Glenn Beck talks Zohran Mamdani's NYC win, GOP infighting & Charlie Kirk’s legacy | Batya!

Joining me now is Glenn Beck, co-founder of Blaze Media and nationally syndicated radio host of the Glenn Beck Program. Glenn Beck, thank you so much for being here.

It's an honor to be with you. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

It's an absolute honor to have you. So I know you're following this mayoral race that just concluded. Zoran Mamdani, New York City's Muslim socialist mayor. You have said that he's a combination of radical leftism and political Islam. Now I'm with you on the radical leftism.

I personally am not getting an Islamist vibe off of him. He's super pro-trans, for example. His mother is Hindu. He, to me, reads mother is Hindu. He to me reads like just your garden variety, Nepo baby socialist. What am I missing?

I hope you're right. Linda Sarsour has said that care was behind a lot of his campaign. And you know, you're either a leftist, these are her words, you're either a leftist or you're an Islamist, or maybe she didn't say that you're for Islam or something, but you can't be both. And they're going to hold her hold his feet to the fire. So I don't know, you know, I know he is a committed Marxist. He believes in that. Where he stands on Islam, I don't know. I just don't like the fact that he is, you know, wanting to globalize the Intifada.

That's a big warning sign that he, you know, doesn't have a bad thing to really say about Hamas. That's another bad sign. You know, that's not Islam. That's an Islamist that goes to that space and a very dangerous, dangerous one.

Unfortunately, he's not the only one. I mean, we're seeing it happen and they're all coming in sheep's clothing all over the West. Um, and, uh, if we don't, if we don't pay attention, we're in trouble. There was a story I just read this morning. Um, a small town in Germany that has a Christmas, you know, fast that they do every Christmas in this town. And they just stopped it.

They've canceled it this year because there is a mosque by the town square that would be offended. And the police said it will cause security concerns and it will cost more to protect the Christmas market than to run the Christmas market. And so the town had to stop it. I'm really tired of being called a bigot or a racist or not tolerant. I don't have a problem with

the mosque. Why are you trying to destroy Christmas? What I mean, what is your problem? I'm not the one who says, if you don't believe my faith, I can take you as a slave. I'm not the one that says, I can marry a child off at 14, 13.

I'm not any of those things. And all of those things are against the Western culture. They are diametrically opposed to Western culture, and I find them evil. You know, I don't believe in cutting people's hands off for stealing. If you do, that's fine. Find a place. The West does not stand with that. And I am afraid there are too many things, too many signs all around that people might say, I'm really not part of that, but they'll play footsies with it.

You know, I love the people that are, you know, for trans people or, you know, for gay rights and then march with Hamas, you're the first to be killed. You're the first to be killed. So if he's serious, that's trouble. If he's not serious about that and he's playing footsie with it, he is in trouble. He's in trouble. Yeah, I think we're really in this moment

where people are suddenly realizing that the West is not only worth defending, but in need of defending, you know, the values this country was founded on. I think that's part of the reason that immigration has become the number one issue

in the country politically, certainly for the right. But there's another reason, which is the economic piece of it. And I want to play you this clip from Mamdani's victory speech, and then make the point and see if you agree with me. So let's have that.

All right.

Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian lime cooks and Ethiopian aunties.

So what to me is so amazing about that clip is that it's all people who are immigrants who are working in these service industry jobs. And to me, it is so emblematic of what the Democratic Party is right now, which is you have sort of rich, overeducated, white, in most cases, progressives, who now have built an economy that depends on a slave cast, often of illegal labor, to do jobs that were once jobs that gave working class Americans a dignified life.

What did you make of this clip?

I would agree with you on that. I think you left out one part, this upper class, over-educated, white politician or mainstream politician, if you will, as they look. And they rail against the millionaires and yet they're friends with all the billionaires.

