Glenn Beck, Harmeet Dhillon, and Carol Roth dissect escalating political violence linked to foreign actors like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, systematic anti-Christian bias in the DOJ, and the administration's plan to enforce competitive gerrymandering. They critique progressive obstruction of the Spirit Airlines merger, rising oil prices due to Red Sea conflict skepticism, and hostile policies driving corporations from cities like Seattle. Ultimately, the episode argues that ideological extremism is now networked while economic missteps shrink the middle class, all amidst a lack of patriotic branding for America's 250th anniversary. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
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Spirit Airlines Merger Debate00:03:25
Shows packed today.
We started with Spirit Airlines.
You know, what is happening?
And by the way, thank you, progressives, for making people's lives better yet again.
How?
How exactly?
They claim that Spirit Airlines not merging would be a victory for the Biden administration.
And if the Biden administration's idea was, you know, to make people's life harder, congratulations, then I guess it is a victory for you.
But if you are actually looking out for the little people, Spirit Airlines going out of business is a huge problem.
But that seems to be the track record.
We look at that.
Also, Harmony Dillon was on with us today.
We have Carol Roth.
And we talked about this pattern of violence.
The assassinations are a problem.
What's happening in our political class is a problem.
The fact that President Trump is traveling to China, one of our biggest enemies, I think might be a big problem.
I hate to say it out loud, but I don't think the president should go to China.
Maybe that's just me.
I want to lay out the facts on what's really happening with violence in our country and where is it coming from, all on today's podcast.
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You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Well, Saturday, we were in New York at Ellis Island.
It was an amazing event.
Amazing event.
Love for you to see it.
We'll play some highlights.
You can find it on demand now at glennbeck.comslash torch and make sure you see it.
Civil Rights Movement Push00:13:57
It was stirring.
It was amazing to be there and celebrate America's 250th.
We had several people that were supposed to be there because of security concerns.
They didn't make it.
One person who did make it was.
Harmeet Dillon, and she's the one I want protected most in the government because I just absolutely love her.
She is our assistant attorney general.
She is running the civil rights division.
She's with us now.
And, Harmeet, let me just start before we get into the news of the day.
Thank you for coming and thank you for sharing your story of being a legal immigrant in the nation.
Well, thank you so much for having me, Glenn, and for your warm introduction.
It was a very moving event, and the stories you told about.
The president's family and your own family were also very moving and just demonstrate how important our history is and respecting it and keeping it legal.
And so I'm really proud to be part of that here at the Department of Justice and generally in my law practice and life.
And, you know, I could not love this country more.
So you are part of the, you're running the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ.
And there's a couple of things that, I mean, I can't take the Jim Crow stuff anymore.
And the lack of people noticing how the DOJ was weaponized.
The DOJ task force report came out last week.
Anti Christian bias was real, systematic, and pervasive.
How deep was the thing that you saw?
You were like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this.
Well, I mean, I can believe all of it because we've been compiling this stuff for a while now.
And I experienced this type of anti Christian and really anti religious bias as a lawyer in private practice over the last several years.
I'll just give you one example.
You know, our government, not just the DOJ, but, you know, various.
Aspects of the government viewed people seeking religious accommodations to not have to get the COVID vaccination if they were government employees as not legitimate.
They basically internally labeled all of those accommodation requests illegitimate.
The Biden DOJ continued the Obama DOJ's efforts to go after Little Sisters of the Poor and other Christian organizations like that.
The Bostock memo that effectively took that Bostock ruling, which I disagree with from the Supreme Court about gay rights, and went way beyond that and basically made it illegitimate for any person employed by the government to have a Christian viewpoint on gay marriage and issues like that, which are very much spiritual and religious in nature.
And so there was just a complete lack of respect.
For the Christian and more broadly, the religious viewpoint.
To the point of trying to get Christians off of juries, screen them out.
To get Christians off of juries, too, in the case of a companion report that we issued a few weeks ago, our Faith Act weaponization report, where disparaging remarks were made by DOJ prosecutors in my department, former prosecutors now in my department here, about a magistrate judge being a Catholic, keeping people of faith off of juries.
And going after and seeking sentences that were more than double for Christian protesters outside abortion clinics than for really domestic terrorists going after pro life centers in Florida in one important case after the Dobbs decision.
So these disparities were marked, they were open, they were written down in emails.
And thank goodness that we have a president.
