On today's show, Glenn and Stu discuss Monica Lewinsky's new HBO docuseries, the latest on Michael Avenatti's arrest in Los Angeles, and the new recount in Florida. Plus, a call-in question about whether or not to run for president in 2020.
00:00:08.320Hello and welcome to the podcast. We are so glad you're here.
00:00:11.560Today's podcast, we have kind of some reflective thoughts on Monica Lewinsky.
00:00:17.560She's doing this big, you know, Clinton scandal docuseries that is premiering this weekend.
00:00:22.700And, you know, I feel in listening to her, I find her fascinating and it's made me kind of examine everything I thought I knew about that.
00:00:32.680But not in the way, not politically at all. So we're going to talk a little bit about that.
00:00:36.920We have Catherine Harris on as well. She was the secretary of state during the 2000 recount in Florida.
00:00:40.600There's another recount going on in Florida. We're going to find out what's going on with it.
00:00:44.060And what is the truth in the media? Because we're not we're not hearing it right now.
00:00:47.760A little bit of wisdom from Rabbi Daniel Lappin and a little bit of fun from Andrew Heaton.
00:00:52.880By the way, you can enter the contest right now.
00:00:55.560Mercury One has the thing going on right now where you can buy a $100 raffle ticket and maybe win a Mercedes, which is really cool.
00:01:02.420But you also if you do it for the next until midnight on Thursday, we're going to draw another another name.
00:01:08.840And maybe it's you. And we're going to invite you to come on down.
00:01:10.880We'll pay for the airfare and the hotel and everything to be part of our big Black History Month temporary museum exhibit.
00:01:17.760That is happening here at our studios. And so you'll you'll come in on a Friday and spend the weekend.
00:01:23.660And it's a lot of fun. It's called 12 score in three years ago.
00:01:27.600That is happening in February. I'm going to call somebody tomorrow.
00:01:30.500Might as well be you and draw out a name and then bring him down for for a weekend here in Dallas in February.
00:01:37.360So go to M one Mercury one dot org slash M one ball Mercury one dot org slash M one ball and help us help other people all around the world by buying a lottery ticket.
00:01:49.860And you have to do that before midnight tonight. That is Thursday.
00:02:14.320We're thrilled to have home title lock on with us.
00:02:17.520Home title lock is something that Stu turned me on to.
00:02:20.300And you have to have this not only for yourself, but you might also recommend, if I may, checking your parents' homes or your, you know, aunt or whoever might be elderly now.
00:02:30.900Because this is a the FBI says fastest growing crime.
00:02:34.660Especially because, you know, if you brought they bought a house and they've lived in the same house for a long period of time.
00:02:39.560This is a big target for these home title fraud people because they know they have there's a lot of equity there.
00:03:59.100He was arrested yesterday afternoon in Los Angeles.
00:04:01.680And the reason why he was arrested kind of makes you think that maybe there's some kind of invisible force out there making sure, you know, either irony or maybe even karma is receiving its daily offering.
00:05:01.760Now, I don't know if the media, specifically CNN and MSNBC, are going to do any mea culpas over the next 12 to 24 hours, but I highly doubt it.
00:05:10.880They have become the Avenatti network and the PR wing over the last eight months.
00:05:15.620In fact, from March to May, the two networks have Adonatti on over 100 times.
00:05:22.920He gave 147 interviews on both cable and network TV.
00:05:28.440MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell actually said, quote, Michael Avenatti is becoming my co-host, I have to say.
00:05:35.540Now, this is, you know, this is before he dragged Julie Swetnick into the limelight to attack Kavanaugh.
00:05:43.900You know, I wonder, is this going to teach the networks?
00:05:47.580Nah, let's not spend any time even thinking about that.
00:05:50.400Could be a learning moment, but it won't be.
00:05:53.000Speaking of Kavanaugh, you have to you have to hear this Twitter exchange between one user and Avenatti on October 5th.
00:06:01.360It said Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed and it's Michael Avenatti's fault.
00:06:07.040That's when Avenatti replied, quote, you are right.
00:06:11.440I should have turned my back on my client, told her to shut up and stay quiet because people like you apparently believe assault victims are to blame.
00:06:20.500Oh, this line of thinking is disgusting and offensive to all survivors.
00:07:26.020And in the court of Avenatti, you know, in the hashtag Me Too in public opinion nowadays, that court, you know, holding him to the standard that he helped create,
00:07:35.680is this statement that he just made not, quote, disgusting and offensive to all survivors?
00:07:43.620Are we not supposed to believe the woman?
00:07:49.260Are we not supposed to immediately deem him guilty as accused, run him out of the public square, make sure that he never has a job again,
00:08:01.340that he could never, ever have a good name or even a chance to defend himself?
