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“This is so sick and so dark and so evil”: Johnnie Moore chronicles atrocities in the Middle East

June 12, 2015
 Wilson

Writer

For months, Johnnie Moore, author of Defying ISIS, has been rallying Christians in America to save those being persecuted in the Middle East. He’s heard some disturbing news out of Iraq and Syria, and has chronicled 20 atrocities that have taken place just this week. He shared a few of the stories on radio this morning. Trust us, after this interview you’ll know why Glenn is uniting people to stand for the Christians under attack.

GLENN: We started -- we started the week with a kickoff of something called never again is now. Where we are standing up for the Christians and for the Muslims who aren't Muslim enough and the homosexuals and anybody else that ISIS says we should kill. We're standing up for them. Never again is now. Stop the genocide over in the Middle East. We'll call a spade a spade. It is about Islam. And these Islamists have got to be stopped.

And so we're going to wake up our churches. We're going to wake ourselves up. We're going to wake our neighbors up. And then we'll put our backbones into it, and we're going to send aid over to those guys. Did you hear just yesterday that one of the guys who was just in his church, he was former military, got up and told his preacher, said, I got to do something about it. Went over, signed up, and was fighting with I think the Kurds and was just killed.

But he made a difference. He made a difference. Will we be brave enough to stand? At least stand in our own community and say, enough of -- this is crazy, what we're doing in this country is crazy.

Let's start talking about something that is real. And real injustice. Every life matters. Not black lives. Not white lives. Not blue lives. All lives matter. Young, old. Born and unborn. All lives matter.

Johnnie Moore who is -- put a new book out called defying ISIS. He's currently in Washington, DC, where he'll be speaking at the Coptic Solidarity Conference this weekend. Johnnie, how are you, sir?

JOHNNIE: I'm great, sir. Great to hear your voice.

GLENN: So, Johnnie, you're a millennial who is tired of watching people sit around on their hands and do nothing. Tell me about what you're seeing happening in the country now.

JOHNNIE: Well, it's amazing what's in the last week alone, a lot of people are waked up. It's really, really remarkable. I've been traveling around the country for a solid month just trying to get the temperature of where people are. I've been in places with poor people and rich people. I've been to rural churches and urban churches. I've just been everywhere. And it seems like we've finally reached a moment where this has boiled over enough for people to pay attention. And I think the message that you're sending across the country, that never again is now is something that people are really, really grabbing on to. But we have to do it quickly. Glenn, I just sat down a few minutes ago to write the list of atrocities I've heard this week from Iraq and Syria. Now, my list has about 20 things on it. I mean, it's unbelievable.

GLENN: Give me some of them, Johnnie.

JOHNNIE: Well, one of them, the latest Christian martyr is an 80-year-old lady. So in the Nineveh plain, where we thought there weren't any Christians left, ISIS found one. Because she wouldn't submit to them, they burned her alive. An 80-year-old Christian woman. It's unconscionable.

By the way, in Libya this week, you know, ISIS found a group of Eritrean refugees, like the Ethiopians, and they're mainly Christians. They kidnapped them. They're holding them hostage. We can use our imaginations as to what they aim to do with them. You know, the only church left in Mosul. They had already broken the cross off the church. The church is still standing. So what they did two days ago, ISIS turned it into a mosque. Not only did they turn it into a mosque, Glenn, they call it the Mosque of the Mujahideen. So this is the mosque that is the center of their jihad.

In Egypt, ten Coptic homes were burned to the ground in a single village, and ISIS sympathizers in Sudan, you know, having imprisoned a couple of pastors in Pakistan. They're trying to take land away from a number of churches. The Baghdad municipality in Iraq openly admitted this week that 70 percent of Christian homes in the city have been seized illegally. It's crazy. Then, by the way, we have the special representative of the secretary general of the United Nations. Right? For sexual violence. This is a woman. This is what she does. She faces sexual violence all around the world. So this is from the UN. They tend to not exaggerate. If anything, they try to moderate their comments. And what this woman said was -- she said that ISIS is now selling women on their slave markets for the price of a pack of cigarettes. That's not from some right-wing activist. That's from the United Nations. For a pack of cigarettes. They're advertising in their jihadist literature now that they have new girls. They've kidnapped new girls. So if you come join our fight, for the cost of a pack of cigarettes, you can buy all of them you want. That's this week.

