Senator Tom Cotton and Glenn Beck analyze Europe's censorship laws, contrasting German hate speech prosecutions with American free speech values while discussing JD Vance's Munich Security Conference remarks. They examine China as an existential threat, detailing Senator Cotton's book on Chinese atrocities, the Wuhan lab leak theory, and the necessity of decoupling from rare earth elements. The conversation concludes by arguing that the U.S. must lead a Pacific coalition against Beijing, urging Europe to assume its own defense rather than relying on American protection. [Automatically generated summary]
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This is the Glenn Beck Program.
Hello, America.
Well, if you listen to the mainstream media, you would think that the world is not respecting us.
It's starting to hate our guts.
Well, is that true?
I want to go over a little bit of what happened last week and now what's coming this week in Washington.
We'll talk about that in 60 seconds.
Critics Call It Political Maneuver00:07:47
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All right, well, does the world hate us or are we gaining respect?
Let's look.
Last week, Trump was busy with the world leaders.
On Wednesday, Trump said he had a very lengthy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin in which they agreed to begin negotiations around Ukraine.
On Truth Social, Trump posted good possibility of ending this horrible, very bloody war.
They also discussed the Middle East, energy, and other issues, and agreed to make visits to each other's country.
The president also spoke to the Australian prime minister.
They discussed defense, trade investment, mineral supply chains, and concerns about China's aggressiveness.
Also last week, the world came to the White House.
King Abdullah of Jordan, he was at the White House.
They discussed the situation in Gaza.
And then late in the week, it was the turn of India's prime minister, Prime Minister Modi, he visited the White House.
They talked about launching a new initiative on military partnership, commerce, and our countries are going to work together on semiconductors and AI.
In the end, the Prime Minister of India said, we're going to make India great again as well.
The 51st governor, the one that runs Canada, is still not happy with Trump.
It played out this weekend in a Canadian soul-crushing event.
I'll get to that in just a minute.
In Germany over the weekend, they were listening to our new vice president, JD Vance.
They were a little upset because he said the control of thoughts and free speech has to end.
It actually made one of the leaders of the group weep openly, saying that it just showed how far apart Europe and America really are.
And yes, as the Germans bust down doors for a retweet, I agree.
On free speech, we're quite far apart.
60 Minutes did a segment on it.
That's our topic next hour.
But the Germans are now claiming that it was free speech that led to the Holocaust.
Excuse me?
In Paris, European leaders huddled behind closed doors over the weekend debating Ukraine's future.
Official statements spoke of unity, but is that the reality?
France and Germany, they're whispering peace talks while Poland and the Baltics brace for something much, much worse.
It's a war of words at this point for now.
But history suggests words don't end wars.
Back home, Washington in its own battlefield, this time over tariffs.
The president announced last week a simple plan.
Whatever you charge us, we're going to charge you.
China was very upset.
Boohoo.
Wall Street panicked.
In the heartland, farmers remembered fair trade means fair play.
Over the weekend, storms rolled in as well.
They came fast and they came hard.
It was Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Virginia, four states that are now digging out from flash floods that swallowed roads and homes and lives.
But among the storm clouds, there was a little parting.
Some good news.
Small town America doesn't wait for Washington.
Neighbors showed up.
Churches opened doors.
And somewhere, a farmer with a backhoe is already clearing a neighbor's driveway.
That's America.
Back in Washington this week, President Trump is delivering on his promises while even attending the Super Bowl in NASCAR.
He's done all kinds of things, including last week a decisive 25% tariff on foreign steel and aluminum aiming to protect American jobs and industries.
Those jobs and industries here in America took a leap on the stock market.
Critics are grumbling, but Main Street applauds as finally a leader puts America first.
On Capitol Hill, Republicans are tackling a six-point agenda.
This is all about the budget and a looming shutdown.
Budget resolutions and reconciliation bills aim to bolster defense, secure our borders, all the while keeping a keen eye on the deficit.
It's a tough balance.
Democrats support the Democrats' support is absolutely needed to keep the government from running post-March 14th.
Bipartisan cooperation is a necessity, it seems, because we're going to lose some stupid rhinos.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department is undergoing transformation.
Seven prosecutors have resigned after being directed to drop corruption charges against New York City's Mayor Eric Adams.
Acting Deputy Attorney, Attorney General Emile Bove cites governance concerns for the dismissal.
Critics say it's a political maneuver.
It's Nixon's Saturday night massacre.
We'll see.
As Kash Patel should be confirmed early this week.
And as he is, if he is, on day one, expect the Epstein client list to follow within hours of him arriving at the Hoover building.
The budget committee, back to them, they have approved in the Senate approving a fiscal year 2025 budget.
The plan emphasizes bolstering border security, military strength, independence, and an annual allocation of $85.5 billion, an offset by corresponding spending cuts reflecting a commitment to fiscal responsibility.
House Republicans are navigating their internal debates over their budget approach.
And the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, advocates for a comprehensive bill that combines Trump's tax cut agenda with increased funding for border security, military priorities.
Our friend and serious budget cutter, Chip Roy, is with the House package.
We'll see if they can bring them both together.
Both chambers are working on this because funding expires on March 14th.
Gee, have we ever heard that before?
We can't shut down the government.
Really?
I don't know.
Democrats are licking their chops at a government shutdown as usual, but wouldn't it be them that shut the government down?
And quite honestly, really?
I've had enough of this game.
1980: America's Cold War Beatdown00:08:05
Would anybody notice?
Maybe this time the Republicans won't blow it.
Trump sent the Pentagon a Valentine on Friday.
That Valentine just pretty much said, be mine.
He sent the Doge team out to the Pentagon on Friday.
Their mission is to cut the waste, cut the crap at the Department of Defense.
I think they're going to do that.
Last night, I don't know if Stu watched Hollywood.
They took the stage.
Saturday Night Live celebrated 50 years of laughs, or depending on who you ask, 50 years of diminishing returns.
The golden age was when Main Street was in on the joke, not the joke.
Tom Hanks is in trouble.
He played a MAGA supporter.
Oh, and the liberal laughs ensued.
Is it 2016 again?
And the hockey game.
I don't know if you saw the hockey game between the U.S. national team and Canada this weekend.
Normally, I'm not really into sports, but sports sometimes, because it's part of culture, has a way of transcending and defining the era we live in.
Sometimes it says out loud what we're all thinking.
And like the horns of Jericho, it announces our arrival and our future.
So let's see if we can find any echo in the past that sound an awful lot like this weekend.
In 1980, the United States was in the same situation we're in right now.
And it was a hockey game that changed everything.
By and large, the world had lost respect for us because just like now, we lost respect for ourselves.
Our nation had gone through some of the most intense movements in civil unrest that we had ever seen.
The left seized on it, keeping us in perpetual cycle of class and societal warfare, patriotism and trust, and the government was spiraling out of control.
Three years after Jimmy Carter accepted the Democratic nomination for president, he addressed these concerns in a televised speech.
It happened on July 15, 1979.
He said there was a threat to the nation.
And let me quote, the threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways.
It's a crisis of confidence.
It's a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.
We can see this crisis in confidence, in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of unity and purpose for our nation.
The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.
Wow, does that sound familiar?
And isn't it amazing how Carter could see what all of these policies were doing?
He could deliver impassioned speeches on the dangerous results, but then he would go back and double down on the policies that continued the spread of the virus.
The great inflation of the 1970s, it's what they used to call it.
It hit a fever pitch by 1980.
Interest rates spiked.
They fell briefly.
Then they flew up from there.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Banks stopped lending.
Unemployment skyrocketed.
The economy was clearly in a recession.
The geopolitical landscape, pretty much the same.
We had lost respect for ourselves, so the world didn't respect us.
Soviet Union appeared to be winning the war for global hearts and minds.
And then hockey.
Hockey came into play.
It was the battlefield of the Cold War.
By 1980, the Soviet Union had taken home the gold in five of the six past Olympic Games.
But then came the night of February 22, 1980.
The game had already happened hours earlier due to a broadcast delay.
Americans were expected to lose the mighty Soviet national hockey team.
But then we heard Al Michaels.
Maybe the greatest sports call in modern history.
You've got 10 seconds.
The countdown going on right now.
World, up to school.
Five seconds left in the game.
Do you believe in miracles?
Yes!
Unbelievable!
Do you believe in miracles?
It was called the Miracle on Ice.
Movies have been made about it.
It was an announcement party was what really it was.
It was the changing of the guard.
It was the birth of a new era.
Herb Brooks brought together a group that everyone said could not win at a time when America was convinced it could not win.
And what it announced is America is back and we're not going to be pushed around anymore.
We would no longer be taken advantage of.
We would no longer allow people just to laugh at us or belittle us because we were back.
Reagan came in shortly after.
Now, like 1980, we've just spent four years under a political ideology, as Carter put it, that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.
Our young people, they don't care about America anymore.
They don't have pride or love for the country because we haven't raised them that way.
