Best of the Program with Jonathan Haidt | 9/17/18

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Hi, it's Stu and Glenn Beck here for the podcast today, where we start with a Me Too era of Supreme Court nominations.

Last time there was a controversy about the Supreme Court.

Of course, then there was another.

It was Me Too before it was Me Too with Clarence Thomas.

And now here we are again with another accusation.

But when you hear the details of this accusation

as we knew them at the time of the recording of this podcast, it was ridiculous.

They've only gotten more ridiculous.

It really is.

This is insane, but it's going to be the drama of the week for sure.

It's also Constitution Day.

We go over some of the stuff from the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence a little bit kind of in advance of Addicted to Outrage, which comes out on September 18th, which is tomorrow if you're listening to this on the day we did the show.

And also, you don't want to miss Jonathan

He is, he's amazing talking about the coddling of the American mind and what's happening to our society.

He's great.

And we'll also talk about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who can't quite explain where she's going to get the $40 trillion for the program she wants.

The great thing is, we can explain

why we shouldn't abandon capitalism.

Yes, in detail.

And that's all today on the podcast.

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

It's Monday, September 17th.

Glenn Beck.

Oh, the games that the Democrats play.

Welcome to the Me Too era of the Supreme Court Justice Confirmation.

Last Thursday, Senator Dianne Feinstein disclosed the existence of a secret letter written by an anonymous woman alleging that the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were in high school back in the 1980s.

Now, yesterday, there was a major twist in this story that everyone who follows leftist strategy should have seen coming.

The anonymous woman has revealed herself.

She is Christine Ford, a 51-year-old research psychologist at Palo Alto University in Northern California.

She works at a university.

She's also a registered Democrat and has donated to political organizations.

But she pinky swears.

She swears this has nothing to do with her coming forward with this story just as the Senate Judiciary Committee votes on Kavanaugh.

Now, there were plenty of time for her to come out.

There was plenty of time for the Democrats to spill the beans.

They decided, no, no, no, it has to be the week of the vote.

Christine Ford, she spilled the exclusive beans to the Washington Post because they believe that democracy dies in darkness.

And of course, if there's anything that Kavanaugh hopes to accomplish on the Supreme Court, it is murdering democracy, I believe.

I am so, I want Donald Trump.

I mean, there's so much.

This is the time for him to have the twitchy eye and just go unstable.

This is the time.

Right now, I just want him to go, you know what?

You didn't like that one, huh?

Here's Judge Napolitano.

How do you like that one?

Ford told the Post that during a high school party, a drunk Brett Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, groped her, and covered her mouth to keep her from screaming.

She says, quote, I thought he might inadvertently kill me.

He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing, end quote.

Now,

we have to take things like this seriously.

But at the last

minute,

you've had this for months.

She's had it obviously her whole life.

But they've had this for months.

The Democrats hold on to it

and do nothing until the week, until Kavanaugh can no longer be asked any questions about it.

There is no indication that she reported such a harrowing attack to the police or her parents or anybody else at the time.

Kavanaugh unequivocally denies the accusations.

The White House released a letter signed by 65 women who say they went to

the high school with Kavanaugh.

They vouch for his character.

But that's not going to matter.

The Democrats will get their circus this week.

Kamala Harris and Corey Spartacus Booker will get their chance to remind everybody to vote for them for president in 2020 because only the Democrats like women.

Christine Ford might be telling the absolute truth about this incident with Kavanaugh.

And it is sad if she is telling the truth that no one will believe her.

But why will half the country reject this?

Because she might also be making this whole thing up for politics sake.

And the fact that the politicians had this, that she filed it with the politicians and not the police,

and that they held on to it until after

the hearings

make it a little suspicious.

The political timing of the story kind of drains all of the credibility out of it.

Kavanaugh was confirmed to the federal bench by the Senate in 2006.

Where was her dramatic story then?

Now, last year, this worked to derail Roy Moore's Senate campaign.

And that was a little dicey, but I think we all looked at him and went, yeah,

there's a little something, something going on there.

Kavanaugh?

This just perfectly serves the left's narrative that Kavanaugh is planning on destroying all of the rights of women.

Truth doesn't stand a chance

when it's up against this kind of hysteria and a media that plays into its hands.

The best of the Glenbeck program.

Glad you're here.

It is

Constitution Day.

Anybody

anybody really know what the Constitution even is anymore?

Anybody.

Anybody?

Bueller?

Bueller.

Does anybody care?

Yeah.

July 9th, 1776.

Copy of the Declaration of Independence.

Independence.

Reached New York City.

There were naval ships out in the harbor.

The British.

Revolutionary spirit.

Tension running high.

George Washington was the commander of the Continental Forces.

He stood in front of City Hall in Manhattan, just off Wall,

and he

read the Declaration of Independence.

The crowd cheered.

They tore down the statue of King George III.

