The Glenn Beck Program - Best of the Program | Guest: Bryan Stern | 12/15/25
Aired: 2025-12-15
Duration: 43:48


=== Global Crisis and Rescue Stories (02:54) ===

[00:00:00]  Hey, it's Monday.
[00:00:01]  So, you know, we're all going to drag ourselves out of bed on a Monday and you know, it's Monday.
[00:00:06]  So let's get all some of the bad news out right away.
[00:00:08]  Horrifying weekend.
[00:00:10]  What happened in Australia and Rhode Island on the first night of Hanukkah?
[00:00:15]  Also, there's problems in Germany.
[00:00:17]  All over the world, this is happening.
[00:00:20]  Also, we're going to talk to Brian Stern.
[00:00:21]  He's the guy that got the dissident leader in Venezuela.
[00:00:25]  Remember, she escaped Venezuela and ended up in Norway for the Nobel Prize.
[00:00:31]  Wait until you hear the story of getting her out.
[00:00:34]  It's amazing.
[00:00:35]  And the true story.
[00:00:38]  Yeah, I did.
[00:00:39]  I went there.
[00:00:40]  The true story of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.
[00:00:44]  Paul on today's podcast.
[00:00:47]  First, let me tell you about Relief Factor.
[00:00:49]  There is a point in life where you realize, you know, you're not trying to feel like you did at 20.
[00:00:53]  You just want to feel like yourself again, not superhuman, not rebuilt, just you, that version of you that could get through the day without thinking about your back or your knees or your shoulders or, you know, whatever.
[00:01:04]  This is why Relief Factor exists.
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[00:01:29]  People who use Relief Factor talk about the moments, you know, the first time they stood up in the morning without bracing, the first time they took a walk without thinking about it, the first time they realized, wow, I'm moving through the day.
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[00:01:46]  Visit relieffactor.com or call 800 for relief.
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[00:01:55]  Hello, America.
[00:01:56]  You know, we've been fighting every single day.
[00:01:58]  We push back against the lies, the censorship, the nonsense of the mainstream media that they're trying to feed you.
[00:02:05]  We work tirelessly to bring you the unfiltered truth because you deserve it.
[00:02:09]  But to keep this fight going, we need you.
[00:02:12]  Right now, would you take a moment and rate and review the Glenn Beck podcast?
[00:02:16]  Give us five stars and lead a comment because every single review helps us break through big tech's algorithm to reach more Americans who need to hear the truth.
[00:02:24]  This isn't a podcast.
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[00:02:34]  Rate, review, share.
[00:02:36]  Together, we'll make a difference.
[00:02:38]  And thanks for standing with us.
[00:02:39]  Now let's get to work.
[00:02:40]  You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

=== Robert May's Christmas Million (10:43) ===

[00:02:55]  Just about a week away from Christmas.
[00:02:59]  I remember as a kid, Christmas was a lot different than it is today.
[00:03:06]  I remember my parents always saying, it's Christmas again already, and not understanding that because it seemed like Christmas was a million miles away.
[00:03:18]  It seemed like the year dragged on and dragged on, and it was a different life by the time you got to Christmas.
[00:03:26]  Because it was for you.
[00:03:31]  Now that I'm older, I wish things would slow down a little bit.
[00:03:37]  But it's just time is merely perspective now, I guess.
[00:03:44]  But I remember being a kid, and there was like this, I don't know, this code.
[00:03:51]  And I don't remember how it happened.
[00:03:53]  And it wasn't, I don't think it was because of advertising.
[00:03:55]  I remember hearing about it at school in the playground.
[00:03:58]  And it was never from a teacher.
[00:03:59]  It was always really from my friends.
[00:04:03]  Tonight, tonight's Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
[00:04:07]  Don't forget, Friday is Frosty the Snowman.
[00:04:10]  Charlie Brown Christmas is tonight.
[00:04:14]  And we would wait at Christmas time.
[00:04:20]  At Christmastime, we couldn't wait to see whatever followed this sound on CBS.
[00:04:27]  Let me take you to a time before CBS television existed.
[00:04:41]  It was 1939.
[00:04:43]  And the country was clawing its way out of the Great Depression.
[00:04:48]  Money was tight.
[00:04:50]  Dreams were even tighter.
[00:04:53]  Montgomery Ward, which had been around forever, was competition to Sears.
[00:04:58]  They had been buying and giving away children's Christmas booklets every year.
[00:05:02]  Someone in the executive chain finally said what corporations always say, why are we paying somebody else to make these books?
[00:05:10]  Why don't we just write our own stories?
[00:05:12]  Can we have anybody in-house that can do this cheaper?
[00:05:17]  And somebody said, yeah, we do.