In most cases, school is saying there's no reason to be proud of your country.
People take it for granted.
They're ashamed of the accomplishments of America, her history, and the very ideology on which she stands.
Now, before I get into this last part, I want to say I don't like the arguments between us and Canada right now.
I don't like it.
We've always been friends.
And it's a beautiful country.
It's cold.
I don't want to live there.
And I don't want it to be the 51st state.
I think it's actually pretty funny that our president is calling the prime minister the governor.
But the Canadian government, led by their progressive prime minister, our governor Justin Trudeau, is an annoying mascot for everything that is wrong in global politics.
Well, he was at the hockey game on Saturday in Canada between the national Canadian team and the U.S. national team.
Rumor was our boys were a little sick and tired of being booed every time the national anthem is sung, and they weren't going to take it.
Canadians didn't care.
Why would they?
Our country under the Democratic leadership has been toothless and apologists for four years.
We've been taught to be ashamed of our country.
Why not boo the national anthem?
And boo, they did.
If you saw it, it made your head explode.
When the puck finally dropped at the start of the game, the American center, he barely looked at the puck.
He didn't care about playing the game at that point.
He immediately tore off his gloves, dropped his stick, and clocked his opponent, taking him to the ground.
When the referees pulled the American away, he skated with his head high, glaring at the hostile crowd.
The message was clear, screw old glory to your peril.
Booing the National Anthem00:08:46
It was kind of awesome.
There were a total of three fights in the first nine seconds, again, which I didn't like, but the Americans were on a mission.
The intensity through the game was brutal.
And the Americans delivered an old-fashioned American beatdown.
The U.S. team delivered a message and won 3-1.
I don't know.
Was it the miracle on ice of 1980?
Because that was more than a hockey game.
And I couldn't help but feel the same way on Saturday.
I think America is back.
We're not ashamed.
We're not going to be intimidated nor cower anymore.
But we don't hate our neighbors.
We just love our country, what she stands for, and the birth of a new, prosperous, and proud era, I think, is upon us.
Congratulations, Team USA.
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10 seconds.
ID.
Welcome to the Glenn Beck program.
We're glad you're here.
Hello, Stu.
Glenn, how are you?
I'm okay.
I'm okay.
I did watch the Saturday Night Live thing.
Yeah, what did you think we could?
It had its moments.
Yeah.
You know, kind of what you'd expect.
You know, it was a perfect Saturday Night Live show in which it was, I think, three and a half hours long.
Probably had three funny sketches in it.
I mean, after 50 years, has America not learned its lesson?
50 years.
And the first sketch they start out with was the Lawrence Welk show with Robert Goulet on it.
I was like, what?
Will Farrell as Robert Goulet?
Was it new?
Yeah, it was brand new.
It was live.
I knew as a kid when Lawrence Welk was on.
Really weird choice.
And you're like, you've had 50 years to prep for the show, and this is your first run at it.
And it wasn't, again, like, you know, because Farrell's funny, it had, you know, a couple of moments, but that was most of it, right?
Like, most of it was you take a really, really funny group of people and, you know, throw them out there on stage.
They're not, it's not going to be all bad, but it was mostly, I thought, pretty bad.
Tell me about the Tom Hanks thing.
Actually, it was probably one of the best sketches in the entire show, too.
It was Black Jeopardy.
And the Hanks part was at the very end.
It was sort of like a throw-in at the end.
He just kind of came on, and his part was not funny.
The rest of the sketch actually was pretty funny.
That one, I would say, was one of the better ones.
But again.
Well, he was the one wearing the red hat, was he not?
Yeah, but he was out there for like maybe the last 30 seconds in a sketch.
It was, you know, it went on for a while, but it was actually one of the more, you know, Eddie Murphy was on there and he was really funny.
And it was actually, that one was pretty well.
I like seeing Eddie Murphy again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is Glenn Beck.
All right.
It's coming up on a year, a year and a half since Israel had to go to war with Hamas and Hezbollah.
Did you see?
We got three hostages out and they got like 40,000 people.
Like everybody who was in jail in Israel, it seems like, yeah, we just let him out.
I mean, I don't think this is a good plan, guys, but maybe it's just me.
Thankfully, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews is still on the ground in Israel and doing God's work, helping out in any way they possibly can.
Let the governments figure everything out.
Let's just help the people.
If you could make a gift today, it will provide critically needed aid to communities in the North and the South that have just been devastated by the ongoing war.
Your donation will deliver help to those in need, including evacuees and refugees from all the war-torn areas, first responders and volunteers, wounded soldiers, elderly Holocaust survivors, and none of this will end up in the hands of Hamas or Hezbollah, which I guess is hard for NGOs to do right now, but not hard for the IFCJ.
Go to supportifcj.org.
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And go to blazetv.com slash glenn.
Subscribe now.
Get $20 off your subscription to Blaze TV when you use the promo code GLENN.
Welcome to the Glenn Beck Program.
My name is Glenn Beck.
Stu is here with us.
Stu.
Does it does the I mean, I think everything is being done to set the stage that there's a new sheriff in town and we're just not going to take anymore.
I love the tariffs that are like that are reciprocal.
Whatever you charge, we'll charge.
That's fine.
It encourages everybody to lower them and we don't have them anymore.
Right.
I'd be greatly went to zero.
Yeah.
Be great.
Be great.
So don't charge us and we won't charge you.
I think that is the way it should be.
Because it's fair.
Yeah.
Then it's fair.
It's not necessarily free trade, but it's fair trade.
Okay.
And I like that.
Boy, everybody is freaking out.
Everybody.
Canada, this thing with Canada.
What the hell?
Relax, Canada.
Don't you understand?
We don't want you.
Okay.
We don't want you.
I know, was it Denmark?
I think it was Denmark that started saying we're going to make offers on California.
Go for it, man.
You got 25 bucks.
I'm willing to sell it.
It's on the market.
I say this is listed.
Go to Zillow.
Yeah.
Check it out.
You'll see it's a big listing.
Right.
I mean, it's not cheap, but honestly, like, we could be convinced to part with it at a very fair price.
You want to take, honestly, you want to take New York and California?
I'm good with that.
I'm good with that.
That way you have like a little vacation place.
You know what I mean?
You can go like, oh, it's the warm part of Canada.
Really?
Yeah, it's called California.
Take it.
You can take the entire West Coast.
Now, you have to take the debt along with it.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
And you have to put border security because we're not having any of those.
Well, they'd be Canadians now, but California Canadians.
None of them are leaving.
None of them are leaving.
They're not leaving because we'd have to really be, of course, they obviously wouldn't be able to do it.
So we'd have to do that ourselves.
And that's going to cost us even more.
I don't know if we thought this one out completely, but it's for sale.
I'm willing to talk about it.
Well, it's funny because everyone tries to do what they see Trump as doing, which is like trolling.
Right?
Like they see, ah, Trump's doing out 51st day.
Oh, yeah, well, here's our thing.
And it's like, oh, yeah, what was, didn't Mexico try that immediately?
Like, did that work?
Fail.
It was a big fail.
Yeah.
Fail.
And, you know, we, it's fun to be the big boys on the block.
You know, I don't like beating my chest.
However, I think beating your chest is important to reset the stage.
Yeah.
We've been wussified for so long that it's necessary to say, no, no, no, Europe, we're serious.
Did you hear JD Vance last week?
Resetting the Stage with Swagger00:08:44
When he was talking about, when he was going in and talking about how the EU has got to stop the silencing of free speech.
And he said, look, we're just as bad.
We went down this road.
Do we have it?
Yeah, play this.
I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they've judged to be, quote, hateful content.
Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of, quote, combating misogyny on the internet, a day of action.
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Koran burnings that resulted in his friend's murder.
And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden's laws to supposedly protect free expression do not, in fact, grant, and I'm quoting, a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.
And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs.
A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes.
Not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.
After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.
Now, the officers were not moved.
Adam was found guilty of breaking the government's new buffer zones law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person's decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility.
He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.
Now, I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off, crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person.
But no, this last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.
Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime.
In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
That, if that's what separates us, I'm happy to be separated from Europe.
I'm thrilled to be, I would hope that they would reverse themselves.
Wait until you hear what's happening in Germany in just a minute.
But the countries, all these countries are now starting to say we're the bad guys.
That's fine.
That's fine.
As long as your policies are those policies or the policies of Trudeau, yeah, we're not best of friends.
We are with your people, but we're not with your government or your policies.
Yeah, and I like, I think the tone of this is great.
I think we've had so many years of just apologizing for everything.
You know, if you remember back to the, what was it, Obama, Romney election, where he was like, oh, he's going on an apology tour.
And it was this big controversial thing.
He's like, no, we're not going on an apology tour.
And then we would play like 9,000 times he apologized for something.
Apologize for this.
That tone feels gone with Trump and Vance.
And like to go there to their faces and say, look at what you're doing.
And when he articulates it this way, these things are so obvious, right?
You can't banning private prayer in your homes?
