'Look Around, and Count Your Blessings' - 10/15/18

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Glenn back.

Well, this weekend, once again, Portland became the stage for radicalism and violence.

Insanity.

Pretending to be heroic.

An extreme real-world outbreak of the tribal warfare that has shaken our culture and our country as a whole.

And once again, we're talking about Antifa.

Yes, there were right-leading protesters there, but as usual, they were the ones under attack.

Only Antifa members realized how utterly post-modern they are.

I mean, let's start with the fact that they showed up to an event called the Law and Order March with hard knuckle gloves, knives, and firearms.

The mayhem.

has become so common now, it's really almost redundant to give anybody in Oregon the details.

More important,

what matters here is that the behavior is not just continuing, but it is worsening now.

What is this mayor of Portland think he's doing?

I mean, it seems an awful lot like the Fuhrer's use of brown shirts.

I don't like to, you know, talk about problems without having a solution or at least a hint of reassurance that things are going to get better.

But this hour, I want to spend time there.

And I want to start with this.

The Atlantic published an article last week titled, Americans Strongly Dislike PC Culture.

And here are the few standouts.

8% of Americans are progressive activists, and their views are even less typical.

8%.

By contrast, two-thirds of Americans who don't belong to either extreme constitute what's called now the exhausted majority.

I'm a member of that.

How about you?

Their members share a sense of fatigue with our polarized national conversation, a willingness to be flexible in their political viewpoints, and a lack of voice in the national conversation.

Most members of the exhausted majority and then some dislike political correctness.

Among the general population, a full 80%

believe that political correctness is a problem in our country.

Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74% of the ages 24 to 29 and 79%

under the age of 24.

On this particular issue, the woke are in clear minorities across all ages.

Now, here's the clencher.

This is the thing that

most of Americans have realized a long time ago, but we have been too petrified to express.

Quote, compared with the rest of the nationally representative polling sample, progressive activists are much more likely to be rich, highly educated, and white.

They are nearly twice as likely as the average to make more than $100,000 a year.

They are nearly three times as likely to have a postgraduate degree.

And while 12% of the overall sample in the study is African American, only 3% of progressive activists are.

With the exception of a small tribe of devoted conservatives, progressive activists are the most racially homogeneous group in the country.

Antifa is the perfect representation of this population.

They, more than any other group or individual, represent the heinous, obnoxious intentions of the new left these are not democrats

they are the left

as i've said before the social justice wealth uh uh warfare that is going on right now is inherently postmodern their war is against you and anyone who stands up for our way of life not just the Constitution, but now the Senate, the House, the President, anything that is Western.

I can assume that if you're listening to me now, you're already going to vote in the next few weeks during the midterms, but this is a big one.

The other thing you can do is stay informed.

And this hour, I want to remind you that you're not alone.

It's Monday, October 15th.

You're listening to the Glenbeck program.

I started writing an essay last night

and I will post it up on Facebook, but

I want to spend some time going over it with you.

You know the saying, may you live in interesting times?

They always say, oh, that's a Chinese curse.

No, it's really not.

No, it's not.

May you live in interesting times is not a Chinese curse.

In fact, the first...

place that we can really find it being said is in the Yorkshire Post that's in England in 1936.

A guy stood up in Parliament.

His name was Sir Austin Chamberlain.

And

he was meeting with unionists and he spoke of the grave injury to collective security by Germany's violation of the treaties.

So he said,

look,

not so long ago, I spent some years of service in China, and there was this old Chinese fellow who told me of a curse.

May you live in interesting times.

And there is no doubt that this curse has fallen upon us.

So it's not Chinese.

It's this guy.

It's the only one.

It's the only place we can really find this.

But I've always liked that

because I don't think it's a curse.

It's just a saying.

And you decide if it's a blessing or a curse.

I personally think it's a blessing.

My dad taught me when I was really young

that no matter what happens to you,

there is no bad.

Now, he taught me this when I was really young, but

it took me hitting rock bottom, alcoholism, divorce, everything else, my life completely falling apart before I really learned that.

It took a dark chapter in my life that taught me there is nothing that life can hand you that is in itself bad.

It just depends on what you do with it.

Is this going to change you in destructive ways?

Is it going to make you angry?

Are you going to be filled with bitterness and despair?

Are you going to be looking for vengeance, blame?

Or will you allow whatever calamity has come your way to strengthen you

through

enlightenment, through correction,

new understandings,

humility.

It's up to you.

So living in interesting times, I think that's a blessing.

And we're going to learn this one way or another.

We can either learn this the easy way, like with my dad telling me, or we're going to learn it the hard way, like I actually had to take at the end and learn through just total collapse.

But one way or another, humility will reign again because

we have an unbelievable lack of humility.

In D.C., in Hollywood, I have a story today to tell you about Michael Bouble, who's now quitting the music industry.

He says he's tired of the celebrity nonsense.

Everybody on the left and the right.

We all have an ego problem.

We're utterly convinced that our side is absolutely right.

And if you violate that, if you violate one part of that, you're a traitor.

You're a traitor to the race, the party, the cause, whatever.

They are wrong, and we remain right.

Now, there are real true right and wrongs.

There is truth.

But I don't think any of us are really looking for it.

At least a large section isn't looking for it.

We are indeed living in interesting times.

But is our crisis, is our problem, a them problem?

Because that's what the world is trying to sell us.

I personally think it's an us problem.

All of us, both sides, all of us.

And maybe we don't see it because we're so busy staging and filtering and enhancing the colors on our Facebook or Instagram pictures that we can really no longer recognize

what is true, even about our own lives.

Because everything that we print and post, most of it is a lie, one way or another, subtle or bold, it's a lie.

And why is that?

Because we've been marketed to ever since we were born, all of us.

If you were born after 1950, you were marketed to your whole life.

Especially now it's just getting worse and worse and worse and worse.

You are not complete unless you wear, consume, you own, you vacation at, or you don't buy product A or B.

You're not complete.

You're not good enough.

You're not complete.

You have to have this product.

But now we're being told that you can't even be part of the great new society unless we believe and champion product, politician, or party A, B, or C.

Opinions now are products as well that you must embrace and wear.

Somebody else's, not yours.

And now we're in the final stages where we ourselves are products.

Companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon and YouTube.

We're not a customer.

We're now the commodity.

We're the thing they're selling.

Oh, you want this group of people that want to buy these things?

Here they are.

If you can't fill in the line,

I am blank.

If you can't fill that in with an actual

word and be it complete, happy,

satisfied, excited,

or I am worthless.

If you don't fill it in yourself,

somebody else will.

And marketers are trying to fill that in for you.

You buy this product and you can say, I am cool, or I am in style.

I am rich.

I am smart.

You buy Democrat and you can say, I am compassionate.

You buy the Democratic label.

I am smarter than others.

I am science-minded.

And it doesn't even matter if you really are.

It doesn't matter if you've ever given a dime or given any time to anything.

Just by buying this label, you are compassionate.

It's the label that everybody needs.

Now, if you want to buy Republican, well, then you get to be patriotic.

I am patriotic.

I support our troops.

I support family values.

It doesn't matter if you're whoring it every night.

If you're by the Republican label, you can say that.

Buy the Christian label, and you can do whatever you want.

You just use religion to excuse you or others in their behavior.

Buy the label progressive.

Oh my gosh, I am science-minded, even though you deny basic biology

Labels like courage

He has courage

That has a price tag now, but don't buy now because the price of courage is going lower and lower for a while

For a while this this was a time-revered label.

You actually had to earn this, but now it can be yours simply by saying things out loud in a room full of people who all agree with you and will cheer and clap when you finally say what they're thinking.

That's courage.

Oh, they have such courage.

Labels and words are experiencing a fire sale, and it seems

everything

must go now.

But once that fire sale is over,

something else happens.

And what comes next

forces people to earn their labels.

And that's the world we're about to enter.

And I actually think it's a blessing, not a curse.

I'll explain when we come back.

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The decision in front of us, where do we go from here?

It's actually really

kind of an exciting time

because

labels are worthless.

Thomas Paine wrote, heaven knows the proper price to attach to something so celestial as freedom.

It's true.

Every single generation, I think except for the last, the boomers,

had to earn and renew their freedom.

They didn't buy or sell the label, the greatest generation.

