Best of the Program | Guests: Gov. Greg Abbott & Leland Vittert | 10/13/25

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A historic day.

We look into what President Trump's legacy will be after the negotiation of this historic Middle East deal.

Also, Governor Greg Abbott talks to us a little bit about what's happening with the National Guard up in

Illinois.

It's the Texas National Guard.

And Leland Vitard.

Leland is the host of On Balance for News Nation, but he's also written a book called Born Lucky.

He's a Middle East expert.

We talked to him about that, but then we get into his life story.

He had,

and still does, autism

and was barely functional.

But his father made all the difference in his world.

And now Leland is a raging success.

Born Lucky is the name of the book.

The author is Leland Vitter, and he joins me on today's podcast.

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Now, let's get to work

you're listening to the best of the Glen Back program welcome to the Glenback program

quite an incredible day and you know

I would just like to hear from those people today that have been saying you know Donald Trump is going to get us in all kinds of wars and blah blah blah blah blah no apparently not you know the real problem is, is that people,

when George W.

Bush told me in the Oval Office back in 2007 or eight, he said, don't worry, Glenn, the next person that gets in here, no matter what party they're from, they're going to realize they're going to have to do pretty much the same thing because they'll have the same advisors and they'll know that their hands are really tied as president.

And that scared the hell out of me.

He was trying to make me feel better, but I didn't feel better.

Wait a minute, the president really doesn't have any power to do anything.

We're going to continue to go down this road, even though it doesn't work.

That's why when Obama got in, nothing really changed.

He didn't shut anything down or do anything big because he was going for the same advisors.

And so all these advisors that are like, you know, we've got 100 years of experience.

We've been working on these things and it's going to pay.

Donald Trump came in and said, I don't agree with any of this stuff.

We're going to try something different.

And so he got rid of those advisors.

And he's like, who'd you just marry?

Honey?

Yeah, okay.

Bring him over here.

We're going to send him to the Middle East.

I mean,

he just, he broke all of the rules.

And he's a negotiator.

And he's a business guy.

And he's a builder.

So he thinks differently.

And look at the difference.

I mean, if you want to look at

the way he has changed the world, he has greatly changed the world.

We're not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination, but he is greatly changing the world.

He is breaking everything that the State Department and the years of the guys who have been thinking exactly the same way, what they've been building.

He's breaking all of that.

And he's like, no, we're going to build it a different way.

We're not going to be a global community where everybody is answering to, you know, the United Nations.

we're going to be our own states and that's the way it should be now if you don't like that if you want to be a global community that's fine but that doesn't mean we all go to war with each other as you're seeing

if you find a way for everybody to work together if you find a way that where everybody wants to be successful and have some peace now there are going to be some people like iran

I don't know what's going to happen with Iran, but I'm hoping that there is some sort of mutual agreement between the Arab states that, you know, if Iran starts something,

it's not going to just be, you know,

it's not just going to be Israel that has to respond or the United States.

It's time for the Middle East, now that they're together, to

take that on themselves if there is trouble there, because that one hasn't been solved yet.

But he reached out and said, look, Iran,

we don't have to be enemies.

Now is is the time for you to come to the table as well.

It's so clear that this is how he actually sees the world.

He does see the world.

Peace through strength is something that he really believes in.

He talked about it quite a bit in the speech about how

this didn't happen because

he decided to let everyone have what they want or to be super nice to everyone.

This happened because they have really big weapons that are really powerful, that hit the targets they want to hit.

And many of them he shared, as he pointed out, shared with Israel,

many of which that they have themselves to use when needed.

And he didn't, that is the approach here.

This is not a,

it's so weird because I think the left and the media see Donald Trump as a guy who is either this maniacal hawk that is going to go just blow up everything all the time.

That's one of the worries that they said.

And we said at the time, none of his history points to this.

Nothing in his history about that.

Way back to when he was 20 years old, he talked about this stuff.

He hates war.

Yeah.

And I think some other establishment criticism comes to him because,

you know, you look at like what Russia did with Ukraine, right?

And you say, okay, well, Russia invaded Ukraine and there's a lot of people like on the hawkish right who would say, okay, like they're in the wrong here.

What are we going?

Why are we going to go and do anything with them?

