Glenn Beck, Jason Buttrill, and Jeff Mudgett dissect Hurricane Harvey's $42 billion devastation, contrasting Derek Lewis's heroism with Joel Olstein's shelter controversy while warning of a $24 billion National Flood Insurance Program deficit. They detail how a refinery shutdown could crash oil prices to $30, benefiting the U.S. but risking global instability, before Mudgett reveals H.H. Holmes likely escaped execution via a body double after exhumation proved his remains were too short. Ultimately, the episode urges Americans to prioritize humanity over politics during crises while exposing historical mysteries and economic vulnerabilities. [Automatically generated summary]
There is desperate need for perspective in this country, so I think maybe we'll give some.
First of all, black MMA fighter, his name is Derek Lewis.
He went out and he was saving Houston flood victims, including a man who insisted on saving his Confederate flag.
Okay, couple things here.
Here's a black MMA fighter.
He saves that guy.
He's not asking him any questions.
He's saving the guy because that's what Americans do.
Second of all, a little perspective, dude.
It's a flag.
I mean, if it was Robert E. Lee's flag, his actual flag, maybe I can understand it.
But if it's the one you had hanging in the window of your, you know, your house, then probably, probably, probably you should let the flag go.
I'm just saying a little perspective.
And speaking of letting things go.
And I know that this is a rhetorical question because I know the answer.
Is the media, is their life really this shallow?
You've seen the uproar started by Politico on Melania Trump wearing five-inch stiletto heels?
Okay, first of all, let me just say this.
I've been around women all my life and I don't understand the whole heel thing.
I just don't care because to me, all you ever hear is, I can't wait to take these shoes off.
Okay, all right.
Sure, they look nice, but I'm having to listen to you all night talk about how much your feet hurt.
I don't get it.
But she's wearing five-inch stiletto heels.
Now, here's the headline that I would write.
Look at Melania Trump walking through the grass in five-inch stiletto heels at the White House lawn going to the helicopter, and she doesn't get stuck.
She doesn't lose a shit.
How is that even possible?
I mean, I've been around all the wrong women, I think, because I didn't even think that was possible.
But what does the media say?
Look at how inappropriate she was when she went down to Corpus Christi in Galveston.
Does anybody really think that the president was going to get his shoes or his pant legs wet?
Does anybody think that the president was going to go on a rescue boat and Melania Trump was going to do that?
Does anybody even think, I mean, you can make the case that the president shouldn't have gone if it hurt the rescue efforts, but it didn't because he didn't go anywhere near Houston for the love of Pete.
Media, Get over yourself.
Get a grip and get some perspective.
My gosh, let it go.
We begin there right now.
I will make a stand.
I will raise my voice.
I will hold your hand.
Because we have won.
I will be my drum.
I have made my choice.
We will overcome.
Cause we are run.
The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.
This is the Glenn Beck Program.
So let me give you an update.
There's some really amazing things that are going on.
The Texas teenagers that have saved over 50 people in a small fishing boat.
The mattress shop owner that has thrown his store open to 400 victims of Hurricane Harvey.
He's just like, you know what?
You need a place to stay here.
Just stay at my mattress store.
On a personal note, I just got a note from Mercury One, and I don't even know if I'm supposed to mention this.
I know the people who run my Patriot supply, so they're not the people that like it when I mention things like this, but I think you should know.
They've donated yesterday 1,000 cases of two-week emergency food supplies.
And they're also supplying 2,500 water filtration units to be deployed in Houston.
Those things are what, $200 a piece?
And this is the kind of stuff that you could actually take that flood water and purify it and drink it.
We've had people right out of the streets.
Like literally right out of the street.
These are the emergency things.
You know, people don't realize how when water goes bad, you die.
And, you know, that was, I think, the number two killer, may have been number one up until about 150 years ago.
And that was water supply.
You would, you know, somebody would be pooping or peeing or dying in the water, you know, up the river, and then you would drink it and your water was tainted and people died all the time, cholera.
This water is going to be such a problem.
And Pat, you know, I lived in Houston, you lived in Houston.
It is, this is going to be a nightmare for a long time because once the water recedes, Houston never dries out.
Never.
It is, it's the only place I've ever lived that has something called super saturation, where somehow or another, it's like the water has a humidity.
I mean, the air has a humidity over 100%.
I don't even know how that's possible, but it's super saturated air.
And you can press, walking out in Houston a lot of the times of the year is like you're drowning.
It's like you're drinking a glass of air.
And it'll never dry.
How that you're drinking a glass of air, you couldn't put a, Jeffy's trying to do the math on that one.
You see, glass of air would be a lot of water in that air.
But anyway, that city is never going to dry out.
How does how do they stop the black mold?
Yeah, that was a huge problem after Allison.
And it's going to be a much bigger one now.
Gosh, this is just...
I don't know.
There's thousands of homes underwater.
Oh, and it's never going to go away.
I mean, how many neighborhoods and how many buildings are going to need?
Remember the building.
You're going to have to gut a lot of places.
Oh, no.
You remember the building next door to the World Trade Center?
It was a big, huge brick building, maybe 20 stories tall.
It was an old one.
It was the last one to be torn down.
Do you guys remember this?
And they had to seal it in plastic and take it apart by hand because it had so much black mold in it.
I don't remember what happened.
Maybe the fire alarms tripped or something and the building was drenched in water.
Black mold started to grow in it.
It became one of the most hazardous buildings in the Western Hemisphere.
And it was right next to the World Trade Center.
And they didn't know what to do.
You couldn't implode it.
They had to take it apart in spacesuits by hand.
What is the city of Houston going to be like after this?
Yeah, they said the average hurricane that's category three or four costs about $4 billion.
The first estimate of this is $42 billion.
So over 10 times the average hurricane that hits.
That's going to be messy.
It's going to be really, and not to mention, I mean, it's not like it's going to stop raining, right?
I mean, like, you know, at some point, they're going to start getting more rain again, and they're going to have to deal with, I mean, when you have a situation like this and it just starts raining again.
How do you go back?
When you're dealing with a city of, what's the whole metro, Pat?
Is it 7 million, the whole metro?
Close to 7 million.
Okay, so 7 million people.
How many of the 7 million are actually affected in their homes?
Do we have an estimate of that?
I haven't seen one.
Okay.
I heard it was a million homes.
So I don't know if that's true, but a million homes.
How many businesses are actually affected?
Let's see if we can get somebody in the research department to look this up this morning.
But how many homes are actually affected?
How many businesses are actually affected?
How do those people go back to work?
How do those people live?
How do those companies open their doors?
And by the way, America's largest oil refinery just shut down yesterday.
That now is 20% of all gasoline is now offline.
Those wishing for the oil industry to be hard hit in this crisis, and who was that the other day?
The young Turks guy, I think.
Yeah, the Young Turks guy.
Well, congratulations.
Your gas prices are going to go. way up and they're already starting to.
Yeah, here in Texas, they're expecting by what, I think tomorrow, they're expecting it to be at $3 a gallon.
It was two.
I mean, it was already up 19.20 cents this morning, last night.
So it'll be, they think in Texas, it'll be up $3 a gallon.
So you know, this is going to affect the entire country.
You can't take 20% of the gasoline offline and gasoline goes, I don't know if the young Turks have done the math, but the food that's delivered to your grocery store comes in a big truck or it comes on a train and that choo choo doesn't use coal.
It uses diesel, which is made out of oil, which is made in a refinery.
Congratulations, young Turks.
You're getting exactly what you hope for.
Now, in the next few days, once we get past all of this, I'm going to spend some time with you on the ramifications of this hurricane.
This is much larger than Katrina.
This is the largest, most impactful hurricane in history.
As you're looking at this, I want you to understand the downstream, if you will, that will impact not only you, but I can guarantee you, Vladimir Putin is getting a briefing every day on what is happening in Houston.
And not because it's some evil, sinister plot or anything else, but because Vladimir Putin's country was geared for $100 a barrel of oil.
When it went down to 50, they were saying, oh, well, they can make it with $80 a barrel, but they've got to get the price of the barrel of oil up, otherwise their economy will collapse.
We're the opposite of Russia.
The lower the cost of oil, the better our system runs.
The higher the cost of oil, once we get over $100, our economy, the way we've structured our house loans and our credit cards and our car loans, everything else, once it's over $100 a barrel, it starts to hurt the U.S.
A sustained $120, $130 a barrel collapses our economy.
That's why 2008 happened.
We had all kinds of stuff that required everything to remain exactly the same and nothing to go wrong.
Well, as soon as gas prices started to creep up, we couldn't handle it.
