Best of the Program with David Harsanyi | 10/2/18

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Hey, welcome to the podcast.

It's Glenn Stu.

We've got, we've got a holy crap bomb that was planted by the New York Times.

I mean, holy crap.

What have they found about Brett Kavanaugh this time?

Well, he's practically Jack the Ripper.

That's a fair way.

That's a fair characterization, I think.

Yeah, I mean, he's way beyond gang rapists.

Oh, God, those are the old days.

Those are the old days.

That's when we thought he was innocent.

Yeah.

You know?

Okay, so he gang raped a bunch of women.

Right.

Big deal.

This is much beyond that.

This is way beyond that.

And so we talk a little bit about Jack, I mean, Brett Kavanaugh.

And

what is happening, what's going to happen next.

And I lay out a few scenarios, four or five of them, that...

foreshadow what I think the possibilities are because I do think the Jeff Flakes or the Susan Collins,

there's a chance they peel away on things like, he lied.

Right.

And, you know, the point is not to abandon Brett Kavanaugh if you think he's a good justice.

It's the idea of be prepared for every eventuality.

That's your job in government.

It's your job

as we look at these big issues.

And I hope that that's happening right now behind the scenes.

I hope it is too.

I have a feeling it's not our advice to President Trump, who is the only president that would have stood by this guy for this long.

And I'm thrilled that he did.

He's got some spine.

If the Republicans cave, I think it's going to spell real trouble for them.

But we'll talk about that a little bit more.

Also, a year later, the anniversary of the Vegas shooting,

a year later,

what do we really know?

We tell the story of one of the potential victims and

how a baby saved their life.

That's coming up.

All on the podcast.

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

It's Tuesday, October 2nd.

Glenn Beck.

You know, there's always two sides of a coin.

For every benefit of technology, there is another side.

There's a dark side.

There's a dark side.

Take social media and the internet.

Before that existed, journalists had a stranglehold on the mass flow of information and opinion.

If you wanted to have a voice, you had to go through your local newspaper, your local news, cable news, national publications like the New York Times.

Your voice, really, the only place your voice could be heard in the past was on talk radio.

But social media has changed all of that.

And now you've got a hot take room.

You know, maybe you just saw some breaking news, and you can instantly publish and blast that information out into the entire world.

Good,

except there's a flip side to that coin.

Let's say you work at a news outlet supposed to be impartial.

Well, anything you've ever blasted out on the interwebs is instantly available to check your impartiality or your

non-biased bona fites.

Let me give you an example: New York Times,

Emily Baslan, July 9th she tweeted quote as a Yale school as a Yale law school graduate and a lecturer, I strongly disassociate myself from tonight's praise of Brett Kavanaugh.

With respect, he's a fifth vote on the hard right turn on voting rights and so much more that will harm the democratic process and prevent a more equal society.

Okay, so in July she came out and she let everybody know, I'm against him.

I think he's dangerous.

Now that was just three months ago.

She exercised her ability, as we all do,

to share with the world what our opinions are.

And then yesterday she shared with the world her independent, her independent viewpoint.

Emily exercised the other platform she has, the New York Times, with a holy crap bombshell on Brett Kavanaugh.

And I hope you're buckled in for this.

Or it's sincerely.

The allegations are horrifying.

You'd ask yourself, what could be worse than attempted rape, Glenn?

Well, gang rape.

Yeah, but what could be worse than gang rape?

Well, here we go.

Emily in the New York Times reported that in September of 1985,

Brett Kavanaugh

threw a glass of ice at somebody.

Yes, yes.

I'm sorry if this is a triggering event for you, if you're all of a sudden like, you remember somebody coming at you, Jack Frost, trying to stab you with the icicles.

I get it.

I get it.

I'm sorry I had to bring this up.

The New York Times is reporting on ice throwing.

Now, I heard this story originally from the New York Times.

I listened to a podcast, The Daily, which I don't recommend.

I listened to it so you don't have to.

But I listened to it this morning and

in that report, and, you know, he went to jail.

And I thought, he went to jail?

You'd think that would have come up.

No, he didn't go to jail.

There were no arrests made.

The charges were not filed.

Nothing.

Neither of those things happened.

Police were called because they got into a fight.

and the police said, Okay, all right, all right, knock it off, go home.

Oh, well, we can't have somebody like that on the Supreme Court, can we?

When he was, hang on, when he was in college, he was in a bar, and some guy said something to him, and he threw ice on him.

And the police were called, and the police said, Hey, knock it off, go home.

I mean, what kind of madman, what kind of Jack the Ripper are we putting on the Supreme Court?

Thank you, New York's time, New York Times.