And say that he's too weak on these issues.

He's constantly trying to give everyone what they want.

He's always negotiating.

And like neither of those are really true.

Like

there are elements of those.

Like Donald Trump will attack a country he believes is in the wrong if he needs to.

You've seen it with Soleimani back in the day.

He'll do the things he believes he needs to do, but he's not ideologically committed to doing that all the time.

The same thing is

also limited in his scope.

Yeah, usually limited in his scope.

Same thing with,

but like not limited in his scope when it comes to ISIS.

No.

Right.

Like Like he came in and was like, he talked about that in the speech too.

He's like, I talked to

General Raising Cain,

and everyone told me it was going to take four or five years.

He told me it would take four weeks, but we'd probably have time left over.

And he was right.

We went in.

He would do it his way.

He found a general who was on the ground who said, look, I don't want to talk ill about my superiors, but here's what I think we could do.

And he picked him and he said, well, do it your way because your way makes sense.

And then it was over in a month, right?

Incredible.

That is a totally different way of looking at these things.

And because he just doesn't have that,

he's not involved in that world where there's just calcification over ideas.

Like exactly what we talked about when it comes to George W.

Bush, right?

Like, you know, this is kind of where we are.

And the same advisors advise the same things.

And it doesn't always mean that it works out perfectly.

It doesn't always mean he's always right.

He is a guy, I think, with that type of stuff, at least, when he, when it does go down the wrong road, oftentimes he'll reconsider.

You know, I mean, I think that's what happened with Russia.

He went down that road with Russia.

He really, and again, he talked about this in the speech, believed he could solve that immediately.

He said it before the election.

He said we could get that done in a couple of days.

He said,

I called over and

Witkoff was in there talking.

And it was 15 minutes in.

And I called him, like, what's going on?

Why is this taking so long?

And they're like, he's still in there.

And he talked to him for five hours and it didn't happen.

And he admitted it didn't happen.

And you saw the change that he had there where he was all of a sudden saying, well, you know what?

Maybe Russia isn't serious serious about this, and we should start doing more to put pressure on them in other ways.

But, like, that's oftentimes just mocked as failure, right?

He went in there with this big approach and it didn't work.

Well,

he's trying something else, he's trying things that he believes will end these conflicts, and that is consistent with who he's been for a very long time.

I mean, you can come up with criticisms for Donald Trump, but this stuff has been pretty successful.

The stuff that he's done, particularly in the Middle East, has been incredibly successful.

Name the president that has not moved us

closer to war or brought us into war in the last, you know, five where we've had troops on the ground.

We're sending troops everywhere.

Name the last president that didn't do that.

I mean, you know,

I guess you could say, you know, Joe Biden, who

withdrew a bunch of troops

that didn't work out for us.

Didn't get us just slaughtered.

It made everything worse.

Yeah.

No, you're right.

I mean,

it's not.

He has a priority for this not to occur.

It's very important to Donald Trump, I think quite clearly.

And he believes he can get it done.

And in some circumstances, it's worked, which, by the way, nothing else we try typically works.

You know, sometimes war will end the thing you're dealing with at that given moment.

We have seen that happen, but oftentimes does turn into something worse in the long term.

And to be clear here, you you know, one of the problems that if we were going to poke holes in this at all, as to what happens so far, there is always a completely ridiculous ratio of how many Palestinians get released compared to how many Israelis get released.

It's 20 to 2,000.

To 2,000.

It's 100 to 1 in this case.

And it's always 50, 100, 150 to 1.

It's always something like this.

And you look at the guys who are coming back from Israel and they're all healthy and well-fed, look like they've just been at a resort.

And then you look at the hostages coming back from Hamas and they just look horrible.

They look either bad to horrible.

And

the issue here is all of the people that were taken hostage by Hamas will return back to life in Israel, hopefully be able to adjust to a life with their families, going to church, living as they were, or at least as close as they can get to that.

It'd be weird if the Jews started going to church.

Well, you know, whatever.

I don't know if they're all Jews.

I mean,

there was people from other countries as well um but uh they uh

the opposite will happen likely with the 2000 palestinians many of these were hardcore terrorists yeah many of them were real criminals many of them were in you know either involved or uh sus suspected to be involved heavily in the october 7th attacks a lot of these people do in the future there's a lot to come here so there's a difference though we they're releasing many of them that are being released did not have charges against them.