Now, think of that.

How you see now statues coming down of tyrants all around the world.

They take the statue of King George and they actually melt the statue and make make 42,000 musket balls, bullets out of the statue of King George.

America's separation from Great Britain was officially now in writing.

So I want to talk to you a little bit about, and this is a whole section in the book.

I come back to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution several times in the new book.

It's coming out tomorrow, Addicted to Outrage.

And I explain,

I think,

I actually, I like it very much, the Declaration of Independence as the greatest breakup letter of all time.

If you make that a dear George letter, I translate it from, you know, old-timey English into,

you know, a contemporary breakup letter, and you understand it.

It's the greatest breakup letter of all time.

But that's what it is.

It's a

breakup letter that says we have to separate because you're an abusive boyfriend and we don't want any of that.

But what's more is it starts with, hey, George, you know, we got to break up because

there's a lot of things going on and things that you're doing.

And every time I try to bring things up, you only make it worse.

But I want to tell you

who I am because you don't seem to get it.

This is who I am.

This is what I believe.

These are the things that we find self-evident.

That's the mission statement for the country.

The Declaration of Independence is so important because it's the mission statement.

It says, we're going to break up because we are these people.

We believe in these

things.

Forget about all of the things that the king did.

Just look at that part.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

So basically, this says, we're going to break up and we're going to start our own country.

And

it's going to revolve around this.

That all rights come from God, not from a king.

Nobody can change them.

Your individuals were not a collective under rule.

And you have a right to be right to be heard and express yourself, and nobody can scoop you up in the middle of the night, and nobody can just level fake charges that I can't answer.

And we're going to develop a country that if it ever goes off the rails, the people can abolish it.

In fact, they have a right and responsibility to abolish that if it becomes

a hindrance or opposed to any of these natural rights.

because that's who we are.

That's what we believe.

That's the Declaration of Independence.

But then

in 1789, they get together and they say, okay, that's the mission statement.

How do we do it?

How do we build this?

There's a whole section or a whole chapter where I...

kind of talk about the Constitution as if it was written by, you know, a bunch of, you know, VW

engineers that had to, you know, make the VW thing.

Remember that awful car?

Yeah.

And they were like, okay, we were making cool cars.

I mean, Porsche designed the first one.

Now we're building the thing?

No, I don't think so.

And so they break away.

They had to, if you want to do a new company

and that company is never going to make the VW thing,

then you better state it in your mission statement.

And then you better build your company rules around the things that you saw lead to the VW thing.

And that's what the Constitution does.

The Constitution is, okay, how do we build this?

More importantly,

how do we make sure that we don't start building a VW thing?

And

in the government, that VW thing is tyranny, a tyrant, a king, a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mao.

How do we make sure that never happens?

Because that's why we broke away.

In our mission statement, it says men are individuals.

They are given certain rights.

No one can take those rights away.

They're life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness so they can be who they want to be.

Now, I'm not saying that's a mission statement.

I'm not saying that we haven't made mistakes.

I'm not saying that we haven't hit it every time.

Of course not.

Man's never going to be per man will never be perfect.

Why do you expect a country to be perfect?

350 million people are gonna get this right?

We can't get one person right.

How are we gonna get 350 of us right?

Men are flawed.

Again, that's where the Constitution comes in.

Because men are flawed, you better check on them.

You better make sure that anybody who gets power is so compartmentalized and so many people are checking on them so it can never get out of control.

This system is so brilliant.

It has so many checks and balances.

But what Americans don't understand is we're at the last clause.

We are now at the last beachhead.

This thing was designed with checks and counter checks and counterbalances to make sure nothing got out of control.

And at the very last minute, one of our founders said, yeah, but what happens if all of that fails?

Chuckle, chuckle, chuckle.

Oh, well, Americans will never let that happen.

They don't want tyranny.

There's so many checks and balances that will.

and somebody said, wait a minute, but what if they do?

Because right now we have this thing written, so

all of the checks and balances are happening in the government.

They're happening at the federal level, and the Senate is supposed to be a balance.

This is the way it was originally written.

The Senate was not supposed to be elected by you.

You shouldn't care about Betto.

Only the people in Texas should care about Betto.

Not you.

I shouldn't care about Chuck Schumer.

Because Chuck Schumer should be making sure that the government doesn't do anything to stop New York from being New York.

You want to do all socialists up in New York?

Have at it, dude.

California, you want to drive the crazy train into the cliff?

Have at it.

But not Texas.

And that's what the Senate was supposed to do, but the the progressives took that away.

So you lose one check and balance.

And slowly but surely, people have either given away their check and balance power or they have had it taken away.

And so we're down to the last one where the crazy founder said, yeah, but what happens if all of that?

It'll never happen.

It has.

That's the Constitutional Convention.

That's where the people can say, you know what, they're out of control, and we need to go in and give them term limits because they'll never do it themselves.

