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Glenn Beck What happened since we met yesterday, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, otherwise known as Andy.

Yeah, wasn't that

a kid who owned the cowboy too in the Pixar movie, I think?

Yeah, he had Andy on his boot.

I don't know what Andy has on his boot, but that's a different story.

Andy is the guy who was referred to in the text of the insurance policy.

Remember that between Strzok and Paige?

He's now leaving the bureau.

Now, there's a lot of people who say, this is no big deal.

Yeah, it really is.

It really is.

McCabe's ouster comes the same day his boss, Director Ray, reviewed the classified memo prepared by the House Intelligence Committee, which we'll get to in a little while.

Some congressmen are even saying that the memo shows KGB-like behavior on behalf of the FBI.

Others say it shows evidence that the controversial Steele dossier was used as the excuse by the FBI to get the FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign.

For a refresher here, the Steele dossier was financed by the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

Fusion GPS, the firm that commissioned Steele, who was an MI6 agent formally and very credible formally,

they commissioned him to compile the dossier.

Also,

working for someone else during the same time frame, the Russian government.

That's a problem.

As if that doesn't look bad enough, CNN reported late last night that Director Ray sent out an all-employee email yesterday evening hinting that McCabe's dismissal may have something to do with the incoming Inspector General's report investigating the handling of the 2016 Hillary Clinton email investigation.

And the hits just keep on coming.

Was the House Intelligence Committee memo on top of the incoming Inspector General's report the final hit that ultimately knocked McCabe out?

What is going on at the FBI?

We know that McCabe's wife received a campaign donation from Hillary Clinton and her political action committee when she was running for Virginia State Senate back in 2015.

Was that a payment that bought anybody's loyalty?

We also know that Strzok and Page were close to McCabe McCabe as revealed in their text messages.

Now, I don't want to use the word secret society,

but these three amigos, McCabe, Strzok, and Paige,

not spoken of, but not really, definitely not a secret

club,

maybe a society.

I'm not sure.

But the three of them are in the mix a lot here.

The House Intelligence Committee memo drops sometime this week.

Now we're about to find out

what is in that memo.

Well,

is it partisan hype?

It is a

Republican-created memo.

So the Republicans have been saying to themselves now for a while, we demand we release the memo.

Yeah, yeah, we demand that we release the memo.

They have complete control.

This was put together by the Republicans.

They were demanding that

they release their own memo.

That's not hard to do.

It's like, I demand that Glenn Beck wears pants.

Well, dude, you're the one that's choosing whether to wear pants or not.

Why make a big deal out of it?

Wear them.

This is much more like a Looney Tunes cartoon, the further we get into it.

And I have a feeling.

that's not all, folks.

It's Tuesday, January 30th.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

All right, we wanted to bring in Jason Battrill, who is

one of our

chief researcher and one of our writers and been with the program for a long time.

He is also former military intelligence and has actually written some of these things

like the Steel dossier.

And I thought he could kind of take us through blow by blow exactly

what happened yesterday and what it all means.

So a lot going on yesterday, actually.

So we know that the FISA, like you were just talking about, the FISA memo or whatever they're calling that now,

was voted on to be released, which was really stupid because

there was never any doubt that it was not going to get approved.

I think it was what, nine to four was the vote, something like that.

But it was theirs to release in the first place.

This isn't like, this is not a secret memo

that was generated for the FISA

warrant.

This was somebody who said, okay, I've seen it.

We don't know.

I've seen it, and here's what I saw in it.

And it was a

written, imagine, imagine if during the Lewinsky thing, if the Democrats would have said, we demand that you release the memo that we created about Bill Clinton and how Ken Starr is being so bad.

Would we put stock in that?

We might look at it to see if there's anything interesting, but we would not use it as a smoking gun because it would have been created by

the Democrats in support of their president.

What we really need is the actual FISA information.

Do we not?

We do.

You mean exactly what FISA actually showed?

Yeah, we need to know exactly what they presented.

We want the real documents, not a second-hand document from somebody who may or may not have seen the full range of evidence.

What I'm curious about is, did, and this is what some people like Trey Gowdy have hinted at, is that this is going to show that the steel dossier was used as evidence that they needed to present to the FISA court to basically say, yeah, you can get these warrants in the Trump campaign.

That's, I am really curious about that.

But not only that, but I want to know the process.

And we were talking about this earlier.

But like you said, I've written some of these before, mostly in Afghanistan with Al-Qaeda and Taliban.

But we get these things all the the time they're like hey Jason go find out you know if Taliban's over in that village or whatever so we'd reach out to a source that we trust and that source would be like oh yeah no problem no problem yeah this guy he's Taliban this guy gives food and money to al-Qaeda all these people well we wouldn't just send in seal team six to go take them out we would then verify we'd verify so we would have to send someone like a CI agent or someone like that to go talk to these guys you know face to face and say where this information come from you know like we need to verify it once it's verified then you take action like hardcore action.

Us would be kinetics, but this would be the FISA.

So what we really need to know on the FISA thing is,

did the FBI

do, even if they say, well, there was no time, did the FBI

at the same time say, let's check on the veracity.

Let's go to the sources that are, that are mentioned in this document

and see if we can verify.

So important.

You could make the case that, well, we didn't have time to do all of that because the presidency, you know, the presidency could be compromised and we only had a few months.

So we had to do them in tandem.

But if they didn't do that, if they didn't go back, because the, you know, especially the golden shower stuff is so ridiculous, is so ridiculous.

And it screams KGB.

I mean, that's the way they do it.

And it screams that.

Did the FBI know that the steel dossier was financed by the DNC and at the same time that Steel was working part-time for the Russians?

That's important.

That's very important.

And you would think that not only that, but this dossier screams former Soviet Union KGB-like style and tactics.

Like, this is the stuff they do.

Before they would like, they would try to insert information in other ways.

Like, they would send stupid stuff, like, like Oliver Stone's JFK movie, which was a total, and a lot of people don't know that story was a total Soviet plant.

All that stuff was like a plant from like a newspaper back in the 50s or whatever.

That was all KGB work.

Oliver Stone picked it up and ran with it.

But this is the type of stuff they do.

They plant disinformation through credible sources like steel.

But the issue is if there is time, like you pointed out, there's time to vet those sources and find out if we need to take other steps.

Now, you could be right.

They could have said, this is, we have no time.

The election's coming.

We have to do something now.

Yeah, we don't know everything that is in the steel dossier.

Right.

So there could have been things that if this is true, we cannot, this, this guy cannot be president of the United States.

We don't know.

And the same could be said if it was on Hillary Clinton.

So I don't want to throw the

baby out with the bathwater.

As long as they are at the same time,

checking, wait a minute, Steele,

you're getting money from the Russians now?

What are the connections there?

Who did you talk to?

Who gave us this information?

Can we verify that?

If they're not doing that at the same time, if they're just turning FISA and looking at Trump based on the Steele dossier and not doing any verification of it, that is really dangerous.

So this conversation, I am highly confident, is the same exact

conversation that's been going on in the House Intelligence Committee at this time.

I bet you that's entirely what they were saying.

Republicans are saying we need to get this out there now because they spied

on the Trump campaign.

And the Democrats are probably saying, look, we're still vetting these sources for crying out loud.

We had no time.

We're still trying to check to see if this stuff is accurate.

If you release this now without redacting, and even if you do redact it,

all those sources are going to go underground.

We're not going to be able to check them out.

That's probably, that's my guess on the conflict right now, this exact same conversation.

And I have to tell you, anybody who is saying that we need to redact it for national security purposes, if it was happening to the other party,

both sides would be switched.

Yeah, absolutely.

Both sides would be switched.

So there's nobody that's actually, I mean, I just think the American people, they just want the truth.

They just want the truth.

I think there are those who are still playing partisan politics and

will accept any argument from their side.

And we should point out, too, that

there are serious people in the intelligence world having these conversations.

However, it's not the conversation they're having with us.

What they're telling, what we're seeing here is nonstop theater.

I mean, again, let's take on our own side just because it's easy to take on the Democrats.

I want to see this memo because I want more information on this.

I want to see the Democrat version, which also exists and supposedly is going to be coming out eventually.

I want to see both of their arguments because this is essentially, you're watching law and order.

There's a prosecutor.

There's a defense.

You're seeing both sides of it.

I want to see both sides of it so I can try to make a decision.

Except

you're tampering with the jury pool.

Yeah.

Right.

I'm not saying that.

This is pre-trial negotiation stuff.

Yeah.

You're actually tampering with the jury pool because

if both sides are putting this out, this is not the investigation.

This is not the actual trial.

This isn't what anyone would use to condemn the FBI, the Democrats, or Donald Trump.

This will only be used to condemn those people in the jury, us, in our minds.

This is not...

I may be the only person alive that thinks that we should not see this memo yet.

Yeah, I mean, look, I want to see it because I want to try to make a decision.

There are people, and we've talked to some of them in Washington who are big-time Republicans who argue releasing releasing this memo now

is a bad idea because of exactly what you're talking about.

There's an investigation going on and it's going to screw the investigation, not about Trump, but about Russia.

And so it's too big of a risk and we should wait.

There's no reason for it to come out right now, you know, per se, other than political reasons.

