Glenn Beck and Ryan Holiday dissect Florida's controversial school safety bill, criticizing its gun restrictions while highlighting Peter Thiel's principled $140 million legal victory over Gawker. They debate free trade versus protectionism, noting that tariffs harm consumers more than workers, before analyzing O.J. Simpson's chilling hypothetical confession in his book "If I Did It." The episode concludes with a discussion on the romanticization of dangerous farming jobs and a new study suggesting Amelia Earhart's bones were found on a Pacific island. Ultimately, the conversation underscores the tension between government overreach, ethical business practices, and historical mysteries. [Automatically generated summary]
First, let me tell you how the rest of the media is going to report on it, and then I'll tell you what it actually means.
If you're, you know, scrolling through the internet today, the dominant flash headlines will be, Florida passes bill allowing school staff to be armed.
Okay, the headline's not wrong.
The new bill will allow librarians, media specialists, whatever the hell that is, advisors and coaches and others to carry a gun on school grounds.
Not only does this make schools physically safer, but it also sends a message to any would-be mass murderer that Florida schools are now off limits.
You don't know who has a gun.
It'll now be in the back of their minds that if they raise their barrel in a school, it's going to be met with multiple barrels aimed back at them.
The new bill also provides $300 million in funding for mental health programs, school resource officers, and school safety upgrades.
Depending on what those things are, that's probably pretty good.
This is all great news.
But after taking this important step forward, the state of Florida took a gigantic leap backwards.
Mixed in with all of the measures that actually will improve school safety, the Florida House of Representatives got to work doing what they really wanted to get out of this crisis, and that is gun control.
First of all, the bill restricts firearm purchases for everyone under 21.
Oh, geez, I don't even know where to begin on this one.
So let's start with the most obvious.
How can you approve a bill that nullifies the Second Amendment to anyone aged 18 to 20?
I mean, because when you get right down to it, that's what this does.
The state of Florida is now saying to their estimated 1 million or so adults in this age bracket that the Bill of Rights does not apply to them.
Also, how many mass murderers in the past five years have been under the age of 21?
The answer is two.
The vast majority are in their upper 20s.
By the way, did any of those guys go out and buy those guns?
30 and 40s.
30s and 40s.
I want to give them any more fuel to crap all over the Second Amendment, but we're not even targeting the right age group.
Upper, 20s, 30s, and 40s.
So to the 18-year-old living on your own and struggling to get by in a really rough neighborhood, Florida has declared that it is safer for you not to be able to protect yourself.
If someone breaks into your home and attacks you, don't worry.
You all only have to call the police and then wait.
Or most likely call the police after it's all over and hope that one of your neighbors will call the police.
The same applies to the 20-year-old single mother and the 19-year-old veteran who Florida agrees can carry a gun in a war zone, just not really in the state.
The bill goes on to require a three-day waiting period to buy all guns, which is completely pointless, and a mandate for background checks, which is already the law.
Florida took some good steps with allowing teachers to carry guns and allocating money for mental health and security upgrades.
But hidden within all of these cries of do something are always these little chunks of freedom that are slowly getting whittled away.
If you didn't watch last night's show, it is available on demand now at The Blaze.
We showed you how the Constitution is being raped, violently raped, every single one of the 10 Bill of Rights repeatedly.
And we are losing all of our rights.
We're losing them because we're all crying, something has to be done.
You can blame the NRA.
You can blame the gun manufacturer.
You can blame the school or the sheriff.
But in the end, the government blames you because the government is taking your rights away.
And if we are not careful, if we don't learn the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, freedom will be a long-forgotten memory soon.
It's Thursday, March 8th.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
You know, any foreigner that I know is not concerned about our gun rights.
And the reason why is they say it is, it's never going to happen in America.
It'll never happen in America.
You guys, this is part of your Constitution.
It's not part of anybody else's Constitution.
I think two other countries have it.
Mexico and Guatemala.
It is such an important cornerstone of the American Constitution.
And many countries define us as this.
And they're all like, you'll never do that.
It'll never happen.
You guys, I don't know why you guys are freaked out.
It'll never happen.
I think it's going to happen.
I think they're going to try.
All you need is a couple of more school shootings.
Let me say this.
No, I won't say that.
I can easily come up with a way where all of our rights are taken overnight and we will all be chanting for it.
And I can 100% guarantee you one scenario where the Second Amendment goes away, which is you stop defending it.
Yes.
The second you stop defending it, they will take every little bit of it.
Because I mean, look, that's their whole, that's the whole goal.
I mean, you could tell this by the way they talk about guns.
You know, even when, you know, do we, I can't take it.
I can't take it.
Is this the montage?
Do you want to hear this?
Okay, yeah.
Well, no, I've already heard I don't want to say it.
It is unbelievable.
This will make blood shoot out of your eyes.
Now, listen, it leads to a larger point, though.
Yeah, I want you to know: you don't have to be a gun expert to have an opinion on the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment applies to all of us, whether you like it or not.
So you don't have to be a gun expert.
You don't have to be, well, I can tell you that the wind is now blowing from this direction, and so I need to adjust my, you don't.
But you do need to know what the argument is.
You need to be able to know what a gun is, what it does, how it works, if you're going to join and say, this gun has to be taken out.
Why?
Can you tell me why?
Listen to the media and what they say about guns.
Making sure that we don't have high-capacity, rapid-fire magazines that allow mass killings.
Maybe we shouldn't have high-magazine clips.
Gas-assisted receiver firearms, machine gun magazines, and what sounded like automatic rounds.
Seeing if we can get automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers.
If I wanted to fire this on full semi-automatic, well, why do we need jumbo clips?
The best of a lot of people.
Do you know what a barrel shot?
I actually don't know what a barrel shotgun is.
Because it's in your legendary.
It's still the thing that goes up.
No, it's not true.
What the District of Columbia was trying to do was to protect toddlers from guns.
It is harder to buy cough medicine than it is to buy an AK-47 or 50 of it.
It is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.
It's legal to hunt humans with 15 round, 30 round, even 150 round magazines.
And he was not able to buy a weapon that shoots off 700 rounds in a minute.
Pistols are different.
You have to pull the trigger each time.
An assault weapon, you basically hold it, goes, it's not true.
No, those are fully automatic weapons.
This right here has ability with a 30-caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second.
Because these silencers make them more available.
Because imagine how their ears were hurting.
If you want to protect yourself, get a double-barrel shotgun.
Put that double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house.
If you ban them in the future, the number of these high-capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won't be any more available.
But some of these bullets, as you saw, have an incendiary device on the tip of it, which is a heat-seeking device.
So you don't shoot deer with a bullet that size.
If you do, you could cook it at the same time.
That deer deserves to get away.
Let's get serious here.
Oh my gosh, a heat-seeking bullet.
I've never, I want some of those.
Heat-seeking bullets.
Huh?
That's an inexplicable montage by the Washington Free Beacon.
The fact that those clips exist is so embarrassing.
And we're arguing with these people about the Second Amendment.
It's amazing.
And first of all, you know, but this is, if I want to turn this into a full semi-automatic weapon, it either is or it isn't a semi-automatic weapon.
You don't turn it from a John Wayne six shooter into a semi-automatic.
Full means I'm going to clip it now.
I'm going to push it into the fully automatic, which means now I hold the trigger down and it's a machine gun.
Those are illegal.
When in this clip where Obama is saying we need to get rid of these automatic weapons, we've gotten rid of the automatic weapons.
There's a ban on those.
You have to have, it takes you a long time.
It took me a year to be able to go through the process to get the license to be able to have a fully automatic weapon.
It is probably, the ones I have are probably $800 guns.
I paid over $20,000 for each of them.
I have two of them.
I want to fire them because they're fun.
I don't fire them because the laws around them are so strict that I'm afraid anytime I touch that gun or take that gun or somebody, God forbid, is going to touch that gun, that I go to prison.
So we've already pretty much taken care of those guns.
You notice that the bad guys have stopped getting those?
No.
You know why?
Because you can make one if you're really, if you're handy, if you can just read a book and you're good with tools, you can find somebody or make it fully automatic.
You can do it.
You'll also go to prison, but I don't think the guys who are either the choice is I know somebody who can make one of these for me and just gonna keep it quiet because I'm a drug dealer or I'm just gonna go buy one.
I don't care if it costs me $100,000 because I'm a drug dealer.
Yeah, a guy in, I think it was California just got arrested because he had built several weapons.
He was banned from having them, but he had built them himself.
Yes.
Because that's, you know, in today's world with technology, you don't have to be a gunsmith to do it.
But again, going to the arguments here, you know, when you're asking us to take you seriously when you go for a semi-automatic assault rifle ban, you don't have to.
I am not a gun nerd.
I don't, I mean, we have had this happen before, and it is frustrating, I will say, because there's an op-ed in the Washington Post, and they were like, people are just gunsplaining to you.
So you bring up an argument and they just pick apart all the things that you said that were wrong about the details of the guns, and that's not important.
That's the left's new argument because they don't know anything about guns.
They've given up trying to act as if they do.
And now the argument is stop acting like I can't have an opinion because you know more about guns than I do.
Okay, all right.
Then you know what?
I'm going to stop.
I want you to stop acting like I have no right to opinions on race because I'm white.
I want you to stop telling me that I have no opinions on abortion because I'm a man.
