During a debate on the House floor on Friday, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was so unnerved by the commentary of fellow Congressman Tom Marino (R-PA), she got up out of her seat and ran through the aisles of the chamber toward Marino. Marino was speaking about the immigration crisis and the role the Obama Administration’s policies have played in facilitating the lawlessness at the border.
Watch the video of Marino and Pelosi below:
On radio this morning, Glenn explained the danger this moment represents. After recounting the beating of Senator Charles Sumner at the onset of the Civil War, Glenn challenged his colleagues in the media to consider the role they may have played in today’s divisiveness and what we can all do to move in a more respectful direction.
Below is an edited transcript of the monologue:
I want to talk to you a little bit about the state of our society. Left and right, we all want to belong to something bigger than ourselves. At the end of our life, we want to be able to look back and say, ‘Our kids live in a better world than we lived in because we did the hard thing.’ If you’ve ever gone through anything, you've ever been broken, you've ever faced a real serious challenge, you will say, ‘Give this to me. Let me take this on so my kids don't have to deal with it.’
But we have become a society that we no longer see our kids' future as real. We've bought into the lie that you can have everything that we can afford, that you deserve everything, that your kids don't really need you, that there's such a thing as quality time over just time. And I don't think any of that stuff is true, I really don't. And as a guy who has lived my life counting on quality time, I think it's a lie.
I watched the families that are great, and I've watched my kids now. My daughter is 8-years-old and my son who is 9, and I realize they are about to be 30. And where will that time have gone? I will have missed it yet again. And it matters. There are certain things that are true, and when we get to the end of our life, we will really only worry about our family and what did we do. I talked to a guy who was in a plane crash yesterday. He was in a plane crash and broke his back, couldn't get out, jet fuel was all over in this plane and spilling out on the ground, and he could hear the ignition of the engines. He thought, ‘Oh dear God, this thing is going to go up in a ball of fire.’ And nobody else was awake at the time. He had to get out. There were only three people on this plane. And the other two were relatively uninjured. He broke his back and thought that his legs were pinned in the plane. But when he really came conscious enough to realize and look down at his legs, he realized, ‘They're not pinned. There's nothing wrong with you.’ He's just sitting in his seat with nothing on his legs. He can't feel his legs. He unstrapped himself from the plane. He falls down into the center aisle. And he drags himself to the door just thinking his legs just aren't work for some reason. And he gets to the door and he tries to stand up and get himself up and there's no power to his legs at all.
A farmer had seen his plane go down, and it landed in a field. The farmer was on his tractor and drives out. This farmer and one of the pilots drag his body about 50 yards away from this plane and then he's in the hospital for almost a year. He couldn't walk. He's walking again. But it has been an unbelievable year of being broken. And he said, ‘Glenn, everything that they say about your life flashing in front of you, really happens.’ He said, ‘It's an amazing thing. You see things.’ He said, ‘Not once did I think about work. Not one scene was about my boss. Not one scene was about the quarterly profits. Nothing. It was all about my children. All about the things that I had done or didn't do in life.’
We're all like this. In the end, whether we admit it or not, we're all like this. We all believe that man should be free. Even the communists, even the fascists, convinced themselves that they're freeing people. ‘You'll be free if you live under Sharia Law because you're free to worship God the way you should worship God.’ So they even believe in freedom in a totally mixed-up, upside down world. We all believe that. And we all want to leave the world a better place for our children. We have to find a way to unite. We have to find a way to where we can live in a world where we disagree with each other.
Now, there are some things that we disagree on so much. For instance, Hamas. The Palestinians are not Nazis. But you can compare Hamas to Nazis quite easily but not the Palestinian people any more than you can say every German was a Nazi. That's not true. 30% of Germans voted for the Nazis. In the end, because they were all so afraid, some just bought into the propaganda. I mean their children were turning them in. In the end, I don't know what the percentage was, but we went over to fight the German people. But once we defeated the Nazis, we were not against the German people. The same thing with Hamas and Gaza. We're not against the people who live in Gaza. We're not against the Palestinians. We're against Hamas. We're against people who say, ‘Genocide is the way to go.’
So we have to find a way where we can talk to each other, where we can listen to one another, where we can have control of our own lives, and that we belong to something bigger than ourselves, something that means something in the end. I have been really concerned over the last 10, 15 years about what's happening in our world and in our country, and I have made some pretty bold predictions and stood alone on them. In 2007, 2006, I was talking about an economic collapse that was coming. It happened in 2008 because of TARP.
We're in the final bubble now called the ‘money bubble,’ and I predicted that in – what, 2007 – that we would bail everybody out and there would be a money bubble. And that's what USA Today had talked about last week in one of their op-eds: The money bubble.
