Christine Ford has come forward with a new accusation against Brett Kavanaugh. She claims that he sexually assaulted her at a party when they were in high school in the 1980s, but he denies it. Glenn and Stu react to the latest development. They also discuss Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and why we should abandon capitalism.
00:07:49.460How you see now statues coming down of tyrants all around the world.
00:07:54.880They take the statue of King George and they actually melt the statue and make 42,000 musket balls, bullets, out of the statue of King George.
00:08:06.180America's separation from Great Britain was officially now in writing.
00:08:12.720So, I want to talk to you a little bit about, and this is a whole section in the book.
00:08:17.720I come back to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution several times in the new book.
00:08:22.780It's coming out tomorrow, Addicted to Outrage.
00:08:24.640And I explain, I think, I actually, I like it very much, the Declaration of Independence as the greatest breakup letter of all time.
00:08:35.580If you make that a Dear George letter, I translate it from, you know, old-timey English into, you know, a contemporary breakup letter.
00:08:55.880It's a breakup letter that says we have to separate because you're an abusive boyfriend and we don't want any of that.
00:09:06.000But what's more is it starts with, hey, George, you know, we got to break up because there's a lot of things going on and things that you're doing.
00:09:17.540And every time I try to bring things up, you only make it worse.
00:09:21.680But I want to tell you who I am because you don't seem to get it.
00:11:19.040There's a whole section or a whole chapter where I kind of talk about the Constitution as if it was written by, you know, a bunch of, you know, VW engineers that had to, you know, make the VW thing.
00:11:50.220They had to, if you want to do a new company, and that company is never going to make the VW thing, then you better state it in your mission statement.
00:12:04.160And then you better build your company rules around the things that you saw lead to the VW thing.
00:12:13.300And that's what the Constitution does.
00:12:16.140The Constitution is, okay, how do we build this?
00:12:20.080More importantly, how do we make sure that we don't start building a VW thing?
00:12:28.660And in the government, that VW thing is tyranny, a tyrant, a king, a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mao.
00:12:38.940How do we make sure that never happens?
00:13:29.760Again, that's where the Constitution comes in.
00:13:33.000Because men are flawed, you better check on them.
00:13:36.420You better make sure that anybody who gets power is so compartmentalized and so many people are checking on them so it can never get out of control.
00:15:59.940That's where the people can say, you know what, they're out of control, and we need to go in and give them term limits, because they'll never do it themselves.
00:16:58.520They realized that they weren't going to get it perfect, and that's why they created a process, which I think you could argue it is perfect because of this.
00:22:33.260The one thing I have found in common with people who are spitting themselves out of the system on both sides and are saying we're in trouble, they all have read Jonathan Haidt's books.
00:22:47.280This is an exceptional book and, I believe, a must-read for everyone in this audience.
00:22:54.600It's called The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt, and he joins us now.
00:23:25.720So the book is about this very strange change that happened on college campuses around 2015.
00:23:35.320Many of your listeners will have heard of these strange events, the shouting down of speakers, the claiming that students need warnings before they read a Greek myth or a story that has violence or racism in it.
00:23:47.200So strange things began to happen, and my co-author, Greg Lukianoff, he had this brilliant diagnosis.
00:23:56.000He himself was subject, he'd had suicidal depressions, he's prone to depression, and he learned cognitive therapy, which is where you learn to question your assumptions and clean up your thinking.
00:24:06.440And once he did that, he began to notice that the students were doing the exact same cognitive distortions that he had learned not to do.
00:24:16.080Oh, if a student, if a speaker comes to campus, you know, people will die.
00:24:20.860This is disordered thinking, and Greg noticed that students were doing this.
00:24:24.760He runs the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and so he diagnosed that students, that colleges are somehow conveying these ideas that are really, really bad for students.
00:24:35.960Students are taking them to heart and thinking themselves into a depression.
00:24:39.820So that's sort of the back story to the book.
