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Glenn's Show Prep

Ask yourself these four questions to reveal your level of preparedness

October 30, 2020
ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images
Glenn Beck

CEO/Founder

Think for a moment about the last time you experienced an emergency situation such as a winter storm or a power outage. How prepared were you?

Now consider a bigger problem such as a large-scale food shortage or water contamination incident. What if a disaster forced you to leave your home for days or even weeks? How well would you survive such situations?

Just the thought can be overwhelming. Preparedness experts Justin Wheeler and Daniel Dean joined me to tackle these tough questions and lay out practical action plans you can take with your family to take your level of preparedness up a notch. It begins with asking yourself the following four questions:

  1. How would a friend describe my level of preparedness?
  2. What supplies do I have on hand?
  3. What steps have I taken?
  4. What scenarios am I ready for?

Find out your level of preparedness by matching your answers to the ones below.

LEVEL 0

How a Friend Would Describe Me

  • No thought or effort put toward preparedness. Every emergency situation is a potential disaster.

Supplies I Have on Hand

  • Less than one week of food in my house.
  • No self defense plan or equipment.
  • No water stored or way to purify it.
  • No extra medicines/prescriptions.
  • No grid-independent energy/heat capacity.

Example of Supplies at This Level

  • Condiments in the fridge, Pop-Tarts in the cabinet.

Steps I Have Taken

  • None. I see articles online and government alerts about being prepared for emergencies, but haven't put any energy toward it yet.

Scenarios I'm Ready For

  • Situation, such as power outage for one day or less due to rainstorm.

***You'll be in trouble beyond a single day of an emergency situation***

LEVEL 1

How a Friend Would Describe Me

  • You have awareness that one should have some stuff on hand for emergencies, and some effort put toward that. Note: This is how most Americans actually live their lives.

Supplies I Have on Hand

  • About two weeks worth of food and water (or way to purify water), somewhat informally, mostly extra canned goods.
  • Basic first aid and OTC medicines on hand because you buy value-sized to make sure you always have a little extra.

Example of Supplies at This Level

  • Flashlight and batteries.
  • Non-perishable foods: canned goods, cereal, pasta/rice, etc.
  • "Bathroom first aid" items (Band-Aids, Ibuprofen, thermometer, Vaseline, etc).
  • Bottled water, a gallon of bleach.

Steps I Have Taken

  • Physical copies of key documents: birth certificates, marriage license, passports, mortgage, car title/registration, etc.
  • I've talked to the adults/older children in my household about "what we'd do if" scenarios, such as a fire, flood, power outage, etc.

Scenarios I'm Ready For

• Small regional issue, minor disruption of services, such as power out for three+ days due to earthquake, ice storm, etc.

***You'll be in trouble after a few days of an emergency situation, or if you're forced to leave home***

LEVEL 2

How a Friend Would Describe Me

  • You're a "Boy Scout." You probably wear a belt even if you have suspenders on. You feel consciously responsible for being prepared. Regular, organized effort put toward being prepared physically, if not mentally and spiritually. You're someone friends/family think of as "prepared" and would probably turn to in an emergency.

Supplies I Have on Hand

  • At least one month of food and water stored (or way to purify water).
  • Prescriptions on hand sufficient for at least a month.
  • Capacity to generate off-grid heat/power on site (e.g. generator, basic solar).
  • An "emergency kit" on hand so you can grab it and leave home if necessary.
  • Something on hand you can use for self defense, could be a firearm, could be a baseball bat.

Example of Supplies at This Level

  • Non-perishable foods specifically stored for emergencies, sufficient for two meals per day per person: rice, beans, dry pasta, canned goods, oats, salt, etc.
  • Actual portable first-aid kit sufficient for the household/family.
  • Candles or lantern, matches.
  • Sleeping bags and extra blankets.
  • Water stored and water purification supplies.