GLENN: This is sick. This is just so sick and so dark and so evil. And evil will grow and grow out of control if good doesn't stand up. But, you know, it's -- I really think that, Johnnie, we can't just -- good is not going to defeat this. God is going to defeat this. This is absolute evil. And, you know, in World War II, we had God. You know, there was God in our country. We have done everything to insult and turn our back on God. And if the people of God -- this is still a country that is 78 percent Christian. At least they claim to be. I would bet you that about 30 percent of this nation is actually Christian. That they -- they're more than just a casual profession of, yeah, I'm Christian. About 30, 40 percent of this country is still, I will stand up for it if push comes to shove. I hope. Maybe it's 10 percent. I don't know. But that group needs to stand up. Be seen. And be doing something. We need to start putting our backbone into what our tongue professes.

JOHNNIE: Yeah, and here's the fact. The fact is, if I could just describe what I just described a moment ago to someone listening to us talk and they call themselves a Christian and it doesn't immediately compel them to do some kind of action, whether that's call a congressman, whether it's provide a donation to help people that are in harm's way, whether it's gather their church community to pray, whatever it is -- if you are not immediately compelled to act, that is your moral compass screaming at you inside of you.

Because here's the difference, Glenn, between what happened in World War II and what happened now. What happened in World War II happened when we didn't have the information age. We didn't have a 24/7 news cycle. We didn't have Twitter and Facebook. This stuff was not in front of our face every day. Not a single person in the world, Christian or otherwise, can say they don't know what's happening in Iraq and Syria. In fact, it's even worse than that. We discovered this week that ISIS had actually self-published their maggot Amazon system. That ISIS had actually gone into Facebook, and they were selling their stolen artifacts on Facebook. They infiltrated our systems. To Amazon and Facebook's credit, they immediately shut it down as soon as they found out about it. This is everywhere. It's on our commercial enterprise. It's on Twitter. It's on Facebook. It's on YouTube. It's in our face all the time. We know what's happening. If you ask yourself why these atrocities happen, they happen for two reasons. There are those willingly to commit them. And there are those willing to remain silent when they do.

GLENN: So, Johnnie, I think, quite honestly -- I mean, I can trace it all the way back to -- to Father Abraham, where good starts, you know, going against evil and trying to wipe out his children. And it goes back and forth and back and forth. And we see the Star of David appear as the sign of the Jew to, you know, to be gathered up and to be put away. Years and years -- centuries before Hitler does. And it always mutates. And it always learns its lesson. But it always has the same marks about it. Evil learns. And it has gone from -- from the Germans. And the German people to the hijackers were from Hamburg, Germany. And it has mutated now. And it has gone to the Middle East. And this genocide is sitting there. And they're not starting with the Jews this time. They're starting with the Christians. They're starting against anything that stands up against them. And what you just said about the -- you know, the internet. I find it -- I find it fascinating that the stakes this time are much higher than they were in World War II. And I mean this. We're still playing for the globe. That's exactly what Nazi Germany was playing for. They were playing for the globe. Global domination. That's the same thing ISIS is playing for. This caliphate is just the beginning. They want global domination. So we're playing for the same thing. But here's -- here's where I up the ante. What you just said, in World War II, we didn't know for sure, you could get away with saying, well, I didn't know for sure. We didn't have that information, did we? Now, every single citizen does. So our souls are in jeopardy.

JOHNNIE: It's a moral issue for each of us as individuals. And, by the way, ISIS doesn't aim to infiltrate our country and the West. They're already here. It's a different game. It's a different game than ten years ago. You know, if you wanted to join al-Qaeda ten years ago, you had to travel to Afghanistan. You had to learn Arabic. You had to live in rudimentary conditions.