Like, it's such an insane thing.
You'd think their response would be, well, that's not really what we're doing.
And it's not.
It's like, how dare you talk to us?
We have to have these laws.
And here's why Germany's a great example.
I know I'm going to get into that in a minute.
And I have a couple of questions for you on that particular story.
But I don't think you've particularly paid enough attention to Canada and what they're doing here.
Well, I feel like you're blowing off the power of Canada a little bit.
Right, okay.
And I don't think you've heard the latest.
Oh, maybe I haven't.
Maybe you haven't.
Because, you know, Texas has a little bit of swagger.
There's a little bit of swagger.
And I think that swagger might be gone after hearing this.
Oh, okay.
Because this is Canadian Parliament member Charles Angus.
And he has a message for Greg Abbott.
All right.
Okay.
All right.
Here you go.
And it's about sending a message, sending a message to Texas governor, Greg Abbott, who said Canada was going to learn a lesson.
Oh, really?
Texas is going to teach Canada a lesson.
Well, we've got $400 million worth of travel that goes to Texas, Mr. Abbott.
How about we teach you a lesson and say we've got better places to go than Texas?
Oh, that's your attitude of Canadians.
We will not go.
Hell no, we will not go.
Wow.
He told us.
You think Texas is going to teach Canada a lesson?
Oh, if we sleep like it.
Yeah, don't confuse, don't confuse Texas with the United States.
Texas is a whole different ball game.
And yeah, I think we might.
If we wake up from our nap, sure we will.
Yeah, but we have to be back by dinner at five.
But I think we can do that.
But yeah, maybe.
But Glenn, we can't.
You know, Texas would be lost without those Canadian tourism dollars.
That's really what the state is built on.
I have to tell you, I run into people all the time and they're like, what about this?
Yes.
Cyboot that.
And I'm like, oh, I can't find a Texan.
It's all Canadian.
We've been invaded by Canada down here.
Because that's really, because when you talk about the border, that's the one we're always talking about.
We're like, wow.
So many Canadians coming into Texas, spending all that money in our state.
That's, I mean, the budget would happen to the budget.
We somehow make it work with zero state income tax, but please, Canada, continue to.
I mean, I just love that.
You know, I can understand.
Well, you can't use oil for Texas.
But, you know, I can understand maybe saying, hey, we're going to hurt the industry because we're not going to let any, you know, aluminum it, whatever it is.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
But tourism.
Yeah.
And I will just point it this out.
Again, this is coming from America's only Blue Jays fan.
Okay.
I, you know, I'm sitting here watching to see if they resigned Vladimir Guerrero Jr. today.
That's the main thing I care about when it comes to the news.
All of that being said, you just can't talk tough with that accent.
It just doesn't work.
I'm sorry.
It's impossible.
It's just literally impossible.
If you're watching the blaze, you got to see him again.
Play that again and listen to the accent and watch him.
He's just and it's about sending a message, sending a message to Texas governor Greg Abbott.
Greg Abbott said Canada was going to learn a lesson.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Texas is going to teach Canada a lesson.
Well, we've got 400 million people again.
It's no fact.
Canada's great.
There's a lot to leave.
Come on.
You can't talk tough.
You just not know.
It's not a thing with that accent.
Like Germany, you can't talk sweetly.
Like there's nothing, you can't have a Valentine's Day in Germany.
Well, you can't say it.
You can't say anything sweet and loud.
You can't be like, I love you.
You can't do that because it sounds like round them off.
It's true.
It's true.
It's what it sounds like.
He said, I wanted to caress your skin.
And it was like, oh, wow.
You just said you were really, really pretty.
Whoa.
No, that could be the nicest thing in the world.
Home Title Lock Protection00:03:54
And you could be intimidated.
And if you say that, if you say, oh, really?
We're going to learn a lesson.
Texas is going to teach us a lesson.
But you say it, then you look at it and go, okay, okay, all right.
Like, all right, calm down, dude.
With Canada, like, they're just too nice.
Like, the accent's too nice in the UK.
That's what they'd have you believe.
They're a military nightmare.
Yeah.
Well, that's true.
That's true.
Okay.
When they invade on horseback.
I can't say that it doesn't go as well, at least in the 21st century.
We're the Canadian Mounties and we're here to talk tough to Texas.
Okay.
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You've heard me talking about a crime the FBI calls house stealing, which is just like, I don't know.
Again, it's like Canadians telling you they're going to settle a score with you.
It just doesn't sound house stealing.
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Welcome to the Glenn Beck Program.
Why Matlock Wasn't the Disguise00:03:20
We're glad.
We're just talking about Saturday Night Live, their 50th.
Eddie Murphy was on last night, and I miss Eddie Murphy.
Yeah.
Do you know what happened to him?
All of a sudden, he was like, I'm Dr. Doolittle.
And then he was the invisible man.
He did a lot of those types of movies.
He did.
Yeah.
He came back with a Beverly Hills cop sequel recently, I believe.
I don't know if you saw that.
I didn't.
He had a real falling out with SNL over the over the years where he got mad that they were making fun of him during like one of his darker periods and didn't come on for like 20 years and then came back on and eventually hosted it a couple of years ago, I think.
But he was on the show and he was, you know, he was really funny.
I mean, like, is he doing stand-up anymore?
That's a good question.
I don't know.
I mean, he did, he certainly is active as far as, you know, he did do that.
That was a big deal.
I think it was Netflix, did it?
The Beverly Hills Cops.
I saw it and I was like, oh, that's really cool.
And then just didn't watch it.
Yeah.
I don't know why.
Yeah, I did the same thing.
I thought, you know, I'd give that a shot, but then I didn't give it a shot.
You guys sent me on a rabbit hole.
What was the show you guys were talking about on ABC where the woman is like some genius and she's a Caitlin Olsen show?
Gosh, I don't even know the name of it.
I'll find it real quick.
High potential.
High potential.
I watched that with Tanya.
What did you think?
I thought it was actually really good.
It's kind of entertaining.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
It's an ABC show, so it's completely clean and really good.
Yeah, she's great.
I mean, she's really, really, she's great in anything she's in.
But yes, it was actually pretty entertaining.
I'm excited.
I don't know.
I don't know if I'm excited for Suits LA, which is coming out next week.
I watched Suits in its original area on USA Network.
I was like addicted to it when it was on and no one watched it.
And then it became the most popular Netflix show ever.
So when they with the reruns.
And so now they're like, oh, oh, you guys like this thing?
You never told us this before.
Let's do a whole new series and act like it's something different.
So now Suits LA is coming out next week.
And I don't know, it could be terrible, but it seems like they're going to bring back Harvey Specter.
And like, it's going to, I'm excited about it.
I'm in.
Have you seen, I avoided this just because of the name with Kathy Bates, Matlock.
Have you seen that?
I didn't watch it, honestly, because I'm like you, Matlock.
I'm really not going to watch Matlock.
She actually took the name as she says she's going in kind of undercover at this at this firm, law firm.
And she picks the name Matlock because it's the TV show.
Who's going to think that that's a made-up name?
You know, why would I pick Matlock as a disguise name?
I mean, she's actually really, really good.
It's a great show.
Well, she's great.
Oh, I like her.
I thought it was just a remake of her.
No, that's what I thought.
It's not.
It's really good.
It's really good.
All right.
Back in just a minute with actual news that matters.
Stand by.
Free Speech and the Holocaust00:15:41
This is Glenn Beck.
Until you hear what CBS says about free speech and the Holocaust.
I think you're going to like it.
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This is the Glenn Beck Program.
Hello, America.
Who can make a German cry?
Very few people, but apparently JD Vance.
We get to that here in just a second first.
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Okay, so last hour I played a little bit of JD Vance's speech at the German or Munich security conference, and he talked about how free speech is under attack in Europe.
And he didn't just point out that it was Europe that was having this problem, but he said it had to end.
But let's not stand here and point the finger at you.
Let's point it to ourselves as well.
Cut seven.
And in the interest of comedy, my friends, but also in the interest of truth, I will admit that sometimes the loudest voices for censorship have come not from within Europe, but from within my own country, where the prior administration threatened and bullied social media companies to censor so-called misinformation.
Misinformation, like, for example, the idea that coronavirus had likely leaked from a laboratory in China, our own government encouraged private companies to silence people who dared to utter what turned out to be an obvious truth.
So I come here today not just with an observation, but with an offer.
And just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite, and I hope that we can work together on that.
In Washington, there is a new sheriff in town.
And under Donald Trump's leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square agree or disagree.
Wow.
Didn't go over well.
In fact, here's the Munich Security Conference chairperson closing out the convention.
Listen to this.
This conference started as a transatlantic conference.
After the speech of Vice President Vance on Friday, we have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore.
I'm very grateful to all those European politicians that spoke out and reaffirmed the values and principles that they are defending.
No one did this better than President Selensky.
Let me conclude, and this becomes difficult.
He was applauded for crying that we don't have the same values in common anymore.
