'Optimistic and Hopeful' - 3/21/18

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Glenn Beck good news the Austin bomber has been found and he's dead today

the last three weeks if you live in the Austin area people have been living in terror it came to an end late last night.

It started on March 2nd.

Law enforcement looked totally baffled as a bomb and then another one and then another one began going off in what seemed like random locations.

The killer appeared to be one step ahead of police the entire time.

And yesterday, just yesterday, we were talking about: is this a group?

Is this somebody who has law enforcement experience?

A reward was offered, leaving many people to believe that the investigation was going nowhere.

But that all changed 24 hours ago, and it changed at the FedEx facility.

There's a sorting facility, and a bomb went off early yesterday.

One additional bomb was found at a separate FedEx facility several miles away.

And for the first time since March 2nd, the bomber had changed his tactics.

Rather than hand-delivering the bombs, which he had done for all the others, he was now using a delivery service.

Well, police tracked the package that exploded at the FedEx sorting facility to its original drop-off store in the small Austin suburb.

After checking the store's surveillance cameras, they caught a break.

There, on multi-camera CCTV footage, was the killer.

Police were then able to identify the bomber's car, his name, which still has not been released, and we nor the Blaze will release his name.

After triangulating his cell phone, law enforcement converged on a small motel.

The killer, which is being described as a 24-year-old white male, saw police moving in and bolted.

After a brief chase, he blew himself up.

So much is still unknown.

We don't know his motives.

Were the bombings truly random?

Was there a specific purpose?

Was he just trying to get famous?

Whatever.

Right now,

all we know is this.

He's dead.

The most immediate question is, are there any more bombs out there?

Austin Police Chief Brian Manley stated that there is a time gap of at least 24 hours where they have no idea where the killer had gone or what he was doing, which means he could have been making or delivering more bombs.

If you're in the Austin area, it is not over yet.

Stay vigilant.

But know that although some people think that this is meaningless to say, it's not.

Our thoughts and our prayers are with you.

It's Wednesday, March 21st.

You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

We have an amazing show for you today.

We have, it's, it's Down syndrome, Down syndrome day,

where we are supposed to, you know, at least recognize that some people's lives are worth living if they have Down syndrome.

We have an amazing guest coming up in about 30 minutes.

She has Down syndrome, and

what the doctors said about her life is completely different than what her life is actually like.

She'll be joining us.

Steven Pinker is going to be with us in about 50 minutes.

And Riaz Patel joins us now.

Riaz is a friend and a guy that we've known on the program for about two years and we really became close when he went up.

While all of his friends were saying, you know, these Trump voters are all crazy.

He went up and he went to Alaska on his own dime to spend some time with Trump voters, And he came back and wrote an incredible op-ed that said, no, that's not who they are.

We're not listening to each other.

And so we've kind of been on this journey together to listen.

And you've actually gone out and you've put people together that are Republicans and Democrats or left and right and libertarians and tried to find

where we're missing each other.

Right.

I think there were so many points that going between Dallas and LA and DC that

people were saying things and they were talking across purposes, that they couldn't actually hear each other, or the thing that they were saying was being heard an entirely different way.

And so bringing these people together and really importantly why I brought it to you is to do it without any agenda.

That wasn't going to skew a liberal or conservative or libertarian, just to say, when is the last time you saw a group of friends of friends sit down and have this honest conversation within the divine?

And it's a tough conversation.

It's a tough conversation.

And if you have a network or an editor pushing for something, it makes people even more afraid to do it.

So this is brought with as little bias, little re-editing, little manipulation, little agenda as possible.

Play the clip that you played for me yesterday.

That is

a liberal saying, you know, look at all these Trump people were angry.

They're angry about gays.

They're anti-gay.

They're anti-gay.

Play this clip.

Listen to this.

That's fundamental.

That speaks to the Republican thought processes.

That they didn't want gays to have equal rights.

No, no.

Yes.

Why were they so mad?

I think the average civil human being will say to you, I don't care what you do in the privacy of your home.

I just don't know.

Why are the Republicans so opposed to it?

Why aren't they so opposed to Obamacare?

I think in part it's this phenomena of, as conservatives see it, of federalizing every problem, that there's a federal solution for every problem society.

And we get crazy because it takes away our freedom and our recourse.

What can we do as an individual American when the federal government imposes, like Obamacare, is such an imposition financially to so many people.

There's no recourse.

And so you have this friendship of many years where she believes her friend voted and believes that she's anti-gay.

And this friend Marianne was like, I have gay cousins, I have gay friends.

That's not true at all.

It's about big government and an executive order creating this.

They never had the conversation.

She had to literally stop her and say, no, no, no.

That's what I'm trying to get people to say is you're not hearing each other.

And so here's the thing.

If we don't hear each other, then we can't find any solutions

at all.

And you found another guy, and do we have him on the phone?

You found another guy

up in the Pacific Northwest.

Seattle, Washington, total progressive, liberal, liberal.

So a guy that we should not agree on anything.

No, I'm sure.

He might think you're the dark overlord.

Well, wait a minute.

Wait a minute, really?

So anyway,

you pale to be a

bit of a danger.

It comes from inside, Glenn, the dark overlord.

The exterior is very white.

The interior of the heart is black.

All right.

But I think, no, he is the exact, he is as progressive as possible, socialist leading.

And I would say in this work he does for poverty, real poverty work he's done, he's done his whole life, he's dedicated to it, he's walking the walk.

He has found recently that the greatest solution, we had a conversation, is a melding of both.

The conservative principle of capitalism works and the liberal principle of giving people a bit of a hand.

And so he has this micro-loan program that I wanted to talk about because I'm not just asking people to talk together to repair their friendships, although that's huge.

I'm saying the solutions to the problems that we all want to solve-poverty, crime, guns-will be in us listening and in the gray thinking that comes.

Because there's, I don't even think it's gray thinking, I just think it's new thinking.

The systems of the past don't work.

No, the world has changed so much.

Yes.

Jeff Klein, executive director of soundreach.org.

Hello, Jeff.

How are you?

Hey, good morning.

Hi.

Hi, Jeff.

Am I the dark overlord to you, Jeff?

This is not a good way to start.

It's an excellent way to start.

Because

when I met him, I thought we would have nothing in common at all.

And now we have this beautiful friendship.

So

to me, the idea of Glenn Beck had so much false attached to it.

But what I wanted you guys to talk about is this program where you have this innovative solution that is really a blending of conservative and liberal philosophies.

So Jeff, here's the thing where we come, where I think the right comes from.

You have to give people a hand up, not a handout.

They've got to work for it.

They've got to

take it on themselves because if everything everything is given to you, look what happens to rich kids most times.

And capitalism has taken so many people out of poverty.

Now, with that, capitalism,

just pure capitalism without any moral sentiments, as Adam Smith would say, is awful.

It's an invisible hand that'll choke the life out of society.

So how do we do good?

What have you found that works with capitalism as well?

Well, you know, I want to validate some of the things you're saying.

I have been working in food banks for a number of years and doing anti-poverty work and just dealing with the scope and the size of the poverty problem in this country is

it just became overwhelming.

And

I've done a lot of research on behavioral psychology and what affects poverty behaviors.

And I started looking at financial systems and how they can possibly work to help people out of poverty.

But,

you know, I do think that there is a,

you know,

the size of the problem is overwhelming for so many people.

I mean, there are hundreds of millions of people struggling to make ends meet.

67% of the country can't come up with $500 on short notice.

in an emergency.

So I just started thinking, is there a way to use microfinance to help break down some of these barriers?

And what did you find?

Well,

you know, I took over a small agency in Tacoma, Washington called Sound Outreach about three years ago.

We were, you know, basically

our role was to get people connected to food stamps.

I'm like, this is a band-aid to the problem.

Yeah.

And that's what conservatives would say.

That's what a lot of conservatives would say.

Yeah, but nobody knows how to deal with this poverty problem in the right way.

And I do do think that

there is something to that hand up and so the handout thing.

But

in this country, achieving the American dream is more difficult than it used to be.

So I've been doing research on that too.

And just

4%

of people in the bottom 20%

of the socioeconomic system can make it to the top.

And

there are other countries that are doing it better.

So achieving the American dream is more difficult.

So what I did was I sort of changed over my agency to focus on financial counseling.

So we

connect people to one-on-one coaching,

checking credit scores, looking at budgets, setting financial goals.

But the other thing I did was I partnered with the credit union.

And so if you're meeting with one of our financial counselors,

you can access a small dollar loan, like a micro loan, to help you out of a difficult financial situation.

So I'm really trying to tackle this barrier of how expensive it is to be poor if you have to go to payday lenders, if you have to use check caching.

It's really thoughtful, specific work about how to empower someone to be able to

move it themselves.

This is the kind of stuff that Stu and I have been talking about for a long time, that there are ways to specifically target the problem instead of coming out and helicoptering over the top and just saying, I'm going to throw cash out of a window.

Instead, looking at, for instance, my church is, I think it's the second largest welfare organization in the world behind the United States government.

But it doesn't advertise that.