This story does not live up to the even the editorial standards of the New York Times.

Someone threw ice in 1985.

Really?

God forbid you ever go to Philadelphia.

Now, Emily, the writer of this story, her tweets make it obvious that she's opinionated against Brett Kavanaugh.

So now the New New York Times has been caught publishing a supposed journalist being an activist.

And this is not a mistake.

How did this story get through the editorial staff?

Well, easy.

I believe they're probably activists as well.

They're activists, and this just goes to show his temperament.

He might, you know, somebody might come in and say, hey, I'm fighting for abortion in the court, and he might just take a glass of ice and throw it at that person.

Get used to it, America.

We have a full week of this as we get closer to the vote.

The ridiculousness escalates to a full-on clown show,

probably by this afternoon.

Now, a clown show in the media.

Leading up to a circus in the Senate.

You know what?

I guess nothing has changed.

But this time, can I at least get some cotton candy?

It's Tuesday, October 2nd.

This is the Glenbeck program.

All right.

So.

Stu.

I'm a little disturbed, but all right.

I know, I know.

The goalposts, man,

they just keep moving them.

I mean, they must be tired, don't you think?

Well, they're heavy.

The goalposts are getting heavier and heavier.

And heavier because

the farther you move them, the harder it is to justify.

This is incredible.

Though I am very disturbed, of course, by these new allegations against Brett Kavanaugh that he threw frozen water at someone.

Frozen water, first of all, can be sharp.

It can be heavy.

You know what?

People are like, oh, that's not a big deal.

So what he threw ice.

Frozen water can't be dangerous.

Tell that to the people of Peru, where 22,000 people were killed in an avalanche in 1970.

Tell it to those people.

Tell it to those families.

See, this is why he's not on the Supreme Court.

Look at his temperament.

You don't have the temperament to be anywhere near that microphone, Mr.

Regeard.

I do have the temperament to be on the Avenatti team, however.

Oh, yeah, of course you do.

I can jump right into that role.

Oh, yeah.

Dead dogs have that.

They spent, Glenn, 15 minutes on this bar fight on CNN this morning.

15 minutes where they talked about how, look, it's it's certainly on its own.

This is their fairness.

On its own, it would not be disqualifying.

Oh, really?

A bar fight in which he's not charged or arrested with anything, and the accusation is he threw ice on someone wouldn't disqualify him 40 years later for the Supreme Court.

Thanks for all the wonderful

room you're giving him.

What leeway?

But here is a situation where they're just like, well, but what it does say,

what it does say is that it plays into a larger picture of this man he was in his anger when he was drinking and this shows that he's capable of doing these things so if he would have anyone reach further i know if he would have come on and he would not have been angry

i would have thought something was up

because nobody does that to me my family Nobody, nobody is going to make those charges and smear my name without me at least responding forcefully.

And if you don't like the anger,

I want you to hear me clearly.

I did not have sexual relations with that one.

Same thing.

He looked and they praised him for being angry about it.

They praised him for his forcefulness.

You could tell the president was angry.

He wants to get back to the business of the American people.

So no matter what he did,

it would have been a problem.

They keep moving the goalposts.

Now,

here is my plea to Donald Trump.

First of all, I don't believe any other president in my lifetime, with an exception of Reagan, and I'm not even sure Reagan would have done it.

No other president in my lifetime would have

stuck with Kavanaugh all the way through those hearings.

There's no way they would have said the cost is too high.

They just wouldn't have done it.

So, A,

points for Donald Trump for having a spine and going, this is garbage.

B,

we're in this situation now.

And if there is nothing, if there's ice fights,

don't give up the ship.

Do not move.

Because if you move now,

they are going to do this every single time.

And you cannot,

cannot give any ground.

With that being said.

And I don't think this is a chance at all.

If Ford, if those charges turn out to be right,

you notice the media is not furthering the Ford testimony.

They're no longer on that.

It seems like she's been abandoned already.

Right.

She's done.

She's done.

She served her purpose.

She bought time.

They used her as a pivot to something new.

Okay.

So

there's nothing new there.

There's nothing new.

Or the press would be saying, you watch what's going to come out in this FBI.

They're not saying that.

They're not, nobody has come out and said, you know what, I was so offended by how forceful he was,

and I wasn't going to say anything, but I know that that happened.

None of that is happening.

What is happening is people are saying, you know, I was for him and I wasn't going to say anything.

But in, you know, as soon as he started to say

he was an altar boy,

I remember him drinking.

So that's what's coming now.

And they're going to go after perjury.

You watch.

That's by the end of the week.

That's what they'll be talking about.