If this is the way Germany and the rest of Europe feels about free speech, then yes, we don't have the same values.
And I don't care if we stand completely alone.
We've done it before.
And when it comes to freedom of the individual, if that's what it takes, that's who we must become.
We have to square our shoulders and remember our principles.
Yes, if you want to shut down free expression and free speech, which means you have to let the worst be said so you can actually have dialogue, learn from one another, learn from the past, and not just become a zombie robot with an out-of-control government that you can never speak against.
Well, that's who we are.
That's what we stand against.
I will tell you that their own people, I can guarantee you, are not for it.
How do I know?
Well, let me show you what happened on 60 Minutes.
Here's 60 Minutes joining a German police censorship raid.
It's 6.01 on a Tuesday morning, and we were with state police as they raided this apartment in northwest Germany.
Inside, six armed officers searched a suspect's home, then seized his laptop and cell phone.
Prosecutors say those electronics may have been used to commit a crime.
The crime, posting a racist cartoon online.
At the exact same time across Germany, more than 50 similar raids played out.
Part of what prosecutors say is a coordinated effort to curb online hate speech in Germany.
Now, I don't like hate speech.
I don't like seeing racist cartoons.
But that is part of life.
It depends on who's in power, on how you define hate.
And when you have a government able to take away inalienable rights, you have a real problem on your hand.
60 Minutes continues.
Is it a crime to insult somebody in public?
Yes.
Yes, it is.
And it's a crime to insult them online as well?
Yes.
The fine could be even higher if you insult someone in the internet.
Why?
Because in the internet, it stays there.
If we are talking face-to-face, you insult me, I insult you.
Okay, finish.
But if you're in the internet, if I insult you or a politician, that sticks around forever.
Politicians.
The prosecutors explain German law also prohibits the spread of malicious gossip, violent threats, and fake quotes.
If somebody posts something that's not true and then somebody else reposts it or likes it, are they committing a crime?
In the case of reposting, it is a crime as well, because the reader can't distinguish whether you just invented this or just reposted it.
That's trusted.
Punishment for breaking hate speech laws can include jail time for repeat offenders.
Jail time.
Jail time.
If you say something offensive about a politician.
Did anybody catch that?
If you say something offensive about a politician, you can be charged with a hate crime.
You do it several times and you'll go to prison.
Ja vohl meinführer.
That's a question of how much did we have in common before JD Vance's speech.
Apparently not that much.
Apparently not.
Clearly not.
If those are your laws, it's a crime.
You can't trust people to be able to decipher whether a quote is fake or not.
It's not their responsibility to look it up themselves.
Listen to Cut 3, CBS, not pushing back.
To build their cases, investigators scour social media and use public and government data.
Lau says sometimes social media companies will provide information to prosecutors, but not always.
So the task force employs special software investigators to help unmask anonymous users.
So this is suggesting you kill people seeking asylum here.
Lau says his unit has successfully prosecuted about 750 hate speech cases over the last four years.
But it was a 2021 case involving a local politician named Andy Groet that captured the country's attention.
Groet complained about a tweet that called him a pimmel, a German word for the male anatomy.
That triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government.
As prosecutors explained to us in Germany, it's okay to debate politics online, but it can be a crime to call anyone a pimmel, even a politician.
So it sounds like you're saying it's okay to criticize a politician's policy, but not to say, I think you're a jerk and an idiot.
Exactly.
Comments like you're a son of a bitch, excuse me, for you to say.
Oh, these words have nothing to do with political discussions or a contribution to a discussion.
And it's up to him to decipher whether it contributes or not.
Yes.
Yes.
Boy, you better be careful if you're going over to Germany anytime soon.
60 Minutes finally asks about some free speech issues.
Listen to this.
The criticism that, you know, this feels like the surveillance that Germany conducted 80 years ago.
How do you respond to that?
There is no surveillance.
Josephine Ballone is a CEO of HATEAID, a Berlin-based human rights organization that supports victims of online violence.
In the United States, a lot of people look at this and say this is restricting free speech.
It's a threat to democracy.
Free speech needs boundaries.
And in the case of Germany, these boundaries are part of our constitution.
Without boundaries, a very small group of people can rely on endless freedom to say anything that they want while everyone else is scared and intimidated.
And your fears that if people are freely attacked online, that they'll withdraw from the discussion.
This is not only a fear, it's already taking place.
Already half of the internet users in Germany are afraid to express their political opinion.
They rarely participate in public debates online anymore, half of the internet users.
You're putting them in prison when they say the wrong thing.
I mean, it is Gestapo with today's technology.
I've warned you, with today's technology and what is right around the corner, you put a Hitler in charge of it and there's not a Jew left in the world.
There's no place to hide in the entire world.
This is extraordinarily dangerous.
Now, that was the extent of the CBS pushback on the Germans.
That was a lot.
Then you get Marco Rubio.
And they go to Marco Rubio to ask him about this.
Listen.
Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide.
And he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups.
The context of that was changing the tone of it.
And you know that, that the censorship specifically about the right.
No, I have to disagree with you.
Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide.
The genocide was conducted by an authoritarian Nazi regime that happened to also be genocidal because they hated Jews and they hated minorities and they hated those that they had a list of people they hated, but primarily the Jews.
There was no free speech in Nazi Germany.
There was none.
There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany.
They were a sole and only party that governed that country.
So that's not an accurate reflection of history.
The free speech caused the Holocaust.
Amazing.
Free speech.
You couldn't speak out against the Nazis.
Who doesn't learn that in school?
Well, probably most Americans and clearly the journalist here in America.
You had no free speech.
How do you get everybody to give the Heil Hitler salute?
You don't do that by becoming popular.
They didn't.
They did it by beating people in the streets.
You will do this when we salute.
If you don't, we'll beat you to death in the streets and we can get away with it because our guy is in power.
There was no free speech.
Free Speech in Retreat00:05:35
This is insanity.
Now, I want to show you what JD Vance said that made the guy cry in Germany.
Listen, next.
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I am free to say this on the radio.
If it would have gone the other direction, I'm not sure I could have been free to say this on the radio.
You might disagree.
You might call what pre-born does hate speech.
What they do is they tell moms that that is a baby, not just a clump of cells, that she's not alone, that she does have options, that she does have a place to go to get help.
If she feels alone, she should know she's not, and that's at a pre-born clinic.
Wow, what dangerous, dangerous speech.
That's why our last administration was putting people in jail because they believed those things.
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10 seconds, station ID.
Now, I want you to remember that the Munich Security Conference chair cried at the closing of the conference.
Cried because he realized the United States was no longer on the same side as Germany and Europe.
Now that seems crazy, but no, I'm not on the same side of people who want to silence anyone.
I am not for the silencing of people on the left here.
I am not for silencing the people in the middle or the right.
Even to the extreme, free speech is an absolute unless you're calling for violence and it actually turns into violence.
No.
But you can say whatever it is you want.
I know that sounds extreme.
It didn't used to, but apparently it does now.
Here's what JD Vance said.
And if you think that Germany is the problem, listen to this from JD Vance.
Cutsic.
I look to Brussels, where EU commissars warn citizens that they intend to shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they've judged to be, quote, hateful content.
Or to this very country, where police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online as part of, quote, combating misogyny on the internet, a day of action.
I look to Sweden, where two weeks ago the government convicted a Christian activist for participating in Koran burnings that resulted in his friend's murder.
And as the judge in his case chillingly noted, Sweden's laws to supposedly protect free expression do not in fact grant, and I'm quoting, a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief.
And perhaps most concerningly, I look to our very dear friends, the United Kingdom, where the backslide away from conscience rights has placed the basic liberties of religious Britons in particular in the crosshairs.
A little over two years ago, the British government charged Adam Smith Connor, a 51-year-old physiotherapist and an army veteran, with the heinous crime of standing 50 meters from an abortion clinic and silently praying for three minutes, not obstructing anyone, not interacting with anyone, just silently praying on his own.
After British law enforcement spotted him and demanded to know what he was praying for, Adam replied simply, it was on behalf of the unborn son he and his former girlfriend had aborted years before.
Now the officers were not moved.
Adam was found guilty of breaking the government's new buffer zones law, which criminalizes silent prayer and other actions that could influence a person's decision within 200 meters of an abortion facility.
He was sentenced to pay thousands of pounds in legal costs to the prosecution.
Now I wish I could say that this was a fluke, a one-off crazy example of a badly written law being enacted against a single person, but no.
This last October, just a few months ago, the Scottish government began distributing letters to citizens whose houses lay within so-called safe access zones, warning them that even private prayer within their own homes may amount to breaking the law.
Naturally, the government urged readers to report any fellow citizens suspected guilty of thought crime.
Europe Is No Longer On Our Side00:03:41
In Britain and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.
What part of that did you disagree with?
What part of that makes you want to embrace the European Union?
For me, it's quite the opposite.
I've always believed that Europe are brothers and sisters and we're fine and we should help one another.
