'There Are Two Americas' - 2/26/18

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love

courage

truth

Glenn back

I've been reading a lot of history I've been reading a lot of philosophy I've been reading a lot of

Jesus I've been I've been reading a lot

Trying to figure out how the hell did did we get here.

Now, I know the progressive era.

I know the movement of postmodernism.

I know history, so I know where we're headed.

But what happened?

How is it so many people just don't care about facts anymore?

What is that?

I believe we have come to the end of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was

a period in the 1700s that

was the

death of religion and the death of the king.

It was the death of people ruling over other people.

Because people had an opportunity to read, to think, to pray, to read their Bible,

to listen to science.

And so they said, no more nonsense.

No more nonsense.

No more people telling me I am your king because God told me I was your king.

Well, I can't sense that.

I can't feel that.

I can't taste that.

I can't see it, hear it, smell it.

I'm not going to buy into that because it's nonsense.

And so we put an end to nonsense and we came to common sense.

There is something in all of us called common sense.

And we're going to base our lives on common sense

and the search for truth.

Being right isn't the important thing.

The actual search for truth is the important thing.

And we're not going to take the truth handed down to us from some king,

from some priest.

We're going to find it ourselves.

That was the enlightenment.

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 questions over blindfolded fear.

Tell me the last time you saw an honest question come out of somebody on TV.

Tell me the last time you saw an honest question being uttered by a politician.

I mean, when I say honest question, I mean one where the person is actually seeking the truth and it could change their mind.

They're willing to ask a question where if the person on the other side has a really great answer, they might say,

huh,

I don't know.

I don't know.

I've never thought of it that way.

I can't respond to that right now.

I might have to get back to you.

When's the last time you saw that?

That's the spirit of the Enlightenment.

That is what set America apart.

But we have replaced our churches with our parties,

with our ideological dogma.

We have replaced our church and our God with the planet and global warming.

Fix reason firmly in her seat.

Is global warming happening?

Well, it was for a while because I can read a thermometer.

0.7 degrees in the last 100 years.

So is global warming happening?

Well, it was.

Yes.

Now,

no.

Will it start again?

Maybe.

Do I believe in global warming?

Let me check the thermometers.

It's pretty easy.

Do I believe that it's man-made?

I don't know.

My reason tells me that you can't just trash the sky and the water and

the forests and the land and everything.

Just trash it and everything's going to be great.

So, yeah, I think man does affect the planet.

Does he affect it enough with

CO2, something that trees breathe?

Something that plants breathe?

I don't know.

Maybe.

I don't think so.

I've seen the science.

You can make a case.

I think you can make a stronger case the other way.

$14 trillion

to fight it.

Does any of it work?

No.

If you believe in CO2, well then common sense would say that you need to stop eating all animals.

Stop eating farm animals.

If you stop eating beef, you will do more to help, quote, the planet

than getting rid of all of the cars and everything else combined.

It is the biggest factor.

So if you fix reason firmly in her seat, I'll have a conversation with somebody who believes in global warming.

I'm going to have a hard time if it's your religion.

But if you're opened to a rational conversation and you're a vegetarian, a vegan,

I'm cool.

Okay, at least you're consistent.

Now, let's have a discussion.

But I will not listen to somebody who has burger breath and telling me that

we are five years away from not being able to turn things around.

You should be going after the meat industry, not the car industry, if that's what you believe.

Let's try this one.

If you believe that we have to stop

children from picking up sticks and pretending that it's a gun,

that we must stop, In fact, you've gone so far to classify finger guns, which all kids have played with forever.

That we have to fix

our society because we are teaching our kids to be violent with the class two

look-alike firearm.

That is now in the code book as a finger gun.

You know, like you used to as a kid.

That's a class two look-alike finger gun okay

all right you believe that that is so dangerous that our kids are pointing their fingers at one another that that teaches them to be violent well i'm i don't believe that but i am with you if

if

You are leading the way in Hollywood to stop all violence in movies because certainly if a kid points his finger with a finger gun

that's training him certainly watching all that violence with big impressive stars has got to be doing something and god forbid hollywood let's talk about gamings where we can gaming our kids can be in virtual reality with a machine gun

they can be a sniper and shooting people in the head.

And you don't want to have a conversation about that at all.

What are you, oh, you just,

what are you, some Neanderthal?

Oh yeah, like the games are making it.

Wait, the class two lookalike finger gun?

That does, but games don't?

I can't have a conversation with you.

I cannot have a conversation with you.

This is the problem.

There are two Americas, and it is not left and right.

It is those who are willing to engage in logical conversation and actual thinking,

and those who want to do Common Core.

Two plus two equals five, if you can show me how you got there.

You want to ban all guns.

Let's think this through.

We're the only country on earth that has the right to bear arms in the Constitution.

So, to get all guns taken away, to get ARs, ARs have been around since Vietnam.

Why is it that all of a sudden we're having shooting with AR?

Why are ARs a problem now?

They weren't a problem in the 70s, but they are suddenly now.

If you fix reason firmly in her seat, that will tell you something has changed within us,

not the gun.

However,

you want to take away all guns.

That will take you possibly a civil war, but it will take you years to get that done.

But you want to make sure that we we never have this problem in school again.

Okay.

Well then we probably shouldn't start start with the guns.

We can talk about that as long as we fix reason firmly in her seat.

But are you aware that out of all of the mass shootings since 1950, all of them, only

two

have happened in a place where people can carry guns?

98.9%

of all mass shootings in America have happened in a gun-free zone.

That should tell you something.

How about this one?

I don't want my kids living in a prison.

Well, I don't want my kids living in a prison either.

Well, that's what it'll be if you have armed guards around our schools.

A prison?

I don't know.

I've I've gone to a football game recently.

They they practically gave me an anal cavity search.

It's a football game.

I didn't feel like I was living in a prison.

I go travel at the airport.

That's pretty intense.

I don't feel like the airport is a prison.

I feel it's nonsense, but I don't feel like it's a prison.

I go to mega churches.

Mega churches have security everywhere, armed personnel.

I don't feel like that's a prison.

I go to a concert.

They check my wife's bag I walk through a metal detector I'm wandered I don't feel like the concert is a prison

I go to a bank there's armed guards there cameras everywhere alarm systems I don't feel like I'm in a prison I feel like I'm in a bank

why is it we protect everything

We make sure you're wanded for everything.

But God forbid we do that to protect our children.

Is the stuff in a bank worth more than your child?

Is a concert a higher priority to protect

than our children in schools everywhere across the country?

I'm just trying to just trying to figure out what we're actually trying to accomplish here.

Because I don't think

I don't think we're actually trying to accomplish anything except win.

That's it.

We're not actually trying to solve a problem.

Both sides just want to be right.

That's it.

They just want to make sure that we get guns off the street because they're right.

No.

No, I don't think that's been decided except for you in your mass.

In your church service, wherever you hold that strange,

I hate the Second Amendment church service, wherever you hold that ceremony, that's what you've decided.

Now, I don't know if we can pull you out of your church long enough to fix reason firmly in her seat,

but the problem with our country is that we have officially,

officially

unpegged ourselves from

the first principle

of making this system, this grand American experiment that man can rule himself.

We have unpegged,

we have drawn up the anchor, and we have pulled out of the port of reason.

It is the enlightenment that gave this experience, this experiment, breath.

It gave it life

man cannot

cannot rule himself without reason

we're better than this

we know these things to be self-evident

we have just put on jerseys

I will tell you what I've told the NRA since the day I joined them.

I don't join clubs.

clubs.

I don't join groups.

The only two groups that I think I belong to, my church,

and I question

all the time.

I'm in trouble all the time because I question all the time.

Good.

Same with the NRA.

The minute they would violate and start to become a political

source that was betraying the Second Amendment in any way, I'm done with it.

That's the only reason.

I don't join for the discounts.

I joined the NRA because they stand to protect the Second Amendment.

And they do it with reason.

The problem is our society has unpegged from reason.

I urge you today, fix reason firmly in her seat and question with boldness.

Question to the point to where you're open to changing your mind.

Ask honest questions.

Because that's the only way we're going to save our children.

And don't get me even started on that story about

the girl, I think, used to be a girl, now she's...

