by Glenn Beck
The mountain we now feel was no mistake. It is here by design. In the late 1800s, the Germans were thought to be leading the “modern world” in science and education. The true educational elites went to university, mainly Heidelberg in Germany, where all kinds new “scientific” thought was being taught. Marxism, socialism, collectivism, evolution, and eugenics. By 1900, the Constitution and certainly the Declaration of Independence looked to men like Princeton professor Woodrow Wilson like an outdated and irrelevant missive sent from the past with no connection to the here and now. Wilson, who attended Johns Hopkins University, modeled directly after the university in Heidelberg as the “model progressive university in America,” was a racist who found the new science of eugenics as the solution the Civil War and Reconstruction failed to provide to his liking. His father was the founder of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, and while he hated his father, in many ways he, as the president of Princeton and president of the United States, achieved many things his father could not have even dreamed of.
The progressives knew they had to do two things if they were to achieve this new system run by technocrats: discredit the founding documents and transform the university system into a tool of indoctrination. Wilson’s words in 1909 were clear: “The purpose of a university should be to make a son as unlike his father as possible . . . as every man of established success is dangerous to [the new] society.”
At first communism was the model, and then in the 1920s Fascism came into style. Remember, this was before over 100 million were killed by the fascists and, primarily, by the communists. It might be more helpful to use the word “technocracy” as what progressives saw as the new model. It called for a strong man who could wield the power of the state quickly and efficiently. After all, what good was a government if it could not steer the power of its people and industry for the good of the central plan? The difference between this new European “left and right” really boiled down to one question: Are we globalists or nationalists? Communism in Russia and China and National Socialism in Italy and Germany in the end produced socialist states with absolute power invested in a strong man. The real divide in Europe was the workers of the world versus the workers of Germany, Italy, or Spain. Here in the U.S., the debate was whether in the end the world would be run by a UN-style body or the state would run the world from D.C., because our money and our might told the world “we could.” For many in D.C. and across the country, this is still the argument. Generally speaking, Republicans want to run the world using U.S. military might, while the Democrats want to give the state’s power to an international body.
The real answer is the United States is not, nor should it ever be, either of those things. We had a wholly new idea. That “governments are instituted among men for the purpose of protecting the rights of the people.” Even suggesting a technocracy shows a contempt for or, at the very least, a fundamental misunderstanding of what made America different in the first place. Let England forever search for the Holy Grail of a benevolent king, like Arthur. We, instead, would allow each citizen to rule his or her own life and property and answer to no king other than his God. This, we thought, was the best way to keep wicked rulers, kings, religious autocrats, and, later, dictators from taking control here.
Just a few days after the czar was overthrown, Woodrow Wilson praised it as a “glorious revolution,” saying: “Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia? The autocracy now has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have been added in all their naïve majesty and might to the forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit partner for a league of honor.” Wilson and his party saw the Soviet model as the future, but they needed to get there without revolution. Luckily for our freedom, Wilson suffered a stroke a year before the end of his second term. He had been planning to run for a third term, the first president to do so.
He had moved too quickly; his policies, racism, and global governance were frightening to the American people. The next election, the people moved back toward personal freedom. Over the next eight years, the federal budget was cut by more than half, as were taxes. People were once again unleashed to create and explore. The result was the Roaring Twenties.
But in the halls of government and academia, the battle of communism or fascism as the new model continued. In fact, it took a new and dangerous turn. When Edward Bernays began the Council of Foreign Relations, its stated goal was to bring these three new branches of government together: government officials, university elites, and members of the press. Here the press would be taught what the future was to look like so they could “teach the people.” Remember, this was before fascism and communism had been discredited by millions of dead. Bernays called this “teaching” propaganda. Later, he would refer to it simply as “advertising.”
The love of a giant state didn’t begin or end with Wilson. Many who served with him went on to powerful positions. Stuart Chase, who was in Wilson’s FTC and helped Upton Sinclair in his bogus “investigations” of the meat-packing industry, later traveled to the Soviet Union with members of the first American trade union delegation and was the coauthor of a book that praised Soviet experiments in agricultural and social management—the same experiments and management that starved millions. In 1932, Chase wrote A New Deal, which became identified with the economic programs of FDR.
