The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 277 ｜ Is Leftist Rage About to Become as BLOODY as the French Revolution？! ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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00:01:22.000 What destroyed the French Revolution were many of the same types of voices we're hearing today.

00:01:29.000 These are riots.

00:01:30.000 They are people who are inebriated by rage.

00:01:34.000 I think it was a miracle that saved his life, actually.

00:01:37.000 People today talk like they want to kill each other.

00:01:39.000 And I said, Congressman, they were actually trying to kill each other better.

00:01:43.000 That's what the Alien and Sedition Acts were.

00:01:49.000 Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on.

00:01:52.000 Jonathan, I am, as you know, a big fan of yours.

00:01:55.000 And as I said to you before the interview started, what I like about you is I get the same thing from you that I get from the Constitution.

00:02:04.000 And that is, you're not always on my side.

00:02:07.000 And that's how I know somebody's reading the Constitution the right way is it doesn't always cut my way.

00:02:16.000 And you're an honest broker.

00:02:19.000 And I've always appreciated that over the years.

00:02:21.000 Thank you so much, man.

00:02:24.000 You bet.

00:02:25.000 I want to talk about your book, Rage in the Republic.

00:02:27.000 I mean, the name kind of says it all, and it's right where we are.

00:02:31.000 Why did you write the book?

00:02:33.000 Well, you know, the book itself, coming out before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, gives us a chance to take stock of not just where we are, but who we are.

00:02:46.000 And the first half of the book looks backwards.

00:02:48.000 It looks at really what were the unique characters and actions that came together to create the most successful democracy in the history of the world.

00:03:00.000 And to do that, I compare two revolutions.

00:03:04.000 It's really a tale of two cities, Philadelphia and Paris, both of which were experiencing growing violence.

00:03:10.000 This is after the revolution in Philadelphia, but one Philadelphia stopped almost on a dime.

00:03:20.000 The violence ended with the ratification of the United States Constitution, a system that allowed for pressures to be vented within the system instead of on the streets.

00:03:31.000 Paris, of course, turned into a bloodletting known as the terror.

00:03:34.000 And so I explored that by looking at a common denominator in the form of Thomas Paine, who was one of two of our great leaders of the of the early republic that was involved in both revolutions.

00:03:49.000 The other one being Lafayette, the what really comes out of this, as you, I think, really poignantly noted, Glenn, is that we've been here before, that the rage we're seeing, many of the voices we're hearing, we have seen and heard before.

00:04:05.000 And it is a caution, sort of a cautionary tale of what destroyed the French Revolution, where many of the same types of voices we're hearing today.

00:04:18.000 The second half of the book looks forward and asks, can that unique American republic survive in the 21st century?

00:04:28.000 And it looks at everything from robotics to AI to global governance, like systems like the EU.

00:04:35.360 And I believe that we can.

00:04:37.740 But the key here is.

00:04:39.280 Yeah, go ahead.

00:04:40.660 Go ahead. Give the key.

00:04:41.540 And then we're going to come back.

00:04:42.420 I want to start at the beginning first and then we'll get to the second half.

00:04:46.380 But go ahead.

00:04:46.840 The key is.

00:04:48.000 Well, the key is for us to remember who we are in this moment.

00:04:51.740 And it is a lot of effort to sort of discard the U.S. Constitution and the values that brought us here.

00:04:59.140 Those values are going to be the very thing that will allow us to survive this century.

00:05:06.000 So let's go back to Thomas Paine and the difference between the American French Revolution.

00:05:11.600 It's interesting to me.

00:05:13.600 He was involved in both of them.

00:05:15.540 Washington seemed to get it.

00:05:17.300 But I believe Hamilton was the other one that understood this is not the American Revolution.

00:05:22.920 Jefferson didn't.

00:05:25.240 Jefferson thought that it was very similar to the American Revolution.

00:05:29.720 What was it that Washington saw that Thomas Paine did not see?

00:05:35.520 Well, Paine is without question one of the most fascinating historical figures I have ever researched.

00:05:41.520 Three.

00:05:42.100 He is just extraordinary.

00:05:44.440 Keep in mind that when he landed in Philadelphia two years before the Declaration of Independence, he had to be carried off the ship.

00:05:53.720 He was a wreck.

00:05:54.820 He had filled in everything he had put his hand to, marriages, employment.

00:05:59.480 He had been fired from every job he held.

00:06:01.980 And he sort of washed up on these shores.

00:06:04.780 There was only one person who saw something in that wreckage.

00:06:09.640 And he was Benjamin Franklin.

00:06:11.080 And Franklin met Thomas Paine when he was penniless and totally out of the running of anything.

00:06:19.620 And it was Benjamin Franklin that sent him to this country.

00:06:23.140 Two years later, he would be called the penman of the revolution.

00:06:26.800 But where the book criticizes Paine is that he was a believer in pure democratic action, the sort of Rousseau view that the general will will produce good things.

00:06:42.000 The framers didn't leave that.

00:06:44.020 They believed that the greatest threat to democracies was mobocracy, was what was one framework called democratic despotism.

00:06:54.420 That's why Madison created a constitution that protected against tyranny of the majority with checks and balances and shared powers.

00:07:04.000 Paine didn't sign on to all of that.

00:07:05.860 And when he went to France, he did not argue for those what were called precautionary measures.

00:07:12.780 And it damn near killed him.

00:07:15.200 He came within a very short period of being guillotined. 0.66

00:07:20.080 Yeah.

00:07:20.960 I think it was a miracle that saved his life, actually.

00:07:23.260 So tell me the, tell me, right now you are looking at a country where you hear all the time, democracy, democracy, democracy.

00:07:39.540 And that should be cautionary to anybody who hears that.

00:07:43.540 If you're preaching for a democracy, that is not what we are for a reason.

00:07:47.600 And people don't believe, they believe majority rules.

00:07:52.260 They believe that's important.

00:07:54.100 They want to get rid of the electoral college and everything else. 0.59

00:07:57.280 Explain the dangers of majority rules.

00:08:01.220 Yeah, that's exactly right, Glenn.

00:08:03.360 And there's a chapter in the book called The New Jacobins.

00:08:06.240 And it is a chapter that looks at this growing movement to strip away powers of the Supreme Court, pack the Supreme Court, dump the Constitution.

00:08:17.200 You have leading legal figures who are saying that the U.S. Constitution has to go on the 250th anniversary of our independence.

00:08:26.080 This is the most successful and stable democracy in the history of the world.

00:08:29.600 And you've got law professors telling people the Constitution is our problem.

00:08:33.780 And what they are really restating is what we heard in the French Revolution, this belief that we just need to strip away those barriers to democratic action.

00:08:44.060 That historically has proven a disaster time and time again.

00:08:48.260 The irony that I point out in the book is that when you look at these past systems like the French Revolution, they tend to produce a single tyrant.

00:08:56.640 So at the end, what they do is they melt down and then the people embrace a tyrant like Napoleon.

00:09:03.020 And that's the greatest irony.