A boy, but she's wrestling girls, and now the girls are upset because it's a boy.

I can't even figure it out.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn Beck.

We're going to fix reason firmly in her seat and go over the Jake Tapper and the sheriff of Nottingham

and

his interview.

It was

quite amazing if you haven't seen it.

We're going to go over it here in just a second.

Let me just give you one little highlight here.

Go ahead, Sarah.

Do you think that if the Broward Sheriff's Office had done things differently, this shooting might not have happened?

Listen, if ifs and buts were candy and nuts, you know, O.J.

Simpson would still be in a record book.

I don't know what that means.

There's 17 dead people, and there's a whole long list of things your department could have done differently.

Man.

Yeah.

You know, I think this is why I think Jake Tapper is one of the best journalists out there.

He'll piss you off one day, and the very next day, you'll be cheering for him.

It should show that maybe he's not as biased as

I am.

You know what I mean?

That once in a while, you know, you're like, oh, why would you say that?

But the very next day,

he is asking the same person really tough questions.

And boy, did he ask this sheriff tough questions.

He asked the sheriff pretty much every question that I had for him.

Every question I had.

And followed up on many of them as well.

I mean, he and created a whole list of new questions after the interview.

We should go through it because there was a lot there.

This guy is, I don't know how he makes it through this with his job.

I don't know how.

This is a disaster.

We fix Reason firmly in her seat and

ask the sheriff some reasonable questions and really get tough answers back.

Glenn.

No answers.

Back.

Mercury.

Another school shooting.

The gunfire lasted less than 10 minutes, but this.

Heavily armed with a bulletproof vest, loads of ammunition, and a powerful AR-15.

Another debate about banning guns.

Keep assault rifles out of the hands of people who are going to shoot our kids.

I want this to be the catalyst, the end of the Second Amendment.

Now, more than ever, you need to know the facts.

Get control, exposing the truth about guns on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

All right, so

I want to talk to you about this school shooting and where we go from here, but I want to do it with

this in mind.

If it meant, if it meant

that

we could stop all shootings,

would you consider an infringement on your Second Amendment right, if it meant?

To me, the answer is yes, but I know the evidence shows that it doesn't work.

So, no, no.

If you could show me

real evidence that this was an outdated mode of thinking and that,

you know, we had somehow or another solved the reason why you should have guns in the first place, and that is against tyranny,

and you need it for self-protection.

Well, then you could talk me into it.

But I've never seen that evidence.

I've looked for that evidence, but I'm open to hearing new evidence.

Share away.

If you are on the other side and I could show you evidence that

we could do a few things beside not taking away guns and it was effective,

would you change your mind?

Would you say, well, let's start there.

And for both sides, if we could get to a place to where I could just say, look, you know, we want to have this gun debate.

That's fine.

But this is one of the oldest debates in American history.

What is a militia?

So we're not going to solve this in the next couple of weeks.

Do we all believe that

more shooting is coming?

I think it's safe to say, yes, we all know that.

Okay, so what are we going to do to solve it?

Well, the first thing is, what can we learn from this shooting?

What can we learn from the last shooting?

We learned from the last shooting in the church that, A, somebody who is just a civilian with a firearm can stop the shooting.

But we also learned that the Air Force was not reporting people with mental health issues or issues with guns and domestic abuse to put them in the system.

That had to be changed.

Now, what have we learned on this one?

Well, I think one thing that we've learned is there's something wrong with this sheriff.

There's something wrong, deeply wrong, in Broward County.

It's one thing to have one guy that stays out of the building and waits while the shooting is going on.

But there were four sheriff deputies.

He denies that,

although his denial has lots of

qualifications to it,

which maybe we'll hear some of that here in this interview.

But I think there's also the thing of, what do you learn from this mass shooting?

And one of the things I think when you're leading up to the mass shooting is if every citizen in America has told you that one specific person is going to do a school shooting, that might be a time to understand that perhaps that person is in danger of doing a school shooting.

Maybe you should do something about that.

When you have the number of reports and the number of altercations with this student that they did and the Sheriff's Department did nothing, that's a problem.

That's a real problem.

And that's easy to fix.

Let's make sure that's not happening anyplace else.

Let's discuss this and get to the bottom of it.

Jake Tapper started unraveling this

hero sheriff's story

over the weekend.

And let's start with why was there no report when they called and said he's going to be a school shooter?

He's a school shooter in the making, and he has access to guns.

Why was there no report?

Listen.

Fewer than three months ago, your office received a call from a tipster explicitly saying that Cruz could be a, quote, school shooter in the making.

According to notes released on that call, no report was even initiated.

At this point, sir, do you understand how the public, seeing red flag after red flag after red flag, warning after warning after warning, they hear that your office didn't even initiate a report when they got a call saying that this guy could be a school shooter in the making?

How could there not even be a report on this one?

Well, if that's accurate, Jake,

there needed to be a report and that's what we're looking into that a report needed to be uh completed it needed to be forwarded to our either homeland security or or violent crimes unit and and they would have followed up on your notes that's from notes released by your office i'm not i'm not making this up this is from broward no and that's and that's what that the the officer who handled that is on restrictive duty and we are that's an active internal investigation and we are looking into it okay so there's another person

under his command that has failed to do the job.

Yet he wanted more law enforcement power.

That should always scare people.

What are you doing with the power that you do have?

But he's been asking for more power.

Listen.

The whole crux of this is giving law enforcement, giving deputies, giving police officers, not only in Broward County, but in Florida and around the nation, expanded power to be able able to do something more than just write a report.

That's the whole reason I went on CNN and the United States.

Isn't making a threat against a school a crime?

Not if the person doesn't have the ability to carry it out.

You could say a nonspecific threat, I'm going to go to a school or it's not a crime.

If the person doesn't have the apparent ability to carry it out, it's not a crime.

In September 2016, the shooter indicated he wanted to buy a gun.

Deputy Peterson knew about that.

He initiated a report.

The school launched a threat assessment.

At this point, you have somebody saying that they're going to shoot up a school and somebody with a gun.

That's not enough?

That's not enough.

That's not enough.

Huh.

And that's just one of the incidents.

Of course, there's dozens.

But I mean, huh?

Is that true?

Because his first answer is, do they have the ability to carry it out?

Yes.

Then he says, well, it hasn't.

Stop using reason.

Okay, I'm going to.

Yeah.

say, calm down.

He said, calm down.

Stop using reason.

Let's just jump on his side or against him, depending on what our religion tells us to do.

That's true.

This is the problem.

This is the problem.

So reason would tell you, well, let's stop here.

Let's stop here.

Is that true?

Now, we know that's not true.

We know that's not true.

There was a paper trail very long against this kid.

So you obviously have enough power to make sure that he is not around guns, to make sure that he gets some sort of medical treatment, et cetera, et cetera, whatever it is.

You may not be able to throw him in prison, but you certainly can restrict him with all of the stuff that we had.

So we know that's not true.

If it was true, that should be the first thing the sheriff is asking for.

Right there.

Here's specifics.

I had 31

complaints against this guy.

19 of them them we did exactly right.

Okay, we'll get back to the others that you didn't get right.

But on those 19, I couldn't do anything.

And we knew he had a gun.

We knew that he was holding it to people's heads.

We knew that he was threatening to shoot up the school.

And we couldn't do anything.

We know that's not true.

But if it is true, or if it were true, that should be the first thing we work on, don't you think?

Because there has to be other schools and other sheriffs that are facing the same thing.

I know this kid is going to go and do something because of the 19 reports that we have, but I can't do anything.

We should hear from those sheriffs.

We should know.

Let us help you protect the children.

All right.

Next cut.

When did he know about Peterson?

I love this one.

When did you find out that Deputy Peterson had not gone into the building?

How soon after the shooting did you know that?

Not for days.

We

had investigators looked.

I'm not sure.

Because you spent much of the Wednesday night town hall on CNN

with the entire Stoneman Douglas community, students and teachers and parents, attacking the NRA, saying that police need more powers, more money to prevent future tragedies.

You didn't disclose any of this to the crowd then, the Stoneman Douglas high school community.

Did you know it then?

Did you know it Wednesday night?

It was spoken about

earlier during that day.

