'The Best of Glenn Beck' - 5/28/18

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This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Love.

Courage.

If I can geek out just a little bit, today's kind of an exciting day for me.

I've wanted to talk to this guy since since I read his first novel, Fatherland, which is one of my favorite books of all time.

I just love it.

And,

you know, I've never been big enough to be able to get him on.

He also did,

I can't remember the name of the book, The Code.

I'll have to ask him about it.

Another great book.

Lots of

great stories

and great novels from Robert Harris.

He is the author of a new novel,

Munich, and it is all about the Munich Treaty and

Neville Chamberlain and what happened with Hitler.

But he takes it the way he always does and

works a new storyline into it.

Welcome to the program.

Robert Harris, how are you, sir?

I'm very well, Glenn.

Thank you for having me on.

You bet.

Are you over in London?

No, I live just outside, not far from Oxford.

Okay.

In the country.

It's a thrill to have you on.

I want to talk to you a little bit about the book, but I don't want to spoil it for anybody.

And don't spoil it for me because I'm halfway through.

But,

you know,

it revolves around Neville Chamberlain.

And

I'm not a real fan of Neville Chamberlain,

and he gets kind of a bad rap.

Why are you,

what is your attraction there?

And

I seem to think that you are a fan of his.

Well, I wouldn't say I was a fan, to be honest.

But I do think there are some stories in history which are really quite opposite to what most people think.

About 30 years ago, I did a documentary for the BBC television about the 50th anniversary of the Munich Agreement.

It's going to be the 80th anniversary this September.

And I discovered that it was completely different to what I thought.

In particular,

Adolf Witfer regarded it as a a terrible defeat.

And that alone, I think, most people don't understand.

And

I wrote Fatherland, as you mentioned, but I always had in the back of my mind a desire to write a novel about the Munich Agreement.

And I had the idea of writing it from the point of view of one of the officials who flew out with Chamberlain to meet Hitler.

in September 1938.

And then I decided I'd also have a German character who travels on Adolf Hitler's train from Berlin to meet Chamberlain at Munich.

And so you follow these two men who were friends who were at Oxford University together as they head towards Munich.

And it gives me an opportunity to write a first-hand account of both Hitler and of Chamberlain.

So,

how much Robert of the novel is

really close to true?

Like, for instance,

the plot to kill Hitler at that point.

Was that going on?

Oh, yes.

Everything in the book really pretty well is true, apart from these two invented characters, Paul Hartmann and Hugh Leggett, the German and the Englishman.

Yes, I mean essentially what happened was that Hitler decided in the beginning of the summer of 1938

that he would for the first time invade another country.

And he issued orders to the German army to prepare to wipe Czechoslovakia off the face of the map.

That was how he termed it.

And

the army came back and said they could reckon they could do this in about five or six weeks and he threw the plans back at them and said I wanted I want to be in Prague within a week.

And elements of the German army took fright at this.

It was the first time that they really woke up to the fact of where Hitler was likely to lead them.

And for the first time there were contacts between opposition elements in Berlin and the British government in London.

And there was a slightly crazy scheme, if the British and French declared war, to try and arrest Hitler.

I don't actually think it was that serious, but certainly it was the real first beginnings of the rumblings of a resistance to Hitler as the Germans realized where it was heading.

Yeah, I was surprised when Chamberlain arrives in Munich that there were, you know, the umpah bands that were that were playing, you know, popular tunes from England that the crowds cheered him.

I always thought of the Germans

not for peace, and that's not what that's not what it was.

Well, no, absolutely.

There's no doubt in the historical record about that, that Hitler, according to all the reporters, including the American newspapers that were there, received much louder cheers whenever he appeared than Hitler got.

And Hitler was furious about this.

One of the reasons I wrote the novel was because I came across,

there was a journalist, a German journalist called Joachim Fest, who was the ghost writer on the memoirs of Albert Speer, Hitler's armament minister.

And in this diary, Fest asked Speer one day back in the 60s, what did Hitler feel about Munich?

And

Speer said Hitler was in a rage for two weeks after Munich.

He wouldn't even speak to his private staff, which was unusual for him.

And then it all came pouring out at a private social occasion.

He said the German people have been fooled and by Neville Chamberlain of all people.

And what he was referring to was that Chamberlain, because he was the architect of a peace agreement,

the German people staged a kind of anti-Hitler protest in the sixth year of his rule by cheering Chamberlain loudly whenever he appeared.

This infuriated Hitler and was one of the reasons why I think he drew back from attacking Czechoslovakia.

So

as I was reading this,

and you really kind of spell it out very colorful,

the appearance of everything with Hitler was strong and militaristic and streamlined.

And, you know, Mussolini is there, the same thing.

And here comes a guy who kind of looks like a walrus and another guy who looks old and frail coming to the meeting.

Those two guys must have seen the English as complete

things of the past and

just weak.

Well, I think that that's true.

There was a great contrast in Munich between

the fascists, the Germans, and the Italians, mostly quite young men in their smart uniforms, and these dowdy, quite elderly civilians in their crumpled suits who've flown into Munich.

But appearances are a bit deceptive.

One of the other reasons I wanted to put Chamberlain in the novel is that he is he was a tough old bird and and Winston Churchill said that about him too.

He was a really dominant Prime Minister.

He busted and lauded it over his colleagues and he was

quite vain and arrogant in his way and as determined on peace as Hitler was on war.

And he drove Hitler mad

because Hitler was not really interested.

The pretext for war was to the return of three and a half million Germans who'd been assigned to this new state of Czechoslovakia in 1919 after the First World War.

But that was only the pretext.

The reality was, of course, that Hitler wanted a war of conquest into the East, you know, the subject I cover in Fatherland.

Chamberlain was determined to keep Britain out of a war on this issue.

We didn't have a Czech uh treaty with Czechoslovakia, but the French did.

So if Hitler had attacked Czechoslovakia, the French would have been legally obliged to go to Czechoslovakia's defense, and the British would have felt obliged to stand by France.

So it would have been like the First World War with all the countries being dragged in.

Chamberlain wanted to avoid this.

So he actually flew to see Hitler, which was a sensational development, especially for a man in his 70th year.

And it was a grave mistake on Hitler's part to agree to see Chamberlain, because Chamberlain naturally asked him what were his grievances, and Hitler told him.

And Chamberlain said, Leave it with me, I'll see what I can do effectively.

And he removed Hitler's pretext for war.

He said, Well, if the concern is these three and a half million Germans in Sudetenland, I'm sure we can arrange for them where the majority is is German, for those lands to be transferred to Germany.

And this is what

forced Hitler in the end to back down.

Hit Goebbels said you can't fight a war on details and Hitler couldn't do it and so he missed that opportunity for war and at the beginning of the novel I put this quote from Hitler in the bunker in February 1945 when he said we should have gone to war in 1938.

September 1938 would have been the perfect time.

And throughout the war Hitler felt he was fighting it a year too late because of Munich.

He'd wanted to invade France in 1939, he'd wanted to invade the Soviet Union in 1940, and instead his timetable was 12 months behind.

And in that time, the British, and more particularly perhaps the Russians, rearmed massively.

Yeah, have you seen the movie Darkest Hour yet?

Yes, I have.

What did you think of that?

I thought it was a good piece of entertainment.

I thought it was a brilliant performance by Gary Oldman.

Because I'm sympathetic to Chamberlain, slightly more than most people are, I know, I felt that it was unfair on Chamberlain because, first of all, who built the Spitfires that were fighting the battle of Britain?

Chamberlain did,

when he spent 50% of British government revenues on rearmament in 1939, an enormous amount for a country of peace.

And also, Chamberlain, because of his experience dealing with Hitler, backed Churchill in rejecting any suggestion of listening to peace terms.

And because Chamberlain at that time was leader of the Tory Party, his was the decisive voice.

And most people think that Chamberlain wanted to do a deal with Hitler.

The opposite is the case.

He supported Churchill very strongly and was the decisive voice on the 27th of May 1940 at the cabinet meeting where it was decided to not even hear what Hitler's peace terms were.

Is there

when you're looking at today's world

and you're seeing everything that's going on,

your job, and you've been so good at this,

you look at history and you see missed opportunities or chances for things to

have been different.

What do you think we're going to look back over the last 20 years and

say if this event was understood at the time, it would have changed things?

Well, I think, you know, history is

a beguiling subject because it enables you to go back and see where people went wrong.

And another of the quotes at the front of my book is from a great British historian called F.W.

Maitland, who said, You must always remember that what lies in the past once lay in the future.

Chamberlain didn't know that Hitler planned a Holocaust.

Nobody could foresee exactly how the Nazi regime would go.

You can only deal with things as they are, as they appear to you.

Obviously, there are huge forces at work in the world today

that we are finding it very hard to even understand, let alone respond to.

I think they are a large degree to do with technology and the way that that is completely transforming our society, destroying the assumptions on which most of us have built our lives.