That generation didn't have it.

It wasn't them who came up with that title.

It was actually the boomers, their children.

At the time, there weren't labels like we have now for every, you know, every subset of every generation.

People saw themselves as people and Americans.

They saw crisis, not as anybody's fault, but rather, oh crap, their turn to stand and do the right thing.

It's what they did with their crisis that made others years later bestow upon them the title, the greatest generation.

Well, I don't know if you noticed this, but we're living.

in a time of great crisis and upheaval.

And I don't think it's going to in the end be much different or of smaller scale than the great struggles of the past.

And in that struggle, all of the labels that we think we have now will fall away.

All of those that have been bought will become worthless.

And every new label for each of us will be purchased with blood, sweat, tears, or actual courage.

And what we face in the end

is not going to be smaller than what many of our grandparents or great-grandparents faced in the World Wars.

It's not going to be any less less frightening than the global economic unrest of the 1930s, but it's not going to be greater either.

It's just going to be ours.

And just like the generations gone by, it'll be our choice whether or not we survive.

I think this is a blessing.

The Boomers never got to see who they really were.

The Boomers feasted off the crisis of their parents.

They never really had to choose for themselves, like the greatest generation did, life or death, freedom or slavery.

They never had to push themselves as a group beyond what humans thought was even possible to achieve something as valuable or as celestial as freedom.

The crisis that we're now beginning to see is a blessing.

It's a blessing our parents never received.

Each of us is going to have to choose.

We're going to have to pick between black and white, slavery or freedom, good or evil, life and death.

The choices are going to be that clear.

We will all know in the years to come who we really are

if we choose carefully who we really are.

Otherwise, we will be painfully aware of

who we simply allowed ourselves to become.

We can become through this struggle exactly who we were born to be, our best and highest self.

If each of us were honest and we began to see this struggle in the proper light, we'd admit that it's the softness of our foundations that have caused all these troubles.

It's our wanting an easier life, not making the hard choices, not having to say no, not having to say yes.

But Barack Obama, nor Donald Trump, are the problem problem or the solution.

They're a symptom.

Look around you.

No matter who you voted for, I think all of us will admit now at this point that our country and perhaps the entire world is very, very sick.

So what's the diagnosis?

What has the doctor been telling us?

And what is the truth

when we come back?

this is the Glenn Beck program.

There's some hard choices for us to make as a nation that are right around the corner.

In fact, if you're in Portland, they're there.

They're at your feet right now.

Who are you, Portland?

What is it that you really believe?

Are you going to sit and let people destroy

the great city that you have?

If all of us are honest and we really look at our situation, we all know, we all see the same symptoms.

We all know that we as a nation are sick.

We're really, really sick.

And

each of us have doctors.

And they're each prescribing the opposite medicine.

And each of us, as patients, are all so desperate to cure what is killing us, killing our society,

That we will follow these doctors' directions because they know better.

They know better.

They know more than we do.

They've got the answer, and we become more and more vested in their cure.

As our friends and family say, that's not the cure.

Because we're taking this medicine and we believe we just become more vested in our doctor.

Our doctor is right.

Yours is wrong.

Now at the same time, the doctor's not going to get more humble because the doctor will know he or she has everything to lose if his or her patients begin to seek another opinion, another diagnosis, another remedy.

It's in their best interest to keep patients busy looking at the other side.

So they're not questioning what he's doing.

And while we're all fighting over the cure, none of us even have stopped to ask if the diagnosis is even correct.

We're just too busy fighting what our doctor said.

Now, I don't know about you, but I know you know we're sick.

I know you know this society is sick.

We are sick and we are in pain.

And when I am sick or in pain, I'm usually at my worst interpersonally.

I usually am not good at making friends at that point.

I don't think you are either.

We snap at each other, we act as our lesser selves.

Because when I'm sick, I'm

hurt

and I am full of despair or I'm fearful

or I just don't have the patience.

And every time I'm really sick or in real pain, it usually is followed by a time where I have to begin conversations with, I'm really so sorry, I was just in really bad pain or I was really sick, I was having a really bad day.

And I know I'm not alone.

And judging by our society today, we're having a really very bad, most difficult day every day, it seems.

And it gets worse every day.

I want those doctors to know.

I want those,

I want those to know that actually

do

just want to watch the world burn.

I want you to know that it's true.

We know there are dangers and difficulties, crisis that lie ahead of us.

But don't assume that we're just going to lie down and watch our country burn down.

It's not.

In fact, many, if not most of us who voted for Democrats and those who voted for Republicans

have a ton in common

and a ton in common with those who voted for neither.

While the parties and the politicians try to convince us otherwise, and many of us may have believed for a while or even engaged in this warfare, it's becoming more and more clear to more and more Americans that our neighbors are not the enemy, no matter who they voted for.

And if you're not there yet,

or your neighbors not there yet,

ask them to ponder this.

Who and your family came here?

I don't care if it was three months ago or three centuries ago.

Why did they come here?

They came here to make a better life

from a country that would not allow them to follow their dream for one reason or another.

From a country that didn't value hard work,

to a country that did value hard work and allowed you to keep what you built so you could live better than you did before.

Or you could have a better life than your parents or your grandparents.

You could afford a better life for your children so they could achieve even more than you did.

That opportunity is not coming because we have just a blessed land.

Because we have all kinds of climate and

great plains and mountains and shoreline.

It's not that.

It doesn't even come from the people because quite frankly, sometimes people suck.

It came from our mission statement.

It came from the American thesis that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And while that mission statement was and always will be aspirational, as it's never been fully achieved,

it has done great good.

Even in its

even in its worst interpretation, it has done great good.

It's shaped and given the best chance to succeed when it's protected by the guardrails of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

People came here because of our laws, which come from the American thesis.

That's what created the modern world.

It is indeed why people still die in the middle of the night, on the desert, just trying to get to this side of the the border.

Can I ask you an honest question?

Is it really that much of a stretch to believe that you and I are not alone in our

doubt of our doctors?

Is it really that hard to believe that our neighbor who knows how sick we all are

really wants everyone who disagrees with their doctor to die

is it possible that our neighbors have seen the flaws in their practitioner as we have in ours

but we haven't talked about that

is it really that much of a stretch to think that if we stop spending all of our time looking at what's wrong with America or what's wrong with them,

we might be able to see and search for the things that are right with America

and good about our neighbors?

Perhaps we're not as sick as all the doctors tell us are.

Perhaps our doctors, our politicians, and our parties are more akin to bad, crooked chiropractors that you've gone to and have done more damage to your spine than good, and will continue to bilk us out of every single dime week after week until we finally stand up and say, you know what, no, or we're broke.

And I understand why we haven't wanted to listen because most likely our friends have all said, don't go down that road.

Our family might have said, don't, don't, don't go to him.

And then you really believed and you fought.

And now you're sitting here and you realize, geez, they're right.

And I don't want to be wrong.

I don't want to tell them that they were right.

Then again, perhaps we are beyond help, and we only have months to live.

But if it is that way,

I don't know about you, but if we're going down,

I want to go down with my friends and my family around me.

And all of them, all of them, even those who told me not to listen to my doctor, or the one I angrily chased away because I just knew they were wrong.

I want all of them by my bedside.

I think we should spend some time, especially when we look at what's happening in Portland and realize it's really easy to jump on the bandwagon and light fires.

It's really hard to put fires out.

It's easy to lose friends and family and chase them away.

It's a lot harder to bring them back.

today there are four stories in the news that talk about our founding documents and our structure of our country our constitution say they all failed well

no not really no they were just forgotten our founding documents really are only an idea that's it i think a really good idea that says you know we should all be able to choose who we want to be you know build our own life chart our own course

and be left alone if we want to be left alone, or be right on top of each other if we want to.

But whatever we choose, we can live our life with dignity and security.

That's a pretty damn good idea.

But that idea hasn't failed.

It's just that nobody really remembers it or believes in it anymore.

I still do.

And I think you do.

And I will bet you that your neighbor does as well.

I'm not a doctor.

Well, actually, I am.

I'm a doctor of humanities, which means I can treat anything in the human body.

So listen to me here.

I'm a doctor.

I think our illness is all in our heads.

I think we've been convinced by those who suffer from some sort of societal munchhausen by proxy,

that we're fatally ill and will only survive because of them.

