Shocker: Critics don't like Beck University

Class Starts Tomorrow!

GLENN: Let me also express that tomorrow is Beck University's kickoff. We are starting Beck University, which I hear CBS and MSNBC —

PAT: Are they in love with that?

GLENN: — love. They love this idea. They think that it is a very good idea. Nobody, nobody is saying that, you know, educating yourself is a bad thing. Nope. Nobody's saying that you have to pass by the sentinels, the guardians of education and only — that's the only way you can ever learn. Nope. Nobody, nobody is saying that, hey, continued education in any way is a bad thing. A

STU: That's really weird because I've heard all of those things specifically from these sources?

GLENN: Really?

STU: Yeah.

GLENN: How about this. Surely nobody's saying that there's only certain professors and certain people that should be allowed to teach.

STU: That's exactly what they are saying.

GLENN: That's weird.

STU: That is so weird that you would think of that as not a possibility.

GLENN: And as Beck University rolls out and as we start to tie ourselves to other universities, you know, Beck University is clearly not a university, but other universities are going to be tied to Beck University. They are going to be providing actual classes. Now, the first three classes that we're doing are faith, hope and charity, and David Barton — and this is really kind of the thing that we've been doing on stage but we thought, you know what, we'll let this, you know, as our kickoff, we'll do these three topics. David Barton does a half hour class every week and it is on the faith of the founding fathers and all of the things that you never learned in school, all of the documents, everything else, he will show them to you. He will show them to you. And it's a half hour class and then there's, you know, a time for question and answers and then you can, at the end, you know, decide whether you want to go on or not. It's free with your subscription to the Insider Extreme which is, what is that, $9.95 a month?

PAT: Something like that, yeah.

GLENN: And then we are going to offer actual college courses with Beck University for $9.95 a month. You go ahead —

PAT: It's a good thing it's not a real university. Can you imagine how bad the football team would be?

STU: (Laughing).

PAT: I mean, that would be —

GLENN: It would be bad.

PAT: It would be sad.

STU: Very good point.

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: Except I am a natural sportsman

PAT: Yeah.

GLENN: we found out with this weekend.

STU: Glenn, a comment coming in on The Feed: If we watch Beck University, will we be as smart as Pete Stark?

GLENN: No. No.

PAT: No.

GLENN: Nobody is. Nobody is. So we can't promise that. I've —

PAT: We've got to do something on him.

GLENN: I've never realized how snotty and arrogant these people — these people are exposing themselves in ways that I never thought possible, as just the snottiest snobs, educational snobs I've ever seen. You can't learn. First, you don't read enough. And then when we prove them wrong because, you know, we're setting all kinds of book records for just, you know, Road to Serfdom, not an easy read, by the way, now you're not reading them. You are just putting them on — so in other words, you're so stupid, you buy a book and then you don't read it. You just have it: I want to look at pretty cover. Then they're not the right books. Then you're — you shouldn't be educating yourself. You've got to have somebody that oversees these things. And it's not just anybody overseeing. It has to be the right people, with the right cre — really? Would those be the people that made Woodrow Wilson the eighth best president in our history? Would those be the people that made FDR number one best president in our history? FDR? FDR? That shows such a lack of understanding of our history and our country. If you want to say he's the most transformative, well, you'd have to have him take a back seat to Barack Obama. But if you want to say he's the most transform — well, maybe even Woodrow Wilson. If you want to say he was the one in the wheelchair, he's number one.

PAT: Mmm hmmm.

GLENN: But the best president based on what? Based on what?

PAT: Well, he got us out of the Depression, Glenn.

GLENN: No, he didn't.

PAT: Yes.

GLENN: He elongated the depression.

PAT: He got us right out of the depression. Bang.

GLENN: Yeah.

PAT: All his policies kicked right into gear, got us out.

GLENN: It just shows completely intellectual dishonesty. You know who one of my new favorite people is? And I can't believe I'm saying this because I hate almost everything that comes out of this man's mouth now in policies. I think he's unbelievable on the policies and the things that come out of his mouth, but I think the guy's an American icon and a hero, is John Lewis. I've been reading about John Lewis. I've been reading about the Civil Rights Movement. That guy was amazing. Now, he may stink on ice right now, but in the category of standing up for what you believe in, literally taking the lumps, you know, his childhood was amazing, this guy's amazing. Amazing. Now, these intellectual honesty. I don't like the guy. But I have to point out if I'm going to point out John Lewis, I've got to point out this guy's amazing in this category. Intellectual dishonesty is what's happening. They paint Woodrow Wilson and FDR as these great presidents. In what — how exactly? He got us out of the Great Depression with the New Deal? The guy who designed the New Deal, Morgenthau said in 1938 or '39, "It doesn't work, we've got to stop. We haven't created any new jobs and now we have a giant..." this is the guy who designed it with Wilson — or with FDR! He's one of FDR's good friends! He didn't have an axe to grind. He was intellectually honest. But that's been completely wiped away. Nobody even talks about that.

Well, how do you say that he got us out of the Great Depression with the New Deal, when the designer of the New Deal said in congress, it doesn't work; we've got to stop. That's the problem. The problem is there's no intellectual honesty.

Look, you want to disagree? That's fine. You want to say, hey, well, you're coming to this conclusion and I come to this conclusion? That's fine. You want to point out, well, wait a minute, you haven't done enough research on this guy? That's fine. But I talk to these historians that don't have — they have no clue. They have no clue. I'm not saying that I'm smarter than them. I'm not saying surely that I'm better educated, but I'll tell you this: I'm still intellectually curious and still intellectually honest. And that's the difference, and that's what we should be fostering.

Pete Stark is a guy who will just say, shut up, shut up, you don't know, do you have a degree, do you have a degree? Take your degree and stuff it in your pants. By the way, I do have a doctorate. Take your degree and stuff it in your pants. My grandfather helped build the moon rover. My grandfather was the shop steward and the chief machinist at Boeing. He had a fourth grade education. He couldn't even read the blueprints. But if there was a tough part to be made, my grandfather made it. You don't have to have a degree. Self education is not a bad thing, but man alive, these people just want to control everything.

Did you see now — you ready for this one? Homeland Security is now editing and now blocking sites that have controversial opinions. Now remember what this government is trying to do. They are trying to get everybody onto the government program. They are trying to get you employed. Those are the only jobs that are being created. And as you become a government employee, your websites now, your computer will be blocked on anything that is controversial. You want to talk about keeping people in the dark, you want to talk about becoming China, there it is. The Department of Homeland Security? Bullcrap. You know who that is? Cass Sunstein. "These are controversial websites." Cass Sunstein. "They're conspiratorial websites." There's no definition on what a controversial website is. What is that? Because I have a feeling that Cass Sunstein and what's her face, Napolitano, I'm guessing that they might have a slightly different definition of controversial website and controversial opinions as opposed to our founders. I don't think public debate could be called controversial by our founders. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm just a dummy, a self educated dummy. I go to Beck University and, you know, well, I won't ever amount to anything. Neither will you. That's why we've got to listen to the big boys like Pete Stark because he's got, like, sheep skin and stuff. Sure, you got sheep skin but that's actually on a sheep still. They took it off. It looks like paper and they wrote stuff in Latin that you can't understand, nor will you ever. It just says, hi, I'm smarnimus maximus and I know better than you.

Beck University, highly controversial. You'll find it on the website at That is, you'll find it there unless you're a federal employee. I'm guessing is one of those controversial websites that has been blocked by the federal government. Soon, soon to be blocked at a computer near you.

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:


Want more from Glenn Beck?


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:


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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,


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

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.