Today, who is not just dedicated to changing that, but to also documenting what happened so that people should feel ashamed to do this to other people of faith in our country because our country is founded on faith and specifically on the Christian faith.
We're not really good at shame right now.
What steps are we taking?
I mean, my biggest fear is we lose in 2028 and all of this stuff comes back with a vengeance.
What is being done to make sure this doesn't happen again?
Anything?
Can anything be done?
Well, Glenn, it very much could happen again.
I mean, you can count on it happening again.
In fact, Hakeem Jeffries and the James Comeys and other prominent figures in the world are promising that the punishment of conservatives will happen if the parties change.
Now, we don't do the opposite, but what I will tell you is that lawyers in this department who violated the rights of Americans, including Brady violations against defendants, refusing to disclose exculpatory evidence in some of these weaponized faith related cases.
They no longer work here.
So, yeah, sure, they could reapply in four years or three years, but their careers would have moved on by then.
And frankly, if they want to fight, I mean, we have records.
Before anyone gets terminated here, there's a record of what they did.
And, you know, that'll all be a public record.
So I think that is an improvement.
I mean, a lot of people have criticized me on the Hill, and Democrats have criticized me for the fact that 75% of the lawyers in the Civil Rights Division left after I became the Assistant Attorney General.
That is absolutely a positive development.
For one thing, most of those lawyers were biased, and no one is entitled to a forever job here.
What we have now, and we're building back up here, is Second Amendment lovers, people who love liberty, Christians, Jews, people of faith, people of all faiths are welcome here if they are willing to respect the Constitution and commit to the civil rights agenda that's consistent with protecting all Americans, not just.
The favored few.
And back to that weaponization report, this DOJ put out guidance that Christians could not possibly be the victims of religious discrimination because they're the majority.
That's ridiculous.
That's not what our Constitution says.
The Roberts Court, for all of its flaws, I disagree with some things.
The Roberts Court has absolutely, and all the way up to last week's opinion in Louisiana versus Calais, has steered the ship regarding discrimination back to the center where it belongs.
Let me switch to the SCOTUS ruling on gerrymandering.
If I hear one more person say Jim Crow, I think I'm going to lose my mind.
I can't even imagine how you feel.
What is the effect of this?
And are we going after the states?
I know you said you're going after enforce in every state that has radically rigged maps.
You're going to enforce this.
What is the plan?
What does it mean?
Okay.
So we're formulating what the Plan means.
I mean, I will tell you that the timing of this ruling is such that, you know, the closer you are to elections happening, the less leeway courts give you to make changes.
A lot of these changes have to be made at the political level, and we're seeing that happen.
And when I say I'm going to enforce the law throughout the United States, I mean, that's not committing to any particular timeline because we do have to respect some of these parameters and we do have to look at the political situation.
So, where some states, mainly it's southern states, but not exclusively, are committing to redistricting, you know, they're going to go through that process, which is a political process, and the Supreme Court has ruled that political gerrymandering is acceptable.
And so that's going to be happening throughout the country.
You know, eventually, I think what you're going to see eventually over the next two, four, six years is there are going to be legal actions, if not by the Department of Justice, by candidates, by partisan entities, just like happened in Louisiana versus Calais.
NAACP forced the hand over there.
They may be regretting that now, but instead of having one black majority district, they went for broke and went for two, and now there may be zero because political gerrymandering means that they can redraw the lines that.
Fit the other criteria that are mentioned in the court, the jingles test that talks about compactness and, you know, communities of interest and so forth.
And that isn't necessarily race in 2026 in America.
I don't believe it's race.
We have a number of people being elected from both parties, constituencies of all different races in America, and that's a beautiful thing in our country.
So we saw last week our acting attorney general go after, you know, Fauci's number two.
I know this is not your area of expertise, but we're just days away from Fauci.
I mean, he's already been pardoned, but we can't bring up charges pretty soon.
Are all these, I mean, are we moving forward on these things?
Are people going to pay a price for anything?
Yeah, look, people are going to pay a price.
You have to understand that the wheels of justice turn a little more slowly in the government than they might in private practice.
I certainly have been frustrated by that myself, but.
When I think you've seen my boss, acting attorney general Todd Blanch, blanket the news waves this past weekend regarding the Comey indictment and others.
And what you see in public is just a fraction of the evidence that's out there.
And so building these cases takes time.
We have had turnover here.
We have had weaponized justice in the form of judges who refuse to let some of our cases go forward and grand juries that refuse to indict.
