Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Chip Roy dissect alleged corruption, with McCarthy accusing Nancy Pelosi of shielding Jack Smith from FBI warnings regarding Chinese ties and drug allegations. They analyze Republican losses in Virginia and Arizona as signs of internal dysfunction while the DOJ indicts the SPLC for laundering over $3 million to extremists like the Klan and neo-Nazis between 2014 and 2023. Glenn Beck theorizes these groups manufacture crises to justify authoritarian soft totalitarianism, while Ben Scallon reports on Irish protests against fuel taxes and government bans on offshore oil, highlighting global dissent against current leadership policies. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Relief Factor Bombshell00:02:58
All right, there's a bombshell indictment that was revealed yesterday.
The SPLC, the funding of extremist organizations such as the Klan, and they actually helped contribute to the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally.
That's crazy.
Crazy.
Remember the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville?
That's what Joe Biden said caused him to get into the race.
And now we find out the SPLC was helping organize it or pay for it.
Also, we talk about Ireland.
Kevin McCarthy on with us to talk about all the corruption in Washington and what is really going on, plus all the other updates you need, all on today's podcast.
Here, let me tell you about Relief Factor in the past few days.
I have signed, I think, approximately about nine and a half billion thank you cards for members of this audience.
And I know what you're thinking, Glenn.
You don't have nine and a half billion listeners.
No, I know, but I think there are, I think I've signed for nine and a half billion thank you cards.
I mean, it just never ends.
Relief factor has kept me going from going insane.
I will tell you, I didn't.
I was there was a time where I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to write anymore.
My hands were so bad and so much pain, but I started taking relief factor somehow or another.
I thought it was smart to say, I'm going to sign everybody who signs up for the first month on the torch, I'm going to send you a thank you letter, hand signed by me.
Oh, what a stupid thing!
Couldn't have been done without relief factor.
Um, but I will tell you, it has broken the back of my pain in my hands like nothing ever did, nothing worked.
My wife convinced me to start taking Relief Factor, and it has worked.
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Hello, America.
You know we've been fighting every single day.
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Pelosi and the Corrupt System00:14:54
Very good.
You?
I'm good.
It's a pleasure to have you on.
You know, I was just saying, I saw an interview that you did in, I think it was 2019, when you joined leadership and Swalwell was in his sophomore year.
The Democrats knew about his relationship with the Chinese spy.
You were talking about it then.
That's incredible to me that nothing happened.
Nobody said it then.
I tried to remove him.
I made a privileged motion.
And the Democrats, Pelosi, he's Pelosi's pet.
You've got to understand, to be on.
Intel, it's the hardest committee to get on.
Only the leader picks, okay, on both sides.
And as a sophomore, they're sitting in the minority.
There's not very many seats.
She elevates him.
The FBI then comes and says, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you've got a problem.
He's sleeping with the Chinese spy.
She gets the briefing and Banger doesn't happen.
I become leader.
I now have the right to the briefing.
I find out about it.
She takes the briefing with me and I look at her and said, You can't keep him on.
She's now speaker.
You've got to put somebody else on.
And she wouldn't, so I made a motion and she worked against it to keep him.
Why?
Unbelievable.
And then when I became speaker, I removed him.
But why did she keep him?
Because he was her protege.
She even elevated him to a position inside steering, decides where all the committees, who gets what when they fight and all that.
She made him vice chair so he would do whatever she wanted.
Same thing with shift.
They all elevated him to make him something special and protected him.
I knew about the Chinese based upon the FBI, and I came forward with that.
That's why I removed him from intel.
I didn't know he was drugging women, but I was told by Democratic congresswomen don't get around that guy.
He's creepy, right?
And so that's what people knew.
She defended him this whole time, kept elevating him.
When I removed him from intel, Intel Committee, Hakeem Jeffries became leader.
He tried to reappoint, said he wouldn't do it.