I'm not on a timeline for TV or any news show.

We need to get it right.

We need to get it accurate.

We're talking about people's lives.

We're talking about a community.

We need to corroborate.

We need to verify.

And once we did the next day, and I looked at the tape and I was 100% certain that it happened the way I was told about the investigators initially told about.

I didn't even release it right you didn't look at the video

one week after the shooting you hadn't looked at the video yet

I looked at the video as soon as our investigators

it wasn't my job to look at the video it was investigators job to look at the video I'm still sheriffing this this this this county there were many things to do we have investigators homicide investigators internal affairs investigators dissecting it and when they felt that there was a video that ready for my view that I might take action on one of our deputies.

I looked at the video.

I mean, if you believe this guy hadn't seen that video before that town hall in a week's time, then he needs to be dismissed as incompetent just for that.

I mean, there's tons of things that I would love to sell you.

But the other thing is, can you imagine, forget it, even if he saw the video.

He tells you there that he knew about it going on stage.

Can you imagine the balls to go on stage on national television and yell at Dana Lash and say that she's not standing up for these kids when you know that your deputy was actually not standing up.

He was crouching behind a wall while people were being executed inside the school.

Can you imagine the balls to go on television and not bring that up?

Now listen to this.

Listen to this idea.

That's incredible.

Let's just fix reason firmly in her seat and let's just use his logic.

He doesn't want to go on television because

there's a crowd there.

It's community.

It's a community that is grieving.

And he wants to make sure you just don't go in front of that community, in front of that crowd, unless he can verify everything.

And he's 100%

sure that that's what happened.

So he was 100% sure that the NRA caused this shooting.

He's 100%

sure

that it was the gun and not the kid.

He was 100% sure, even though

he had evidence presented to him that things could have been different if not one, but four of his deputies would have moved in.

He was 100% sure that it was the NRA's fault,

but he wouldn't bring anything.

He wouldn't bring anything about his group unless he was 100% sure and he just wasn't, he wasn't there.

But he was so sure that the people who weren't there were at fault.

I don't understand that.

That doesn't seem like you're really doing an investigation.

That seems like a witch hunt.

Oh, and he didn't want to let that fact out in front of the families

in a public forum.

He wanted to do it one-on-one, Glenn.

I wanted to make sure that was one-on-one.

I know.

Well, he did the very next morning in a press conference, so he didn't do it one-on-one.

He just put it out in a press release, talked to reporters about it.

Talked to reporters, but in this interview with Jake Tapper, Tapper, one of the reasons why he didn't do it was because he needed to, you just didn't tell people like that in a crowd or just an impersonal forum.

Like the town hall, you needed to, you know, there was one parent that wasn't there, and he wanted to make sure everybody was there so he could personally tell them.

So all the parents were there at the press release?

No, that's interesting.

No, it's strange, isn't it?

You let that crowd attack Dana Lash, calling her a murderer and all these other terrible things.

It was mob.

It was a mob.

Christians and Lions, as you've been talking about it.

I mean, absolute mob.

And you knew, as you were sitting on that stage and

making it worse by putting more blame on her and the NRA, you knew your own deputy,

you were going to fire him the next day for dereliction of duty because he didn't go in there.

You, your judgment of it, is of his actions are so bad.

And you don't even bring that up.

And in fact, you make it worse.

You make people go after her.

You make her life be threatened.

That is incomprehensible.

If this guy makes it through this thing with his job, that is,

I don't even, there is absolutely no justice.

I will tell you that during, during the town hall, during the town hall,

CNN people wondered if Dana and others had security to be able to get them out.

They started to worry about the guests' security.

Wow.

Wow.

Huh.

I know I felt that way, but it's strange to hear CNN might have felt that way, and yet they continued to go.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn Beck.

There is a lot wrong with this sheriff, and we are going to go through our investigation today at 5 o'clock.

You don't want to miss it.

What are the things that just don't make sense here?

And by the way,

he was nailed for nepotism and hiring you know family members and uh campaign people three hundred and eighty eight thousand dollars in uh in cost adding so he could have his campaign people on staff

he's there's something wrong here

mercury

love

courage

truth

glenn

The modern era progressive insurrection is coming.

The coming insurrection.

Something that we talked about about eight years ago.

We saw this beginning of this movement in France.

It's a political civil war fought within the Democratic Party's own house.

I'm convinced that there are two...

There are two civil wars going on right now, and they're both happening in each of the parties.

One is this

infiltration and takeover by the alt-right of the GOP and the Democratic socialist takeover of the

Democratic Party?

On the one side, in the Democrats, let's just talk about the Democrats here.

There's the new blood Democratic socialists, basically just a

PC and less scary way of saying socialists or Marxists.

And on the other side, there is the establishment of Democrats.

The New Blood is now angry, and I think they're about to make their move.

California may be the first battleground state.

In a surprise and completely unexpected move, the California State Democratic Party decided not to endorse Senator Diane Feinstein as she gears up campaigning for the 2018 midterms.

Calling Feinstein a senior senator is a little misleading.

She's entrenched and been the senior senator for, oh, I think about 150 years.

She was, I believe she was talking about when she was running for governor

and how the last time she faced this was when she was running for governor.

And that was in 1990, I believe.

She was older than me today.

She was older than I am today at that time in 1990.

Feinstein represents everything that the new blood is angry about.

In their eyes, she's a centrist, a Washington stooge, a corporate sellout.

And they're tired of the status quo, the capitulation, the lack of direction.

What is the Democratic platform right now?

Really?

What is it?

Resistance?

Opposition to Trump?

That's not a direction.

That's a spinning compass.

And it is exactly the same position that the GOP found itself in after seven years of Obama.

The establishment had no clue how to reach their base anymore.

The one thing they knew everybody agreed on was Obamacare had to be stopped, and it was anyone but Hillary.

Resistance to one thing and one person is not a platform,

and this leads to disgruntled voters.

Trump came along and he listened to them, and the result was probably the most stunning upset in American political history.

The radical progressives are the only voices on the left that are actually outlining any kind of action or agenda.

To quote Feinstein's newly endorsed opponent within her own party, it's not just about resistance, it's about real laws.

And here's what they want.

Open borders, a single-payer healthcare system.

They want a massive welfare state, and they're tired of waiting for it.

To them, just like we discussed years ago, In the book from France, The Coming Insurrection, the slow creep and eventual socialist takeover isn't working.

That's what they were complaining about in France.

It's taking too long.

And I don't think you, you people that we elected that promised us this utopian world are ever going to get there.

I think it's all about you.

And so in that book, the French were prepared to rise up and take it.

Progressives, democratic socialists, whatever they're calling themselves

these days, they are coming for the incumbents, the people like Dianne Feinstein.

Whether she'll lose or not at this time, I don't know.

But they are coming, and they're the only ones left with an actual plan.

They're the only ones with an actual voice and message.

Democrats are about to make a hard turn to the extreme left.

What's going down in California, I believe, is just the beginning.

It's Monday, February 26th.

You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

So, today, I'm we started the show with the school shooting and this

this plea to revive the Enlightenment,

which is what the movement was that created this country.

The idea that man can rule himself is being lost because man's proving the point that he can't.

Because

he's given in to the religion of the day, our political ideology.

And so we're changing positions.

We're going back and forth.

Nothing makes sense.

There is no common sense anymore.

When a class two look-alike firearm, a finger gun, can get somebody in trouble

because that's teaching our kids to be violent.

But Hollywood, nobody's even talking about that.

Or gaming, where you're in a virtual world with a gun and you're shooting people's heads off.

No, that's nothing to worry about.

But a class two firearm, something's wrong.

We have no reason.

And I want to start focusing on people who are using reason and are breaking the norms.

People who are, think of this, open

to having their minds changed one way or another.

I think journalism is in real trouble because we are, we're just, you know what you're going to read from whatever, you know, news organization you go to.

You would think reading Politico that Politico is on the left.

I think most conservatives believe that.

I'm not sure that they would agree with that.

But the editor-in-chief of Politico magazine, Blake Hounsell, is a guy who has written a piece lately that I don't know if he's getting heat for saying, wait a minute, hang on just a second.

I'm not so sure about this Donald Trump

collusion charge anymore.