They were scooped up and not charged with something.

So, you know, they were holding these to keep combatants off the battlefield, but they were not necessarily charged.

They didn't have them.

They weren't the ones on video murdering children.

Correct.

Right.

Like, it wasn't them.

Correct.

But again, some of them were suspected.

They believed they had planning,

you know, possibilities.

They were in groups with the people who were doing these things.

And there is certainly a risk, as we've seen after 9-11, that when you take terrorists and you put them in Guantanamo for a few months and then you release them back, they become the heads of ISIS.

Like this stuff does happen.

So there's a long road ahead.

This is not a, it's, it's a victory lap for a very small piece of this, but a very important piece of it.

If they can keep the peace between the Arab world, forget about Hamas, you keep the peace and you hold together a coalition of the Arab world with Israel,

that's worth all of it.

Massively important.

Massive.

And while it might not necessarily solve Hamas or Hezbollah or any of these other groups,

if

we have a place where Israel and many of these Arab nations are in a good place together.

Trading with each other.

And maybe some of these countries are actually overseeing.

Gaza,

and they are the ones that need to come in and be the bad guys when Hamas does these things.

It's a totally different dynamic.

There's no way to turn against Israel if that situation is true, if that relationship can be maintained.

And that'll be difficult.

There will be times where that's going to be really difficult to maintain.

But again, it's a path.

It's like a possibility of success.

We were in a situation, I mean, as long as we've done the show together, Glenn, 100% of the time, I was convinced this was never going to occur, where there would even be a chance where Arab nations and Israel would be buddy-buddy or at least something close to it.

I would say 99.9% of the time because the Arab Accords were so historic.

You're like, wait, what just happened?

Yeah, the Abraham Accords.

Yeah, I agree with that.

And of course, there's always the possibility of a miracle.

That's the only thing really I held out hope for.

This might be it manifesting itself.

And that's great.

Here's what Hillary Clinton said.

I really commend President Trump and his administration, as well as Arab leaders in the region, for making the commitment to a 20-point plan and seeing path forward for what's often called the day after.

It's going to take a lot of work.

It's going to take a lot of coordination.

But the U.S.

took advantage of an opening that was available and we were able to be successful.

That's great.

Good for her.

Not what Biden said.

No, the Biden administration is like, Donald, what?

Who?

Duck?

Are you?

I don't know what you're talking about.

But congratulations, Hillary Clinton, for at least being honest, which

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Now back to the podcast.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

And don't forget, rate us on iTunes.

Governor Abbott, welcome to the program.

Hey, Glenn.

Hey, how are you?

Man, I'm doing great.

How are you doing?

I'm good.

I'm good.

I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions.

First, any thoughts on the peace deal

in Israel and the Arab world today?

It's just remarkable.

I haven't seen anything like this before.

As you know, the Middle East is one of the most complicated areas in the entire world.

And to see President Trump be able to go in there, work with other countries across the entire region as well as over in Europe and other places like that to galvanize countries literally across the globe and say, this is what we have to do.

We have to have peace there.

We have to stop the shooting, stop the killing.

We have to release the hostages, all of that.

And to do that in such a short period of time and to see the effectuation of it begin overnight is

just stunning.

And

so I would say so far, so good with the relief of the hostages.

The test will be tougher when we get to the next stage where Hamas actually has to step down

from running Gaza,

controlling Gaza, and we have to see them live up to that component of the peace deal.

If they're able to pull that off, and if international troops will be the ones who will be ensuring the safety of it, and ensuring that it's not U.S.

international troops, but from other countries

that will be stabilizing Gaza as opposed to Hamas,

then it may be an extraordinarily valuable deal.

Well, we'll keep our fingers crossed on that.

I wanted to talk to you because Pritzker and the courts have just said to the National Guard, to the Texas National Guard, you can't do anything.

Now, last week, I think they said you couldn't deploy them there.

You did because of what the Constitution actually says.

But now you've got to hold on them protecting ICE.

What's the status on this?

All right.

So let's go back to fundamentals here because what I have found is everybody in the country doesn't understand the fundamentals.