It's a frightening time of change, and often after a long period of relative stability, which we've had since nineteen forty five, this leads to a kind of complete revolution.

In a way, the situation we're going through now reminds me rather of the period before nineteen fourteen.

One feels that there's something big coming along.

How I would deal with that, I I don't know.

I mean, part of the point of the my Munich novel is that these two men, these two young men, are sort of trapped by history.

They can see they're heading to the chasm, the abyss, but there's nothing they individually can do, although they try to do it.

And it feels that history has reached one of those points.

Do you know what I mean?

That something big is happening and nobody can quite grasp it.

Yeah,

you can feel it coming.

Robert, do you have a second?

Can you hang on while we take a quick break?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, hold on.

Robert Harris, the author of the book, Munich, it is out now.

It's a novel.

He's a a tremendous writer.

If you've never read a Robert Harris book, you should.

And you can start with Munich, the novel.

Noted author, Robert Harris, the author of the new book, Munich, the novel.

It is about

the Munich Accords and

Neville Chamberlain and Hitler duking it out.

And

what we kind of misunderstand,

I'm finding out as I'm reading this, Neville Chamberlain's, you know,

we have peace in our day, that was the Munich Treaty,

and Hitler saw that as a loss.

It's a great,

thrilling novel that I think you really enjoy.

Robert is one of my

favorite authors.

I fell in love with his stuff with Fatherland, which came out in the 90s.

And I'm a little upset that

you can't buy on Kindle anymore.

But

Fatherland,

I've read five five or six of your books, Robert, and

one of them I want to talk to you about is the Fear Index.

A minute ago, you said you were concerned about technology and how that's going to change us.

And the Fear Index is

AI gone crazy and it makes you look at AI in a completely different way.

Yeah, it's about a a hedge fund manager in Geneva who used to work for the Large Hadron Collider

and who sets up an artificially intelligent

algorithmic trading operation,

which, like Frankenstein's Monster also in Geneva, goes out of control.

And I had a lot of fun writing it.

But as you say,

it's a pretty frightening

superstructure over the world,

this financial trading.

Most of us don't understand it.

And we've seen, you know, in 2008 what happens when it gets out of control, how it affects all our lives.

And in a way, the world has never really recovered from the disaster of the complexity of the financial world and the way, in the end, it caused so much trouble.

What is

as a writer, if I said to you, which one's the more believable scenario?

North Korea launches.

Putin

through

nefarious ways kind of cobbles together the old Soviet Union and

is deeply embedded in all of our systems and turns us against each other.

Or

financial doomsday that that just kind of traps all of us into

something

ugly?

Well,

I mean, you know, the the second two could easily merge.

Um I think that that's what's frightening.

Um North Korea I think perhaps is

in in a weird sort of way.

You know, there is a kind of mad, insane rationality to the North Korean regime in that they would blow their own brains out if they launched any sort of attack.

And people generally aren't quite that crazy, even if they may look it.

But something like Putin that that gradually shades into a conflict that gets out of hand, that's much more the way things go in history.

You know,

the Russian occupation of the Crimea was really the nearest thing we've seen to the Sudan land crisis.

I was reading your book.

Did the West do anything?

No, not really.

They simply put on sanctions, but that was it.

Yeah, as I'm reading Munich and he's talking about that, and that's all I could think of, is this is exactly the same argument that Putin was making.

Yes, and of course you see for the

Western governments

and for most Western people the Crimea seems to be Russia's backyard.

You know you assume that it was really part of Russia.

Most people would have thought there's no appetite really to fight or suffer over an issue like that, just as I don't think there was much in 1938 in Britain.

Bearing in mind it was only 20 years after the First World War where the British alone had lost three-quarters of a million men killed.

There was no appetite to to fight over that issue.

And that's one of the things you've got to think about, Munich, I think.

You've got to put it in the context of its time.

Chamberlain said he thought there would be a spiritual breakdown in Britain if the ordinary people didn't see their leaders trying to do everything possible to avoid another great war.

He destroyed his reputation trying to avoid it.

But I think in the end he did do a service, even if inadvertently, in giving the country a year or more to rearm.

And also it made it gave it a moral superiority and strength that Churchill was able to draw on, as we see in Darkest House.

The name of the book is Munich, a novel.

The author is Robert Harris.

Robert, thank you so much.

God bless.

It's been a pleasure.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Bye.

This is the best of Glenn Beck.

So Netflix has a new movie out with Jack Black.

It's called The Polka King.

And the Polka King is an actual guy.

And I started looking looking into him, and I thought, we have to talk to this guy.

His name is

Jan Lewan,

and he is from Poland.

He was born in

Nazi-controlled Poland and grew up under the Soviet Union, came over here, wanted to make it big,

fell into a Ponzi scheme.

I should say he started a Ponzi scheme, and others fell into it.

He lived the high life, met the Pope,

Pope John Paul II,

had real notoriety in the polka world.

His music was nominated for a Grammy, and then he went to jail where he was stabbed in prison.

He is out now and has a whole

lifetime of interesting stories.

Welcome, Juan Lawan.

How are you, sir?

Fine.

How are you?

Very good.

So let's start with

when did you come over here in the United States and what was life like back in Poland for you?

Well, when you live in Comune's regime,

the life is terrifying every day.

You couldn't trust nobody and

you're living always with the fear that you're going to be punished for anything.

So

life in the communist is definitely

very negative, very depressing life.

So you came under at the height of the Cold War with Ronald Reagan, which must have been

yep, it's exactly it.

So you come over here, you move to Pennsylvania, and you become the polka king.

Tell me

okay, the the polka king, you know, that it came along because uh when

I guess your question is how I went to that.

I learned that

nostalgia to Poland for the people who came here after the Second War, and many of them cannot go back to Poland during the Communist regime.

Many cases they will find out in in jail since they didn't come back to Poland after the Second War.

So there was the fear on this and and they were all

just just there for me because I was starting learning English a little bit, but I was speaking Polish.

And then I

due to my education in Poland,

in the theatrical school, and this,

I wasn't ready for that kind of entertainment with the polka and this.

And I found that when I turned the Polish folk music to polka,

I gained lots of viewers.

I mean, my concert hall and festival, they were full to the last seat because

they love that

broken English, Polish,

you know,

that's the way it goes.

So you,

in the movie with Jack Black, you appear to be a wide-eyed, I love America and I'm going to make it big.

And

it seems as though you don't really know what you're doing is wrong

until later.

But you started a Ponzi scheme.

Can you?

Yes.

Tell me about it.

And did you know that it was wrong at first?

No, not at all.

I went with my accountor

for the legal advice and I was advised that everything is fine.

A couple of days later, we went again.

Everything is fine.

Go ahead.

I wasn't told I have to register that was the that was wrong thing on the beginning no so I I feel free to advertise I

this is perfect that's that's again how I gonna build the empire right and how what were you what were you selling people

well with the we he created the promissory note which I offered them 12%

and that was very easy for me on the beginning to pay that because

in Poland that time everything was penny and in America you sold for tens of dollars.

So I create the gift shop.

When you create the gift shop,

you have to have money to buy these gifts, which I didn't have nothing.

So people who travel with me to Poland, they saw on their own eyes, oh my gosh, that doll costs twenty-five cents here, and in America I pay twenty

Jan, you should buy Poland, you should get everything to America, and you're going to get rich, and we're going to get rich.

Sure, I go for it.

And that's called start.

Of course, later on, I learned I'm not doing illegal thing, that is illegal.

Well, I already have huge merchandise in the silver, umber dolls, and everything, just to to sell that.

I wasn't able to sell when the accident came over, when the when the nine eleven came over and all things fall in parts, my two musicians get killed, my son was suffering with terrible things, we all were suffering.

So even though I was told don't do it,

I was keep doing because when you drown, you will catch anything.

So I did wrong, knowing that I doing wrong, and I paid a high price for that.

Yeah, you went to prison for how long?

Almost six years.

And

you were stabbed in prison?

Yes, because

I should never

finalize in such a terrible prison in Smyrna.

That's just for people who commit

terrible violence.

Most of them, they were killers.

And

somebody like me with the accent, with

lots of to be designed with the conversation, they thought, well, he is such a soft, you know, this guy, this guy is here for something,

what we call

child,

which I have nothing to do with that.

And they get angry.

But that's what they say in media.

My opinion on that is different.

Something went wrong.

Somehow, somebody did the job.

And

the guy who really cut my neck left and right, he got 25 years on the top of his life sentence.

So it makes no difference for him.

And why he did that, I still don't know.

I was very nice to him.

I buck him coffee and come a story and everything and keep conversation and

somehow, you know, he got me when I was sleeping.

When you can't trust a killer, who can you trust?

Thank you.

So,

Jan, now you're out.

Jack Black is playing you in a movie.

What does the future hold for you?

And

what's your attitude about being here?