That's been a challenge.
I'm confident that you are going to see justice.
I mean, people want it to go a lot faster than it has.
That isn't my area.
And civil rights, I'm very proud to say that in a year, we've accomplished a tremendous amount of justice within our areas of expertise.
But, you know, the U.S. attorney's offices I'm in touch with, my friends in different U.S. attorney's offices, they're bringing cases regarding illegal voting.
They're bringing cases regarding some of these massive fraud issues.
Yes, there are pardons out there that cover a lot of the behavior that.
Frustrate Americans.
I think I'd love to see Fauci pay for some of the things that he did and others.
And, you know, I can't promise you any particular results, but I can tell you that everyone here in this building is extremely dedicated to the president's agenda, certainly in our leadership here, and to getting justice for Americans who were wronged in the last several years.
Can you go?
Let me go back to the gerrymandering thing.
Can you speak as the person that is running the civil rights division at the DOJ?
Can you speak to those people?
like the people on The View that say this is just, we're just silencing blacks and minorities and, you know, we're going back to the, I don't even know, 1950s or whenever, to nightmare years.
What would you say to them?
Well, first of all, I'm not sure they would listen.
But what I would say to them is I'm a woman who grew up in the Deep South.
And, you know, there was the Ku Klux Klan in my county when I was growing up in the 1970s in rural North Carolina.
And that was scary.
And guess what?
It isn't there anymore.
It is not mainstream, it is fringe.
Our country has come so far.
We've had a black president, we have had, you know, just so many people of power from all over.
Look at Hakeem Jeffries as the minority leader.
We have a diverse and beautiful society, and we should be proud of that.
We should celebrate it, and we should stop putting our thumb on the scale.
It's not fair to all Americans, and it is simply perpetuating a racist history that we should be proud to be able to have moved past in our country.
And so I think some of these gerrymandered districts, I mean, you know, it has consequences on both sides.
What it does is it creates one very liberal district, and then all the other districts.
Become slightly more conservative.
That's generally the pattern in a red state or a southern state.
And instead, what you're going to have is more competitive districts eventually for everybody.
And I think that's actually a really good thing.
I frankly, even though, of course, I'm a Republican, I go on Capitol Hill, I testify, I speak to members of Congress sometimes, and I despair at the sort of the difficulty one has in dislodging any of these people from their positions.
Once they get elected, it seems almost impossible to replace them.
We could use more change.
We could use more fresh blood in politics.
And I think all Americans should view this as an opportunity to get some better people elected to Congress.
Harmeet, thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Just want to say I wish you were our attorney general.
I'm just throwing that out there and not asking you to comment on it.
But thanks, Harmeet Dillon, our assistant attorney general in charge of the Civil Rights Division.
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Foreign Money Kill Threats00:15:19
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Now back to the podcast.
This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and we really want to thank you for listening.
All right, I want to play a couple of things for you.
You know, It used to be really simple.
If somebody tried to kill the president, you know, it looked like one guy, one gun, you know, they try.
You could point to it.
You could understand it.
You could explain it to your kids.
But I think that world is absolutely gone.
We're looking now at something really different.
Because when you line up the attempts on Donald Trump's life, and there's a new story out on our show prep today, you can get it for free at glenbeck.com.
Sign up for the show prep.
There's a couple of stories in there about.
Assassinations and what is coming and how bad it is.
This president has been targeted officially now more than any other president in history.
They have tried to kill him more than any other president in U.S. history.
And what we're seeing is a progression.
It's a pattern.
Let's start at the beginning.
In 2016, a man at a rally in Las Vegas tried to grab a gun from a police officer and shoot the president.
That's the old model.
That's the, what was her name?
Squeaky from.
Remember her?
Tried to kill Gerald Ford.
It was impulsive.
It's fast.
It's rash.
It's the old model.
It's the old school.
Back in my days, we tried to grab a gun, it's close range.
It was desperate.
2017 comes along.
Things start to shift.
A man tries to attack Trump's motorcade with a forklift.
Now, think about that.
To me, this is the difference between planting a bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center and then that not working and then trying to fly airplanes into the side of the building five years later.
The bad guys now are starting to think about disruption and spectacle.
By 2020, We're not even in that room anymore.
Letter arrives 2020.
Ricin, meant to kill through the mail.
Distance now is entering the picture.
You don't need access.
You just need to find a way to get proximity.