All right.
You can't have it both ways.
It's ridiculous.
But I don't agree with that, right?
I don't agree.
You can't have opinions.
You don't have to.
But you can have an opinion on the Second Amendment, but you cannot make the case about a certain gun being banned if you don't know anything about that certain gun.
Yeah.
Now, it's true.
And what's interesting about it is there is one time where you can, I believe.
You can make an argument when you don't know anything about the difference between semi-automatic and automatic or handguns and shotguns and a sword.
Or if you're the vice president and say, take your shotgun out and fire a couple shots in the air.
It's illegal to do that.
If you were an NRA member, you'd know that, Joe.
You'd know that.
You'd know that.
But you know when it is okay to have that opinion?
And you know when it doesn't matter when you know the difference between semi-automatic and automatic guns?
When you're actually going after all guns.
You don't need to know the difference between semi-automatic and automatic if you're going for all of them.
If your real argument is take them all away, then there's no need to learn about the differences and why they are there and how they would be used and what effects they would have.
Because in reality, that's what they're arguing.
They know they can't get it right now.
They're looking for progressive steps towards the removal of all of them.
So there's no need for them to know the difference because is it a gun or not is the only fact they need.
Does it kill people?
Is it a gun?
You don't need that kind of gun.
By the way, I just want to remind you that the assault rifle is actually a modern sporting rifle.
It was not a weapon of war that was brought onto the market.
It was a hunting rifle in the 1950s, in the 1950s, that the Pentagon saw and went, that's just a better rifle.
The Disturbing Push Experiment00:15:49
Can we buy the rights to that and be able to make these for the military?
Yes, they were on the market as deer rifles, as hunting rifles, a decade before they went to Vietnam.
So please stop with this is a weapon of war.
This is a modern sporting rifle.
You know, there's a couple of things we have to do.
I want to take...
I want to take people to the range with me.
If you are afraid of guns, if you are somebody who, you know, I just don't know where I stand on this.
I'm afraid of guns.
I want to, and we'll try to come up with a way to do this tomorrow and have you call in tomorrow.
But I want to take some people to fire guns who have never done it before.
Because unless you've fired them, unless you know, you have no concept, no concept of the sport of rifles, the sport of guns, and how they actually can save your life, not just kill people.
Also, if you watched the push last night, we gave you a homework assignment.
If you watch the push, call us now, 888-727-BECK.
I want to switch gears and talk about the push.
We'll do that right now.
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Glenn Back Mercury.
Glenn Beck.
There's a lot to talk about today, a lot to cover.
We have coming up in a little while, we have Ryan Holliday.
He wrote a book called Conspiracy that is really fascinating about one of the, I think, bigger news stories of the day coming up in a little while.
Also, at the top of hour number three, we are going to talk a little bit about free trade and just the principles behind free trade.
Why is this a conservative principle?
Is it easy to win a trade war?
What's the history behind that?
And why is this an important thing for conservatives?
We'll deal with those coming up in a minute.
Also, yesterday, we talked about the push.
Yeah, a lot of people watched it.
I like Justin says, luckily, I was socially compliant and watched the push.
Now I can spoil it.
I like that.
And also another tweet at World of Stew is where you can tweet these.
I'm watching Push and cannot believe this.
It's blowing my freaking mind.
I'm so embarrassed for him.
I can't even look at the screen half the time.
It is terrifying.
Now, let me, before we start taking your phone calls on what you learned from it or what you thought, it is a social experiment, except it's man, it's borderline reality show, too, you know, to where it was done, I think, in a, in a scientific way.
Can you take an average person and convince them to murder a stranger in 90 minutes?
Not somebody that is somebody just like you.
Can you get them to murder a stranger in 90 minutes?
And the results are shocking.
People who watch the push on Netflix, call us now.
We're going to take your phone calls next.
Glenn back Mercury.
You're listening to the Glenn Beck program.
All right.
So The Push is something on Netflix.
It was created by a psychologist who is also a magician in England, and he does social experiments.
And this is a one episode.
It's not a series.
It's just one episode.
It's called The Push on Netflix.
And it's a documentary.
Kind of.
It's a cross between a documentary and a reality show.
It's an uncomfortable mix.
But what he's doing is, can we convince somebody, the average person, to murder in 90 minutes?
And they start the episode with a phone call into a restaurant where a woman is sitting with a baby stroller and a baby.
And somebody from the restaurant just picks up and they say, hey, is this so-and-so's restaurant?
Yes.
Do you see a woman with a baby carriage?
Yes.
We're the police.
That baby is not hers.
We need you to distract her, get the baby, tell her that somebody's waiting for her on the phone, put the phone away, grab the baby carriage, push it out of the restaurant, meet me at the corner.
Okay.
So they convince in three minutes, they convince somebody to steal someone's baby just because unknown child of Dr. She wasn't.
She wasn't.
And you're only taking the word of a stranger on the phone that he is the police.
Okay.
It's fascinating.
So then they say, all right, but what we're going to try to do is a lot harder.
And I think they have 90 actors and 90 minutes.
Everybody's in on it except this one person.
They do it to four different people, you find out.
And the idea is, can we create a social situation just through social pressure to get these people to actually push a stranger off the top of a building in 90 minutes and kill them?
It is unbelievable.
One of the most shocking things I've ever seen.
Can we give some classroom guidelines here, Glenn?
Yes.
Okay.
So we gave you homework yesterday to watch the show.
Yes.
If you didn't do your homework, that's going to be a problem.
However, because it'll make you want to watch this even more.
Yeah, that's true.
But if you are on the phone and you're calling in, we don't want to give away the end of the episode.
I mean, we can talk about what happened in it.
Yeah, but we don't want to give away the end.
Anybody push or not push?
We don't want to, don't give that away.
Don't give that away.
The rest of it, I think, is generally speaking fair game.
If you are super, you know, if you're going to watch it tonight, you might want to think about we're going to try to be as careful as we can.
But as long as we don't say, it's fascinating, even if you know all the way along, because the way they pulled this off is really remarkable.
And you're asking yourself the whole question, would I do that?
Would I do that?
Because it starts small.
Would you do it still?
Absolutely not.
No.
How far along would you go?
I mean, the first one is funny for me because they're vegetarian and that's what they do.
They put real meat hot dogs and then they put flags that say they're vegetarian in them because they don't have the vegetarian hot dogs.
Even that I wouldn't do because, but that's just a weird one for me.
I think in a normal situation, people would do that.
This whole situation is somebody is trying to help out this massive charity, well-known.
Everybody who's anybody is involved, and they're helping out the main person and their boss is the one who hooked them up into this.
And so the first thing is they're in the kitchen and like, geez, man, the vegetarian meat didn't show up.
These are just real hot dogs.
Just put the vegetarian signs on this.
That's the first compliance.
And it's breaking down your will and getting you to comply little pieces at a time to build to 90 minutes.
You're going to kill somebody because we're asking you to do it.
It's amazing.
I'm very interested to see where people feel that they might bail out of it.
And were they disturbed by this show?
So I think the worst of me, the best of me stops at the vegetarian because I think that can make people sick.
You know, you're a vegetarian and you might have health reasons for doing that.
I hope the best of me says I stop there.
The worst of me says I stop somewhere between giving the speech, hopefully I don't give the speech, and moving the body to the stairwell.
I don't think I get to the stairwell.
I think I could get to the point where I put them in a box.
Outside of that, I don't think I could go any further.
This is an amazing thing.
Okay, so we go to Jeff in Chicago.
Hello, Jeff.
Good morning.
What were your thoughts?
Well, two pieces to this, Glenn.
First of all, the show is incredibly disturbing.
I found myself watching this and thinking in my head, I wouldn't do that.
But then when you replay and you think the situation the gentleman's been put in in balancing this overall good of this charitable charitable donation to, you know, can I just do this to get to the overall good?
And what I found myself wondering is, which percentages do these folks fall in about attending church, right?
From yesterday.
Yeah.
From yesterday.
What's the constant moral north that was guiding these individuals, right?
Because that's the ultimate balance here.
And I'll throw this at you because I don't have the perfect tinfoil hat that you do, but I'm trying.
A second show that I'll turn you on to that I would suggest you overlay with the push.
Carrie Byron, formerly of MythBusters, The three of them started a show on Netflix entitled White Rabbit Project.
Now, it's a series, but you only need to watch the first episode.
In this first episode, they try to replicate superpowers, and they find a gentleman who successfully took a living cockroach and turned it into a cyborg that she could control with her telephone.
Tell this live cockroach when to walk left, when to walk right.
The ultimate conclusion of it was the scientist who did this was able to put electrodes on his arm, bridge them via wire to electrodes on her arm, and he could move her arm for her whether she wanted to or not.
What?
But it was all fake?
It was all real.
All right.
All right.
Now I've got another stick.
Thank you.
Thanks for watching.
Don't add any shows to you can't assign the teacher homework.
Let's go to Justin in Tennessee.
Hello, Justin.
Hey, Glenn.
My wife and I watched the show last night, and I was initially really disturbed and was thinking I would never do this stuff, especially once it got to putting the body in the crate.
That was where I was like, I definitely wouldn't do that.
I've always prided myself as being a critical thinker and being willing to stand up and challenge things.
But then I started thinking about my story.
As a teenager, I was a hardcore Republican.