00:24:43.400The three ideas that you refer to – sorry, I had to do that little background.
00:24:48.420So the three ideas, what we conclude in the book, as we've listened to students, as we've read a lot about what's going on – and I'm a professor at New York University, so I'm in the thick of things here – is that there are three really, really bad ideas.
00:25:02.300What doesn't kill you makes you weaker.
00:25:06.140Number two, always trust your feelings.
00:25:09.300Number three, life is a battle between good people and evil people.
00:25:14.440And if we can get students to believe all three, we can't guarantee that they will fail, but we really set them up for a life of weakness, complaint, grievance, and failure.
00:25:26.100So, Jonathan, I have a book that is released tomorrow, and he wrote it, and I wish I could rewrite it again because I've learned so much as I'm writing.
00:25:40.440I don't know if you've ever experienced that, but you get to the end and you're like –
00:25:50.520Yeah, so it is – it talks about our addiction to this and how this is happening, but it also touches on postmodernism, which is coming out of our universities, which is kind of the root, is it not, of all three of these problems?
00:26:10.440Because you just said if we can teach all – if we can get kids to believe all three of these things, we destroy them.
00:26:20.000So nobody's trying to destroy students.
00:26:22.980I think what's happening here, the best idea I can share with you and your listeners to understand the craziness that is broken out, not just on university campuses but across so many of our institutions, is that social media has put us all in a game in which the way we get prestige is by calling out others.
00:26:44.500Or at least – let's just start with students, young people who grew up with social media.
00:26:51.960Everybody's always trying to figure out, what can I do that will gain me respect?
00:26:55.220We actually care about respect and prestige more than we care about money.
00:26:58.520I'd even say many of us care about money once you're above a certain level.
00:27:02.380People care about money primarily for the prestige it gives.
00:27:04.700So social media changed the basic connectivity of society so that all you have to do is criticize someone online or join in with the criticism and you gain respect.
00:27:16.180And so what you have to see is this is not about people trying to destroy students, certainly, but people are playing out their political battles.
00:27:27.080They're using others as pawns in a way, and they're setting up a playing field in which kids just trying to get by and get by socially end up hurting each other.
00:27:37.360Okay, so that is the – I think that's the addiction part.
00:27:39.940That's the end of the dog, the tail of the dog in a way.
00:27:43.440I think the – what you talk about is, you know, this helicopter parent madness that went on, that this is the first generation that – we're seeing the results now of children that could do no wrong, received, you know, praise no matter what they did.
00:28:02.660We're seeing that generation now, and they can't handle the stress.
00:28:23.500In fact, our book, we really frame it as a social science detective story because this new morality emerges on campus right around 2014, 2015, the whole morality of safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, all those things.
00:28:36.420And so we think there are several causes, one of which is social media, which we just talked about, and I'm sure we'll come back to.
00:28:42.380But the other big one is – but the other big one is, as you say, it's that we did this to our kids trying to protect them.
00:28:48.720We try – we all want our kids to be safe.
00:28:51.960We all want our kids to be successful.
00:28:53.540So beginning in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s, we clamped down on kids' freedom.
00:29:12.600We got this ridiculous idea that if we ever take our eyes off our kids, if our kids go around the corner to a park and there's no adult watching them, they will be kidnapped.
00:29:23.800So there was a huge crime wave in the 1970s and 1980s.
00:29:28.440And when you and I were growing up and any of your listeners who are over 40, when we were growing up, even though there was actually a lot of crime in America, you went out and played after school.
00:29:40.480We rode our bicycles from around the age of eight.
00:29:42.780So that's the way childhood always was until the 1990s.
00:29:46.160And even though the crime wave was actually ending in the 90s, things were getting safer and safer in the 90s, that's the decade in which the social norm changed.
00:29:55.320Maybe not everywhere in America, but certainly in urban and suburban areas, it changed so that kids never got the right to practice being independent or self-supervising.
