Glenn Beck likes to imagine himself a student of American history. He (mis)appropriates the symbols of our nation’s past to spin morality plays with lessons that he can use to infect his disciples with his mental dystrophy. He speaks a lot about the Constitution, despite his utter lack of comprehension of it. His TV program is on a recruitment drive for “Re-Founders,” presumably a reference to returning our country to a time when wealthy, white, elitists, like himself, were the only ones who could vote, and could also own slaves.
More recently, Beck has adopted the title of one of our most revered political tracts, “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine. That title on a tome with Beck’s name below it was always perversely ironic. But now, ThinkProgress has published a fascinating excerpt from another Paine tract, “Agrarian Justice.” The title alone brings to mind the movements for civil, economic and social justice – all concepts that Beck maligns as Marxism. But the specific citations noted by ThinkProgress further reveal what a fraud Beck is as an historian or a political analyst.
“It is a position not to be controverted that the earth, in its natural, cultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life proprietor with rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal.”
“[C]reate a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property. And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.”
Essentially, Paine is declaring that all people have an inherent right to the land and it’s product and profit. Those who are granted stewardship of it owe compensation to everyone else. In other words, redistribution of wealth. OMG! Beck is glorifying an avowed socialist who wasn’t even a natural born American. Beck is promoting the philosophy of an illegal alien who aspires to steal from the rich and give to the poor. Beck must therefore be complicit with this plot to destroy the country.
If Glenn Beck had Common Sense we wouldn’t have to be Arguing with this idiot.