This is a brilliant document.

It has been slowly dismantled.

It's not perfect.

As Winston Churchill says, the greatest thing about a republic or democracy

is that it's the worst system,

it's the worst system, absolutely the worst way to manage,

except for all of the other ways.

Yes, it's flawed, but this is the best way to do it, but we haven't lived it in a long time.

Well, and remember, too, I mean,

the brilliance of the founders was recognizing human fallibility.

Right.

They realized that they weren't going going to get it perfect, and that's why they created a process, which I think you can argue it is perfect because of this.

You can amend it.

If you find something wrong, you can amend it.

And there's a process to go through to amend it.

They never want to go through that process in Washington.

They just want to implement it.

When they say the founders never saw this happening, they know.

They knew that.

They knew that.

That's why they left the amendment process.

That's the only way this document is living and breathing.

You can open it up through the amendment process and say, you know what?

That's not right.

The gun thing, that's not the way we feel now.

We've learned some things.

So you amend it.

You don't twist and take out of context the words to say, well, it's a living, breathing document.

No, it's not.

It's living and breathing when you open it up and say, we need to amend this because that's old-timey.

they never saw it coming, that's part of the genius.

That's part of the genius.

Well, it's too tough to do that.

Again, that's part of the genius

because it slows you down.

Do you know that the Patriot Act was written in the 1990s?

What?

The Patriot Act was written

for the most part in the 1990s.

It went nowhere.

No one wanted the patriot act

so it just sat on a shelf and waited until there was a disaster because people will vote for security when they're freaked out and so they did can you imagine how did that patriot act we didn't even ask that question

how is this how have you designed this elaborate this elaborate system With Homeland Security and everything else, how did you put this together so quickly?

No,

easy.

We did it years ago.

Right.

It was ready to go.

I mean, another good example of this is Medicare for All.

Bernie Sanders introduced Medicare for All in 2013 and got exactly zero co-sponsors.

We've got, let's say, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen.

When he released it in 2017, he had 16 co-sponsors.

Mind you, by the way, the Democrats had solved this problem, if you remember, right, with Obamacare already.

And now they want Medicare for all.

In 2013, it wasn't popular.

It didn't make sense.

No one wanted to jump on that bandwagon.

Now it's all democratic socialism.

And if you look through this name, you're going to see a lot of 2020 potential Democratic nominees.

Corey Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris.

You know the names.

It's blatantly obvious that this stuff is going on.

That's the way it works.

That's progressivism.

The cure to progressivism is what progressivism deems the cancer.

The Constitution.

Today is Constitution Day.

If you don't, if you would like to learn more about this and if any of this has made sense, That's in Addicted to Outrage.

New book.

It comes out tomorrow.

You can order it, have it delivered to you tomorrow, and begin to read it.

Addicted to Outrage, how we can actually heal and solve the nation's problems.

But we can't do it while we're angry.

We have to use reason.

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

Like listening to this podcast?

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

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

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Do it.

One of the most influential writers,

I think, in the last five years, at least in my life,

is Jonathan Haidt.

He has written a couple of bestsellers.

One of them is the, what was it, The Unrighteous Mind or The Righteous Mind, which is, I know that, I know language makes a difference, especially there.

But The Righteous Mind, you know, why we can't get along with people.

And it is, it's a game changer.

The one thing I have found in common with people who are spitting themselves out of the situation out of the system on both sides and are saying, we're in trouble, they all have read Jonathan Haidt's books.

This is an exceptional book and I believe a must read for everyone in this audience.

It's called The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt, and he joins us now.

Hello, Jonathan.

How are you, sir?

Very well, Glenn.

Pleasure to be back talking with you.

Yeah, so, Jonathan,

you have in this book, and

I wish you were here so you could see, it is all, it's all highlighted.

I've highlighted, I could talk to you for days about this.

It is fascinating.

You outline three main problems that are happening in our society now.

What are they?

So, the book is about this very strange change that happened on college campuses around 2015.

Many of your listeners will have heard of these strange events, the shouting down of speakers, the claiming that students need warnings before they read a Greek myth or a story that has violence or racism in it.

So strange things began to happen, and my co-author, Greg Lukianoff,

he had this brilliant diagnosis.

He himself was subject, he'd had suicidal depressions, he's prone to depression, and he learned cognitive therapy, which is where you learn to question your assumptions and clean up your thinking.

And once he did that, he began to notice that the students were doing the exact same cognitive distortions that he had learned not to do.

They were catastrophizing.

Oh, if a student, if a speaker comes to campus, you know, people will die.

This is disordered thinking.

And Greg noticed that students were doing this.

He runs the Foundation for Individual Rights and Education.

And so he diagnosed that students, are, that colleges are somehow conveying these ideas that are really, really bad for students.

