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Chapter 1: What is the main theme of JD Vance's book 'Communion'?
Also, I think we're at a turning point in our nation. Should we choose to accept it, Mr. Phelps? should you and your team choose to accept it. We're hearing a lot of great things about America from Europeans who are visiting America. And I went through all of them.
We have to restore the belief in America that this is worth saving, that it's unique, that it's different, that it's special, that it's worth saving. And I think we can do that today. And I show you the path on that. And then the other thing we have to do is restore our story and our education on what our country, how it's actually built. Why was it built?
And we do that through our Summer of Education at torch250.com. We talk a little bit about that on today's show. And finally, a plot against the UFC fight at the White House. It was just revealed today. Several people are under investigation. Some have been arrested, but it was a bombing event. shooting plot that is absolutely terrifying and shows this is no longer a lone wolf situation.
This one would have had to be planned and trained for, and they were moving in, and thank God the FBI and DOJ caught them in time. But this comes with a warning. When you're afraid, you will give up freedoms.
Chapter 2: How does JD Vance reconcile his faith with political challenges?
And I have to tell you, If we make it to election day without a major thing happening, then God has truly blessed us. If something major happens, our government will grow in size and people will rush to anyone who will say, I'll keep you safe. We mustn't do that. So weaponization of government is also on the list. You're going to hear the full show, get the full three-hour show.
I think you get it in about two hours and 15 minutes. But this is the highly edited version, just so you can have a daily consumption of everything you need to know.
Here's the podcast. You're listening to The Best of the Glenn Beck Program.
Hello, America. Welcome to the Glenn Beck Program. It is Tuesday. I want to get right to our guest, because it is the Vice President of the United States. It's J.D. Vance.
I've got to talk to him about many, many things, but he has a new book out called Communion, Finding My Way Back to Faith, which I think is a very important book at this time, especially even if you're just trying to understand the Vice President, who may become our next President of the United States, at least we'll be running for it.
um and uh and also the times in which we live we'll get to that um and the iranian things here in just a minute let me introduce the 50th vice president of the united states jd vance and his new book communion finding my way back to faith jd um you and i when i'm reading your book um We have an awful lot in common. Your mother, I'm a big fan of Hillbilly Elegy. I mean, what an amazing story.
Your mother was an addict. My mother was an addict. Your mom had a happy ending. My mom did not.
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Chapter 3: What are the complexities of negotiating with Iran according to JD Vance?
Your father, you were estranged when you died. It was a lot more severe than mine. I was estranged with my father when he died. And there was so many... So many things that add complexities to your life when you go through all of that. And I hope we have a chance to have a longer interview to kind of get into that.
But I want to start with a part of the book where you talk about where you committed to Christ. You were in a cathedral and you noticed that everything was kind of falling apart. The whole world was falling apart and you committed. Can you talk a little bit about the moment you chose to commit?
Yeah, Glenn. So this is back in the summer of, I think, 2018. And if you remember the time was, you know, I eventually became a baptized Catholic and very bad time for the Catholic Church. There was a very bad sex abuse scandal that was getting reported on in Pennsylvania. And, you know, there was just this sense that, yeah, I was curious in Christ.
Chapter 4: What insights does JD Vance provide about America's cultural perception during the FIFA World Cup?
I was curious about Christianity, but I wasn't yet ready to commit. And I was there with my son, actually. I was in this cathedral. It was beautiful. It was completely empty. And I felt this kind of sense of despair at first because, you know, no one was there. And this beautiful old church, no one was there. There was nobody praying. It felt almost lifeless.
And then there was just this beautiful sort of ray of light that came through the stained glass windows. And it was the perfect time of day to where, you know, you could see the dust and the light. And I just, I felt this sense, it's difficult to explain.
I'm not saying it's rational, but I felt this sense that, you know, yes, the church is going through a tough spot, but things are going to be okay. And I belong here.
And that was sort of the moment that I decided, you know what, for all of my belly aching and back and forth and here are the reasons why to do it and not to do it, like this is my home and I'm going to try to make this home as successful as possible and contribute as much as I can. And that's what I did. That was the moment I made the decision.
Okay, so that seems like a commitment to the church. Is that the same as the moment to follow Christ? Did that come first and then the commitment to the church, or are they the same thing to you?
Well, I would say that the decision to follow Christ was gradual. I was raised in sort of an unchurched but very devout household. My grandmother would take us to church every now and then, but not regularly. I didn't feel like I had a church home.
