Glenn Beck counters the 1619 Project using artifacts like Jefferson's Declaration draft, Raoul Wallenberg's Schutzpass, and Claus von Stauffenberg's unopened Mein Kampf. He highlights heroes such as Colonel John Stone and Paulina, who defied tyranny despite fear, arguing that courage is contagious against authoritarian "new normals." Ultimately, Beck asserts that true history requires personal bravery to correct educational myths and preserve principles. [Automatically generated summary]
We now have more founding era documents from about 1770 to 1830 than anybody but the Library
of Congress and the National Archives.
We just bought a massive collection that, I mean, the Smithsonian was in the running.
I mean, it's massive.
That is all of the Pilgrim history and all of the history of Jamestown and everything.
So we have the largest collection and we intend on putting 1619 In its place because that is an absolute lie and there's something to say When you go, that's not true.
Oh, well, who are you?
you? Just the one that has all of the documents in their own handwriting to say what happened.
I didn't even tell you what I wanted to talk about today, and so as we're taping this right now, it's Friday afternoon, and supposedly Trump's about to give a big speech, so let's not even dive into the day-to-day stuff.
I think people sort of know what we think about some of these things that was on your radio show this morning.
We'll keep picking it up over the next couple weeks, obviously.
So when you say he was a bad dude, you're talking about what he did to Tesla and just the business type things that he did and the way he controlled everybody.
Yeah, well, you've been ahead of the curve on a couple things over the years, and I suspect that this is going to be another one of those times, because people are ready.
People, you know, there was the pushback against 1619.
It took a while, but there was a pushback, and then they started slowly retracting some of it and deleting tweets and things like that.
But the next piece is actually giving the counter-narrative and having the real breadth of work behind it.
Notice on the sides, you'll see on the margins, if you've ever used Microsoft documents and you've made a change, It always puts off to the side who made the change, what the change was, and date.
God, it's like, wait, so I asked you this yesterday, but can you just explain to people how, first I think it's hard for people to understand that these things still exist, right?
I think that's one thing.
But how do you, how do you possibly attain these things?
You know, it's incredible when you look at this and you think about all the all the bills that are passed now and you see the, you know, the stacks of paper that, you know, nobody's read.
And it's like the most important document in the world.
And he said, That this king has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred right of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating them and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere to incur miserable death in their transportation.
This warfare on humans, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare, and then it's capitalized, Christian and underlined, the Christian King of Great Britain, determined to keep an open market where Capital letters, the only thing capitalized in this document, are the words United States of America at the very heading.
He capitalizes where he has on an open market, men should be bought and sold.
He is saying the African-American is not a slave, he's a man.
Now, he goes on to say, we've been fighting him.
He blocks us every turn.
We've tried to get rid of this poison, but we can't.
He keeps blocking us.
Now he's telling the slaves, you can gain your freedom if you kill us.
And we're trying to free him, so he's doubly injuring these people.
It's an amazing paragraph.
So why isn't it in the Declaration of Independence?
Because John Hancock stood up before they selected even who would write the Declaration.
They stood up and said, okay, we know if we aren't all 100% in lockstep, the king is going to say, Virginia, you know what, you don't agree with him, and he'll divide us.
We cannot be divided.
Who here says we have to be unanimous?
Before this was written, all states said unanimous.
That's why the Finnish draft says the unanimous declaration of the United States of America, or Declaration of Independence.
He brought this back.
Every word, every line had to be voted on.
When they got to that, out of the 13 colonies, two Two said no.
That leaves 11 colonies, and importantly, Virginia, which is a southern colony.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, all of the big names are in Virginia.
They said yes to that paragraph.
Only two colonies said no.
So help me out.
How are all of our founders Racist dirt bags didn't know what slavery was.
They clearly did.
So, a couple of other things that I think change history.
I mean, I know you've read it, but the admirable motto of the year of understanding, which you have chosen for the year of 1938, shows the part that you are playing in this work.
I, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of the President of the United States and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
So help me God.
Ronald Reagan, January 20, 1980.
And on the top, to Nancy, who brightens the corner.
He was a guy, he was military, actually the guy who first protected, kind of our first Secret Service agent, first protected Abraham Lincoln when he was coming into Washington for the very first time.
He's the guy who said, we got to get you out We're going to have you go into a theater.
We're going to have you change clothes.
You're going to hunch over like a little old lady, and we're going to get you out the back into a carriage, and we're going to get you on a train, take you to Pittsburgh, because everybody's going to think that you're going to Washington.
We'll get you to Pittsburgh, then we'll take another train into Washington, and no one will know.
It saved his life.
Saved his life.
He became a colonel in the Northern Army in the fight in the Civil War, and he refused to hate the other side.
He just thought they were wrong, but he refused to hate them.
That caused a lot of problems with a lot of politicians because they were whipping up the hate.