00:30:07.320And then when they go off to college, are we surprised that they're having trouble being independent and self-supervising?
00:30:14.100You know, some of your recommendations, and one of the reasons I like this book so much is because you not only diagnosed the problem, the last, what, third of the book or quarter of the book is, okay, so here's what we do.
00:30:25.460And your recommendations, it's crazy that you need someone like you to say, you know what, have your kids ride their bike unsupervised, you know, down the street.
00:30:37.720Send them to the store for a gallon of milk.
00:30:40.160Like, have them do things, you know, that are unsupervised.
00:30:45.160My grandparents would have, they would have never, my parents wouldn't have even understood that advice.
00:30:51.960But now, I said this on the air the other day, and I said, I remember being maybe six, seven, we had a little store, you know, about a block and a half away from our house.
00:31:01.340And my mom would give me money, and she'd say, go get a gallon of milk.
00:31:19.020And so one of the, so I, you know, I think the way to, the way to think about so much of what's going on in our society, and, you know, I can't wait to read your book, because it's so easy for us to think that there are good people and bad people.
00:31:29.300It's so easy for us to think that someone did this, or people are hurting our kids.
00:31:32.880But really, you know, I'm a social psychologist, and what we specialize in is understanding the way social forces act on people.
00:31:40.000So it's not that they're necessarily good or bad.
00:31:42.100It's that we're all really social creatures.
00:31:44.520And many people have traced this back to the origin of cable TV in the 1980s.
00:31:50.480You know, when you and I were growing up, there were only three networks.
00:31:53.040The news was only on half an hour, an hour a day.
00:31:55.740There wasn't the chance to be submerged in stories about, you know, several kids go missing every year in America.
00:32:01.920I mean, more than that, but in terms of, like, true abductions by strangers, it's extremely rare.
00:32:06.520But it's only in the 1980s that we could all be immersed in that story all the time.
00:32:11.700And so it was the change in the media environment that was one of the reasons for the huge freakout.
00:32:30.640So when parents have just one kid and they're surrounded by news stories about kids being abducted, yeah, they don't let them walk to the corner store anymore.
00:32:42.960Anybody who I think is a game-changer individual, somebody who is really, who gets it and is actively engaged in trying to think differently and do things like save freedom of speech,
00:32:57.080they are all fans or have read Jonathan Height's books.
00:33:12.360The Coddling of the American Mind is the book.
00:33:15.020Jonathan, I'd like to get through the next two problems so then the next segment we can actually talk about some of the solutions that you have in your book.
00:34:25.020And this is the basis of most pop psychology, that if you're spending your life feeling angry, feeling cheated, it's up to you to change the filters.
00:34:36.600Life is complicated, and you get to decide which filters you're going to use.
00:34:41.240And instead, what's happening on college campuses, and it goes back much earlier, is because we're afraid of hurting kids' feelings, a goal is in part to be sensitive and caring, we think that if someone presents an idea that a student finds threatening or invalidating, if it invalidates a current idea, that can be painful.
00:35:02.240Well, we don't want students to experience pain.
00:35:05.540And so this whole idea of safe spaces, that if a speaker comes to campus, and one of the first cases was at Brown University, they were going to have a debate between two feminists, one of whom believed that America is a rape culture, one of whom believed that America is not a rape culture.
00:35:23.180And that's a great thing to talk about at a college campus at Brown University.
00:35:28.740And because some students at Brown thought, well, what if a student at Brown had been raped?
00:35:33.560It would be too painful for her to hear someone say that America is not systemically a rapist kind of society.
00:35:55.600And if educators get in their heads that students should be protected from uncomfortable moments, from having their most cherished ideas challenged, well, you might feel like you're being nice to them, but my God, you're crippling them.
00:36:09.240Isn't that what a university is supposed to do?
00:36:12.920If I'm paying my money, I want someone who will take everything that I believe is true and throw me up against the wall and make me prove it, make me look at all of the different things so I know how to find truth.