[00:05:19]  We have this guy named Robert May.
[00:05:22]  And he was a copywriter, unassuming.
[00:05:25]  I mean, he did not look like a guy who was writing Christmas stories, a myth-maker.
[00:05:29]  He was in an office.
[00:05:31]  His office for Montgomery Ward was barely wider than the desk inside of it.
[00:05:38]  And when they came to him, he was a man who was drowning in grief.
[00:05:44]  His wife, Evelyn, was dying of cancer.
[00:05:48]  The two of them had one daughter.
[00:05:50]  She was small, Barbara.
[00:05:53]  And Robert's medical bills were just stacking up.
[00:05:56]  And in the middle of all this, Montgomery Ward came to him and said, hey, can you write a cheery little Christmas story for children?
[00:06:07]  He said later, he almost turned them down, almost said, are you kidding me?
[00:06:11]  How do I possibly write joy when my life is collapsing around me?
[00:06:20]  He said he went home, and that night he looked at his daughter, this little girl trying to make sense of her mom dying, make sense of sorrow that was way too big for her world.
[00:06:36]  And he remembered the offer to write something of joy.
[00:06:40]  And he thought, if I can give her something, even if I can't give her stability, if I can give her a moment, it's worth it.
[00:06:54]  So he started thinking back in his life, and he remembered being a small, shy child.
[00:06:59]  And he always felt different.
[00:07:01]  He always felt less than.
[00:07:05]  And so this character started to form, a character that was mocked for what made him different.
[00:07:11]  Until that day, that difference is what saved the world.
[00:07:16]  Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
[00:07:19]  Rudolph wasn't a reindeer.
[00:07:21]  First, Rudolph was Robert May.
[00:07:25]  He was every child who felt small, who felt different.
[00:07:32]  And he would write in bursts.
[00:07:34]  He would scribble lines between doctor visits and shaping rhymes in the hospital hallways.
[00:07:40]  He would draft a few lines, and then he would go into his wife's hospital room with his daughter, and he would read them aloud.
[00:07:51]  His mom was fighting for breath.
[00:07:56]  When Evelyn died, he stopped writing.
[00:08:03]  Montgomery Ward urged him, finish it, finish it.
[00:08:07]  And he did.
[00:08:10]  When he finished it, he printed, the company did, 2.4 million copies of Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer that first Christmas, 2.4 million.
[00:08:19]  And it was an instant sensation.
[00:08:22]  It passed from hand to hand.
[00:08:24]  It was read aloud in living rooms across America.
[00:08:29]  The country didn't know the man behind it, but they knew the feeling of hope being born out of heartbreak.
[00:08:40]  And then something that I'm not sure would happen now happened.
[00:08:48]  Montgomery Ward, which was usually really strict about intellectual property, did something unprecedented.
[00:08:57]  They saw the devastation in Robert May's life.
[00:09:02]  And they said, Robert, we see you're struggling with these bills.
[00:09:07]  You wrote this.
[00:09:09]  You struggled with this.
[00:09:12]  And they gave him full ownership of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
[00:09:16]  All rights, all royalties, all future potential.
[00:09:21]  That is an act of Christmas generosity that is unheard of.
[00:09:26]  And especially in that era when everyone was struggling.
[00:09:29]  And it changed the course of May's life and his daughter.
[00:09:36]  His wife died, but his wife's brother was a songwriter named Johnny Marks.
[00:09:45]  He took the story and shaped it into a melody that we all know.
[00:09:52]  Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer.
[00:09:57]  Bing Crosby was offered.
[00:09:59]  He said no.
[00:10:02]  They offered it to a singing cowboy, and he's like, I don't think this fits my image, but I'll give it a whirl.
[00:10:08]  Gene Autry.
[00:10:10]  In 1949, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by Gene Autry became the second best-selling song of all time, only behind White Christmas.
[00:10:21]  It sold over 25 million copies.
[00:10:26]  And it turned Robert May's grief-born story and sorrow into cultural bedrock.
[00:10:39]  And then 25 years after the original booklet, Rankin and Bass brought the Rudolph to stop motion animation.
[00:10:50]  And Burl Ives played the snowman and the abominable snow monster in the island of Misfit Toys.
[00:10:57]  Nobody wants a Charlie in the box.
[00:11:02]  And the American myth was complete.
[00:11:11]  Economists have tried to figure out what the rights were worth in total.
[00:11:20]  They looked at the entire empire, the books, the records, the TV specials, the merchandising, the international licensing.
[00:11:29]  It's well over $100 million in revenue.
[00:11:33]  Adjusted for inflation, the money that is flowing to the May and the Marks family today, the rights that Montgomery Ward handed to the grieving widower because it seemed like the right thing to do.
