Ya know, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but sometimes ya just gotta admire Glenn Beck. I mean, talk about a guy with resiliency. Here’s a guy who was ultimately found to be too batshit crazy for freakin’ FOX news fer Chrissakes! Then he starts his own outlet, “The Blaze” and within a year starts pissing off his own subscribers with his views, causing a flurry of negative comments and subscription cancellations on his site. And then, as recently as last year, he informed his staff at the Blaze that they had to start making arrangements to move their operation to Jerusalem Israel, in order to avoid “the end of days” according to this REPORT. Quite a resume.
But for a revolutionary visionary like Beck, there is always another mountain to climb, another battle to fight, and another scam to pull. This particular battle is against ignorance in the lecture halls of academia. According to an ARTICLE in Salon.com, he and his partner, alleged historian David Barton want to set the record straight on the actual, “fundamentalist Christian” history of the Founding Fathers of the United States. And these two Whack-A-Mole targets are dead serious about it;
Barton’s history is one where the Founding Fathers’ idea of government was rooted in fundamentalist Christianity, instead of Enlightenment philosophy, and one which minimizes the contributions of people of color in service of centering Christian white men as the righteous shepherds guiding everyone else. As Kyle Mantyla at Wing Watch reports, the latest move by Barton and Beck is a two-week program, at $375 a head, that will teach high school graduates their fake version of history before heading off to college so “they can then set their ignorant professors straight on the ‘real’ history of America.”
The whole aim of this street corner 3-card-monte scam (other than soaking his suckers) is to stuff college classrooms full of fledgling, fact challenged kids to fight their professors and instructors tooth and nail about verifiable historical facts. As the one with the recognizable face, along with the website and media outlet, Beck is the front man to push the goods. As he proudly proclaimed in his initial announcement to the prospective parents who were assumed to have the shekels to shell over for this nonsense;
“Your kids will be challenged to go and find the documents to make the cases that they’re most likely going to have to make in college with their professors,” Beck said in his announcement. “I guarantee you the professors at college will have the wrong answer.”
The “wrong” answers, in this case, being the actual facts about history.
I almost squirted cold water out of my nose when I read that part. Think about it. The scam is to fleece the kind of idiots who actually pay to listen to Glenn Beck to pay $375 to “educate” their kids for two weeks to bogus facts by an alleged historian, and a part of the program is library research and homework? Oh, and the $375 doesn’t include their travel, food and lodging during their “internships”. If these kids have any kind of cognitive thought, something like this could lead to a revival of the youth rebellion that led to the “peace and love” hippie days of the 60’s!
But the funny thing is that like pretty much everything about Glenn Beck, this isn’t even an original scam, that he created with a fresh thought out of his own tiny brain. The article pointed out that this is a strategy that has been used for years by Evangelical “creationists” to push the agenda of having their religious beliefs taught in public high schools, with some success. The man is nothing if not shameless.
So, for those of you who were blithely sitting around thinking that Glenn Beck had long ago faded off into total irrelevance, he’s plotting a comeback. And if he gets his way, it’s your kids that will have to listen to his claptrap in classrooms that you or them are paying through the nose for. Glenn’s a real peach, isn’t he? I highly recommend that you take the few minutes to read the original article that Salon linked to in the story (it’s in my quote from them). Some of the specifics are mind boggling!