Best of the Program | 8/3/26

Hey, it's Monday. We've got a great podcast for you. Good day with a guy with a gun. He helps stop a bad guy with a gun during a mass shooting event in an Idaho in and out fast food restaurant. There's a real lesson to learn there. Also, Bill Maher reads from the DSA platform, which pushes communism and socialism in America. I'll tell you what that means and why it's good for our team. You don't have to win an argument anymore. I'll explain in that monologue. Also, the Democratic governor nominee of Wisconsin, Francesca Hong. She has campaigned with anti-American Hasan Piker and Elon Musk Omar. What does that mean? My mom had some advice, and I think it applies here. All that and more on today's podcast. All right, let me talk to you about chapter. Have you ever looked at your credit report and found something that... didn't belong? Kind of a strange feeling. Somebody somewhere out there has a file on you and the information that file is just wrong. Now let me ask you something. What if that file wasn't, you know, about your credit? What if it was about your health care? One of my listeners called in to chapter because the Medicare costs just kept going up and nobody could tell him why. His chapter advisor started digging and discovered the record being used on him to make decisions about his coverage was actually incorrect. It wasn't right. It wasn't him. He got it fixed. Chapter got it fixed and then helped him find better options. Chapters' advisors aren't paid to push you towards one plan or another. They're just there to help you find out exactly what makes sense for your situation, so you have some peace of mind. When somebody else is making decisions based on a file about you, it's probably worth making sure they're reading the right file. They compare every medical plan nationwide. They've saved people an average of $1,100 a year in health care savings in this audience. And it's free. It takes 20 minutes. Dial pound 250, say the keyword chapter. Pound 250, keyword chapter. You're listening to the best of the Glenback program. So it's Saturday afternoon, Twinsfall, Idaho. Very small little town. Great town. It's 2.30 in the afternoon. Jim Jordan Salinas and his girlfriend are sitting in the drive-thru at the in and out on Blue Lakes Boulevard. Their plan is just let's have some lunch. Then we'll maybe go ride some horses. And that's when people start running. They thought at first it was a kitchen fire. That's what the mind does. It reaches for the ordinary explanation first because the ordinary explanation is always, well, almost always the right one. Employees are coming running out the doors. People are crossing the road in a dead sprint. Kitchen fire has to be. Then pop, pop, pop, pop. He gets out of the car. He says it was automatic, mechanical. The only thing he remembers from those seconds is his girlfriend saying, don't, don't what, what, honey. Out in that lot was a 24 year old man with a rifle. He had already fired into the restaurant.

He was firing at cars. A cab driver was charging his Tesla in the parking lot got hit. A man named Lane was just sitting at the stoplight watching the bullets go into the car directly in front of him. And then the bullets started going the other direction, a pistol from the drive-through line. Then somewhere else in the same lot and off-duty Idaho State Police Trooper doing exactly the same thing. He didn't like it when bullets started firing both ways. At least Salinas didn't. He turned away from the restaurant, moved into the open parking lot, and killed himself. Gunn said the shooter was focused on the man shooting back at him, and that's what let everybody else get out. But three people still died. Seven were wounded. Two of them are critical condition. One of the dead worked at the counter in a building that had just been open for nine days. Jim Jordan Salinas is 35. He works in health care. He lives in Kimberly. And in 2021, he was there at a shooting at the Boise Town Square Mall that killed two people. It was then in there that he decided I'm not going to, that's not going to happen again. If I'm around, it's not going to happen again. He decided he was going to learn how to use a firearm. So for five years, he drove out to the desert outside Eden on weekends, and he practiced five years every Saturday. He told the Idaho statesman he had never pointed at gun so much as an animal. He said four words that he had run so many times in his head. They had worn a groove inside of him. Observe, orient, decide, act. He's a citizen vigilante. No. Let me tell you a story. Let me tell you who he used to be. Up until recently. Let me take you back to England, 1285. Edward I first. He signs the statute of Winchester. And in it, a thing called the hue and cry. What the hell is the hue and cry? The hue and cry? If you witnessed a felony, you were required by law to raise the alarm. And then every able-bodied man who heard that alarm was required by law to drop whatever he was holding and join the chase. Town to town, county to county until the man was taken and handed over to the sheriff. And if he got away because nobody came, the whole hundred paid for the crime out of their own pockets. Your neighbor's stolen goods came out of your purse. Same statute. Every man was able to keep arms in his house according to his means and not for the king's army, but for exactly what happened Saturday. That was the law. For 544 years, that was the law. There was no police force. There was you and your neighbor. You know that London didn't get a police force until 1829? 1829. And the founding principle written down for that first force was this. The police are the public and the public are the police. Officers being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to the duties which they are incumbent on every citizen. So police officers were just like you.

