Best of Program | Guests: Vicki Barbolak, David French & Charles Duhigg | 12/20/18

On the podcast today, we've got a couple of things.

We started a little rocky, a little rocky with bump stocks being

outlawed by the President of the United States.

A lot of people were not happy about that.

Then we took a happy turn, and we had a guest in.

Her name is Vicki Barbalock.

She is, she's trailer trash.

She's trailer nasty.

Self-identified.

Yeah, and she's a 61-year-old woman

who was aging out of comedy until she was discovered or rediscovered on America's Got Talent.

She's hysterical.

You don't want to miss that.

Also, I think an interesting conversation with Charles Doohig

on anger and how anger can get out of control quickly, all on today's podcast.

You're listening to

the best of the Glenbeck program.

It's Thursday, December 20th.

This is the Glenbeck program.

It's not going to be

a good day for Donald Trump fans.

Yesterday, the president, by decree,

outlawed bump stocks.

Okay,

first of all, let's not set a precedent of taking away anything to do with guns through presidential decree.

We would be apoplectic if anyone else, if even if George Bush would have done it, let alone Barack Obama, we would be apoplectic.

Now, I am not defending bump stocks.

I don't know anybody who uses them or why you would want them.

You can do the same thing with a rubber band or your belt loop.

I mean,

it doesn't matter.

People are going to find a way around it.

But you don't ban it.

And for this president to come out and just

at a time when people are not talking about this, I mean, we just gave away something that I don't care

that you could have given away as a compromise later in Congress.

You're telling me you could have got a bump stock ban through Congress with Democrats?

Of course you could.

Of course you could have.

Of course you could.

Why would we force this through?

And again,

I think it's completely unconstitutional.

First of all, we should set the baseline there.

It's unconstitutional to do this.

This is obviously an infringement on your ability to bear arms.

Obviously.

It is.

So

fundamentally, it is unconstitutional.

It's tied to another law that is unconstitutional, which is the three different statutes that come out against machine guns and automatic weapons, which I completely think are unconstitutional as well.

But even if you go beyond that, let's just say we live in this world, we're in a progressive world where we don't necessarily follow the Constitution all that closely, and we do the things that just have to be done, and that's the way, that's the world we live in.

Even if you're in that world, you gotta pass a law.

You gotta pass a law.

You can't have the president just making up distinctions on, well, we don't like that thing.

Again, in the legal statute of what a machine gun is,

is the very clear language that a bump stock is not included.

Very specifically, it says any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot or can be readily restored to shoot automatically more than one shot without manual reloading by a single function of the trigger.

So in other words, you pull the trigger back once and you hold it.

That's not what a bump stock is.

It isn't.

And if you think, well, but I think that's similar to a bump stock.

That's great.

Then pass a law against a bump stock if you don't like them.

I'll still argue that it's unconstitutional, but at least it makes some sense.

So, and here's the reason why I said this to the Democrats and they didn't listen.

Don't go down this path, Democrats, because someday Barack Obama is going to be gone.

And you're going to so disenfranchise people and make people angry and set this precedent that someone else that you really don't like is going to use those same things against you.

Yeah.

We now have Donald Trump.

Now, please don't set this precedent.

You can't have

the precedent of a president just saying, you know what, and something else I want to ban.

You can't do it.

Right.

The next Democrat president who wants to ban whether it's magazines at a certain capacity,

anything they want to pick apart from your ability to bear arms, they will cite this bump stock ban and say, look, the president, a Republican president

did that.

Of course,

we didn't say anything.

And we didn't say anything because I don't want to defend bump stocks.

I don't care about bump stocks.

I don't know anybody who does care about bump stocks.

But it's those battles that you don't care about that become the most important.

Yeah, go back.

I mean,

there was a battle in the Supreme Court that, you know, this is relatively recent history about marijuana, in which

someone, they went, they...

basically fought the commerce clause when it came to marijuana.

And it was a case in the 2000s that I was, you know, because it was marijuana, I don't think any conservative was like into

thinking about it.

And it was not a big issue on talk radio at the time or anything.

But that was like probably one of the best opportunities to reverse the ridiculous nonsense the government has used with the Commerce Clause

over a very long period of time to restrict the way, or to get their tentacles into business.

And you know what?

The Commerce Clause is a really good example of that itself.

I don't remember the farmer's name,

but the court case that happened under FDR, nobody paid attention to.

Nobody cared because it just involved a farmer and his wheat.

And I don't grow wheat, and I don't care.

But that's why Washington is in all of our businesses because of that one move that no one cared.

Will Moran.

I'm right around that.

It's Phil Morin versus

Whitburn.

We're right in there.

Willard versus Fickburn.

Okay, Clark.

There we go.

We had all of the syllables, just all in the wrong order.

They're all in the wrong order.

Okay, so that was the Attorney General against

the

against a farmer.

