'President Trump's Scorecard' | Guest Host: Mike Broomhead | 12/24/18

The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.

This is the Glenbeck program.

Welcome.

My name is Mike Brumhead in for Glenbeck.

Today, we are going to talk this morning about the government shutdown.

What does it mean to most American people?

Why is it happening?

How long is it going to last?

Is this really the beginning of the end for President Trump?

So much to talk about from the pullout in Syria, the new turnover inside the staff this morning, the migrant caravan, how all of that ties into the government shutdown, and the seriousness of the pullout of that of Syria.

It's going to be a big part of the show today.

The economy is on everybody's minds.

It seemed like there was a slowdown as people begin to be a bit fearful.

A lot of government employees, up to 80,000 of them, are going to be affected by this government shutdown.

So, the first part of the show, how does it affect you?

How does it affect me?

And what will happen next?

And how quickly could it possibly be over?

All of that coming up this morning on the Glenn Beck program.

My name is Mike Broomhead, and this is the Glenn Beck program.

This is the Glenn Beck Program.

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Merry Christmas.

My name is Mike Broomhead.

I'm in for Glenn.

This morning, we appreciate you spending part of your morning with us.

This is so much happening in the world this weekend.

As I was watching the news, the incoming chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, explaining that this is a game of chicken that the president is ready to go long term with.

This could go into, well into the next session of the Congress.

Members of Congress, in my home state, I've had on the show, no one is very hopeful for when this is going to end.

The Democrats digging in their heels because, of course, they are coming in in the House of Representatives in power, and they are digging in their heels in the first battle.

Which side will blink first?

The White House has indicated they would take less than the $5 billion for the wall funding, which will be a big part of the show this morning as we talk about the wall funding itself and what does all of this mean.

This goes back much longer than the Trump presidency, even before Obama into the Bush presidency, all the way back to Reagan.

We've been chronicling this forever.

Why is this such a big issue now?

And we'll get to the wall part of it in a moment.

But what does this shutdown mean for all of us, the average person?

Is it going to affect us?

Well, the SBA, if you own a small business, if you're trying to get a loan, we know the small business administration will be closed for the most part, key pieces of staff.

It's going to affect lending.

Is it going to hurt people?

Of course it is.

There will be some key members of the federal government that won't be working.

But as we saw with the government shutdown during the Obama administration, for most Americans, it didn't affect your day-to-day life.

But what this shows is an immense dysfunction inside our federal government.

And what I mean by that is when you can't get anything done, everyone keeps talking about a bipartisan way to work together.

Well, there's a few things at play.

With all of this, the Trump supporters, the base for the Trump camp, don't want to see the president give in on any level when it comes to the wall, which is another reason why the Democrats don't want to give him a victory on this.

There is a huge amount of politics tied with all of this, that when you look at American politics, each side needs to be able to show a clear win.

This does have a lot to do with 2020, with them trying to destroy President Trump.

The Mueller report, which believe it or not, there's not a whole lot to report on the Mueller report and the investigation.

How much does that they're not going?

I don't believe they're going to impeach this president.

The House is going to talk about it.

There's going to be tons of investigations, but this is going to be a lot more about making sure they damage this president's reputation and perception with the American people going into 2020 more than it's going to be actual action that's taken because impeachment's never getting through the Senate.

So starting with the idea that they're not going to give this president a victory, the president ran on building a wall.

He said Mexico was going to pay for it.

And it looks as if

they're not going to to overtly pay for the wall.

He says through some of the restrictions and some of the changes that were made to the NAFTA agreement that the Mexican government, the Mexican people, will indirectly pay for this.

$5 billion in the grand scheme of our budget is not a lot to fight over.

It's the principle of this.

I'm not saying that people in Washington are necessarily principled, but this is about the principle of this fight.

The Democrats are saying that this wall is inhumane.

It's un-American.

What's fascinating to me is the lack of anywhere else beside talk radio that you're hearing the actual words of the Democrats.

My problem, my mantra has been about the

mantra has been about the problem with the media.

Traditional media in America has done so much

to tell only one side of the story.

As if you've heard me in for Glenn before, I was a Ted Cruz supporter like Glenn was in the primary.

I was not a Trump supporter.

And then when the president won the primary, I wanted to give him a fair chance at winning the election.

I voted for the president, but I was not necessarily a die-hard supporter or defender of this president.

What I ended up being was a defender because the media has been so immensely unfair to this president.

There are two sides to every story, and the media is supposed to be very critical.

I think they should ask the difficult questions of everyone, but they have been nothing fair to this president at all.

Now, there are some disagreements.

I disagree with the pullout of Syria.

We're going to talk a lot about that this morning, but the president has been treated immensely unfairly.

And by that, I mean Chuck Schumer in 2009 speaking to a college group, President Clinton

in the 1990s, I think 1994, maybe, in a State of the Union address asking for funding so that he could

expedite the deportation of illegal immigrants, the harsh criticism he had for illegal immigrants.

Chuck Schumer himself saying years ago, in 2009, illegal immigrants, you shouldn't even use the word undocumented.

By calling them undocumented, we're showing the American people that we're not serious about stopping it.

If it's illegal, you should say it's illegal.

He said, I believe it's illegal and it's wrong.

Why is the media not asking Chuck Schumer now why he's digging his heels in on this?

Nancy Pelosi, the funding for the wall that was signed when the Congress wanted to stop illegal immigration, the Obama administration, Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer.

The Democrats were hardliners on illegal immigration.

Now we've got a standoff in a government shutdown.

The president taking one of the bullets out of the gun of the Democrats by saying, if the government shuts down, I'll own it.

Well, now he owns it.

He owns the shutdown.

The Democrats are putting out memos about how horrible this is.

They downplayed all of this and blamed it on the Republicans during the Obama administration.

That part of it is American politics.

That's what political parties are going to do.

The media is the one that is supposed to give you both sides of the story.

The Democrats would say this.

The Republicans are saying that.

The Republicans want this.

The Democrats are only going to give that.

But instead, we see a one-sided view of how devastating, how horrible the Trump shutdown is.

Is it bad?

Of course it's bad.

It's never good when the government is not functioning properly.

And our government hasn't functioned properly in a very, very long time.

But the government shutdown is about politics more than it's about principle.

The principle that they're fighting over is whether or not they're going to give any funding for a wall.

Is the president

going to, at the end of all of this, be able to put out a tweet that says, we win, we just got X amount of dollars to build a wall?

He's already showed you the prototype of the wall.

He's putting all of this, the fencing out there where we can see through the fence to the other side.

Big steel fence.

It's got the,

it's pointed at the top.

If you've seen it, it's the spires at the top.

And it's effective and beautiful is what the president said.

They do not want to give him anything that looks like a victory on that front.

That's politics.

But where is the media explaining this and asking the simple question?

How did the Democrats get away with doing a complete 180 on the immigration issue?

Now, I'm from the state of Arizona.

I'm on vacation in Florida, but I live in the state of Arizona.

We are a border state, and this is a nonpartisan issue in the state of Arizona.

This is about border security.

When you're looking at the border strike force and the stories that we've told, the necessity for border security, whether it's an actual physical wall all the way across the southern border, which I'm not an advocate for, by the way.

I'm not an advocate for a border wall across our southern border.

There are places that fencing works.

Incidentally, speaking speaking of the Democrats, where are the people in the media reporting this?

You may not remember it, but it happened.

Duncan Hunter Sr.

was a member of the Congress, and he pushed a piece of legislation that built a two-tier wall in Southern California.

That was approved by the Clinton administration.

They have a two-tier fence in Southern California that is very effective.

in stopping people crossing the border illegally.

Is it perfect?

Nothing is.

Has it done the job they wanted it to?

Absolutely.

There are places where fencing

is necessary to stop border crossings.

In other places, it is technology.

It should be manpower.

We should be equipping.

the manpower at the border patrol.

We should be making sure they have every piece of equipment they need to do their jobs.

Can we use drones?

Can we use sensors?

All of that is true.

We can do all of that.

But there are immense parts of the border that are easily walked across where there is no fencing.

There's maybe a barbed wire fence or none at all.

I've seen it with my own eyes.

So how do we, as Americans,

hold our government accountable when you're only hearing one side of the story?

There are a lot of people listening that are astute.

They are politically astute.

They pay attention.

They are educated people on the issue of illegal immigration and border security.

And what ends up happening with them is they had no idea or probably had forgotten the two-tier wall that happened in Southern California, Duncan Hunter, a Republican, staunch Republican, and the Clinton administration approving and getting that two-tier wall built.

Well, how is the shift happening?

Now all of a sudden, offense is immoral and un-American.

No one is asking that question of them.

How is it that you've changed 180?

Explain to us the change.

Everyone changes their mind.

People get divorced.

At one time, you say, till death to us part, and then years later, you've changed your mind.

Well, there's something that happened that made that drastic shift for both of you.

No one is questioning the drastic shift.

Is it purely politics?

Is it purely because this president ran on a border wall?

It seems like it.

It seems as if this is the victory they don't want to give him to further diminish his chances at reelection in 2020.

And if that's the case, why are they not being held accountable for forsaking the right thing to do the politically expedient thing?