I've said this so many times. You're the first responder. It wasn't until Jimmy Carter, where first responders became the police officers or the ambulance. You had always been the first responder. Police just paid to do full time what was already your job. The badge is a new thing. The citizen is the old thing. So Citizen Fitchellani, no, no. Saturday afternoon in that parking lot. He had them both standing 45 feet apart. A trooper on his day off, no uniform, no radio, no backup, no call. And a health care worker from Kimberly who just wanted a burger. Neither one of them was on duty. Yet both of them were on duty. I wish this was more of a story where the good guy wins. But not really because three families got a knock on the door. Two people are still in critical condition. I don't think anybody in Twins Fall, Twin Falls is calling this a victory today. Not all of us are capable of running into gunfire. No, all of us should be running at gunfire. Everybody needs a gun. Salinas is not a hero because he had a gun. That's Idaho. Half the parking lot had a gun. I can guarantee it. Half the parking lot had a gun. This guy's a hero because for five years of Saturdays in the desert outside Eden, when nothing was happening, nobody was watching. There was no reason on earth to keep going out there. He did.

I've said this a million times. Courage isn't manufactured in the moment. It's withdrawn in the moment. You can only take out what you've already put in. It's an interesting side note to this story. Within hours, the internet had the wrong man. Police chief had to come out and say, no. This is on Sunday. No, no, the name going out circulating online. That's wrong. He had nothing to do with this whatsoever. You have it wrong. Thousands of people with all of the time in the world, every tool available to them got it wrong. One man with about four seconds got it right. Observe. Orient, decide, and act. You know what our problem is? Most of us stop and observe. I mean, we are, I am a pro at observation. I'm magnificent. I could win medals at observing. I think all of us could. We are gold medalists in observing. Because we haven't even thought about the other ones. We just observe. Oh, no, no. We observe and then we'll grab our cell phone and we'll record it. You know, the rest of this isn't about talent. It's habit. And habit is only ever a thing that you did on a day when it didn't matter. So you'd have it on the day when it did matter.

Things could have been a lot worse, a lot worse, in this small little town in Idaho, if it hadn't been for one man. Go find your desert. Go out on Saturdays. And do more than observe. Life is not a spectator sport. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. I can't believe it's been four years since the overturn of Roe, but tragically, abortions have continued to rise. Today, the abortion pill accounts for more than 60% of all abortions. Last year alone, over 1.1 million babies lost their lives. And that is why the work of pre-born network clinics is more urgent than ever before. Every day, moms are facing unplanned pregnancies, and they walk through preborn's doors. They search for hope. Instead of pressure and fear, they're met with love and kindness and compassion. And through a free ultrasound, moms meet their babies for the very first time. It was like the beginning of my healing journey. They do an ultrasound. And that's when everything changed, because when I saw my baby, when I heard her heartbeat, that was it.

