Glenn Beck's art show in Park City, Utah is a big hit, and the support for DaBaby continues to pour in. But is it more than enough? And what's going on with the Olympics? Glenn and Pat discuss all that and much more on this episode of Glenn Does America.
00:00:00.000Welcome to the podcast. Today, we talk about the Olympics and some of the fun stuff going on with that wonderful patriotism being viewed by all of America as you watch the Olympic Games.
00:00:13.240We also talk about the troubles of DaBaby. I know you're a huge DaBaby fan, as Glenn and I are as well.
00:00:21.200We have an update on Glenn's art show, which I tried to keep as short as possible because it apparently went well.
00:00:25.800We have Ronald Pastrito on as well to talk about the similarities between the Woodrow Wilson administration and the Joe Biden administration.
00:00:37.500And Senator Mike Lee joins us to tell us why we're spending $1.2 trillion with the sign-on of Republicans.
00:00:43.820We get into all that today on the program. Don't forget to subscribe at blazetv.com slash Glenn. Promo code is Glenn.
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00:01:12.360You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
00:01:16.360Mr. Pat Gray joins us from Pat Gray Unleashed.
00:01:23.320Yeah, so how'd the weekend in Park City go with the art show?
00:12:44.020Nicole Solas is a stay-at-home mom in South Kingstown, Rhode Island.
00:12:49.080She enrolled her five-year-old daughter in kindergarten in the South Kingstown school district and then said, you know, I want some information because she had heard that the teachers were starting to teach critical race theory.
00:13:03.580And so she said, I need some information from the school.
00:13:08.780Now, it's perfectly legal for her to request.
00:13:13.180In fact, they have it on their own website.
00:13:15.100If you want information, blah, blah, blah, you do it.
00:13:20.160Then she figured, I should probably pull my daughter out of school after they threatened to sue her because of her public record request about critical race theory and gender theory, which the district told her to submit.
00:13:36.280She's now being represented by the Goldwater Institute, and she is on the phone with us now.
00:13:57.220And this isn't the first time that they have given me these very high estimates to get public information, which, frankly, we already pay for with our taxes.
00:14:05.920First, they had given me a $9,000 fee to get information.
00:14:09.360When I first started submitting my public records request, other information was $2,000, $3,000.
00:14:15.420The Goldwater Institute resubmitted a public records request on my behalf with much more specific terms that were more likely to turn up information, and that was now $74,000.
00:14:25.140Which is insane, because this is public information, and it shouldn't be a government secret.
00:14:32.820It's information that, really, the public has a right to access, and a public records request is just the way to get that information.
00:14:39.840In my town, 80% of the budget goes to the school, and it costs $27,000 for a student to educate.
00:14:47.960And now I have to pay $74,000 to know how they're being educated.
00:14:52.900It just seems like this is not the way it's supposed to work.
00:14:55.100So you asked for lesson plans and course materials used or assigned at any school within South Kingston School Department in the 2021 school year
00:15:04.940that include any of the following terms, 1619 Project, Zinn Education Project or Howard Zinn, Equitable Math, Gender Theory, White Privilege or Whiteness, Systematic Racism, CRT or Critical Race Theory,
00:15:19.380Ibram Kendi or Kendi, Robin D'Angelo or just D'Angelo, they said that they could do that, but it would take them eight hours to retrieve.
00:15:34.440Yeah, I think it was a lot more hours.
00:15:36.680I think it was like 693 hours or something like that, and they have, under the statute, they can charge $15 an hour to compile and retrieve all this information.
00:15:49.380But it still has to be a reasonable fee.
00:15:51.940And when you're asking for lesson materials and instructional materials, that shouldn't have to be requested under the APRA, the Access to Public Records Act.
00:16:05.640They, at any point, can just email this to me of their own volition.
00:16:09.820They can just respond to my questions that I asked in an email without having to charge me money, because this is really just a conversation about what our kids are learning.
00:16:19.380So, they're the ones that constrain me to this public record request process, and I believe they're doing that to evade my questions and not answer them.
00:16:32.260The teachers were incorporating all this stuff in?