If Donald Trump, please, please, Donald Trump,

the only chance you have, and the only chance the Republicans have,

if this thing goes awry in any way,

you have to have a plan and announce it in the same press conference that you say,

you know, he,

you know, quit or

vote went down in 1948

down, whatever it is.

Whatever it is.

Whatever it is, that press conference, you must say, and here's my next nominee.

And we're going to have it done before the election.

Now,

in my opinion, the only one that can stand that is Mike Lee.

Because you don't need...

How long did it take to do the Jeff Sessions vote?

Oh, I mean, he brought in January 20th.

He was inaugurated.

And then February 8th, the vote went down.

So four weeks.

Yeah, three, four weeks.

It probably could have been faster.

You had other things going on.

Okay, so you have four weeks to do it.

That's what you have now for the election.

You have four weeks.

The one who can get that, the one who doesn't need all the FBI checks and all of that is Mike Lee.

It's already been done.

He's the only one that can get done that quickly.

Yeah.

He's the only one that can be done that quickly.

Or another senator, but Mike Lee is the guy.

And Mike Lee's the only senator on the list.

Yes.

So

you've got Mike Lee.

You could select him.

Let's just say Brett Kavanaugh is hit by a plane tomorrow.

Which I wouldn't.

It's a strange accident, but it could happen.

It happened in Indiana Jones

and one of them where the guy were fighting on the the tarmac and the plane was turning around.

If that happens to Kavanaugh.

Well, this one, they won't be delivering the ARC in that plane.

They'll be delivering the New York Times in that plane.

But anyway, so let's just say, and it makes him into sausage,

you need to announce that Mike Lee is the candidate.

We are going to have this done by the election.

They're, of course, going to go crazy because Mike Lee is uber

pro-life, and he would vote.

Well, I mean, the bottom line is he cares about the Constitution more than anything.

He will vote.

He will vote the Constitution, and he will also vote for right of life.

He's not going to go in there with an agenda, but he is a right-to-life guy.

So, Kavanaugh wasn't good enough.

Here's Mike Lee.

There's not going to be, there's no drinking parties with Mike Lee.

There's just no drinking parties.

Maybe.

And it'll be like Mike is like,

all right, I confess.

I tasted beer in 1983.

I didn't really like it, but I tried it.

It was root beer?

Have you heard of this root beer?

So anyway, he's the only one that you could push through.

Because if you don't, if you don't have a plan immediately,

then the Democratic plan works of delay.

Yeah, and that's the most important point.

Their strategy is not to say that Kavanaugh is a sexual abuser.

Their strategy is not to say anything about Kavanaugh specifically.

Their strategy is to delay this thing so they can get to the election.

And if they get past the new Senate coming in, they can potentially have a chance of stopping this.

Now, if you were to,

the day after this goes down, God forbid,

they find something terrible.

Like, say they find something terrible about him, right?

And everybody agrees, and it goes down 80 to 20, right?

Like, it's just one of those things they found something terrible about Kavanaugh.

We don't think that's going to happen.

However, you must be prepared for that potentiality.

You have to be ready for it.

And

if you tried to go down the other suggested road that we talked a little bit about yesterday, which was a Diane Sykes or an Allison Ide or one of the others.

You won't make it to January.

You could potentially have enough time before they seat the Senate, but I mean, it's going to be really close and you might not make it.

Lee is the only thing you'd have that you'd be able to get that through fast enough.

Lee also is the guy that everybody in the Senate has to look at after they voted against.

I mean, they will vote against.

Yeah, the Democrats will still do it, but will Jeff Flake vote against

Mike Lee?

I just don't think so.

I don't think so.

You know, I mean, you know, these

people have good relationships with Lee, even though they think he's too conservative for them.

And remember, it's advise and consent.

Now, I know the Democrats won't care about that, but there's a chance that you can get all of the Republicans on board.

If you don't,

I want to lay out some scenarios of

what we're looking at here.

And please help me with the good scenario.

I'll lay out five or six scenarios for you when we come back on what is headed our way.

The best of the Glenn Beck program.

All right, I want you to think of some scenarios

on how this ends and the right way to deal with all of it and what it means

to the future.

We'll give those to you here in a second.

We want to go over some of the things that people now are saying about Brett Kavanaugh and not the ridiculous stuff.

I'd rather

focus on

two things.

This extra week was to find out if

the Ford thing was real.

I don't think that's real.

If it is real, if they come up with credible evidence that it's real,

he's out.

You agree with that, Stu?

Yeah.

I mean, if somehow they were able to prove that he did something or really make you believe he did.

Yeah.

I mean, if it's credible evidence,

if it is preponderance of evidence.

You know, the details matter, but yes, generally speaking, yes.

Okay.

Perjury.

