one sense.

Right.

but in another way it's uh it's just crazy and it really you know I know she walked it back and I know that the author has walked it back a bit but obviously the very core of it is just nuts and and that the core of it is that we're going to get rid of all our fossil fuels in ten years and not just fossil fuels but also nuclear energy if anyone's at all serious about clean energy and and moving away from carbon emissions and dismisses nuclear energy, they can't be taken seriously.

No, they can't.

They can't.

It is the cleanest by far and helps us.

We could use all of the nighttime energy

just to be able to make hydrogen.

I mean, there is so much that can be done with nuclear energy that would help us be completely emission-free that anybody who says that they're serious about having energy and clean energy and they dismiss nuclear,

they're frauds.

They're just frauds.

Well, they are.

Or very immature or don't understand how the world works.

And

this plan does not underst have any sort of it does not embrace economic reality is a way I would put it.

I mean, imagine having to retrofit every single building in America in twelve years.

Imagine having to retrofit every car or get a new car so they can run on electricity, which won't even be there because we won't have anything to generate it.

It is just nuts in that way.

And then in another way that it's nuts is that it's a Trojan horse for, or was a Trojan horse for a bunch of socialistic plans like economic security for people, quote-unquote, unwilling to work,

you know, and a bunch of things.

But even if you are willing to work, this is a reversal of the Bill of Rights.

This is FDR's second Bill of Rights, is it not?

Yeah, it is.

And, you know, free education,

you know, free housing or guaranteed housing and a bunch of other things of that nature that really have nothing to do with green energy or anything like that to begin with.

So, David,

is there anything serious in it that you can look at and say, well, you know what?

This is a solid idea.

No, there's nothing like that.

Banning meat, giving everyone a house,

you know, free education.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I think that there are many progressives who believe these are, you know, this was pulled back by the authors because it was mocked, not because they don't believe these things should happen.

So we have to remember that.

These are the goals.

And this is just authoritarianism.

I mean, it tells you how to live your life on every level.

It wouldn't be okay with me even if

I thought a climate disaster was over the horizon.

We have to think about other things, including the economy and including our rights, as you mentioned.

David, the real tell here is, to me, the nuclear power thing.

It's like, if you are really concerned with

the globe and the way it's warming, you're going to want to embrace nuclear power if you're actually serious about it.

And they ban it in this bill.

Right.

And you leave in coal, apparently, right?

I guess they don't mention coal.

I didn't think of that.

I would just say this, though.

You're right about nuclear energy, but also

we lead the world in reducing carbon emissions over the last few years, mostly, I think, because of fracking and natural gas.

So if you eliminate that and you eliminate nuclear power, you're not really working towards anything.

You just want an excuse to control the lives of people because once you control all carbon, you control all life, which I think this is just a power play sort of thing.

So how frightened are you that there are 70 co-sponsors of something that is truly ridiculous?

I'm actually pretty frightened.

I mean, I'm pretty frightened that all these

Democratic candidates, leading ones, you know, Kamala Harris and others, immediately endorsed this plan.

While the initial

fact page was out there with all this stuff, they embraced it.

That should be scary.

Now, I don't think, I'm not scared because I know it can't really happen, but I am scared with what we'll do to the economy trying to make things like this happen.

I think that should scare us.

Well, you say that it can't happen, but you listen to people who are not paying attention.

And David, honestly, if we went through another 2008 or worse, which I do believe is on the horizon just because of Europe alone.

This is the kind of thing that

socialists say, hey, we're going to take care of your housing, your housing, we're going to take care of your car, your food, your guaranteed job.

And if there is a serious, serious and I'm talking about a depression, this is the kind of stuff people run towards.

Right.

I mean, ten years ago, if I called a Democrat a socialist, they would feign indignation and act like they had been insulted.

Today, most Democrats seem to think that that's a pretty swell idea.

So I think the debate has actually gotten a lot more honest.

And

this and other things are just part really of the fight

between people who believe in free markets and people who believe in socialism.

And

I do wonder, though, I just want to quickly say if people understand what they're supporting.

For instance, I saw a poll that said

72% of people want Medicare for all.

But when they explained to them what Medicare for all actually meant, it dropped to 36%.