00:16:35.720Well, the principal from the elementary school where my daughter would go, I've since pulled her out and placed her in private school, said that they integrate values of gender identity in every grade.
00:16:47.620And she said that they have a certain line of thinking about history that they teach children in every grade.
00:16:53.760And she told me this after I said, do you teach anything with anti-racism?
00:16:57.280And as we all know, anti-racism really just means racism or critical race theory.
00:17:19.680Either I don't know or let me get back to you.
00:17:21.760And then, finally, it was submit a public records request.
00:17:24.460So, I know they're absolutely doing it.
00:17:26.320And I have tons of evidence that I've uncovered through these public records requests and with my own research, showing that the school district believes that all white people are racist.
00:17:35.460I just found a document saying that, and that part of their goal is to have implicit bias trainings with students and teachers, and they're 100% committed to this, but they're not telling me exactly how.
00:17:49.880And so, I want them to be completely transparent so that people can decide if they want to enroll their kids in this district or opt out of certain lesson plans.
00:17:57.800And we can finally engage in a robust public debate about the values of, you know, critical race theory or anti-racism or whatever you want to call it.
00:18:07.100I tell you, you can file for a Freedom of Information Act, and you don't have to pay for it.
00:18:13.020I mean, it's, again, on our time, on our dime.
00:18:16.940And you ask for all records of communications, including email communication to or from any South Kingston School Department official, principal, teacher, teaching assistant, counselor, or any other person from January 1, 2020, to the date of this request, which includes any of the following terms.
00:18:34.4201619 Project, Zen Education, Howard Zen, Equitable Math, Gender Theory, blah, blah, blah, all of these things.
00:18:42.720I know that here in Texas, when we finally did get the Freedom of Information Act from a school district called Southlake, it showed that they were mocking the parents and saying, we're just going to do it anyway.
00:18:57.360And one of them said, let's keep this information away from the parents.
00:19:03.400And two of the people went to jail over it.
00:19:06.720And nobody had to pay for that information because it came from a government source.
00:19:12.720Yeah, so the Freedom of Information Act is different from the Access to Public Records Act, which is a Rhode Island statute.
00:19:20.440And that Rhode Island statute carves out this $15 an hour fee that a public entity can charge you for.
00:19:27.340They can also charge you $0.15 for hard copy.
00:19:30.320But you're right that this information should not have to cost taxpayers money.
00:19:36.100They're already paying for the information just, you know, by having the public entity do their job.
00:19:40.720So I think that that's going to be a point of contention, that it's not reasonable to have the $74,000 fee.
00:19:49.780And it's certainly not equitable for all of this talk that schools have about equity and everyone having equal access.
00:19:56.500I don't know how you justify that kind of fee just to know what your kid is learning, because it sounds like they're saying that only the extremely wealthy are privy to information about what their kids are learning.
00:20:05.760So what did the Goldwater people say, and what are you doing about this now?
00:20:12.420Right now, we're determining what our next step is.
00:20:15.960We're still talking about that, and I'm sure we'll make a decision soon on whether we want to go to court or if we want to take some other legal action.
00:20:26.580How is the community responding to you and the people in the school?
00:20:32.500Are they with you or against you, or is it split?
00:20:39.180I have parents and even teachers emailing me and thanking me for putting myself out there.
00:20:44.720I also get lots of tips from parents about what is being taught in school here, and it's sometimes hard to get verification.
00:20:55.680So if they say, oh, my kid had to do something with Black Lives Matter in class, and I'm telling you, I'm hoping you can do something with it.
00:21:02.420But they're scared to actually tell me the name of the class, the name of the teacher, the actual assignment, because they don't want to be retaliated against it the way that I was retaliated against.
00:21:11.240But, you know, you can't just go out there and say something's happening and have, you know, no proof.
00:21:15.580So people are still scared, but they are extremely supportive.
00:21:26.320If people like you don't stand up now, it's only going to get harder, and you most likely won't win in the future if we don't stand up now.
00:21:36.620Is there anything that our audience can do to help you?
00:21:40.980I just want to reiterate what you said, that more parents need to start standing up to their school boards and just to remember that school boards are made up of ordinary people.