This is what they're going for now.

This is what Jeff Flake has bought.

And what he purchased was an extra week for the media and the Democrats to move the goalposts.

And now the goalposts are moving.

The goalposts now are, did he perjure himself?

Did he lie under oath?

And not about,

not about

Professor Ford,

but about what was written in his yearbook.

So here are the things that they are saying.

And you have to say,

is this,

would this rise to the level of perjury?

All right, go ahead.

And I want to warn you, we are about to use highly technical medical terms.

And if you are, this may be go a little bit over your head, that's okay.

Stick with us.

Okay.

Judge Kavanaugh's yearbook page included the entries, Judge, have you boofed yet?

Have you boofed yet?

And Devil's Triangle.

On Thursday, he said boofed meant flatulence and that the Devil's Triangle was a drinking game in which three glasses were arranged in a triangle.

This is disputed according to the New York Times.

And I want to make sure that you understand that I'm reading

from what is supposedly the greatest newspaper ever created.

They are talking about whether the word boofed means flatulence or not.

Boofed in the 1980s was a term that often referred to,

well, again, technical terms, anal sex.

And this is how Judge Kavanaugh's classmates said they interpreted his comment.

They said they had never used it before as it referred to flatulence.

Okay.

Now, the term boofed, Glenn, was a term that I do remember from

my, I would say, elementary school days.

Oh, good.

Oh, well.

You know, that was before clinical.

Middle school, maybe.

I mean, it was like, I don't think I necessarily knew what it meant, but I feel like it had a sexual connotation to it.

However, what I found is interesting is as I was

talking to you about this this morning before the show, and assuming that everyone would understand that as what it meant, you had a totally different understanding of the word.

Well, I wasn't the hippist.

No.

So I don't accuse you of that.

But I seem to remember something

I don't recall, but I think we used to, you know, getting stoned or something.

I can't remember if it was.

The word boofed meant getting

or getting stoned, something like that.

Maybe.

Okay.

Have you ever heard the term spleef?

Yeah, maybe that was in Richmond High Times at Richmond High.

Yeah, maybe.

I mean,

it's been a long time.

Right, okay.

Okay.

But I looked it up in the Urban Dictionary.

Okay.

Okay.

So this is, is this guy?

I mean, this is as close as you can come to like a founding document of the word boofed.

Yes.

Right.

This is like, if you go back to the Federalist Papers, about boofed.

The Urban Dictionary.

That's what.

Okay.

That's what this is.

The Urban Dictionary.

To abuse any licit or illicit substance via insertion into one's rectum.

That's the number one meaning.

That's the number one meaning.

I have never heard it used like that.

Butt funneling.

Now, I don't know.

Again, these are highly technical terms.

I don't know who says, you know what?

I bet it's better if we drink beer through our butt.

But apparently, that's been done.

I didn't know you could do that.

I didn't know you could do that either.

And I don't recommend.

And it's not called really drinking if you do it that way.

It's called

learning here.

Goofing.

No.

I don't know if

you have butt butt blackouts, if you know, all of a sudden your butt falls asleep.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure.

Okay.

Okay, so

there's the number one.

The next one is something that is whack, dumb, or effed up.

Used to describe objects, people, or stuff you don't want to do.

So that, you know, that guy's a boof?

That guy's a boof?

I feel like that's maybe also how I heard it, now that you're saying it that way, because it was just kind of like an insult.

Yeah, that may have been.

Yeah.

Right?

I just don't.

I remember the words, but I don't remember it connected to, you know, sticking things inside.

Anyway,

here's one that kind of makes me feel a little better.

A synonym for weed.

Okay.

Yeah.

So, how would it, is there a sentence?

Smell.

Use it in a sentence, please.

Smell dat boof.

Now, I assume that's D-A-T is what you're saying.

Yeah.

Smell dat boof.

Okay, yes.

That makes me feel uncomfortable.

Fifth, the act of lifting the

bow out of a whitewater kayak while going over rocks, waves, or waterfalls.

What?

In order to launch over hydraulics or rocks.

This entry is sponsored by Cabela's.

Yeah.

I've never heard that before.

Boof.

The low-toned noise a dog makes.

Okay.

Typically, when they are suspicious or unsure of whether they should actually bark or not.

Now, I haven't heard a flatulence one, but I have heard many things related to the butt, which I think some.

Somewhat another term for having sex.

That'd be in the butt, Bob.

Okay, so.

Okay, so again,

I think this is the interesting point here.

They're trying to say this is essentially perjury.

There's no way that's perjury to me.

That is a bonker's claim.

The idea that that word probably meant different things at different schools, as mine and yours did, right?

As there are seven different definitions on Urban Dictionary for it.

