2014 Values Voter Summit: How Glenn Beck is incredibly wrong
The Glenn Beck speech at the 2014 Values Voter Summit was very good and worth watching—which can be seen below. There is a lot he said correctly—especially regarding Sykes-Picot agreement. I was one of the first to cover that origin of trouble in the Middle East and if members of Beck’s staff passed it along to Glenn Beck to report—well, that’s why I write this stuff—to educate and help people understand the world around them. It doesn’t hurt my feelings if Beck takes his big platform and expands it. Click here to review my article on the matter. It is the key to understanding the trouble and politics of the Middle East. The rest of Glenn Beck’s speech was good as well and worth witnessing. I agree with most of what he said, but in some parts of it he is vehemently wrong. In those portions his life as a former addict crosses over into the realm of strategy and his advice is bad. Specifically, it is in his self-sacrificial calls to surrender thought to God and to embrace Christen passivity in the face of evil. Like many people who have found God late in life to redeem their self-destructive paths people like Beck fill their lives with scripture to plug the holes that were formed through drug and alcohol abuse. It’s a survival mechanism that works better than personal and social destruction. But for confronting evil, strategically, Christ is not the example and the kind of passivity Glenn Beck talks about in his speech will get a lot of people hurt, and or, dead. So let’s explore the correct position below after watching the speech.
I understand that Glenn Beck is under tremendous media pressure to avoid being called a rebel rouser and is taking the Martin Luther King approach to solving problems when confronting evil. Well—Martin Luther King ended up dead—killed by his rivals. Beck also talked about Jesus, for many of the same reasons and suggested that Judas was frustrated with Jesus and his lack of ability to rally the troops against the Romans—which is why Judas betrayed Jesus. Well, Jesus and his passivity caused him to be killed—assassinated as a religious rival to the power held in Jerusalem. Beck and his utterances about Christ’s passivity obviously has not listened to the popular church song, “Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War” which invokes a bit of battle balled. Passivity of religion rolled over into politics will end your movement before it ever begins and sparks for rebellion is necessary if there are hopes of overcoming evil. God will not come down from Heaven and break down the walls of Jericho to the sounding of trumpets and slay the enemies of King David through simple prayer. Such things require action to square off against evil and to conquer it as it presents itself.
Without Sam Adams, his cousin John would have never been the second President of the United States. The American Revolution would have never happened. Without Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson would have been just another former European styled intellectual pointing out what should be as opposed to what was. Without a rebel rouser, action against the enemy does not happen. In his speech Glenn Beck brought up the criminal Barabus who was picked by the mob to save instead of Jesus. Beck stated that the angry mob in Jerusalem wanted a rebel rouser to spark rebellion and Jesus just wasn’t that type of person to perform the task, so they picked Barabus whom history would have otherwise only remembered as a harmless, petty inciter against the vile institutionalism of the day. However, it was the pressure from the mob that caused the Romans to even put in place a system of providing a choice to their subjects to take the edge off their tyranny. Without the aggressive pressure of people like Barabus—the Romans would just slaughter anyone who disagreed with their power. Because the Romans feared an uprising against them, they put in place mechanisms to appease the mob—just as what happens to this very day especially during elections.
Praying to God in front of an armed thug who wants to destroy you and everything you stand for will only get you dead. Trusting in God to save your soul from evil might get you into the gates of Heaven, but it will destroy life on earth for you and all that you love. Passivity is not the answer—aggression is. The bad guys need to know that the mob is angry and that at any moment some rebel rouser will shout “let’s get them!” The only messages such villains understand is force—unapologetic force at that. It is nice if that force is backed by a value system represented by Christians or some other religion of value, but passivity toward aggression cannot be a plan for expanding goodness in the face of evil. That is just dreadfully empowering for those who favor aggression and blind power over those who are easy targets.