So a lot of this falls on the shoulders and at the feet of the media.

Big part of the show, we'll talk a little bit more about the shutdown, immigration specifically, and some more of the details of all of this coming up here in just a few moments.

We're also going to talk about the news changeover inside the Trump administration, why that happened and my disagreement with the president when it comes to the pullout in Syria to a certain degree and why I disagree and what I'm suspicious of, as many others are.

All of that is going to happen this morning on the show.

So, stick around for that.

My name is Mike Broomhead, and this is the Glenn Beck program.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

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Merry Christmas from all of us here at the Glenn Beck program.

My name is Mike Broom, heading for Glenn.

Today, we appreciate you spending part of your day with us.

It is a lot happening even during this Christmas season as the members of Congress have gone home deadlocked.

Nothing is working.

Nothing's going to happen.

President not signing anything.

So they have all gone home.

They're going to try again in the next session with this government shutdown as it continues to roll.

Which part of the governments are affected?

They say that there's, you know, the impacted shutdown include the Department of Homeland Security, Justice Department, Interior Department, State Department, Department of Housing and Urban Development are all affected by the shutdown.

How much will the average American feel this is part of the question?

The bigger question still is, why are we having a shutdown when it seems like border security is something both sides agree is necessary on a certain level?

You can take this back to the Obama administration and just a quick history lesson.

You know, I was on the border in McAllen with Glenn and everyone else in McAllen, Texas, when these children were being brought across the border in 2009

and watched the horrific treatment of these kids and how they were separated even then by age group and put into different rooms.

And this then needed to stop.

All of those pictures you saw, it started again.

AZ Central, my hometown publication, put out a picture of showing these kids in cages that outraged everyone until they figured out that those pictures were actually taken during the Obama administration.

The demonization of this president by the media.

That's who I'm holding solely accountable for the one-sided story.

Do I like the way everything is being handled?

Absolutely not.

But you're only telling half the story.

The government shutdown is a game of chicken.

This president said, I will not accept any

spending bill that doesn't include the $5 billion for the wall.

The White House has now put out word that they would accept less, somewhere around $2.5 billion.

The other side doesn't seem like they want to blink.

They believe they're going to win on this politically.

But speaking about illegal immigration and what's happening, I can just give you a few firsthand accounts.

Some 75 or 80 miles north of the border, on the American side of the border in Arizona, there are signs in the desert.

from the Department of Homeland Security that say, do not stop on these roadways for hitchhikers.

Do not approach abandoned packages.

Do not approach abandoned vehicles because this is a drug corridor.

So we know our government is aware of the fact that the cartels have got a corridor deep into the United States that is so dangerous that the only thing they can do is warn the American people.

Well, if it's not easy to traverse the border there, if a wall isn't necessary, how are they walking across the border?

They have on the hilltops, they have got lookouts for the drug cartels that are outfitted with food for days, with radios, and their job is twofold.

One is to keep an eye out when their cartel is trucking drugs in through that corridor to watch out for law enforcement and for rival cartels.

Their job also is when they have their own hit teams to rob rival cartels as they make their way through that same corridor.

It's called Vico Valley.

You can look it up.

One small indicator.

We're seeing seeing the government, this migrant caravan, the members of the caravan are now blaming the organizers of the caravan for making it so dangerous.

That's the other question.

Why would this caravan travel north through Mexico and then make a turn to the west and walk all the way to Tijuana when they could have went to Brownsville, Texas?

It would have been the closest port of entry and tried to enter there.

No one wants to point out the politics.

Of all places, I saw in MSNBC some accurate reporting by one reporter that walked around and said that, you know, there are women and children, here they are.

But when you hear reports that this is mostly men, that's accurate.

Look at all these young men.

He went on to say that most of these young men are not talking about asylum for the sake of asylum, but filing for asylum for the sake of a better life and for, you know, because they're poor,

which is not a reason to seek asylum.

There are so many different things that can and should be done, and they're not helping.

The media media enjoys protections and they always should the media should be able to be critical of the government on every level without fear of retribution they should always have that protection it help keep a free society free

but not when they're they're voluntarily telling one side of the story

That's how the reason I became an adamant Trump defender was to give both sides of the story.

And they just aren't.

There is not an accurate picture of what's happening at the border.

There's not an accurate picture of these unaccompanied minors, of the numbers of families that are crossing the border that aren't even families.

These are adults posing with children that are not their children because that was the easiest way in.

This is a long way from over.

But until the media begins to give two sides, until one member of the media that they call credible on the other side of the aisle, whether it's the MSNBCs or the CNNs of the world, until they begin begin to ask Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi about their 180-degree shift and what it's going to take, that when they are going to do some conceding, as long as they've got the cover from the traditional media, this could go on for months.

And I don't believe the president's going to blink.

I think the president's going to do his best to ensure, as they did with the calls to Wall Street, I believe he's going to do everything he can.

to ensure that the stock markets have as the least amount of jitter as possible and the country begins to at least run as close to normally as possible in spite of the shutdown.

But as the furtload workers go on, this is going to take a very, very long time to fix.

And when you've got people, even if they get the money back later, you've got to eat today.

It's something to keep your eye on.

I mean, it really is something to keep your eye on.

It is

pretty dangerous.

So the immigration issue is something obviously we're going to talk about a lot this morning because it is the key to the government shutdown.

Coming up, we're going to talk about replacements in the White House, Mattis leaving early because of criticisms about Syria.

Talk to you about Syria, what my doubts and fears are on the shut are on the pullout of Syria and other places in the world.

Is it the right thing to do?

The president says yes.

We'll ask some questions about that coming up right around the corner.

Again, my name is Mike Broomhead, in for Glen Beck.

You're listening to Glenn Beck.

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Hope you got a great Christmas planned.

So a lot of criticism happening.

The president announcing last week that he was going to pull the troops, some 2,200 troops that we had out of Syria.

And a lot of criticism coming from Lindsey Graham and others.

Not surprised that

Rand Paul was very supportive of this move.

I have mixed feelings on this.

I come from a military family.

Many of you know the story.

My brother was killed in Iraq back in 03.

I was more than disappointed.

It's hard for me to describe.

Despair would be part of it.

Depression, actually.

I suffered watching our troops leave Iraq.

Our former president was warned of the vacuum that would be created, and that vacuum created the uprising of ISIS.

ISIS came into fruition in Syria and at their height, controlled the entire border between Syria and Iraq, parts of northern Iraq, the devastation of what they were doing, the Muslims they were killing who disagreed with them, and the murders they were committing, and the heinous acts of terrorism around the world that they took credit for.

And that all happened because our former president didn't heed the warnings of the great military minds that said we will create a vacuum by leaving.

Much bigger force, different situation.

But are we going to see some of the same results?

Are we sending the wrong message, A, to the Syrian people,

B, to the Russians, because of their influence in that region?

If anybody believes that Vladimir Putin

is on a humanitarian mission in Syria to help stomp out ISIS, you're wrong.

No one with any knowledge of Vladimir Putin and the evil guy that he is believes that that's what's happening.

This is about widening the footprint and economic strength of the Russian people, trying to rebuild the Soviet Union as a world power again.

We know that he's testing nuclear weapons.

We know what Vladimir Putin's about.

I am not someone that believes we should be the world's police force.

I also don't want another military family to have to endure what my family endured.

But is leaving going to create on a smaller scale a vacuum?

Are we sending the wrong message?

Don't forget it was the Russians who were charged with making sure the chemical weapons were pulled out of Iraq, that they were destroyed, and they certified that they were.

And then there were Russian agents there when he used, when Bashar Assad used chemical weapons on his own people.

And so we struck back.

If you remember the missile strike on that airfield, and we warned them not to do that again.

Is leaving that region and claiming victory against ISIS the right thing to do in the world.

We're talking 2,200 troops coming out.

Well, it appears as if General Mattis doesn't believe it's the right thing to do.

He was critical of this.

The president is removing him a couple of months early.

Interesting enough,

as much as there were disagreements, and that's putting it mildly, between the late Senator John McCain and Donald Trump, it was Senator McCain that said on my show in Arizona that the Trump cabinet was the best cabinet he has seen for any president since the Reagan years, and maybe even better.

Well, we're watching a lot of turnover in that cabinet, and some of the great, respected military minds and the people that gave credibility to the Trump administration are leaving.

And then, is this the right message to be sending?

Are even Trump supporters beginning to see

chaos

or have doubt?

And that is a big concern for me, or for the president, I'm sure.

The bigger concern for me is the long-term effects in the world of what's happened.

Go back to the 1990s and the deal that President Clinton cut with the North Koreans and the speech he gave saying that the deal we cut with the North Koreans was going to ensure that the North Koreans never had nuclear weapons.

Fast forward, what, 27 years later, and here we are.

We were dealing with the North Korea that was test-firing ICBMs and threatening nuclear war.

Well, then we saw the deal that President Obama cut with the Iranians, and it mirrored the deal in many ways with the North Koreans, and his speech regarding the deal certainly mirrored the speech by President Clinton, saying that it would ensure that the Iranians would never have nuclear weapons.

Look what we're dealing with them now, test-firing missiles.

Still

set on destroying Israel.