Now, not just because flatulence didn't make it there does not mean that locally that was not the way people used it.

You do have the problem of people in Georgetown Prep now starting to come out and saying, look, I was for him, and I don't think he did this Ford thing.

But

now that he was saying that this is what these words mean, come on, man.

And that he was never really fall down drunk.

Yeah, he was.

Okay, well, so we have that one too.

You want to go to this that one?

Yeah, go to the next one.

This is,

again, the lists of potential perjury from for Judge Kavanaugh

The next one is excessive drinking Judge Kavanaugh portrayed himself in his testimony as enjoying a beer or two in high school and as a college student But not as someone who often drank to excess during those years I drank beer with my friends end quote

Then this is disputed is what they say in the Times his statements are at odds

with some of his classmates and how they remembered him nearly a dozen college classmates of Judge Kavanaugh said they recalled him indulging in heavy drinking, some saying, so now it's not, it's less than a dozen because some of them said heavy drinking, some saying it was beyond normal consumption,

parenthetical here.

To be sure, a smaller number of classmates said his drinking was unexceptional.

So again,

this is like judging yourself and how much you drink is notoriously difficult, as I would assume a Mr.

Alcoholic over here would be able to tell you.

I mean, the whole point is the toughest thing to do is admit you're an alcoholic, right?

Yeah.

It's very possible, and I would say likely, that most people who drink to excess in these periods would not necessarily say that they're doing something abnormal, even if they are.

Here's how I take this.

I took that testimony when I watched him talk about drinking.

It was very clear that he was getting drunk.

And he said, look, we all said

to excess.

We drank to excess.

We all did.

Haven't you done that?

I mean,

on the drinking thing, I don't consider this a problem because

I believe that he was, in effect, saying, yeah.

But there is a difference between a blackout,

okay?

And maybe he had blackouts and didn't remember them.

I don't believe that at all.

You have a blackout, you remember it.

You don't remember what happened.

You remember the, that you didn't.

But you remember you were like, oh, crap, I don't even remember.

Now, maybe at 17, you know, you're like, oh, that was so crazy.

I don't even remember that.

Maybe you're at 17 and doing that, but you have to consume a lot of alcohol.

May I ask a, can I bring an expert witness?

Yes.

And Glenn Beck, please come to the stage.

You know, to me,

I'm going to make a generalization, but with a specific accusation, 95% of people who say they drank to the point of blacking out are lying.

I believe it's 95%.

I believe that blackouts do exist, but it is extraordinarily rare.

I had to spend a week in France, which I can't believe my liver returned with me.

I thought for sure it was going to be like, you know what?

I'm staying on the beach here.

I drank.

I think that it would have been said.

I got to get back home.

I got to dry out.

My point, though, is that I've had a lot to drink in my life at certain times.

I've never even been remotely thinking about it.

The amount of alcohol that you have to consume.

in a very short period of time.

Now,

I've done my homework on it,

and it's not exactly the way I have experienced it.

Apparently, you can have blackouts if you drink an enormous amount of alcohol.

If you were boofing,

maybe.

If an enormous amount of alcohol gets into your bloodstream quickly, you can blackout.

I have read places where they say it's rare.

Some places say it's common.

I'm sorry, but I do not believe.

I believe believe it's a movie trick that most people, you know, they're like, oh, we did one last night.

We had sex.

No way.

Right.

Shut up.

95% of the time.

95%, that's a lot.

I had a friend who had drank a lot in a very short period of time and

blacked out, fell off a stage and had to go to the hospital.

And that was a legit, this is in college.

Yeah.

And that was a legitimate, like, he drank way too much.

Nothing, he didn't do anything wrong.

He just fell off the stage and almost killed himself.

And didn't remember any of it.

And just remembered being there, but did not remember the falling or anything.

And so I'm not saying it never happens, but like the idea that you would say to someone, oh, this guy's lying.

He did blackout is completely absurd.

You can't, you cannot, you cannot accuse someone of lying about that.

Only they would know if it occurred.

You can say that, and this is what they are saying, that he lied.

Because he said, you know, he gave the impression that he wasn't ever out of control falling down drunk.

Well, okay, I don't believe that, but I also don't, I wasn't left with that impression.

No, he said, I mean, the quote is: I drank beer with my friends.

Almost everyone did.

Sometimes I had too many beers.

Sometimes others did.

I like beer.

I still like beer, but I did not drink beer to the point of blacking out.

He just said, I didn't blackout.

He didn't say he didn't drink it to excess.

In fact, he said, I have drank to excess.

And, you know, I mean, I am not a big drinker in my life, but I've drank to excess several times, but never, I mean, the idea that getting to black, blackout drunk,

you're maybe a different story.