00:09:05.680 When people talk about the Athenian democracy, the Athenian democracy collapsed and the framers didn't want the Athenian democracy because they saw it as a mobocracy.

00:09:20.280 That is always the case, isn't it?

00:09:21.940 I mean, very few revolutions end with the people who started them.

00:09:25.080 I think we're one of the only ones that that that ended with the people because it always it ends in a mobocracy and then people are screaming out somebody make this madness stop.

00:09:37.380 And that's when you get your dictator.

00:09:38.900 I mean, yeah, the way it always happens.

00:09:41.240 It does.

00:09:42.180 And paint came to understand that, you know, I always think I'm a big film noir buff.

00:09:48.240 And I remember there's a great line in a film noir movie where Fred Murray turns to the femme fatale and says, I love you so much.

00:09:56.260 I only wish I liked you.

00:09:57.660 And that's sort of what happens with a lot of people with pain.

00:10:01.680 He's he died without any friends.

00:10:04.440 It was he alienated everyone.

00:10:06.480 He started fights.

00:10:07.600 But the great genius of pain is pain knew what it took to win a revolution.

00:10:13.760 Madison, Madison knew what it took to create a republic.

00:10:19.480 And in many ways, those two figures shaped our destiny.

00:10:24.360 Pain understood in the end what Madison was talking about when he was sitting the Luxembourg prison waiting to be guillotined.

00:10:31.620 He understood that, you know, he advocated a unilateral system.

00:10:36.560 I'm sorry, a unicameral system.

00:10:38.500 He didn't like two houses.

00:10:39.860 He wanted the the the masses to have this enhanced voice.

00:10:43.580 He came to abandon that and he came to understand that you have to control democracies if they are going to flourish.

00:10:51.920 And ultimately, he was saved literally by a swinging door because he was in with a group of Belgians and he was dying. 1.00

00:10:59.300 He was very sick.

00:11:00.560 And they convinced the jailer to open the door.

00:11:03.740 Well, when they opened the door, you couldn't see a mark of four on the door.

00:11:08.460 That was a marked place that all four of them were to be executed that night.

00:11:12.560 So he was saved literally by a swinging door.

00:11:16.400 Otherwise, he would have joined his other friends who were guillotined in the French Revolution.

00:11:21.000 I love that story.

00:11:23.840 You know, one of the reasons why he had no friends in the end is because I think he was gravely misunderstood on age of reason.

00:11:32.480 You know, he's trying to make a case to the French that don't believe in God, in fact, relate to God right directly to the king and government.

00:11:41.060 And they did not see any of it.

00:11:42.580 But we have a letter, and I'll have to share it with you sometime.

00:11:46.260 I have a letter in Thomas Paine's own handwriting where he is writing back saying to the founders, what are you doing to me?

00:11:53.340 I'm trying to make this case.

00:11:55.920 I'm not talking about, you know, America.

00:11:59.020 I clearly, I saw the miracles.

00:12:01.220 I mean, he is misunderstood as this grand atheist, and he's really not.

00:12:06.520 He doesn't believe in God the way necessarily I believe in God, but he is not an atheist at all.

00:12:11.680 No, he's not.

00:12:13.080 And what's also interesting about Paine is that he was the ultimate contrarian, and he was also incredibly principled.

00:12:21.220 You know, he was so unpopular.

00:12:24.080 He has the distinction of being tried and convicted in three countries and actually being accused of sedition in three countries.

00:12:33.460 When he came to the United States, taxi drivers wouldn't even pick him up because he was despised so much.

00:12:39.180 Benjamin Franklin's daughter, as I talk about in the book, was one of his friends.

00:12:43.680 And she said it would have been better if he died after he wrote Common Sense.

00:12:48.000 That was one of his friends.

00:12:49.260 So it's an amazing story about this guy who always had a sense of his North Star, but he also had a sense of when he was wrong.

00:12:58.960 And that's different from a lot of people.

00:13:01.300 But Paine was never someone they wanted to embrace.

00:13:03.940 They liked Thomas Jefferson.

00:13:05.300 You know, he's tall, handsome, erudite, you know, slave owner. 0.79

00:13:09.700 Paine was against slavery.

00:13:11.240 They didn't like Paine, who was a hard-drinking guy, penniless, who just started fights in every pub he went into.

00:13:20.400 By the way, one of the reasons he was penniless is that he insisted that his works, he had the first bestseller.

00:13:27.200 That's what Common Sense was.

00:13:28.440 It was the first world bestseller.

00:13:31.220 And he insisted that not only should some of that money go to people fighting for the revolution,

00:13:36.940 but that the price should be kept low so everyone could afford it.

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00:14:11.240 And I believe two-thirds of Americans had either read it or had a copy of it by the time of the revolution.

00:14:20.520 That's right.

00:14:21.300 Which is crazy.

00:14:24.040 I mean, there's not two-thirds of anything that has been written, except maybe the Bible in today's America.

00:14:29.520 That's an outrageous, especially in a time when you didn't have books.

00:14:33.180 No, it's so true.

00:14:36.400 And I drove my kids crazy for years because I did nothing but research Thomas Paine.

00:14:42.160 But he is so darned interesting.

00:14:47.700 You know, he was a corset maker like his father and hated it.

00:14:51.760 But corset making may have saved the American Revolution because he hated it so much he was going to become a privateer,

00:14:58.360 which is basically a lawful pirate.

00:15:01.280 It was his father through this secret network of corset makers that found out and found him on the ship and took him off the ship.

00:15:13.180 That ship went out and was absolutely destroyed by a French privateer.

00:15:18.680 He would have died on that ship.

00:15:20.140 But he ultimately joined another ship and actually became effectively a pirate.

00:15:25.560 And the only reason that's important, as I mentioned in the book, is it gave him something he had never had before.

00:15:31.100 Money.

00:15:32.120 When he finished that voyage, he was able to return and study the Enlightenment and go to university classes.

00:15:40.780 So in some ways, we were not only saved by corset making and a swinging door, but strangely enough, piracy.

00:15:51.400 You know, I don't know if we ever would have gotten to the American Revolution without common sense.

00:15:56.240 And I don't know if we would have won it without the American crisis. 0.68

00:16:00.580 I mean, in a year period, he played such a critical role in clarifying and saying, look, this is common sense.

00:16:11.600 This is what we're fighting for and driving us to the declaration.

00:16:15.820 And then when everybody is, when we're losing and we're running from the British and everybody is saying, well, this was a mistake.

00:16:22.460 He galvanizes at least the troops behind Washington.

00:16:27.260 Is it true that he wrote that on the head of a drum?

00:16:31.660 Well, partially it is true.

00:16:34.220 What's interesting is that his relationship with Washington was really a father-son relationship.

00:16:43.140 You know, he rode into Philadelphia with Washington.

00:16:46.900 Washington credited him with saving the revolution.

00:16:50.580 When Washington was in the winter at Valley Forge and his troops had no morale left, he turned to Thomas Paine and said, right.

00:17:02.920 And he did.