It's Attorney General.

Yeah.

And

because of that, the guy who grew his wheat on his farm, he never sold it.

It was just for him and his family and his livestock.

It never went anywhere.

They said, well, it could.

And

more importantly,

you are going to be feeding your family and your livestock with wheat not purchased.

So that wheat that you would have purchased if you weren't a wheat farmer, that might affect the price of wheat coming into your state or leaving your state.

So we have a right to regulate your land.

Oh my gosh.

And people didn't say anything.

And that's how we lost our freedom.

And the same can be said.

First of all,

the bump stock thing.

Also, yesterday,

can you imagine?

Well, you don't have to.

Imagine when President Obama just said, you know what?

We're leaving Iraq.

And he became General Obama and how upset we all were?

Wait, hold it just a second.

No, no, no.

This is going to be really bad.

The president yesterday went a step further.

He didn't even alert the Pentagon.

The Pentagon found out yesterday through Twitter that we were going to be pulling out of Syria.

This is causing all kinds of problems with our allies.

Russia, I know the opposite is being said, trust me, Russia loves this because it has just given the Middle East to Iran.

And by the way, Russia is saying it on their official social media accounts.

Their official spokespeople are saying what a wonderful move it is.

The idea that we're trying to act as if this is bad for them in some way is ridiculous.

Well, they're only trying to take down Trump.

Wait a minute.

Yesterday, last night, everybody was saying they were in bed with Trump.

So which one is it?

Stop it.

Stop it.

It's been a weird...

There's a thing that happens, I think, with big executives where, and you've even expressed this frustration at times, Glenn, where like you have an idea and you really want to do it, and everyone kind of keeps telling you you can't do it, and here's X, Y, and Z why you can't do it, and you haven't changed your mind, but you're ceding a little bit of authority to the people, your advisors, the experts around you.

But eventually, you hit that point where you're like, I want it done, and I'm doing it.

Right.

And it seems like Trump hit that point on several things this week.

And, you know, Syria seems to be the main one.

But this, the same sort of thing happened with tariffs, I think.

He had a lot of people around him telling him, don't do the tariffs thing.

And then one day he was just like, it's happening.

And it kind of came out on Twitter.

This seems to be the way that he makes those decisions.

Now, with the bumpstock thing, it's not his right because the Constitution prohibits him doing what he did.

However, in most of these situations, it is his right.

I mean, he can pull out troops from Syria if he wants to pull out troops from Syria.

And, you know, look, his entire life has been.

A guy who's, he didn't want the Iraq war in the first place, mostly.

He kind of supported it early on, but he switched on it pretty quickly.

He, you know, has opposed most of the wars throughout history.

And I think his coming in, he said he wanted to get the troops home.

It's relatively consistent with where he's been.

However, the way he's doing it is, I think, what's shocking here to a lot of the people in the military.

And again, we're just letting these Kurds down.

Again, we just keep it.

Look, I want to end this war, too.

I want this war to come.

I want our troops to come home.

We've got to stop all of this stuff.

But we also stopped with Yemen and Saudi Arabia, which has big, big ramifications that no one is telling the American people.

Saudi Arabia is so weak right now.

If Saudi Arabia falls, you hand the entire region to

Iran.

Now, Iran is also in a precarious situation, but Iran has the full support of Russia.

And now Russia is in a precarious situation, but so are we.

I mean, we are all on the edge, and anything that adds chaos is bad.

The Democrats just doing all kinds of investigation and just trying to drag his butt through an impeachment on trumped-up charges, no pun intended.

If there are charges, great.

Let's hear them.

Let's get it done with.

But this chaos in Washington is bad.

This chaos of, I didn't sign a letter.

I didn't have any business.

Oh, I do have a letter.

It is business.

I did sign it.

Kavanaugh,

he's going to be great for the right.

He's going to stop all abortions.

He's just a pro-life demagogue.

And then he gets in and he's not

the border.

I'm going to make Mexico pay for it.

No, I'm not going to.

In fact, we're not even going to build one.

And I'm certainly not going to make Mexico pay for it.

I'm going to give them $5 billion.

All of these things are causing chaos.

And we've got to stop.

Stop.

We have to have something that is reliable and predictable and something we can all gather around and say, yes, I trust this.

And right now,

what do you trust?

What do you trust?

And don't say, well, it's better than this or that.

I get it.

I get that.

But do you trust it?

And we're when it comes to people saying that he's going to be impeached.

I don't know if he's going to or not.

I don't think so.

I don't think so.

What's her name?

Ann Coulter came out and said yesterday he's going to be that he's not going to make it to the end of his term.

I don't agree with that.

But remember, it's President Pence.

President Pence is steady, very conservative, and rock solid.

That's not Hillary Clinton.

The best of the Glenn Beck program.

Do you have the audio of George Bush and why he did TARP?

Yes, we actually do.

Hey, yeah.

