I Think I See What Glenn Beck is Doing

[On August 28, 2010, a peaceful rally of grass-roots conservatives, touted as the Restoring Honor rally, was conducted by Glenn Beck. Attendance estimates range from 300,000 to 1,600,000. Glenn later said "I think this is the only guy that really gets it," speaking of the following blog post. -- KJK]

The Glenn Beck rally is confusing people.

Why?

He is aiming far beyond what most people consider to be the goalposts.

Using Boyd’s continuum for war: Material, Intellectual, Moral.

Analogously for political change: Elections, Institutions, Culture.

Beck sees correctly that the Conservative movement had only limited success because it was good at level 1, for a while, weak on level 2, and barely touched level 3. Talk Radio and the Tea Party are level 3 phenomena, popular outbreaks, which are blowing back into politics.

Someone who asks what the rally has to do with the 2010 election is missing the point.

Beck is building solidarity and cultural confidence in America, its Constitution, its military heritage, its freedom. This is a vision that is despised by the people who have long held the commanding heights of the culture. But is obviously alive and kicking.

Beck is creating positive themes of unity and patriotism and freedom and independence which are above mere political or policy choices, but not irrelevant to them. Political and policy choices rest on a foundation of philosophy, culture, self-image, ideals, religion. Change the foundation, and the rest will flow from that. Defeat the enemy on that plane, and any merely tactical defeat will always be reversible.

Beck is unabashed that God can be invoked in public places by citizens, who vote and assemble and speak and freely exercise their religion. They are supposed to be too browbeaten to do this. Gathering hundreds of thousands of them to peaceably assemble shows they are not. But showing that the people who believe in God and practice their religion are fellow-citizens who share political and economic values with majorities of Americans is a critical step. The idea that these people are an American Taliban is laughable, but showing that fact to the world — and to potential political allies who are not religious — is critical.

Beck is attacking the enemy at the foundations of their power, their claim to race as a permanent trump card, their claim to the Civil Rights movement as a permanent model to constantly be transforming a perpetually unjust society.

He is nuking out the foundations of the opposition’s moral preeminence, the very thing I proposed in this post.

Ronald Reagan said we would not defeat Communism, we would transcend it.

Beck is aiming to have America do the same thing to its decaying class of Overlords, transcend them.

Beck is prepping the battlefield for a generation-long battle.

He is that very American thing: A practical visionary.

See, simple.

Restore pride and confidence to your own side, and win the long game.

As Ronald Reagan also said, there are simple solutions, just no easy solutions.

God bless America.

-- Lexington Green's blog on chicagoboyz.net, 8/31/10

America in pain

The biggest political change in my lifetime is that Americans no longer assume that their children will have it better than they did. This is a huge break with the past, with assumptions and traditions that shaped us.

... But it isn't pessimism, really, it's a kind of tough knowingness, combined, in most cases, with a daily, personal commitment to keep plugging.

... When the adults of a great nation feel long-term pessimism, it only makes matters worse when those in authority take actions that reveal their detachment from the concerns — even from the essential nature — of their fellow citizens. And it makes those citizens feel powerless.

Inner pessimism and powerlessness: That is a dangerous combination.

-- Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal, 8/6/10

Change? Audacity? You got that right!

During his entire first term, Carter's record doesn't touch the Obama administration's record in its first year and a half. Obama has already tacitly OK'd the Iranian nuclear program and derided Israel's nuclear program. He has allowed Iranian protestors to be slaughtered in the streets without so much as a peep for days on end. Obama has allowed the Russians to sponsor an uprising in Kyrgyzstan that resulted in the removal of a U.S. airbase. He has lent legitimacy to an Islamist Turkish government and sold American debt to a communist Chinese government that supports North Korea. He has presided over the largest oil spill in world history in the Gulf of Mexico and spent his efforts blaming everyone but himself.