It, in fact, probably is a little, you know, thrown rocks at me for saying that.

They don't advertise it.

It's not something that they wear on their sleeve.

However, there are things that you do.

For instance, if I'm in trouble and I've really, you know, I'm losing my house or whatever, If I'm a tithe payer, you know, a taxpayer, if I'm a tithepayer, they will come in and they will help stabilize my situation.

However, they require me to take financial counseling.

They require me to do certain things that show I am interested in turning this around myself.

And they'll help as long as you're helping yourself.

If you're not helping yourself, there's no place.

I can't help you.

How big a motivator is that to you, Jeff, in terms of harnessing the power power of someone's motivation to better themselves, the capital dream?

I got the American Dream.

How big, how game-changing has that been when you can harness it?

Well, you know, all the research I've seen, and actually just first-hand experience working with this population, is when you don't have financial slack in your life,

making decisions is difficult.

And so people say, oh, they put themselves in that situation themselves.

They're stupid.

They're lazy, whatever.

Really, if you're living paycheck to paycheck, if you run out of money before the end of the month, you're stressed.

And under stress, you make poor decisions.

So

if you can give people slack, more financial slack in their lives.

So kind of the way this works is,

you know, Riaz is totally right.

Like, I'm a total flaming liberal, like have been forever.

We've known each other since we were in sixth grade, by the way.

Would be wonderful.

It would be great.

But we don't have the political will or the social will in this country to get there.

So what do you do instead?

You give people more access to capitalism so that they can take advantage of the system the way other people do and get ahead

so if you can't if you have a poor credit score and you're paying high interest rates on your vehicle or you're paying high most people don't know that a lot of your insurance premiums are based on your credit score too so if you focus on credit building and get your credit score up you can get more financial slack in your month by reducing your monthly payments on your premiums or your vehicle payment.

Now,

if you can't get there,

we've got a shortcut.

We can refinance your auto loan through our credit union partner.

If our financial counselor meets with the USCs, oh, you're paying on time.

You've paid on time 12 months on your vehicle at $550 at 29% interest.

You can afford 14% interest for sure.

If you're affording $500 a month, you could afford $300 a month.

So we can save someone $200 a month and give them more slack in their life.

Which is a game changer.

So, Jeff, thank you for coming on and sharing this.

I want to look into your program because what you've said here, I don't have a problem with.

Do you have a problem with this?

Any of this, Stu?

This sounds all good.

I mean, on the surface, this sounds all good.

Yeah.

I brought it to you because I thought.

Lord, that's really nice of you to say.

And just to answer that question,

I've been friends with Riaz a long time.

And if he vouches for you,

like any talk of Dark Overlord, like

he doesn't allow me to make direct eye contact ever.

Jeff, thank you so much for the work that you're doing, and thanks for coming on the program and having a conversation.

I appreciate it.

Well, thank you for having me.

God bless you.

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Glenn back Mercury.

Glenn back.

Here's what's interesting about that last interview, and it's exactly what we're looking for.

And that is people on both sides, we can agree with Jeff in Seattle.

For different reasons, socialism won't work in America.

I just don't think it works anywhere.

He just says we don't have the political will to do it.

So we agree.

However, you say it, you guys are agreeing.

Right.

We agree that we agree that poverty is bad and we have to do something.

He has found because he says, okay, we don't have the political will for socialism, let's use capitalism and let's include responsibility for your own life.

There is nothing wrong with any of that.

And

we should be able to have that conversation.

And yet it was a little frightening to have that conversation on the air.

Really?

Yes, because he is who he is.

And you have a knee-jerk reaction, just like he would have a knee-jerk reaction with me, a knee-jerk reaction of, wait a minute, I should be careful.

And you should be careful.

We should look at all of the details.

but everything we talked about on the air is a great solution.

And the talking is the key to talk, even though it seems scary.

He's this, I'm this, he may believe this, you may believe this.

In the conversations, which I'm trying to have are where those solutions are going to come from, these creative, thoughtful solutions.

He needs to read a book called The Spirit of America.

It's an old book from the 1940s because he referenced the American dream twice.

The American dream was changed by FDR.

The American dream is: I can come over and I don't have to go through guilds.

I don't have to have anybody's permission.

I can be whoever I want and I can chart my own course.

The American dream under FDR was changed to a house, car,

a chicken in every pot.

That's guaranteed outcome.

This, the American dream was guaranteed chance.

Everybody has an equal chance.

Everybody has an equal opportunity, not an equal outcome.

And that was changed.

And it's important that you decide which American dream you believe in.

Yeah.

Okay.

Ries, thank you so much.

Thank you, guys.

We'll talk to you later.

Back in just a second with

an amazing person whose life definitely is worth living on this Down syndrome day.

Glenn back.

Mercury.

You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

Member of the National Academy of Sciences, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, recipient of nine honorary doctorates, foreign policies, world's top 100 public intellectuals, also on Times 100 most influential people in the world today.

But then again, so was I.

So, I mean, that's kind of discredited.

Steven Pinker, he's going to be joining us in about an hour and a...

fascinating conversation should be on the offing in about 35 minutes.

We have Karen Gaffney with us.

Now, today is Down Syndrome Awareness Day.

And with everything that is going on, with

this push to eliminate people with Down syndrome because they don't have any quality of life, I think lessens our quality of life by a great deal.

Karen has spoken at TED Talks.

She has

spoken

at the state capitals.

And I wanted to get her on.

She has Down syndrome.

She is also a champion swimmer.

She has

she, is it swum?

The English channel.

Swum.

She has crossed the English channel and

is an amazing individual, and she's with us now.

Hi, Karen.

How are you?

I'm great.

Thanks.

Good.

Could you start with, because in your TED Talks, you talked a little bit about

your fifth grade teacher.

And I think this goes to quality of life and if your life matters.

Yes, my fifth grade teacher was very helpful to me when I showed up in her class.

It was her first year of teaching, and she didn't know much about Down syndrome until I came into her class.

And then, you know, she came to my high school graduations and grade school graduation.

And then later, she moved to Germany and got married.

And we still stay in touch all these years.

We wrote letters back and forth to each other.

And then later, I got a special letter from her.

And she told me that she was friendly with a baby with Down syndrome and she needed my help.

And so

she said in her letter that there must have been a reason why our paths across

and explained to me what she did.

She, um,

what did she, what did she name her child with Down syndrome?

She named her baby Mia Rose.

Right now, she's probably in the seventh grade.

She

speaks both English and German and goes to a neighborhood school.

So, wait, wait, wait.

Her baby, her baby has grown up.

She's in what grade now?

About in the seventh grade right now.

And and and she is she has Down syndrome, and she speaks two, she's bilingual.

Right.

She

speaks two languages, and she's also a swimmer.

So, Karen, you've obviously been paying attention to the news where

the case is being made that we should abort all Down syndrome children

because there is no quality of life.

How do you feel when you hear things like that?

You know, that is the thing that makes me sad.

You know, I don't want to hear stuff about that.

I want to see more positive things about

wanting to

help people like us live a great life.

I don't want to talk about being avoided or terminated.

They would say that you don't have a great life.

I do have a great life.

You know,

I do.

I'm trying to get stronger every day.

You know, I

try to do the very best I can.

What did the doctors say when you were born that your life would be like?

That I want to be able to tie my own shoes or write my own name.

You know, I want to be able to do a lot of things, you know,

but I can do it.

And I remember,

you know, I also have a lot of accomplishments in my life.

You know, I graduated from high school with a regular high school diploma.

And then after that, I went to Foreign Community College, where I got my Associate of Science degree and a teacher's A certificate.

I work at Oregon Health Sciences University right now, where I'm doing a lot of clerical work and data entry and recycling and all this and scanning and all that stuff now.

And I'm also the president of my own non-profit organization.

Karen,

you know,

I guess we can just, you know,

people think that they can get rid of people if they're not really human, they don't really have rights.

Or I guess, you know,

their case would be, you know, the quality of life really is

lower than what a human should have to endure.

Do you have any thoughts at all on what makes a person human?

You know, I think what makes person human is if they accept us for who we are.

You know, all lives matter, regardless of the number of premises we have.

And I think

we also have a place in this world as well.

That's what makes us human.

Karen,

I appreciate the fact that you are speaking out.

I can't imagine what it feels like to

see people

talking about

people like you and saying, you know, that

we'd all be better off without you.

I can't imagine what that's like to endure.

But I applaud your bravery and I applaud you standing up and speaking out.

Is there anything that you want to express before we hang up?

Anything we missed?

I just want to say that Down syndrome is a life worth living and a life worth saving as well.

And we want to live

a great life.

And I know that we do.

Karen, thank you so much.

God bless.

You bet.

Karen Gaffney.

This woman,

she swam the English channel.

She escaped Alcatraz 16 times.

16 times.

We didn't put her in Alcatraz, right?

Yeah, she has towns in her brazen.

Of course we do.

No, we are are terrible.

No, I guess, you know,

swimming, you know, the channel between San Francisco and Alcatraz.

That was supposed to be impossible.