You need a system, a way to exploit it.
And then everything begins to accelerate from there.
Now, 2024.
Planned, well thought out, strangely, seemingly very easy.
Butler, Pennsylvania.
Back to the movie Assassin.
You know, the story is one gunman, rooftop, and a rifle.
And this time it almost works.
It almost works.
A bullet hits Trump's ear.
I mean, if that's not an act of God, I don't know what is.
The supporter, one supporter is killed, others are shot and wounded.
This is no longer chaotic.
This is planned, well planned, and calculated.
Elevation, distance, all of it.
Here's the part that bothers me.
There are lots of warnings here.
Lots of them.
In that particular case, people saw the shooter on the roof.
No one stopped it in time?
That roof was left empty and unguarded.
Really?
How?
Two months later, two months after that assassination, same year, West Palm Beach, man hiding in the bushes at the golf course with a rifle, waiting, watching.
This is not anger anymore.
Now they're stalking him.
And behind the scenes, federal prosecutors uncover a plot tied to individuals linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
This is two years ago.
And not just Trump, but multiple U.S. leaders are targeted.
I want to say that again.
It's important because I'm going to tell you the latest.
Not just Trump, but several U.S. leaders are targeted by the Iranians.
Now that's a different category.
Again, that's not a lone actor, that's geopolitical.
That's foreign terrorism.
And yet the media is silent on that one.
Nobody even brings that one up.
Why is that?
We're at war with Iran.
You would think that that would be a layer.
Okay.
Let me go to the last one Washington, D.C. Man forces his way into a room filled with the most powerful people in government, armed.
Let me say that again.
Gee, filled with the most powerful people in government, and he was armed.
He fires.
Secret Service agent is hit.
Survives.
But I want you to think about the target.
It's not a rally.
It's not a golf course.
It's a room full of the leadership of the United States.
That's not an assassination.
That's destabilization.
Had it worked, that's destabilization.
That is the constitutional order being disrupted.
Because who was in that room?
That could have been a decapitation event of our government.
It wasn't, but it could have been.
And if that guy could get in, what's stopping?
People with real money and from Iran getting in.
I mean, remember, oh, well, they can't do that.
Who's going to fly planes into buildings?
Well, I don't know.
And why is the media treating it like this?
Because along the way, there's been other lesser known pieces of this pattern.
You know, an armed man breaching Mar a Lago.
When was that?
Six months ago?
A plot tied to ISIS sympathizers.
Again, foreign directed attempts stopped before execution, but foreign funded.
Some succeed in getting close.
Some never make it out of planning, but they're all signals.
They're all signals.
Why aren't we listening to the signals?
Well, let me give you an example.
Let me go to the audio from today, Sarah, if I can.
Let me see if I can find my audio sheet.
Let me play.
Let me play.
Where is it?
Here.
Here's a Michigan Democrat.
I believe running for Senate.
Yeah, running for Senate.
Okay.
Here he is this weekend.
Cut one.
Do you personally see parallels between Nazi Germany and what's happening under the Trump administration?
Yeah, I do.
It is deeply concerning that we see an authoritarian slide.
And as we talked about earlier, dividing people against each other to convince people that.
If you're not doing well economically, it's somebody else's fault, is an incredibly dangerous place for us to be in.
I don't think that a lot of people would argue that there are shades of authoritarianism here that we need to be deeply concerned about.
Stop.
First of all, have you checked who you're running on?
You're running with the Democrats.
If you're not doing well, it's somebody else's fault.
That is your entire campaign.
That is the platform of the Democratic Party.
What are you talking about?
But again, let's just talk about authoritarianism.
Let's just compare them to Nazis again.
Also, you had another Senate candidate in this time in Pennsylvania that was arrested this weekend for making a threat about his Republican challenger, left voicemails saying that Congressman and his daughter would have their throats slit, and then also made threats against the president.
So just this weekend, you have two candidates for Senate in the Democratic Party saying this.
Now that's a problem.
Well, the media doesn't want to address that.
Let me give you another one.
How about this one?
We're going to go to cut two.
This comes from Virginia Tech.
Virginia Tech on Friday, a former Columbia professor did a tour stop there, declaring his support for Hamas.
And he's talking about the term death to America.
I want you to listen to this.
We are in a war, a racial and religious war, since 1492, as I'll elucidate in a little while.
But we are in a battle for hearts and minds and souls, sir.