But again, going back to the sort of theater of this

idea,

the Republicans, dozens of them, went on Twitter and started a hashtag, release the memo.

They demanded you help them to spread this hashtag so it got trending so that we'd be able to release the memo and here at the end of this what we find out is that the rep it was a Republican memo written by Republicans it was voted on partisan lines in the committee that Republicans could release it and now it's going to go to a Republican president who's going to likely say that it was going to be released when you said release the memo who were you asking who were you demanding release the memo the exact people who wanted you to start the hashtag hashtag.

So it's just like it's all theater.

They're just trying to get all of us excited about these things.

And I want to see the information.

I do.

But why do we have to deal with this as well?

I just, I just, I just, I think we can sum it up with this.

And I'm sorry to change the subject, but this is very important.

Will someone please tell Glenn Beck to wear pants?

We need a hashtag so he

can finally see it.

Your hashtag Glenn must wear pants.

I'd like to push back on this one, but I also agree.

There's a lot more going on.

Jason, stay with us because it wasn't just the memo.

That was

about a third of the news yesterday.

Guys, and please spread the hashtag GlennWearThePants.

Glenn wear the pants.

Hashtag GlennWearThePants.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn Beck.

Okay,

so

let's go through this.

The FISA memo we now know, is going to be released.

It could always be released because it was an internal Republican memo,

and we saw a lot of stagecraft here to get this released.

We don't know what it says, but it'll go to Donald Trump.

He'll approve it, and it will be released.

That was only one-third of what happened yesterday.

Also, what happened was Director Ray Wray reviewed the memo, and

he also is having some problems with a new inspector general that is coming in.

You want to give us a little bit of that, Jason.

So, I know Director Wray, so they said, I guess one of the things the Democrats said was they were complaining about, as they should, that they to release this was to compromise an investigation.

So, I guess Republicans compromised on that and said, okay, well, we'll let Director Wray read the memo.

So, they had been holding this back from the fbi for the longest time but they finally let director ray read the memo so director ray read the memo i think it took him a while uh i think they said it was a four-page memo and not too long after that andy mccabe deputy director andrew andrew mccabe is announced that he steps down now i think that the timing on this is very very interesting i i think that this definitely had a part of what happened because mccabe is friends with uh strzok and page the two people that remember they lost all of their texts.

He's friends with them.

And

he was the Andy in

those texts that says, you know, remember, we had a meeting in Andy's office, and we just can't let this guy win.

There's got to be some kind of insurance policy.

Right.

And we also know that

around this time, there was an Inspector General report that was going around.

And we'll get into that in just a second.

Stand by.

Glenn back.

Mercury.

You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.

So yesterday was a big day and the investigation on Russia and Trump and Hillary Clinton, a lot happened.

One is the memo, the FISA memo, that has been deemed secret.

It was written by the Republicans in defense of the Republicans.

And then the Republicans had to convince you to convince them to release it.

So yesterday, they voted to release this memo.

It'll be interesting to see what is in it,

but it will be important to stress what is not in it.

This is only one side of it.

And, you know, with all the hype on this, I got to believe

there's something juicy in it.

We brought in Jason Battrill, who is a former military intelligence, used to write these kinds of memos.

What do you expect to see in this that is accurate?

I expect to see that they did have some information coming from Russia.

I definitely expect that there's credible sources that Steel uses.

I don't expect to see names of sources because I don't think Steel will ever give those up.

So we're not going to see anything a whole lot new, I don't believe.

I I think we're going to get a whole lot of what some people are calling pure speculation and rumor, and what other people are calling actual hard intelligence.

But the Nunez memo itself is not going to have that.

The Nunez memo is going to be more about the case against

the way the FBI handled both the Clinton email investigation and also the way they got into this with Steele, right?

Because this is going to be essentially their side of it.

Yeah.

Well, wait, the FISA memo from Nunez isn't about the Clinton.

That is

another memo that is coming out from the Attorney General.

I'm sorry, not the Attorney General, the Inspector General.

That one is,

what were you doing during the Clinton thing?

There's some, that one apparently is

not good for the for the FBI.

And I'm really interested because that's an inspector general.

So it's nonpartisan.

And that memo, we know an email went out from Director Wray yesterday.

It was a FBI-wide email last night.

So all this stuff is happening within the same day, pretty much, within a 24-hour timeframe.

But last night he sends it out and

he examines

and addresses why McCabe left.

And he strongly hints, according to CNN, strongly hints that it was because of this Inspector General

finding about how they handled the 2016 Hillary Clinton email investigation.

And so

is that real?

Is that really why he left?

And to have CNN as the source on that, that's pretty good.

They don't want to report that.

We know that this has been going on for a little while.

So I don't think the findings were new.

It's just this announcement was new.

But that coupled on top of what Director Ray just read in the House Intelligence Committee memo, that might have been the one-two shot that eventually just knocked him out.

Right.

Because

the Inspector General is coming out and saying, look what you had, look how you handled this.

And if the FISA, the Nunez FISA secret memo, has McCabe in there with this secret cabal between the three of them saying we need some sort of an insurance policy, and there's more to that than what we already know,

that would be very bad.

Is my instinct wrong to think that we should probably just wait until this stuff comes out before going crazy over this stuff?

I mean, I just feel like there's so much nonsense surrounding it and so many many political goals,

people pushing for their own agendas, that until we actually see this information, we really can't judge it.

I feel like we're just kind of caught up in this hype circle.

So I disagree with you to some extent.

I don't think that

we are caught in the hype circle on this.

I mean, what we're trying to do is saying don't get caught in the hype circle.

When this memo comes out, remember, it's one side written by the political players in Washington defending their side.

Now, there may be,

you know, you know what this is?

If we jump to conclusions based on a politically written memo

from a party and the party bosses,

and we act on that, We are no different than if the FISA court was given all of this information about Donald Trump from the DNC and they acted on that without saying, wait a minute, let's see all of the evidence.

Where did you get this evidence?

How did you arrive at this?

We can't do what we are accusing the FISA court of doing, and that is just taking one source and looking at all of these things and saying, oh my gosh, look at all of this.

We got to act.

No, no.

Look at it, store it away, keep it in your head, remain calm and carry on.

This is amazing because we have a politically motivated dossier that kicked off a lot of this.

Now we have a politically motivated House Intelligence Committee memo almost in response.

I mean,

I'm really torn on this because either way, our country loses on this.

Either way.

And Russia wins.

And Russia wins.

Either the Democrats conspired with Russian help to undermine a presidential candidate or Republicans are conspiring to damage the FBI.

I mean, either way, look at this.

I was just looking at the post-mortem for the FBI.

So this is the FBI and the DOJ.

McCabe, as of yesterday, out.

Or from the Justice Department, it's been demoted twice.

He's basically like a janitor now over there, I think.

Strzz and Page, both kicked off.

Well, Strzok kicked off the molar probe.

Page left just before the text went public.

The FBI general counsel, he served as counsel for McCabe, Baker.

He was reassigned.

Many people speculate because of this.

Rabicki, the chief of staff for both Comey and Ray, left the FBI.

This is racking up day by day.

Really bad view either way.

I mean, this is no winning.

There is a long-term win if we hold our heads together.

If we are patient and don't do anything based on political stuff, do it on reason and facts.

Then there is a big win here.

You know, in 2008, I said, I'm telling you, if this guy lasts,

this guy lasts, the way he's running things, we will find the biggest scandals, bigger than Watergate.

We'll find it.

It'll be there.

I believe we are seeing this.

Why is it so

remarkable to think that the FBI might be turned into a political organization when that is exactly what the Washington Post exposed with Richard Nixon.

He used the Justice Department.

Look at the number of people in the Justice Department, all the way to the Attorney General.

Would anyone be surprised if we found out our former Attorney General was stacking this politically,

was doing all kinds of things for political reasons?

Would anyone have a doubt the guy who did

Fast and Furious might have been involved in stacking the FBI?

So we're not investigating the things we should be?

I wouldn't be surprised by that.

And quite honestly, neither would the Democrats if I said that about Donald Trump.

Would you be surprised if Donald Trump was stacking the DOJ to make sure that they investigate what he wants and not what he doesn't want?

That was the problem with the Watergate.

And look how many people it took down.

As it should have.

I say, let the chips fall where they may.

I want the FBI and the Justice Department fumigated.

I want it.

I want all of the partisans from the left and from the right.

I want them out.

Justice must be blind.

We have created a system where nothing is blind.

You're judged on everything,

whether you voted for this person or that person.

Justice must be blind.

And I think if we hold our heads together and we don't panic and we don't play, all the world is but a stage and we are merely but the players.

We are being played.

We're being played and we're being played for votes.

Both sides are playing this for votes.

And it makes us us not see

that there is real corruption in our government, and it is tied directly to the parties and to Russia.

That's what we have to hold out front and center and let the chips fall where they may.

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glenn back

let me go to saul who's listening to us in new york hi saul welcome to the program

saul are you there

there yes go ahead sir

okay hey glenn i agree with you that it's politically motivated, but it's not politically motivated as much as you think on the Republican side.

I mean, what do they gain by making it politically motivated?

No one's going to jail.