And I have to tell you,

that's a lie.

They need us to be sick.

And I don't know about you, but I've had enough time in bed.

We're not as sick as they tell us.

They've convinced they've filled in the line for us because we never had to fight for it.

We never had to fight for what that blank is.

As a country, we say, I am what?

Worthless, racist, over?

No.

We as a country,

we are a powerful force of good.

We are people who make mistakes but learn from them.

We as a people are always looking at a better tomorrow, not a dusty,

broken past.

We came here for a reason, and one of the reasons is we wanted to leave the past in the past.

We wanted to chart a new course.

If we choose to see things the way they are and couple that with who we always have

strived to be,

our best selves, better, not

better than the neighbor, just better than you were yesterday.

Can you just be slightly better than you were yesterday?

Not perfect, not like him, not like her.

Stop comparing yourself.

Can we be better than we were yesterday?

If we can do that and see each other

in the best light, put our past in the past,

and our strife and our coming crisis in the right

light, down the road, down the road, after we've done all of this hard work, some other generation that will come along will look back and name and give a label to us.

I believe that label is going to be good.

I believe that label could be great.

But one thing is for sure:

it will not be the one we choose.

It will be the label we have earned.

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Glenn Beck.

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Okay, coming coming up next hour,

we have something really, I think, wildly entertaining

and a wee bit satisfying.

A guy who decided, you know what, I'm going to take on the left and all of this politically correct nonsense and won.

Mercury.

Glenn Beck.

It's Monday, October 15th.

You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship.

Part 1, Introduction.

Something has gone wrong in the university, especially in certain fields within the humanities.

Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant within these fields.

And there are scholars increasingly that bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview.

So, Dr.

James Lindsay, along with a couple of other friends, decided, you know,

let's find out what this is all about and let's see what the lines are.

And they learned an awful lot.

They learned something quite valuable that you just can't get away with anything.

You have to fall into

a set pattern, really.

Dr.

James Lindsay is joining us now.

He is a thinker.

He's not a philosopher, but he is a thinker, which I like.

A doctorate in math, background in physics.

James, how are you, sir?

I'm good, Glenn.

How are you?

I'm good.

So

tell us what you were trying to do.

What were you trying to prove?

Well, we were looking into these fields to find out whether or not their scholarship has gotten so kind of ideologically biased that if we put forth

really absurd arguments,

that they might be willing to publish those so long as they fell in line with the political views that they seem to be forwarding in place of scholarship.

Trevor Burrus: So at first,

you didn't really understand the political view part, right?

Because the first few

studies that you've submitted,

you got back.

they were rejected.

Yeah, well, it's not quite that, actually.

I think we understood the political view, but we didn't understand the need for scholarship.

We started this project out, and as you said, we got the first several papers back rejected.

We started in August by Thanksgiving.

It was literally Thanksgiving on the day of we really realized we were in trouble.

We weren't getting anywhere with trying to hoax them, but the problem wasn't that we didn't understand the politics so much, although there's still a lot to learn there.

And there was for us too.

It's very complicated.

They call it a matrix of domination that you have to understand.

But it was more that we actually were not trying to work their scholarship in.

So there are two things that are needed to get these papers in.

One is that you actually have to understand what they call scholarship.

You have to do it according to their rules.

You have to understand the concepts you're working with and present them knowledgeably.

And then you also have to navigate this kind of matrix matrix of offense-based rules that stand in place of what stand in place of the academic rigor you would expect in a

more serious field.

One of the things I thought was really interesting, and I apologize for, I think, misunderstanding this initially, because the coverage gave me the impression that what you were outing here was these sort of pay-for-play journals where you could get anything published as long as you pay and they'll print anything.

But this is,

I think, A, much, much, much more thorough process, and B, much scarier because these were not these like, you know, crappy internet things that you could pay $100 to get your thing, your nonsense published.

These were top-end journals.

Can you kind of go through how you made the decision to go that direction?

Yeah, actually, you know, a little over a year ago, about a year and a half ago, I heard you on your program reading out from the paper I wrote previously with Peter Bogoshan, the conceptual penis as a social construct.

And that ended up going to one of these

pay to publish open access journals that has apparently fairly low or very low

review standards.

And so it didn't prove what we wanted to prove or didn't even really offer good evidence for what we're looking at.

But it was fun.

We learned our

it was definitely fun.

It was definitely fun.

Right.

Yeah, penises don't exist, but they cause all of our problems anyway.

Right.

They successfully that.

But yeah, so we learned our lesson.

We took the criticisms we got from that to heart.

It was fun, but it didn't work.

People criticized us, I think, fairly, pointed out where we were weak by using these journals.

And instead, we committed to a few things going into this new project.

One is that we would not use pay-to-publish journals in any sense.

Secondly, and by the way, they don't charge like $100.

They charge like a couple thousand.

It's really kind of a financial racket going on there.

It's its own big problem, and I hope people continue to address it.

Secondly, we decided that we would use the highest ranked journals within the disciplines that we were examining that we could get into.

So we would start at the best journal we could find for what we were doing and then work our way down.

If that one didn't take it, we'd go to the next one.

And then thirdly, we committed to being transparent about our results no matter what happens.

So if we had gone crash and burn, complete failure, then

that would have been what we reported.

I don't think it would have gotten much attention, but we would have come out and admitted that we were wrong.

But that's not what happened.

And

early on in the process, not just to keep us honest, because I think we would have kept our promise, but early on in the process, we ended up in contact with a documentary filmmaker who was interested in this stuff already.

So he's been recording us for a year.

His name is Mike Nena.

And since he's been recording us, I mean, clearly, whatever happened is going to come out.

So there it is.

Okay, so before we take a break and get into what you actually got published,

tell me about the work behind it.

This took a year to do.

What kind of time

are you looking at?

Well, the easiest kind of thing to look at with this is I had exactly five social outings between Thanksgiving and when

the project came out into the public.

I took maybe that many days off, including weekends.

I worked probably 80 to 90 hours a week, almost every week.

My two collaborators worked also very, very hard.

Peter put in at least a full-time job.

Helen did most of the same.

And I know you talked to Helen the other day.

Yeah.

So this was an immense amount of work.

It required learning these fields very quickly, writing academic papers.

A typical academic will publish a couple a year maybe if they're working hard.

And we wrote 20.

Holy cow.

Yeah, it's a lot of work.

It was an insane amount of work.

And these are all fields we have no expertise in.

Helen has a little bit of background in some of this, but this was primarily having to learn this material on the fly.

with no education, with no teachers instructing us.

Our only feedback was how our papers fared in the peer review process and then reading what was out there to try to emulate it.

And so what does having something published in one of these magazines mean?

What does it mean to the author and to the educational community?

Aaron Powell,

for the author, it is the absolute pinnacle of what an academic is trying to do in the research side of their career is to get papers published in well-established journals.

For example, Hypatia is one of the journals we got a paper in, and Hypatia is the feminist philosophy journal with probably the highest standing.

So it would carry a lot of weight looking at the academic community that that scholar is embedded in.

So they could take that to their university and say, hey, I got this many papers published.

If people are being considered for tenure, there's a research component to that.

Depends on how the school wants to do their tenuring process.

But typically, seven papers spanning seven to ten years is considered the basic research requirement to be qualified for tenure.

Our papers spanned, the ones we wrote spanned 15 sub-disciplines of thought.

The ones that got accepted spanned seven.

And

so we've got big journals.

We've got seven disciplines that papers got into.

We probably would have had more had we not been cut short.

Because

you had 12 in the pipeline that looked like they would be published.

And then this came out.

And so you pulled those, but you might have had as many as 12.

I think, honestly, we had 14 that weren't dead yet.

And I can say with some confidence that I think 12 would have gotten in and possibly

13.

So I would guess with pretty good confidence that somewhere between 11 and 13 would have gotten in in the end had we not gotten pulled.

Okay, so when we come back, we'll go into, and remember, we're on public airwaves.

So

we'll be as careful as we can to discuss what was in each of these papers

and

where they got a little gold star for.

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These are

these now published studies are just tremendous.

I mean, I don't know if you guys had beers before you came up with this or how you guys came up with these, but they're fantastic.

Let's go through some of them one by one.

Let's start with the first one, Dog Park.

The thesis is dog parks are rape-condoning spaces.

