The fallout from the post-World War I Sykes-Picot agreement continues in the Middle East, as the Kurds in northern Iraq voted to separate and gain their independence from Iraq and join the United States. Meanwhile, the Christians in the region of Nineveh are in danger of being wiped off the face of the earth.
00:09:09.340I'm told about our national heritage or about civilization, but I'm shown people of my color that I'm shown the people of my color made it what it is.
00:09:19.360Well, I happen to listen to the Glenn Beck program where they teach me about the black founders quite often.
00:09:24.800So I have to tell you that one, I can't even see that one because I'm not I've not been told that it's just a group of white people that have made it.
00:09:34.300I mean, I hate to be old fashioned, but I see people as people.
00:09:38.140I can be sure that my children will be given curricular materials that testify to the existence of their race, testify to the existence of their I mean, that's I can be sure that my children will be given curricular, curricular, I can't even say it, the materials that testify to the existence of their race.
00:10:00.840So is there a is there a is there a African-American denialist society that is like the flat earthers?
00:10:09.140I've never met the people who deny that others exist except white people.
00:10:31.900When when I took the SATs back in high school, I took I didn't do much studying, but I did do a hey, here's how you take the SAT test reading period, which I read a couple books on it.
00:10:45.420And one of the things I remember from it was there was a controversy about how these test materials did not properly address the African-American communities.
00:10:56.380And so this is before I took the test.
00:10:58.520So in response to that controversy, they added questions about African-Americans to the SAT, which is, of course, a kind of a silly response.
00:18:11.980And we're going to talk to him coming up in a few minutes.
00:18:14.140Also, David French is going to be joining us.
00:18:16.800And we have to spend some time on what is happening with the Kurds.
00:18:21.640If you have been helping with the Nazarene Fund, this is really important.
00:18:26.140And we were going to announce something, what I think it was last week.
00:18:30.620And we said we needed to wait for the Kurdish referendum to see how that was going to shake out.
00:18:39.180I'm not going to get into the full announcement and what we were planning on doing and what we are still planning on doing.
00:18:45.960But we, we, our sources told us we had about an 18 month window starting around Christmas time.
00:18:52.720To be able to save slaves and what is happening with ISIS in the Middle East before the Middle East is completely, Iraq in particular, is just in complete chaos, a failed state.
00:19:06.820So we were working on some pretty aggressive things for an 18 month time period.
00:19:12.700And the way this is shaking out with the Kurds, the window may be closed.
00:19:18.180And that's why we've delayed announcing anything, because we may have to change everything we were thinking about doing.
00:19:27.140The windows may be closing and the Christians are going to be caught right in the middle.
00:19:31.800And the Kurds are going to have the Iranians and the ISIS, Turkey, the communists over in the Kurds, the Syrian Kurds, you name it.
00:19:45.700The Kurds are going to come under attack.
00:21:02.360You know, it tells me that the populist wave that swept Trump in and a populist wave that really is dominant in the South is still dominant.
00:21:11.600I mean, we a lot of people forget that that Trump really catapulted in it really began to lock down the nomination and Super Tuesday, which was a southern dominated primary primary.
00:21:23.700And if there's one thing, if you follow the politics of the South, if you studied the politics of the South, populism has sold here for generations.
00:21:38.440And please, if you're listening in the South, instead of getting mad, let's have a discussion and talk about actual history.
00:21:46.680But populism in the South really with reconstruction and even the Civil War, populists created this illusion that the Civil War was not about slavery.
00:21:59.620It was about states' rights, which is so clearly debunked if you just read the Confederate Constitution.
00:22:07.300I mean, it's you don't have to have any conversation on it at all.
00:22:10.020But populism has has swept the South up into this glory days of this was about something different than slavery.
00:22:36.220I mean, this is a guy who had, you know, he's a populist folk hero is what he is because of his stance that he took regarding the Ten Commandments.
00:22:44.660And he's a person who will catapult to defame by defying federal court orders that were lawful court orders that he disagreed with.
00:22:56.320Now, you know, look, that's all well and good when you love when you when you love his cause and you hate the order that he's defined.
00:23:03.160You know, I'm somebody who's been arguing on behalf of the constitutional rights of students and faculty members in college campuses.
00:23:10.940And we can pretty much bank on colleges not defying those court orders.
00:23:15.900I mean, if we have a world where you just defy the court orders you don't like, it's a lawless world.