00:17:04.000 And it rallied the troops.

00:17:06.920 Now, that relationship I explore in the book towards the end of the French Revolution discussion, because I think the greatest disappointment for Paine,

00:17:15.820 I, and he didn't show that a lot because a lot of people attacked him.

00:17:20.300 But I think the thing that cut him the deepest was he felt that Washington abandoned him, that when he was sitting in the Luxembourg prison,

00:17:29.380 he did not feel that Washington came to his side and reading his letters.

00:17:36.200 When he left, when he left, wasn't it?

00:17:39.080 I mean, Washington said this is not the American Revolution.

00:17:42.800 Washington, you're wrong, and he was upset at Washington, and didn't Washington at the time make it clear, you're on your own, dude.

00:17:50.960 You're on your own.

00:17:52.100 Or is that not true?

00:17:53.580 I think that it wasn't clear to Paine.

00:17:56.000 Paine dedicated rights of man to Washington, which Washington didn't like.

00:18:01.020 So when he sent Washington the books, Washington didn't respond.

00:18:04.940 But then when he got sent to the Luxembourg prison, there was no real strong intervention by the United States to save his life.

00:18:15.520 And you could see it was really having this impact on Paine, because Washington really was his North Star.

00:18:23.780 He believed in Washington.

00:18:26.280 And that was one of the most telling moments for Paine.

00:18:29.380 That was a very dark period of his life.

00:18:32.040 The French Revolution had turned into the terror.

00:18:34.100 They were going to execute him.

00:18:36.260 Then suddenly Robespierre was executed instead, and he was released.

00:18:41.380 But I think it was that break with Washington that took its greatest toll on Paine.

00:18:47.660 So I'm convinced there would be no American Revolution without Thomas Paine.

00:18:54.860 But I believe there would be no Republic without Washington.

00:18:58.520 Talk to me a little bit about the mob that started to take root after the American Revolution.

00:19:09.240 Washington was terribly important, as you know, Glenn.

00:19:12.600 He was this rallying figure.

00:19:15.060 It was Paine that gave him the words that he needed.

00:19:19.360 It was Washington that was the symbol.

00:19:22.120 People didn't rally around Paine.

00:19:24.480 In fact, Common Sense was anonymous.

00:19:27.180 And actually, one of his, originally, and one of his greatest critics, John Adams, who I think was a bit jealous of Paine's influence, admitted that when his wife wrote him and said,

00:19:39.300 And people say, you wrote Common Sense, and at this time, Paine was not really that well-known.

00:19:46.740 And John Adams said, I could never have written that.

00:19:50.920 I think I know who wrote it.

00:19:52.860 It's a guy by the name of Thomas Paine.

00:19:55.100 And he wrote to a friend and said, I met him.

00:19:57.800 And this is a quote.

00:19:59.100 And he had genius in his eyes.

00:20:01.000 And that's the same thing that Franklin saw, and I think the same thing that Washington saw.

00:20:07.200 So Washington and Madison together helped temper this republic and to create the things that limit the passions of democracy, force compromise.

00:20:19.040 That's what people today resist the most, right?

00:20:22.200 They want to just pack the Supreme Court with a liberal majority.

00:20:26.360 They want to reduce the influence of the Senate, to try to force compromise.

00:20:34.240 All of those things were the rallying cries of the French Revolution.

00:20:38.320 All of those things were what Washington and Madison rejected.

00:20:43.020 And in some ways, I think Paine was the voice of righteous rage in our revolution.

00:20:52.400 And Madison was the voice of pious reason.

00:20:55.380 And Washington preferred Madison after the revolution.

00:21:00.440 As I say in the book, there's nothing more inconvenient than a revolutionary after a revolution.

00:21:07.020 And that's what Paine found in two countries.

00:21:12.820 So let's move to today.

00:21:18.980 Where's the righteous reason today?

00:21:22.280 Well, that really gets back to where we are.

00:21:27.060 And you're so right about that.

00:21:28.400 I mentioned the book that when I was working on the French chapter of this book, I was sitting in my office at George Washington.

00:21:34.200 And all of a sudden, I heard guillotine, guillotine, guillotine.

00:21:37.140 And I had this sort of odd moment.

00:21:40.020 I felt like I was being pulled into my pages of the French Revolution.

00:21:43.480 In fact, students outside my window with a guillotine during the pro-Palestinian protest.

00:21:51.220 They brought a guillotine and they were listing people they wanted to guillotine from the university.

00:21:56.680 Now, I don't think that they really wanted to see anyone guillotined.

00:22:01.960 But it made me think, you know, is it possible?

00:22:06.020 You have that moment of doubt after all of our history.

00:22:08.880 Could we still lose it all?

00:22:11.140 And the answer is, of course, we can.

00:22:13.380 I mean, that's what Benjamin Franklin was talking about when he said, it's your republic if you can keep it.

00:22:17.920 Every generation can lose this gift that we have gotten.

00:22:21.380 And what worries me is how the establishment have become the new Jacobins.

00:22:26.260 Remember, the Jacobins of the French Revolution were establishment figures.

00:22:29.800 They were journalists, lawyers, aristocrats, much like people today.

00:22:35.060 You've got Erwin Shumarinsky, dean of Berkeley, saying the Constitution basically has to be trashed.

00:22:42.060 You've got he's just one of a number of people have said the Constitution is now the problem that we have to get rid of.

00:22:48.580 Those are the familiar voices.

00:22:50.260 You also have politicians now who will not openly say that.

00:22:57.480 But I have talked to senators and congressmen that say nobody reads it.

00:23:04.500 Nobody cares.

00:23:05.780 Nobody cares.

00:23:06.700 It's all about policy.

00:23:08.160 It's not about the Constitution anymore.

00:23:10.200 So, I mean, while you can say you love the Constitution, your actions show, no, you really don't.

00:23:16.500 You don't know it.

00:23:17.280 You don't revere it.

00:23:18.260 You don't follow it.

00:23:20.260 So it's it's it's almost it's just a step down from somebody openly saying, get rid of it.

00:23:26.400 No, you're right.

00:23:27.480 And that is the thing about rage is that it gives you a license to do and say things you would otherwise do.

00:23:34.880 It's addictive and it's contagious.

00:23:36.940 But what people won't admit is that they like it.

00:23:40.520 When you look at the streets of Minneapolis and other cities, those people like it and it spreads.

00:23:48.540 That's what happens in these these revolutions where people are saying, let's get rid of these precautions.

00:23:54.000 Let's have direct democratic rule. 0.98

00:23:57.560 That's what we're really talking about here.

00:23:59.540 The irony, as I point out in my book, is that the Rage of the Republic really shows over and over again that today's revolutionaries become tomorrow's reactionaries.

00:24:09.960 All of the so-called mountain, as they were called in the French Revolution, Robespierre, Marat, all of them, they were all guillotined.

00:24:17.680 They were all killed in the end.

00:24:20.240 And so it's why I quote at the beginning of the book, one of the few Frenchmen to survive from the revolution.