Matter of fact, the Iranians, and this is where it connects, the Iranians in Syria on the Israeli border firing missiles or trying to fire missiles into Israel.

So the long-term effects of a decision sometimes aren't felt for years.

Sometimes they're felt almost immediately.

The pullout of Iraq, the creation of ISIS, the vacuum created in Iraq, we felt almost immediately.

Is this sending a message of recruitment, a message of victory to our enemies?

When you proclaim victory against ISIS, what intelligence did the president have to make that victory?

And again, giving the president the benefit of the doubt from my perspective was he obviously has the intelligence reports that no one else has

is privy to.

And then the Congress gets briefed later.

What was it that the president had on his desk that made this the right move?

Because there were many people on his side of the aisle.

Lindsey Graham has been a fierce defender of this president when it comes to the wall.

He was a fierce defender of this president in his choice of Brett Kavanaugh for a Supreme Court, but is fiercely critical of this.

Who is is the president listening to?

It's another valid question.

The American people that want to support him.

And I'll be honest with you, I have become more of an observer.

I'm not invested.

The last president I was invested in was George W.

Bush.

I volunteered on the Bush campaign in 2004.

And still,

I think the world of George W.

Bush as a human being, I think he is a terrific man.

I was invested there.

I'm not invested here.

I want what's right for America.

From the Mueller investigation that we saw going on, if the president had done something wrong, the American people have a right to know.

If it wasn't criminal, but it was the wrong thing to do, let the voters decide in 2020.

You know, but I've also watched this thing morph into from a collusion with the Russians' investigation to an obstruction of justice to campaign finance violations and anything they can try to hang this president for.

I can see that with my own eyes.

But as an observer of what's happening, good people, and the president has been phenomenal at business.

He's got great instinct, but he surrounds himself with people that know what they're doing.

Well, this president did exactly that at the beginning of his presidency.

And I gave him huge kudos

for his foreign policy decisions, which I thought were not going to be good at the beginning of his presidency.

And he proved me wrong.

His first foreign trip by going to Saudi Arabia and then visiting the Vatican and then visiting Israel or Israel and then the Vatican, speaking to the three major religions of the world before going to that NATO summit and beginning to renegotiate NATO.

I thought his first foreign policy trip was a home run that no one gave him credit for.

I thought the moving of the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was the right thing to do.

I thought that was the right thing, the right message to send the Israeli and the Palestinians, for that matter.

But when your top advisors and some of the best military minds that America has to offer is suspicious of your leaving Syria, my question is,

what are the reasons behind this president making that decision?

And what I haven't heard much yet, and I'm sure that we're going to, maybe Morning Joe has said it, but I'm not a necessity, believe it or not, I don't watch Joe and Mika very often

because every episode of Morning Joe is like watching the Festivus airing of the grievances.

But maybe they've said it.

But when do you start hearing about, well, this is all part of what Russia has on Trump, that they're telling him behind the scenes, if he doesn't get out of Syria, that there's going to be bad news for him.

So he's doing this as a cover for the rut.

I haven't heard that yet, but it's got to be coming if it hasn't already been said.

The reasons for this

worry me,

not for any other reason than the long-term effects it may have for the American people and for the horrible things that Bashar Assad continues to do to his people.

So, more of this before we finish up this hour of the show.

Again, my name is Mike Broomhead, and this is the Glenn Beck program.

Hey, thanks for being here.

Merry Christmas from the Glenn Beck program.

My name is Mike Broomhead in for Glenn Today.

I'll I'll be in a few days this week as well.

The government shut down a big part of the story, the pullout of Syria.

We're going to take troops out of Syria.

There's

a lot of argument among the American people of how involved we should be and where we should be involved.

We've got to have an influence around the world.

The world has become much smaller.

We all know that.

From North Korea to Iran and everything across the Middle East and North Africa, we've got to have an influence.

Russia is proving that.

The Russian influence and the teaming teaming up with Bashar Assad and what Bashar Assad has done to his people, the millions of Syrian people that are either exiled, imprisoned, or dead at the hands of Bashar Assad is a worldwide tragedy.

I don't necessarily believe that we should be fighting everyone else's war.

I agree with that principle.

But if we are not involved, if we are not invested, if we are not an influencer, others will be.

What will that region look like?

Just look geographically at what sits, where Syria sits in reference to Israel, to Iraq, to Iran.

You look at that region of the world and what happens when you've got an evil person like Abashar Assad partnering up with a Vladimir Putin.

And it's not just the governments, but it's the people.

that thought the Americans had their back.

I have had, I've been proven wrong by the president before.

I'll be honest with you.

I'm not a fan of

tariffs.

I'm not a fan of tariffs.

I am,

but I'm no economist.

The president is a brilliant businessman.

So

I am a free market, free trade person.

What are the tariffs long-term going to do to our economy?

He says long-term it's going to be better for America, giving him the benefit of the doubt.

But I will say this, I don't think tariffs are the right way to go.

This worries me.

Losing a family member in service to the country,

for any reason, when you lose a family member, it's devastating.

And nobody wants to feel like it was for nothing.

And there are families that deal with a tragedy like that where, myself included, where you worry, was it for nothing.

We have had the great privilege and honor of hearing my brother's story of how he was killed, with the men that he served with, with the lives that he influenced with the lives that he saved and as horrible as that loss is it is

it is

somehow healing to know that it was not for nothing when i watched isis invade iraq and i watched isis

then

destroy things and use american military vehicles to murder people, it tore me apart personally because it felt like it was tearing down everything my brother fought for.

I know that's personalizing things way too much, but how else is a family member supposed to feel?

What is going to be the fallout of us leaving Syria?

Is there going to be a negative effect?

Of course, the goal is to end the wars and the conflicts and bring the American military members home.

Incidentally, if we're not going to send our members of the military in to win, if we're not going to take the gloves off and allow them to be the warriors that they are, we shouldn't send them in the first place.

I also believe that.

But are we leaving

a vacuum behind?

And if we do, what effects will we feel of it?

We should learn lessons from the past.

And I'm nervous that this is going to be, every president has made big mistakes.

Is this going to be the big mistake by Donald Trump?

I wish I had a definitive answer in my heart.

I wish I had a definitive feeling in my heart about this.

It's a difficult situation.

I'm happy that the men and women that are there will be returning home safely.

But would they tell you it's time to come home?

Would they tell you mission accomplished?

Would they tell you that that

ISIS has been defeated and it's now safe for the American people to come home?

That in the end should be a big, you know, a big

question that's asked and have answered.

We're going to talk about, obviously, the government shut down, how long it might last, how it affects people, what areas of the government are affected, why it's happening.

Immigration is going to be a big part of this as well as an update on some of the things I know about illegal immigration across this country, how we should be and why we should be fostering legal immigration.

We're also going to talk about Ruth Vader Ginsburg in the next hour.

RBG undergoing surgery for cancer.

Another reason why the Democrats are feverishly trying to make sure Donald Trump doesn't finish this term would be one more Supreme Court nomination with the Republicans holding on to the Senate.

Very, very interesting stuff.

All that coming up in the next hour of the show.

Stick around for that.

Again, my name is Mike Broomhead.

This is the Glenn Beck Program.

the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment this is the glenbeck program

coming up in hour number two of course we're going to talk more about the government shutdown the duration of it who it's affecting how it will affect the american people all of those things coming up more about syria the pullout and the changes in the trump administration who exactly will replace mattis some of the biographical issues but ruth bader ginsburg undergoes surgery.

What does that mean for the makeup of the court moving forward?

All of that coming up on the Glenbeck program.

My name is Mike Bruvet.

Stick around.

This is the Glenbeck program.

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hey Merry Christmas from the Glenn Beck program my name is Mike Broomhead we are I'm here all day for Glenn and part of the week hope you've got a great Christmas planned.

Let's start this hour off talking about RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Word came out she was in the hospital, went through cancer treatment.

She's up and around and working after cancer surgery.

A spokesman for the court also said she remained in New York Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

No information released on when she might return home.

Her surgery was on Friday.

It removed two malignant growth in her left lung.

Doctors say there's no evidence of any remaining disease.

Of course, the question has been about the health of Ruth Bader Ginsburg because she is up in years.

And will she stay on the court throughout the Trump presidency, first term, second term, if that happens?

And what would the makeup of the court look like with the liberal stalwart that she is gone?

And who would Trump nominate to replace Republicans still holding on to the majority in the Senate, at least in this term for the president?

And what would that look like?

Now, the nomination process for Brett Kavanaugh was a complete disaster.

Most people people would say it was an embarrassment.

And it really was.

That should have been handled much differently.

And just to give you an explanation, there's a mechanism in place in the Supreme Court.

Most of you are familiar with it.

But I talked with Senator John Kyle, who for 18 years was on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

He left the Senate.

If you know the name Jeff Flake, Jeff Flake replaced Senator Kyle when he left the Senate.

But when John McCain passed away, John Kyle took his seat over again and replaced John McCain until the end of this year.

And now Martha McSally had been replaced.

That's kind of the makeup of the Senate in Arizona.

But John Kyle came on to talk about the Brett Kavanaugh situation because of how familiar he is with the process of the courts and talked about what a complete political disaster that was.