Now, in this battle in the last decade, a new battle, you can sit in the privacy of your own home. You get trained and inspired in front of your computer screen, and then you take your American passport and you go over to Turkey and walk over a border or you go across the street. Just stop and think about this for just a minute. Just yesterday, in the United States of America, a 17-year-old kid pleaded guilty in Washington, DC, for recruiting for ISIS. And when he stood in front of the judge, he didn't try to justify it. He didn't say he wasn't guilty. He said unashamedly, he said with more commitment to his hate than most Christians I know are committed to their compassion and their faith, he said without wavering: I am guilty. I aimed to recruit for the Islamic stated.

Seventeen years old, in the United States of America.

GLENN: Johnnie wrote the book Defying ISIS. It's available in bookstores everywhere and also on Amazon.com, but something that everyone should read. And, Johnnie, I sure appreciate everything you're doing. If you want to contact him. He's fantastic at speaking at church and everywhere else. DefyingISIS.com is where they reach you?

JOHNNIE: That's where it is.

GLENN: Okay. Johnnie, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

JOHNNIE: Thanks for having me.

GLENN: If you are moved to action, I would ask that you would do two things: I would ask that you would go to mercuryone.org and you would end the week where we started. And that is, donate your time and anything that you have. If you have five bucks or 100 bucks, we have a 15,000-dollar donation the other day from one of our listeners.

PAT: Nice.

GLENN: And donate to mercuryone.org. We are sending supplies over and we are -- believe me, before we send anything over, we will show you everything that we're doing. We'll show you who our partners are. We're making sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. We're very, very careful on it. I hope to be going over with the donation. But we would like to have a staggering donation to make. And you can help us by going to mercuryone.org. Also, you can change your Facebook photo. You can change your Twitter photo. And grab something from never again is now on mercuryone.org. And then I would ask you that you would join us in this movement.

Now, I have -- I have Martin Luther King's pledge that he had everybody sign when they decided to join him. We have updated it for the times. But we really have changed very little of it. And it's up on GlennBeck.com. And I want you to download that. And I want you to sign it.

I want you -- when you sign up, I want you to sign it and say, you're in. Because what's happening in Birmingham, Alabama, on 8/28 and 8/29 is the beginning of a movement. I talked about it on last night's television show. Somebody said, why don't we just get together? Why don't we all go to McKinney, Texas because there's a march with a whole bunch of -- I said, because we're not ready, that's why. We're not ready. We're not disciplined enough.

There is trouble coming. And we better all stand together, and we better be disciplined enough. So make a donation at mercuryone.org. Decide whether you're in or out. And join us there at mercuryone.org. Consider joining us on 8/28. And 8/29. May I ask that you would join us in Birmingham, Alabama this August 28th and 29th. Be a part of history because I'm telling you, I felt this when we went over to Israel. I felt this when we did Washington, DC. This is historic. Restoring Love, which happened at the Dallas Cowboys Stadium. Was the largest volunteer event ever in American history. The first time Dallas Cowboys Stadium has ever been sold out for a speaking event. So that was cool history. This, I believe, is like Restoring Honor, this is going to be historic. Bring your family and join me in a historic moment. Never again is now! Mercuryone.org.

We lost him: A farewell letter from Beto

My fellow supporters,

It is with a heavy heart that I must make a sad announcement today. The time has come to press pause on the dream of Beto for president. It's not the end of the Beto dream. It's just pressing pause for a while, like pausing a Foss CD. The dream will keep right on spinning, until we return to it and press play again. I mean, look at Bernie Sanders. That guy's almost twice my age and he's still running for president. That means you can look forward to Beto running for office for decades to come. I have found there is tremendous joy and freedom in running for office and never winning. All the travel, Vanity Fair cover stories, food and free beer, with none of the hassle or responsibility of having an actual job in elected office (or any job at all). It's really great.