Blake, I'm interested in this piece because

it's an interesting piece called Confessions of a Russia Gate Skeptic.

And you point out that there are really serious questions that need to be answered and serious things that have happened as they've gone through these investigations.

But you bring up an interesting

point, which is something I think we've talked about a lot on the show.

We weren't big Donald Trump fans here.

But I've kind of felt the same thing that a lot of these claims about Russia Gate and the outward intentional collusion with Russia may be overblown.

Could you go through kind of how you came to this conclusion?

And I'd love to hear, too, if you're getting pushback from people who do seem to have an investment in making sure that this is true.

Sure.

And thanks so much for having me on.

This is something I've been thinking about for a while as I watched some of the breathless coverage of the Russia scandal.

And, you know, by the way,

let me just say that I think that the Russian meddling in the election is a serious matter, and I think

we saw

the indictments from Mueller of the 13 Russians and the three Russian organizations.

They definitely tried to mess with our democracy, and that is serious business.

The question is really whether Donald Trump was personally involved in cutting a deal with the Russians to help him win the election.

And I'm skeptical for a number of reasons, one of which is that

I watched the Trump campaign, and it was a mess.

I mean, it's certainly an achievement that they dispatched a pretty strong Republican field, and

they beat Hillary Clinton, who was,

if not a formidable candidate, she certainly had a formidable war chest and organs of the Democratic Party behind her.

But, you know, remember, this campaign was really disorganized.

And I think Steve Bannon, of all people, said it best when he said, we couldn't even collude with the Republican National Committee, let alone the Russians.

And from everything that we saw covering the campaign, I think that's true.

I mean, these guys couldn't organize a two-car parade.

And also, this is something I didn't mention in the piece, but I think it's worth noting.

They didn't expect to win.

So if they were counting on this sweet deal with the Russians to get elected,

why were they leaking in the weeks running up to November 8th that

they were going to lose?

They were all looking for their next gig.

Trump was quietly working on Trump television.

And by all accounts, he was shocked that he actually won.

So I don't think that kind of thing squares with this notion that there was some secret collusion.

Having said that, he certainly seemed open to the idea right the Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr.

where he said you know there's this crazy email from this British promoter who says hey you remember that thing about how the Russians are going to help your father get elected I've got some dirt for you and Don Jr.

emails back you know if it's what you say it is I love it especially later in the summer But then there's no follow-up as far as we can tell.

It seems like it was a meeting

on false pretenses by these people who were trying to get the

Magnitsky Act sanctions lifted.

And it's not clear what their connection was to the Russian government.

I think the the Trump people were disappointed because they were expecting some better dirt than they got, which was some stuff related to Bill Browder, who's a former hedge fund guy who's been

funding and leading these efforts to sanction the Russians because his lawyer was killed in mysterious circumstances years ago in Russia.

So it's murky,

but I think people have really gotten ahead of their skis.

So I think there are lots of reasons to doubt a sort of strong version of the collusion argument.

So Blake, I think we're in lockstep on this.

I too believe that the Russians I don't know if they were trying to affect the election as much as they are trying to cause chaos and distrust.

I mean, that's their own words.

They are trying to pit us against each other and destroy us from within.

I mean, the enemy has to come from within for us to really fall, if you believe Abraham Lincoln.

A house divided itself against itself cannot stand.

And we're doing a nice job at that.

And yeah, we're doing great.

We're doing that expertly.

America's number one.

Yeah, we're number one at that.

Do you see a willingness in the press

to find the real answer, which to me is the real answer is

Russia is real trouble.

And if we don't pay attention and we don't start doing things that we need to do, they are going to get better at this

and hurt us as we did them in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Do you see a willingness in the press on either side to stop making this about Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump and make this about the Russians and what they're trying to do to us.

Well, you know, I think it's hard to generalize about the press.

There's lots of reporters who are sort of trying to dig into the facts of the investigation.

And, you know, there's opinion folks that are trying to make

score political points on one side or the other all the time.

I do think there is a real bipartisan concern out there about how to stop the Russians the next time around.

But nobody's really talking about the point that you made, which is that

the reason they were able to have any success, and it's hard to say what kind of success they had, and how do we measure

what the impact of their efforts was.

We are so divided as a country.

We're tearing each other apart every day.

People are sharing

fake and misleading news all the time.

And

because the partisan divide has gotten so wide and so deep in this country,

it's like child's play for a country like Russia to come in and manipulate us.

I mean,

when you see what they did, they took positions on what was it, right after the election, they did a not my president and a celebratory, you know, pro-Donald Trump party, both in New York City.

They took the side of the cops against Black Lives Matter and against the cops with Black Lives Matter.

I mean, that's all they were trying to do is to get us to the extreme to argue with each other and hate each other.

Yeah, and they're doing a bang-up job of it.

I mean, remember that

people talk about how Michael Flynn went to that Russia Today gala dinner in Moscow.

Well, guess who was there?

Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate.

And she's never really adequately explained what she was doing there.

And then you have lots of evidence, including in the indictment, that the Russians were trying to help Bernie Sanders and boost his campaign during the election.

So, you know, you have to keep in mind that Vladimir Putin is a completely amoral guy.

He doesn't really have an ideology other than Putinism.

And, you know, he doesn't care whether he's supporting Republicans or Democrats or the Green Party or Libertarians or whoever.

He just wants to cause chaos.

And, you know, it suited his purpose during the election to

help out Donald Trump, and then it suited his purposes after the election to boost the left and hurt Donald Trump.

This is a guy who only cares about power, and frankly, you know, he's winning right now.

Back to Stu's original question.

Are you getting any pushback from the

politicos of the world, so to speak,

that

want to make this the story of one side or the other, Democrats, Republicans, bad.

Yeah, I mean, I was, you know, I was hesitant to write this, and I'd been thinking about it for a while for exactly that reason

that I was afraid I was going to be accused of

covering for Donald Trump or

offering him support that he didn't deserve.

And,

you know, finally, I just had to get it off my chest and say what I thought

because

I think that people have gotten way out of control and beyond the facts on this.

Yeah, I've gotten a fair amount of

respectful, not hateful, criticism on Twitter, mostly from the left.

And then there are people that are kind of welcoming me into one ideological side or another.

I'm just trying to call it straight.

Right.

Blake, we're not trying to welcome you into one side or another.

What we're trying to do is say thank you for saying something that we know probably cost you because you believed it.

Not because we believe it, but because you believed it.

We need more brave people to actually say what they think is right and take that risk.

Thanks, Blake.

Appreciate it.

I appreciate it.

Thanks.

And that's Blake Hounschell, the editor-in-chief of Politico.

So it's a big deal when something like this comes out.

The article is Confessions of a Russia Gate Skeptic.

And I encourage you to read the whole thing because they go through piece by piece, Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Michael Flynn, all the accusations,

and take them on in a way that I think is not expected by the rest of the media.

So really interesting piece.

We'll tweet it from Ackland back in Atworld of Stupid.

Courage is contagious.

Markets are beginning to price for a potential interest rate hike in March.

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Glenn Back Mercury.

Glenn Back.

Coming up in just a little while, we have John Lott.

He is probably

the

best

statician, would you call him?

Statistician on guns.

He is a co-author of my book, Control, The Truth About Guns.

And we have him to come in and just let's fix reason firmly in her seat.

And let's talk about the actual stats.

of guns and ARs and everything else.

And let's base our life on facts, not on feelings.

That's going to be hard to do in this

world that is disconnected from reason, but let's at least stand our ground.

And going back to a quick Blake Hounschell from Politico, again, point this out.

This is a guy who is the editor-in-chief of Politico saying, hey, I don't know if there's really that much to a lot of the things that the media is emphasizing when it comes to the Russia thing.

And I think it's important to highlight people from the left or from the mainstream media who come and say, say, hey, wait a minute,

let's take a breath here.

And

let's maybe go push against what the rest of the media is saying.

I know that whenever we talk about Russia and say, hey, there is something here from Russia, we get pushback from the bright parts of the world who say, we're not, I don't know, being loyal enough to Donald Trump.

And we haven't couldn't have been clearer that we don't think this is a Donald Trump issue.

It's not.

It's important that I think we highlight those voices when they are out there.