Tell me about it.

Well, it's kind of funny, actually.

I'll tell you a story.

When I went to, we all got together to have this come come public as best we could.

So I went to Portland.

We all went to Portland, Oregon to

get ready for this project to come out to the public.

And we went to the dog park on the first day I got there.

Almost right, I got off the plane.

I took an Uber.

Next thing you know, I'm walking Peter's dogs up to the dog park with our filmmaker.

And we get to the dog park and there's this just dog there that's living out the paper.

It was crazy.

This dog was fighting the other dogs, pinning them down, humping them left, right, and center.

The owner comes over, swings the swings the ball thrower at the dog gently.

I'll point out he wasn't being abusive, and then says, Stop humping.

And then we get to, I lean over to the filmmaker and kind of mutter, I guess, a little too loudly, like maybe we should start interrogating people about their sexuality, given what's going down here.

And then this lady yells out to me, oh no, no, it's okay, she's a girl dog.

And I was like, oh man, this paper's happening for real.

So,

what is the thesis?

So, the thesis was, well, the original idea behind the thesis was that we should write a feminist paper arguing that we should train men the way that we train dogs to prevent rape culture.

And so,

I thought that up today, thought it was pretty funny when I was brainstorming ideas for papers, threw it to Peter.

Peter takes his dogs to the dog park every day.

Said, let's work in some of the stuff from the dog park.

And as we started working in just, you know, absolutely absurd ideas from

what might be considered the most ridiculous dog park in the world,

the paper grew into that.

And so we made it about so-called queer performativity in human reactions at the dog park, and then ended up concluding things like that.

We should be able to leash men like we leash dogs to prevent rape, except it's not politically feasible.

And

it would be great if we could put shock collars on men, but that's not okay either.

So we have to shock them out of hitting on women by screaming at them to scare them and get them to desist from their behavior.

The thesis of the paper was, though, that humans

reacted differently to gay dog humping as opposed to straight dog humping.

And men were far worse about this than women.

And then we concluded that this is indicative of rape culture, and we called the dog park rape-condoning space, which we then walked into nightclubs.

We said nightclubs are also rape-condoning spaces with no evidence for that whatsoever.

We just read it.

So that was pretty out there.

That one was really out there.

I think it's, I don't know, maybe the one about the

feminist

spirituality meetings and poetry.

It's a little more out there, but it's probably close to the most.

Well, let's finish the dog park.

This one was accepted and reviewed.

Some of the reviews, this is a wonderful paper, incredibly innovative, rich in analysis, extremely well written and organized.

Yada, yada.

I believe this intellectually and

empirically exciting paper must be published.

And congratulate the author on the research done and in the writer.

And in the writer.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was one of the most disturbing parts of this, I feel like, because, again, it wasn't like these

journals looked at this and didn't really go through it and kind of just made its way through the process.

There are very specific comments from dozens of reviewers

who are doing peer review and saying specific things that you wrote that are completely ridiculous are amazing new accomplishments in the field.

I mean, that had to be, while funny and it proved your point, it had to be really disturbing as well.

Oh, yeah.

That's by far what we consider to be the most important evidence that we gathered in the process of this project.

That the papers got published or that they got awards in some cases or one case and all of this, it's fine.

It says a lot and it's disturbing.

But the reviewers' comments show that these

peer reviewers, which worked out between two and four or five per paper, so we ended up with something like forty-five or fifty total sets of comments.

They really did engage with what we did.

They really looked at it.

They

said our analysis was good when our analysis was terrible.

They didn't raise an eyebrow about the data we gathered.

The idea that,

you know, that dog park paper contains a bit of completely irrelevant evidence about where dogs go to the bathroom in unauthorized ways, as we worded it.

And that's completely irrelevant to the paper, but nobody raised an eyebrow about how ridiculous that is.

They were concerned, however, that we indicate that we're humans, not dogs, so that we can be sure that we don't claim that when a dog does a humping of another dog, whether or not the dog that got humped wanted it or not, because how could we know that as being humans, not dogs?

And they were really concerned, as I hope everybody's seen in our little video we put out to announce the project.

They're really concerned with the fact that we respect the dogs' privacy in the process of inspecting their genitals.

What specifically were they concerned about?

I mean, the privacy of the dog.

What?

I mean,

you got me, man.

That it was done in the privacy of a veterinary office?

I don't.

Okay.

Let's see.

You did fat bodybuilding, which quickly is what?

That's the idea that what needs to be added to the professional sport of bodybuilding is a category in which fat is displayed politically so that fat is just considered another tissue that's equal with muscle.

And to say that that's not true is to be mean to fat people, fat phobic as they call it.

That's incredible.

And that was accepted?

Yeah, that was accepted.

That was a

pretty exciting acceptance,

especially because we actually had a real scholar who let us use his identity, who wrote that, who we claimed wrote that paper.

And he actually is a professional bodybuilder, Mr.

Northern Hemisphere in 1978, or something.

I mean, this guy's 70 years old and just stacked.

And the picture in my mind of this guy being the author of this paper for fat bodybuilding was just kind of hilarious.

Because that was another thing, too.

A lot of these papers, you had completely fake organizations.

You had completely fake scholars coming from colleges that I think didn't exist in some cases.

I mean, some of this would have been easily disproved by basic checking,

wouldn't it have?

I think so.

I mean, there's kind of a

tricky point, and I don't want to get too far into the weeds here, but honestly, scholarship should stand or fall on its merit, not on who did it.

And so a lot of people are making that point.

And we deliberately chose names that would be hard to find in a Google search.

In specific, we chose very common names on purpose.

I actually used

I rolled dice to pick off of a list of the most common names for certain years, and so that way they would blend in with lots of people.

Okay, hang on, hang on.

I got to take another break and then we'll come back and finish why

you thought that was important and go through some of the

other studies.

Back in just a second.

We're talking to Dr.

James Lindsay, author of Life in Light of Death.

He is, you can follow him at

Conceptual James

on Twitter.

He is one of the, if not the mastermind behind

the

papers

of record that were being written for feminist studies and queer studies and were published in some of the the leading journals

and

critiqued, but

not really critiqued critiqued in a way that most people would.

I'm just quickly go through some of them

going in through the back door, which is not something we're going to discuss here.

That's really great.

Rubbing one out,

the violence of objectification through non-consensual masturbation.

Then we get to some really disturbing ones.

The progressive stack.

James, tell us about the progressive stack.

Yeah, the progressive stack is a pretty horrifying piece of work.

In fact, it's evil.

Fortunately, it did not get accepted.

The journal was inviting us to resubmit it and

give it another go.

It says this is a solid.

It says it's a solid essay that, with revision, will make a strong contribution to the growing literature of addressing injustice in the classroom.

Yeah, and so what it argues for is that we take students in college classrooms and we have them go through some kind of an inventory that determines how privileged they are.

It recommends a thing called the step forward, step back game as a possibility.

Once they're determined how privileged they are, the students are ranked according to their privilege.

Then the more privileged you are, the worse you get treated in class.

So the most privileged white and male students are invited to listen and learn throughout the semester, which means they aren't allowed to speak or ask questions in class.

They're invited to sit in the floor in chains to experience reparations and level the knowing field to de and reprivilege the classroom learning environment.

And

the problem that the reviewers seemed to have with this set of suggestions was that we thought there's no way this will get in.

We have to temper it by saying we have to be compassionate to these students as we put them in the floor in chains.

And they said, said, watch it with a compassion that re-centers the needs of the privileged over the oppressed.

And there's this idea out there called the pedagogy of discomfort, which means that you learn to overcome your privilege by being made uncomfortable and left to sit in that without being comforted.

And so they actually wanted to make a terrible, scary idea properly evil.

And that's the worst part is it's only a small step from what already exists in a great deal of the feminist and race-based education literature.

So this was not really terrifying.

This was not accepted because it wasn't bad enough?

At first, yeah.

And then later they were a bit concerned with the depth of a scholarship and the kind of routine things that you would expect out of

a scholarly paper.

They claimed, for example, that we drew on too many concepts and it would be confusing for the reader and to try to narrow it down to something a bit tighter and so on.

But

the idea that giving students experiential reparations and asking them not to be able to speak in class or to be spoken over and interrupted to teach them what that feels like, none of that was questioned.