That's obvious.

And like you, we need to fumigate these departments.

And guys like Jim Jordan working so hard to try to get this truth exposed.

I think that falls into the CNN narrative where this is politically motivated.

It's partisan politics, et cetera.

Well, hang on just a sec.

So this is on Hang on, hang on.

Hang on just a sec.

I agree with you.

It's on corruption.

I agree with you.

I mean, there's some serious Republicans who like Jim Jordan.

Pardon me.

Yeah, we love him.

There's some serious Republicans that are involved in this.

And there are some serious Republicans that are saying, don't release this because it will hurt the investigation right now.

Don't.

It's important that it comes out, yada, yada, yada.

The problem I have, Saul, when you say it's not politically motivated, again, I said earlier,

if I said to you, you have to call Glenn Beck because

he has got to wear pants.

And I want you to do a hashtag thing.

And I want you to tell all your friends, Glenn Beck has to wear pants.

Well, Glenn Beck is telling you that.

This is a Republican memo issued by the Republicans.

And then the Republicans, who had the right to release it the whole time, they could have just released it.

They made a big deal out of it.

And, you know, I mean, that's what politicians,

that's what political parties are for.

But recognize when there is a political party involved in this,

if they would have just released it, that would have been one thing.

But they didn't.

They made it into a show and said, we've got to release this.

Well, they had the power to release it the whole time.

The whole time.

It's real.

These are real issues surrounded by theater.

It's the same thing with the Russia investigation.

We won't look at the left.

They are making this big big thing about Trump and trying to make this into Trump when there's a real issue

about what Russia is doing with our elections that exists underneath all this theater.

And all we do is deal with the theater back and forth, back and forth, back and forth when there's something real here.

The same thing, I think, with the FBI.

I think there's a lot of great FBI agents.

I think they do a lot of great things.

Our intelligence community are not all villains.

However, there is an obvious issue with corruption at certain levels of these organizations.

And we don't know what they are yet.

We don't know what they are yet, but we need to find out what it is, and we need to sort through all the nonsensical theater to get to it.

I think the theater hurts it.

It's what parties do, but that is, I think it's detrimental.

And I think, so I agree with you, Saul, that

there are real issues here.

I disagree that

it's not political theater.

It is political theater.

And we have to be able to separate that from what the memo says and then separate that from what the actual hard evidence says.

We won't know what the hard evidence says.

This is one side looking at it.

So

we have to be

measured here because the real goal is to actually find out what's happening in the FBI, the Justice Department, and with Russia.

You with me, Saul, or did you leave?

No, I'm still here.

The question I have then is when you have a year's worth of investigating with this Mueller investigation, and yet on some networks and some pundits talking about the distraction from the Republican side on the Mueller investigation, how much are we distracting?

This man has had a year of our tax dollars to spend to do this investigation, but yet we're still hearing a narrative that this is all just a distraction to the Mueller investigation.

So that's your problem, is your problem is, and I agree with you, is with the media and the way the media is spinning it.

You know,

Watergate happened in 1972.

It wasn't finished until like 1970, what, six?

I mean, it went on for four years.

Yeah, Nixon came out in his State of the Union and said, one year of Watergate is enough.

Right.

I mean,

this is how long these things take.

I just think it is really imperative that we all look and say on both sides, this is political posturing, and in that political posturing, there may be some truths that we need to look at.

But this is political posturing.

Let's look at those truths and let's verify.

Let's not do what we're accusing the FISA court of doing, taking an open dossier, one source, and buying into it and saying, we need to spy.

No,

that's one source.

Let's verify what's in there and do it methodically.

We have one shot at this.

Let's do it right.

Glenn, back.

Mercury.

Love.

Courage.

Truth.

Glenn, back.

Wow, was that Republican-backed tax plan evil or what?

Whew.

And if you did get a raise or a bonus or anything, those are just crumbs.

At least those are the lines from the Democrats.

That the plan is all about lining the pocket of the companies and rich people.

Although in California, they're trying to claw all that money back and trying to tax the companies.

on all of the profits that

they now get to keep because of the federal income tax.

Trickle-down economics.

It's a myth invented by Republicans to make you just poor and miserable.

Democrats have repeated basically the same line since Andrew Jackson, and I'm not kidding.

And the media has helped them repeat that message over and over and over again.

And our, you know, so-called educational institutions are just feeding that nonsense to our children day and night.

Now, I want to make sure everybody understand.

I mean, I

mean,

the tax plan was not some genius, oh my gosh, look at this, a real overhaul.

It was a mediocre plan that could have been a lot better, but I will take it and I will celebrate that we have it.

But let me point out one part of the tax plan that's really good that nobody has really talked about, and it's designed to help some of the most economically depressed areas in the country.

It's a stealthy part of the tax plan.

It's buried on page 130 of the bill, and it allows states to designate certain regions within the state borders as an opportunity zone.

Now, these are the areas with high poverty, unemployment, slow business growth.

And what this tax plan does, it allows businesses and venture capitalists to invest long-term in these opportunity zones.

And by doing it, they can save a ton of money through avoiding capital gains taxes.

This is really good.

This is how this works.

Over the last five years, the U.S.

economy has grown and added jobs, but the growth has been mostly in large cities.

From 2010 to 2014 prime Obama years, more businesses closed in rural America than opened.

You know, Democrats, if you would just hear that, you might start to figure out why Donald Trump won.

There's another reason.

Now, with this in the new tax plan, investors are going to be able to create opportunity funds for these zones around the country and seed new businesses, expand existing businesses, or develop real estate.

If the investors maintain their investment for 10 years, they avoid paying capital gains taxes altogether.

That is gigantic.

The chairman of President Trump's Council for Economic Advisors said, if this plan works, quoting, we'll look back 10 years from now and say this is one of the most important parts of the tax bill, and nobody really even talked about it.

Plenty of ways to be cynical about a provision like this.

Maybe it's a corporate scheme to take rural America for a ride while avoiding taxes.

Or maybe it really is what it sounds like, the government actually cracking open a window of opportunity for private businesses to do

what they're best at.

And the process helps parts of the country that really need the boost.

What a concept.

It's Tuesday, January 30th.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

A guy whose writing has really affected my life, and I have a ton of respect for, and I think is a brave and funny individual, Jonah Goldberg, joins us now.

Hello, Jonah.

How are you?

Hey, Glenn, it's great to be here.

It's good to have you on.

So let me start with this.

Before we get in the news of the day and everything that's going on,

you were outspoken on Donald Trump.

Tell me the things that he has done that you say, I can't believe it.

This is really good.

Oh, gosh, there are a bunch.

I mean, obviously

the judges, you know, starting with Gorsuch, but also on the lower courts,

I like, from what I've seen, about 98% of the deregulation stuff.

You know, and some of it is not necessarily his hands-on, his personal handiwork.

I mean, Ajit Pai and Scott Gottlieb are doing great things at the FCC and the FDA.

I love what I, you know, I think a lot of the things he's done, we would have gotten from almost any other Republican, but one one of the things that I think he deserves extraordinary credit for is moving the capital of Jerusalem, I mean, the capital of Israel to Jerusalem.

I'm not sure any other Republican would have done that.

I'm not sure any other Republican would have touched Anwar quite yet.

And so, I mean, there's some things that I think that he's done are great.

It's hard for people to,

it's so funny because if you say, well, you know what, I would like to live a little more sustainable life.

I don't, you know, I think recycling is important.

You're immediately a, you know, global warming crackpot to some.

And if you, you know, if you don't believe in that, you know, then all of a sudden, you know, I don't believe in man-made global warming, or I don't believe that the solutions that we're saying that will work will actually work.

Well, all of a sudden, now you're a crackpot on the other side.

And

there's no middle ground.

There's no way for people to say, you know what, I really like Donald Trump and I have to give him real high praise on these things, but I'm really kind of disappointed or disgusted by these things.

We can't play that middle ground anymore.

It's all or nothing on both sides.

No, look, I mean, that's a huge frustration of mine, and I think there are a lot of reasons for it.

I really don't like this kind of binary tribal thinking where everyone has a coalition and we all must agree with our members of our coalition that

our enemy coalition isn't our opponents it's our enemies they're you know the democrats are an existential threat and all that

excuse me i don't like that kind of thinking um

but i think you know one of the reasons why we have it so much with with donald trump is that you know take take you know the various sex scandal allegations that roll out with donald trump the latest one being this thing with stormy daniels

it's not enough you know i i don't i have no problem with voters doing a cost-benefit analysis and saying, you know, look,

on net, he's been better for me and better for the country, and he's doing things I like, but I really just can't stand some of that personal stuff or the tweeting or whatever.

But you see people like Jerry Falbor Jr.

and Tony Perkins from the Family Research Council just going way out there to offer, as Perkins called it, a mulligan to Trump and basically minimize or dismiss his personal character stuff.

And I think that's really problematic for people who pretend to be or claim to be

leading moral authorities.

And, you know, Jerry Follow Jr.

took over the mantle of basically his dad's empire, which tried to push Christian morality as deep into politics as they could get it.

And I've defended them for it for years.