It's why Lincoln's vice president walked out and was so upset.
It's why we have a picture of The only picture that is of John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln in the same picture and Booth is behind him and it's at the second inaugural address and he actually tried to kill him there because he was so enraged that this guy would say Let's come together.
Let's heal these wounds He was enraged by that and really wanted to kill him with his own hands and attempted to do it.
Yeah, well I This colonel became a colonel in the Civil War.
He was blamed for something that he never did.
It was a trumped-up charge because he became very unpopular with Congress.
Congress tried him.
He wasn't allowed to even put on defense.
He wasn't allowed to speak in front of Congress.
They never came to a verdict because they know that he would have been set free.
So he was held in prison.
He was held in prison, I think, for about six months.
Lincoln found out about it and said, what the hell are you doing?
Charge him, convict him, or let him go.
And they didn't.
They waited another six or eight months.
Lincoln found out about it again and just said, get him out.
He was so upset, he went over, he left the United States, and he went over and he was working for the French in Egypt.
Years later, he comes back.
He's thinking, he's hoping everybody is going to forget about those things that they said about him.
He's at home.
He gets a knock on the door.
No one will hire him.
They do remember.
No one will hire him.
He opens up the door.
It's two representatives from the United States government.
And they said, Colonel, we understand you were in Egypt and you were working with the French.
And he said, yes.
And they said, so do you speak and read French?
Yes.
Good, because we just got a big box of stuff and we don't know how to put it together.
Colonel, please inform us at what price you can furnish during the summer of 1884 about 8,000 cubic yards of stone according to the sample furnished to you.
When I got this for Christmas one year from my wife and she handed me a box and she gave it to me and then she took it back and she said, I can't give this to you.
And I said, why?
She said, I'll give it to you tomorrow.
I said, what?
She said, it's Christmas.
You will spend all day crying if I give this to you.
And I'm like, I'm not going to cry.
She said, promise, because I know you, you will.
And I said, I won't cry.
She gave it to me.
I spent all Christmas crying.
This is one of the most powerful things I own.
This is a Schutzpass.
This is a letter of protection signed by Raoul Wallenberg.
He went.
We asked him.
The United States went to him.
He's like, I don't know what you would compare him to, the Nordstrom family.
The Wallenberg family was like the Nordstrom family on steroids.
And they were very powerful, very influential, blah, blah, blah.
I think he was one of the younger sons.
And the United States went to him and said, listen, We think the Germans are killing the Jews.
We need somebody to be our eyes and ears.
Would you go over with your government and work in your embassy and tell us what's going on?
He said, reluctantly, yes.
He knew what was at stake.
He gets over there.
He sees what's going on.
He not only reports back, he starts doing this.
And his king, in letter after letter, says, Stop!
Do you know we have the Germans here?
What are you doing?
We are in trouble because you are making all of these Jews citizens.
This was a pass that said they don't have to wear the star.
This person now belongs to Sweden.
He would take these and he'd print them and sign them and he'd go to the trains and he'd stuff them in between the cracks of the of the cattle cars where all the Jews were in.
He'd stuff them in and he'd stand on the top of the last car and he'd say, stop the train!
You have the wrong people!
These people are my citizens!
And they would unload and everybody who had one was free.
The problem is, he didn't know when to stop.
The Russians were coming in, and one of the people with the Schutzpass said, Rell, you've got to come with us.
You've got to get out now.
And he said, no, the Russians are right there.
They can't be as bad as the Germans.
There's too many people that we'll leave behind.
So he was last seen running into the soldiers of Russia.
We don't know whatever happened to him.
The United States of America didn't even ask, didn't even ask until Gerald Ford.
There's a couple of endings to the story.
One, that he died in a work camp in the late 60s, early 70s.
Others was that he was shot on the ground in Budapest, which we doubt because Stalin wanted to interrogate him himself personally.
The most likely death was that he was tortured and And treated horribly and died before 1955, I think.
This is I found this in auction and this is so nothing on its own.
I bought this, it says January 2013.
This is a Russian cigarette case that happened to be carried and it was all explained but no one tied it to this and when I saw it for sale I was like, oh my gosh!
This cigarette case was carried by a man that was in the brigade that went into Budapest, that he ran into.
This cigarette case on it says, in Russian, let's kill all the Jews and go home.
As he's saying, they can't be as bad, this is who he's running to.
And I told him a few people and he came to my office a few weeks later.
And he sat down, he looked at my desk and he said, I see the pictures of your family.
Where are your heroes?
And I said, what do you mean?
He said, if you don't gaze upon the faces of people that you want to be like, If you don't, when you have a tough moment, you have to look down and see somebody who stood.
That's why I like Raoul Wallenberg so much.
This amazing, amazing man.
This is a copy of Mein Kampf, all in lambskin, given by Hitler himself.
And I was bringing the whole family and I said, you can't go to Israel for the first time.