And there is a mechanism where all of that could have been done behind closed doors weeks and weeks and weeks earlier.

This was the Hail Mary pass that came in from Dianne Feinstein and the Democrats on that committee trying to damage Brett Kavanaugh enough to stymie that nomination.

It was a Hail Mary pass that almost worked.

It almost worked.

But what they do, and when you go through an FBI investigation, which Brett Kavanaugh, I believe, went through seven of them, you fill out a booklet that's over 100 pages long.

And you will give every detail of your adult life that you can remember.

And they ask you for references.

Well, knowing the FBI knowing that you're going to give references that are going to say good things about you, they don't stop at the references that you give them.

They ask those references for the names of other people that you associated with and hung out with in your past.

And they dig deeper and they continue to dig to find a clear picture, as clear as they can, of your life.

And Brett Kavanaugh had passed every single one of those and had been, by all accounts, a very upstanding member of what they called the second highest court in the land, which was the DC Circuit.

Then he gets gets nominated for the Supreme Court and he becomes public enemy number one because of his association with Trump, purely for that reason only.

Now the process with Dr.

Blasey Ford, normally the way this works is Dianne Feinstein gets that letter.

Dianne Feinstein takes that letter to the chairman of the committee.

They put it in the file and it gets investigated.

Now the FBI could have done a much more thorough investigation, much longer than a week if it wanted to, than what the restrictions were put on it, if they'd have done that at the beginning and if they had so chosen.

They would have brought Judge Kavanaugh in behind closed doors.

They would have brought Dr.

Ford in behind closed doors.

Her name would have been private.

She would have not have had the death threat.

She would have not had the public scrutiny.

She would have not had any of the other things she complained about.

They would have interviewed her under oath in a private setting.

Judge Kavanaugh would would have brought in to answer the allegations.

And as Senator Kyle explained, what ends up happening in those situations can happen one of three things.

The nominee sees what he's being or she's being accused of or has been said about them, and they pull their own nomination and they say, I no longer am going to try for this job, and they pull their own nomination.

Sometimes the committee pulls the nomination for the reasons that they've been given, which you and I would never find out about.

Or sometimes, in spite of whatever the allegations are, they are passed through.

All of that could have been done behind closed doors.

It wasn't.

It was made

as a publicity stunt.

And I'm saying all of that because I, and as much as I'm not a fan of the politics of RBG, I don't wish ill on anybody, especially not cancer.

So I'm not wishing her ill health.

I'm not wishing her to leave the court for health reasons, but it's a real possibility that she doesn't stay on the Supreme Court long term.

What do you think the next judicial nomination is going to be like from this president?

You want to know why the vitriol and the idea of impeachment is being brought up.

You want to know why they are so crazy about doing what they can to replace this president.

A, yes, it's because Hillary got beat.

It's because they hate him because he beat the heir apparent.

No No doubt about that.

But the other part of it is going to be judicial nominations.

We all know that the longest lasting legacy for any president whatsoever

is Supreme Court nominations.

What would a court look like with an RBG gone and a Trump nominated replacement in place?

Now, as Brett Kavanaugh said, and he stated all the time that he thought Roe v.

Wade was already decided law, didn't matter.

They were ginning up the fear.

He makes a decision recently about Planned Parenthood and sides with the liberals because of legal reasons, which enraged some of the base.

But it also showed that

this judge said, I will judge things based on their legal merit, not on how I feel about them.

And he did it.

We saw Chief Justice Roberts do the same thing.

When Roberts went on the court, the decision he made about Obamacare

and his response was, if you don't like bad law, elect better lawmakers.

It's not our job to say whether it's good or bad.

It's legal or it's illegal.

It's constitutional or it's not constitutional.

So Kavanaugh has already shown himself to not be a one-issue person.

He's not going to be a cowboy on the court.

It doesn't matter.

The left created a narrative and that's what it was going to be.

If you thought that was crazy,

if you thought that was crazy train, you wait for the crazy train that starts down the tracks if RBG has to leave the court or decides to leave the court for her health reasons.

You want to know why the vitriol and the anger?

This is why.

The 20 or 30 year legacy of a Supreme Court nominee for any president, especially since the Republicans held on to the Senate.

And with the rule changes that were in place, thank you, Harry Reid,

now it takes only a simple majority to push a Supreme Court nominee through as opposed to the 60 votes from before.

The Democrats have no one to blame but themselves for these things.

You know,

I am an armchair historian, especially in 20th century politics in America.

And when Harry Reid says years and years and years ago,

that to invoke the nuclear option would change the makeup and would do irreparable damage to to the United States Senate.

And then when it's politically expedient for him to do it, he does it.

And everybody warned him.

As a matter of fact, Mitch McConnell turned out to be the prophet on this one, saying, you are going to regret this sooner rather than later.

Along comes Donald Trump and Brett Kavanaugh, and now it only takes a simple majority.

And they lost their minds.

They created the situation.

Again, let's go back to the idea that the media is never going to give you the full picture.

Did you hear anybody in the media say the Democrats are the ones that changed the rules?

They didn't.

They didn't.

In the end, it was the changing of the rules by Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats that made it so it was only a simple majority and not 60 votes.

So now the potential there for Donald Trump to name another Supreme Court nominee or another justice is

a real possibility.

And again, I'm not wishing ill on Ruth Bader-Ginsburg, not by a long shot.

But she is an elderly woman undergoing a major surgery for cancer.

I mean,

that is not a good prognosis.

If she can return to the bench, then she should.

It is

something that we should be watching.

What we're going to do in just a moment is we're going to go back to the illegal immigration issue, which is at the forefront of why we have a government shutdown.

What is the history of all of this before we talk about all of the things within the shutdown that are going to affect the average American?

How much of it will affect the American people?

The Democrats are making it sound like devastation.

Is it truly going to be devastating?

So all of that coming up in the next part of the show.

Again, I'm Mike Broomhead.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

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Welcome and thanks for listening.

My name is Mike Broomhead in on the Glenn Beck program.

I'm in all this week for Glenn, with the exception of tomorrow.

We appreciate you spending some time with us.

This is

odd times in America as now we're looking at the government shutdown over a wall in border security, and it seems as if the Democrats have shifted sides, which is odd to me that no one is asking that question of how they could possibly have spun the 180 that they have spun.

And from everybody, from their leadership, Bill Clinton, and I had hoped that at some point

Donald Trump maybe will.

During the State of the Union address, I would love it if the president gave the State of the Union address and just ripped the speech that President Clinton gave in his State of the Union address, demanding more money for border security, to beef up the border patrol, to expedite the deportation of illegal aliens when Senator Obama spoke so eloquently about what illegal aliens are doing, especially in the face of legal immigration, that it needs to be stopped and no American or every American should be upset about it.

We have a right to be upset about illegal immigration in this country.

Chuck Schumer calling it illegal.

Why these leaders in the Democratic Party, two of which are no longer in leadership, but Chuck Schumer certainly is.

Chuck Schumer is the one that is fighting this shutdown, saying the president is throwing a temper tantrum and this government shutdown is his fault.

The president said, I'll take the blame.

I am not signing a piece of legislation that doesn't include billions of dollars for border security.

Wall, fence, by the way, it's going to be a fun couple of years.

At least let's look at the silver lining on the dark cloud of the Democrats taking over the House again and Nancy Pelosi being the Speaker of the House, we will have plenty of sound bites from Nancy Pelosi to deal with over the next couple of years.

Nancy Pelosi was being asked about the wall, and she said a wall is un-American.

The wall is immoral.

And then someone used the phrase fence and said,

you supported a bill that gave billions of dollars, including a couple of billion dollars, for the fence.

And Nancy Pelosi's reply, with a straight face, was, well, now you're talking about a fence and not a wall.

If those are the kind of gems we're going to get over the next couple of years, at least it's going to be a fun to watch.

But I don't understand the 180-degree turn.

What to do with people that are in this country illegally already is a political fight that we're going to have to have.

At what level, at what cutoff point do the people that have already put down roots here because the American government has turned their back, at what point do the American people have some responsibility via their government for those people?

But border security shouldn't be one of them.

If you think about what's killing people, we now know that the opioid epidemic in America is killing people at an alarming rate.

And, you know, that problem is something we can argue about as well.

When you have people being prescribed opioids, and these are everyday people that would never imagine they would be dependent on anything.

And then, by taking medication at the doctor's prescription and becoming dependent on those drugs, and an opioid addiction, for what I'm being told, is one of the hardest addictions to overcome.

New regulations and reporting on the prescribing of opioids means that you cannot go to multiple doctors to get opioids because once you're in the database, they cut you off as far as the prescription goes.

And now you find people that never in a million years would have imagined themselves going to an illegal drug dealer on the streets buying heroin because they can no longer find the prescription opioids they were taking before.

Well, where do you think those opioids are coming from?

They're crossing the border from the south.

Opioids, fentanyl.

By the way, fentanyl doesn't take a whole lot

to get people high or kill them.

So it's also much easier to conceal because it comes in in much smaller amounts.

In the early 1980s,

all that ATF worried about,

or I'm sorry, not ATF, DEA worried about was marijuana.