Yeah, well,

before I go further, let me just say that,

believe me, I'm very sorry for people who get caught in my situation, who lost the money.

I will do everything possible to

supply my restitution as much as I can

since I am faithful for that.

But

I never thought that movie gonna change my life.

Jack Black told me that.

We were talking for six months every night for two hours on the FaceTime.

And he learned from the day I born, you know, how they got everything so perfect in the movie, I still don't know.

I did send them some of my

writing, what I was doing through this

years in prison.

They learned from that, but I think

Jack Black was great influence to

the scriptwriters, Maya and Wally,

that they did so perfect because I don't see it.

Maybe it's 10%

Hollywood, you know, that's that is.

But now the movie gives me opportunity.

I have right now in thousands of very nice comments, of course the negatives as well, but next to I should say, well, if they're writing to me, they probably just write in positive way.

So but the point is that they're asking me right now to do the concerts

and I willing to do that.

My music director, Steve Kaminski, who actually saved the music in the movie, we have in In the movie, we have top-not arrangements for big band polka.

It's not like regular dancing small thing.

Okay?

I don't know.

Did you saw the movie?

I have not yet.

I've seen several clips of it, but I have not seen the movie.

I wish you will see the movie.

I will.

I will.

I will watch it.

So that is my cameraman, John Cotterba from writing video.

He supplied them with

all of the footage which he traveled with me all the time.

You're going to see that in the movie.

They did everything.

I mean, my gosh, fantastic.

I hope I'm going to generate because I don't need money anymore.

I want to give to people who suffer over that.

And I'm so sorry.

Believe me, I am sick over that.

Jan Lawan, it's a pleasure to talk to you.

And I'm sorry I didn't watch the movie.

I had plans to watch it with my family this weekend and something came up, so we didn't watch it.

But I'm anxious to see it.

You have led a very interesting life, and I wish you all the best, sir.

God bless.

You know what I love about living in

this time period, especially if you saw The Post.

Have you seen the movie The Post yet?

I have not seen that yet.

It's really good, worth seeing.

But you'll see in that, when they release the Pentagon Papers and the New York Times is shut down, and they say you can't release anymore.

There's no place to go.

If The Washington Post doesn't release them, there's no place to go.

Government wins.

You can't release the papers.

It seems so odd that that news couldn't come out, but that's the way it was.

The Monica Lewinsky stuff, if it wasn't for Matt Drudge, we may not have known that.

The internet changed everything.

Back in the 80s, I remember trickle-down economics, and it was always lampooned.

And you could never, you could make a case, but you could never make a media case because you didn't have control of it.

Going around the internet now, Washington Free Beacon.

Here's what people said about trickle-down economics and the president's tax plan and what actually happened once it was passed.

It feels like you're relying on this tax cut of the corporations of the wealthy to trickle down.

Southwest and American Airlines both announcing they're going to give $1,000 bonuses to employees following the tax overhaul.

Wage increases don't follow tax cuts like this.

So the world's largest retailer is giving its U.S.

employees a bonus, a wage increase, and expanded maternity and parental leave.

So you're creating a huge tax cut and you might not get wage growth.

Right.

Capital One Financial, which just confirmed to CNBC that they will raise the minimum wage for all U.S.-based employees at Capital One to $15 per hour.

And anybody who thinks that this corporate tax cut is going to trickle down to lift wages has a staggering ignorance of how public companies function.

Wells Fargo said it would raise its minimum wage to $15 per hour.

I mean, it's amazing.

I love that he's just so sure of himself on that last one.

Well, because you know what?

They could be sure of themselves because there wasn't anybody that would have given that information.

Back in the 80s, if CBS, NBC, or ABC didn't make those

stories about what the companies were actually, it didn't happen.

I mean, it was like it didn't happen.

Now you have enough outlets and you have control of the media yourself to where you can grab those snippets, you can edit those things, and you can show, no, this is exactly what happens.

They have no fear that the liberals with trickle-down economics had no fear of this turning around on them because it never has.

But now we have the internet.

It's interesting, too, to see these companies take these stands.

Normally, companies, even companies that lean, right, don't want to take stands that associate themselves with Republicans publicly.

But this is such a clear win for companies.

And, you know, companies really do this.

Yeah, companies really do this.

I mean, I think people, they want their employees happy.

There might be selfish reasons for it, right?

They want their employees happy.

They like the PR.

of saying, hey, we got a bunch of extra money.

You know what?

We're going to distribute that to the people who work for us.

There are some selfish reasons for it, but who cares?

I mean, it's great.

It's great that people, you know, are able to make plans, long-term plans now.

These are all permanent changes until, I mean, permanent, as permanent as they get,

you know, with lawmaking, but permanent changes for corporations.

And they are able to really plan for their long-term

companies' well-being and their employees' well-being.

This is a big change.

I mean,

it's not the most bold tax plan we've ever seen.

It's not.

Imagine, imagine what would have happened had they done a flat tax rate.

Oh, my gosh.

If they would have done a flat tax rate, can you imagine the money that would have poured into the average family's home?

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

I mean, because this is really, it was really more of a corporate plan, right?

I mean, it was not particularly

life-changing when it comes to the individual side.

That was, I'll take anything, right?

I'll take any dollar amount you want to give me of my own money.

I'll willingly accept it and act like you're doing me a favor.

You know, from the corporation side, it actually is a really big difference.

They no longer have to, I mean, they don't have to make these big changes.

There were so many people who said it wasn't going to be a big deal because their effective rate was this low anyway.

It's shown to be a big change for these companies.

A big deal.

We should listen and respect those who

have lived through a mass shooting, especially after they have gained perspective.

Patrick was a sophomore at Columbine High School when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris massacred their classmates.

He was one of the lucky ones.

He walked away with his life that day.

And he vowed that he would live a life of service because God had granted him that blessing of living.

So Patrick went on to join the Army.

He served a tour in Iraq.

When he came home, he was elected to the Colorado State House of Representatives, where he served served his constituents since 2014.

Every year since he was elected, Patrick has introduced legislation to remove the restrictions on concealed carry in school.

In the wake of the Stoneman Douglas shooting and the renewed call for gun control, Patrick is pushing his legislation just as hard.

Under the current Colorado law, anyone who has a concealed carry permit may bring firearms onto school property, but you have to keep them locked inside their vehicles.

That's a quote from the law.

Patrick says that doesn't go far enough.

His act would allow every law-abiding citizen who holds a concealed carry permit the right to defend themselves and others at all times.

Patrick says, time and time again, we point to one common theme with the mass shootings.

They all occur in gun-free zones.

As a former Columbine student who was a sophomore during the shooting on April 20th, 1999, I will do everything in my power to prevent Colorado families from enduring the hardships that my classmates and I face that day.

People are arguing, and we're going to continue to argue.

More guns equals more violence, but they forget that the vast majority of guns are in the hands of responsible and good people.

There was a coach that stood in the way.

Used his body to block.

If he had a gun,

how many could he have saved?

He died a hero, but many died after him.

The reality is, we are bringing nothing to a gunfight with evil every single day.

Perhaps we should have this conversation, but we should listen to all sides, so we can give ourselves and our children a chance

with an equal contender.

If you listen at all to the program, you know that I read an awful lot

and

I can go through two or three books a week pretty easily.

And I thought I would devour this book by Eric Kirtlander, Hitler's Monsters, but this has taken me about a month to get through, mainly because I get sidetracked and start looking up the things that he is pointing out because you've never heard any of this before.

And it will give you a couple of things.

A new look on

what allowed the Nazi movement to really grow and grow deep roots for a while.

And also the fact that, no, ha-uh.

No, this was not a Christian movement, which a lot of people like to say, National Socialism, Hitler was a Christian.

No, ha-uh, no, no, that was not a Christian movement.

Um, the only guy that has done serious work on the supernatural history of the Third Reich is Eric Kirtlander, uh, and he joins us now.

And I, I, I want to make sure that you understand that this isn't some guy who's just like, I just did some research.

Uh, he has his Ph.D.

of modern European history at Harvard from Harvard, M, M.A.

Modern European History, Harvard, B.A.

History,

at, is that Bodoin College?

I'm not familiar with that.

Bowden College.

Bowdoin College, sorry.

Belgian.

Bowdoin, yeah.

Belgian, okay.

Well, welcome.

I'm a huge fan of this book,

and thank you for.

How many years did it take you to compile all this?

Well, thank you, Glenn, for having me on.

I really appreciate it.

I watched the show many years ago, and Robert Galately, one of my colleagues at Florida State University, was on.

I think he had a book comparing Hitler's stalin to Mussolini, and I appreciated appreciated the way you brought in

academic historians into your conversation.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me on.

And like many academic monographs, it took me a good eight to ten years from conception to going to archives and doing the due diligence, reading other people's work, and then finally starting writing, presenting it, and eventually deciding I had a critical mass of information to make my arguments.

