Category: The Washington Free Beacon
Glenn Beck’s viral warning on Democrat mutiny video gets Trump repost — now he lays out 4-point action plan
On November 18, six Democrat lawmakers released a short online video titled “Don’t Give Up the Ship,” in which they encouraged service members and intelligence personnel to reject “illegal orders” from the Trump administration.
While the video posited that the administration “is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens” and acting in ways that threaten the Constitution, it did not substantiate its claims with any evidence or examples of illegal orders, leading many — President Trump included — to call it sedition.
When Glenn Beck got wind of the scandal, he posted the following, which President Trump then reposted.
Today on “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn expounded on his warning, urging the need for four actions to be immediately taken to prevent the unraveling of our republic.
1. Congress must censure the mutinous 6
“If lawmakers can publicly encourage military resistance without consequence, then Congress has surrendered its moral authority. You cannot police the executive branch; you can’t oversee the intelligence agencies; you can’t demand transparency if you cannot police your own members,” says Glenn, calling censure necessary “constitutional maintenance.”
“If Congress refuses to [discipline the lawmakers who made the video], then the precedent remains, and it gets worse. And history shows us no nation survives a politicized military — ever.”
2. Pentagon must publicly reaffirm: ‘We obey the president’s lawful orders’
The military has to “restate the chain of command publicly and immediately. The joint chiefs don’t need a press conference; they don’t need hearings. They just need to say the United States armed forces obey all lawful orders of the president,” says Glenn.
“That’s the firewall between an American republic and every failed nation in history.”
3. SCOTUS must slam the door on Boasberg’s secret spying precedent — immediately
Glenn urges the “the judiciary, especially the Supreme Court: Close the door on the Boasberg case” immediately.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg “opened a door that is so dangerous,” says Glenn, by approving secret grand jury subpoenas and gag orders in the 2022-2023 Arctic Frost investigation — launched by the FBI and special counsel Jack Smith to probe Trump allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election — that let the executive branch seize phone records from at least nine Republican senators without any notice to Congress for over a year.
“No judge — no matter how noble his intentions — has the authority to rewrite the separation of powers. If one branch can secretly spy on another, then you have no checks and balances. You have a surveillance government,” says Glenn, insisting that the Supreme Court must “intervene.”
“If they don’t, this is the new normal,” he warns.
4. If media and elites stay silent, the American people must stand up and demand consequences
“In a functioning republic, this is supposed to be where the media steps in. This is where the cultural leaders, the voices — left, right, center — stop obsessing over clickbait and start explaining to the people what just happened, why it’s unprecedented, why it matters, [and] how we as citizens need to respond,” says Glenn.
But as of now, that’s not happening in media, academia, or Hollywood.
The reason for their silence, says Glenn, is “because America’s cultural class no longer sees its role as the guardian of the republic” but rather as “guardians of ideology.”
If their failure continues, it’s the role of the American people to “step in,” Glenn says.
In order to do that, citizens must put aside their political beliefs and party affiliations and focus on the big picture.
“This is about whether the military stays under civilian authority, whether our adversaries overseas are given the indication that we are ripe for the taking. This is about judges that want to erase the separation of powers. … Most importantly, this is about whether your children will inherit a functioning republic,” Glenn says.
“You don’t riot; you don’t panic; you don’t despair. We are headed into Thanksgiving. Give thanks for the crosses that we bear; give thanks because our liberty, our freedom — should we decide to keep it — will be more valuable to us. But you should call your representatives. … You need to demand transparency; you need to insist on consequences.”
Rage, division, and apathy, Glenn warns, will get us nowhere. The answer is “citizenship.”
“If we sleep through this, the system will break — guaranteed. But if you wake up, stand up, and insist on boundaries, eventually it will happen.”
To hear more of Glenn’s encouragement and analysis, watch the clip above.
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It gets worse for Nashville Democrat who ‘hates’ her own city: ‘Burning down a police station is justified’
Democratic congressional candidate Aftyn Behn’s political past has once again come back to haunt her.
Behn, who currently serves in the Tennessee state legislature, has failed to navigate her on-the-record remarks ahead of the December 2 special election to replace former Republican Rep. Mark Green. Despite running to represent Tennessee’s 7th congressional district, Behn has expressed disdain for the district and critical resources that assist constituents.
‘I don’t remember these tweets.’
Behn was confronted on MS NOW about a series of now-deleted tweets where she apparently advocated to dissolve the police department in 2020, the same summer as the George Floyd riots.
One of these tweets read, “Good morning, especially to the 54% of Americans that believe burning down a police station is justified.”
