Below is a transcript of Monday's opening monologue. Scroll down for a free video highlight - and sign up now for TheBlaze TV to watch the full episode. Don't miss The Root: Armies of Armageddon Thursday at 5pm ET for more on this topic. 

Well, hello, America. I’m going to lay that out a little bit more clearly for you today. That was early this morning. Welcome to The Glenn Beck Program and to TheBlaze. This is the network that you are building.

Vladimir Putin literally vanished for nearly two weeks, but nobody seemed to care. The media was more interested in the political bickering over Hillary Clinton and the emails. You would think that the president of a major country going AWOL would be a bigger story. Imagine if our president didn’t show up. Okay, well, that’s a bad example. Hang on, let’s imagine that. Ooh…okay, imagine he didn’t show up. People would be interested, right?

American news would go all Jerry Springer, and that’s really what we’re doing now. We’re just playing left and right games. We’re playing the nonsense. I really hate being the guy that brings you this really bad news, but no one else is offering any meaningful perspective, so we don’t really have much of a choice.

All week, we’re going to be wargaming what I believe is coming, and I told you this a couple of weeks ago that I feel compelled to stand on these things and tell them to you until you really understand them, because you need to understand what the power players around the globe are actually saying and doing, their words and their actions. We’ll follow the logical trail to the logical outcome.

You may disagree with us, but it’s what I believe, and it all culminates on Thursday with The Root: The Armies of Armageddon, which traces the evolution of jihad and explains how and why ethnic Fascism and Islamic Fascism are rising and how they’re tied together.

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Another chalkboard that I did in 2011 when GBTV first started and came on the air was this. I wanted to bring it back because, and I want to make this very, very clear, this is 2011 that I did this. Time and order may vary wildly. I still agree with that, but I want to show you where we are on this.

This is what I said would happen to the world to establish a new world order. The Arab Spring, war and revolution would spread. The caliphate would gather with Turkey at the center. I was one country off. It is Syria. Israel the focus of the hate, I think we can say that’s true. Pressure extends to Europe and America, that’s what’s happening now over in Europe.

European fall, the civil unrest, the default and then the collapse of the euro, the riots joined by Islamic protesters, and war and civil war, this is where I really want to focus today, but then I said that we’d get the American Spring. Again, I put these in consecutive order, but this is not obviously the time. Times will vary wildly.

Network framework completed, in other words, everything that this new government that we’re building would be completed by then. All of our pressure points would hit, our military would be stretched, our people would be stretched, our churches would be stretched, everything. Poverty push, we would be discouraging people from working. Economic hardship and eventually a collapse, riots and civil war, that we’re going to leave for another time. Hopefully that never happens, but so far all of this has happened and now this.

Civil unrest, we’re starting to see that. Default and collapse of the euro, we are starting to see that. It is now in negative gain. The treasury bills for Germany, they are now offering negative interest. Riots joined by the Islamic whoever, that would be, we’re seeing that right now. Then war, this pertains to Russia.

I want to show you on this map what I mean by that, and I’ll try to explain this a little bit better than I did in that clip this morning. Russia is playing for this part of the world between these two seas right here. They want their old territory back. They want all of this back and then some. They are trying to reestablish the third Roman Empire, and the third Roman Empire was centered here in Crimea. They have already taken that.

We have just done Operation Atlantic Resolve, which means unbeknownst to most of us because our media just doesn’t care to cover important things, Operation Atlantic Resolve, we have put troops and tanks and everything else here in this area, and we have drawn a line saying as NATO you are not crossing this.

Okay, so now Putin disappears, comes back more of a hardline, and that hardline wants to take the Ukraine which is right here across that line—Russia trying to reclaim the land that they believe is there. We’ve put up our defensive line, the Operation Atlantic Resolve, and the caliphate, the caliphate is pushing another way. Here is where the caliphate is, in Syria. I said that it would actually be in Turkey.

The reason why I said it would be in Turkey is because the other important iconic place in the world was in Turkey, Istanbul. That was another that used to be Constantinople. It was a very important religious, for Christians, religious center point. Most people think of Rome as the Christian empire, but it’s not. It is now.

It was here, here, and at the time when the Arab world was sweeping through the Middle East and coming up here, they were stopped in Paris. It was in the 1300s that the French pushed them back through Spain. So, if you think like somebody who was, you know, stuck in the 1300s, you would want these guys. This is a Rome to you. This is Rome to you. We have to start thinking like they think.

Now, what happened, Moscow is destabilizing Europe by funding the neo-Nazis, PEGIDA, the Golden Dawn. There’s Nazis here. There’s Nazis here. There’s Nazis here. There’s Nazis here, and all of that money is coming in from Moscow. This is a collision course with Putin and the West, and this is what you have to understand, what Putin is doing here is Putin is sending all of this money over to Europe because he’s saying the Christians have lost their way. The United States of America is not standing up our Christendom anymore. Who is really standing up?

Because in the caliphate and because we’ve destabilize the Middle East, all of this has been destabilized, and where are all of the refugees going? They’re all going up into Italy. Two hundred thousand refugees and illegal immigrants have come up into Europe just in what, the last quarter, 200,000. Can you imagine having a bunch of people from Tunisia or Libya or Egypt or Syria coming through your border, 200,000 of them?

That’s why you have the neo-Nazis starting to rise up, because just like our governments, their governments aren’t doing anything about it. They’re not stopping any of the illegal immigration. So, what’s going to happen, I believe, is they’re going to hit Paris, and that will excite all of the people to come up here and here and up through here. It will start to squeeze Europe.

When that happens, as I said, this line of NATO will fall back around here, and Moscow will push this way and this way. Then we’re going to be left with a question that we had in the 1940s, do we fight the Fascists and the Communists or do we side with the Communists to beat the Fascists? We decided we would band with the Communists. So, this time it will be, oh geez, Russia is a really bad guy again, the Fascist there. Do we side with the Fascist or do we side with ISIS? We will pick Russia.