Just $28. Sponsors one ultrasound. 140 will help rescue five babies. Donate. Dial pound 250. Say the keyword baby. That's pound 250 baby. Or visit preborn.com slash back. Preborn. Sponsored by preborn. So Bill Maher, definitely not a conservative, a couple of weeks ago came out and said, hey, my vote is up for grabs. If these socialists are the choice, have you read what they say? Do you hear what they're for? I'm not with them. And apparently, he said, I went on vacation and everybody was yelling at me how out there. You're a Republican. He's like, I'm not a Republican. I'm just not stupid. So he reads a few sentences out loud on HBO and his own audience gasps at this. This is not a conservative audience. It's not a church crowd in Tulsa. It's Los Angeles, an audience that shows up on a Friday night to laugh at Republicans. And Marr told them the Democratic Socialists of America have gone openly communist that when the president says it, it happens to be true. And that his own party. being right now, his own words, is being colonized. Then he read from a post of one of Zohran Mamdani's top age, urging people to vote for communist candidates, and the room went deathly quiet. Listen. Donald Trump has told one trillion lies, but when he says the Democratic Socialists of America are actually communist, that's not one of them. And it's not hard to prove it, just by quoting the DSA and their candidates. Let's just read the quotes. The DSA platform says, your work, you work as much as you are able and no more than needed. If that was any closer to Karl Marx's dictum from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs, they'd be sued for plagiarism. Not to leave any doubt, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani once tweeted Karl Marx's words, exactly. They're not trying to hide it. Their most popular influencer, Hasan Piker, thinks communism is so groovy. He laments the fall of the two of the most murderous regimes in history, the Soviet Union and Chairman Mao's China. Zohran Mamdani's aide, his top aide, Cia Weaver said, if you don't believe in the government's sacred right to seize property, it's over. And impoverished the white middle class. What? That's a goal? He then, he goes on. And the key to this, the reason, the response to the gasp, the most important thing he said all night. He just read a tweet that said more people should vote for a communist. And it was from a Democratic socialist candidate, okay? And they went, ah. He looked at them and said, good. I'm glad you're shocked. People have to realize this is going on. We're in a moment here right now. And Bill Maher may be the most important man on the planet to stop this. This is something that I've been warning about forever. This is the reason I do this job.

If it wasn't for the people who are actually communist, actually socialist, actually want to destroy our country, if they were just Democrats, I wouldn't be doing this job. I really wouldn't. It's not worth it. It's not. These people are serious and I've seen them coming forever. But here's what I want you to understand in the moment. Nothing red was leaked. Nothing was hacked. Nothing came from a whistleblower or an undercover camera or a dossier. Everything he said in that entire monologue, and I urge you to go watch the whole thing and then share it, is published. It's sitting public. It's sitting on a website with a nice red and white design and a friendly cartoon fist, waiting for anybody in America or around the world to click on it. The address... of this program is D-S-A-U-S-A-U-S-A.org. Write it down. It is the most effective thing in American politics right now, and neither party wants to talk about it. So let me tell you what's on it. They call it workers deserve more. It opens with a lovely little story about a day off in the world without capitalism. You don't have debt. You have no mortgage. No landlord, no health insurance because you don't need it. Food, education, energy, medicine, transportation are no longer businesses. You can walk your kids to school. You can read a book. You meet friends for dinner. It reads like a brochure for a very nice retirement community. And that's the point. That's the part they want you to read. Then scroll under the headings of mass incarceration. They don't say reform the police. They say demilitarized departments, break the police unions, and move the money as steps towards their words, not mine, fully abolishing the police and prison system, end quote. That sign of a lunacy. That's just lunacy. These are lunatics. But why stop there? Under working class democracy, They call for abolishing the Senate, abolishing the electoral college, replacing the president and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by Congress answerable only to Congress. I want you to think about that one. This isn't a policy proposal. This is the removal of two of the three branches of the government of the United States. This is a complete redo of the Constitution. It's throwing all of it out. and starting fresh. The end of that? Democrats, is that what you want? Under economic democracy, public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries. So they do want to own the machine. Okay. Under foreign policy, defund the Department of War. Now listen to this. I just want you to think, what is the world's response for America?

