Addicted to Outrage

by Glenn Beck

  Also, how disingenuous is it of the press to pretend that everything Trump says or does is bad? I mean, McDonald’s has some items that are at best questionable, if they can actually be labeled food. I think I was about fifteen before I realized that the milkshake was labeled “shake” on the menu for “legal reasons.” Perhaps we should rethink any item that we could be sued over because we have tried to fool people into thinking it was food. They also produce food that is the most effective and consistent laxative available anywhere. Most of it will run right through a person—there are times when I think that when they ask, “Do you want that to go?” they mean it in a completely different way. However, with all that said, their french fries are the best ever. I am not sure if they are even potatoes, and I am pretty sure they aren’t French, but there is no question—the best in the business, and everyone knows it. What is happening with the media is as if Donald Trump was McDonald’s, and no matter what the source, every single journalist, host, and late night show suddenly hates everything about McDonald’s. I mean, the big creepy clown may have been okay in the seventies, and now it is like seeing those old photos from the 1920s of the kids in Halloween costumes, so I get it, but nothing is good? Even if it isn’t good for you, you can’t find anything good to say?

  “Well, Steve, I have to tell you, even though we did that five-part exposé on how McDonald’s doesn’t actually use shamrocks to make shamrock shakes, I will tell you there is something about that obscene amount of tartar sauce that hides the taste of that plastic cheese on the fish patty that makes a Filet-O-Fish one of a kind.” If no one ever said anything about liking something about McDonald’s, you would know that everyone was in the bag for Wendy’s or Burger King.

  I am so saddened by those who pretend that character doesn’t matter, as we have all seen the effects of this postmodern philosophy on our kids over the last few years. The president, the media, and our reactions will distort our culture even more and shape a new generation that will think differently about morality, truth, civility, and power, in many unexpected ways. Our “outrage” over the last three or four presidents is coming with a very high price.

  It may not matter to you right now, but we are still seeing the devastating effects on our culture and our children’s perception in the way that oral sex is now not looked at as “sex” due to our dismissal of the Clinton scandal. In fact, according to a recent poll, our children and culture will pay an increasingly high price for the seemingly complete dismissal of virtue in our lives.

  A new study showed that only 28 percent of Americans now feel that premarital sex is morally wrong. In fact, 69 percent say that it is morally acceptable. Among adults who were asked during this study if they thought sexual relations between teens were okay, only 54 percent said no. Forty-two percent claimed it was morally acceptable. That number is up ten points since 2013, and up six points in the past twelve months. It is, however, a bright spot in the poll, as it is the only kind of sexual activity that is still not accepted by the majority. Which makes the position of the left and the media even more reprehensible. Sam Bee said that she, as a feminist, often uses the c-word, as it is her effort to “reclaim the power of that word.” And yet somehow you find a one-night porn-star hookup to be beyond the pale?

  On the left, citizens act as though Donald Trump’s personal failings are something new, which they would never have tolerated. To them he is a deviant, a possible “tyrant,” and someone who may have sold us out for cash or influence to Russia.

  When I point out Bill Clinton’s or Anthony Weiner’s deviancy or the way Obama used government agencies to target and destroy those who opposed him, and remind them that Hillary and Bill seemingly sold access to multiple countries through the “Clinton Foundation,” Democrats will try to tell me, “Yes, but—you can’t compare them to Trump.”

  As if Clinton is merely Pee-wee Herman and Trump is Jack the Ripper. Perhaps we should recognize that our standard shouldn’t be “who is the lesser deviant, tyrant, or oligarch” and set a higher standard than a man who gently inserts cigars into women or just “grabs ’em.” Both are accused of sexual harassment, only one has gone to trial, and both have been accused of rape. Are they guilty? We may never know, because both parties did everything they could to discredit the women and accuse the accusers of being part of either a “vast right-wing conspiracy” or a “deep state.” The point, I think, is that people who make “the party” the center of their world will tolerate anything, and it will only get worse from here as we are teaching future presidents, as well as our children, lessons that will not be forgotten soon.

  * * *

  The takeaway, for me, is that perhaps it is not advisable to compare the worst traits of our leaders. My mother used to tell me that I should not compare myself to others but to the me of yesterday. Jordan Peterson told me the same thing recently, backstage at one of his sold-out “shows.” Me versus Me. It is the only fair comparison, and it is the one comparison no one is encouraging us to make.

  Isn’t this what our political debates should be about? You and me? Who cares about them. They work for us. You and me. Not Us versus Them, Trump versus Clinton, Left versus Right, or black versus white. This is about each of us and no one else. We need to look at who we are, what we believe, and who we want to become.