And it doesn't mean that there isn't going to be a reviewer somewhere who's like, well, you know, you could have looked at that or this.

But as you point out, it's pretty dense already.

I mean, at some point, you've got to say,

you're ready.

Yeah.

And get it out there.

There's a couple of things, and I want you to kind of lead this a bit, but I want to ask you a couple of questions up front that I think show the depth of your research.

One,

you went, and this fascinated me.

You went to the detail of looking at books that Hitler had collected and had read,

and you looked for things he underlined.

And there were a couple of things that you talked about, and I can only find one of them now as I was looking this morning.

But one that he underlined was

horror always lurks at the bottom of the magical world, and everything holy is always mixed with horror.

This comes from a book called Magic in 1923.

He underlined this, and

there was also another quote about something about a truly great man has to have the seeds of a demon inside of him.

That he did underline.

The other quotes from a page that he had underlined, but he hadn't underlined that particular quote.

And I want to be very clear about this because this is an important methodological point.

A fellow historian, a journalist who writes history, found the book in the Library of Congress where we have Hitler's library.

And it seems to be underlined and annotated in the way that Hitler had annotated other books.

We're not 100% certain he read and annotated it, but he's the most likely suspect.

So I use this book to represent, you know, a kind of the cultural milieu in which he may have been thinking, because it seems that he read it.

And then I tie in other sources that talk about Hitler seeming to, you know, be interested in parapsychology, magic, even if he just thinks it's a way to manipulate people and not an actual force in the universe.

He clearly was involved in that kind of milieu.

That's the point I'm making.

And it does appear that he underlined 66 passages in that book.

But as someone who is not, I'm not a specialist in handwriting, I don't know for certain that he did.

I just want to put that out there.

So, Eric, the other thing that I thought would be important to start with to show the depth of your research was

the, I mean, you go back into the 1800s and you're really trying to lay out the mindset of Germans at that time.

And I was not aware, and you talk a lot about the films that were made, the silent films in the teens and the 20s.

And I went back and I don't remember which one I watched, but I watched one of these silent films

that you pointed out in your book.

And it is terrifying.

And it is, it, it,

the, the,

the distortion of the Jew into a monster, or later Nas Veratu, the vampire,

is terrifying that that went on so long without the Nazis.

Right.

So, a number of film scholars and literary scholars have argued that Weimar, because of all the trauma it went through, the way that people in Weimar processed it was by through horror, through expressionism, through very kinds of avant-garde artistic

media that were

channeling a kind of return of the repressed, right?

And I try to show the ways in which

certain images, monstrous images of the other, right?

Jews, Slavs, communists, were portrayed in not an empirical way.

Here's what's going to happen to the economy if finance capital does that or the communists do this, but in a metaphysical or supernatural way, right?

And that's, and I'm trying to show how that culture precedes the Nazis.

It doesn't mean everyone who watched horror movies was a Nazi, but their way of processing trauma and crisis,

I argue, was influenced by a kind of supernatural thinking.

How much of this came from the

churches?

I know the churches in the West, in England, et cetera, et cetera, many of them were really damaged because of World War I.

And the people were kind of shook from that, and they kind of started to see, wait a minute, the church is just really kind of a political organ here.

How much of this return to magic

in Germany came from the churches

kind of selling out or not being what churches should be?

That's an excellent question, and you're not going to want me to get into too much detail here.

But what I will say is I point out in chapter one that Max Weber, the famous sociologist who was alive at the time, said, clearly the traditional churches in the wake of hyper-industrialization, even before World War I, and science, are no longer providing the kind of answers for a lot of people, a lot of younger people living certainly in cities that they used to provide.

And yet, with this disenchantment of the world, right, people still need something higher than themselves.

They need faith in something.

If science isn't going to do it and traditional religion doesn't do it, what's in between?

Well, New Age religion, occultism, these so-called border sciences that claim to explain everything, like world ice theory, but really can't be proven empirically, that's a vehicle for faith.

Pulp fiction, science fiction.

And we see that across the West after the 1890s and especially after World War I with the decline in traditional religion.

We even see some of the Catholic and Protestant um leaders trying to tap into that more grassroots, supernatural um

way of thinking.

But so but what I argue, and I guess this is something that, as you point out in the intro, it would be reassuring for you

as someone who believes in a Judeo-Christian ethos in the West.

It's usually to the degree that they move away from that that they're open to these new ways of thinking.

I don't find a lot of devout Catholics and Protestants who

believe in world ice theory, for example.

But they're compatible because they're both faith-based ways of thinking.

But I do think you've got to take a step away from traditional religion towards what I would call border science or occultism in order to find that as your kind of new religion, right?

So, you're right that while the churches may have made certain concessions to it or, like you say, become too political, I don't think that Christianity per se was a bridge to this kind of thinking.

And I don't mean it exactly that way.

I mean the absence of

that thinking

led people to go find something that was different and worked.

I want to have you explain explain border science and things like that when we come back and kind of get in and set the groundwork of what they actually believed and what they used.

I mean, the idea that they were using astrologers and divining rods to find submarines is amazing.

And eventually, the miracle weapons that they were going after and the reason why,

possibly, they did not get the bomb is

an amazing revelation, and we'll get to that here in just a second.

The book is Hitler's Monsters, a supernatural history of the Third Reich.

Eric Kerlander is the artist.

If you're an author, if you're a fan of those

incredible, crazy documentaries they've made on this topic.

This goes much, much further.

Oh, much.

And it explains it with real credibility.

Yeah.

This is Indiana Jones and the, you know, Holy Grail and the Last Crusade.

It is,

it's,

you know, the Ark of the Covenant and

Captain America.

But it's the real stuff.

It's amazing.

We have Eric Kirtlander on.

He is the author of a book.

Hitler's Monsters.

This is a serious, scholarly book about the supernatural history of the Third Reich and what they believed and what they used.

Eric, help me out.

Let's get a couple of definitions.

What defined the occult?

What does that mean?

Is that devil stuff?

Right.

So I started out thinking, oh, you know, I'm going to look at occultism, whatever that means.

And then I realized the occult has a pretty specific meaning for scholars.

It's things related to demonology,

witchcraft,

certain

what I later call border sciences, but really that are linked to things like astrology and dousing

and doctrines like Areosophy or Anthroposophy.

These are also things that usually come under the umbrella of occultism, something that's between religion and science and will help you uncover a secret world or a hidden world, right?

That's where the term comes from.

Pretend I read the book, but still could not get my arms around the osophies.

Can you define those?

Excellent question.

And again, these osophies are larger doctrines which supposedly explain the world in ways that traditional religion and science can't because they integrate both.

So theosophy, which Madam Blavatsky, a Russian thinker in the mid to late 19th century, came up with, is this idea that if you study the religions of the East and the kind of practices of the East and unite it with Darwinism

and

evolution, you can come up with a syncretic doctrine that explains all of world history.

So she came up with this idea of root races, the most superior of which lived in Atlantis millennia earlier, maybe mated with extraterrestrials.

And then these other races, which had various qualities.

You know, the early theosophists were not as explicitly racist as the later Anthroposophists or Areosophists, obviously with Aryan in the title, but they all believe in this idea of root races, that modern biology and Darwinism make sense, but it's got to be leavened with Eastern philosophy and religion, and that you can understand the stages of world history through that.

And if you reverse engineer everything, you can get back in touch, both spiritually and racially, with the great root races of the earlier period.

And so much of what they were doing was having seances and following certain doctrines to try to get back in touch with humanity when it was at its highest point.

You can see why that was attractive to some Central Europeans and the folkish movement, the more racialist political movements and anti-Semitic movements, because it, in a way, justified their view of the world.

So, Eric,

I just want to go back.

I was interested to read how much they were into Eastern religion, and I can't remember,

was it Himmler that carried around the sayings of Buddha in his pocket?

The Bhagavad Gita.

It's not exactly the same thing.

But yeah, Himmler, Hess, Rudolf Hess, the deputy Fuhrer, Walter Daray.

These are the name.

This would not be something that people would expect.

No, but it makes perfect sense when you think about what is their larger view of the world.

Why do they use the swastika?

Which is an Indo-Aryan fertility symbol, right?

Right.

Because in their mind, coming out of this 19th-century supernatural imaginary, the first chapter, they recognize that the great races and civilizations, and of course we don't have scientific evidence for this, but this is their view of the world, all came from these Indo-Aryan races, which may have developed in Atlantis or the Hyperborea, some ancient Aryan or racially pure Atlantean civilization, but at some point because of a flood or giant blocks of ice, did migrate east.

thereby populating India,

East Asia, Japan.

And the reason all these superior civilizations occurred is because of the leadership of the Indo-Aryans, for whom the symbol of the swastika is the, you know, and the religion of Tibet.

Why Tibet?

Well, it's a high point where in a flood, a lot of the high priests of Aryan religion could have fled, and then they're trying to re-inscribe those ideas back into their view of Nordic race and religion in the 20s and 30s.