The San Francisco Chronicle, that eventually came out with these stories, criticized me for doing that, said I was just playing politics.
Think about the number of young women we could have saved had they not done things like that, that followed his removal.
So, usually stuff happens like this, and you put corrupt people in because if you're corrupt, you can control them.
They'll do exactly what you say because you'll say, No, you are doing that.
Otherwise, I destroy you.
I reveal everything I know.
Is that what was happening?
That's what I believe because look what happened.
He didn't jump into the governor's race early.
You had Katie Porter in there that was rising.
Then all of a sudden, they dropped these videos on her because Pelosi and Gavin and Schiff, they didn't like Katie Porter, okay?
So she collapses.
Then all of a sudden, Swalwell gets into that race and the Democratic apparatus.
Schiff comes out, everybody gets behind him.
The SEIU, they start giving them a lot of money, but they also put a lot in for a super PAC.
But there is one person in that group that doesn't endorse them Nancy Pelosi.
When this comes forward, okay, right before it all, when it first comes out, she treats it like Joe Biden, protects Joe Biden the entire time when people know he's not all mentally there.
But the moment the nation finds out, she's the first one to remove him.
I believe she knew the other stories because.
About right when I left, I had a reporter come to me about a young Democratic staffer that had a problem with him.
I got her an attorney.
She didn't know I was the one to get an attorney for.
So I believe if I heard these stories, Pelosi had to have known.
That's why she didn't endorse him for governor when people started really looking into it.
And then she went to knock him out once the paper printed it.
So.
How many people do you think, Kevin, are like this?
How much of the stuff?
Because, you know, we'll see stuff and we'll like, it's quite obvious something is wrong here.
What is the percentage of people like this?
Now, I don't want people to say, look, there's a lot of good people on both sides of the aisle.
A lot of people, I'm sure, all the way through.
It's a microcosm of society, Congresses.
So you're going to have good and bad.
Now, I'm going to be fair.
I went to, we had a member on the Republican side, Matt Gaetz, and I stood up to Matt Gaetz.
The reason he made the motion to remove me is because I would not stop the ethics investigation against them.
Right.
And lo and behold, I was correct.
He did sleep with an underage girl.
Now, the other concern I have here is on Smallwell.
He has two really close friends one is a senator now, Gallegos, and another is a congressman, Gomez.
Gallegos was his chairman of his campaign when he ran for president.
Gomez was the chairman of his race for governor.
They weren't just close, they were together all the time.
The stories I heard about Swalwell, I'd hear about those two as well.
How quickly they ran once it got printed.
And I had some of the Democrats come to me and say, How ironic that these two are running because they believe they have the exact same problem.
And they probably thought they had the same kind of protection.
They did.
If the Speaker, if Nancy Pelosi is protecting you in the Democratic caucus, you're golden.
If she elevates you because she tells you, now you're the vice chair, but this is who I want you to pick in a race to who gets the committee, he did it every time.
When Kevin comes after you, I'll get all the Democrats to vote one way and we'll protect you.
And then we'll elevate you when we don't like who's running for governor, we want you to run.
And they put all the political apparatus behind her.
And then what happens right after that, once the public knows it, it just flashbacks to Joe Biden.
Remember, I was the earliest one to come out and said, Look, I met with the president.
He's not all there.
They criticized.
I worked with Wall Street Journal.
We had to work for more than six months to make that story come out for the public.
They all attacked everybody.
They put all the talk shows, Morning Joe, and all that, like something is wrong with me.
And then once he gets on stage for the nations to see it, they're the first ones to run from him and said, He's got to go.
They knew and been lying to the American public this whole time.
So, one of the CNN came out and they said, You know, this is just good gumshoe journalism that finally exposed this.
And I said, That's not, I don't even think Swahwell is the story.
I mean, it is a story, but that's not the story.
The story is, How, who did know all these years?
Who did know this stuff was going on?
Who didn't know it?