With the exception of myself, no one has supported Beto more faithfully and true than you, the fans. I'd also like to thank my wife Amy for continually raising our children so that I can travel this great land in my never-ending quest to find myself (and also to connect with you, the fans). From attending my very hip and not-at-all contrived jogging town halls, to slapping those trendy Beto bumper stickers on your hybrid-SUVs, to steadying tables all over America so I could jump on top of them and yell and jab the air, to clicking "like" on all those Facebook videos of my dentist visits – you perpetuated this Beto dream way longer than it had any right to be perpetuated.

So, I'm sure you're now wondering – what's next for Beto?

Other than pursuing my career as a solo rock recording artist, I believe the best way I can serve America and bring true justice to this great land of ours is by stealing from the rich and giving to those who fall in the sweet spot on the intersectionality charts. Except I won't steal from my billionaire father-in-law, only because getting my family cut out of the will would not be in America's best interest. You need a Beto who is independently wealthy via his wife and so do I. Plus, as you know by now, from following the 2020 presidential campaign so closely, the only acceptable status quo in America is leaving the wealth of Progressive elites alone. Everyone else's wealth is fair game, including the middle class. It's the right thing to do.

You need a Beto who is independently wealthy via his wife and so do I.

Therefore, from this day forward I will henceforth be known as Beto Hood. You will be able to join the cause by purchasing official Beto Hood merch soon at Beto Hood dot com. Together, with my band of merry men, who will be known as "merry non-binaries", we will roam the land, righting all the wrongs and bringing about all the social justice that Donald Trump refuses to let you have.

Beto Hood and his Merry Non-Binaries will live on the road. And in the woods (in eco-friendly, fully sustainable treehouse yurts). And in the shadows. We will skateboard and learn archery and rappelling. We will become proficient in hand-to-hand combat. We will become experts in all weaponry except guns, since guns are the evilest weapons. We will care for all the animals of the forest. You already know my affinity for squirrels. Not only will we continue to rescue all the orphan squirrels, we will train them in petty thievery and nimble sabotage. We will affix tiny helmets on them, fitted with tiny Go Pro cameras to live stream their heroic exploits on Facebook. Side note: my colonoscopy next week will also be live streamed on Facebook and available to rent on iTunes.

Using the skills I honed as a college graduate scaling the gates of UTEP, Beto Hood and his Merry Non-Binaries will scale the gates of America's richest and steal from their grotesque wealth. Jewelry, high-end electronics, precious antiques, art, women's shoes – nothing of value will be off-limits. Drawing on my experience while my father was a county judge, we will live above the law. It will be dangerous work, the Lord's work as some people say. But totally worth the risk.

Also, we will not wait for Constitutional amendments nor judicial overreach to get rid of America's AR-15s. We will steal those too. One by one. Using very large versions of those stretchy sticky hands that come in cereal boxes, we will literally be able to snatch these vile guns right out from under the noses of the monsters who own them. Then, with our literal mountain of confiscated AR-15s, we will melt them down and use the metal to build a flotilla of sturdy watercraft, called Beto Boats (trademark pending). Families will be able to use these Beto Boats to save themselves and others when the rising waters of climate change overtake our cities in exactly ten years.

Who needs the presidency? I have big, bold plans for a bright future as an outlaw hero.

Who needs the presidency? I have big, bold plans for a bright future as an outlaw hero. So, don't cry for me, America. Beto will be just fine. Dropping out of this race is nothing that another months-long, head-clearing road trip won't cure. And after that, I'll start shopping for some tights.



[NOTE: The preceding Memo was a parody written by MRA writer Nathan Nipper – not Beto O'Rourke.]

Ryan: Making of an Ant Queen

Photo by Kevin Ryan

The embattled, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning author Liu Xiaobo wrote that "Life is priceless even to an ant."