defunding the Department of War, closing all of our overseas bases, abolishing ICE, an end to all detention and deportation, amnesty for everyone, regardless of status, and end to sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. Those three countries by name on their own website. Wow, that's quite a world, isn't it? And in the preamble, the sentence that ties the whole thing together, they are building a party to draft a new constitution and to create a new democratic socialist republic. Not amend this, not to reform America. Draft a new one. Now. You share this with people, I can guarantee you. I can see it because I can see it in my own family's eyes. What they'll do is they'll roll their eyes. They're like, these are fringe kids on the internet and they don't speak for anybody. Well, the website answers that too. There's an author's note at the bottom. The program was drafted between April and June of this year by a committee elected through the process of their own 2025 national convention. The committee included members of their national political community, their board of directors, and leaders of their national committees. They went to the NPC to amend, finalize, and approve. This is not a blog post. This was a ratified governing document produced by leadership for the purpose of guiding those who get their endorsement. Okay? And that endorsement is very important to some people. This is not the Democratic... platform. We care about those, right? You're supposed to care about those. What's in there? It tells you. And this isn't a small organization anymore. On the 4th of July, they announced they passed 121,000 members, which, according to their own numbers, makes them the largest socialist organization in American history, larger than Eugene Deb's socialist party at its peak in 1912. Also, the Marxist Unity Group faction, the one that Mar named holds three of the 25 seats on that national board. Five of their members won congressional primaries this year. Now, the second thing you're going to hear is you're taking this out of context. You're exaggerating. That's a right-wing talking point. No. No, actually, the loudest voices saying it out louder right now have a D after their name. John Fetterman on the Democratic Socialist Agenda, quote, this isn't a big tent, it's anarchy. And then the question he put to his own parties, why can't Democrats call this out? Henry Quayar of Texas, quote, I read their platform and it's radical. He wants Democrats to reject it by name. Now, he's got standing to say it. He says they spent more than $20 million trying to primary him twice. He beat them both times running on border security and oil and gas jobs in a Democratic primary. Mark Kelly of Arizona warned that abolishing police, prisons, and borders and defunding the Pentagon don't make sense and will cost his party seats.

Annie Andrews running for the Senate in South Carolina as a Democrat called the ideas un-American and unhinged. Rahm Emanuel says it's a losing message anywhere outside of a few zip codes. And Chuck Schumer asked directly whether his platform belongs in the Democratic Party wouldn't answer because that guy's terrified. There's one more piece, and it's the part most people have not heard. Last week, Fox reported that people identifying themselves as DSA's own international committee have signed on to a statement from a group called Friends of Socialist China, a pledge to support and defend Chinese socialism, which, by the way, I just want you to know that socialism is full-fledged communism. Okay, they say they're not for communist. Well, they don't, but others say they're not for communism. Yet they describe China as socialist. By the way, let's not confuse when I say they, I mean the Democrats say they're not communist, but you're in bed with socialist who describe themselves as communist, at least half of them. And they describe the record of the socialist countries as overwhelmingly positive and calls the idea that socialism produces oppression, a piece of capitalist propaganda that needs correcting. Some of those names have been on that list since 2022. This is not an outlier. In January, the DSA issued a formal statement demanding that Nicholas Maduro be returned to Venezuela. A Research Institute report in February documented their delegations meeting with Maduro and the head of Cuba. Followed by campaigns back home pushing exactly the policy priorities those governments wanted, including taking Cuba off the terror sponsor list. Prison camps and thought control are propaganda. Really? Maduro should be restored. Have you talked to people who live there? The Chinese model deserves defending their words, their letterhead, their website, not mine. So here's where I'm landing on this, and it might not be where you would think. We don't need to beat these people. We need to provide the introduction to these people. You know, they can't wait to tell you who they are. Look at the numbers. Eschelon Insights, as voters last month, the free market came back at 40 plus 41, capitalism plus 20, the DSA minus 21, socialism minus 29, communism minus 73. When Reuters and Ipsos asked at the end of July whether Democratic socialists have good ideas, 51% said few or none. But in the same poll, 47% of Americans, said they don't really even understand what democratic socialist policies actually are so they couldn't comment. Half the country. Half the country has not been shown this document. Half the country have no idea. And in that vacuum, all they've heard is libraries and fire departments and free health care and a nice story about a day off. That's why the fight isn't an argument. It really is a link.