So that's kind of their view of the world.

So it's not that odd.

They just skip over the Slavs and Jews, right?

Because those are subhuman races or Africa.

But Asia makes sense to them.

We're talking to Eric Kurtlander.

He is the author of Hitler's Monsters.

It is a scholarly book on

the supernatural leanings of the Third Reich and

what was in the society that made them embrace Nazism and what did the Nazis use to strengthen that embrace?

More in a second.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

There's a book that is a must-read,

but I warn you, it's going to take you a while just because it's so fascinating.

You will jump out of the page and go, wait a minute, I've got to look that up.

It's called Hitler's Monsters, Eric Kurtlander, a supernatural history of the Third Reich.

This is a scholarly book.

This is not a, you know, this is not pulp fiction.

It is

a

deep dive

and well documented on what the Nazis believed and what they did.

And Eric,

I want to clarify one thing with you that

I didn't walk away knowing for sure,

and maybe you don't know the answer.

How much of this did they believe or make a pact with, and how much was just being used?

That became a central question for for me as I was going through different sources.

So, one thing I can say, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess,

believed, truly believed in a lot of these different doctrines, border sciences like parapsychology, Taoisting,

astrology.

They truly believed that if you did it in a scientific way, you could glean answers that mainstream science and religion would not give you.

So, he was looking into the whole Himmler, he was looking into the Holy Grail.

He was, at the end, he was, I guess you could credit this to

Tesla, but I'm not sure if he credited it more to Tesla or to Thor's hammer.

Exactly.

Which was it?

Was it Tesla or was it he believed the Thor hammer electricity in the air?

We have the, I mean, Peter Longerich, one of the greatest historians of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, and other sources both corroborate him asking

his acolytes to look look into whether the energies that we associate with Thor's hammer can be somehow harnessed, that maybe they're not traditional scientific energies, but something more occult or hidden.

And that's why certain of the gods had certain powers.

He thought he was the reincarnation of Otto the Great, or Henry the Fowler, I'm sorry, one of the great medieval German princes.

Many people have noted Himmler's actual investment in these ideas, as as well as Hess.

What I find though, and that's where the real debate comes, is that many other Nazis, Otto Ohlendorf, who led the Einsatzgruppen to kill thousands of Jews, he was seen as a kind of one of these technocrats, highly educated.

Turns out he was pushing

biodynamic agriculture and anthroposophic, which is an occult doctrine, approaches to the world as a kind of not a substitute religion, but as something that could unite religion and science in the Third Reich.

He's not normally associated with those ideas.

Hitler had a dowser in the Reich Chancellery to look for cancer-causing death rays and gave an honorary degree to one of the progenitors of world ice theory.

Some in the Third Reich said that they found Mussolini through divining rods

or dousing over a map.

And you document that really well.

Did Hitler believe that stuff?

So I would say Hitler is

perfectly representative of the Nazi movement and maybe Austro-German society.

He's right in the middle.

He clearly believed in some of these doctrines because he'd grown up with them, and he didn't find traditional Catholicism compelling, and he didn't embrace modern science because he considered it a Jewish science and was too empirical.

But he wasn't as invested as some other Nazis were, like Himmler or Hess.

On the other hand, there were a few Nazis like Heydrich.

He's one of the only leaders I can find find who almost never shows authentic investment in any of these ideas and wants to combat them as another form of sectarianism.

So he doesn't care what religion, occult, or philosophical doctrine you have, whether you're a liberal, communist, or even a conservative, if you're not a Nazi, that's potentially a problem.

So Heydrich goes after occultists, but many of the other leaders who claim they don't like the occult, like Rosenberg or Himmler, actually just don't like people who practice it in a way that challenges their beliefs.

The minute, by the way, this is the problem with a lot of religion, right?

People argue that they have the true faith and the true method or path to the Lord, right?

So what you see in the Third Reich, much like occultism more generally, is claims that they're doing it scientifically.

They understand it.

These other people are charlatans.

And many historians, when they saw that superficially, who weren't particularly interested in research, you say, oh, they're hostile to occultism.

And I point out they're not hostile to to it epistemologically.

They're hostile to anyone who practices it in a way that isn't compatible with their racial ideas, their politics, their propaganda.

It actually worked to the West's advantage to some degree.

The

SS-Obergruppenführer Kammler, who

was really only known for making the crematoriums in Auschwitz more effective, was the replacement for von Braun in the rocket science department.

Because if I'm not mistaken, wasn't it because of

horoscopes or astrology?

We can't confirm it's because of astrology.

What we can confirm is that Himmler preferred to have SS men who shared some of his approaches to science and politics and race theory around him more than than tried and true professionals like von Braun.

And that's why Speer, as you see in my chapter, the primary sources I have from the archives are Speer reminding all the other Nazi leaders, we aren't going to come up with miracle weapons that are going to decide the war.

This is propaganda.

And then you have Goebbels and Himmler and Kommler saying, oh, no, we can do this

with enough will, with enough faith, if we harness the right energies.

And clearly that tips over into the realm of border science very often.

And it's not empirical.

It's not something that's actually feasible.

Towards Towards the end, it seemed to really work to the West's advantage.

Again,

their race theory and their belief in these what you call border sciences.

I was really interested in

what you said that one of the reasons why we think that they weren't farther along with the nuke is because they saw that as a Jewish science, and so it was a little underplayed.

And the border sciences, the miracle weapons,

were looked at

with possible equal

shot of it working.

Do I have that right?

Exactly.

You have two parallel things going on.

Obviously, they lose a lot of the best scientists who may have been quote-unquote liberal or Jewish, right?

Many who stay are still top scientists, Heisenberg, Max Planck, right, von Braun.

But they're working in a pair, they're doing,

they're carrying out traditional science, mainstream science.

And then you've got a lot of Nazis led by Himmler, who's got this whole institute, the Annenerbe, the Institute for Ancestral Research, who's frustrated that they don't want to work with his scientists, who are operating based on folklore and Indo-Aryan race theory and want to experiment with hidden electrical energies.

And

the one thing I'm certain of is that the incompatibility of those two cultures certainly undermined some of their strategic thinking.

We know that Hitler and Himmler, because they read science fiction, liked the idea of rockets and

ships and jets and didn't think in terms of these more abstruse ideas like nuclear physics, which not only is something you can't concretely hold or build, but is something they associate with abstract thinking of Jews and liberals and communists.

Thank God.

But in a way,

now I didn't, I can't quantify.

A lot of the things I bring up in the book, as scholarly as it is, are things that someone else who's a specialist in these areas, armaments, military history, should really pursue and see to what degree this really did undermine their war effort.

I suggest it did.

Speer suggests it does.

But, you know, that's a whole other line of research.

Yeah.

Eric, I could spend hours with you.

I'd love to have you.

I'd love to have you back because we haven't gotten into some of the miracle weapons and the bell, which

you know, the flying saucer and anti-gravity stuff that they supposedly were working on, but we're really not sure if they were.

I'd love to continue our conversation on that.

I do want to switch gears because you wrote another book, which I have not read.

It is your first book, and let's see if I have it.

The Price of Exclusion, Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Decline of German Liberalism.

Just based on the title, I have a feeling we would have a lot to learn from that in today's world.

We would.

And the second book, Living with Hitler, Liberals and the Third Reich, which I think you'd appreciate most of all.

We have slightly different political views, but I think you'll find the arguments in that book about the way that progressives kind of sold out to fascism, not because they were fascist, but because they saw certain continuities that made accommodation possible.

I think you'd find that interesting.

Eric, I don't want to turn you political, but if you had any historic

milestones that would be important, there's

CPAC announced that they are having the National Front speak from France, which is a national socialist party.

And

I think they're doing it because they'll say there's lots of things that we do have in common, and we don't have to take that.

And this is a big movement that is happening all around.

And

any lessons from history?

Well, this is, and if anything unites the three books I've written, which have been written in a time when I would argue our liberal, so-called liberal parties have moved to the right on socioeconomic issues and then in other ways embrace values issues, value fights over values, and our right has done the same thing.

What you see happening is

an unwillingness for very we would might we could maybe both agree that it's the role of Wall Street and government elites who don't want to fight it out over the actual empirical realities of how do you get the best health care or the best tax policy.

They fight it out over ideology and values, and those values have moved more and more towards what I would argue, the populist right.

So how do you win elections in America and France and the Netherlands now?

You claim you're going to protect people in ways that can never quite be explained from global forces, other ethnicities, religions, terrorism, economic forces that both parties used to embrace, right?

Trade.

Those are dangerous.

And this, of course, moves both parties, but obviously our right wing more than our, what I'd now call our center, towards what we used to call, what we now call the alt-right, but we used to call fascism.

And that's very dangerous.

That's, especially in America, you could always trust conservatives to defend the Constitution, to be at least classical liberals, right?