But getting to blackout drunk is, I mean, you've told me some of the levels of alcohol you've had in your life.

The levels are almost inhuman.

Like, I would definitely be dead.

You're, I mean, you're dumping poison into your system.

Your body,

your body can't handle it.

A blackout is shutting your body down, saying, I can't keep you alive and run all of these other systems.

Right.

I mean, that's that's you know, that's intense.

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

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You know, I was thinking about it the other day.

I was watching CNN and I saw three former Blaze employees sitting there and I thought, I have been so blessed to work with some amazing, amazing people,

you know, when they were young and before they got famous.

And it's just, it's,

I don't know, it's really satisfying.

One of the guys that I think of often, and I have no idea why I let him walk out the door,

but I think I would have had to block it with my own body, which he wouldn't have been able to move.

because he went to go become one of the founders of the Federalist,

which is a

great great group of thinkers online.

He has just written a book called First Freedom, A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Guns.

And his name is David Harsani.

Hi, David.

How are you?

I'm well.

Thanks for having me.

You bet.

I appreciate it.

You're a bigger guy than people think or know.

So thank you for that.

I think it was a fat joke.

I mean that in a good way.

Yeah.

David, before we go into your book here, just give me a minute on your take on Kavanaugh and what's going to happen.

I think he's going to get through.

And

I think this is one of the ugliest smears we've seen, at least in my life, covering politics and thinking about politics.

And I think it's going to backfire in that it's really brought together most of the never Trumpers and all the sort of disparate parts of the right and rightly so.

And if not, I was listening to you before, I think that Trump has to be ready for that, and they have to push through someone else because the courts, especially when you have a divided political environment as you do today, the Supreme Court's incredibly important.

And, you know,

there's a rightful seat there

for a conservative, and Trump should do what he has to do to get it through.

What do you think about Mike Lee?

As everyone knows him, you don't need the FBI.

You could vote in a week.

I love the idea.

I mean, and you know, he's not going to wander off.

No,

no, no.

No.

He's hardcore, so I'm very happy with that.

Yeah.

Okay, so

let's talk about your book.

The thing I like about your your book is that you do not

shy away from America's gun culture.

Yeah, I think we talk a lot about the politics of gun, and guns, and obviously that's important, the ideology behind it.

But I think a lot of people miss the culture behind it, the hundreds of years of embedded culture,

not just in war, but in commerce.

and in just the individual lives of Americans and how important it was and how that is in our DNA.

And that's why we talk about guns the way we do.

So because I grew up in New York and guns were sort of alien to my neighborhood and place I grew up on, unless criminals had them.

I thought it was important to try to figure out what that was about.

And that's what the book's about.

Wow.

So how did you, I mean, what did you find?

I didn't know that you were,

you know, not part of the gun culture.

I grew up in the gun culture, if you will.

My grandfather and my uncles, you know, they'd go hunting and fishing, and we always had guns around.

And it takes on a different meaning to me and to people who grew up around them.

What did you find?

Right.

I mean, you know, where I grew up,

if you mentioned guns or if someone had a gun, they'd immediately think about it in a negative way, not in something that would be positive.

So, you know, just a personal story, my dad had a little jewelry store in New York, and it was robbed.

And right after that, my dad tried to get a gun.

And it was this, you know, this painstaking process of trying to get one to protect your own property and your own work and your own family.

So that's, I think, when I started turning towards, you know, having a curiosity about what it was about.

And then when I moved to Denver and lived in Colorado and other places, I saw what it was really about and how people treated it and how like an NRA member is the most responsible person on earth when it comes to guns.

So

yeah, and I don't know if that people No, they don't understand that at all.

Take me through some of the stories that you talk about because what I like about this is it's not a gun, this is not a book about

necessarily the laws and everything else.

This is a story about America and how

we do, I mean, we're unlike any other nation on earth when it comes to guns in our history.

Take me through

either Sam Colt or Buffalo Bill, two of my favorites.

Well, Sam Colt's just one of the most amazing Americans that ever lived.

I mean, not only was he an engineer and just created this incredible innovation where a person went from firing one

musket shot once a minute or maybe twice a minute to shooting five times in mere seconds.

He was also just an innovator in marketing, in selling himself,

in using the press to sell to other people and

using engineering to create something that he can make cheaper so the normal American, the normal man, the normal woman can get their hands on it.

And it changed the West.

It changed the way that the relationship a person has with a weapon.

And he also had inter, you know, he was before Henry Ford, he was using interchangeable parts.

It was like the first Industrial Revolution.

So he was just an amazing man.

And almost, it was my favorite chapter to write.