What does that mean, Medicare for all?

What does that mean?

It means we're going to take away your private insurance and throw you into a

government program of insurance.

It's socialized medicine is what it means.

But people don't want to lose their insurance.

They actually sort of like their insurance.

So once they hear about the specifics, they don't like it.

So if I want to be positive about the future, I say to myself, there are sort of these grand plans people like in theory but might not like in reality.

And that's usually what socialism is actually about.

Well unfortunately it fools country after country after country.

Tell me what it

the the idea of getting rid of grounding all planes.

Well, the plan is that we're going to have high speed rail.

It's hard not to laugh when you talk about this stuff, but it's it's scary too.

But she she claims that we're going to have high speed rails and they'll work so well that we will sort of crowd out any need need for air travel or actually for cars as well in urban areas.

As you see in California, they have a high-speed rail that I think is $100 billion in debt right now and doesn't really work yet.

So I'm not sure how we can envision that throughout the country.

Every city that I've ever lived in that talks about having a high-speed rail, it always fails.

Always fails.

Always comes in overpriced.

Even just regular, you know, out here in D.C., they're trying to build, expand the metro.

It takes literally 10 years.

You know, it's way over budget.

It's constantly the case.

People in America love their cars.

And moreover, in the middle of America, I lived in Denver, for instance, for many years.

You need your cars.

There's no way you can use a train to get around.

It's just a silly thing.

So is she talking about actual bans or

some sort of a carbon tax that would discourage things like planes?

Because it sounds like in 10 years, we're just going to stop air travel.

We're going to stop cars.

Or is it a penalty if you want to use the car?

How do they envision this happening?

They don't get into specifics about how they would ban things.

And I don't think she uses the word ban on the planes, but she does use some sort of language when it comes to cars in urban areas of having government sort of explain to you how many cars you need or don't need and following through in that way.

I can't say that she's put kind of the thought into this that would be nuts and bulky.

You know, I mean, we don't know how these things are supposed to be accomplished for the most part, only that they should be, their aims and goals.

And occasionally she'll say, you know,

she uses euphemisms for ban.

She doesn't say ban, but so, David, did she write ⁇ who wrote this?

Who is the brain behind this?

I don't know that there is a brain behind this.

Well, you know what I mean.

Who's the head behind this?

Who wrote this and put this together?

I suspect there are, I don't know, but I suspect there are a bunch of special interest greenie types

who helped her write this thing.

I mean, it's just a grab bag of everything they want thrown in there.

So I suspect that's who wrote it.

I don't know for sure.

But, you know, politicians who endorse this thing should be held accountable for doing so.

I think that's important to note.

Where are we headed, David?

I was in the State of the Union.

I was actually in the room with them.

And

there is now a growing

Marxist

community that is

arrogant, is self-centered,

and will make you pay if you don't join them.

Yeah, it's bad.

I mean, I think they're authoritarians.

They're socialists.

Kamala Harris had her CNN.

I think she's probably one of the front runners or is the frontrunner.

And she had a CNN town hall where she just was bragging about how she wanted to take everyone's insurance away from them, health insurance.

And it's a huge, hugely important part of people's lives.

So I think we're headed to a pretty bad place.

I have to say,

I was not a fan of Donald Trump, and I generally am not a fan of politicians, but when he dropped a line about socialism in the State of the Union address, it made me

very proud of the president.

And I think it's an important battle to be won.

I think young people don't understand it because they never lived through the Cold War and they don't know what it means.

My own parents defected from a communist country.

I don't want anything like that for my kids.

And

I think it's going to be a pretty ugly fight.

I will tell you this.

I thought when the President said, we will not be socialist, I just talked about this yesterday in a monologue where what he was really saying is, I will protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.

Anyone who's pushing for these kinds of things, this Green New Deal, they are in violation of the oath they take in office.

You're not protecting and defending the Constitution.

The core of the Constitution is individual rights.

The core of socialism is collectivism.

They cannot work together.

And that's important.

I mean, I think it was P.J.

Rourke who said, who boiled down the Constitution, to stay off my lawn and keep your hands to yourself, right?

And neither of those things, socialists care about, neither of those things.

So

to me, they're authoritarians.