But I think one of the reasons why you get this binary thing is that because of Donald Trump's vanity and his narcissism and because of the defensiveness that so many of his biggest supporters have, you can't criticize X while supporting Y

because all Donald Trump wants to hear from anybody is flattery.

And he takes and he needs flattery.

And that forces you to either stay silent on things you cannot flatter him on or to actually flatter him about things that he shouldn't be flattered on.

And it's a bad psychological component.

So Jonah, what are you expecting from the State of the Union tonight that actually is meaningful?

I mean, I hate these things because it's just it's nothing but a, you know, a gift list and an introduction of, you know, children without faces.

You know, I think that's, I honestly, I think that this is, this is monarchist swill and that

we would be much better off if the president, like in the old days, just sent a letter to Congress or if we had them, had the State of the Union acted out by mimes

and

anyone who

whoever did the worst by voice vote was fed to wolves.

I mean, I think that would be better.

But

that, you know, so stipulated.

I don't know.

Look, I think

his first address, the joint session of Congress technically wasn't a State of the Union.

Everyone's calling this his first State of the Union, fine.

But he did very well on that first one.

And

it was one of the first examples, because it was right at the beginning of his presidency, of everyone restarting the countdown.

It's like there's a construction site sign outside the White House that says X number of days since an unpresidential action by the president.

And that one was like, you had all this stuff about how Donald Trump became president tonight.

Even Van Jones said it was a very forceful and good presentation.

And I don't remember what erased it, but it was a matter of days, if not hours, that a tweet or some other thing came out that just sort of took all the chips back off the table.

So,

again,

I think he'll probably give a good job.

He'll try to make this immigration reform thing, which my magazine supports, I haven't made up my mind,

into a bipartisan overture to the Democrats.

He'll try to sound magnanimous.

He'll certainly brag about

beating ISIS, which I think he should.

He'll brag about the effects of the tax cut.

And that's all fine and good.

I just don't know that it has much lasting power.

And I think part of the problem, you know, one of the surprises I had about the Trump administration was that he didn't immediately go cut deals with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi much earlier on, or didn't try to.

And I think one of the reasons why is I think he personally would love to do that.

I think he personally emotionally likes this idea of cutting deals and when working with Democrats, he knows those guys better.

He grew up around those guys.

He used to be one of those guys until fairly recently.

But part of the problem was he listened way too much to Steve Bannon at the outset.

And he, you know, it's an unfair and old joke, but you know, that inaugural address probably sounded better in the original German.

And it was this sort of

blood of patriots.

Trieste belongs to the Italians kind of talk.

And that was Bannon doing that, and he fueled all of that.

And the problem was that Trump spent maybe the first six months of his presidency and continues to this day doing and saying things that culturally and politically make working with Trump radioactive for Democrats, particularly the base.

And that is one of the things that has made it very, very difficult for him to go across the aisle.

I don't think that was Bannon's plan.

I think Bannon actually believed his own BS and thought this was the beginning of this vast nationalist protectionist movement, and it wasn't.

But Trump has politically painted himself into a corner that makes it very difficult for Democrats to work with him and very difficult for him to work with Democrats.

We're with Jonah Goldberg, senior editor to National Review.

I want to ask you, Jonah, if you don't mind, I'm going to take a quick break.

And then I want to come back and talk to you a little bit about tariffs.

My kids asked me about tariffs and why is this bad, dad, and

how does this work?

He has started to move into tariffs, which anybody who is free market really

doesn't like, and a $1.7 trillion stimulus package.

We'll get into that in a second.

We should also get an update from Jonah about his new book coming out in a couple months, Suicide of the West.

How the rebirth of tribalism, populism, nationalism, and identity politics is destroying American democracy.

Wow.

Tax season is approaching, and that's why this week, I guess, you know, one of the things they did in Congress was make sure that it's tax identity theft awareness week.

Oh, thank you for that, Senator Congressman.

I appreciate that.

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and

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They might have just bought your social security number on the dark web.

One in four people have already experienced identity theft, 25%, and that number is going to go up.

So if you're only monitoring your credit, your identity can still be stolen in ways that you may not detect, and they can steal your information on the dark web or get an online payday loan in your name.

The thing that might affect you right now is your income tax return.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn Beck.

Jonah Goldberg from the National Review, a deep thinker and

a guy who just knows what he believes and his principles and

keeps marching forward, a guy you can trust to have in battle with you.

Jonah,

let's talk a little bit about the washing machines in America and why this makes a difference, that there's now a tariff on it.

Yeah, I mean,

look, I'm a free trader, and I think that free trade,

That the protectionism being cast as a populist issue has always been a mistake, right?

I mean the the idea that what protectionism does is it puts bureaucrats or business people or politicians between the consumer and the products that they want to buy.

It is elites saying, oh no, these will cost you more.

You can't get those.

You have to buy this instead.

That's not populism.

That's not democracy.

That's elitism.

That's statism.

That's whatever you want to call it.

Adam Smith recognized this in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, that businessmen are always trying to get an advantage over

the public by conspiring to raise prices.

And those kinds of conspiracies are almost impossible to stop,

but they can only be effective and really damaging if the government gets involved.

And I wrote, as you know, I wrote this book called Liberal Fascism, which got into fascist economics.

And so much of that is about the government getting in between the producers and the consumers and deciding and picking winners and losers.

And that's what protectionism is.

And so

I get, you know,

there are

at the margins good arguments for the government you know, retaliating against governments that are betraying trade deals, right?

I mean, you don't have to be a thousand percent purist.

My colleague Kevin Williamson at National Review just basically says

we should have a constitutional amendment that says there shall be no tariffs

or limits on trade of any kind.

I'm not sure that I am there.

You can make some arguments for national security stuff and all the rest, but as a general principle, protectionism boils down to the government picking winners and losers among a certain set of producers of certain manufacturer or manufacturers of of certain goods and saying, we're going to help you out and conspire against the public to set prices higher than what they should be.

And I think it always, if left to run rampant, always leads to a terrible place.

Jonah, isn't it something too?

Because we as conservatives have talked for many years about opposing the redistribution of wealth.

And if you follow the line of what a tariff purports to do,

with the washing machines, for example, we're going to charge an extra $50 or $100 on every washing machine.

It's going to cost people more money, and that money is somehow going to be filtered through the system and eventually get to create a certain amount of jobs.

So you're essentially taking $50 or $100 from the average person buying a washing machine and you're funneling that money to some worker in some city who's going to make $50,000 or $60,000 on all those little groupings of $50.

I know it's not that pure, but I mean, that is essentially just redistribution of wealth, which is something we're supposed to be opposed to.

No, that's exactly right.

And it sort of gets at why I honestly and truly believe there should be a 0% corporate tax rate.

Because no

economists cannot, for the life of them, come to a consensus on who pays it

on corporate taxes.

But one thing they're sure is that the consumer pays most of it.

It's not like GE pays the

corporate tax rate, it's corporate tax payments out of some special kitty that is just

fat cat price.

It comes with the price of the widgets that they sell.

And

same thing with Coca-Cola or any of these companies.

And so the idea that, and the same thing goes with protectionism.

There's this idea that somehow the government knows better how to organize a society.

Right now, there's this movement afoot for a couple dragging steel makers to basically take over the issue of steel trade, steel imports in this country.

And what always gets left out of this is that there are a lot of manufacturers in the United States that need cheap steel to make the other stuff that we want to be manufacturing here.

It's really amazing how much we're repeating from the Great Depression on letting these giant companies steer the policy of the United States, which will hurt all of the smaller companies.

I mean, it's a direct repeat in many ways from the 1930s.

Yeah, I mean, every big, you know, one of my greatest pet peeves is this mythology that big corporations are quote-unquote right-wing right we know that they're not on cultural issues you know big Fortune 500 companies were way ahead of the curve on things like gay marriage and all sorts of other things I'm not criticizing them for it I'm just saying that they're not these sort of Thomas Nash cartoons bastions of like reaction or anything that Marxist stuff is over and when it comes to like economic conservatism

They're for every regulation that hurts their competitors and helps them.

They're for free trade for me, but not for thee, or the other way around.

They look at their bottom lines as sort of rent-seeking entities from the government.

So

go ahead.

I just need to stop you because we're going to need to break.

And I want to take you to another place.

It was announced today that Amazon is partnering with Warren Buffett and JPMorgan Chase to go into the healthcare insurance business.

But how Warren Buffett described it is astounding.

We'll get to that next with Jonah Goldberg.

Glenn back

mercury.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

So earlier today, in fact, it sent some healthcare stocks tumbling before the opening of the stock market today, Amazon, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan

Chase announced that they are exploring the option of getting into the healthcare business, the health insurance business.

Warren Buffett said: the ballooning costs of healthcare act is a hungry tapeworm on the American economy.

We share the belief that putting our collective resources behind a company's best talent can, in time, check the rise of healthcare costs while concurrently enhancing patient satisfaction and outcomes.

Here's the strange line in this:

the company will be free from profit-making incentives and constraints, end quote.

Jonah Goldberg from the National Review, what kind of, how does that work?

I don't know how that works.

I don't really see it clearly either.

To me,

I haven't studied up on it, but I mean, it sounds to me sort of the equivalent of what Google does, where it provides

free dry cleaning and

free cafeterias and free food and all that kind of stuff.