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Photo by SAMUEL CORUM/AFP via Getty Images
“Yeah, I’m not going to engage in cable news talking points,” Behn said. “But what I will say is that, you know, our communities need solutions. We need local people deciding … solving local problems with local solutions … and that’s not the overreach of a federal government or a state government of which we are dealing with in Nashville and our cities across the state.”
The MS NOW anchor pressed Behn to clarify her comments repeatedly, but she failed to do so.
“Once again, I don’t remember these tweets,” Behn said.
RELATED: ‘You’re a piece of s**t’: Nancy Mace and Cory Mills clash in heated exchange after failed censure
This is not the first time Behn’s past remarks have landed the Democrat in an uncomfortable situation. She previously expressed severe disdain for Nashville, the very city she is running to represent.
“I hate the city, I hate the bachelorettes, I hate the pedal taverns, I hate country music, I hate all of the things that make Nashville, apparently,” Behn said.
“I hate it.”
In a video posted to X on Thursday, Behn seemed to deny that she hates Nashville, admitting that she takes issue with “the bachelorettes” and “pedal taverns” but ultimately blames Republicans for her comments.
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Louis CK’s ‘Ingram’: Skilled comic spews self-indulgent self-abuse
For more than two centuries, the great American novel has tempted writers who dreamed of capturing the country’s soul between two covers.
From Melville’s “Moby-Dick” to Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” from Faulkner’s haunted South to Steinbeck’s dust-caked plains, these novels shaped the way Americans saw themselves. Even in decline, the form still attracted giants. Updike, Roth, Morrison — writers who made words shine and sentences sing. Each tried to show what it means to be American: to dream, to stumble, and to start again.
To compound matters, ‘Ingram’ isn’t just a story of exploration, but also one of self-exploration, in the most literal and least appealing sense.
Now comes comedian, filmmaker, and repentant sex pest Louis C.K. to try his hand at what turns out to be … a not-great American novel. In truth, it’s awful.
Road to nowhere
“Ingram” reads like a road map to nowhere — meandering, bloated, and grammatically reckless. The prose wanders as if written under anesthesia. Sentences stretch, then sag. The paragraphs arrive in puddles, not lines. There’s an energy in C.K.’s comedy — a kind of desperate honesty — that, on stage, electrifies. But on the page, that same honesty slips into self-indulgence. The book is less “On the Road” and more off the rails.
To be clear, I love his comedy. I’ve seen him live and will see him again in the new year. He remains one of the most gifted observers of human absurdity alive — a man who can mine a half-eaten slice of pizza for existential truth. But this is not about comedy. This is about writing. And C.K. cannot write. The pacing, the architecture, the restraint — none of it is there.
Rough draft
The story unfolds in a version of rural Texas that seems to exist only in C.K.’s imagination, a land of dull prospects and even duller minds. At its center is Ingram, a poor, half-feral boy raised in poverty and pushed out into the world by a mother who tells him she has nothing left to offer. His education consists of hardship and hearsay. He treats running water like sorcery and basic plumbing like black magic. C.K. calls it “a young drifter’s coming of age in an indifferent world,” but it reads more like rough stand-up notes bound by mistake.
The writing is atrocious. Vast portions of the book read like this:
I couldn’t see my eyes, but I knew what was on my throat was a hand by the way it was warm and tightening and quivering like you could feel the thinking inside each finger, which were so long and thick that one of them pressed hard against the whole side of my face.
Or this:
I sat up, rubbing my aching neck til my breath came back regular, and I crawled out the tent flap myself, finding the world around me lit by the sun, which, just rising, was still low enough in the sky to throw its light down there under the great road, which was once again roaring and shaking above me.
Sentences stretch on like prison terms, suffocated by their own syntax, gasping for punctuation. The dialogue is somehow worse. Ingram’s conversations with the drifters and degenerates he meets on his journey stumble from cliché to confusion, the rhythm of speech giving way to nonsensical babble.
RELATED: Bill Maher and Bill Burr agree Louis CK should be welcomed back in Hollywood
Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
A gripping tale
To compound matters, “Ingram,” isn’t just a story of exploration, but also one of self-exploration, in the most literal and least appealing sense. There’s a staggering amount of masturbation. C.K. doesn’t so much write about shame as relive it, page after sticky page. His public fall from grace plays out again and again, only now under the pretense of art. It’s less confession than repetition — self-absolution by way of self-abuse, and somehow still not funny.
Any comparisons to writers like Bukowski or Barry Hannah are little more than wishful thinking. Bukowski was grimy, but in a graceful way. He wrote filth with style, turning hangovers into hymns.
Hannah’s madness had a tune to it, strange but unmistakably his own. Even Hunter S. Thompson, at his most incoherent, had velocity. His sentences tore through the page, drug-fueled but deliberate.