00:24:29.780 And he observed that revolutions like Saturn devour their children.

00:24:36.500 And Paine himself made reference to that expression.

00:24:39.980 And it has proven itself over and over again that revolution unleashes not just the best, but the worst of us.

00:24:48.280 And if you don't have a system that can take those pressures, it consumes you with the rest of the world around you.

00:24:54.620 Now, that's going to be very important because the book goes into what we're looking at in the 21st century, which is unprecedented.

00:25:01.200 With AI and robotics, we are looking at massive unemployment numbers.

00:25:05.660 Even the most conservative estimates are looking at a huge population of citizens that may have to be subsidized by the government.

00:25:15.000 And the book, there's a lot of research on that.

00:25:17.860 What's different about Raging of the Republic is I look at what does that mean about being a citizen?

00:25:23.700 What does that mean if a large part of our population is supported entirely by the government?

00:25:29.080 How does that change your relationship to the government?

00:25:31.480 How do we make this republic work if we are essentially a kept citizenry?

00:25:36.980 And I explore that and suggest ways that we can avoid it.

00:25:42.240 But the only way we will survive this is if we return to the principles that created us, including what I call a liberty-enhancing economy, which is capitalism.

00:25:54.320 People forget that Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith came out the same year as the Declaration of Independence.

00:26:02.860 And it did not go over well back in Great Britain.

00:26:06.500 Its success was in the United States.

00:26:09.800 The framers immediately saw capitalism as the key economic theory to coexist with their political theory.

00:26:19.480 They realized that unless people are economically free, they can never be politically free.

00:26:25.460 But they also, I think, had read the first book on moral sentiments.

00:26:33.320 And that is the part that we completely leave out of the conversation.

00:26:38.220 If you don't have moral sentiments, the invisible hand of the market will give you everything you want.

00:26:44.100 And it will strangle you to death.

00:26:47.100 And, you know, we think, we thought, because I don't think we've had capitalism, real true capitalism for a very long time.

00:26:56.860 But what we are in now, I don't even know what to call it now.

00:27:00.960 But, you know, we have so, what people have a problem with, with capitalism, I think, is the fact that there is no, there's no understanding of moral sentiments, our responsibility.

00:27:18.800 And that doesn't mean just capitalism.

00:27:20.660 That means also freedom.

00:27:22.440 As you said, it's a republic if you can keep it.

00:27:25.260 That requires you to have moral sentiments.

00:27:27.960 No, you're so right.

00:27:30.000 This is why I love talking with you.

00:27:31.520 You're the best read person I know in the media.

00:27:33.720 And you're absolutely right that people forget that Adam Smith was really offering a theory of political economic rules, not just economic rules.

00:27:50.120 It was an economic model.

00:27:51.640 He tied it directly into his view of society.

00:27:57.160 He did believe in morals.

00:27:59.100 And in that sense, he broke from some people in what's called the Scottish Enlightenment, who sort of downplayed the role of faith and morals in their theories.

00:28:09.480 Adam Smith did not.

00:28:11.440 He believed wholeheartedly in those decisions.

00:28:14.480 And people often misportray him, as you noted, because they say, oh, well, you know, it's not for the love of the butcher, which is, you know, why we, the system works.

00:28:24.200 It is self-interest.

00:28:25.920 But Adam Smith still believed that individuals still needed to make virtuous decisions.

00:28:31.180 Real capitalism, I think, is the greatest charity of all time.

00:28:39.900 You get to do what you believe.

00:28:42.180 You pay the price for it if it fails.

00:28:44.520 You get the winnings if you keep it.

00:28:46.680 And if you are, if you're a good capitalist, you realize the only thing you have to do to win is figure out how to make people's lives better, you know, or give them what they want.

00:29:00.620 Yeah.

00:29:01.180 Give them what they want.

00:29:02.240 And in an immoral society, then you get into all kinds of problems.

00:29:05.840 But in a moral society, you get into a, I mean, it works really, really well.

00:29:11.660 So let me go through a couple of things.

00:29:16.340 We are looking at so many things where we don't agree on truth, on morals, on anything, on right and wrong.

00:29:28.440 And if you don't agree with one side, you're evil.

00:29:33.000 And that works on both sides. 0.88

00:29:34.720 You're either evil on one side or you're a Nazi, according to the other side.

00:29:39.600 How do we, how do we, you know, the secret of America is unum, e pluribus unum.

00:29:48.980 The one thing we agreed on was the declaration and the bill of rights, that you have these rights and responsibilities.

00:29:57.420 And that's what makes us free and prosperous.

00:30:01.580 If we don't have that, what do we have?

00:30:05.600 And how do we get back to that?

00:30:08.840 Well, I do think that's what we need to be talking about.

00:30:12.540 You know, I have, I just gave a speech in Prague where I may have irritated my, my audience and said that I have less faith that the EU will survive this century.

00:30:21.040 The key here is how can we preserve a republic with the pressures that are coming?

00:30:30.320 And the book lays out a couple of critical components of that, that basically mean that we have to reaffirm and magnify some of the original values that created the American Republic.

00:30:42.000 That includes keeping government as local as possible, avoiding these global governance systems like EU.

00:30:48.640 It means trying to, to maintain what I call a liberty enhancing economy.

00:30:54.460 And we do that by trying to, to not subsidize just, you know, half or more of the population, but to try to make wise decisions about what areas are likely to be homocentric and what are going to be robo-centric, as I talk about in the book. 0.74

00:31:13.080 And the book actually refers to certain jobs is what I call Guinan jobs, which are, it's actually a named after the bartender on the Star Trek enterprise.

00:31:22.040 I used to always, as a kid, marvel the fact that Guinan, the bartender was, was standing in front of a replicator that could make the perfect Romulan sunrise cocktail.

00:31:32.080 And yet she made it.

00:31:33.920 And so I call these Guinan jobs that for some reason they wanted Guinan to do it.

00:31:39.120 Now, there are lots of jobs like that where people are still prefer humans, but there are other jobs which will be wiped out by robotics.

00:31:48.720 And we need to look at that.

00:31:50.640 But what I'm afraid of is that the usual response in government is let's just subsidize dying industries and, you know, penalize industries going to robotics.

00:32:00.660 That's right.

00:32:01.060 Yeah.

00:32:01.180 And it's never going to work.

00:32:02.200 You're just going to burn money.

00:32:03.640 No.

00:32:03.720 The key is to be smart about this and we need to lead the world in that.

00:32:11.720 You know, Kondrakiev is one of my favorite economists from history, you know, Stalin's economist.

00:32:19.560 And he came up with a Kondrakiev wave and he actually did research when Stalin said, you know, which is better, capitalism or communism?

00:32:28.200 And he's like, let me think that through the answer to Stalin is whatever you say. 0.55

00:32:33.000 He was killed after, you know, he came up with his wave. 0.78

00:32:35.620 But his his whole thing was capitalism will it's seasonal and it will burn itself out.

00:32:43.260 It will go into winter where where communism and socialism and all this try to take the trees and force them into growth when they have to have sleep.