I'll rip through it real quick.

One is they are obviously the, quote, National Guard.

And the president has the authority under the Constitution, under federal statutes, to be able to call up the National Guard and to deploy them under certain circumstances, one of which is to deploy the National Guard to prevent interference with the execution of federal law.

And that's exactly what the President has done in Illinois, in Oregon,

in California, and places like that.

And as you kind of pointed out, and this is detailed, you got to be kind of a lawyer to figure out what these courts said, but very importantly, the Federal Court of Appeals in California, the Federal Court of Appeals in Illinois, all said that the President is fully authorized to call up these National Guard for purposes that were articulated by the President of why they were needed.

What happened, and this actually occurred before the National Guard were even sent to Illinois, because the trial court judge there said the trial court wanted to hear evidence about whether what was actually going on the ground satisfied the criteria of preventing interference with execution of federal laws.

And so that's all

that's going to happen.

You've got to prove that that's exactly what they are for.

Because if they do that, they will be allowed not only to be discharged there, which they are allowed by the courts to do, but they will also be able to be there.

to carry out the function of protecting ICE as ICE is trying to perform its duty to enforce federal law.

Now, listen, Glenn, what we've all seen on TV screens across the entire country, the way that people in communities, it could be protesters, it could be assassinators in these communities across the country, are interfering with ICE performing their jobs.

And so this is fundamental.

And I know whether it be at these federal court of appeals or when it gets to the United States Supreme Court, President Trump is going to be judicially authorized to fully enforce Title 10 of the federal law to make sure that these National Guard troopers are going to be able to be deployed and protect ICE members who are coming under assault in states across the entire country.

He's not allowed to have them do police duties, though, right?

I mean, that's the difference,

right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's the deal.

And that's one of the evidence issues that the trial court wants to hear.

So

the president doesn't have the authority to call up National Guard to act like police officers there.

But that's not what he's doing.

He's never even said he's trying to do that.

But, of course, that's the bogus arguments being made by Prisker and by people like Gavin Newsom.

And you know as well as I do.

Prisker and Gavin Newsom,

they are sanctuary city governors,

and they are more than happy having chaos in their communities and the last thing they want to do is to uh push down that chaos and allow some national guard soldier to come in and make the communities more safe and it's just disgusting that we have governors in this country uh who who

actually promote uh crime and chaos in their own communities and these are governors who are promoting endangering federal officials who are trying to carry out the functions of their office.

And I'm telling you, Glenn, if any of these people, any of these ICE agents or any federal employees, if they are injured in any way whatsoever, then Governor Pritzker and Mayor Johnson of Chicago, they are an accomplice in the crime that would injure one of our National Guard or one of the ICE agents trying to carry out the functions of federal law.

Tell me why Donald Trump chose Texas, because I know he always does, everything he does is for a reason.

Why did he choose the Texas National Guard?

President Trump knows that the Texas National Guard is the most elite National Guard that we have in the United States, whether it be serving on our homeland or serving on foreign lands.

He knows that they have the expertise of dealing with civil riot control.

They have done that on the border in the harshest of elements, in the toughest of times.

They have been deployed around the state of Texas by me to deal with situations like this, where we needed the National Guard to have the back of our law enforcement officers during the George Floyd protest, during other protests.

And so

these are proven and tested National Guard

who we have a very large number of them.

And he knew also that if we sent our guard there, we would still have plenty of guard, thousands of them on the border as we do right now, as well as plenty of other National National Guard to be able to perform whatever other function that I, as governor, would need them to be able to provide.

And so

this is just easy math for him

coming from a state that has the kind and quality and training of National Guard that President Trump respects.

The rules of engagement, I've always concerned about the National Guard kind of just being sitting ducks.

They can't really do anything.

What are you going to do?

Shoot.

What are the rules of engagement?

Yes, it's very simple and great question.

But there are rules of engagement that our guard have been very well trained on for literally years.

And then when they arrived in Illinois, they went back over the rules of engagement, and that is they don't go proactively.

actively and shoot somebody or anything like that.

Their mandate is to protect the ICE agents, but in protecting ICE agents and other federal employees, if they come under assault, they have certain tactics and strategies that they can use to make sure that they're going to maintain safety around them.