Right.
It's the cover up of this.
Yeah.
And they're letting Nancy Pelosi know she, oh, no, I didn't know about it.
You know, what's so egregious to me is something's happening in the Republican group.
Tony Gonzalez, I helped that man get elected.
He faltered.
Okay.
But I was the first one to say he needed to resign before the election, not to cover him.
And then after the election comes out, and then people want to.
This is a challenge that we have.
How are we, I mean, I'd be remiss in not asking you.
How the Republicans going to do in the midterms and then post Trump?
Well, right now, I'm very concerned, especially about the House.
And there's a couple measurements.
Yeah, Virginia.
Now, to me, I do not like what's happening in this redistricting because now we're letting politicians pick their voters instead of the voters pick who they want to represent.
I'm opposed to all that.
I've put my own money in against California.
I sent $100,000 for the Virginias.
We did.
Now, one positive thing here when everybody's saying negative, We did increase Republican vote by 3% from the 24 presidential.
If we were able to do that in election, we would be in a much better place.
But if you look historically, whoever wins on the off the election for governor in New Jersey and Virginia, if the Democrats win both, historically they flip the House.
If Republicans win one, we flip the House.
But if you look at that delegate races, there were eight Republicans who were running for reelection in Virginia, and they were in seats that Harris carried in the presidential.
They all lost.
There were five Republicans running for reelection in those seats that Trump carried.
We lost five of them up to 4.5%.
So that concerns me.
If you look at the presidential race, President Trump carries all the swing states.
He wins the popular vote, which is very big for Republicans, a president, and they lost seats in the House.
Four years prior, when we didn't win the presidency, it was the first time since 1994 not one Republican incumbent lost.
And we beat 15 Democrats.
So, how do we win then and lose now?
That means President Trump did very well, but the party didn't.
And if you take it a step further, in the last 70 races for the Senate in the presidential year, 69 of the 70 states, however they vote for president, that party wins.
But this time, President Trump won Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, and Wisconsin, but the Republicans didn't win those Senate seats.
So, they're underperforming.
And then, what I'm watching, The highest number of retirements, kind of in modern history.
The number of times we're losing discharge petitions.
In three weeks, we lost more discharge petitions than we have in 30 years.
And you've got to understand what that is.
It's a rule that if you get 218 members of either party to sign a discharge petition, it's about one bill, that bill automatically comes to the floor.
When you do that, you're turning the floor over to the minority.
In my entire political career in Congress, only one time did a discharge petition go, and the Speaker at that time, Republican Speaker, wanted it to happen.
Now they just had a discharge petition, a bill passed that was authored by one of the AOC crowd.
Unbelievable.
So that's a bad sign you're not working together.
And then when the Democrats shut down the government, you're only given 24 months to have a majority.
The Senate stayed in session, the House did not.
I know.
If I'm in the minority, And the House shuts down, the minority's winning because you're not passing.
Correct.
You're giving up two months of your 24 months.
I know.
I know.
Why wouldn't you be in there passing things every single day?
Put the 80 20 issues on the floor, and you know what?
Come November, you'd show the Democrats voted against this.
So I would show those Democrats voted to keep Swalwell.
Run on that, too.
Let me, I only have about a minute left.
Let me ask you what am I missing on Thune?
Because none of this makes sense on the voter ID stuff.
Why isn't that going through with as popular as it is?
What needs to happen?
Okay, so the Senate has different roles than the House.
The House is pure whoever has the majority.
I don't like all this Republican on a Republican fight when we're trying to keep it, okay?
I just, I'm fine.
When I watch others on the outside fighting, you got to unite.
And what I would do, Thune wants this to pass through.
What Thune has is some members who may not and has some Democrats who may not.
So you need more votes than just Republicans.
Otherwise, you got to change the rules.
That's the decision where you want to go.
But the Save America Act, it is so popular with Republicans and Democrats.
I would take it by pieces then, okay?