00:32:53.240 And you have to burn out the, you know, the dead stuff and we are headed towards a deep, deep winter and those things have to die.

00:33:04.940 But, you know, as you point out in the book, you're talking about such displacement of people.

00:33:11.080 You know, I have I have been, Jonathan, I've been talking about this for 30 years.

00:33:17.180 I've been warning about AI.

00:33:18.580 I'm a big fan of AI.

00:33:20.480 Also, a big perponent of saying warning because it is it's like everything.

00:33:27.200 It is a double edged sword.

00:33:28.800 It will cut our throat or it will cut the cut the forest down in front of us so we can we can expand.

00:33:36.260 But I don't you know, you get to this place to where if we're not careful, we will have a very few people making all of the money, controlling absolutely everything.

00:33:50.680 And then we're kind of just sheep that are have to be fed by the machine and by the elites.

00:33:57.400 How do we avoid that?

00:33:59.040 You know, I talk about that in the book because I ask a question in the book that was asked by a Frenchman who went by the name of Farmer John.

00:34:12.760 And he was a Frenchman who came to our shores and wrote a book that was itself a rage success in Europe.

00:34:20.720 And it described what was happening in the United States.

00:34:24.100 People were fascinated by these Americans.

00:34:27.600 We were viewed as a type of new species.

00:34:30.320 And he asked us for this poignant question.

00:34:32.840 He said, what then is this American?

00:34:35.860 It was an honest question because we were the hottest thing of the time.

00:34:40.880 We were the first Enlightenment revolution.

00:34:43.740 And we have to ask ourselves again, what then is this American?

00:34:47.920 Who are we?

00:34:49.500 And the fact is that people came to this country.

00:34:51.940 We don't have a a a legacy of land or shared culture.

00:34:57.040 We have a legacy of ideas.

00:34:59.020 That's that's what makes us unique.

00:35:01.160 People came here because they could reinvent themselves the way Thomas Paine did.

00:35:06.100 He came here as a human wreck, as a lifetime failure.

00:35:09.800 And he reinvented himself.

00:35:12.100 And he said at the time when he landed that there was, quote, something special here.

00:35:17.700 There is still something special here.

00:35:20.020 It is who we are.

00:35:21.840 And we need to make sure that people have this ability to go through self-exploration, to become the people they want to be.

00:35:32.520 And as bad as jobs are, you know, my grandfather, one of my grandfathers was a coal miner who got black lung in the mines.

00:35:39.360 And my other grandfather was a cooper made made barrels.

00:35:43.520 They didn't like their jobs.

00:35:45.480 Certainly my coal mining grandfather didn't like getting black lung.

00:35:49.320 But if you asked him who he was, he'd say, I'm a coal miner.

00:35:53.540 We've always been defined by what we did, by how we were productive.

00:35:59.420 And we can't go into this century with a huge percentage of our population of unproductive people who have no identity, because the only identity they will have then is the government that's supporting them. 0.77

00:36:11.640 So how do they find identity?

00:36:17.000 I mean, I see, because I think there's like there's two.

00:36:19.300 I am a big proponent of AI and I warn at the same time, but I use it.

00:36:25.420 I see it as a tool to allow me to do things that I have in here.

00:36:29.420 I just don't have the staff of 400 to be able to keep up with what's in here.

00:36:34.460 I, you know what I mean?

00:36:35.500 I, I can do so much and I have a staff check everything, check everything, check everything.

00:36:40.800 Because I know what it is, but it's a tool and a great tool.

00:36:44.700 But there's also a part of the population that is like, it'll do my job for me.

00:36:49.880 And when you get to, when you get to that, well, then you're going to be a slave to the technology or to the government or whatever.

00:36:59.860 I mean, there are people that just, they want to punch in, punch out and just live their life.

00:37:06.120 Yeah.

00:37:06.600 That's what I refer to in the regional republic as a kept citizenry.

00:37:10.000 We can't have that.

00:37:11.280 And we also cannot create an economy that's fake, right?

00:37:14.760 You can't have an arts and craft citizenry that just has a bunch of people doing effectively arts and crafts, right?

00:37:21.020 None of that is going to give them a sense of worth.

00:37:24.400 So it means that we have to focus on those industries that we still want human beings to be part of and then can be productive.

00:37:32.420 They are there.

00:37:33.340 I believe in capitalism.

00:37:34.860 I believe that there will be those industries.

00:37:37.620 As you suggest, Glenn, there's going to be a burn off, but then people will shift.

00:37:42.480 We have to facilitate that by not artificially subsidizing some industries.

00:37:48.760 We have to allow people to find ways to advance themselves.

00:37:51.940 What we need to avoid is that if you have a small percentage of productive citizens, they're going to increasingly live separately and they're going to demand more power over how money is spent.

00:38:03.940 And you're going to have a calcified class structure that has never existed in this country.

00:38:08.800 And that's what we have to avoid.

00:38:11.460 But I think we can.

00:38:12.900 But we won't if we follow the way of the new Jacobins, these leaders and this mob that is calling for us to trash the very thing that we will need to survive this century. 0.99

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00:40:09.940 Let me go through a couple of things.

00:40:21.240 How do we get to a place to where...

00:40:27.080 Well, first, give me your thoughts on Minnesota and what is happening there.

00:40:33.440 Is that insurrection?

00:40:34.560 Is that a protest?

00:40:36.520 What's happening there?

00:40:37.600 Well, I don't like the term insurrection.

00:40:40.060 People use that at January 6th.

00:40:41.540 I said it wasn't an insurrection that day afterwards.

00:40:46.680 Can you define what an insurrection is?

00:40:49.220 An insurrection is truly trying to overthrow the government itself.

00:40:53.520 I think these are riots.

00:40:55.700 They are people who are inebriated by rage.

00:41:00.100 It's also caused by these politicians who are so similar to what I describe in the book in France.

00:41:06.160 They are so much like these figures that enabled the mob in France and then ultimately were themselves guillotined and devoured essentially by the revolution.

00:41:17.320 We're certainly seeing that.

00:41:19.660 I don't think we're at an insurrection here.

00:41:23.060 What should worry us is what these people are saying.

00:41:27.460 That is, what it is that they want.

00:41:30.060 You know, they want instant power.

00:41:32.200 They want democratic change without those Madisonian precautions.

00:41:37.120 They want to just get rid of the Supreme Court or stack it, get rid of the Constitution.

00:41:42.400 One of my colleagues has argued that we have to rewrite the First Amendment because it's, quote, aggressively individualistic.

00:41:50.120 These are not.

00:41:52.620 Yeah, but these are not fringe voices anymore.

00:41:55.580 I mean, these are figures and they're telling the public, you know what your problem is?

00:42:01.720 It's this Constitution.

00:42:03.500 It's this republic.

00:42:04.900 Then it can become an insurrection.

00:42:07.240 And what we're seeing in the terms of the sort of unrequited rage will spread.

00:42:12.920 That's the reason I'm so concerned with what we're hearing from democratic leaders.