We talked about the Caliphate. We talked about the rise of Nazis again in Europe and the old hatreds of the world. We talked about anti-Semitism on the rise. We talked about something that just made it in the newspapers last week, and this one came from Argentina. They're now blaming the United States for their inflation, and they're blaming the United States for their collapse. We talked about that four years ago. I'm really bad at timing. I don't know when these things happen. It's not that I can see the future. I know enough of history and I haven't been taught and trained by a guild.
There are certain things in history that happen and cycles repeat themselves. First, I looked for revolution around the world and I looked to the French Revolution and the American Revolution. I looked at what happened in Germany in the 1850s, in France, in the 1870s, in Russia in the teens, Cuba, Germany, China, all over the world. It's the same story, same pattern. But as we started to really fight with one another is when I first started to have this, ‘Oh-oh, wait a minute. We're in trouble internally. We are starting to hate each other.’ I started to look at the Civil War. And I told you a few years ago, it made me feel better when I did that because there was one thing that happened that we were so far away from. We had extra time.
But a soft version of it happened last Friday. If you remember, last week we were talking about Ted Cruz. They were talking about procedure. And the Democrats were very upset because of their procedure. And we were talking on the air about the Constitution. You got to care about the Constitution. Who cares about your little procedural rules? But that's a very big deal. And that's what made it in the papers, that Ted Cruz was a monster because he broke procedure when it came to the immigration debate. And what he did is he went over to the House, and he talked to the House members and said, ‘What are you doing?’ That was the crime of the century and it was in all of the newspapers about how bad Ted Cruz was.
But this was another procedure that was broken last week.
That's Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) running across the House floor ranting and raving about what Congressman Tom Marino (R-PA) is saying and he has the floor. She never asked for the floor. She just comes over and she starts wagging her finger in this face.
I don't believe that we are at this moment, but we took a giant leap toward this moment. I've been worried about an actual Civil War. And I do believe that we are a nation that is either at or near a ‘cold Civil War,’ where, thank goodness, nobody is firing shots at one another. But if you read the comment sections on the Huffington Post or TheBlaze, you hear the same stuff from left and right. Now, thank goodness it is only 5% of the population that is like that. But the vitriol is getting worse. And we can't engage in any of that. We have to strengthen our ties to people who we disagree with so we know each other, so we know that we're good people, that we don't wish them harm. We disagree, but we don't wish anybody harm. We stand shoulder to shoulder against those who would like chaos because there are those that would like the country to spiral into chaos. And whether they're communist or white supremacist, it doesn't matter. What matters is that the 80 or 90% of this country stays together – even though we disagree.
There came a time in the 1850s, and we've told you about this because, as I said, we were so far away from this. There same a time in the 1850s where both sides, the Whigs and the Democrats, both side were talking about slavery. They've been talking about slavery from the beginning of the country, and they were talking about getting rid of it. But they weren't going to do anything about it. And finally, this new party, this Republican Party started. They were like, ‘You guys are just playing games. Neither of you guys mean anything.’ The weaker of the two parties was the Whigs. The Republicans got out and they were the ones that were talking honestly about slavery, and they called it by name. They said, ‘You know, the people in the South, I don't care which party you're in, you're in bed with the horror of slavery.’ That's when somebody from the House broke all protocol, came across, and beat a guy within an inch of his life there in the well of the Senate.
Now, Nancy Pelosi clearly did not do that. But you saw the anger rise up in her so much that she broke protocol. Remember, just earlier this week, we heard how much protocol means. You don't have Ted Cruz break protocol and go over and talk to people in the House. This wasn't talking to people in the House. This is Nancy Pelosi enraged by what was said, running over and sticking her finger and then calling him inconsequential, calling him all kinds of names even after the incident. This is clearly not the beat-down of Charles Sumner.
But I warn you: This is an important event that Americans should see. And it has nothing to do with politics. If you agree with the Republican or you agree with Nancy Pelosi, it doesn't matter. This is an important moment that people need to see. When we dehumanize on the House floor, when they start being enraged and moving in that rage, we're in trouble. We're in very, very big trouble.
The good news is: There's still time. And there's time for all of us stop concentrating on ‘Glenn Beck said he was sorry.’ Is anyone else willing to say, ‘You know what? I did some things I'm not really proud of.’ ‘You know what? I've got to change my ways as well.’ Is there anyone else in the media who will join me? You don't have to agree with me. But is there anyone in the media who says, ‘Enough is enough’? We've got to stop worrying about the ratings. We have to stop worrying about the money. We have to start worrying about the things we're all going to worry about when we're on our death bed: What did we do?
Let's start to move towards a better future, one where we can at least talk with each other with respect.