During the 1932–33 Holodomor, the man-made famine-genocide in the Ukraine, as many as 12 million people died over two years. The New York Times, through its reporter Walter Duranty, acted as the propaganda arm for Stalin. “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine,” he wrote in a dispatch from Moscow in March of 1933. “But—to put it brutally—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” He won the Pulitzer Prize that year. The combination of nationalism and socialism, along with some private ownership, being practiced in Germany and Italy was appealing to the progressives as well. Mussolini became the poster child for the new scientific system of government. American elites loved this new fascism. It was the model for the New Deal.
The Nazi press enthusiastically hailed the early New Deal measures: America, like the Reich, had decisively broken with the “uninhibited frenzy of market speculation.” The Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, stressed “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,” praising the president’s style of leadership as being compatible with Hitler’s own dictatorial “Führerprinzip.”
Nor was Hitler himself lacking in praise for his American counterpart. He told American ambassador William Dodd that he was “in accord with the president in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the president places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan ‘The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual’ ” (Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch).
After Roosevelt established the National Recovery Administration, the agency produced a report for the White House detailing its strategy, stating boldly, “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.”
Fortunately, reality is a relentless jurist, and by the end of the war, both communism and fascism had been discredited.
* * *
Later, Stuart Chase, in his book After the War, began to outline what the U.S. government would eventually look like. With just a few significant exceptions, the United States is almost entirely that state now. It is clearly a fascist or “technocratic” state, controlling banking, energy, transportation, communications, health care, and welfare, and, while allowing
for private ownership, imposing heavy regulations on all industry and business. It has stated goals of “getting off the gold standard,” to run our budgets and not ever-expanding deficits, and to become a debtor nation rather than a lending nation. In the same book, Chase claimed that this system was now inevitable, as all the pieces had been put in place and nothing could stop it. In an effort to distance this from the Italian, German, or Soviet model, he wrote that this extra-constitutional system was “unnameable,” as it wasn’t quite fascist or communist. He therefore called it “system X.” It is 90 percent of America today. We now merely need to wait for the benevolent “technocrat” to flip the final switch in our inevitable time of national crisis.
The biggest reason we could no longer truly “go our separate ways” was due to one of the worst rulings of the Supreme Court, Wickard v. Filburn. An Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn, was growing wheat to feed animals on his own farm. The federal government had established limits on wheat production, based on the acreage owned by a farmer, to stabilize wheat prices and supplies. Filburn grew more than the limit that he was permitted and so was ordered to pay a penalty.
In response, he said that because his wheat was not sold, it could not be regulated as commerce, let alone “interstate” commerce (described in the Constitution as “Commerce . . . among the several states”).
The Supreme Court disagreed: “Whether the subject of the regulation in question was ‘production,’ ‘consumption,’ or ‘marketing’ is, therefore, not material for purposes of deciding the question of federal power before us. . . . But even if appellee’s activity be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as ‘direct’ or ‘indirect.’ ”
This one ruling changed us forever, although very few Americans realized it at the time. It gave the federal government control in all areas of our life no matter how big or small. Who would have thought that a ruling about a rural farmer growing wheat for his own livestock would have been the basis for the 1965 Gun Control Act? And yet there it is: The “indirect” impact of guns being manufactured and sold locally gives the federal government the authority to dictate how Americans are allowed to defend their own lives and property.
I believe that this is “the unnamed mountain” that divides us. Part of the strain we are feeling is the breakdown of the system, as we are now at the point of final choosing. We either return to what we were designed to be or take the final step toward “system X.” What I find so distressing is the fact that today’s citizens don’t seem to have a problem with what a party or a president does—for instance, keeping children in cages on the border, using warrantless wiretaps on U.S. citizens, allowing the NSA to gather information, or adding to our national debt, now to the tune of ONE TRILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. Instead, each side, it seems, has a problem only when it is done by anyone but “their guy.” This is a society ready for a dictator. The only questions that remain are: What is the crisis that pushes the people to cry out for the top to come down? Which side finally grabs control? And what do they do to the other half of the country that disagrees?
So many are telling us now that they just want to “burn the whole system down.” But do they even know the system? Do they know that what our Founders set forth has not been reflected for decades? If you still want to “burn it down,” then what? Replace it with what? Who is in charge, how does it work? This is a hope for anarchy and chaos.
If we lose what little we have left, we will regret it. Believe me, I know.
Once I sobered up, I wanted to shed it all. Get rid of the car and nice watch. Anything that I had purchased to make me feel like I was a successful big shot. I was about to donate everything I had to charity and live without all of the trappings. My wife convinced me I would regret it and that I should not do that. She made a very compelling case that someday I would look back and wish I still had it. She was right. She took most of it in the divorce, and I do “wish I still had it.”
