11 Blatant Deceptions in 17 Minutes of Air Time!

Below is Glenn Beck's 17 minute attack piece on the "One Nation" Rally called by the AFL-CIO. Glenn Beck blatantly deceives his audience 11 times. He is not merely giving his opinion but being blatantly dishonest. He lies about world history, economics, and in some instances, his own television program and rally.

It seems that websites devoted to calling him out, such as "Media Matters" and "Newshounds" are only concerned when he attacks figures in the Democratic Party. They ignore blatant factual lies, passed of as truths. The fact that most of these lies have been allowed to pass is a testament to the U.S. political spectrum of Extreme Right v. Center Left.



Section One - Obama

1.“Our President… Blames America for all the problems of the world.” Obama is hardly a radical. His speeches, though Beck must not have noticed, ooze with patriotism, “greatest country in the world”, “one nation under God”, and all kinds of rightist nationalism. Obama frequently speaks of the U.S. as a force only for good in the world, and portrays U.S. foreign policy as motivated purely by morality and charity. Beck needs to listen to Obama’s words, which oddly enough, are designed to appease people like him, however ineffectively.


2.“We already know… there are Communists around the whitehouse.” The closest thing to a Communist in the White House was Van Jones. Jones was a FORMER communist, as he had joined a small Maoist sect in college. However, since 1992 he has been merely a liberal reformer. His low-ranking post was “Green Jobs Czar”, and he simply mouthed environmentalist rhetoric in order to channel support for Obama’s policies. He was fired when Beck publicized his radical past.
Obama fired Shirley Sherrod from the Department of Agriculture simply because she was falsely accused of being “Anti-White.” These charges were disproven almost instantly.
The fact that Obama would fire a former Communist turned liberal, and a civil rights veteran on the flimsy evidence of her being “anti-white” shows that no open Marxists would ever be welcomed in the White House, regardless of Obama’s radical past.
As of yet, no “open communist” has been proven to be working within the administration. Beck’s attempts to find are foolishly limited to Van Jones, the former Maoist turned environmentalist, and a department of education worker who made a sarcastic joke about Mao Zedong.
If any open Communists existed, I am sure Beck would have pointed them out.

Section 2 – The Rallies

3. “No signs because the people who came aren’t professional agitators…” ¬– Beck himself specifically asked those attending his rally not to have signs. At the last minute, his rally was declared non-political. Some attendees brought signs anyhow. The Beck rally was simply a religious revival meeting. How does the fact that those who attended obeyed his request not to bring signs, reflect on the nature of the attendees? The various Tea Party rallies throughout the country have featured numerous signs, many comparing Obama to Hitler and invoking racist imagery. When Beck has not ordered them not to, Tea Partiers are about as “professional” in their agitation as they can get. Often their signs are printed for them by those who bus them in, organizations such as Freedomworks with large budgets of corporate funding.

4. “Many had to go…” – The idea that Labor Unions have the ability to force their membership to attend rallies is ludacris. Labor Unions have no arrest power or legal authority. No one was forced against their will to attend the Oct. 2nd rally, and no one in their right mind would make such a claim. The Unions heavily sponsored the rallies, but no coercion of any kind was used in gathering attendance to the rally. If such coercion existed, I am sure that more evidence would be presented on FOX than simply a brief quote from one unionist.


5. “Not a single wad of paper…” – The reason that the national mall was “clean” after the Beck rally, was not because its attendees were “more respectful.” It was due to the fact that the rally was heavily sponsored, and due to its massive funding from right-wing capitalists like the Koch Brothers. The results of this massive funding included the ability to hire a clean-up crew, so not as to depend on the National Park Service to clean up, as most rallies do, whether they be of the political left or right.

Section Three – U.S. Foreign Policy

6. “Do they forgive our trespasses as we have forgiven others our debts?” – The U.S. is in debt to countless foreign countries, as the Tea Party movement often likes to remind us. Furthermore, the U.S. financial institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization do not “forgive debt.” Rather these institutions lend money to impoverished countries, with strict stipulations. In Bolivia, for example, a massive revolt erupted because the government was forced by the IMF to privatize all water, and even went as far as to jail people who collected rain water on their roofs. The “debts” from U.S. foreign lending institutions are rarely if ever forgiven, and they often result in forced privatization and corporate domination of the country. In addition, the vast majority of state revenue in various impoverished countries is used to repay debt. Interestingly enough, much of the budget of state, federal, and local governments in the U.S. is used for the same purpose, such as $11 Million in the Cleveland City Budget, used to pay the banks this year.