  Soon, as you will learn in the tech section of this book, we will reenter the world of “non-sense” that we thought had died with the Dark Ages. Soon, because of what are called “deep fakes,” you will not be able to trust your eyes and ears. Most have no idea what a “deep fake” is, or, if they do, they refuse to see the ramifications of a people already greatly distrusting and divided against one another, who now cannot trust their own eyes or ears, and how this could be used as a “Reichstag fire” in many places all over the world, including ours. I believe we will begin to be deeply affected by these “deep fakes” in the next three to six years. When they hit, we must all know how to think critically, to debunk, to communicate effectively, to respond quickly and globally—and, most important, to respond truthfully with reach and impact. This one extra “push” may finally be the moment of overdose in our addiction.

  We must sober up, restore reason and decency, and thicken our skin. Our loyalties must be to the truth, reason, and compassion. We must also bind ourselves, with those principles, to one another or we will not make it. Not just America, but this time it may be the entirety of mankind.

  If we are going to kick our addiction, we need to make promises that we can actually keep. Such as “I will praise parties, politicians, and even those online, no matter which side they hail from, when they are correct—and I will speak out when they are wrong, but I will do so with facts and reason, not outrage and half-truths.”

  It is hard nowadays to listen to opinions. Frankly, I am sick of even my opinion. Opinions are a little bit like armpits. We have more than one, but that doesn’t mean that anyone wants to smell them.

  If you are sincere, you are trying to live your own words consistently, and you are willing to hear ideas different from yours without thinking about what you are going to say after “they” stop talking and would actually change your mind if someone made a good case, then great, let’s be friends. If not, we can still be friends, but keep your armpits to yourself.

  The twelve steps of AA work, for the same reason our system of government works, when adhered to, because they are based in human nature and truth—not political truth, but universal and eternal truth. Those things that are “self-evident.” Not what we want to believe or what enablers will allow us to get away with. Enablers are the ones who are making us more and more dependent. It is sick. Frankly, it makes the Munchausen-by-proxy freaks look healthy and loving.

  We have to really take a long look in the mirror as a people and ask why we are all allowing this to happen, and have we had enough. America, we are going on 250 years old and we are acting like a five-year-old. Stop it. Grow up! We are told every day of a new outrage, a new
villain, and a new “rule” that we all now must obey. None of us can possibly keep up with it.

  For instance, we all had to accept Bruce Jenner’s wanting to be a woman. (I was proud of us, frankly. I think all of us showed great compassion toward someone who had spent his whole life hiding and feeling as though he didn’t belong. It was heartbreaking.) Then, before any procedure to physically change things, we were required to call him by his new name, Caitlyn, and had to stop calling her “him.” Keep in mind this happened seemingly overnight. If you made a mistake and called her “him” or “Bruce,” you were publicly shamed. Then, when she did a photo spread in Vanity Fair, we all had to agree that “she” was beautiful. Complete lockstep. Strangely, most people did all that without hesitation. Think of this: Within a matter of weeks the entire country, and the Western world, went from knowing an Olympic athlete who was on our Wheaties box to calling him “her” and saying, dutifully, how lovely “she” was without any trouble at all. Each step of the way, there were new rules and new terms that we had never even heard of sometimes even the night before but were expected to fall in line with right then and there. How out of control are we? How self-medicated must we really be? I am actually risking my career (no exaggeration) by using this example. For multiple reasons. I am sure I am not even aware of some of them. But perhaps the biggest offense that I have committed is that in this paragraph I have “dead named” her. Once someone says that they are a different gender, as we all are being taught now, they are that different gender and we are no longer allowed to discuss anything about their life before they SAID that they were a different gender. By my recounting the story of Bruce Jenner and who he was “before,” I have “dead named” him.

  Who is making these rules? When did we elect them to rule like gods above us? We have gone from sincerely trying to be more compassionate by changing what we say or how we say it to ensure we didn’t hurt people’s feelings to living in a word cage of our own making, not even knowing who our keepers are or what, if anything, will let us out of this cage. This is not kindness, it is fascism. The words “political correctness” have become much more clear to those who are paying attention.

  Say the words (Orwell called it newspeak) and only those words that the nameless and faceless who now have “political” power tell us are correct. Refuse to comply, and those with power will first try to teach you through shame and intimidation, and then by destroying your life or others’ to set an example. There is no reason, nor is there any recourse. This is not democratic rule. It is mob rule.

  This mob pretends to be outraged, and so many have become so thin-skinned that they perhaps truly are outraged at the slightest “microaggression” (newspeak) and whip people into a frenzy. Meanwhile, the average citizen, who is being forced to just accept and go along, is only just now becoming outraged—not about being silently forced to comply, but by equally thin-skinned microaggressions on “their side.”