And so I became, as a teenager, sort of an early 20s kid, like a lot of kids who were raised in that background, but weren't properly formed in a real faith community, sort of an arrogant atheist. I was one of these people who thought that I knew better, and I went about trying to achieve every marker of worldly success. I wanted to go to the best schools, and I wanted to have the best job.
I wanted to make the most money. I wanted something prestigious to hang my hat on. And I kind of got to this point where I had won all of these elite competitions.
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Chapter 5: How does Glenn Beck warn against government overreach in times of fear?
I was at Yale Law School. Things were going very well for me personally. And I was kind of looking around and saying, you know what? Those people that I dismissed as simpletons, they're much happier and much healthier and much more interesting people than the elite crew that I seem to be joining. And if they have something that's kind of anchoring them,
Maybe there's something deeper to what's going on here. Maybe the inspiration for their character and their wisdom is this Jesus Christ figure that I'd kind of discarded. And so that was not like a conversion on the road to Damascus. That was me slowly seeing reflections of Christian truth in the way that various Christians live their lives and the way that they raise their families.
And over time, I just started to think, you know what, there's something real here. And then when you decide that there's something real here, then I think I wanted to give my family what I didn't have as a kid, which is a real formation, like an actual church community.
And I kind of, you know, experimented with different churches and went to a number of different places and eventually, you know, found a home and a church that we love. And that's kind of where we are today.
You, your story is just absolutely, you're one of the most fascinating guys I think alive today. Your story is just fascinating. You talk in the book about Peter Thiel and you wrote, Peter gave voice to something I'd been feeling, but not fully understood. I was obsessed with achievement per se, not accomplishing something meaningful, but to win a social competition.
I think that's what you just addressed. People will say your relationship with Peter Thiel is all about high tech. Some uncharitably will say that, you know, he funded your campaign. And so you're going to usher in a new, you know, high tech oligarchy, but it seems that your relationship is more spiritual. Is that, was that accurate reading in this?
So one of the things that happened, so Peter was a friend of mine before we sort of ever were talking about politics. But one of the things, and by the way, Peter's a very unorthodox Christian. I want to be fair on that account. He has very unconventional views about a whole host of things. Sometimes I disagree with him. Sometimes I agree with him.
But what Peter sort of almost gave me permission is that I was in law school. I was calling myself an atheist at the time.
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Chapter 6: What historical context does Glenn Beck provide on the weaponization of government?
And, you know, he came and gave a talk and he talked more about spirituality and religion than he did about business or politics. And I sort of realized like, whether you agree or disagree with this guy, his Christianity is much more interesting than the atheism of the people that I see surrounding me. Like there's something there that I'd kind of dismissed as a kid.
And that started me down, again, this way of sort of re-exploring and rediscovering my own faith. But, you know, definitely, you know, seeing this guy who was smarter than anybody I had met, who was obviously very wealthy, very successful, sort of realizing that this idea that I had in my head that Christianity was for superstitious people, and atheism was for smart people.
And that was the categorization that I had made falsely. And there were a lot of people, Peter was one of them, but there were a lot of people who slowly over time revealed that to be fundamentally an arrogance that was deeply corrosive to my own soul.
You are in a religion and a political party, I think, that is hard to square at times because of the Pope. You and Marco, you have things you have to do as the vice president of the United States, your foreign policy objectives in Iran, the Pope is against the you know, what you have to do on immigration. You view it one way, he views it another way.
Even now, I mean, the press is even saying, you know, the fraud task force initiative is, you know, an attempt, again, just to target Somalis. How do you thread that needle with a pope, a guy who seems to not appreciate what you believe politically, and yet he's your spiritual leader?
Well, I'd say a couple things. First of all, I think this is true of sort of all Christianity, is you have certain people who are going to disagree politically with what me or the president or Secretary Rubio or anybody else does, and they're going to try to say you're not being Christian enough.
And one interesting thing is that often those criticisms are made by people who say, I don't believe in Jesus, but you're not being Christian enough, which I always roll my eyes at a little bit. Now, obviously, that's not true of the Pope. The Pope is explicitly the leader of the Catholic Church. I'll say two things about the Pope, Glenn. So the first is that
Oftentimes, I find that when the media reports on him as an antagonist of Donald Trump or as somebody who just rejects wholesale everything that Donald Trump says, and then I'll read what he actually says, and I realize... The Pope does sometimes have disagreements, but he's actually much more nuanced and much more subtle than what the media gives him credit for.