She's done it 16 times.

Wow.

She has conquered Lake Tahoe in 59-degree weather.

And she swims to raise funds, you know, to raise awareness for people with Down syndrome.

I constantly complain because my dressing room is only 59 degrees, and I complain about it every day to everyone that listened to me.

We all know it.

We all know it.

Because there's something wrong with the air conditioning.

It's just on all the time.

So it's 59 degrees in there.

I have to be in there for like one minute a day, and I'm constantly complaining about it.

She swam in 50.

Just Lake Tahoe.

Just the Lake Tahoe.

Just Lake Tahoe.

No big deal.

But you know what?

I will say this about her.

Certainly doesn't deserve to live.

Certainly shouldn't have been.

She has one more chromosome this year.

Oh, my gosh.

Get rid of her.

Let's all strive to get rid of people people like this.

This is why this is such an important story today.

I mean, you know, like we could give you example after example after example of amazing people like this with Down syndrome who are thriving, who are thriving in this world, who aren't burdens, who are thriving and achieving things that.

Even if they are a burden, they are human.

Right.

It doesn't matter.

You're right.

They are human.

It doesn't freaking matter.

Life is life.

Yeah.

And, you know, the idea that we're going to come out here and all try to celebrate this wonderful achievement that, as a society, we can get rid of the weakest among us.

And obviously, in this case, not the weakest among us at all.

It's just, it's despicable.

And today's the day.

Do you know the actual name of the day?

I don't.

I mean, I keep calling it Down Syndrome Awareness Day, but I don't know what it's called.

Something like that.

That's what you're supposed to say.

Crazy socks.

You're supposed to be wearing crazy socks.

Did you wear crazy socks?

I did.

Well, yeah.

Let me see his crazy socks, please.

Can you let let me let me see what are they

crazy socks?

You have to know here.

I mean, you what do you have to crazy?

I mean, how long does it take you to get to your socks, dude?

I'm trying to find the Eagles logo.

Your Eagles socks, obviously.

Well, those are crazy that somebody bought Eagles socks.

They are.

I mean, not this year, but maybe last year, the year before, the year before that.

58 years or so before this year.

It wasn't exactly popular, but that's the thing.

You know,

this year

it is because they won the Super Bowl.

But that's a whole nother story.

Not that crazy.

Did you wear crazy socks?

I did.

I mean, as crazy as I had in my.

Yeah, I mean, these are crazy.

Let me see.

Those are crazy.

Oh, yeah.

They're kind of,

would you say Christmassy?

No.

No.

No, they're more like

Native American.

Santa Fe, Native American.

There you go.

Kind of thing.

Very nice.

And I also.

I'm culturally appropriating the Native American Santa Fe lifestyle in socks today.

That's very nice.

Yes.

Thank you.

We've said this before, but we could

every day,

all day, talk about this story.

And this goes from Down syndrome, but it goes really, it's focused on life.

And

I think morally make the right choice every day.

If that's all we talked about every day was ending the elimination of 60 million people in our country alone over the past

half century,

it would be a boring show.

And no one would want to listen to it because it would get really boring.

But morally, we'd be making the right choice.

But here's how we take the step in the right direction.

We start recognizing that

we need to renew the enlightenment.

We need to renew the principles that the founders

were living in that gave us the idea of this country, which is all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain rights, among them life, liberty, and property.

And you can't take any of those things away.

And you have a right to your voice and your own faith and to live it and to live your life the way you choose.

That you have

a right and a responsibility to question authority and to question those things that everybody says, yep, that's the way it is.

Well, maybe it's not the way it is.

Maybe it's just the way it's always been, but that doesn't mean that it's always like that.

And we need to question those things.

And when we can celebrate the diversity of thought,

I don't care.

Don't judge people on

their gender, their race, their abilities.

Judge them on the content of their character and

how they think and how they move and how they make you think.

You know, there's got to be something that

is moving.

And when there's a moving body interacting with another one,

everything starts to move.

It just changes things up.

Right now, we're trying to say, Everybody stay in place.

This is who you are.

This is what you'll believe.

That's not right.

And, you know, the way to start

saving people's lives, the 60 million lives, is to recognize the value of every human being.

And right now, all sides, we're looking and we're starting to devalue people we walk around with.

I won't be friends with you because you have a different opinion.

Yeah, I mean, that doesn't lead to any place good.

If you remember, right after the election, there's a lot of stories about dating apps where you could ban Trump voters from contacting you.

And it's like, again, certainly politics are important.

I think I'd have a tough time being married to

a socialist, right?

Like, I think there are lines there, and I understand that.

But, you know, the fact that you would have to be a little bit more.

But I'm friends with socialists.

Right.

And you're going to eliminate 50%

of the country because...

No, I mean, that's.

No.

And they have nothing to offer.

They have nothing to offer.

I mean, you know, Tyler, who works here at the studios, Tyler, when he was in his 20s, was a, was a Marxist.

He was a Marxist.

He believed he went on a mission and he, you know, was like, hey, these guys are working for

Chiquita Banana for like $6 a month.

And banana people are making some money.

He came back a Marxist and then he started living life and started listening and started learning.

And he was like, you know, my heart is better served through the system of capitalism.

Why would we say you believe one thing, I dismiss you, when you should be growing and changing, you should be exploring every day.

By the way, we do that with Steven Pinker, his book, Enlightenment Now, coming up in just a few minutes.

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Glenn back.

So Steven Pinker, if you don't know who he is, you need to find out who he is.

He is really amazing.

He's

an atheist, and he's a little hostile, I think, sometimes to religion, at least in one of his books.

But,

you know, disregard that if

you're somebody who believes in God as I do.

But his stats on the quality of life and

how

you know capitalism and the Western way of life has changed the entire world is remarkable.

You want to feel good instead of going, Everything's getting worse.

No, no, no, listen to Steven Pinker coming up next: Glenn back,

Mercury,

love,

courage,

truth,

Glenn Beck.

I'm thrilled to have Steven Pinker on the program.

He is currently a professor of psychology at Harvard.

He has taught at Stanford, MIT.

He's won numerous prizes for his research.

He has done a couple of books, one of the best books

really on,

if you feel like, oh man, things, everybody's just dying faster and the guns are,

if you feel like things are bad now, read his book the better angels of our nature and you will see how good things really are and i would say the same thing is kind of true in this book enlightenment now the case for reason science humanism and progress uh he has two-time uh pulitzer prize finalists uh behind him uh humanist of the year nine uh doctorates or honorary doctorates world's top 100 public intellectuals and time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world today.

But as I said earlier, I also won that.

So we're going to discredit that one and not give it to Stephen.

Welcome to the program, Steven Pinker.

How are you?

Fine, thank you, Glenn.

So, so, Stephen, I am fascinated

by what you're writing about in the book.

But let me start here.

It is, Stu, do you have some of the stats?

It is,

I'm a catastrophe.

I'm an optimistic catastrophe.

And I see catastrophe everywhere, but I really believe that if we use our brain and

we root ourselves in some basic principles, we're going to be okay.

I read your book and you get stats like this.

Go ahead.

Over the course of the 20th century, Americans became 96% less likely to be killed in a car accident, 88% less likely to be mowed down on the sidewalk, 99% less likely to die in a plane crash, 59% less likely to fall to their deaths, 92% less likely to die by fire, 90% less likely to drown, 92% less likely to be asphyxiated, and 95% less likely to be killed on the job.

I just had a guest on Last Hour said, it's harder than ever to accomplish the American dream.

And I said, I don't think that's true.

I don't think that's true.

Stephen, help us out on that.

Start with the positives that are happening.

Yes, the

most obvious positive is that people worldwide are living longer.

For most of human history, a newborn baby could be expected to live on average around 30 years.

Today, it's 71 years across the world, and it's more than 80 years in the developed world.

So that's a start.

It used to be that only a small percentage of people could read or write.

Now, 90% of the world's population under the age of 25 can read and write.

The number of wars has been decreasing.

In fact, when Colombia signed a peace agreement with the FARC guerrillas last year, they brought an end to the last war in the Western Hemisphere.

So an entire hemisphere is free of war.

In fact, five-sixths of the world is now free of war.

The crime rate is down

worldwide, and certainly in the United States, it's half of what it was in the 70s and 80s and early 90s.

Global poverty has been decimated, has been slashed.

Now less than 10% of the world's population meets the definition of extreme poverty.

Used to be 90%, so the percentages have absolutely flipped.

We have

an additional eight hours of leisure time just since the 1960s.

We, of course, can access the world's culture with a device that we have in our shirt pocket.

When I was a student, if you wanted to see a classic movie like Casablanca or the Seventh Seal, you had to wait years for it to be shown at a local repertory theater.

If you were lucky enough to live in a city that had a repertory theater or on late-night television, now any movie you want to see, you can stream on demand.

And that's true of art, of music, of culture.

Steve.

Go ahead.

Sorry.

Yeah, in area after area, even though it's hard to recognize it when you read the news because the news is about everything that goes wrong.

But our lives really have improved.

