Glenn Beck (6:27)
but it's a drug. And it's interesting because you are both the user and the dealer, because media, social media or mainstream media, it's not you. You are using the drug and it's lying to you, but you're also dealing the drug because you might have hit something that was honest. But then if things start to slide at all, you have to find out what that next honest thing is that will take you to the next level, and that's really hard. You have to be able to walk away from all of it. You have to be able to say, it's not that important to me. You have to be, how many times have I offended this audience? How many times have I have. You probably listened to the show and went, what the hell is wrong with you? Why would you say that? Do you not know who the audience is? Yeah, I do. I do. And there have been times when I've almost driven you away because I felt. Well, a couple of times because I was arrogant and I thought I knew better than you. That was a huge mistake. That's my fault. That's stupidity. But other times, like, for instance, when I printed Addicted to Outrage. Thank you. I can barely remember it because it sold, like, four books. When I published Addicted Outlet Outrage, I knew it wouldn't do well. I knew it wouldn't do well. But it was important for me to talk about what outrage can do to you. It was important for me to say, you know what? I've made mistakes and I've learned from it. For me. But when you are. When you're addicted to that high, you addict others to that high as well. You've got to keep the audience high, which means you have to push harder. You have to dig deeper. You have to reveal something darker, something more shocking than what I told you yesterday something even more forbidden, because yesterday's outrage isn't a big enough drug. That's what got me high yesterday. It won't get me high today. And sometimes that pursuit uncovers real corruption. Sometimes it does serve justice. But sometimes, if we're honest, it becomes escalation for the sake of escalation. Not because truth demands it, but because the machine demands it. And once you walk down that road, stopping. Walking down the road is almost impossible. Okay? You have no idea. When I left Fox, it screwed with me for four years. Hard. It is so hard to walk away. So hard. Roger Ailes told me, you're not walking away. Nobody ever does. When he said that, I realized, oh, my gosh, I really now have to walk away. Because he's right. Nobody does. But when you walk away from just the outrage part, not the fame, just the outrage part, I guarantee you you're going to be accused of selling out. If you show restraint, you've been compromised. If you choose mercy, you're protecting evil. And it's the very crowd that lifted you up that will turn on you the moment you refuse to go further. One of the saddest things for me is you've listened to me for 25 or 30 years and I can say one thing, and all of a sudden you'll say, you're a traitor. And it's like, what? Really? Is that? How shallow our relationship is? This is principle. And here's the principle that I think we have to defend. And it goes right to the bride of Charlie Kirk. Can we leave the grieving to their grief? You may not like somebody, you may not trust somebody. You might disagree with them. You might believe they're wrong about everything. But grief is sacred ground, and it's not battleground for speculation. If someone dies and you believe a crime occurred, there's a process to that. There are investigators, there are courts. If you have evidence, give it to the authorities. If you have resources, quietly fund the pursuit of facts. You don't conduct a trial through thumbnails and trailers. Let me explain it this way, because I'm a former alcoholic dj. Let's say a small town family loses their father in an accident. Suspicious. However, the town is divided. Rumors are starting to swirl. And one local radio host, like me, begins asking questions. Not with evidence, but with feelings. I don't know, I feel. And they're very, very guarded and careful. They'll hint, they'll imply, they will build the audience on suspicion, but they'll never truly accuse because I gotta pay for that one in a court of law. But I have this feeling what happens soon. The widow can't buy groceries without whispers every time she goes into the store. The children hear theories about their mom at school. Five months later, nothing has been proven, but the damage is permanent. And even if later the host says, you know, I was just asking questions, the community is fractured. That damage is permanent. That's the principle at stake. Free speech matters deeply. I will defend someone's right to say the things. I will defend their right to say the despicable things they've said about my children and me because they have a right to say it. And the moment we start silencing people that we disagree with, we lose. We lose our freedom. We lose the republic. But free speech is not the same as. As moral obligation and responsibility. Free speech comes with responsibility. And the First Amendment protects your right to speak. It does not compel you to speak. It doesn't sanctify escalation. It does not require you to monetize suspicion. Because there's a difference between investigation and insinuation, between courage and compulsion, between truth seeking