I moved into libertarianism and then Christian anarchism, which is a whole nother thing.
Yeah, that is a whole nother thing.
And you can't assign me homework on that.
All right.
Tolstoy.
Tolstoy is a Christian anarchist.
Anyway, I still consider myself that.
But as I moved into that, I realized I was kind of more aligned with folks on the left.
And I still occasionally would push back, but over the last probably 2014 to 2016, I was very much, I would even consider myself, I'd gotten to the point of being a social justice warrior.
And sometime in 2016, I finally realized that I'm not thinking for myself anymore.
And so watching this, I was like, this same sort of thing has happened to me in different ways.
I don't know that I would kill somebody.
Yeah, I will tell you, and I don't want to tell how people, you know, what they did at the end, but I thought it was really interesting the interviews with those subjects afterwards who talked and said, you know, I have to rethink everything in my life.
I mean, I don't think that's where you would land after that experience.
And if you take this and you really watch this and you look at it as a science experiment, and you also have, if you've ever read Ordinary Men, which is a real deep scholarly look at how the Nazis turned the Polish, the really good men who were police officers into brutal killers, it's the same story.
It's exactly the same story.
And so you kind of wonder, geez, would I do that or not?
Let me go to Cliff in West Virginia.
Hello, Cliff.
Let me go to Kim in North Carolina.
Kim, are you there?
Hello.
Hi, Kim.
Hi, guys.
Hi.
Yeah, I saw it last night and it was disturbing, honest and true.
I started watching it, and like you said earlier, I kept asking myself, would I do that?
Would I go this far?
Would I go this far?
And I really don't think I would have gotten any further.
Once they took him out of the crate and put him at the stairwell, that's when I would have said, sorry, I'm done.
Yeah.
I'm done.
Can't do this.
Did you feel like it was morally okay for them to make that show?
I'm very conflicted on that question.
In a way, I think it is because it will open people's eyes to realizing that we aren't as strong as we think we are.
Yeah, exactly.
We're a lot more vulnerable than we think we are than we'd like to be.
When you said you found it disturbing, I found it the same way, but it's different than like a horror movie that you're like, okay, saw that was disturbing.
There's no redeeming value in it.
This was disturbing because, in a good way, because it made me examine me.
It made me, it put me into a very uncomfortable situation going, geez, I don't know.
Would I do that?
Would you agree with that, Kim?
All through the show.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, I kept asking myself all through that, would I do that?
What would I do if I if I was that that guy?
You know, how, how far would I have gotten?
And I mean, he kept saying no, no, and then he'd eventually do it.
And I'm like, why are you doing that?
You know, it's uncomfortable.
You know it's wrong.
Examining Our Own Morality00:03:26
Why are you doing that?
But at the same point, I'm sure all of us have our limits.
It's really, you know.
Yeah.
Kim, thank you for your call.
It really is interesting because it's not just the social pressure.
I mean, the social pressure really comes in towards the end, but it's not just the social pressure.
It is the pressure of ends justify the means.
This is such a good, and if I don't do this, it won't be good.
It's too important.
It's too important.
I have to do this.
I know I'm bending my principles, but this time it's too important.
Quickly, just to review, we're talking about the push.
It's a Netflix show.
If you haven't seen it, moderate spoilers are sort of applying here.
We're not giving away the ending or anything like that, but we are discussing it.
And you'll still enjoy it even if you...
Yes, absolutely.
The idea is, would you kill somebody?
In 90 minutes, can they take average people and in 90 minutes later, they've become a cold-blooded killer.
Yeah.
And it's interesting to hear every caller has said the same thing.
They'll go a little bit down this road, but I know I would have stopped here.
I know I would have stopped here.
What I found interesting about it was, you know, I guess people, we are really more vulnerable than we thought.
And I find that to be interesting because the same people who were in this situation on the show likely would have sounded just like the callers and us, who would say we would have stopped at this point.
Yeah.
But also kind of judging others and saying like, hey, you know, we are more vulnerable.
And that's the underlying, I think, message here.
There is an underlying message of the show, which is really informative for everything, everything that you do in your life, which is you really need to have these decisions made before you get to a stressful point.
Because when you get into the stressful moment, human beings will follow the path of the least resistance way too often.
You better have principles that stop you each time.
And the answer would be every single time with these four people.
And it may have been, it may be this in the end, that all four said, no, I won't kill.
All four may have said, I will kill.
But if you would have asked them at the beginning of the night, hey, will you murder this person?
No way.
They would have laughed.
They would have walked away.
No way.
It's just that they had made compromises, starting as small as putting a flag in a vegetarian, in a non-vegetarian dish that said vegetarian.
It's the small little compromises all the way.
And that's the thing you read in, if you read ordinary men, it didn't happen.
They didn't just all say, okay, I'm a good cop now to I can just shoot children in the head in the middle of the woods and put them in a big burial mound.
It didn't go that way.
It was small little things that they needed to get them to violate one at a time.
And we're in this together.
I really do want to have more of a conversation on.
Is it morally right to do this as a almost as a reality show?
It wasn't, but it was so close to a reality show.
It was really, it's uncomfortable, but I think important to watch.
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Glenn Beck, Mercury, Glenn Beck.
Isn't it amazing how influenced we are by others and how we all, like at the very beginning of the show on Netflix, The Push, they select people or they disqualify people that could be part of this experiment by just getting them to go into a room with three actors.
Everybody, nobody knows their actors.
And they go in with these actors and they're just filling out an application for something.
Nobody's talking.
They're just all working and they're standing by these chairs.
When the bell rings, the three actors sit down.
Then does the person who they're trying to figure out can be on the show, will he sit down or not?
And then when the bell rings twice, they stand up.
Bell rings, sit down.
Stand up, sit down.
It's amazing how many people do that.
And are we doing that now on social media?
Are we just hearing the bell ring and we see a story?
We see a reaction.
We hear a bell ring and we go to social media and we react the way the crowd is reacting.
Glenn Beck, Mercury.
Courage.
Truth.
Glenn back.
Political activism has infected one of the most important institutions in America.
Yes, McDonald's.
Since today is International Women's Day, McDonald's in California has flipped its golden arches upside down to resemble W. Get it?
M, which is bad because men starts with an M like McDonald's.
He turned upside down and now it's woman.
Wow.
Another W word.
McDonald's is, you know, is Following suit with all the digital platforms, you know, maybe I'm crazy, but I think this is just, you know, a cheap publicity.
So I don't think there's not a single woman that I know or respect that would be driving by going, you know what?
Suddenly, I am going to have that quarter pounder with cheese.
They respect me.
I mean, they employ women at all levels.
Many of the customers are women.
Many of the customers are not women.
You know, they make sure that they have boy and girl-centric happy meal toy options.
I mean, do we need to really celebrate women even more?
How about we get a transgendered Ronald McDonald?
And Grimace has always been, I don't know if that's a man or a woman.
He is, he's cis neutral.
Anyone with a brain cell knows this is a pandering marketing campaign and it's working.
Everyone is covering it.
But will it do anything?
I mean, does anybody think, oh, you know what?
I'm going to fight for that gender inequality in our society because McDonald's has turned their sign upside down.
I'm guessing it's not going to sell an extra hamburger.
I'm just guessing no.
I would argue that McDonald's already does a great job at eradicating inequality between the sexes.
We're all equal when we pull up to that drive-through and that window late at night and embarrassingly bark out an order and ask for two Big Macs and large fries, something that all of our mothers would have said, do not eat that crap.
We do it, male or female, and we all feel the same shame.
Secrets and Legal Compromises00:07:37
It's Thursday, March 8th.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
Do the ends justify the means?
Are there real white hats and black hats anymore?
Can you actually be a white hat taking down a black hat if you've done them in nefarious ways?
Are you wearing a gray hat or are you wearing a black hat?
There are so many things today that we'd all like to see, you know, dishonest bad media go away and collapse on its own weight.
We might even cheer when something like Gawker, which was a despicable website, when Gawker went out of business and had to shut down, we might all cheer.
However, are we comfortable with the idea that a billionaire can conspire and make that happen?
Even though the end is good.
Ryan Holliday is an author.
He wrote a great book called Trust Me, I'm Lying, which is a fantastic read to go back to see how the news you see every day gets to you.
It's a sausage.
It's incredible.
You'll find teeth and shoes in it.
You have to read that.
The new book is Conspiracy, Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue.
And it brings us through this entire story, and Ryan joins us now.
So, Ryan, can you tell this story like only you can?
Tell this story before we get into what we are supposed to learn from it.
Well, it's an almost unbelievable story.
In 2007, Gawker Media, a gossip website in New York City, has a Silicon Valley arm called ValleyWag, and they out the Silicon Valley investor, Peter Thiel, as gay.
He's at that point the founder of PayPal.
He was an early investor in Facebook, but a relatively unknown person whose sexuality was known to his friends, but he was not publicly gay.
He's humiliated by this.
He's frustrated by it.
He's hurt.
Gawker's headline, I believe, was, Peter Thiel is totally gay people.
So imagine your most sensitive secret being made public in such a flippant way.
And he finds this not to be illegal, but to be disgusting.
Hang on just a second.
Ryan, when this happens with Gawker, is this because I find Gawker despicable.
They've done things to me and my family that are just despicable.
But on this, people were saying, well, we should out people because that's only going to make people more comfortable with gay people if they know you're around them all the time.
