Best of the Program | 9/10/26

0:00Today, we reflected on a couple of things. First of all, Charlie Kirk. It's the one year anniversary. And I didn't want to talk about Charlie as much as I wanted to talk about you and the progress that we have made or not made. Also, September 10th, 2025, versus September 10th, 2001. This is a deep show you don't want to miss. Truth is under attack in our culture. People are embracing lies about gender. They're rejecting the sanctity of every human life. And the government is even punishing people for saying what's true and right, or worse, the woke mob is doxing them and slandering them with no due process. Just an angry mob making their lives miserable or worse, putting families in real danger. But the biblical principles on which our country was founded still matter. Real patriots and Christians are beginning to stand up. They're showing real courage without a safety net of a big bank account. They're bolstered only by the truths that are self-evident.

1:01But these people must be defended. Alliance defending freedoms on the front lines of this fight. And they're standing in courtrooms across the country upholding truth and you're right to speak it. Your gift to ADF will be matched by a special grant while the funds last. Visit joinadf.com slashback or text back to 83-848. Visit joinadf.com slashback or text back to 83-848. You'll miss me too. The best of the men that program. We can't tell you how many scripts I have written and thrown out. How many ideas my producers have come to me with for this speech tonight for the Charlie Kirk Memorial. By the way, you'll see it at clenbeck.com. It'll be live. You'll be able to watch it. It'll be in front of the paywall. So you don't have to be a torch member. But you can see it begins at 830 Eastern.

2:03clenbeck.com. I've gone through so many different thoughts. Lord, what do you want me to say? And I keep thinking about four words. I am Charlie Kirk. Sarah, would you have somebody go into my office just right underneath the 9-11 flag? Is the Charlie Kirk poster? I got it from his funeral and I brought it. I put it down in my office and it's never moved since. And I got it for the museum because it was such a moment of history. And I think it says I am Charlie Kirk, I think. That's what we all said. I'm Charlie Kirk. And we meant it.

3:03I meant it. I meant it. The way you mean things when your chest is tight and the whole country is looking at the same screen at the same time. And it was easy and it was the right thing to say in September. You know, we were all crying and saying his name that week made us part of something just enormous. And I do think we meant, I know I meant it, but I have this monologue. So you know, it's more about me. I know, I'm an ego may, it's more about me than you. So I'm not, I'm telling you what I'm thinking of. Did I mean that? Today's a mile marker. Today's a day you can go back and go. Did anything in my life change or was that just, was I just caught up at the moment?

4:05You know, saying I'm Charlie Kirk now cost a little more than it did even then. I want to spend today on the show. Not necessarily talking about him. You knew him as well as most people did and the ones who really knew him. Have a hard time talking about it today. What I've been doing instead and mostly at night is kind of a quiet audit. And I'd rather do it with you than pretend it. I've already passed it. I know I said I'd be Charlie Kirk and I made some promises to myself. I was going to take Hillsdale classes. I took one and then I stopped.

5:06I got busy. I said I would read my scriptures more. I have until I got busy this summer. I try to be a better elder statesman. I try to be a calming influence in the world. I'm going to read more. I got a stack of books. I've moved that stack twice. Are you still going to church? I know people who walked in last September, they went for six weeks. And then they didn't. And nobody in their life knows except for them.

6:08That's the trouble with promises like this. It's invisible when you keep it and invisible when you don't. Here's one I think I've avoided. Have I sat down face to face with somebody who thinks I'm a bad man? And not a comment, not a thread, a chair, a table. And me asking more than answering. Because that was the whole thing with Charlie. That was the entire radical act. It was a folding table in a line of people who came to argue with him. He never went where he was loved. We're further apart than we were back then. A year ago, much further apart.

7:09Say his name today in the wrong room and you'll get a laugh or a lecture of what he supposedly believed from people who never watched him for even ten minutes. Some people have lost friendships over that name. Don't hate them back. Don't hate them back. I know what that costs. I'm not good at it either. But the moment we answer contempt with contempt, we've quit his method and kept only his name. And his name was never the point. You know, there are people on our side who did that. They took a dead man. They took his name. And they used him as a permission slip. They told themselves of the cruelty that it was courage. I guess I can understand where that comes from to a point.