Russia's the opposite.
When gas prices go down and they're hovering around 50, they become desperate and unstable.
Because we've closed the refineries, they're still producing the oil, but we've taken 20% of the refinement of that oil offline.
So what happens?
All of the barrels that we are purchasing now begin to back up.
Now they're going to sit on ships somewhere in the Gulf or off coasts, and they're going to sit there until there is an opening for that oil to get into a refinery or into an oil reserve.
That oil reserve, that's going to be a glut, which means the price of oil will plummet, which means people in the Middle East and in Russia will become more desperate.
Because of this hurricane, you will see over the next few days as we start to line this up, and I hope to be able to really give you some in-depth analysis on this beginning next week.
You will see the ramifications of what is happening in Texas will not only affect you, but affect freedom, literal freedom all around the world.
We're interconnected now.
Everything relies on everything else, and we rely on one another.
The good news is, I have some real evidence that Americans, forget about the companies and the politicians and everything else, Americans have not lost their soul.
Americans are still the people we grew up believing we were.
We'll give you more on that coming up in just a second.
Malware Hiding in Popular Apps00:06:26
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We have one.
The Glenn Beck Program.
Mercury.
This is the Glenn Beck Program.
So there is some good news.
Yesterday, just in the last 24 hours, you have stepped to the plate in an unbelievable way.
Over $500,000 was raised just on yesterday's program, and we can't thank you enough for that.
This is going to be something that goes for a very, very, very long time.
And I think it is going to, it's going to have a chain reaction that you're going to probably feel in your community.
And I am humbled by what you have already done and how many people are just giving like $5.
Yesterday, I got an email.
I mean, people, and we're going to talk to Jason, who was down yesterday in Houston.
He said he could not believe the number of people who were driving their own personal cars and bringing their boats from all over the country.
And he said they were just leaving their car.
And as they were leaving, they were like, buy car.
They just knew they were never going to see their car again.
And Jason almost got stuck a couple of times because they're driving around and they're trying to find a place to launch the boats.
But the water is coming in so fast that the cars are, you know, when they drive down a street, if they can't launch it there, by the time they were turning around to try to get out the same way, they were blocked.
I mean, they almost got trapped yesterday just, you know, they didn't have a boat.
They were following the guys who had the boat.
At one point, they got separated.
They're like, we're going to be asking them to rescue us.
We need more boats.
And We also need your help on communication devices.
The satellite phones that we dispatched yesterday, unfortunately, not waterproof.
And so we're losing a lot of satellite phones.
The communication devices are going down.
We really need your support to be able just to communicate.
This is a long way from being over.
You have to remember the waters were receding with Katrina really quickly.
And you were able to go.
By this time, they were going door to door and they were spray painting X's and numbers on doors of how many people were dead in those homes.
We're not even there yet.
And this is a long, long way from being over.
And we really need your support at mercury1.org.
We are trying to be as transparent as we possibly can be so you know exactly where the money is.
I'll give you an update on what was happening yesterday.
But we have, I think it's Project BBQ yesterday finally was able to get to the location, which is the conventional convention center.
And they're the ones that are going to be supplying 25,000 meals a day last night.
They finally were able to fire things up.
I think they served only 2,500 last night.
They'll be up to 10 or 15,000 by today.
And by tomorrow, they'll be at 25,000 meals.
And in a real moment of graciousness, we have offered when they're done, they can come back and stage here.
Any barbecue facility, actually, that wants to come and stage themselves here is welcome at any time.
There's plenty of room in the parking lot this year.
There is room.
Thank you, Jeff.
Lots of room.
So, you know, that just think of this.
This is all donations.
Think of the amount of beef you need and pork.
I mean, thank God we're in Texas.
Think of the amount of food for 25,000 people, breakfast, lunch, and dinner at that one location.
If you can help us, five bucks makes a world of difference.
Go to mercury1.org.
Mercury1.org.
Back in a minute.
You're listening to the Glenbeck program.
Mercury.
This is the Glenbeck program.
Toddler Clinging to Drowned Mother00:13:30
Authorities.
Brace yourself for this.
In Beaumont, Texas.
Authorities found a shivering toddler clinging to the body of her drowned mother in a canal in southeast Texas after the woman tried to carry her child to safety from the floods.
A witness saw the woman take her 18-month-old daughter and tried to walk to safety when the current of the flooded drainage canal next to the parking lot swept both of them away.
The child was holding on to the floating woman when police and fire rescue team in the boat caught up with him about a half mile downstream.
When you hear stories like that, it makes stories about politics grotesque, doesn't it?
We have such a great opportunity right now to put into perspective our life and what's worth fighting for, what's worth standing up for.
And I will tell you that if it doesn't involve your children and your family, it's just not worth your time.
I think that's one of the grinds that we have right now that we feel.
It's not just political strife.
It is the chaos, the grind of everything changing and you not knowing what to count on anymore.
You not knowing, you know, there's no one to help sort things through anymore.
There's nothing we even know to be true until we have something like this.
I hate to say it this way because it'll be misinterpreted, but a miracle is nothing more than a change of perspective.
And I am so happy to see there are so many Americans that are looking at the chance to serve and that are having a change of perspective and going, ick, I don't want to be those people anymore.
This is where I need to be.
This is what's important.
When you see the number, the sheer number of people, it'd be interesting to see if there's any kind of study that's being done at all in Texas of what this hurricane is costing the businesses in the state of Texas outside of the affected area in manpower.
How many companies, I know ours is, how many companies are sacrificing people and resources and sending them down to Houston?
We are, we're having a drop-off point for our neighbors, you know, here at the studio lot.
People can come in and bring water and food or, you know, not food, but I give the list.
I think it's up at Glenbeck.com.
But we're asking people to come and bring the baby diapers and everything else.
But it's because the staff, so many members of the staff are just like, on Friday, I'm going down.
I'm going to help.
And we need to deliver stuff.
And so this is just something that they've put on themselves.
How many are doing that?
How many people are just saying, I've got a boat, I'm going down.
When you go down and you see the sheer number of people, did you see the video yesterday of the Houstonians making the human chain to get the woman who was in labor and having a baby, getting her to safety?
Do we have the video by any chance?
Oh, there it is, right there.
So if you happen to be watching the broadcast on the Blaze, you'll see they're making a human chain.
This woman is in labor.
They need to get her to dry ground.
And everybody in the neighborhood pulls together, everybody who is there.
I saw a video of a guy in a wheelchair who was up to his chest in water.
What was he going to do?
People in a boat, just strangers from another part of the state, come up, go check the house, find him in there.
Imagine what was going through his mind.
Wow.
I mean, we have to put into perspective one of the things that is the biggest need at the shelters are charging stations.
We forget about this.
You know, you call.
Well, if your house has been flooded, your fuses popped a long time ago.
So at this point, if you're still in your house, unless you are very, very smart, you're out of power.
Your batteries are gone in your phone and everything else unless you've been turning it on just to check.
But most likely, you didn't plan on still being in this situation.
If this started on Saturday, you weren't thinking that on Wednesday I'm still going to be in this situation.
What was that guy thinking as he was sitting in a home by himself in his wheelchair and the water is coming up?
And if he still had power and could hear and could hear the reports of the rain that was coming, another, what was it, 20 inches last night was expected?
Can you imagine?
I'm dead and there's no place to go.
And you hear a boat pull up to your front door and somebody open the door and say, is there anybody in here?
Imagine what that felt like to that guy.
Is there anything else that we should be doing?
When we started the Nazarene Fund two years ago, somebody asked me this just the other day.
What started that?
That was me sitting in my office or sitting in my studio.
And Johnny Moore had just come by and he had said, there's a huge problem.
These Christians in Yazidis are just being crucified and sold into slavery.
And he said, we're trying to get these 50 families out.
He and Mark Burnett were trying to get, I think, 50 families out.
And they needed a million dollars to do it.
And I said, we're going to help you on that.
We'll raise a million dollars.
We'll get them out.
But what happened just before that was the turning point.
I was on television and there was a nun who was trying to get to the United States just to testify in front of Congress on what was really happening to these Christians.
And we had a Skype interview with her and she was living in this container, cargo container, and it was in the middle of Iraq and it was in early August in the desert in Iraq.
Now imagine living your life in a metal box in the middle of the Iraqi desert in August.
I don't think that's very cool.
You know, there's no windows, there's nothing.
And she's broadcasting her Skype on phone in the middle of this container.
And she was talking about how she needed help to get into the United States because people needed to hear the message.
And she was talking about everything.
