In Defense of Glenn Beck

By Michael Van Der Galien at HotAir.com

Earlier today David Swindle wrote the best defense of talk show host Glenn Beck I’ve read so far. As regular readers of my own blog PoliGazette know, I’m not exactly a Beck-fan - although not an enemy either. To summarize, I have argued on several occasions that ’serious conservatives’ should tolerate Beckbut distance themselves from him publicly nonetheless.

However, David convinced me today that Beck should not merely be tolerated by conservatives but publicly celebrated.

A thorough researcher who does plenty of homework in preparation for his program, Beck has perhaps done more than any other broadcaster to make Americans keenly aware of so many vital facts that few others in the media have ever even mentioned. For instance, he has stressed the immense significance of Saul Alinsky, the late godfather of radical “community organizing” — and probably the single most formative tactical influence on Barack Obama during his years as a political neophyte.

Alinsky’s blueprint for social upheaval and revolution largely eschewed any form of confrontational defiance that might scare off or alienate ordinary Americans. Instead he stressed the need for revolutionaries to mask the extremism of their objectives and to deceitfully present themselves as moderates, until they could gain some control over the machinery of political power. No source, anywhere, offers a clearer or more comprehensive exposition of Alinsky’s tactics, and by extension of Obama’s campaign strategies, than DiscoverTheNetworks. Glenn Beck has helped bring this information to the American people, presenting it in a way that everyone can understand.

Beck also has done a magnificent job of bringing to light the vitally important, though not widely understood, Cloward-Piven strategy — a key tactic of the left.

In recent months, Beck has driven home vital revelations about so many significant people and organizations on the left: the Supreme Court Justice and promoter of ethnic politics Sonia Sotomayor; the Harvard professor and racial grievance monger Henry Louis Gates; the America-hating communist revolutionary Van Jones; the Apollo Alliance on whose board Jones sat, and whose environmental recommendations have a profound influence on President Obama; the former Weather Underground terrorist and current Apollo Alliance board member Jeff Jones; the FCC Diversity Chief who seeks to deal a death blow to conservative talk radio, Mark Lloyd; and most recently the Tides Foundation, funder of an anti-capitalist animated video that is being shown to schoolchildren across the United States.

Although there is more in David’s post - much more even - the main point can be summarized in one short sentence: without Beck, the Obama administration would not have had to deal with any controversies.

Without Beck the far left would not have been exposed.

Many would undoubtedly have liked it to be different but David is right. Beck is the only national figure willing to take on the extreme left and to prove that Obama has ties to them and may even be one of them.

That’s it; it is time for conservatives to stop criticizing Beck and to give him credit for helping the conservative movement take on the most progressive individuals ever to be in charge of the most powerful country on earth.