When your brother-in-law tells you, this is fear-mongering, don't debate him, don't. Don't cite me. I'm not the source. I don't want to be. Just send him the URL. D-S-A-U-S-A.org. Let him find the words, fully abolishing the police and prison system on his own screen, in their own typeface, their own logo at the top. Let him scroll down to see the author's note and see that the leadership has signed off on it. Because the moment somebody discovers this for himself, it stops being a talking point from a radio host and becomes something he knows. That's why I've always told you, you have to do your own homework. I discovered when I was 30 that there was very little that I actually knew myself. I had been told a lot of things, but I hadn't earned the right to say that's something I truly believed. It was something I had heard or something that I was taught. I had to go out and find them for myself. And that's the beginning of what was happening in Mars Studio Friday night. Nobody argued anyone into anything. He just read out loud from a document to a room full of people who thought they knew what they were supporting. And they made a sound, oh boy. They wrote it down. They put it on the internet. They're proud of it. All we have to do is introduce them to the rest of America. Let Americans read it. D-S-A-U-S-A dot org. More in a minute. You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program. Yesterday afternoon afternoon in Milwaukee, not the capital of Wisconsin, but in Milwaukee. A high school gym, bleachers pulled out, doors propped open for air, crowd that... was skewing young, the kind of crowd that campaigns, a campaign that prays for this kind of crowd, nine days out from primary. And it was very American. Until you started listening. The frontrunner for the governor of Wisconsin brought two guests to that gym. One was a congresswoman from Minnesota. The other was a man who broadcast about three million people from a studio in Los Angeles. When he was introduced, some of the people of the room came to its feet, and he told them that Wisconsin is the heart of the historic American socialist movement. That's true. He posted it too on his way in, the People's Republic of Wisconsin. So he's right partly about history, maybe more right than he knows. And once you know it, the whole afternoon can read differently. So let me fill you in on that so you can read the room and see what's really going on. First, who got the standing ovation? It's the guy that in August of 2019 on a live stream reacting to a Republican congressman named Dan Crenshaw, the Navy SEAL who lost an eye in Afghanistan, he went on a live stream and praised the enemy fighter who took the eye, called him brave. And in a language that I'm not going to repeat on the radio nor would I do it in my private life. And then he went on to say that America deserved 9-11. Then he said, dude, I'm just saying it. Well, Twitch suspended him for a week. He walked it back on his uncle's show, called it satire, said he should have used better language, and then he clarified that he hadn't said Americans deserved it. He said, America deserved it, as though that were the repair.

Well, years later, he's still working that same material, joking about a sequel. He has aired Houthi propaganda on his stream, the Iranian-backed outfit in Yemen shooting at civilian ships, met it with sympathy instead of scrutiny. Democratic congressman from New York, Ritchie Torres, wrote to Twitch and Amazon, calling him the poster child for the anti-Semitism that broke out after October 7th. Democratic congressman in Illinois, Brad Schneider said in March that when Democrats put this man on their stages, the party forfeits the credibility to condemn bigotry on the right. The Democrats said that, not me. The Democrats said that. And then you have the woman standing next to him. She's the one who described the murder of 3,000 Americans as some people did something. Okay, well, yeah, they flew planes into buildings. Reporter asked the candidate whether campaigning with him was a risk. A woman who wants to be the governor, Hong in Wisconsin, said, it's not a risk. What would be a risk is to not build the broadest coalition possible. You know, I talked about this earlier. Show me your friends and I'll show you your future. Something all of our moms said, most likely. So you should remember it. And we should apply it today. Let's look at her friends. Coalition is the oldest word in the story and Wisconsin really invented it. Let me tell you who Wisconsin really is. In 1910, a Milwaukee elected pattern maker. They elected him mayor. His name was Emil Seidel. He was mayor, the first socialist mayor to run in a major American city. Same city that sent the first socialist to Congress that same year. And they kept electing socialist mayors on and off for the next 50 years. But here's what they were known as. Sewer socialists. They campaign on sewers and garbage collection and water and milk inspection and paving, municipal housekeeping, okay? Out of New York, the party's leading intellectual lawyer named a Morris Hillquit. He was a man who ran for office in New York over and over and over again and kept losing. And he looked at Milwaukee winning and he coined this as an insult and it's stuck, but not as an insult. Sewer, so they're nothing but sewer socialists. You're not revolutionaries, you're plumbers. Milwaukee took that insult and wore it like a jacket. But Seidel years later, that's the mayor in Wisconsin that kept winning, he was writing a memoir. It never got published. I wonder why. In it, he left a few lines worth carrying to you today. He said they wanted more than sewers. Oh, so very much more than sewers.