8:10Maybe it comes from grief with nowhere to go. It still isn't caring anything. His wife stood up 11 days after and said the answer to hate is not hate. She said she forgave the young man. She's the one who paid her children. She didn't take the other road. And every one of us who did, maybe we should be a little quiet about it. You know, 50 years to the day of the battle of Munker Hill. Boston laid a cornerstone on that hill for a monument. And it was an enormous day, enormous day. Lafayette came to set the cornerstone. Daniel Webster gave the speech. About 40 old men who had actually fought in that battle,

9:11sat down in front. And the crowd ran for miles and they passed the hat. It's what happened after the speeches stopped that makes the difference. You see, we've been here before. 50 years after the battle of Munker Hill, Boston laid this cornerstone. They didn't have the money. And they people stood in line for miles. As I said, Daniel Webster, Lafayette, and 40 old men who had actually fought on Munker Hill, attended. And they passed the hat and they're going to build this. They lay the cornerstone. And they started building. And about two years into that, they run out of money. And the monument stopped at 37 feet. And it's at for a year. And then two. And then five. Let's dump on a hill where every ship coming into Boston Harbor could see exactly what a cheering crowd is worth once the speeches stop.

10:14Nothing. 37 feet. They ended up selling the battlefield. They wanted to dedicate the whole field. They'd send up selling the battlefield. They bought the ground. The men died on. And then they sold nearly all of it off. So they could build houses. And they built those houses and sold those houses. Those lots to pay for the monument to the men who died on that land. They only kept four acres. So what finished it? It wasn't the crowd. You know what finished it? Wasn't adults. It's children. Children mailing in quarters. And a magazine editor named Sarah Hale. She's the woman who wrote Mary had a little lamb. She later spent 17 years pestering presidents until one of them gave us thanks giving. She got the women of Boston to hold a fair, pies, quilts, needlework.

11:20And she's the one who suggested a children. Send in a quarter. $30,000 in a matter of days all in quarters. So 18 years after the cornerstone, the thing was finally opened. Webster came back and spoke again. A hundred thousand people came. And in the front row where there had been 40 men that fought in that battle, there were now 13. Everybody came for the cornerstone. Almost nobody was there for the 18 years in between. And the oblisks that stands there today. It stands there not because of the people who got the stage. It's for the people who never got the stage. Whose names are not carved anywhere in that monument. A year ago we held the largest cornerstone ceremony of my lifetime.

12:24I sat right up front for his memorial. A hundred thousand people in a stadium and more outside. And a nation and a world watching. That was real. Like it will never diminish it because I felt it. But a cornerstone is only a promise with a date on it. That's it. So what I've been sitting with as I've been preparing for today. The question isn't whether we meant it. I think we all meant it when we said it. The question is, where's my 37 feet? Where's the place I stopped when the money or the intention or the attention ran out. And life became more ordinary again.

13:26Like I said, mine's a stack of books I've moved twice. Mine are all the un... The classes I just didn't take at Hillsdale. If you can name yours, that's most of the work. I challenge you to pick it up this week. Not a movement. Not a moment. And just the one specific thing that you set out loud when you were crying. 40 minutes at a kitchen table with the actual documents that you were supposed to read or going to read. Sunday. Then the Sunday after. Maybe it's just this friend you stopped talking to in 2020. And you haven't talked to them because you couldn't get along because of their politics. Call them about nothing.

14:27And when somebody laughs at his name, somebody says something horrible today, don't flinch and don't swing. Say his name plainly and then go back to your lunch. His verse was Isaiah. Here I am, Lord. Send me. His wife told him once backstage, please. Please, talk to me before you say that again. He said it anyway. That was the promise, the four words the rest of us said in September. That promise. The promise. Measure the wall from the cornerstone you laid a year ago. Where's your 37 feet? Finish it. Finish it. This is the best of the Glenn Beck program and we really want to thank you for listening.

15:28So I'm going to tell you some things that if you're not my age, you don't know. On September 10th, 25 years ago, today, you're going to take your grandma to the airport. You could probably park your car in front of the airport. Get out, have the keys and say, I just got to take my grandma into the gate and you walk grandma all the way to the gate. You walked in, you carried her bag down the concourse. You stood at the window until the plane pushed back. Don't believe that anymore. You didn't need a ticket. You didn't take off your shoes or your belt. You got a pocket knife on your belt. You might have forgotten about it. When grandma, if she's getting on, she's got a pocket knife. They're not taking it from her.

16:28The cockpit door of every plane was a piece of trim with a latch on it. It was the same door that you now have on an airplane going into the bathroom. That's the same door. Crews at that time were trained to cooperate with hijackers because for 30 years, hijacking meant landing someplace warm and then everybody got home by Thursday. Ask somebody. Ask anybody over 45. Ask them if it's true that you used to be able to walk into a federal courthouse. And nobody stopped you. Nobody asked you for identification. There was no metal detectors. Ask them. No concrete planters in front of buildings. No steel posts along the sidewalk because nobody thought of the sidewalk as a thing you needed to defend. You could walk into your kid's school through the front door at 11 in the morning. With the lunch, he forgot.