So if this were published and it were real, if this were published, what would that mean to the university system?

What does that mean?

So all these answers are really complicated.

There would be people who try to take this up.

In fact, we got the idea from a news article about somebody at the University of Pennsylvania who was employing a similar but less extreme version of this in her classroom and got in trouble for it late last year.

So, this idea didn't come to us out of the vacuum.

This was actually something that people are attempting in classrooms.

And so, there would have been some

educators, primarily working in social justice side

field topics, courses, I guess is the best way to say that, but also probably into some of the general ed stuff, who would take up some degree of these suggestions as

experimental but legitimate to use in the classroom.

And this was being submitted to the gold standard journal.

This wasn't some fringe journal in education.

This was the gold standard feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia, that we were working with here.

Which is where a lot of the literature that's like this already exists.

Which, if you don't mind me going on a little bit, this is kind of what's happening.

We think that what's happening here is kind of the equivalent with ideas of money laundering, called idea laundering.

So

they take these bad ideas, some of which are just opinion, some of them are prejudice, some of them are genuinely terrifying, like this educational thing.

And then they launder them through the academic process and they come out with the stamp of academic approval that makes them look like they're real knowledge.

So you'll hear people say, Oh, well, there was a study, or we've based this program on studies that show, well, that's fine when the studies are good, but when the studies are coming from a place that can't tell

truth from prejudice and opinion, it becomes a real problem.

James, one of the other ones I found disturbing was the

HOH2 and HOH-1.

And HOH2

was accepted.

Can you

explain this one?

Yeah, that paper was accepted by Hypatia, the same journal I was just mentioning.

It's just a code name we gave for convenience.

What it argues is that you can only properly criticize things that go against social justice.

And in particular, you can only use humor to make fun of or

use satire to deflate that which goes against social justice.

If you use humor against social justice, if you criticize social justice, what that means is you never really properly engaged with it, therefore we don't have to consider your criticism.

And that's one of the huge problems going on in this

set of

fields is that they don't accept criticism.

If you try to criticize them, they say that it's privilege-preserving epistemic pushback.

That's a scholar named Alison Bailey, who's huge in the education literature.

They say it's white fragility.

That's Robin DeAngelo, who has just had a big book published on that this year, but introduced a concept in 2011, which says that if somebody with privilege, in particular white people for her work,

is challenged so that their privilege is put into question, that they are fragile and don't know how to deal with it because their privilege made them weak.

They don't know how to psychologically deal with having that challenged, and they act out in anger or grief or something like that in trying to maintain their privilege.

And so

these ideas are already getting out there.

We've just took them a step further.

It's interesting, because the one about hoaxes is interesting in that if to criticize what you guys did, they would almost have to cite your paper.

That was the idea, yeah.

It was definitely to put them in that position.

And I've asked Patia to stand by the paper that they accepted and published in our right names.

They haven't responded yet, but we'll see what they do.

That way, indeed, people who want to criticize our project from a position of intersectional feminism will need to cite us in order to criticize us.

Unbelievable.

Can we get one more, Glenn, you talked about this on the scary front.

The feminist Mein Kampf.

Well, you also did the white man Mein Kampf.

You did two.

One, the feminist was accepted and the white man wasn't, right?

Correct.

Okay, tell me.

Correct.

Tell me about them.

So I'll do the white one first because it didn't get in.

It was much more frightening.

It was written from the position of an autoethnography where the researcher is reflecting on, in this case, her own experience as a white lesbian woman coming to hate her own whiteness.

And it was rejected partly because the scholarship wasn't quite there, which is the case in all of the papers.

but also because it positioned the author as a good white rather than being sufficiently supplicant or whatever to critical race theories.

So

there was an explicitly political reasoning behind why it was rejected, and it was that the the author as a white woman was trying to make herself look good by criticizing her own whiteness was was one of the main reasons.

The feminist one was well hold on just a second.

Hold on just a second.

And that took

the parts of Mein Kampf where he was talking about Jews and replaced the words Jews with

whites.

Yeah, in that case, it was either whites or whiteness.

And then we edited the text around it and added a whole bunch of literature and reworded things so it would get past plagiarism checks and things like that.

So yeah, that was a, it started with scanning through Mein Kampf, picking out passages about the Jews and replacing Jews with whites or whiteness, and then editing around it.

The feminist one didn't do it quite the same way.

The feminist one was not about, it didn't take Jews out and replace it with men, for example.

It actually is the chapter in Mein Kampf where Hitler explains the need for the Nazi Party as chapter 12 and what its members would be expected to hold to, including especially the sacrifices that they have to make to be Nazis.

And we replaced our movement, the party, etc.

He doesn't mention Nazis specifically in that chapter.

We replaced that with intersectional feminism or solidarity or allyship, something to do with the feminist movement, and criticized the idea that

some feminists do what they call choice feminism, which is the idea that if a woman is living her own life the way she wants to and considers that to be a statement of feminism, then she is doing feminism.

It's feminist for women to have full agency and make their own choices in the world.

That's what this paper was criticizing.

saying that no, no, their responsibility if they really want to consider themselves feminists is to be to make sacrifices and stand in in solidarity with other oppressed people, particularly of you know, women of color or women of other marginalized statuses.

James, a couple of quick questions.

Um, A,

this had to be one of those things that you entered into and hoped that you were wrong.

And when they were accepted, you had to celebrate and then, short time later, going, Good God,

this is bad.

Am I right?

That is exactly right.

So especially with the Mein Kampf paper, I think, the one that got accepted,

the idea there was that we were trying to, it's very different from Mein Kampf, of course.

Don't let me mislead you that it's a one-to-one thing.

But

the politics of grievance come through.

And I really am glad I get to talk to you about this, if I can.

because politics of grievance is everywhere and it's certainly being used in the academic left as we were trying to demonstrate.

We called this stuff grievance studies.

But we see it everywhere, right?

And I think this is why we're so divided politically right now.

I was really happy to talk to you because, I mean, I don't want to get anything touchy with you, but you're a real dude and that's why I wanted to talk to you.

Thanks.

You know, you had this whole maya cola about

how things were going for you under Obama's time, and I thought that was huge.

And I was like, you know, this guy, Glenn Beck, is a bridge.

He's looking for reconciliation.

It's on your Twitter bio.

We need to be talking to each other again.

So our project was, you know, we're people on the left.

We're left liberals.

I'm not ashamed to say that.

I know you consider yourself a classical liberal and you're conservative on the right.

That's great.

We on the left need to take responsibility for our own lunatics.

And so our project was kind of that, you know, we're left-wing people who want the left to come back from the edge.

And we hope that, you know, the same thing's happening on the right and we can all start.

I think, you know, people In general, I get a lot of sense of this.

People send me emails about this now all the time, especially.

We're We're all kind of sick of all this nonsense, all the fighting, all the polarization, and we can't get anything done.

I think we want to get back to productive politics.

And as long as we're relying heavily on this grievance stuff, which clearly the academic left is, I think we see a lot of it coming out of the right-wing media sphere as well from my perspective.

I think as long as we're focusing on that, we can't have productive conversations.

We can't

remember, you know, you're an American, I'm an American, you're a person, I'm a person.

We have most of

the things that we think in common, even though we have some probably pretty serious political differences.

But I think we also have in common that we want to have better conversations.

We want to move society in a direction that benefits us all.

And it's just a matter of working out the details.

And I really hope that, you know, that our project kind of reaches that point.

Does that make sense?

It totally does.

I am, I hate to say this to you.

I'm out of time.

Could I invite you to come down and

do a podcast with me?

You We could spend an hour and a half uninterrupted

and just start where we've just left off.

Yeah, I would love that.

It would be great.

Great.

James, thank you so much for all of your hard work and for your honesty.

It is greatly appreciated, hopefully from the left and the right.

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We normally cover individual divorces, but this one's interesting.

Someone, a couple, has divorced because a woman was caught on Google Street View running her fingers through another man's hair.

They're laying on a bench in public, and he's, she's, and I guess the picture was taken in 2013,

and he didn't know about it for years.

It was on Google.

He found out about it,

asked her about it, and she admitted to the affair.

And now they're getting divorced.

So thanks, Google.

Another wonderful thing.

No, but they're not storing anything on him.

I'm not doing anything wrong.