Students are taking them to heart and thinking themselves into a depression.

So that's sort of the backstory to the book.

The three ideas that you refer to.

Sorry, I had to do that little background.

No, no, that's fine.

That's fine.

So the three ideas, what we conclude in the book, as we've listened to students, as we've read a lot about what's going on, and I'm a professor at New York University, so I'm in the thick of things here,

is that there are three really, really bad ideas, and here they are.

What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.

Number two, always trust your feelings.

Number three, life is a battle between good people and evil people.

And if we can get students to believe all three, we can't guarantee that they will fail, but we really set them up for a life of weakness, complaint, grievance, and failure.

So,

Jonathan,

I have a book uh that is released uh tomorrow and it i i rewrote it uh and i wish i could rewrite it again because i've learned so much as i'm writing i don't know if you've ever experienced that but you're like oh you get to the end you're like what's your book what's it called uh it's called uh addicted to outrage and oh my goodness i gotta read that yeah so it is um it it um talks about uh you know our addiction to this and how this is happening but it but it also touches on postmodernism, which is coming out of our universities, which is kind of the root, is it not, of all three of these problems?

Because you just said if we can teach all,

if we can get kids to believe all three of these things, we destroy them.

Why would anyone do that?

So nobody's trying to destroy students.

I think what's happening here,

the best idea I can share with you and your listeners to understand the craziness that has broken out, not just on university campuses, but across so many of our institutions, is that social media has put us all in a game in which the way we get prestige is by calling out others.

Or at least, let's just start with students.

Young people who grew up with social media,

everybody's always trying to figure out what can I do that will gain me respect.

We actually care about respect and prestige more than we care about money.

I'd even say many of us care about money once you're above a certain level.

People care about money primarily for the prestige it gets.

So social media changed the basic connectivity of society so that all you have to do is criticize someone online or join in with the criticism and you gain respect.

And so

what you have to see is this is not about people trying to destroy

students certainly, but people are playing out their political battles.

They're using others as pawns in a way.

And they're setting up a playing field in which kids just trying to get by and get by socially end up hurting each other.

Okay, so that is the, I think that's the addiction part.

That's the end of the dog, the tail of the dog in a way.

I think what you talk about

is

this helicopter parent madness that went on, that this is the first generation that

we're seeing the results now of children that could do no wrong, received, praise no matter what they did.

We're seeing that generation now, and they can't handle the stress.

That's problem number one.

Children are too fragile to handle anything.

That's right.

So why did things get so weird?

Why did they change beginning with the students who arrived on campus right around 2013, 2014?

It's a mystery.

In fact, our book is, we really frame it as a social science detective story because this new morality emerges on campus right around 2014, 2015.

The whole morality of safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, all those things.

And so we think there are several causes, one of which is social media, which we just talked about, and I'm sure we'll come back to.

But the other big one is, as you say, it's that we did this to our kids trying to protect them.

We try, we all want our kids to be safe, we all want our kids to be successful, and oftentimes good intentions backfire.

I think this is a lesson that conservatives more attuned to than progressives.

So beginning in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s,

we clamped down on kids' freedom.

We began over-protecting them.

We got this ridiculous idea that if we ever take our eyes off our kids, if our kids go around the corner to a park and there's no adult watching them, they will be kidnapped.

They will be snatched, abducted.

So, you know, there was a huge crime wave in the 1970s and 1980s.

And when you and I were growing up, and, you you know, any of your listeners who are over 40, when we were growing up, even though there was actually a lot of crime in America, you went out and played after school.

You went out with your friends.

You were in someone's backyard.

You walked around town.

You know, we rode our bicycles from around the age of eight.

So that's the way childhood always was until the 1990s.

And even though the crime wave was actually ending in the 90s, things were getting safer and safer in the 90s.

That's the decade in which the social norm changed.

Maybe not everywhere in America, but certainly in urban and suburban areas.

It changed changed so that kids never got the right to practice being independent or self-supervising.

And then when they go off to college, are we surprised that they're having trouble being independent and self-supervising?

It's amazing.

You know, some of your recommendations, and one of the reasons I like this book so much is because you not only diagnose the problem, the last third of the book or a quarter of the book is, okay, so here's what we do.

And your recommendations, it's crazy that you need someone like you to say,

you know what, have your kids ride their bike unsupervised, you know, down the street.

Send them to the store for a gallon of milk.

Have them do things, you know, that are unsupervised.

My grandparents would have, they would have never, my parents wouldn't have even understood that advice.

Of course, that's what you do.

But now I said this on the air the other day, and I said, I remember being maybe six, seven, we had a little store up, you know, about a block and a half away from our house, and my mom would give me money and she'd say, go get a gallon of milk.

Nobody thought twice of that.

I said this on the air, your advice.

And everybody's like, I don't know, man.

I mean,

that would be dangerous.

I mean, could you, you know what I mean?