But I have to tell you, I no longer am comfortable with a single dollar going over to Europe to defend those kinds of policies.
You're not on the same side.
We are not on the same side if you violate freedom of speech that way.
And remember, this is why Klaus Schwab told Europe, just believe in the system.
Well, what is the system?
We found out the system is if the people vote for a candidate that is not going to play ball, if they are at all in line with freedom of speech, they're a radical, need to be shut down, and we cancel that election until the people get it right.
That's a dictatorship.
We are seeing the hatred of the old Germany and Europe start to grow again, and Europe could become a very large foe of freedom.
This is Harry Lynn Beck.
We got to talk about that a little bit more when we come back.
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20 bucks off your subscription to blaze tv what was seen last night on 60 minutes uh is really worth you watching uh It is what's happening in Germany, but it's happening all over Europe.
And then couple that with what happened at the security conference in Germany this weekend, where JD Vance spoke and the chair actually crying because we are so different.
We no longer have enough in common, he says.
And I happen to agree with him.
Balancing Free Speech and Fascism00:13:47
If they are for the silencing of speech where you can't talk about politics or a politician, yeah, I'm against that.
I'm absolutely against that.
And we're not on the same side.
Is there any chance this is just a cultural difference?
Trying to look at this as charitably as possible.
We're a unique country.
We are an exceptional country and a country that has a First Amendment that cherishes free speech as something that's important in the country and to its culture.
And over there, like, you know, I don't know.
So if I understand your question right, it is a difference in culture.
In both places, we don't understand one another clearly.
For instance, we look at people who are in the street saying, hey, I want Germany to be Germany.
I want France to be France.
I want England to be England.
What's the problem?
I don't want the European Union making decisions for me.
The way Europe views that is racist.
Why?
Because their history of Germany, at least, was that that leads to very bad things like the Holocaust.
But what people don't understand about America is we are a completely different system.
We are not based and watered down.
Everything they have is kind of almost a watered down monarchy in a way.
You don't have the freedoms that you have here.
And their systems of government float between two extremes, fascism and communism.
And fascism could take the face of a monarchy or even a democracy.
But fascism on one side, if you're thinking about a train track, the right side train rail is fascism.
The left is communism.
And freedom is found someplace in between those two tracks.
If you're in the center, that's the sweet spot.
It balances both fascist and communist.
But huge government either way.
Correct.
And people here in America, especially in our press, and those foreign press that don't understand America, they try to make it between those two things here.
Woodrow Wilson and the progressive left did try to make it, and it is until now.
We're starting to pull up these tracks.
We had the same two choices.
You're either a fascist or a communist.
That's not the American track.
The American track is total government on the left side and no government on the right.
And so that's your freedom scale.
So what we try to do is get away far enough from total control so it can never reach its ugly face and hand and grab us.
But also left of total anarchy and no government.
We have to go to the left of that, but not too far left or you're going to, that's the difference.
Anarchy.
Their two choices on left and right are communism, fascism.
Ours is anarchy, no government, or total government, and that's either fascist or communist or some sort of religious country or anything like that that takes total control and tells people exactly what to do and how to live.
Yeah, and I think that's the reason why I'm thinking of this from an average German citizen, right?
Like, I don't know, our understanding of German politics is somewhat limited, right?
If you're an average German citizen and you're getting nonstop, Trump is basically Hitler from, I'm sure, their own media.
But then in addition, also from American media.
Yes.
Right.
So there's no, unless they're really involved and really looking into this, all they're seeing is Trump is horrible.
You're seeing, I mean, the American media has fooled half of our country into believing he's Hitler.
So they probably think he's a really bad figure.
Oh, yeah.
And then the way they look at politics, they see, okay, well, this party, whether they're good or bad, but they are, every single piece of media says they're trivializing the Holocaust.
And then JD Vance comes over and meets with their leader.
AFP.
Are you talking about AFD?
Yeah.
Like you could see how they might translate that not just as, okay, free speech, we've got to deal with a lot of terrible people saying a lot of terrible things because the principle is important, which is how we view it.
They may view it as, well, they just agree with this terrible party who's saying all these terrible things.
So there is a caution to us as well, because we don't understand them.
They don't understand us.
You can look at their top 10 policy proposals.
Let me give them to you here in a second.
They're actually pretty awesome.
I'm talking about AFD.
However, big caveat, don't necessarily take these as something in the same way we would understand them over here.
So their policies, finally protect the borders, no cash benefits for asylum seekers.
Are you cool with protecting the borders?
Cool with no cash benefits?
Tighten the asylum laws.
Totally fine.
Stop giving away our citizenship.
Yeah, I mean, it's broad, but yeah, sure.
Work must pay, not welfare.
Yeah, right.
End economic, or sorry, economic growth for all, not green restrictions.
These are the policies of AFD.
No green restrictions.
Love that.
Yep.
Lowering taxes for citizens and businesses.
Great.
End the nonsense of bureaucracy.
Sure.
Energy must be affordable again.
Yeah.
And defend freedom of speech.
All fine with me.
That's the AFD policy.
That's what AFD is running on.
Well, all of those things are great.
Yeah, they seem fine.
I mean, there's a couple in there that are a little too broad.
You have to know.
But generally speaking, that's a fine platform.
Fine platform.
Okay.
Like anything.
I don't necessarily adopt everything that anybody says.
You know, it's like I'm not really for tariffs, but let them play out that people chose.
And he was very, very clear about it.
Now, with that, you start to get articles that say, oh, they're Nazis.
Yeah, yeah, because I went into this trying to understand.
Again, I'm an American trying to understand the German system.
And so the crime here is that JD Vance gave this party some sort of voice, some sort of platform, and they shouldn't be platformed because they're so terrible.
And every single article I read about it says something, the version of this.
This is the New York Times version of it.
Mr. Scholz said the AFD had trivialized Nazi atrocities like the concentration camp at Dachau.
And there's it links to that.
Now, this is maybe more of a basic question of how the internet works, but I read a lot of news stories.
This sentence, the AFD had trivialized Nazi atrocities like the concentration camp at Dachau with a link.
Where does that link go?
Takes you to the statement that they made.
Right.
How they trivialized the Holocaust.
Right.
How do they trivialize Dachau?
Oh, my God.
You can't if you have, if you're over in Europe, you couldn't go to that because then you would be reposting hate speech.
And that's a whole separate problem.
Here we are in America without those restrictions.
That link should go to explain to me how do they trivialize Dachau.
Instead, what it goes to is just a history of Dachau, which I am well aware was very bad.
It doesn't go to a link about how the AFD trivialized it.
It's just, hey, you should know that Dachau was really bad and a lot of things happened there, which were bad.
So I started, I went on this long rabbit hole of reading about 15 different mainstream stories about the AFD.
All of them said either they trivialized the Holocaust or they were downplaying the Holocaust.
Okay, what did they say?
Right.
Did you ever find?
Now I was looking for something current, right?
Yeah.
The only thing I could find, they went to a bunch of different sources cited this one example of one of their politicians citing a World War II memorial as a memorial of shame.
Now, you should, first of all, you should be shamed of it, Germany.
You should be ashamed of your, it is a memorial of shame.
It should be.
It should be something you are ashamed of.
His point seemed to be to me was a point that you've made many times, Glenn, which is we should acknowledge the terrible things our country has done.
However, that shouldn't be all we acknowledge.
Like Germany has done a lot of other things in their history, which are great.
And you should be able to be proud of those while, and this is an important addendum, especially with Nazi Germany and how recent it is, you must also point out all the terrible things you have done and make sure you never do them again.
You don't forget.
You know, like I would make a similar to a lesser scale argument about our actions in that same time period with Asian Americans.
Yes.
Right?
Like that should be a central part of what our kids learn about when we talk about World War II.
And we don't learn about it at all because it was progressives that did it, so we don't care.
But like that is really important that we stay away from that.
We should not, however, look at the entire American history and boil it down to five or six terrible things that we've done.
100%.
So like, is that trivializing the Holocaust?
I mean, I don't know if his opinion is we shouldn't have that memorial because we shouldn't remember the Holocaust, that's a real problem.
Yes.
If his opinion is, look, the Holocaust was terrible and what the Nazis did were terrible.
However, we shouldn't only focus on that as all of German history, which by the way, it does seem like modern Germany does a lot.
I mean, like, modern Germany should, no one who was born in the 1960s and 70s and 80s should feel a responsibility for what the Nazis did.
No, you should stand guard.
They should absolutely stand guard and realize maybe something in their culture leads them to have problems like that, which is what should send all of their alarm bells going crazy when they're arresting people for internet posts.
So this is the other thing that they forget by not learning their history, what caused this?
What caused this?
I told it was free speech.
What caused this initially was Germany was humiliated.
Okay, let's learn allies and let's not humiliate Germans, you know, especially when they're going to go build tanks in secret.
But it was that.
It was progressivism that seeped into the Nazi ideology that said that there's superior races, et cetera, et cetera, through eugenics.