Have you ever heard this?

Listen to this.

This is from a new documentary on HBO.

George Bush, they're talking about TARP.

And remember, he said I had to violate the free market system to save.

Had to abandon the free market system to save it.

Right.

Yep.

Listen to why he did that.

Hank came in with Bernanke, with Geithner, started talking to the president about we're going to need some legislative authority.

We're kind of out of ammunition.

We needed to put capital into the banking system.

But Hank's concern about capital injections was that it would look like the government was nationalizing or taking over the banking system.

And so his idea was to buy troubled assets.

This is why it was called the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the TARP.

About halfway through the conversation,

the president interrupted Hank and directed a question at Ben.

I asked, are we headed for a Great Depression?

And Bernanke

said, you know, it looks that way.

And you have to make up your mind, you know.

Do you care?

And what I cared about was people that would be hurting.

They were already starting to hurt.

People didn't run out of their homes.

Payrolls couldn't be met.

And I just could envision what a Great Depression would mean.

If it's bad now, imagine how bad it would really get.

As we left that meeting, the president turned to us and said,

If this is Hoover or Roosevelt, for damn sure I'm going to be Roosevelt.

I just want you to put that in perspective because we are headed for the effects now.

We're going to feel the ramifications of 08,

and the world

is already feeling it, and it's coming.

Our president is going to be in the same situation.

You're going to be Roosevelt or are you going to be Hoover?

Are you going to abide by the principles that we have, or are you going to fundamentally change us

for

compassionate reasons or whatever?

It's going to be an extraordinarily difficult choice.

But America is on the verge of changing.

We must stand for the Bill of Rights right now.

Speech, right to protect yourself, right to assemble, right to privacy.

Those things must be unchangeable and defended and never weakened, especially over the next five years.

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

Like listening to this podcast?

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

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

I never watch America's Got Talent.

I just don't watch TV, generally speaking.

But my son came to me with YouTube and said, Dad, you have to see this woman.

Vicki Barbalock is her name.

She was,

she's 60, you're 60 years old.

I'm the 61 this year.

You're 61.

Okay.

And she came out on stage, and I don't remember who it was, Naomi Campbell or somebody said, what are you going to do?

And she said, I'm a ballerina.

And she's clearly not a ballerina.

And she followed that with, no, I'm kidding.

I like to eat.

So I'm not a ballerina.

And it went on from there.

And she, you came back, I think, two times after that?

I think there was, you know, I think there was like four more shows till the last final.

Okay, and you are now going back for the championship show.

Champions show.

Champions, where are they now?

I'm like, I'm in the driveway.

I haven't laughed.

I just got out of there.

So you, now, like, you really, you are from California.

Yeah.

You've been a comedian.

20 years.

20 years.

And you kind of found yourself in a place to where you were too old for your own

club.

I mean, yeah.

I mean, I didn't start till I was like nearly 40.

And I didn't know that was not a good idea.

I had to be glad.

luckily or I wouldn't have started, you know, I probably would have that because I am an idiot.

But I mean, and so, you know, I was, I was having a great time doing it.

But when I would go, no matter what would happen to me, like e-television would say, I'm in the next breakthrough from the comedy store.

I would go to these agents in Hollywood and they go, well, we, we, we, you're too fat, you're too old, you're too ugly.

There's nothing we can do for you.

And so, and so, I mean, I, I just, I just kept hoping something would happen.

But I just, you know, like Steve Martin said, you get so good, they can't ignore you.

And that was my only plan.

Just keep doing it, keep loving it.

But I kept thinking maybe Steve was wrong.

Then America's Got Talent happened.

And what happened, that show had such a gigantic reach.

And the people it brought to me, it just, then Hollywood had to come around.

You are, without being politically incorrect, I mean, you are clearly politically incorrect, but without trying to be politically incorrect, you are just so natural.

You just feel like somebody that everybody knows.

You know, that's fun about what I'm doing is I am like meat and potatoes comedy.

I'm in the middle of the road.

I'm in Midwestern.

Miss Mitzi, the owner of the comedy store, she goes, Vicki, are you from the Midwest?

And I said, no, but my parents, my mother is from Iowa.

My uncles are my heroes and they're from Iowa.

She goes, I can tell.

You have a very Midwest sense of humor.

You know, but I've never lived in the Midwest, but that is,

I think, who I am, the middle of America.

Your dad.

Yeah, my dad played for the Pittsburgh Steelers.

He played for the Steelers.

I'm not bragging, Beck.

I just wanted you to know what the daughter of an NFL football player looks like because you never saw one before.

This is no padding.

This is natural.

So, yeah, and so he had, you know, he'd been hit around a lot, you know, leather helmet time for him, 1950, 51.

And so as I grew up, he was daffy and daffy and daffier, but he was just lots of fun.

And, you know, he was just a great dad, but he was totally daffy.