We need to recognize what we have and really evaluate its merits before we throw it out.
We are so precariously close to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There is so much good here; the problem is, we don’t even know what it is anymore.
Ask the average American to explain our system of government. What is the role of government? What is its primary job? It might as well be magic. How did it come to be? This last July Fourth, I saw a man-on-the-street poll where they were asking, “What do we celebrate on July Fourth?” About half answered with a self-conscious giggle that signaled “I don’t know for sure, but . . . independence.” It was all downhill from there. Independence from whom? Only two people had that answer. “Do you know where the Declaration of Independence was signed?” One said Boston. Most had no idea. The only one who answered correctly—Philadelphia—was a Russian tourist who had been in the country for only a day. By the way, what made this even more painful was that the questions were asked on the sidewalk in front of Independence Hall.
Americans don’t know; they just “know” that it isn’t working. But if you have no idea how your car is supposed to work, when it breaks down, let your wife bring the car to the mechanic or you stand a very good chance of paying over $1,000 to replace your “displaced defibrillator.” Unless the people educate themselves and lead the way, those who are not our better angels will “fix it” for us at a cost that none of us are going to be willing to pay.
Only one in a thousand Americans can now list the freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment, yet this is the amendment most Americans mean when they say “I’ve got rights.” At that pace, it isn’t just the defibrillator, but it looks as if the water coolant injection system for the brakes may have gone out as well.
There are thoughtful people, like President Obama, who have a problem with our system of government because it is based on a charter of negative liberties rather than positive liberties. For instance, if you look at the Soviet Marxist Constitution, it is a charter of positive liberties—or, in other words, the things that the state MUST do. But if we have no knowledge of our system of government or what the Bill of Rights is, let alone why it enumerates negative liberties, we are a society just looking for someone to be our “daddy” and tell us that everything will be okay.
So, just for fun, let’s dive into this a bit. The Soviet Constitution included a series of civil and political rights. It also granted social and economic rights not provided by constitutions in some capitalist countries. Among these were the rights to work, rest and leisure, health protection, care in old age and sickness, housing, education, and cultural benefits. Today, I believe you could sell this system to much of America. You could even call it the Constitution from the Old Soviet Republic, and, because we are so historically illiterate, I believe it just might be voted in with record numbers. People love “free stuff,” but as always, free stuff comes with a price.
The Soviet Constitution outlined limitations on political rights; Article 6 effectively eliminated partisan opposition and division within government by granting to the Communist Party the power to lead and guide society.
Article 39 enabled the government to prohibit any activities it considered detrimental by stating, “Enjoyment of the rights and freedoms of citizens must not be to the detriment of the interests of society or the state.”
The government did not treat as inalienable those political and socioeconomic rights the Constitution granted to the people. Citizens enjoyed rights only when the exercise of those rights did not interfere with the interests of the state, and the CPSU alone had the power and authority to determine policies for the government and society.
For example, the right to freedom of expression contained in Article 52 could be suspended if the exercise of that freedom failed to be in accord with party policies. In other words, speech that wa
s not politically correct. Freedom of expression did not entail the right to criticize the government. The Constitution did provide a “freedom of conscience, that is, the right to profess or not to profess any religion, and to conduct religious worship or atheistic propaganda.” It prohibited incitement of hatred or hostility on religious grounds.
The Constitution also failed to provide political and judicial mechanisms for the protection of rights. Neither did the people have a higher authority within the government to which to appeal when they believed their rights had been violated. The Supreme Court had no power to ensure that constitutional rights were observed by legislation or were respected by the rest of the government.
The people also had POSITIVE RIGHTS, or things and duties they MUST perform.
Article 59 of the Constitution stated that citizens’ exercising of their rights was inseparable from performance of their duties. Articles 60 through 69 defined these duties. Citizens were required to work and to observe labor discipline. The legal code labeled evasion of work “parasitism” and provided punishment for this crime. The Constitution also obliged citizens to protect socialist property and oppose corruption. Violation of this duty was considered “a betrayal of the motherland and the gravest of crimes.” Finally, the Constitution required parents to train their children for socially useful work and to raise them as worthy members of socialist society.
Laws also specified that citizens could not freely renounce their citizenship. Citizens were required to apply for permission to do so from the president of the Supreme Soviet, who could reject the application if the applicant had not completed military service, had judicial duties, or was responsible for family dependents. In other words, the Soviet state was Hotel California: You can check in, but you can never leave.
