Former Congressman Elijah Cummings has passed away at the age of 68. He was a leading figure in the Trump impeachment investigation and served as the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. On today's show, Glenn Beck reacts to the news and rants about the mainstream media's coverage of the event. Also, Bill O'Reilly talks about the cancel culture and what comes next.
00:00:54.300Now, Elijah Cummings is is has never been a guy that I've agreed with politically, but I have had respect for Elijah Cummings and what he has accomplished in his life.
00:01:04.260Let me just let me just give you a little bit here.
00:01:07.620Democratic congressman from Maryland who gained national attention for his principled stands on politically charged issues in the House, his calming effect on anti-police riots in Baltimore.
00:01:16.360He died Thursday morning at Gilchrist Hospital care, Johns Hopkins affiliate in Baltimore.
00:01:22.460He was 68 after ongoing an unspecified medical procedure.
00:01:27.360The Democratic leader did not return to his office this week, according to The Sun, a statement from his office as he passed away due to complications concerning a longstanding health challenge.
00:01:38.160Mr. Cummings was the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee and a leading figure in the Trump impeachment inquiry, born to a family and southern to southern sharecroppers and Baptist preachers.
00:01:50.780He grew up in a racially fractured Baltimore in the 50s and 60s at 11 at 11.
00:01:57.340He helped to integrate a local swimming pool while being attacked with bottles and rocks.
00:02:02.800Perry Mason, the popular TV series about fictional defense lawyer, inspired him to enter the legal profession.
00:02:09.540Many men in my neighborhood were going to do were going to reform school, though I didn't completely know what reform school was.
00:02:17.660I knew that Perry Mason won a lot of cases. I also thought that these young men probably needed lawyers.
00:02:23.180He became the youngest chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus, yada, yada, yada.
00:02:27.500He has been a force for good much of his life.
00:02:31.200He has also taken stands as a legislator that I disagree with.
00:02:37.300But I just I just I think this is an insult from The Washington Post.
00:12:51.440Have you heard anybody in the media say that about the Arab Spring, about Libya, about Syria, about getting into bed and arming these people?
00:16:07.260So the way I think about cancel culture is that it's rooted in some of these primitive human drives to obtain social status and in group solidarity with our peers, as well as to identify our friends and our foes.
00:16:20.720And we generally go into tribes when we're afraid.
00:16:45.720Well, you know, tribalism is inherently human.
00:16:48.900And so whether we're in danger or not, we do like to be around, you know, sort of, sort of our group, you know, people who we feel comfortable around.
00:16:57.000But when we are in danger, we are more likely to, to seek people who think like us, who behave like us, and to sort of denigrate people who we're afraid of or who don't agree with us.
00:17:08.500So tell me what happened to you in 2016, while you were an undergrad at Yale.
00:17:13.600Yeah, you know, Glenn, I've been concerned about cancel culture for a long time.
00:17:17.840And, you know, I was actually in the military before I attended Yale for undergrad.
00:17:21.060And, you know, I'd heard stories about, you know, extra sensitive college students and snowflakes and so on.
00:17:27.700And I thought a lot of it was probably just the media maybe blowing things out of proportion.
00:17:32.400But then literally within my first two months at Yale, so this was the fall semester of 2015, a faculty member named Erica Christakis wrote an email around Halloween telling students that they should communicate with each other more if they're offended by the costumes that they, you know, other students choose to wear.
00:17:50.900Rather than relying on the university administration to give us guidelines of what costumes were allowed to wear or not.
00:17:57.860And the student reaction to her was just pure outrage.
00:18:02.760They turned her into a pariah on campus for essentially defending freedom of expression.
00:18:07.340And eventually she had to resign and basically said that the climate on campus was not conducive to free speech.
00:18:14.420So she stepped down from her from her positions at the university.
00:18:17.580And so, OK, so I thought that was weird.
00:18:19.540I thought, OK, so, you know, maybe this is just a quirk of American universities and that this is just unique to schools in the United States.
00:18:28.240But then I arrived to the University of Cambridge here in England last year.
00:18:34.080And literally within a few first few months, Jordan Peterson, who's probably the most famous academic in the world, gets disinvited from the university because a bunch of student and faculty protesters said that, you know, him him being here would make them feel scared or unsafe or something.
00:18:48.860And so, you know, there is this problem in academia, but then in culture more broadly about people getting canceled for, you know, things that they say.
00:18:59.020Can I ask you this, Rob, what you know, the thing that happened at Yale?
00:19:04.960Here's here's a woman who is saying, look, talk to each other, have personal responsibility.
00:19:11.260Take this upon yourself to understand.
00:19:16.620Don't expect the the college to do this.
00:19:19.500This is the exact opposite kind of thinking from the 60s or any kind of of real movement with the youth.
00:19:29.060They are they are holding up these the government and the administration in that case and saying, yeah, we we should have them do everything for us.
00:19:46.100Yeah, you know, it's funny you say that if I'm not mistaken, I think in an interview, Erica Christakis, the professor who got, you know, who stepped down at Yale, she actually kind of referred to herself as this kind of 60s liberal.
00:19:57.880You know, this person who sort of marched with the students and believed in the whole freedom of speech cause.
00:20:03.460So it's sort of ironic that she's getting targeted now for simply defending freedom of expression.