An ant colony can only survive for a few months after the death of its queen. On average, queens live 10 to 15 years. Some, up to 30 years, one of the longest insect lifespans, hidden deep within the colony, protected, unable to use her wings because she's a little bigger than she used to be.

Plus she's very busy.

The majority of ants are female. Wingless, sterile worker ants. They build nests, they forage, they hunt.

Theirs is a far briefer life than the queen's, ranging from a few weeks up to a year. But they see more of the outside world than any other ant.

The bigger they are, the farther they travel. And they release pheromones along the way so that they have a trail home.
Drones — winged male ants whose primary function in life is to mate with the queen — die after mating and rarely make it out of the colony.

Then, there are the soldier ants. They protect the colony and attack.

To quote philosopher Bertrand Russell, "Ants and savages put strangers to death."

They go on raids.

The attacking colony rarely loses, so most colonies flee as soon as an invasion begins. But they sometimes remain and fight.
Ants on both sides of the battle die in droves.

Henry David Thoreau describes an ant battle in Walden: "On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely."

If the attackers succeed in overtaking a colony, they pillage the eggs. Some are eaten, fed to larvae. But others become victims of slave raiding. Meaning that the victors return home with their enemy's unborn, feed them, nurse them. Then, when the eggs hatch, the victors force them into slavery.

Often, the slaves even develop an allegiance to the colony which ransacked their home and enslaved them. They'll even help raid other colonies and either die pointlessly or help with the seizure of the next generation of slaves.

Sometimes, however, the slave ants rebel.

In the words of Persian poet Saadi, "Ants, fighting together, will vanquish the lion."

Flying ants, both male and female, leave the colony to form another colony. Once they find a suitable place, the males's wings fall off and they mate to their death. Then one or more of the females becomes queen.

*

It felt odd, any time I sat with a roomful of media, a few hundred journalists from all over the world, as they simultaneously, silently, decided "Yep, that's newsworthy. We should hammer that."

It wasn't like everyone turned to each other and said, "Let's agree on the narrative."

It was an energy.

Photo by Kevin Ryan

Like in Houston, at the third Democratic Debate, after Biden misused the word "record player," you could hear chatter spread through the room, people muttering the words "records" and "record player."

In Houston, the media watched the debate from a gymnasium around the corner from the auditorium. So I could contrast the crowd's reactions with the media's reactions.

Nearly every time, there was a disparity between the two. The media were more relaxed — during the debate at least. The audience enjoyed any mentions of identity issues. There were a lot. But the media barely reacted at all.

This was a good thing, probably.

*

It's impressive to see how politicians force their stump speeches into a new form, depending on the context. How they say it like an epiphany.

That night brought the opposite for the ever-fledgling Kamala Harris. I could not believe it. Was this the same woman who'd made Iowa hers, just a little over a month ago?

All night, she was so loyal to the tactic she'd premeditated that she didn't realize it wasn't working, like she kept putting on a puppet show on some busy sidewalk.

At one point, she declared, proudly, "We're not talking about Donald Trump enough."

The most talked-about man in the world, perhaps in our country's history.

In five weeks, she became an entirely different candidate. Her latest version resembled a Xanax-fueled stepmom. It was like she was transforming into Joe Biden.

She kept laughing at her own jokes. And the entire media room cringed every time.

Photo by Kevin Ryan

Amy Klobuchar's pre-formed jokes and half-zany dad jokes fell short every time, too. Most of the media saw Klobuchar's long rants as a chance to chat with a neighbor or jet off to the nearest bathroom, which was likely a locker-room full of plastic flight containers and padded camera cases and journalists who curse like sailors.

During the debate, the press was stoic. So if a candidate got a reaction from them, it carried a certain authenticity.

They laughed at things that the audience ignored or disliked or didn't notice. In part because the audience didn't do a whole lot of laughing. But the media laughed like professionals laugh. In-jokey and staid yet ready for anything unexpected.