And she wasn't complaining about her situation at all.
And it was weird because I almost had tunnel vision.
I stopped listening to her and I'm just looking at her in this metal box and I'm starting to imagine what just her life is like and that she's not asking for anything from her, for her.
She's not saying, hey, help me, help me.
She's saying, I got to get to the United States because the people here are suffering.
Not me.
The people here around me are suffering.
And I thought to myself, what the hell am I doing with my life?
I am sitting in this air-conditioned studio.
And here's this woman actually standing up in a time that is beginning to look like the 1930s in several places around the world.
And I'm sitting here doing what?
And she said, thank you so much for helping me get the word out.
And I don't know if you saw that episode, but I just, I broke down, not unusual for me.
I broke down and I just said, I'm sorry, sister, but I haven't really even listened to what you were even saying because I just realized, what am I doing with my life?
What are we doing?
That was the moment for me that I decided to get involved.
And there's been some other things here recently.
I told you recently, and we'll go over it this fall as we go on, but I want you to know I've, look, I've told you about the Nazis rising up 10 years ago.
I told you about the communists and the Nazis and showed you that this has happened in the 1900s, the early 1900s under Wilson.
It happened under FDR as well.
The Nazis and the communists, they fight and they close down shippings and they try to close down ports and they try to close down capitalism, both of them, both sides.
And Americans have to be good enough to navigate between those two things.
I told you about that 10 years ago.
And I've warned you for a long time, these things are about to come.
And when they do, they will be overwhelming and even the very elect will be lost.
Even the people who you love and adore and really get it, they're going to be lost because it's going to be overwhelming.
As I said to you over the last probably month, something deep inside of me has changed.
The seasons have changed.
We are in a new era.
We have finished writing the beginning of what America and the world is going through.
And we're now writing the all-important middle.
This is when we actually decide which way are we going.
If you're watching a three-act play, the first shows you the life that people had before and then the conflict.
And then the second act is them going through the conflict and it leads to a pivot point or a choice curtain.
Then act three.
How do they solve it?
We're now entering Act Two.
And I urge you to look at the possibilities in front of us.
I urge you, the good possibilities.
I urge you to look at the wake-up call that we're getting right now.
Because this is going to go back to politics, just like it did after September 11th.
It's going to go back and it's probably going to be worse than it was a week or so ago.
This is a chance for you to strengthen yourself, to find shelter, to find peace, to find your heart again, and to figure out, okay, if I don't want to go back to feeling that way, how do I guard my heart?
Guarding Your Heart Against Lies00:14:53
How do I stay there?
Because the lions are coming again to rip us apart and use politics and economic strife to do it.
Get involved and allow yourself.
Sounds so weird.
But allow yourself to be a human being first and a political animal last.
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Glenn Beck Program.
888727B.
Mercury.
Glenn Beck Program.
So there's some amazing people doing some really incredible things.
Guy named Mattress Mac in Houston is known.
You know, he's the guy, come on down and try our mattresses.
He's the kind of guy that does those ads.
Saves you money.
Right.
He does the obnoxious ads in town.
But everybody's got a lot of money.
People like him.
Oh, he's fantastic.
People like him there.
His name is Jim McInville, but everybody calls him Mattress Mac.
And he opened both his gallery furniture stores to flood victims.
I mean, they're sleeping on the mattresses.
They're sleeping on the recliners.
They're on the chairs.
He's like, just kind of.
I don't think you can sell those after the money.
No, no, no, no.
That inventory is.
That inventory is gone and he just invited everybody to get it.
He's got these huge warehouses and he's like, look, you need a place to sleep.
You need a place to stay.
Come here.
And he's taken all of his inventory.
Pretty incredible.
It's gone, but a really, really good guy.
Really good guy.
Yeah.
And they're popping up everywhere in Texas.
This is the Glenn Beck Program.
Mercury.
Harvey, what does this mean to you?
We know a little bit what it means to the people, and we have amazing stories of people pitching in and becoming better than they were the day before because they have a purpose in life.
And that purpose is to do something noble.
Let's go save people.
What's happening in Texas is truly miraculous, but the costs are...
I don't even think people are really yet thinking about what this could mean to the globe.
We're going to tell you some of the good news.
In fact, we're going to tell you a lot of the good news.
We're going to tell you about a lot of the heroes, but we're also going to give you perspective on what this actually will mean to you in the coming months.
And we begin there right now.
I will make a stand.
I will raise my voice.
I will hold your hand.
Cause we are one.
I will beat my drum.
I have made my choice.
We will overcome.
Cause we are one.
The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
We know the cost of, well, we don't.
I was going to say, we know the cost of the human toll, but I don't think we do.
Not until those floodwaters recede will we be able to see how many people were trapped and just could not get out.
Pat worked at KPRC in Houston for a long time when Allison came by.
People don't understand Dallas and Houston, they both have an underground system in between all the stores.
So people, it's kind of like Minneapolis where they build the bridges over the streets so nobody has to go out in the cold.
The opposite is true here in Dallas and Houston.
To avoid the heat.
To avoid the heat, they have an underground downtown.
And last time when Allison hit, which was nothing like this.
Yeah, I forget how many people died in the tunnels, but it was a lot.
It was, I mean, 24 people died overall, I think, if I remember correctly from Allison, but many of those were in the tunnel system.
And so, I mean, once you get trapped down there, and I don't know that they've been able to get down there and see if anybody is there as of yet, because, you know, the waters are still rising.
So they expect the rain, though, to stop now, to slow down.
I think they're only expecting another inch or so.
And then by Thursday, they might even have some sun.
So there's some light at the end of the tunnel, but still a long tunnel to go.
Still a long ways to go.
So here's some things that you need to know because this is how this truly affects you.
One, you can allow this to affect you in a positive or a negative way.
Anyone who is trying to engage you in a negative conversation at this point, flee from.
And I mean that even if even if the Blaze or somehow or another Glenbeck.com story is out and it's a negative spin on it, flee from it.
Don't read it.
You have to fill yourself while we can with the hope of what humans are really like, not this garbage of what people are saying we're like.
And there are people that just will not give up.
I'm going to give you a good example of this.
Joel Olstein, you can think about whatever you want about Joe.
Joel is a really good guy.
I really believe he is sincere in his belief.
Now, he doesn't look sincere because he's got that smile on his face all the time.
And it's like, Joel, you can't be that happy all the time.
He's like, I am that happy.
And I really believe he is.
And it pisses me off.
But that's who he is.
Okay.
He grew up in a preacher's family.
His father was a bigger preacher than he was.
He didn't want to become the preacher.
His father passed this on.
I think his brother decided not to do it.
You know this story, don't you, Pat?
His brother, something happened with his brother.
His brother decided not to do it.
So he decided at the last minute, you know, I think this is what I'm supposed to do, but I'm supposed to do it differently than my father.
And he started this church and he gets a lot of pushback because he's not a gospel guy.
He's much more of a, you know, the positive thinking guy.
Think and it will be become and it will become.
I think he considers himself kind of a gateway to Christianity.
He does.
He does.
And there's a good place for that.
But a lot of Christians don't like it because, oh, he's not the preacher that, you know, is, okay, well, I get that.
But there's a lot of people that want what you're doing.
And there's a lot of people that will never go to church because that's not the message that they're ready for or want.
They need an easier, apply it to my life.
Show me how this affects me today message.
And that's what Joel does.
Now, you can agree or disagree with it, but it's not my cup of tea all the time.
Sometimes I really like it, but it is what it is.
And I think he's a good man.
So what's happening to him right now?
Well, one, he's being abandoned by Christians.
He is off on an island by himself because there's a lot of preachers who just don't like that Joel Olstein guy because he doesn't talk about the Bible enough.
Okay, well, congratulations on knowing the mind of God.
Congratulations, because I didn't get that message that we should abandon these people because they don't do it exactly the way I think it should be done.
I didn't get that message, but if you did, congratulations.
They're abandoning him because they don't see him as a gateway to anything but evil.
I think it's wrong.
But that's why Joel Olstein is having the problem that he's having now.
Joel Olstein has his back against the wall, and he may never recover into a place of being a real uniting figure in Houston again.
Why?
Because he bought the Compact Center, which is where the Rockets used to play, right, Pat?
And it's this huge arena, and he bought it for $80 million, and he transformed it into a big mega church.
And it's quite impressive.
And people come from all over the world to worship there and listen to him speak, et cetera, et cetera.
And they do a lot of good.
They do a lot of good.
The Compact Center is a backup to the George R. Brown Convention Center.
