Blog
LatestArticlesVideosHands-On History
Radio
LivePodcastSerialsStations
TV
Podcast
Show Prep
Events
Restoring the Covenant
More
AboutBooksCharityReal EstateSponsorsShopContact
SEARCH
Live Radio

©2020 MERCURY RADIO ARTS.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

TERMS OF USE | PRIVACY POLICY

Live

Which will you choose: Life or Death?

August 11, 2015
 Staff

WRITER

The Christian Holocaust being carried out by ISIS. The Iran nuclear treaty that jeopardizes the future of Israel. The Planned Parenthood scandal that sees baby parts being sold on a petri dish. God could not be making it any clearer on these three stories - do we choose life or do we choose death?

Listen in the opening monologue of today's podcast:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it may contain errors:

Glenn: I was talking to the Kendrick brothers on television and Louie Gohmert. We had a fascinating conversation off the air. Kendrick brothers are the guys that made the made Fireproof. They just made a brand-new movie called War Room. I saw the movie last night with my family. It is fantastic. Really, really good. And the movie that America really needs to see.

But we were talking with Louie Gohmert. And one of the Kendrick brothers said to me, do you think something is coming here in September? And Louie kind of looked up. And I said, why do you say that? He said, I don't know. I just feel like it is.

And I said, I do. I do. I think something -- whether September, I don't know. I just feel like something -- I really truly believe that we have a red line put in front of us. And I've said this before on the air. But I want you to really hear this. Because I think this is important. And I don't mean it as a country. I mean it as you as an individual and you as a family. I think we have been given a few red lines, three of them, to be specific. And it all revolves around what happened to Moses.

Moses comes out. You know, where is your Moses now? And he goes up. And they make the golden calf. And Charlton Heston throws them down, and they all kind of fall in. Then he says, you have to choose. This mountain is life. This mountain is death. Choose today. Life or death.

Who do you serve? Life or death. That was a really important moment in the Moses story. Okay?

I think that's exactly what's happening to us right now on three fronts: One, ISIS. It's why we're standing on 8/28. Two of these are why we're standing. First one is ISIS.

We are being told to pretty much just ignore them. We're not really going after them at all. We have troops engaged all around the world. But are we really engaged over there? Not really. And we're ignoring them. And what's happening?

Today theres a new video that came out from ISIS where they buried bombs and put people on them kneeling. Now, listen. Think about any of those ISIS videos. If you've never seen the video, I urge you to watch them. Not for the violence, but for the example.

I have not seen one single ISIS video where any of the people are begging for their life. They're not crying. They don't even -- they look frightened, but they -- they look brave in their -- I mean, they look as frightened -- the bravest man in the world would look right before he died. All of them are mumbling something. I would imagine prayers. These guys are amazing. They just released a new ISIS video where they planted a bomb underneath each person that was going to be beheaded. And as soon as they move, they blow up. I mean, it's like 14-year-old boys are coming up with this. It's like a video game to these guys. So we're being told, just ignore them. Christians are being slaughtered. This is the biggest genocide of Christians since the church began after Jesus' death. Do you hear that? They're wiping out all of the Christians in the Middle East and we're not doing anything.

So we are choosing death. By our silence, we are choosing death. The next one is Iran.

41 percent of Democrats support the president's bill. Only 41 percent. Republicans, what is it? It's got to be two. But yet, what is our Congress doing? What is our administration doing? And what have we done to make sure that Congress has the cojones to stand up? What have you done to support Chuck Schumer? Democrats what have you done? Have you risen up to support him? No. Have we? No.

We are choosing -- we're being told, choose Israel or Iran. And we are choosing Iran. Israel, life. Iran, death. Choose.

And then, you know, something that I don't think -- I really truly believe that God is up there going, I can't make it any more clear. There's no way to make clearer. I've got a petri dish with a pile of baby parts. Choose today: Life or the culture of death. Which do you want?

I believe we are sitting at the red line. I believe we are sitting at that Moses moment. Choose you today, who will you serve? Choose today, light or dark. Life or death. Which will it be America? And I'm not talking about changing policy. I am talking about you sitting down at your dinner table and saying to your family today, those three things. Which do we choose? Which will we stand for? Which -- will we be the people that hide people in our basement because we believe in life and we will stand against the evil of the world? Will we stop just skating over the surface?