And in a majority of countries, people say they're happier than they were decades ago.

So

Cleveland Clinic came out last week, and they said that no longer is hunger the problem in the world.

For the very first time, it's obesity is beating malnutrition.

Well, that's certainly true.

Yes, it's certainly true in the developed world.

And of course, obesity is a problem, but as problems go, it's a better problem to have than starvation.

It really is.

Yes, it is.

But I didn't see that anywhere in the news.

And all I heard about was how kids killing kids in schools because of guns,

how that's just getting out of control.

Well, it's, you know, there are the fact that there's been improvement doesn't mean that there's perfections, that there's utopia.

There are always going to be problems.

And we have to deal with problems as they arise in the most intelligent way possible, using data, using trying out policies, see what works, learn from our neighbors who've tried out policies.

Because no one is omniscient.

No one knows what's going to work just sitting in the armchair just from their sheer brain power.

None of us is that smart.

We've got to let the world tell us what works and what doesn't work and use the entire world as a laboratory.

Look at other countries, see what they've done, look at what different states have done.

This is, of course, an old American idea that the states are laboratories and we should learn from the policies that work.

It's kind of a scientific approach to dealing with policy and politics, which I certainly advocate above our current tribal attitude, where each side believes the other side is evil.

So that's kind of where I want to go, because your book really is, it sets

the case out early on about the Enlightenment and that what we're really losing here is the ability to think and to discuss and to even recognize facts.

I don't know if you saw in the news yesterday, but Cambridge Analytica,

the people that were trying to manipulate the election said that facts don't matter anymore.

It's all about feeling.

Yes, and I mean, you know, many politicians have

sensed that for a while, that

the way to mobilize people behind you is to whip up their emotions.

I think it's an exaggeration to say that

facts don't matter.

You know, Pearl Harbor really did happen, and 9-11 happened, and we recognized racial discrimination in the 50s and 60s.

And so I think that it's a bit of an exaggeration.

We're not living in a total fantasy world.

But of course, there are demagogues who will manipulate facts.

There have always been

liars and distorters of facts.

And, of course, for the health of our democracy, we've got to do everything possible to keep in touch with reality, to minimize the demagoguery where a politician will either defy facts or distort them.

And that's what a free press is for, among other things.

So are we getting that, though?

I mean, you know, the majority now, 50% of millennials are getting their news from Facebook alone.

And I don't think

nobody is being taught

critical thinking.

And they're being taught what to think, not how to think.

And people don't, I don't think, even understand how to find facts anymore.

Yeah, I agree that we need...

better critical thinking instruction at every stage of education,

but starting young.

Because cognitive psychologists, and that's my specialty, I'm a cognitive psychologist, have shown that

it's very easy to slip into irrationality.

The human mind wasn't designed for modern statistics and mathematics and logic.

Our mind is designed for small-scale villages and tribes.

We have all these fantastic tools now where we can correct our errors and our biases.

And we do have to learn to use them because it doesn't come naturally.

We're left to our own devices.

A human being will just think in stereotypes,

will generalize from their own experience.

We seek evidence that confirms our beliefs and don't pay attention to evidence that disconfirms our beliefs.

So there are a lot of ways in which we naturally are irrational.

But these are obviously correctable.

They must be because we wouldn't know that they were fallacies unless we had some kind of standard of what's rational to compare them against.

And of course,

we sent the man to the moon and we've eliminated smallpox and we live longer and we design cars and planes.

So we're all obviously capable of rationality.

And the trick is to kind of instill a rational thinking.

And I agree, as young as possible.

Okay, so Stephen, I'm going to take a break.

And when we come back, will you just take us through

kind of a 101 on critical thinking and how do we break that?

How do we turn the tide on that?

How do we get away from our emotions

and

start really just, as Thomas Jefferson said, fix reason firmly in her seat.

How do we do that on a mass scale or even in our own individual lives?

Steven Pinker in a minute.

The book is Enlightenment Now from Steven Pinker, The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

We'll make sure we tweet out the link at World of Stew and at Glenn Beck.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn Beck.

Steven Pinker, the author of the book Enlightenment Now, one that will give you hope that we're actually going to make it,

is joining us now.

Stephen, can you go over just a little bit?

And if you want to mix in, however you want to do this, but I have two questions.

One, can you give us a little 101 on critical thinking and and two

you know what the enlightenment means and why

losing that we do we lose really America and the West

yeah so an example of critical thinking would would be to

examine the kind of fallacies that the human mind just naturally makes unless it's it's well educated.

So just give you an example.

I mean many people have the experience where they had a dream that something happened to, bad happened to a loved one, and call them up, find out, oh, they broke their toe that day.

So they think, oh, I've got clairvoyance.

I can actually sense things that I don't know about through vibrations or some sort of kitschy energy fields.

But the thing is,

that's a failure of critical thinking because we don't take into account the thousands of times that we have dreams that don't predict the future.

We forget all of those.

We remember the lucky hits, and so we falsely conclude that there is something spooky going on.

Or another example is the so-called gambler's fallacy.

If you're at the roulete table and you get red five times in a row, and so you bet on black, thinking, well, it's bound to come up black now.

Because you think the idea, well, it's 50% red, 50% black.

It's so far it's a lot of red, so it's due for a black.

Now, that can't be true, because the roulette wheel doesn't have any memory.

it doesn't have any desire to appear fair.

It's a misunderstanding of randomness.

People think that the law of averages means that the numbers are trying to appear 50-50, whereas the reality, of course, is that if there's any chance deviation, then it'll be diluted when there are more and more spins in the future.

And we tend to underestimate randomness.

We think we see patterns in everything, and we forget about how many,

the vast number of possibilities for coincidences.

We're just surrounded by numbers, we're surrounded by events.

I mean, who's to say that you might not look out the car window, see a license plate in front of you, and maybe it's almost like your telephone number?

That just is going to happen by the law of averages, but people see deep meanings in them.

So, critical thinking is to,

the point is to teach people to avoid falling into these traps.

Also,

to recognize that

since we it feels so good to have your beliefs confirmed,

that you feel noble, you feel wise, you feel like your own team, your own tribe is superior.

So we concentrate on all of the stories

and studies and opinions that back up the opinion that we have in the first place.

And we ignore all of the criticisms, the studies that may not come out our way, and get more and more positive about our beliefs.

There's another trap that we fall into.

And we know it's a trap because we know that people in the past believed things that weren't true.

People believed that the world was flat.

People believed that racial segregation was just the natural order of

things.

But

how do we break this team thing that we're in now that

we're willing to switch long-held principles because our team, it benefits our team or whatever.

How do you hold on to

things that are true

when they don't work your way, when society is pushing the other direction?

Yeah, it's a huge challenge, and I don't have an easy answer, but certainly being aware of the problem is a place to start.

Just to know that we're all human beings, we all have weaknesses,

and one of them is this kind of tribal team thinking.

There is a truth out there, and none of us knows it for sure.

It's a constant struggle to learn.

We can be mistaken, and we should recognize our fallibility and recognize our

tendency to fall into supporting whatever is good for the team, which is not necessarily what the truth is.

I mean, it's really the attitude and mindset of science.

If you're doing science properly, you're letting the world tell you which of your beliefs are true or false.

You don't walk in with certainty.

Of course, scientists are human and they do that, but that's why we have debate and argument and peer review so that no matter how confident you are in your beliefs, if the experiments show that you're wrong or if there's a flaw in your logic, then there'll be other people who will argue against you.

So we need more of that mindset, I think, in the political amena.

Steven Pinker is joining us.

He's the author of the book Enlightenment Now, which is an absolute must-read.

Can you give me, let's take you through, because you talk about this in the book, that

income inequality is not necessarily what we, you know, we're not thinking it through.

It's not necessarily the problem that most people seem to think that it is.

Can you take us through that?

Yeah,

I have a chapter on income inequality because it's

something that has increased within rich countries.

And people often say, well, how much progress can there really be if we have all this income inequality?

And I suggest that the

problem is kind of misconceived, that it's not so much inequality that's the problem.

There are other problems, certainly if the rich can buy elections or just pour money in and have politicians do what's in their interest, that's a problem for democracy.

But that's not the same as income inequality.

That's a problem with our

laws that allow unregulated donations and without transparency.

There's also, of course, you do have to be concerned with kids, with the elderly, with the unlucky, with the sick at the bottom end of the scale.

And I certainly believe in the kind of programs that we have, like Social Security and Earned Income Tax Credit, that it's almost a dirty word to call it redistribution, but there's a little bit of that, and all countries do it, all wealthy countries.

And it really has helped the poor.

The poverty rate, taking into account government benefits, has declined.

In 1960, about a third of Americans fell below the poverty line when you measure it in terms of after-tax income.

Now it's more like 6 or 7%.

And I think we should concentrate our efforts more on helping the people at the bottom than worrying about the gap between the top and the bottom.

Aren't we better, though, in poverty, not because of social programs, but because

this system actually works?

Yeah, I think there's some of these.

Certainly the fact that we've got this fantastic wealth-generating

machine called Markets,

has

done wonders for poverty both at home and across the world.