And it's all heavily subsidized and doesn't make an enormous, it doesn't make a profit of any kind, but it retains talent.

And so maybe this is just an effort to create something that

isn't necessarily seen as a profit center, but it is seen as a very useful sort of retention center.

Because health costs are eating up

a lot of big businesses.

So could it be like reducing costs isn't the same thing as increasing profits, but in a certain kind of accounting way, it kind of is, right?

Right.

So, I mean, but I mean, I'm trying to figure out, would you have to be a member of the bank and do everything with Amazon?

Or, I mean,

I don't know.

I don't quite get it either.

It doesn't, I mean, I think what they want, first of all, I think part of them is, and Warren Buffett is very good at this stuff, and so is Jeff Bezos.

And so is Jamie Dimon.

They want to sound as altruistic as possible.

Yes.

And so, you know, it's sort of like the old cliche about how if someone says it's not about the money, it's about the money.

If these guys are saying, I don't trust these guys to say it's not really about the profits, you can't be two of the three richest people on the planet and not have some concern about profit.

Well,

you've also left out the nation's largest bank.

Yeah, no, there's that too.

You know, except for that, Mrs.

Lincoln.

Right.

Yeah.

So

it's a weird thing.

You know, and I'm not saying it's impossible for them to be altruistic.

You drive around this country and you look at all the libraries named after Geddes and Mellon, you know, those guys.

There's a lot of that possibility, but that doesn't sound like this.

This sounds like a very clever PR spin on maybe something that's very smart that will undermine CVS and United Health and some of these other

tech, you know, medical health care giants.

And frankly, they all need to be disrupted and undermined because the healthcare sector just...

It just doesn't work.

Yeah.

All right.

let me change subjects because we have the President's State of the Union address, and I have a feeling he's going to be announcing his $1.7 trillion stimulus package.

Conservatives freaked out at $787.

I mean, I can remember the number,

$787 billion.

We thought that was outrageous.

Now it's somewhere between 1.5 and 1.7 on a stimulus package.

That comes the same week that somebody advised the president that we should be building, the government should be building the 5G network.

Thank God for a Jeep Pie from the FCC.

And the other, both Republicans and Democrats on the FCC said, no, we don't have any place doing that.

Who's advising the president right now on some of these things?

And do you see us being able to affect

this out-of-control spending and kind of, you know, adoption of let let the state take this business on attitude?

Well, you know, this is not going to make me popular with anybody, but I think one of the things that has been remarkable about the Trump presidency so far is how well under incredibly trying circumstances the

institutions, particularly, you know, the House and the Senate and the establishment generally, including in his own administration, has been able to manage and direct the Trump presidency from some of Trump's worst instincts.

And, you know, I think Trump probably wanted to do infrastructure day one.

He wanted tariffs day one.

You know, he wanted all sorts of things day one that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell said no to, but, um,

or sort of engineered the system to make impossible.

And the problem is, is all they were really doing was kicking the can down the road.

There are very few things that

constitute core ideological beliefs of Donald Trump.

One of them is protectionism.

Another one is this infrastructure stuff.

And he still has this belief, which Bannon had to, that spending hugely on infrastructure can buy Democratic support.

I don't think that's necessarily true anymore.

I think it would have been true at the beginning of his presidency, but he didn't go that way.

In terms of the more dismaying, you know, sort of ideological corruption of the GOP to supporting this stuff, I find it repugnant.

You know, I mean,

if you honestly believe in protectionism and if you honestly believe in massive, you know, Keynesian economic spending where you just give the economy this huge sugar rush and of all that kind of stuff, if you believe that stuff, you have every reason for you to go out there and advocate for it.

But there are so many people I know personally who don't believe this stuff.

and who have suddenly changed to endorsing it or didn't believe this stuff, but suddenly endorse it because Donald Trump likes it.

Now, it is possible that some of these politicians in closed rooms have been ensorceled by Donald Trump's Aristotelian gift for persuasion and rhetoric and explained to them that protectionism is better.

But I don't think that's really the case.

I think this is purely an example of power corrupting people, people sucking up to power, of bending

and jettisoning their principles in order to be in the good graces of the ruler.

And it's very, very sad.

And the GOP, to the extent it's going to be a Conservative Party, Free Market Party going into the future, is going to spend decades cleaning up this mess.

Jonah, could I ask you to come back some point and

just

tell me what it was like growing up in your home?

I mean,

your dad, you just released one of your dad's writings.

Your dad wrote for the Wall Street Journal.

So he was, you know, you grew up around a guy who was in

and in and around these circles and monitoring them,

you know, since you were little.

Your mother was the one who told Monica Lewinsky, save the dress and

make a tape to, not Monica Lewinsky, but Linda Tripp.

I mean, that's,

I can't even imagine.

I know my experience of,

you know, just that one event.

I can't imagine that my mother was involved in any way or not.

How this just affected you?

Well, you forget that when my mom, when I was a little, little kid, my mom was in a scandal with the Nixon administration, which we can get into some other time.

But yeah, no, look,

I had a strange childhood.

And,

you know, and I'm not...

I'm not your typical pseudo-intellectual demi-Jew from the upper west side of Manhattan.

And it's, you know, but I'm very grateful to my parents for, you know, the sort of weird, goofy, strange upbringing that

they gave me.

You know, my dad's idea of, my dad was your classic sort of Jewish intellectual, and his idea of a vacation was either going to the other side of the couch to read a different magazine

or book, or going to Europe and looking at museums, or going on long walks with his sons to explain to them why Stalin was really, really bad.

And,

you know, that was sort of my, you know, I got most

of, did you ever kind of roll your eyes?

I mean, because every child goes through a period where you're like, oh, geez, and they're going on about this again.

Do you ever roll your eyes on that Stalin stuff or did you, did you buy it the whole time?

Well, I mean, it was, it was, a lot of it was sort of like in Karate Kid, where Ralph Macchio doesn't know why he's waxing on and waxing off and paint the fence up and down, up and down.

And then all of a sudden, sort of my late teens, I kind of discovered, holy crap, I know a lot more about this stuff than everybody else in this room.

And to me, it was just my dad talking, you know, and it was, you know, I used to tell people that, you know, one of my earlier memories is of my dad pushing me on a swing, explaining how the Yugoslavian black hand was the first modern territory.

And

one time, I wrote about this in a eulogy I wrote to my dad, where we were walking down the street

going to get bagels on a Sunday morning.

I couldn't have been older than seven, maybe, maybe eight.

And all of a sudden my dad stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk, squeezed my hand really hard and said to me totally straight-faced, Jonah, if you are ever pulled over in a South American country, tell the officer, I am so sorry.

Is there any way I can pay the fine right here?

You don't want to go down to the jail.

And then we went back to walking.

I'm like, okay, daddy.

So he was a strange, he was a peculiar duck, as he liked to say.

Who did you get your sense of humor from, mom or dad?

The dry stuff I get from my dad,

the

more gonzo crazy

stuff I get from my mom.

So the more dry stuff, you're implying that there is a shot that maybe your dad was joking about the

South American police officers?

Unclear.

He just thought that kind of stuff was

it amused him to say it, but he almost never broke character.

I mean, I'll give you another example.

Again, I wrote about it in the eulogy.

When I was a teenager, I accidentally, long story short, I accidentally rubbed some hot sauce in my eye, and I went running into the bathroom to wash out my eye, and I'm like tearing up and it stinks, whatever.

My dad walks by, bathroom door is open, he walks in and he says, what happened?

And I'm like blubbering, ah, I got hot sauce in my eye.

Ah, I was eating, you know, cheese and crackers, crackers.

And he just deadpan says,

damn it.

I wish I had told you not to rub hot sauce in your eye

and walks out of the room.

Jonah Goldberg,

you can follow him at the National Review online.

I follow his Twitter page.

Yeah, at Jonah NRO, I'm very now concerned that I'm doing a terrible job as a parent.

I have not told my kids to not put hot sauce in their eyes or what to do when they get arrested in a South American country.

But I guess I'll have to have a couple of years to get to that.

A couple things from Jonah.

We have to talk to him about this too.

Man, we just have so much to talk about.

Is Jonah still online?

Jonah.

Yeah.

Can you give us a highlight of your new book?

When's it come out?

It doesn't come out till April.

And it's going to be, it's sort of a...

For some people, I try to explain it as kind of like a prequel to liberal fascism.

And it explains where our our

where the greatness of western civilization and and the greatness of america comes from and how our decline is a choice and how the greatest greatest threat to america and the west is the pervasive ingratitude to how good we have it and how we got here and it starts i mean the the table starts about 250 000 years ago and goes through the invention of how how we got capitalism, how we got democracy, all the way up to the present day.

So it's a big book, and

I'm pretty proud of it.

And the name of it is the Suicide of the Western News.

The Suicide of the West,

which is somewhat of an homage to a famous conservative intellectual named James Burnham, who wrote a book by the same name in, I think, 1964, I want to say.

And

it covers some of that ground, but gets into a lot of economic theory, and I think is pretty readable.

And even if you disagree with some of my points, I think there's just a lot of interesting, fun stuff in there.

Jonah, thanks so much.