I mean, you're getting money from George Soros and Bill Gates and all of the Tides Foundation. Don't talk to me about how you don't like the rich. The rich are calling the shots in your own campaign, in your own life. And I find it, I find it reprehensible. The other thing because I played that clip on the radio the next morning. and the thing I pulled away from is we are back to Teddy Roosevelt's hyphen American speech that there's no such thing as a hyphen American. You're either an American or you're not and as he said I've met people who are naturalized Americans. I've met

people who want to be Americans who are more American than people who were born here in America. They come here for a reason. They understand it's the rights that they didn't have in their country at home. The protections that they had,

the ability to break out of the class and be whoever it is they want to be. That every time that a politician starts dividing us into class and into hyphen Americans, you're planting the seeds of our own destruction. E pluribus unum, from many, one. And the one is just, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal

and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And governments are instituted among men to protect those rights.

That's our one. That's our one. That's what we all came, my family came for in the 1800s. Your family came. And they all came because that was a completely different idea.

And it's still unique. We're the only, look at Great Britain and how many, 4,000 people have been put in jail in the last 24 months. 4,000 people on speech. On speech, we're still a very unique place. That's our one, come together on that.

Cause I can live side by side with anyone. I don't care how they vote, if they believe in that. I can live next to anyone of any faith, as long as you understand, I'm the same as you, we're both children of God. You can call God whatever you want to call God,

I'll call God, but I have the same rights and I get them from either the universe or your tree or whatever, but it's a higher power than man and government.

Yeah, I wonder though, Glenn, how you would advise Republicans who now live in Virginia, who know that their neighbors overwhelmingly voted for somebody, who texted about fantasizing about conservatives being killed, their children being killed. I think a lot of people are feeling very betrayed by how their neighbors voted. You brought up Mamdani defending chance

to globalize the Intifada. 70% of Jewish Americans living in New York voted against him. They are feeling very betrayed by their neighbors. You are a uniter and not a divider. You've been warning about civil war for 10 years now. What is your advice to people feeling so betrayed by their neighbor's choices?

This is going to sound trite, but it is the only thing that gets me through the day. And I mean, you were an awful lot of like you do this for a living. I do this for a living. We are we are paid to look at all of this stuff every day, digest it all, and then select the things that we think are the most important. So there's more than what we talk about that we look at every day.

And it's poison for the soul. It's just awful. It's evil. It's awful. The only thing it gets me through is getting up every day and saying, I know these things are true about God. I know that I'm a child of God. We're all children of God and he loves us. I know those things are true. He loves us and he's not neutral in the affairs of man. He has it.

Everything else, I'm just going to be grateful for. These are not enemies of ours. These are enemies of his. We have to do everything we can to stay on his side. He's never on our side. If you look at the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln talked about how is it that both sides can claim God? How in their churches can both sides say God's for slavery, God's against slavery? They're both fighting in the same name of the same God.

He's not. We have to be humble enough to be on his side. And we've seen, you know, I was very upset after the 2020 election. I didn't think it was a fair election. And I thought we are doomed. We're doomed. And look what happened. That time gave Donald Trump a season to mature, grow into the president, take a breath and go, okay, what did I just experience? Who are the real enemies?

If I had this chance to do it over again for four years, what would I do? In that time period where we were all, we're doomed, we're doomed, we're doomed, he was preparing. And if you don't believe that was a miracle that he turned his head, I mean, I don't think I've ever seen a bigger miracle than that. He turns his head, clips his ear, and he lives. And now look at what we've had in the last nine months.

God's not neutral in these things. We have to do our part, but the worst thing we can do is sow division, sow hatred, so distrust. We have to be aware of what's happening around us. We can't hide from it, but we can't play into it

or it'll cripple you. It'll cripple you.

So speaking of civil wars, there's also a mini one happening on the right right now over Nick Fuentes, whether he should be debated with or not, whether his ideas should be given a hearing or not. You have people saying, basically, our enemy, if you're on the right, your enemy is the left.

I don't have any enemies on my right. We need to fight the bad guys on the left. And then you have other people saying, actually, no, it's extremely important to police the kooks from our side, people like Fuentes, who's an avowed white nationalist. It's extremely important to insist that we can be American nationalists who are not white

nationalists to protect that multiracial coalition that President Trump built and to say, not Fuentes. Where do you fall in terms of those two camps?

