B (3:03)
Let me tell you a history story here. Lee Zeldin's coming up in just a minute. We're going to talk to him about deregulation. I may. Well, he's not in person, so I. I can't kiss him, but I might have kissed him on the mouth for what happened yesterday. I just. I just love what happened. We think most Americans think they live in a free market, that this is capitalism and that is the lie you must dispel. Okay? You don't. You don't know how much you've been manipulated and how the government has been involved in the manipulation in these big corporations. Let me ask you this. Let me, let me. If I took you back to any American city in city in the 1920s, what would it look and sound like? Most people would think you'd hear the Ooga horns an awful lot. Okay? You don't hear engines for the most part. You hear a hum. You hear steel will wheels on steel rails. Okay? The whisper of electricity overhead spark. Children stepping off of street corners. They don't have fear of getting hit by cars. Workers getting onto streetcars without owning anything and just going downtown to work. Shops rise close together because distance doesn't matter because the trolley is coming every few minutes. And so you just grab a trolley and you get there. City is one kind of living machine. It's efficient, It's. It's rhythmic. It's almost elegant. Okay? That was America in the 1920s. By the 1930s, in America, nearly every major city from Los Angeles to Detroit to Cleveland had an electric streetcar network. Now, I want you to remember this as where every city is trying to. To build those stupid rail systems that nobody wants. I just want you to remember that the United states in the 1930s had had more urban rail mileage than anywhere else on Earth. We were the leader in streetcars, and then all of a sudden, overnight vanished. How? I mean, all we want to do now is build light rail systems because they're the best they're the best. When we build them, nobody rides them. What happened? You look at Paris, Tokyo, Zurich, anywhere else in the world. Their trains and their trams, they never died. What killed that here in America? Oh, it was a free market. Was it? Was it? Let me tell you the real story on what happened. America chose differently, but I don't think we actually chose here. Transportation became a private battlefield. Private, public, private battlefield. This is where the story turns dark. In the 1930s, there were three giants that were rising, that were changing, and they had money like nobody else. You had General Motors selling automobiles to everybody. You had Standard Oil of California selling fuel to all of those automobiles that people now needed. You had Goodyear Tire and rubber supplying the rubber, touching every single road. These companies were the up and comers. These were the ones who had all the money, all the power. Streetcars didn't pay anything to those guys, okay? They were competition to those guys. Every electric trolley meant passengers that didn't have to buy cars, wouldn't burn gasoline and didn't have to buy tires. The streetcar wasn't a vehicle. It was a rival business model to those three companies. So late 1930s, a new holding company comes up and quietly starts buying up all of the electric streetcar systems across American cities. It was called the National City Lines, okay? National City Lines, they're just. We're a streetcar company. We're just buying up streetcar companies. Huh? Huh? What America didn't know at the time, behind the National City Lines, where were they getting their money to buy up all of the streetcar companies? Gm, Standard Oil and Goodyear, they would buy the local streetcar company, they'd stop investing in the maintenance. Then things would start to break down. There'd be problems, and they, they would then say, we can't fix this system. It's just outdated. And they'd rip out the tracks. Meanwhile, as the train systems that they owned were having these problems, gm, Standard Oil and Goodyear would come to the cities and say, you know what you need? You need buses. Buses are absolutely going to change the world. You have a city, bus lines, they're not going to break down like these old outdated rail lines. You need buses. And so they replaced all the rail lines with buses. And some cities push back. But then suddenly, you know, who's to say that it was bribery? Who's to say it was lobbyists? I am, I am. I'm one to say that all of a sudden every city got rid of them, okay? The permanence of the rail, disappear. Rails, that signals stability. Buses can be rerouted tomorrow. What happened? Developers stopped building dense neighborhoods around the transit. So cities sprawled out, you know, everywhere. And that's problem. Not a problem. Up to you. But the automobile became a necessity. It was no longer a choice. You live in any city, live in. Live in Los Angeles. Used to have the leading streetcar system in America, Los Angeles. It was great. Try getting anywhere without a car in Los Angeles. You can't. You can't. You can take the bus. Good luck with that. So this changed the design of American life entirely. This didn't just change the streetcar industry. This changed our architecture, our city designs, the way we live, the way we commute. This changed lives. And then they put a sticker on it that said, americans just love their cars. So you know that I'm not just making this up. 1949, federal prosecutors brought an antitrust case, okay? And the jury came back and found, yeah, the companies were conspiring. They. They were a monopoly on the buses and the supplies to the transit systems. They had lied. They had used lobbyists and all of this thing. And they came down hard on them. And the judge gave them the penalty. You know what the penalty was for GM, Standard Oil, and Goodyear Tire? $5,000. 