Glenn Beck: What They Stopped Teaching Your Kids

Surprise! This is a special bonus episode of Culture Apothecary and today we're asking a question that should make every parent sweat. Are we raising kids who know every one of America's sins? But have no idea what makes freedom worth defending. My guest is Glenn Beck, one of the most influential voices in conservative media, the founder of Blaze Media and Torch, and the author of the new dystopian novel Chasing Embers. As America celebrates its 250th birthday this year, Glenn is launching a mission to help families rediscover the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and what freedom actually requires for us. He's got a whole full-blown curriculum to help parents teach their kids true American history. You can watch this episode on the real Alex Clark YouTube channel or Culture Apothecary on Spotify. Please welcome Glenn Beck to Culture Apothecary. If you ask the average teenager today whether America has been a force for good in the world or a force for evil, what do you think you'd get? Teenagers today might say a force for good, anyone over 25 I think would say a force for evil. Why is that discrepancy with those ages? Generation Alpha is just different, they're coming out different. They are more conservative than even I am in my generation. I think they're quicker to pick up on the bullcrap that is being shoveled their way. They've also seen their older brothers and sisters or people who are now 30 are really all screwed up. I just think I think Generation Alpha is the one that's going to save us. I think it's the greatest generation. So when public schools are teaching American history, are they focusing more on America's sins, do you think, or are they focusing on America's achievements? I don't even think they're focusing really on America. And up until about four years ago, I think Hitler was not required to teach while teaching World War II, how? And that's just the way it is. And so I'm not sure that our kids are learning anything. Generally speaking, I think the courses are just nonsensical in many ways. It's only teaching dates and names that you have to memorize and they're not teaching the story at all. They're not teaching anything that is relevant. How do you teach World War II without Hitler? You have to have Hitler because he's the main driver of the story. So what that means is you're not telling the story. You're just saying this battle happened at this time, memorize the date, memorize the name. Well, that doesn't teach me anything. So I think you're walking out of the classroom, you know, maybe at best an empty vessel. What is the best way for parents to go about teaching their kids to love America while still acknowledging that we're not perfect? If you don't teach the bad things about America, your kids are going to think that you are ignorant or lied to them. And I'm not sure which one is worse. So you have to teach. You know, that's the thing that I concentrate on with our museum is we have all the good things about America. But I also collect all the bad things about America. I can outdo any professor of American history in any college or university that hates America. Go ahead. Go ahead. I'll outdo you. And I have the documents to prove what you say we did. I have the documents to prove we did do it. And it's awful. However, can you tell me the good things? They can't. I can. Winston Churchill is one of my favorite people from the 20th century. And if you just read about him from the Western point of view, he's fantastic. But if you go and read him from the point of view from an Indian, now he's a monster. And he really did do those things in India because he was an empire guy. So which is he? Is he a good guy or a bad guy? And the answer is, yes, he's both just like we all are, just like American history is. It is both good and bad. The difference is, are you becoming a more perfect person? Never perfect, more perfect. Are you getting better or are you getting worse? The trajectory is what history is supposed to show you and what you're supposed to adjust. That's the part of history you adjust. Okay. I see. We're going in the wrong direction. Great. This is a pivot point. I want to move forward and up now instead of continuing to decline. This year America turned 250 years old and you've actually decided to spend your summer teaching families the declaration of independence and the bill of rights. You're creating lesson plans and songs and discussions, basically an entire curriculum for parents and kids. And I think most people hear me say that and they're like, okay, so what, civics class. But when you hear me talk about it, I can't do a justice. It really doesn't sound like a history project. It's like, you're really trying to prepare families for something with these lessons. So what do you see coming that kind of has you concerned to where you have this urgency that we need to be teaching kids about the declaration of the independence and the bill of rights? Every problem that we're facing right now stems from the question, are we a collective or are we individuals? Marxism, communism, socialism is all about the collective. Everything right now from the left is becoming about the collective. All Jews are bad. All Palestinians are good. All Muslims are misunderstood or good. All white people are bad. It's infantile to think that way and wrong. But everything is about the collective. If you don't understand that that's what the fight is really about, then you've lost it. You've already lost the argument. What we are about, what America is about, is the individual. All men are created equal. We're endowed by our creator with certain and alienable rights among them, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That God is the author of those rights and he gives it to you as an individual and then you as an