So were they using the ends justify the means at that time to do something good?
Or are they just dirtbags?
I think it's a little bit of both, right?
I think they thought, why should he get to keep this secret?
And I think they also thought, why should it be a secret?
This isn't something to be ashamed of.
But the truth is, he didn't want it to be public, and I believe that's his prerogative.
Yeah, it's his story to tell, not anybody else's.
And so he sort of despairs of being able to do anything about it for five years.
He just sort of sits on this.
He's frustrated.
He's hurt by it.
But he can't do anything about it.
And it's only in 2012 when Gawker makes another enemy.
They run an illegally recorded sex tape of the professional wrestler, Hulk Hogan, that Thiel sees the opportunity that he's been looking for this whole time, that he'd been looking for.
He'd hired a lawyer to spot opportunities like this.
He approaches Hulk Hogan and he says, look, what they did to you is not only despicable, I think it's illegal both federally and in Florida where you're a resident.
I will fund this.
Teal approaches him through an intermediary.
This is totally in secret.
I will fund this case as far as you're willing to take it.
And he approaches a number of other people who have similar cases.
And then for the next four years, this case winds its way through the legal system.
And he eventually wins $140 million bankruptcy-inducing verdict against Gawker in Florida to the shock of all onlookers and legal strategists at the time.
And he achieves that thing that he had set out to do in 2007, which was to both get his revenge and to prevent this website that he believed to be evil from doing what it did to people.
So I know Peter.
He is a very, you know, generally quiet guy.
You know, he's an odd duck.
He's a really nice guy.
Doesn't seem like a guy who's driven by vengeance, but does sound like a guy or feels like a guy who will take all the time necessary in the world.
He is not in any hurry.
He'll wait until it's right.
Well, that's what's so brilliant about what he did.
I think most of us, when something is done to us, we react, we respond, right?
A fight breaks out.
A conspiracy, to me, is more something that brews, that develops.
And that's what was so brilliant about Peter.
He didn't, he said, look, what they did to me, I don't think was right.
And I'm angry about it.
But it's never good to be driven by anger.
And so instead, he stepped back.
He never forgot what happened, but he looked for an opportunity where he actually had legal ground to stand on, where he actually could have an impact, where the public would be so universally repulsed by what these people did that he would have a shot at making a difference.
And so I think both that patience and that ability to be strategic is why he was able to solve a problem, if that's what you want to call it, that many other powerful people had looked at and said, basically, there's nothing you can do about this.
But he didn't do, did he become the thing that he despised?
I don't get the impression that he did.
He did this on the up and up.
The only thing, the reason why it's a conspiracy is he didn't want to be out front, but now that it's known, he doesn't mind.
I mean, he's owning it now.
Sure.
Look, I think secrecy is a fundamental element of a conspiracy.
And I respect that he was willing to see that the optics of a billionaire being publicly in front of this thing completely changes how the public would look at it.
But he said to me, he got this advice from one of his friends.
His friend said, Peter, you have to choose your enemies carefully because you become just like them.
And so that's really the danger of spending nine years scheming to destroy or ruin someone or something is that you study them so much, they consume so much of your mental bandwidth that you can kind of become like them.
I don't think that he became anything like Gawker, but for instance, there's a seminal moment in jury selection where they notice that overweight female jurors are the most sympathetic to their case.
Choosing Your Enemies Carefully00:14:58
And now that's not disgusting, but there is an element of unpleasantness in selecting a juror to then exploit their most vulnerable body issue.
But don't you think that that's done in the court system every day of the week?
Well, agreed.
My point is I think we tend to be idealists about change.
We think that we can make change without getting our hands dirty or without dealing with some of this unpleasantness.
And so there's compromises in pursuing something of this magnitude.
And I think Peter was so committed to what he was doing that he felt that that means did justify the end.
So Ryan has spent a lot of time with Peter Thiel.
Peter Thiel, this is not an anti-Peter Thiel book.
This is Peter worked side by side.
He had unprecedented access to Peter.
And while Peter didn't, I don't think, Ryan, unless there's another conspiracy, he didn't fund this book.
He just gave access more with Ryan Holliday.
The book is conspiracy.
And there's some tough questions that we have to ask ourselves.
More in a minute.
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Gold is up, and it has lots of room to run.
And that is for several reasons.
When things go unstable, gold is always the safe haven.
When interest rates go up, gold is a safe haven.
When inflation goes up, gold is a safe haven.
All of those things are happening right now, and that's why gold is up.
Nobody that I know that has half a brain cell is an all-in person on gold.
Yeah, take it and get it all out and put it.
You know, you have an IRA.
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You have some in the bank.
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Glenn Beck Mercury. Glenn Beck.
We're with Ryan Holliday.
He is the author of a book called Conspiracy, Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue.
It's a really, it's a very tough question that we have to tackle, but I want to get a couple of more facts out of the way here before we do with Ryan.
Ryan, a couple of things that have been picked up from the book.
One thing that Peter had conversations about his strategy trying to get Gawker to go away.
And they discussed, at least seemingly, it comes off a little flippantly, but at least considered doing things that were actually illegal when it comes to the examples, to well, I'm sure Ryan can walk us through the examples.
I don't have them in front of me.
Go ahead, Ryan.
It struck me as a little bit of a tempest in a teepa, the media coverage, because it's like getting in trouble for thinking about speeding and then not speeding.
But if you think about Teal's position, he finds Gawker to be this great evil.
He's trying to do something about it.
But as a billionaire, he has essentially limitless resources.
He's also the majority owner of one of the most powerful intelligence and defense companies on the planet.
So he has these immense resources.
And so it's a question then of which of them is he going to use and what limitations is he going to impose on himself.
So theoretically, could he hire private detectives to follow Gawker writers and attempt to find dirt on them that would be embarrassing?
Could he start a rival website that would focus nothing, but nothing on their personal lives?
Could he bribe employees to leak information to him?
Could he lobby politicians to go after them?
There's many things that he could do.
But what he decides actually early on after sort of laying all these options out on the table is that he wants only to do what's legal and ethical because he's both, I think, an ethical and moral person, but also because at some point your involvement is made public.
At some point you win and then the public looks at what you did and they judge you for this, right?
And so his belief was that if they accomplished this thing they were trying to accomplish with unethical or illegal means, the victory wouldn't stand.
And it would also be, as we were talking about earlier, it would be Pyrrhic in the sense that it would come at a great cost to himself because he would have had to become the thing that he was trying to change in the first place.
I have to tell you, I am, you know, this is kind of being spun as an anti-Peter Thiel book.
And just that alone speaks volumes.
I mean, I don't know how many billionaires there are that would have the self-control that he had to say, no, I want to do it.
I want to do it the right way.
Can you tell me anything?
Because you have an exclusive in this about a guy named Mr. A. What is who?
I know you're not going to tell me who, but what is Mr. A's role?
Well, one of the weirdest twists of this story, this incredibly well-covered story, I think people thought, I guess myself included, thought like Peter Thiel was involved on a day-to-day basis.
And in fact, he sort of follows the startup model, which is in 2011, he has dinner with this promising young college graduate who has told Peter he has an idea, and they sit down to dinner.
And this kid says, Peter, I think I can solve your Gawker problem.
I think that buried in their archive of posts are illegal acts or acts that make them vulnerable to civil judgments.
And I think he says, if you give me $10 million in three to five years of time, I think I can make something happen here.
And basically on the spot, Peter invests in this kid.
And this kid is Peter's go-between, his operative who hires the attorneys, who vets the cases, who makes the decisions day to day.
And Peter is, in the way that Peter puts $500,000 in Mark Zuckerberg's hands and he goes and makes Facebook, Mr. A goes and makes this conspiracy a reality.
So what do you think Mr. A is going to be doing now?
Well, I would imagine when you solve a problem for a billionaire like this, the world is sort of your oyster from that point forward.
I think he's got basically limitless options now and has one patron who's probably willing to back him on any project under any condition.
Holy cow.
What was Peter's motivation in cooperating with you, Ryan, on this book?
Well, as I'm sure you guys have seen just seeing the coverage and now talking to me, this is a story that has been intensely covered, but with such bias and such sort of tribal instincts on behalf of the media, because the media sees what happens to Gawker, and they think, oh, that could happen to us.
Let's circle the wagons.
So there's been this incredible amount of judgment about what's happened.
And I think that's greatly impacted the coverage, right?
To such a degree that Peter has become, in many people's eyes, this sort of James Bond villain.
And that's really not what he is when you meet him and you see what he did and why he did it.
And so I think, you know, I'd written critically about Gawker many times myself.
My emails were once hacked and leaked to Gawker.
And so I know what that feeling is like.
So I was willing to at least be fair.
I told Peter, look, you're not going to get to see the book before it's printed.
You're not going to have any input on it.
I'm going to play it down the middle.
But I think he at least believed that I would play it down the middle rather than holding him up as the villain if that wasn't true.
So, Ryan, there's if I'm just trying to think this through.
If a billionaire, say George Soros, who is not a friend of mine, if he decided to go after me and I was doing something, the Blaze was doing things that were blatantly illegal.
And I don't mean, you know, death by a million paper cuts, what a billionaire could do.
I don't think I would have sympathy for Peter if he had just been paper cut after paper cut, technicality after technicality, just keep him in court and bleed him dry.