So, when China switched from

state control and

dogmatic communism under Mao to free markets, they got

made a huge dent in world poverty just because hundreds of millions of Chinese were lifted out of squalor and peasant existence to a kind of middle-class existence.

Stephen Pinker.

Hold on just a second.

We got to take a quick break.

Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now, more in a minute.

Glenn Beck.

Mercury.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

Foreign policies,

world's top 100 public intellectuals, not elitists, intellectuals, somebody who is pushing for the return of the enlightenment and is very, very optimistic and hopeful.

His book is called Enlightenment Now.

And the book is filled with stuff that's really positive.

And I mean this without hyperbole.

It is the greatest human achievement in history, the things that have happened over the past hundred years.

I mean, things have improved that much.

And Stephen, I want to ask you, you talk about this in the book, of

when faced with really positive things like the reduction in poverty, we as human beings tend to still search out the negative.

We tend to always, you know, oh wow, you know, poverty is down by so much.

But

look at this recent incident of violence.

Look at this problem with our food supply.

Look at this chemical we found somewhere in the water.

We're always looking for something to bring us back to the negative.

Why is that?

Yeah,

in some measure, that's good, that we don't get complacent.

And it's because our ancestors, of course, were concerned about the problems in their era that they came up with solutions.

And it's only good that we be aware of the problems that remain and some problems that might even be bigger than ever so that we tackle them.

But it is true that we tend not to appreciate the progress that we've made, partly because we're wired for negativity.

We are much more worried about losses and what can go wrong than what has gone right.

And again, there's something somewhat adaptive about that because they're just the things that can go wrong can do you much more harm than the things that can go right can help you.

Just think about how many things could happen to you today that would make you much worse off.

How many things could happen that would make you much better off?

Well, the first one is a longer list, and indeed we're right to be concerned about them.

But I think we've taken that too far because if we don't appreciate the progress that we've made, we can throw our hands up and say it's hopeless, it's intractable,

we're doomed.

So let's enjoy ourselves while we can and not even try to solve these problems because they're unsolvable.

That is a danger.

I think we can also welcome in radicals who say, well, the system is failing so badly, let's just bulldoze everything because anything that comes up out of the rubble has got to be better than what we have now.

And that's dangerous, too, because we know from

Nazi Germany, from Maoist China, from Venezuela, that if you have radical change in the hope that nothing could be worse, things can get a lot worse.

And it kind of goes back to the theme of the book of the Enlightenment.

You said something

earlier in the interview where you said, you know,

we have to look at where things have worked.

That's what our founders did when they put this together.

They didn't, like Iceland, say, hey, tweet us your constitutional clauses.

They did a lot of research on history and they scoured history to say this worked, this didn't.

When it didn't work, why didn't it?

And it was the spirit of open questioning, open examination without a team jersey.

Go ahead.

That's exactly right.

When people say, kind of wonder, well, are you saying that we should go and read a bunch of difficult European philosophers, or does it mean we have to all read Immanuel Kant?

And say, well, no, the greatest and like the most prominent Enlightenment thinkers were our own founders and framers, Jefferson and Madison and Hamilton and Adams.

They were all Enlightenment thinkers.

And exactly as you said, they tried to reason their way to the best possible system of government, in large part by looking at history and what had gone wrong and trying to learn from the mistakes of people in the past.

And it's really just a, I mean, my life changed when I read

two things.

Immanuel Kant, where he said,

there are many things that I believe that I shall never say, but I shall never say the things that I do not believe.

I didn't understand.

When I read that, I thought, I don't even understand a world where you're afraid to say, you know, what you believe.

I do now.

I understand that now.

And the other thing was from Thomas Jefferson.

Fix reason firmly in her seat and question with boldness even the very existence of God.

For if there be a God, he must surely rather honest questioning over blindfolded fear.

That's just a challenge.

Both of those, as Kant said, dare to reason.

Dare to understand, dare to reason.

Exactly right.

That would have to be the motto of the Enlightenment, if there was one.

And we are the beneficiaries of the Enlightenment whenever we enjoy the freedom of American democracy.

But we are now kind of, as I see it, locked horns in a three-way fight of postmodernism, that nothing is real,

tribalism, and a few that are saying, no, no, no,

let's challenge.

There's a lot of good stuff ahead, but we've got some really heavy lifting to do mentally.

Let's sit down and have that conversation and come together.

Which one is

go ahead?

Yeah, that's right.

That is largely my argument in Enlightenment now, that

tribalism

is a real threat to the ideals of American democracy, the idea that

Americans, or for that matter, any other nation, should be ethnically homogeneous and should just compete for greatness against every other nation also competing for greatness.

We kind of tried that.

We got World War I, we got World War II, and the idea that nations can, number one, they can coexist because there are many things that benefit everyone, that it's not a question if one wins, the other one loses.

And trade, of course, is

the prime example.

But also that America is based on an idea, on a social contract, that there's no such thing as an ethnic American.

You can be Protestant or Catholic or Jewish or black or white or German or Italian

or Hispanic.

We came together under an idea that governments can, if they're designed with the interests of the people in mind, can enhance people's life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

That's why we have a government.

And

the government is not just kind of an embodiment of a tribe.

It's a gadget.

It's a gadget designed to make us happier, and we've got to design it so that it will do exactly that.

Zillow isn't really designed to, I mean, I read the Declaration of Independence, and, you know,

it is

not only our right, but our duty to reform a government if it becomes hostile to the rights it's supposed to protect.

But what is interesting in the Declaration of Independence, it says, just don't, you know, just don't shake it off and go, well, that didn't work.

Let's come up with something else.

You have to shake it off and replace it with something that is better at defending those rights.

That's right.

And they said government shouldn't be rejected for light and transitory purposes.

Right.

So don't think every time you have a complaint about government not working, don't think that it's time to overthrow the government because you could end up with something much, much worse.

And of course, we know that there are a lot of ways in which a good democracy learns from its mistakes and reforms itself.

And we should continue that process.

I've only got a few more minutes left with you, and I've got two questions that maybe you can try to condense quickly.

I am very optimistic because I believe that freedom, unlike anybody has ever imagined, is right over the in the next 10 years because of technology.

But because

I read enough on AI, ASI, AGI,

I'm also very concerned

that

I'm concerned about the goals that we are going to be putting in to AGI.

Where do you stand on this?

Are you optimistic that we make this transition or not?

Yes, about artificial general intelligence.

Yes.

I think any new technology has potential for harms and dangers.

And that was true of the technologies of the past.

When cars were introduced on the roads, a lot of people got killed before.

But there's

safety measures.

But on this one, the argument is you really have one shot to get it right.

Yeah, and I'm skeptical of that.

Just knowing people doing artificial intelligence research.

Now, I'll tell you, you know, it's really, really hard.

The idea that we are going to come up with a magic formula and the magic algorithm and have a system that's not only going to be brilliant but improve its own intelligence

in zooming upwards.

I think there's a reason to be skeptical that there's a lot of fails.

It's a trial and error process.

And of course, we have to build in safeguards as we develop them.

But I don't think it's going to shoot up beyond what we can control.

And I do have a discussion of that in Enlightenment now.

Let me close with this.

There is something new going on,

I think,

and it is a willingness to break the barriers.

And

I first started feeling it about, I don't know, six years ago in Silicon Valley, where it was beyond the tribes.

It was beyond left and right, with some, not all.

And they were interesting conversations.

And now there are thinkers like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, of course, you know, yourself, the Weinsteins.

Do you sense that there's a new enlightenment that is beginning?

I sure hope so.

And it can't all be people who agree with each other, but

there has to be a forum for debate so that the bad ideas can be

winnowed out and the good ideas can survive on their merits.

But I do think that there are closed forums

in radio, in academia, in government.

And if we open them up and have people hear opinions that they're not so used to to get out of their comfort zone,

that's essential to further progress.

Steven Pinker, thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

You bet.

Bye-bye.

The book is Enlightenment Now from Steven Pinker, The Case for a Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, and does outline, I believe, the biggest story in the world.

It's the biggest story in the world of the

world history.

It really is.

And we never focus on it.

This has all happened largely in our lifetimes,

In our country.

And

it's amazing.

My favorite Steven Pinker story,

of which I have one before this interview.

I was reading The Better Angels of Our Nature, which goes into one big focus of it is talking about how

a lot of people think violence is constantly getting worse.

And he in gruesome detail goes through how bad things used to be.

You'll read it.

I read parts of it to my wife, and I would be like, reading it, I'd be like, good heavens, listen to to this.

And you'd just be like, oh my God, I am really glad.

Even if I were born in a prison in Mexico today, I'm glad I was born today.

Right.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And you really get the sense, you know, it's better.

And one of the points he makes, and he goes through in great detail of how we have this idea that wars are always, we're always afraid of these flamed up wars all over the world.

And there's always this constant conflict.

