Best of the Program | Guests: Trent McCotter & Ryan Walters | 10/16/26

Glenn Beck (0:04)

Hey, on Today's Show, we start where we started yesterday, with the banking things, but I have an update on that. And that's really important. We'll give you more next week. But we start with the banking update. What are they spying on, and can you trust the banks at all? You don't want to miss that segment. Then we also go into the flying car and Elon Musk. What? We've been promised this for a long time. It's finally here. And wait until you hear Karen chime in with, oh, it's not really an invention. Oh my gosh. And we end it with Micaela and Ricky, who are apparently attracted to swishy socialists, or socialists that just want to kill you, one of the two.

It's probably something that we should beg forgiveness for, but you might enjoy it on today's podcast.

SPEAKER_2 (1:12)

You're listening to The Best of The Glenn Beck Program.

Glenn Beck (1:20)

Alrighty, so yesterday, I told you what the banks were doing. Yesterday, I told you that the DOJ had released some information that looks like the banks were targeting people through the federal regulators. They were targeting people that were buying MAGA hats, red MAGA hats. You bought a MAGA hat, you were on a list with the federal government, and you could lose your bank account. They were tracking about 700,000 people in America. It is the worst abuse of the Constitution I have ever seen in my lifetime. And I told you, this is not something that you should care about as a conservative, or a liberal, or an independent. You should care about this because you're an American. This has got to stop because it will fall into somebody's hands, either the left or the right or the middle, it doesn't matter. Somebody who is craven for power, if this is not punished, we lose our republic and we lose it quickly. So yesterday, I told you that I have a friend, a banker friend who is a vice president with US Bank. And I called him and I got an email back from him right away. And I didn't have a chance because I was in recording all day yesterday until about six o'clock last night.

And so I didn't get a chance to talk to him. I'm going to hopefully talk to him today. I'll have more hopefully on Monday, but Ricky spoke to him and went back and forth in the email. And he said, look, consumer, this is on background. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for decades has reached out to the banks when they're investigating crimes. This happens throughout the years, hundreds of times. They warned them, subpoena records, and let them know that they need to stop activity or they will be fined. 2025, they were doing this with conservative groups, but interspersed with hundreds of other times that they reached out. Banks were not aware conservative groups were being targeted. They thought this was business as usual. In those instances, banks are told under the investigation for financial crimes. Publicized regulatory agencies using the power of government to enforce their beliefs. Banks would never be given details of the alleged crimes, but these were happening along with hundreds of other legit ones. Banks weren't catching on that it was political. And as you can imagine, things like that have strict bank policies on how to handle those to stay compliant. People doing that from the regulators, doing that in the regulators' positions should be in prison.

Okay, so that was just the quick update from my bank. And he said, please call me, and I didn't have a chance to call him. So I'm gonna get some more from them. Now, this guy, I know this guy quite well. And he is just as upset about this as I am.

Now, I wanna tell you some good news today, some really good news. But this is going to require your help. And it's gonna require the help of the banks to do it as well.

Yesterday, I told you this is about reputational risk. What is that? Well, let me tell you what it is not anymore. Despite the lack of coverage, the federal government took the word reputational risk away from those people who regulate our banks. In April, a rule went into effect. Regulators can no longer punish a bank over something called reputational risk. They can no longer pressure your bank to close your account because of your politics or your faith or your speech or any other thing that is legal that Washington doesn't like. Then in June, the Fed, the FDIC and the Comptroller of the Currency, went through their guidance on lending, risk management, even cybersecurity, and struck the term out of every federal document. They put the reason in writing. They said, quote, Reputational risk can be misused by supervisors to push banks into cutting off people and legal businesses over constitutionally protected beliefs. That is the government admitting what the government did. This is this is the answer to the cancer. Reputational risk is the idea that banks should decide who gets to be a customer based partly on what that customer may or may not believe in, and what that customer may believe might make the bank look bad. Who is it going to make it look bad to? The federal government, because the federal government says, you know what, we think carbon is really bad. We think fossil fuels are really bad. We think red hats are really bad. And so if you loan to those people, we'll punish you because that's not creating a beautiful and equitable society. All right, nobody wants their bank, you know, financing a crime ring, but these aren't crime rings, okay? A bank is supposed to judge you on questions with answers. Do you pay back the loan? Yes or no. Do you have collateral? Yes or no. You know, is your business making money? Yes or no. Show us your books. Can you prove these things in your book? Yes or no. You can't prove your reputation to somebody who has already decided they don't like you. How is the oil and gas industry going to prove their reputation to a bank when the federal government has already said, no, we don't like oil and gas? Well, I'm sorry, you may not like it, but it's legal. But as long as there's reputational risk for the bank, if the government says we don't like that, and you're gonna put your reputation at risk with us, they can find them. So there's no number, there's no standard, there's no appeal to any of this. Reputation is whatever the person holding the clipboard says it is. And when the person that is holding the clipboard is a federal examiner for the banks who can make your bank's life absolutely miserable, the bank gets the message without anybody having to write a law. And that was the genius of it. And it came from the WEF. Congress never voted to cut off gun dealers. Congress never voted to starve oil and gas. No senator stood up and said, let's make it hard for a Christian charity to keep a checking account. Nobody had to. It's run by bureaucrats. This is Woodrow Wilson's dream come true. This is the progressive way of governance. You want Marxism? This is it. You don't elect these people. You don't even know who the regulators are. You don't know whose office to call.