And as you're pointing out, you can't always trust that anymore.

And if if our so-called liberals have to be the constitutional conservatives,

we're in trouble, right?

They're the interventionists, right?

They're the ones, the progressives who always want to

tear down the Constitution or change it.

And now they're the ones defending the FBI and the Constitution.

We have a constitutional crisis.

We have a political cultural crisis.

I think both traditional conservatives and so-called liberals or progressives could agree on this.

And the lessons of history from the 20s and 30s are scary ones about

the way this happens.

Eric, I'd love to talk to you again.

Thank you so much, and thank you for the really hard work.

I mean, I've read a lot of books, and I don't think I've read one that I think took more hard work than this.

This was turning over every stone, and thank you for your hard work.

One last question: Would you definitely, or would you definitively say the National Socialist Movement of Germany was not a Christian movement?

When you're talking about a country of 80 million people and 20 or 30 million who supported the Nazis, obviously lots of Christians saw something in Nazism, whether it was extreme nationalism, anti-Semitism,

Lutheran kind of patriotism.

But when it comes to the leaders, and here's where I feel I'm on solid ground, those leaders were frustrated by traditional Christianity, which they linked to Judaism and to universalism and to

a world beyond the here and now, which they saw as not helpful in creating a racial, ancestor-worshiping, blood and soil movement.

That's why they liked Shinto and Hinduism and Buddhism, whether they interpreted those religions properly or not.

They saw them as more compatible with creating a religion of the here and now.

Eric, thank you.

And so, in that, I would say they weren't, the leaders at least were not Christians by any conventional sense of the word.

No, thank you very much, Eric.

Hold on, if you would.

I'd like to talk to you a bit.

Hitler's Monsters is the book, A Supernatural History to the Third Reich.

Eric Kerlander is the artist.

We're going to have him back on again.

There's so much to go through in this week.

I mean, I want to talk to him about all the miracle stuff.

The bell.

Did you even know what the bell is?

It is, just look it up.

Let's just look up Nazi Bell.

Never heard of it.

Never heard of it.

And it's fascinating.

Whether it happened or not, I don't know.

So, what did you think, Stu?

I mean, it's fascinating.

I'm,

as you are, and as several people around here are, just real nerds when it comes to learning about that era, because it's just fascinating that any of that happened.

I mean, obviously, first and foremost, horrifying.

Horrifying.

But then beyond that, it just, the fact that these people somehow got power and did all this crazy crap with it is just fascinating to me.

We should bring him in and then invite people to come and just, you know, come and just listen to him, maybe spend a weekend with him.

Because I've done some research off of this book.

Not research, research, but just looking up some of the stuff that you've been Googling all these books.

Oh my gosh.

And it's fascinating.

You watch some of the movies from the early 1920s in Germany, and all of a sudden, so much just starts to make sense to you.

And you're like, oh, my gosh.

They never saw it coming.

They never saw it coming.

So the name of the book, again, is Hitler's Monsters.

Available in bookstores everywhere.

Glenn, back.

Mercury.

Climate change isn't just bad for the environment.

It is bad now for the womb.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story highlighting women who claim their decision to have children is directly influenced by climate change.

They had an example, a woman named Sarah.

She considered having another child, but that would mean moving into a bigger house, and that's further from her job.

She's not sure

she can justify the environmental impact for a larger home and a longer commute.

Allison.

She was in the time.

She's concerned about the apocalyptic future of extreme weather.

She said, I don't want to give birth to a kid and wonder if he's going to live in some sort of Mad Max dystopia.

Miriam shared her concern.

My instinct now is to shield my children from the horrors of the future by not bringing them into the world.

Amanda actually decided to have more children because of climate change.

Her reason?

Someday my husband and I will be gone.

If my daughter has to face the end of the world as we know it, I want her to have a brother there.

Oh my gosh.

You want to talk about fear-mongering.

So many women are bringing climate change into their reproduction decisions that the organization Conceivable Future was founded to help women make environmentally friendly reproductive decisions and navigate our doomed world.

Not to bring a child into the world because you're scared they are going to increase your carbon footprint or that they'll live like moody drifters in a desert-like terrain is the very definition of insanity.

These women are deciding not to have children based on their fictional perception of their children's quality of life.

And we're the fear mongers?

The disgusting lie of an impending environmental wasteland and an overpopulated planet wasn't true in the 1970s.

It wasn't true in the 1960s when it really started to take root and everybody was freaking out in the mid-70s.

It wasn't true.

It wasn't true that we were going into an ice age and that we would all freeze to death and there would be no food by 1990.

That wasn't true in the 70s and the 80s and it's not true today.

This is nonsense.

Stop it.

We have to be better stewards of our planet.

Yes.

We should recycle.

We should use less.

We should make sure that the things that we we do use, we can reuse.

But to not have children?

The birth rate in the United States reached its lowest point in 2016 and the decline continues all around the world.

It is almost criminal that these women

have been scared so deeply that they are allowing a 50-year-old unsubstantiated fear dictate whether or not they bring human life into the world.

You know, let me give you a few things to be afraid of.

How about this?

Women, if you are afraid of this, let me give you something to be scared of.

AI.

We right now have scientists, credible scientists.

Stephen Hawking.

Some of the scientists that you believe global warming is true because of it.

They say that global warming is nothing compared to AI.

They say AI will wipe out the entire human human race in the next 30 to 50 years, long before

carbon is killing the planet.

Long before.

Why don't you listen to them, but you listen to these?

And here's an idea.

Balance.

Balance in your life.

There are some days when I read stuff like this, I hope I'm one of the first that a robot replaces.

I want to talk a little bit about balance again today.

Yesterday, I talked about balance, the balance between self-worth and humility.

It's a balance

we can never get.

If we're on top of the world, if we are doing great, I did it.

I did it.

Man, look at me.

Look at me.

Look at me.

Our actions scream.

Look at me.

I did it.

And if we're having a bad go of it, I'm just stupid.

I'm just, I'm the worst.

I can't believe it.

I mean, I never catch a break.

I just always make the wrong decisions.

Oh, man.

Humility and self-worth.

Where do we get

that?

Yesterday, Sarah, I don't know if we still have the Martin Luther King commercial that Dodge

ran,

but

there was a commercial that is,

people are actually calling for the firing of the person who came up with this commercial.

This commercial was brilliant.

Was it, did it, did it sell a truck?

I don't know.

Did it go too far by comparing Martin Luther King and his mission to a truck?

Yes, definitely, definitely.

Was this commercial good?

Yeah, I think it was.

It was based on a sermon that Martin Luther King did

50 years ago to the day on Super Bowl Sunday.

And here's what he had to say.

You only need a heart full of grace.

Soul

generated by love.

Oh my gosh, they should be fired.

Or maybe, perhaps, this is exactly the message America needs.

What is a heart full of grace?

What is that?

That is a heart, I believe, that is balanced between self-worth and humility.

I'm not going to change the world.

I'm not going to change anybody's life.

I'm just trying to do the right thing.

I'm just trying to change my life.

I'm trying to be a better person.

And I know I can do it because I know who I am.

And because I know who I am, I know who you are.

And I know how we're connected.

And so I'm going to serve you.

I'm going to help you because that helps me.

It helps all of us.

That's what we're here for.

That's a heart full of grace.

Yesterday I brought you this message.

And right before I went off the air,

I received this phone call.

Let's go to Minnesota and Brian.

Hello, Brian.

Hello, Mr.

Beck.

How are you?

I'm very good.

How are you?

Thanks for holding.

You bet.

Hey, I just wanted to say, I wanted to preface this with, I'm at work, and I don't listen to you very often.

And I think it's a bit of serendipity that I happened to listen to you a while ago.

The first thing I heard was MLK saying something about having a heart full of grace.

Yeah.

And then

And then you talked about being honest with yourself.

And you went on that line for quite some time.

I served our country in the 2nd of the 75th Ranger Regiment.

And I've

been honest with myself, ever since I got out, I've hated myself.

I've despised myself.

And I'm a husband and I'm a father.

And what you said, you know, it's hard for people to reach me.

at a certain level

because I don't want people to, because I like to keep people away from me, except for my wife and my daughter.

I'm not a huge people person.

I don't like people, and I think it's because I don't like myself.

I've never really had an epiphany moment in my life.

I certainly never expected one from Glenn Beck.

But that's what happened.

I had to pull my truck over, and it moved me to tears to realize

how much I can't stand myself and how much

of an issue I have

being

the kind of person that I need to be

to guide my family.

And

all because of the fact that I don't serve anymore and I feel useless.

I feel emasculated.

And I have no idea how I got to this point today.

I have no idea why I'm at this point right now, because I certainly didn't expect it.

And I certainly didn't expect it at the time that it happened.

But I'm glad that it did.

Brian, I just wanted to let you know that.

I just have to tell you, you're not alone, brother.

And I have been in exactly your place.

I've been there.

And it gets better.