And so when we say death to America, we mean loud and clear a total end to US empire.
The destruction of this crusading settler colony, her entire project, her capacity to meddle and intervene in other nations, to wage war, to engage in ooze, to engage in interventions, to continue her ongoing genocide.
For anti blackness, for anti indigenous founding and structure, right here where we are.
It means a reckoning, it means indigenous sovereignty, it means black self determination.
It means that we would be engaged in different ways of life according to indigenous traditions and spiritualities and ways of living with the land and not on it.
Wow, that's amazing.
He's so open minded and so great.
Mohammed Abdu.
By the way, the Death to the Academy tour stop, spelled with a K.
I guess it's kind of like America with a K. Or did they just have a leftover K, you know, because maybe they were printing signs that said KKKK and they had a leftover K and they're like, oh, no, it's only three Ks.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
But it's so open minded of him, right?
Wow.
What could possibly, besides justice, what could Mohammed's reasoning be?
To collapse and destroy the United States of America.
What's happening here, America?
What's changed?
Everything.
Everything.
You know, it used to be one guy walking in behind President Lincoln and shooting him.
One guy, Hinckley, coming up and shooting the president.
One moment.
Now it's layered.
You have the lone actors.
You also have the ideological extremists.
You have the distance attacks, the mail, the surveillance, the infiltration.
But you also have something else.
You have the failure points.
You have the security gaps.
You have the missed warnings.
You have systems that don't seem to be adapting or at least not fast enough.
But you also have, on top of that, foreign intelligence plots.
Let me ask you this Did you notice the news this weekend about.
About how we just need to end the billionaires.
Oh, if we can just stop with all the billionaires, we'd just be free.
Wait, what was that Democratic senator in Michigan saying?
To say you're not successful because of somebody else?
I'm sorry, I don't know how that works with ending the billionaires, taxing the rich.
Anyway, who funded all that?
Foreign money.
Millions and millions of dollars from communist China and other hostile actors in the Middle East.
Are we looking for any of that?
Is anybody putting this together?
The real story here, the real story, connect the dots.
Real story is there have been multiple attempts, multiple.
And it's not that, it's how they're changing from impulsive, those are still in play, to planned, to networked, to international.
Now you got all of them.
Now you have all of them.
And yet the media and those tasked to protect the constitutional order, treating it like this, like nothing has really changed.
We're just still dealing with a lone gunman.
I don't think so.
May I ask three questions here?
One, why isn't our system blaring flashing red lights everywhere?
Why is this still happening?
Why are we not hearing about all the additional threats?
Two, has anybody asked, with this trajectory, what does the next version of assassination attempt look like?
Not 10 years from now, the next one.
And the third one, and maybe the most uncomfortable, is, I think the president is traveling to China, isn't he?
China has just spent millions of dollars on our streets trying to collapse our system.
We know Donald Trump has hurt China a great deal.
Of course, you'll never hear that in the media because they're all for China.
You'll never hear anybody talk about it in universities because they're getting all that Chinese money.
But let me ask you as they are funding Code Pink and all of the others who are vowing to stop the president by any means necessary, should the president meet?
In China with the Chinese leaders, or should maybe we meet in some like neutral territory and maybe perhaps, you know, make sure the president's not poked by an umbrella or shake hands with somebody?
I'm sorry.
I actually worry about the president, and I would be saying the same thing if it was a Democrat and the conditions were exactly the same.
This is the president of the United States.
Please, Mr. President, don't go to China.
Don't go to China.
And maybe our DOJ should start really stopping all of the foreign money that is coming in to kill you.
Maybe they should spend 10 minutes on that.
This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
Welcome to the Glenn Beck program.
Glad you're here.
Thank you so much for listening with everything that's going on in the world.
Economic Reality vs Stock Market00:09:45
And there's a lot.
I want to bring Carol Roth in to talk a little bit about.
Well, let's start with oil.
Why did oil go up today, Carol, when the president announced he was opening up and protecting some ships going through?
Do you know?
So I think there's something, you've heard of the boy who cries wolf problem, right?
And unfortunately, I think that the president has a little bit of a straight will be open and safe problem.
Some investors may put it to the side, and sometimes you see that in the stock market.
But the hardcore investors, those who are in the bond market, those who are in the commodity market, they are looking at not what the president is saying directly.
They're reading between the lines and they're taking note of his actions because the president happens to be very transparent if you know what you're looking for.