I think he needs, you know, more, we need a full

shot on him.

Yeah.

So

here we are at the

one-year anniversary of Las Vegas and the shooting of Las Vegas.

Did you, in your looking through history, did you ever find another time in American history, and I should say,

you know,

pre-progressive,

where

guns had been viewed in America as anything but good?

No, I sort of actually, you know, in the 19th century, guns were sort of idealized and romanticized in books and things of that nature.

It wasn't until the 30s, really, when anyone started to think about.

And for for some good reason, people were running around with machine gun shooting places, you know, in Chicago and elsewhere.

So, I mean, there was a legitimate fear that some people had.

But before that time, no one even thought to limit gun ownership in any way.

I mean, certain places in the West, maybe they had certain areas where you couldn't have a gun because everyone was drunk and fighting, but generally no one had to go and ask the government, the state, for a gun.

I think, in fact, that when you think about the Second Amendment, how you think about the ideals behind it tells us a lot about how you think about freedom in general.

I think you're pretty authoritarian if you think that the individuals shouldn't be able to defend themselves and rather should rely solely on the state.

Because you could have um you could have had a gatling gun.

I think you can still buy a gatling gun

legally.

Uh but you could buy a gatling gun, but we didn't have those, you know, the mass shootings.

Uh one, it's a little harder to conceal a gatling gun in a violin case, but also because the government's prohibition of alcohol led to the formation of these huge, terrible, and powerful mobs.

Yeah, and you know, they use Tommy guns, and you see them in the

movies, and, you know, it's kind of

fictitious only in that the gun has, you know, big blowback, and it's not that easy to shoot, and it was almost never really used in criminal activities.

It was more scaremongering by people who wanted to ban them.

I'm not saying people should have Tommy guns and driving around in their cars, but I'm just saying.

I am.

Yeah.

I'm okay with that.

If you're a responsible citizen, I'm fine with that.

That's true.

That's true.

Well, so, so, David,

when we worked together, how long ago was it?

10 years ago?

I don't know.

Yeah, almost.

Yeah.

So 10 years ago, if I would have said to you, in your lifetime, do you think there will be a serious

move

that either comes close or does take away America's right to guns, you would have thought that was a crazy question, if I'm not mistaken, don't you think?

Ten years ago.

Actually, yeah, I do.

But I do feel better about the Second Amendment than I do the first, the fourth, the fifth, and others.

Because there are 400 million guns out there, and I think that the people who are part of the culture that I'm writing about and talking about will not hand them over that easily.

So I'm less worried about them than I am

certainly the First Amendment, I think, foremost, but others as well.

Well, you lose the second, and you definitely lose the first.

I wonder, I wonder,

you know, I wonder what it's going to take before people wake up to the road that we're sadly on.

The name of the book is First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History of the Gun.

It is a great read.

It's David Harsani, First Freedom.

It's out today.

You can get it at Amazon or wherever books are sold.

David, thanks so much.

This is the best of the Glenbeck program, and don't forget, rate us on iTunes.

I am not one to issue trigger warnings, but this particular sound

has triggered one person.

She says that she gets this awful feeling like she's about to fall off a cliff.

She says, as soon as I hear helicopters, I fall back into that nightmare.

She even got the feeling one time while watching American Ninja Warrior because it was filmed in Las Vegas.

So it's American Ninja Warrior in Vegas.

It's helicopters and some of her favorite music.

In fact, her favorite, she cannot listen to

Jason Aldean.

Her name is Mega Panzera.

She said that even when she passes a food truck, that night will come back in a crashing intensity that engulfs her.

She's in the middle of the panic and she can hear the gunshots, one after another, after another, after another.

Like the sound that little boys make for machine guns, she said.

She can see the faces of the people as they sprint toward her.

Some of them fall, some of them don't get back up.

She can smell the crisp desert air of October in Las Vegas.

The aroma of food fanning out of the food trucks with their motors that are usually so loud, stinking with beer that people dropped as they ran.

She can hear the screams.

The screams for her that never seem to stop.

and the feedback from the guitars flung onto the stage and abandoned.

Yet despite all of that,

the engulfing terror terror of that feeling, it only takes one sound to bring her back.

It's this sound.

The tiny cry of her baby, her son, her hero.

Megan went to the Route 91 Harvest Festival.

It was October 1st, 2017.

a country music festival that became the deadliest mass shooting in U.S.

history.

For Megan, though, it all started as a date with her then-boyfriend, Valdo Penzera Jr.

He was from New Jersey.

He was in for the weekend to visit her in Las Vegas.

She was working there as a teacher.

They had been looking forward to the weekend for a while.

No stress.