He's poised to raise our taxes at the end of the year. He's pushing for comprehensive "immigration reform" that will really act as an amnesty for illegal immigrants. He has denigrated Arizona before Mexico, bowed before the king of Saudi Arabia and the Chinese president and the Japanese emperor, hugged a Venezuelan quasi-dictator, and undermined a constitutional uprising in Honduras. He has pushed carbon taxes and gas taxes and estate taxes. He has propped up unfit mortgage borrowers and penalized those who pay their mortgage on time. He has bailed out his buddies in the banking industry and nationalized the auto and health industries for the benefit of his union friends.

He has insulted the Cambridge police and defended Muslim terrorists like Maj. Nidal Hassan. He has utilized advisers who are Marxists (former Green Jobs Czar Van Jones), anti-Semites (foreign policy adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, special adviser Samantha Power, National Security Adviser Adm. James Jones), racists (Attorney General Eric Holder), sycophantic pro-Islamists (Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan), kooks (Director of White House Office of Science and Technology John Holdren), perverts (Safe Schools Czar Kevin Jennings), and paid thugs (Rahm Emanuel).

When Obama took office, the national debt was just under $10 trillion. Now it is $12 trillion, and by 2015, it will be at least $19.6 trillion. Unemployment under Obama increased to 9.7 percent, up from 7.6 percent when Bush left office. The inflation rate has yet to explode, but most economists believe it will have to unless Obama drastically raises taxes, destroying the economy even further.

Carter can't touch this guy.

-- Ben Shapiro, townhall.com, 6/16/10

Shared sovereignty isn't sovereignty

Now, for Americans, sovereignty is not an abstract concept. ... We understand very well that under our constitution, sovereignty is vested in us, in America. It's not the government that's sovereign. It's the people who are sovereign. So when you hear people say, "Well, you know, problems today are really global in nature and therefore, you need global solutions and what we need to do is to share sovereignty or to pool sovereignty," what they are saying indirectly to Americans is, "You have too much control over your own government and you need to give some of it up to Germans and Chinese and South Africans and all the other members of the United Nations."

I think since most Americans think we don't have enough control over our own government, the last thing we want to do is give what we have up in whole or in part. And I think it's important, as you look at a range of issues that are being discussed, some in Congress, some in international organizations covering a huge diversity of subjects, from the idea of international fees and taxes for banks that would fund international regulatory activities to the Law of the Sea Treaty, which the administration is trying yet again to get through Congress that would fund an international authority from revenues, royalties of deep-sea mining, to any of a variety of other things, including issues like gun control, the death penalty, family issues, that the tendency to put more and more of these issues into international negotiations is a tendency that we should resist because it is ultimately destructive of our liberties. -- John Bolton, The First Post-American President and American Sovereignty, 5/18/10

ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzz

If you lose Massachusetts and that's not a wake-up call, there's no hope of waking up. -- Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN)

Dot-to-dot

Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Muammar Qaddafi and Vladimir Putin have all praised Barack Obama. When enemies of freedom and democracy praise your president, what are you to think? When you add to this Barack Obama's many previous years of associations and alliances with people who hate America-- Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Father Pfleger, etc.-- at what point do you stop denying the obvious and start to connect the dots? -- Thomas Sowell, 10/7/09

The right to pay for mistakes or not

In reality, what is called "the market" consists of human beings making their own choices at their own cost. What is called "social justice" is government imposition of the notions of third parties, who pay no price for being wrong. -- Thomas Sowell, 10/7/09

Laughless

The left does not understand humor. -- Don Wade

By any other name

Today's leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from Nazism. However, there's little or no distinction between Nazism and socialism. Even the word Nazi is short for National Socialist German Workers Party. The origins of the unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the '20s, '30s and '40s. Those horrors were simply the end result of long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the quest for "social justice."It was decent but misguided earlier generations of Germans, like many of today's Americans, who would have cringed at the thought of genocide, who built the Trojan horse for Hitler to take over. -- Walter E. Williams, 10/7/09