Addicted to Outrage

by Glenn Beck

  The real circle of life doesn’t happen in Disney movies, it happens on a farm. You didn’t need sex ed or birds-and-bees speeches, because you saw your bull try to get lucky all day long. Death, life, the meaning of the earth, and how everything is used with no waste. You understand compassion, having to kill an animal that is in pain, or finding and rescuing the one lost lamb as I and my kids did a couple of summers ago. We chased and chased, on foot, on horseback, and by ATV. We are, after all, “city slickers.” We must have looked like idiots. When we caught her and put her in the pen, the kids had a new understanding of a father’s love and how sometimes you have to do things that the “kid” doesn’t want to do or thinks are bad, but it is only because they don’t understand or see the bigger picture. There is just something real about the people in a farming town. When something happens, they deal with it and move on. While we are missing that in the cities, our farming neighbors in Idaho remind us what real people are like.

  Recently we were driving along near the ranch, and up ahead of us a woman hit a deer with her car. We stopped to see if we could help. She was in her thirties, wearing a dress, and got out to check on the animal and the damage to her vehicle. “Poor little thing,” she said, and retrieved a rifle from her trunk to put the deer out of its misery. Then she promptly phoned her husband to come get the carcass, stating simply, “No reason to waste good meat.”

  Our community is very nice. They don’t judge or laugh at us, that we know of. I am sure they have had plenty of laughs at our “NYC” ranch ways, but to be fair, I would do the same; and in fact, no one can wreck our family more than our own family. We are hysterical, especially when we don’t think we are. They may laugh, but they amaze us.

  We have a caretaker who works on our ranch. One day while he was putting the biggest bolt I have ever seen through three huge logs that are at the front gate, the bolt snapped and split his head open. While I would have called for some sort of air rescue, he just said “Crap.” When I saw him still working on the gate as I returned home late in the afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice the giant, bloody bandage. As he told me the story that resulted in thirty stitches, I told him to go home and rest. He said, “Naw, I have too much to do.” I asked him what the doctor had told him. He said, “Well, driving to town and back was going to take way too much time and I still had numerous chores to get done before dark, so I just drove down to the vet and had him stitch it up instead.” Some other neighbors were out deer hunting—rifles, orange vests, the whole bit. While walking through a field they came upon a deer that had gotten tangled up and stuck in some barbed wire and mud from a downed fence. As they approached, the deer thrashed about wildly trying to escape, but was trapped. The three men put down their rifles, got out some pliers, and began to try to cut the animal loose. The deer kicked and bit at them as they worked, trying to hold the animal still and cut the wires loose. By the time they freed the animal, they were all covered in bruises, cuts, and scrapes. As the deer bounded away, it turned back to them and snorted, then disappeared into the brush, leaving the men cold and bloody behind them. One neighbor smiled at me and said, “Guess we had that coming.”

  When we first built the house in the mountains, we wanted it to feel like my grandfather’s old home. All of the furniture was secondhand except for a few pieces. One of them was a black bearskin rug. When a few of the guys from town were up, one of them said, “Wow, nice bear.” Well, me still living full-time in NYC and not fully prepared for this conversation, I said, “You know, I am not really sure, but I think our designer got it at a place called Good Old Things in Manhattan.” The entire room stopped, and one of the other guys said, perplexed: “You bought it . . . at a store?” They have yet to return my man card.

  We love our little town. It reminds me of all of the people I grew up with who would do anything for you at any time, day or night. There is a section of town lovingly called “Snob Hill.” The houses are smaller, much smaller than anything for blocks in every direction in my neighborhood in Dallas. Don’t get me wrong—we love our house in Dallas. Yet we now pine for the twelve hundred square feet of our home in the mountains. Simple, quiet. There’s this old 1968 Admiral TV in the living room where the kids lie on the floor, like I used to do when I was a kid. I found myself saying “Kids, back up from the TV.” I threw in the cancer thing, too, even though I know that is a huge lie—I think.

  You even begin to appreciate—some—bugs. Allergies and honey. You even understand the why and miracle of natural forest fires. How even the burning down of a forest in the natural world, from lightning strikes and so on, actually is good for the soil and forest in the long run. And little things like the saying “When the cows come home.” Actually, it isn’t that long. It’s about eight to ten hours at my ranch. Now my kids look at me when I say I could do this until the cows come home and respond, “So, really, not that long, huh, Dad?”

  The city is great, but we all should spend some time in my little farming town. Or some little farming town. It is where my kids and I have learned a ton about life.

  The one thing I have learned by spending our time in a very small community in Idaho, where I raise cattle and grow alfalfa and wheat, is how easy it is to remain grounded. Think about that word. People say “They’re very grounded,” meaning someone is stable, consistent, rational. You’re connected to the very stuff of life (and death) on a farm or a ranch. You’re connected to your community, to neighbors, to nature in a visceral, immediate way. It’s also massively humbling. Mistakes are easy to make and consequential, often resulting in bloody cuts, bruises, or work that must be repeated from the beginning.