00:08:08.000I wonder if all the men and women screaming at Kavanaugh and the GOP senators in elevators can now see the Pandora's box that they actually wanted open.
00:11:15.620Well, it's been a busy week for the former first ladies, for current first lady Melania Trump.
00:11:21.460But it has also been a busy one for the woman who 20 odd years ago while working at the White House for then the then president at the age of 21 shot to fame in the most embarrassing way possible.
00:11:38.940She has released the, quote, Clinton affair docuseries that premieres this weekend on A&E.
00:11:45.440It's a six part series examining the cringe inducing days and months surrounding her affair with Bill Clinton.
00:11:51.280In an article in Vanity Fair earlier this year, she wrote this.
00:11:56.180Some closest to me asked why I would want to revisit the most painful and traumatic parts of my life.
00:12:01.800Again, publicly, on camera, with no control on how it would be used.
00:12:08.020A bit of a head scratcher, as my brother is fond of saying, do I wish I could erase my years in D.C. from my memory, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind style.
00:14:53.600I think one of the reasons why she comes off as likable is she seems to be the only one in an entire situation who's actually wrestled with what occurred.
00:15:03.680Right, like Bill Clinton has never shown any true understanding of what happened there.
00:15:10.520Hillary Clinton has never wrestled with what happened, I think, from her perspective when she was basically trying to, you know, beat these women into oblivion politically to make them go away, to preserve her husband's career.
00:15:24.600She really seems to have done soul-searching, and what I like about it is she's not just coming out and saying, I'm a victim, and look at me, I'm the new face of Me Too, right?
00:15:35.200Like, she's saying, I did some things, you know, really terrible things, and I shouldn't have done them, and I feel terrible about them, and I have called and written people that I wronged at the time to apologize, and I think she seems to really have a good perspective.
00:15:53.000Go to, let's play a couple of clips from this.
00:15:57.800Just play clip number one here, Sarah.
00:15:59.840There was a point for me, somewhere in this sort of first several hours, where I would be hysterically crying, and then I would just shut down.
00:16:08.100And in the shutdown period, I remember looking out the window and thinking that the only way to fix this was to kill myself, was to jump out the window.
00:16:51.960She felt responsible for giving him problems, right?
00:16:55.140She was so in love with him that she felt, and she said this in another point, too, that she, she didn't come out and speak out about it initially because she didn't want to cause problems.
00:17:04.980She was okay with him denying the affair initially because she didn't want to cause problems for him.
00:17:10.820Uh, that's a tough, I mean, look, again, she admits that she, she did wrong here.
00:17:34.520He's had, he has a capacity to deal with it at some level.
00:17:37.600You're just some intern who, who rolls in there and gets out of control and does something stupid, and then your entire life is defined by it.
00:18:33.700There was a point for me somewhere in this sort of first several hours where I would be hysterically crying and then I would just shut down.
00:18:41.320And in the shutdown period, I remember looking out the window and thinking that the only way to fix this was to kill myself, was to jump out the window.
00:20:16.900She never really was an ally of the right.
00:20:21.140Where, you know, sometimes where you have like, um, you know, if, if someone accused Barack Obama of an affair and was outward and speaking about it, like Stormy Daniels is with Trump, right?
00:20:30.200Like Stormy Daniels feels, I'm sure, to the left, like an ally because she's trying to take the president down.
00:21:26.420John Ronson was a guy, and we've had him on a few times, who wrote a book about, more in the social media era, these people, these random stories you hear that bubble up for one day.
00:21:36.860But, you know, the woman, the most famous one is the woman who made the joke about AIDS in Africa, trying to mock the fact that we didn't care about Africa enough.
00:21:44.640But she was going over to Africa on a plane to go help.
00:21:47.380She was going over to help, and she was on the plane when the tweet blew up, went viral, and her life was basically ruined.
00:21:55.620And you read stories like that, and you realize when, this thing that seems fun to give snarky comments to on the web, there's somebody there just suffering through that moment.
00:22:27.760We're talking, you know, this is an eight-figure, you know, gig for him.
00:22:31.680And you were on Twitter saying, like, look, you know, I understand, and I, you know, you were, you could, I think a lot of people on the right did go after him for that, because he was a left-wing celebrity, and he was critical of people like Ben Shapiro.
00:22:46.100But, I mean, in those moments, if you can kind of get over that desire to feel that emotion, I think you wind up being a better person for it.
00:23:19.160There's something that's happening in Europe, and, and I find it, I find it viscerally the right thing, but intellectually, absolutely the wrong thing.
00:23:31.840There, now in, in Europe, they are, they are claiming there is another human right that all humans deserve, and that is the right to be forgotten.
00:23:46.920Monica Lewinsky, the case would be, she has a right to be forgotten.