  We have become two distinct and different cultures: Both the left and the right live in large, constantly self-reinforcing bubbles and don’t even try to understand each other. We’re right, they’re wrong. At the very minimum, call it Starbucks people versus Dunkin’ Donuts people: We don’t read the same things, we don’t watch the same things on television, we’re not buying the same things in the aisles of our grocery stores. Some of you probably don’t remember that that used to be okay.

  10

  * * *

  The Mountain between Us

  This Great Divide isn’t a recent phenomenon; in different ways it has always been part of our history. The genius of our Constitution is that our Founders were somehow able to take all of the needs and desires of people living in different regions and facing different problems and somehow knit everyone together. The conflict wasn’t only North and South, it also was cities and farms, agriculture and industry, different religions, languages, and levels of education. Bringing all of those constituencies together to create a nation was about as easy as fitting the Keystone Pipeline through the eye of a needle held by Al Gore. Our differences were always far greater than those things we had in common. We are the most diverse nation in the history of the world. No nation has ever even come close.

  Unlike most European nations, these people had no single language or religion; there was no national newspaper. America didn’t even have a national anthem until 1931. But Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, Adams, all those great men who wrote the Constitution somehow found the common denominator, a set of bedrock principles that all of those people could agree were worth compromising their own desires to achieve.

  The mountain that divides us now is the loss of those principles.

  * * *

  The natural rights that we as human beings are endowed with by God are not to be limited or compromised by men. The country was built on these human rights: Respect for the choices of others. Freedom to believe and speak and worship. The right to be safe in your home, both from others and from the government. The right to your own life as your own inherent possession, and the right to defend yourself and your life from harm. The power we granted to the federal government was going to be limited to truly national issues, such as our common defense, our monetary system, international trade policies, and the resolution of disagreements between the states. Honesty mattered, and personal integrity, and, maybe most important, an understanding that we might not like or agree with the choices made by other people, but it was their right to make those choices and we would accept them for the greater good, because the greater good is based in the free agency of the individual.

  A system of government that was based fundamentally on the recognition of man as he is as a species. It was what set us apart from the other countries of the world. And then we lumped those principles all together in a cauldron we called patriotism. Patriotism, which was supposed to mean an allegiance to the Constitution that upheld all of these rights, but to many people it has taken on a different definition: My country, right or wrong. The Constitution doesn’t seem to play a role with many on either side anymore, and, to make matters worse, it is now becoming my party or my politician, right or wrong.

  If we are to save our way of life, we must find our way back to what brought us all together in the first place. It is vital to understand that the Constitution didn’t grant us these rights, it simply recognized, acknowledged, and codified their existence as a means to ensure everyone understood that the government did not have the power or authority to deprive us of those things. But in addition to those bedrock principles there was a single belief that brought us all together: the acceptance that all of our rights were given to mankind by God. God isn’t even mentioned a single time in the Constitution, but the belief in a Supreme Being was the spine of the Declaration of Independence. “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” The Founding Fathers embraced a broad spectrum of religious beliefs, from dogmatists to atheists, but all of them accepted the importance of the idea of a Supreme Being as a universal concept. It was pretty simple: I don’t have to share your beliefs—I don’t even have to believe in any God—but I accept the concept of natural laws, of which some would be enumerated in the Constitution.

  If you’d like a good laugh, just pause right here for a few seconds and try to imagine how our current batch of politicians would do if they had to write either document. We are so divided that we can’t even agree on a way to make sure that no American child goes hungry, that we shouldn’t spend a trillion dollars a year more than we have, or that a fetus is a baby; just think about these politicians trying to deal with concepts of naturally derived human rights.

  The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are the most divinely inspired documents perhaps of all time. They are so brilliantly written, so crystal clear, and so unbelievably empowering that they changed the world.

  It wasn’t always perfect, and for a lot of Americans it wasn’t always fair and it
definitely wasn’t equal, but we managed to bumble along. When it was necessary to protect and defend the country, we came together as Americans. The states united to make the world safe for democracy in World War I. Together we struggled through the Great Depression. And then, working together, we created the arsenal of democracy necessary to win World War II.

  But this time, when that work was done once again, we couldn’t entirely go our separate ways. The changes brought on by FDR and the progressive presidents before him, Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, coupled with the progressives in both parties in Congress and the Supreme Court, had changed us in fundamental ways. The Bill of Rights and the individual rights of Americans were weakened after each war of the twentieth century. Going into the 1930s, progressives on both sides of the aisle were certain that the American system was outdated and lumbering. It couldn’t move fast enough with its checks and balances.