And I would put each piece one by one, okay?
Voter ID.
Just put that up and see all who would vote for or not.
Then add the next piece.
And then what you can do, you can cobble it all back together after they vote for it.
But if you keep it all together, I've watched this on difficult bills, and everybody wants to pick one thing they can't be for.
Okay, then let's put it piece by piece and really show the American public and jam it right at you and then piece it back together and show no, it's the way to go.
You've got to think outside the box and you've got to put harder pressure.
That's the way I would look at it.
Kevin, great to talk to you.
Kevin McCarthy, former U.S. House Speaker.
Appreciate it, sir.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You bet.
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SPLC Funding Lies Exposed00:03:52
All right, yesterday, the Department of Justice dropped an 11 count indictment charging the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, with wire fraud, bank fraud, false statements, and conspiracy to launder money.
These guys, I just want you to know, I do have a horse in this race.
I think these guys have been a bane of my existence for a long time.
I have warned about them for a very long time.
So, you know, if you want an absolutely neutral view on the Southern Poverty Law Center, You're going to have a hard time getting it from me, but I'm going to try to be as fair as I possibly can with these guys.
They are a tool of the progressive engine, and I think so much more.
So prosecutors say from 2014 through 2023, the Southern Poverty Law Center quietly siphoned over $3 million donor dollars off to the top.
That's your grandma's 20 bucks.
You know, that's George Clooney's pledge straight into the pockets of Klansmen, neo Nazis, Aryan Nation bikers, Unite the Right.
Planners, do you remember that one?
And American Nazi affiliates.
Now, why would you do that?
One guy tied directly to the National Alliance supposedly got over a million dollars.
Another deep in Charlottesville, that rally, he pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Hmm, that's weird.
All the while, the SPLC's website and mailers scream, help us dismantle white supremacy, and they are actually funding it.
Now, how did that happen?
Well, the same way these things always do, layer by layer of deception.
Starting back in the 1980s, they built a covert network of field sources.
Some were already inside of the hate groups, others infiltrated at the SPLC's direction.
They had to keep it hidden from the public and their donors.
I don't know where you find this in a 501c3's organization papers, but supposedly they were protecting lives.
This is exactly what happened.
I swear to you, these.
These extreme right wing things that are supposedly everywhere, I swear to you, it is probably nothing but paid off people from the SPLC and FBI informants.
I mean, there are probably three people there that are actually real.
Anyway, they went so far to create shell bank accounts under fake names.
They fed false information to banks about who really controlled the money.
This is a violation of everything.
They routed payments through prepaid cards and cutouts.
This is what terrorist organizations do.
Donors thought they were funding lawsuits and exposes.
Instead, according to the feds, they were bankrolling the very racist the SBLC was denouncing on the evening news.
The indictment doesn't call it sloppy accounting, it calls it deliberate fraud.
A lie to get the cash, hide where it really went, keep the grift alive for nearly a decade.
SBLC says this was just intelligence work.
It's dangerous, necessary, and we shared it with the FBI.
Nope, no, they didn't, according to the DOJ and the FBI, they say we had no, there's nothing telling us that you were doing this.
DOJ said yesterday they weren't dismantling hate, they were manufacturing hate.
That they paid the arsonist to keep the fire going so they could keep raising money to put the fire out.
And on top of that, the DOJ said, never were we informed.
Okay, I want to take this to a different place.
Those are the facts.
I want to take this to if the allegations are true.
How Extremism Fuels Revolution00:10:09
This fits directly into what we have seen all over the world in really ugly political systems controlled extremism.
Let me explain how this works.
This is the way it's happened all over the world.
First, you help create or intensify the very danger you publicly are claiming to fight.
If the indictment's version is true, the machine would look like this money flows in quietly.
Into radicals and to dangerous people, and it helps them become louder and more active.
The public then sees a bigger threat.