That's what they chased was marijuana.

Along comes Pablo Escobar and the cartels and cocaine into Miami and the rest of the United States, and cocaine was there.

Now the drug cartels in Mexico are trucking in opioids, fentanyl, and meth.

Methamphetamines they call ice.

I don't want to get confused with immigration and customs enforcement, but ICE crossing our borders at an alarming rate.

The reason why this is such a passionate issue for me is I will tell you, I am a transplant almost 24 years ago from Florida, where I am on vacation, to the state of Arizona, which I now call home.

I don't think there's a greater place to live than in Arizona.

I love the state of Arizona.

It is being overrun at its southern border by the drug cartels.

They control corridors on our soil.

As an American, that should outrage you.

What should equally outrage all of us is right now, let's say that everything the Democrats are saying about this shutdown is 100% true, that it's going to affect millions of Americans, it's going to be devastating 80,000 federal workers, furloughed federal workers, many of them in law enforcement that won't be paid until the shutdown is over.

Let's say that the worst-case scenario painted by them is absolutely true.

Why are we not equally outraged at both sides of the political aisle,

or

the two branches of government fighting about this, or as our friend

Alexandria Casio-Cortez would say, chambers of government, the three chambers of government, the House, the Senate, and the White House?

She did say it, another reason why it's going to be a fun couple of years.

Why are we not saying to the Congress, it's your job to write laws?

This has been going on that we know of with the separated children and unaccompanied minors has been happening since 09.

Where have you been?

Where have you been?

What are you doing?

Where is a piece of legislation?

And everybody says elections have consequences.

The Democrats are going to take over the House.

That is absolutely 100% true.

I believe in that principle.

Elections have consequences.

Well, Donald Trump won the presidency.

And elections have consequences.

When Barack Obama won, they said it was a mandate from the American people that the Obama agenda needed to be pushed through.

When he said he had a cell phone and a pen and he'd go around Congress, the left politically and the media applauded him as somebody that was going to get things done and go around the gridlock in Washington.

Not so much now.

But the very Democrats that were border hawks.

10, 15 years ago, not actually less than 10 years ago,

are now people that are saying a wall is immoral.

Well, let me tell you what's immoral.

Human trafficking is immoral.

Bringing people to this country and then putting there somewhere against their will to work off many times in prostitution the money they owe for being brought to this country illegally, enriching the drug cartels by human trafficking, allowing the cartels to control corridors and put this poison in our country, that's immoral.

That is absolutely immoral.

And those are the things that we as Americans should be fighting for, and the media should be our voice in all of that.

You want to hold someone accountable.

Start holding some of these members of the traditional media and tell them to stop being so lazy and ask the real questions.

Coming up, we will talk about the changes in the Trump administration.

Mattis out, but his replacement, Shanahan, who exactly will replace Mattis?

That is going to be a big part of the conversation coming up here in just a few moments.

Talk about the big changes and the pullout in Syria.

All of that right around the corner.

My name is Mike Broomhead.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

You're listening to Glenn Beck.

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Welcome back.

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It's the Gun Beck Program.

My name is Mike Broomhead from Phoenix, Arizona, Infra Glenn, this week.

And Patrick Shanahan will replace General Mattis as Defense Secretary.

He is the assistant or the Deputy Defense Secretary.

He's worked for Boeing as an executive.

He is not a military man himself, but he was raised in a military family.

He said his father taught him service before self,

which was a big part of his upbringing.

Liked by the White House, according to most,

wasn't very close necessarily with Mattis,

but they called him the fix-it-man at Boeing, that he has got an illustrious career in that industry.

What's that going to do for him being the defense secretary?

And the questions arise with General Mattis leaving disagreements between the president and Mattis,

that the expedited departure as opposed to waiting around for the confirmation of the next person.

He's going to be out as of January 1st, according to the president's announcement, that the new or the acting Defense Secretary Shanahan will take his place January 1st.

Again, all of this going back to who knows which decisions, all of them, but the decision to pull troops out of Syria in an expedited fashion, the way it was announced, whether or not it was a good idea, and anxious to hear more from some of the military minds around the world.

People that I've talked to in the intelligence industry, people I've talked to that I believe in and trust, most of them, I would say nine out of 10 of them, think this is a bad move.

Rand Paul likes the move, but Rand Paul, I wouldn't say he's an isolationist, but he leans that way for sure.

In principle, I agree on many levels, we should not be the world's police force, especially using our military the way we do.

We send our soldiers and we send our troops, I shouldn't just say soldiers, whether it's Marines, sending airmen,

sending our Navy, our sailors in to combat zones to be a police force is not the way they're built and what they should be used for necessarily.

But we understand post-World War II, we still have a presence in Europe, Japan.

All these years later, we still have military presence in those countries.

And if

we're going to invest the way we do in doing things, how long are we willing to be a part of those parts of the world in peacetime to maintain those things and have a ready force where it's needed?

Is the world safer now than it was 10 years ago?

I don't think many people believe that it is.

I think we're safer from ISIS.

I do believe they've been decimated.

Have they been beaten?

I don't know about that either.

Isn't that a question when we look at the military minds of this world?

Many of them saying that this is an, of all people, not a military mind, but

Lindsey Graham saying that this is an insurance policy, that

the small footprint of troops that we have in Syria is an insurance policy.

Going backwards is not something I want to see.

There are two things here that concern me.

One, the background my family has, losing a brother, and then watching Iraq fall apart years after my brother was killed in Iraq.

It felt to me personally like everything that he had been a part of working for was being decimated.

It was devastating to many military families because the only thing you have to hold on to is that feeling that it wasn't for nothing.

Well, if everything we had gained is lost, then it feels like it was for nothing.

I don't want any family to feel that way.

I don't want any family to feel like it was for nothing.

Additionally,

We send men and women into harm's way.

They sign up to do the job.

But when we send them to do that job, job, they have to feel like they have the support of the American people.

Are the American people just tired?

It sounds silly, but are they just tired of war?

Are our enemies going to say that they've outlasted us?

Because I believe this is going to be a recruiting tool.

There's no doubt that they are going to play this up as a victory

for them.

So

I am not a big fan of sending men and women into combat zones without the equipment and without the orders to go and win.

But

are we setting ourselves up for failure?

Are we setting ourselves up for

going back?

I speak in high schools, or I used to quite a bit.

In Arizona, I would ask to go to speak to social studies groups, or, you know, the classes would all come together in an assembly.

And I would always handle it more as a question and answer.

I didn't give a speech, and high school kids don't want to hear a 51-year-old guy speak.

I would let them ask questions and do my best to answer them.

And high school kids, at least where I'm from, are concerned about the same things we're concerned about.

Jobs, terrorist attacks, are we safe?

At the time, nuclear war with the North Koreans.

And I had someone ask me about, you know, because of my unique situation, having lost a brother, how I felt about the different wars and why I was still supportive of us being in some of the countries we were in, you know, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria.

And I looked at these kids on a Friday.

So a bunch of the boys were wearing football uniforms and some of the girls were wearing cheerleading uniforms.

And

I said to them, Some of you are seniors, which means next year or the year after, some of you will be trading in those football and cheerleading uniforms for military uniforms.

And what's been going on since 2003, March of 2003, was the invasion into Baghdad.

What's been going on all of these years and not been solved in the Middle East as long as the Afghanistan war has been going on and our involvement there across North Africa now where we have troops in harm's way dying as we speak.

And

the idea that we as a generation

didn't do it.

We didn't fix it.

We didn't take the gloves off and finish the job the way we should have.

We pulled out of Iraq way too soon.

We should have, hindsight's 2020, but we should have done something about Syria years ago.

We could have knocked down the air capabilities of Bashar Assad and at least leveled the playing field for the free Syrian army to give them a fighting chance to take their country back without a big military footprint years ago and saved millions of lives being devastated, lost, or changed.

Whether it's exile, imprisonment, or death, we could have played a part in allowing them to fight their own battles, but helping them.

Hindsight's 20-20.

But you look in the face of an 18-year-old and you say to them, this has been going on since 2003.

Many of these kids were not born or infants when this happened.

We haven't finished the job.

And because of that, many of you will don the uniform of the United States military and go on a deployment to the Middle East.

I have four grandsons,

the oldest of which is seven years old.

Less than 15 years from now, what's he going to do?

If he decides he's going to join the military, where will we be in the world?

So, this serious situation is more than politics, and it's more than just about 2,200 troops being pulled out of a region.

What are the after effects and the long-term effects of this?

And what generation, how many people is it going to affect?

Go look at your kids.

You got kids that are 15 years old.

How will this affect them five years from now when they're 20?

How many of your sons or daughters have said, I want to join the military?

Where will they be in the world?

And will this, what's happening now with the pullout of Syria, have an effect on them?

The commander-in-chief makes very serious decisions.

And before I had a knee-jerk reaction one way or the other to denounce what the president did or say it was the right thing to do, I wanted to be a bit more educated on the whys.

The people that I know are saying that this could be a big mistake,

that this could come back to bite the president because if ISIS or another group, you change the name:

Al-Qaeda, the Taliban,

ISIS.

What would be the next group?