5,000. That's. That's like a parking ticket. No one went to prison. The tracks kept disappearing. This wasn't about transportation, okay? Streetcars created neighborhoods. Downtowns built for people instead of parking lots. Cities connected by shared movement. Everything the left says they want today was pushed by these giant corporations and pushed out. And now they're using the same tactics to get those cities back. It's not going to end well, because whenever you're doing things undercover, whenever you're trying to be sneaky, whenever you're not being upfront with the American people and you're letting the elites decide, you've got problems, it doesn't work out well. So the distances grew. Dependence on cars exploded. Highways carved through urban neighborhoods. The American dream was located. Relocated to the suburbs, which is fine. It's fine. But you didn't choose it. Three companies through collusion, bribery, everything else, public, private partnerships with governments. They chose that because now you need a car to participate in society at all. Okay? America was paving over the rails while we were doing that. Berlin modernized the trams. Amsterdam expanded their streetcars. Hong Kong kept its electric trams running continuously for over a century. Those cities enjoy options that we don't have. They have the light rail. They have walkable districts, mixed transit systems. It just works because they didn't rip at the foundation out. They. They Just kept building as the cities transformed, okay, we dismantled our own advantage. And I want you to understand this is not smoke filled rooms plotting evil. This is more dangerous. I think this was incentives and human frailty. The companies followed profit. That's what companies are supposed to do. Cities wanted short term savings. The company, the National City Lines, was creating a problem. So then the people funding the National City Lines could come in and fix the problem and have the answer. Does any of this sound familiar? Consumers wanted freedom, but bribes were given and taken. Collusion between giant corporations happened. They had the money to lobby, to buy and to bribe. And the legal system, when it finally kicked in, it did virtually nothing. And let me ask you this, see if this sounds familiar. If you had bribed politicians, colluded, lied, misrepresented everything, and you destroyed an entire way of life, all for profit, do you think you would have faced a $5,000 fine or do you think you would have gone to jail? Does any of this sound familiar? Because that's what has to change. And the only way to change that is to reduce the size of government. They were all selling the same thing. A promise that the future would be easier if we tore up the past. Is that not the promise of corporations and NGOs and lobbyists and big government advocates today? Forget the past. Tear the past, take the statues down and we'll have a brighter future. Would it not have served our generation and our children's generation better had the system worked the way it was supposed to and let people actually decide that? They may have chosen the same thing, but it would have been their choice, not a manipulation. The streetcar wasn't just transportation. It was a vision on how society could move together. Did you even know about streetcar dominance in America? Did you even know we led the world in this? Did you know we were the envy of the world? Did you know how we went from the trolley to and American elites choosing buses over trolleys? I didn't for the longest time. When I found out, I was outraged by it. Once those rails were gone. This is the secret also that you have to pay attention to because it's repeating itself. What did they do the, the National City Lines? GM said, you know, it's going to be a lot better for the tires. You're going to save more money. Just rip those, rip those rails out. You couldn't go back, okay, one day the trolley came down your street, the next day it was a giant bus. And everybody adapted. And today we don't even know what was lost. And I think that's the biggest trick of it all. When something slowly disappears slow enough, people stop remembering it ever existed. That's what you're witnessing in real time now with health care and energy over the last 20 years. Health care, has it gotten better since Obamacare or worse? Did Obamacare fix the problem or make it worse? Did it live up to its promise? No, because that wasn't the real goal. Look at energy during the Biden administration. What did the socialist, Marxist and climate radical politicians, lobbyists and NGOs who put into the legislation that you couldn't even see until it was passed? The Green New Deal. Not just to close all of the coal fired electrical plants, but they would receive federal money if they also tore those plants down. Bring up the rails. Bring the coal fired plants down. I share this with you today because we are destined to repeat history if we don't know our own history. If you ever notice how hard it is to find something you can trust, not a trend, not a logo, not a story, just something made. Well, something made to last. Made by people who actually care whether it holds up a year from now. They're not just trying to sell you something, but they care. And they have the same values. Most clothes, they're not designed to be like they were. You know, maybe they're designed to be good for a few washes and then they quietly fall apart. That's why I have a lot of respect for American Giant. They built their entire company around the idea that clothing should be tough and comfortable last and made here in the United States. And they have spent a fortune bringing machines and manufacturing back to the United States. They work with all American cotton, American factories, American skilled workers who know what they're doing. So buy American today@american-giant.com Glenn that's american-giant.com Glenn Save 20% when used by 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. I have the man of the hour on. I mean, I have the man maybe of the decade on, maybe of the last 100 years. This guy has just announced yesterday the Environmental Protection Agency is deregulating the largest, single largest deregulation action in U.S. history. It changes everything. Oh yeah, I might have to play some sexy music behind it when he, when he's talking because this is just, this is, this is because conservative and constitutional porn that is about to happen. Lee Zeldin joins me in a second. First, let me tell you about Rapid Radios. We Assume that communication will always be there when we need it. You know, we just don't think about it. We just expect when we call, it rings and we text, it sends. 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Lee Selden I've never had the desire, nor have I ever made out with a man. But today I would consider it. You are, you are the greatest man alive today. Thank you, thank you, thank you for everything that you and Donald Trump have done and announced yesterday.