So

where do you get this?

From your dad or from your mom?

Because you're.

I think, you know, I just, I was also a little fat little kid.

I was like hugely fat.

I was like 220 at 12.

And so I was, my birth weight was 104 pounds.

So I mean, I was.

You've really let yourself go.

I know exactly.

But now, so, so my, so my life was a child that was bullied.

And I would make the fat jokes first.

So fat jokes were defense.

I learned that in my whole life that anything good happened to me came because I could make people laugh.

So it was always something that I did.

I worked for my parents at their carpet store for 20 years, and I didn't care if people bought carpet from me, but if they didn't laugh at my joke, I was devastated.

So, I mean, it was all, I've always been about making people laugh.

And

the stuff in your

stuff in your act, for instance,

you know, you never drink alone.

Yeah, like, you know,

I'm very proud of that.

A lot of the other moms, they would just sit around and drink all day, but I was disciplined because, you know, only alcoholics drink alone.

I read all the pamphlets.

I would always, I always waited until the kids get home from school.

That's, That's, you know, sometimes I call in a fake dental appointment, you know, when I'm so parched.

Yeah, right.

But I did my best.

Right, right.

And, and, and when you, when you took your kids on field trips.

Oh, yeah, that's another thing.

My mother, you know, that comes from the last generation.

I think of women that party 24-7.

You know, and I got kids, I'm thinking, party, but the party was over, right?

I didn't know.

My mom and her friends always, always brought flasks on field trips.

I mean, I'm like, I'm going to get on a bus sober with first graders, not now, not ever.

I don't care what they do to me, right?

So I go on my daughter's first field trip and I take out my flask.

And it is, it's not a big alky flask, you know, it's a very pretty, it's a little two-ouncer.

Right.

It's not okay.

How loaded could you get off of two ounces anyway?

Right.

Right.

But I take it out and I take a little flat, you know, sip.

And all the other moms on the field trip, they just go ballistic.

They're like, you know, she's got a flash, she's got a flask, you know.

And I'm like, calm down.

You know, beates.

I'm not driving the bus.

I am not trying.

Relax.

So, how much of your life is

true?

How much is,

for instance, do you watch

The Marvelous Miss Maisel?

I do watch it.

I think it's one of the most brilliant shows ever.

It's so great.

Are you so great for women?

Are you Sophie

the Sophie character?

Put that on your plate.

That is completely.

Are we going to find out you're living in a mansion?

Yes, you are.

If I keep going, I'm going to buy a triple Y.

Pretty much, you know, and the thing about the drinking alone, that was my mother.

Every day I came home from school, my mother would sit there with her deck of cards between her legs, her mu Mu on inside out with a large amount of safety pins here in case 30 people needed a safety pin on every given day.

She was a president of the PTA.

She was a treasurer of the women's club.

She was all those things.

And she, you know, would we'd come home and

the first beer would open, boom, when we'd walk in that side door.

And my mother was a fun woman.

I started when I started stand-up telling that story.

Audiences got worried for me that I had this terrible childhood with a crazy alcoholic mother.

It wasn't like that.

My mother was a blast, and she was, it wasn't like that.

So I took that story of my mother and I put it on me.

And I mean, I do love to party.

I'm not lying about that.

Box wine is my life.

So

everything that

I talk about is coming from a truth that I know.

right you know and you and but you do live I live in a beautiful trailer Glenn you cannot dynamite me I've waited five years to buy the second best trailer in my trailer park and I would like look at their trash can for like five years I'd like what's in there I knew they liked Applebee's that's all they knew and then one day the trash was empty and I called the trailer park realtor Les he's like 90.

I'm like Les, I want to buy this trailer.

He loaned me the money.

I started AGT at the same time as trying to get this dream trailer.

It all worked out.

But I mean, I mean,

I am so proud.

I live off top of the hill.

Look at, it's beautiful.

So you're out of the slums.

You're looking down on the people.

I call that part of the park the ghetto.

I always call this the heights.

I don't talk to anyone below the lake, which is actually a drainage ditch made to look like a lake.

But I don't speak to those people anymore.

I wish I could, but I cannot.

Right.

Well, you're in a different class now.

They can look up on the hill and be inspired by what you've seen.

You know, that's what I try to say.

Don't give up your dream.

So,

you know, if you sold your high-class top of the hill

trailer park, you know, trailer there in California, you could probably live in a 20,000 square foot home here in Texas.

You know, I love...

You know, I always had a dream.

Seven years ago, my friend Brett Frank, who lives in Denton, he saw me in Hollywood, flew me out here for his birthday party in Denton, his 30th birthday.

I two-stepped all night.

I had the time of my life.

He and I took my promo promo pack over here to the Dallas Improv seven years ago.

Asked him if I could do a set there.

They never, you know, got back to me.

It took me seven years to get here.

I've always wanted to be in Texas.