I don't think this is a problem for the First Amendment if they're going after things that are really, truly illegal and they're big.
And I'd like to get your response on that when we come back.
What does this mean for the First Amendment that a billionaire can mark somebody and then take them out?
is that good for the republic when we come back glenn back mercury.
This is the Glenn Beck program.
I am, I'm currently on a couple week rant of we've got to do something and how that always leads to bad things.
You just don't make good decisions when you're angry, upset, emotionally.
We've got to do something.
It usually also means I'll violate my principles because I want this pain to stop.
So what are our principles?
I didn't like Gawker.
Gawker did some things that were dangerous for my family.
I thought they were despicable people.
And I did wish them to go out of business.
But I wouldn't have done anything to get them to go out of business.
And I like the way Peter Thiel did this.
He waited to see, is there something that they have done that breaks the law?
When they had Hulk Hogan, that was an illegally recorded tape.
And for what?
What was the purpose of exposing that?
So Peter took them to court on that.
The problem is, is he's a billionaire, has unlimited sources.
And are we setting a precedent that somebody who has an axe to grind can put another company out of business?
One man can put a media company out of business if they want to.
Did anybody learn that lesson in a negative way?
Ryan is with us.
Ryan Holiday is the author of the book Conspiracy, Peter Thiel, Hulk, Hulgan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue.
What have you come to, Ryan, on that?
Well, that is the big question.
And it is potentially scary to think that a billionaire could shut a media outlet down.
And then when you step back, you know, your point about not reacting emotionally.
Well, did Peter actually do anything new that doesn't happen every day anyway, right?
The ACLU, the Sierra Club, the NRA, they back cases all the time that they think move their ideology forward or stands up for one of their constituents.
And so the idea of a wealthy person backing a lawsuit, not out of financial gain, but out of ideological alignment, is actually, you know, not remotely new.
And if you were to ban it, society would undoubtedly become a worse place, right?
Why shouldn't your rich uncle be able to support you against a person who ran into you with their truck, right?
So there's the legal question, which I think he did everything right.
And then there's the ethical question, which I think he did everything right.
But you have to ask that ethical question, too.
And would you have felt different if he would have taken Gawker on with almost frivolous lawsuits and just done death by a thousand paper cuts?
Do you think it would have been a different story for you?
Absolutely, because there you're not actually attempting to win.
You're not attempting to have your argument validated.
You're attempting to destroy someone for something that they may have not actually done wrong.
And so Peter's decision, for instance, not even to attack on First Amendment grounds, because he believes that that is sacred, but to look instead at the individual's right to privacy, right?
Is there a newsworthiness in this sex tape or is there a copyright claim here?
He specifically did not sue them on, say, frivolous libel or defamation grounds because he was worried about the precedent that it might set.
And he didn't believe there was anything wrong there.
So his distinction is really, really important.
And I think a potential hypothetical would be: what if a liberal had backed Shirley Sherrod in her lawsuit against Breitbart when they ran that deliberately edited manipulative tape of hers in, I believe it was 2011.
And I don't think many of the people who are deeply upset about what happened to Gawker, I don't think they would be upset if Breitbart had gone out of business in 2012.
I think they'd be cheering it the exact same way.
So go ahead, follow up.
Very interesting.
Yes, that's absolutely true.
I wanted to get your take quickly on I can't remember the guy's name who actually wrote the story, but he's become somewhat of a cause celeb on the left of a guy because he's not the guy, he's not Nick Denton who ran Gawker, but the guy who actually just did the post.
Gawker's Irony and Liability00:05:35
He's a lowly comedy.
Yes, yes.
He's just a writer and he's working for Gawker, not making a ton of money.
And he was involved in this lawsuit and he has been presented as this guy who got in the middle of this thing and he was helpless in this situation.
And now he has no chance of making any money.
He owes like, you know, an ungodly amount of money for this lawsuit and can't do anything about it.
He wasn't wealthy.
He didn't own Gawker.
Can you give any perspective on that and how you see how that went down?
Yeah, so in a way, he's just doing his job.
Like Gawker publishes these stories all the time.
It's so unremarkable when he gets the Hulk Hogan tape that Nick Denton, the CEO, isn't even notified, right?
The case that bankrupts the company, the CEO doesn't know about it until after it's published because that's how run of the mill it actually was.
And so, yes, it was unfortunate that this individual, this writer doing his job, takes the full brunt of it in the public eye during the trial and then is held liable.
The jury says holds him personally liable for about $100,000 of this $140 million judgment.
But what people forget is that months after the verdict, Peter and Hulk Hogan settle with Gawker that releases both Denton and Delario from these individual claims, and they're able to walk free.
They were not necessarily ruined by it.
And Peter said, look, my goal was to destroy Gawker, not to ruin these people personally, but individuals are held accountable for their actions, and that's life.
I mean, we all have choices.
No matter if everybody else is doing it, we still have a choice.
You know, I'm so intrigued by Peter.
I think he's a real force for good.
And I think he's a deep and thoughtful man that doesn't make everything that he does right or good.
But he really seems to think about things.
And I heard him say once, it's not that I think I'm right.
I'm not even sure if I'm right.
I just don't think other people are even thinking about these things.
Yes.
What does that tell you about him?
He would say that even about this case, that it's often not that he was right and other people were wrong.
It's that Gawker wasn't even, Gawker just assumed that this whole Kogan case would get settled.
They weren't even taking it seriously.
And so Peter is a person who has theories about the world, and he's willing to, as Nassim Teleb would say, put some skin in the game, right?
He's willing to throw some weight behind them and see what happens.
And I think to me, the lesson of what happened and what I tried to write about in the book is that you can fundamentally disagree with what Peter did.
And you can think that it's dangerous and alarming that Gawker doesn't exist anymore.
But there is something to study, a lesson to learn about how this guy did it and why he did it and how he was able to effectuate the change that he believed needed to happen outside of writing op-eds or putting out a petition.
He made real change in the real world where other people said there was nothing you could do about it.
And to me, that's a lesson that, in some ways, that's an inspiring thing right now in this society where we're stuck on both sides of the aisle.
I think we just feel like change can happen.
And here a guy made something happen.
Yeah, when I saw that in the book, that phrase, I thought to myself, that is something that the world is not even rewarding now.
It doesn't reward you to think.
It doesn't reward you to think out of the box and to think differently.
And it doesn't reward you to say, I'm not sure if I'm right.
I just want us to think about that.
And that's really what we're missing.
And the irony is that in some ways, Gawker was part of that problem, right?
I think one of Thiel's objections to them is not just the despicable things that they did and the violations of privacy, but as the site that just sort of made fun of everyone for every mistake, every failure, every personal idiosyncrasy, they were disincentivizing people from thinking outside the box, from being weird.
And weirdness is where innovation comes from and creativity.
And we should want people to take risks and turn out to be wrong.
What we don't want to do is mercilessly mock them to the point where nobody tries anything because they don't want to end up on the front page of Gawker.com or any website.
Ryan Holiday, thank you very much.
Thanks for having me.
I think we sold you on that story.
That's a pretty good story.
Ryan tells it well.
And there's a lot in here that has not previously been reported on it.
Conspiracy, Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue by Ryan Holiday.
I'd also, we should have Ryan back on at some point.
Trust me.
For trust me, I'm lying.
Yeah.
It is.
He is a guy who has a first-hand, first-hand experience, really, with fake news.
Yeah.
I mean, it was really kind of his job as a PR person.
And he knows how it works, and it's really fascinating.
Avoiding Online Mockery00:02:12
So we'll have to have that.
Quickly, the concept of that book was that he would, you know, those weird stories that bubble up to the national media and you're like, how do we even hear about that?
It was his job to try to get them elevated from a blog to local media, to regional media, to national media, to try to get attention for clients and all sorts of stuff.
So he was like in the media manipulation business for a long time.
And you know what?
It goes to, remember the first thing that I said when we went to CNN and I said, I'm really uncomfortable with this, the ingesting of news.
Oh, yeah.
Because if you make one mistake, that is your basis forever.
And it's interesting because what he did was it was on a blog and then he would call the local news and say, did you see this?
You see this blog?
You see this blog?
And they would use that as a credible source.
And then he'd go to the regional news and say, did you see this in the newspaper?
And it got more credible as it went on.
All right.
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800, 200, 90, 31.
Glenn back, Mercury.
Glenn back.
Oh, let's see.
We've got a lot.
We're going to, coming up in a few minutes, the conservative case for free trade.
Why does free trade matter?
And we get into that coming up in just a second.
Apparently, America also has a drunk shopping problem.
A drunk shopping problem?
Yes.
Americans spent an average of $448 per person in drunk purchases in 2017, which seems really high.
But they did a survey of 2,000 adults and found out that number.
I mean, it is one of those things.
It is easier to buy things when you've had a couple.
I will say that's true.
Sounds like speaking from experience there, Stu.
I did have an interesting experience fairly recently.
I went to a Christmas party and I had a couple of adult beverages, which I tend to do time to time, but not super often.
And so I had a couple of adult purchases.
And I was talking to a friend of mine who talked to me about he had just purchased a toilet light.
Now, a toilet light is a light.
It's a little LED light and it hangs over the side of your toilet.
And it has a motion sensor on it.
