Best of the Program | Guest: Vinnie Penn | 6/2/26

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
As the Crispy Chicken Sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:05)
And I'm like, yeah, I know.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:06)
I'm crispy.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
Did you expect me to whisper?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:09)
If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:11)
Look, I know I'm a handful.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:13)
I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal. And with seven rewards, I'm just $4.

**Glenn Beck** (0:20)
Quiet, no.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:21)
Crispy, saucy, and $4?
Very. Only at 7-Eleven. Valued through 6-23-26. Participating stores only while supplies last see out for full terms.

**Glenn Beck** (0:31)
So today, I actually had to say Bernie Sanders is right. I mean, not really, not really. I mean, he's kind of right. He's about a quarter of, he's 25 percent right on something. And I could identify what it is, and I do. He just proposed some AI madness, madness about the government taking over 50 percent of all of the AI companies. It's madness. But he's right on one thing. You did build this. So how do we solve what's coming? Really fascinating conversation. Also more on Platner and the race in California. There's just so much we have to get to today. This is the best of. If you want to hear the whole thing, just go to glenbeck.com/torch or wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the full three-hour podcast, but this is the best of Tuesday.
All right, I want to talk to you about one word, and this one word describes almost every argument we are actually having in America. And you'll understand how that works out here in just a minute. But let me give you that one word that is the actual argument for everything. The one word is mine.
Let me explain.
This has not hit your kitchen table yet, but it will. Please hear me, this will. And if you don't deal with it now, you will be in panic and the Bernie Sanders of the world are going to give you something that is dressed up in the prettiest language you've ever heard. You want to date that pretty thing like nobody's business. It's all about artificial intelligence, and it's about your data. And underneath all of it is one question, who owns the future? In the next couple of days, I want to talk to you about energy and these data centers. But I want to talk to you first about what Bernie Sanders said. Now, Bernie Sanders, and I'll give him credit where credit is due. The guy doesn't have a problem. You know, he took his honeymoon over in the former Soviet Union when it was still the scary Soviet Union. So I mean, he doesn't have a problem telling you exactly who he is. And he just told us his plan, and he's calling it the American Sovereign Wealth Fund Act. Wow, like a patriot act? Now, I happen to speak, you know, political bullcrap. So let me translate what that actually means. The government he's proposing will take a one time 50% cut of the biggest AI companies in America. Open AI, Anthropic, all of them, okay? And here's the really clever part. He doesn't want it paid in cash. He wants it paid in stock. He wants Washington to own half the company. I warn you, this is going to come from the Progressive Republicans as well. We have to say no to this every time. Now, he's pairing this with what he calls a robot tax built on a report out of his own Senate committee warning that AI could wipe out nearly 100 million American jobs in the next 10 years, and that's going to happen. So he wants to fix this in a very generous way because, quote, technology belongs to everyone, wealth belongs to everyone, the future belongs to everyone. Wow, sounds like just a hug from Bernie Sanders. Until you ask the one question that nobody really ever wants you to ask. Bernie, when you say everyone, who is everyone? Now watch, because this is where socialists always have a sleight of hand trick. Every time a politician says, everyone, watch their hands, because everyone always turns into a committee or a board or a fund. A handful of people in a building in Washington making decisions for 350 million people who will never know their names. It's the collective, it's the masses, it's the people. And history is stacked with people who claim to speak for the people right until the moment they were deciding everything for each of us and then executing those who didn't go along with the plan. Now, I'm not going to say that that's Bernie Sanders. I'm not going to call him a fascist. I think calling everybody a fascist or labels is pretty lazy unless they deserve it. Honestly, half the people who throw fascists around couldn't define it if you spotted them the first three letters. So I want to be precise on what fascism is because precision is a strong weapon. The danger here is never goose-stepping soldiers, okay? That's a cartoon. The real danger is always much quieter. It's structural and it shows up in every system that has ever gone wrong. It's when people who create value get separated from the value they create. Now, there's lots of ways to define fascism, and most people want to make fascism just about nationalism and anti-Semitism. But that doesn't help on anything. What is that? Fascism is an actual economic system and one the progressives loved until Hitler. Communism is a system where the state owns the mean of production. Okay, so they own all of the factories and everything else. Doesn't work. Fascism also doesn't work, but it works better than communism. And that's where the state partners with corporations and owners. That's it. That's the whole disease in one sentence. When it is socialism or fascism or communism, the rule is the same. The state becomes the owner or a part owner, and the referee, and the player all at once. And when that happens, you don't get a fairer game. You get a rigged game. It doesn't matter what flag is flying over or what label you want to give it. It doesn't matter what it's called in the textbook. Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist. Fine, I'll take him at his word, okay? But the mechanism he's describing, Washington holding the stock, Washington steering the harvest, that's the dangerous part you need to watch, not the label, the machine that he wants to build.