Yep.

And we're people who know the stats on crime.

Yeah, no, that's right.

And so one of the, so, you know, I think the way to, the way to think about so much of what's going on in our society, and, you know, I can't wait to read your book because it's so easy for us to think that there are good people and bad people.

It's so easy for us us to think that someone did this or people are hurting our kids.

But really, you know, I'm a social psychologist and what we specialize in is understanding the way social forces act on people.

So it's not that they're necessarily good or bad.

It's that we're all really social creatures.

And many people have traced this back to the origin of cable TV in the 1980s.

You know, when you and I were growing up, there were only three networks.

The news was only on half an hour, an hour a day.

There wasn't the chance to be submerged in stories about the, you know, several kids go missing every year in America.

I mean, more than that, but in terms of like true abductions by strangers, it's extremely rare.

It was only in the 1980s that we could all be immersed in that story all the time.

And so it was the change in the media environment that was one of the reasons for the huge freak out.

Another was declining family size.

When you and I were kids, there were a lot of families in my neighborhood that had five kids.

And now, you know, I live in New York City.

I have two kids.

Most of my friends' children,

most of my kids' friends are only children.

It's rare to have a sibling.

So when parents have just one kid and they're surrounded by news stories about kids being abducted, yeah, they don't let them walk to the corner store anymore.

We have

Jonathan Haidt, anybody who I think is a game-changer

individual, somebody who is really, who gets it and is actively engaged in trying to think differently and do things like save freedom of speech.

They are all fans or have read Jonathan Heights' books.

Brilliant guy, comes at it very, very honestly, has changed as a person through writing

his books.

And I just so respect him.

The Coddling of the American Mind is the book.

Jonathan, I'd like to get through the next two problems so then the next segment, we can actually talk about some of the solutions that you have in your book.

Sure, sure.

So

you reveal the three bad ideas.

One, what doesn't kill you makes you weaker.

The second one is always trust your feelings.

Let's go into that one.

Sure.

So

my first book was called The Happiness Hypothesis, Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.

And

I read the most psychologically rich works from the ancient world.

So the Stoics from Greece and Rome,

the Bible, the Old Testament, New Testament, the works of Buddha and Hinduism.

And one thing that they all have in common, in every wisdom tradition,

you find people saying something like this: Here's Marcus Aurelius: The whole universe is change, and life itself is but what you deem it.

So, we don't experience the world as it is, we experience the world through our filters, our mental and emotional filters.

Here's Buddha saying essentially the same thing: What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow.

Our life is the creation of our mind.

And this is the basis of most pop psychology:

that

if you're spending your life feeling angry, feeling cheated,

it's up to you to change the filters.

Life is complicated, and you get to decide which filters you're going to use.

And instead, what's happening on college campuses, and it goes back much earlier, is because we're afraid of hurting kids' feelings,

a goal is in part to be sensitive and caring,

we think that if someone presents an idea that a student finds threatening or invalidating, if it invalidates a current idea, that can be painful.

Well, we don't want students to experience pain.

And so this whole idea of safe spaces, that if a speaker comes to campus,

and the classic, one of the first cases was at Brown University.

They were going to have a debate between two feminists, one of whom believed that America is a rape culture, one of whom believed that America is not a rape culture.

And that's a great thing to talk about at a college campus at Brown University.

And some students at Brown thought, well, what if a student at Brown had been raped?

It would be too painful for her to hear someone say that America is not systemically a rapist kind of society.

And so she might be...

Would it be healthy?

Of course.

Or would it be healthy?

Exactly.

Exactly.

That's right.

So, and that's why the title of our book is The Coddling of the American Mind.

Coddling means over-protection.

And if educators get in their heads that students should be protected from uncomfortable moments, from having their most cherished ideas challenged, well, you might feel like you're being nice to them, but my God, you're crippling them.

You're denying them.

Isn't that what a university is supposed to do?

If I'm paying my money, I want someone who will take

everything that I believe is true and throw me up against the wall and make me prove it,

make me look at all of the different things so I know how to find truth and

I've been awakened so I know what's true to me.

Does that make sense?

My God, does it make sense to me?

Yes.

So the traditional idea of a university, I mean, you can trace it all the way back to

Plato's Academy in ancient Greece.

If you have a community of people who argue and debate and discuss, but are bound together by norms of friendship.

So if you just get people yelling at each other in the public square, it doesn't do any good.

But if you have a community that retires, that steps outside of downtown Athens, and they have a place where they meet and they discuss love and justice and beauty, and they have these spirited debates that Plato wrote about, well, that's wonderful.

That's how you find truth.

And so that is our myth, or that is our origin story for Western universities.

Unfortunately, a new idea began creeping in in the 80s and 90s where the goal of educators should be to foster self-esteem, to

protect people, to make them feel safe.

And again, this overprotection is really, really bad for students.