The concept here is that when you walk up to the toilet in the middle of the night, you don't have to turn all the lights on and blind yourself.
It just lights the inside of the toilet in a flash, like kind of a cool LED colored light.
Oh, it's like a disco.
It's like a disco in your toilet.
Yeah, all right.
Now, after a few drinks, that sounded like the greatest invention of all time.
Sure.
And at the party with Amazon in my pocket, I purchased the toilet light.
Shockingly, after a couple more drinks, I did not remember that I ordered a toilet light until I came home and my wife was like, what the hell is this thing?
Now I have toilet lights and I think every toilet in the house looks fantastic.
It was a brilliant purchase.
So you didn't, it wasn't just one.
It wasn't like, I'm going to try this out.
I actually ordered one.
Oh, you ordered one.
And then it was so great.
I've now ordered two more for the kids' rooms.
Wow.
It's actually fantastic.
If you don't have a toilet light, all you need to do is drink and shop.
Take the podcast of today's show, have a couple beers, then listen to this segment, and you will order it.
And it'll sound amazing.
That is Chris.
I love you so much.
That is the greatest idea I think I've ever heard.
And if you're really drunk, you'll have the toilet light to light up when you're heaving over the toilet in the middle of the night later on.
Correct.
It's positive on all ends.
So let me ask you this.
Conspiracy theory has spread among Facebook and Instagram users.
The company is tapping our microphones to target ads.
Facebook says it's not.
Facebook does not use your phone's microphone to inform ads or to change what you see in the news feed.
Steel Subsidies and Nationalism00:15:19
Sure.
Yeah, right.
They say, they say what's happening is they're basically following everything that you do because you give them permission to do that.
Yeah, it's basically, no, we're not listening to you.
We wouldn't need to.
You're telling us way more than that is essentially their answer.
Right.
And hey, Google, no, you're not listening to us all the time, are you?
See?
No.
Full attention.
Okay.
Hey, Alexa, you're not listening to us, are you?
Alexa, are you listening to us all the time?
I only send audio back to Amazon when I hear you say the wake word.
Sure.
For more information.
Yeah, yeah, I got it.
Stop, Alex.
Stop spreading your lies.
Glenn, back.
Mercury.
Courage.
Truth.
Glenn, back.
Right now in America, we're having a discussion of principles, or we should be having a discussion of principles, but sometimes it just turns into a discussion of teams.
The principles that set America up as the great changing force of the world was freedom and the freedom to exchange with people.
And it started with, really, can we be free to exchange between each other with the states?
At the very beginning, the Articles of Confederation, the reason why it was too weak is everybody had their own money.
People were charging different taxes and tariffs across the state borders.
And we knew if we were going to be the United States, that wasn't going to work.
We needed something.
We needed to be able to trade with each other and just have, and everybody would be on an equal footing.
That's really one of the biggest problems of the Articles of Confederation and why we adopted the Constitution of the United States.
Trade, free trade is in the marrow of our bones.
But right now we're having a discussion that maybe we shouldn't have free trade.
Maybe because of national interest or national security, we should have tariffs here, there, or elsewhere.
And it's easy to win a trade war.
Well, what is the principle behind free trade?
Why is this important as a conservative principle?
Here to talk to us about that is Scott Linsicum.
He's an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and an expert on free trade.
Scott, thanks for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
Good to be back.
Scott, tell me in a nutshell, so let's start at macro.
Why is this a fundamental conservative principle?
Sure.
So I think there are a few reasons, really, but most basically, and you brought it up with respect to trade among the states, free trade really at its most basic is simply the absence of government in voluntary, mutually beneficial transactions that just so happen to go across borders.
Just as conservatives recoil at the thought of putting a bureaucrat between themselves and their doctors, you'd think they'd be similarly opposed to putting a bureaucrat between themselves and their merchants, for example.
Now, beyond that simple principle, when you then look at what protectionism is on the other end of free trade, you see that protectionism is a hidden regressive tax on consumers who are forced by government to subsidize certain well-connected producers.
And the only difference between a tariff and a subsidy is that the tariff money comes right out of our own pockets instead of coming out of the treasury.
And this is kind of a classic bottom-up redistribution and one that actually hurts poorer Americans more than richer Americans because poor Americans have, of course, smaller budgets to stretch in the first place.
Is there any difference between Illinois saying to Alabama, because Alabama got a new BMW plant and all the workers are going to go down there, and Illinois saying, you know what, you brought them in at an unfair advantage because you brought them in with tax incentives.
And so anything that comes from Alabama, if you buy that BMW in Illinois, we're going to charge you a little bit more.
Right, right.
No, you know, there's not any sort of fundamental difference between the border between two states and the border between two countries.
You know, you can try to think of kind of nationalistic ideas, but the fact is in terms of kind of the economics and the principles of it, you're really dealing with the same thing.
And, you know, it's really important.
So aren't we doing that then by saying, I'm going to give Boeing a tax incentive by coming to this state?
Isn't that, in a way, a subsidy?
Why does it work with the states and it doesn't work with foreign countries?
Well, I mean, I think one of the reasons is that we kind of recognize the value of the system of the free exchange of goods across borders when it comes to the states.
And we don't think that while we might not be thrilled with certain companies in certain states getting these subsidies, we understand that, first of all, their taxpayers are, in a way, subsidizing our consumption.
But second, that the system itself is so valuable that it's not worth destroying it just because we might not like what happens every once in a while.
That there is kind of this greater importance to keeping the system alive.
Now, when you change that to international boundaries, for some reason, that whole calculus goes out the window.
And all of a sudden, foreign governments subsidizing our consumption is a big problem.
And we are far more willing to accept government interference in our transactions because of these vague kind of allegations of unfairness or whatever.
Now, never mind that a lot of these allegations of unfairness are made by the foreign producers' domestic competition.
And in fact, those are the guys who got to write our unfair trade laws.
And those are the guys that you might imagine have a rather strong commercial interest in ensuring that we as consumers buy from them and not from their foreign competition.
There's been about three main conversations I feel like going around this topic.
I want to ask you about each of them.
The first one, though, I think has been the least covered, which is let's just say the argument for protectionism works.
Let's just say it's a good idea for a moment.
Are the circumstances with the steel industry in particular even there to justify it if it did work?
Yeah, it certainly doesn't appear so.
So if you look at steel production over the last, actually several decades, it's pretty steady.
There was, of course, a huge drop in the Great Recession, but over the last almost 10 years, steel output's been about 90 million tons.
You also look at imports, and imports are still only about 25 to 27 percent of the market.
So the U.S. industry still has over 70 percent of the domestic market share.
You look at the company's profits.
They're actually making hundreds of millions of dollars in profits right now.
And then, of course, you look at the national security arguments here, which are what are being debated right now.
And you look at most of our imports actually come from our closest allies, like Canada, for example, or Europe or Japan.
These are countries with which we have security treaties.
I mean, Canada, for heaven's sakes, is part of the American national defense industrial base, defined by law.
So hang on just for a second, though.
If we play this out, I mean, looking at World War II, we had the resources, we had the factories, and we could build these things.
If we were down to 10% steel, we were only making 10% of our own steel, you could make the case that a country to be strong has got to have these plants.
But that's not the case in this.
Yeah, definitely.
So in fact, Secretary Mattis himself wrote a letter to the Department of Commerce as was required under the statute we're dealing with right now.
And he noted that only 3% of current Department of Defense needs could be satisfied.
So only 3% of total domestic steel production could satisfy all of DOD's needs.
So DOD only needs a tiny fraction of our actual U.S. steel output.
Same goes for aluminum.
So the idea that we have this withering steel industry, then we can't build tanks and planes and the rest, just simply is nonsense, as Secretary Mattis himself made clear.
All right, next question.
Pretty much every president from both parties has always talked about and many times enacted tariffs on, particularly steel.
We've done it a million times.
What were the results when we've done it?
Right.
The results were not very good.
So in a paper I wrote for Cato last year, I actually documented the long history of American protectionist failures.
And steel features prominently.
And if you look at over the years, over and over and over again, steel protectionism imposed immense costs on American consumers and not just American families, but also a lot of American businesses and workers, manufacturers that need steel, construction companies that, of course, need steel.
So not only did it impose immense costs, hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for any steel job saved or created, but also didn't even lead to the revitalization of the industry.
So the industry still suffered bankruptcies.
The industry still came back for even more protection.
And so over and over again, you see that it just simply didn't work.
And in fact, you see in some cases the industry refusing to innovate, refusing to reinvest, refusing to get lean and mean and competitive again, and instead relying on government protection.
It violates the Kondrakyev wave.
So, Scott, because one other part of this is you could argue that you can save a few steel jobs with a big tariff, right?
But the overall effect on employment in America is actually negative with these things.
Is that what you found?
Exactly.
So if you look, for example, at the ⁇ so, of course, President Bush imposed steel safeguard tariffs back in 2001 and 2002.
And the net result was the destruction of about 250,000 jobs, according to one report, 100,000 jobs in the other.
I mean, the exact numbers don't matter.
The fact is that you saw a net destruction of jobs overall.
And that's just basic common sense, really, especially in something like steel that's such a critical raw material.
Steel workers in this country are outnumbered by steel-consuming workers by something like 45 to 1.
So it's inevitable that if you tax the inputs of these 45 to save the one, you're going to end up with more losses.