It really does.

You just, now that you've recognized it, now you can start taking baby steps.

and a year from now you won't recognize how great your life is so that was

that was yesterday's program at the very end of the program and i was struck by

i hate myself i despise myself

because i used to feel that way too

um i don't know if brian is a drinker but the way that's the way i dealt with it And I used to hate people.

I used to say that all the time.

I hate people.

I don't.

I hated me.

I hated me.

I was a self-hating egomaniac.

That's who we've become.

We are filled with certitude

that we know exactly what's happening.

We know exactly what the problem is.

We do this in our it's so strange.

We do this in

politics.

We know our side is right.

Their side is wrong.

We know it.

And there's no room for gray.

But I'm sorry to say, principles are principles.

They are black and white.

But how we're getting to those principles, how we're understanding those principles,

there's a lot of gray.

Their side is not always wrong, and we're not always right.

In fact, we seem to switch places an awful lot.

Brian says he feels useless

and emasculated.

I fear there's going to be more of that before there's less, but the good news is:

if you recognize it now,

you can take the steps

to change that course.

And it's really hard, but it's so well worth it.

My father taught me the most important thing anybody's ever taught me in my life, the most powerful words in any language is I am.

You change what follows those two words, and you will change your life.

I can guarantee you

that he spends a lot of time as I did.

I am useless.

I am worthless.

I am so weak.

I am so pathetic.

Well, if you had somebody around you saying that all day long for months and months and months, perhaps years,

it would affect you and we would call it mental abuse.

We say those things to ourselves much more than anybody else could possibly say say that.

We're inflicting mental abuse on ourself and we believe it.

After a while, you believe it.

Do yourself a favor.

Get out a notebook and a pencil

and just put positive and negative.

One side positive, one side negative.

Don't judge anything.

Don't ponder it.

Just when you have a thought.

Oh, I'm so tired.

I'm so worthless.

Oh, my gosh.

I'm so, whatever it is, I am.

Just notice, is it positive or a negative?

Then just mark it down.

When I did this years ago, I don't think I had any positives on.

In the worst times of my life, I have fewer positives than negatives.

Your job is to stop using, in my opinion, the name of God is I am.

Who shall I say sent me?

said Moses.

I am am that I am.

Don't take the Lord's name in vain.

What he means by that is my creative power is in my name and I am will create whatever it is.

Don't take it in vain.

Don't take that lightly.

I am strong.

I am stronger today than I was yesterday.

I am better today than I was yesterday.

I am discovering my worth every second.

You can't just convince yourself that you are worthy.

I'm discovering my worth every day.

I am finding new things to be excited about every day.

Believe me, you change your thinking and you will change your life.

Oh, and by the way, for anybody who thought that the guy should be fired for that Dodge Ram commercial, maybe Dodge could say that because I don't think Brian is going to be out buying a Dodge because of the commercial, but because of that commercial and because we weren't bitching about it on the air, but actually talking about it, it changed one man's life.

Good job, Dodge.

I have a love story I wanted to tell you about.

Oh, a love story.

That's great.

This is good.

All right.

All right.

It was a long time ago, about 25 years ago.

25 years ago.

Two crayfish.

Pardon me?

Two crayfish.

Yes, okay.

They met.

And they

went fast.

You know, things moved pretty fast.

It was not one of those.

They meet.

It was really.

Love at first sight.

Love at first sight.

Not even that.

It was just sex.

They went at it.

Yes, right.

Okay.

There was an issue, however.

Uh-oh.

One of them had a mutation in a sex cell.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

A sex cell.

Yes.

Whether it was the egg or the sperm, the scientists don't know yet.

Don't know.

As they analyze this love story.

Oh, boy.

Now, normal sex cells contain a single copy of each chromosome.

But the mutant crayfish cell had two.

Somehow the two sex cells fused and produced a female crayfish embryo with three copies of each chromosome instead of the normal two.

Somehow, too, the crayfish didn't suffer any deformities because of this, which was normally what would happen.

I want to know, is there extra meat?

Yes, it's actually these crayfish are very large.

Really?

And they produce a lot of eggs.

And what's interesting about these new crayfish that happened on this day, this love story that paid off 25 years ago, just 25 years ago, is they can now clone themselves.

And they, I guess they became popular by people, aquarium hobbyists in the 1990s.

And they, because they were bigger than the normal ones and they produced lots of eggs, so you'd get lots of extras.

And they kept producing so many extras, people started freaking out and just bringing them to local lakes and just dumping them in the lakes, the extras.

And then, of course, obviously, free to roam.

They're very resilient, free to roam.

They're able to produce more and more and more and more.

And now they're all over the world.

No one knows how to get rid of them or what to do about them.

It's honestly like the

rabbit population

in Australia.

Do you know that?

I think it's rabbits, isn't it?

Well, I mean, I know one phrase about rabbits that works into this.

No, no, but I mean, there was, there was a, there was, I can't remember how this worked, but somebody brought over, I think it was rabbits to Australia, and there was

the natural predators were not strong enough, and the rabbit population went crazy and overrun, I think it's Australia with rabbits.

And it was a real problem over in Australia because people, you know, there's bring all the cute little bunny and they bring it over.

I don't know about the cute little crawfish, but you know, you're taking it out of its natural habitat and you're just starting to dump it and it doesn't have necessarily any predators.

And in this case, it's genetically cloning itself.

Is that the one where there's like a whole island where it's just like covered in ike?

I don't know.

It might be a book that I read to my kids at night.

I don't know.

It's interesting, though, that they say that about one out of every 10,000 species this occurs with, there's some mutation.

And then the woman,

the lovely woman,

she doesn't have a

crop person very much says me to and doesn't want to be with the men anymore.

And then she starts having her own clone babies.

They're taking over Europe.

There's millions and they can't stop it.

because they just keep cloning themselves by the hundreds.

Was it man created or was this natural?

Natural.

It happens.

Evolution.

It's evolution, people.

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

So much to the, I would think, chagrin of my friends and chagrin of his friends,

we are friends.

Eric Liu, he is the founder and CEO of Citizen University, also the executive director of the Aspen Institute Citizenship and American Identity Program.

He's from Seattle.

I don't think I need to say anything else.

He's from Seattle.

So

we don't necessarily agree on everything.

But we have become friends because we both are trying to find sane ways to have conversations with each other and other people, or we're doomed.

We're doomed.

Welcome.

How are you?

Glenn, it's great to be back.

So would you agree with me that both sides, to one degree or another, have become unhinged on the extreme edges yeah i think our politics today and especially if you spend more than 10 minutes on social media um it is about uh voices on the unhinged extremes yeah um and it's about this pattern that plays out over and over where um each extreme has to gin it up in order to yeah um to feed the rage and the anger about the other side's extreme yeah you know i think that that is our politics as it's mediated you know through especially through social media.

But I think there is a broad swath of

sane people,

call them, you know, interested bystanders, people who aren't super active in politics, super active in commenting on politics,

who just want to understand each other and who just want to fix stuff.

And some of them are as progressive as I am, and some of them are as libertarian as you are, and many of them are in all points between, but they're not interested in the game playing and the posturing that so much of national politics is about today.

Yeah, I mean,

we're making everything about politics now.

Absolutely everything is about politics, and we're not going to survive that.

That's just, that's nuts.

The story today came out on Sports Illustrated.

They just did a swimsuit issue that doesn't have any swimsuits.

All of the women are completely naked, and they're beautiful women.

One is lying down naked face up, with the word truth painted on her ribcage.

Another one is naked with feminist emblazoned on her arm.

The other is the daughter of Christy Brinkley that is staring at the camera, laying on her side with the word progress written across her back.

And they've put this, this is, I don't understand this.

This is Sports Illustrated, a magazine for men trying to say, see, we shouldn't objectify women.

I don't understand that.

Yeah,

there's a lot that is great fundamentally about the Me Too movement and the fact that our society is waking up to shifting norms on what's okay when it comes to actually treating women with respect.

Yes.

But I do not look to Sports Illustrated as my moral guide on the objectification of women.

How do we find a way

and tell me what your feelings are on the people that you know?

On the dangers, even Margaret Atwood brought this up, the dangers of these

kangaroo courts or just not even a kangaroo court, just you're guilty and you're done if anybody accuses you.

The danger is there,

but I think actually as a society, we're navigating it right now.

I mean, this is somewhat uncharted.

It's not like the society has tried before to have deep equity between men and women on who gets to harass whom.

We've never done that before.

We're having a society-wide reckoning.

Are there going to be cases where people abuse that, the power that comes with that?

Sure.

But are our institutions and are the leaders in our institutions fundamentally trying to reckon with that in good faith?

I actually think we are, right?

And even this kind of absurd Sports Illustrated cover is a sign that, you know, one thing you can say about Sports Illustrated is they're trying to tune into the zeitgeist.

They are aware of the marketplace, right?

And they know the zeitgeist.