individual, you set up a government to protect those rights. What the left hates is the idea that or what Marxism hates is that the idea that man can rule himself. It's really not about an oppressive government because Marxism becomes an oppressive government. Communism is an oppressive government. Everybody thinks that fascism is, oh, well, that has nothing to do with Marx. Really, it's national socialists. It always becomes because it is based on the collective and the individual just becomes a number. When you start looking at the numbers and you just look at everybody as numbers, well then I can ration healthcare. I can say we're going to kill these people over 65 because they've already had their life. All kinds of things, but when you get down to the individual, all of that breaks down. What I'm trying to teach this summer is the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence. If you understand those two things, you know I have certain rights and with them come certain responsibilities. I was just talking today that the national, the DSA, the socialists are now saying they want to abolish the, the Senate. Yeah. I saw that this weekend. They also said nobody should be able to pay any bill ever. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's interesting. The abolish of the Senate, we've already tried that. They tried that in Pennsylvania and its author was Benjamin Franklin. And from 1776, I think until 1790, maybe they had no Senate and they had one collective body that made all of the decisions and it turned out horribly, horribly. They actually were in shooting matches against signers of the Declaration of Independence and it goes the way all collectives always go. It's why the, in the, in the Constitution, it says no state shall be deprived of, of, I can't remember, representation by a Senate because they learned that lesson. You can't abolish the Senate. You have to have the two bodies that are always collected, always checking the collective. The Senate was supposed to make sure that the state was represented. The Congress was to make sure that the person, the individual was represented. And that person was closest to you. That's why they have to be reelected every two years because if they go wrong, you want them out. And so the people had every two years you could get rid of the guy because he was closest to you and he held the purse strings. He was the one that was holding the power of tax. So if you didn't want taxes, you vote them out in two years later. The Senate was not an elected position. It was an appointed position by the individual state legislatures. And so they would say we want this guy and this guy to go to Washington because they're going to represent California or they're going to represent Texas, not the United States, the people, but the state so the state remains supreme. All of it was done to protect the national government from saying it's just a collective. All states are the same, all people are the same, no, no, no, no. The people are represented individually in the smallest form possible, then the states are represented, and then the federal government is the president and the Supreme Court. That's what this is supposed to be about, and we've lost all that. We have to remember it. Glenn, you know who Barry Weiss is from the Free Press, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so she does something really cool with people that subscribe to the Free Press where she does these separate clubs in different cities. You get together with strangers of different political persuasions for dinner, and then you discuss things. And I went to one the other night, and the prompt that we were given, we can talk about whatever we want, but she gives one prompt. And because it was America's 250th birthday this year, she said to talk about, what do you think is the most underappreciated thing about America? And so I said the freedom to homeschool, because in a lot of countries, it's illegal. Somebody said roads, how you can just go into different states and go different places. Someone said freedom of speech, and you have talked a lot about this, how the majority of Americans cannot even name the five freedoms protected by the First Amendment. Does this concern you? Yeah, that's an understatement. Yeah. You know, I hear people say all the time, oh, England is the same, you know, the West is all the same. America and Canada, they're like, no, they're not. They're not. England has arrested 12,000 people in the last 12 months for speech violations. China is under 100 people. Russia is under 50 people. Wait a minute. What is happening over there? They don't have actual freedom of speech. The First Amendment protects all types of speech, okay, and protects the individual. And there's five freedoms. And we have to know all of them. You have the right to freedom of speech to say what you want. You have freedom of press to be able to print what you want. You have the freedom of petition to ask the government, hey, what are you doing? I don't like that. Answer this question. You have the freedom to gather in the streets as long as you're peaceful and say, we are we're gathering here against the government or against whatever or for whatever. And the last one is freedom of religion. I've had them out of order, but freedom of religion. That is meant to protect religion, not to protect the government from religion. These are things that the government cannot touch. I have a right to my religion. I have a right to question you. You work for me. Not the other way around. I want answers. And all of us are going to gather and we're going to gather right in front of the White House. And we're going to protest because we demand our First Amendment right to an answer. Which of those five freedoms do you think that my future children are most at risk for losing if we are not careful? I