They want to play up the conflict, but even on the immigration issue, yes, he's criticized some of the policy directions that we've taken, but he's also said it's right for a nation to have borders, that newcomers have a duty to integrate into their host cultures. Those are things I very much agree with.
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Chapter 7: What parallels does Glenn Beck draw between past and present government actions?
I thought it was communism. I was like, oh, he's going to write a book on communism. And it's communion is the name of the book, not communism. At a time when the vice president you know, should be talking about communism, et cetera, et cetera. That's the obvious thought. Why is it important that you wrote a book on Communion?
well because one i i obviously had a very complicated but i think in some ways a very common way to finding my own faith where i was raised christian fell away from it and came back to it i mean now i think a lot and i think a lot of christian parents are asking themselves the question why is it that we or how you know maybe they've raised a kid who's fallen away from the faith or maybe they're raising children in the faith and they're sort of thinking about why why didn't that stick
Or how do I make it stick so that they don't have the same journey that I did? I think there are a lot of people, especially in the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination, who are thinking about spirituality, who are going back to church. We see a lot of young people in particular who are returning to church. But maybe like me, they didn't have the proper formation.
And so I thought that this was... something important that I wanted to say. It's obviously not a very political book. It's not a conventional politician's book. It's not like I have the eight-point policy proposal in the final chapter to solve all the problems. But I just thought it was something that was valuable and meaningful to say.
I've been writing this book for 10 years, and I kind of had this moment of, well, I'm either going to publish it now, or I'm never going to publish this thing. So I might as well just get it out there, say what I need to say. And obviously, you know, people are going to take from it what they will. But the one thing I'd ask, Glenn, is that If you find it meaningful, great.
But I think that there are so many different pathways to Christ. And I think, you know, for some people it's, the Pentecostal church that my dad called home. For some people, it's the Southern Baptist church that a lot of my friends call home.
I think what's really cool and dynamic about American Christianity is that we're sort of forced to reckon with a lot of very complicated issues because our faith is constantly being challenged, both by non-Christians, but also, I think, importantly, by our fellow Christians who are asking very important questions about the meaning and nature of God.
That's what I love about the American church, and that's one of the things that I hope to contribute to in some small way.
So I have to ask you a couple of questions on Iran.
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Chapter 8: How can Americans unite in the face of fear and division?
We are supposedly, we have now apparently electronically signed a peace deal. We don't know what is in it yet. You've come out and said some of the things are wrong that are being said. How do you negotiate with an apocalyptic end times 12-er regime?
And what makes you confident that we can, as the president has said on the outset, get no support for proxies, end of the missile program, and no nukes? Do we have those? And how do you lock them in with, to be honest, crazy people that think they're living in the end times?
Let me say a few things about this. First of all, Glenn, you know, the president is, I mean, one of the most important lessons that he's given me in international negotiation or anything is you don't trust anybody. I don't trust the words. I don't trust the commitments that they have committed to stop funding terrorism and to stop, you know, building or buying a nuclear weapon.
Those commitments are there, but I trust people's actions. And so the way that we set up that deal, given the president's directives, is if they perform the things that they say they're going to perform correctly, then they get a lot of relief. And if they don't perform any of those things, then they get nothing. And for the United States, either way, Glenn, we're in a great position.
They don't get one cent of American money regardless of how this deal takes place. They don't get any sanctions relief unless they perform. But we got the Straits of Hormuz open. Oil is now down below $80 today. We have their military still destroyed, their defense industrial base still destroyed. their nuclear program still destroyed.
And now the president's saying, you know what, if you want to behave like a normal country, we're going to treat you like a normal country. And if not, the United States still has all the cards, and there's no skin off our back for entering into this negotiation.
And no support for proxies, end of the missile program, and no nukes for sure.
Correct, Glenn. And if they don't do that, then they don't get any of the benefits of the bargain. And that's really the whole point here is I keep on sort of hearing people say, well, the Iranians get this or the Iranians get that.
And they miss out the part where the Iranians get some sanctions relief, you know, the ability to sell their oil, for example, if they do what they promised they would do. That's the fundamental point of this deal is we reward good behavior. We don't do anything if the Iranians don't meet their end of the bargain.
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