C.K.’s writing has none of that. He tries to channel Americana — the heat, the highways, the hard men who dream of escape — but his clumsy prose ensures the only thing channeled is confusion. As C.K. recently told Bill Maher, he did no research for the book, and that much is evident from the first page. His characters talk like they were written by a man who’s only seen Texas through “No Country for Old Men.”
Don’t quit your day job
In the history of American letters, many great writers have fallen. Hemingway drank himself into oblivion; Mailer stabbed his wife; Capote drowned in his own decadence. But their sentences still stood. Their craft was the redemption. With “Ingram,” C.K. has no such refuge. The book exposes the limits of confession as art — that point where self-exposure turns into self-immolation. It could have been great; instead, it’s the very opposite. The only thing it proves is that writing and performing are different callings. Comedy forgives indiscipline. Literature doesn’t.
The great American novel has survived worse assaults — from bored professors, from self-serious minimalists, from MFA factories that mistake verbosity for vision. But rarely has it been dragged so low by someone so convinced of his brilliance. There’s perverse poetry in it, though. A man who was caught with his pants down now delivers a novel that never pulls them back up.
Trump faces drugmakers that treat sick Americans like ATMs
President Donald Trump struck a second deal last month with the world’s largest drugmakers, promising lower costs for American patients. The industry claims cooperation, offering help for consumers and expanded domestic production. Yet those same companies have raised prices on nearly 700 prescription drugs since January.
Big Pharma hopes the most unconventional president will fall back on the most conventional policy: granting the largest firms regulatory advantages, taxpayer-funded promotion, and freedom to keep ratcheting prices upward.
Trump should expose the game Big Pharma has played for years and force the industry to compete in a real marketplace.
Trump’s instincts are right. Americans pay inflated prices, and he has confronted the industry’s excesses. But Big Pharma spent decades building cartel-level dominance. Few industries mastered regulatory capture more effectively. The pharma industry wins higher prices while concealing the system that keeps costs rising.
The industry’s tactics follow a predictable pattern. With its right hand, Big Pharma announces a partnership with the White House. With its left, it secures guaranteed government contracts, political protection, and federally promoted products. Independent analysts warn that rebate schemes encourage price hikes. The dynamic mirrors a retailer inflating list prices before Black Friday to create the illusion of deep discounts.
The federal government helps tip the scales. Regulatory frameworks favor the largest drugmakers and block smaller competitors, keeping profits high and patients in the dark.
Patients pay the price
What the industry calls reform resembles a shell game that protects profits and punishes patients. The Food and Drug Administration created an “accelerated approval” pathway to speed lifesaving treatments. In practice, the system advantages the largest corporations. A 2020 study found that increases in FDA regulations boosted sales for major firms while cutting sales for smaller companies by 2.2%. Smaller manufacturers cannot absorb substantial compliance costs, which means cheaper or more effective drugs never reach the market or arrive years late.
Patients pay the price. Follow-up studies for expedited approvals lag for years, and many drugs never show clear benefits. Harvard researchers found that nearly half of cancer drugs granted accelerated approval fail to improve survival or quality of life. The FDA withdrew one in four such drugs and confirmed substantial benefit for only 12% of the rest. The drugs generated revenue, but they offered little hope to patients who paid dearly for treatments that did not deliver.
RELATED: The hidden hospital scam driving up drug prices, coming to a state near you
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Meanwhile, prices keep climbing. Since Trump left office after his first term, cancer drug prices rose faster than Biden-era inflation. Median list prices for new medicines more than doubled between 2021 and 2024, surpassing $300,000 a year. In 2023 alone, drug companies raised prices by 35%. The Rand Corporation found that Americans spent more than $600 billion on prescriptions in 2022 — almost triple what patients in other developed nations pay.
Competition, not cronyism
Families facing cancer now shoulder thousands more out of pocket while Big Pharma posts record profits. Trump deserves credit for recognizing how unfair practices and Democrat policies pushed drug costs beyond the reach of average households.
A better path is within reach. Real reform depends on competition rather than political connections. Trump can break the illusion by opening the market, lowering barriers to entry, and cutting regulatory burdens that keep smaller firms out. He should expose the game Big Pharma has played for years and force the industry to compete in a real marketplace.
How the Senate’s phony ‘deliberation’ crushes working Americans
The United States Senate is broken, and most Americans know it — including President Donald Trump. A chamber that once passed laws with a simple 51-vote majority, a practice that held for more than a century, now demands 60 votes for nearly anything of consequence.
Defenders call this the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” guarding minority rights. In reality, the 60-vote threshold is a rule the Senate invented in the last century — and one it can discard tomorrow.
The filibuster transformed from a test of stamina into a tool for avoiding hard votes — and, today, a convenient excuse to delay or kill the America First agenda.