And it's, of course, real at some level, but it's actually getting better less people are dying in wars now than they have in a very long time and I kind of just blurted that out on the air one day in an in a conversation and you know when we get fact-checked by these organizations it's always some conservative thing and it's always they always beat us up and and go crazy on those things for whatever reason politi fact fact-checked my statement that

people are dying less frequently in wars.

And again, that was something I got from Steven Pinker.

And of course, when you get fact-checked, you're like, crap, like, did did I get something wrong?

What did I do?

Well, they actually fact-checked it with Steven Pinker.

They called him up and they said, hey, is this true what this idiot on the radio said?

And of course, it was true because it came from Steven Pinker's book.

So they actually fact-checked my claim with my source.

That's funny.

And they still only gave me mostly true, which I

to this day.

Unbelievable.

He's an amazing writer.

So you know, he's a humanist.

So he is, especially in that last book, he does not like religion at all.

No, he's not a fan.

Not a fan.

And there's times when he was like, and another thing, marshmallow peeps.

Like, okay, Steven, put it out.

You know, when he said, you know, we don't all have to agree.

You know, we can all agree with each other.

And I really wanted to say, oh, Stephen, you and I don't agree on a lot of stuff.

Yeah, but when you can go through an hour interview like that,

and this has happened with Penn Jillette as well, with you, you know, you totally disagree with Penjillette on religion, but if you can talk for an hour like that and something sensible and

get something out of it, there's no reason you can't talk about those difficult topics with those same people.

Well,

it's also, as Penn and I talk about,

we could work hard on solving problems, and it would be, as he says, 30 years before we'd ever get to a place to like, oh, yeah.

I mean, there's a lot of stuff that we can solve that we agree on.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn Beck.

There is an amazing op-ed that I read and I was like, I've got to talk to this woman.

And it turns out she was in the Netherlands.

And I thought, oh, well, you know, she's...

You know, she's not going to come out with it.

It's expensive, long distance.

You know, I don't know why, but we reached out to her because everybody looked at me and went,

we can call her.

And so she's on with us next.

She is

today is, I don't even know.

It is, I got the

World Down Syndrome Day.

Okay, so

bring attention to Down syndrome.

And, you know, we've been talking about Down syndrome for the last few weeks because of another op-ed that I read in the Washington Post that said, you know, they're a hassle and it's expensive and, you know, parents are sad and they don't have a quality of life so let's eliminate Down syndrome and the kids that are are already formed in the belly of their mother our next guest says no and she's got a fascinating story back

mercury

love

courage

truth

Glenn back my grandparents were Democrats they were Democrats their whole life they were you know FDR Democrats.

They were what was called blue dog Democrats at the time.

Those have become very rare.

They're not breeding a lot of those.

And the problem is anti-abortion rights.

That's the heart of the issue.

In 1978, there were 125 anti-abortion Democrats in the House of Representatives.

By 96, that number was down to 70.

Then by 2007, it was 32.

As of yesterday, it was three,

nearly two, if not for Illinois Representative Dan Lipinski's narrow victory.

Now, he co-chairs the Blue Dog Coalition.

I didn't even know they existed.

Many people assumed that Lipinski, the last of a dying breed of conservative Democrats, couldn't make it this far.

In part because he stands by his beliefs.

He voted against Obamacare, the only Illinois Democrat to do so.

He supported over 50 bills that target Planned Parenthood.

He's one of only six Democratic representatives to vote in 2013 on abortion after 20 weeks.

And as such, he's been the target of various progressive groups: Planned Parenthood, NARAL, Pro-Choice America, Emily's List, the Human Rights Campaign, MoveOn.org, SCIU, and the like.

This is an era of hysteria and polarization.

And politicians like Representative Lipinski are needed.

And quite honestly, we need them in both parties.

We need to not become monolithic and just say,

this is the only way.

Otherwise, get out.

That's what's happening.

They're getting rid of anybody who believes in some traditional values on the left.

The Democrat who won the primary was all but promised a seat in the House.

Their Republican counterpart is a white supremacist neo-Nazi Holocaust denier who's been disavowed by his own party.

I don't think strongly enough, but disavowed.

So all it takes is for the Democrats to do the same, it would appear, to elicit the disfavor of their own party.

And the way to do that is to have some conservative values.

It's Wednesday, March 21st.

You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

Today is World Down Syndrome Day, where

we have,

you know, where the world should just take a moment, especially this year and the years to come and say, you know, I think the world's a better place because of people who have Down syndrome.

I have a daughter of special needs and I,

you know, it's not something that you're like, oh man, I hope I have.

But when you are in that situation, you find the beauty and the miracle in it.

And I think this says something about us that we are now eliminating through abortion, or our goal is to eliminate all people with Down syndrome.

I think the world becomes a darker and colder place.

I read a great op-ed in The Washington Post and also on The Blaze.

There was another one written for The Blaze that is really good by Runata

Lindemann.

And

she is with us now.

I know I butchered your name.

How do you say your name?

I'm sorry.

Well, it sounded good.

It's Renata Lindemann.

Thanks for having me, first of all, Glenn.

It's an honor and a pleasure.

You're welcome.

I'm thrilled to have you on.

I read your op-ed in the Washington Post, and

it was so spot-on.

Can you take us through

what your life has been

and what you wrote in that op-ed?

I'll try in a nutshell.

So um I was uh about thirty-five when uh when I became pregnant um and at that age uh I was offered uh testing and I declined.

Uh testing for Down syndrome, that is.

Uh after birth uh we heard that uh our daughter was born with Down syndrome and uh well, first of all, uh that is that is a major shock to us, to me.

And I had all these these old fashioned uh

stereotypes uh came to mind.

And uh

well, i in a nutshell, very quickly we discovered uh life with Down syndrome is not what we thought it was.

And and

um

you you learn to um

you learn that Down syndrome is actually very nice.

It's it's a child with Down syndrome enriches your life and uh it makes you think that there's more to life than just uh success and money and career to chase.

And

well,

shortly after my daughter was born, I started being an advocate for Down syndrome and trying to raise awareness, getting rid of all the stigmas.

And I also heard,

I became aware of the high abortion rate.

And this was fourteen years ago now.

And

while screening

has become commonplace, every pregnant woman is offered screening for Down syndrome nowadays.

And so I became a disability activist

and we try to raise awareness about

the discriminatory and eugenic nature

of the screening, of the screening practice.

And we collect all sorts of information to

show the world, show

the United Nations with our project

stop discriminating down but also within the Down syndrome community how

the screening the routine offer of screening affects our families and reinforces discrimination reinforces that stigma reinforces that idea that Down syndrome is something bad

can you can you help me out with something because

when I found out that you were a Dutch citizen you lived in the Netherlands

I was really impressed by your courage because

there's some really spooky things going on that just scream eugenics,

where

the Netherlands are

starting to price people and what they're worth and everything else.

And

here is a part of the world that has a very proud heritage of saving Jews in World War II and doing everything they could to stand against the Nazis and all of these horrors.

And yet at the same time,

it was the German people that found out about the T4 program, about

the, quote, undesirables or those not worthy to live.

The people who actually voted for Hitler stood up when they found out this was going on and said, you can't do that.

Don't do that.

Aren't we going to a place to where

we're starting to be worse than the German population?

Yes,

I agree with you, Glenn.

That's not even the word to describe it, but

it's much trickier this time.

The Netherlands was, in fact, the first country to introduce the new genetic screening test called NIPT, non-invasive prenatal testing.

It was the first country in the world that implemented this test into its public health care.

As of last year, it offers all pregnant women NIPT screening focused on Down syndrome.

The way it is done is very tricky.

It's done step by step.

Prenatal screening has been around for decades and first was offered to a very small group.

And then it it over the years it intensified, more screening, more tests.

The group of women became larger until it became what it is today, all pregnant women.

And it's all done with with all these euphemisms like choice and freedom and women's rights.

And so it is for some people it's very hard to see what is actually happening.

So feminists

are calling it our right, whereas they should see it.

The the ultimate goal of the screening is to save money.

Down pride and saving downs have collected evidence and it's it's really out in the open.

So if the goal is to save money for health care

purposes, then why are feminists lining up to abuse, have their pregnancy and their bodies used for that purpose?

What is your answer to that?

I don't know.

I think

it's been years of

the mainstream media pushing that message, using those euphemisms, freedom and right,

that people actually

uh don't stop and think.

They just

take over these words.

And and of course the freedom so if you're uh i if you criticize the s the screening practice that is currently happening, you must be anti-freedom.

It's it's like you uh just said, it's it's very polarized into pro-choice and pro-life or anti-life or uh s sorry, uh um

pro-life and pro-choice so um

help me out on this let me play devil's advocate and in this case actually devil's advocate yeah um yeah uh look

you know why

you know we have the technology to find out uh that there's a problem with a child if if there was a problem where you know uh

you know their liver was damaged and their kidneys were damaged and their heart was damaged.

You know, it would just you wouldn't say, let's have that child born into the world because it's just it's not going to live and it's not going to have you know, it's just going to be horrible for everybody, including the child.

I mean, why wouldn't we use this?

I mean, nobody wishes Down syndrome on somebody.

