Russell Vought, Rebecca Friedrichs, and Matthew Bocci address critical race theory's Marxist roots, mandatory union fees in government jobs, and the exploitation of 9/11 survivor trauma. Vought details the President's order to halt CRT training based on whistleblower reports, while Friedrichs explains how her legal victory freed teachers from corrupt unions. Bocci recounts his father's final calls before the towers fell and his subsequent abuse by an uncle exploiting his grief. Together, these segments highlight systemic corruption, the necessity of individual dignity over radical restructuring, and the enduring resilience required to overcome profound personal tragedy. [Automatically generated summary]
Critical Race Theory Destroying Our Country00:12:06
Hey, welcome to Wednesday.
We have a big special on Blaze TV tonight that is about brainwashing our kids.
This time it's part two.
It's about the new sex ed course that is just horrific.
We talk about it in great detail and also what is happening in Washington with the critical theory, which is Marx.
It's what's destroying our country right now.
It's Black Lives Matter.
It's what's happening in our schools.
It's the cancel culture.
That's all critical race theory.
Donald Trump is standing against it.
We have the director of the OMB from the administration to talk about how they're going to cut all of these programs, how they are going to find out exactly what is going on, because now we've found out that deep state is real and the government, unbeknownst to the president, has been funding critical race theory propaganda and lessons inside the government, trying to turn our own institutions against itself.
It's phenomenal.
Then we find another document dump that the teachers unions, along with the Board of Education, if you will, has funded a radical group trying to teach teachers to overthrow the government of the United States.
We got a comment from Betsy DeVos, who is, of course, against all this.
This has been in play now since we think at least 2004.
If you didn't believe in the deep state in 2016, I get it.
If you don't believe in it now, you're a moron.
What do we do about it?
All that and an incredible story from a kid who is nine, who lost his dad on 9-11.
The first survivor story from a child of a 9-11 victim, all on today's podcast.
And don't forget to subscribe at Blazetv.com slash Glenn.
Use the promo code Glenn, get access to that special.
Also, New Studios America and so much more at Blaze TV.
You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Yesterday, we found out that the White House has ordered an end of critical race theory training.
Now for government agencies, that's a start.
We need to get it out of our schools as well.
We have Russ Vogt on with us.
He's the director of Office of Management and Budget.
And what that does, in case you don't know, this is the guy responsible for overseeing the implementation of the policy from the president, the management, the regulatory agendas all across the executive branch.
Kind of a tough job when you got a guy that is doing so much to cut all of that stuff.
Russ, how are you, sir?
I'm doing fine.
Thanks for having me on, Glenn.
You bet.
So, first of all, what was it that was seen at the federal level that got the president's attention and said, we got to stop this right now?
Well, I think you've seen a lot of these kinds of reports begin to percolate up in the news, and we specifically mentioned that in the memo that we put out on Friday.
But, you know, the president has seen some of the great work that's been put out there by Chris Ruffo, some of the investigative work that's being done as a result of whistleblowers, quite frankly, as we get a handle on the many areas where the agencies are often contracting out with third parties that have ideological bents that are teaching content that's inconsistent with the long history of our country,
but quite frankly, the future of our country.
Because if you teach the workers of the federal government to hate their country, where are we going to be down the road?
So we did some important work last week on behalf of the President, and we're going to be working to make sure it actually gets implemented, and it's not just a policy prescription.
So, how pervasive was it?
How many agencies were involved?
Was any of it systematic or was it all coming from this BLM movement?
It's not new, that's for sure.
But to be honest with you, Glenn, we're just getting at the beginning of this process.
We want to do a full review.
We want to have extensive implementation guidance.
We want to do a formal wrap-up of all the spending.
We don't want it to just be anecdotal, although we have quite a bit of anecdotes that we know of, which is why we put out essentially a cease and desist letter to get started in the meantime.
But this has been going on for a number of years, it seems like, and is not just a result of the last several months of the BLM movement and the unrest that it has caused across the country.
I think it, you know, if I'm guessing, a lot of it was ramped up in the last administration, and it has probably ramped up in the last several months as agencies trying to make sense of the moment that we're in.
But unfortunately, they got some bad guidance and some bad instincts on that front.