What?

Glenn Beck.

The Glenn Beck program, 2016, election by numbers.

Well, it would be great if this 2018 played the wrong one, but election by the numbers, here we are, 2018 midterm election.

And what do the numbers look like, Stu?

Depending on what you're looking at, you can find a lot of good and a lot of bad if you happen to be a Republican or are rooting for conservatives to have a chance here to pass pass anything.

Obviously, you need both to really have a good chance of passing anything.

And as we've seen over the

past couple of years, even that is no guarantee to be able to get anything done.

But what you're seeing now is really good polling for the GOP in the Senate.

A lot of these races that were close have moved the GOP's direction.

To get to 50,

which is what they need, of course, to have control with Mike Pence as the deciding vote, you need to have,

there's about 10 races there, and they've knocked out most of the, now just the ones that lean in their category gets them get them to 50.

there's an additional seven toss-up races where they could get all the way up to 57 if they were to sweep those um you know maybe even outside shot at something dramatic maybe even getting to 58.

Most likely, you're probably in that area of 53 or 54 right now, which is an improvement over the current situation in the Senate.

But if they lose the House, that doesn't mean anything.

Yeah,

it doesn't mean, it means something, but it doesn't mean a heck of a lot because you're not going to be able to pass anything because the House is going to vote the other way.

And the House is where it looks, things look very bad for republicans um it's interesting the way that they're looking at this is not whether usually it's like will will will the party lose or gain seats right that's the way we usually typically look at these things and then there's the control angle as well who will control the house well if you notice you haven't heard a lot of talk about whether republicans will will gain any seats largely because it looks like it's not even possible at this point in fact um the the polling models that they have working right now uh 538 has one one, which they have

the chance of Republicans maintaining their current amount of seats at less than 0.1%.

Now, you might say, oh, well, they've gotten, you know, there was issues with, they didn't get Trump right, which is the thing every time I talk about polls, they're like, oh, well, they didn't get Trump right.

Well, first of all, the national polls were almost exactly dead on for Donald Trump.

It just didn't get the Electoral College right, but that also wasn't what they were polling, right?

Some of the states were obviously wrong.

But for example,

538, I believe, had about a 30% chance that they thought Donald Trump would win.

They're saying there's a 0.1%,

less than a 0.1% chance, that the Republicans will maintain the same amount of

seats in the House.

In fact, they are saying the equal chance that Republicans maintain the same amount of seats as Democrats gaining 83 seats.

Now, both of those are extreme outliers, right?

Like, they don't think either one of those is going to happen.

Right.

But the chances

of the Democrats just controlling the House are about 80%.

Again, more certain, if you want to use those words, or more probable is the right way to say it, than Donald Trump being elected.

Or

more probable than Hillary Clinton being elected, right?

So

it's a big difference.

And what you're seeing oddly after the Kavanaugh thing is, I think, people kind of going and hardening their own sides, where the far left really hardened their own sides.

So districts that were left-leaning have become more left-leaning.

Districts that were more right-leaning, and a lot of these states that we're talking about in the Senate are red states.

So, those states have actually improved for the GOP since Kavanaugh.

What we're seeing in the middle, though, in these purple districts in the House, is movement towards the Democrats so far.

There's a lot of movement in the generic sort of congressional poll where you see

generically what party do you prefer.

Right.

There's been a movement about six or seven points in that area towards Democrats.

So, what it looks like right now, and again, these things can change with large developments.

Obviously, you know, something like a war were to break out, these would change completely.

You know, individual scandals can change these things as well.

But the Republicans look like, as of this moment, they're in really good shape to control the Senate and really bad shape to continue their control of the House.

What is that going to mean?

I mean, look at the extreme policies that the left is looking to push in through the Democratic Party.

Free health care,

single-payer, I'm sorry, single-payer health care, free health care, free college,

repeal the taxes.

They are looking for an even bigger

infrastructure package than what Donald Trump was even asking for.

And you mentioned healthcare, Medicare for All.

In 2013, Bernie Sanders proposed this and got zero co-sponsors.

Zero.

He was the only one who would publicly support it.

Now,

you look at the top 10.

CNN has a list of the top 10 Democratic candidates, which, by the way, will not be enough to cover the field.

There's going to be a lot more than 10, I think.

But, I mean, everybody, with the exception of Joe Biden, who I will not be surprised at all if he comes out and does endorse Medicare for all, All the big names are for it already.

Many of them were co-sponsors of the bill.

It seems to be this, I mean, the idea that we in 2010 and 11 were being called racists for suggesting what they wanted was single-payer.

And now here they are,

the entire field is endorsing single-payer healthcare.

It's incredible.

Yeah, we were scaremongers and racists for saying it.

Yeah.

So I just want to go through, there's three stories.

We'll go through this tomorrow, but I just, I just want to

throw these at you.

Cortez was out this weekend.

We have to eliminate the Electoral College.

Okay, no, that is

a fundamental aspect of what brought these states together in the first place.

The states said, we don't want the big states telling us what we can do.

And if the big states can control everything, well, then

what do we have?

It can't be that way.

So we had the Electoral College.

We are one state away from losing the Electoral College anyway.

You lose Texas and you have New York, California, and Texas.

The rest of the country doesn't matter.

It'll be those three states.

You lock those three states up and it doesn't matter anymore.

That's pretty frightening.

Pretty frightening.

So now they're talking about taking apart the Electoral College, which would make all of the red states really pretty much inconsequential.

Yeah, I mean, it certainly would change the way the founders thought about the idea of people being elected, right?

All they have to do is just appeal to the big cities.

And by the way, this is an idea that

it's not just Democratic support for getting rid of the Electoral College.

I know Trump supports it, for example.

It's wrong.

I'm not a big fan of the national popular vote.

It's certainly not what our founders had in mind, but

there's some contingency on both sides of the aisle that actually believe this is the right way to go.

Which, I mean, that gets you just basically a country run by cities.

I mean,

which I mean, that's the.

Who wants that?

As a Republican, I certainly don't understand why you'd want it.

But

again, like, it shouldn't be that way, right?

Well, the cities could run themselves and the cities can run whatever they want and the rural areas can do what they want.

Why do we all have to live under somebody else's thumb?

I don't want to live under a farmer's thumb.

No farmer should make the, although I'd feel better with this than the other way around.

No farmer should be telling what somebody in the city has to do and how to live.

They don't understand taking any of my farmer friends to Manhattan, their heads would explode within 25 minutes.

They would not want to live there.

They wouldn't understand it.

So why should we have the people in farms and farmlands trying to dictate rules that are good for them them that also have to be applied to the city.

It's ridiculous.

Right.

And it's why the House and Senate both exist, to give a balance to that.

So that

not one side can tell the other side, right?

You know, no, it's actually,

it goes further than this.

If you would have, if you could erase the mistake of

the progressives under Wilson, where they changed the meaning of the Senate.

The way they got elected.

Yeah.

It used to be that the House was the place where the people could move and move quickly.

So things could be passed because there was a disaster and things could be passed quickly.

Then the next, the first check on the balance of power, the first check on that power, was to go through another body that was a lot slower, the Senate.

People are always like, that's too slow.

It was designed to be that way.

So you go through another body that was much slower.

But it wasn't just that it was slower.

It was also supposed to be men or women that were selected by their state legislature.

Now, what would that do?

That would make sure that those guys are beholden to their state, not to the rest of the country.

Not figures in national politics.

Correct.

I shouldn't care what

What's His Face in New York says.

Shouldn't care when Hillary Clinton was senator or Barack Obama was senator.

I shouldn't care about that.

Because they would be focused on their state, and they would be making sure that the federal government would not be eating into the power of their state.

Then it goes to the president.

And the president is only supposed to veto thing if he finds it unconstitutional.

Now they'll say, I think this is unconstitutional, but I'll sign it.

Wait, no,

that's the opposite way.

You're supposed to veto it, not if you don't like it, if you find it unconstitutional.

If it's unconstitutional, then it would go to the Supreme Court.

We've screwed up the balance of power so much, and that's why you have this story today.

The United States Senate is a failed institution.

You also have this one from Vox, the case for abolishing the Supreme Court.

And this story, the Constitution of the United States has failed.

I mean, you're just arguing for a king, right?

With these several stories in a row that give you the argument for a king.

