Glenn Beck has been pretty busy this weekend. After delivering the commencement speech at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Virginia, where he told the graduating class to “shoot to kill,” he jetted off to North Carolina to deliver the same message to the National Rifle Association. He began is address by appropriately greeting the crowd with a hearty “Hello gun nuts.”

It is interesting to note that Beck could barely get through a couple of paragraphs of his speech at LU without sobbing. But at the NRA he didn’t even mist up once in 45 minutes. But as always, the most interesting part of Beck’s performance is the shockingly ignorant and repulsive things he says. And the NRA speech was no exception – starting with this:

“We have to think of something, because the Titanic is going down. We need to save the passengers, that’s what we need to worry about. Let the ship sink if we have to. We have a great plan: It’s called the Constitution, and we’ll build another one.”

What a hideous notion. Does he have no conception of how many lives would be ruined were his fantasy to come true? Of course, he wouldn’t have to worry about himself because, like the Titanic, the wealthy were given priority access to the lifeboats while everyone else was locked away in steerage until the ship’s fate was sealed.

Along with his striking indifference to the suffering of others, he also affirmed his reputation as a flaming hypocrite. Beck has spent months castigating Ron Bloom, a Treasury Department advisor, for an off-hand remark (which Beck takes out of context) wherein he said that he agrees with Mao’s quote that power comes from the barrel of a gun. Well, at the NRA affair Beck said that he agrees with Mao (and Bloom) as well, and that that’s why “they” want to take your guns away.

Now that Beck has aligned himself with Mao, I’m sure we can expect him to do a week of shows about himself with blackboard illustrations tying him to radical communism. He could link it to his assertion at the NRA conference that there aren’t any Democrats anymore, they are all revolutionary Marxists. All of them. Along with media reform activists, Free Press, and your church.

On the religious front, Beck was unambiguous about the need for you to abandon your church and follow him. He declared that we have “lost faith in faith.”

“Our faith is down. Our churches are emptying. Do you know why? Because our churches don’t stand for anything anymore.”

Beck asked his audience what they still believed in. He ran down a list of institutions that he implied were no longer worthy of our trust: congress, politics, big business, capitalism, etc. Then he listed the three things that we could still believe in: each other, our troops, and cops. No mention of the church. Now if you note that his audience is a few thousand people gathered to celebrate gun ownership, then all three of Beck’s beacons of trustworthiness are armed, and two of them are enforcers of authority. What exactly is his message? He obviously values the use of force and fear over democracy.

As Beck might say, does that sound familiar? Despite his complaint early on in this speech that he is tired of being called a Nazi, that is precisely what he sounds like. And he even made excuses for the German regime by completely mischaracterizing what drove them to war:

“Now who did they blame? World War II and the fascists came in, Adolf Hitler came in, because the Germans looked at the Jewish banker. Then they also looked at, who else? Oh, France. France and Great Britain. They forced them to pay – at our bidding. We, through Woodrow Wilson said, ‘Make ’em pay. Make ’em pay.’ And France said ‘Make ’em pay.’“

So it was our fault that the Germans invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia and England and France and Russia? It was our fault that they massacred millions in cold blood? It was because of our president in cahoots with western Europeans and Jews? And Beck doesn’t want us to call him a Nazi?

To describe these ravings as lunacy and ignorance simply doesn’t go far enough. But as usual, Beck went to great lengths to glorify ignorance. That’s a position he can take with authority given that his background consists mainly of being an alcoholic, drug abusing, college dropout, who rose to fame as a morning zoo, AM radio shock-jock. But it’s not enough for him to pay tribute to the self-educated, he has to go further and denigrate those with real academic achievements:

“I’m a self-educated man, and proud of it. If you have a Harvard degree, or a law degree from Yale or Princeton, what the hell do I care? What difference does that make? I can sit down with the best of them one-on-one.”

I have no problem with an individual’s ability to acquire knowledge. And I don’t believe that a college diploma is the only measure of intellect. But neither do I disparage those who demonstrated the commitment and intellectual fortitude to endure the rigorous years of learning and testing one’s limits that occurs throughout a college career. It’s funny that Beck thinks that he could “sit down with the best of them” despite the fact that he never does so. If he did, he would be thoroughly demolished. His grasp of reason is as brittle as egg shell, and he has a severe aversion to facts. But perhaps my favorite part of Beck’s fantastical philosophical misadventures was this:

“Quite honestly, I never understood the free love, smoking dope, having sex in the mud, Woodstock hippies, then. I don’t understand them now. But that’s who’s running our country now. Personally I liked them better when they were in the mud naked having sex than running our country.”

Personally, I rather liked it better myself. However, Beck is lying when he says it, because he was five years old when Woodstock took place in 1969. How could he have understood it then? But to be fair, with his warped perspective of the world, how could he understand it now either? He has a long history of animosity toward youth. He regards them as stupid and easily manipulated. But even setting that aside, his impression that hippies grew up to take over the country is ludicrous. Hippies were a minority at the time and, while most of them did become contributing members of society, the vast majority of today’s leaders were never hippies.

This speech was another example of Beck’s failure to comprehend modern society – or reality. It incorporates his trademark idiocy with ever lower and more disgusting insults to decent people and institutions. He reaffirms his devotion to authoritarianism, militarism, and the Church of Beck. Along with his speech at Liberty University, Beck made this a weekend of extremist conservatism that is little more than warmed over Randian exaltation of selfishness. I hope he takes a couple of days off now. I’m getting nauseous.