[00:11:51]  Well over a quarter of a billion dollars, one of the most valuable intellectual properties in Christmas Hero in history, handed to a man who just needed hope for his daughter.
[00:12:08]  wrote it for that reason and i think that's why we waited as kids and we still love it as adults
[00:12:19]  because behind the red nose and behind the jingle bells and the puppets and the fat snowman is this a single man who in a very small office rode his way through heartbreak and then a company showed unexpected
[00:12:38]  compassion and that created something remarkably true, the Christmas myth about a reindeer born from the pain of a father just trying to give his daughter one spark of light in the dark.
[00:13:06]  And that's why we waited for that sound at this time every year.
[00:13:11]  And while that sound isn't there anymore for our children, now it's the Apple logo.
[00:13:22]  It's the same story, it's the same magic and it's the same message, all life is worthy.

=== American Financing for Real Breathing Room (14:33) ===

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[00:14:45]  Please call American Financing at 800-906-2440 800-906-2440 or go to Americanfinancing.net.
[00:14:54]  Now back to the podcast.
[00:14:56]  You're listening to the best of the Glennbeck program from the WALL Street Journal.
[00:15:02]  Listen to the opening of this story, Maria.
[00:15:05]  A man's voice, cut through the rain, pelting the pitch black Caribbean sea, just audible between two boats tossed around by 10-foot waves, people on the smaller vessel.
[00:15:15]  A simple fishing skiff held up cell phones like emergency flares in the night.
[00:15:19]  Larger craft pulled closer, a figure bundled in a bulky jacket and black ball cap waved her arms.
[00:15:26]  It's me.
[00:15:26]  It's me, Maria.
[00:15:29]  This is the epic tale of the mission to get the opposition leader, Maria Carino Machado, out of Venezuela.
[00:15:43]  This was called Operation Golden Dynamite.
[00:15:47]  Dynamite is what the Swedish chemist Alfred Noble, a Nobel, invented dynamite.
[00:15:56]  That's why he started the Nobel Peace Prize, blah, blah, blah.
[00:15:59]  She was getting the Nobel Peace Prize.
[00:16:01]  She was not allowed to leave Venezuela.
[00:16:04]  Somebody had the idea of let's put her on a boat while the U.S. is bombing boats in the area.
[00:16:10]  Terrifying.
[00:16:11]  The guy who led it is the founder and CEO of the Gray Bull Rescue Foundation, Brian Stern.
[00:16:17]  Brian, welcome.
[00:16:23]  You there, Brian?
[00:16:25]  Hi, Glenn.
[00:16:25]  How are you?
[00:16:27]  Good, good.
[00:16:28]  I thought you were lost at sea here for a second.
[00:16:31]  Brian, what an epic tale.
[00:16:34]  Can you tell it from the beginning?
[00:16:36]  You're standing, I think, in the Miami airport on December 5th.
[00:16:42]  It was last Friday, and it's kind of crazy when I say it like that because a lot of things have happened since then.
[00:16:51]  It's just over a week ago.
[00:16:54]  My team and I were coming back from Aruba where we were setting up for Venezuela operations.
[00:17:00]  And I've been very vocal about Venezuela for a very long time.
[00:17:03]  I've worked Venezuela for a long time.
[00:17:06]  We've known for a while that President Trump wanted a piece of Maduro.
[00:17:11]  We've known that.
[00:17:12]  He was very vocal about it as the 45th president, and again, as the 47th, as we've seen.
[00:17:17]  So we were getting ready and transiting through Miami airport when I turned my phone on and I had a whole bunch of text messages from a friend of mine.
[00:17:27]  So I call him back and he says, hey, look, man, I know you're doing Venezuela stuff.
[00:17:31]  I've got a weird one for you.
[00:17:33]  You want to hear this guy out?
[00:17:35]  And I said, well, you know, is it real?
[00:17:36]  Is it not?
[00:17:37]  Because lots of people call us like nonsense.
[00:17:39]  You know, what's interesting is this is our 800th mission that we've done as a team.
[00:17:45]  800 missions in four years.
[00:17:48]  So we get calls to do stuff all the time.
[00:17:51]  My team and I started August 2021, and we're in December 2025.
[00:17:56]  So we've worked all over the place.
[00:17:58]  Russia, Ukraine, you name it.
[00:18:00]  We've done it.
[00:18:01]  Gaza, we've done Israel.
[00:18:03]  So I asked my guy, I asked my friend, you know, is it real?
[00:18:06]  Because I'm transiting and I don't want to waste a lot of time and we're busy and stuff.
[00:18:10]  He's, it's real.
[00:18:11]  It's real.
[00:18:12]  And I said, okay, cool.
[00:18:13]  Connect me.