  Mucking out a stable stinks; manure is heavy and cumbersome to work with. But results are immediate, and the sense of achievement is somehow extremely rewarding. Growing a field of hay takes patient, consistent work over long periods of time. It is stressful. You pray for rain and that the frost won’t kill young shoots. But feeding hay you’ve grown to your own cows and horses is beyond joyous and rewarding. I could do without the yearly pregnancy check where someone who has only one sleeve on his shirts has to spend the afternoon with his arm up the cow’s rear end while I have to buy them drinks.

  Jefferson, when helping to design the justice system, was adamant that the jury box must not be filled with eggheads but rather with average people and farmers. I get it now. All of nature’s laws are explained and taught to your children through the circle of life witnessed daily on every farm. But what is more, farmers still have to rely on God. They are connected, as a matter of life and death, to nature. They can be the best, smartest farmer in the world, but should the rain not come, or should too much rain come, their crops are destroyed. They also are more willing to help their neighbors when their crops fail, as they know it is only a matter of time before they are in the same condition. It is almost a community with a natural understanding of unspoken community insurance.

  Part of the reason we have the Electoral College is to protect farmers and ranchers. It was designed to help ensure the populous cities and towns wouldn’t end up as a ruling elite class over the rural peasants. But it’s important, because our connection to the earth is vital. What is more humbling online than being publicly shamed? In a city, eating at restaurants and zipping around on electric scooters we don’t even own, we can become so disconnected from the reality of human existence on this earth, how fragile it is. The farther we are from the hard work of survival, understanding where our food comes from, understanding the cost in blood, sweat, and tears of raising, caring for, and slaughtering an animal to nourish your family and neighbors, the more likely we are to take it all for granted.

  Spending time working side by side with my son, driving new posts into the ground for the fence line, never would seem like something fun—and, believe me, it is not fun-type fun—but the things like that, I think even at thirteen he would say have provided us with the best father-son time and lots of laughs.

  A major motivating factor fo
r Jefferson in deciding to make the Louisiana Purchase was his vision that Americans needed to be connected to the land. He dreamed of a connected, community-oriented agrarian society of farmers and ranchers, growing food and raising livestock, tilling the soil. Deeply connected to the process of life-affirming work, never losing sight of the value of hard work and the reality of the laws of physics, biology, chemistry, and geology that it takes to keep a person and a nation alive.

  Ever wonder why postmodernism isn’t very popular in “flyover” country, or why humanities professors at Berkeley don’t drive pickup trucks? The professor probably doesn’t have much use for a truck . . . and postmodernism ain’t much use in the real world.

  As we moved out of the communities where our families used to live, we grew farther apart not only as families but also as a people. We began to find like minds. Literally. In his book Coming Apart, Charles Murray points out that in 1960, just 3 percent of American couples both had a college degree. By 2010, that proportion stood at 25 percent. The change was so large that it was a major contributor to the creation of a new class all by itself. College brings people together at the time of life when young adults are beginning to look around for marriage partners, and the college sorting machine brings the highest-IQ young women and men together at the most prestigious schools. As if that weren’t enough, graduate school adds another layer of sorting. If you put people with greater educational and cognitive similarity together, you have the makings of greater cultural similarity as well. When one spouse is a college graduate in the top percentiles of cognitive ability and the other is a high school graduate with modestly above-average cognitive ability, they are likely to have different preferences in books and movies, different ways of spending their free time, different friends, and differences in a dozen other aspects of life. In 1960 there was a measure of cultural dispersion built into marriages.

  This has real effects and ominous implications, as these couples, now in the broad elite, begin to pass on their natural-born intellectual capabilities, coupled with the additional educational opportunities these elites demand and need for their children. The pool gets smaller and smaller and farther apart for those who live in the small farming communities or those who do not work with those in the upper-middle class. It is a new kind of segregation, which has nothing to do with race. We are already beginning to see the ill effects of this. If your children go to college, Woodrow Wilson’s dream of the university goal of “making a man most unlike his father” has indeed become a reality. It you are religious, you have a 60 percent chance of leaving the university no longer believing in God. A 40 percent chance even if you attend a religious university.

  14

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  Into the Arms of the Arrogant and Ignorant

  This country really began changing, as I have already pointed out, in the early progressive years between 1880 and 1920, when we found out what the other guys were doing and decided to try to stop them—or as the early progressives would say, “help them”—either by war, subversion, or sterilization. It started changing when people decided their values were the only right values, then tried to make other people live by them. Internally and externally. We do not have a domestic and a foreign problem. We really have only one: arrogance. Thinking we know best and forcing others, be they our neighbors here or those on the other side of the globe, to believe as we do.