00:36:33.980And I've been awakened, so I know what's true to me.
00:36:44.780So the traditional idea of a university, I mean, we can trace it all the way back to Plato's Academy in ancient Greece.
00:36:52.520If you have a community of people who argue and debate and discuss but are bound together by norms of friendship – so if you just get people yelling at each other in the public square, it doesn't do any good.
00:37:04.460But if you have a community that retires, that steps outside of downtown Athens, and they have a place where they meet and they discuss love and justice and beauty, and they have these spirited debates that Plato wrote about, well, that's wonderful.
00:37:18.560And so that is our myth, or that is our origin story for Western universities.
00:37:23.020Unfortunately, a new idea began creeping in in the 80s and 90s where the goal of educators should be to foster self-esteem, to protect people, to make them feel safe.
00:37:34.800And again, this overprotection is really, really bad for students.
00:37:40.140One of the clearest signs that we're messing things up is that depression, anxiety, suicide, and self-harm – that is teenagers cutting themselves to the point where they have to be admitted to the hospital – these things began climbing very rapidly after about 2012.
00:37:55.620So we are messing things up, we're harming our kids in the name of protecting them, and we've got to stop.
00:38:01.460But in your book, you talk about something that is absolutely incredible to me, that now at universities, if you have gone to the, you know, the, I don't know, the campus shrink or the doctor, and there's anything regarding mental health, you will get an email from the university that says – is this your book, or is this another one?
00:38:25.800Yes, no, this is a story of the book, yes.
00:38:28.100All right, go ahead and tell the story.
00:38:34.780Yeah, no, but we told the story, this is at Northern Michigan State University, in which it was routine that if anybody went in to talk about depression or anything like that, they got a letter telling them, you must not talk about this with your friends, or we might have to send you home.
00:38:53.100Now, this is crazy to say – to tell people who are having emotional difficulties that they better not talk with anyone about it because –
00:39:01.220Now, the university was afraid of liability.
00:39:03.660The university was afraid, well, what if you tell someone, and then that contributes to their depression, and then they commit suicide.
00:39:11.560But the point is that the bureaucracy at a university is working to protect the university from bad publicity and from lawsuits.
00:39:21.200The therapeutic community is working to protect students from harms that they see that I think are not really harms in most cases.
00:39:30.380Universities are complicated places, and what we try to do in the book is trace out how this weird, bad, bad culture is happening, all from people pursuing what they think are good motives.
00:39:46.500I want to come back and talk to you a little bit about the solutions that you outline in the book, and it's the reason why I think every parent should read this book.
00:39:58.500And we'll talk to Jonathan Haidt about that when we return, The Coddling of the American Mind, it is on the must-read list.
00:40:08.380If you're a listener of this program, you must read this book, The Coddling of the American Mind, back in just a second.
00:40:14.540You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck Program.
00:40:35.760Much of America is getting outraged for outrage's sake.
00:40:39.440And with all of the nonstop outrage coverage, we're actually missing out on the stuff we should be outraged about.
00:40:46.560It's time to put the bottle down and end our bender.
00:40:49.460In my new book, Addicted to Outrage, I talk about how thinking like an addict or a recovering alcoholic can actually help heal the country.
00:40:59.560On sale tomorrow, wherever books are sold.
00:41:01.420All right, let's talk about democratic socialism here for a second because they're, you know, they're big into the, it feels, feels, feels, feels.
00:41:09.040You know, they've got a bad case of the feels.
00:42:20.920$5.4 trillion for guaranteed jobs, $1.4 trillion on just the student loans that are out, $1.3 trillion on free college, paid family, medical leave, social security.
00:42:43.720$40 trillion is quite a bit of money, and the taxes that you talked about raising to pay for this, to pay for your agenda, only count for two.
00:42:54.360And we're going by left-leaning analysts.