17:29You go down to down the hall to the classroom, knock on the door and like, yeah, Johnny, forgot his lunch. No, he's saying anything. There was no color coded threat level in the morning news. No department of homeland security. No TSA. No, no fly list. No cameras on every corner. Nobody had said the words. If you see something, say something. Talk to somebody over 45. Ask them if it's true that terrorism with this thing that happened in other countries to other people on the third page. See if they remember what they were arguing about the summer before 9.11 because I do. I looked it up because I have a record of what I was talking about. Shark attacks. A missing intern. Remember, Shandra Levy? I said, was his name Gary Condit? I think he was a congressman. It was a big scandal. They thought he had killed her. I said off the air that week, you know, the happiest person.

18:30There's two people in the world that are happy 9.11 happened. And that is Osama bin Laden and in a way, Gary Condit. Because nobody cared about that missing intern anymore. We were still talking about whether the election had been stolen. Some things never change. But that was the country. It was so ordinary that nobody wrote anything down about it. When I say Shandra Levy, anybody, my age will go, oh gosh, I haven't heard that name forever. It ends all about it. And then on the morning of September 11th, it was a Tuesday and it was beautiful. And we all stood, we watched the towers come down. And while we were all bracing for a number of dead, do you remember what that number was? We were estimating when those towers went down that is many as or maybe more than 50,000 people were going to be dead.

19:30By a freak of nature, the buildings were relatively empty. They hit them too early. 50,000, we were doing that arithmetic in our head and in our stomach. Oh my God. The final number came to 2977. The youngest was two years old and the oldest was 82. For more than 90 countries, because that's what the World Trade Center was. The whole world's marketplace, you know, which is precisely like why it was chosen. Why was it chosen? Do you even know? Do people even know this? Why was the World Trade Center even chosen? And who did it? 19 men did it. 19 men did it. They were Islamist terrorists. They were sent by Al Qaeda, acting on a crazy ass theology that's still going strong, that considered our way of life as an offense against God.

20:34That sentence used to be so obvious that it was boring. But now, look at the gymnastics everybody has to do. How careful everybody is to avoid saying it had anything to do with Islam. 25 years on, we've talked ourselves into a version of that morning with no villain in it at all. It's just like it just happened, like it was a weather thing. And while we were counting towards 50,000 dead, there were streets in the Gaza Strip where the Palestinians were handing out candy. Don't believe me? Look it up. The video is available. Look it up. They were handing out candy. Mothers were handing out cake. They were dancing and clapping and celebrating everywhere else in the world. Everywhere else they were lighting candles. The Palestinians celebrated.

21:36And somewhere along the way, we decided to stop mentioning that. Why? I have to tell you, I'm going to say some things here that I take no pleasure in. But they have to be said. Let me make this declaration. We are about to find out something that we said forever. I'm not going to let them win. Not changing me. We've changed everything. And we are about to find out if the terrorists did win in the end. Because what did they want? What did they want? What did they want? What they wanted, they're getting, but not from them, but from us. They wanted the free market destroyed. Because they understood something that our own children are no longer even taught that the towers weren't buildings. They were an argument that ordinary people trading freely. Without a king or a cleric had built more prosperity for more human beings

22:39than every empire in history combined. That's what they were aiming at it. And it survived them. But then we had a generation and education that teaches them that the same system is not just flawed. Not a need of repair, not a need of, you know, it's not a machine that can be cleaned up and re-oiled, retooled. But instead, they're taught it's an evil system and the only honest responses to burn the whole damn thing down. They failed when they tried to make that very point. And now we're making it for them. Hey, Tisdad, to stop they had to make that one point and then watch. Watch what we do to ourselves. They needed us to hate each other. They thought we would. That was the actual objective. Break the country into pieces because we won't stand together.

23:42And the rest is only a matter of time. They failed in September 2001. They failed completely. We didn't do it. Strangers stopped strangers on the sidewalk. I know you if you didn't live through this, you don't believe me. It's true. You would see a stranger on the street and you could see that they were hurting and you would stop and say, are you okay? We didn't know each other. We were strangers. Men who had spent a year screaming at each other on television stood on the Capitol steps together to sing badly, but sing together and mean it. There were lines around the block to give blood for people who turned out had not survived to need it. Nobody asked what you were, what party who you voted for for six months, maybe six months. We knew what it was true. We knew what had true value. And you know what that was? Each other. And now look what we've done to ourselves.