think you lose one. You lose them all, but freedom of speech is already on the rocks because you don't have the freedom to question a lot of times. You don't have a right to say, hey, I disagree with that. Or wait, that doesn't make sense to me, you know, in everyday life. You'll be hammered for it by the left. And I don't mean politically, I mean in your everyday life, you don't have a right to say certain things. And that doesn't mean you remain popular or you remain consequence free, but you have a right to say it. I think religion is on the ropes and that's religion's fault because religion has so traded truth away so they can, I don't know, so they can pay for their buildings or they keep their tithing mind. I don't know why or because they're their pastors or cowards, but you're about to lose, lose that because it's become meaningless. People aren't going to church because how do I apply the scriptures to my everyday life? You know, they try to stay out of everything. Well, no, render under Caesars, which is Caesars, but wait, there is a right and wrong. And that's what the whole thing is about. What's right? What's wrong? You know, the reason we have the declaration, and oh, I can't remember how many thousands of sermons that we have from the founding era, but all of these things from the founding era that were spoken for 40 years from the pulpit. They all back up the declaration of independence. All those ideas just didn't come out of the ether. They were everywhere and they were spoken by everyone because they were being preached about that God is the God of an individual and you are the sovereign of your own life. But that means you have responsibilities. You don't report to no one. You report to God. He keeps score. And so these things are what made us strong and without religion telling us these things and reinforcing these things, we lose our way. Talk a little bit about what you've created to help parents raise kids who think independently when the algorithm is always trying to tell them what to think. That is going to be one of the hardest things is the algorithm is going to be so hard because you're going to stop thinking you have to know what to ask. Well, sometimes I'll say something to Chatchee PT or Claude or something. I'll ask a question. It'll just vomit out an answer and I'll be like, that's not right. What about this and this and this? And then it'll be, oh, you're a genius. Thank you for bringing that up. You have to know you cannot take it at the first pass or even the third pass. What we've created is for this summer, the summer of 250, there are a couple of things. We've done an audio book called Chasing Embers, which is for youth, young adults. It's a young adult book and it's a dystopian look at the United States in 90 years. It's gone. Nobody even knows what the United States is. The kids don't know their own history. And there's a group of people that are trying to piece it back together and the country is run by a dictator, I don't want to give a waste for future books, but it's very right out of today's headlines. If we continue down this path, this is what we're going to be like. And what age is that book ideal for? Oh, I think it can be read by adults, but it can also be read by 12-year-olds, 10-year-olds, 12-year-olds. And it's meant to be read as a family. I mean, I think everybody will really enjoy it. What they're trying to do is these kids go out and they're trying to piece their finding pieces of history. And they only have fragments of things. And there is no library left, there's no books. And so people were taught, the group of people when it fell apart, memorize things because books were being burned. And so they memorize things. And now they're in the third generation. And so now there's just fragments of things that they're still trying to remember and piece together and the kids go out and piece it together and it's a great adventure. One of the other things we're doing is there's 20 episodes now available at the torch of America's story. It's an audio telling of American history. I narrated. And some of the, I mean, these episodes have up to 400 audio tracks on them. They run about an hour each. It's the best audio I've ever been involved with and best story I've ever been involved with. It takes us through reconstruction, from the pilgrims to reconstruction in 20 episodes. And you will, you'll, you'll be addicted to this. It is really, it focuses on the story in the word history. The response we're getting is like, I would not have, I would have learned American history if I had been taught like this. And you've created songs for kids to learn too, right? Yeah. So on the bill of rights, we have a lesson plan for each bill of rights. So, and they're made to talk to your kids. So you're just having a conversation. It's not a sit down and memorize. And then the songs I took and I wrote lyrics for music that would just drill the bill of rights into their head. So we take each amendment and the, the first one is five in the first. And it just drills into the head, those five in a fun way. No, they're really, really good. And listen, you guys, Glenn knows music because you, you appreciate Billy Eilish songs. Right? You're a Billy Eilish fan. So he knows stuff. I used to be a program director of top 40 radio for years. So I know music. Yes, he does. So they're actually so, so good. You guys will love it. You'll love listening with your kids and I think it's a good refresher for adults as well. So 20 years from now, Glenn, if the summer of 250 succeeds, you know, exactly the way that you've planned, let's say every parent in America downloads these lessons. What is different about the average American kid? They can at least have an intellectual discussion on what we would be selling. Right now people are throwing away freedoms. They don't have any idea what it is, how