[00:18:14]  He said, do you mind if I show your number?
[00:18:15]  I go, yeah, sure.
[00:18:15]  You know, I go, are you in on it?
[00:18:17]  He says, no, not really.
[00:18:18]  Not really.
[00:18:19]  I'm not really in on it.
[00:18:20]  I go, okay, cool.
[00:18:21]  So he connects me with this guy who turns out to be on Maria's team and one of her folks.
[00:18:28]  And at first, he wasn't transparent that it was Maria.
[00:18:32]  So he asked me a couple of questions.
[00:18:34]  Do you do things in Venezuela?
[00:18:35]  Tell me a little bit about yourself.
[00:18:36]  We go through that.
[00:18:38]  And he asked me, and I go, you know, what's the project?
[00:18:43]  And he starts to kind of describe it his way.
[00:18:46]  And he's a good guy, but he's never done this before.
[00:18:49]  And I spent 27 years in the intelligence business, so I've done this a lot.
[00:18:53]  And I very quickly figure out that it's Maria.
[00:18:55]  And at first, he denies it.
[00:18:57]  He says, no, How funny would that be?
[00:19:00]  And I said, look, man, you know and I know.
[00:19:03]  You know, you know and I know that it's Maria.
[00:19:05]  If you're not transparent and honest with me, I'm not going to be able to do a good job.
[00:19:09]  So I need you to, you know, we're going to be in this thing together.
[00:19:12]  I'm not saying I'm going to do this, but if we're going to do this together, you need to be honest with me because things change.
[00:19:18]  And he says, okay.
[00:19:19]  And he kind of admits to it and cops to it.
[00:19:22]  And that was Friday.
[00:19:25]  Saturday, that was Friday night.
[00:19:28]  He and I spoke again Friday night when I got back to Tampa, and then we spoke again all day Saturday doing things.
[00:19:38]  Sunday, we set conditions.
[00:19:40]  Sunday, we set conditions and planned.
[00:19:42]  I went to Miami to go meet with some Venezuelan friends of mine.
[00:19:48]  Monday morning early, deployed to the Caribbean.
[00:19:53]  We set conditions on Monday, initiated on Tuesday.
[00:19:56]  She was in Oslo for Wednesday.
[00:19:59]  That's unbelievable.
[00:20:00]  What does it mean that you set conditions on Monday?
[00:20:04]  What does that mean?
[00:20:06]  So it's kind of like this is an orchestra.
[00:20:13]  The way these operations work is like an orchestra.
[00:20:17]  You have the string section, you have the horn section, you have the drums, the percussion section.
[00:20:21]  You have the, you know, I don't play music, but whatever, you know, all the different things, all the different instruments.
[00:20:27]  You know?
[00:20:28]  Now, you know, you have like the violin people.
[00:20:31]  I was wondering why you missed the viola, but it's not my area.
[00:20:35]  I don't do that.
[00:20:36]  I do have Maduro, you know?
[00:20:38]  Right.
[00:20:39]  So you have all these different people, and it's all music, and we're all on the same team.
[00:20:46]  But the reality is the violin people don't know how to play a saxophone, and the saxophone people don't know how to play a violin.
[00:20:53]  And the music of the violin is different than that of the saxophone and all these different things.
[00:20:57]  But everything has to work in harmony.
[00:21:00]  And if one instrument in the orchestra is off-key, you're not making music, you're making noise.
[00:21:06]  And that's the one thing that everyone hears.
[00:21:08]  So when we build these operations and we talk about setting conditions, it's getting all the instruments to be ready to rock and roll.
[00:21:15]  And many of those instruments, many of these people, do not know what they're doing.
[00:21:20]  So there are people, lots of people, who worked on this operation, who were instrumental in this operation, who have no idea that they helped get Maria Karina Machado to safety.
[00:21:33]  They do not know.
[00:21:34]  For their safety.
[00:21:34]  It's crazy.
[00:21:35]  For their safety.
[00:21:36]  And also because we need to understand, you know, Maria Karina Machado, Maria Karina Machado, from the Maduro perspective, is like what Osama Laden was for us.
[00:21:49]  There's tens of thousands of intelligence officers have been looking for her from Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, Iran, the Chinese, Hezbollah, cartels.
[00:22:01]  She is the most wanted person in the Western Hemisphere.
[00:22:05]  And to add insult to injury, because of the Nobel Prize piece, they knew if she was in Venezuela that she's going to need to be making a move this week.
[00:22:15]  So they were really switched on.
[00:22:17]  They were really looking aggressively.
[00:22:19]  So how did you get her from hiding to the shore?
[00:22:22]  And then you got to tell the story about the water because that's insane.
[00:22:27]  So the water part was honestly the harder part.