The organization points that threat out and makes more money, more moral authority, media defense, and political leverage.
And it's just lather, rinse, repeat, lather, rinse, repeat.
This is the self licking ice cream cone.
The danger feeds the institution.
And that institution narrates the danger.
Then you turn labels into weapons.
In authoritarian systems, extremist, terrorist, foreign agent, these are all tags that are used to not just identify real threats, but to isolate opponents.
You chill people's association.
You cut off funding.
You make the public afraid to defend the target.
This is what Sol Alinsky talked about.
Now, Reuters has reported that.
Russia, their Supreme Court recently labeled Memorial extremist.
And that created a mechanism to prosecute the donors, the contributors, and people who share its materials.
Belarus used extremist designations to do the same thing to media outlets and journalists.
So you begin to isolate people, Solzhenitsyn.
Third, you build a climate where the map becomes territory.
Once a group is publicly targeted as hateful or extremist or subversive, the press, the foundations, the bureaucracies can begin treating the label as proof.
So you'll notice that's what the press does.
According to the Southern Polarity Law Center, this group is put the label in.
This is where soft totalitarianism systems are born.
You don't start with gulags, you start with.
Reputational death, which kind of becomes a soft blacklist.
You start funding the choke points and public fear.
That's what the Southern Poverty Law Center was doing.
Freedom House has warned that authoritarian systems exploit broad extremism and misinformation networks and frameworks to tighten the control over speech and civic space.
Think of that.
What are they saying?
They're saying you control every once you get this label out.
Now you can control speech, you can control people, what they do in the public.
AI makes censorship and surveillance and disinformation easier and faster and cheaper.
Remember, what did the government do after it did all of this?
After the SPLC would label, what were they doing?
The Biden administration was using them as justification to go to people and say, look, the.
SPLC says these are dangerous people.
You have to censor them.
Well, what is this beginning to sound like?
This is beginning to sound like a color revolution.
Okay?
Usually, a color revolution, if it's not directed, it's a mass protest movement that arises because something is illegitimate.
There's an election fraud or whatever.
It's usually a disputed election.
And then they use civil society networks and independent media and public mobilization to challenge whoever the president is or the prime minister.
That's a color revolution.
So, what do they need?
They need an unpopular incumbent, a person that is running the government that is hated by at least half the people.
They need a united opposition and enough independent media to spread the case.
That the vote was falsified, or that this guy is an authoritarian, and you need to dismantle and make the other side defending him afraid and fractured.
You also need the ability to mobilize large protests like no kings.
So, Moscow came to view this sequence as a series of things.
First, you have to train the opposition networks, then, you have to delegitimize the government.
You have to spark protest, replace the regime.
That's how Moscow looks at it.
I told you for forever it is bottom up, top down, inside out.
This is how the Kremlin interprets these events.
Whether that's accurate or not, that's the way they do.
I think it's accurate.
So let me get back to the SPLC.
If an institution can inflate or steer the public perception of extremism, Then it can help manufacture a crisis atmosphere.
They are not the key to color revolution.
They are one layer of the color revolution.
I believe this, my theory.
Nothing is proven until proven in a court of law.
But if you can create that crisis atmosphere, it does several things at once.
It delegitimizes the political opponents.
It pressures media to conform.
It justifies surveillance and deplatforming.
It scares donors and churches and business and people away from the quote wrong side.
And it creates moral permission for extraordinary countermeasures.
How many times have you heard people try to kill somebody?
Well, let's use Charlie Kirk.
How many people say it was justified?
That's an extreme position, one that Americans have never held, never, except in our very worst times.
Now you have people justifying violence.
It's justified.
Why?
Because somebody has ratcheted up the labels.
In an environment like we have right now, they're priming the ground for street mobilization, government action.
Corporate pressure, selective law enforcement, it's all pushing in the same direction.
Now, that's not a revolution.
That's the precondition for a revolution.
That's legitimacy for war.