I truly believe that's coming. If you don't do it, God help us. No, he won't, actually. He won't.

I believe he can do no more for this country if we choose death on those three things. We will get the full ramification of those three things. A culture from Planned Parenthood. A culture of death and destruction. We will lose the blessings of choosing Iran over Israel. And we will have a global caliphate spread like nobody's business. And Christians all around the world will be slaughtered. As well as Jews, homosexuals, and those Muslims who aren't Muslim enough.

I believe we are on the verge of catastrophe, and we are being asked right now as individuals: Choose. This must be a visible moment for you to raise your hand and say, I stand with life. Not all black lives matter. All life matters. Iranian life and Jewish life. Muslim life and Christian life. Atheist life, Christian life. Homosexual life. All life matters.

Will you join us in Birmingham on 8/28? Bring your family and make this historic choice now. Make the choice. Just real quick. The people that are coming. Ruth Graham, Billy Graham's daughter, and Alveda King are going to be marching on each side of me on those historic streets. I don't think there's a better way to kick this off than the two people that kicked it off last time. Billy Graham and Dr. Martin Luther King. And we have their daughters, Alveda King and Ruth Graham coming. Then Johnnie Moore is going to be there. David Barton. General Boykin will be there. Matt Kibbe will be there. Jon Voight will be there. Rafael Cruz will be marching.

Will you? Will you and your family join us? August 28th and 29th in Birmingham, Alabama. You do need tickets. You don't need them for the march. You need them for the event afterwards. They're $10. And you can get them at now.mercuryone.org. Find out all the information about all the activities at now.mercuryone.org or GlennBeck.com. We'll see you in Birmingham on 8/28.

A contested Democratic convention could lead to the ONE candidate who could beat Trump, says Michael Medved

Paul Morigi / Stringer/ Getty

On Wednesday's TV show, Glenn Beck sat down with radio show host, author, political commentator, and film critic, Michael Medved.

Michael had an interesting prediction for the 2020 election outcome: a brokered convention by the DNC will usher in former First Lady Michelle Obama to run against President Donald Trump.

Watch the video below to hear why he's making this surprising forecast:

Use code BECK to save $10 on one year of BlazeTV.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.

FLASHPOINT? Virginia Gov. Northam declares state of emergency to ban firearms ahead of gun-rights rally


Zach Gibson / Stringer

On Thursday's "Glenn Beck Radio Program," BlazeTV's White House correspondent Jon Miller described the current situation in Virginia after Gov. Ralph Northam (D) declared a state of emergency and banned people carrying guns at Capitol Square just days before a pro-Second-Amendment rally scheduled on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Jon told Glenn that Gov. Northam and the Virginia Legislature are "trying to deprive the people of their Second Amendment rights" but the citizens of Virginia are "rising up" to defend their constitutional rights.

"I do think this is the flashpoint," Jon said. "They [Virginia lawmakers] are saying, 'You cannot exercise your rights ... and instead of trying to de-escalate the situation, we are putting pressure. We're trying to escalate it and we're trying to enrage the citizenry even more'."

Glenn noted how Gov. Northam initially blamed the threat of violence from Antifa for his decision to ban weapons but quickly changed his narrative to blame "white supremacists" to vilify the people who are standing up for the Second Amendment and the Constitution.

"What he's doing is, he's making all all the law-abiding citizens of Virginia into white supremacists," Glenn said.

"Sadly, that's exactly right," Jon replied. "And I think he knows exactly what he's doing."

Watch the video to catch more of the conversation below:

Use code BECK to save $10 on one year of BlazeTV.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.

Ryan: Trump Louisiana Finale

Photo by Jim Dale

Part One. Part Two. Part Three.

At the end of Trump rallies, I would throw on my Carhartt jacket, sneak out of the press area, then blend in with everyone as they left, filing out through swinging doors.

Often, someone held the door open for me. Just 30 minutes earlier, the same person had most likely had most likely hissed at me for being a journalist. And now they were Sunday smiles and "Oh, yes, thank you, sir" like some redneck concierge.

People flooded out of the arena with the stupidity of a fire drill mishap, desperate to survive.