Well, that that sounds all very reasonable, but it's not that the what is really happening.

First of all, you could screen first of all, you could screen

probably for almost everything nowadays.

But it's all cost benefits analysis.

So they figured Down syndrome is is pretty common.

It's one of the most common genetic

arrangements, chromosomal arrangements that that

children are born with.

So

they made that the focus of of prenatal screening.

It uh whereas there are other conditions that are much more rare, that have a much bigger impact on the life of the child and the health of the child that are not screened for.

So

from that point of view it it doesn't make sense.

Well it makes sense, but only money sense.

Screening is only used to enable abortion.

It's not used to help the child or the family.

So it doesn't really fit fit public health from that point of view anyway.

So would you be for, in the future, being able to gene splice?

So if the parents have a test and before the baby is formed, that they can gene splice and eliminate the defects?

Or are you

because

I'm afraid of all of it because

we're starting to make the

uber human, the Superman that the Nazis wanted.

Where do you stand on that?

No, I am I'm completely on your side.

Most children are born with

life

most children with Down syndrome,

go back to my topic,

have a healthy and happy life.

There are some children that are born with conditions that are not compatible with life and they they will die shortly after birth.

I don't think abortion is first of all, I don't think abortion is is a cure, but but the gene splicing and the g manipulating and and uh babies born out of three or more parents, I don't think that is the w the way either, because uh it's it's that slippery slope argument.

Where are we going to stop?

And babies are not products.

That's first of all.

Um

Do you worry at all?

I think that

I mean, I think the world is made a much better place by our own personal, quote, defects.

And I think when it comes to

Down syndrome, you know, it's like everything.

It does have its problems, et cetera, et cetera.

And it's not all rosy and sunshine and lollipops for the parent or, you know, for the kids and the later adults.

However, I really think I can't think of something

that is is deemed as a defect in in the world that is as

so clearly positive to the world as people with Down syndrome.

Yeah, exactly.

That's that's what we live every day.

My children who are now twelve and fourteen I have two daughters with Down syndrome.

The way they are in life, their unconditional love, their ability to

experience and live in the moment, not to worry about things that I worry about.

They have such an ability to enjoy life and to enjoy the moment and to not let petty little things or worries

what happened 6,000 miles away from where I live.

They don't let things like that get them down.

They live now and they worry about the dance that they have on Friday night, things like that.

So it really grounds our family, it really grounds me.

And it puts everything in perspective.

And we need people like that.

Well, we need people like you as well, and we are watching you from the other side of the planet.

Thank you so much for everything that you're doing, and thank you for your voice.

I think you meant that as a couple, but it came off a little creepy.

We're watching her from the other side of the planet.

Like, what?

Oh, no, I've got cameras in her house.

Okay.

Lindemann.

She's a spokesperson of Down Pride and Saving Downs.

By the way, you can get her Blaze op-ed on this topic at theblaze.com.

We just tweeted it from at World of Stew.

We also got it from Matt Glenn Beck.

Yeah, the headline is: what, feminists?

What is it?

You didn't open it back up.

Of course, obviously, you had to ask that question.

I did, I suppose.

Supporting babies because they have Down syndrome is something no feminist should support.

That seems really obvious to me.

It does.

And maybe not to the rest of the world.

Volatility in the stock market, wild swings in Bitcoin, constant turmoil in Washington.

What do you have to hedge the bet?

You know,

it's funny people don't think of hedge funds and what hedge funds really are.

It's just a...

An algorithm that says, look, if this is going down, that means that this is probably going to go up.

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And, you know, the algorithm can work faster than human beings.

And so, you know, generally speaking, if you're going to make an investment here, the algorithm looks for the other side.

So in case it reverses itself, you don't lose anything.

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Glenn Back Mercury.

Glenn Back.

There is one important story that is worth about a minute here,

and that is

the court system yesterday saying that the woman who accused Donald Trump of harassing her in her hotel room while she was a contestant or just after she was a contestant on The Apprentice can move forward.

And they cited the Clinton case.

And so it's going to go forward.

And

this could spell trouble if he did it.

And there's a blue dress.

And there's a lot on that one now.

If they have the hardcore evidence and he lies under oath like Clinton did, then there's trouble.

Yeah, I think two things here.

One,

if you put Donald Trump in a situation where he has to testify on these things,

you know, they can just

capture you with a wrongly worded phrase.

You know, they just, they can get you on a process crime, and that is always a danger.

And it's why you don't want, you know, people testifying under oath if they don't have to, because that's obviously the goal here.

The goal would be to wreck him, not even if it has to do with the affair or

just get him on something.

And the other thing is,

the death of the non-disclosure agreement is

so consequential.

It is.

Thousands and thousands of people have had problems with their employers or other individuals.

They've signed agreements to say, look, you can have $130,000.

You can have $150,000.

But that, because that does, I'm not saying I'm guilty.

I'm just saying, you know, I'll give you this money and just go away and don't talk about it because it's a hassle for me to hear about it.

And that has, in some cases where women were really victims,

and other cases where it's just been a hassle for the employers, has helped alleviate large problems for not only our legal system, but also people trying to deal with these things against large companies who could come after them with all the force that they have.

Now, if you're a large company, why would you settle?

If you can come out and say, yeah, they paid me off, but I'm basically going to admit it, except for the exact legal definition of admitting it.

That's trouble for our society.

Glenn Beck.

Mercury.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

Welcome to the program.

Welcome to the studios, Mr.

Pat Gray.

Thank you.

Good to be here.

Thank you, Pat.

You know,

I was writing a...

a movie on demand the other night and uh just didn't even think about what it was rated i just assumed.

And after the first, I don't know, 90 seconds, they said approximately 86 F words.

And I realized, hey, maybe this is our rated.

And I can't watch it.

Thank you for your service.

It's a war movie.

It's a war movie.

Most of those are not.

Yeah.

Yes.

And I wasn't even, you know, wasn't even thinking.

But anyway, I did some research on the movie because I was really interested in it.

And it's about,

it's a true story about how broken our vets are coming back from

Iraq and Afghanistan and how backed up the VA is, and how the bureaucracy just turns them away.

You know, there's waiting lists of thousands and thousands of people to get into the centers where they can get some help because they're broken.

And so they don't get the help they need.

They're not

getting the treatment at all.

And so

a lot of them,

in complete despair, commit suicide.

As we know, it's 22 per day.

And when that happens, they lose their life insurance, lose their benefits, their families are destitute.

There's no way to even pay for a funeral, which is why I'm so in love with this dog tag furniture business from Troy, who is also a veteran.

And one of his buddies died from suicide when he came back from Iraq.

It was one of his battle buddies.

And

he had no money.

The family had no money to bury him.

They get $300

from the government if they've committed suicide.

Here, here you go.

And, you know, the average cost of a funeral is, what, $7,000?

Which is.

That's not even...

That's a pretty cheap funeral.

Yeah.

And wrong in another sense.

And wrong.

When we buried my mom last year, it was $15,000.

So it's not cheap.

They give you $300 and say, hey, thanks.

You know, thanks for a service.

And so Troy started this business called Dog Tag Furniture, where he sells these really beautiful American flags that you get for your home.

They're wood.

They're wood.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they're really, really, really nice.

They're really beautiful.

Really nice.

And so he was, because he didn't know what to do for these guys, and he was trying to help his friend's family.

And he just turned some scrap lumber into this great-looking,

he calls it furniture, but it's these wooden American flags, and it's really beautiful.

And so, how much are they?

They're like $120, $125, something like that.

But absolutely beautiful and absolutely worth it.

And all the proceeds go to helping the funeral costs of veterans who come back and commit suicide.

Yeah, it's very cool because

there are tons of veterans charities.

I mean, we've 72,000.

Yeah.

None of them help with this.

Not one.

Not one.

It's just this weird hole in that system.

And, you know, there's a lot of great charities doing a lot of great things, but this is one thing that, I mean, this hits the families really hard.

Really hard.

$7,000, $10,000, $15,000 costs.

You know, it's not like

in addition to all the grief and terrible things that are associated with the future.

We've had two suicides in my family, and I can't even imagine if we would have had to worry about the funeral.

I mean, we weren't rich either time by any stretch of the imagination, but

we could afford to bury my brother-in-law and

my mom

at the time.

It's...

what do you do with 300 bucks?

Nothing.

Yeah, maybe you can cremate them, but there's no service.

Not even cremate them for that.

We've had

family recently where that's been the case.

It was a heck of a lot more than $300.

Really?

Jeez.

It's like, okay, we got what we wanted out of you.

See ya.

And then you're just left to your own device.

The problem is, I mean, you know, you don't want to get into a situation to where somebody says, you know, like, you know, my life life insurance doesn't cover suicide.

No, right.

Mine's void.

Yeah.

So, I mean, you don't want to

incentivize people because when they get really down, then they're like, you know what?

I'm better off.

I'm worth more dead than alive.

I mean, think of George Bailey.

I'm worth more dead than alive.

That was a movie.

No, I.

I mean, geez, I can't believe you'd bring something like that up.

It's not even factual.