So this is the kind of stuff that makes a deep state possible.
When you have one arm of the federal government teaching that the federal government is racist and all of the anti-American Marxist kind of teachings that just go on without really anyone saying anything or, I mean, at this point, can you even put a finger on when it started or where it started or who's responsible?
Not yet.
And we're hoping that our review can help us draw some firm conclusions from that.
And if we need larger policy solutions, we'll do that as well.
The president has made that clear.
But I do think that it is a challenge when you have these big agencies.
Often the policy officials that the president has put in charge that represent the American people based on the last election don't have awareness of the types of professional development or workplace training that goes along.
And I'm sure they get whiffs of emails that get sent around to invite them to this or that.
Another aspect of, I think, what the President was trying to do, Glenn, is provide cover for the hard decisions that agency heads can now make to root this stuff out.
We had seen this before the memo from Secretary of Energy Dan Breet.
The minute he was made aware of some of the trainings that were going on in the national labs by Sandia Corporation, he immediately asked for a review.
But that takes courage, quite frankly.
And the President has basically said, look, we're going to do this government-wide, and so all of my policy officials can get after the work.
And I'll wear the pressure on his shoulder.
So can you, and you may not be the right person to ask, but there's a lot of people that see critical theory.
They don't know what it is.
When you connect it to Marxism and communism, they roll their eyes.
They think that's nonsense.
Can you explain what it is and why it's so destructive?
Sure.
And I had this conversation with a dear friend of mine last night who had concerns about the memo, or at least wanted to have an awareness of the memo.
And that is critical race theory is the view of our institutions that the reason we see some forms of inequity is because our institutions are rotten, that they are systemically racist, that the founding was flawed because of its racism.
And it is a kind of the critical aspect of it is the critique is that we're not headed towards, we were not, the civil rights movement was not successful, that we have not moved towards a colorblind society.
And that one of the reasons is that our institutions are flawed and are leading to ongoing inequities.
And so that's the critical aspect of it that leads people to kind of think through if something's fundamentally flawed to the core, then you need to tear it down.
The institution needs to be brought down.
And we look out over the last several months and we see critical race theory on all of our TVs, the wages of putting this into the bloodstream, as opposed to a different view, which I think is what the American founding was about.
And I've seen on your programs before, Glenn, which is we are individuals made in the image of God.
And as a result, we are afforded dignity as a result of that.
And the highest aspirations of our country were reflected in the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.
And over time, we also have been reforming out of our system, little by little, individuals by individuals, movement by movement, an effort to eliminate where there is sin and where there is evil and dysfunction.
And that gets reformed out, but it doesn't say that the whole enterprise, the whole project, that the whole country needs to be torn down because it's rotten to the core.
And really, those are the two worldviews that are represented here.
And you see it with the hope and optimism of the Trump administration saying, look, this is the greatest country the world has ever seen.
And we're going to make reforms as we see it where we need to weed this out or weed that out or make reforms.
But we're not going to just toss out the entirety of our great country, which has led the world in freedom and opportunity for all people.
Well, I will tell you, I hope that the president starts to encourage companies to do the same because there's a lot of companies that are engaging these same people that have been engaged by the federal government to teach this nonsense that America is inherently evil and that whites are inherently racist and cannot be forgiven by it.
It have to be.
The only way you can have an end to racism is with reverse racism, if you will.
It's craziness and very dangerous.
Can I ask you one unrelated question?
There was a story that came out today that talked about how people are now starting to see, they're starting to fatigue on this whole coronavirus, and they're starting to see this more as a crisis of budget.
Is the president considering anything like special economic zones or naming the entire country an economic zone to be able to relieve the average business person from some of this regulation that will help them get back on their feet?
Well, we feel like we have over the last several months is to treat the economic crisis in the same way that we treat a public health crisis to the extent where any emergency authority that agencies had on the table, we have tried to use.
By our count, we were over about 700 different regulatory or enforcement-relaxing decisions that were done on the basis of an emergency.
Treating Crisis Like a Public Health Emergency00:02:38
And quite frankly, we're now trying to make many of those permanent, and we're going through a review of that right now.