00:23:20.520But it made him a folk hero for a lot of folks, especially for, you know, the folks who dominate a primary electorate in the in the state of Alabama.
00:23:29.380And so it's nothing about this is surprising.
00:23:31.820This is exactly what you would expect.
00:23:34.360And I think the populist sort of wave has not abated at all down here.
00:23:50.460But to the extent that they're disappointed with Donald Trump, it's mainly when he departs from the populism of the campaign.
00:23:56.360Why is this dangerous to the average person, David?
00:24:00.320They don't understand why the wrapping yourself in the flag and populism is a bad thing.
00:24:08.520Well, you know, often it's not based so much on ideas as it's based on an attitude.
00:24:15.140It's based on an anger and it's based on a rage and it's based on a, frankly, a misunderstanding that this is the only way to win.
00:24:24.900This is the only way to defeat the left.
00:24:27.300And so what you have are politicians who are capitalizing on emotion, they're capitalizing on feeling, and they're not advocating particular ideas.
00:24:37.700And what begins to happen when that happens is you start to define yourself by your opposition to the other side as opposed to what you're for.
00:24:45.540I mean, and you see this all the time.
00:24:47.140You see people who define whether or not something is good by the number, you know, the gallons of liberal tears being shed.
00:25:25.600So I was talking to Brad Meltzer, who's a great historian and writer, and we had a conversation yesterday.
00:25:33.120And I said, we have abandoned the Judeo-Christian heroes.
00:25:38.380We have abandoned Moses, who was not a warrior.
00:25:43.180And we've abandoned Jesus, who was not a warrior.
00:25:46.980And what I can't say that this is true for the entire West, because, you know, Europe still has enough of the fascist communist love in them that they like a strong man.
00:25:58.680But it's not the same as it is in the Middle East.
00:26:01.260And then when you went to Europe, it lessened.
00:26:23.220Haven't we lost the essence of who we are if we can't get back to a point to say, you know, the reasonable person, the quiet person, the peacemaker is the hero, not the one that punches people in the face?
00:26:42.280Well, I mean, I think we're really on the knife's edge here in the sense that if we don't turn back from this notion that character no longer matters in a president, for example, or turn back from the notion that the ends justify the means or to use a popular phrase from the left by any means necessary.
00:27:02.700You know, the polarization that we experience now is is only the beginning.
00:27:07.180You know, and one of the more discouraging things that I've seen, again, you know, I live in rural Tennessee here in the South.
00:27:27.160And and character is destiny in so many ways, as my colleague Jonah Goldberg is fond of saying it.
00:27:32.060And and when you have low character, you're going to the results that are achieved, the long term cultural damage, all of those things are going it's going to come back to bite you, the extent to which you wrap your arms around people of low character.
00:27:49.580And that that is a problem that we're confronting in this country.
00:28:07.400And I can't believe your day was pleasant after posting this.
00:28:12.560But you you you brought out something really, really good.
00:28:15.680You said, look, you know, everybody on the NFL that is cheering for free speech.
00:28:21.060They're all too happy to sick the government on a tiny few bakers or florists who don't want to use their artistic talents to celebrate events they find offensive.
00:28:28.820How many progressives who celebrated First Amendment on Sunday sympathize with the college students who chance speech is violence and try to seek to block conservatives from college campuses?
00:28:39.380But then you went on to say, but as a conservative, I see many conservatives decry Google's termination of a young dissenting software engineer working overtime yesterday to argue that Trump is somehow in the right.
00:28:52.340Yet Google is a private corporation and Trump is the most powerful government official in the land.
00:29:35.280Then in tweets, he didn't just go after, for example, these football players.
00:29:39.600He went after Steph Curry because of Steph Curry's reluctance to go to the White House.
00:29:43.520And then he then he even said, if people don't do what I say, which is stand, there should be economic boycotts and reprisals against the NFL.
00:29:52.860Now, this is the most powerful man in the world.
00:29:54.660And I want you to put on your thinking cap for the audience and say, what happened if Barack Obama said,
00:30:00.860if Tim Tebow injects religion into the football field anymore and he kneels after a touchdown anymore, he should be fired that expletive.
00:30:12.980And then if he's not fired, we should boycott the NFL.
00:30:16.360You can't tell me that the entire conservative world wouldn't absolutely melt down at that.