One of the clearest signs that we're messing things up is that depression, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm, that is teenagers cutting themselves to the point where they have to be admitted to the hospital, these things began climbing very rapidly after about 2012.

So we are messing things up.

We're harming our kids in the name of protecting them, and we've got to stop.

But in your book,

you talk about something that is absolutely incredible to me that now at universities, if you have gone to the, you know, the,

I don't know, the campus shrink or the doctor, and

there's anything regarding mental health, you will get an email from the university that says, is this your book or is this another one?

Yes, no, this is a this is a story of the book, yes.

All right, go ahead and tell the story.

Yeah, So, well, first, let me make clear.

This was just at one university.

This is

several.

Yeah.

But we told the story, this is at Northern Michigan State University,

in which it was routine that if anybody went in to talk about depression or anything like that, they got a letter telling them, you must not talk about this with your friends or we might have to send you home.

Now, this is crazy to tell people who are having

emotional difficulties that they better not talk with anyone about it because th now the university was afraid of liability.

The university was afraid, uh well, what if you tell someone and then that contributes to their depression and then they commit suicide?

I mean it's it's bizarre reasoning.

Um but the point is that the bureaucracy at a university is working to protect the university from bad publicity and from lawsuits.

Um the therapeutic community is working to d to uh protect students from harms that they see that I think are not really harms in most most cases.

Universities are complicated places and what we try to do in the book is trace out how this weird bad, bad culture is happening all from people pursuing what they think are good motives.

Okay.

We only have about 30 seconds.

I want to come back

and talk to you a little bit about the solutions

that you outline in the book.

And it's the reason why I think

especially every parent should read this book.

We'll talk to Jonathan Heid about that when we return.

The Coddling of the American Mind, it is on the must-read list.

If you're a listener of this program, you must read this book, The Coddling of the American Mind.

Back in just a second.

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

Cake bakers, quarterbacks, dresses, statues.

Much of America is getting outraged for outrage's sake.

And with all of the non-stop outrage coverage, we're actually missing out on the stuff we should be outraged about.

It's time to put the bottle down and end our bender.

In my new book, Addicted to Outrage, I talk about how thinking like an addict or a recovering alcoholic can actually help heal the country.

Addicted to Outrage.

On sale tomorrow, wherever books are sold.

All right, let's talk about democratic socialism here for a second because they're, you know, they're big into the, it feels, it feels, feels, feels.

You know, they've got a bad case of the feels.

Throw them some props for a second.

They're great at identifying their audience and hitting them with a message that straight to their heart because it feels.

Struggling with medical bills?

Oh my gosh, we feel for you.

For universal medical health care.

Are you having a hard time paying for rent or mortgage?

We feel.

No worries.

Make way for housing for, you know, being a federal right.

Are you a student looking at years of paying off school loans?

We feel for you.

We've got you.

We feel.

I'll promise to cancel all those pesky student loans for you.

It's great.

So you can see how this message resonates with people who are struggling.

And I guarantee you, we hit the next collapse, the next 2008, which will be worse.

A lot of your friends who are listening now, who are pointing to those people, are saying, no, no, that's crazy.

We can't afford that, will be saying

we have to have it.

All right.

No one can explain how

the democratic socialists are going to pay for, what is it, Stu?

$32 million for Medicare for all.

A trillion, Clint.

Trillion, sorry.

$5.4 trillion for guaranteed jobs.

$1.4 trillion on just the student loans that are out.

$1.3 trillion on free college.

paid family, medical leave, social security.

It's $40 trillion

is the bill.

Nobody can get Cortez to answer the question.

Here she is with Jake Tapper.

How are you going to pay for that?

$40 trillion is quite a bit of money,

and the taxes that you talked about raising to pay for this, to pay for your agenda, only count for two.

And we're going by left-leaning analysts.

Right.

Well, when you look again at, again, how our our health care works, currently we pay much of these costs go into the private sector.

So what we see is, for example, you know, a year ago I was working downtown in a restaurant.

I went around and I asked how many of you folks have health insurance.

Not a single person did because these they were paying, they would have had to have paid $200 a month for a payment for insurance that had an $8,000 deductible.

What these represent are lower costs overall for these programs.

And additionally, what this is, is a broader agenda.

Okay, she hasn't answered the question there.

Let me just start here.

She said, a year ago, I was working in a bar.

Year ago.

I just saw a photo shoot she did just last weekend where she's wearing a $5,000 outfit in the photo shoot.

A year ago, she was working in a bar.

Now look at her.

I'm really tired of, I'm really tired of how bad things are here in America.

There are 320 million of us that are lucky enough to call the United States of America our home.

That is 4.4% of the U.S.

population.

4.4%

are fellow citizens.

Lucky enough to live here.