So we haven't done anything as possible to be able to say, hey, the whole country is an opportunity zone.
But piecemeal, we have tried to take that approach, and we think we have been very successful on that front.
And if people have good ideas, we definitely have an open mind to where we can do more.
As a businessman that has people coming through my business all the time, I worry about litigation.
It's only a matter of time of litigation.
Somebody gets sick, somebody says you haven't done enough, whatever.
Is there any relief or protection from litigation that is coming?
We hope so.
We hope that that is a part of any eventual phase four deal.
The president does think we need more legislative initiatives, and so that's why he's tried to continue to stay at the table, even if the Democrats on the Hill have been in the magnitude of their asks made it such that we could not reach an agreement.
But of the things that we believe are still important is that certainty that comes from potential lawsuits.
And I think that's certainly been something that we've heard from the Hill as being an important, at least from Republicans on the Hill.
Well, I will tell you, we really appreciate the cuts that you guys have made and the things that you have done to roll back a lot of this craziness from the last 15 years.
I'd like to send you some golden scissors, but maybe it'd be better to have an axe as you continue your job.
Thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
is the best of the Glenbeg program.
I want to bring on somebody who I just think is remarkable.
Her name is Rebecca Friedrichs.
She's the author of Standing Up to Goliath.
She's the founder and president of KidsForKidsandCountry.com, forkidsandcountry.com or .org.
And she was a teacher.
She saw what was happening.
She stood up and she realized she might be able to do more good outside of the system.
Rebecca, how are you?
I'm doing great.
It's great to be here.
So, Rebecca, after the special that we had last, what, two weeks ago, I got a ton of email from people who said, I went in and they treated me like a moron.
They pretty much laughed at me.
Parents Must Stand With Teachers00:10:21
They wouldn't give me any information.
I am convinced that unless we stand together, we're not going to make an impact.
You are exactly right.
We have experienced the same thing.
I'm in California.
So even when we go to the state house, we've come together, hundreds of us, at the Senate Education Committee, and they treat us like morons.
They talk down to us.
They will not pass any bills that we bring forward saying, look, we just want some transparency.
We just want you to let us know what's going on before you do this to our kids.
And they shut us down every single time.
We absolutely have to stand together.
Teachers can't fight it alone.
Parents can't fight it alone.
And we need our churches to step up too.
We need faith leaders with us.
And we need to help people to realize how important it is to vote and to vote their values, not to vote because they want free stuff.
Because if we can start getting good, godly people into office at every level, starting down at school board all the way up into the national level, then we can end this nightmare.
So the teachers' union, taking on the teachers' union, I mean, you took them on all the way to the Supreme Court, the California Teachers' Union.
And the National Education Association.
Yeah.
And tell me what happened because you didn't win.
It was looking like you were going to win, and then Scalia died.
That's right.
Our case was heard in January 2016.
We were arguing for freedom from forced unionism for every single government employee in the United States of America.
We didn't think it was right that we were forced to fund a union that stood against our values, that claimed to represent us but did not.
We didn't even want to be members.
We didn't want their representation, but we were forced to pay.
For example, my husband was a professor at San Diego State, and he was forced to pay $1,200 a year in fees as a non-member of the union.
And then they would file grievances against him when he was a director.
So we didn't have a voice at all.
So we wanted to end that.
We took it to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Case was heard January 2016.
We were poised to win with a five to four decision because sadly there are four justices on that court who do the bidding of the unions.
And anyway, one month after our case was heard, Justice Scalia died.
And there's a rule in the court that the justices have to be present when a decision comes down.
So we lost his vote.
We had a four to four tie.
But the good news is another case was built upon our case, and it was heard in 2018.
And June 27th, 2018, every government employee in the United States of America was freed from forced unionism.
So they all might still be stuck in a union, but they no longer have to pay them.
Okay, so here is the thing, because I've been saying the last few days, because everybody looks at their teacher and they're like, my teacher is good, and they love my kid and blah, However, you might feel really good about a teacher, but if they are in the teachers union or they sing the praises of the NEA,
I don't trust them with my child because they must be part of it or they're so ignorant.
I don't want them teaching my child.
Is that fair?