00:30:22.120And so what happened was you had the most powerful person in the world trying to dictate to these individuals how they should express themselves.
00:30:31.380And look, what happened last Sunday wasn't them.
00:30:35.080It wasn't the Colin Kaepernick Black Lives Matter protest.
00:30:38.220That wasn't what happened on Saturday.
00:30:40.120What happened on Saturday was people saying to the president, you don't dictate how we speak.
00:30:45.140So I absolutely understand that impulse, just as I would understand it if a whole bunch of players knelt with Tim Tebow to protest if Barack Obama did something like this.
00:30:56.060And it's always very helpful to put on our thinking caps and say, what if the other side had done something similar towards somebody we perhaps liked?
00:31:04.740Then it begins to clarify these issues.
00:31:07.180My position, though, is we need to stop being so outraged about speech we disagree with.
00:31:14.440Our position should be to rebut bad speech with better speech.
00:31:17.720I didn't like Colin Kaepernick's protests, and I wrote that, and I tried to persuade people that his protest was not right.
00:31:25.680They will say, though, that you can't persuade these people, and somebody's got to strike back.
00:31:50.260You know, this fight fire with fire, often what it ends up doing is it makes you feel good because you're really, really mad,
00:31:57.460but it doesn't accomplish what you want.
00:31:59.540What it actually accomplishes is more division.
00:32:03.140What it actually accomplishes is more rage, and what he actually accomplished was mainstreaming, kneeling for the national anthem and for the flag.
00:32:13.220That's what he actually accomplished, and I'm saying let's turn down the temperature, and let's respect free speech,
00:32:19.000and let's not freak out when somebody disagrees with us.
00:32:22.520Let's have a consistent view that says the United States of America is a place where people have the right to be wrong,
00:32:27.400and I'm going to try to persuade them when they're wrong, but even if they stay wrong, I'm going to tolerate that,
00:32:33.480and I'm going to be okay with the fact that there are going to be people who are wrong in this society.
00:32:37.740We'll never create a utopia, so we've got to learn how to live together when we don't agree with each other,
00:32:43.300and it's not by saying I want to fire people who disagree with me and I want to fire people who offend me.
00:39:56.360But basically, what that says is all ships, all planes from anywhere in the world have to come to the United States first and then to Puerto Rico.
00:40:06.400That is ridiculous to have that in place, especially at this point.
00:40:12.580They need to lift it so boats and planes from all over the world and the United States can assist in the relief effort.
00:40:22.060And it can come directly to the citizens of Puerto Rico.
00:41:11.980There's very few people that have come on this program that have that I've put into the category of a real hero, a global hero.
00:41:24.520Somebody who is actually facing down giants and not popular with anyone except the people and has stared down true dictators and rewriting history and the book of how things are done.
00:41:44.800Living in Egypt, there are there are no satire.
00:42:24.040Before you know it, he's now doing a television show where he's actually taking on the president of his country and doing things that had never, ever been done before under a dictatorship.
00:43:35.960So, Bassam, you know, the one thing that we should come together on is I was really concerned about the Arab Spring because of the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:43:46.000And I really felt that the the, you know, as I said back at the time, Mubarak is a monster.
00:43:53.900And we've as Americans, we helped create him.
00:43:57.260I mean, we have no business to to to tell anybody about freedom.
00:44:03.040We were in bed with Mubarak for a long time.
00:44:58.680I chose comedy and satire to go through it, which was very difficult because we had to write comedy where things were basically falling apart outside, especially threats.
00:45:09.740I mean, like there were people I was put under siege in my theater writing my show and I was put under siege by people who are supporters by the military, not the Islamists.
00:45:20.460So so the thing is, you are completely right about being scared of the Islamists and it's totally justified.
00:45:27.920But what people miss is that the Islamism, radical Islamists, has been also a tool by military as much as it was a tool by Islamists.
00:45:38.480Yeah, it was Sadat in 1980, who was actually gave a greater power to Sharia in the Constitution in order to have unlimited times of reelection.
00:45:48.740It was the al-Haqq in Pakistan who also pushed into the Sharia laws so he will appease the Islamists.
00:45:54.620It was Jafar Numeri in Sudan who changed the country into an Islamic state because military dictatorship was not working.
00:46:01.080And even now, right now, the military under Sisi is using all of the conservative values of Islamism.
