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Glenn Beck: White House pleads the 5th on 8/28 Rally

July 08, 2010
 Radio Clips

The Glenn Beck Program


Learn more about the 8/28 Rally...

GLENN: I want to play the 8/28 question that came up at the White House press briefing yesterday. Here it is.

REPORTER: Second question. Does the president have any reaction to Glenn Beck's August 28th rally which some are taking as an insult to Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech? Has the president said anything to you about that?

GIBBS: I've not seen — let me go back and see what Glenn back has said. I just — you are going to be surprised but I don't spend an inordinate amount of my time watching them.

REPORTER: I understand that the permit is under review right now at the National Park Service for using the Lincoln Memorial to do a rally on the steps.

GIBBS: I will check that out.

GLENN: Let's go through this. First of all, Robert, you don't spend an inordinate amount of time with the Glenn Beck program. I'm sure you don't, watching it. Is that because you have all the George Soros funded people just monitoring and is that — is that how — do you just get a briefing on it? Because boy, it sure seems like you guys spend an awful lot of time worrying. The 8/28 rally, really interesting. Now, who is taking this as an affront to the Martin Luther King speech?

PAT: Some.

GLENN: Some.

PAT: Some are, Glenn.

GLENN: Some.

PAT: Some people.

GLENN: Wouldn't it be interesting to see what those some people are? Because from what I understand according to, according to some reports that I got last night, I haven't seen the exact words myself, but some are the Black Panthers. Some are the Black Panthers. It's very interesting. And there's the usual suspects that are upset about this. It's, boy, you are going to be so disappointed when you see what is happening on the Lincoln Memorial.

Now, the other thing that is going around in the press is that I hear that the permit for the Lincoln Memorial is in the permit process now. "See, Glenn Beck is lying again. He doesn't have a permit." You don't refuse a permit. Remember, this is the federal government. So this doesn't work like you work. This permit process has been in process for, what, eight months, something like that?



Glenn Beck is seen here on GlennBeck.TV, a feature available exclusively to Glenn Beck Insider Extreme members. Learn more...

PAT: Yeah, I'd say at least.

GLENN: Forever. You don't — first, you have one level. They say, can we — you say, can we do this. They say, what is it. You have to explain it, you have to put up money, you have to do everything. Then what happens is — here's Liz. Because you're down with these people, and these people are good people. It's the National Park Service. They're good people. They are not political. I just want to explain, Liz, that this is just a — this is the way it always happens, right? And you only get the permit, for anybody?

LIZ: Right.

GLENN: Three days prior?

LIZ: Right. We won't have the permit until the week of. They are always in the application process. That's how they do it with everyone. It's not just us.

GLENN: It's not us.

LIZ: No.

GLENN: And we have no reason to believe that this is a political — I mean, this is the National Park Service. These are good guys.

LIZ: Right. They have been wonderful to work with so far.

GLENN: And there is — the process is you have to first get the initial approval because they could reject you and say, "No, you are not going to do that."

LIZ: Right. You have to reserve the space and see if, you know, there is already an event planned for it and that's what we did a few months ago.

GLENN: Correct. And then you go, you have to put up certain amount of money, right?

LIZ: No, you don't have to pay anything for the space.

GLENN: No, not for the space, but —

LIZ: For the permit fee?

GLENN: No, don't we have to have a certain amount of things guaranteed along the way that we have to have the port a potties and you have to —

LIZ: Right. You have to follow the rules and regulations, yeah.

GLENN: So you have to reserve things and get things done and pay for things along the way, and they check you.

LIZ: Correct.

GLENN: How many times a month?

LIZ: We've met with them twice now in person but we submit things as we go through the process. They have to approve everything we show at the rally, program.

GLENN: Not content. It has to fall within the purview of what we said.

LIZ: Right, exactly, how we file the permit.

GLENN: So they are just making sure that there's nothing, you know, that there's — you know, that we're not, what? Commercial —

LIZ: Going rogue, yeah.

GLENN: Going rogue on them. Commercial sponsorships I don't think are allowed.

LIZ: Right.

GLENN: Et cetera, et cetera.

LIZ: Right, right.

GLENN: But they look at this. It is a free speech event and so they don't interfere with the content of it except for the rules that they have already.

LIZ: Right.

GLENN: And as long as we abide by everything that they've already laid out, the permit is granted, as it is with everyone, the week of. And it's done by the National Park Service.

Now, is the National Park Service probably going to get heat or are they already getting heat? Oh, I bet they are. But we're abiding by everything they've asked. They've been really upstanding and, you know, right people. They've never given any indication they're fans or anti Glenn Beck. They are just doing their job. And we have respected them for that. So anybody who tells you that we don't have the permit, they've never tried to file a permit, as we hadn't. We have experts now that file these permits all the time. We've hired them to get this process done. When it first happened, we said, wait a minute, you are not going to get the permit for, like, a week, until a week before? And they are like, relax, this is the way it always happens. So everyone knows, we have not only the permit, the space of the Lincoln Memorial, we have the space — we have taken the mall and asked for the space from the Lincoln Memorial all the way to the capitol building. We have the entire mall reserved for that day. Not because we're expecting that whole place to be filled but because we wanted to make sure counterprotests and everything else, we want this to be a peaceful event. There is only one sliver of the mall that we don't have. It was reserved by the White House and it is like a quarter of the space behind the Washington Memorial. So we wanted to make it a safe space, we wanted to make it a peaceful space, we wanted to do justice to the space. It is a sacred space to me as well, and anybody who thinks that we're going to desecrate the image of Lincoln, Washington, or even MLK, I invite you to come and bring your family because you will be amazed. You will be amazed at how uplifting this will be.

STU: Glenn, we also have some breaking news because a guy from Mediaite is the guy who actually asked this question. Breaking news from Mediaite in this article. They also have an exclusive upcoming interview with new Black Panther Party chairman Malik Zulu Shabazz who is promising that he also will be attending the 8/28 rally and I mean, if you remember, he's not a fan — the organization isn't a fan of white babies, as we learned yesterday, but they will be — they will be there, I'm sure, to restore honor.

GLENN: I ask you, the American people, to say a prayer of peace and to make sure that our — to, don't sit down, have no fear, do not let them intimidate you.

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.