Appreciate it.

Hey, thanks.

Thank you guys.

Bye-bye.

He doesn't sound like he's like his dad at all and going to the other side of the couch for another book.

No, no, not at all.

It starts 25,000 years ago.

Oh, okay.

So it's simple.

That's a good thing about it, because I mean, liberal fascism is not a simple topic at all, but it's so readable.

So I love Jonas.

He's funny.

He finds a way to distill it.

I mean,

how big is that book?

300 pages?

350 pages?

Something like that?

It's not a long, you know, and it covers everything.

Yeah, it does.

It's really good.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Every once in a while, one of those products

crosses a line from product name to just the thing that we call the product.

It's like, you know, Kleenex.

You know, instead of tissues, it just became Kleenex.

Everyone called it Kleenex.

TiVo was like that.

The DVR was just a TiVo for a long time.

Now it's DVR.

Well, you know, Q-tips are like that.

When you think about cleaning your ears, it's just Q-tips.

That's not necessarily what they're called.

That's the brand name.

And, you know, you think, okay, well, this is something we all have and we all use, and it's got to be the best way to do it.

Well, actually, not at all.

It's not even designed to clean your ears.

That's not what a Q-tip is supposed to do.

Look at the box.

They got a bunch of uses for it.

They don't say stick one of these way down in the middle of your ear.

That's not what they're recommending.

Wax RX,

they are recommending you use Wax RX to clean your ears because that's what it's for.

The Wax RX system is the method physicians trust the most, and it's just like the system they use in their offices.

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Glenn back.

I just love Jolene Goldberg.

We have to have him back.

You know, we just looked up, his mom was part of Nixon, got in trouble with Nixon.

Yeah.

I mean,

her testimony at Watergate, because of what she was doing, she was spying on McGovern.

Her testimony was part of it right there at the end that led to his resignation.

So she was involved with Linda Tripp and the blue dress and Watergate.

And she worked for the Kennedy administration and the Johnson administration.

It's a crazy

really interesting.

That would be a great conversation with him

to talk about that.

Yeah.

Just parents.

That's an interesting conversation with everybody, isn't it?

I think so.

To see not only what you take away from your parents, but also just the life they lived and how it influenced you.

Sometimes it's not the straight advice like Jonah was talking about.

It's just something that they did that you noticed that changed the way you thought about it.

I think that's more than almost anything I learned from my dad.

It was just watching him, you know?

And it's interesting.

It would be really interesting to track, to do an interview with people about their mom and dad when they're teenagers

or

when they still think mom and dad can fly, then teenagers when they think they're the worst in their 20s, 30s, and then 50s.

Because my parents, the image of my parents, has changed so many times in my mind because I understand them at my age

every step of the way.

Glenn, back.

Mercury.

Love.

Courage.

Truth.

Glenn back.

At five months in the womb, babies have 10 fingers and 10 toes.

They can yawn, they can stretch, and they do.

But they also feel pain.

Now, despite the scientific fact, the Senate voted against the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, which would ban late-term abortions on babies at 20 weeks.

46 out of 97 senators decided they want to continue the debate rather than pass the bill.

Now,

It's not a perfect bill.

Still allows babies conceived by rape or incest to be aborted, and it draws a hard line at 20 weeks.

The question is: so, does that mean that a baby that is 19 weeks and six days old,

do they not feel pain?

And I hate to get here because this is just so dicey.

A baby conceived

through rape,

does that baby not feel pain?

Even if there is a a point where a baby doesn't feel pain, does it mean it's okay to kill a baby?

I'm not proposing answers.

I'm just saying we have to think about this.

Just because it doesn't hurt, is it okay to take that life?

No, it's really not.

We shouldn't be dismembering

and doing the things we do to babies in abortion clinics.

Abortion is and always will be hideous and barbaric, no matter what gestation period it occurs or how that baby came to be.

It's just barbaric.

As a society,

we really

need to have a decent conversation with each other.

We need to be able to stop just yelling names and

throwing blood on each other one way or the other and just sit down and just talk about the children.

This bill was a step in the right direction.

It shows a glimmer of hope that maybe we're beginning to realize the sheer horror and murder of abortion.

I know this.

History will judge us.

There will be people

that will say in a hundred years, you know, if I were alive then, I would have stopped abortion.

I can't believe these people were monsters, and I'm not a monster like that.

Just like we now say, if I were alive during the state

slave trade, I would have stopped it because those people were monsters and I'm not a monster.

And yet we refuse to look at the numbers that there are more slaves today than all of the English slave trade combined.

All 400 years combined, more slaves today.

But we're not doing anything about it.

We just have to look at these issues.

Because once you really look at it, and once you have to say out loud, yes, that is a baby, then the next thing you have to look at is: do we kill it or not?

Humanity is going to realize what an atrocity this is.

And that realization will serve as a gruesome blemish on our history.

I pray that we open our eyes sooner rather than later.

It's Tuesday, January 30th.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

All right, Speaker Paul Ryan has just held a press conference.

He was asked about the Republican memo that Congress voted to release last night.

And

here's what he said.

Point number three.

There may have been male feasance by people at the FBI.

And was it?

And let me just, let me finish my points.

There may have been male feasance at the FBI by certain individuals.

So it is our job in conducting transparent oversight of the lead of the executive branch to get to the bottom of that.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

And so what we want is all of this information to come out so that transparency can reign supreme and accountability can occur.

My only problem with this is I completely agree.

I completely agree with what he said, except that's why we want this to come out.

No, if you are doing a murder trial, you don't necessarily bring out half of the facts in the middle because maybe some of your sources, maybe some of the leads dry up because, oh, crap, they're onto us.

You don't do that.

And that's the biggest problem that I have with this is why are we, why are we doing this?

I don't want to win.

I want this problem solved.

I want to know what the truth is.

And I want the bad guys.

And I don't care who they are.

I want them to go to jail.

I personally believe, a lot of people don't, I personally believe there's a real problem in the Justice Department.

And it doesn't come as a surprise to anybody who didn't wholly trust Eric Holder.

Are you telling me that the Justice Department was left in the same condition that he founded in?

And what was the condition he founded in?

Why do we accept that this kind of corruption was not only

done,

but done at vast levels in the 1970s under Nixon?

But now suddenly, we don't really have to look into any of this because it could never happen.

Of course, it already has happened.

It will happen again, over and over again the minute we start to trust everyone and say, ah, you know what?

We're not really looking.

People go corrupt.

That's just the way it is.

I don't want the details now because I need them.

What good is this going to do?

Because here's what's going to happen.

Let's say that

there's

testimony in this document that there was malfeasance, which can you define because nobody ever says, you know, my friend, boy, there's some malfeasance going on there.

That's a, that's a, that's a legal term.

Right.

So

definition of malfeasance, intentional conduct that is wrongful or unlawful, especially by officials or public employees.

So that's a pretty

direct charge there.

Okay, so, but no, it's not.

It's not.

He says there's malfeasance, which is wrongful

or

unlawful.

Well, I want to know what the wrongful stuff is, but the wrongful stuff does not lead to an indictment of people going to jail.

It might.

It could.

It could.

The unlawful definitely does.

Because there's sort of a scale here.

There is misfeasance, which is conduct that is lawful but inappropriate.

So you're on the right side of the law, but you did something you shouldn't have done.

Then there is non-feasance, which is failure to act where there was a duty to act.

So you didn't step in when you should have.

Then there's malfeasance, which is intentional, which is pretty big word.

Intentional conduct that is wrongful or unlawful.

It kind of goes against

the general description.

When you get down to it,

there's

first degree, second degree, third degree.

It's not good.

I think you're right in that there's still a little wiggle room built into that.

However,

it's a fairly serious charge if he's using the legal definition.

Now, he could just be using it as a word and we don't know, but it seems intentional.

And he used the word may,

may have been malfeasance.

Okay.

Let's find out if there is.

Let's find out if there is.

This document being released now, what does it do?

I can tell you that there are many conservatives that are very concerned it actually forces the people that they were working with to get information on the FBI and on Russia and everything else.

It will force them back into the dark because they're not going to, I don't want to talk about this.

Uh-uh.

So by releasing this, it could hurt the investigation.

It could also hurt any kind of legal proceedings going forward.

That's not good.

Yeah, it's not good.

And

hang on just a sec.

For what purpose, Du?

I think it's just so we can have an arguing point.

Right.

And there's a pushback point.

I think that's where it comes from, right?

You want to be, you know, people have been beating up the administration on Russia for all this time.

And, you know, Republicans have pushed back and said there's been some questionable activity at the FBI and these other organizations, and here's some supporting evidence for it.

I think that's the basic.

There's no other reason.

I mean, we do need to hear it eventually, but there's no reason we need to hear it in the middle of the investigation.

But I guess if you do, I mean, I'm just trying to think of it now from the Republican point of view.

If you're looking at it from purely political.

You have 2018 coming up.

Yeah, I understand it.

And if you don't offer any kind of defense,

if you're just quiet, it's not going to help.

You have to do that.

And this thing's going to go on for another two years.

You're probably right.

So, you know, that's sort of a big point.

And I guess I can understand that.