And basically, every time the yields on the 10 year get into the range of about 4.4%, the administration, led by a very smart guy at the Treasury and Scott Besant, Starts to worry that we're going to have bond market dysfunction.
And so the president comes out and says everything is going to be good.
Everything is going to be wrapped up here soon.
We're taking care of everything in an effort to get those yields down and to buy them a little bit of space and a safety buffer.
And if you are in the bond market, you're in the commodity market, you've noticed this pattern.
And at some point, you don't believe it anymore.
And obviously, the longer that this goes on and the more tail there is, there's going to be on cost and economic consequences.
So I think that you have, in certain markets, certainly.
Each one is individual in terms of how they're digesting information and has different focuses.
But I think that they have caught on to every time we hit this level, this is what the administration says, but we're not actually seeing an end to this conflict.
And investors who are very focused on geopolitics and oil and gas believe that the strait at this point is closed indefinitely and that there's no clarity about when an opening date is really going to happen.
So, even if ships, apparently three American flagships have gone through, even if ships are going through, no, none of them had oil, I think.
But yeah, so you know, obviously, there would have to be a long extended, you know, not a one off situation or a three off situation, but there would have to be a return to some sense of normalcy and flow.
And even then, that doesn't mean that there's, you know, definitely an end to the conflict, but you know, that within the context.
Is going to have a different read in terms of the market.
And look, the reality is, Glenn, that the cost of gas and the cost of oil on a worldwide basis should be higher at this point in time.
There has been a lot of concerted efforts in terms of strategic petroleum reserve releases across the world and other efforts to try to keep this down and keep a lid on it during the conflict.
So even at the high levels that we're at, it could be worse.
And I think that, again, that's part of the calculus is how much.
Runway is there to keep a lid on this over time.
And obviously, the longer that it goes on, the more longer term risk there is.
So, the flying bananas are done this weekend.
Spirit Airlines is out.
And Elizabeth Warren, when she announced this with Joe Biden that they weren't going to merge with JetBlue, she said that's a win for the Republican, win for Biden.
You know, tickets on a cheap airline to go someplace to go see grandma or go back to school or whatever it was.
That's not a win for you today.
All these people have lost their jobs.
The airline is closed.
The only ones that will win are the bigger airlines.
Yeah.
The thing about the Elizabeth Warrens, which has progressivism, but basically liberalism in general at this point, is that they are always wrong and never in doubt.
And this is a very dangerous combination because, you know, you can have this moral preening.
But it doesn't replace economic reality.
And they are so decoupled from the economic reality, either because they don't understand or because they don't care, that they get to be Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons.
Oh, I did a thing, I helped.
And no, you did not help.
They take their victory lap.
And then what happens is that long term, everybody suffers the consequences.
MA is part of my background.
I'm a recovering investment banker.
We see this all the time.
You have a company that needs a lifeline, and another company steps in and it's letting the market sort it out.
Does it mean that you know that that would have worked?
I don't know, it's you know 50 50, but at least there would have been a chance.
What they did is they took a struggling company and they said, No, you cannot have that lifeline.
Look, we did a good thing.
And like you said, now we have less choice.
Now we have people who are out of a job.
Now we have less of an opportunity for this to work its way out in the markets and in the system.
And this isn't just about MA.
This is about minimum wage.
This is about rent control.
This is about every time they don't understand or don't care about economic reality.
They want to do a thing.
They want to do their Ralph Wiggum thing and be helping, and they're not helping, and they're making it harder for Americans to thrive, to be successful, and in some cases just to afford the cost of living.
And unfortunately, that's where we're at today.
Well, but you can't.
I'm sorry, but I can't give them the benefit of the doubt on this because every time, I mean, the facts are out about minimum wage.
They're going to go and say there needs to be a minimum wage now.
They're going to try to pass it in Congress again.
No, especially not a national minimum wage.
What somebody can live on in Preston, Idaho is different than what somebody can live on in New York City.
That makes no sense whatsoever.
You put a national living wage together and it's 25 bucks, the people in small towns of America, you will lose those jobs.
You will lose many of the jobs in the big cities because people can't afford that as a business.
And the proof is there.
They just never seem to want to look at it.
Yeah.
I mean, if you recall, I'm with you on this.
If you recall, my second book was The War on Small Business, which talked about what happened during COVID and how there was this direct attack on the small businesses of the world.
And the intention behind it is that small business equates to freedom.