And again, you can read that at Glenn Becker at World of Stu on Twitter.

Back in a second.

Glenn back.

Mercury.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

I want to continue the conversation we were having before the break about

courage.

Have you noticed that courage is not rewarded anymore?

Courage is courage to speak your mind.

For instance, we just had Blake Houndshell on.

He's the editor-in-chief of Politico.

Now, here's a guy who has pressure for clicks,

pressure.

from his peers,

pressure in this world that he lives in of

groupthink, pressure in the world that he lives in of political power and posturing.

And he says himself in the interview that he just did with us that

he was concerned about saying, wait, I'm not sure there's anything to this Donald Trump collusion thing.

Now here's the editor-in-chief of the Politico.

You'd think he wouldn't be afraid of anything.

But he was afraid.

Why?

Because we've let our ideologies

become our religion.

Our religions, our actual religion, our churches are even answering to the higher power, and that is politics.

We are all becoming

members of the church

of the GOP or the DNC.

And just like all churches, man, we fight against each other.

If you are a part of that church, you're going to hell.

You're part of the devil.

I've come to a place to where I just don't believe any of that.

I just don't believe it.

And you know what?

If God is, if that's God, then

I don't want any part of him.

If God is this guy who is like, yeah, there's a really good person who's really trying to really be great and he's following the faith that he finds honestly in his heart, and you're going to damn him to hell.

I don't know what, I don't understand any of it then.

I don't understand what I was supposed to learn from Jesus, if that's the truth.

And I know that makes me a heretic.

Good.

Good.

I'm not saying it's true.

It's where I am.

I don't know what truth is anymore.

Because truth...

Truth is supposed to be verifiable.

Everything else is faith.

Truth is verifiable.

And even truth can change when it comes to scientific truths.

We take theories and we've made them into truth.

I, you know,

evolution?

I don't think so, but I don't know.

The Big Bang?

Could be.

But it's a theory.

I don't know.

What happened before the Big Bang?

What led the fuse?

What's first cause?

I don't know.

You don't know.

We have to be able to have these conversations without damning each other.

Jake Tapper.

Boy, I wish he, I wish he would have done, I wish he would have said more at the town hall, but I don't know what he could have said at the town hall.

The problem was the town hall itself, CNN should not have put 4,000 grieving, angry people into an auditorium to have a reasoned, rational debate.

It was destined to be a bloodlust from the very beginning.

Do I wish he would have said something?

Yes, I do, but he didn't.

Over the weekend, he did an unbelievable job of excoriating this sheriff when he had the facts and he asked simple questions.

I pointed this out over the weekend and man, it's incredible.

Jake Tapper can do nothing right.

A guy who was a hero of journalism to so many on the right just a few years ago when he pushed the administration up against the wall?

Is now the devil himself.

Why?

Because he's asking tough questions of the administration.

Isn't that what we want?

I don't want someone who is asking easy questions of either side.

I want the truth.

You know,

The commanding voice

The voice that speaks little

But when it speaks

It has compelling moral authority that's gone

We don't have that anymore

We have flattened every distinction out we don't want anything different We want uniformity.

We want to all walk in lockstep.

That's not who we are.

Respect for

the noble, for the great, for the brave, for the rare,

for the man or woman that only appears every hundred or thousand years.

That's gone.

Respect is gone.

Ask anybody, who do you really respect?

The answer will literally be: nobody,

nothing.

This is our age, the age

of unrespecting,

the age of mediocrity.

That's not who we are.

If you want to be a leader today, man,

even a mediocre leader going to pull you down from every side.

You're going to be shot at from every side.

You are constantly and in every way, from every side, being pulled down.

And let me ask you:

do you know anybody alive today that's going to be remembered in a hundred years or a thousand years?

Do you know anybody?

do you know have you have you seen anyone that is is living today

that has the respect and the staying power of Plato or Aristotle

or Paul Augustine Aquinas Lincoln

Immanuel Kant Bonhoeffer

Churchill

King

do you see them

America,

you're good.

No matter where you're hearing my voice,

you are good.

Unfortunately, in today's world, it's not enough just to be good.

good.

You have to be good for something.

What is it that you are contributing?

What is it that you are

that you're building?

What good are you bringing to the world?

Will it be said of you,

the world

was a better place because you were alive?

You have to be good for something, and that good is something that you must spread to others.

America is great because America was good, and we spread it to others, not out of arrogance like we have in the last hundred and twenty years,

but because what we created was good.

We're living in a world world of mediocrity.

We are living in a world that is pushing,

strangely, sameness and otherness.

You are either with us or against us.

You're either in lockstep on everything

or nothing at all.

Rise above it.

Be better than that.

Rise above mediocrity.

Rise above indifference.

Rise above the crowd.

And when the whole crowd has turned their back on you,

that's okay.

At this time in history, the crowd is wrong.

And if you ever see someone in that crowd turn, for just a second, they turn and they recognize common sense and they recognize common truths.

Make sure you say to that person in the crowd, good for you, yes.

Because if they begin to turn and you look at them and say, what good are you anyway?

Where were you the rest of the time?

They will never turn your way again.

No matter if they spit on you, no matter if they hate you,

it doesn't matter.

The world has always hated those people.

It's always hated the people who wouldn't go with the crowd.

This is our greatest opportunity

to really prove who we are and what we believe.

Don't get tired.

Become committed.

Screw your courage to the sticking place

and stand for something.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn Beck.

So there is a story that I read that I just can't figure out.

I don't know how this is bad.

Donald Trump decorated the Oval Office with hand-me-downs from past presidents.

He's in Respect the Office, Glenn.

Oh, hey.

No, I can't believe that.

This is one of the greatest stories.

This makes me go, yeah.

Because I would not expect this from Donald Trump.

This is a great Donald Trump story.

This is a great Donald Trump story.

If you look at the photos of the White House over the years, you'll find that Trump has just borrowed a number of design elements from his predecessors.

Dwight Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter both skipped redecorating that follows a new president's ascension to the White House.

Even Ronald Reagan didn't break out his interior design until his second term.

Still, most modern presidents have redesigned the space to fit their own taste.

I thought the whole thing would be dipped in gold by now.

Okay.

That's what everyone said it was going to happen.

He's going to put his name on the front of it.

So remember when George Bush said the first question you get once you are elected president is you get a call from the White House and they say, what do you want your rug to look like?

Okay, I think Donald Trump's

answer was, I don't know, is there an old one laying around?

He's using Ronald Reagan's rug, George Bush's couches in this story, Barack Obama's desk.

That's

you'd have to go into that one.

Yeah, the Abraham Lincoln bust that was last displayed by Barack Obama, Gerald Ford's large case, you know, grandfather clock, a portrait of Jefferson hung by Lyndon Johnson in Bill Clinton's drapes.

Amen.

Good.

He didn't spend anything.

What do you have?

I love this.

They have cleaned those drapes, right?

I don't know if they could get everything out of the rug, but they did clean the drapes.

Here's another story that I would

be interesting to see the media cover.

North Korea's cheerleaders

that became the media darlings at the Winter Olympics.

Yeah, it was a great story.

They really were passionate about the North Korean team.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

New report out at Bloomberg.

Apparently, they're also sex slaves for the dictatorship.

They have to attend daily parties

to promote propaganda and they must provide sexual services.

to the party leadership, whether they want to or not.

Might seem like a fancy show on the outside.

However, they have to go to parties and provide sexual services, and that kind of pain follows.

Oh, I wonder if anybody from the press would like to take it back that they were so funny and so

cheery.

Maybe they were very happy because that was a moment where they weren't doing that.

Clapping for a team is a lot better

than what they had to do at home.

And there's one more,

there's one more story out.

You remember the cat lady from New York?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

She's come out in a new press story and said, I've never had any plastic surgery at all.

This is all natural.

She made me the cat.

I don't know.

Glenn back.

Mercury.

Love.

Courage.

Truth.

Glenn back.

Abraham Lincoln said, I am a firm believer in the people.

If given the truth, they can be dependent upon to meet any national crisis.

But the great point is to bring them the real facts.

So we're going to do that this half hour.

Let's start here with the facts about the hashtag never again movement and the upcoming March for Our Lives rally that is planned for March 24th in Washington, D.C.

