By Seth Richardson
If you’re the author of an obscure book about American history or our Founding Fathers, the best thing that can happen to you is to get Glenn Beck’s attention. A self-proclaimed insomniac and voracious reader, Beck devours books like children devour candy. I always considered myself an avid reader, capable of finishing the latest Tom Clancy or W.E.B. Griffin thriller at a single marathon sitting, but I bow to the master. Beck appears to be able to bull his way through American history and political analysis books that only a scholar could love like a Coast Guard icebreaker bashing its way through the ice. In this, Beck is clearing a path for the rest of America, if we are only willing to follow him down the path of enlightenment.
What’s more remarkable is that his audience is adding it’s weight to the armored prow of Beck’s assault on the icy disdain and revisionism that Progressivism has foisted off on America as a substitute for factual knowledge and understanding of our history and politics.
Every time Beck recommends a book, it shoots to the top of Amazon.com and other bookseller’s best seller lists literally overnight. When Beck recommended F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” on his show on Wednesday, I immediately tried to reserve a copy at a Barnes & Noble somewhere on the Front Range. Less than an hour later, I drove 35 miles to Park Meadows, the closest outlet that had a remaining copy in stock, to pick up my copy, but my reservation hadn’t made it through, and no more copies were available. I managed to find the sole remaining copy I could locate in the Denver/Colorado Springs area at the Park Meadows Borders.
The same run on Beck-recommended books has been true every time I’ve sought out one of his recommendations. And it’s not just his recommended books. Just today, when he recommended actress Janine Turner’s new website, Constituting America, a site dedicated to educating America’s children about the Constitution and it’s true meaning and history, within minutes the website was overloaded and gaining access was delayed for more than an hour. When he mentioned that the manifesto of STORM, self-professed Communist and Obama sycophant Van Jones’ violent, radical Marxist group from the late 90s, was available on his website for download, his announcement crashed his own servers in minutes, and Beck has some really powerful servers precisely because every time he provides a resource, America races to their computers to access it.
Why is this?
Because Americans are desperate for truth, and they are hungering for the real story of America, not the Socialist/Progressive redacted and twisted version that is being taught in our schools and pandered by radicals and revolutionaries in every corner of our nation. Americans know that something is wrong with our country, but they’ve been lulled into complacency by our leaders and by our educators, many of whom are firmly in the Marxist/Socialist camp, particularly at our institutions of higher education, where our young people are most vulnerable to the propaganda and historical revisionism of Marxism and Progressivism. Academia is dominated by Leftist thinkers and outright radical Socialist professors like Weather Underground 60s bomb-thrower William Ayers, who is busily infecting public education with his Marxist radicalism from his position in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
But Beck is lancing the suppurating wound of Progressivism that has been infecting our nation for nearly a hundred years, and the light of truth is beginning to kill the infection and heal the wound. And that drives the Progressives insane with fury, so ideological hacks like Ariana Huffington and her ilk at the Huffington Post roll out the Saul Alinsky smears and ridicule to try to marginalize Beck and paint him has a hyperbolic conspiracy theorist. It’s all they can do, because they can’t refute his arguments. Not once has Beck’s red phone to the White House rung. Not once has Obama or any of his minions ever tried to rebut his well-researched arguments. Not once. That’s because Beck speaks the truth, and the liars, thieves and traitors in the White House have no way to rebut the truth.
Beck’s passion is so strong that it can lead to skepticism, and even I felt that way at first. When Beck called Woodrow Wilson one of the most evil people he knows of, and perhaps the worst President in our history, I was skeptical. I thought it was hyperbole, and that his impassioned plea to America to learn its history was hyperbole. But just to be sure, I picked up Ronald J. Pestritto’s “Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism” and forced myself to read it, and was horrified. Horrified almost beyond words.