You know, small businesses are very independent, they're scattered geographically and individually, they don't have the funds to support these candidates and the lobbying efforts and, you know, Quote unquote, you know, legally launder money the way that big businesses can.
And so, you know, they always talk about how it's Main Street's term and we're here for the backbone of the economy.
But at the end of the day, they're not thinking about the economy.
They're thinking about their power.
And what consolidates their power is being in bed with the big guys, which is why we have corporatism instead of capitalism these days.
And it seems to me that.
These companies need to go through with it.
I just saw an interview with the mayor of Seattle, and she's like, Starbucks is not going to move.
They need us.
They need to be in Seattle.
I don't think they do need you, but they might have some loyalty to Seattle.
But I have to tell you, if I heard somebody who had been marching revolutionaries in front of my business say that, I would be so, but I'm different.
I'd be like, you know what?
Wrap it up, gang.
We're moving.
I don't care where we're moving to.
We're going to move to Tennessee.
We're going to move to Florida.
We're going to move to Texas, but we're moving.
That's it.
Enough.
Same in New York.
You come after these corporations.
Are they actually going to move?
Do you think?
I mean, we've seen it here in Chicago.
Absolutely.
Over time, they're going to be forced to do it.
Ken Griffin, who was the founder of Citadel, which is a major financial services firm, got absolutely fed up with what was going on in the state and the attempt to milk businesses, milk the quote unquote wealthiest people.
And so he took his own tax base, he took a bunch of jobs, and by the way, a lot of philanthropy.
He gave a lot of money to improve the city.
And what we're seeing is it's not only him, but other wealthy people who have left.
And the burden is now falling to the middle and working class.
You have a bunch of people who are saying, I don't understand how my property tax bills keep going up.
I don't understand why everything is getting more expensive here, is because they're driving out the people who are giving the most dollars to the state in order to be able to operate.
You think the state is going to all of a sudden peel back its budget?
No, they're just going to continue to pass it on.
So instead of growing the pie, they're shrinking the pie, and you have to eat a bigger piece of it.
In this case, the pie is not delicious, Glenn.
Marketing Branding Cash Table00:02:59
Yeah.
And it's sad because the ones who pay, like Spirit Airlines, it's the poorest.
It's the poorest people.
Nobody rich is riding Spirit Airlines.
It's just the people who are struggling day to day to get by, who are wanting to save money, and Spirit Airlines was there for them, and now they're not.
Can I switch subjects?
Go ahead.
Oh, sure.
Go ahead.
Finish up.
I was just going to say they're going to price people out of being able to take a vacation.
The people.
Who are at, you know, working hard, working class people are no longer going to be able to fly because the government had to get in the middle and say, I'm sorry, you can't have this choice.
Exactly right.
Exactly right.
You know, we did our big celebration for America's 250 or Freedom 250.
It's always confusing because Freedom 250 is the conservatives doing something, America's 250 is the big corporate, you know, and progressive thing that wants to keep America kind of, you know, the American founding is problematic.
So we don't really want to focus on that.
That's an actual quote.
But, you know, I remember, I'm old enough to remember the bicentennial.
I remember in 1976.
It was everywhere, everywhere.
And there were products everywhere.
I don't even see any marketing of this at all anywhere.
Do you?
So, this is a crazy thing.
There was something that came out from Oreo in the last couple of days that they're doing a special edition Oreo with red, white, and blue filling in the middle.
So, of course, my initial thought, like, okay, great, this is, you know, 250th anniversary celebration.
Finally, we're going to see some merch.
And no, they're doing it.
They're calling it the Firecracker Popsicle Edition instead of branding it with this huge celebratory milestone.
And it's just as, you know, not only a patriot who would buy, you know, every piece of merch that is out there because it's just, you know, fabulous and you can't get your hands on enough.
Red, white, and blue, and things that celebrate America.
But as somebody who focuses today a lot on marketing and branding, this is just leaving cash on the table.
And the fact that no one in corporate America is stepping into this celebration, I have seen almost no merchandise.
And it's a shock because I would have thought the second we hit January 1st, we would have seen the American flag red, white, and blue everywhere.
It's been absolute radio stylus.
And now we have a product, and they didn't even put the branding on it.
Yeah, it's crazy.
I didn't even know that about Oreo.
That is nuts.
If firecrackers, what you can't say?
I mean, who else is marketing?
I guess you could market those to France and England as well.