Some easy examples.

And I haven't been told exactly what they are down there, but I'm going to tell you generally what they do.

They would have tear gas capabilities.

flashbang capabilities, pepper ball capabilities,

less than lethal force capabilities to make sure sure that they're going to be able to maintain crowd control in ways that will protect the safety of the federal officials while at the very same time not doing any physical harm to anybody in the community who is threatening them.

But also, Glenn, remember this.

It was just a few weeks ago where

guard needed to be there, but they were not there at the time of the shooting in Dallas, Texas, when there was an assassination attempt by a gunman trying to kill, murder

the

national, I'm sorry, the ICE agents there.

And,

you know,

are you supposed to just stand back and say, yeah, have at it, take your best shot?

Of course not.

They would have been in charge of trying to eliminate that shooter before that shooter shot.

what turned out to be two illegal immigrants who were in detention.

You know, there's

that's the second incident here in Texas.

And I know the first one, the first one, I think everybody but one has been arrested.

And that was

quite the accomplishment on that.

Make sure you get everybody involved.

Let me switch to the border here real quick.

I read a story today about how the drug cartels have, at least in Baja,

have declared war on Americans.

Are we seeing anything,

any upswing in dangerous engagement from the drug cartels on our border?

Well, it depends on where you are, because, you know, the border runs from the Gulf of America to the Pacific Coast.

And you were talking about in the California area.

And we...

We have not yet seen in Texas anything exactly like that.

We are prepared for in Texas, which is why we still have thousands of National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety officers on the border.

And it's also why we are working in a very close collaboration with the Trump administration to make sure that we are going to be able to push back on anything like this.

But I'll tell you about two things further in response to this.

One, remember,

Trump has publicly stated what he also

privately stated, and that is he is looking to take out the heads of the cartels in Mexico.

And he has not backed off of that in any way whatsoever.

The other thing is that we all know that we need to be prepared in every region of the border about a new form of engagement by the cartels, and that will be active drone warfare.

And I know in Texas, we're prepared for it, and we're gearing up.

The other thing, something that new that just came out over the weekend, but they've been working on it a couple of weeks.

Do you remember back when Biden was president and I was doing everything I could to protect the border?

Yeah.

And I deployed those big orange buoys into the water, into the Rio Grande, that prevented people from being able to cross the border.

There was an announcement made by the Trump administration that they are putting down about 80 miles of those big orange buoys, especially in the Eagle Pass area, that would prevent people from being being able to cross.

And they're looking at other spaces where they would be adding in the aggregate more than 100 miles of those buoys.

One thing about those buoys, they are fully effective at preventing people from crossing in those areas, but they're about, I don't know, about a tenth of the cost of a border wall.

And so it's a very effective tool for the federal government to continue to deny illegal entry.

But there's also, there's also, listen, we know the commitment of President Trump to make sure that we're going to have zero people crossing the border during his administration.

But what I told President Trump is, listen,

we want to work with you for the next three years to make sure that we stop the flow coming across the border, but we need to do it in a way so it's effective for more than just three years,

for the next 30 years is what we need to do.

And those buoys on the border, the border wall that he's building, some other things they're doing in the state of Texas, is ensuring that what he has done during this term in presidency is going to have a lasting effect to deny illegal entry into the United States of America.

Governor Greg Abbott, I know you need to run, but I do want to congratulate you on what you've done with Epic City.

And, you know, you immediately sprung into action the minute we started hearing about these Muslim Sharia laws that he's possibly springing up.

And I want to thank you for that.

And we'll keep our eye on the Attorney General to make sure that he enforces those laws.

Thank you.

You got it.

Got you busy, Glenn.

You bet.

Bye-bye.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Leland,

great to have you on.

How are you, sir?

Pleasure to be with you, Glenn.

I remember when you and I worked together at Fox.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

You, first, I want to start before I get into your story, because your story is so great.

Before we get into that, tell me your analysis because you were a foreign correspondent based in Jerusalem forever.

What is your take on what's happening right now over in Egypt and

also in Israel?

That we don't understand right now, and that's fine in real time, how historic and seismic the shift in the Middle East is right now.