Who are the they, the socialist. He. He wanted more than sewers. Oh, so very much more than sewers. But that's the arrangement. And it's held for 116 years. The sewer wing wins the elections. How did Donald Trump win in such a socialist place? Well, there's lots of reasons. But one is he could appeal to the sewer socialist because he was effectively talking about the sewers. He was talking about jobs. He was talking about the price of gas. He was talking about all those things. And that's a sewer socialist. That's language sewer socialist listen to. Somebody who's going to go in and fix things. The platform wing writes down what the movement is actually for. The plumber knocks on your door. The theorist keeps the plan. And neither one of them is actually lying exactly. They've just divided the labor. One is the front man. The other is behind the scenes. Hillquit never came to Milwaukee. He sneered at it from a thousand miles away. But Sunday, the sneer flew in, took a microphone and a high school gymnasium in the suburbs of Milwaukee and got a standing ovation. And he didn't talk about sewers. He said they were going to run up the numbers on August 11th and carry that into victory in November until there would never be another Republican winning in Wisconsin ever again. And then he said, it's not me, it's all of us. Now, I want you to watch the division of labor in this campaign because it's textbook. The ads and on the stump, all they're talking about is cost of living, child care, health care, wages. She's a chef. She washed dishes. She is a single mom who couldn't find a place she could afford. That's the sewer socialist. And I don't say that with a sneer. Those are real things in real lives. And if my own party had better answers on the price of a house and a week at groceries, you know, she'd be 20 points behind instead of 20 points ahead. Why? Because. In June, she sat in that Los Angeles studio with Hasan Piker for 90 minutes. And in a rapid fire round, she said yes to state-run grocery stores. Yes, to cracking down on tech. Yes, to freeing Palestine. Yes, to a statue of Scott Walker built for the express purpose of letting people tear it down. That's all more than sewers. The last one was a joke, I think. But that's more than sewers. What you have to understand, when they say a broad coalition, you have to understand. A coalition is not a guest list. It's a contract. You don't get somebody else's crowd for free. You get it by owing somebody something. And when the man on that stage, when, you know, what he was talking about wasn't a budget line or a bill number. He asked for the win itself. And what does he believe? You don't have to guess what the rest of the coalition wants because they publish it. We've been talking last hour. The co-chair of the Democratic Socialist America sat on Fox a week ago, went down the list on national television, abolish the Senate, yes, replace the presidency, yes, replace the Supreme Court, yes, abolish ICE, yes, open the borders, yes, defund the Pentagon, yes, open and empty the prisons, yes.

Put the large corporations under public ownership. Yes. Nobody had to leak that. Nobody hacked anything. She said it out loud on a Sunday show. And the plumber on your porch is still talking about your groceries bill. That is the way socialist work. Sewer socialist. It's not a smear. It's a tactic. Now, if you're on my side on any of this, we're nine days away. Don't spend the nine days away celebrating. The same polling that has her running away with the primary has November inside the margin in a state that decides presidencies by 20,000 votes. A candidate you find easy to mock is not the same candidate or not the same thing as a candidate that's easy to beat. She might be. But this is Wisconsin. Ask anybody who's been through a Wisconsin November. Now, why does any of this matter to a man today in Twin Falls or a woman in Macon who's never cast a vote in Wisconsin?

Because we all have to learn this. Sewer Talk is your life. It's your street. It's your water. It's your kid's school. The number at the bottom of your receipt. Platform talk is about categories of people. Who owns? Who takes? Who is owed? Who has to be broken so the arithmetic works? One of those is government. The other one every single time. Every time it has been tried ends up needing somebody to blame. If somebody is just talking about the sewers, that probably is a good thing. But you must then see who's standing around them. The question to ask a candidate is not who she stood next to on any given Sunday. Because anybody can dodge that. The question is Mayor Seidel's question. But instead of sitting there in a book for 114 years, it's asked loud in public on record before the ballots are counted or even cast. When you do have power, what is the much more than sewers to you? And believe me, they'll tell you. They'll tell you. They always have. They're telling you by who they stand around. She's telling you by taking the Democratic Socialist of America endorsement and running as a Democratic socialist. They'll tell you because they've written it down. One of them wrote it down and left it in a drawer for a hundred years. But the other ones have written it down. They're in their own party. And they're talking about it openly. They're proud of it. See what they wrote down. at D-S-A-U-S-A-U-S-A.org. And share that with your friends, D-S-A-U-S-A-D-S-A.org.