The Glenn Beck Program
Ep 277 | Is Leftist Rage About to Become as BLOODY as the French Revolution?! | The Glenn Beck Podcast
07 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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What destroyed the French Revolution were many of the same types of voices we're hearing today. These are riots. They are people who are inebriated by rage. I think it was a miracle that saved his life, actually. People today talk like they want to kill each other. And I said, Congressman, they were actually trying to kill each other back then. That's what the Alien and Sedition Acts were.
Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on. I am, as you know, a big fan of yours. And as I said to you before the interview started, what I like about you is I get the same thing from you that I get from the Constitution, and that is you're not always on my side. That's how I know somebody's reading the Constitution the right way, is it doesn't always cut my way.
And you're an honest broker, and I've always appreciated that over the years.
Thank you so much.
You bet. I want to talk about your book, Rage in the Republic. I mean, the name kind of says it all, and it's right where we are. Why did you write the book?
Well, the book itself, coming out before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, gives us a chance to take stock of not just where we are, but who we are. And the first half of the book looks backwards. It looks at, really, what were the unique characters and actions that came together to create the most successful democracy in the history of the world?
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Chapter 2: What parallels are drawn between today's rage and the French Revolution?
I want to start at the beginning first, and then we'll get to the second half. But go ahead. The key is?
Well, the key is for us to remember who we are in this moment. And it is a lot of effort to sort of discard the U.S. Constitution and the values that brought us here. Those values are going to be the very thing that will allow us to survive this century.
So let's go back to Thomas Paine and the difference between the American-French Revolution. It's interesting to me. He was involved in both of them. Washington seemed to get it. I believe Hamilton was the other one that understood this is not the American Revolution. Jefferson didn't. Jefferson thought that it was very similar to the American Revolution.
What was it that Washington saw that Thomas Paine did not see?
Well, Paine is without question one of the most fascinating historical figures I have ever researched. He is just extraordinary. Keep in mind that when he landed in Philadelphia two years before the Declaration of Independence, he had to be carried off the ship. He was a wreck. He had failed in everything he had put his hand to, marriages, employment. He had been fired from every job he held.
And he sort of washed up on these shores. There was only one person who saw something in that wreckage, and he was Benjamin Franklin. And Franklin met Thomas Paine when he was penniless and totally out of the running of anything. And it was Benjamin Franklin that sent him to this country. Two years later, he would be called the penman of the revolution.
But where the book criticizes Paine is that he was a believer in pure democratic action, the sort of Rousseau view that the general will will produce good things. The framers didn't believe that. They believed that the greatest threat to democracies was mobocracy, was one framework called democratic despotism. That's why Madison created a constitution that protected against
Tyranny of the majority with checks and balances and shared powers. Paine didn't sign on to all of that. And when he went to France, he did not argue for those what were called precautionary measures. And it damn near killed him. He came within a very short period of being guillotined.
Yeah, I think it was a miracle that saved his life, actually. So tell me, right now you are looking at a country where you hear all the time, Democracy, democracy, democracy. And that should be cautionary to anybody who hears that. If you're preaching for a democracy, that is not what we are for a reason. And people don't believe, they believe majority rules. They believe that's important.
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Chapter 3: Why is Jonathan Turley concerned about the current political climate?
It does. And paint came to understand that, you know, I always think I'm a big film noir buff. And I remember there's a great line in a film noir movie where Fred Murray turns to the femme fatale and says, I love you so much. I only wish I liked you. And that's sort of what happens with a lot of people with pain. He died without any friends. He alienated everyone. He started fights.
But the great genius of pain is pain knew what it took to win a revolution. Madison, Madison knew what it took to create a republic. And in many ways, those two figures shaped our destiny. Paine understood in the end what Madison was talking about when he was sitting in Luxembourg prison waiting to be guillotined. He understood that.
that he advocated a unilateral system, I'm sorry, a unicameral system. He didn't like two houses. He wanted the masses to have this enhanced voice. He came to abandon that. And he came to understand that you have to control democracies if they are going to flourish. And ultimately, he was saved literally by a swinging door because he was in with a group of Belgians and he was dying.
He was very sick. And they convinced the jailer to open the door. Well, when they opened the door, you couldn't see a mark of four on the door. That was a marked place that all four of them were to be executed that night. So he was saved literally by a swinging door. Otherwise, he would have joined his other friends who were guillotined in the French Revolution.
I love that story. You know, one of the reasons why he had no friends in the end is because I think he was gravely misunderstood on Age of Reason. You know, he's trying to make a case to the French that don't believe in God, in fact, relate to God right directly to the king and government, and they're not seeing any of it. We have a letter, and I'll have to share it with you sometime.
I have a letter in Thomas Paine's own handwriting where he is writing back saying to the founders, what? Are you doing to me? I'm trying to make this case. I'm not talking about, you know, America. I clearly I saw the miracles. I mean, he is misunderstood as this this grand atheist. And he's really not doesn't believe in God the way necessarily I believe in God. But he is not an atheist at all.