00:42:16.500 They want to ride this rage wave to the elections this year, the midterm elections.

00:42:25.400 They don't they don't realize that history has shown people just like them who are ultimately declared reactionaries by the mob that they are leading.

00:42:36.260 But for them, the only thing that's important is the midterm elections.

00:42:40.360 I tell you, Jonathan, I've been saying this for a long time.

00:42:44.020 I said this when they first put Michael Moore in the presidential box, maybe in 2004.

00:42:49.120 And I said, you can't put a revolutionary, you can't put a guy who doesn't, you know, fit into that constitutional box and believe in that and and make friends because it's not him.

00:43:01.600 It's the people who are left of him and left of them and left of them that now have access.

00:43:07.660 And these people will come in.

00:43:09.660 They believe something and they they will come in and they will they'll eat you in the end.

00:43:17.940 They will eat you in the end.

00:43:19.140 You think you can control them, but they're actually revolutionaries that actually believe in something.

00:43:25.500 And I you know, when you say we're not in an insurrection, I think that the average person in Minneapolis does not consider what they are wanting or thinking about as an insurrection.

00:43:36.560 But you are looking at people who, you know, these Turtle Island people who are saying, you know, America was a mistake, never should be, blah, blah, blah, who are actively working to overthrow the government. 0.57

00:43:47.940 Then you have crooked politicians who either think they can control this and use this to their advantage or I think in some cases to cover their own crimes on something entirely different.

00:44:00.400 And that's just a bad stew.

00:44:03.300 It is. 0.97

00:44:05.400 And there's nothing more pathetic than watching people like Schumer and Walsh, you know, mouthing these revolutionary and reckless rhetoric lines. 0.98

00:44:16.720 It's pathetic because this is only going to come out one way. 0.98

00:44:22.040 I mean, this mob is not going to embrace those individuals as their leaders. 0.98

00:44:28.060 They they are the temporary convenience that they that they need.

00:44:32.360 But what they are unleashing could be uncontrollable.

00:44:35.880 Now, having said that, we have a system that is still working.

00:44:39.980 You know, we have been stress tested before the what worries me are these figures like Schumerinsky and others who want to change the system itself, because as long as we keep the constitutional system, I have no question about our survival and that we are going to flourish.

00:44:56.980 It's only if they take that system down and that unfortunately is what a lot of these law professors and others are arguing for.

00:45:06.180 So I agree with you.

00:45:08.600 However, there is a step in between this and that is so to so perverted.

00:45:13.940 I mean, how does the president prosecute people for crimes in states where the prosecutors or the attorney general or the even federal judges will not stand with the Constitution and the rule of law of the United States?

00:45:32.800 And I'm not saying there's a lot a lot of them, but there seems to be a lot more than I thought there was.

00:45:38.500 No, there is.

00:45:39.380 I think the New York legal system was an example of that.

00:45:41.920 You know, I covered the Trump trials and I was in the courtroom and he was tried and and convicted.

00:45:51.400 And when I came out, there were people dancing in the street.

00:45:54.880 There was complete ecstasy.

00:45:56.360 It was it was true rage that was being unleashed and the joy of it.

00:46:03.060 And this the legal system failed.

00:46:05.980 Eventually, it corrected it.

00:46:07.860 Eventually, appellate courts did the right thing.

00:46:10.200 I'm hoping they continue to do the right thing.

00:46:13.280 But this is a problem.

00:46:15.260 You know, you have jurors and judges who can ignore the law.

00:46:20.680 But we've had that throughout our history and we have survived.

00:46:23.880 Fortunately, we have a multilayered system. 0.71

00:46:26.160 It doesn't always happen as fast as we want.

00:46:29.600 But it has been this bad.

00:46:30.900 Well, yeah.

00:46:32.920 I mean, if you look back at like the Jefferson Adams period, you know, the I once was in a in a hearing and a member said, you know, Professor, don't tell us about the forming of the republic.

00:46:45.180 People today talk like they want to kill each other.

00:46:47.760 And I said, Congressman, they were actually trying to kill each other.

00:46:50.560 That's what the alien and sedition acts were.

00:46:54.320 You know, they wanted to kill each other.

00:46:55.980 So don't pretend that your problems are unique.

00:46:58.720 There's this dangerous conceit from people on the left that we've never faced these problems.

00:47:03.500 Of course we have.

00:47:04.560 And you're the same voices that we've heard throughout our history.

00:47:07.180 The key that we have to keep our focus on is as long as we preserve this system, we can outlast these people as we have in other ages of rage.

00:47:17.780 It is owned.

00:47:18.480 That's why they are so insistent on trying to change the system.

00:47:22.600 I had one.

00:47:23.020 I had a debate with one Harvard professor who admitted that they want to change the Supreme Court because they can't make radical changes to the constitutional system if the Supreme Court is still around.

00:47:34.280 He said that openly.

00:47:35.380 So this is a concerted, knowing effort to try to get rid of the Supreme Court and then to push through these radical agendas to change our system.

00:47:47.100 And the scary thing is, is I think they'll do it.

00:47:50.160 I think they'll actually do it if they're given the chance.

00:47:53.780 So let me ask you this about changing the system.

00:47:56.960 Um, they're talking about the zombie, um, oh, filibuster, getting rid of the zombie filibuster and getting rid of anything related to the filibuster scares the heck out of me.

00:48:11.140 But from what I understand, the zombie filibuster, um, puts it back closer to the way it's supposed to be, where you actually have to stand up and make your case.

00:48:19.700 I mean, if my understanding filibuster was to slow everything in government in our constitution is just meant to slow the process down.

00:48:27.580 So you don't do anything hasty and you give people time to think, and that's what the filibuster was supposed to do.

00:48:34.220 But now you just filibuster and then it's over and it needs a 60 vote, uh, to, you know, bring it to the floor.

00:48:41.780 Um, getting rid of the zombie filibuster, good idea or bad idea?

00:48:48.000 Well, I'm not too sure it was so essential to have strong Thurman with, with bacon in his pockets, trying to talk for days on end, certainly made for good theater, made for a great movie, uh, with Mr. Smith goes to Washington.

00:48:59.960 I think the key here, what I talk about in the region of the Republic is that we have to look at preserving, uh, these minority protections in our constitutional system, everything from the filibuster, uh, to, um, electoral, the electoral college ways of guaranteeing that we have, for example, a federalism system where states have real power to go their own way.

00:49:26.100 All of those are bulwarks against, uh, tyranny of the majority.

00:49:31.880 And it's why many of these people on the left want to eliminate that.

00:49:36.940 Uh, you have law professors that said, even without, I talk about this in the book, you've a couple of Yale and Harvard law professors that have argued that they could change the Senate without a constitutional amendment so that, uh, you can give more representation to more populous states.

00:49:52.100 I have no idea how they think that comports with the constitution, but it won't matter.

00:49:57.720 If you can pack the Supreme court successfully, those things become less important as to whether you can make the case as opposed to make the court.