Is this going to fester into something else where we are going to be sending men and women a couple of years from now back into a region because of the uprising of terrorism because we didn't leave a footprint behind?

And it's more of a thoughtful question than it is a political question.

And is this going to be that mistake?

Every president makes one or more.

Is this going to be that huge mistake that ends up costing this president

and the American people?

More to discuss on this topic.

Of course, the shutdown

that's affecting everyone, the exact places that it's affecting, and the people that it's affecting.

A lot more still coming up on the show.

I'm Mike Broomhead.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

Merry Christmas from the Mike Broomhead Show, or from Mike Broomhead on the Glenn Beck program.

We are thrilled you've joined us for part of your day.

There's so much happening, and we're talking about the pullout in Syria and the seriousness of all of this.

Britt Hume made an interesting point.

He said, criticism of Trump has been overblown, but Syria and the Madison is a big deal.

This is the part where I think the Democrats have overplayed their hand so many times.

Everything that's happened with Donald Trump has been the end of the world.

And you can only scream,

the sky is falling so many times before people start ignoring you.

One of the criticisms I have of the 24-hour news cycle, even

on Fox News, you see it all the time.

There's this constant breaking news and the big breaking news, that ominous sound,

and then it turns out to be nothing.

You know, locally, I'll get a tweet from our local newspaper and it will say breaking news, and you'll open the tweet and it'll be a weather report.

Well, see, in Arizona, if it rains, that's breaking news.

But that's not breaking news.

Every move that this president has made since he won the election has been grounds for impeachment.

The president of the United States wasn't even president for two weeks when Maxine Waters called for impeachment.

And someone pointed out to her,

he's only been the president for two weeks.

She goes, the amount of time doesn't matter.

So they've been screaming impeachment

since the election, never mind the inauguration.

This, I believe, is a bigger deal for this president.

General Mattis is a well-respected military mind on both sides of the political aisle.

When you have an advisor like this that's leaving, and then there's an expedited exit because of the disagreements with the president, this is one of those situations where instead of every time someone leaving this administration, they add them to the tote board and they have pictures across the screen.

This is one of those areas that can be held up as a concern.

The location of Syria, the involvement of the Russians, the uprising of ISIS in the past,

the genocide in that country is a world problem

because of what can happen next.

What will happen next?

And if we don't get our arms around this, if for whatever reason

General Mattis disagrees with the president to the point of one or the other saying, I quit or you're fired.

It's a big deal.

The change in policy of removing troops from Syria

is another big deal, but it can fall on deaf ears to many people because we've been hearing everything's a big deal.

Just go through the Mueller investigation, going back to

Manafort and Michael Flynn, and everybody was going to be the one.

This was going to be the one.

This was going to be the one that turned around and destroyed this president.

Every single person.

Well, this one's cooperating.

This one's been arrested.

This has happened.

That happened.

This is it.

This is the one.

So you heard about Michael Cohen being the one that knew all the secrets and was going to be the demise of this presidency.

And then you heard about the people that own

the National Inquirer, and you heard how they were going to be the ones.

They're the ones that really know the secrets.

It's always the next one.

It's the next one.

And it hasn't happened.

People just kind of roll their eyes because every time it's a problem, every time this is the one that's going to devastate it, this is the end.

This is where impeachment or resignation is the only choice.

And you've got many members of the media saying they have no choice in the House.

The House has no choice.

They are obligated by law to seek articles of impeachment.

And you look at things and you wonder,

what exactly are you talking about?

So that idea of impeachment of this president is obviously something to discuss in the next hour.

Is this president going to face impeachment?

Should he face impeachment?

Or is this just more about politics with the serious issues that face our country?

The history lesson's not over on illegal immigration in America and what needs to be done.

And believe it or not, one publication saying this whole thing is politics because this is how the president could build the wall without Congress.

He doesn't need Congress to build the wall.

How could the president pull that off?

What could he do if he really wanted to and end the shutdown by building it without Congress?

All of that coming up.

We'll do that in the next hour of the show again.

My name is Mike Broomhead.

I'm in for Glenn Beck all of this week.

This is the Glenbeck program.

We will be back.

The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.

This is the Glenbeck program.

Gonna talk about education in America in the next hour of the show.

Talk about the least educated state.

It's not always about money.

We are going to talk about what's happening in the world as far as the government shutdown goes, what it means to most Americans.

We'll catch up on that.

Illegal immigration and the history lesson continues as well because if we don't understand the history of things we are doomed to repeat it this goes back much longer than many of us realize although it seems to be squarely on the shoulders of this president all that coming up in this hour of the show it's the glenbeck program i'm mike broomhead stick around

This is the Glenbeck Program.

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Merry Christmas from the Glenn Beck program.

My name is Mike Broomhead.

We are here just for another hour.

I appreciate you spending some time with us.

And

education in America is going to be a part of what we talk about this morning.

California, the least educated state, which kind of surprised me,

the amount of money spent on education in the state of California, they have got the most people over the age of 25 who have not completed the ninth grade.

And they also have the most people

that

that are, don't have a high school diploma of any age.

And it's not just numbers of people, but highest in percentage, highest in per capita.

So

the state of education, which is something that's become more important to me the older I get, will be a part of what we're discussing, not just for the sake of bashing California, which is easy to do sometimes with the government they have, but it is more about learning lessons from other people's mistakes.

And so that we'll get to.

The changeover in the Trump administration can't be overstated.

This is a big deal with Mattis leaving and the circumstances and manner in which he left.

That we'll also talk about.

The illegal immigration issue is a big one for me because it's led to the shutdown.

The cornerstone of this president's campaign was building a wall.

And it was about stopping illegal immigration.

There are three things that the Trump administration wants to accomplish.

And I think he wins on all three.

One is, of course, border security.

Arizona has something called the border strike force made up of state police officers, it's state troopers.

And the DPS director and our governor came up with this border strike force.

And what they are is a liaison.

And they work hand in hand, filling the gaps in the local, you know, the

more low-income border counties where those police agencies need help with some of the crimes being committed by people that have come across the border illegally.

And a liaison with federal law enforcement and trying to work with them where they can, whether it's Border Patrol or ICE, in trying to stem the tide of the crimes that are coming across the border.

And it's an important issue across the country because all of the drugs we've talked about that cross into Arizona, the opioids, the fentanyl, the ICE, or what we call a meth crossing the border ends up in places all over the country.

You look at the spike in the opioid epidemic in America.

We talk about taking it seriously.

Well, shutting down the flow, or at least making it more difficult to get those drugs into this country are important.

So there are two things happening with the migrant caravan and illegal immigration as it stands.

First of all, it overwhelms ICE.

Now, Border Patrol stops them from crossing the border.

But once they're here, once they're in the states, it becomes an immigration and customs enforcement issue.

Now, the FBI was revamped after 9-11.

They are an anti-terrorism organization and by most accounts, doing a stellar job in stopping terrorism.

You know how we know that?

We don't hear what's going on.

They stop many attacks, but they have been refocused and retasked.

Immigration and customs enforcement should be doing just that, but they do drug interdiction, human trafficking.

They do so many other things that they should, I believe, this is my personal opinion, narrow the scope of what ICE does.

Immigration.

They should be tasked with people that are overstaying their visas.

We have got the digital technology to track people down that overstay their visas and make sure that they leave the country.

An enormous amount of illegal immigrants in this country are people that overstayed visas.

The other part of that is the customs enforcement part of it.

But the immigration side of it could be, that could be one of the things that they focus solely on.

If there are other crimes being committed by illegal immigrants, put it off on the DEA if it's drug crimes.

ATF.

Let those other

investigative branches do those jobs.

But if we're going to get serious about it, the president wants border protection, which I don't know how you cannot, how anybody can believe that the border is secure.

On any level, it isn't.

But secondly, it is about chain migration.

It's odd that we are allowing the current generation of immigrants to choose the next generation.

I'm not talking about minor children.

That seems to be a no-brainer or spouses, but it's parents, it's brothers and sisters that are adults.

It should be done on a merit basis and not on a chain migration basis.

That makes sense.

And then the visa lotteries, as opposed to people coming based on their merit.

Our litmus test should not be wealth.

Our litmus test should be ability.

I am an advocate for a guest worker program.

I live in a border state.

I can only give you anecdotal evidence from where I live.

In the state of Arizona, at our peak, I believe 08,

somewhere around there,

there were 60,000 new home starts.

They were building 60,000 homes in one year.

The market crashes.

It starts to make a comeback.

The economy is going very, very well.

The construction world is working very hard again.

And there is a lot of work out there for them.

They're now at a little over 20,000, somewhere around 20,000 to 25,000 home starts in the middle of this housing boom.

You want to know why we don't get anywhere near 60,000 home starts in Arizona?

I'm just giving you an anecdotal where I live.

Because they don't have the manpower on job sites to do the jobs.

I have friends who own construction companies because that's the world I came from.

I was an electrical contractor.

My friends in the framing and drywall business could hire 30 or 35 people.

They have three people show up.

If we had a viable program where people could come and work, not able to take advantage of any public services whatsoever, they could come and go as they please.

They could send money home as they please.

It would help the economy south of our border.

It would help the American economy and jobs that Americans aren't doing,

that really aren't doing.