Well, I don't think he's worth anybody's time, quite honestly, because I don't think he actually believes anything. I think he's from this new culture that says the most outrageous things for attention, and I'm not gonna give him any attention.

I am very clear on anti-Semitism. I am very clear on who and what we should stand for. I am very clear on fascism, communism, authoritarianism, and the US Constitution. So I don't think he's worth debating because there's no logic behind any of that. It's rage, etc., etc., and I think it's performance art. However, know that that exists and that will affect people. So now let's look and take another step back from that. Okay, so people hear that and take it seriously.

It's our job to understand why are they susceptible to that?

Why?

How is it that anyone with any sense of logic and decency can fall for that? They've been disenfranchised by something. What is that? I think we saw the beginning of this with why Mondani won and why the election didn't go. I mean, they never go the Republicans way or the Democrats way, whoever the incumbent is.

But what was the problem? Why didn't we connect? Because we were still talking about cultural things. And right now people are afraid for their job. They're afraid they can't make ends meet. Young people, if you grew up and you don't remember 9-11,

so you don't remember 9-11, so you don't remember a world with the airport where you can just walk up to the plane, you don't remember a time without the Patriot Act, you don't remember a time where the banks weren't getting bailed out by the federal government

while your mom and dad are losing their job, or COVID where your family lost their job, lost everything, and yet Home Depot can be open. But if I owned a true hardware store, I couldn't stay open somehow or another. They were immune, but I wasn't. If that's your framework, and you have grown up in a society where they've said to you

as a young man, you're bad, you're the problem, you're racist, you shouldn't even be treated equally, you should be slighted because of your heritage. Communism is neat, socialism is neat, and America is bad. If that's the stew you grew up in, that's why you listen to somebody like that. And we have to understand where they're coming from. We have to meet them where they live, not on our terms, on their terms.

And understand that is real. Perception is reality. So that's their real reality, that this is the way things are. We must go in and meet them there. If we don't, we're never going to connect with them. We have to listen first. How did you get there?

But only engage with people who are honest. If you ask honest questions and you are honest on both sides, that means I will change my mind if you bring up something that is, that I look at and go, wow, I think you're right on that.

Then that means I have to change my position. If I'm not willing to change my position, you've brought up something that should have changed my mind and I recognize that that's a really good point, it should change my mind, but I'm not moving anywhere because I want to win.

Then you're not an honest broker. You're not looking for truth. Only engage with those people who are looking for truth, but you'll only find them if you first come to them and say, how did you get there? What are you thinking? Tie those together, because I can't tie that together.

It sounds like what you're saying is, yeah, that if you tell young men for a decade that they're the problem, they're toxic, they're poisonous, their whiteness is a sin, and their gender is violence, they're going to start to believe you at some point. I think that's really smart.

And then you bring them into school, and you bring them into school and you say, hey, play by the rules. They watched their parents play by the rules, but they got screwed by the banks and everybody else. Play by the rules, go to school and you get a job. Well, that's not true. That's not true. Not anymore with AI and the way the world is changing. That is absolutely not true. It wasn't true from the beginning. Not everybody needs a Harvard education. Not everybody needs a $50,000 a year education. You don't need that.

Some people should go to trade school. Some people shouldn't go to school at all. Some people are industrious enough that they can go out and they can find their own way. Companies are no longer looking at those diplomas with any kind of meaning, unless you're in certain fields. So they feel betrayed and lied to, and now they've got this giant debt because they played by the rules. We have a lot of work to reach these people

because at the same time, they're experiencing that they have teachers and professors in their head every day spoon feeding them. This system is evil. This system is bad. This system is what's keeping you down.

These people over here, when, Whenever you start to hear, you need me or you need these people over here with me to keep you safe because they're out to get you, run from those people, run from those people. Just use logic and reason, fix her in the seat of reason, question everything with boldness. You'll figure it out.