[00:22:30]  Yeah, so we don't get into a lot of the specifics for security reasons, as you would imagine.
[00:22:35]  Okay, okay.
[00:22:36]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:38]  She was in a house and then had to get to a spot where there was a boat.
[00:22:42]  And this is not a port where you're like getting a ticket.
[00:22:47]  This is a sandy, nasty, kind of, you know, kind of beachy, marshy area that you wouldn't really want to be in, honestly.
[00:22:58]  And that's why we picked these sites for that reason.
[00:23:02]  You know, not pleasant.
[00:23:03]  And she embarks on boat one with a small group of amazing men.
[00:23:10]  And they're embarking with the expectation of rendezvousing with the second boat.
[00:23:15]  That's the boat that I was on, which has come from across the whole Caribbean.
[00:23:19]  So our trip was very, very far.
[00:23:21]  Their trip was relatively short, but we're doing this under cover of night in pitch black.
[00:23:26]  In a little bit of moonlight, a little bit, and a lot of cloud cover.
[00:23:30]  We were in five to ten-foot seas, depending on where, right?
[00:23:36]  And these are not big boats.
[00:23:38]  These are not big boats.
[00:23:39]  Oh, yeah, by the way, the whole world is trying to find her.
[00:23:42]  And oh, yeah, by the way, our military is dropping things from the sky onto boats.
[00:23:47]  So this is a pretty good thing.
[00:23:52]  So she goes out.
[00:23:54]  She's running really late, right?
[00:23:55]  The boat launches really late.
[00:23:59]  And then the seas pick up.
[00:24:01]  They're 10-foot waves.
[00:24:03]  They start drifting.
[00:24:04]  You don't have eyes on her.
[00:24:05]  Nobody has eyes on her.
[00:24:07]  And you do have the threat from above.
[00:24:10]  Did anyone above know?
[00:24:12]  Don't bomb us.
[00:24:13]  Please don't just don't bomb us.
[00:24:15]  And don't a little boat might be out there.
[00:24:17]  Don't bomb them either.
[00:24:19]  So this is where it gets hard for people to understand.
[00:24:23]  This is where it gets hard for people to understand is that nothing we do is classified.
[00:24:29]  I'm not government, contrary to common opinion.
[00:24:32]  We do not work for the CIA.
[00:24:33]  I'm not a I've enlisted as a former assassin.
[00:24:37]  I've enlisted all kinds of things.
[00:24:38]  None of these things are true.
[00:24:41]  We're a nonprofit.
[00:24:42]  We're just a foundation.
[00:24:43]  What you see is what you get.
[00:24:45]  If you go to gravelrescue.org, you can read about all of it.
[00:24:49]  We're donor funded.
[00:24:50]  This operation was paid for by donors, tax deductible.
[00:24:55]  Okay?
[00:24:56]  So because of who we are, though, and because of what we've done and where we've done it and where we come from and where my board comes from and where my team comes from, we have our fingers.
[00:25:12]  We have a very large network of good guys and bad guys.
[00:25:16]  The good guys are at the highest levels of government, four-star admirals and generals, deputy assistant secretary of fill-in-the-blank, you know, from the intelligence community, the diplomatic corps, the military community, the special operations community.
[00:25:33]  You know, I've only been doing this for 27 years only, right?
[00:25:36]  So we know a lot of people, and we have a very good reputation.
[00:25:41]  So when we call and say, hey, look, you know, here's a lat long.
[00:25:45]  We're going to be conducting an operation in the vicinity of this lat long around this time.
[00:25:50]  Be advised, that's us.
[00:25:52]  Number one, don't get excited.
[00:25:54]  That's us.
[00:25:54]  Don't kill us.
[00:25:55]  Number one.
[00:25:56]  Number two, it would be super cool if you could tip us off if you see someone coming to someone else trying to kill us from flight time of a Venezuelan F-16 to where we were operating, about four and a half minutes, five minutes.
[00:26:09]  So we are danger close to the bad guys.
[00:26:13]  And the way these work is, you don't know if you have a problem until you're getting shot at.
[00:26:21]  They don't call you on the phone and say, hey, jerks, we know what you did.
[00:26:26]  We're coming for you.
[00:26:27]  You better surrender.
[00:26:28]  They don't do that.
[00:26:29]  They shoot you full of holes instead.
[00:26:30]  So this whole time, we're doing all kinds of tricks, all kinds of deception operations.
[00:26:36]  We're putting things out, getting things on the street.
[00:26:40]  We had a whole group of bad guys convinced that we were going through the land into Guyana.
[00:26:45]  That wasn't true.
[00:26:46]  All kinds of things designed to create confusion, create space, to create noise, right?
[00:26:56]  It's the abracadabra of any good magic trick, right?