So when the George R. Brown Convention Center is full and they just need a place for people to sleep, you go to Gateway or to Lakewood, the church.
Well, the story is that Joel Olstein is not opening his church to people.
Well, the city has not asked him to.
In fact, the city, he doesn't have the resources that the George R. Brown Convention Center has.
So send the people to the George R. Brown Convention Center because that's where they can be fed.
That's where they can shower.
That's where the city is all set up to go.
And when that is full, he has a deal with the city and he's been in touch with the city every day.
And Lakewood was in danger of flooding at the very beginning.
At the very beginning.
Now, because people saw a picture of the church and it didn't have any water around it, they're lying.
That evil Joel Olstein just getting rich on the back.
He doesn't care.
He's not a Christian.
And no one is coming to his defense.
First, they came for Joel Olstein, and I said nothing because I wasn't a member of his church.
And they're going to pick us off one by one.
Now, here's Joel from last night.
He was on with George Stephanopoulos.
Well, George, first off, the building was inaccessible.
The floodwaters went down.
I mean, this building flooded in 2001.
It had 10 feet of water in the lower bowl, and we put up floodgates, and it kept it from going over.
It was only a foot away.
But, you know, I think, George, the narrative is that we didn't want to take people in or that we didn't open in time.
It's totally not true.
We were here for people.
We were a shelter.
We were taking people as soon as the floodwaters receded when several people came here to take them in.
But the city has a shelter four miles from here.
We work with the city all the time.
And when their shelter was totally full, they started bringing people over here.
And here we are again today doing it like we did in 2001 when we housed 3,000 people.
So I don't know.
I think somebody created that narrative that somehow we were high and dry.
And none of that is true.
This building, it was a safety issue, and it took people in from the very beginning.
You do seem to be up and running now, but any lessons learned from this?
Well, I think there always is, but I think, George, sometimes it's, you know, when somebody's not in this situation where we had nobody in this facility, we were fearing that it would flood.
The last thing we would do is put people in it right at the beginning.
But yeah, you would, you know, we would probably be, you know, do some things differently, obviously.
But, you know, my niece was stranded right across the street from this building the first two days of the flood on the or one day of the flood on the freeway.
So it was, it was a big flood and it affected all of the people that run this facility as well.
But you know what?
We've been here 60 years helping people and we're going to be here long after all this dies down helping these people as well.
So there's nothing you can do when that Twitter grass fire starts.
It just rages out of control.
And when people see it on Twitter, it's so.
It's just true.
If Twitter said it was so, then it's so.
Then it's so.
Then it happened.
That's the way it is.
Period.
Somebody calls him a liar on Twitter and everybody else picks up on that.
And then pretty soon it's out of control and you can't tell anybody anything.
Okay.
So let me go here.
Do we have microphone?
Microphone?
There we go.
So let me go here.
Sorry, we're having a problem with our microphones.
So let me take you here.
Why does that matter?
One, it doesn't.
The Twitter war does not affect your life at all.
Why would you get involved in something that you don't know anything about?
Oil Prices Crash Through Floor00:08:15
Why?
Because you have an agenda, or the people around you have an agenda, or the people you follow have an agenda.
Don't get involved in somebody's agenda, even if it makes you feel good because you're winning.
We all lose.
We all lose when facts are not leading the way.
So let me give you a few facts of what this is going to mean to you in the coming weeks and months and why it's important to stay out of that kind of stuff, one, and B, do not take people down that have a long history of helping.
We need every hand we can find.
Back in just a second.
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This is the Glenn Beck program.
Mercury.
The Glenn Beck program.
Okay, we're going to go to take you down to Houston.
Yesterday, Jason Mattrill, who is working for my, he's my head researcher and writer here at the radio and television ranch, if you will.
And he was down and saw the things that are quite impressive.
Not the human toll, but the human spirit in Houston.
We'll talk to him about that here in a second.
First, let me give you a couple of facts on this and how this is going to affect you in the coming months.
And we're going to need each other.
This is one of the reasons why.
Please heal relationships.
Use this moment to heal relationships.
People with flood insurance, they usually are buying policies backed by the federal government and the National Flood Insurance Program.
I think this is one of the worst things that we have ever done as a government.
It encourages people to build million-dollar homes right on the coastline.
And then they don't, they wouldn't build those houses there because no bank, no insurance company would give them the insurance in case of a flood or a washout or whatever.
So no bank will give them the loan.
Well, step in the federal government.
Hey, we want to be able to back that up.
And so when they're wiped out, what happens?
We, the taxpayers, are paying for those homes.
The program already owes the U.S. Treasury more than $24 billion just from the previous disasters.
Experts now are projecting the damages of this storm, just the initial estimates for wind damage alone.
And remember, wind was not the problem in Houston.
The initial estimates for wind damage alone, insurance claims, they believe will reach as high as $6 billion.
Yesterday, Fannie Mae, everybody's favorite mortgage company, owned by you, the federal government and the taxpayer.
Fannie Mae said that more than 36,000 homes with mortgages guaranteed by you, the taxpayer, are in areas heavily affected by Harvey.
They believe that they have $5.1 billion in unpaid balances on the homes that are most likely going to have to be bulldozed.
Well, don't worry, the bank will get the insurance money.
Oh, well, first of all, it's not a bank.
It is the federal government playing bank.
So they'll lose their money?
No, they won't because they'll be covered by insurance.
And the insurance company is you.
The ramifications of this, the dominoes that could fall.
Next week, I will start to talk to you about why Anyone who is saying, good, these oil companies, they're going to get theirs.
20% of the refinery load now has yesterday, the country's largest refinery shut down because of this.
That means we are now refining 20% less of the oil every single day to turn it into gasoline.
Here in Texas, at the beginning of the week, gas was 220.
They say by tomorrow or the next day, it will be at $3.
What's happening to the gas prices in your town?
What's happening to the gas prices all around the country?
It's happening because 20% of the refineries that take oil and make it into gasoline are now offline and we don't know when they're coming back.
So that'll drive your cost up.
But here's another thing that nobody is explaining to anybody.
That's going to cause the price of oil to go through the floor because oil is the raw material.
And we have plenty of that raw material that we already bought last week.
It's on ships.
It's still arriving.
It's been sitting out on the coast on these giant oil tankers waiting to come in to the port to offload to the refinery.
But there's no place to offload because the refineries aren't refining any of it.
So now we'll have this huge glut of oil, which means that we won't need to buy oil for a while until we can get those oil refineries back online and burn through this glut of oil.
Good for America.
Price of oil through the floor.
But if it's down 40, 50, it could go as low as $30 per barrel.
That's not good for the Middle East.
And that's certainly not good for Vladimir Putin.
Mandatory Evacuation During Floods00:09:22
These are the kinds of things that we're going to be looking into and we're going to be following because you need to understand the ramifications of what does, what, what is really affected and what's going to actually affect me.
Forget about politics.
What's going to actually affect me?
And in the meantime, we're going to try to do everything we can to keep your heart right where it needs to be.
We're all Americans.
Let's come together.
The Glenn Beck Program.
Mercury. Glenn Beck Program.
We just had some really critical information that we should pass on to you.
We hate to disappoint the audience, but sometimes people are disappointed.
This one comes in from Twitter at World of Stu.
I was disappointed Jeffy didn't go cover the storm.
He won't blow away in high winds, and he's very buoyant in case of flooding.
I could have used him.
Where are you at, man?
Come on.
Jason, Jason went out, who is head writer researcher for the Glenbeck program.
And we're glad to have you back safe and sound.
You and Sean went out yesterday.
You couldn't actually get close to anything because you were dumb enough to drive a car.
Who even has a car in Texas that is headed towards Houston?
Yeah, so we rented a very high mobility Hyundai that seemed like a good idea at the time.
Yeah.
So we didn't expect to have to actually maneuver when we got down there in this Hyundai.
We were going to jump into the vehicles with the rescue group that we were with.
But they had full-on boat crews.
They had tons of gear, all that stuff.
So like at the last minute, they were like, guys, follow us, convoy down to the actual boat put-in area, and you can just follow us down there.
So we were like, okay, you know, we'll try.
So we started going down towards Katie, Texas, which was the hardest hit area at that time yesterday.
And we got maybe Katie was the hardest hit area.
Yeah, you didn't hear this.
Yeah.
So they pulled up a map that morning and they were like, these are all the areas, some program they were using of all people throwing out.
Oh, was it really?
Oh, my gosh.
It's a huge suburb.
It is the main suburb.
If you work in Houston, it's the main suburb.
And it's, you know, fairly, I mean, it's not like hoity-toity, but it's affluent.