Russia and ISIS are the two driving forces steering the globe closer to the edge of world war. Let me take you to Russia. Let me give you an update on what has happened with Putin. He finally reappeared this morning, and he joked about the gossip surrounding his disappearance, but he never disclosed what the actual reason for his ten-day escape was. So, why was he gone?

Well, let me show you a few things that have happened, because I don’t have the answer, but let me give you a few things that bother me. Before the disappearance, a Putin critic, we’ve shown you, got whacked. Now, this is the guy who was on our side. This is the only guy that if Putin was going to get whacked himself we would say, “Okay, whew!” but he got whacked in an obvious hit job. At the same time, you have the head of the military, Igor Girkin, saying that Putin is going to end up like Czar Nicholas or Milosevic if he doesn’t straighten up. Those ended in a coup and death.

Then Putin goes missing. Wild rumors began to circulate—he’s dealing with a love child, there’s a coup, he’s had a stroke, he’s dead. While he’s missing, and this is important to notice, the state media—remember that—the state media released a documentary where Putin said Russia was ready to go nuclear if need be. This was a message to the West. Then this morning Putin returned. He joked about being gone for a while, and the first thing he did was order a massive scale military drill over the polar cap.

Why would you do it over the polar cap? Because the polar cap allows you to come over into the NATO territory. So, let me put this into context of Operation Atlantic Resolve. In response to Russia’s recent aggression in the Ukraine, the U.S. Army launched a massive military convoy stretching over 1,000 miles through six European countries, forming the defensive line against Russia.

We warned in our special The Root: Red Storm Rising that this would end in one of two ways, either Putin would get more aggressive or Putin wouldn’t be aggressive enough, and extremists would grow impatient and seek a coup. So, the missing Putin, was this a warning to Putin to say “Do as we say” or was it just about a love child?

I will tell you up until I found out that he was gone for 11 days, I bought the love child thing. I thought okay, if he’s gone for three or four days, but the love child thing I have a hard time from the guy who I hunt bears and sharks in my underpants without a shirt with my bare hands. I just don’t see him fazed by his love for children for 10 or 11 days.

So, Russia continues to destabilize the region and itself. Here’s the problem, if men like Dugin and Girkin are publicly supporting a hostile military takeover, which they are, we are in for a very dark times. One of the possible candidates is Sergey Shoygu. He is the most hardline of the hardliner Fascists, and he possesses all three prerequisites needed to pull off a successful coup. He has access to lots of money. He controls the Russian state media, you know, the one that just released an old tape of Putin taking a hard line. He is also the head of the military.

If he takes over, it would make Putin look like Mother Teresa. Any Russian restraint would be snuffed out. Russia’s march to reclaim the third Roman Empire would be on big time. This is very scary stuff, especially if you understand what the caliphate is after. We can only cross our fingers and hope that it was the love child, which indeed it might have been, but let me give you the update now on ISIS.

I saw another story that made my blood run cold. A few weeks ago, I said on the air that France was in real danger. Watch.

VIDEO

Glenn: Because of what is happening, I believe London, France, Germany, Greece, I believe these things could be destroyed in what is coming and especially because remember who you’re fighting against. You’re fighting against Islamic extremists. The places that they will target will be places like the Cathedral of Notre Dame. You could go back to France in 15 years from now, and it might be free. It might not be. It might be free, but the Cathedral of Notre Dame may be gone.

So, this weekend when I saw this headline on TheBlaze, I froze: “ISIS Vows to Bomb White House, Big Ben, and the Eiffel Tower.” I thought for a while now that it was France, especially with the massive illegal immigration problem that it would take the center stage. I will tell you that I have an interview coming out with Tim Ferriss on his podcast that I did a week ago. I think it comes out in three or four weeks, and he asked me, “What do you see for Europe?” I told him in that interview maybe a week, two weeks ago, that it’s going to be France, and it’s going to be the Cathedral of Notre Dame.

He looked at me, and I felt a little awkward because it was strangely specific and out of the blue, but now that I see ISIS is all but declaring Paris their number-one target, I believe this is important for you to understand.

On a side note, the young kid who executed the so-called spy that ISIS caught, he’s from France, they believe. The kid couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12 years old. That’s how scary this is getting. I know people have mocked ISIS on Twitter for saying that they were going to conquer Rome, but I don’t believe they look at Rome the way you look at Rome. Maybe they do. Again, they are coming through Italy as well.

Can they do it? I don’t know. Will they try? Well, bin Laden in 1999 said that he was going to bomb the skyscrapers of New York. I would suggest that we take these people at their word. You have to think like a 13th century person and the Crusades to understand their words. Remember, ISIS keeps talking about fighting the armies of Rome. Back in the Crusades days, the caliphate was dominating, and it was France that pushed the Moors out of Spain and put a stop to it.

So, what does that have to do with the armies of Rome? Here’s where it gets interesting. Pope Clement V in the 13th century relocated the seat of the Catholic Church to Avignon, France. Most people don’t remember. Believe me, the Muslims do. It was Pope Clement who gave the order to send the Crusades out to the Levant, as in the L in ISIL.

So, to them they would be fighting the armies of Rome when they target France. Their symbolic target I don’t believe will be the Eiffel Tower. I think they will go for something sacred like the Cathedral at Notre Dame or maybe something in Avignon. I don’t know. They’ll hit what they can. After all, ISIS wants to conquer a small town in Dabiq just because they believe it will initiate the literal countdown to the apocalypse. These people are looking for religious symbolism.

The globe continues its march toward war. The media continues to fail to give us perspective, so we will stay on this.