[00:27:00]  The Russians call me Amerikonsky Voshavnik.
[00:27:02]  It means the American magician.
[00:27:04]  This is how I got the name, is because when the street card guy says, don't take your eye off the card, here's your card, don't take your eye off the card, the last place you should be looking is that card.
[00:27:15]  That's the last place you should be looking, right?
[00:27:18]  Okay?
[00:27:20]  That's how we do this stuff.
[00:27:21]  So it's a little bit of deception.
[00:27:24]  It's a lot of manipulation, and it's a lot of really understanding how the bad guys function, how they work, what they'll fall for, the cultural nuances.
[00:27:34]  I know they are hungry for Maria.
[00:27:37]  I know that.
[00:27:38]  I know that.
[00:27:39]  I spent 27 years in the intelligence business hungry for very important people, and I know how I would react if I got a tip, right, from a reliable source.
[00:27:49]  So we create that tip for a reliable source, from a reliable source, and they go for it.
[00:27:55]  What happens?
[00:27:56]  They're dedicating resources to a figment of my imagination.
[00:27:59]  You're streaming the best of Glenn Beck.
[00:28:01]  To hear more of this interview and others, download the full show podcasts wherever you get podcasts.
[00:28:07]  All right, so let me just cover some of the headlines here quickly.
[00:28:09]  Brown University yesterday, there was a shooter.

=== Freedom Is Costly (15:22) ===

[00:28:12]  Two are dead.
[00:28:14]  The only one that has been named so far is the Republican Club vice president, Ella Cook.
[00:28:22]  There are nine that have been injured.
[00:28:25]  They thought they had the shooter, but turns out it's not him.
[00:28:30]  He has been released.
[00:28:32]  And there's just some questions on this one that are weird.
[00:28:36]  Also, Al-Qaeda struck and killed U.S. soldiers over the weekend in Syria.
[00:28:42]  There will be a military response to that, I am sure.
[00:28:45]  And yesterday, yesterday on the beach, in Sydney's eastern suburbs, Sydney, Australia.
[00:28:56]  It's summer there.
[00:28:58]  There's locals, there's people that are coming from all over the country, all over the world for the warmth of summer, and the community celebration of the first night of Hanukkah.
[00:29:09]  In the rest of the world, it is the darkest days of winter.
[00:29:14]  On the other side of the globe, it is still sunlight because it is in the middle of summer.
[00:29:21]  But it was a dark, dark day yesterday, despite the sun being up.
[00:29:27]  There were families with children.
[00:29:29]  They were chasing the waves.
[00:29:31]  The smell of grilled food that was drifting across the sand.
[00:29:35]  Music, conversation, laughter in the air.
[00:29:40]  And then around 7 o'clock, laughter was replaced with screams of terror.
[00:29:47]  Two men dressed in black and armed with high-power firearms positioned themselves atop a small concrete pedestrian bridge.
[00:29:55]  It arched over the Campbell parade near the Bondi Pavilion.
[00:30:02]  They stood on top in the center of this bridge and rained bullets as they fired into the crowd.
[00:30:15]  Shots rang out.
[00:30:19]  Astonished crowd.
[00:30:24]  It just went on and on and on.
[00:30:30]  Thousands had been gathered for Hanukkah by the sea.
[00:30:35]  They're now ducking for cover, some trying to push children to safety, others frozen in disbelief, as friends and strangers alike fell all around them.
[00:30:46]  The carnage was unbelievable.
[00:30:50]  For 10 minutes, these guys fired off this bridge.
[00:30:56]  The beach, usually alive with surfers and sun seekers, just transformed instantly.
[00:31:05]  Bodies were trampled, frantic dash for some sort of shelter and protection as the waves just continued to lap innocently at the shore while people were screaming for help.
[00:31:20]  Now, in the chaos, there were acts of individual courage.
[00:31:25]  A fruit vendor, later named by the media as Ahmed Al-Ahmed, he saw one of the gunmen firing his weapon, and in a moment of pure resolve, he vaulted from behind a nearby car, tackled the shooter from behind, and wrestled the rifle away.
[00:31:44]  It was an unbelievable scene.
[00:31:48]  Witnesses say, And it was all captured on tape.
[00:31:51]  There he is.
[00:31:54]  Witnesses say his bravery likely saved countless lives.
[00:32:04]  Police arrived.
[00:32:05]  They started shooting at him.
[00:32:09]  They shot at the two that were up on the bridge.
[00:32:13]  They wounded both of them.
[00:32:17]  15 people had been killed by the time this over, dozens wounded, young children to the elderly.
[00:32:25]  Cherished members of the Jewish community, including Rabbi Eli Schlanger.