You'll figure it out. And you'll be able to be strong enough to hold yourself up. Everybody is being taught you have to be dependent on something else or a system. No. Be dependent on you and God. That's it. You have absolutely everything

you need to be able to succeed. Everything. You came fully equipped. God didn't make any mistakes. You're here in your situation for a reason. And maybe that situation is bad. My mother was an alcoholic. My mother was abusive. My mother committed suicide when I was 13 or 15 years old. Those are horrible things. Or are they? Because those things, when I grew up enough to understand, wait a minute, I could carry that around as a giant cross. Or I could look at those things and say, yeah, but if that didn't happen, I wouldn't have this understanding, or I wouldn't have moved from this place

to this place, or I wouldn't be the same person that understands when somebody is suicidal. I can understand them and relate to them and be able to help them. There's no such thing as bad unless you define it as bad, unless you carry it around and say, I'm just so screwed. Anybody who tries to tell you, keep stirring that anger, get away from them, get away from them.

So one of the big spreaders of anger and of that toxic messaging towards young people, the mainstream media, obviously, you spent decades working in mainstream media. In fact, you had a show on CNN as a conservative. Now, this is like utterly unthinkable in the CNN of today. The only way that conservatives get on that channel is when they're surrounded by a host of liberals

to beat them down.

They were the longest elevator rides of my life. Literally, the doors would open up at the lobby and everybody would be talking and laughing and the doors would open up and they'd all see me and it'd go completely silent. Everyone would ride in silence until I'd get off my floor.

I mean, it was crazy. It was crazy. That's hilarious. What happened there?

How did CNN go from a brilliant decision of having someone like you on so that even if their audience did lean left, at least they understood what the smartest version of the right was to what we see now today. Like, how did that happen and why?

I think, you know, again, I'd have to go back to the schools. Journalists learn that they are there to further an agenda, whatever that agenda is that's right. That's not what journalists do. Journalists are supposed to question and they're supposed to balance and look at all sides and then deliver that to you so you can make the decision. Now journalists believe they make the decision.

They're just trying to figure out a way to convince you that that's the right decision. So journalism was completely turned upside down. And you know, it's amazing how if you live in if you live in New York City just for a little while, you will see it is such a closed society. There is no such thing as the reality of the rest of the world or the rest of America. It is such a different place and they don't think that they're the ones in the goldfish bowl.

They think life is all like that. No life is like that except unless you're in New York City and especially if you're on the Upper East or West side, no life is like that outside of that community. But they're so arrogant. And so closed off, they don't know people that are different than them. They just don't.

And as a result, you're saying their media reflects that same bubble that they themselves exist in socially. I think that's completely accurate. You made a really good point that I think is totally accurate. You said that a lot of President Trump's economic agenda, the benefits of it are going to be felt in five years, in 10 years. I think that is totally accurate. My question is, what about people who don't have that runway? Cost of living affordability is going to be the

number one issue in the midterms. How does the president make the American people understand, A, the agenda, but also, B, how does he make things easier for people who don't have five years to wait to see those benefits?

No, I don't think the country has five years to wait. I don't think the country has two years to wait. And this is my advice to the president. He does not need my advice. But if I were giving advice to the president, I would say, look at what happened in this last election.

People were not talking about big things. They were talking about how do I make, how do I pay my bills? How do I make the pain of my every day stop? You know, it's the hierarchy of needs. The problem is, is to get to the place where Donald Trump knows we can have a successful country for decades to come. They're not going to be quick fixes. They're not. He is doing what the United Nations 20, I think it was United Nations

2020 and then it became United Nations 2030, Agenda 2030. What the WEF did, what all of these people all over the globe tried for two decades to craft this framework to catch the West as it collapses, okay? Because it can't stand the way it was built in 1945. It doesn't work this way anymore. What he's done is he's come in and he said, yeah, we're not doing any of that. And beyond not doing any of that, he's building entirely new structures and framework.