There's something mystical and romantic.

And ever since that night, and Denton was on the border, but I mean, I love it here.

I would love to have a place on a lake or a trailer.

I would, you know, I'd have to be.

I don't have drywall.

I don't like drywall.

I'm going to eat that right now.

I just don't feel comfortable around it.

I like to be slightly off the ground.

See, in this part of the country, though, you're the first to be sucked up.

You know what?

You're right.

In this part of the country, I'm going to take it back.

I'm going to have to do it,

I'm going to have to face it.

I don't want to get blown to Kansas.

Or you can have an underground trailer.

Part of your trailer is underground that you go for safety.

Back in just a second, we're with Vicki Barbalock.

She is the winner of America's Got Talent Top 10.

She is now going to be in the Champions Edition on NBC.

It begins January 7th.

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

David French on, we wanted to talk a little bit about being deplatformed and social media and what it says about us, et cetera, et cetera.

But

he's a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

And so I wanted to get his opinion because he has written a lot about ISIS over the years as well.

His opinion on us pulling out of Syria and what this means.

Welcome to the program, David.

Oh, thanks so much for having me.

I appreciate it.

Sure.

So your thoughts on what happened yesterday.

It's stunning, and it's a terrible mistake.

It's a very dangerous mistake.

It's stunning in part because just days ago, the administration had reaffirmed its commitment to our Kurdish allies and to completing the mission of destroying ISIS.

And people have to understand when you talk about ISIS, there's the caliphate, you know, their attempt to create a nation state that has been largely, the caliphate has been largely wiped out.

But ISIS, the terrorist organization, still exists.

And to put this into perspective, In 2011, when Obama wrongly pulled out of Iraq, this is something that

conservatives were deeply concerned about when he did it.

And when he wrongly left Iraq, there were only about 700 members of al-Qaeda and Iraq left in this country, only about 700.

The best estimate of the remaining strength of ISIS in Iraq and Syria is between 20 and 30,000.

And so to say that it's done, that the job is done, is just not factually correct.

It is

wrong.

We knew this in World War II.

I mean, when the regime collapsed in Germany, we didn't stop.

We went werewolf hunting.

We went looking for those that were called werewolves, self-described werewolves, that were the Nazi believers that went back into the communities and were not going to let this thing die.

We knew we had to kill them and stop them.

Well, you know, this would be about like

declaring the end of the Afghan war

right after the Taliban fell,

even though we knew, we knew that al-Qaeda was still out there.

Yeah, the capital cities of the caliphate have fallen.

And that's been, and Trump deserves a lot of credit for continuing that military campaign and stepping up that military campaign that began under Obama.

But now to pull out before that job is done,

and then to make it worse, the people, there are three entities most likely to gain, three

enemies of the U.S.

that are most likely to gain from this.

ISIS, of course,

Russia, and Iran.

This is something that we're going to strengthen our enemies, we're going to betray our allies, and to what purpose?

This had been one of the most successful American military interventions since 9-11.

I mean, we had, with very

light casualties by comparison to other American military interventions, toppled the heart of the Caliphate, empowered Kurdish allies, held the line against Russia and Iran, and put ISIS in headlong retreat.

And before it's all

before it's all done, you just leave and you do it by shocking your own generals.

That doesn't make sense.

Why did it happen?

Well, we have to crawl into the mind of Donald Trump.

I mean,

I think part of, you know, from the beginning, he has expressed deep skepticism about America's military actions, involvement overseas.

He has been talked out of on multiple occasions, headlong and precipitous retreats in Afghanistan, in Syria.

You just get the feeling that this is what he wants to do and that he's been repeatedly talked out of it by the people around him to

go ahead and do it.

Yeah.

Right.

Okay.

Let's talk about something that I think, David,

conservatives and all Americans should be very concerned about

right now, but I'm going to really be focusing on it in 2019.

And that is the silencing of voices and social media.

You wrote

an article, Social Media Idealism Collides with Human Nature.

I think that headline says it all.

Explain that.

Yeah, so essentially what I'm talking about there is the frustration that the social media companies are now feeling with how their their platforms are used and their clumsy and sometimes

their clumsy and sometimes censorious attempts to bring their platforms in alignment with their vision.

And so what they imagined was, you know, they're either going to create these platforms that are going to bring the world together and

not just bring the world together, but and transmit and communicate their values.

That you had these Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, executives, almost all of them uniformly progressive, who believed that these platforms would accomplish progressive things in the world.

But it turns out when you create a platform, when you create a true marketplace of ideas, you also empower a lot of voices you don't like and a lot of voices you disagree with.

And particularly on Facebook, it's very interesting.

If you look at the top publishers on Facebook in the political context, time and again, it's conservatives.

Time and again, it's Republicans.

And that's not what Zuckerberg built Facebook for.