it came about, how hard we fought for it. I described the American, American history and history of freedom as if you were listening to a very long lecture and the professor said and then there was freedom and it was like this, that part where he just goes and that's how long man has been free. It's how inconsequential it has been in the overall history. I mean, it's a blip. It is a blip in history. And we're about to lose it. And we're about to lose it because we don't know it. We don't appreciate it anymore. So my hope is that we might still be having the same arguments because if you listen to these things and you you join us on this journey, we have faced all of these problems before. There are no new argument. The founders were arguing about the same things we're arguing about today. So those arguments will continue, but at least we'll have an educated populace who will know why it was done this way, why it works, why the other doesn't work, and what the real choices are. So we just don't throw it away. That's what I'm really afraid of is that we just throw it away. Okay, ask some really fun rapid fire questions for you. All right. One book every American family should own. I'm just thinking black book of communism. I mean, it's I know it's really tripe of the Bible. It has to be the answer. The museum that every American parent should take their kids to. Opening in February, the American journey experience, my new museum in Dallas, Texas. So fun. Okay. And homeschool groups can tour and stuff too, right? Yeah. In fact, we open it up now by appointment, but it's you're only touring the vault. We have about a 5,000 square foot vault that has more history in it. You've been having to. Yeah. Yeah. That's a 5,000 square foot vault. And it overwhelms people. This is a hundred and forty one thousand foot museum that 5,000 square foot vault holds one percent of our collection. And I'm going to be telling stories in a completely unique way. This hopefully will have one example of it in the opening, but hopefully in a year or so, you will see. My goal is in 10 years that all the other museums come to us and say, I have to see this because you've completely reinvented the museum. I've studied Walt Disney. And I'm I'm I'm designing a museum that Walt Disney, I think, would have designed. What's the website or info for that? You can go to American journey experience or Mercury1.org. One historical figure every kid should know. George Washington. Every kid should know George Washington. What age should parents start talking about freedom? Five. Three. As soon as you're starting to talk about God, freedom. You were born to make your own choices. You were born to reap the harvest or pay the consequence. No one else. You. You have a partnership with God. You are free to build or destroy. It's up to you. What is one conversation that every American family should have at the dinner table this week? The blessings and the extraordinary dangers of AI. The piece of historical or pop culture memorabilia is the latest that you've added to your archives. Just got an Oscar, which was one of the first Oscars ever made. I got a ticket, if you will. It's about this big written in hand by the governor of Rhode Island on May 4th, 1776, because I think May 2nd, the governor of Rhode Island was the first governor to say, we're not doing King George anymore. We're done. And so he wrote this thing out for two people to go down to Philadelphia and come up with some sort of declaration declaring our independence. It's the first thing written saying go declare our freedom. Which founding father had the coolest wife? Oh, Madison. Absolutely. Madison. I mean, Dolly Madison. She was, she was, they're burning down the White House. Her, they, the British come into the White House so fast that their dinner is still on the table when the British comes. Okay. They were in the middle of eating and they hear British are coming to burn down the White House. They get up and she's like that painting, roll it up, take it, that, take it right now. They, they, because of her, they saved so much. And she was just, she was a blast. She was a blast. And also John Adams wife. If I could meet any of them, I would meet her. Oh, founding father that you at least want to sit next to you on a road trip. Hamilton. Why? He was a guy who, when we got our freedom, he thought we should go back to having a monarchy. It should just be George Washington. He would be fine with the Federal Reserve. He, he, he was a big government guy. It's really strange. But he, he, to me, he is the least. I mean, I know he wrote the Federalist papers and everything else, but he's the least interesting to me. Most misunderstood American in history. Tokyo Rose, but nobody knows who she is. Donald Trump. I was going to say Donald Trump too. Donald Trump. This is what I love about you, Glenn. It's so fun. It's so much knowledge and, and love of history. What is the place that parents can go to find all of these resources? The easy place to go is torched250.com, torched250.com. There are hours and hours. And we just added car play to it so you can listen to it in your car. The Bill of Rights is really important and really good. Great stuff on it. But the American story is just 20 hours of feasting on American history. And it's really good. Glen, thank you so much for coming on a special bonus episode of Culture Pathicary. Thank you. So good to see you. And congratulations on your engagement. Thank you, Glen. You're welcome. God bless you. I love the fun questions at the end. Glenn is one of my favorite conservative leaders who has always been right on and full of integrity. This was a special bonus episode, but regular episodes drop every Monday and Thursday at 6 p.m. Pacific, 9 p.m. Eastern wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Alex Clark and this is Culture Pathicary. [BLANK_AUDIO]