Parts of it are very nice.
Yeah.
Parts that are very nice.
The feeling driving down there was kind of hard to describe because what kept going through my head was like watching Independence Day or an alien invasion movie because there were tons of people coming out.
There was only rescue vehicles and like police and stuff like that going in.
All the radio stations, most of the radio stations were tuned to the emergency broadcast thing.
So you're seeing that.
So as we're driving down, you can actually see like we would get to a certain area after we broke apart from the main group and we were trying to work our way through the back roads.
We'd get to a certain area and then all of a sudden you'd see, you know, all the way up to the houses, all the way up to their front doors, the water's creeping in.
The waters were sweeping over it.
Like you could just see the tops of trucks that had just gotten stranded in some of these intersections.
You could not move.
So Jason, as you were going down there, the big controversy over the weekend was the city and the state had an argument, evacuate, evacuate, evacuate.
The argument from the city was not, no, we shouldn't evacuate because it might cause more problems.
It was, no, I don't know if we need to do it yet, if I'm not mistaken.
Kind of the same thing that happened in New Orleans.
However, that may have turned out to be a great blessing because you would have had probably a million people trapped in their cars on these highways and nowhere to go.
That's what happened in all evacuations.
And the last time it happened in Houston, people were stuck in traffic.
They ran out of gas and families were trapped in their cars.
Now imagine five, six, seven, eight, some places, 12 feet of water.
Would that have been much worse, do you think?
Oh my gosh, yes.
We could, I mean, I think to go off that point, I think they were doing it right.
It seemed like it was efficient the way they were doing it.
They had two stages as we were listening to the emergency broadcast.
There was the suggested evacuation saying that, okay, in these areas, water level is rising.
We suggest you evacuate, but it wasn't mandatory.
The places that were dire, those were under mandatory evacuation.
So it was going in like stages.
So you could, there were certain areas that you have to get out and mandatory evacuation.
They would leave.
So those were the people that we were seeing, you know, cruising down the freeway or getting out of there.
But it was managed.
The other places that were just, we suggest you evacuate, that was actually kind of surreal because, and you can see how people actually, you wonder, you know, when you see these news broadcasts, how do these people, why did they stay in their homes?
Yeah.
Like, how did it get to this point?
Yeah.
I could actually get that now because you'd go into some of these villages on the outskirts of Katie and you've seen these neighborhoods, Pat, where they're very, they're just like our neighborhoods, you know, like the neighborhood that I live in.
There's people walking their dogs down the down the sidewalk.
They're looking at the waters rise, you know, and there's kids, you know, building little toys and it's going into it.
They didn't feel threatened at the time.
Well, water is gradually, gradually rising.
But I could sympathize with them because I'm like, well, if it's not really, if it's not coming up to my door, I'm probably not leaving either because I have all my stuff in here.
We went through many storms and several hurricanes and never flooded in Katie.
So especially Katie residents would probably be like, well, that's not going to happen here.
So I was just talking to a guy about, because I can't take the tornadoes here anymore.
I just can't.
It freaks my children out.
And so I want to build a storm shelter.
And I want to build a storm shelter also for the library that I have.
I don't want it sucked up into the sky.
And so I'm talking to this guy and he said, you know, don't build the storm.
Where do you want to build it?
And I said, I don't know where we could go.
And he said, well, I suggest you build it in your garage.
And I said, well, wait, why?
And he said, because if you build it where you have to go outside, think of this.
Usually it'll be in the middle of the night and you'll have to get everybody up and then you'll have to go outside, get dressed.
It'll be raining, you know, blah, And then nothing will happen.
And then you'll get wet coming back in and then you'll all go to bed.
And what will happen one or two storms down the road, you'll say to the kids, you know what, let's just stay here in bed and we'll all go if it gets bad.
And then you're sucked up into the sky.
And the same thing happens here with these, with hurricanes is you've gone through them over and over again, nothing happens and you're not seeing, it doesn't connect with you that that's going to happen to you or your neighborhood.
And then all of a sudden you were driving yesterday and you would drive down streets and you were trying to get places.
And by the time you went, okay, well, that's blocked, you'd turn around and you'd realize I'm trapped.
I can't get out now.
That was the most claustrophobic feeling.
And that's what the rescuers are having to put up with too.
I had never heard of this in some of these situations because usually it's like after the fact the waters had risen, they pretty much leveled off and then rescue workers go in.
It's still rising even up to this day.
So as we were getting to certain points, water risings, water was rising behind us.
So we were like, well, how the heck do we get out of here?
At one point, we just stopped beside the road, scratched our heads, and said, We might be stuck out here for a night.
Like this car is getting swept away.
You know, one of the coolest on that, in that little conundrum of trying to get out, I saw one of the coolest things I saw out there.
So we got to a certain point just before we had to evacuate and get out of there to where we got to a point where we were going to try to turn around.
The water level was rising up about halfway up onto one of the homes.
And you saw a long line of cars.
People were just pulling up in the people's driveways.
I was like, why are all these cars pulled up in the people's driveways and yards?
Well, what it was was, is that was kind of like the point of no return.
All the neighborhood, the people in the residence of these homes, they were driving up basically metaphorically to the fire.
They had whatever they had.
They had blow-up boats.
They had floaties.
They had canoes.
And they were like, this way.
And they were going right up there and they were throwing in their own and they were going to help out their neighbors.
I got chill seeing that.
I wanted to stay there and watch.
But again, we would have gotten swept up with it too.
But that's what they were willing to do for their neighbors.
They're driving their car and everybody's walking away going, man, my car's lost.
Oh, yeah.
It's just like, that's not going to happen.
They're never going to see that again.
Yep.
Yeah.
It's really remarkable.
Jason, thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
I mean, the company had run a Jason's car.
He didn't care.
That's a fair point.
Thanks, Glenn.
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Diabolical Pleasure Started Young00:03:54
And it's like, okay, dummy, where's your front door?
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You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.
Look here.
The Glenn Beck Program.
HHA 727B.
One of our producers, Natasha, feels pretty guilty today.
I wanted to bring her on because she said she feels really guilty because she knows that she should have really been paying attention to the flood because that's where your heart is.
Yes.
But instead, you were watching something on H.H. Holmes last night.
Season finale of American Ripper on the History Channel.
Yeah.
That's my guilty pleasure right now.
Serial killers?
You're not one to talk, Glenn.
It's true.
You did a show on H.H. Holmes yourself.
Yeah.
H.H. Holmes, in case you don't know, he's America's first serial killer.
We did a great episode on his story that is just phenomenal.
You don't know this story is incredible.
And the History Channel just took his great-great-grandson because his great-great-grandson has this theory that he was actually Jack the Ripper.
Yes.
And it's an eight-episode series, and they go through and find the similarities between H.H. Holmes and Jack the Ripper.
And I wouldn't say there's any real hard evidence, but the speculative evidence is pretty cool.
They were both doctors, and they both killed in a similar fashion.
Very surgical, clean killings, very, very similar.
And the eyewitness accounts from Jack the Ripper in London suggest that he was actually an American.
Yeah.
I've never heard that before.
And the handwriting samples from both of them are also similar.
They took the handwriting samples to an expert and they couldn't conclude that they were the same person, but they couldn't rule it out.
And there's also some like English phrases.
So now, in case you don't know, this guy killed first just for money, and then I think it actually started when he was young.
It started kind of with pleasure.
He got away with killing his best friend when he was young.
And then it just built from there.
But he would kill people and he would dissolve their bodies and then sell the skeletons for, you know, for science, for, you know, up in the classroom.
Here's a skeleton.
So a lot of those early skeletons were from him.
And he kept getting away with it.
And then he built this horrible torture chamber and killing slaughterhouse in Chicago and built it as a hotel.
And it was diabolical, truly diabolical.
But when he was buried, he was buried under, I don't know how many pounds of concrete because he had it in his will that he wanted to make sure nobody could get into his crypt and do to his body what he had been doing to everybody else's body.
And in a strange turn of events, they actually honored that.
And they dug him up on last night's episode.
Yes, the season finality, they showed H.H. Holmes being exhumed.
And I don't want to give anything away.
Building a Hotel from Torture00:04:29
I've explained it already.
No, I don't.
You know that.
But I want Jeff to explain it and what he found inside.
Okay, so Jeff is the great-great-grandson of Jeff Mudgen.
Jeff Mudgett.
Mudgett.
And he's a great-great-grandson.
He's going to be joining us here in just a couple of minutes.
Yes.
And it is a fascinating, fascinating story.
We've booked this weeks ago.
