The Latter Day Lonesome Rhodes

Glenn Beck’s recent rally at the Lincoln Memorial was on the anniversary of MLK’s “historic” I Have a Dream speech. What strikes me about that speech is how that one line about the “content of their character” has been taken entirely out of context. The speech was a typical exploration of racial grievances and identity politics – as was Martin Luther King Jr‘s entire political life.

Glenn Beck and the rest of the mainstream conservative movement don’t have time to do their homework and don’t care to get bogged down in facts. But most importantly, they so desperately want to have some legitimate claim to the “civil rights” bandwagon that they’ll imagine one where it doesn’t exist. They’ll continue to make fools of themselves, refusing to accept that conservative Whites simply aren’t welcome in Cosmic America.

Likewise, many White Advocates make the same mistake in relation to the mainstream conservative movement. They don’t do their homework, don’t learn the facts, and hold an illusory belief that the mainstream conservative movement secretly sympathizes with their racial goals. They exhort us to stop sharing our message and climb on the mainstream conservative bandwagon, deluding themselves into thinking that Glenn Beck is a secret friend of ours who’s engaged in some kind of elaborate strategery.

He’s not.

There are three basic facts one needs to know about Glenn Beck: he’s a “dry drunk”, a tireless self-promoter, and a latter day saint. The man’s not an intellectual, but he’s not exactly a demagogue, either. He’s a true believer. Beck is bursting with the passionate zeal of a man who overcame his personal demons through rebirth in Christ. His entire shtick is about wrapping the promotion of LDS tradition in a palatable mainstream conservative package, performed in the spirit of a recovered alcoholic hosting an AA meeting.

Like Lonesome Rhodes in the classic Andy Griffith movie A Face in the Crowd, Beck has a preternatural ability to connect with ordinary White Americans. He has better instincts than O’Reilly, Hannity, and Limbaugh because he truly is an ordinary White American. The rest of them are ideologues, intellectual elites pretending to be “one of us”. With Beck, it’s sort of the opposite: an ordinary man pretending to be an ideologue. He leads from the rear of the conservative zeitgeist, patiently and persistently pulling the tea party movement toward Cleon Skousen’s Radical Americanism.

Cleon Skousen was a Mormon FBI agent and constitutional scholar who formalized and systematized the LDS tradition of American exceptionalism, embracing the U.S. Constitution as a divinely-inspired sacred text, and believing that we have a prophesied mission of saving the country when the Constitution “hangs by a thread“. His book, The 5,000 Year Leap, along with three of his other books, is required reading in Beck’s nationwide network of “9/12″ groups.

I’m also a Mormon convert and I’m also a Radical Americanist. I believe, along with Glenn Beck and Cleon Skousen, that we as a people must return to our founding documents, our founding ideals, and our founding faith. But where we depart is my recognizing that we must also return to our founding people. A nation is united by more than tradition and transcendence, it’s also united by blood and kinship. Glenn Beck exhorts us to return to the wisdom of the founders on nearly every critical issue – save for one: race.

Despite my being a poor man’s Glenn Beck, despite my having a virtually identical ideological foundation and vision for America’s future, I won’t be climbing on his bandwagon. That wagon is heading off a cliff. The entire ordeal is a tragic waste of time and energy, one that will as surely result in the demise of our people and what we cherish as doing nothing at all. Beck and his influences have fully embraced modernity and cosmopolitan universalism in this one vital way, to the point of cravenly serving a Black Marxist radical’s anti-White and anti-American agenda.