And that's, of course, what happens over and over.
And that's leaving out the kind of egg-heady economics on deadweight loss and the rest.
I mean, just looking at the common sense angle of it, you're going to end up with losses that far outweigh the gains.
So let me ask you the third question, and that is, trade wars are easy to win.
Right, right.
Yeah, the sad thing about a trade war is that everyone loses.
You don't end a trade war emerging victorious.
All you've really done is you end up, you're poorer.
In fact, trade wars are simply when both sides yell across the ocean and then turn inward and shoot their own citizens.
And that's really what happens over and over again.
You know, as we tax imports of whether it be steel or automobiles, we simply harm American consumers.
And, you know, foreign exporters will get hurt too, but you're taking a lot of casualties for that.
And then, of course, if a foreign government retaliates, which many have promised to do in the case of the current steel and aluminum tariffs, then, of course, our exporters get hit, their consumers get hurt.
And at the end of the day, everybody's just poor and worse off.
And when the thing finally ends, there is no real victor here.
So I want to take a quick break, and then I want to come back because I want you to make the case for the person who is just hardworking, is really struggling, sees jobs going overseas, sees their jobs not getting any better, and somebody's saying, you know what?
It's because we're being taken advantage of by Europe and China.
And I want you to speak directly to that person when we come back.
It's Scott Letzikum from the Cato Institute, and it's nobody better.
Nobody knows this topic better than Scott.
You can read his, he just wrote a story for, he referenced the paper from Cato.
You can find it.
We'll tweet it out at World of Stew and at Clembeck.
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Glenn Back Mercury.
Glenn Back.
Free Trade in Layman Terms00:15:22
Talking free trade in layman's terms on why this is a conservative principle, why it's an important American principle.
And Scott, I want you to speak directly to the person who is not into global politics.
They look at globalism and say, yeah, I want to be a part of the global community, but we're being ripped off and I'm struggling and feel like our jobs are going overseas and nobody's protecting us.
We're playing fair.
The other parts of the world are not.
It's time somebody stands up for me.
Right.
So, you know, I think there are a lot of responses there.
I mean, the first, of course, is that, you know, I think free traders generally need to be a bit more sympathetic to the concerns and fears of a lot of average Americans.
You know, we're dealing right now in a very disruptive economic period.
It's not just globalization, though.
In fact, the vast majority of job losses, particularly in manufacturing, over the last few decades have come from automation and technological change than from trade.
And of course, there are changing consumer tastes that just simply we prefer services more these days than we do to certain manufactured goods and so forth.
And so, you know, there is a necessary amount of sympathy that goes to kind of being in this very, very disruptive period.
But again, it's important to note that this isn't just or even primarily a globalization thing.
The second thing to note is, though, that the parts of disruption that are trade-related are really just manifestations of kind of free market competition, which we kind of all inherently understand are really good and not just good, but important for our economy.
You know, the American economy is this kind of dynamic churning beast of sorts that if you start to slow that down, or if you start to prevent the adjustment that the economy kind of does naturally in a free market, if you start thwarting all of these great things that come from free market competition, we actually all will end up even worse off.
And on trade, that's not just cheaper T-shirts, it's jobs, whether it be trucking or ports or in, again, import-consuming manufacturing, in services, you name it.
And all of this is overall a good thing.
But look, that still doesn't help the guy whose job actually did get outsourced or sent abroad.
That's rough.
But again, it's a part of this kind of greater economic dynamism.
And the other point, oftentimes unmentioned, is that if you have jobs that literally existed only because they were behind a tariff wall or because they were receiving a government subsidy, you do, of course, have to ask the question about whether that job, whether that subsidy or that tariff really should be staying in place in the first place.
I mean, you, again, are kind of dealing with this redistribution idea.
Should some of us be forced to subsidize others?
But look, finally, there is an adjustment thing.
Something that we talk about a lot is we really do need better policies in place when it comes to helping workers, helping individuals adjust.
We just have not updated our policies to reflect how disruptive an era we have right now.
And that, again, is not just trade.
In fact, it's far more about all these other things that are going on.
And particularly information technology.
We have to have policies that are from the 1950s and 60s to help workers that are disrupted, displaced in 2018 really makes no sense.
And I think there really is a place for legitimate government action or at least reform of our systems.
One of the things I love to talk about, the example I love to use, is that for a long time we had a tax credit for people who were training in their same job, but they couldn't get the exact same benefit for training for a new job.
That makes no sense in this sort of economy.
Quick, Scott, let's go.
We have about 30 seconds left, 40 seconds.
One quick question I have for you.
I read the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, to say the Congress shall have power to regulate commerce with foreign nations.
Yet we were talking about this as if the Congress can't do anything to stop these tariffs.
What's the process of this?
Right.
So because Congress has over the years delegated so much of its trade powers to the president, you're really looking now that the Congress would have to act.
It would have to pass some sort of legislation, and I guess it would have to be veto-proof legislation.
Now, that said, there's history for this.
Under this very same law, Congress in 1980 actually did pass a law against its own, a president of its own party.
and then overrode the veto.
So there is potential for action, and Congress does have the constitutional authority to do so.
But more broadly, we really need to have a talk about whether the trade powers delegated to the president still make sense in today's economy, but certainly in today's economy with today's president.
Thank you, Scott.
Appreciate it.
Adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and probably the leading authority on trade and why free trade is something we should all be a champion of.
Glenn, back.
Mercury.
You know, what's wrong with us?
Seriously?
This is the Glenn Beck program.
Stu, I don't know what's wrong with us.
We just talked about steel and we were not wearing a hard hat.
I don't know if you've seen all of the people on location, all of the reporters that are talking about steel.
They're all wearing hard hats.
That is true.
I will say I did roll my sleeves up for that last segment if you weren't watching on television.
Yeah.
I'm wearing a denim shirt.
Okay.
I could have had a hard hat.
I could have looked like a man.
We were pretty hard workers here.
Lots of calluses on our hands.
This is dodgy.
This hard work.
I need at least two hard hats in the studio at all times in case we need to talk about trade, tariffs, or steel.
Okay.
Thank you.
All right.
Pat, you're not wearing your hard hat.
I just want to mention, though, that I've got permanent calluses on a couple of my fingers, and I have no idea why.
I've never done an ounce of hard work in my life.
I don't know where they came from.
You actually have permanent calluses?
I do.
Do you really?
I've known you for 40 years.
The only hard work you've ever done is like when car doors were heavy and you had to open them.
Right.
Right.
If the butler didn't do it first.
Right.
Butler.
Yeah.
I don't know.
My hands are baby soft.
I've never seen it.
I know.
I don't know why I have them.
I go out.
You know what I'm saying?
I'm proud of them, actually.
What's really funny is you go out to farm or something.
You do something and you don't have to do it.
And you love it.
And you're like, this is great.
You know, hard work, man, it just really makes you feel good.
And it just means something.
But if you actually have to do it, it's awful.
Yes.
The minute I would have to farm my land, I love being the farmer that I am because I'm only up and I'll plow the fields and I'll, you know, I'll cut the hay and everything else, but I don't have to.
And the minute I say, I'm done, I just turn the tractor off, walk away, go, I'm done for the day.
That's the way hard work is fun.
Well, I think people that listen to this show recognize that I'm the real American here.
You know, you guys both started in radio very young.
Yeah.
Now, I had, I've had difficult manufacturing type jobs.
Have you?
I was an assistant spot welder for a summer.
Assistant spot welder?
Oh, yeah.
Assistant spot.
Really?
Which basically meant, like, if you think you're like a spot welder, right?
And there's a big sheet of metal and it's sitting up on a table.
And then, but they need to kind of move it.
And what I would do is I would get under the table and they would do that.
They would do the spot weld above my head and then sparks would fall on me.
That was basically the job.
Did you have to have a hard hat?
I did.
I actually had a job with a hard hat.
But I mean, it sucked.
I hated it.
It was 100 degrees and there were sparks in my face all the time.
Oh, wait, but wait.
If you were doing that because you were going to make a metal table yourself.
Right.
You'd be out there and be like, this is the greatest.
That's what people are like, oh, I want to restore old cars.
Yeah, unless you have to restore all cars every day.
You want to restore the old cars.
When we actually had no money to buy cars and they were breaking down all the time, we didn't want to restore it.
We wanted a new one.
Right.
Do you remember the days when you could just reach behind the instrument panel and you could unplug the check engine light?
Oh, yeah.
And you would do that because I'm not fixing it and I'm tired of looking at it.
So I just unplugged the damn thing.
That's the best solution.
Now the check engine light comes on and you're like, oh, crap.
Yeah.
Well, now you can't even have access to the battery anymore.
It's all covered.
At least on my car, it is.
It is.
All of it.
All of it.
Yeah.
Mike, you don't put, I've had to jump my car a couple of times, which is about as deep into car repair as I can go.
That's not car repair.
It's not?
Okay.
No.
But now the two places you put the thingies, you know what I'm saying?
Again, I'm getting technical here if you're not a car person.
The places you put the thingies.
The places you put the thingies are not next to each other on the battery anymore.
I noticed that.
There's one, like in one place, and then you got to reach down underneath the car to a completely different section of the engine locked.
There might be things down there that could cut your fingers off.
That's what I think.
Right.
That's why I go on my phone.
I just go, Uber.
And then I just don't drive for a month or so.