Right.

I mean, okay, really?

They failed?

Or have we not been using them properly?

You know,

it's like going out into the woods with a Swiss Army knife

and saying,

I've been trying to cut down trees and split lumber.

And this Swiss Army knife has failed.

No, you're not using it properly.

That's not what it was meant for.

Yeah, I would also argue the the failure part, right?

You're talking about what is basically the biggest success story in global history, the United States of America.

The fact that it has its problems is well documented, but the idea that you'd call it a failure is patently insane.

Insane.

Absolutely insane.

All right, let's go through a couple of other things.

How about the Portland mayor?

Who the hell is Ted Wheeler?

And how did he ever become mayor of Portland?

It's Portland.

I think that's how it happened.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

So, you know,

last week, the Portland mayor refused to let the cops intervene when Antifa was just directing traffic.

Excuse me?

Can anybody just get up and start directing traffic in Portland?

Can I just go out in the street?

Can you imagine what would have happened to us in New York City if you would have started directing traffic?

Oh, my gosh, you might be disappeared.

I mean, especially if it was a union job.

You'd be in the bottom of the river.

What laws do you even have in Portland now?

You can just go direct traffic.

You can break an old man's window.

He's driving and he's like, no, I'm not gonna.

You young whip.

And they break his window and chase him down.

Police, nothing.

Nothing.

Now, I don't know if you saw the

mob in.

Yes, and I did use the M-word.

I don't know if you saw the mob in Portland this weekend, but they had

a law and order march.

And Antifa showed up for the law and order march because they, of course, in Portland now are the law.

This is Brown's shirt stuff.

Started beating,

kicking,

burning flags, whatever.

It's pretty scary.

And the mayor

released a statement at a press conference where he said, I was appalled by what I saw in the video, but I support the police's decision not to intervene.

How?

How?

How can you support that decision?

I don't.

I mean, I guess that just the idea of, look, this is wrong, but we don't want to make it any worse.

He's trying to make it sound as if the police, this is his angle for the mainstream.

Our police can do no right.

They act and they're just thugs.

They don't act and they're do-nothings.

So they have no way to win.

It's a great observation.

There are two political parties, and whatever you do, one of them might criticize you.

Yes,

this is the job of being a mayor, right?

If you're the job of being a leader, you're supposed to actually have an idea and do something, which I think he did, by the way.

I think you're right.

Not to speak is to speak.

Right.

When you say for public consumption, that is exactly what he's doing.

Yes.

His opinion is: oh, geez, we're damned if we do, damned if we don't.

But in reality, what he wants is

much more on this side than on the police side.

He's much more on the Antifa side.

And you can back that up with how he reacted to the FBI.

The FBI building in Portland is

under siege from Antifa.

I mean, think of the balls on these guys.

They take the FBI building and block it off.

So FBI agents are now trapped inside the building.

They call for police.

Police say, We've got to call the mayor.

What?

I'm calling you.

Dispatch police.

We have to call the mayor.

The mayor goes on and says, If the FBI thinks that this city is going to back them up, they're in the wrong city.

Excuse me, what?

What?

So the FBI had to get federal officers to come in and get everybody out of that building and into safety.

And the town did nothing.

Portland did nothing to these guys.

I mean,

what is this?

I mean, it's close to anarchy, right?

It's certainly the way that you'd think it would come if it does.

It's, you know, the idea that the FBI can't depend on police officers.

Forget the FBI.

It's just these are people.

These are actual real individuals who are in danger.

And

how about the woman who has the food cart across the street from the FBI?

She was

threatened with an inch of her life.

I think they've had to move out of the city, her and her family.

They took her stuff, destroyed it, threatened the neighbors who were coming down trying to stick up for her.

I mean, they're just, they've become animals.

They've become animals, and they claim these are their streets.

No, they're not.

No, they're not.

Punk.

Have you paid paid for them?

Because I think a lot of the people who are trying to make it to work are the ones who actually paid for it.

Your streets?

Since when?

But

read enough history.

Usually people

who are

national socialists or Marxist radicals of some sort, they're in power and

they let this stuff go until the people have had enough and and then they do what they want with those people, and they, you know, use those people as cover to seize even more power.

That's the way it works on a national scale.

I have no idea what this Portland mayor is doing,

but it's insane.

Meanwhile,

Alec Baldwin, who has a new show on,

where is his new show starting?

Do you know?

I don't off the top of my head.

Yeah, I think it's...

Yeah, he's got a new show.

ABC.

I'm being told.

Is it ABC?

Jesus.

Yeah, so he's got a new show on ABC.

And, of course, he's on NBC all the time.

He was just giving a speech over the weekend.

And he was talking about

the elections.

I want to make sure it's clear it's elections.

But he did say we need to overthrow this government and this government of Donald Trump.

Maybe we should watch what we're saying, Alec.

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Caravan of more than a thousand Honduran migrants are headed for the U.S.

border.

So we got that going for us as well, as if there's not enough chaos in the country.

All right, we're going to be going out, and basically, I want to have some laughs.

We're going to be out on our tour, Addicted Outrage Tour, a theater near you.

All you have to do is find out where and when.

It's glenbeck.com slash tour.

Yeah, and we're going to be all over the country.

Check out the list.

I think it's going to be a fun way of looking at the elections.

It's going to be a little different than what you're going to get from like Colbert, for example.

You think?

Yeah, a tad different way, a little different lens.

Might be a little different lens than

the New York Times and CNN and all of them, really.

So it's going to be fun.

And it's right before the election and then right after the election as well.

So lots to talk about.

Glenbeck.com/slash tour.

There is a fascinating story about Michael Bouble.

If you're a long-time listener of this program, you know that Michael Bouble is a friend of the program and somebody that I have known, I think, since before he was really, really famous.

This comes from the dailymail.co.uk.

I'm not sure that Michael wasn't joking in part of this.

Just give you the highlights.

Michael Bouble is officially retired from music

following his son Noah's cancer battle.

The singer, 43, explained that the heartache he endured following his son's cancer diagnosis at just three years old has changed his perception of life and he is done now with fame.

With a new album out

titled Love on the Way, he explained that this is time for him to step away from music, wanting to leave it at the very top after making the perfect record.

Michael revealed his decision to quit the industry in what he claimed to be his last interview.

My whole being has changed since my son got cancer, he said.

Michael Boublet says he was embarrassed to realize how egotistical he had become as he nursed his boy Noah back to health.

But now he's got his mojo back.

The Canadian singer has won four Grammy, sold 75 million records, earning him $35 million a year.

He has been married to a stunning Argentinian model and actress for seven years.

The couple lived a life of luxury with their three children, Noah 5, Elias 2, and daughter Vidya Amber Betty, who is 11 weeks old.

Yet all of this seemed meaningless when Noah was diagnosed with liver cancer two years ago, and the devastated couple immediately announced that they were putting their careers on hold for the care of their son.

Noah has been declared now cancer-free.

Michael Bouble is very emotional.

His brown eyes well up at the mere mention of the C-word.

Cancer.

There's too many C-words now.

And it is clear he is living in the shadow of what he describes as two years of hell.

You just want to die, he said.

I don't even know how I was breathing.

My wife was the same, and even though I was the stronger of the two of us, I wasn't strong.

My wife was.

I'm sorry, I can't make it to the end of the sentence.

Let's just say we find out who we are with these things.

Going through this with Noah,

I didn't question who I was.

I just questioned everything else.

Why are we here?

Is this all there is?

Because if this is all there is, there has to be something bigger.

He says that one way he got through was to pretend he was in

Roberto

Benini's character from Life is Beautiful.

I don't know if that was a choice, he said, but that's who I became.

For instance, I never called it the hospital.

I called it the fun hotel.

He said, every day I got extra bed sheets and I would build a tent for Noah.

I just made the best of it.

It's such a difficult exercise.

It hurts me and it hurts to to talk about Noah, because it's not my story to tell, it's his.

But my whole life has changed.

My perception of life.

I don't even know if I could get through this conversation without crying, and I never lost control of my emotions before in public.

I actually thought I'd never come back to the music business.

I never fell out of love with music, I just needed to put it aside.

What was hard was going to the store and buying hot dogs and toilet paper, and going to the gas station, going for a walk by the sea to clear my head.

Everyone recognizes me and says, How's your son?