00:20:09.940And I think a lot of people from that generation are sort of bewildered at what's happening, because oftentimes they're the ones being targeted now.
00:20:17.640But don't you find it don't you find it additionally strange that in an era where your voice can be heard, you have the power to be heard and to be seen anywhere around the world, that you have the power to start your own business, unlike any other time in the world.
00:20:34.900And you can become famous, unlike any other time in the world, that that generation is going back to like a 1950s kind of structure.
00:20:43.720Well, I think what's happening here, Glenn, is that the ideology and power are afraid of free speech.
00:20:52.820So, you know, in the 50s and the 60s, there was a sort of perhaps more conservative ideology that held power in the universities and in society and the group that considered themselves the underdogs.
00:21:03.680Maybe the sort of progressives at the time were fighting for freedom of speech, whereas today those students who protested back then now have the power and they're afraid of sort of uprisings of people who are challenging that.
00:21:16.300And so I'm not entirely sure that freedom of speech itself is, you know, this bedrock principle, but it's only used as a sort of as a weapon against the opposing ideology.
00:21:26.720Exactly right. So then what happens, Robert? What do we what is our future hold and how do we get our arms around this?
00:21:34.880Because as you point out in your article, you know, wait until it's you. You could be next.
00:21:41.780You point out in the article, that's not enough. That's theoretical to too many people, even though we're seeing it happen in real time right now.
00:21:49.980You know, it's still not enough. Right. I don't think that those words, you know, you could be next, which I see a lot on social media and in conversations about cancel culture.
00:22:00.680I don't think it actually registers for most people simply because the social rewards of, you know, getting into a mob and trying to cancel someone.
00:22:08.780You know, those rewards are too immediate and gratifying. And the dangers of cancel culture are pretty remote and abstract.
00:22:15.560I mean, it just isn't a sort of salient threat for a lot of people.
00:22:22.320So Kipling wrote in his poem, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, that all these things will happen until terror and slaughter return.
00:22:34.040And what he was talking about was you're just going to go off the deep end, but it will take terror and slaughter to return to common sense.
00:22:45.220And we've seen this time and time again. Are we at that point to where the only thing that's going to stop this is just I mean, people didn't understand it in the 1920s.
00:22:54.040Hey, you could be next. But by 1939, pretty much everybody was clear, you know, even those in Germany, pretty clear.
00:23:05.600Are we at that point to where that's the only thing that's going to stop this stuff is the world going into total madness?
00:23:12.860You know, I'm a little bit more optimistic than that.
00:23:17.800I don't think that we're sort of, you know, physically in danger, but I do think there's a lot of reputational danger at stake here.
00:23:24.680You know, people aren't necessarily fearing for their personal physical safety, despite what a lot of like social justice activist warriors will try to tell you.
00:23:32.560You know, it's not physical safety. It's more a reputational safety.
00:23:35.260You know, any one of our reputations could be destroyed in the blink of an eye for something that we might have said, you know, 10 years ago.
00:23:42.440You know, you see a lot of people digging up old tweets or old Facebook posts that you might have written in like 2009.
00:23:48.700So I think it's more of the reputational destruction that's the real risk here.
00:23:53.660But I think that as we continue to talk more about this and bring these, you know, these issues to light, that people will slowly come to their senses.
00:24:02.360But in the meantime, I don't really see cancel culture going away.
00:24:05.740I think that it's going to get quite a bit worse before we start to see it get better.
00:24:11.180Rob, thank you so much and really appreciate you speaking out and risking your own reputation.
00:24:18.060I'm sure you've had pushback. Have you not?
00:24:22.200Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've had a few critics here and there, but I just brushed them off.
00:24:26.160Yeah. Good for you, Rob. Thank you so much.
00:24:27.960Rob Henderson. You can find him at Rob K. Henderson.
00:24:31.740Follow him on Twitter. Thank you so much, Rob. Appreciate it.
00:24:37.420This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:24:39.760Hey, it's Glenn. And if you like what you hear on the program, you should check out Pat Gray Unleashed.
00:24:55.940His podcast is available wherever you download your favorite podcast.
00:24:59.900Hi, it's Glenn. If you're a subscriber to the podcast, can you do us a favor and rate us on iTunes?
00:25:05.080If you're not a subscriber, become one today and listen on your own time.
00:25:09.520You can subscribe on iTunes. Thanks, Mr. Bill O'Reilly.
00:25:14.260We have the impeachment moving forward.
00:25:17.680Mitch McConnell is starting to do private classes on what's going to happen if the impeachment moves over to the Senate.
00:25:24.220They're saying now that it looks like it's going to be done by Christmas time.
00:25:27.980I don't know if I buy that. Schiff pushed Volker yesterday.
00:25:32.980There was a fight in the cabinet room.
00:25:36.360This is nuts. Where do you want to begin, Bill?
00:25:40.680Let's begin with the Yankees-Astros playing tonight and Gale Force wins.
00:30:35.200Isn't that exactly what Greg Craig did as the private attorney for President Obama?
00:30:40.180He was acquitted, Greg Craig, of his whatever.
00:30:45.880But what I'm trying to tell you is there is nobody on the face of the earth that can get through this labyrinth and know exactly what Rudy Giuliani did or did not do.
00:30:56.340This is all private conversations under the banner of I have a private company.