You've got to be on the right side of this issue, right?

Right.

And that's.

Right, but if I did photos of naked women and put, you know, hashtag me too, I don't think I'd get the pass that

from either side, in my case.

The question is one of, you know, in the law, they talk about standing.

Do you have standing to make a case, right?

During the Super Bowl, we all watched the ads and stuff.

I didn't think Dodge Ram trucks had the moral standing to use an MLK speech about the dangers of commercialism to sell trucks.

To me, that was, and to lots of Americans, that was, you know what?

Message and messenger not aligned here.

You mean the MLK message?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay, so the MLK message, may I present an opposite point of view?

That's a sermon that most Americans have never heard was really good.

I agree with you that, you know, the images of the truck coming in halfway in, you're like, okay, that's really, you don't need that.

Just a simple dodge at the end would have been perfect.

Would have been great.

So

who have you found, Eric?

You know,

I have been looking for a while, looking for people like you that we don't necessarily agree, but we can have really good conversations and we can move things forward together.

Who have you found on

the left or in the media that is really willing to do that?

You know, and I'm not sure if she's been a guest on your show, but my friend Nira Tandon,

who runs the Center for American Progress, a big, big progressive think tank that I know you cross swords with.

But Nira is both able and willing to have conversations with anybody and to have them in ways that aren't just about the made-for-TV food fight,

that are really trying to say,

what's your deal, right?

What are you getting at here?

I really feel one of the biggest problems is nobody's listening at all.

Nobody feels heard right now.

Somehow or another, the left, which still controls most of the media, doesn't feel heard.

And the right, now that they control the House and the Senate, and that they don't feel heard.

And it's because

nobody is actually,

I guess, emoting what the average person is feeling right now.

You know, we're all scared.

It's amazing.

I saw a YouTube video of a liberal talking about how

afraid she was that Donald Trump was going to build concentration camps.

And it was in a room, it probably had a thousand people in it.

And they all were like, yeah, yeah.

And I remember I debunked the lie about Obama making concentration camps because that was a big deal.

Big conspiracy theorists.

Big conspiracy.

I was called a conspiracy theorist for debunking that conspiracy

theory.

And now the other side is feeling feeling the same kind of fear that so many Americans did when they didn't trust the president.

And I think this is a moment where we can wake up and say, see, this is why the president should never have this much power.

The president should not be able to affect our lives to the point to where we're afraid of him.

Yeah.

I actually agree with that.

I think there's one lesson that people on the left are learning today, and that is

the dangers of this imperial presidency, right?

Which is not a Trump phenomenon or even an Obama Obama phenomenon.

It is going back half a century at least, right?

At least since World War II, right?

The concentration of power in the executive, right?

But I think you're, I want to go back to something you were saying about listening and being heard, right?

We live in this time right now where there is, and we've talked about this, there's so much pain.

There's so much pain.

The segment you were doing right before the break, in which you were just speaking to a human, an individual, about the pain they are feeling in their journey, and you were tying it to the pain that you have felt at various points on your journey, right?

That kind of conversation, which is both about listening, but it's about, I'm not just listening to the words you're saying and to the points you're making.

I'm trying to listen underneath

to the emotional currents there.

That's a set of habits that nobody's modeling for us in national politics.

And that we as citizens, frankly, it's gotten easier for us basically to shed those habits because nothing in our daily lives rewards that, right?

Social media doesn't reward that.

The media doesn't reward that.

The media doesn't reward that, right?

And so we've got to actually build experiences where we see each other face to face again.

You know, if we were having this conversation by phone, this would be different.

But I'm looking you in the eye right now, Glenn, and I'm looking at you as you have spoken about these questions.

And there's a human connection here.

that I can't now just call you a nut job and call you a this and call you a that.

Like we've connected on some level, right?

It doesn't mean we're going to agree on the issues, but it means that I'm not going to demonize.

And I think the deepest ill in our politics is how we've forgotten how to rehumanize each other.

That's so funny.

I

just wrote a member of the press this morning, a private conversation that dealt with that.

I said, we are.

We are calling each other subhumans exactly the way the early 1920s Nazis were starting to train people that you're subhuman.

If you don't agree with me, you're subhuman.

And we're training each other that way.

But it doesn't, social media is not the only one that doesn't reward it.

Media doesn't reward it either.

I mean, if you're not going to call somebody a nutjob or a Nazi, you don't win and they don't put you on.

And you, Stu,

was it you yesterday that said that you had seen somebody say, no, well, on the surface, this means X and X.

And the guy was like, no, but that's...

It was an interview about some controversial comment that had gone on in the media and they had brought someone on to kind of answer for it and the typical kind of cable news back and forth and that was essentially the way they went when the when the person was pushing back against it they said yeah but you got to admit on the surface it's it's it's an insult it's like well isn't the point here as human beings that we go beyond the surface that we think a little bit deeper about these things yeah because we can all get frustrated at the at the surface of it we can all find the worst possible intent of a comment and turn it into something that's going to enrage our side, but that shouldn't be our goal.

So, Eric, how do we do that?

Well, it starts with something I actually want to give you guys credit for, which is you got to put something at risk, right?

When you started a couple of years ago saying, I own my piece of how our politics and our political culture have gotten toxic.

And I've decided I want to be part of the solution.

I want to start reaching out and having conversations across different divides, right?

You put a bunch of stuff at risk.

You feel it acutely.

You feel it every day.

You put, I don't have to name it, right?

It's not just about the business side of things and the listeners and the sponsors or whatever.

I'm talking about just reputational power and so forth.

You put stuff at risk.

And I often ask myself and I ask my friends who are left of center, what are we willing to put at risk?

in order to change this politics, in order to go a little deeper beyond the surface and beyond just this

throwing of flames at each other, right?

So number one, it's being willing.

And I want to name the fact that you all have started something and set in motion a different cycle of responsibility taking rather than responsibility shirking, right?

Thank you.

There is only one way to break the cycle of dehumanization and responsibility shirking, and that is to break it.

That is to be, you know, say, you know what?

I didn't start it.

I'm not the one to blame, but darn it, I'm actually just going to say I'm stopping right now and I'm trying to change direction here, go a little deeper, rehumanize.

And yeah, I may pay some price for that, but

this is a question of purpose.

As one of the famous poets said, we didn't start the fire.

It was Billy Joel and stopped me.

He was always

a poet.

Yes, indeed.

So what do your friends say to you when you say, what are we willing to lose?

What are we willing to, what chip are we willing to put up?

Let me tell you about something we've been doing at Citizen University.

For the last year plus now, year and a quarter, we've been doing these regular gatherings that we call Civic Saturday.

And these are basically a civic analog to church.

It's not church, it's not synagogue or mosque, but it's about American civic religion, right?

The stuff that you and I as civic nerds are steeped in, right?

I mean, understanding the language and the texts and what you might think of as civic scripture, whether that's from the Declaration of the Preamble or King speeches or Susan B.

Anthony or whatever it might be.

And understanding that we have all inherited this body of values and text and idea.

And we do these gatherings with the arc of a a faith gathering.

We sing together, you turn to the stranger next to you, you talk about a common question, there are readings of these texts, there's a sermon that I've been giving.

And then afterwards, there's more song, and then there's an hour afterwards where people kind of form up in circles and talk about what are we going to do together, right?

And I go at length to tell you about this because, number one, it's been amazing how people have responded to this.

There is this need across the left and the right, whether you are traditionally religious or not, there is this need in our political life for a space where we can come together and rehumanize, right?

Number one.

But number two, when in that space, I've said to folks in these sermons what I said here, which was, we've got to be willing to take risks.

We've got to be willing to ask ourselves, what are we willing to put on the line?

And people,

people are, people sit there for a minute because they haven't been asked/slash challenged to do that in a long time, right?

All of our political leadership is about, let me indulge you.

let me indulge your worst instincts, let me indulge you, not

what can you do, and maybe even give up a little bit in order to start solving the problem, right?

And that leads to different kinds of conversations.

And frankly, not all of them are about Trump or national politics.

A lot of these conversations then come to life in our city, which is changing dramatically right now.

That's what it should come down to in the first place.

He has written a book, You're More Powerful Than You Think.

His name is Eric Liu, and we'll have more tonight at five o'clock make sure you join us on theblaze.com slash TV

hey just so you know things could be worse imagine if I got on the air today and said by the way the government has decided to change the alphabet again today yeah this is what happened in Kazakhstan they had a new alphabet introduced last year had 32 letters but it had tons of apostrophes in it and the apostrophes were supposed to denote distinct sounds.

What happened was people got really pissed off largely because it's really hard to get to the apostrophe on your handheld device.

So you're typing a message on your phone, you're constantly bringing up shift and going to the apostrophe.

They've now reworked with less apostrophes, a new alphabet, and that will be going in, even though people have bought signs for the old one.

But big government is the solution.

Glenn, back.

Mercury.