Glenn Beck

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.

After a lengthy opening monologue on last night's program in which he declared that "Emperor" Michael Bloomberg is the "most dangerous man in America," Glenn Beck turned his attention to the financial crisis in Cyprus and urged his audience to pull their money out of the stock market and out of the banks and start stockpiling it at home since what is happening if Cyprus "will happen here" because "it has happened before; it happened the last time the progressives tried a utopia."

Beck went on to warn his audience not to tell anyone but their immediate family that they were hoarding money because "the last thing you want to be known as is someone with cash on hand when all of the banks are closed," warning that they will "become more and more of a target" even from their "relatives who call you a joke now" because "drowning people pull others under the water":

It is no secret that Glenn Beck fancies himself as some sort of historical soothsayer capable of seeing parallels between the past and what is happening today in order to make predictions about the future.  

On last night's program, Beck proclaimed that Sen. Rand Paul's filibuster last week the modern day equivalent of Sen. Charles Sumner's 1856 "Crime against Kansas" speech, which resulted in him nearly being beaten to death on the Senate floor. Likening the criticism Paul received from Senators like Lindsey Graham and John McCain to the savage beating Sumner received, Beck went on to declare that just as the Republican Party went from nonexistence in 1854 to capturing control of Congress and the White House by 1860, Paul's filibuster would one day be seen by future historians as a watershed moment and predicting that they "will look back in a hundred years and say 'this speech ignited a global freedom movement'" that eventually won the White House.

"You were here to hear the heartbeat when the Tea Party started," Beck declared. "And last week, you witnessed the birth":

On his radio program today, Glenn Beck declared that we have witnessed "the death knell of the American Constitution" because Attorney General Eric Holder sent a letter to Sen. Rand Paul saying that there could possibly be hypothetical "extraordinary circumstance" under which it would be necessary for the President to authorize the use of military force within the United States, perhaps to stop attacks like Pearl Harbor or 9/11.

That somehow morphed into a revelation by Beck that he and his inner circle have recently come under spiritual and physical attack by the forces of darkness, which made him realize that "we're not fighting man" and "that something is on the horizon." 

"We are headed for a great depression," he went on to declare, "and we are headed for civil unrest, and we are headed for things that you never thought was possible in your country."

"Remember the Japanese internment," he continued, because "progressives and collective thinking always - hear me - always goes wrong":

Last night's Glenn Beck Program kicked off with twenty five minutes of paranoid raving from Beck about how the federal government is stockpiling armored vehicles and billions of rounds of ammunition because "they know something we don't know," by which he presumably meant that President Obama is preparing to foment a civil war.

In fact, according to Beck, these developments are part of the administration's effort to impose gun control on the nation by buying up all of the ammunition to make it impossible for American citizens to obtain any, which is itself apparently part of an even larger conspiracy to re-institute slavery: