Elizabeth Ailes releases a statement about her late husband Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News and founder of the Fox Television Station Group, and the consultant for Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Rudy Giuliani s first mayoral campaign, and so much more.
01:10:27.920the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment
01:10:49.520this is the Glenn Beck program senator Ben sass we would we'd like to treat you with respect and then we saw the pictures of you in the red shorts and you know what it is it's reminiscent of remember the book that Arlen Spector wrote where he talked about the Senate bathhouse
01:11:09.120yeah that's right John Thune was naked in the hot tub yeah we made tender love for
01:11:17.040I don't think you wrote that but Ben sass welcome to the program sir I am here just to be your straight
01:11:24.400man wow uh what uh what uh unfortunate timing for you to be on this program after these pictures are trending now yeah I think my phone's breaking up but it's been good I've enjoyed it
01:11:38.720thanks for the interview not a problem do you stand by I mean I'm sure you stand by the red
01:11:44.960shorts but how about the little pencil legs wow
01:11:48.560too soon I'm sorry okay all right I'm just happy I'm not wearing umbrows
01:11:55.840I would have been in 1992 garb yeah so well you know we'll come back in about 20 minutes it won't be too soon
01:12:02.800um uh I want to talk to you about your book the vanishing american adult which I think you are
01:12:07.840you are spot on on so much I would we were kicking around that we believe that there should be a
01:12:15.920constitutional amendment that uh makes it illegal for any senator to write a book um because they usually
01:12:22.480don't have anything to say and I mean who the hell do you think you are writing a book
01:12:26.000I am I am if the book has a little bit of substance I uh I'm ashamed I apologize all right
01:12:32.640okay all right next time okay um I do want to get to the book but can we can we start with
01:12:38.080the news of the day and the storm that is happening in washington dc can you tell us the weather pattern
01:12:47.520yeah there's weather and there's climate right uh so let's talk about weather as you want to but
01:12:52.240let's be sure we also then back up and put it in the context of climate because the chaos here
01:12:57.920isn't just the last uh four months it isn't just the last 18 months it's not just this presidential
01:13:03.440cycle it's that for a heck of a long time we've forgotten to do basic civics and when you don't do
01:13:08.400basic civics you lose that sense of what politics are for because I'm of the one cheer for politics
01:13:14.800school zero cheers doesn't work the world's broken and so you need a framework for liberty you need
01:13:19.600security we need spies we need to protect sources and methods we need to have clarity about when
01:13:24.480and what foreign uh interventions we do and don't do and what allies we support and not but you don't
01:13:30.480want washington to be the center of the world and five of the seven richest counties in america are now
01:13:35.120here that's because we've not been doing civics and so there's a drift toward government filling that
01:13:39.200vacuum um what is the uh the forecast for any of the president's uh...
01:13:49.920initiatives going through tax cuts health care uh the border uh with all of the wall on the wall i
01:13:57.520mean what if is any of it going to come is it happening i really uh hope i obviously overwhelmingly
01:14:05.680hope and um and partly believe some of it will still happen there will be some movement on an agenda
01:14:12.560but the reality is there's just not much of a decision making process in the white house right now with a
01:14:18.320really big carve out which is on the national security side uh general mcmaster is a really
01:14:24.080good pick by the president and he's doing a really good job the president has named a bunch of
01:14:28.320exceptional people uh on the foreign policy and national security space so mattis is arguably the
01:14:33.840most impressive person at the pentagon in a half a century for example and those folks are working
01:14:39.360together trying to develop a strategy you know the president's planning to still leave town tomorrow
01:14:43.520night and go to the middle east and his idea about trying to foster and facilitate more arab sunni
01:14:49.520cooperation as a counter force against you know the last administration's willingness to let iran
01:14:55.840expand its fear of influence lots of things happening there that are important and worth deliberating
01:15:00.000about the problem is on the domestic policy and the economic policy side there's really not any
01:15:05.040decision making process inside the white house so you just have kitty soccer he's just that's exactly
01:15:10.720right he has he has really done a great job on on um um on the the um security side especially with
01:15:22.320with foreign policy in the pentagon i think i think mcmaster um tremendous tremendous however
01:15:30.160where are the republicans i mean you have the greatest cover going on right now i mean barack
01:15:37.920obama used to try to overwhelm the system and have the news cycle going out of control so you couldn't
01:15:44.480pay attention to anything you didn't know what to watch and i used to say on fox all the time watch the
01:15:49.520other hand well there is no other hand here can anyone in congress actually start to put together some