Because

Trump turned 50 years of conventional wisdom on its head.

Jared Kushner understood and explained to Trump that the root of all the problems in the Middle East is not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It is Iran.

And I think what we saw over the past eight months, and to be fair, over Trump's first term, but it culminated in the past eight months, is the isolation and degradation of both Iran's ability to act militarily on its own and its proxies.

And thus has allowed a total sea change in the power dynamic of the Middle East away from Iran and towards the Gulf countries and towards Israel.

So that has totally changed

everything.

And we're seeing, I think, the beginning of it, not the end of how much is going to change in the Middle East for the good.

What does it mean?

What does today mean in five years or 10 years?

Look, the one thing I learned about being in the Middle East is if you want to predict the future in the Middle East, okay,

you must be a prophet himself.

You will be proven a fool.

And here's why, is because

things change.

If two years ago I had told you after October 7th, Hezbollah and Hamas would be destroyed, Iran's nuclear program would be in ashes, but the real threat, both in Europe and in the United States, would be this

wild rise of anti-Semitism and radical Islam terror now calling for the death of Jews and attacks on Jews around the world, you would have called me crazy because everybody would have said, oh, you know, everybody's going to rally around Israel.

It's the exact opposite of what has happened.

So I can't predict the future, but what I can say is, is that for the first time, I think, since the Iranian Revolution, 1979, there is a realization of where the real evil in...

in the Middle East is and a willingness by the United States to confront it honestly.

There are people on the right.

Looking at how quickly things are changing.

There are people on the right, Leland, now, that do not recognize Hamas as evil.

They are so down this rabbit hole of the Jews controlling the world and Donald Trump and

all of this stuff that

I don't think they actually see the

evil in the middle in the Middle East.

They see it coming from Israel.

It's bizarre, and I'm trying to get my arms around it to understand it and understand where it's coming from.

But

have you noticed it in the right?

And what is the solution here?

Well, I think the solution, Glenn, is exactly what you're doing, which is calling it out for what it is, which is it's not some new age critical way of thinking.

It's rank.

anti-Semitism and Jew hatred.

There's a difference.

You would agree with me that you can dislike what Israel, how Israel fought the war.

You can say, I don't want to fight their wars.

I don't want anything to do with it.

And I disagree with them.

That's different than the message of I'm for Hamas or Israel has to be

destroyed because

they're the source of all the problems in the world.

Yeah, and I'll go one step further.

It's different than saying

Hamas is anything other than an evil terror organization.

There is

good

and evil in the world.

There is a difference between the two.

And

I don't necessarily like the term moral clarity, but I don't have a better one

for what is required in these situations.

And this sort of Hamas-adjacent talking points or agreeing with these talking points, it's no different than Mamdami,

who sort of, it's like, well, Hamas may be bad, but they have legitimate grievances.

No, they don't.

And I'm sorry,

once you start raping and pillaging and waging war against civilians, I don't care what your grievances are.

You must be destroyed.

And then we can deal with whatever the other issues are later.

So what do you think happens to this Palestinian movement here in America now that this is over?

I don't know, but it scares me, number one.

And I think number two,

what we've seen is it's not really a Palestinian movement.

It was an anti-Jew movement.

It was the sort of graph on of BLI,

of the neo-Marxist, oppressed, oppressor worldview that just grafted on to the pro-Palestinian movement.

But at their core, they're neo-Marxist anti-Semites.

And we know that because now that there is a peace deal in Gaza, okay, and ceasefire, and if anything, it's going to help the Gazan people who they said were starving and so on, you know, terribly oppressed.

Well, they're not anymore.

But yet these people are still marching around calling for the death of Jews, right?

You know, when we knew a peace deal was happening and on October 7th, there were thousands in the streets of New York saying we needed another October 7th, this one even stronger.

So

that's who we're dealing with.

And I appreciate you calling it out from the right because I think there is an element of the right.

But thank God there are people like you, Glenn, who on the right are saying this is crazy and this is wrong and this is despicable.

That doesn't happen on the left.

You've got Kathy Hochul endorsing Mamdami in New York City.

That's the governor of the second or third largest state in the country endorsing a guy who is Hamas adjacent.

That doesn't happen in the Republican Party or on the right.

Can it, though?