But it was also the fact that they were looking at foreigners and saying they're destroying our country.
That's where they hang their hat and say, oh, you're against asylum seekers.
Well, I would like to know where do they, all of these people coming into the entire West and changing the makeup of the West, they're all seeking asylum?
We didn't have this many asylum seekers in World War II.
What are you talking about?
I don't want the fundamentals of my country changed or lost.
They say, well, we want, you know, we want a homogenic society.
That's what the Nazis said.
Well, that's kind of what we say too, you know, when we say justice for all, e pluribus unum, from many, one.
We want some homogenic stakes on this tent.
We want you to agree to certain things.
Like free speech.
Like free speech.
Just the Bill of Rights.
That doesn't mean we all look alike or anything else.
It means you have to believe in these tenets.
The problem is we're the only ones where our constitution is rooted in those rights.
That's why they freak out over there.
That's why you should be worried about what's happening in Europe, because they don't understand true freedom.
They've got only two choices, fascism and communism.
We led the way last time while we were becoming fascistic ourselves under progressivism.
Let's not repeat that this is, this may be.
We may be an island by ourselves, like England found itself being an island in World War II.
Identify Your Goal00:05:56
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Donald Trump tweeted something, or somebody tweeted something.
If you're saving your country, you cannot violate any of its laws.
I'm paraphrasing that.
It's from Napoleon, and it is absolutely unconstitutional.
That's not the way we do it.
I don't think Trump, I mean, Trump says a lot of things that he doesn't mean.
But that one is bothersome and not worth dwelling on, but at least pinning up in your own mind and watching carefully.
We must stand for the Constitution.
No matter how bad it gets, we restore order through the restoration of the Bill of Rights and Constitution.
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This is the Glenn Beck Program.
Hello, America.
Welcome to the Glenn Beck program.
We have one of my favorite people in Washington on Tom Cotton.
He is a guy who has been going and looking for the truth and speaking the truth for a long time.
He's got a new book out about the threat that China poses.
We're going to talk about that, but also a little bit about COVID, the inside story of national intelligence, et cetera, et cetera.
We begin with him in 60 seconds.
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Senator Tom Cotton, welcome to the program, sir.
How are you?
I'm doing very well, Glenn.
It's good to be back on the program with you and looking forward to talking about sort of dangerous risk China poses to American life.
Yeah.
You know, I read your book.
I haven't finished it yet, but I've been reading it.
You know, you talk about the seven things you can't say.
Let me just say them.
China Is An Evil Empire00:15:35
China is an evil empire.
Thank you.
China is preparing for war.
China is waging economic world war.
China has infiltrated our society.
China has infiltrated our government.
China is coming for our kids, and China could win.
That's what your book lays out.
Let's take some of these one by one.
China's an evil empire.
Clearly, make the case.
Glenn, as Ronald Reugen said about communist Russia, we could say the same thing about communist China.
It's an evil empire.
That's something that is often unsaid in our society because China has infiltrated so many corners of American society and people don't want to lose contracts or access or jobs or what have you.
But I think a simple look at the facts tells you that China, in some ways, is probably worse than Soviet Russia ever was.
Remember, Mao Zedong, the founder of Chinese communism, is the worst mass murderer in all of history, worse than Stalin, worse than Hitler.
And China has never repudiated him.
You know, when Stalin died, Khrushchev and the Politburo kind of exposed him, so to speak, and repudiated him.
China venerates Mao to this day.
His picture hangs over Teneman Square.
His remains are still embalmed in a mausoleum.
Xi Jinping, the current dictator of China, is an open Maoist and aspires to be more powerful than even Mao.
But just look at what they've done to their people, the monstrous crimes against their people.
Like the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s and 60s killed anywhere from 45 to 50 million people.
The Cultural Revolution in the 1960s was an effort to totally destroy all of cultural Chinese traditions, much worse than anything you saw in the French Revolution.
The one-child policy, which continued well after Mao, probably resulted in more than 300 abortions, 300 million abortions, and 200 million forced sterilizations.
And how many people had their child, their baby?
Yeah.
And then only to have the Chinese government come in and drown it in a mud puddle.
I mean, they are brutal.
Yeah, and just and what they do today in Tibet and Xinjiang, trying to ethnically cleanse and erase those peoples forever by taking their kids away from them and putting them in communist indoctrination schools or considered Christians, Glenn.
Many people are surprised to know that China is one of the largest Christian nations in the world, maybe as many as 100 million Christians in China.
Yet they face severe persecution.
They face risk of arrest and punishment.
Children are banned from going to church or Sunday school and required to sign atheism pledges at school as they try to snuff out Christianity among the next generation.
China is even rewriting the Bible, literally.
It's substituting the word of God with the word of Mao.
And, of course, they treat other religious and ethnic minorities even worse.
I mean, consider the Falong Gong, a harmless spiritual movement that has roots in Buddhism.
Americans, to the extent they're familiar with it, have probably seen them doing their yoga and breathing exercises in parks, all because of one peaceful protest.
25 years ago, these people had been brutally oppressed, tortured, disappeared, murdered.
There's credible reports that tens of thousands of them have had their organs harvested while they're still alive, Glenn.
Again, China could not be more brutal, more depraved in the way it treats its own people.
And it's really constructed a kind of techno-totalitarian police state beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell, the author of 1984.
He said in that book that tyranny is like a boot stomping on the human face forever.
With China, you might add, it's a smartphone app monitoring the human face forever.
You know, I talked to Chris Stewart a couple of years ago, and he said, going over to China, he said, you know, we were informed there's nothing secret here.
Don't bring your phone.
Don't do anything.
He said, the only place that wasn't under surveillance was up against one corner in the shower.
He said, everything else is being watched.
Everything is being watched and listened to.
That is a panopticon.
Oh, absolutely, Glenn.
More than half the world's surveillance cameras are in China.
Think about that.
China makes up maybe a sixth or a seventh of the world's population, but more than half of the surveillance cameras are in China.
They are everywhere.
And they're also powered by advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence.
China boasts that it can identify the face of any one of its subjects anywhere in the country in just a matter of seconds.
And it's right about traveling there.
I can tell you, I mean, I've never personally been there.
I don't plan to, Glenn.
I was sanctioned five years ago for pointing out the origins of COVID and standing up for Hong Kong or freedom.
But I know people have traveled there to include people that traveled there for U.S. government business or just as U.S. government employees.
And China isn't even subtle about it.
You know, they said that they would create a dummy account on Gmail or Hotmail or some other web-based email just so they could tell their family or friends that everything's going fine.
And they'd open it up at night and all the emails that already clicked as red.
You know, the Chinese communist spies are reading their emails and not even bothering to mark them as unread.
No, I think they want you to know.
They want you to know.
Yeah, they're so aggressive and so blunt force in the way they want to push your eyes.
Like what Chinese officials have said to countries on their periphery is that you're a small country and we're a large country, and therefore you have to dance to our tune.
So I want to come back because there's so much to talk about COVID and everything else that is really truly evil.
But before we leave into the next thing you can't say about China, why is it, do you suppose, I mean, we all think that we would be, you know, for the emancipation of slaves.
You know, if I lived in 1850, I would have been all over it.
Really?
Because what's happening in China is slavery.
And we are all buying Apple products.
We're all buying Google products.
Google is in bed with China.
Facebook is in bed with China.
I mean, everybody is.
Why is it we can't seem to understand that China is an evil empire?
We kind of got it with the Soviet Union.
Well, I think I would say that our people do understand that China is an evil empire.
They may not understand the full extent of it, and that's what I want to explain in my first chapter in Seven Things You Can't Say About China, about how it is an evil empire.
But however bad they think China is, however dangerous it is, it's actually much worse.
But it's a lot of our elites that want to paper over it, that don't want to ring the alarm, which is what I'm trying to do with this little book.
In part because our elites are often co-opted by China.
Over the last 40 years, due to failed policies that, frankly, both parties supported in the 1990s and the 2000s and the early teens, we shipped not just jobs or this or that factory or even business overseas.
We shipped entire industries overseas.
And there are many, many Americans who are deeply invested in China and who won't say a critical word about China, even raising the point that slave labor is being used in northwest China to oppress ethnic and religious minorities,
so much so that companies came up to the Capitol years ago and were lobbying against legislation that would force them to inspect and audit their supply chains to make sure that Chinese slaves, literal, actual slaves, were not making products in their supply chains.
They were lobbying against that legislation.
Again, probably China was compelling them to.
And you could just see when they testified that their bosses had said, you know, we know this is going to put you in a hard spot with Senator Cotton and other China hawks testifying.
But if you say a single word that costs us any business in China, you're going to be fired immediately.
So where is the president, do you think, on recognizing that China is an evil empire?
Oh, I think there's no question that Donald Trump is the toughest president we've had on communist China since at least the end of the Cold War and probably the end of World War II since the Chinese took over in 1949.
I mean, I guess Eisenhower could give him a run for his money, Glenn.