I think it's fair, and I think the listeners need to know one more thing.
There's three issues with teachers.
First of all, they're all trapped in a corrupt system.
So it doesn't matter how sweet or wonderful or incredible your particular teacher is.
If that teacher is in a unionized school or school district, that teacher's trapped in a corrupt system.
So the three things people need to know about teachers is, number one, they either have no idea that the union is the bad guy.
They know things are corrupt, but the union keeps telling them, we're your savior.
We're here to take care of you.
It's the legislators.
It's the school board.
It's the this.
But these teachers have no idea that it's the union that put those legislators in office and those people on the school board.
So these teachers truly are ignorant to what their union is doing.
That's a problem.
Second thing, a lot of them know, but they're too terrified to stand up to their union.
Like your whole entry to this interview, you were talking about how people are too afraid to stand up, afraid of losing their jobs and their career, afraid of all that.
That's exactly how teachers are, and they've been that way for about 50 years.
And so then the last thing is we do have teachers who agree with the unions.
Those are the scary ones.
Those are the activists that the unions have been planting in our schools.
So I agree with you, Glenn.
Teachers have got to stand up, but parents have to stand up with them.
Teachers can't do it alone.
Stand together.
And those teachers that don't know what's going on, we have something on our website called Adopt a Teacher.
Take three minutes to read it.
Adopt every teacher you know and educate them on the truth and then stand with them.
And we can end this.
So I'm looking at your website now, which is forkidsandcountry.org.
And you adopt a teacher, and it has videos there, but it talks about embracing, educate, enlighten, empathize, encourage, and empower.
So this is not going in hostile.
This is going in saying, hey, look, I just, you know, can we go have a cup of coffee and let me pay for it because I just want to honor great teachers.
Precisely.
And then I wrote an entire book called Standing Up to Goliath.
And I wrote that book with teachers in mind and parents, by the way, because parents don't realize that the teachers' unions have corrupted the PTA and everything going on in our schools.
So parents are actually paying into this sex ed and all these evils as well and don't know it.
So yes, I ask people to lovingly adopt teachers they know, teachers in their church, teachers in their neighborhood, their family, their child's teacher, and to approach them with grace, not to approach them attacking because maybe the teacher doesn't have any idea.
Educate them.
Most people don't have any idea all the lies teachers have been told.
So they try to talk to teachers and the teachers say, but this, but that, but what about, what about?
And people don't know what to say.
That's why I wrote a whole book.
All they have to do is hand it to them.
You know, walk them through it, read a couple chapters, and I'll take you to coffee and let's talk about it.
And just help them warm up to the idea that they've been duped, that they've been deceived, that they're funding evil, so that these teachers will stand up and get out of the union.
Rebecca, thank you so much.
I appreciate all of your hard work.
I urge you to join the effort and just go to forkidsandcountry.org and look at the information that is there.
I still recommend, Rebecca, that you organize and you help people come together in their own towns because everybody feels alone and they don't know who's involved.
And if there's a way to hook up with each other, you need to.
You need to hook up with each other because we won't be able to do this by ourselves.
Thank you, Rebecca.
I appreciate it.
ForkidsandCountry.org.
The best of the Glenbeck program.
I just wanted you to start with this.
Somebody from the school district walks into your classroom.
You don't know anything about it, but it's about 9 o'clock in the morning.
And what happens?
Yeah, so they pulled me out of my classroom, and I was met by my brother in the hallway, and we were informed that a plane hit my dad's building, that my dad was safe, and that they were evacuating the tower.
As a nine-year-old kid, I kind of subconsciously thought something was odd in the sense that they didn't allow us to really ask questions about what was going on.
I still didn't think too much of it, though, and I tried to just go about the rest of the day as normally as possible.
What perplexed me the most was the fact that so many kids were getting pulled out of my school, and yet we were still in school, Nick and I, my brother.
My mom kept us in school because she had spoken to my father and then started calling family who was coming over to the house to try to help her because I also had two young brothers at the time.
There was just so much chaos and so much commotion at the house that she wanted us to just stay in school for as long as possible.
And so you were in school.
And you weren't watching it, but the rest of the students, they were watching what was happening, right?
No, they weren't watching it.
