you're a go! you got the green light. that means go! oh, yeah. start saying yes to your company's best ideas. we're gonna hit our launch date! (scream) thank you! goodbye! we help all types of businesses with money, tools and know-how to get business done. american express open. ♪ morning glory, america. i'm hugh hewitt. in a week shattered by another school mass murder and in congress the collapse of the debate centered on the 1.8 young men and women living in the country illegally but having done so for so long they really think of nothing else as home.

i will speak to steven pinker about his new book "enlightenment now." drawing a conclusion compared to that we have seen in florida and las vegas and texas last year, much less the death toll in syria and the savagery rry roh and elsewhere. democrat chris coons of delaware served in the senate from delaware since 2010. earning both his graduate in tkweupbity and law. and senator james langford from oklahoma. before being elected to the senate in 2014 served in the house. and before that he ran oklahoma's largest and most famed church camp, falls creek, where basically every oklahoman

has to spend a few weeks of their life. together they are leaders of the senate's bible study and the efforts to find a solution for the dreamers. they are co-chairs of the national prayer breakfast. and i want to start there perhaps with you senator, coops, welcome, senator langford. a week ago you had a bipartisan deal on the budget. you had carson wentz at the big prayer breakfast, and it looked like things were coming together. a week later we have a slaughter in florida and come lapse of the dreamers. one step forward and 100 steps backward. what is your mood after this swing of events? >> hugh, it is great to be on with you and my friend from oklahoma. this was a very hard day for me yesterday on the floor of the senate. we took up and failed to pass any of four different proposals that might have addressed some of the key issues in our broken immigration system. and as the father of three teenagers to witness another

massacre of this time in a high school in parkland, florida is a bitter reminder of our failure in the congress to take up and address anything that would tackle the mental health issues, the gun background check issues that americans of all backgrounds are calling out for us to talk steps to address. so i remain hopeful because of my faith and because i know that there are people of goodwill on both sides in the senate. but i'm gravely concerned, disappointed and frustrated by the impact of outside groups that have lobbied heavily against on our making progress on these issues from both sides. >>er in la senator langford, yo church camp for all of those years. i'm sure you were as deeply touched and horrified by florida as senator coops. you're both members of this bible study. when you go in next week and you sit around and talk about the fact that the senate essentially left 1.8 million kids high and

dry and hasn't done anything to address these slaughters. >> well, interesting enough, we don't talk about policy issues. we talk about our own personal faith, our families, our journey. that has become a journey for us. we develop deeper relationships that once we walk outside the door, it impacts that greatly in the honesty of conversation. honest, trustful conversation. in d.c., it is hard to find someone you can have a trustful conversation with someone and disagree. we can get a chance to sit down together, talk through the issues, say here's where i'm coming from and be able to hear each other, not just talk at each other. that makes a world of difference. and you're right. someone who worked for more than 20 years, my passion has been teenagers. i have kids that are teenagers. it is a very impactful day to see any time that you see a school shooting. many of the schools have greatly

advanced their own security there with locking doors, limited access systems. this will be another evaluation for that. we have talked about mental health that congress has passed things on memory health and dramatically increased funding for mental health. but this will continue to be an issue. now the story is coming out for this particular individual in florida it is once more that same issue again. we have to address not only how we handle our own families and communities and school security, but we have to continue to be able to handle how we treat each other to work through hard things together. >> senator coops, i talked to secretary devos thursday on my radio show, attorney general sessions on on i from. they both supported the idea of hearings, guns, the dark web, 64,000 people dying of fentanyl and opioid abuse, and slaught issers at school.

at what point does kopbgz convene as a whole and ask what the heck is going on with this country? >> you ask a great question, hugh. one of the things we need is strong bipartisan hearings in the united states senate. one of the coolings we faced this past week in trying to come to a resolution on border security and the status of dreamers and other immigration issues is that we hadn't had hearings in the relevant committees. the judiciary committee on which i serve, homeland security committee, hasn't had a whole series to lay out the challenges and issues. and so in some ways it was left to senators like senator lankford and myself to dig into some of the proposals, the challenges, accusations by folks pro and con on these bills and try to understand them. senator durbin, senator menendez have been engaged on these issues for a very long time. but the majority of current