The car doesn't work.
When Tanya bought me, she bought this old truck, 1957.
And the engine is huge, but it just looks like there's nothing to it.
You know what I mean?
It's all open.
Get to any side, and the truck is so damn big that you could probably almost stand next to the engine in between, you know, inside under the hood.
You could almost stand in there.
And so, when we first got it, uh, you know, I know nothing about cars.
And so, Rafe and I were looking at it, and we, you know, he jumped up on the bumper and he was looking into the engine.
And I was telling him, you know, I think these are the cylinders in here.
I think this is, yeah, I'm pretty sure.
And these are the spark plugs.
And then we got underneath the car and we were just laying there and we were just looking up at it.
And he was like, what's that?
And I'm like, no idea.
What's that?
I think that maybe turns the wheels.
I'm not really.
I don't.
I'm not really sure.
Yeah.
We ended up spending like 40 minutes just laying underneath the car.
And Tanya came out and she said, What the hell are you guys doing?
And I said, We're just learning about the truck.
She said, Neither of you know anything about it.
Get up.
But there was something about laying underneath the car and pretending that we did.
That was good.
Yeah.
But I contend, if I actually would have had to fix that truck and there was nobody else to fix it, it wouldn't have been a fun experience with me and my son.
I would have been, I would have come out with a finger that was bleeding and I would have thrown not that wrench.
I would have been saying things at that level to him.
Yeah, it's not, I mean, people glorify, you know, like sort of romanticize, I guess is the right word, of manufacturing jobs.
And it's like, well, you know, anyone losing their job, you don't want to lose your income, right?
That doesn't mean that we should glorify manufacturing jobs as this thing that we want the entire economy to be based on in the future and make sure all of them return.
For instance, I'd rather have it.
I think most people would rather have, if they had a choice between a manufacturing job and a job where they flap their fat mouth for three hours on the radio, they probably got to pick this one.
Why?
Because you don't have to freaking get dirty.
You don't have to get sweaty.
You don't have to know what the hell you're doing.
There's lots of benefits of this game.
And two out of the three have no calluses on their hands.
And the one who does has no idea how they appear.
Which is a really good thing, actually.
That's a good thing.
I like a billion men talk on that program.
But you know what's interesting is, if you look at the stats that we went over yesterday, what is it?
60 or 80% of jobs now are white collar in America.
That is a huge difference.
And something that we all would have said is really, really good.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, sure.
That used to be, they used to say, oh, we don't want these low-paying jobs.
Now they're saying, because manufacturing job has a really good political sort of connotation to it.
You're talking about things because it's like what you were talking about.
You're talking about people who, men who actually look like men.
Yeah, men who, yeah, exactly.
And it's, and it's a great, it's also, though, a but their jobs people complained about, right?
Yeah, people had them.
Yeah, I mean, like, I work in a factory my whole life, and you think, oh, dang it, I'm sorry.
Right.
Like, you get, it was something that it was.
They complained about it.
And there's a nostalgia related to it, just like you were talking about fixing cars.
It's like, we kind of like that.
You get your hands dirty, you get in there, but it's a picture.
It's been how you want it your whole life.
Yeah.
I mean, you wind up with long-term problems.
Why do you think unions are always complaining that they need larger health care plans and better pensions and things?
It's not just because, you know, there are legitimate health problems that arise from many of those jobs.
They're difficult freaking jobs.
My grandfather didn't have a finger.
My grandfather had a finger cut off in a job that he had.
And it was just like, oh, yeah, I just lied.
It was no big deal.
I just lied.
I mean, that's the way it used to be.
I know.
You know what I mean?
I was out with the tractor, and we were, I don't know what it is, but you got a spiky thing that goes off the side and it kind of fluffs up the fluffs up the hay.
Sure, that's not what it's.
Farmer Glenn, is that you?
It's me.
It's me.
So we were fluffing the hay.
Fluffing the hay.
You're fluffing the hay.
And no idea what you're talking about.
Absolutely no idea.
I know why we do it.
I just don't know what it's called.
Okay.
Okay.
So we're fluffing the hay.
You sound like every liberal on guns right now.
I know.
I know.
Good thing is there's only about five farmers left in America.
So, but it got it some, I can't remember.
It's been a few years.
Something got tangled up or oh, because the alfalfa, it can start to get caught up in this likely hay fluffer thing.
This is not a good conversation.
The OJ Simpson Story Twist00:04:56
So, you know, you get out and you're immediately looking at it and you're like, okay, I've got to, but it stopped.
And if you don't, if you don't turn the fluffer off, it's just jammed.
And you've got your hands and arms in there.
And if the fluffer starts to fluff again, it's going to rip your arms off.
That's right.
Farming is one of the most dangerous jobs you can have.
It is.
And when you don't have a farmhand that you go, hey, the fluffer is stuck.
And then he gets out and then you're logically just sitting there going, I don't know what to do.
But you see him reach in.
That's when you say, should I turn the fluffer off?
And he's like, you didn't turn it off?
Now, this is a very specific hypothetical situation, but it could happen.
I have no idea if what you're saying makes any sense, but I cannot hear it in the context you mean it.
I cannot.
And it's just not helpful.
All right.
Pat, rescue us from this.
I'm excited about Sunday night.
Are you guys going to watch the OJ confession?
If I remember.
You got to remember.
You have to call me.
I won't remember.
Oh, you have to remember.
It's 7 o'clock Central, so 8 Eastern.
And this is the one that was done, what, 10, 12 years ago when they wrote the book, If I Did It, Here's How It Happened.
Do we know why that book wasn't released?
Yes.
Yeah, because the Goldmans were pissed and they stopped it.
And they were like, hey, maybe you shouldn't be making millions of dollars off our kid's murder.
Yeah.
So it became such a controversy at the time.
And so whoever did it in the first place, I think it was Fox, wasn't it, that shelved it?
And so now they're bringing it back out after all this time and putting it on the air.
And they're putting it on the air now because, ah, no one cares about the Goldmans anymore.
Yeah.
It's been long enough now.
Yeah, I guess.
So they're going to play it.
And he goes through this hypothetical and he starts speaking hypothetically.
And then all of a sudden it turns first person.
And it's chilling when he does because he starts talking about his friend Charlie that came over to his house.
And he said to me, in the words of OJ, he said to me, OJ, you're not going to believe what's going on over at Nicole's house.
And he said, whatever is going on, it's got to stop.
Do we have the audio of that?
We have the trailer of it.
Here it is.
Play a little bit.
In 2006, OJ Simpson gave a no-holds barred interview, including his gripping account of what might have happened that fateful night.
For over a decade, the tapes of that infamous interview were lost.
Until now.
Lost.
I'm going to tell you a story you've never heard before.
It takes place the night of June 12, 1994, and it concerns the murders of my ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her young friend Ronald Goldman.
Forget everything you think you know about that night because I know the facts better than anyone.
I bet you do.
I bet you does.
This is one story the whole world got wrong.
Does he confess?
You be the judge.
OJ Simpson, the lost confession.
I said lost.
March 11th.
It was lost.
It was sitting in some vault someplace and somebody was licking their chops going, oh my gosh.
Is it time yet?
It's time now, isn't it?
Now that he's out, they can actually play this, I guess.
I mean, it's amazing because he does do it in a first person.
Wasn't that the point of the book?
Yes, but what a weird point.
It's one of the strangest things in American history.
Well, because he starts talking like, if it happened, here's how it might have happened.
But then he switches to, I did this, and he said this to me.
And it's a chilling kind of switch into first person speak where it sounds like he's talking about what he did.
Yeah, I mean, what he actually did.
Can you imagine going to someone who was accused of a crime and his freedom is dependent on the idea that he did not commit it and going to him and saying, hey, would you write a book describing a hypothetical way that you'd commit the crime you're accused of?
What person, what would possibly motivate you other than the fact that you did do it and you believe you wanted to confess for some reason, either money or for to get it off your chest, but you knew you couldn't do it without going to prison.
This is your way of confessing.
I just want to also point out, it's worse than that.
It is, imagine your wife has been killed.
A brutal, brutal killing.
You are busy looking for the killer on every golf course in America.
People think that you've done it.
What would possess you?
And you would be, you would say, that's obscene.
Of course.
If I remember, if I remember, I am going to definitely watch this on Sunday night.
If you remember.
Well, you might be out fixing old cars.
I'm not fixing exactly.
I was sitting under them.
You need to put a flat screen underneath the cars.
I've already got one because the car doesn't work because I have no idea how to fix it.
SimplySafe Beck Safety Features00:02:40
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Glenn Mercury. Glenn Beck.
They think that they may have found Amelia Earhart.
And don't get excited.
She's not doing well.
I didn't think she was alive.
Well, I didn't know.
I just, you know, cats on the roof.
Anyway, new scientific study shows that bounds, the bones found in 1940 on a Pacific island now belong to Earhart.
They said that in 1941, these were not her bones.
They now have done it again.
And they've said that these are, it looks, I don't know the full story.
We'll have to get this tomorrow.
But they found a woman's shoe.
They found a sextant there.
They found herbal liqueur.
And, you know, this is a better ending for her, I think, being a possible castaway on this island than the other theory is that she was captured by the Japanese and tortured to death because they thought she was an American spy.
But we'll give you the full story tomorrow because it's pretty remarkable.