They loved it when Booker said the thing about "Let me translate that to Spanish … 'No'." And Yang's opening handclaps. As well as Pete Buttigieg's reaction to Yang's raffle.

The biggest laugh of the night in the media center, surprisingly, was when Yang said, "I am Asian, so I know a lot of doctors."

*

Early scientists believed that ants adhere to a complicated hierarchy, which biologist E O Wilson compared to the Hindu caste system. The idea was, ants and humans have a lot in common, and ants belong to a society divided by class and determined by labor.

In the Wealth of Nations, father of capitalism Adam Smith wrote: "It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people."

Ants have been organized into colonized societies since the Cretaceous Period, 140 million years ago, when dinosaurs still dominated the Earth. All of that changed 74 million years later. Which was about 66 million years ago. When a comet slammed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula, resulting in the KT mass extinction.

80 percent of all plants and animals died. The ash and dust and debris polluted the air, blocked the sunlight, transforming the Earth into a dark, frozen wasteland full of asthma.

Insects, carrion-eaters, and omnivores all survived. Any purely carnivorous animals starved to death, while mammals and birds fed on insects and worms until the earth repopulated itself with more animals that could be eaten.

The K-T Mass Extinction ushered in a new era of life. Species that had lived in constant retreat from predators were suddenly able to form more elaborate purposes.

After these lifeforms thrived for tens of millions of years, certain mammals started to become vaguely humanlike.
Early humans popped up about 300,000 years ago.

Meaning, ants have existed for 140 million years, which is 139.7 million years longer than humans.

For reference, if you counted to 300,000, it would take you roughly three-in-a-half days. To get to 140 million would take about four-and-a-half years.

Humans only began developing language about 100,000 years ago.

Yet we're the ones with libraries and governments and ABBA and iPhones. What did ants have? Other people's sugar?

*

Before the debate, I wandered out of the gymnasium and onto bustling sidewalks with makeshift security fencing on each side. And hopped over the massive yellow tubes that belonged in E.T. and pumped cold air into the building. Past dozens of police and security, through an elaborate weave of temporary checkpoints and wires bigger than a fire hose.

On the street, I passed a group of six-or-so teenagers flipping DELANEY signs around like those cardboard "WE BUY GOLD" banners which actual people bob around while dressed as Elvis or Lady Liberty or a Banana.

Photo by Kevin Ryan

The sun cast a delightful orange over Houston, glitter in the humid air.

Those kids were having a blast with those signs. Laughing so hard they had to stop occasionally and slap their legs.

On the other side of the fence, some of the most powerful people in the world were readying for battle, and these kids could not have cared less.

*

The protestors had gathered just outside the gates of the campus entrance.

Far as I could tell, it was me and no other journalists present. The rest of the media were in the gymnasium, preparing for the debate or networking or already on-air. Once they got into the media center they stayed put. For many reasons, I assume.
The air collapsed under a wave of heat unique to Houston.

Photo by Kevin Ryan

Gnarled blockades served as borders on both sides of the street. Locked into steel fencing, flanked by rows of police cars with their lights on but their sirens off.

Worse than the humidity, and more intense, was the energy bouncing out of the protestors on Cleburne Street. The opposite of suction energy, shoving out with tension and panic and elation.

Photo by Kevin Ryan

Curtis Mayfield's "Move on Up" blared from a Bluetooth speaker. I envisioned a slow zoom from above, beginning with the top of my head and rising, up and up and up. Drawing in the greater scene. Up past Trump's message-board plane. A panorama of city, then county, then state, capturing the topography and nuance of each snapshot of nature.

The higher the camera rose, the more I resembled an ant. One more wingless worker or obedient soldier rushing from place to place on a mission.

And when you got far enough above, you saw the colony that each of us belongs to.

Then it shrank like a passing bobsled, and Earth itself resembled an ant.

The scale of it is daunting.

For thousands of years the sky has filled humans with romance and humility and wonder. A restive impulse that strikes when we gaze up at the moon, the stars, the galaxy, the quiet.