The air smacked you as soon as you crossed the threshold, back into Louisiana. And the lawn was a wasteland of camping chairs and coolers and shopping bags and to-go containers and soda cans and articles of clothing and even a few tents.

In Monroe, in the dark, the Trump supporters bobbled over mounds of waste like elephants trying to tiptoe. And the trash was as neutral to them as concrete or grass. They plodded over it because it, an object, had somehow gotten in their way.

It did not matter that they were responsible for this wreckage.Out in the sharp-edged moonlight, rally-goers hooted and yapped and boogied and danced, and the bbq food truck was all smoke and paper plates.

They were even more pumped than they had been before the rally, like 6,000 eight year olds who'd been chugging Mountain Dew for hours. Which made Donald Trump the father, the trooper, God of the Underworld, Mr. Elite, Sheriff on high horse, the AR-15 sticker of the family.

Ritualistic mayhem, all at once. And, there in Louisiana, Trump's supporters had gotten a taste of it. They were all so happy. It bordered on rage.

Still, I could not imagine their view of America. Worse, after a day of strange hostilities, I did not care.

My highest priority, my job as a reporter, was to care. To understand them and the world that they inhabit. But I did not give a damn and I never wanted to come back.

Worst of all, I would be back. In less than a week.

Was this how dogs felt on the 4th of July? Hunched in a corner while everyone else gets drunk and launches wailing light into the sky? configurations of blue and red and white.

It was 10:00 p.m. and we'd been traveling since 11:00 a.m., and we still had 5 hours to go and all I wanted was a home, my home, any home, just not here, in the cold sweat of this nowhere. Grey-mangled sky. No evidence of planes or satellites or any proof of modern-day. Just century-old bridges that trains shuffled over one clack at a time.

And casinos, all spangles and neon like the 1960s in Las Vegas. Kitchy and dumb, too tacky for lighthearted gambling. And only in the nicer cities, like Shreveport, which is not nice at all.

And swamp. Black water that rarely shimmered. Inhabited by gadflies and leeches and not one single fish that was pretty.

Full of alligators, and other killing types. The storks gnawing on frogs, the vultures never hungry. The coyotes with nobody to stop them and so much land to themselves. The roaches in the wild, like tiny wildebeests.

Then, the occasional deer carcass on the side of the road, eyes splayed as if distracted, tongue out, relaxed but empty. The diseased willows like skeletons in hairnets. The owls that never quit staring. A million facets of wilderness that would outlive us all.

Because Nature has poise. It thrives and is original.

Because silence is impossible. Even in an anechoic chamber, perfectly soundproofed, you can hear your own heartbeat, steady as a drum. A never-ending war.

I put "Headache" by Grouper on repeat as we glided west. We were deadlocked to asphalt, rubber over tarface.

And I thought about lines from a Rita Dove poem titled "I have been a stranger in a strange land"

He was off cataloging the universe, probably,
pretending he could organize
what was clearly someone else's chaos.

Wasn't that exactly what I was doing? Looking for an impossible answer, examining every single accident, eager for meaning? telling myself, "If it happens and matters the next year, in America, I want to be there, or to know what it means. I owe it to whoever cares to listen."

Humans are collectors and I had gone overboard.

Because maybe this wasn't even my home. These landmarks, what did they mean? Was I obvious here? When I smiled, did I trick them into believing that I felt some vague sense of approval? Or did my expressions betray me?

Out in all that garbage-streaked emptiness — despite the occasional burst of passing halogen — I couldn't tell if everything we encountered was haunted or just old, derelict, broken, useless. One never-ending landfill.

Around those parts, they'd made everything into junk. Homes. Roads. Glass. Nature. Life itself, they made into junk.

I cringed as we passed yet another deer carcass mounded on the side of the road.

As written in Job 35:11,

Who teaches us more than the beasts of the earth and makes us wiser than the birds in the sky?

Nobody. Look at nature and you feel something powerful. Look at an animal, in all of its untamable majesty, and you capture a deep love, all swept up in the power of creation. But, here, all I saw were poor creatures who people had slammed into and kept driving. Driving to where? For what reason? What exactly was so important that they left a trail of dead animals behind them?