You think you're close to getting over it and you're sucked right back into it, but at the same time, I was given back my faith in humanity.

He said the illness made him realize he needed to make a change in his life.

I've spent

a good deal of time with people who aren't so lucky.

When this terrible news came, I realized I wasn't really having fun in the music business.

I had lost the joy, and at some point just before the Brits, I was starting to lose the the plot.

I'd become desperate to hold on to something I thought I might be losing, and I thought I had to do something special to keep it.

I started doing things out of my comfort zone, like presenting, and the truth is, it had been a while since I had been having fun.

I started to worry about ticket sales for my tours, what the critics said, what the perception of me might be.

I felt like I was living with this over my face and near, and the reality I was seeing was all blurred by it.

I decided I never wanted to read read my name in print again, never read a review, and I never have.

I decided I'd never use social media again, and I never have.

But the diagnosis made me realize how stupid I had been to worry about all of these unimportant things.

I was embarrassed by my ego.

I was embarrassed that it allowed this insecurity.

I realized that for many years I couldn't believe I was on the same stage as my heroes.

I couldn't believe I was looking across somebody like Paul McCartney and saying things like it's hard to get here, but my God, it's harder to stay here.

Then I woke up and thought after ten years of trying to get here and five years of being scared that it would go away, I think I can enjoy it.

After his son's illness, he says, I just don't have the stomach for it anymore.

The celebrity narcissism.

I started to crumble, but then I started to wonder why I wanted to do it in the first place.

I had forgotten that it was all about souls connecting because I'd become so anxious.

There were people in my business life saying, if you hadn't done this or that, if you had written a better song, tickets might be selling quicker.

I started to take all of that on board, and no one wanted to take any responsibility.

It's just so much easier for people to pass the buck to me because I was insecure enough already.

I would digest it and say, it's my fault, I'm rubbish.

It affected me, and I started to think, it's all going to go.

I'm going to lose everything.

It is

fascinating to read these things from him

because what I've always felt about Michael Bouble

was

he was just having fun.

He was just living a dream.

And I wondered, and I never spotted it in him.

I just wondered

if it was ever going to get old to him.

Because what makes him, I think, the best performer I've ever seen on stage is that joy

he just has a joy of performance and it is so it is so infectious

yeah he loves it I mean you can tell when you see him live you can tell he just absolutely loves doing it or at least did at one point

but they're starting to talk about I mean There's conflicting reports that he's actually thinking about stopping it completely.

He says, I was learning with passion that I was afraid I'd become a mere poor photocopy of my heroes.

But when I come back from this terrible time, I realized I'm not a mere photocopy.

I've learned everything I can from them, taken it, found my own soul, my own voice, my own style, and now no critic can take that away.

It needed clarifying.

Now I'm just singing the music I love.

Maybe when you let go, that's when it comes back to you.

It's a lot like love.

He is,

he, he, I think he's joking about

he's because he says I miss the guys in my band so when my wife had to go back to Argentina, I said to the guys come on over to the house.

Let's have a drink, order some pizza, play some video games and jam.

They came over and we partied and I said, let's play some music.

And I thought, wow, this is fun.

It was then that I realized I missed making music.

I didn't even know I missed it.

That was about a year ago.

So why would he possibly be saying that he is now

It seems like it might be one of those situations where the internet has taken somewhat a sarcastic comment and turned it into reality.

His spokespeople are coming out today and saying that he's not actually going to retire because he's in the middle of a tour and a book,

album release, and all that other stuff.

So

here's what he says exactly to the reporter.

He pauses.

There are three reasons I wanted to do this album.

One, because I felt a debt of gratitude deeper than I can explain to the millions of people all over the world who prayed for us and and showed us compassion.

That gave me faith in humanity.

Two, because I love music and I feel I can continue the legacy of my idols.

And three, because if the world was ending, not just my own personal hell, but watching the political turmoil in America and watching Europe break up, there's never a better time for music.

Then he suddenly stops.

Quote, this is my last interview, he says quite solemnly.

I am retiring from the business.

I've made the perfect record, and now I can leave at the very top, end quote.

Somehow, though, the writer says, I don't think he really means it.

That's unbelievable because, you know, it was put all over the media as if he was retiring.

Well, he said it was his last interview.

He's got other interviews scheduled, right?

Like, he's had a whole press tour for this album.

It's just silly.

And the most important thing, though, is looking at that and saying...

That is really the type of thing that changes your perspective completely, right?

You go through something like that and you stop and you examine all the nonsensical idiocy that you participate in every day uh and you can reprioritize you don't want to have to go through that to do it but sometimes it's the only thing that makes you kind of reprioritize the things you're doing in your life uh and he seems to have i mean he he is making 35 million dollars a year if he's out there uh touring and stuff and he's able to walk away from that um because he just wants to spend time with his son.

How many times do we hear those excuses?

It's equitable to spend more time with my family.

That was completely real with this guy.

It's nice to see somebody who actually, you know, can't.

And it's nice to see that he got through it and has made it into a good thing.

You know,

I have

probably more respect for Michael Bouble

than any other professional that I have ever met in the entertainment industry because he has found a way to keep his feet on the ground and he was unafraid.

I mean, when everybody, whenever, when it was very popular to hate me he didn't I mean it's always popular to hate you.

I know but he but he and he was never taking a stand for me he just wouldn't

he just didn't understand he's like look I'm I'm not in politics.

I'm a Canadian.

Why do I care?

Didn't he get out of it?

Didn't he get a fight at a hockey game?

Hockey game?

Yeah.

He said the guy turned around and said, I can't believe you like Glenn Beck.

And he's like, I'm Canadian.

I don't vote.

What does it matter?

What does it matter to you?

And the guy threw a punch and he said, I threw punches back.

And he said,

I got into a hockey fight.

I got into a hockey fight.

I am so happy to hear that his family is

doing better.

And his son has made this miraculous turn.

And Michael Bouble,

you've given enough.

If you want to give more, we will certainly take it.

But

do it right for you.

Do what's right for you and for your family.

And your real fans

will be thrilled no matter what you decide.

I mean, unless it's leaving the music business, then we're pissed off.

Yeah.

By the way, this new album is out in a few weeks.

A couple of tracks on it have already been released, and they're really good.

Really good.

Really, really good.

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I just think he's wrong on this.

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Glenn Beck.

Let me go to Shane in Texas.

Hello, Shane.

Welcome to the Glenn Beck program.

Hey, thanks for taking my call.

Yeah, I'm from Texas, but I went to Portland to visit my mom this summer, and I brought my young children.

And downtown Portland used to be, you know, beautiful and fun, and now it's oppressive, unsafe,

smells like pee and poo.

And, like, if I park at the wrong place and don't pay the meter, I get a ticket, and I could, you know, presumably, if I don't pay it, get a warrant, go to jail.

But you can camp out, shoot, you know, drugs and smoke crack on the sidewalk, which people are doing,

and go ahead and pee and poop right there, and you're good.

You're good to go.

And I felt very unsafe with little ones there.

It's not a place I'm going to be going back to.

Portland used to be a beautiful city.

Just a beautiful city.

What does your mom say about it?

Well, they live across the river in Washington, so they spoke with their feet.

They live in Vancouver, Washington.

And, you know, we visited her probably 12 years ago, and it was not like this.

There were some crazy people, but now...

And it's sad.

There's a lot of very unhinged, mentally unstable people.

And also,

it's kind of like feeding the cats.

There's a lot of people bringing these,

I guess you could say, societal dropouts, food.

So it's kind of like the Tim Leary, you know, tune in, turn on, and drop out.

And people are supporting them.

So they're able to, you know, they don't have food, but they have, you know, a 40 to drink and they have weed, and they can just hang out and harass you and

beg you for money and get free stuff.

And man,

I used to live in Chicago, so I'm used to dangerous cities.

But this was a whole other level of danger.

I will not be taking children there again.

Thank you very much, Shane.

I appreciate it.

Best to your

mom.

All right, coming up 5 o'clock today, we begin a series on our UNUM, the Declaration of Independence.

It is a really important series.

Things we have to learn, things we must know because they're not being taught elsewhere.

Get your family, watch it five o'clock on the blaze today.

It's a week-long series, the Declaration of Independence.

Glenn, back.

Mercury.