In my new book on chapter 30, let me just quote, of that 4.4,

we own 25% of the world's wealth, much more if you count the U.S.

companies, housing, cash, and assets in foreign countries.

We consume 33% of the world's energy production.

Now, I want you to know, all these things have been turned into horrible things.

We hold command on all seven seas.

We own 48% of all satellites in space.

We are the only nation that has sent a man to the moon and back.

By the way, we did that four times.

And strangely, I just had to throw this in.

We also consume 41% of the world's chewing gum, but that's a different story.

In barely 120 years,

we grew to become the world's most powerful nation.

And 100 years after that, we are the only superpower on Earth.

We're pretty set for the future as well, believe it or not.

We are,

as far as resources go, more than 55% of the world's shale oil is here.

65%

of the world's uranium is here.

We have enough energy to provide power to the entire planet, including projected population growth, for the next 2,000 years.

And if you doubt doubt that, Google TerraPower Wave Reactor.

What else?

The bottom, I know she was working in a bar last year, and people can't afford the $8,000 deductible.

Just trying to breathe.

Trying to just remember all those Lama's classes?

Because I think I'm going to give birth to something really ugly if I don't breathe.

Why is there an $8,000 deductible?

One might ask,

but not now.

The bottom 10% of our population, the bottom 10% of our population by way of wealth is still the top 10%

compared to the world population.

We have 68% of the world's PhDs living among our population.

Many of them are foreign-born and educated, but the money is better here.

In the Me Too era, easy to focus on the very real and disgusting cases of violence against women that flood the media, but it might be worth noting, I don't know, occasionally, that violence against women is actually dropping.

Violence against wives and girlfriends has dropped by 75%

since the 1990s.

While news cameras point at Charlottesville as Richard Spencer and his band of tiki torch touting buffoons and the NFL players kneeling to protest police brutality and racism in our police departments, you should know this.

Hate crimes against blacks have dropped 50%.

Oh, it's so bad here.

Nobody can afford anything.

Because of capitalism and the Western way of life, the amount of money that we now spend on necessities such as food, transportation, our home, our clothing, our furniture, and our utilities and gas, has been cut in half in the last 90 years.

Think of that one.

What your grandparents were paying in the Great Depression

has been cut in half.

The rate of children dying before the age of five has dropped over half since 1990.

Now that is a miracle that should be on the front page.

That is, according to researchers, like averting 27 major plane crashes filled only with children

every single day.

What do you think we take a moment and go?

Damn, capitalism is great.

Some other improvements apparently nobody wants to be connected to.

Malaria is down 32%.

HIV is down 50%.

Neonatal preterm birth complications down 55%.

Protein energy malnutrition down 57%.

So much so that the World Health Organization has come out and said malnutrition is no longer a global problem.

The global problem now is obesity.

Lower respiratory infections down 66%.

Measles down 91%.

Arthur Brooks says, it's the greatest anti-poverty, poverty achievement in the history of mankind, and it's happened in our lifetime.

Why?

Because of everything they're trying to dismantle.

I'm sorry, but if you're anti-capitalist, you don't know your butt from your elbow.

You don't know what capitalism has done in your lifetime.

It's capitalism, technological and medical innovation, free trade, Donald Trump, free trade.

Now, let me just put the miracle of the life-saving things that have happened because of the United States of America, capitalism and free trade.

Let me put it into perspective.

Give you some good news for everybody.

If you happen to be pro-life,

you've probably fought hard and you think you want to stop Planned Parenthood.

That's good.

You want the doors shuttered immediately.

That's good.

But to put this into perspective, how many deaths has Planned Parenthood caused?

Let me give you some perspective.

If you shut the doors of Planned Parenthood, you would have to eliminate the number of abortions that occur annually because of Planned Parenthood more than 19 times

to be able to equal this.

Progressives, you've been fighting to repeal the Second Amendment with hopes of stopping all gun-related homicide.

I've got more good news for you.

The incredible global life-saving achievement that capitalism and the United States are responsible for, equivalent to more than 630

years

worth of gun-related murders.

I don't know.

I think I'm going to go with those facts.

I think I'm going to keep

addicted to outrage.

Those facts are in the addicted route.

I'm going to keep that handy.

I'm going to look at those things

more than I look at Twitter.

This

is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Stu had, you know,

his precious Eagles lost.

They did.

The Bucks, yes.

And then he decides to fly to Los Angeles a little later so he can watch the Eagles.

That's part of the reason, yes.

That's 100% of the reason.

Your kids could be dying.

100% is part.

I mean, that's definitely

the whole part, but it is part.

So anyway, so

you had a great, great flight.

Oh, yeah.

Great experience.

Got on the flight.

I think it was a 7 o'clock takeoff.

And

about 7.30, they gave us our first update, which was they loaded the cargo onto the plane incorrectly.

Okay.

So it's going to fly crooked.

I guess it's going to fly crooked.