00:46:08.520It's kind of like, oh, our Islamism is better than their Islamism.
00:46:11.880And everybody, and they has put people in jail because they tried to reform some interpretation of the religion.
00:46:18.300So the thing is, I don't think that the Muslim Brotherhood were on the way to the caliphate.
00:46:23.220As a matter of fact, they were in bed with the military.
00:46:25.740The military actually pushed them to the front because the Muslim Brotherhood would give them guarantees so they will keep their own benefits.
00:47:12.680And it is in their benefit to keep that duality so they do not support education, they don't support awareness, they don't support openness.
00:47:23.240It is their own best interest to have people stuck between the duality, the bully with the gun or the bully with the Sharia.
00:47:31.880So we see, Bassem, we see people over here.
00:47:35.280I mean, we're marching in the streets on both sides, marching in the streets now.
00:47:38.800And they're, you know, I'm so oppressed and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:47:42.680And then you see people like you, where people in America don't have any concept of going on television or going online and telling a joke about a president or a leader and then being arrested for that or being disappeared.
00:48:11.920I mean, you know, when I always get asked, it's like, Bassem, do you think we are like a bunch of kids because we are complaining while you guys, like, went through a lot?
00:48:19.820I said, no, I think you should be complaining because it's like you guys are like someone who is used to a certain kind of service.
00:48:32.560Nobody on the other table is like, oh, you should be grateful because other people in the world don't have food to eat.
00:48:37.780No, you have actually worked, like, for the past 400 years, civil war, revolution, at the beginning, civil rights, to get this kind of service.
00:48:47.480So when people think that this is not the kind of service they paid for through their history, they should be upset.
00:49:16.720But the last two presidents have made it personal.
00:49:21.400The last two presidents have, and it's getting worse, are making this very, very personal.
00:49:30.080And we're starting to creep to a place to where, you know, the president just this last weekend said, you know, you should be you should be fired from your job.
00:49:39.340They should, you know, run you out of business, whatever, for freedom of speech.
00:49:44.640And Americans are losing the understanding on both sides of the aisle that the only speech that needs protecting is the speech that the majority or those in power don't like.
00:50:53.900Not all, like, there's a lot of stuff that bugged me about me.
00:50:56.760But, like, this year, when he said, you know what, I'm not going to the correspondent dinner.
00:51:01.060I'm not going to that tradition where every president in the United States, since, like, the only one who bailed out was Reagan because he was shot.
01:09:34.860Then we have everything going on from the hurricanes is still going on in Houston and Florida and what is happening in Puerto Rico.
01:09:43.500And the impact on all of these things on your money, your family's livelihood, what you have in a 401k, what you have in your pension fund.
01:09:55.920That chicken is coming home to roost, man.
01:10:01.400So how do you protect your investments?
01:10:03.440I want to have you read an exclusive report from President Reagan's budget director, David Stockman.
01:10:10.420And in it, he says, here are the threats that are real and are coming and could really wipe the economy to a new level that we haven't seen probably in the last, you know, 80, 90 years.
01:10:22.580No savvy investor can afford to ignore the warnings, may I suggest.
01:10:30.260We need to have some things that we can restart, you know, our society with.
01:10:35.520And when it comes down to a push comes to shove, gold is where the country and the world has always reset in the end.
01:17:23.120I am old enough to remember when the slightest disagreement against anything that Donald Trump said would have been met with vicious reprisals, mainly from Steve Bannon,
01:17:34.440who here, how times have changed, not only disagreeing, but campaigning against Donald Trump.
01:17:41.440In 2017, every principal has an expiration date, and that is the point.
01:17:49.220Bannon wants everyone to know that his attack on Trump is an attack on the Republican establishment, which I guess it is.
01:17:56.760After all, who is more establishment than the president of the United States, Steve?
01:18:00.620This is an eighth-grade romance gone wrong.
01:18:05.500According to Bannon, draining the swamp is the reason why he did not support Luther Strange.
01:18:10.780Throwing his support behind Moore was actually meant to help Trump, he says, not hurt him.
01:18:17.220We did not come here to defy Donald Trump.
01:19:22.600You're listening to the Glenn Beck Program.
01:19:24.460You know, four years ago, on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father who had fought on Omaha Beach.
01:21:33.340So you're in town and we wanted you to stop by to talk specifically about what's happening.