serving senators don't have deep knowledge about what it would mean to secure our southern border, about what it would mean to really provide a pathway to citizenship for dreamers. and so a lot of our conversations in the bipartisan working group that senator lankford and i were part of is to help get caught up to what the issues are. in your conversations with the attorney general, secretary of education, i think they do correctly raise that we should be having more hearings in the senate so we can, in a thoughtful way, address the addiction crisis rolling throughout our country, tearing up families, and come up with responsible bipartisan proposals for how we can tackle gun violence. you know, because of amedvocacye don't even have federally funding research to what is causing gun violence in our country and how we can provide some meaningful interventions around the intersection of

mental health problems and gun violence. i do think these things need study, hearings. more than anything, we need to take action. >> senator lankford, what happened on the dreamers? i thought president trump made a generous offer not only regularization but a road to citizenship for 1.8 million people, far more than were enrolled in daca. i thought the cost of $25 billion up front was reasonable. why in the world did this collapse when it appears to be so close to getting across the goal? >> i do think it's close. let me back up to one quick thing chris was saying. i agree we need hearings. but the issue of race relations and violence and mental health and taking care of our neighbors is ultimately not a government issue. it is a family and neighbor issue. if our churches and our communities and nonprofits and neighbors taking care of neighbors, if we can't look up and help people around us, there is nothing government can do to pass enough laws to be able to actually take care of what's

happening in our society. so society's issues first begin with society as a whole. and that's taking care of our families and our communities and churches in that engagement. that will be a prime issue we have to push to people. passing one more law is not going to fix all of society. it is us engaging with each other. the president put an incredibly gracious offer on the table and one that was a middle ground piece. they put to go a proposal. we tried to be able to do that as well to hear all sides. for some people just getting a chance to read through it and to be able to go through it and to see what's there rather than what the headlines are about it i think would make a difference. my hope is now that we have been through a failed vote is series with four different sets of votes, everyone will finally sit down and be is serious and say let's look at all of these issues and find an area of common ground. i don't thinkeer that far away on some of these issues.

>> senator coons, do you agree with that? if you bring up against, you have to bring up mental health, dark web, opioid. all of these toxins. any way to advance the dreamers on this this spring? >> first, let me appreciate the cost spirit with which senator lankford proposed these but present a slightly different view on what the votes on the floor last night meant. only one thing got 60 votes, and that was a bipartisan rejection of the bill president trump endorsed as being too extreme. that bill got 39 in favor, 60 votes against. of the four border states that are represented by eight senators, only one senator supported the grassley/cotton bill. the bipartisan compromise bill that senator rounds and king advanced got 54 votes. and i believe had the president

not been actively lobbying against them and threatening to veto it, it would have gotten 60 votes. it was a compromise. yes, the president's generous offer to see a way to citizenship for 1.8 million dreamers was embraced. but so was full, robust funding for border security. the bill did not fully address some of the president's additional concerns about changing family migration, about changing diversity visa, and what i think the president should have accepted was that deal on border security and dreamer path waugh to citizenship and then challenged a bipartisan group of us to go to the next phase and to tackle high-skilled immigration, family migration, diversity visa status, temporary protected status. there are so many other issues that we had six months to tackle. i think we could make progress.

but i wish the president heard yesterday. >> as i understand it, it wasn't full funded. a promise of additional funding down the road, which most of us are skeptical about. am i hearing that wrong? >> senior coons is correct, $2.5 billion a year for the next 10 years and a mechanism to try to make sure it was funded. what was missing was all the rest of border security. a wall won't fix the problem. a wall won't solve it. yesterday, was, okay we will give you a wall but not the rest of the border security that's there. what's interesting is the issues of family migration, those have been in before. the gang of eight bill in 2013, both of those were there. they led a major study on immigration in the 1990s. she made recommendations back in the 1990s about family migration. these are not new issues. the issues have been around a long time.

we have a 20-year backlog of people trying to legally come into the country. if we add another 2 million, which i believe we should as citizens, ten years out from now, the family backlog gets even bigger. i hope we're at halftime through these negotiations. even is taking time to cool off, and we reengage and get it done. >> i hope if that happens you are at the forefront. come back and keep me posted on msnbc. thank you both. i'll be back with steve pinker. i'm hugh hewitt. stay tuned. only preservision areds 2 has the exact nutrient formula recommended by the national eye institute to help reduce the risk of progression of moderate to advanced amd backed by 15 years of clinical studies. that's why i fight. because it's my vision. preservision. sometthat's when he needs the way ovicks vaporub.'s sleep. that's why i fight. proven cough medicine. with 8 hours of vapors.