If this is true, an organization says these people are dangerous, that feeds or expands those kinds of people.
Those people continue to do dangerous things, and their dangerous things that they're doing is amplified and it's made to look much, much bigger.
Then the press reports the danger.
Then the public sees that report, they label, and they say, Oh my gosh, it's everywhere.
Then, because the people are rising up saying, Somebody's got to do something, the institutions demand crackdown.
The same organization that was pointing out the danger and funding the danger says, You got to do something about it.
They're elevated as the trusted interpreter of the threat because they're the ones who found it.
This is exactly how societies go from free debate into managed fear.
And once fear becomes the currency, totalitarian habits follow fast.
Look at what's happening right now in Virginia.
Look at what they did in Virginia yesterday.
What do they do?
And everybody who voted this way, I saw the people coming out, people who are coming out of the voting booth and voted to take away the voice of 40% of Virginia.
40% all said the same thing.
We have to stop Donald Trump.
That's fear pushing you into totalitarianism, and you don't even know it.
You label the enemy, you isolate the enemy, you criminalize contact with the enemy, you pressure media, financial channels, you make ordinary citizens afraid of being seen near the enemy.
This is what happens every single time.
Is that what the Southern Poverty Law Center was doing?
Well, I could sure make the case.
The last people that are pointed to and say these people are dangerous are the people who have been pointing out the danger themselves.
I will tell you that anybody who gave to the Southern Poverty Law Center, they are not going to read this the same way.
They're going to say this is this totalitarian state coming after and trying to silence this group that has done well and done good things for so long.
We have to support them even more.
Oil Crisis and Rising Prices00:14:17
Because for a good portion of the country, they're in too deep.
And the media will never, ever disassociate themselves from the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Never.
Never.
You're listening to the best of Glenn Beck.
Need a little more?
Check out the full show podcasts anywhere you download podcasts.
Welcome to the program.
You know, we're just talking about Canada, trying to show how.
We need to look deeper into all of our problems.
Instead of saying housing prices are so high and it's whatever, blame, whatever, it's that.
Why don't we look deeper into things?
You know, people are growing angry.
Housing prices, affordable health care, loss of culture.
Why?
Why?
Because of the political decisions that were made to, in many cases, to import huge population growth.
And that drove up the price of everything, the loss of culture.
Why was that decision?
Are we talking about that?
And are we talking about what are we going to do to get that under control?
No.
Instead, we just argue about you have a right to be a country without a border.
Gas prices, fuel prices, heating prices, even groceries.
Well, blame it on Trump because of the Iran war.
Well, why?
Why did he go to war?
Because we had terror and he said he was going to stop all foreign wars.
No, he never said that.
See, this is a possible solution.
To be able to get ourselves, I mean, to fix the oil prices in America at least, you have to produce your own oil, you have to refine your own oil, and you have to stop being held hostage by crazy people in the Middle East.
So we have to go over to war all the time.
I don't want a war for oil.
So the war in Iran is a possible solution.
May not work, may not be the solution you would come up with, but it's at least a possible solution that the president chose.
Okay.
If you want to solve the problem, you have to come up with a way to not be held hostage by crazy people.
You have to stop doing business on oil with unsavory characters like Russia or Iran.
You have to stop shutting down your own supply to oil.
Start drilling for your own resources.
Open your nuclear power plants back up.
Open your oil rigs back up.
But that's not what's happening.
Nobody's talking about that because they're getting more and more angry.
And I'll tell you, one place I worry about.
And one place I cheer for and pray for are the people in Ireland.
They are rising up and they have had enough of all of this.
But I don't know how this ends.
Ben Scallon is with us.
He's Grip Media's senior political correspondent.
He is a conservative leaning Irish news outlet, Gripped is.
And he's here to tell us about what is actually happening in Ireland and what the protesters are doing today.
How is this going?
What is the reaction?
And is there any progress?
Ben, welcome.