And because it happened last night, we're not going to cancel it.
But it's a really remarkable story.
And if you don't know the story of H.H. Holmes, just go to theblaze.com or I think at Glennbeck.com too.
You can find it.
And we'll probably post it up if it's not already today up on the front page.
The story of H.H. Holmes from his story.
It's pretty remarkable.
Pretty remarkable.
So that's coming up in a minute.
Thank you so much.
I can't wait.
Appreciate it.
So let me tell you this story.
17-year-old Thomas Edwards, three friends, Richard, Liam, and then his brother, DeClan.
They range from 17 to 15 years old.
They're all high school students at Straight Jesuit College Preparatory School in Houston.
So here's what happened.
Tom wakes up in the morning and he sees the massive flooding.
Now, he has a truck himself, and it's nearly completely submerged.
And all of the one-story houses all around him have water all the way up to their doors.
So imagine 17 years old.
What do you do?
What do your kids do at this point?
He wasn't feeling sorry for himself.
He didn't even think about himself.
He didn't think, oh, wow, there goes my truck.
What he did is he called his friends and said, hey, can we get together?
We have to go pick up my best friend's dad's fishing boat and let's go bring it back.
So here's what they did.
They put the boat onto the trailer.
They drove it back to their neighborhood.
And once it began to float, they could hear people screaming.
They got in the boat and they started going and they started hearing people screaming.
And so they took a paddle board behind them on the boat and they said, grab on to the paddle board and we will take you to the Kroger's down the street.
And so they were pulling people out and they were doing this all day.
This was the only boat in the neighborhood.
They did it until two o'clock in the morning, going back and forth, back and forth, until the rescuers, the quote, first responders, showed up.
They saved 50 people.
Wow.
You don't have faith in the youth of America?
That's the youth of America.
They just haven't necessarily had the chance to do it.
They haven't had the chance.
We shelter them from everything.
Don't dismiss the 15, 16, and 17-year-olds.
They just saved 50 people.
And they did it without mommy and daddy.
They did it without the federal government giving them a license to do it.
They did it on their own.
This is who we are as Americans.
And this is actually who the next generation is.
If you look at the ratings of the VMA, the Video Music Awards from MTV, they've been cut in half in the last few years.
Speculation now is they lost another million viewers in last weekend's video music awards.
Speculation is because the youth just, they don't want to see all the divisiveness.
They're tired of the lecture of what's cool and what's not by a bunch of singing hypocrites.
Back in a minute.
Inventing Terms for Holmes Madness00:12:47
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There is a remarkable story in American history that most people have never heard of.
It's America's first real serial killer.
His name was H.H. Holmes.
We did an episode on this, oh, probably about a year or so ago on H.H. Holmes and the blood that he left behind around the time of the Chicago World's Fair.
Well, there has been a History Channel show, a series that has been going on called The American Ripper.
And it was written by the great-grandson of the serial killer, H.H. Holmes.
He has a theory that our first serial killer was also Jack the Ripper.
And last night in the series finale, they actually exhumed the body of H.H. Holmes, and he's here to tell us what exactly was found and how that's turning out.
And we begin there right now.
I will make a stand.
I will raise my voice.
I will hold your hand.
Cause we have won.
I will be my drum.
I have made my choice.
We will overcome.
Cause we are the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.
This is the Glenn Beck Program.
Jeff Mudgett is with us, the great-grandson of H.H. Holmes and the author of the book Bloodstains.
BloodstainsTheBook.com.
Welcome to the program, Jeff.
Good to have you.
Thank you very much.
It's an honor, Glenn.
So, Jeff, I've been waiting to talk to you for, I mean, I am fascinated and horrified by your great-grandfather.
At what point in your life did you find out you were related to him?
You know, before I answer your question, I wanted to make one comment about your story, your narration about Holmes that I spent the weekend going over.
I actually think you captured who Holmes was better than has ever been done before.
And I wanted to say bravo.
Wow.
Now, no, and I'm totally from the heart.
I found out when I was 40 years old.
My grandfather told the family the horrible secret that he'd kept to himself, including my grandmother, about our horrible ancestor.
Did that screw with you at all?
Did you be like, holy cow?
I was a successful California lawyer, trial lawyer at the time.
I gave that all up.
My life was turned upside down.
I saved my marriage barely, but I had to find out what was true and what was legend.
And as you know, doing work on homes, the more you dig into this story about this evil genius, the more strange it gets.
Yeah, he is, it is, it's so strangely tied to one of the greatest, brightest spots of the 1800s, the Chicago Expedition, that right down the street, we're seeing these incredible feats of what America is accomplishing.
Just a few blocks down, here's this incredible serial killer who built this hotel of horrors.
Can you want to go into that just a little bit so people understand who don't know who your great-grandfather was?
Yeah, yeah.
He was, as you so accurately stated, he was America's first quote-unquote serial killer and first psychopathic.
They invented those terms for him.
He was so horrible.
And he invented a building they now call the Murder Castle or Factory of Death, which, as you noted, from the Ferris wheel, you could see the top of the hotel from the World's Fair.
And he put up lonely ladies that had come from all over the country to visit this spectacle of the World's Fair.
And what I try to explain to people, explaining what it must have been like, I consider him like a lion over the savanna in Africa watching the herds of gazelle.
And I think that's the mistake people make, Lynn.
They try to consider him one of the normal serial killers we read over and over about this was a different man.
This was different.
No, he was, I hate to use this word for him, but he was brilliant.
He did stalk his prey.
He knew exactly what he was doing and so cold and calculated.
And the way he built this murder castle, he would turn people away.
Women would come in and they had two women or three women or whatever.
A guy would come in and he'd say, we're all full.
But if you were a woman by yourself, you definitely got a room.
And can you describe a little bit about the murder castle and the way he set traps up and viewing stations and what was going on there?
Yeah.
And if someone would like to go accurately into the actual architecture of the building, my friend John Borowski wrote a book that I think best describes it.
But you have a building where someone would walk in the lobby as a normal hotel and be given a room if the doctor considered her his next victim.
They would place her in a room where there were gas tents that he could either render her unconscious or asphyxiate her.
And then his assistants, and he would send her down a chute to the basement where he would proceed to work on them in fashions that I try to explain as our real American Frankenstein.
And people, as you know, Glenn, they deny that that kind of thing is possible in America.
Well, it was.
It was.
What do you mean, our American Frankenstein?
He would invent methods of surgery on these victims.
He would conduct experiments in torture.
He actually had a rack where he strapped a young lady to it, tried to impregnate her so that he could see if he could evolve a taller race of human beings.
That's what we're dealing with.
Oh, my gosh.
So can I go back to the first question, Jeff?
When you have somebody like that in your gene pool, did you go through periods where you're like, is there any of that in me?
Yeah, and I knew I was different, Glenn.
I never thought of murdering anyone, but I knew that, you know, I had a temper, I had angers, I had visions that weren't wholesome.
I tended to write those off as just normal reactions of an American male.
But then when my grandfather told me the secret and I started researching, you know, the hundreds of books written about Holmes, those tendencies I had, I could see they had a basis.
There was an origin to them.
Now, I dealt with them in choices.
He obviously made different choices, and that's what I tried to capture in my book, Bloodstains.
So the guys who are the people that were helping him in the murder castle, tell me about them.
Well, and that's one of the most interesting parts of the whole story that hasn't been captured.
He had assistants, law-abiding citizens, who he turned into felons, co-murderers, that actually carried on some of his actions even after he was dead.
Oh, my gosh.
And I think that's one of the things I admired about your synopsis of Holmes, how we need to dig a little deeper into this story.
I think, Glenn, if we studied Holmes more precisely, we might be able to prevent this from happening in the future.
Why?
Why do you say that?
I don't think we understand his mentality.
We tend to write it off as a psychosis or he's a psychopath.
Those terms that we use that mean very little, in my opinion.
Again, literally were invented for him.
Yeah, yeah, because they couldn't describe him.
And this mind of his, while we want to believe he was sick, quote unquote, I think it's more towards the evil side of the equation and that as he said himself, he was born with the devil in him.
So he, if I remember, because it's been a while since I've done that episode.
But if I remember right, he had piercing blue eyes and was quite the charmer.
Oh, he had hundreds of mistresses, as you said, three or four wives.
He could seduce almost any woman he laid his eyes on.
And these women, besides being seduced, often became parts of his cons around Chicago.
And I've often thought of digging a little deeper into the story and writing about the women that fell in love with Holmes.