I mean, on the left, can it?

I mean, they have let this go for so long that it is really powerful.

And those are the kinds of people that do kill people.

And so

it is so empowered on the left.

Can the politician expect to live

if they go against this?

Well, I think, Glenn, it requires politicians with actual moral courage.

And people can take from that what they will.

But

if you're so concerned about your own political future, as so many on the left are, that you are unwilling to

name, shame, call out, whatever you want to use the term as, people who are Hamas adjacent and those who endorse people who are Hamas adjacent, that pretty much says everything about who you are and what you care about.

I'm not sure it's just about your career politically, though, anymore.

I think we're, you know, we've entered a, you know, this, we've turned a page, and uh, the violence is real now.

And there are people that are unhinged that will, uh,

they'll, they'll take you out.

They will take you out.

I think that's very true.

And I think where we are seeing the most of that language is from the left, but that is a different discussion.

Yeah.

Leland has a new book out that is called Born Lucky.

And you wouldn't think that when you actually hear his story.

And I didn't know this about you, Leland, at all.

And you are

an amazing success story.

Well,

go ahead.

No, no, I was just going to say thank you.

You know, I think what you're talking about is the fact that when I was five years old, I was diagnosed with what we now know to be autism.

And Born Lucky is the story of my dad adapting me to the world rather than the world to me.

And the reason, you know, we debuted on the New York Times bestseller list at number four, and we've sold out three times on Amazon.

back in stock now is not because of me.

You know, Glenn, I'm a television anchor, but I'm not that narcissistic to think it's about me.

It's about this story.

And born lucky is proof for every parent of a kid who's having a hard time.

Doesn't matter if it's autism, anxiety, ADHD, anything.

It is proof for every parent of a kid who's having a hard time, how much power they have, how much agency they have, what they can do.

And it's not anything that the experts tell you.

So when you were in fourth grade, you did an IQ test for the school, and your spread was 68 points.

You were borderline retarded on the low end when it was your verbal test, but non-verbal, you were in the genius category.

That's phenomenal.

Right.

Well,

now, my wife would tell me I'm probably still borderline many things

right now.

But

so

you picked up on this moment in the book where my parents are told they need to get me evaluated, which is what no parent wants to hear, right?

And I was having terrible issues in school.

I never got invited to a birthday party or anything like that.

But if a kid touched me in line, I would turn around and hit him.

You know, kids would make jokes and I would try to be serious.

I would run into kids on the playground.

It just, nothing worked.

And had really terrible sensory issues.

You know, I had my socks on in a way I didn't like or a jacket or anything like that.

I would completely melt down.

And then obviously what was all these learning disabilities.

So the parents take me to this medical office building for all this testing, linoleum floors.

bad magazines, old coffee, whatever.

They wait for two hours.

They're terrified.

I'm their son who's that my sister at the time was one or two years old.

So they bring me back from all the testing and they say to my parents, we really don't understand what's going on inside his head.

You know, severe learning disabilities, terrible behavioral problems, awful sensory issues, all the things of what we now know to be autism.

And my dad said, what do we do?

And the woman said, there's not much.

And he said, is there anything we can do?

And she said, generally not.

And that began my dad's quest

to adapt me to the world and to find things that I could have self-esteem in and to help me earn self-esteem rather than given.

So I wasn't going to be good at school, wasn't going to have friends, wasn't going to be good at athletics.

But he started me at that age a little bit earlier, actually, doing 200 push-ups a day, five days a week.

Hard work, effort equals achievement.

It's something you can take pride in.

Your character was a huge part of his lessons.

Something you can take pride in.

And that was this process.

And you write in the book about the push-ups.

It was also so your dad knew you were going to need to protect yourself, right?

Yeah.

No, look, my sister, who plays a really important role in this book, and I think one of the things that people don't understand, and so many families are suffering silently right now and feel alone with their kid who's having a hard time, doesn't matter what the issue is, is how much the siblings are affected.

I mean, my sister's a PhD in math and professor at MIT in Harvard and, you know, unbelievable in every way.

But, you know, her first memories of me, and I didn't know this until we interviewed her for Born Lucky,

is she was in kindergarten, I was in fifth grade, and I would come from my classroom downstairs to her classroom, pick her up, and then we would walk home.