They were just going to go see some, you know, music, have some food, have a great time together.

Some of their favorite country musicians, they were all there for that same weekend and they talked about it.

And more and more each day, they got excited.

But when the day finally arrived,

Megan felt a little gutted.

She was exhausted.

She really wanted to go, but she had been feeling sick a lot lately.

So the morning of that concert,

they went to the doctor and by fate that morning

they found out that she was pregnant.

She and Valdo were going to be parents.

She said it was a strange realization to have.

She said, giving the

setting, and it happened so fast, and I didn't expect it that

maybe it didn't fully kick in.

Either way, she was now tired and pregnant, and she had plenty of excuses to skip the up-close festival experience and, you know, just go sit in the bleachers at the back.

But the passes weren't cheap.

Something deep inside of her, she says now, kept telling her, her,

it was the right thing to do.

It's the right thing to do.

Go.

She's returned to that assurance.

That assurance that put her in the bleachers.

The view and the sound wasn't very good.

She had paid for great spots.

But she thought this would be a better place for me.

It's just it'll be a little more relaxing.

I'll be back from the crowd.

I can watch them enjoy themselves.

And we're all together after all.

There they were sitting in the bleachers, not where they had paid to be.

And then around 10 o'clock that night, during Jason Aldean's performance, it happened.

So many things happened.

Too many things happened all at once.

So many things at once that they continued to replay all the different things, one at a time to this day.

It started with confusion, the firecrackers that turned into machine gun barrage, the screams.

They said they couldn't believe that all the screams just kept going, all of it.

Imagine the panic they felt as 20,000 people turned around all at once and started running directly at them.

Everyone ran.

Everyone was just trying to stay alive to protect themselves or someone near them.

The bullets were falling like hail in a tornado.

They looked down as the bullets were falling right where they would have been if Megan

hadn't been so tired and pregnant

and hadn't listened to her voice inside.

So their seats at the back saved them, or as they see it, their son saved them.

Because from the back, they were able to quickly escape.

Although as they sprinted to safety, Valdo felt a whip of air pass his head as a bullet flew past.

It was close, and he knew what that meant.

He said, that was the moment I realized, I have a family.

I've got to do what I've got to do to keep them safe.

And he's done just that.

It was a moment that redefined him.

or at least strengthened a part of him that he had been putting aside for later.

Megan left Las Vegas and joined Valdo in New Jersey.

Several months after the shooting, they got married in a gazebo.

They did it in front of a body of water called Bueller's Pond at a park near their home in a procession led by their mayor.

They didn't have a reception, they just went out for dinner.

They didn't have a honeymoon because they thought it was more important to focus on their baby, so he would be born healthy to keep him safe, like he had kept them safe.

A few months later, just eight months after the shooting, he was born.

They both say now that when they hold him, they feel the weightlessness of new life.

They've become immune to the dark moments they lived.

They say they feel hope.

The flashes of dark thoughts are still there.

Megan says she feels a sudden anxiety when she thinks about her son's first day of school.

I don't know.

I don't want to hold him back.

I want him to have fun, but the world is just so different now.

Valdo knows that.

Like everything they've gone through, like all that they've seen and felt and heard, all the dangerous moments they barely escaped, it's just a matter of time.

The world is different.

Yes.

But time is not.

Who knows what their son will be like when the day arrives for him to walk into the classroom alone?

Only time will tell, his father says.

For now,

time is fragmented.

It's kind of cruel sometimes.

Megan and Valdor are still painfully aware of their environments everywhere they go.

Things you didn't have to think about before, you have to think about now.

It's just different.

It's different, and we're raising him in a different world.

It's really scary, Megan said.

When she gets the feeling

that everything is just so much larger than her,

it's the world, how the world has changed into something explosive and scary.

Open spaces bring that feeling on, that lights in your eyes panic.

Something else happens.

They haven't been to a concert since that day.

Say even going to the mall is enough of an obstacle.

But any time they're swarmed by that feeling,

it goes away the minute they look at their son

or they listen for his tiny sounds.

He is the future and they see the future that he will bring.

Valdo is now a dispatcher for the local police department, member of a nearby high school district school board, and in both positions, he is able to affect change in many ways, change that could save his son, could save anyone's son, from nightmares like his and Megan's.

Because at the heart of it, nightmares of that kind are nightmares that we all feel.

They're all of ours.

851 injuries.

59 deaths.

We see the numbers.

We see the frantic cell phone footage.

And it's all too easy to succumb into that debilitating feeling like Megan and Valdo have.

But just look for the tiniest things.

Look for the tiniest sounds.

Look for the stories like theirs.

Listen for hope.

Because it is there.

Much more than we even realize.

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