I don't care.

You know, there might not always be down to the definition socialists, but if they want to control what you buy, what you eat, what you see, what you say, and all that stuff, to me, they're just, you know, it's just tyranny.

I don't know to what level it's going to come here, but it's worth fighting against, I think.

David Harsani from thefederalist.com.

Thank you for your help and your research, and we'll talk to you again.

We want to take you to another socialist country that was also very into the planet.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

As you know, as a longtime listener of this program, world renowned for our

study

and

exposés that we do on science.

We've won the from the Academy of American Scientists and Scientific Stuff three years running now, have won the show of the year, 2001, 2007, and again last year.

And so now that we are looking at the Green New Deal, we want to get to the nuts and bolts of it.

And that is, of course, what Ocasio-Cortez says they are not interested in,

you know, eliminating all cattle and cattle ranches and

beef farms.

But we know that if you're going to address global warming, you have to take care of cow farts.

But if you're, again, a long-time listener of this program, you know that the problem is not on the back end of the cow, but the front end of the cow.

And we have Sarah Place.

She's a senior director of sustainable beef production.

She's a researcher and

an expert in upcycling in human nutrition.

And

just, I would assume, also,

you know, knows something about cow farts.

Welcome to the program.

Sarah, how are you?

I'm great.

Thanks for having me, Glenn.

Good.

So let's talk seriously here for a minute about the people who are seriously trying to get

cattle ranches and and and and cows uh eliminated from our our diet entirely.

And they do it in the name of global warming.

Yeah, I think what you know we always try to emphasize to people is really cattle and people that are cattle raisers are part of the climate change solution, not a problem.

So as you mentioned, cow farts off the top, that definitely is fake news.

I can say before I was at National Cattlemen's that was actually part of my research was measuring methane from cattle.

So it does come out the front end of the animal but it's overblown in terms of its contribution to climate change particularly in the United States.

Okay.

Okay.

So wait a minute.

So

it is cow burps that is

is the actual, where the methane comes from.

And you say it's overblown.

How?

Yeah, so I think it's important to just zoom out and look at the big picture context you know the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States puts out a greenhouse gas emission inventory every year

and if you look at that you know methane from cows is about 1.8 percent of emissions in the entire United States well waiting but it's not huge but wait I mean the IPCC report correct me if I'm wrong Stu because you know this stuff inside and out don't they say Cattle that is the number one cause of the problem for greenhouse gases?

Yeah, well, the entire, they say the entire meat industry.

Right, Sarah?

This is their claim that this is one of the biggest drivers of global climate change.

Yeah, yeah, I'm glad you brought that up.

So there was a report that came out in like 2006 called Livestock's Long Shadow from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization that looked at all livestock.

So you're right.

It would be all cattle, sheep, goats, poultry, everything.

And they claimed in that report that 18% of global emissions, so not U.S., but global emissions, came from livestock.

And that report also had an erroneous claim that that was a bigger portion than transportation.

The UN FAO has actually come out and said that was wrong, but that doesn't prevent it from being repeated

still 12 years, 13 years later, like it's fact.

What part of it do they say was wrong, that it was more than transportation, or that 18% was wrong?

So kind of twofold.

So the first thing, the first thing that was truly wrong was the comparison to transportation.

So essentially how they got that 18% number was they did what's called life cycle assessment.

So it's a bit into the weeds, but essentially you add up everything that gets emitted over the entire life cycle of a process.

So if we're going to talk about livestock, that would be everything that comes from feed production to feed the livestock all the way through to the slaughter of the animals.

And what was really key in that report was the biggest chunk of that 18%, a third of it, was what we call land use change.

So, specifically, things like deforestation down in Brazil, which is, of course, again, another pressing issue, but we don't have a deforestation problem here in the United States.

So, that was really one of the key problems: they added in everything for livestock, and then when they compared it to transportation, they just looked at tailpipe, you know, or

emissions directly from vehicles, right?

They didn't add in all the emissions that go into building vehicles, that go into maintaining all of our transportation infrastructure from roads to

airports, et cetera, et cetera.

So, hopefully, that makes sense.

It was kind of an apples to oranges comparison.

We're talking to Dr.