We need all the fat people to get onto the right side of the plane.

Is that something that I've seen?

I've never heard of that before.

You know, I don't think I ever have either.

It's a balanced thing.

The plane has to be balanced.

But with a

plane that big, though, I mean, I've never run into that problem on a commercial flight before.

And then about a half an hour.

You can leisurely do it right.

Right.

Yeah.

So a half hour later, they said, well, we're still working on it and we don't have an update.

And then another half hour or so goes by.

Same thing, another update.

As soon as we get this done, then it was they had to

ran out of fuel.

So they were running too low on fuel, so they had to refill the fuel.

So the fuel truck came back and filled it back up to full.

Then they gave an update of, okay, some good news.

We're not going to have to leave this plane.

So we're at about

two and a half hours at this point.

I was sitting on the tarmac.

And they say, look, the good news is we're not going to have to actually change planes.

We're going to get this one off the ground.

About 45 minutes after that, they came up with another update, which was, we are now going to get off the plane because we don't have, we can't stay on this plane, but we're going to try to get another plane.

And then what stick went back into the airport?

Try after two and a half hours, you're going to try to get another plane.

Okay.

Yeah, we're over, we're over three now.

Did you sit snack in the airport?

No, no.

Try not.

Do.

Or do not.

There is no try.

Yes.

I almost went full Yoda on them, but I decided not to.

Don't do it.

You never go full Yoda.

But

we went back in about three and a half hours.

We finally got back on the flight and took off here.

So I'm on a good, solid two hours and 15 minutes or so.

You're doing good.

Thank you.

You're doing really good.

I feel almost coherent.

By the time the news and why it matters is on, you're going to be great.

You're going to be You're going to be great.

So

this is a second flight I have taken in a row

where they pulled the plane back and then said,

yeah, we just have a mechanical problem with the plane.

I'm like, geez.

Okay, we should probably check the plane before we come back from the gate on mechanical problems.

Is it just me?

So you're sitting there, and yesterday in Dallas, we were delayed as well because we had that mechanical problem, which they never really identify and was a little hairy because when we took off, it sounded like the landing gear came off the plane.

But as we're sitting there, and I'm fortunate enough to, you know, sit in first class and I'm there.

And

all I was thinking, because I was reading, you know, some book on communism, believe it or not.

And I'm reading, and I'm reading that, and I'm looking, and I'm like, look at this.

Look at this this system of injustice.

They put the people in the front first.

They get to sit down.

They're having drinks.

And then they march everybody down the aisle that they can look and go, you're not getting any of this.

Then I thought, serious, and this is a serious thought.

Why do we have the curtain?

Seriously.

It provides no privacy.

It's not like we're, it's not like we close the curtain and then we're all having a party or something.

Ah, now we're really going to party.

Why do you have the curtain?

The first-class curtain.

I think it's to add that certain little element of eliteness.

Yeah, you guys aren't with us, and we're not even gonna let you look at us.

Right.

They slam that curtain shut.

I don't.

Right.

Okay.

Okay.

I think you're right.

I think it is that little, that little air of mystery.

We're not gonna.

So then, my thinking, again, on the tarmac waiting, there wasn't a mechanical problem.

I would have been thinking of these things.

If that's why we do it, why don't we have a curtain that goes up the aisle so I don't have to look at them and they don't have to look at me?

So we're in these, you're just walking by first class.

All you see is the carpet in the aisle.

There's curtains on both sides.

You want to be enclosed?

No, I don't.

But I mean, if you're going to go for it, if it's like, we don't want you to see any of this special stuff, why don't they just go all the way and curtain everybody off?

And why aren't the curtains gold?

That's another exactly.

I always thought that was more bathroom guarding because the peons, us peons back in coach, may have to, well, when we walk up, we might be tempted by that front of the plane bathroom.

But no, no, we walk to the back because we can't disturb the people in the front because we can't walk through the curtain.

You cannot penetrate it.

It's a force field

against bathroom use.

It's really weird.

The lady said to me, the stewardess, she said, I said, I'm not really hungry.

I don't want anything.

And

she said,

She honestly said this like it was distasteful.

She said,

Would you rather have something from the back?

I'm like, All I could think of was like, you know, the bathroom and the back.

What is in the back?

I didn't realize she was talking about, you know, those people.

She said,

Would you rather have something from the back?

And I'm like, what is in the back?

And she said, you know, cheese and crackers and, you know, little sandwich wraps and boxes.

I'm like, no, I'm really not hungry.

But that didn't sound appetizing at all.

Is it possible they just couldn't believe you weren't hungry?

Like she was just shocked that you would

like it's a Jeffy thing?

Like, hey, come on.

I wish you were still sitting on the tarmac.

We all know that.

I wish you were still sitting on the tarmac right now.

Just another 30 minutes and they're going to have this thing fixed.

Just another 30 minutes.

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