Unless you pass through the gates of Auschwitz first.
And my wife said, Honey, that doesn't make it really a vacation.
And I said, I want the kids to understand why Israel is there, and I want them to make a choice now, when they're young.
Who are you going to be?
If the world goes insane, who will you be?
And I engaged a woman.
She was, oh, in her 80s, and so sweet.
She was one of the righteous among the nations, which are the Christians that saved Jews.
And we went through Auschwitz, and then we met with her.
And as we were leaving, she told us this.
She sat down with the family for like an hour.
It was just amazing.
And she told us how, at 16 years old, she saw a Jew on the street just starving.
You could only feed a Jew, I think, 400 or 800 calories a day.
And just starving.
And it was a girl her age.
And she said, please, do you have any food?
She said, I don't.
But if you come here tomorrow, I'll bring you something.
So she came, she sat down at the dinner table that night with her mom and dad and they were eating dinner.
And this is a death sentence.
You feed a Jew, you get the same thing as a death sentence.
And she said, mom and dad, I have to tell you something.
She said, I promised I would bring some food tomorrow to this Jewish girl who was starving.
And she said, she remembers the whole room just stopping and her mom and dad putting their spoon down And looking at each other and staring at each other, not saying anything.
And then her mom got up.
She started pulling a big pot out and put it on the stove.
And Paulina said, What are you doing, Mom?
She said, Well, if she's coming for food, she'll clearly have hungry friends.
They saved about 100 Jews.
So after I talked to her, I said to her, Paulina, how do I water the seed of righteousness in myself and in my family?
What do you do to strengthen that?
That seed is there.
How do we make it into a tree so we stand?
And she looked at me and said something that I thought was profound, but up until recently, I didn't truly understand.
You know, it's interesting, I often think now, now that I've been taking some of these positions that aren't thought of as popular or okayed by mainstream or whatever, that the only thing to fear is fear itself.
And I've been thinking about that a lot lately, that the more that I say the things that I believe to be true, that happen to be against the mainstream things, The more I get over that, because if you can get over the fear, then if it's true that we're on a list, and they're coming for us.
You know, when I was on tour with Jordan, one of the things that he would bring up often, because he would talk about the parallels to Nazism, to some of the authoritarian movements of the day, and he would say to everyone in the crowd, he'd say, you know, there's 3,000 of you sitting out here right now, and I guarantee you that every single one of you would think that you wouldn't be a Nazi if this was 1936 Germany, and that proves probably that you would be.
I mean, a friend of mine, Marcus Trell, I said to him, how do you stand torture and not break?
And he said, Glenn, everyone breaks.
Everyone breaks.
He said, but the ones who break the fastest and the loudest are the ones who will say, I'm never.
I'll stand.
Oh, I'll stand.
Because they haven't Thought about it.
It's why I wanted to bring my kids to Auschwitz.
I need you to feel it so you can think about it and really look at this as a possibility.
And once you do that and you realize, by the grace of God I'll stand, then you're ready.
But we have got to prepare ourselves now to be ready.
Because if you're ready now, the problems go away.
They think you're sheep.
I mean, I asked you on a podcast with you the last time, where's the line?
What line do you have as an individual that you say, I won't cross?
Well, I won't go there.
I mean, if I said to you last summer, yeah, they're going to tell us that we can't have Thanksgiving with our family, that we have to wear a mask all the time, and the president's going to make that mandate, and they're going to shut down the economy, you and I and everybody else would have said, never, never.
How many people now would just be happy if we just, if we had, okay, this is a new normal and they're going to start, you know, letting, letting things back up, but it's never going to get the way it was.
And he didn't want to be around crowds and he didn't want to be noticed.
And so we're going and he's like, no, no, no, there's a crowd, no, there's a crowd.
And I'm like, Rafe, it's going to be fine.
It's fine.
It's just the parents.
They're just like us.
We're just watching your friends.
No, no, no, no.
And he really freaked out.
So I had to take him home while his sister got her belt.
And I'm driving home and I'm like, what do I say to him?
And I quite frankly, I was a little pissed, but I didn't want to be pissed at him because he wasn't, you know, he wasn't misbehaving.
And, uh, And we drove home, and I held his hand the whole time, but we didn't really talk, because I'm thinking, what do I say?
Pulled into the house, got into the house, and I knew exactly what I needed to do.
And I said, come into my library.
Come on, sit down in the library.
And at that time, my whole walls were covered with artifacts and men determined to be free and Raoul Wallenberg and the picture of the woman that he saved and a picture of him.
All of the heroes, Rosa Parks, everybody, Winston Churchill.
And we sat there on the couch.
I said, just want you to look at the walls.
And he did.
And I said, why do you think I have them up here?
And he said, because they're all heroes and they weren't afraid and they do the thing.
And I said, no, because I know each and every one of them was terrified of doing what they knew they had to do.