And one of the New York Times articles at the trial, as the jury came back, rendered him guilty, and the judge determined he was to be put to death, the reporter mentioned that four or five of these women stood up in the jury audience and actually had crocodile tears rolling down their cheeks as he was let off, even when they knew what he was, Glenn.
So there's one more thing before we leave and go into a different chapter, his death.
You just had his body exhumed, and it's fascinating.
We'll get into that.
But also you have a theory that he is the literal Jack the Ripper over in London.
We'll get into that.
But let me make one more stop.
He owned several buildings in Chicago, and one of them was a concrete factory, and it never sold any concrete.
Why do you think he owned that?
I know exactly why he owned that.
He used it to dispose of bodies.
He would put a body into a block of concrete and dump it into the Chicago River.
And as you correctly state, he never sold any concrete despite owning a factory which made concrete.
How many people do you think doing your research?
Because they've never been able to put a number to it.
How many in your research do you think he was actually responsible for killing?
You know, that's a question that'll go on forever.
You have historians state 8, 9, 13.
He admitted to 27, although some of those were found to be still alive after.
And when you get into his memoirs, Glenn, he lied about everything he said.
And that's the hard part to take to accuracy and fact.
But in my opinion, he killed over 200 people.
Whoa.
And How many were tortured and how long did some of those last?
Historians Debate Ripper Death Count00:02:21
I have no idea.
Okay.
So you start your journey and it takes you to some pretty amazing places.
Places like, my great-grandfather may not have actually been hung.
That may not be his body in the crypt underneath the ground.
We'll get to you exhuming the body and what you found because it's pretty stunning here in a second.
But it also took you across the ocean to London and you found some pretty solid evidence, nothing rock solid, but some pretty solid circumstantial evidence that Jack the Ripper, who people believed at the time may have been an American, was actually your great-grandfather.
And we'll talk about that here in a second when we come back.
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DNA Doubts Jack the Ripper Theory00:15:56
You're listening to the Glenbeck program.
We are having just a fascinating conversation with Jeff Mudgett.
He is the great grandson of H.H. Holmes, America's first serial killer, who if you do not know who H.H. Holmes is, I'm running the His Story episode that we did over a year ago on HH Holmes tonight on the blaze, 7 p.m.
It is bone-chilling, but fascinating.
You've never heard an American story like this one.
You can find the book Bloodstains, BloodstainstheBook.com.
There was an eight-episode title show called The American Ripper.
And this goes to the great-grandson's theory that maybe my great-grandfather was Jack the Ripper.
What made you think of this first, Jeff?
Yeah, and, you know, to set it straight right off, Glenn, it's not a maybe to me.
He was Jack the Ripper.
what i used to do for a living and while i can't conclusively prove it i don't think there's any doubt that if you google if you google right now and you google hh holmes and jack the ripper i mean they could be brothers at least I mean, they look an awful lot alike.
You know, and that's exactly.
And that was a composite done by the BBC in Scotland Yard who came up with an identical resemblance.
And then we also did it on the show.
So I can only, when I was writing my book, I was contacted by a gentleman named Mark Potts from Pennsylvania who's been studying Holmes and the Ripper his whole life.
And he gave me some information.
I had the initial response that everyone has, Glenn, when a new suspect as to the identity of Jack the Ripper is raised.
We all doubt it.
But I started looking into the evidence with an open mind.
And lo and behold, I now have zero doubt.
I even gave a TED talk about Holmes being Jack the Ripper.
Oh, I have to watch that.
And we put the audience to a vote.
I swore them in as my jury, and we came out with 77% guilty.
So give me the high-level case here that he's Jack the Ripper.
All right, here we go.
We've got a 5-foot 7-inch, 150-pound, 25- to 35-year-old American doctor with expert anatomical knowledge and surgical skills whose appearance bears a remarkable resemblance to the composite drawings generated from live eyewitness testimonies.
Our suspect is a proven killer whose MO matches subsequent JTR light killings in Chicago and New York.
He was a remarkable writer with an intricate knowledge of how major media worked, and his handwriting is a likely match to the dear boss and saucy jack postcard, which in the opinions of expert English linguists were written by an American trying to sound English.
That is enough.
If Holmes were alive today, Glenn, we could go down and get a warrant for his arrest to have him stand trial for the murders of Catherine Eddoes and Elizabeth Stride.
Do we have any evidence that he was there in England, that he had ever traveled abroad to England?
Do we have anything?
Yeah, during the show, my co-host Amaryllis Fox, who was ex-CIA trained, she went down and researched the passenger lists and found two or three with one with the Holmes name, which was an alias, which is hard to establish as direct evidence, and then two other aliases that he likely used on the trip back.
We also have a letter from Holmes to his lawyer stating that he was irritated with London because he could not find his favorite New York newspaper every day.
And that letter was referring to the same time when Jack the Ripper was there.
No, it's a different time, but we had already established that Holmes had made two or three trips to London in all likelihood.
Glenn, as you know, when you're dealing with Jack the Ripper and 130-year-old crimes, if you and I went back in a time machine, H.G. Wells time machine, and we filmed Holmes murdering one of the victims, we got blood, we had DNA, we brought fingerprints back.
The ripperologists would still doubt my theories.
And that's something that's hard to get around when you deal with Jack the Ripper.
Although I think the show had a number of revelations, including the fact that we've now proven that the dear boss and Saucy Jack Postgard were not hoaxes, as history has stated for over a century.
What's an English lancet, and what role did that play in your work?
I'm not an expert on surgical tools.
I know are those dealt with bloodletting of a victim?
I'm not sure.
It's one of the artifacts that you found during the American Ripper that linked Jack the Ripper and H.H. Holmes.
It was called a Lancet.
So I don't know.
And the tools you're talking about were found when we went to Indianapolis, the site where Holmes murdered one of his partner's young children.
A horrible death.
We found, we had some people come up with a box of Holmes' artifacts.
And inside that box of these artifacts was a lancet from London, which was a surgical tool.
Okay, when we come back, they just dug his body up and what they found inside the concrete crypt.
Next.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
Mercury.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
Jeff Budget is with us, the great-grandson of H.H. Holmes.
He has written a book called Bloodstains.
You can find it, Bloodstains the Book.
His great-great-grandfather was America's first serial killer.
He is the guy they literally coined the term psychopath for.
They didn't know how to describe him.
People couldn't get their arms around him because he was so evil beyond anything that really we have.
You know, I haven't thought of this, Jeff, but I know you have.
Can you compare him to anyone in American history?
I mean, I wouldn't even put him in with Jeffrey Dahmer.
He's much more Nazi kind of mangela kind of guy.
Yeah, he gets into the leaders of history that we consider evil, the Hitlers and those.
The only difference is I don't know if they murdered with their own hands.
They made orders for those to do it.
Herman enjoyed murdering himself.
When he was a teenager in New York, kids started to disappear.
They thought later that he had murdered his best friend by pushing, I think if I remember, right, pushing him out a window and then posed his body and watched him die.
And that's what started this whole thing.
Yeah, we tried to go back and research his childhood in New Hampshire.
And quite frankly, we were unable to dig up any direct evidence in order to make a statement regarding when he first started murdering.
Although the legend from the time, as you state, many people associated with Herman went missing.
Yeah.
So he first went and he started marrying people and they would disappear.
He would murder their children.
He went to Chicago.
He built this house of horrors during the World's Fair.
And that's really kind of where it became untangled.
You in your book, Bloodstains, you say that here's the, you know, not conclusive evidence, but some pretty good circumstantial evidence that he was Jack the Ripper.
He comes back from London.
He's, it was that before he had started building anything in Chicago around the same time.
Can you line that up for me?
Yeah, that was before.
And the interesting part about that, Glenn, is Scotland Yard followed him back across the Atlantic and actually researched Ripper-style murders in New York and were interested in similar style killings in Chicago, but I believe didn't have the budget to continue their investigation.
So what we did on the show was to hire a Chicago detective who tracked down all the murders at the time.
And as you stated in your narration, hundreds went missing during that time.
And lo and behold, as soon as Herman was back in Chicago, Ripper-style killings went through the roof.
And then when he was arrested, finally, they stopped.
And If you don't know who this guy is, tonight on the Blaze at 7 p.m., we're rerunning an episode of his story.
It is the story of America's first serial killer, and it is mind-boggling, and you don't want to miss it.
I don't recommend you watch it with your children.
Maybe you're teenagers, but your children, your little children will be freaked out of their mind because it's an amazing story.
So he's in Chicago.
While he's in Chicago, he is actually looking for other places.
He actually has a tie to Fort Worth, you know, where our studios are.