00:23:18.160Mike Lee, the senator from Utah, you were up late last night working on this bipartisan government spending bill.
00:23:27.640How many of you guys voted against this thing?
00:23:30.100There were about 40 of us who voted against it, maybe 35 who voted against it at the earlier stages.
00:23:41.200Here's the weird thing, though, Glenn.
00:23:42.480We voted on this a couple times last week.
00:23:44.720The bill didn't yet exist at the time.
00:23:47.980The bill didn't exist until last night, late last night.
00:23:53.080I finally received it as I was sitting on the Senate floor with a bunch of my colleagues who were getting ready to give speeches in favor of it, and all of a sudden I got it electronically.
00:24:24.100Yeah, that's kind of what they were doing, deciding overall threshold amounts and deciding, you know, in general terms what the agreement would consist of.
00:24:34.020But normally that's not how we vote on actual pieces of legislation.
00:24:48.560And of that $1.2 trillion, 550 of it is new federal spending above and beyond what we were expected to spend this year.
00:24:59.320Which strikes me as curious, given that it's a terrible time to be spending more money at a time when, due to deliberate, reckless overspending by the federal government, poor middle class Americans are finding that everything they purchase is more expensive.
00:25:14.140From chicken breast to gasoline, to cars, to housing, everything is more expensive because we're spending too much money in Washington.
00:25:51.440You know, you brought up, when you were on the floor of the Senate, I watched some of the highlights, and you made a great point about inflation.
00:26:00.180You were like, even just the act of spending all of this money, when you're talking about infrastructure, will drive the cost of the things that are already expensive up, because now the private sector has to compete with the government.
00:26:17.820So everything that goes into these projects, from cement to the aggregate materials you use to make concrete, to steel, to labor, and everything else, all those things are more expensive right now.
00:26:32.300And so, look, I'm not a fan of stimulus-style spending.
00:26:37.220But even to those who might be, they might be able to make a slightly less bad case for this in a time when demand for these products is low and industries are shutting down.
00:26:48.720I still wouldn't like to see government doing that, but whatever.
00:26:51.980You can make a case for it in that circumstance, not one that I agree with.
00:26:55.900But you can't make a good case for doing it right now, where everything is inflated, where every federal dollar we put into this is going to go less far because it's a federal dollar and it comes with lots of strings attached, and it will go even less far because of the fact that all of these things were in short supply and can be procured only at a premium.
00:27:14.880We will get less from this as a result of the fact that it's federal and as a result of the fact that we're doing it right now.
00:27:20.200So why are they saying this is a good deal?
00:27:22.580Why are the Republicans even thinking we have to do any of this stuff?
00:27:28.160Well, look, I'm always reluctant to speak for those who are not present.
00:27:33.160I'm not a good spokesman for them because I disagree fundamentally with what they're doing.
00:27:38.080I suspect if one of them were on the phone with us, they'd say, okay, well, first of all, we need infrastructure.
00:27:43.200Secondly, if we do this, then what the Democrats do on their bill, the bill that they intend to pass with a simple majority, either later this week or later this month, they will spend less than they would otherwise spend if we didn't do this.
00:27:59.560Now, if we were in court and someone testified to that effect, I'd stand up and say, objection assumes facts not in evidence.
00:28:08.500I don't know how they can possibly know that they will spend less if we pass this bill.
00:28:13.580And in any event, that doesn't mean we don't have to put our names on something that we think is bad and harmful to the American people if we don't agree with it.
00:28:22.720Look, Glenn, there are sort of three different groups of people in America, one of which will benefit from this bill, one of which might not notice much of a difference, and the others will be hurt by it.
00:28:35.220The first group, consisting of those who might benefit from it, tend to be wealthy, well-connected individuals and business interests in this country who might actually get rich off of it.
00:28:44.800The next group, consisting of well-off Americans who have enough money that they won't notice a big hit to their lifestyle.
00:28:54.500But almost everyone else, the vast, overwhelming majority of Americans, fits into the third category.
00:29:00.280People who have limited paychecks, in many cases, living paycheck to paycheck, every dollar will buy less as a result of spending like this one.