No, he was on that bridge.

Now,

Henry started with the documentary, It's a Wonderful Life.

Yeah,

right, okay.

But anyway,

you don't want to incentivize, but then we've got to do something because they're screwed up because we asked them to serve.

Yeah.

And they go through hell over there.

It's just, it's sheer living hell.

And when they come back, they need help, and usually, oftentimes, the VA just turns their back on them.

The VA, we know, is just a massive government bureaucracy, and they just don't function well.

And then when you have the numbers they have to deal with, a lot of these guys are getting lost in that shuffle.

So it's 22 per day.

And if that's where we come in,

you can help by going to dogtagfurniture.com.

Dogtagfurniture.com and buy one of these wood flags.

Troy gets nothing out of this.

He doesn't take a salary for this.

He gets nothing out of it.

Well, you don't want a flag.

Just give him the money.

Say, make the flag for somebody else, you know, or whatever.

But this is a way to help these families.

And Trump obviously came in with one of his big mandates was to fix the VA, and that has not happened yet.

To his credit, he seems to be replacing, it looks like he may be replacing some of the leadership he put in because it hasn't happened fast enough.

It's just one of those things that's inexcusable.

It should happen.

I mean, that should be - it's a national crime.

It really is.

It is.

It's a national crime.

You remember, Pat.

I mean,

I worked with Jim Lago years ago in Corpus Christi.

He's still there.

He was a Vietnam vet, and, you know, he was really proud of his service.

When he got back, nobody else was proud of his service because it was Vietnam.

And, you know, that kind of

twisted him and the whole Vietnam experience kind of twisted him.

And I remember thinking, I don't ever want to be a part of a society that treats our Vietnam vets as well.

And he was messed up too, right?

When he came back.

He was messed up.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he's great now.

Yeah.

But when you look at it, I think we're actually worse.

We may be worse.

We have, for instance, did you know yesterday they voted in the Senate to continue the, now listen to this, to continue the war in

Yemen.

Yeah, and

until recently, I didn't even know we were in a war in Yemen.

Yes.

But they didn't actually say we endorse the war.

We're going to fund the war.

They just said, no, the president can do that.

Now, Barack Obama is the one who started the war in Yemen.

We have a proxy war with Iran, and we're fighting it with the Saudis.

Now, if we believe in that, that's good.

But nobody even discussed it with us.

It just happened.

And so Mike Lee and Bernie Sanders, of all people, stood up yesterday and said, look, this has got to stop.

We have the power of war.

You can start something, but after 90 days, you come to Congress.

Well, it's been, what, three years?

Long time, yeah.

Long time.

Nobody even knows.

We're sending people into harm's way for God only knows what.

We're having them fight in our name.

None of us even know.

They're killing themselves at record, record number.

They're broken.

We know that the VA is broken.

We know that they're broken.

And none of us really talk about it.

I mean,

it's pretty horrifying what's happening.

It is.

It's pretty horrifying.

It is.

And these are the people who are willing to do what the rest of us aren't.

That's a pretty tough job.

And it takes immense amounts of courage and patriotism and guts.

And then they're treated like this later on.

It's despicable.

Okay, so it's immoral.

It's dogtagfurniture.com and just go there.

They don't make anything on it.

This is just one guy trying to help

pay for funerals.

It's not furniture like chairs and

tables sitting on some of this kind of wall.

Yeah, okay.

Dogtanfurniture.com.

Can we just talk a little bit about,

it looks like Bill O'Reilly was right.

I've been, you know, we have monitors in front of us, and so I can see what, you know, Fox is doing, MSNBC is doing, and CNN is doing.

CNN, with all of the things that are going on, CNN has been almost non-stop Stormy Daniels.

Yeah, and associated women.

Right.

I mean, it's just, and Bill said this was coming.

Yeah, he said this is going to be the next big push, and it it seems like he was definitely right on the right.

Well, and especially with the news yesterday that she supposedly passed a lie detector test, that's going to fire him up even more.

What?

The lie detector test thing is, I will say, very

sketchy science.

In fact, it's not science.

I go back and watch the Pendlet BS on the lie detector tests.

It's fascinating how those things actually work, which really they just don't.

But still.

That's why you can't use them in court.

You can't use them in court.

They're unreliable.

You know, it's become a story.

And now.

It's an indicator, though.

One of the indicators.

It's one indicator.

And one of the other women now who is coming after

Playboy Playmate or whatever?

Another one who signed an NDA.

This is the third one.

Oh, somebody besides the Playmate?

Yeah, she was the reality show.

Yeah.

She was the first one.

She, to me, is the one that has the most credibility.

Because she was on Apprentice.

Because she was on Apprentice, and she didn't say anything.

She wasn't going for money.

And she wasn't even when she saw him, you know, and

he said, no, I'm, I'm good.

I don't,

she was like, okay, I've got to say something.

She stood up, said something.

Then she just dropped off the face of the earth.

And she only, she only really got a bee in her bonnet when he said,

No, she's a liar.

Then she was like, okay, no.

Oh, yeah, that would piss me off.

Yeah, no, no.

Yeah, I'm not a liar.

So she's suing the president just to correct that she is not a liar.

And she's like, he defamed me.

And so

I'm suing.

Yesterday in court,

they used the Clinton standard and said, if Bill Clinton can be sued for this,

so can any president.

And so that one, to me, is going to be the one that I think causes the problem.

The Stormy Daniels thing and all that.

I mean, first of all, I mean, well, I think it's

all standard.

Yes.

I was going to say, it's all price.

Did we not all kind kind of, you know,

everybody's excused anything he did before, let's say, 2016, before 2015.

Anything that he did, we've all understood.

He did plenty.

Or

2016, I would say 1143 Eastern time.

That is the thing.

That's probably more accurate.

Yeah, probably.

I mean, you know,

but it's all priced in.

It's all priced in.

If you don't like him, this isn't going to make you necessarily not like him more.

If you thought he had a problem with his character before, you probably have already priced that in.

If you think that he's great and you're going to excuse anything he's done since before 2016, then this isn't going to change your mind.

No, and here's the only tough part.

If you're an evangelical, you're a Christian.

Oh, it's not tough for them at all.

No.

The leadership,

they're fine with it.

Right, because they're saying, because anything he did, but he's denying all of this.

Right.

So if it comes out and it's, and, you know, there is a blue dress, well, wait a minute.

Then he was lying to you then, you know.

And then that will be in the past.

It's a way, it's a wonder how that works.

Then that one will be in the past.

Yes.

I think, though, it's more interesting to look at how this has changed us.

You know, I mean, look at this.

This is amazing.

This is, here's the poll.

And I want to make this, this is very, the wording on this is very important.

Do you agree with this that an elected official who has committed an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in the public and professional life?

This is not saying do you believe Bill Clinton or Donald Trump?

Right.

It's not saying,

because you can say, oh, Stormy Daniels, I don't believe that with him.

That's not the question.

The question is, if someone does violate

something in the ethical standards, can they perform their duties in the public life?

In 1998, when that question was asked, 77% of Democrats said it's a private matter.

No worries.

77%.

Now, of course, this is when Bill Clinton's going on, right?

At that time, Republicans, only 28% said it's just a private matter.

So 77% of Democrats in 1998, 28% of Republicans in 1998.

Now let's move to 2017, where now there's a Republican president.

They all say the same thing.

Oh, they all very consistent values.

I'm guessing that it's still in the 20s and still in the 80s.

Now, Republicans,

67% say it's a private matter.

67% from 28 to 67.

For Democrats, only 26% say it's a private matter from 77 to 26.

Well, the good news is that the numbers haven't changed that much.

It's just the people that have changed.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn Beck.

What are we going to do?

The Parkland situation is out of control.

Now they have found yet another sheriff's deputy asleep on the job, you know, a month after the shooting.

Amazing.

Two kids have come into class with knives,

and one was just expelled for making a bomb threat at school.

And let us not forget that only 30 minutes before the officer was found sleeping on duty, other deputies arrested the brother of the shooter for trespassing.

Yeah, and he eluded the locks and security.

Yeah, and he said he just wanted to soak it all in.

Yeah.

Which is a good question.

Wow.

Wow.

Holy go.

The result of this,

these multiple security issues over the past couple of days.

Bulldozing.

I wouldn't be surprised if they wind up just bulldozing this school and just breaking it up into another district at this point.

This is turning it up to be a social disaster.

700 kids are absent from school today.

700.

Would you go to that school?

I don't think I would.

I don't think I'd let my kids go to that school.

I would be demanding that that the sheriffs, the sheriff is replaced.

How is he still having?

How does this guy have a job?

How does he have a job?

Disaster.

Yeah.

There's something really wrong in this whole district.

I don't know what it is, but man, if I were a parent, I would not be standing for it.

How can you, when you know the microscope is on you right now, how is your security not perfect?

This is the time.

How is your deputy just not sleeping?

You got to stay awake.

It's called Red Bull.

Yeah.

Just stay awake.

That's one of the prerequisites.

Can you stay awake?

Glenn, back.

Mercury.