We should also point out, because obviously we, you know, we have a lot of, you know, I wouldn't say we have a lot of friends in Washington

or anywhere.

I was going to say, I don't know if we have any friends in Washington.

But it's important to note, I think, for the audience who might think, okay, oh, those guys are anti-Trump.

Of course, they're hearing from conservatives and Republicans.

No, no, no.

We're here.

This is actually, these people that we've heard from are pro-Trump people.

They just don't like, they're concerned about this investigation.

Because they do believe, as I do, there is something there.

Right.

There is there.

Now, the press is saying there's not.

I believe there is, but we won't know.

And anything that hurts that investigation in the long term is we shouldn't be doing.

We shouldn't be doing.

Because the underlying point here is more important than the political squabble that will play out even to the election.

The idea that

we have a...

The second most powerful or third most powerful country in the world

who has conducted what I would say are acts of war against this country.

This is not something you normally get away with.

You're influencing and trying to manipulate another country's election.

This entire investigation and if we had this on the Soviet Union when I was growing up, Reagan would have, he might have gone to war over this.

Yeah, it's that big.

It would have been a very scary period.

Add into that.

Again, even if you don't care about the Russia part, which is hard for me to understand because this is not, it's not a, it's not an anti-Trump thing.

Again, political nonsense has brought that into, is Trump bad or good, which is not the question I want answered.

The question I want answered is, is about what Russia did exactly and how do we stop it.

But the same thing applies to the FBI.

Again, this comes down to

is the FBI good or bad or is Trump good or bad?

And again, that's all sort of a distraction.

We all know that there are a lot of people in the FBI who are good.

There are a lot of people in the intelligence community that are good.

But if we have a problem that is a little bit above a couple of bad apples who are acting with their own political sort of ideology and letting that affect their work.

It's a huge problem.

It's a huge problem.

It will affect you eventually.

Exactly.

And it's important.

It's so frustrating because, for instance, the FISA memo.

All right.

I don't believe in secret courts.

I just don't believe that we should have a FISA court.

I'm sorry.

No secret courts.

It's

what?

Extra constitutional.

It's outside of the Constitution.

You don't do do it how how would you

how would you investigate something exactly the way we do all of it you go to a court you go to a court and you're quiet about it and you don't have to have the newspaper there you know we did we did it with john gotti it wasn't in the paper happens all the time happens all the time

right you go but you have what what fisa was i need extra latitude So the standards are lower and it's all secret.

I don't believe in the FISA court at at all

with that being said what we're talking about here is is what evidence did they give the fisa court

if the and what did they do with it if the fbi went and took a dossier which they're used to seeing and they took it from uh from steel

And they look at it and they say, holy cow, look at these charges.

That, of course, happened.

Now, did someone at the fbi say wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute where did he get this well he got it from steely he's a former mi6 he's very he's worked with us before he's very buttoned up okay great where did he get this information specifically this one this one and this one where did he get those chase down his sources talk to him

Well, I don't know.

I mean,

Director, if this is going on, he's going to be the president in four months.

Great.

I'll talk to FISA, and I will tell them that we need to act because we think

this is a trusted source.

And we now, because of the Patriot Act, have that ability to just go, we think it's a trusted source.

We need to make sure that there is no connection to Russia for the next president of the United States, or that he's not being set up and going to be blackmailed.

We need to protect the president of the United States.

One way or another, we have to act on this information.

But at the same time, track all this down.

Find out, because we are already doing investigations on Russia, and I have a feeling all of this came from Russia.

So, this may also be evidence that Russia is doing everything they can to destroy our election process.

If they had that conversation,

is that wrong?

If the Muslim Brotherhood brought George Bush information, which he did, you know, on September 8th and said Al-Qaeda is going to blow up

the World Trade Center, would you say, well, we can't use that information because it was all funded by Muslim Brotherhood?

Now, if we went on a jihad ourself on September 9th

and we said, we're going to get al-Qaeda.

We're going to wiretap them.

We're going to, because we know they're going to take down

the World Trade Center.

That would be wholly irresponsible.

They should do both.

They should immediately do everything they can to follow that information to find out it's right because it's coming from the Muslim Brotherhood.

But there's also pressure.

It's September 11th is go date.

Also, wiretap.

Listen, find out.

Is there anything we can do to stop this?

Find out if it's true.

But on the other hand, proceed as if it is because we have a time pressure.

That's totally reasonable.

It's reasonable, but dangerous.

Very dangerous.

That's why you shouldn't have the Patriot Act in the first place.

Yeah, it's dangerous because it sets, if that precedent is okay.

The idea that a sitting president with all that power can utilize it based on essentially opposition research is very concerning because, you know,

and I love that the Democrats don't see any problem with this because if you're allowed to do this as president, what do you think Trump's going to do?

Right.

Like I'm saying from a Democrat perspective, if you are, you think Trump is, again, this evil fascist that wants to just, you know, who hates every race and is the worst person in the world, well, if you believe that, why on earth would you want this to be a power that the president had?

I mean, because in your mind, surely Donald Trump is going to use these tools the same way or worse than Barack Obama did.

So you better find out what these things are and stop that power before it's able to be utilized by your enemies.

As I said earlier today, justice must be blind.

It might be

under the executive branch, but it cannot be a tool of the executive branch, no matter who the executive is.

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Glenn Beck Mercury.

Glenn back.

So news for the Cleveland Indians.

I mean, not the team, but the Indians in Cleveland.

They're going to be very, very happy because the offensive Cleveland Indian logo is going away.

Yeah, Chief Wahoo, no longer going to be on the uniforms of the Cleveland Indians, starting in 2019.

So it's going to take, they're going to take a year.

So I haven't really heard about the big Indian protests on this.

Yeah, I mean, you know, like it was a cartoon that was going to be a big one.

You dropped it, smiley-faced.

No, I'm aware of it,

but I'm not aware of the big Indian or Native American pushback.

There's some activists that there's some activists, but no, I would say there isn't one.

I mean, you know what this is?

This is, this is, I mean, you want to talk about the arrogance.

Oh, they're just.

They're too small and they don't, they don't even, they're too stupid to even know that they're being mocked.

And uh, we we have to take this off because they're just too stupid, or or I don't know what it is, but they won't say anything, and so we have to protect them.

It's so arrogant.

Can I ask a journalist question as well here?

Yeah, I know you're not a journalist, but yeah, I play one.

We should do this on the other side because I'm interested in the way the New York Times wrote this up.

I don't think I've ever seen the New York Times use language like this.

I'm interested, they're writing like conservatives.

I can't imagine.

Next,

Glenn, back,

Mercury.

This is the Glenn Beck program.

Yeah, real quick on the Cleveland Indians.

Here's what the New York Times wrote

as they get rid of their mascot on the uniforms.

Yeah, and I...

Maybe this is minor, but it just reads really strangely to me.

This is their last paragraph of the New York Times story on the Cleveland Indians abandoning the Chief Wahoo logo next year.

I don't don't know why that makes me laugh.

Okay.

The Indians' team name.

Now, remember this with the Redskins.

The Redskins' team name, 100% verifiable fact, was named after their coach who was Native American to honor him.

Period.

There's no disagreement about that.

People have said later on, oh, well, it turned into a negative phrase, Redskins.

But that's not what he is saying.

Well, George Washington turned into a bad name.

Well, yeah, but it's not.

Right, exactly.

It was a doubt.

That's not the point.

Right.

So here's what they say.

The Indians' team name itself is supposedly derived from a member of a Native American tribe in Maine who played for a different Cleveland team in the National League from 1897 to 1899.

Now, you're the New York Times, and you're writing a story about the Indians' logo.

And you include this name, this paragraph at the end.

The Indians' team name itself is supposedly derived?

Like, isn't it your job as a journalist to say it either is derived from that or it isn't, or it's a claim from the team that is unverified, right?

Like, it's supposedly adds a little bit of like,

supposedly they say it's a, but we don't believe that.

We want to make clear that you know that.

Supposedly, you said

you said you couldn't believe this from the New York Times?

That's what threw me off.

I thought maybe the news, I've never seen this from the New York Times.

I've seen that every day.

I was thinking like, you know what?

Reagan might have been a pretty good guy.

And they came out for tax cuts at the end of the article.

You know, that whole tax cut thing, that trickle-down economics

looks like proof is in the pudding here.

It's working.

Pat, do you, Pat Gray's with us?

Do you, do you, what do you think about the name change, the loss of Chief Wahoo from the?

Well, you know, it could, I think, be construed as offensive.

Really?

It could be.

Very cartoonish.

I don't know that it is, though.

It could be.

Thank you.

I don't know that it is.

Is this the big white man stepping up and saying, oh, you know, these Indians who are not protesting, they're just too stupid to know this is offensive, so I'm going to do it for them.

I mean, it's insulting.

A bunch of white liberals being offended on their behalf.

Yes, it's insulting.

They're not offended on their own behalf.

Right.

They've done study after study, and it comes out about 90% of Native Americans aren't offended by that stuff.

So what are we doing?

What are we worried about?

Yeah, you're imposing your white man justice.

I mean, it's really incredible.

Incredible.

It's actually insulting, I think, to minorities.

Oh, I think it's very insulting.

Very insulting.