[00:32:30]  He's a British-born assistant rabbi.
[00:32:34]  He helped organize Hanukkah by the sea.
[00:32:42]  The beach won't be looked at the same ever again.
[00:32:47]  As the suspects went down, people from Australia just ran up onto the bridge.
[00:32:53]  And what I thought was an amazing, amazing moment that spoke volumes of our culture.
[00:33:00]  The police were on top of these men, trying to administer care to keep them alive, while citizens, understandably, came up on the bridge and just started kicking them.
[00:33:14]  Police jumped on those people and pushed them away and said, stop, stop, stop.
[00:33:20]  And they did.
[00:33:22]  Because we're not a culture of death.
[00:33:26]  First suspect, 50 years old, Sahid Akram, 50 years old.
[00:33:35]  He's a dad.
[00:33:36]  The second suspect is his 24-year-old son.
[00:33:41]  both in critical condition now in the hospital under police guard let me ask you to imagine just for a minute what it must feel like to be jewish today
[00:34:03]  Not in theory, because we had an incident stopped in Amsterdam over the weekend, in Germany over the weekend, in LA, somebody drive-by just shot at a Jewish home with the Hanukkah candles in the window, screaming F the Jews.
[00:34:21]  You want to know what, you want to chant, bring the infetata here.
[00:34:26]  This is what it looks like.
[00:34:28]  It is here now.
[00:34:31]  So what does it feel like to be Jewish today?
[00:34:35]  I don't know.
[00:34:36]  I can't relate.
[00:34:38]  But I want you to imagine, not as a talking point, but in the quiet moments when the phone would light up with another alert, another headline, another synagogue guarded by concrete barriers and armed police.
[00:34:53]  There's a particular fear that comes with memory.
[00:35:01]  Jewish people carry history, not as abstraction, but as inheritance.
[00:35:07]  And it lives in names that are whispered at dinner tables and photographs rescued from ash and stories that begin with, and we thought it would never happen here.
[00:35:19]  Europe told itself that very thing once.
[00:35:23]  So did Germany.
[00:35:23]  So did France.
[00:35:25]  So did polite society everywhere right before it happened.
[00:35:32]  And the world has been saying that for decades now.
[00:35:36]  It would never happen here.
[00:35:37]  And here we are again.
[00:35:39]  And here we are in the worst we've seen in America.
[00:35:45]  Shadows that all of us hoped were buried forever.
[00:35:50]  Hatred with organization, ideology, hatred with teeth, violence, justification.
[00:35:56]  They're no longer whispers.
[00:35:57]  They're shouting it now in our streets.
[00:35:59]  They're shouting it in the streets of Australia.
[00:36:02]  They're shouting it in the streets of Germany and England and France and Norway.
[00:36:09]  They're burning flags.
[00:36:10]  They're firing guns.
[00:36:12]  They're chanting not only death to the Jew, but death to the West, death to Canada, death to the U.S., death to Europe.
[00:36:20]  This is no longer confined to the margins anymore.
[00:36:24]  And the West is tolerating it.
[00:36:26]  The West has explained it away.
[00:36:28]  We've minimalized it.
[00:36:29]  We've said it was a lone wolf.
[00:36:31]  Sometimes we even excuse it.
[00:36:37]  Just for the day, let's just stop and look at Australia for a minute.
[00:36:40]  For years, Jewish communities there warned the officials.
[00:36:46]  Anti-Semitism isn't theoretical.
[00:36:48]  It's here.
[00:36:48]  We're living it.
[00:36:49]  We're seeing it.
[00:36:51]  It's not just graffiti or angry words.
[00:36:55]  It's metastasizing into something ideological and organized and deadly.
[00:37:03]  And in Australia, the officials told them, calm down.
[00:37:06]  Trust the institutions.
[00:37:08]  We got it.
[00:37:12]  Somehow or another, multicultural harmony would manage itself.
[00:37:16]  But it didn't because it doesn't.
[00:37:20]  Ideology doesn't dissolve when it's ignored.
[00:37:24]  It consolidates.
[00:37:25]  It grows.
[00:37:26]  And it has across the Western world entirely.
[00:37:30]  Europe, Britain, Australia, Canada, the United States.
[00:37:34]  It's the same pattern.
[00:37:35]  Violent anti-Semitism rising, Jewish schools guarded like fortresses, Jewish families wondering whether visibility itself is now a liability.
[00:37:46]  And yet all across the West, officials hesitate to name the problem clearly.
[00:37:56]  So let me do it.
[00:37:57]  Precisely, precisely, truthfully.
[00:38:02]  Islamism.
[00:38:04]  Islamists.
[00:38:06]  Not Islam.
[00:38:08]  Not Muslim.