01:21:39.540We're seeing all kinds of we're seeing all kinds of stories come out now that Americans, high school, college and even beyond don't understand the First Amendment.
01:21:52.960They don't understand any of the Bill of Rights and they don't they don't understand socialism, Marxism, communism, capitalism, none of it.
01:22:12.200I mean, you've had teenagers who stormed the beaches of Normandy and you had you had those very same people had to sacrifice during the Great Depression.
01:22:22.200And here we live in a time where students, they haven't had to sacrifice.
01:24:16.140Let me just let me just highlight a couple of things I wrote about this last night, because I saw this last night and a couple of senators wrote to me and said, is this right?
01:24:24.540And I said, yeah, unfortunately, it is.
01:25:55.020And I think it's such a it's so embedded now.
01:25:59.180You're working on something to kind of get to this a little bit earlier, try to get kids earlier to so they understand the basics about history.
01:38:22.580Also, what I love now is the fallout from the Democrats over Trump saying that the NFL players should be forced into standing during the anthem.
01:38:33.540And then Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that there should be some standing rule in the NFL that requires them to stand.
01:38:44.360If Jeff Sessions wants that, then there should be a rule in every bakery that if you are you disagree with gay marriage, you still have to bake the cake.
01:38:56.280It's a private company and a private individual.
01:39:01.260If the individual decides that they don't want to stand for it, they don't have to stand.
01:45:22.480What bothered me about this last night, and I want you to read this editorial, and I want you to see these pictures at glenbeck.com, and I want you to pass this on to your friends.
01:45:32.340The time for laughs on this stuff, long gone, long gone.
01:45:40.680This is like having a picture of Jews going into a gas chamber as a joke.
01:46:00.540We, as adults younger in our life, we tolerated the funny Che shirts, and now this generation embraces these killers.
01:46:10.520Communists, fascists, populists, nationalists, socialists, ANAFA, Nazis, Black Panthers, the leadership of BLM, white and black supremacists, ISIS, Hamas, all of them, and all those who laugh them off, despite the piles of dead bodies left in their wake, will be held accountable in the courts of humankind.
01:46:36.680I pray for this cadet, but I also pray for the men and women who have to serve by his side.
01:46:50.640May it never be one of somebody that we love, that when the chips are down, he looks at them and says, I have your back.
01:47:00.800Because history shows us, communists never have your back.
01:47:13.600Sometimes they have your back, but they usually have a gun pointed at it.
01:50:20.080The reason I was calling, and I waited, you know, it doesn't matter at this point.
01:50:26.440The situation that Puerto Rico is confronting right now, it feels that, to me, that is a bit, a bit underestimated.
01:50:36.240Situation being is that on the airport right now, San Juan International Airport.
01:50:42.160There are a lot of American citizens that are stranded there from mainland trying to get home.
01:50:49.420These people have been there without water, without food, for over four days.
01:50:55.780There was a call to the governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Rosario, and let him know that there is a very bad situation at the airport.
01:51:04.900There are people currently dying at the airport because they can't get out and because the situation is that bad.
01:51:12.460There is no communication on the island.
01:51:15.160And what you see and what I've been following up on reports and the media on Puerto Rico, all you can see is that the government is overwhelmed with the situation.
01:51:25.840Mayors of different towns are snapping on national TV because, at this point, they feel that their hands are tied.
01:51:33.480The situation is as bad as there are courts from cemeteries.
01:52:00.600And even the people that got prepared and they bought the water and they brought the supplies, all the supplies are scattered and spread all over the mountains of Puerto Rico.
01:52:10.560There are communities in Puerto Rico that they're still waiting seven days in.
01:52:17.600The dam of Guaxaca River, that dam, it's broken.
01:52:22.940And they just evacuated 70,000 people out of that dam, trying to get them to safety.
01:52:30.900Stu, do we have any aircraft carriers off the coast?
01:52:34.700Why have we not sent aircraft carriers?
01:52:36.660I know there are some that have been, they're working on sending, there's a particular medical vessel that they're sending there that's gigantic.
01:53:09.900Mary, thank you very much for your call.
01:53:11.800I'm going to try to, we'll try to do some more on this tomorrow because people really need to know what's going on.
01:53:17.280And the one thing that you can do is call the, call your senator, call your representative, call the White House and tell them the Jones Act must be repealed.
01:53:28.900That is, that stops ships from coming in from all over the world unless they pull into port in America first.