00:50:07.500 Yeah.

00:50:08.240 Uh, Alan Dershowitz told me if they pack the Supreme court, that's the end.

00:50:12.200 That's the end.

00:50:13.520 Um, let me, um, let me just ask you a couple of quick questions here.

00:50:17.440 Um, I have been, I held my tongue on Pam Bondi, uh, for a year. 0.99

00:50:24.440 Um, and I've seen her do some, what I think are stupid things. 0.73

00:50:29.220 And I've also seen nothing, uh, seemingly none of the big guys go to, go to jail. 0.98

00:50:36.120 Nobody seems to be paying a price.

00:50:37.820 And that's one of the things that has to be, um, fixed or clarified.

00:50:42.880 If you don't have a case to put somebody in jail, then explain it and move on.

00:50:49.620 I don't, there are some people who just want people to go to jail.

00:50:52.020 I don't, I want people tried.

00:50:54.140 I want it fair.

00:50:55.160 And if they're guilty, put them in jail.

00:50:57.080 And it doesn't matter if they're at the lowest ladder or the highest ladder.

00:51:00.860 But right now, America is starting to think that there are two systems of justice.

00:51:05.480 And it was this idea that maybe it's, if you, if you're on the left, you get away with it.

00:51:11.280 And you're on the right, you get hammered.

00:51:12.580 I don't think so.

00:51:13.720 I think it might be power.

00:51:15.840 Um, and Pam has not been putting cases together or I'm going to be really fair.

00:51:22.680 This is my question.

00:51:24.340 What am I missing?

00:51:25.660 You know, I, I, I worry that maybe, cause I just started coming out and saying, you know, 0.99

00:51:31.200 you either crap or get off the pot. 0.99

00:51:33.780 You know, what is happening? 1.00

00:51:34.720 Give it, give us some, give us some, you know, uh, updates here.

00:51:38.620 Um, and I, I'm not a prosecutor.

00:51:43.300 I, I'm, I don't know anything about all of this.

00:51:45.860 And I'm afraid that I, I'm missing something that would slow this process down to almost a

00:51:51.720 snail's pace.

00:51:52.680 But I also believe we're running out of time.

00:51:55.700 If you don't start prosecuting people that did do things that were wrong, there's not,

00:52:02.280 nobody's ever going to pay a price.

00:52:03.680 And then we, we have just this out of control government just going on both sides.

00:52:09.860 Well, it is a legitimate concern.

00:52:11.660 I've been critical of some aspects of attorney general bonding.

00:52:14.580 I've been complimentary of others.

00:52:16.400 Although I look, I've, I've, that's certainly been the case of every attorney general in my

00:52:20.120 lifetime, every president of my life.

00:52:21.600 Yeah.

00:52:21.860 But, uh, a good test of that is going to be the Clinton impeachment, uh, uh, sorry,

00:52:27.740 Clinton contempt sanction. 0.74

00:52:29.360 You know, the Clintons did an extraordinary thing by telling, uh, the, uh, house oversight

00:52:35.300 committee to pound sand.

00:52:37.000 They had a legitimate subpoena, uh, lawfully issued, but on a bipartisan vote.

00:52:42.020 And they just said, we don't feel like it.

00:52:43.740 Uh, it is the most open and clear case of contempt I have seen in my lifetime.

00:52:49.020 Now we, I think the Clintons are counting on the fact that they might be able to play this out until after the Trump administration.

00:52:56.520 If there's a democratic president, uh, they'll scuttle this effort. 0.98

00:53:00.460 But what if they don't, you know, it does take a long time to put cases together.

00:53:04.240 What if the next president is named Vance?

00:53:06.640 Uh, the fact is, I don't see any cognizable defense here.

00:53:11.200 One of the things I've been writing about is this is the first time where there's not even a suggestion of a defense.

00:53:16.460 It's just basically, we're the Clintons and we don't feel like showing up.

00:53:21.020 So this would be the world's fastest trial.

00:53:23.400 Now this goes to your point, Glenn, that they may be counting on the fact that they would be tried in Washington, D.C.

00:53:29.360 And it's pretty hard to imagine a jury pool in Washington without at least one person who wouldn't convict the Clintons, uh, if they had a video of them committing heinous crimes.

00:53:41.680 But they can't count on that.

00:53:43.420 And, and this is going to be a real test to our system.

00:53:46.460 Democrats voted to hold them in contempt.

00:53:49.900 That's another difference here.

00:53:51.620 So you not only have a bipartisan vote for the subpoenas, you have a bipartisan vote to hold them in contempt.

00:53:58.140 And the Department of Justice needs to move with the speed of the, the, the Biden administration.

00:54:03.700 They went to zero to 60 on Bannon and other figures.

00:54:08.000 We'll see if they can do it here.

00:54:09.380 Um, how is SCOTUS going to rule on tariffs?

00:54:16.640 And if they rule against the president, what does that mean?

00:54:20.860 Well, you know, I've always said the odds are against the president on IEPA.

00:54:27.660 Uh, but I have to tell you after the oral argument, I said, you know, it's not as clear as people suggest.

00:54:33.020 Uh, the, the, the justices did, uh, I would say a majority have serious questions about the president's interpretation.

00:54:41.080 But if you look closely, they had different reasons.

00:54:44.180 And so how that cycles out in the final vote is something we'll have to see, but if they do, wait, wait, wait, wait, because if they, you don't, you wouldn't say I have a reason different than yours, but I'm going to vote the same way as you, or what is that?

00:54:57.800 Well, because some, we've seen justices who disagree with, with an interpretation of the majority, but still wrote a concurrence with the majority, uh, and they can choose whether it's a concurrence or a dissent.

00:55:10.340 So is it possible you could have a divided court, maybe a plurality that preserves the tariffs?

00:55:16.560 Yeah, they could fracture on the rationale and you could have some that say that they will concur with upholding the tariffs.

00:55:23.100 All of that is possible.

00:55:24.400 Uh, but if he, if the administration loses, there are a myriad of other tariff provisions that they can rely on.

00:55:33.840 So the tariffs are not going to immediately go away.

00:55:36.260 Also, even if the court rules against the administration, it could make any relief perspective so that they don't have to return the money.

00:55:44.420 So there's a lot of elements here that we don't, we really don't know.

00:55:48.540 And that's why we're all waiting to see that, that opinion get handed down.

00:55:52.240 Your guess?

00:55:55.440 You know, I would always guess that, uh, because IEPA is silent, that, that they lose it.

00:56:02.080 I, I thought that, uh, Solicitor General Sauer did one of the best jobs I've seen in front of the Supreme Court.

00:56:08.100 And man, he made some great arguments.

00:56:10.800 And his main argument is, look, IEPA is based on a prior, uh, uh, statute with the same language.

00:56:17.500 And you said under that statute, a president has tariff authorities.

00:56:21.380 I thought that was a real haymaker of a point.

00:56:24.000 And we'll have to see if the justices, when they drill down on this go, well, yeah, that, that is a bit of a problem, isn't it?