Steps I Have Taken

  • A plan. My household has a plan in place that covers a few specific scenarios, such as what we'll all do in an ice storm/blizzard or if there is a terror attack in our area. The people in my household know what to do and whom to contact if there is an emergency.

Scenarios I'm Ready For

  • Regional issue including significant disruption of basic services, such as a power outage of up to 1 month.

***You'll be in trouble after an emergency situation lasting longer than a month, or if forced to leave home for longer than a couple of days***

LEVEL 3

How a Friend Would Describe Me

  • You've made prepping a "way of life" to an extent and are ready for anything. It's more than a personal thing; this is a group activity now, within your family circle, and perhaps with friends and neighbors.

Supplies I Have on Hand

  • A one-year supply of food/water or more, and the capacity/plan to grow more in a garden.
  • Barter items that will be useful in an economic collapse, such as silver/gold, ammunition, building hardware, clothing.
  • Major first aid supplies, including antibiotics, basic surgical equipment, etc.
  • The capacity to generate energy, heat and potable water off-grid, including fuel as necessary.
  • Both handguns and rifles/shotguns on hand, enough ammo that you're worried about being on an ATF watch list.

Example of Supplies at This Level

  • Significant food storage, including a scheduled calories/day diet for all household members: dehydrated and bulk dried foods.
  • Major first-aid/trauma and emergency dental kit plus potassium iodate tablets sufficient for 10-15 days.
  • A handgun and rifle for all willing adult members of the household, 1000 rounds of ammunition per weapon.
  • Propane or other cooking and heating fuel safely stored.
  • Gold and silver coins, rounds or bars.

Steps I Have Taken

  • Serious training both for myself as well as other household members, including survival/medical skills, farming, sewing skills that will be necessary during a prolonged breakdown of services and government control.
  • I have a relocation plan that involves my own family and potentially others, including provisions I can use both locally and wherever my retreat location is.

Scenarios I'm Ready For

  • A major national emergency, such as a complete economic collapse, a nuclear/biological war or pandemic, or an EMP taking out the US Power grid

***You'll be in trouble if there isn't some semblance of a stable recovery and government after a full year***

LEVEL 4

How a Friend Would Describe Me

  • You are ready to survive a Zombie apocalypse. You absolutely terrify the Liberal Intelligentsia.

Supplies I Have on Hand

  • Gardening and/or farming equipment.
  • Solar bank with deep storage batteries.
  • Farm animals.
  • Horses or ATVs for travel (with stored feed/fuel).
  • 500+ gallons of fuel/diesel stored below ground.
  • Battle rifles and carbines, at least 10,000 rounds of ammunition per weapon.
  • Copy of the Bible, the U.S. Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Atlas Shrugged and books by Glenn Beck.

Example of Supplies at This Level

  • Heirloom seeds, fertilizer/compost.
  • FAL, M-14 or AR-15 rifles, accessories, extra magazines and equipment.
  • Goats, cows, pigs and chickens or other livestock.
  • Extra auto parts for ATVs/Vehicles: batteries, starter, alternator, belts, hoses, water pump, etc.
  • Kerosene and lantern, wood or coal stove and fuel.
  • Surgical kit including scalpels, clamps, sutures/staples, blood transfusion kits.

Steps I Have Taken

  • I have a fully capable small farm/ranch, with food and supplies for myself, family and visitors.
  • I have the plans and capability to defend it all against marauders up to platoon-sized foreign/UN troops.
  • I have the ability to generate an income in a scenario either through selling food, equipment or services I am sufficiently skilled to deliver.
  • I have the spiritual and philosophical basis to make morally correct decisions for myself, my family and property in a doomsday scenario.

Scenarios I'm Ready For

  • The End of Days/Rapture/2nd Coming, global thermonuclear war, eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera, election of Hillary Clinton

***You'll be in trouble only if you fail to maintain my moral compass during trying times***


This post was originally published on December 1, 2015.

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

The Crisis of Meaning: Searching for truth and purpose

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.