We're in Dallas, Fort Worth.
He was going to build a second hotel down here, but the Texans kind of caught on to him, right?
Yeah, Herman, you're right.
He was going to build a second, a bigger murder castle, except that Herman's cons were finally catching up with him, Glenn.
And his assistants were starting to get jealous of the money he had that he wasn't sharing with them.
They were also beginning to grow scared of the fact that if you crossed Herman, you ended up missing him.
And, you know, that can only go on so long, even with assistants that you consider very loyal.
So it caught up with Herman, and he was arrested for, quote-unquote, stealing a horse in Texas.
Wow.
So it was actually insurance investigators that eventually nailed him on the murders, right?
They were following, I can't remember exactly.
You'll have to, forgive me, it's been over a year since I've gone through the story again, but wasn't it an insurance guy who was like, wait a minute, this scam is repeating itself and they seem to be tied to him.
Is that right?
Is that how he got caught, finally?
That's absolutely correct.
He was the master of insurance fraud.
He started out, Glenn, by using skeletons.
They would call them resurrectionists.
He would dig them up.
He would change their facial structures so that they couldn't be identified.
And then he would turn them into an insurance company and collect the often as much as $10,000 check.
And he grew tired of the digging up graves in the middle of the night, and he turned to murder more often.
So he's arrested.
He goes to prison in Philadelphia.
What was his prison time like?
Was he popular?
Was he like Jeffrey Dahmer, who eventually was shivved?
Was he remorseful?
What happened to him in prison?
A wonderful question.
During the show, we actually interviewed the superintendent of one of the historical prisons in Philadelphia now, and she shocked us by explaining how Holmes ran the show when he was in prison.
He had his jail cell.
The doors were open.
He had reporters seeing him every day.
He had a desk with his clothes hung up on the walls, much like Al Capone did when he was in prison.
So you believe, if I'm not mistaken, you believe that he was not actually, he never paid for his crimes, that he pulled a body double at the end, and it was not him hanging by the neck.
There was no, he was wearing a hood, but I think that's the way they all were hung at the time.
Maybe I'm wrong on that.
He said that he didn't want an autopsy on his body.
That was honored.
And he was buried weirdly, and it was honored as well.
Can you take me through what you think actually happened to him?
I think you've explained it accurately.
And there aren't many that join me in this theory, but I believe he escaped execution and another was buried in his place.
And I was hoping with American Ripper and the final episode last night that we would be able to answer that question definitively.
And quite frankly, I'm still questioning what we found and how that matches up with the evidence I have that it wasn't Holmes.
Okay, so tell me what you found.
You dig him up.
He's your great-grandfather.
You dig him up.
You want to have DNA testing.
He was buried in this sarcophagus, this giant heavy concrete sarcophagus, which he said, I want to be buried specifically between two plots in Holy Cross Cemetery in a concrete encasing.
He wanted that because he didn't want anybody to dig up his body and do to him what he had done to others.
That's the story.
Is that true?
And what did you find when you opened the sarcophagus?
All right.
We had some archaeologists and anthropologists from the University of Pennsylvania doing the dig, all scientific.
The judge that allowed my request for the exhumation demanded that it be done not as a media circus, but in the interest of history.
So we opened it up.
We took his remains to the university where these archaeologists set them all out for us.
And quite frankly, my first impression of the skeleton, Glenn, was that this wasn't Holmes.
This was a strange-looking human being on the table when all of the reporters had written story after story about what an elegant, handsome man Holmes was that could seduce the ladies at his trial even.
Yeah, but I mean, but I mean, I would imagine he didn't look beautiful after being dead for over 100 years.
How do you mean it didn't look right?
I mean, what were you noticing?
Well, last night, the archaeologist discusses that the skeleton's too short to be Holmes and that the bone structure represented this muscular mass, which wasn't Holmes at all.
They went with dental records, Glenn, which matched those of the physical given to quote-unquote Holmes before the execution by the prison physician.
And what I've tried to raise over and over again was that wasn't Holmes who was examined by the physician.
And those dental records don't match for a reason.
It wasn't him.
As a matter of fact, the physician in his Juma report states, wait a minute, wait a minute.
When he walks into the cell, his quote is, this isn't the guy that's in the papers and the pictures.
This isn't him.
That's what the physician said, Glenn.
Skull Too Short to Be Holmes00:07:07
So I tell you what, the mystery hasn't been solved yet.
Have you done a DNA test?
Could you not?
I mean, you should be able to see if your DNA is his DNA.
The DNA test was done.
It was sent to a laboratory in London.
They're one of three in the world that can do ancient DNA like we needed.
In my opinion, it's inconclusive.
History believes it was conclusive.
That's why they ended the show last night as they did.
So I'm going to try to convince them into continuing the series maybe with a two-hour special so that I can sit down with someone like you or maybe Bill O'Reilly.
But we need to talk through the evidence piece by piece and see if we can answer it.
Well, I'm fascinated by his story.
I'd love to help you in any way, even if it is just matching you up with Bill O'Reilly, because I am fascinated by the story.
The skull still contained brains.
Is that unusual for a body this sold?
One of the scariest moments of my entire life, Glenn, and they didn't show it last night for reasons I've still tried to get them to explain this morning.
But at the university, I took the skull in my hand, much like Hamlet, the scene from Hamlet, looked into the eyes, and as I rolled the skull in my hand, it flopped in my hand.
And I was lucky not to drop it, to break the skull, to tell you the truth.
I grabbed the scientist by the collar and pulled her over and said, Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, what's flopping in my hand?
She goes, There's nothing flopping in your hand.
And I said, Yes, there is.
Here, you try.
And it flopped in her hand.
She looked inside.
His brain was still intact, Glenn, after 121 years.
Any idea why?
I asked her.
She had no idea why.
This is bizarre.
The Holmes mystery continues.
Wow.
You ever feel is this a blessing or a curse for you?
You know, I used to think it was a curse, Glenn, but now that I get the opportunity to go on great shows like yours and explain to the world that if we do this right, we can prevent serial killings in the future.
I think it's a blessing.
Well, that would be a noble, noble goal and a great thing that would come out of this horror.
But I agree with you.
He was not.
He was more than sick, and there was something, you know, he said he was born with evil in him.
I believe that to be true, but there's also something else going on inside of him.
And if we can figure out anything that would help others, it would make this sad story and horror story, American horror story, at least have a happier ending.
The name of the book is Bloodstains.
It's bloodstainsthebook.com.
You can find it there.
You were going to say?
You know, think about that brain preserved at the University of Pennsylvania and 50 years from now, science expanding to the level where we can look into that to see what he actually was.
Are they preserving his brain?
Yes.
Jeff, I would love to meet you sometime because you are just fascinating.
I'm not sure I want to have dinner with you, but you are truly a fascinating guy.
Jeff Mudgett, the great grandson of H.H. Holmes.
Thank you so much, sir.
Appreciate it.
Hey, it's been an honor.
And like I say, your narration of the Holmes story was the best I've ever heard.
Can I just ask you, and I don't mean this to pile on compliments.
I'm confused.
What is it that you thought was different or that we captured that was different?
Well, I'll explain it like this.
I've read everything that's ever been written about Holmes, Glenn, and the way you described it captured the evilness of this man.
It's not another Jeffrey Dahmer.
It's not that.
It was something more than that.
And I think you captured it.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it, Jeff.
Jeff Mudgett, Bloodstains in the Book, or BloodstainstTheBook.com is where you can find more information.
And tonight, the episode that he was just referencing is going to be rebroadcast at 7 p.m. only on theblaze.com.
If you don't have the Blaze on cable, make sure you just subscribe.
I think you can subscribe for free and then just cancel tomorrow after you watch it.
I don't recommend it.
I don't encourage that.
That is what I'm just saying.
I wouldn't recommend it.
I would prefer that you were honest.
And if you see stuff that's worth your time, then you continue to join us.
You can steal a bunch of passwords on the dark web and sign in if you want.
You can do that.
It's easier just to get it free because you forget the password.
You just sign up for free again.
So anyway, Jeffy is really our only sponsor.
We have 2 million subscribers.
Jeffy is the only one that really.
Anyway, do that at theblaze.com slash TV.
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This is the Glenn Beck program.
Mercury.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
So what Jeff didn't want to tell you is that what they actually found out, that wasn't H.H. Holmes' body.
H.H. Holmes, there at the very end, right before he was hung, left the hanging and death industry to go into facial cream.
And sold a lot of it.
Sold a lot of it.
It became very, very clean.
And it's the same facial cream now that Joanna Gaines is leaving.