Sarah Place,

and she is the senior director for sustainable beef production and a researcher.

And I am a rancher myself.

I have, well, this time of year, I think I now have about 100 head, so it's not a lot.

But

our animals are grazing on natural grass, and

we're trying to do,

you know,

right by the animal, right by the planet.

Everybody I know who's a rancher or a farmer, they are more concerned about the environment than any environmentalist because their living is made on making sure that that soil and those animals are taken care of and are protected.

Are you concerned at all about

this new

hybrid beef product that is coming out as people are saying that that's going to be much better for you?

Yeah, so are you talking about some of these so-called plant-based products and the cell cultured stuff?

Yeah.

Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah.

Yeah, so I think a lot of things in this space are just, there's a lot of media hype relative to like what actually happens on the ground.

So as you just pointed out, I mean you're you're the same as all the other ranchers across America and there's over 700,000 cattle producers in this in this country.

It's the single largest segment of American agriculture.

So people, the reality is people are dedicated to doing the right thing as you said.

And in terms of those products, you know, again, it is a lot of hype in terms of their sales.

They're fairly small in the grand scheme of things.

And of course, the sell-cultured products don't actually even exist yet.

You know, there's just a lot of media coverage about them coming out at some point, but they're still not commercially available.

I think our biggest challenge is just this real big chasm we have in terms of understanding between the normal consuming public that's disconnected from agriculture by a few generations

and some of this marketing that is surrounding some of these products because they're trying to use some of the misinformation that's out there to their advantage, especially with regard to environmental impacts of cattle production.

I have to tell you, Sarah,

there is nothing more healthy for a family

than to go and spend a summer on a farm.

And I mean this sincerely.

Something happened to us when we moved away from the farm.

You learn so many things.

You learn about sex.

You learn about life and death.

As my kids and I went out to go capture a sheep that was lost from the flock, and we had to go out and we spent about an hour chasing this darn thing

because we're city slickers.

We talked about scriptures.

You learn everything about the circle of life and how to take care of the planet.

There is something to be said that as we lose these things in an agrarian culture, as we have lost them,

it's one of the sources for losing our way on so many things because

what you read about is not what life on the farm or life on a ranch is actually like.

It's just not.

Yeah, I think you're 100% right on that.

I mean in the last hundred years we've gone to, you know, from a majority population in rural areas and in agriculture to now it's you know less than 15% of the U.S.

population is in rural areas.

So that is just the reality.

And it's sometimes like you point out some of these basic things, you know, the cycle of life that have been lost,

that connection has been lost for people.

And that, you know, what you mentioned earlier, the upcycling, I mean, that's really our way to try to drive that home to people is

recycling.

What is upcycling?

Yeah, so everybody's heard of recycling, right?

Essentially taking one thing and making something of equivalent value.

Upcycling is taking something of little or no value to people.

and making a higher value product.

And again, when we think about beef production, cattle production, that's exactly what's happening, right?

I mean, cattle are eating plants that we can't eat, and they're using lands that we can't use for crops otherwise.

And they're making this super nutrient-rich food for us.

And so, again, it's just using a different word to kind of try to drive home to people the basics.

That, again, if you are on a ranch or you are connected with agriculture, some of this seems like a no-brainer.

But because people are removed a few generations, you know, we do have to kind of explain the basics again to people.

Sarah, it's great talking to you.

Thank you so much.

Dr.

Sarah Place,

you can find her and follow her at DRS Place.

Dr.

Sarah Place, thank you so much.

I appreciate your time.

The entire agricultural community is uncomfortable with you calling yourself a rancher.

No, I apologize to all ranchers.

Thank you.

No,

I'm a guy who pretends to be a rancher.

Right.

You go on vacation ranching.

I do.

I go.

I do want to go.

I would move there in a heartbeat.

You're essentially city slickers, the movie.

That's essentially what you are.

You're a city guy.

I say all the family is, but I certainly am.

Yeah.

And you should be like, I'm like, you know what?

We need some horses.

Why do we need horses?

Because we want to go.

No, because they would look good right over there whenever you really, it would be so picturesque.

All right.

Anyway,

I apologize to everyone in my 500-person town in Idaho for embarrassing you on so many levels.

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