[00:38:10]  If you're a Muslim, you want to live peacefully, worship freely, raise children, continue, you know, to live and contribute to a society, you know, and you're not an enemy of the West.
[00:38:21]  I'm totally good with that.
[00:38:23]  Look at the fruit cart guy.
[00:38:26]  He apparently didn't hate Jews.
[00:38:28]  He wasn't part of a culture of death.
[00:38:30]  He stopped it.
[00:38:31]  And millions do that every single day.
[00:38:33]  But Islamism, Islamicists, that's something entirely different.
[00:38:41]  Islamism is a political ideology.
[00:38:44]  It's not about faith.
[00:38:46]  It is about power.
[00:38:48]  It's the belief that society has to be governed by religious law, Sharia law, that freedom of conscience is illegitimate, that women are subordinate, that dissident dissent is heresy, And that the world and everybody in it has to submit.
[00:39:08]  And it's very clear about all of this.
[00:39:11]  It writes it down.
[00:39:12]  It teaches it.
[00:39:13]  It shouts it from the public square.
[00:39:16]  For the love of Pete, it's everywhere.
[00:39:19]  It chants it.
[00:39:21]  It doesn't hide behind, you know, it doesn't hide its ambitions.
[00:39:25]  It doesn't hide behind anything.
[00:39:28]  But here's what it doesn't do.
[00:39:30]  It doesn't coexist with open societies.
[00:39:33]  It replaces them and has been replacing open societies for centuries.
[00:39:43]  Any culture built on individual liberty, freedom of speech, equality before the law, it can't survive alongside an ideology that views all of those principles as sins or as an affront to Allah.
[00:40:00]  In that scenario, one side must yield or one side will be destroyed.
[00:40:08]  And history is very clear on which one does.
[00:40:16]  You know, we're very different people.
[00:40:20]  Even the difference between us in Canada and us in Europe, it might be seemingly stark.
[00:40:28]  It might be like we're very different.
[00:40:30]  But when you look at us as a civilization, we're very different together.
[00:40:38]  We're very different from the rest of the world.
[00:40:41]  And we don't understand these things because we project our values on everybody else.
[00:40:48]  We assume that everybody ultimately wants to live and to compromise, live side by side.
[00:40:53]  We assume violence is accidental.
[00:40:56]  We assume that it's a lone wolf.
[00:40:59]  We assume that words like tolerance and dialogue mean the same thing to everybody, but they don't.
[00:41:06]  And so we tolerate politicians and newscasters and everybody else that explain things away.
[00:41:12]  They explain the stabbings and the truck attacks and the shootings and the riots as isolated incidents.
[00:41:17]  They're not.
[00:41:19]  We talk about finding the root cause, but we won't name the root itself.
[00:41:28]  We call it extremism, as though it sprang out of nowhere, as though it was a weather event instead of a worldview that has been around for centuries.
[00:41:42]  I ask you to think about what it feels like to be Jewish today because of the Jewish people, but also because you're next.
[00:41:51]  Jewish communities always pay the price first.
[00:41:54]  They always do.
[00:41:55]  And believe me, you are on the list.
[00:41:57]  You, your faith, your freedom, your children are on the list.
[00:42:02]  And history shows this with brutal consistency.
[00:42:08]  When a society begins to rot from ideological cowardice, the Jews are always the early warning system.
[00:42:17]  They're the canary in the coal mine.
[00:42:19]  And when they're targeted openly and the state responds with hesitation, that society is already sick and in the hospital.
[00:42:29]  It's already in trouble.
[00:42:31]  And make no mistakes, the violence is not far away.
[00:42:35]  It is already here.
[00:42:37]  Synagogues attached, Jewish students harassed on campus, Jewish neighborhoods guarded like war zones, public celebrations requiring armed protection.
[00:42:47]  Now, this is not normal and it's not sustainable.
[00:42:50]  And the West likes to believe it understands freedom, but freedom is not a vibe.
[00:42:54]  It's not a comfort.
[00:42:56]  It's not the absence of conflict.
[00:42:58]  Freedom is costly and it requires moral clarity.
[00:43:02]  requires the courage to draw a line and say, this doesn't belong here.
[00:43:08]  And if we refuse to do that work now, our children are going to have to do it later, under far worse conditions.
[00:43:16]  They will have to fight not to preserve freedom, but to recover it.
[00:43:22]  And history always shows that's much more costly.
[00:43:27]  America, you are closer than you think to losing not only our country, but countries that took centuries to build.

=== Freedom Lost Through Silence (00:12) ===

[00:43:35]  Not through invasion, but through erosion, through silence, through the polite refusal to speak uncomfortable truths.
[00:43:44]  If not you, who?
[00:43:46]  If not now, when?