And so everything that you see, every bit of negotiation overseas, all of the negotiation with the tech companies and everything else and bringing on on-shoring things here in America, that's long-term strategy. That is the only chance we have of survival. The problem that we have is he's got to find some ways to reach down to the lowest level and help them so they can hold on a little longer and buy into this hope.

That's going to be extraordinarily difficult. But also it falls to the American people to understand, and I don't know how you're going to get that you know I think it's 60% 57% of the American people cannot read past a sixth grade level so I don't know how you explain things to people who can't read past a sixth grade level I don't know how to explain things to people who are so apathetic or so convinced that they are right that they will not listen to anyone else.

But we as people have a responsibility to look beyond my pain and my day, and it's really hard, and my lifetime. It's our responsibility to say, what does this mean in 10 years, in 20 years? When you have kids, you begin to do that. When you have grandkids, you really do that. It's why I'm so concerned about Sharia law and Islamism all over the West. If we don't fight this with our mouths now, our kids and grandkids will have to fight

it with machetes and bullets in the future. I'd rather fight it with my mouth and my spine now by standing up. We have a responsibility to say this is going to hurt, but I see the vision and please help me as much as you can, because I really want to be there, but I'd like to survive, but I see the vision and this is the right thing. Choose the right path.

It's not going to be the easy one. And I don't know if America can do that.

I don't know.

Finally, I wanted to play you a video that I found while I was preparing for this interview. Let's have that.

Thank you, everybody. More importantly, we have Glenn Beck here, everybody.

I'm not sucking up to Charlie because I just said this to him on my show. This guy a lot holds a lot of the responsibility of of the win A lot of the credit comes to Charlie and what you've built you're fantastic Oh, it is I will do better receiving that but it's the turning point team that deserves the credit. They

Hmm so that was amazing the last time you saw Charlie it was right after the election. What's it like watching that back now?

A couple of things. It's amazing how you don't have awareness of the times that you're living in or the people that you're around sometimes. I mean, if you if you're standing with, you know, the president, you know, or you're in the Oval Office, you got it, you got it. But when you're around somebody who is a peer like Charlie was around somebody who's just doing what they do and kind of what you do, you don't necessarily recognize the time you

live in and how important what that person is doing, how deeply important that is. I knew that Charlie was different. I had tremendous respect for Charlie. I meant what I said. He was really one of the key reasons why Donald Trump won.

We're going to feel that in the next couple of elections. Hopefully they get it together and can still pull it off. But he played a huge role in that. But I I think we all should take the time and recognize the time we live in. We are so blessed, so fortunate to live at this time. We, unlike generations gone by that didn't have great struggles,

we're facing struggles like the greatest generation. We get to choose who we are. We get to choose, we are. We get to choose do we stand or not? Am I just gonna close my eyes and hope for the best or am I going to be one of those people that like Charlie that people will remember that that that that that our children can be proud of that our grandchildren when they're learning

about these times, that they can say in school, in their class, to their friends or whoever, you know what? I know this story about my grandfather. I know this story about my grandmother. And I remember being told that when that happened,

they stood against the storm. They stood all by themselves. And it was really a frightening time for them. But that's who I come from. What an honor to be able to live at the time that our stories can be told to our children

and our grandchildren, to the place where it will change their lives. My great, great grandfather and great and great-great-uncle fought for the North in the Civil War. Wow. There's nobody of any importance in my family heritage.

You can go back as far as you want. You won't find a guy who even, you know, picked up the crap for the king. We're a bunch of nobodies. And I found my great-great-grandfather and great-great-uncle.

They were captured as a Beck would be. They fought for like two weeks and then they were captured, but they were put into the notorious Andersonville concentration camp. My uncle died.

My grandfather survived, but was never the same. But just that little story said to me when I found out, I come from people who are willing to stand. I come from people who suffered and then went on and built something, you know, that was good.

I think we should appreciate that. And Charlie made me appreciate that more. Thank you so much for joining me. It's an honor. It's an honor.

Anytime. Thank you so much.