For over a week now, CNN and the the rest of the media portrayed this movement as grassroots and totally teen-driven.

And maybe it was at the very beginning, but it's not anymore.

Just a few days after the horrible tragedy at Stoneman Douglas High School, a junior, Cameron Caskey, set up a GoFundMe account to raise money for the March for Our Lives.

Caskey is the teenager who confronted Senator Rubio on stage at CNN's monster truck rally event last Wednesday night.

And so far, 32,000 people have donated $2.5 million to go to the GoFundMe account.

2.5.

So you know that is more money than we raised by far for restoring honor on the National Mall.

So what is this money going for?

Well, on the GoFundMe page, Casky says the funds will be spent on the incredibly difficult and expensive process that is organizing an event like this.

How does she know how much it costs?

We have people making more specific plans, but for now, know that this is the march, and for everything left over is going to be going to victims' funds.

The March for Our Lives has now received an additional $3.5 million in pledges from George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Gucci,

and Eli Broad.

Cameron Kaski's father said that Cameron and friends are being directed by people with knowledge of how to responsibly spend this money, and it's going to be very transparent.

End quote.

Well, I hope it's better than George Clooney's September 11th fund.

Caskey's dad also said that with Clooney's help, the teens have been able to bring some attorneys in, some administrative help, and public relations firm whose clients include Meryl Streep, Will Smith, Charlize Therone, Woody Allen.

Hmm, keep him away from the teenagers.

So why do you need all of this if it's such a grassroots thing driven by teenagers?

Because these are now 16-year-olds with over $6 million at their disposal.

Already, the March for Our Lives rally has a slick website selling merchandise.

This is a political campaign, make no mistake.

The new spokesperson for the rally said, yes.

Yes, any leftover funds going towards supporting a continuing long-term effort by and for young people to end the epidemic of mass shootings that has turned our classrooms into crime scenes.

In other words, March for Our Lives is essentially a new gun control lobbying firm started by 16-year-old kids, but not run by 16-year-old kids.

And by the way, my question would have been, you have an official spokesperson now?

The teens have brought in Dina Katz to help organize the rally.

Katz is the co-ex-executive producer of Dancing with the Stars.

Oh, and she was the co-executive director of the Los Angeles Women's March.

No big deal.

The rally is also being organized in collaboration with a nonprofit group called Every Town for Gun Safety.

The advisory board of this group includes one former governor and six former mayors, all Democrats.

It also includes Michael Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, and Kenneth Lehre, who helped start the Huffington Post BuzzFeed, oh, and the website stoptheNRA.com.

Caskey said the march in D.C.

will include a protest outside of the White House where they will destroy AR-15 rifles.

He told CBS, at the end of the day, this isn't a red and blue thing.

This isn't Democrats or Republicans.

This is about everybody and how we're begging for for our lives.

Now, perhaps Caskey truly feels that way, but it's a crash course in how American politics and media work.

This may have started as a teen cause, but it has been hijacked by very powerful forces on the left, and they have a very specific agenda.

It's Monday, February 26th.

You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

Imagine, if this this was on the other side, what the press would be saying about the funding if just one, just one of the Koch brothers would have written a check for $100,000.

Imagine what the media would be saying.

We want to stick to the facts, 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 questions over blindfolded fear.

That was Thomas Jefferson, and that is the spirit of the Enlightenment.

That was the spirit of America, but we have lost that.

Now everybody's just trying to win.

Well, let's stop trying to win and let's actually start to figure out what is happening.

There's something deep inside of our children that has changed.

ARs have been available since Vietnam.

Kids weren't shooting each other.

What's happened to us?

And let's get the facts on guns and the actual facts on what the proposals actually mean.

Will they help our children be safer?

We go to John Lott.

He has written an article.

He's also a co-author of my book, Control.

He is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and probably the best mind on the stats around guns and gun control.

Welcome to the program, John.

How are you?

Doing okay, Glenn.

Good to talk to you again.

So, John, let me just go through your article piece by piece because facts are important.

The new hot number from the gun control advocates is that there have been 18 school shootings so far this year.

Can you tell me about the 18 that have happened since the beginning of the year?

Right.

Well, I mean, it includes gunshots fired on campus as well as those off of campus.

Includes things like a police officer who accidentally discharged his gun and nobody was harmed.

It includes suicides that may have occurred by an adult in the car parking lot that had nothing to do with the school, somebody just driving by, pulling into the parking lot and killing themselves.

It includes a case where a pellet gun broke a window in a school bus that was parked

not even on actual school property, but in a parking lot for buses.

Nobody was inside the bus at the time when the pellet gun broke the window.

Things that range from

annoying to

minor cases to things that don't have anything to do with guns on campus.

And

you have

two of them that are kind of what would be these mass public shootings that get everybody's attention, where you had people killed

and multiple people harmed.

One was in Kentucky, and the other one was obviously in Florida.

So,

what everybody is saying they're looking for is an end to these.

And they're making all kinds of proposals, so let's take them one by one.

First, more background checks.

Right.

Before we get through the whole list, I just want to say something.

That is, I'm incredibly frustrated by this debate.

I've been involved in this debate for 20 years.

I had a piece in the Wall Street Journal back in 1998, in March 98,

calling for getting rid of gun-free zones at schools, pointing out that we hadn't really had any of these attacks at schools until after 1995 when the so-called gun-free school zone act was passed federally.

And,

you know,

I want to do something.

I don't want these things to ever occur again, but I want something that actually matters.

The types of rules that you are asking me to go through right now, the one thing that they share in common is that they wouldn't have stopped these attacks.

And yet they're the ones that people keep on pushing for even before we know

what the facts were for a case.

Right.

I mean, we look at what happened with the sheriff, and

all of the things that should have been done, could have been done, would have been done in other places.

We had multiple opportunities to stop this shooter, even while he was shooting, and we didn't do them.

Right.

Well, I mean,

it's

cowardice and other things.

You can have training.

It's not clear that the sheriff's deputies had proper training in these cases.

And,

you know,

but even beyond that, I want to replace these signs that we have at schools that say these schools are a gun-free zone with signs that you can see in places from Texas to Oklahoma to Ohio and other places that say warning selective staff or teachers at these schools

have weapons to be able to go and defend themselves and others.

You know, we have 25 states in the United States that, to varying degrees now, allow

people to be able to carry permanent concealed handguns on the school grounds.

You know, staff or teachers.

Some are much more liberal in terms of allowing it than others.

But in all those places that allow it, there's not one example of a school shooting occurring.

There's no, you know, the fears that people have if you listen to the discussion last week from people like

Senator Rubio to the listening session that President Trump had, where people were saying, well, you know, teachers are emotional, was one of the arguments that were brought up against Trump.

Well, you know,

you don't see any problems that occur.

I know of one accidental discharge that occurred outside of school hours,

and that's it.

You know,

And that's over years, decades.

And so

the discussion is often, well, let's put a police officer in a place.

The problem is, putting somebody in uniform is,

it may make you feel good, but it's an impossible job.

Anybody who's read any of my books knows that I think police are extremely important in stopping crime.

I think police are the single most important factor.

But

if you put an officer in uniform to try to guard against these types of attacks, it's an impossible job.

Putting somebody in uniform is like putting somebody there who has a neon sign above them that says, shoot me first.

Because if he's the only person that has a weapon, these killers know that if they kill the police officer first, then they have nothing more to worry about.

Then they're going to be free for some period of time until others are able to arrive on the scene to go and kill people.

So, John.

Why do they take them out first?

This is something that we clearly know as a society.

It's why we protect the identity of air marshals.

It's why we don't put an armed police officer in uniform on airplanes.

We let them mix in so the bad guy never knows who the good guy is.

We don't want to shoot out.

Well, you certainly don't have a problem with a shootout in an airplane.

And by the way, pilots, are they emotional?

Because all the pilots had to be trained to use a weapon just in case the air marshal goes down.

We didn't have a problem with that either.

This is a bogus debate.

Let me go through before we run out of time.

Let me go through the things.

For instance, more background checks.

Tell me about why that won't work.

Well, the one go-to law from Obama through now and other times has been these background checks on private private transfers.