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♪ welcome back. i'm hugh hewitt. you can hear me monday through friday on salem radio network. saturday mornings i'm here on kwpbz. time for a change of pace with

rock star harvard professor steven pinker. he is best known for "the better angels of our nature." his friendship with bill gates. or a 2007 talk with millions of views. author of a brand-new best seller "enlightenment now." the case for humanism, science and progress. welcome, mr. pinker. back in my days they taught the meaning of life course. how did you get into the job doing that? >> well, i teach introductory psychology. i stumbled across data showing that rates of homicide have fallen by a factor of 35 since the middle ages. that just stunned me. like most people, i assumed violence was getting worse and worse. the more i looked at data on how often people harm each other, the more i came across graphs showing rates have come down in 70 years. rates of violence against women,

rates of vince against children. as long as the rate doesn't go to zero, there are always enough incidents to fill the news. unless you look at the graphs, you can't appreciate how much progress we have made. as if that wasn't enough of a pleasant surprise, i then discovered that measures of other aspects of human well-being like how long we live, how many people die of disease, how many starve. all measures show there has been enormous improvement. you can't read about it because there's never a thursday in october in which papers run a story that says global poverty fell by 180,000 yesterday. they could have run that every day for the last 30 years. >> the late futuristic roman chuan said 90% spent their money on bread. but if we could i want to go to

the most controversial line i could find. "enlightenment now" you say few sophisticated people today profess a belief in heaven and hell, the literal truth of the bible, on or a god who throughouts the law of physics. you just heard senator coon s&l a t and lankford. are they sophisticated people? >> not in that respect. in scientific reality the last several centuries. reports of miracles turn out to be false memories and tall tales and carney tricks. there are no pheurbmiracles. >> in a book you want to sell people on optimistic, you're aggressively anticipate-religion.

i've had professor dawkins. i debated the new atheists. i'm not furious with them, just curious. why go after human flourishing? >> it is not against religion. it is certainly against the belief that god interferes with the laws of the universe and by praying to him we can make the world better. i think that is a dangerous belief because it's not true. if we want to make the world better, we have to figure out how to do it ourselves. if we want to cure ourselves, we have to come up with vaccines and not prayer. if we want to stave off global warming, we can't assume god won't let bad things happen. religious institutions themselves have evolved and become more humanistic and less likely to invoke miracles and the laws of the bible to justify what's right. that's why religions moved toward greater racial toll answer, gender equity.

religions like other institutions have been affected by enlightenment, in a good way. >> as an objective matter, though, if you write about few sophisticated people believe in a god who defies the laws of nature, isn't it likely that fewer people will listen to you and less inclined to take any of your heedings if there's a lot of good news as well as bad news in addition to the constant stories out of florida where we have a massacre or syria where 800,000 are dead or the hoe rohingya genocide. and the reality of genocide and the rise of weapons on of mass destruction. >> yes. all of which cast doubt on the idea that there is a shepherd who looks out for human welfare. what was the ben nephew lent shepherd doing while the

teenager was massacring his classmates? i don't look to win popularity contests. some of which leaders will agree with. some will disagree with. i assume readers have enough sophistication to value different propositions. even if they do reject the whole thing, i'm not going to bend the most accurate picture of reality just to make leaders feel better. and i really do think if we want to make humans better off we can't assume there is a god that let's the laws of physics and biology. that is a sincere believe. it is not dising religious believers. religious institutions can do a great deal of good. but if you're counting on god to make the world a better place you are probably going to make the world a worse place, and we saw that yesterday. >> i want to get to your argument about the role of media on the internet. does it have any chance, professor pinker?

>> yes. . obviously the media have a responsibility to report on what's going wrong, to report on suffering and injustice. but they also have a responsibility to report on what's going right. even if it doesn't result in an event on a thursday. because otherwise people can become cynical and fatalistic. they can think why try to make the world a better place if it just gets worse and worse no matter what we do. oren tkors radical solutions. smash the machine. the society is in such a disaster that anything would be better than what we have now. and people take for granted institutions like democratic governments, the rule of law, science. >> we're out of town. thank you for joining me. the book is called "enlightenment now." i'll be right back. ♪

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good morning, everyone. i'm alex wilt here at msnbc world headquarters in new york at the half hour. new reaction from president trump's national security adviser to the special counsel's indictment, this at a security conference in munich this morning, appearing to break with the president by conceding russian meddling in the u.s. election. >> we would love to have a cyber dialogue when russia is sincere about curtailing its