And we would have the ability to then alleviate some of the pressure at the border.

When you hear about the migrant caravan in Tijuana and the vast majority of these young men that are a part of this caravan wanting to work,

why not alleviate the pressure on the Border Patrol?

And I'll tell you why it makes sense.

The cartels are not stupid.

So while on one hand, you've got people posing as families and crossing the border and demanding asylum and tying up ICE

with all of this paperwork and holding people in ankle bracelets and turning them loose and hearing dates, the drug cartels are continuing to truck in tons, billions of dollars of worth of that poison that's going into the veins and up the nose in citizens.

So you tie them up in one area and you're making money there,

but then your drugs and your crime cross the border because they can't be in two places at once.

So alleviating the pressure at the border where we're able to, you know, and there can be strict rules and all of those things is a big part of what we could be doing, what we should be doing.

And we're not.

This goes back to Reagan getting the promise of border security, which was never fulfilled.

You know that Bush Bush signed in the law to build a fence, never got funded.

And now this president says we're no longer going to get empty promises.

But isn't it fascinating

that a story was written that President Trump doesn't need them.

He could go around them.

The president is able to, if he wants to, pull money from other executive agencies

without Congress.

He says he will do that.

The Congress will blame him.

The Congress will say he's doing the wrong thing.

But the Congress is not doing anything to work with him on any level.

This is a,

I heard from a family court lawyer a great analogy.

The difference between criminal law and family law is that in criminal law, you see good people, or I'm sorry, you see bad people on their best behavior, defendants.

In family law, you see good people on their worst behavior because it's such an emotional time when couples end a marriage, especially when kids are involved.

How many times a judge gives the lecture, you've got to love your children more than you hate each other.

Well, this is a nasty divorce.

You've got Trump on one side, you've got the Congress, the Democrats in Congress on the other side, and neither side wants to give an inch.

And all of us, we're those kids caught in the middle of a nasty divorce.

No matter what happens, we are going to lose

because neither side wants to give an inch.

The president has so much on his side just on the border security and the popularity with the American people.

Don't you find it odd?

I talked about this with the Democrats.

Isn't it odd that Barack Obama ended during his time in office the wetfoot-dryfoot rule with the Cuban people?

He established the embassy again, raised the American flag in Havana, and reestablished normalcy and relationship with the Cuban government.

By the way, the Cuban government and what they're doing to their people has not changed.

It is an oppressive communist regime.

And if you say anything against the government, they re-educate you, so to speak.

You're punished.

You're hauled away.

The people still have zero freedom in that country.

We've done nothing to change the lives of the Cuban people, and neither is their government.

But we re-established a relationship with them.

Then what we did was end the wetfoot-dryfoot rule, which was if you are a Cuban citizen and you got on dry american soil you were given political asylum i watched boats when i was a kid being chased to the shore by the coast guard if they got to dry land it was like paying playing tag and you get to base and you're safe well the obama administration ended that wetfoot dry foot rule

Isn't it odd now, just a few years later, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the people in leadership in the Democratic Party, in essence, want to do that with the illegal immigrants coming and posing as families.

If you can get across the border, you should get asylum.

How is it any different?

They applauded the Obama administration for ending it with an oppressive regime like the communist regime of Cuba.

And yet they want to establish it for these people coming from Central America.

By the way, the stories are still out there about MS-13 gang members being captured, about known child molesters being captured crossing the border.

There's no vetting process here.

A long way from over.

This is a long way from over.

This talk about this government shutdown.

The reasons for it are as entrenched as they can be.

But how long will it last?

We're going to do that coming up here in just a few moments.

Once again, I'm Mike Broomhead, and this is the Glen Beck program.

This is the Glen Beck program.

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Merry Christmas.

My name is Mike Broomhead.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

Illegal immigration.

And here's something else I don't think is done very well by the people on the right: is the designation or the differentiation between legal and illegal immigration.

The analogy I've been using is this.

If your neighbors across the street next door had a house fire, God forbid,

and they needed a place for a couple of days until they figured out housing until their house was repaired, you'd open your home.

You'd give them a place to sleep.

You wouldn't think twice.

You'd invite them in your home and you would give them refuge until they got to where they needed to permanently.

If you came home from work and your neighbors had had a house fire and you walk in your front door and they're already sitting on your couch eating your funnies and watching television, it's going to be a different conversation.

Same predicament, same situation.

It certainly is the way it was done that matters.

And that's what's happening.

Our laws are being broken.

This caravan is a perfect example, although it was trumped up, no pun intended.

It was made up, it was politicized, it was for made for television.

They were burning the American flag and waving the Honduran flag.

That is not the way to seek asylum.

They had opportunities along the way in Mexico to seek asylum the right way.

They refused.

This is politics on their side.

For the American media to do what they're doing

is shameful.

The Mexican media is telling the truth.

The Mexican people don't want them there.

The Mexican people wanted the new Mexican president to clamp down on the next caravan, which he's doing.

They are going to close their southern border.

The next caravan is not going to be greeted with high fives, food, water, and rides.

But

instead of telling that story,

they continue to blame the president and act as if he's some kind of a racist, xenophobe, isolationist.

I am a firm believer in legal immigration.

I've watched many families in one generation live the American dream, come to this country with nothing,

raise their children, become citizens at the very first opportunity, flourish, buy a home, retire, and watch their children and then grandchildren live the American dream.

Most of us applaud that.

Not too long ago,

the 80s singer, Billy Idol, became an American citizen.

The picture of him that went viral waving an American flag.

Well, it just happened to be that he's a celebrity.

But how many of us have stopped when it's in the newspaper or we see it on the news,

4th of July, there will be a swearing-in party, a swearing-in ceremony for new citizens?

We all stop and applaud that, or most of us do.

I believe that we should be a place of refuge and asylum.

But when you've got Syrian refugees that want to come here and they're being infiltrated by terrorists, then the president says we need a better vetting process.

He's right.

I had to get on an airplane and I'm going to get on an airplane to go home in a few days.

You go through a different process now than you did pre-9/11.

As the terrorists have morphed their tactics, our government has morphed its in stopping the terrorist attacks and the bombs on planes and things of that nature.

New screeners, take off your shoes, put your laptop in another compartment, show us your cell phone that it works, all the things that they do to try to be one step ahead of the terrorists.

Air marshals, they change what we do on airplanes, how they lock the cockpit door.

They do all of those things in answer to, to try to be one step ahead of those that would harm us.

But somehow now in

this process of illegal immigration, we're not supposed to morph and change how we handle things.

So we've taken refugees in for a long time.

Now we know that the refugees are infiltrating with the refugee, or I'm sorry, terrorists are infiltrating the refugees and coming to America, and we're not supposed to change our vetting process.

We now know that there is a 400% increase at our southern border of adults posing with children that are not theirs as families, but we're not supposed to change our vetting process based on the data that we know.

None of that makes sense.

Being in a border state, I'll tell you another statistic that border patrol and ICE keep track of the people that come north of the border.

And there is a category called OTMs, other than Mexicans.

It's people crossing the Mexican border from other countries.

And of course, you get Central and South American countries, but you get the Communist Chinese across the Middle Eastern terrorist states.

And there are statistics you can find.

The question of whether or not we should be doing something is a no-brainer.

But when you constantly hear in the media that this is just a racist agenda, this has been going on for five presidents that I know of, you know, in my lifetime.

When is Congress going to be held accountable to write some kind of a law

that gives real teeth to border security and it gives a real immigration program that people can live with.

Make it easier for good people to come and make it harder for bad people to get here.

Easier to do it legally, much harder to do it illegally.

That seems like a no-brainer to most of us.

Talk about education, the lack of education in America and how it's affecting our children, how it's really affecting our future.

I have the privilege of speaking in high schools quite a bit in Arizona, and I am always, my faith is always renewed in the youth when I talk with them.

But what are we doing about education?

Is it money that's really the issue?

And the reason why I want to bring this up is it's been a big issue in my home state, but I think nationally, this is a big, big, big issue.

Immigration.

And before we get out of here, one of my favorite things to talk about on a Christmas Eve,

the assault, the war on Christmas.

We're hearing more Merry Christmas than you are hearing happy holidays.

All of that we'll be talking about in the final half hour of the program.

Again, my name is Mike Broomhead.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

So much still to discuss.

Glad you're with me.

Stick around.

You're listening to Glenn Beck.

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Want more, Glenn?

I mean, who doesn't?

Besides my wife, stream live or download later at Glennbeck.com.

Hey, Merry Christmas.

It's the Glenn Beck program.

My name is Mike Broom.

Head I'm in for Glenn this week.

I hope you're having a great Christmas.

It's hard to believe it's Christmas Eve.

I'm still writing 2016 on stuff.

We appreciate some of your morning or some of your day, actually.

The state of education, it's interesting.

I was quite possibly the worst high school student on the planet for quite a while.

I wasn't a bad kid.

I was just obnoxious and I didn't take it very seriously.

The older I got, the more I realized that I was very fortunate.

My education at its base when I was younger

was very good.

I learned to read.

I learned to write.

I learned to comprehend what I was reading so I could convey a thought.

And all of that served me very well.

Basic math.