24:44For free. 19 men with box cutters couldn't do it. We've done it to ourselves for free. And the marching part of it I think is the most grotesque and strangest of it all. Good Americans, decent people, people I know. Now out in the streets carrying water for a movement whose actual governing philosophy would be to kill you if you're gay. And the LGBTQ community marches with those flags and banners marches for cultures where a cruise ship full of gay travelers just got turned away at a port in Turkey and Turkey's a moderate place. And then they look at us and say America's full of oppression how we get pressed gay people. It's one of the safest countries on earth for people that live an alternative life.

25:45And now they're convinced them somehow or another to tear that whole thing down. They call Israel the oppressor when Israel is the only refuge in that region. More open to them than maybe we even are on our better days. They'll kill you. That's not Stockholm syndrome. That's something worse. Stockholm syndrome takes a, takes a chapter. Nobody has our kids at gunpoint. It's easier than that and worse. We got lazy. We stopped reading. We get in 2007 we get the cell phone. We get, we get the smartphone. Oh yeah, it's smart. Well, that's a dumbest thing we ever did to our society. And we decided that thinking is too hard. We decided thinking was a kind of rudeness and that strong feelings were the same as conclusions.

26:54You know, there are more Americans today with a phone full of photographs of food, a waiter just sat down in front of them than there are Americans with a shelf of books that they've actually read. We've never had more access to every single fact in human history. And we have never known less. At the same time, we've never been more certain of what we know, even though we know Jack. We have so many moral failures, but none of those are moral failures. That's just atrophy. It's just a muscle we stopped using. And it goes the way muscles go. You know, civilization takes centuries to build. This wasn't built in 250 years. This took centuries to get here.

27:56Out of a thousand years, English common law, the printing press, the reformation, the enlightenment, the founding, the long, ugly, tireless work of making the promise true for everybody in it, century after century of people who never saw the payoff just laying down another set of bricks. You know what we learned on September 11th? It can all be lost like that. Not conquered, lost, just gone. You know, I learned this September 11th. It can just be set down, walked away from by people who just assume it just grows wild. Let me tell you something. If we lose it, people weep at that loss.

28:58The generation after this one is going to wake up in a world where the American century is over and they'll begin to understand what it actually was. And they will spend their whole lives, maybe two generations, maybe three, clawing to recover a fraction of it. And not the America I remember before 9-11, not the rose colored version, the one that never existed, the real one, this one right now with all the arguments and the warts and the failures and the real injustices that still happen here and they still need fixing. That's what they'll be trying to get back. Not manage it, not destroy it, they'll try to get today back because they'll look at today with all of our flaws and problems, everything that everybody's whining about. And they'll say those were the good old days. They will look at this exact moment. A country where a man can call the president a fascist on a screen the size of a barn door,

29:58on a $1,500 phone while claiming he's broke while a machine brings dinner to his apartment. And he goes to sleep without any fear whatsoever of a midnight knock on his door. Yeah, for as many problems as we have, these are the good old days. I know nobody wants to hear it, but this is it. You're living it right now. You know, we've already proved that we can do this not in theory in this lifetime, in this country, with the same people we have right now. You know, in the bridges and the tunnels closed after half a million people were stranded on the seawall and lower Manhattan with a sky black behind them. Do you know what happened? Bet you don't. I mean, they're not teaching you anything about it.

30:59I can tell you most people have never, they never knew what happened down on that seawall. This is the best of the Glend back program. It's September 10th. We've been recovering from the Kirk. Today, if you missed any of the broadcast, our one is pretty powerful. And here in this hour, we are talking about September 10th. And I want to use this as a measuring stick to remember where we have been, where were you last year? And I don't mean like where do you remember where you were? I mean, what did you promise yourself? If you did, you know, I am Charlie Kirk. If you said that, what did you mean by that? And have you done any of those things? I mean, I did this against myself last hour. And I don't measure up to where I wanted to be. What I promised myself I would do. I don't measure up. I don't think many of us do. Some of us think God there's some people better than me and maybe you.

32:03But we have to be able to remember. And remember, you know, as I was saying, remember that you could walk through the concourse of the airport, get right onto a plane on September 10th, 25 years ago. But the next day, you could not do that anymore. But we also just dog pile on all the bad stuff. Do you know when the bridges and tunnels closed, half a million people were stranded right there in lower Manhattan, half a million. Sky was on fire behind them. Black, dust, ash, everywhere. I mean, it was, you know, the Coast Guard put out a call for every boat that could come. Tug Boats, Ferries, dinner cruises, fishing charters, you know, a guy with a Boston whaler. Anybody, Coast Guard, anybody, they can help evacuate people. Please come and help. In under nine hours, they took half a million people off of that island. It is, listen to this.