00:23:55.060She, she shouldn't have to live her entire life apologizing or being shaped by one event in her life when she was 21 years old.
00:24:07.980She has a right to be forgotten, and because of the internet, it never goes away.
00:24:16.680It's always there, and so you don't have a chance to start over again, and I, I really do believe this is something that we have to address because our memories, they, they work to our advantage.
00:24:31.780I mean, our memories soften, we think of our childhood years as better years, most of us, even though they weren't, they weren't, we just see them differently.
00:24:42.300Time eases things, but when you have the internet, and it is right there in your face, and it's always that thing, you don't ever move.
00:24:53.800If you're big enough, if that mistake was big enough, like Monica Lewinsky, she can never move on from that.
00:25:01.780Now, they're passing laws in Europe, but the problem with it is, well, then are you erasing history?
00:25:09.840You can't erase history, but how do we balance this?
00:25:16.340How do we balance the right to be forgotten with the, with the right to record history as it really, truly was?
00:25:26.180We have no separation from the history now, and that's the real problem.
00:25:36.560This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.
00:25:40.260Kind of like deja vu, as we look at a Florida recount, and I welcome to the program, Catherine Harris,
00:25:56.060a former Florida Secretary of State who oversaw the nonsense that was happening in Florida in 2000.
00:27:16.940The Brenda Snipes thing, from a distance, seems like she shouldn't have been there, you know, a long time ago she should have been fired.
00:27:26.040Well, you know, the supervisors of elections, which many of your listeners may not realize, are constitutionally elected officers, meaning that each county elects them, and they are solely responsible for their equipment and solely responsible for the organization of the ballot.
00:27:43.300Now, the secretary of state can give input, but they have no authority over them.
00:27:47.820Hence, we had to restore the butterfly ballot.
00:28:27.080But what's interesting, and this is, I think, what's important, whenever I was secretary of state, my only safe harbor was people got tired of me talking about, I'm just following the law.
00:28:36.980Some of the laws I didn't like, but they were the laws we had at the time.
00:28:42.140And our rule of law is our bedrock of our nation.
00:28:45.660It restricts all the arbitrary exercise or abuse of power by making it subordinate to existing laws that are well-established and well-defined.
00:29:00.280Now, what frightens me was my personal experience.
00:29:03.680We went to the – and people never knew this or recalled it, but we petitioned the Florida Supreme Court immediately after the – when the recount was going to hit for a statewide recount, and they refused.
00:29:18.640The Democrats were more interested in Al Gore's political viability in prolonging what is this first phase called the protest phase.
00:29:25.920And by doing so, they short-circuited the opportunity to recount statewide in the contest phase.
00:29:32.120So when courts interfere with the law, when politicians interfere, when lawyers interfere, there are unintended consequences.
00:29:40.300So here they thought they were being so clever to enhance his political viability, but they short-circuited themselves.
00:29:46.240And this is what worries me with these experiments.
00:29:49.080Then the Florida Supreme Court finally intervened and said, no, you don't do a statewide recount.
00:29:56.380You're just going to count them in these three heavily Democratic counties, and that's going to determine the result for Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade.
00:30:05.540In doing so, they ended up losing at the end of the day at the U.S. Supreme Court because it wasn't equal protection under the law.
00:30:12.880But you probably remember Palm Beach came back and said, well, the Florida Supreme Court said you can certify Friday or Sunday, sort of an arbitrary edict, but they said you shall.
00:30:26.880So we said, while the nation is waiting and we need to get on with this, we're going to wait until Sunday to give everybody the time and the abundance of caution.
00:30:34.960So come Saturday, Palm Beach started saying, we're not going to be ready.
00:32:08.380In the last election cycle, they were not allowed to vote.
00:32:10.880But if they allow the felons to go through, which there were 42,000 felons on our rolls in the secretary in an election 2000, if they allow that vote to go through, that is breaking the law.
00:32:21.800Just because you don't like it does not mean you don't follow it.
00:34:20.460They are now bringing that technology to Venezuela.
00:34:23.840We have a woman in Pakistan who is a Christian who they're screaming to be beheaded where the Supreme Court said this is a trumped up charge.
00:34:35.480And the U.K. is afraid to bring them in.
00:34:40.200Sharia law is now starting to be a part of the U.K.
00:34:43.200Then you also just have the fun of the last election.
00:34:46.300Well, in passing, let me just drop in one little thing which may not be relevant to our discussion today.
00:34:52.160But when you said the whole world is going crazy, there seems to be an exception.
00:34:56.020Large parts of Africa are actually quite sane.
00:34:59.000And this is a fact, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, and many, many other places as well.
00:35:07.100What I mean by this is that I've recently been doing some speaking in both the United Kingdom and in Switzerland.