and audience feeding and fame, if you're not careful, convinces you that every instinct must be broadcast. I suffer with this so badly. I don't know. I have this feeling I should say that. No. Not everything you think not every suspicion needs to be shared. Not every silence is weakness. Sometimes it's strength. Sometimes restraint is the highest form of strength. We should be rallying around principles that make us more human, not more viral. Decency process, Presumption of innocence, respect for grief. It's been five months. Put yourself. If this society can no longer put itself in another man's shoes and see what those five months must be like. And you were dogpiling in the first three weeks. We're a lost society. Once we normalize, turning mourning into content, none of us are safe from being content ourselves. The culture that rewards behavior like this isn't just influencers. It's us. Because we click. We share, we debate. We fuel the machine. We demand people get involved. And that demand creates supply. So instead of saying what the hell happened? To fill in the blank of the influencer, what the hell has happened to the right or to the left? Maybe the question is, what is happening to us if we don't anchor ourselves in who we are? And my opinion shouldn't matter more than your opinion. Glenn's got to speak out on this because his opinion. My opinion, is no more important than your opinion. If you are waiting for me to endorse Your opinion, you're lost, don't have. There's power in you. But you got to know these things before the likes, before the numbers, before the praise, or all of us are going to be swept by, Swept away by whatever gets the most reaction. Truth requires patience. Justice requires evidence. Grief requires space. These are not partisan values. These are civilization values. If you lose the civilizational values, it doesn't matter who wins the argument. Let me tell you about American Giant. Long before algorithms, you know, there were calloused hands shaping steel and cotton and timber into something lasting. There were men and women who measured twice, cut once, and took pride in a finished product that could be passed down through generations, not tossed out. Quality back then was not a marketing term. It was a personal standard. And somewhere along the way, we started optimizing for speed and scale instead of durability, and things got cheaper and faster, more disposable. And so we shipped many manufacturing jobs overseas because it was, it was cheap. American Giant decided, you know what? I think it's time to go in the other direction. And they build their clothing here in America. They work with American factories and American workers who still believe how something is made actually matters. From the fabric to the stitching to the focus on craftsmanship and long term wear, not just what looks good on a website when production is close to home. Standards aren't abstract, they're visible. They're accountable because something made with calloused hands tend to last longer than something designed by an algorithm. Buy American today@american-giant.com Glenn. Save 20% when you use my name for your first purchase. That's american-giant.com Glenn. Now back to the podcast. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. Last night was not a speech last night, it was a mirror. And if you were watching carefully, not through Twitter, not through the spin room, not through cable chirons, but actually watching the room, you saw something that should concern every Democratic strategist in America. You saw something in the room that, if you vote for the Democrats, should have made you question, who am I standing with? The damage was not done by the President. The damage was done by the people who refused to stand or clap for the most obvious things. Let me say something plainly here. This was the best speech President Trump has ever given. I mean, you want to talk about a mic drop and I urge you, go back and look at the. When he was walking out. I mean, I think you will see it now when I point this out, you will see it when he's walking out and he's shaking people's hands on the way out. The guy looks 20 years younger. He looks like he's 60 when he walk, he's walking out. He walked in strong, clear, disciplined, not tired, not wandering. He was on prompter, yes, but he commanded the prompter, unlike any time I've ever seen him give a speech. He had humor that landed. He had key moments like the hockey team. That was humor, that was human, that was light, that was confident. The opening statistics, I thought, were overwhelming. Rapid fire, border inflation, energy, jobs. There was a rhythm to this speech. The most important thing is he did not look like he was defensive. And Donald Trump has. Has been on the defense for most of his presidency, not necessarily this term, but last term, and then when he was running for president, and even towards the beginning of this first or this second term, he has been saying, look, it's going to be great. He no longer had to say that last night. He was on the offense last night. He looked certain he knew what he had done and he was commanding as President of the United States. But that's not the story, although that's big news. That's not the story. The story was the Democrats. When you have a third of them