The current role that America has in the world shows this—the foreign policy of those raised as peaceful Muslims—like Barack Obama in the country of his education Indonesia—has a hands off pacifist behavior that is also characteristic of the modern liberals and libertarians who think that they can smoke a joint and offer the peace sign to a radical terrorist and all will be well—that God will just sort it all out. They are insanely wrong. Religion is only good for a relationship to the after world and establishing some foundation beliefs that can build a civilization. But it will not provide good advice on how to deal with an aggressor.
I’ve never been a pacifist. I learned martial arts at a young age and learned how to make myself invincible from a one on one attack through blocking techniques. You can’t guarantee that you will always win in such matches with the opposition, but you can force a stalemate by not allowing their force to overcome you. This has been a very successful position, and I’ve had many people—most of them bigger and stronger try to impose their will over the years—and they have not succeeded even after nearly five decades. I’ve been in a lot of fights from young to old, the most recent one was actually a few years ago in front of several Butler County police officers which took place in the Hamilton Court House parking garage. When confronted with vile evil, God won’t swoop in to help you. You have to help yourself and confront it directly. They have to know that if they make a move against you, or the things you care about—that you will pummel them. That is the only way to achieve peace without being the victim of slaughter. I’ve never been a drug user or a person who uses evasion techniques to avoid thinking—so have never had a need to turn to God to fill holes in my background. I have always acted upon the moral appraisal that my mind produces based on the conditions of the world around me. So I can speak from experience, pacifism feeds aggression against goodness, it doesn’t make it go away.
It took several hundred years after the death of Jesus for Christianity to begin taking hold. In the meantime, many innocent people were murdered and lives were destroyed needlessly because mankind was too willing to surrender their life on earth for a perceived entry into the afterlife. This allowed evil to manifest on earth and rule the planet for the last several thousand years. And it was a stupid strategy that was supported by people like Glenn Beck over the years who get their messages mixed up—on one hand they stand aghast at the depravity of the world but then think that the situation will be solved by putting trust into God without any direct action taken by the victims of violence. God made evil as well as the good, and places them into the battlefield of life for purposes yet defined. However, in that transaction, goodness cannot yield to villainy and pacifistic behavior will not lead to victory for Christians. When you see the actions of a bully, you have to be willing to look that bully in the face and destroy it if needed—and you can’t hesitate—you have to be willing to turn evil into a pretzel if need be and to end its life on earth if the situation calls for it.
As a person who has looked directly into the eyes of evil for many years and challenged it with force of my own, I can report that pacifist behavior feeds them leading to violence not avoidance. I once confronted evil by taking on the entire police department of a local city who was using their power to sell drugs to kids through a local school. The police gained these drugs through raids and instead of the evidence sitting on the shelves in a FBI lab somewhere, the cops were selling it back on the streets for extra cash—and everyone knew about it, including the mayor at the time. How do you dear reader think that confrontation went? Praying to God certainly didn’t help. Many of those same cops were influential in the local churches, and gave a lot of money to the donation plates. That evil had to be confronted directly—and it was. I’m still around—many of them aren’t. So who does God favor? Does God favor the meek and weak, or the one who will spit down the throat of evil when pressed? My experience tells me that God does help, but only when evil is confronted by the good—not yielded to. Many of those police officers referred ended up destroyed by car accidents or health ailments within a few short years so fate does play out to some extent, but in my experience, meekness leads to the destruction of good, not the furtherance of it.
It is also in my experience that disguised behind the sermons of peace are people generally afraid of confronting evil, and they use the excuse that God is the ultimate mitigation of justice to avoid needed confrontations. Born again Christians are particularly of this type as they must believe that their sins from the past will be rewarded through meekness toward God, by surrendering their lives to ancient provocation. It is easy to do such a thing and still appear to be tough in standing against evil—without actually having to perform the task. But it doesn’t work. Evil must be confronted. You have to be willing to look it in the eye and beat it down. Without such a position, evil grows through embolden observation of pacifism. Glenn Beck says a lot of things that are right, but on the issues of aggression and the inevitable confrontations with evil, his past taints his strategic thinking for the future. And his opinions about tactics against aggression by mixing religion with observed thinking is wrong.
Rich Hoffman