They were informed, they pulled us out of the classroom and then told the rest of the students what exactly happened.
So then, I don't think that the students, maybe my classmates knew, maybe they didn't know, but I actually don't really know what they said to them.
So they kept us in another classroom for a little while while they were informing the students on all the details that they had, I guess.
And ultimately, like I said, we were the only kids left in school.
And they were all fucked out.
And at the end of the day, when we got on the bus, we were the only two kids on the bus.
And just I remember getting back home and just being like met immediately with all the chaos that I had already described before.
And it got worse once I got inside.
And the TV was on and the footage was on and people were upset and calling my dad and calling hotlines.
And there was a Canada Sherlock missing hotline too they were calling and hospitals, etc.
The Chaos After the Call00:05:28
It was one thing after another.
And ultimately, my grandmother kind of ushered my brother and I out of the house to go play with our friends because she didn't want us to continue to witness the commotion at the house.
Now your dad, two weeks before 9-11, woke up in the middle of the night screaming.
He had a dream.
Tell me about that.
Well, he insisted it wasn't a dream.
He insisted it was a ghost.
And that his late aunt, who had died of ALS probably 20 years prior, was standing at the foot of his bed in perfect health condition and holding his late sister, who died as an infant.
And for him, that moment was life-changing, except unfortunately, it didn't act upon the feeling that he was, I guess, instinctively feeling inside.
He didn't follow through, I guess, too.
He wanted to quit.
He then expressed that he was not happy.
He was telling my mom he thought he was going to die young, that he wanted to be cremated.
And this was all leading up to 9-11.
And my mom just basically being like, you're 38 years old, you're healthy, you're in the best shape of your life, and you're talking about wanting to be cremated.
It was incomprehensible for her.
And so that morning when he called my mom, he called from his cell phone.
His desk phone was out.
The lion was out.
And he got through on his cell phone, which surprised my mom because she thought that he was going to quit.
That weekend before he said he was going to quit.
Wow.
And so, and essentially what happened was he only would call her when he was leaving, when he was out of the building or out of the office from his cell phone.
All the other times he would call from his desk phone.
So for her to receive the cell phone call to her, she thought he actually walked out.
And my father was a joker.
He liked to pull pranks on people.
And so when he told her a plane hit the building, she was blown away.
And excuse me, initially, she was thinking he was joking.
And then he told her to turn the TV on.
And then she's blown away by what she's seeing and realized that this is not a joke.
So you, for several days, you and your brothers actually would call your dad's phone and leave messages to your dad thinking that maybe he was still alive.
There was the slightest possibility in my mind that perhaps he lost his cell phone.
Maybe he called his cell phone.
So my mom actually retrieved the phone messages because she thought that he may have called his cell phone and lost it too.
She was holding on to that belief as well.
But for me, I was calling that phone and hoping that he'd pick up the other line.
And I left voicemails on his phone until his mailbox was full and couldn't receive anymore.
And just basically begging him to come home.
And obviously he was naive, but just not really understanding it until they finally came and told us that they found him.
So you write in your book that the house was full of family and friends.
And when you looked at the television, you saw people jumping from the towers.
And that stuck with you.
And it actually led you kind of down a darker path, if you will, of of trying to what figure out what they were thinking and and trying to piece maybe what your dad was thinking and feeling at that time.
Tell me about the.
Go ahead.
That's exactly right.
It was, I knew a few things regarding my dad's final moments.
I knew that he had made phone calls to my mom.
The first one that I've described before.
The second one was shortly thereafter, and he said goodbye.
The last call that I know of and that my family knows of is that he spoke to his brother and said goodbye.
So those phone calls happened within minutes of the plane hitting, which to me symbolizes that my father knew he was going to die and that he accepted his fate and faced that head on in a courageous manner.
And what was so remarkable to me looking back is the fact that he didn't sound scared on the phone and he didn't want my mom to fear and he didn't want my uncle to fear and he tried to portray that to them.
And so that was just such a powerful thing for me and that courageousness was really impactful for me.
And it really resembles my father as a man too.
But the question that started to loom in my mind was the fact that the majority of jumpers from the North Tower came from Canner Fitzgerald.