But I mean, remember, Eisenhower threatened to nuke communist China.
That's what it takes to be tougher on China than Donald Trump.
And for Eisenhower, in some ways, it was easier because Eisenhower was a Republican.
The Republican Party was 100% behind Cheng Kai-shek, the nationalist Chinese government that lost the Chinese Civil War and repaired across the Taiwan Straits to Taiwan.
So Eisenhower had the wind in his sails on being tough on China.
When Donald Trump came into office eight years ago, he had the wind in his face because you still had, by and large, bipartisan consensus that we shouldn't rock the boat with China.
We shouldn't confront them.
We shouldn't make them feel uneasy.
We're still going down this path of so-called economic liberalization, which is going to lead to political moderation, which had long since been disproven.
And President Trump really changed the terms of the debate about China.
There's still a lot of people who are not as strong as he is or as I am or some other Republicans.
But you saw it with President Biden's administration.
He was very hesitant to reverse President Trump's policies on China.
He reversed almost everything else, but he was hesitant on China because he knew how unpopular China is and that the American people do recognize China as a threat, even if they don't understand the full extent of it because so many of our elites refuse to speak these truths.
So the senator from Arkansas, Tom Cotton, is with us.
And just hold for 60 seconds because I want to stop here and talk a little bit about what really happened when COVID was unleashed in the world and why did it take so long for the CIA to come out and say, okay, yeah, it was China.
More on that in just a second.
Tom Cotton, the name of his book is The Seven Things That You Cannot Say About China.
He's going to say all seven of them.
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10 seconds, station ID.
So Senator Tom Cotton is with us to talk about his new book, The Seven Things You Can't Say About China.
What really happened in Wuhan when COVID was unleashed on the world?
And why did it take Ratcliffe to finally come out and say, okay, I think it was Wuhan and a lab leak?
Well, first off, Glenn, I think it's important to note that the CIA report that concluded that COVID most likely originated in those labs in Wuhan was actually completed in the final days of the Biden administration.
Director Ratcliffe, to his credit, made those findings public.
The CIA now agrees with the long-standing conclusion of the FBI and the Department of Energy's intelligence unit.
But that was done on the Biden watch.
So this is not some partisan conclusion that Donald Trump directed.
It was the best thinking of the CIA that was done under Joe Biden's tenure to reflect what the FBI and the Department of Energy had done.
Why did it take so long?
Why did so many people man the ramparts on behalf of China in the winter of 2020 against me and then eventually against Donald Trump?
Well, unfortunately, there's a lot of people in America who maybe it's uncharitable to say they're compromised by China, but they certainly have faced lots of pressure from China or China has leverage over them, like the news media, who is largely owned on television by Hollywood Studios, over whom China has great leverage, as I write in Seven Things You Can't Say About China.
Democratic politicians at the time who were facing a president or a presidential candidate, Joe Biden, whose son was deeply exposed to China.
Democratic politicians who had been long invested in really what took off under Bill Clinton, which was this idea that if we just trade with China and export our wealth to them, they'll get wealthy and then they'll get moderate and then they'll be a normal nation, not a revolutionary communist power.
So I wasn't surprised in the winter of 2020 when I was the first to ring the alarms about the lab in Wuhan and say this virus likely originated there that I was that the Americans tried to silence me.
And certainly, obviously, the Chinese officials tried to silence me, but I wasn't surprised if even Americans tried to silence me.
I'd seen it over and over, and I see it still.
And I lay this out on the bottom of the book, is that because China has developed so much economic power and economic leverage, a kind that Soviet Russia never had, because our economies were not so integrated, that has given China enormous influence in fighting the information war against America and finding points of leverage inside of America, in corporate America, on Wall Street, in the media, in Hollywood, in sports, in our state and local governments.
You see it everywhere.
So I was not surprised when I came out and said, and again, Glenn, I didn't have any classified intelligence.
I'm not aware of any classified intelligence at the time.
I'm just like, guys, use your common sense.
There is the highest level bio lab that China has is in Wuhan.
Rough Greens for Healthier Dogs00:04:36
We know it's had a history of safety incidents.
They're researching novel coronaviruses there.
The director is literally nicknamed the Batwoman.
And early reports by left-wing liberal scientific journals, people that later came to China's defense, said that there were no bats or whatever it was or artwork being sold in that wet market.
Bats didn't even exist naturally in Wuhan or anywhere around it.
And the first cases were not associated with people who had been in the wet, so-called wet market.
So it was clear to me from the very beginning that almost certainly that virus came out of the lab.
Now, whether it was just a negligent leak that workers took out of the lab and into that wet market and it's close confines or whether they had actually been working on trying to modify coronaviruses, we still don't know.
We never know, obviously, because Chinese communists have destroyed all the evidence and probably disappeared anyone with knowledge of it.
But there's no question that that plague was leashed on the world because of Chinese communism.
So I only have about 90 seconds before I have to break again.
Just tell me, how do we hold China responsible without holding ourselves responsible?
Because Fauci and NIH and everybody else was involved in that in Wuhan.
Well, I'd say that's a separate thing that needs to be explored very carefully.
I think President Trump has a lot of people who are looking, for instance, at the deep ties and connections between Tony Fauci and the NIH and some of our other public health authorities and Chinese authorities, to include in Wuhan.
More broadly, how do we hold China accountable, not just for the coronavirus, but what they've done to American industry, what they've done to our businesses and workers.
I think there's a lot of steps we can take to try to decouple our economies to the greatest extent possible.
Can we do it entirely?
Can we get back to where we were with communist Russia in the Cold War?
Probably not at this point.
But we certainly need to do so with critical and strategic goods like the rare earth element that power modern electronic digital economy or basic pharmaceutical agreements like acetadenophen and ibuprofen or antibiotics that we all depend on.
Those are things that we need to do and we need to do urgently.
I mean, I guess, you know, you talk about that in the book, a couple of things that you say that you're not allowed to say is they're waging an economic world war and they're preparing for war.
So when we get back, I mean, how much time do we have, do you think, to be able to wean ourselves off of the communist teat on things like antibiotics and medicine?
I mean, we are so intertwined, that seems almost impossible.
It seems like a tumor that you just can't cut out.
So let's talk about war with China next.
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Why China Deters War00:13:11
So we're talking to Tom Cotton about his book Seven Things You Can't Say About China.
And if I were in the Chinese military intelligence, I would already have written a report on this and given this to the Chinese Communist Party because Tom Cotton is not just a senator.
He is also now the the head of the you're the head, aren't you, Tom, of the Senate Intelligence Committee?
I am.
Yeah, I have chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee since last month.
Right.
Let me ask you something off the topic real quick, because right now, Bridge Colby, they're trying to get Bridge confirmed.
And the rumor is that you're against it and working behind the scenes.
Is there any truth to that?
And if so, what is the problem with Bridge?
So, Glenn, I think all of the president's nominees, especially in critical national security positions, need to be aligned with his positions, and really the most fundamental core convictions, like stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
And that's something that I've explored with the nominees that we've had go through so far, Pete Hegseff, Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army, that'll be exploring with all the nominees ahead to make sure that they're aligned with the president on his central national security positions, for instance, stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
So are you inferring that Bridge is not for that?
He had indicated in the past that he thinks containment is a plausible and practical scenario.
You know, that's not my position.
That's not the president's position.
But I look forward to meeting with him and all the other nominees and going forward in the hearings to see where they are now, especially given the fact that Israel has exposed Iran by taking out their air and missile defenses, by basically eliminating the asymmetrical threats they face on their own borders, like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Those were the main deterrence that Iran had in place.
And this is a threat not just to Israel or our friends in the region.
This is a threat to us, Glenn.
You know, Iran going nuclear is in some ways like North Korea going nuclear 20 years ago.
Right.
It was written off as well.
It's a regional threat.
But like North Korea back then, Iran is also working on missiles that can range the United States.
This is a grave threat to us.
And again, I'll explore it with all of the nominees that are in critical positions like Department of Defense, like Department of State, like the intelligence community.
So, Tom, let me go back to the book.
You say that China is preparing for war.
How likely is war with China, especially if we up our tariffs and are trying to disentangle ourselves from them?
How likely is that?
Well, I hope not very likely, Glenn, because as George Washington said, it's the wisdom of the ages that if you want to have peace, you have to be prepared for war.
And it's what China has been doing from the very beginning.
Now, I think maybe Chinese communists, kind of like Russian communists before them, according to Winston Churchill, may not want war.
They may want the fruits of war.
And for them, the fruits of war is a takeover of Taiwan, an even greater dominance over the global economy, and essentially reducing America to an isolated economic vassal state on the other side of the war, of the other side of the world.
But the way that we would avoid a war is not by accommodating or conciliating communist China.
That's not what Ronald Reagan did.
It's being so strong and having a military that is second to none and making it clear that we will defend our interests that we deter China from starting a war.
So I agree with the peace through strength.
However, I don't think we could win a war against China on Taiwan.