The deal is,

not only wouldn't it have been relevant for this attack in Florida, and people were calling for this like in an hour and a half after the attack, even before they knew how the killer had gotten his gun,

there's not one mass public shooting this century or years before that would have been stopped if this law had been in effect.

There's simply no cases where people have gotten the gun in this way that would have been stopped by the background check, even if it had been effective.

One of these silly things that they push for,

and

my own belief is the reason why they push for it is they just want to make it costly for law-abiding citizens to get guns.

They know, they've been asked a couple times by the media

to identify one case where this has mattered.

And the response that you get from them is, well, we still need to try to do something.

You know, maybe it might stop something in the future.

And they can't point to one case in the past where it would have helped.

How about the new assault weapon ban?

Let's just ban these assault weapons, John.

Let's just, I mean, nobody needs an assault weapon.

Would this have helped?

No, it wouldn't have.

I mean, first of all, I'm not even sure.

I hope that people are just ignorant and don't know what the guns are and how they operate.

But to,

you know, the AR-15s are a semi-automatic rifle, small caliber semi-automatic rifle.

They fire the same bullets with the same rapidity, doing the same damage as a small caliber hunting rifle.

If you want to go and ban all semi-automatic guns, fine, let's talk about that.

But to go and buy, I don't think it makes sense, and I can talk about it, but to try to go and buy some guns based on how they look just simply doesn't make any sense.

Correct.

Well, but you wouldn't have to ban the semi-automatic handguns because a semi-automatic handgun, I learned from NBC News, it just doesn't travel as fast as a rifle.

And so a rifle will just kill the person with a handgun

much quicker.

Well, if you look over the last decade, about 68% of the mass public shootings have involved solely handguns.

If you include handguns

used in part of the attack, you know, handguns with rifles, handguns with shotguns,

It makes up about 84% of the attacks involved handguns in some way.

And so, you know, all they're going to do is they'll ban, you know, maybe they could ban all rifles, and then they'll come back and they'll say, well, we need to ban all handguns.

You know,

what people need to talk about are the costs and benefits of guns.

So when they go and they say, let's ban guns for people under age 21, well, it's horrible that this 19-year-old killed people.

And we should do things to try to stop it, things that we know will work.

But the thing is, lots of law-abiding 20-year-olds use guns to protect themselves and their families.

And the problem that you ultimately face is that if you were going to say, ban guns from a particular area or ban guns for particular people, it's the law-abiding good citizens who obey those rules and not the criminals.

It's the reason why we've been having these attacks after we've created these gun-free zones.

John Lott from the Crime Prevention Research Center, his latest book is The War on Guns, Arming Yourself Against Gun Control Lies.

He is the best on the stats.

You need to have that book in your library.

Thanks, John.

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Glenn Beck Mercury

Glenn Beck.

Okay, there's a story that I had a really hard time understanding, and it's probably because I'm not a sports fan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're not big into sports.

You probably don't recognize how difficult this is.

Yeah.

But I mean, it's a really, really big deal.

Mac Beggs

won

second straight.

Second straight.

Class 6A Texas championship in girls' wrestling.

She went 32-0

during the season.

Wait.

And I mean, what a Mac, yeah.

Mac Beggs, yeah.

So wait, Mac.

Incredible achieving.

Now, to win one championship at this level is very difficult, but to go undefeated 32-0 and win a second straight 6A championship in Texas.

Right.

That's incredible.

And people are not acknowledging how difficult that would be to achieve.

Well, if you, and it might be just because people don't follow

him a him and you called him a her.

What was that?

You called him a him and a her.

Why did you?

But this is a part that I had a hard time following.

Is

he wrestling girls?

Or

is she wrestling girls?

Yes.

That's your answer.

Yes.

More in a minute.

Glenn Beck.

Mercury.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

Are you really not taking any responsibility for the multiple red flags that were brought to the attention of the Broward Sheriff's Office about this shooter before the incident?

Whether it was people near him, close to him, calling the police.

Jake, I could only take responsibility for what I knew about.

I exercises my due diligence.

I've given amazing leadership to this agency.

Amazing leadership.

I work.

Yes, Jake,

there's a lot of things we've done throughout.

You don't measure

a person's leadership by a deputy not going into a, these deputies receive the training they needed.

Maybe you measure somebody's leadership by whether or not they protect the community.

In this case, you've listed 23 incidents before the shooting involving the shooter, and still nothing was done to keep guns out of his hands, to make sure that the school was protected, to make sure you were keeping an eye on him.

Your deputy atrophy failed.

I don't understand how you can sit there and claim amazing leadership.

Jake Tapper.

Pat Gray, thoughts.

I love Jake Tapper, and we've said it many times.

Sometimes he'll be agonizing to us,

and then other times he'll be agonizing to the left.

He treats everybody, he's an actual journalist.

Yeah, I think so.

He actually asks hard questions.

I think he could have, I think he was put in an impossible situation at the town hall.

He was.

But that's not his fault.

That's CNN's fault.

And

he held the sheriff's feet to the fire.

non-stop for about what 20 minutes

28 minutes

can you imagine that the poor sheriff i mean poor sheriff i don't mean it that way the sheriff his mouth was so dry he was starting to look like anita dunn

with the lizard tongue with the lizard tongue he was his mouth was dry he knew he was in trouble i was surprised he didn't say is there a commercial break you have to go to or anything he he did shut Jake down though on

one question yeah when he was asked and I think we have the audio when he was asked about whether or not if they would have followed up on any of this stuff could this have been averted and he was pretty powerful.

Here we go.

Play it.

Do you think that if the Broward Sheriff's Office had done things differently, this shooting might not have happened?

Listen, if ifs and butts were candy and nuts, you know, O.J.

Simpson would still be in the record books.

I don't know what that means.

There's 17 dead people, and there's a whole long list of things your department.

Wow.

Oh, my gosh, Jake, you are just so good.

Wow, that's great.

If ifs and butts were candy and nuts, nuts, O.J.

Simpson would first, O.J.

Simpson is still in the record books.

Yes, he is.

100%.

Now, six people have outrushed him in a season, so he's moved down.

He moved down a little bit.

Maybe that's what he had.

But that wasn't due to ifs and buts, was it?

No,

more of the 15th and 16th game of the season, which they added on after he had the 2,000-yard season.

Probably the specifics there.

Yeah, well, Sheriff, you asked for it.

You got it.

Toyota.

What do you think of that?

Let me try this on you.

Don't forget, hire the vet.

Okay?

That's amazing.

That's all I've got to say to you.

I have to tell you, I love Slogan Wars.

Is there clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose?

All right, Sheriff,

deal with that, won't you?

Four out of five dentists recommend crest

or

Trident.

One of them.

I don't know.

Something.

They agree.

Four out of five agree on something.

And we know that one of them wants you to eat more sugared snacks.

We know that.

Why do that?

No, what the dentist is in that poll.

I don't think there was a better shutdown than that.

I don't know.

Because

it wasn't for effect.

It was true.

It was righteous indignation.

I don't even know what that means.

And there are 18 dead people.

Right.

Oh, that was.

Oh, my gosh.

That was really rough.

I mean, you know, and look, I don't think,

I think there's very little desire.

And Jake Tapper's an exception, I think, to this, but there's very little desire to actual real conversation on this topic.

You were on CNN this weekend, and you kind of talked about that.

You were on with Brian Stelter.

We have a clip of it here talking about

do myself any favors.

No, I don't think CNN really liked you that much, After this.

They didn't like me in the first place.

I mean, with anybody.

I don't think I made anybody happy.

That's kind of your

story, isn't it?

It is.

It's kind of your life story.

Here it is from CNN.

We can't read only the things that we agree with.

We have to have conversations, calm conversations that make us uncomfortable.

We have to have that.

You've talked on your programs in the past about

one thing, too.

And this is something that you're not going to want to hear.

CNN

had a right and a responsibility to have that conversation, that town hall.

But when you added a room full, when you added, what, 2,000, 2,000, 5,000 people that were grieving and angry, you did nothing.

You made things worse.

If you wanted to have that conversation, then let's have that conversation

in a calm way.

But adding it, adding the crowd, it became the Christians and the lions.

It was discussed.