01:15:56.880proposals that the president only has to sign um so here let's distinguish between what should happen
01:16:04.480and what is really possible because one of the places where i've changed in the two and a half years
01:16:09.680i've been here is i still believe that what should happen is the legislature as the article one branch
01:16:15.920should be the place where policy deliberation and initiative happen right but now descriptively the
01:16:21.200reality is since the rise of television since the late 40s early 50s when television became
01:16:26.720the main way that we communicate together and now let's call it television let's call it um
01:16:31.600moving imagery as opposed to print based culture right an image based culture so now the rise of
01:16:37.280digital media descriptively you've really never had any big things happen in washington the last
01:16:42.560six or seven decades if the president wasn't using the bully pulpit to focus attention on one issue
01:16:48.800and right now obviously for lots of reasons um this white house doesn't have any kind of clarity
01:16:54.400about policy initiatives and so they kind of bounce around from thing to thing that that doesn't
01:16:59.360exonerate the congress the congress has a nine percent approval rating and to quote my wife that
01:17:03.280seems insanely too high um so the congress is not doing its work but neither of these two political
01:17:09.600parties have had clarity of an agenda for the american people for you know a decade two decades and so
01:17:15.840right now both parties main job they think is to flit about doing hot take to hot take and mainly
01:17:21.680saying that the other people are even worse than we are that's different than casting a vision you
01:17:26.240get back in but the particular vision we should talk about but as a descriptive matter we should admit
01:17:31.280that absent a bully pulpit from the white house to guide a domestic economic policy agenda it's not
01:17:36.720very likely that it'll go forward why is that though i i i don't i i mean you guys can come up with
01:17:42.720the rules you guys can pass the laws you guys can do i mean and it's not that hard it's not that hard
01:17:47.440cut the spending you know i mean it's not that hard but we had seven but but spending is really
01:17:54.480mostly about entitlements now and the public doesn't seem to want us to focus on entitlements
01:18:00.240we still should and i would gladly lose right i've run for one thing once in my life politics are not
01:18:06.080the center of my uh life or identity i would gladly try to have a big conversation about actually being
01:18:11.840honest with the american people about entitlements most people here have zero desire to do that i thought
01:18:16.800until the last presidential cycle only the democrats were indifferent to whether or not
01:18:20.960we bankrupted our children but now when you had 17 republican candidates for president and 15 of the
01:18:26.96017 started the election cycle saying we need to tell the truth about entitlements only two didn't
01:18:32.160and it seems like the public didn't really care there isn't enough domestic discretionary spending that
01:18:37.760can possibly make a difference to move the needle i'll give you one stat when kennedy was president
01:18:43.12052 of our federal spending was national security one percent was health entitlements today 71 of our
01:18:51.600spending is five entitlement programs and the remaining 29 of all federal spending is half and half defense
01:18:57.920and non-defense discretionary spending well i think we under invest in defense i can make a bunch of
01:19:03.440cases about why i believe that the 14 and a half percent that's non-defense discretionary you just can't
01:19:09.440solve the problems of bankrupting our kids there even if you took all of it away the problem is in
01:19:14.560entitlements and there's no political will or courage here to tackle that but hang on just a second is there
01:19:20.640enough political forget about the courage and the uh is can you muster up enough will to um to get a
01:19:29.280consensus on something because with this swirling around the press is so busy feeding in the bloody
01:19:39.200water that i think you guys could get almost anything through at this point
01:19:45.520so let's talk about uh obamacare entitlements as an example about why uh so many republicans don't
01:19:51.920seem to actually want to repeal and replace obamacare we then all start technical stuff about
01:19:57.200why it takes 60 votes to do most things in the senate we only have 52 senators to do reconciliation
01:20:01.280which is only a subset but for a minute just bracket all that substantively there are 50 republicans
01:20:06.720we have the vice president so we need 50 of the 52 of us to do anything at all and then you could
01:20:10.960use my expense as the tiebreaker you'd need 50 of 52 of us to agree what's wrong in american health
01:20:16.720care i have very well formulated views you can argue with me but i have a clear sense of what i think is
01:20:22.480wrong in american health care and no obamacare exacerbated lots of problems it isn't the case that
01:20:28.240the problems of american health care just began eight years ago the american health care system had
01:20:32.560unsustainable you know premium growth of two and a half times inflationary growth annually for year
01:20:37.440on year on year on year why is it that we never get higher quality lower cost care in american health
01:20:42.720care there's a technical business case and policy argument for why that is i didn't know before i got