Are you willing to fight that?
I've seen a lot of war games about a potential conflict over Taiwan Glenn, which is the likeliest hotspot for any tension between the United States.
I would say that none of them end happily.
Even if the Taiwanese could delay China from getting a foothold on the island and the United States and our allies could come over the horizon and help them fight back, the results would be catastrophic.
Even if it was a stalemate, Glenn, you could be looking at global economic depression lasting for years because of destruction of the global semiconductor manufacturing base.
We could have hundreds of aircraft lost, maybe as many as 20 ships lost, thousands of American troops killed.
That's why it's so important that we be strong enough and that we signal to China, just like Reagan did to Communist Russia, that they should not even think about going for the jugular in Taiwan.
And I think that success related to China over the next four years would be, you know, when there's a new president in January of 2029, there's been no war.
Our military is stronger.
Taiwan's military is stronger.
And China has been deterred.
That's what success would look like.
That would be fantastic if we can get there.
But I think the whole world seems to be on fire.
And now, especially after JD Vance over the weekend was speaking in Germany and the head of the security conference actually wept because of what JD Vance said and said, wow, we are so far apart.
I always thought we were on the same page.
JD Vance was talking about freedom of speech and safeguarding that.
There is a movement.
We may be the last place on earth soon that is actually standing up for the individual right.
I don't think you would expect German leaders to stand up.
Germany doesn't really have anything like freedom of speech that our people are familiar with.
And Germany is deeply exposed to China as well.
Even as China is eating out German industry, the way it's hollowed out much of American industry over the last 40 years, Germany is deeply exposed to China, needs access to the Chinese market, has some of its larger major industrial companies present in China, which again gives the Chinese communists vast leverage over Germany.
The same is true for a lot of European countries as well.
So I think if there's going to be a coalition that confronts and stops communist Chinese aggression, it's going to be led foremost by the United States and our partners in the Western Pacific, like South Korea and Japan and the Philippines and Australia and other countries that have been targeted for Chinese aggression over the years that may not share a way of life or democratic principles, but also don't want to be Chinese colonies like Vietnam, for instance.
Right.
You know, you're the chair of the intelligence committee.
Your confidence, I mean, the one thing I've seen Donald Trump do is a bunch of stuff that I never thought any president in my lifetime.
He's almost rebooting the whole system and clearing out what seems to be the nest of snakes and vipers.
And we know it's riddled with snakes and vipers in our intelligence community.
I think that getting rid of USAID was a very positive step.
What's your confidence in Tulsi Gabbard as the head of DNI and Ratcliffe and the CIA that it's not going to be business as usual of the CIA, that we are actually going to line things up with the president?
I have a lot of confidence in John Ratcliffe at the CIA.
It's obviously the biggest and most important intelligence agency.
John Ratcliffe understands the threat that China poses.
He was on the House Intelligence Committee before he became the DNI in the first Trump administration.
He agrees with me that we need to get the CIA back to basics and focused on collecting the foreign intelligence that our leaders need to make sound decisions, which is very hard to do in China, as we were discussing earlier, because of the nature of their surveillance state.
But it's work that has to be done.
They have a lot of brave, patriotic professionals who want to do it, but who have been adrift over the last few years because of bad political leadership.
I also have a lot of faith that Tulsi Gabbard recognizes the danger of this threat.
Tulsi, before she was the director of national intelligence, was a congresswoman from Hawaii for eight years.
We came into the Congress together.
I've noticed that even fairly liberal Democrats from Hawaii understand intuitively the threat posed by China and North Korea, probably because they're a lot closer to the threat.
That Hawaii was exposed to Chinese or North Korean attack a lot earlier than Seattle was, and then Chicago, and then Washington, and now all the way down to Miami.
So I have a lot of faith that both Tulsi Gabbard and John Ratcliffe understand the nature of the threat from China and also are going to do what's necessary to get our intelligence agencies focused on that threat as the main threat we face.
You know, people think that Donald Trump is just being nationalist by saying about the Panama Canal, get China out of there, but also Greenland.
Can we stand without China without at least an agreement with Greenland for their rare minerals?
Yeah, Glenn, again, that's another perfect example of how Donald Trump kind of reset a lot of the debates.
We certainly can allow China to have leverage over the Panama Canal.
Chinese-affiliated, directed, influenced or owned companies have a lot of influence right now over the Panama Canal.
Likewise, China has a lot of interest in Greenland, not only because of its potential mineral wealth, which is vast and vital in a modern electronic and digital economy, but also because it could allow a foothold in the Western hemisphere.
And going back to James Monroe more than 200 years, one of the prime objectives of any American statesman has been to deny hostile powers from the old world a foothold in the new world that they can use to project power against the American homeland.
When you look at the world today and China's influence everywhere and the way that Europe is going, what do you see happening to NATO and the allies when it comes to the balance of power in 2030?
NATO has been adrift for a long time, Glenn.
NATO cast about for some missions in the 1990s and 2000s and distracted from its traditional mission, why it was founded in 1945, which is to protect Europe's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
And that's where NATO really needs to get back to.
I frankly don't expect NATO to be a major part of standing up to China if there is ever a conflict.
It's the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
It's not the Western Pacific Treaty Organization.
But again, if the United States is going to be the linchpin of a coalition that contains Chinese communist aggression, we need European NATO to take much more responsibility for its own security.
This is a point the president has made repeatedly now for 10 years, is that Europe needs to stop spending its money on a bunch of wasteful welfare policies and subsidies for its own industry.
It needs to start spending its money on its own defense.
We can still cooperate with them.
We can still provide them, say, extended deterrence from our nuclear arsenal against Russian threats.
But no one in Europe can expect Americans to care more about the future of Europe's kids than Europe's leaders do.
Last question.
Are you going to be voting for Kash Patel this week?
Yes, I will.
I thought Cash did an outstanding job at his hearing.
I know Cash well.
We've consulted throughout his confirmation hearings and process.
I think he'll probably get a clean sweep of Republican senators because Republican senators of all stripes.
And, you know, we had a lot of different viewpoints in the Republican conference.
I think the FBI is badly in need of reform, especially at the headquarters level, especially among their leadership.
I think we all know FBI agents, as do I, with whom I served in the military or knew from school or met as they passed through Arkansas, who are also disappointed in FBI leadership.
And all those patriotic, hardworking FBI agents who joined the FBI to do the right thing to protect innocent Americans from criminals or from attack, they deserve better than what they've had for the last many years.
And I think Kash Patel, like John Ratcliffe at the CIA, is going to get the FBI back to basics, back to focusing on stopping crime and stopping real espionage threats, like the threats that we face from China every single day in every state in the union.
You can read the seven things you can't say about China.
Again, this is from the head of our Committee on Intelligence, and I can guarantee the Chinese are reading it.
What is our thinking here in America?
Senator Tom Cotton, Seven Things You Can't Say About China.
Senator, thank you so much, Tom.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Glenn.
You bet.
Bye-bye.
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There you have it.
The truth.
Stripped down like a fence post in a prairie storm.
Glenn Beck returns after this.
I was just asking her how, if she liked, I was asking Sarah, and I was asking her what she thought of today's show on a scale from 1 to 13.6, and she would not give me an answer.
Wow.
Because she doesn't care about the show.
I say 11.3.
11.3.
That's exactly what I think everybody in the audience is saying today.
And then Sarah's just sitting there in denial.
She won't even.
I just have to ask an important question.
Are we on the air now?
Yes, we are.
Yeah.
This is the kind of I'm thinking.
Down to 11.2 now, I got to say.
Glenn doesn't even know.
The host doesn't even know.
If he doesn't know he's on the air.
Sorry, I had my headphones off and I just joined your conversation.
I was preparing something for tomorrow's program that you don't want to miss.
That was interesting with Tom Cotton.
A lot of news in that one, I think.
A lot of news.
Very interesting.
Yeah, that was I don't, I got the impression he wasn't exactly in the camp supporting one nomination.
I can't think of what one, but.
Yeah, not a big Elbridge fan.
Yeah.
You know, he said he would give him a chance or whatever, but it sounded like how I would sound if I was describing a nominee I didn't like.
Yeah, for me.
Yeah, yeah.
Yes, someone I didn't like, like you.
Yeah, I'll give Glenn a chance.
Sure, maybe we'll go out to dinner this weekend.
Maybe.
You know, we'll never know.
We'll have to check into that, check our schedules.
You know, I mean, who knows?
You know, we don't really like the same foods, you know.
And, you know, I'm going to be traveling and maybe we'll make it out to dinner.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Yeah, I don't.
What is his problem with him?
I mean, he seemed to have at least a prior position, a different opinion on that on the Israel-Iran.
Yeah, but I mean, is Tom saying that we should bomb Iran?
A lot of, you know, people who are critical of Tom on the MAGA side of things seem to think he's too aggressive in that realm.
Yeah.
But I mean, you know, Trump is very tough on Iran, but also not looking to start a war.