So I thought maybe he was one of them.
And so I had seen the documentary that showed family members identifying their loved ones through these photos of jumpers or people hanging out of the windows.
And I reached out to photographers myself as a 13, 14 year old kid, asking them to meet with me because they had met with widows and blown up photos for them so that they could see if that in fact was their loved one.
The Fly That Stayed00:05:39
These photographers never reached back out to me.
So I continued to do my own research and asked family close to me if they thought he jumped.
Everyone told me no and eventually stopped engaging in those conversations.
And it then took one person to finally engage with me and fully take on all of that responsibility and answer those questions.
That was an uncle through marriage who exploited my vulnerabilities and sexually abused me and told me my father jumped from the towers.
But in reality, that wasn't true.
This is where this story just goes in a direction you just don't see coming.
We're talking to the first time I've ever talked to somebody who was a child of a parent whose lost the life was lost on 9-11 for the first memoir from a child of 9-11 called Sway.
His name is Matthew Bocci, and the book is quite incredible.
So this is the part of the book where you're 14 and you're using drugs and alcohol, right?
And what how old were you when this uncle by marriage comes into your life and starts to yeah so the period of grooming pretty much began when I was like 12 years old.
I stopped well I didn't really engage in in the same manner that I did in the in the next couple years because there was other family members who would talk to me about 9-11.
So unbeknownst to me, he was already grooming me.
Obviously I know that now.
But the abuse happened when I was 14 and that's right around that time.
It's exactly when I started drinking and drugging.
And in reality though, my story is a story of progression in terms of drugs and alcohol.
I was a recreational drinker weekends with my friends.
Pot was later brought into the mix like later into high school and wasn't an addiction by any means.
But ultimately when I got to college, I started experimenting with other drugs, painkillers especially, and other pills.
And that's when I started to feel some true relief that I guess I had been searching for for quite some time.
And once I felt that, I was going to chase that feeling forever.
Or so I thought back then.
But it took a lot of struggle and determination to get to the point I'm at today.
So your mom told you at some point, look for the signs from your dad.
And you had an odd spiritual moment.
Will you go into that a bit?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
I had been in and out of treatment centers for two years prior to getting sober, officially.
I never tried really going to meetings.
I never gave sobriety a true shot.
I tried just cutting out certain substances and just maybe drinking alcohol and other things like that.
And it never worked for me.
Ultimately, I'd been brought back and inevitably I would be back to the same stuff that I was doing in the past.
So my dad, after he passed away, there was a sign from my father.
My mom was first told to look for the signs.
And that sign that happened was about two days after 9-11.
And a fly landed in her night on her nightstand in her room.
And she took that instinctively as her sign that my dad was safe and not coming home.
And that fly ended up staying in our house for six months after 9-11 and would be the sign that would be constant with me throughout my life into my adolescence and into my teenage or late teenage and early 20s.
So essentially I had been facing legal trouble but didn't really care about that.
I was more so concerned with continuing to get high.
And so what I did was thinking that I was going to be able to manipulate my way around a drug test, gone in with a detox mouthwash.
that would give me clean saliva.
I was under the impression it would be a mousewab test.
I was later realized that it was a urine test, which I did not have fake urine.
I had left it at my house.
So I went back home after failing and I was given one last chance.
And so I didn't know what to do.
I knew that I could go back in a month, use the fake urine, continue to get high, and continue to live the life of shame and misery that I was living on a daily basis.
But I walked outside that day.
I was home alone.
And I looked up in the sky and was just like mesmerized by a crystal clear blue sky day that brought me right back 9-11.
And initially, I just sat there and started crying.
And I was hysterical.
And I asked my father, I said, Dad, please give me a sign.
I need help.
And I would say, in an instant, a fly lands on the railing that I was leaning against.
And it's this very particular fly.
So it's not, you know, when I say a fly, for me and my family, you know what it is and can point it out, you know.
But it landed there, and it would move around in a circle and look at me and stop.
And move around in a circle and stop.
And I filmed it on my phone.
And I was, like I said, hysterically crying.
And right after that fly flew away, I said, this is it.
This is my sign.
And I called up a detox facility and I said, I need a bed as soon as possible.