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00:56:54.480 So you were talking about AI, and you talk about it in the book, and, um, you also talk about local, local, local.

00:57:02.260 Make sure everything is as local as possible.

00:57:05.280 Our AI policy now, um, is that states really don't have much to say about anything because they don't want to slow down the process.

00:57:14.400 I think this is extraordinarily dangerous.

00:57:17.600 Um, I mean, I don't care what it is.

00:57:20.880 Because the people have a right to say, no, I don't want to do it that way.

00:57:25.800 Um, and, you know, in, in every state, how do you feel and will it stand if, if that's, if, if that's what we actually end up with?

00:57:36.740 That, no, the federal government has control of this, and they're going to make all of the rules, and no state has anything to say about it.

00:57:43.100 You know, I, I talk about this in Raging the Republic and saying that I don't think we're going to get this cat to walk backwards.

00:57:49.860 AI, uh, is now integrated so thoroughly in various industries, I do not think that any given state is going to be able to seriously curtail it, or even a government can curtail it.

00:58:02.380 I don't think the EU could curtail it if they wanted to, which they don't.

00:58:05.960 Uh, so AI is here, and it's going to continue to grow.

00:58:11.220 What we can do is to reinforce its protections.

00:58:14.880 For example, I talk about in the book how AI has been accused, for example, of inducing suicide or enabling suicides with teens.

00:58:25.500 And these are shocking cases where AI is advising teens how to hide marks of prior suicidal attempts.

00:58:32.900 Yes, I, yes, the argument of these, these companies is, well, look, it's not like we did it that's AI.

00:58:39.580 Look, you replaced employees with AI.

00:58:43.060 That's why these teenagers are talking to AI is because there used to be a human there.

00:58:48.860 If you do that, I think you should treat the AI like an employee, and you are liable for it.

00:58:54.440 In my view, they can sue under toward, which I teach.

00:58:58.220 Those are the types of precautions that we can have.

00:59:00.780 The same thing is with defamation.

00:59:02.040 You know, in Raging Republic, I talk about the fact that ChatGBT defamed me in a bizarre situation that the Washington Post and New York Times got involved in because ChatGBT said that I had sexually assaulted students on a trip to Alaska while teaching at Georgetown.

00:59:22.780 Now, every aspect of that was hallucinated.

00:59:25.480 I've never taught at Georgetown.

00:59:26.940 We don't take students on field trips.

00:59:29.600 I've never taken a student on a field trip.

00:59:31.200 I've never been accused of sexual harassment or assault.

00:59:33.700 And I think that the Washington Post was a bit disappointed when they found out it was untrue.

00:59:38.040 But then they, you know, but they then sort of begrudgingly said, we're sort of interested because this is the only pure hallucination we've ever encountered because we can't find any basis for hallucination.

00:59:51.520 There's not even an article that would cause hallucination.

00:59:54.840 Now, the fact is, I regret now that I didn't sue.

00:59:59.060 I've never sued for defamation, but I almost regret now that I didn't because the solution of ChatGBT was to ghost me.

01:00:08.880 So if you go on and ask ChatGBT about Jonathan Turley for years, and I think it's still the case, but it might have loosened up a little recently.

01:00:18.840 But for years, I didn't exist.

01:00:22.200 They just basically ghosted me.

01:00:24.460 And I write in the book, this sort of captures the inherent dangers of AI in these companies that if you raise defamation, they then eliminate your existence so that you disappear.

01:00:40.780 And there's no right to be recognized so they can get away with it.

01:00:44.520 That is a heck of a lot of power.

01:00:47.340 And it's largely unchecked.

01:00:49.620 And we do have to look at things like that.

01:00:52.620 How far are we away from somebody, you know, because people are already marrying their, you know, their avatar, their, you know, ChatGBT avatar.

01:01:04.040 And you can see people, it's coming, where they will say, this is my husband, this is my spouse, this is my best friend.

01:01:13.640 You don't have a right to terminate him in the, you know, the next upgrade.

01:01:18.920 You don't have a right, et cetera.

01:01:20.440 And as ChatGBT and AI becomes ASI or AGI, you're going to have a, you're going to reach a moment where it's going to claim or people will claim that it is, it should have rights, should have human rights.

01:01:42.620 Yeah, I don't think.

01:01:44.980 Go ahead.

01:01:45.820 Yeah, not in the short term.

01:01:47.080 I don't think in the short term we're going to see that.

01:01:48.840 The question that you're raising is a good one, is to the degree to which AI and robotics are combined, and you have greater sense of interaction, it can give the illusion of sentience.

01:02:01.940 And sentience has always been the key issue as to whether you have rights.

01:02:06.100 The reason that human beings are treated differently from other animals is because of sentience, the awareness of who you are, consciousness.

01:02:13.360 And so this is sort of the Westworld, you know, type of theory that eventually they could break through to sentience.

01:02:22.480 We're a long way from that.

01:02:24.340 But I think that what we have to focus on immediately is what AI is going to do to us as opposed to what we're going to do to AI and prepare ourselves for the elimination of whole job categories.

01:02:40.120 There's not going to be taxi drivers.

01:02:42.040 There's not going to be bus drivers.

01:02:44.020 There's not going to be many radiologists.

01:02:46.240 All of that is going to go the way of the buggy whip, right?

01:02:49.980 And when I talk about AI and Rage of the Republic, I mentioned the wonderful first work of Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, called Player Piano.

01:03:01.780 And he describes the scene of this carpenter looking at this vast factory of lathes.

01:03:09.600 And each lathe is reproducing or exactly replicating his actions.

01:03:14.960 And he was told what an honor it would be that he would be immortalized.

01:03:18.420 But, of course, he and the rest of his colleagues were then fired, and they just watched these machines do what they did.

01:03:25.720 The player piano problem is a serious one, that we become player pianos, that robots and AI mimic what we do, and then we are not necessary.

01:03:38.200 And so we have to have that debate.

01:03:40.580 We've got to talk about it.

01:03:41.620 But what Rage of the Republic suggests is that we have to talk about it not just in terms of the economic impact.

01:03:47.080 We have to start to talk about it on its democratic impact, of how that's going to change our relationship with the government.

01:03:56.060 Jonathan, it's always great to talk to you.

01:03:58.120 I wish we could talk more.

01:03:59.860 Thank you, Glenn.

01:03:59.940 You're fascinating.

01:04:00.920 Thank you so much.

01:04:01.600 Your book is great, Rage of the Republic.

01:04:03.920 It's available everywhere.

01:04:05.240 Thank you so much, Jonathan.

01:04:06.620 Thank you, Glenn.

01:04:07.680 Good to be with you.

01:04:08.440 Just a reminder.

01:04:15.540 I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

01:04:21.140 Thank you so much.

01:04:35.740 Thank you.

01:04:44.100 Thank you.

01:04:44.740 Thank you.

The Glenn Beck Program - February 07, 2026

Ep 277 ｜ Is Leftist Rage About to Become as BLOODY as the French Revolution？! ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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