And they've done everything they can to hurt those platforms and to hurt the traffic, trying to I mean, for me, I have, what, 3.2 million Facebook likes and fans and followers.

And

they want me to pay to be able to reach the people who said I want the stuff from him.

I mean, they're doing everything they can to limit the voice.

Yeah.

You know,

and the problem is

they want two things.

They want it all and they can't have it all.

So what they want is to reach every person in the world, and then they also want to spread and inculcate a particular set of values.

Well, if you make your platform

a value transmission device, you're going to limit its reach.

And so they keep trying to square that circle.

They keep trying to say, well, we want everybody on there.

but we really truly only want a certain kind of expression on there.

You can't have both, but they flail around often trying to have both or at least limiting, trying their best to limit the spread of ideas that they dislike.

And this is a real problem.

It creates

almost an unbearable amount of tension because on the one hand, you have conservatives saying, hey, treat us equally.

We don't need special treatment.

Just treat us equally with other perspectives.

And then you have progressives.

who happen to be in their peer group, essentially, saying, what are you doing?

You're all progressives.

You want the progressive values spread.

I think you also have a third group of

people that are both sides that look at these really hideous things from anti-Semites or whatever

and say,

you got to get rid of them.

But the correct answer is, I can't get rid of anybody.

It's a platform.

I can't get rid of anybody.

Well, yeah, the correct, I think, and I've been along arguing this, that the correct way to look at this is to not try to reinvent the wheel, but take America's 200-plus years of experience with the First Amendment and apply it to these social media companies, not by force of law, and I don't want Congress saying you have to apply First Amendment principles, but I'd say Twitter and Facebook voluntarily applying First Amendment principles.

And core to the First Amendment jurisprudence is the idea of viewpoint neutrality.

In other words, if we're a platform,

whatever rules we put in place, they're going to be viewpoint-neutral rules.

We're not going to privilege a point of view and suppress another point of view.

We're going to create a marketplace of ideas.

And I think that that's the way through this wilderness.

But because they have not done that, and because they have put their thumb on the scales, you know, sometimes to get rid of really, truly bad people, no question.

But because they have put their thumb on the scales, they're opening themselves to endless charges of double standards.

Yeah.

Because those double standards are very, very real.

And

I'm trying to decide, Facebook, Google,

you know,

all social media and these big platforms, YouTube.

Are they creating?

a hostile

civilization?

Are they just empowering that hostile position?

Are they just revealing

who we really are?

I think it's revealing and empowering.

So I don't think people are,

people are people.

But what Facebook has been able to do, what YouTube has been able to do, is essentially take all of the flaws of human beings, all of, and often all the virtues of human beings as well, but all of the flaws of human beings and put them right in our face all the time.

So that if, you know, let's say you have neighbors who live five doors down who have bad ideas about politics, you might not ever encounter them pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter.

But now everybody's bad ideas, and by bad ideas, the ones you don't like,

are thrown in your face constantly, all the time on these platforms.

And I think what it does is it sort of takes our natural emotional reaction to being exposed to things we don't like, makes it relentless, and then sort of over time turns it up to, you know, 11.

And

the only way to really escape it is to turn off social media entirely.

But then you get that sort of nagging feeling that what am I missing?

Am I missing these developments with my grandkids?

Am I missing these developments with my friends on the West Coast?

So you turn it back on for the friendships, and then there it is again.

all of the things that you dislike.

And I think it just takes who we actually are and just throws it in our face all the time.

And it makes it worse.

It's a great point because I mean, think about the holidays come around, like whatever, you know, if you have a holiday party that you go to once a year and you know a couple people there that you don't like are going to be there and you sort of dread it.

And we're like weeks going into that party.

We are exposing ourselves to like six or seven hours of that party every day where everyone we don't like is always talking to us.

That cannot be healthy long term, David.

No.

Well, you know, and it's interesting.

If you look at some of the charts of anxiety and depression, especially amongst younger people in the country, the rates of anxiety and depression, they started to really spike around the time that the smartphone became ubiquitous.

And of course, it's not the phone itself.

It's what's on the phone.

And what's on the phone is social media.

And you can even see a sharp rise in political hatred.

that is tied to a couple of specific or correlates with a couple of specific events.

And one of them is widespread adaptation of the smartphone.

And so, you know, these that when you when you feel like you cannot avoid or that this good thing that you like also carries with it this kind of poison pill in the middle of it

that that plays on your insecurities, that plays on your emotions, that touches sometimes your deepest beliefs.

Yeah, it can be toxic.

David French, National Review, great article.

Social media idealism collides with human nature.

Thanks, Thanks, David.

We'll talk again.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

And don't forget, rate us on iTunes.

A couple of weeks ago,

I read a great article from Charles Doohig, and he's the author of The Power of Habit.

And it was, the article is about how we're all angry and we're all outraged.

And

what struck me as so interesting is he quoted a study that came out in the 1970s of a guy who was doing an anger study and found out that there's

good anger and bad anger.