No, he's not. And what's also interesting about Paine is that he was the ultimate contrarian and he was also incredibly principled. You know, he was so unpopular. He has the distinction of being tried and convicted in three countries and actually being accused of sedition in three countries.
When he came to the United States, taxi drivers wouldn't even pick him up because he was despised so much. Benjamin Franklin's daughter, as I talk about in the book, was one of his friends. And she said it would have been better if he died after he wrote Common Sense. That was one of his friends.
So it's an amazing story about this guy who always had a sense of his North Star, but he also had a sense of when he was wrong. And that's different from a lot of people. But Paine was never someone they wanted to embrace. They liked Thomas Jefferson. You know, he's tall, handsome, erudite, you know, slave owner. Paine was against slavery. They didn't like Paine.
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Chapter 4: What insights does Turley provide about Thomas Paine's influence?
So, I mean, while you can say you love the Constitution, your actions show, no, you really don't. You don't know it. You don't revere it. You don't follow it. So it's just a step down from somebody openly saying, get rid of it.
No, you're right. And that is the thing about rage, is that it gives you a license to do and say things you wouldn't otherwise do. It's addictive and it's contagious. But what people won't admit is that they like it. When you look at the streets of Minneapolis and other cities, those people like it. And it spreads.
That's what happens in these these revolutions where people are saying, let's get rid of these precautions. Let's have direct democratic rule. That's what we're really talking about here. The irony, as I point out in my book. is that the raging republic really shows over and over again that today's revolutionaries become tomorrow's reactionaries.
All of the so-called mountain, as they were called in the French Revolution, Robespierre, Marat, all of them, they were all guillotined. They were all killed in the end. And so it's why I quoted at the beginning of the book one of the few Frenchmen to survive from the revolution. And he observed that revolutions like Saturn devour their children.
And Paine himself made reference to that expression. And it has proven itself over and over again that revolution unleashes not just the best, but the worst of us. And if you don't have a system that can take those pressures, it consumes you with the rest of the world around you.
Now, that's going to be very important because the book goes into what we're looking at in the 21st century, which is unprecedented, right? With AI and robotics, we are looking at massive unemployment numbers. Even the most conservative estimates are looking at a huge population of citizens that may have to be subsidized by the government. And the book, there's a lot of research on that.
What's different about Raging in the Republic is I look at What does that mean about being a citizen? What does that mean if a large part of our population is supported entirely by the government? How does that change your relationship to the government? How do we make this republic work if we are essentially a kept citizenry? And I explore that and suggest ways that we can avoid it.
But the only way we will survive this is if we return to the principles that created us, including what I call a liberty enhancing economy, which is capitalism. People forget. that Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith came out the same year as the Declaration of Independence. And it did not go over well back in Great Britain. Its success was in the United States.
The framers immediately saw capitalism as the key economic theory to coexist with their political theory. They realized that unless people are economically free, they can never be politically free.
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Chapter 5: How does Turley compare the American and French revolutions?
He was killed after, you know, he came up with his wave. But... His, his whole thing was capitalism will, it's seasonal and it will burn itself out. It will go into winter where, where communism and socialism and all this try to take the trees and force them into growth when they have to have sleep and you have to burn out the, you know, the dead stuff.
Um, and we are headed towards a deep, deep winter and those things have to die. Um,
but you know as you point out in the book you're talking about such displacement of people um you know i've i have been john i've been talking about this for 30 years i've been warning about ai i'm a big fan of ai also a big proponent of of saying warning um because it is it's like everything it is a double-edged sword it will cut our throat or it will cut the
cut the forest down in front of us so we can expand. But I don't, you know, you get to this place to where if we're not careful, we will have a very few people making all of the money, controlling absolutely everything, and then we're kind of just sheep that have to be fed by the machine and by the elites. How do we avoid that?
You know, I talk about that in the book because I ask a question in the book that was asked by a Frenchman who went by the name of Farmer John. And he was a Frenchman who came to our shores and wrote a book that was itself a rage success in Europe. And it described what was happening in the United States. People were fascinated by these Americans. We were viewed as a type of new species.
And he asked this poignant question. He said, what then is this American? It was an honest question because we were the hottest thing of the time. We were the first Enlightenment revolution. And we have to ask ourselves again, what then is this American? Who are we? And the fact is that people came to this country. We don't have a legacy of land or shared culture. We have a legacy of ideas.
That's what makes us unique. People came here because they could reinvent themselves the way Thomas Paine did. He came here as a human wreck, as a lifetime failure, and he reinvented himself. And he said at the time when he landed that there was, quote, something special here. There is still something special here. It is who we are.
And we need to make sure that people have this ability to go through self-exploration, to become the people they want to be. And as bad as jobs are, you know, one of my grandfathers was a coal miner who got black lung in the mines. And my other grandfather was a cooper, made barrels. They didn't like their jobs. Certainly my coal mining grandfather didn't like getting black lung.
But if you asked him who he was, he'd say, I'm a coal miner. We've always been defined by what we did, by how we were productive. And we can't go into this century with a huge percentage of our population of unproductive people who have no identity because the only identity they will have then is the government that's supporting them.
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