Well, thank you so much for having me, Guy.
Great to be here.
Thank you.
So, what is happening currently on the ground with the protest in Ireland?
So, as you have no doubt heard, because it did make international press, the last couple of weeks have been very eventful here in the Emerald Isle.
We've seen massive blockades of major roads all over the country with truckers and farmers in particular who are protesting over the price of petrol.
Many of these are business owners who are Literally now operating at a loss where they can't even pay the bills, let alone make a profit or have any kind of a thriving business.
And in a country like Ireland that is so known for its agricultural sector, this is one of our major, when you think of Ireland, you think of farming, some of our agricultural products are the best in the world.
And so this is a huge deal.
And one of the elements of this, of course, Is the Iran war.
Needless to say, that's been the primary driver of fuel prices worldwide.
But for many years now in Ireland, over 50% of motor fuel prices are purely comprised of government taxes and levies.
So when you fill up your car, over half of what you're paying is going straight into the state's coffers.
And so that's been the case for a long time.
People haven't been happy about it for a long time, but they've kind of just accepted it.
It's been a grumbling issue in the background that people have begrudgingly tolerated.
But then, when the price of energy worldwide explodes and people are not able to make ends meet, this has now become kind of the focal point where people are saying, Well, why are we paying so much taxes?
And what are you going to do about it, given that this is something that you can immediately do to pull the ripcord and help every citizen in the state?
It's kind of like I think what they're demanding is kind of like when we have an oil crisis, we go into the strategic oil reserve and it reduces the price to some degree.
But with you controlling the government controlling 50% of the price just through taxes, you would think that it would be a no brainer.
especially when people are this unhappy just to go, okay, we're going to reduce it by 50%.
We have to have some of it, but we're going to take 50% of the taxes and reduce them, at least temporarily.
Why won't they do that?
Well, they did a small tax cut that many people who are in these industries are saying is woefully inadequate and has just been eaten up by inflation almost as quickly as it was put on.
And they, for example, just to give one practical example of a measure they took, we have annual scheduled carbon tax increases.
And the explicit purpose of this is to deliberately force people out of their cars.
That was actually what one transport minister said back in 2019 to make it so unaffordable to drive your car.
That you're forced to take a bike or public transport or get an electric vehicle or something like that.
So, that is the express purpose of the policy to hurt you.
And lo and behold, it's hurting you.
So, now that that's become very politically thorny for the government, they've postponed the carbon tax hike until October.
So, they haven't even said we're going to reduce carbon tax or we're not going to put carbon tax up.
They've just kicked the can down the road by a few months.
But as many analysts have pointed out by this point, October is going to be coming into winter when energy prices are going to surge.
So you're going to be hit with a particularly large bill, bigger than you would ordinarily be hit with, just when you need energy the most.
So that's where we are now.
It's not really satisfactory so far as many of the protesters are concerned.
So if you're flying through Europe, they're actually now saying, the EU is saying, we may not have enough jet fuel.
I really don't understand how this is not.
Going deeper to say to the politicians and to the people of Europe, saying, Wait a minute, wait a minute.
We can't afford jet fuel.
We have a real problem.
Everything stops without jets flying.
We have a real problem.
And you're either manufacturing this to get us to not fly and to not drive, or you've made so many errors.
Is anybody talking about opening up the oil rigs again, opening up drilling, opening up this, you know, the system that will give you cheaper energy?
There are people who are calling for that, but the government is emphatic that we will not be doing that.
You know, Glenn, that in Ireland we import 100% of the oil that's used on the island.
We have one oil refinery, but we don't actually generate any.
And it is estimated by independent assessors that we have hundreds of millions of barrels of oil potentially off the coast within our territorial waters.
But in 2020, the government actually banned oil exploration so that you can't look for it offshore.
So that's potentially sitting there under the ground, and nobody is allowed to look for it or try to utilize that.
And at the same time, we're importing it.