And when anger gets out of control, it just burns everything down.

And we are now into that, what I would call addicted to anger, addicted to hate, addicted to outrage.

We're in that phase.

And how do we pull that back and still recognize that there are things that people should be angry about?

You know, that we're not angry for

invalid reasons per se.

We just don't have a control of our anger anymore, and we're not doing anything positive about it.

And so I wanted to get Charles on with us.

Welcome to the program, Charles Duhigg.

How are you, sir?

I'm good.

Thanks Thanks for having me on.

Sure.

So first of all, tell everybody about the study that happened in the 1970s and what he found.

It's really interesting.

So a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst sent a survey to everyone living in a small town in Massachusetts.

And he asked this basic question,

think of the last time you were angry and tell me what happened.

And it was 14 pages long.

It was a long survey.

And he found that dozens, hundreds of people actually responded to this thing.

And what they did is they described when the last time they had become furious and what had infuriated them.

And what he expected, the academic, was that they would say, look, I'm really sorry I got angry because it made everything worse.

It just exacerbated all these tensions.

I should have kept my temper in check.

But what he found is exactly the opposite.

People said that when they got angry, when they shouted at the person who was driving them crazy, things actually got better.

That not only did it feel good to be able to communicate what was bothering them, but that the other person listened really closely.

That all of a sudden they started taking their concerns seriously and they would sit down and try and find some resolution together.

And this is actually what we know about anger: that for the most part, when anger is expressed interpersonally from one person to another, it actually helps tamp down tensions rather than exacerbate them because it's this very dense form of communication.

It forces us to listen to each other and to try and come to some type of resolution, a catharsis of what's bothering someone in the first place.

So, then how has this

this cycle turned into this where it is only increasing anger?

We're not listening to each other.

You can see people screaming at each other, and they are not listening.

Right.

And

there's a couple of problems going on right now.

The first is that when you think about anger nowadays, so much of it is expressed online, or it's expressed on the screen, right, over a news station.

And as a result, the people who are the focus of that anger, they're not listening.

They're not part of that conversation.

And their reaction is to punch back rather than to take seriously what the person is saying.

That's part of the problem.

Another part of the problem is that in the last 20 years, there's been this huge group of professionals,

the outrage merchants, who exist now to fan the flames of this anger.

This is companies,

it's cable news, it's Twitter and the Facebook, it's political campaigns.

One political professional told me that the way you win campaigns now is through fear and anger, because that's the surest thing to get people into the voting booth.

But the third thing that's happened is that anger only works when you think it's going to actually change things.

When people stop believing that the system is functioning well, that it's working for them, then that anger actually becomes this desire for revenge.

You're not interested in having the other side hear what you have to say.

You're interested in beating them,

being victorious over them, vanquishing them.

And when that happens, anger is no longer a productive, healthy force in our lives.

It becomes something that despoils, that corrupts, and corrodes.

I think that's where we are.

Would you agree?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

And a lot of people, when they talk about this, they look at politics right now, right?

They look at whether you're a supporter or not at the White House.

And they say the president fans the flames of anger.

But it's a mistake to say that we're angry right now just because of who's occupying the Oval Office.

This is something that has been building for the last 15 years.

And though Trump is someone who uses that anger effectively, it's going to persist even once he's gone.

So this is, since I just, I love this article, Charles, because I thought you just nailed it.

Thank you.

But it is, you know, I say to people all the time, you know,

there was a time when people just hated my guts.

And I'm like, you know what?

Listen, I've got some perspective here.

Imagine a world where Glenn Beck is hit by a bus or a falling safe right now.

Does the world change?

No.

Donald Trump, Barack Obama, they're killed by a bus.

And does the world change?

No.

It's us.

It's us.

They are a reflection

of us.

And when he leaves office, somebody else is going to be doing it.

And how do we break this cycle?

Well, I think a big part of it is two things.

First of all, to recognize the reason why people are so angry right now is that they feel like the systems

that surround them have stopped working.

Psychologists and sociologists refer to this as procedural justice, right?

We don't feel the need to take justice into our own hands when we feel like our courts are working well, our economy is working well, our elections are working well.

But ever since the financial crisis, there are wide spots of this nation who saw banks got bailed out and they didn't have any relief for homeowners.

On the left, you have folks who saw an election occur where their candidate won the popular vote but lost the presidency.

That undermines your faith in these institutions like the economy and our democracy.

And as a result, that makes people angry, but also makes them feel powerless.

So, Charles, I was.

I was so afraid this morning because I was reading some articles about Harvey Weinstein that they thought

they were going to dismiss the charges today and not take him to court.

And I thought, if that happens,

what do so many people in America now say, there is no justice.

There is no justice.

Exactly right.

Right.

And the fact that after the financial crisis, the no one from Wall Street really went to jail, right?