not standing for the US Hockey team, what is going on? No real applause for the Olympics or the World cup coming to America. Muted response for the First World War II veteran. Polite, restrained clapping for the Coast Guard rescue mission. What? What? The moment. That was the most powerful moment I have ever seen any president give, other than Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. There was no moment in presidential history in my lifetime that was as strong as that until last night. Stand if you agree the first job of government is to protect the American citizen and not foreign citizens. That's the easiest applause line ever presented in American politics. That is, you shouldn't even think. You just stand up. That's not even partisan. Is the job of the American government, Congress to protect the American city, a citizen or illegals or foreign citizens? How? What. What happened? Hesitation, folding of arms, looking down. No one clapping, no one standing up on that side of the aisle. Just play this out with me. That's something that even if you don't believe in, you stand up for. It's something that you. You go, like, I don't believe in this, but this is going to look really, really bad. We all got to stand up. You don't damage your opponent. When you do that, you damage your brand. This was the worst night for any brand. And maybe, and maybe twice as Bad for the night that Coca Cola came out and said, we're getting rid of the original recipe and we're going right for new Coke. I mean, that did brand damage like I've never seen before. This. I not sure the Democrats survive the brand damage that they're doing right now. You know what I mean? When you, when you don't, you can't stand for that. The American people last night were not watching like operatives. They were watching like parents. And parents understand instinctively if you can't stand for protecting citizens. Something is very broken, something is very wrong. The border section was devastating to the Democrats. Angel moms. Elizabeth stabbed 24 times. Delilah crushed by an 18 wheeler. Now a little girl in first grade kissing her father. You don't stand for that. Calling for commercial license to be denied to illegal immigrants because of her and calling it Delilah's law. And you can't stand for that. You can't clap for removing dangerous rapists and criminals from the country. Think about this. We can disagree on immigration policy all you want. We can debate violence, visa quotas, you can argue about asylum reform. But when you can't stand for deporting violent criminals, that's not a strategy. That's the end of your brand. That's moral confusion. I was stunned by that because America looked at that and went, do these people hate our country? Do they hate America? The average person, you had to walk away with that. The contrast on all of it, I mean, the economic contrast, very sharp. He talked about, you know, inflation and how they drove up inflation by spending too much energy. They drove up inflation because they stopped drilling, you know, and he said, you caused this. Your policies caused this. I'm fixing it. Crushing health care costs. Everybody in the country knows health care is being crushed. It's crushing people. You did, you promised Obamacare. You said it would fix it and it hasn't. It's made it worse. And I'm going in and fixing it. When he comes out and he says, look, you're going to pay. What was it, the IVF thing? I got to get into that. When he talks about any of the drug, drug costs going from $4,000 to $500, you can't stand an applause for that. You can't than taxes. Did you notice that when they introduced Michael Dell, who gave, what was it, $6 billion, some crazy amount of money to these, you know, to the, you know, these America accounts so your kids can be, when they're born, they can get an account worth, I don't know how much. Well, Michael Dell gives. He and his wife give. I don't remember what it was. I think it was, I think it was $6 billion, wasn't it? $6 billion. $6 billion. Okay. They don't stand for a guy who just gave the nation and the children and the most vulnerable $6 billion. They will stand and applaud for. We want to take more of these rich billionaires money, but we're going to take it. We're going to use it for the irs, we're going to take it. And then God only knows where that money goes. They'll cheer for taking and crushing billionaires, but they can't stand and applaud a man who voluntarily gave $6 billion to the government to help children. That should tell you a ton. They could not applaud for a deduction on your auto loan for the first time in history. No tax on tips. No tax on tips. They could not applaud for that. They couldn't applaud. When he talked about 401ks are up. What, what was it? 30%? I think, I mean, I know that, I know that you don't feel it and quite frankly, it's hard to feel. I, you know, I don't feel it. When I go to a, when I go to a fast food restaurant and I, I'm rolling out of there and it's just Tanya and I and we've just spent 35 bucks at McDonald's, I have a hard time going. Inflation's under control. So I get it. If you're trying to buy a house, I completely get it. I don't think the average person feels it yet, but I don't think the average person has looked at their 401k either. How much is the average 401k up?