We don't have any nuclear power because that's something that we haven't really even discussed approaching here, let alone actually implementing it.
Yet we will import the electricity that's generated in nuclear countries like France.
So we are one of the most energy-exposed countries in Europe, and Europe as a continent.
Is incredibly energy exposed relative to a country like America, which obviously has its own domestic supplies of this stuff.
So we're incredibly in a serious position.
We were doing the same thing until Trump.
We were shutting it all down.
We were making it impossible to get our own energy.
And we were headed exactly the same way.
And thank God for Donald Trump to say, nope, we're drilling, drill, drill, drill.
We're pulling it up.
But we haven't built a refinery here in so long.
Everything we drill, we have to sell overseas because we can't refine its light, sweet crude.
We can't refine it here because we don't build refineries.
So, our prices of gas are still up through the roof because all the oil we pull, we have to sell to somebody else.
Ben, it seems like much of the West, including here in America, is on this suicidal course.
That the policies that are being imposed are just pushing us into suicide as nations or even a culture.
Do you see hope on the other side?
Do you think things are going to change?
Is this a straw that broke the camel's back?
Well, the protesters here, when they were blocking certain kinds of infrastructure as a form of protest, the government accused them of an act of national sabotage.
I wonder what kind of sabotage it is to deliberately increase the price of energy on citizens with the express purpose of making their life harder.
I think there's a lot of.
People in the crowd who would have called that an act of national sabotage.
I'm not aware of another region outside of Europe that does that, given, as you know and as your listeners know, energy is the lifeblood of any kind of society or economy.
This is the essence of the modern world, how we are able to heat ourselves, feed ourselves, transport ourselves.
Without that, everything grinds to a halt.
And so the idea that you would go out of your way as a state to intentionally make it harder for people to utilize that.
Seems absurd to me.
And of course, they say if a government minister was sitting here that this is all being replaced with green energy.
But we've been pursuing that for decades now, and we're still in the position we're in.
So without even getting into it, you know, you could have all the arguments you want about the efficacy of windmills and offshore wind and all these different renewable measures that they push.
But if that was all it was cracked up to be, I don't think we would be in the calamitous situation we're in now.
The results kind of speak for themselves.
I'm going over to England to speak at the Tommy Robinson rally.
And my wife is like, What should we expect?
I mean, how dangerous is it going to be?
And I'm like, It's going to be fine, honey.
It's going to be fine.
But the one thing that has crossed my mind is, you know, it's easy to blame Donald Trump for the price of oil.
And, I mean, it was his move that has caused all of this.
So, yes, in some ways, it absolutely is.
Is our fault.
What is the population's view on America and Americans at this time?
Well, frankly, Ireland is very hostile to Donald Trump overall.
There are exceptions, of course.
You're never going to get unanimity on somebody who's as polarizing as the U.S. president.
But I think there was a poll done not too long ago which found that if Ireland had a vote in the U.S. presidential election, we would vote Democrats with a bigger margin than California.
So we would literally be the most liberal state in the U.S. if we were to have a vote in such things.
So, yeah, a lot of.
A lot of people blame Donald Trump, and obviously there's a strong argument for that given everything that's happened.
But I also think all the measures that we're discussing climate measures, green energy measures all this recent crisis is doing is giving us a time machine like glance into the future of what they would be hoping for us.
How can you complain that Donald Trump is restricting our supply of oil when?
European leaders for decades have been deliberately trying to destroy their own supply of oil.
Isn't he just doing our own job for us that you guys tell us is the objective of successive governments?
You can't really blame him for delivering us into the utopia that we were all aiming for.
Good point.
Ben, thank you so much.
And we pray for your people, and I hope it works out.
We pray for your farmers.
When I say I am a farmer, I own farmland and cattle, a ranch, so I can relate to what the farmer is going through.
And it is a really, really hard life.
You don't need anything else to make it even more difficult.