It's about a quarter mile, and we would get to the back of the school where the PE fields were to the woods, which led to our house.

And as we walked into the woods, Liberty said, The first memory of my brother ever was every day when he got to the woods, he would start start crying.

And I would hold his hand as I walked home with him.

And, you know, that, and that was the bullying and the isolation and sort of the crushing

issues that came not only from the kids, but from the teachers as I grew up, because my dad never told anybody about this diagnosis.

No teachers, no counselors, nothing.

Wow.

And

so.

Take me through some of the things that your dad

did because

I'm impressed with you and what you've accomplished, but your father is remarkable.

How did he come up with the things that he did?

Because you are

more than fully functional in today's society.

You're a huge success.

What did he do to get you there?

Well, that's a great question.

I would just tell you, and I'll give you a story a little later, that I still deal with this every day.

You know, autism is not something they're ever cured of.

This is a daily, almost hourly discipline of seeing the world as others see them, as my dad taught me to interact and understand the social fabric.

But, you know, one thing he did, he knew I wasn't going to have any friends.

So as he said, I thought maybe I could be your friend.

So starting at five or six, he and I spent hundreds of hours together every month.

I mean, thousands of hours together.

And he would take me to lunches with his friends.

And I would have loved to have gone to a lunch like with Mr.

Beck, right?

Because I was a mini me to my dad.

He talked to to me about politics and news and events and on and on.

And we would get to lunch and you would be talking about, you know, your family or whatever you were doing that weekend or whatever.

And I would interrupt like a thousand questions a minute.

Where, you know, how do you pick your topics?

How do you do your monologue?

Where do you get your advertisers from?

How much do you charge for ads?

On and on and on.

And my dad then would never say anything publicly to me, but he would tap his watch.

And that was my cue to stop talking, number one, but number two, to kind of bookmark that, right?

And so now we're driving home in the car.

And he says, okay, Lucky, you know, when Mr.

Beck was talking about his weekend plans or his lunch with, you know, whoever or whatever it was, and you interrupted and asked about his commercials,

why did you think Mr.

Beck wanted to talk about commercials at that moment?

Well, gee, Dad, I don't know.

I thought it was interesting.

Okay.

Well, what could we have talked about that Mr.

Beck would have found interesting?

That was, you know, that was what he was talking about.

How do you connect with him?

And that was the

basis of granularly teaching me the social and emotional connections of everyday life.

And born lucky is that story of how my dad

made me understand that he loved me, but that, boy, there was so much work I had to do to fit in in the world.

At one point,

You know, there was a kid, you writing the book, a kid in middle school who kept pushing me both figuratively, literally, teachers wouldn't do anything, came home, told my dad what the kids had done, blah, blah, blah.

I finally asked, can I hit him yet?

Right.

Tell that story.

So you have to understand the school situation that I was in.

I've been pulled out of two or three schools before I started in seventh grade.

It was a seventh through 12th grade school.

And two weeks into school, the principal calls my parents in.

So my parents think they're coming in for like a normal, like, hey, how's two weeks going into school?

And they're sitting there and

the

principal sits my parents down in the little, you know, office,

looks across the desk at them and says, everybody at this school thinks lucky is really weird.

So that's arrow number one through my parents' heart.

And then she follows up, and I do too.

So I had no protection.

Right.

Wait a minute.

There was an eighth grade art teacher who didn't think I was going to become Picasso and said in front of the entire class, Hey, Vitter, if my dog was ugly as you, I would shave its bleep and make it walk backwards.

So that was the environment I lived in every day.

But there was this kid, and he kept malving off.

And my dad had turned me into a pretty hefty little fellow.

I was fat and kind of chunky and awkward, but I was pretty strong.

And

you know, my dad had said, you know, the way you deal with bullies, you eventually just hit him in the nose.

Great.

And I didn't.

I

slammed his head down on the desk, but it was the beginning of me starting to fight back.

And I think Born Lucky people will see

how fighting back affected things.

That was the last time you had to do that, correct?

It was the last time I was allowed to.

Okay.

BornluckyBook.com.

BornluckyBook.com.

This is, you will love, love, love this book.

BornluckyBook.com.

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