Glenn Beck

On his radio program today, Glenn Beck continued his truly unhinged crusade against Common Core by pointing out that Exxonmobil supports it while alleging that the company is only doing so because someone in the government called in a favor and maybe even secretly promised them drilling rights for doing so.

The all-encompassing reach of Common Core has led Beck to decide that he will not allow his children to ever attend college because he will not allow them to be indoctrinated and become part of "the system that is coming." Beck then became very serious and cautious, telling his audience to "just be aware that there are many ways to mark people" and warning them to "be very careful":

• Rick Santorum says "it would be suicidal" for the Republican Party to accept marriage equality.
• Melissa Harris-Perry responds to the right-wing freakout over her MSNBC promo.
• Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania, responds to news that Sen. Bob Casey Jr. now supports gay marriage by saying that "if Bob Casey, Sr. was still alive, he would be extremely disappointed in his son."
• Judging by the fact that its website is now defunct, we are guessing that the Newt Gingrich-founded and Jim Garlow-led Renewing American Leadership effort is no more.
• Glenn Beck calls the Obamas the "most ostentatious family I've ever seen in my life."

Glenn Beck's position on the issue of marriage equality is kind of hard to figure out since he tends to wander all over the place as he vacillates between declaring that he doesn't care so it should be legal and fearing that if it does become legal, progressives will try to shut down churches that refuse to perform them.

On his radio program today, Beck delivered a typically stream-of-consciousness monologue where he touched on the topic again during which he proclaimed that "the reason [proponents of gay marriage] have won is because they've made it about freedom." 

Beck said that fighting against the principle of maximum freedom by saying that marriage has always been between one man and one woman is why opponents have lost and been painted into a corner as bigots "because the principle of it is right":

Over the last few days, Glenn Beck has become obsessed with Common Core ... and we have become obsessed with chronicling Beck's paranoid ravings about the dangers that it supposedly represents.

And every day he grows even more obsessively paranoid about it, leading him to proclaim this morning on his radio program that Common Core is "the biggest story in American history":

When you look at what they're gathering on people and the laws that they've just changed to do it; and it changes our relationship with security, it changes the relationship of families, it changes the relationship of the state with the Constitution, it changes all of education, it changes the way our children are going to be able to get jobs, whether they are going to be a serf or a lord, it changes everything.

I believe Common Core is the biggest story in American history because if you don't stop it, American history is over as you know it.

Despite the fact that we spend hours every day watching Glenn Beck's radio and television programs, we are often completely mystified by whatever "point" it is he is trying to make because ... well, the ravings of a paranoid conspiracy theorist are generally kind of hard to follow.

Case in point was last night's program where Beck warned that the government and corporations have teamed up to implement something he calls "System X' designed to turn the nation's schoolchildren into cogs in a corporate machine.

He spent a good deal of time talking about it on his radio program again today and, as best we can understand, Beck's theory is that the 2009 stimulus legislation contained $5 billion dollars designated to be given to states in support of public education, but carried a requirement that any state accepting the money must set up a "longitudinal data system." The data gathered by such a system, Beck insists, is being harvested by the federal government and stored in a massive facility in Utah and will be used by both the government and corporations to monitor every student from the time they enter school for the purpose of controlling their futures. From the moment a child enters school, his or her future will be determined and those with skills deemed valuable by the corporations will be guided into areas that serve the needs of the corporations while all the others "will be a cog in the machine forever."

Beck is particularly obsessed with page 44 of a document entitled "Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance—Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century" [PDF] put out by the Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology. In a section on "behavioral task performance," the report mentions various methods researchers have used for measuring how students respond to challenges.  Among the methods used have been some studies that employed various sensors and cameras, photos of which were included in the report:

Even though, on the very next page, the report says such devices "may not be practical for use in the classroom" and that the measurements they take are "dependent on the use of highly constrained tasks in digital learning environments, which may be difficult to translate into use in the classroom," Beck is convinced that "your kids are going to be poked and prodded like 1984" and will have wristbands and cameras attached to them so that they can be monitored at all times: 

So when you start hearing others on the Right and GOP members of Congress warning about the dangers posed by Common Core, this is what they are talking about.  And you can thank Glenn Beck.

Glenn Beck kicked off last night's program with yet another half-hour long monologue about how the world is on the verge of total chaos and collapse all because progressives today refuse to take personal responsibility for their behavior and actions ... the same way the hippies of the 1960s refused to take responsibility for stopping the Vietnam War, which gave rise to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia who killed three million people:

On the weekly "Good News Friday" episode of "WallBuilders Live" today, David Barton cited a poll supposedly showing that a majority of Americans believe that the government poses a threat to their rights and freedoms, which he suggested is a good thing because it meant that there was also a majority of citizens who would be willing to stand up and push back.

But there was also a danger, Barton warned, in that it could lead people to fear the government which, in turn, leads to conspiracy theories:

I think fear causes you to do a lot of things.  Conspiracy mentalities are a bad deal. We're told in Isaiah 8:11 not to call conspiracy everything that everybody else calls conspiracy ... The problem with conspiracy is that faith is actually fear and if you have a lot of faith, that is having fear.  Job said "that which I feared has come upon me;"  it's like having faith for bad stuff to happen.

...

A lot of times when you get a conspiratorial mentality, it causes you to act in ways that the conspiracy actually becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. So I think on the one hand, as long as we have a health skepticism of government and Washington and their ability and, actually, their efforts right now to take power, I think that that's healthy so long as it doesn't turn into fear that becomes conspiratorial and phobic which then drives us to do things that causes Washington to really come after us.

Hmmm ... maybe Barton ought to share this view with his BFF Glenn Beck the next time he appears on his program.

At the top of last night's program, before he got around to explaining how President Obama's trip to Israel is really designed to undermine Israel, Glenn Beck discussed the recent election of Pope Francis who was dubbed "The Pope of Hope" on Twitter. 

And that is just what is needed right now, Beck said, because the world is about to be set on fire because we are going to see a rise of a new Axis Powers as he predicted that within "the next five years, there will be a country in Europe that is run by the Nazis":

• LiveAction bizarrely claims that Steven Crowder's Ashley Judd rape joke at CPAC "never happened." 
• Matt Barber blasts Pastor Rob Bell's "apostasy" for supporting marriage equality.
• Bryan Fischer says "same-sex 'marriage' fails to satisfy even the companionship purpose for this most sacred of relationships."
• Keep in mind that no matter how crazy Glenn Beck gets, Sen. Rand Paul will continue to regularly appear on his program.
• And so will Gov. Rick Perry.