I became an electrician, which is, you know, everything you do is an algebraic formula.

I was fortunate that I took education seriously at its foundation so that when I had to catch up when I got older, I had the ability to.

And one of the questions kids always ask is: when am I ever going to use this again?

And the answer is, I don't know.

But we take education serious, or at least as adults, we do, with our kids.

And

when you look at the state of education, it seems like a lot of times what it is is more indoctrination than education.

I've said for a long time: if we create critical thinkers,

they will figure it out.

And the numbers of people at the foundation of our country that could read and write, it astounded the rest of the world that we were the best, we were the most educated society.

And that's fallen way, way, way off.

We tend to indoctrinate more than we educate.

We tend to tell kids what they should think as opposed to teaching them how to think.

And there's a lot of complaints in that.

But California spends a lot of money on education.

They are dead last

in residents that are 25 and older who have never completed the ninth grade,

and the 49th for the percentage of who have graduated from high school.

9.7% of California residents 25 and older never completed the ninth grade, and only 82.5%

have graduated from high school.

That is a staggering number of people that have not.

When we talk about the issues,

the history lesson of immigration that we just went over

and how we're doomed to repeat it if we don't understand.

If we aren't teaching our kids about the Holocaust, what the greatest generation,

the World War II generation, were able to accomplish D-Day.

I was in France.

I went to Normandy and Luxembourg, Belgium over the anniversary of D-Day last June.

And as much as I am a student of history, there was nothing like standing in those places:

Utah Beach, Omaha Beach, Pointe du Hawk, the Pegasus Bridge, going to these different places and meeting some of the men who fought there

and realizing that they were 18, 19 years old when they did it.

and the struggle

that they had to endure.

And had it failed, what America would look like.

That everybody east of the Mississippi would probably be speaking German, and everybody west of the Mississippi would be speaking Japanese.

That there is a necessity in teaching not just what we've done, but why we've done it,

the consequences of intervening or not intervening.

Should we have intervened earlier?

Maybe Pearl Harbor doesn't happen.

Those questions.

Would Hitler's impact on the world have been diminished had we done some kind of a preemptive strike?

But that's just one part of education.

When you you see a statistic where you're setting people up to fail, and it's a system where you are throwing billions of dollars at the problem with no accountability,

really,

it makes me wonder what education is in America.

Is it a business?

Because if it is, it's failing.

Except the executives, which would be the teachers' unions and the big organizations invested in education, aren't going to lose their paycheck.

And I'm torn because when I go into high schools and speak with students, these are thoughtful

people.

They are not selfish, mind-numb idiots that they're portrayed to be sometimes, but we do them a huge disservice.

We don't challenge kids nearly enough.

We don't hold them accountable.

We don't make them work hard.

There was one teacher that was fired because school policy said the lowest grade you can give is a 50%.

So even if you don't turn in a piece of paper, you don't get a zero.

You still get 50%

for not doing the work.

Those are the things that concern me when I talk about education.

But

in the end, whose fault is it?

It's yours and it's mine.

If my kids would have graduated from high school and couldn't read, that's my fault.

If I don't know that my children can't read when they are in the second grade, third grade, that they're not learning to read or they're at least not learning what they're being taught, that's on me.

But the education system seems, in my opinion, seems to be failing because where we used to lead the world, we don't.

We aren't challenging people.

We're not making sure that we're creating critical thinkers that can read something, convey a message of what they've just read, comprehend it, and repeat what they've just read.

Instead, we make sure we're churning out good citizens.

Well, good in the minds of the people that are doing the indoctrination.

And I say this with all due respect to teachers because we all have

teachers that influenced us.

We all have somebody or people in our lives that we look back at and say, that person was a huge influence on me.

I'm sure I've mentioned here on this show before,

our dean of students, when I was in high school, I always thought hated my guts.

I was a maniac of a kid.

You know, I drove this guy crazy.

Years after I I was out of high school, I saw him at a high school football game, and he remembered not only me, but he remembered my younger brother's name, my youngest brother's name, who never even went to that school, my mother's name,

asked how we all were doing, asked how my electrical career was going.

He knew what I was doing for a living.

And he is someone that's been a promoter of this radio career when it happened and has been a great support system to me.

And I was under the assumption that he just disliked me immensely.

I was just a bad kid.

He was trying to straighten out.

This was one of the people instrumental in keeping me from going completely off the edge.

His name is Bill Geddes.

And I'm in touch with him once in a while.

We keep in touch on Facebook.

And there are...

literally thousands of kids that have the same stories about him and people like him at our schools that made impacts on us.

So

I am not denigrating

the service of

teachers.

There are many, many, many great teachers in this country.

The system has got issues.

When you've got a national standard, it's one thing.

When you have a national way of educating,

I want you to think of how it is possible that the same issues that an inner city kid from Brooklyn, New York faces the same kid, same issues as a kid in Butte, Montana.

How does some kid from Fountain, Colorado face the same challenges as a kid from Clovis, New Mexico?

It's different.

And teachers should be able to educate students and not have to just be teaching them to pass tests.

One of the fun things I've had the pleasure of doing over the last few years is making fun of, because they deserve it, the assault on Christmas.

It does seem to me this year that I'm hearing a lot more Merry Christmas than I am happy holidays in years past.

So before I close it out on this Christmas Eve, a little defense of Christmas itself as a holiday and a Merry Christmas from us here at the Glenn Beck program.

My name is Mike Broomhead.

I'll be back.

And Merry Christmas.

My name is Mike Broomhead.

I'm in for Glenn.

I'll be in the rest of this week with the exception of tomorrow.

I appreciate you spending part of your day with me.

And I truly mean it.

Merry Christmas.

It's a great, my favorite time of year.

If you're a social media user, the Mike Broomhead Show fan page on Facebook or Mike Broomhead, All One Word on Instagram.

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All one word, Mike Broomhead.

The assault on Christmas, the war on Christmas has always surprised me.

It is an overtly Christian holiday.

And let me explain, and I'm not going to proselytize or preach.

I'm just going to explain to you.

There are some very

good people in this world that have a humble belief that all of us were created

and all of us do the wrong thing on some level.

And

there was

the prediction.

by the Jewish people of a Messiah, and that Messiah was fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

And the birth of Jesus is when we celebrate, although we realize December 25th was not actually Jesus' birthday.

We celebrate the birth of that Savior, God become man.

Easter, we celebrate the finish of that ministry with his death, his physical death and resurrection at Easter time.

But it is truly

like you have Hanukkah and Passover for the Jews.

These are devout,

well-respected holidays.

The Muslims that have Ramadan.

Would anybody,

honestly, would most people in America question the way a Muslim celebrates Ramadan?

How dare you?

But in America, there is this assault on Christianity.

It's an overtly Christian holiday.

I don't know of any Christian in the world that asks you to celebrate the way I do or we do.

There are some people that go to church on Christmas Eve.

There are those that go on Christmas Day.

There are those that don't go at all.

We all celebrate differently, but it is an overtly Christian holiday.

We have a lot of immigrants in this country.

Can you imagine on the 4th of July?

This is a great thing to imagine.

You're going to have a 4th of July

parade in your town, Independence Day, and someone in your city government says, you know,

we are a very diverse community, and having only the American flag in the 4th of July parade, or having any American flags, really is exclusive.

We are not being inclusive of the non-citizens that are here.

So we want to

have the parade, but there can't be anything overtly American in the Fourth of July parade, because we are then going to be excluding and not being inclusive of those people that are not American.

And you say, but we're celebrating the independence of America.

I know, but,

and there's always people that would believe that way.

It is an overtly Christian holiday.

Whether you celebrate it that way or not is your business.

Get a tree, don't get a tree.

Wrap presents, Santa Claus, whatever you want to do.

I don't waste my time even getting getting angry about it.

I think it's the funniest thing I've ever heard of.

It's like telling you we're not singing you happy birthday on your birthday because there's other people in the room that aren't having a birthday that day, and we don't want to exclude them.

It's your birthday.

I say that because it's my favorite time of the year.

We get reflective.

We count our blessings.

People tend to be a little nicer to each other.

I love the way Christmas affects everyone.

And I really do wish we could start it earlier and carry it on throughout the year.

Our problems don't change.

The important issues in this country are not changing.

The government is still shut down.

We still have, you know, the economy to worry about and the pullout in Syria and the changes in the White House.

But isn't it nice that there's something now that's going on that puts a lot of that in a perspective where we can drop our guards a little bit and wish someone a Merry Christmas that we've been battling with politically for a long time or otherwise?

One of my friends from youth is a very liberal guy.

who happens also be Jewish.

I wish him a happy Hanukkah every year, and he wishes me a Merry Christmas.

When we talk to each other, it is nothing but great things, but we fight like crazy when it comes to politics, but we never lose a sense of respect for each other.

So

my wish for you this Christmas

is that you would have peace and joy, and if you're like me, the celebration of the birth of the Savior.

So until

the 26th, I'm going to enjoy the time with my family here in Florida.

I hope that you're enjoying your time with people you love.

From the bottom of my heart, I wish you all a very, very Merry Christmas.

And thanks to everyone here.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

God bless.

You're listening to Glenn Beck.