Beck was right. Wilson was a racist of the first order, a eugenicist, and an all around arrogant intellectual SOB whose disdain for the Constitution, the Separation of Powers Doctrine, and the idea of checks and balances on government excess, are unrivaled anywhere outside of the writings of Stalin or Lenin. It was Wilson who set this nation on the path to Progressive destruction, and no matter how difficult it is to wade through all the flowery rhetoric Wilson spews about the “unified will of the people” to the truths of Wilson’s megalomaniacal desire to create an Imperial Presidency and take personal control of the entire government, you should expend the effort, because it will open your eyes to the realities of what Progressivism, and Barack Obama, have in store for America.
And then there is “A Patriot’s History of the United States,” by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. A weighty tome that rips asunder the Progressive propaganda about our history as a nation, and sets the fire of truth to the lies of contemporary historical revisionism. I learned more in my two weeks of study of this book than I did in my entire schooling, from primary education to college. I was astonished at how little I really knew about my own country and it’s founding, and at how much misinformation I had been spoon-fed by the Progressives.
And Beck’s own book “Arguing with Idiots” is full of information the radical left doesn’t want you to know about.
In every case, Beck’s recommendations are spot-on and constitute a reading list for true Americans who want to know and understand what is happening to our country, how we got were we are today, and what we once were, and must become again.
Keeping up with Beck isn’t easy, but then again liberty doesn’t come cheap, and freedom is never free. I’ve sacrificed my escapist preference for science fiction and military thrillers for night after night of digesting the hard truths that have been hidden from me, and from all of us, by those who would destroy our Republic and our way of life. I made a commitment to myself, and to my fellow Americans, to do as Glenn Beck asks, to educate myself and learn the truth, no matter how difficult it is, because that is the only path to freedom left to us short of armed rebellion. And I don’t want to have to go there.
If we fail to do the hard work of educating ourselves, of returning to the practice of seeking out the truth the hard way rather than simply swallowing and regurgitating whatever some leftist college professor or TV pundit tells us, if we refuse to engage one another with the truth in vigorous and fearless debate, if we decline to put forth the effort that is required to be well-informed citizens who are willing to demand that our children be taught the truth, not Progressive and Marxist elision and revisionism, then we deserve to lose our nation to the forces of tyranny and despotism, and we deserve to be bound in the chains of our own ignorance.
But whatever we may choose for ourselves, our children don’t deserve that fate, and it is our duty watchdog our own liberty, and that of our children.
Go to GlennBeck.com and buy every book on his list. Do it today. Then begin your reeducation out of the Marxist/Progressive propaganda that has been foisted off on all of us for the last 100 years. Nobody’s going to do it for you, and nobody says it’s easy, but the alternative is slavery and servitude for your children, and their children’s children.
© 2010 Altnews
Welcome Martin, and thank you for your comment, and for the link to your website, which I highly recommend to others.
I must say that Beck is a clown sometimes, and he’s brilliant at it. His facility for sarcasm is amazing and very effective. He is right to use every tool at his command to attract and entertain while informing, because the array of rhetorical weapons being brought against us is formidable.
Beck has read Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” and so have I. Though I am loathe to generate profit for the author’s heirs, the information Alinsky provides is important enough as a weapon for the defense of Liberty and the Republic that I strongly recommend reading it (and if you can avoid buying it, do so) and adopting some of the techniques he recommends, because we need every weapon in the arsenal right now.
I couldn’t have said this better myself. My initial thoughts on Glenn Beck were, “he’s a clown.”
However, after watching his TV show for several months I found it hard to take exception with what he was saying.
1. Pray
2. Check Facts
3. Read History and educate yourself
4. Read original sources
5. Take responsibility for yourself – be ready to help others.
So, I started reading about the history of the American Revolution. I picked up some of the books he recommended – even before he recommended them, and others that he had not.
I read Pestrito’s book on Wilson (taking it as a personal challenge – and my eyes did NOT bleed!)
I started a website on the Founders to chronicle what I learned. Then I got other people to write, too!
I’m still reading and still buying books.