It's, it feels, it feels completely infuriating and it makes you feel powerless.

And what do you do when you're angry and powerless?

You pick up a pitchfork.

You start cheering for the guy who seems to say to you, the system's rigged.

We just need to burn it all down.

That we need to drain the swamp.

It's not surprising what's going on in Washington, D.C.

right now, because

the preconditions are all there.

But you asked how we make it better.

And the first thing we do is we reinvigorate those institutions.

We make sure that the courts hold people like Harvey Weinstein and Wall Street accountable.

We make sure that democracy isn't being undermined by foreign actors or by a system that seems to turn up its nose at the popular vote.

But equally, we also have to look within.

There's a really interesting experiment that was done in Israel where they were able to take some of the angriest people and make them more tolerant by essentially holding up a mirror to them and showing them what you're saying is so extremist, it's so distasteful, you ought to be embarrassed by it.

That is right now Facebook and Twitter for many of us.

It's that mirror.

Look at the people you follow, and if they say crazy things, stop following them.

We have to take responsibility for managing our own anger, and we have to set an example for our kids and our siblings and our spouses.

We have to become the less angry change we hope to see in this nation.

I applaud you for this article and the way you handled it, because nowhere in the article did I see you take on one side without, in the very next paragraph, taking on the other side.

And

I thought that was

really good and healthy because

that's not what we're getting on either side.

We're not getting people saying, here it is over on the right.

Here it is over on the left.

Now knock it off.

Here's what's happening.

And it's interesting, you know, some of the commentary on Twitter about this article is people saying, why do you keep on letting the Republicans off the hook or why do you keep on letting the Democrats off the hook?

But the truth of the matter is, you know, this politics of anger, it was perfected by both the left and the right.

President Obama's motto, Change We Can Believe In, was a really subtle way of capturing anger.

It's saying, change,

not like all those other people who lied to you.

And obviously, President Trump uses anger very, very effectively.

He is a tool, sometimes a weapon.

And it is on the left and right.

This is not a problem that gets solved by blaming one side.

It's a problem that gets solved by people coming together and saying, and I've used this phrase, radical centricism, right?

I'm a firebrand of a moderate.

It's the people who come together and say, look,

we understand that compromise is part of the American system.

We just want to find people who are willing to speak to each other civilly because we know that's where the best compromises come from.

Radicalism and fanaticism, it has never done this nation well.

Whether it comes from the left or the right, it never ends up being in a good place.

I was struck by

your part on Cesar Chavez on trying to put the anger back into the bottle

because it was very reminiscent of

Gandhi.

You know, people think that Gandhi went on to a hunger strike

to stop the injustice.

No, he was trying to put anger back into the bottle of his own supporters.

That's a rare person.

Do you see that?

It is.

Do you see?

I see the need.

Do you see the leaders that are willing to self-destruct for

to help put the anger back in the box?

I do.

I do.

I think that there are leaders like that right now.

I think that they're out of favor, frankly.

So I think that they are making some self-sacrifices, and we tend not to appreciate them for those self-sacrifices.

I mean, just look at the number of people who have retired from the Republican Republican Party and retired from political office.

I think a lot of those people are folks who said, look, either I want to take a stand, like Jeff Flake, right?

Who, whether you disagree or agree with him, he clearly was saying, I want to speak out when I don't have to.

Or there's other folks like Paul Ryan, who I think has said, look, I'm just not willing to participate in this, what I need to become in order to succeed.

But the truth of the matter is that when you're dealing with an angry group, they tend to not appreciate the sacrifice you're making.

That's why it's called a sacrifice, right?

Even Tedar Chavez or Gandhi, at the time, they came under intense criticism for the actions they took to try and tamp down on the anger of their followers.

It's only in retrospect oftentimes that we see it as a selfless act.

And I guess to your point, I think one of the things we could do right now, and look, there's plenty of people listening who disagree deeply with Paul Ryan or with Jeff Flake or with others on the left who have stepped down from office rather than

in order to sort of sacrifice their career for something bigger than themselves.

I think whether you agree or disagree with them, we ought to have a space in our vocabulary to say, I respect that these are public servants.

I respect that these are people who've spent their lives trying to help others.

And even though I disagree with them, I respect that they are at least stepping down or leaving that or sacrificing for something that they think will make the world a better place.

And though I disagree with them, I am going to respect that act.

We are so jaded

and so not trusting of people's motives that

it's hard to get there.

Charles, thank you so much.

And hope to

hope to talk to you again.

Thank you so much.

Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit.

And the article

is really worth your time.

He does,

I think he's probably on the left because I always think everybody is on the left,

but he's probably on the left.

But when you read his article, he takes both sides on really hard.

And you may not agree with

his

political philosophy, although I didn't see it there.

You should listen to the research that he's pointing out and the history, the marks of history that prove this to be true.

The Blaze Radio Network.

on demand.