So I crossed myself dolorously and said an "Our Father" and recited a stanza from Charles Bukowski's "The Laughing Heart"

you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.

Out here, nothing but darkness. Needing some light, by God. Give me something better than a Moon that hides like an underfed coward.

Jade told me about some of the more traumatic things she'd seen while working at the State Fair.

"Bro, they pull roaches out of the iced lemonade jugs and act like nothing happened."

"All right but what about the corn dogs?"

"You do not want to know, little bro."

She looked around in the quiet. "Back in the day, the Louisiana Congress refused to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21," she said. "They didn't want to lose all that drunk gambler money. So the federal government cut off funding to highways."

We glided through moon-pale landscape for an hour before I realized what she had meant. That there weren't any light poles or billboards along the road. Nothing to guide us or distract us. Just us, alone. And it felt like outer space had collapsed, swallowed us like jellybeans.

Like two teenagers playing a prank on the universe.

In the cozy Subaru Crosstrek, in the old wild night, brimming with the uncertainty of life and the nonchalance of failure, we paraded ourselves back to Dallas. Alive in the river silence that follows us everywhere.

New installments come Mondays and Thursdays. Next, the Iowa caucuses. Check out my Twitter. Email me at kryan@blazemedia.com

Amid election security concerns, states should look to blockchain

Wikimedia Commons

The Iowa primary is just around the corner, and concerns of election interference from the last presidential election still loom. Back in 2016, The Associated Press found that a majority of U.S. elections systems still use Windows 7 as an operating system, making them highly susceptible to bugs and errors. And last year, a Mississippi voter tried multiple times to vote for the candidate of his choice, but the system continuously switched his vote to the other candidate. It's pretty clear: America's voting systems desperately need an update.

That's where blockchain voting comes in.

Blockchain voting is a record-keeping system that's 100% verifiable and nearly impossible to hack. Blockchain, the newest innovation in cybersecurity, is set to grow into a $20 billion industry by 2025. Its genius is in its decentralized nature, distributing information throughout a network of computers, requiring would-be hackers to infiltrate a much larger system. Infiltrating multiple access points spread across many computers requires a significant amount of computing power, which often costs more than hackers expect to get in return.

Blockchain voting wouldn't allow for many weak spots. For instance, Voatz, arguably the leading mobile voting platform, requires a person to take a picture of their government-issued ID and a picture of themselves before voting (a feature, of course, not present in vote-by-mail, where the only form of identity verification is a handwritten signature, which is easily forgeable). Voters select their choices and hit submit. They then receive an immediate receipt of their choices via email, another security feature not present in vote-by-mail, or even in-person voting. And because the system operates on blockchain technology, it's nearly impossible to tamper with.

Votes are then tabulated, and the election results are published, providing a paper trail, which is a top priority for elections security experts.

The benefits of blockchain voting can't be dismissed. Folks can cast their vote from the comfort of their homes, offices, etc., vastly increasing the number of people who can participate in the electoral process. Two to three-hour lines at polling places, which often deter voters, would become significantly diminished.

Even outside of the voting increase, the upsides are manifold. Thanks to the photo identification requirements, voter fraud—whether real or merely suspected—would be eliminated. The environment would win, too, since we'd no longer be wasting paper on mail-in ballots. Moreover, the financial burden on election offices would be alleviated, because there's decreased staff time spent on the election, saving the taxpayer money.

From Oregon to West Virginia, elections offices have already implemented blockchain voting, and the results have been highly positive. For example, the city of Denver utilized mobile voting for overseas voters in their 2019 municipal elections. The system was secure and free of technical errors, and participants reported that it was very user-friendly. Utah County used the same system for their 2019 primary and general elections. An independent audit revealed that every vote that was cast on the app was counted and counted correctly. These successful test cases are laying the groundwork for even larger expansions of the program in 2020.

With this vital switch, our elections become significantly more secure, accurate, and efficient. But right now, our election infrastructure is a sitting duck for manipulation. Our current lack of election integrity undermines the results of both local and national elections, fans the flames of partisanship, and zaps voter confidence in the democratic system. While there's never a silver bullet or quick fix to those kinds of things, blockchain voting would push us much closer to a solution than anything else.

Chris Harelson is the Executive Director at Prosperity Council and a Young Voices contributor.