7. “Do you think they’ll ever get off our backs and stop taking stuff from us?” – The idea that the world is “taking stuff” from the U.S. is ludacris as well. The U.S. uses far more resources than is proportional to its population. The U.S. economy is largely dependent on cheap labor from foreign countries. The U.S. invaded Iraq, and as a result now owns the rights to its oil resources. Currently efforts are being made to destabilize the Venezuelan government because it demands a fair price for the oil it exports to the U.S. All of these do not point to the people of the world “taking stuff” from the U.S., but the exact opposite. In addition, the U.S. banks are now “taking stuff” from the U.S. taxpayers in the form of bailouts. Banks also are “taking stuff” in the former of privatization of schools, public resources, etc.
The wealthy elite in the U.S. is “taking stuff” from the people around the world, and at home. Even jobs many have depended on for income are now being taken, as unemployment reaches 20%.


8. “Do you know how many young women and girls we have saved from brutal regimes…” – It was the U.S. that installed the Taliban in order to “fight communism” i.e. the People’s Democratic Party that taught women to read in Afghanistan following the 1979 Revolution. The U.S. currently supports Saudi Arabia, which is extremely oppressive of women. Within the U.S. there is one of the highest rates of rape per capita for an industrialized country.
Furthermore, in Afghanistan violence against women has not decreased since the U.S. intervened, but increased as lawlessness have ensued and Islamic war lords have been funded to “keep peace.”
In Iraq, Saddam’s government was much more open to women’s liberation than many of the various fundamentalist sects that now control sections of the country. The Baathist Regime of Saddam Hussein had various women holding public office, and was loathed by Iran as a “secular” regime. Bin Laden even engaged in war against Saddam’s Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s, because he viewed Iraq as “western” and “Marxist.”

9. “When fascism faced the world, it was the United States that defeated it…” The U.S. didn’t land at Normandy until the USSR had already turned the tide of the war at the Battle of Stalingrad. Far more Soviet Soldiers died in World War Two, and unlike the USSR, the U.S. opposed a world united front against fascism. The U.S. government barred people from supporting the Spanish Republic when it faced an internal fascist insurgency. U.S. anti-Fascists were forced to travel to Spain illegally and could be prosecuted for visiting Spain to aid the Republic.
However, U.S. corporations continued to fund the Spanish fascists, both directly, and through funneling money through Germany and Italy.
The IBM corporation designed the computer system used by the Nazis for the holocaust, and Henry Ford proudly mouthed support for Hitler on numerous occassions. The American Legion, a “patriotic” organization of Veterans made clear that it admired the Italian Fascists. A coup d’etat was plotted to overthrow Roosevelt by the “Liberty League” an free market faction of the Republican Party.
The U.S. did not enter World War Two until the Pearl Harbor attacks, and even then, it did not get involved in the European theatre of the war until the Red Army was already marching through Europe. Many former Gestapo agents were recruited in the CIA in exchange for immunity from war crimes prosecution.

Section Four – Socialism & Communism

10. “Socialism and Communism have failed everywhere they’ve ever been tried…” Cuba has the highest life expectancy and literacy in all of South and Central America, as well as the Caribbean. It has a lower infant mortality rate than the United States. Under Socialism, the Soviet Union went from a primitive agrarian system to launching the worlds first sattalites just after defeating the Nazis. China currently leads the world economically. Venezuela’s moves toward socialism have slashed poverty exponentially. This statement is utterly false, if actually examined. Beck is simply repeating a popular cliché of U.S. culture, that has no basis in fact.


11. “No one is taught about the evils of Communism…” – The only reason Beck’s previous lie is tolerated is because of the mis-education about Communism. The U.S. school system, public and private, as well as the Universities, preach anti-Communism at a high volume. The myth that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, or that Mao was a genocidal maniac is extremely rampant in U.S. society. For Beck to deny it is outrageous, especially since his nightly broadcasts are devoted to “teaching” what is supposedly “never taught.” I challenge Beck to find any news reports in mainstream media, or any mainstream school curriculum that has anything positive to say about the former Soviet Union, North Korea, or the various revolutionary regimes around the world.