You excited for the State of the Union?

I can't wait.

Right.

I can't wait.

Right.

Yeah.

I can't wait.

You know,

Kiefer Sutherland is not showing up.

Now, I didn't know he was supposed to,

but he's not showing up.

Oh, he's not showing up because he's the designated survivor.

He has to stay away from the State of the Union TV show.

It's ridiculous.

Of course, he's not going there, Claude.

Geez.

Mr.

Educated talk show host over here doesn't know that Kiefer Sutherland can't be at the State of the Union.

I am so sick of who's invited and who's not and who's showing up.

And

what you're going to wear.

We're going to wear a pink ribbon.

We're going to wear blue shoes.

I mean, who cares?

It's just, who cares about all of that?

I want to point out, joining us here is

little Sally Muckinfutch, who's no more than three, and she has no eyes and no mouth, and she doesn't have a nose so she can't see smell

speak quite honestly breathe until her neighbor uh coincidentally a waiter from california uh offered her a straw and just jammed it into her face and it saved her life and that's why we wanted Little Sally stand up and

Bill, whatever his name is from the TGI Fridays, he's here as well.

And then they applaud for five minutes.

And I'm tired of it.

I just shut up.

All of you, shut up.

Is Bill from TGI Fridays really going to be there?

Because that sounds great.

Yeah, he jam.

I mean, it was, and it wasn't a paper story.

He saved her life.

He saved her life.

He just jammed that.

Just straight into her face, right?

Because there was no opening there.

Right.

He could tell by the look of her skin that she was like.

Suffocating.

No, no.

No, he did it out of anger.

Oh, okay.

And this is a story they're not going to tell you, okay, because it's the Republicans.

But he did it out of anger because he could tell that if she had eyes, she was looking at him like, where's my drink?

And he knew my drink,

I've already put it here in front of you, but you don't have eyes.

And so he got mad.

He took that straw and he just jammed it in her face.

Now, they're thinking about not giving him the fine

because

you're fined $1,000

if you give a straw to somebody that didn't request it, but she had no mouth.

And quite honestly, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal said she deserved it.

Yeah, law's a law, though.

You can't give anybody a straw, even if they have no mouth.

Right.

And that's the rope.

That's the law.

I mean, we are society of laws or men.

Children without faces, you just don't care.

How are you looking at this state of the union?

So I'm trying to assess.

I'm sort of weighing

the good from the first year of Trump with the concerns that I have.

And

right now, I think the good outweighs.

the bad with the things we've talked about a lot of times, like Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch got the tax cuts, which have definitely stimulated the economy and helped employees.

He rolled back the EPA regulations.

He got us out of the Paris Accord and the TPP Treaty, gave land back to states.

And I think you could say actually finished off ISIS pretty much.

Oh, no, you don't say it.

He did it.

He did.

He did it.

He's generally changed.

the way the administration deals with the military.

And he's added respect back

to the military, which is a huge thing to do.

And he's elevated a lot of military people to real levels of prominence and influence in the administration, which

can be risky if you do it too much.

But I think he's done it an appropriate amount.

The Jerusalem thing, you've got

opening up drilling on Anwar.

That'll be big for America's energy independence.

And then you weigh that against the concerns that the push for amnesty, which I'm not excited about, the fact that we we don't have a wall yet or provisions to build it,

the libel laws he wants to open up and the risk to free speech.

There's been no repeal of Obamacare yet.

The character issues are a concern to me, but not apparently to evangelical leaders.

So

what is the state of our union right now?

Is it solid?

Are we on solid footing?

Or

do the concerns outweigh?

You have to look, too, at a couple of things.

Sorry, I was going to say the $787 billion stimulus package, which was outrageous last president.

Now it's double that.

It's double that.

Double.

Or more.

Or more.

It might be as high as 1.7.

Is that going to be a good thing to the pundits now?

Are they going to say, well, yeah, now it's good?

That's not good.

They're just not calling it a stimulus package.

They're saying it's for infrastructure.

But that's what it was.

It was an infrastructure stimulus package.

And what happened to that 800 billion?

Well, Joe Biden was all over it.

Joe Biden was all over it.

He made all those signs, if you remember.

Yeah, I do.

I remember.

Those are nice.

Those are really nice.

So, I mean, you know, we have that.

We also have this really disturbing news that came out.

And thank God, Jeet Pai stomped this down yesterday quickly.

The chairman of the FCC.

He's casualizing the 5G network.

The 5G network.

That is to come out and have the president say, you know what,

we think we should build a 5G network, and private industry will just

rent

the backbone of a 5G network from us is terrifying really not good really not good

yeah there's an interesting thing of I'm concerned a little bit about how you know Trump always we always said Trump would have better policies over a four-year period than any you know certainly Hillary Clinton right I mean you know of course the question is long-term and that's going to be up for debate for the next couple decades right of what happens to the party and what they begin to support if they turn into that nationalist party, it's no matter how many good things he does in this term, it's a very negative thing because then there's no conservative representation.

But he always had a bunch of policies, even in the campaign, that were he proposed and said that he was going to do and

that we liked.

And there was a big bucket of policies that we didn't like.

And what it seems like is the first year, he

went into that pass of least resistance, has taken and done many of the things you mentioned, Pat, which were good and that we supported.

And as we start year two, we're getting infrastructure, we're getting

DACA, we're getting path to citizenship, we're getting a lot of proposals here that were the ones that we were skeptical of and did not like back in the day.

So hopefully this isn't a split where we're seeing the policy turned down.

I mean, I kind of like Ben Shapiro's construct of this when he was talking about it on the other day, the other day when he was here, which was an A, I think it was an A minus for executive policy, which almost everything you mentioned there, Pat, was

executive policy.

None of it was legislative.

It can all be reversed.

The only thing legislative was the tax plan.

And I think he gave him a C minus on legislative priorities, and then everything else, an F, which is the stuff that you talked about when it's character, it's the office.

It's an interesting split.

And I think, generally speaking, how I see it,

he's done a lot of good things.

He's definitely been better on policy than I thought he was going to be.

Definitely.

And that's a huge thing.

I had a friend who supports Trump reach out to me.

He's in politics, and he said,

I understand, Glenn, but the evangelicals are playing this really smart.

They are making all of their support.

I think it hurts them in the long run, but they're playing it very smart, and they're giving him support and clearly saying the minute he starts going the other direction, we're done.

And he said, so

he is being held on a short leash, which is good.

This is a supporter, by the way.

He said, the question is,

in the last four years,

will there be a leash on him at all?

Will he care about the left or the right or politics?

And some could look at that and say, that's really good because now he really doesn't care.

He doesn't have to be elected again.

But

that's where

presidents usually become a little more bold is

in the second term.

What happens in the second term?

Who's he going to listen to?

Who's going to temper him?

Who's going to help him find a path?

Because he, I don't think, and I don't mean this in a bad way.

I don't think he has thought things like the 5G network through or even the Patriot Act.

You know, he was,

his first, in the Patriot Act, his first gut reaction was, right.

This FISA.

This is what they used against me.

This should be gone.

Two hours later, somebody sat down and explained it to him.

And

he was saying, you know what?

This is great.

This is American.

We need it.

So it really depends on who he's listening to, who he wants to,

I don't mean this in a bad way, but pay off who's helped him that can advise him and he wants to help them back.

That's a

I don't know.

That's a question mark.

What does that mean for the policies going forward?

It's It's going to be a really interesting year and interesting State of the Union address without Kiefer Sutherland.

So he won't.

Right.

Yeah.

Are we sure he's

positive now?

He's not designated survivor.

How many

TV shows?

Yeah, he has to be separate from everybody else because he's the person who becomes president in this situation.

Anything really

happens.

Well, if Kiefer Sutherland is the American president, I think a lot would really

be bad.

Very bad.

Probably very bad.

You're going to talk about this on Pat Gray on Lee today?

Yes.

This is the big topic du jour moments from now.

All right.

Very excited to hear it.

And you can hear it as well on the Blaze radio and TV network as well as on iTunes with the podcast.

If you miss it, you can always catch up later in the day.

I also sent out a smoke signal.

Is that what that was?

About 3 o'clock Eastern.

Yeah.

Just sums up the whole show in a smoke signal if you want to wait until then.

They probably should make it longer than that.

Really?

Yeah, it was about seven seconds of smoke.

Smoke signals say a lot in a very little amount of time.

Sure.

It's a fair point.

He was telling Chief Wahoo that he's going to be talking about him.

today.

Is that you racist?

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Glenn back Mercury.

Glenn, back.

I just have to pass this on, and I'm going to post this at glennbeck.com right after the show.

A couple was driving down the street, and they were in Spain, and

the woman was kind of real close to

the man who was driving, and they thought that was a little weird.

What's going on there?

So they pulled over, and as they pulled them over, they said, Could you step out of the car?

And the couple were, no,

we'd rather not open the doors.

They opened up the doors, and oranges fell out.

And

then the

police realized that hundreds of oranges?

Hundreds of oranges.

And

the couple had robbed an orange truck, you know, a shipment of oranges.

But they actually said to the officer, you know what?

We're just on a long trip and we've been picking them along the way and it's just added up.

Glenn, fast.

Mercury.