33:06It was the largest and still is the largest sea evacuation in the history of the world. Bigger than Dunkirk. And then everybody just went back to work. I just just went home. Most of them never told anybody about it. Just, and nobody organized it. Nobody was in charge of it. We were, we were, we just did the right thing. Those people didn't die out. They're still here. They're your neighbors. They may be the guy that you can't stand because of the sign in his yard. And when people say, you know, I want my country back, that's what they mean by that. I want that back. I want that back. That's the country I loved. But may I reverse that for a second? I want you to look at that another way. That country loved us. Not the government, the country, the thing itself.

34:13It fed people who never worked a day for it. It took in ones that nobody else wanted. Inside the generation made children or grandchildren, doctors and lawyers. We went across an ocean twice for strangers and came home and asked for nothing, but the ground to bury its boys in. It made poor men's sons richer, richer than a European duke. And we thought so little of it that we didn't even bother to write the man's name down. Do you know we are making more millionaires right now this year than ever before? People who are coming from the middle class and becoming a millionaire. This country has been carrying us the entire time quietly every single day. And nobody ever says anything nice about it. And nobody ever sends it a note. And now we've spent 25 years telling everybody it's wicked that it's rotten.

35:15It was rotten from the start that everything it gave us was stolen and everything that it built should be torn down or burned down. It hasn't stopped and that's a part that really I can't. It's still feeding us this morning. It's still a place people are dying in the desert to reach. It still goes on loving a generation that never once said thank you and might even be embarrassed to say thank you America. There's a name for that. You love somebody who just won't even look up, won't even give you just keep setting the table anyway. It's just going to keep doing it because it loves you and it'll keep doing until the day it can't. And it's not going to warn us. There's not going to be a letter. It just won't be there one morning because that's what we felt on September 11th.

36:16My God, this could be over before we hit dinner time. And the ones who come after will spend their whole lives trying to decide, trying to describe to others what we lost. We're telling our kids and our grandkids and they don't believe us now. Wait until all of this is lost. We'll fail because there won't be words for it left. I want you to go back to that concourse with me where I said you could walk in with your grandma and you could walk her all the way to the gate and you could carry her luggage and nothing was ever going to. Nobody stopped you and you stood there and watched her from the window as her plane pulled away from the gate. Come back to that concourse. She's wearing her good coach. She's got the good coat on the nice one. You're carrying the bag with the wheels that one of them just doesn't work right. You stand at that window and you watch that plane pull back.

37:23You actually wave even though you're pretty sure she can't see you. And then you walk out into the parking garage and you don't think anything about it at all. You get the car turn on the radio. What's for dinner? That was a gift. Nobody told you but that was a gift. You were handed the last ordinary morning of the old world on September 11th, sorry September 10th 2001 and you spend it thinking about dinner or whatever else because everything else was ordinary that day and you're right to think about that. That's what ordinary is for. But I want to remind you we're standing in the ordinary, a different kind but an ordinary

38:23today, right now somewhere in this country. There's a morning coming that will divide our lives entirely. And that day is not on any calendar. Nobody's watching and saying, I know and that's going to happen. And what we will remember about today, this Thursday, this nothing of a day is what we always remember. Not the argument, not the elections, but the kitchen, the dog. Somebody's hand on the back of your neck. You can't save a country by loving it. But you also can't save one. You've stopped loving either.

39:23You can't love the thing without loving the people in it. And the people in it. And the ones we're not speaking to anymore. It is an ordinary Thursday in America. I don't know what the rest of the day brings. I hope nothing. So we can all go to bed tonight and close our eyes and not think about this ordinary day. Anymore? And hopefully we wake up tomorrow to another ordinary Friday. I remember September 10th, 2001. It was the last ordinary day of my life of the America I knew

40:36and in one day the next morning that ordinary America was completely different. It's weird that we call what's happening in the world today ordinary, but it is. It's just the new normal. And I think, God, we've got another September 10th. I don't know. Recognize what we have. Don't spend this ordinary Thursday this September 10th. The way we've spent the last 25 years of this date. I still believe we're bound for greatness and glory and great things.

41:40I still believe that our best days are ahead of us. But some days I really have to fight to believe that. But it's not going to come down to an election. It's not going to come down to politicians. It's going to come up to us on an ordinary Thursday. Just a group of ordinary big people. That's America.