01:20:48.800here that most republicans don't really understand that or want to fix that you have republicans who
01:20:55.600really think the worst part of obamacare is the cadillac tax that's insane it's a tiny tiny little
01:21:01.520piece of the program and you can debate the merits of whether or not a tax on employer-sponsored
01:21:05.520insurance that equalized the individual market is good or bad policy but it's a tiny part of what
01:21:10.640the story is in obamacare and we seemingly have republicans who have so little clarity about a
01:21:15.600vision for a system of health care where you have an insurance policy that's portable across job and
01:21:21.120geographic change for american families which is what we need in american health care more and more
01:21:25.920jobs are going to get shorter and shorter and most of the uninsurance in american life is from
01:21:30.080people changing jobs so then from health status so ben when when does somebody like you and a
01:21:36.800group of you even if it's three or five when does a group of you say basically what the republicans said
01:21:45.600in the 1850s neither party is serious i'm not going to play this game anymore and in a very short period
01:21:54.240of time without social media what started is about 20 people elected the president in 1860
01:22:03.520when what is a tipping point because i hear this from republicans all the time and you're seeing the
01:22:09.760number of people who are saying i'm not having anything to do with the republican party i'm not
01:22:13.600having anything to do with the democratic party there is a large growing number of people who are sick of
01:22:18.960both of them when is it that you guys are going to just come out and say i can't do it anymore
01:22:24.800because it's all lies well said so let's unpack it a little bit i'm third or fourth most conservative
01:22:31.840guy in the senate by voting record but i'm not very partisan and that i'm very unimpressed with both of
01:22:37.440these parties so i have thought of my calling and my approach to this job has been that i think of
01:22:42.960myself as functionally an independent who caucuses with the republicans and so i there you know when
01:22:49.440you have republican versus democratic fights on the things that we're voting on now i'm not just
01:22:54.800republican i'm you know at the at the conservative end of the republican continuum so i am republican
01:23:00.560when the choice is republican versus democrat but what i'm really for is limited government i'm for
01:23:06.720families and mediating institutions and markets and i'm for the future in that we should be talking
01:23:12.560about the challenges of 10 and 15 and 20 years from now before they're fully upon us with the
01:23:18.160way cyber is going to remake warfare for example and so i am trying to have a conversation that is
01:23:24.400okay fine on the continuum of stuff in my mind i'm sort of uh i have three levels of this the bottom
01:23:30.880level is right to left continuum on small policy then one layer above that is right to left continuum
01:23:37.440on the bigger policies that we know how to think about right now but there's not a lot of political
01:23:41.840courage or will that stuff like entitlement reform what would a portable health care system really
01:23:46.720look like but then above that there's another tier which is the most important one which is basic
01:23:52.640civics education and what are we trying to do as a people in america because america is the most
01:23:59.120exceptional nation in the history of the world because we believe in the dignity of 320 million americans
01:24:04.560we believe in the dignity of seven billion people that god gives rights to by nature and government
01:24:09.040is a shared project to secure those rights and we need to pass on that understanding of a republic and
01:24:14.240right now we've allowed our foundations to erode for so long that we don't have a shared american
01:24:19.760narrative so a bunch of people you know sort of reduced down to tribe and and when you're lonely at
01:24:25.200home which is a lot of what's happening in america right now as we hollow out these local institutions
01:24:30.560people are projecting more onto politics these two parties aren't worthy of projecting your grand grand hopes and
01:24:37.120dreams on parties are tools and these tools are pretty spent and exhausted so i'll stop here but
01:24:42.560to your point glenn i do think these two parties are going to be disrupted and disintermediated that
01:24:47.920doesn't mean i'm for a mushy middle between these two no no for a conservatism that goes beyond this
01:24:53.760present moment of constant short-termist kiddie soccer i will tell you just what i heard was one of
01:25:00.000the most stirring and exciting things i've heard from from any leader in a long time um ben is going to
01:25:06.160continue to be with a senator ben sass he's written basically what you just heard
01:25:11.680is what he's talking about here a bigger picture the vanishing american adult our coming of age crisis
01:25:17.920and how to rebuild a culture of self-reliance that's the name of his book um you know a lot
01:25:22.960of books i'll read mike lee books because they're they're deep on the constitution uh but it's just like
01:25:31.120okay i got it this is an important book especially if you're a parent ben sass the the vanishing
01:25:36.880american adult it's available in bookstores everywhere back with ben sass here in just a minute