Article I lists exactly seven situations that require a supermajority: overriding vetoes, ratifying treaties, convicting in impeachment, expelling members, proposing constitutional amendments, and two obscure quorum rules. Passing ordinary legislation is not on the list.
The Senate’s tradition of unlimited debate — the seed of modern filibusters — wasn’t designed to create a supermajority requirement. It was an accident.
In 1806, on Aaron Burr’s suggestion that the Senate rulebook was cluttered, the chamber deleted the “previous question” motion, the mechanism the House still uses to end debate and vote. No one understood the implications at the time. Filibusters didn’t appear until the 1830s, and even then they were rare because they required real endurance. Senators had to speak nonstop, often for days, until they collapsed or yielded.
How the filibuster became a weapon
Everything changed in 1917. After 11 anti-war senators filibustered Woodrow Wilson’s bill to arm merchant ships on the eve of World War I, the public revolted. Wilson demanded action. The Senate responded by creating Rule XXII — the first cloture rule — allowing two-thirds of senators to end debate.
Instead of restraining obstruction, the rule supercharged it. For the first time, a minority didn’t need to speak until exhaustion. They only needed to threaten it. The majority now had to assemble a supermajority to progress.
The filibuster transformed from a test of stamina into a tool for avoiding hard votes — and, today, a convenient excuse to delay or kill the America First agenda.
The Senate has rewritten its filibuster rule many times since. In 1975, it lowered the cloture threshold from two-thirds to three-fifths (60 votes). In 2013, Democrats eliminated the filibuster for most presidential nominees; in 2017, Republicans applied that same exception to Supreme Court justices.
These changes all point to the same reality: The filibuster is not a sacred tradition. It is a standing rule, created and amended by simple-majority votes. The Senate can change it again any time.
The myth of ‘unprecedented change’
Filibuster defenders insist that ending the 60-vote rule would be radical.
It wouldn’t. In reality, it would restore the practice that governed the Senate for its first 128 years — unlimited debate, yes, but no supermajority threshold for passing laws.
RELATED: Democrats reject ‘current policy’ — unless it pays their base
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Defenders also claim the filibuster forces compromise. History says otherwise. The biggest legislative achievements of the last century — Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — all passed when the filibuster was weakened, bypassed, or irrelevant.
What we have now is not deliberation. It is paralysis: a rule that allows 41 senators, representing as little as 11% of the country, to veto the will of the rest. The Senate already protects small states through equal representation and long tenures. Adding a 60-vote requirement for routine governance is not what the framers intended.
The fix
The solution is straightforward. The Senate can return to simple-majority voting for legislation. It can keep unlimited debate if it wishes — but require a real talking filibuster that ends when the minority runs out of arguments or public patience. Or it can leave the system as it is now and watch President Trump’s America First agenda stall for another generation.
The filibuster is not a 230-year constitutional safeguard. It is a 108-year experiment born in 1917 — and it has failed. The Senate invented it. The Senate can un-invent it.
Giving History the Human Touch
America owes all her triumphs to the humans who crawled across battlefields, toiled in factories, blasted through mountains, sermonized on soapboxes, and experimented in labs. American history—world history—is human history more than anything. The late David McCullough understood this as well as anyone, and in the posthumous collection of his essays and speeches, History Matters, this basic idea is a consistent throughline.
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Putting Atheism on the Defensive
Academic pariah he may be, but on the big questions Charles Murray is a man of his time. Science, he believed for most of his life, had demolished the traditional notion of God. Consciousness is produced by the brain, nothing more. The Gospels are less history than folklore.
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Karp’s Quest to Save the Shire
“You’re killing my family in Palestine!” a protester screamed at Palantir CEO Alex Karp while he was addressing a Silicon Valley conference last April. “The primary source of death in Palestine,” Karp, the Jewish, half-black, progressive, tai chi practitioner shot back, without missing a beat, “is the fact that Hamas has realized there are millions and millions of useful idiots.”
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Cold War Interlude
Is there a more purely entertaining British novelist writing today than William Boyd? I doubt it, and I would even go a step further than that. Since his crowning achievement with 2002’s whole-life novel Any Human Heart, Boyd has pivoted from the witty, Evelyn Waugh-ish literary books with which he began his career to a series of period-set spy novels that focus on what it’s like to be an innocent caught up in events beyond their comprehension. From 2006’s mega-bestseller Restless to 2012’s Waiting for Sunrise, Boyd has consistently proved himself the purveyor of high-class, page-turning espionage fiction. Warmer and funnier than le Carré, less jaded than Mick Herron, his novels are page-turners par excellence.
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Six Democrats and One Trump Equal Trump Exhaustion Syndrome
WASHINGTON — Six elected beltway Democrats with backgrounds in the military or intelligence are stirring the pot with a video…