But at ground level, I was a man in the throes of a great human drama. And my job was to document it as neutrally as possible.

The 120-odd protestors on the south side of the street spilled onto the sidewalk and into a lawn, and they chanted as the Trump plane groaned overhead.

They were crowded together, and they were all fighting for different causes. Lots of contradictions under the same banner.
Next to a group of Beto supporters with pro-choice t-shirts, several women chanted

We.
Want.
A pro-life.
Dem.

Chaos itself occupied the south side of the street. The protestors weren't sure how to handle it. So they chanted and sang and probed for the problem. Like so many tiny creatures hauling an orange slice.

Across the street, facing that horde of supporters, two men gripped pro-life signs.

They were the counter-protestors. Their barricade was far wider than needed. The grass around them looked sad, like the trail a dog makes along the fence when it wants to escape.

Behind the two counter-protestors, a mini-bus covered with photos of aborted babies, tangled fetuses, severed and indistinguishable chunks.

Photo by Kevin Ryan

Photo by Kevin Ryan

I squinted and gasped and felt downright unwell.

Two days earlier, my wife and I found out that she was pregnant with our first child.

At the very moment I stared at images of tiny human shapes contorted and grey, our baby was the size of a pea.
A few weeks later, we'd see its heartbeat pulsing like a strobe.

I'm not making a statement on abortion. That's not my job as a journalist.

It's more my admiration for the impeccable depth of life. The timing. How messages and symbols confront us all the time, with unmatchable creativity.

Because there I was, literally in the middle of two opposing factions. Again. In the divide. Tangled into so many dichotomies. Life and death. Freedom and oppression. Order and chaos. Activity and stagnation. Creation and loss. Art and nature.

And I had once again remained in the middle.

This brought me tremendous satisfaction. It signified personal and journalistic success.

It was also a bit ridiculous.

As a reporter, I never wanted to pick a side. I already had a side. My side was America, and Ireland. My side was humanity.

My side was life.

New installments of this series come out every Monday and Thursday morning. Check out my Twitter or email me at kryan@mercurystudios.com

M1 Ball: Glenn honored with inaugural 'Bonhoeffer Angel Award'

"Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak.Not to act is to act."
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The cost of discipleship can be daunting and few people are willing to sacrifice and stand in the face of evil to do what they know God is asking of them. The "Bonhoeffer Angel Award" is awarded to someone with the vision and courage to act when others only talk, to dig in and listen to the whisperings of the spirit when others turn a deaf ear. It is only fitting the inaugural award go to the visionary founder of Mercury One, Glenn Beck.

The award was presented by the Board President of Mercury One, David Barton and CEO of the Nazarene Fund, Tim Ballard. There was a touching video tribute as well including the likes of Penn Jillette, Senators Mike Lee, Ted Cruz and Joe Liberman, Congressman Loui Gohmert and Rabbi Daniel Lappin.

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE:

Glenn will be hosting the annual Operation Underground Railroad gala Saturday, November 2nd with keynote speaker Tim Ballard. If you are able to join us, tickets are still available and donations of all sizes are welcome.

Join Glenn this Christmas for a special one-night event

Summer is ending and fall is in the air. Before you know it, Christmas will be here, a time when much of the world unites to celebrate the love of family, the generosity of the human spirit, and the birth of the Christ-child in Bethlehem.

For one night only at the Kingsbury Hall in Salt Lake City, on December 7th, join internationally-acclaimed radio host and storyteller Glenn Beck as he walks you through tales of Christmas in the way that only he can. There will be laughs, and there might be a few tears. But at the end of the night, you'll leave with a warm feeling in your heart and a smile on your face.

Reconnect to the true spirit of Christmas with Glenn Beck, in a storytelling tour de force that you won't soon forget.

Get tickets and learn more about the event here.

The general sale period will be Friday, August 16 at 10:00 AM MDT. Stay tuned to for updates. We look forward to sharing in the Christmas spirit with you!