So you would have told the students to shut.

You would have told them to shut up?

Listen to that.

No,

I would have said, this is too raw right now to have a stadium full of people.

Let's just, you pick the people, you have the kids that want to talk, and let's have that conversation in a small room without the cheering crowds.

It's why I won't go on Bill Maher.

Bill Maher has asked me for years to go on his program.

I won't because it is just the cheering crowd.

Somebody's trying to win.

Martin Luther King would not have done that.

Martin Luther King would have had the the discussion without the cheering crowds.

Don't try to win.

Look for reconciliation.

That's great.

And you're right.

That's the only way.

People ask all the time, especially lately.

I think there's a good number of people who really want to try to come together and figure this out and not scream at each other.

It just feels

different in a couple of ways.

Yeah.

And that's the answer.

But we're not going to get to it if we're continually screaming at each other.

I'd love to have this conversation with you, Pat, but I think that we have,

I think we've come to the end of the period of enlightenment.

Everything that this country was based on was the honest search for truth, empirical truth.

You know what I mean?

I'm not going to listen to a church tell me that they have all this power, that they can do these things because God gives them the power, and so I must fall in line.

I'm not not going to listen to a king tell me he's got all this power because of God.

I'm not going to listen to magicians.

I want empirical fact.

Now, if you want to go on faith, that's fine, but keep your faith out of the control of the government.

The government

and faith should not mix when it says

when it comes down to control of people's lives.

And we looked for the truth and let the chips fall where they may.

We don't look for that anymore.

We're not looking.

We're not interested.

No, you're looking for the win.

It's exactly right.

I am sick of winning.

If this is what winning feels like, I am sick of winning.

And we've been playing it now for over 20 years, and I'm sick of it.

Yeah.

And no one wants to have honest conversations.

I mean, you know, this is a problem.

I bring the, let me give you these two audio clips.

These are specifically

selected for Pat Gray's enjoyment.

Because these two moments back to back in the same interview tells a heck of a story of where we've been over the last week.

Here's David Hogg, one of the students who's been on every show imaginable, also was on the same show as you were on this week on CNN with Brian Stelter, talking about Dana Lash and the NRA.

What Dana's trying to do, I believe she's the CEO of the NRA, she's trying to distract people.

If you listen to her talk, she's a national spokeswoman for the NRA.

Exactly.

She's a national spokeswoman, and as such, she's a national propagandist propagandist for the NRA.

If you listen to her speak,

she's not really saying anything.

She's sounding positive and confident, and that's what she wants the people in the NRA to believe.

She wants people in Congress to pass laws that help out with mental health and things like that, and she says that she can't do that.

Are you kidding me?

You own these politicians.

You've passed legislation that enables these bum stocks, which, by the way, aren't allowed at NRA shooting ranges because they're too dangerous.

That's how bad they are.

Continuing on with my point, she wants Congress to take action and says that they won't.

Are you kidding me?

She owns these Congressmen.

She can get them to do things because she doesn't care about these children's lives.

Okay, so he didn't even know who she was.

Right, but she,

but he does know that she owns Congress.

He does she doesn't care about children's lives, which is odd because she has children.

Yeah, she doesn't care about children's lives.

That's interesting.

Right.

It's interesting.

And she's, she's, she owns people, even though she just started with the NRA.

Yeah,

weird.

She was working with us.

I didn't know she had all of those politicians in the pocket.

Yeah, she should have passed stuff for us.

I mean, what the hell is happening?

Wouldn't that have been been nice?

It would have been really good on more cable channels, probably, right?

Damn it.

Okay, so, but again, here's a guy kid who's put out there as an expert by every media source.

Here's the guy, he's got all the passion.

He's the guy.

We got to take him seriously.

We have to respect all of his views.

We can't say one word of criticism of what he says because that means you just don't care about children.

You don't care about the victims of this.

Later on, he's asked not about the NRA, but about the mass disaster that has been Broward County Sheriff

Scott.

Israel I can't only think of sheriff Israel and so he he's asked about that here's what he says are you concerned that you might actually lose support if you get too personal too incendiary well she's already done that by attacking Sheriff Scott Israel who obviously there were some major mistakes made here and ones that we have to look into

and I don't want to say anything until after the investigation is done because I don't know what happened I'm just a student that had to witness this horrifying incident huh but honestly how can you say that you support law enforcement if you're just constantly attacking them over this?

How hypocritical and disgusting are you?

These are the people that are trying to protect our lives.

Do they make a mistake?

Absolutely.

Is that something that we have to fix?

Absolutely.

But there's a much bigger problem in Washington.

Okay, so he's so when it's about the NRA, he knows everything about them.

He knows that Dana's the CEO and owns all of these politicians, despite her just starting this position pretty recently.

But when it comes to the police, wait for the investigation to do.

He's just a student.

What How do I know?

What is he just a student?

You can't ask him those questions.

He's just a kid.

That was kind of my point from the beginning.

That's why I specifically said that.

Here's what I can't, again, get my arms around.

So what did I say to Brian?

I said to Brian, you know, to have these emotional crowds was not a good thing.

You want to have them on?

Great.

Let them talk.

And his response was, So

you think Jake should have just said, shut up?

No, that's not what I said.

No, it's not what you said.

I didn't say that.

And that's really disrespectful.

You weren't talking about the kids, in fact.

You were talking about the audience.

Yeah, the crowd.

Yeah.

I don't know what Jake is supposed to do once the crowd's in the room.

The problematic decision is the crowd being there.

And not

CNN's decision up front.

Not the representation of these families.

Like, if you had the, you could have been in there in a room like Trump did.

He did a listening session with people who

were victims of the shooting.

And there wasn't screaming over the top of each other either.

Because it was calm.

It was calm discourse.

You put in 5,000 people, all of which

are to just yell at Dana in her position at the NRA.

It's a recipe for disaster, and they should have recognized that.

Okay.

So, so

he doesn't, he won't listen to that.

And wants, you know, if you, if you say we shouldn't have had the arena,

then that's akin to saying we have to tell these kids to shut up.

We have to take these kids, they have a right

to be listened to.

They don't have a right to be listened to unchecked.

You had Brian

Seltzer.

Stelter.

I can never say his name because I always think of Brian Setzer.

Oh, the orchestra.

Yeah.

So you have Brian sitting there.

And who's sitting next to the other on the other side of this kid?

Dan frickin' rather.

And you hear this kid

make this argument that Dana is, you know, the NRA, which is a little ridiculous,

more than a little ridiculous.

And then you have him stick up for this sheriff, who nobody in their right mind is sticking up for the sheriff.

No one in their right mind is sticking up for the sheriff.

And there's no discussion at all on

there's no pushback on him

on saying,

how does this make sense?

I thought you wanted this to stop.

And what makes you think that passing a ban on some guns is going to make any of this stop?

There's no evidence of that.

And here's some things that we could take care of right now, because there could be another shooting in your county if this is happening with the Sheriff's Department.

There's no pushback at all.

No.

Yeah.

Well, and I think the reason why the advocacy groups and a lot of the media really like these kids that are, you know, were victims of this, or at least at the school when this occurred, is because of that.

You can't push back.

You can't push back on the argument.

So the arguments get smooth sailing.

They get this nice, clear, empty highway to just drive down and say every liberal blog statement that's ever been put out there without anybody saying anything.

Because obviously you can't push back.

The kid obviously doesn't know these points.

He's just

obviously reading blogs and just spouting out.

He's being exploited.

He's being exploited by the left.

He's being a 16-year-old that is being given a national platform.

That's what's happening.

It's definitely not a word of criticism to him personally, but you have to be able to push back on the points, or there's no point in having him on.

May I remind you, though, only you can prevent forest fires.

Waffle.

Thank you, Pat.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn back.

I'm going to do the media's job for him.

Tonight at 5 o'clock, we are going to be looking at the questions that really need answering on

this Florida shooting.

And in particular, this sheriff.

There's something really wrong there.

Yeah, taking it from the big picture and the small picture today.

What are some of these weird inconsistencies in the stories around the shooting?

We'll get into those tonight at 5:30 on the Blaze Trump, 5 at the Blaze TV, and then 5:30, the news and why it matters.

Glenn, back.

Mercury.