  As I said in an earlier chapter, our government and our universities changed dramatically around 1900. But there was something perhaps even more toxic that happened as well: We became arrogant. I personally saw the change from humble nation to superpower on a trip to the Met in NYC. I had brought my children to teach them a bit of history and the history of art, when we came across the space where Washington Crossing the Delaware usually hung. I asked one of the guards if they had moved it elsewhere. He told me that it had been crated and was in the museum’s warehouse. “After all, it isn’t the original,” he casually stated. “Pardon me?” “Yes,” he began, eager to teach, “the original was destroyed in the Allied bombing of Germany in 1942.”

  “Wait. What?” My ignorance and arrogance were on full display. “Why was ‘our’ most famous painting of Washington in Germany during the reign of Adolf Hitler?”

  As it turns out, Emanuel Leutze had painted the work in Berlin during the revolutions of 1848, which had begun after the printing of the Communist Manifesto on February 21 of that same year. It was meant to inspire liberal Europeans with the example of the American revolutionary hero. He’d painted two full-sized replicas after a fire damaged the original in the 1850s, one of which was the one I’d visited so many times at the Met. The other hung on a wall in the West Wing of the White House for more than 150 years—that is, until 2015, when the Obamas loaned it to a museum in Minnesota.

  The message comes from the people in the boat. The man in a Scottish bonnet and a man of African descent facing backward next to each other in the front, Western riflemen at the bow and stern, two farmers in broad-brimmed hats near the back (one with a bandaged head), and a rower in a red shirt, possibly meant to be a woman in man’s clothing. There is also a man at the back of the boat wearing what appears to be Native American garb to represent the idea that all people in the new United States of America were represented as present in the boat along with Washington on his way to victory and success.

  This was the message Leutze was trying to get his fellow Germans and other Europeans to see. If you have something strong enough to unite them, people from all walks of life can come together by choice, and miraculous things can happen.

  After that experience I began to formulate a theory that the painting wasn’t the only major icon whose real message I had missed.

  I had always known that in the old-timey days we respected the French, and they liked us. But, really, who gives a giant three-hundred-foot statue as a present? Why would the French spend so much time, money, and effort on such an elaborate gift as the Statue of Liberty?

  First of all, you’ve got to be pretty arrogant about your taste. I mean, what if at the time we were diggin’ midcentury design? I would be questioning myself all the way to my friend’s front door. “Maybe it’s too big.” “What if they already have a three-hundred-foot lady light?” You’d better hope they like it. Because if they don’t, it isn’t something that they can hide and take out when someone from France comes to visit.

  “So, where did you end up putting the statue we got you?” Crap.

  In my house I would be panicked. “Honey, the French are coming, they’ll be here in ten minutes! I can’t find that stupid statue they gave us for our anniversary anywhere.”

  However, I should have known it wasn’t really about us once I found out they just dumped it off in a New York park like a box of unwanted hot dogs, where it lay in pieces for six years until we could raise the money and find the right man to figure out the directions, put it together, and build the base. Imagine how many extra screws and bolts were left over. And the instructions were all in French. Gee, thanks. Next year for Christmas, why not get the kids the loudest, most annoying toy on the market?

  Make no mistake—just like the Delaware painting, that statue was not built for us.

  In 1865, Edouard de Laboulaye, a French political intellectual and authority on the U.S. Constitution, proposed that France give a statue representing liberty to the United States for its centennial. The recent Union victory in the American Civil War reaffirmed the United States’ ideals of freedom and democracy, serving as a platform for Laboulaye to argue that honoring the United States would strengthen the cause for democracy in France. In our “newfound arrogance” we have come to believe it was about us, when indeed it was actually all about the arrogant French.

  You see, revolution was once again on the march. With the last revolution ending with so much bloodshed and eventually Napoleon, they needed to figure out a way to show the French that Marxism, which was beginning a second sweep across the nations of Europe, was a bad
idea. They felt that if they could raise money for a giant birthday gift to their buddy America, they could also make the pitch that America was on the right track in finding real freedom.

  Once the statue arrived, to raise money to assemble the world’s largest IKEA project, Emma Lazarus wrote the poem that now graces the bottom of the base:

  Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

  With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

  Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

  A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

  Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

  Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

  Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

  The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

  “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

  With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

  This is the ultimate and real challenge of the statue to the world: Keep your guilds (unions) and family names, titles, and all that your governments do to keep those whom you call the “dregs of society” down. Send those who you claim can’t make it or add to society to me. I will simply set them free to create what they want to create. I will not get in their way or tell them they can’t do it because of this degree, title, license, or position. And if they do make it, they earned it and they get to keep it. What’s more, I will protect them, with the Bill of Rights, from people and governments that wish to steal their work or their rewards or meddle in their lives, like you!

  You often hear people quote this from the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses . . .” People often forget this part, though: “yearning to breathe free.” As you can see, our humility as a nation has been gone for a while. We now make out that immigrants are all about “their needing our help.” Of course, because that is the signal we now send out. But the message isn’t about welfare or socialized medicine. It’s about freedom.