00:35:13.260I just got back from Switzerland last week.
00:35:15.560And in both cases, I have found that there are Christian evangelical churches packed to the rafters.
00:35:24.180And the leadership is almost always pastors from Africa.
00:35:29.800Now, this is really fascinating, of course, because in the 19th century, we watched England and Europe bringing the gospel to the so-called dark continent, to Africa.
00:35:41.040Well, Africa is returning the compliment right now.
00:35:43.340And it's really a pleasure to talk to many of these people who are completely free of the infection of secular fundamentalism, which drives so much of what you're describing in Europe, elsewhere, and even in the United States.
00:35:59.180Because you believe, and we were talking about this the other day.
00:36:03.720In fact, let me play an example of it.
00:36:05.700Here's a group of people that are out protesting a speech by Ben Shapiro, a bunch of college students.
00:36:12.480I want you to listen to this exchange and help me make sense of this.
00:36:17.760Do you think he should speak tonight or no?
00:36:56.980Well, this is exactly what would have happened had a Catholic priest stood up in 720 when the Muslims were sweeping through the Spanish Peninsula.
00:37:09.040And he would have said, hey, I want to give a speech about why Catholicism works.
00:37:43.640It was the king of Poland who actually saved the Western world on that day.
00:37:48.300It's not different from any time there have been clashes between competing and incompatible faiths.
00:37:56.180Ben Shapiro stands for, as do you, for heaven's sake, for so many years, Glenn, for a worldview based on a Judeo-Christian biblical model.
00:38:08.180And the mobs on the campus stand for a vision that is based on the Tower of Babel, essentially.
00:38:16.620I mean, nine verses at the beginning of Chapter 11 in Genesis provide a complete matrix of understanding of the tension that is taking place there.
00:38:25.960But, of course, they don't want to hear what he says.
00:39:21.700And the idea that there are lots and lots and lots of different civilizations all equally as good as one another is not one that merely I disagree with.
00:39:34.320But all those folks who drown in the Mediterranean, struggling to get from Africa to Europe, well, they also agree with that view.
00:39:42.860And all the people who recognize that there's no illegal immigration problem in, you know, in Kinshasa and no illegal immigration problem in Saudi Arabia.
00:40:53.560Look, what distinguishes a religion from a tennis club?
00:40:56.680And really only one thing, and that is that it answers three transcendent questions of life.
00:41:04.240Essentially, the most important one, how did life arrive on this planet?
00:41:08.860You know, here we are in this sort of remote speck of dust in a remote galaxy in a limitless universe.
00:41:15.140And although we've been searching avidly, spending vast amounts of your tax money and mine trying to find other life in outer space, which is, you know, something that would be fantastic because then it could prove that this really was a random occurrence.
00:41:29.960But at the moment, so far, we've only got life on this planet.
00:41:33.940You've got to answer the question of how we got there.
00:41:36.280And there are only two doctrines to explain that.
00:41:51.680The other view is by a lengthy process of unaided materialistic evolution, primitive protoplasm turned into plumbers and proctologists or whatever.
00:42:01.940I mean, and one shouldn't laugh at other people's belief systems because that's rude.
00:42:07.700But that's really what this is all about.
00:42:10.000And everything flows from how you answer those two, that basic question.
00:42:16.580Secular fundamentalism has become the official state religion in America.
00:42:20.780It's certainly the religion of the temple of American culture, the university campus.
00:42:25.820And that's why the battles are being fought over there on the campus.
00:42:30.120So did you say you were over in England?
00:42:57.640She's now under government protection, which you can't really trust that for very long.
00:43:03.360She's asked the U.K. for shelter and refugee status.
00:43:07.480They will not give it to her because they said she'd cause probably too many disruptions and civil unrest in the United Kingdom.
00:43:17.540As I'm looking at the United Kingdom, Rabbi Lappin, you've got the Labour Party being investigated for anti-Semitism.
00:43:25.600You have all of the police, it seems, and all of the government structures hiding from the bad element of the Islamists and hiding the bad element from others.
00:44:05.840But you walk into most Anglican churches in the United Kingdom and there's three half-wits sitting in the pews because they've got nowhere else to be.
00:44:20.040But I spoke for Hillsong Church in London, 10,000 people sitting there.
00:44:26.860And so it was in every church I spoke.
00:44:29.760So, look, I personally believe being as this is a struggle between two competing belief systems, I do think that the only hope is not political but religious because we know back to the year 2000,
00:44:45.520even the New York Times agreed that the most reliable correlation of Republican voters was regular church attendance.
00:44:53.300And so I do think that in the same way that we saw a huge religious reawakening in America fuel the war of independence and we saw a second religious reawakening propel the abolition of slavery,