Addicted to Outrage

by Glenn Beck

  Are we still those people? I know my neighbors in Idaho are, but closer to the urban centers of America, we are not. Not only do we not mind our own business, we don’t mind our own business the world over. That idea was such a part of American society that our first coin even had that engraved on it. It wasn’t “In God We Trust.” On one side it said “We Are One,” and the other said simply “Mind Your Business.” I suppose “So we’re all in this together, but we’re distinct individuals with volition and free will who leave each other alone” didn’t fit.

  What were those principles that the rest of the world wanted so desperately? Because they certainly didn’t want us to tell them how to fight, whom to fight, how to run their banks or businesses, or which church was correct. No, it was the humility of the Bill of Rights. The laws that were “unchangeable,” that freed slaves and the oppressed. It is why the statue is holding the tablets, representing the Declaration and the Constitution. Notice that it says JULY 4, 1776. This is important, as it is the birthday of man’s independence. Progressives will say that the Declaration is only a breakup letter and has no meaning or impact in today’s America. It does, as we discussed earlier; it is literally our founding document and the document that guides the Constitution. Without it, the entire system falls apart, as we will later see.

  We can argue over how those principles were lost, but it is our virtues that animate the words and breathe life into our nation that are perhaps even more critical to recognize, as they pertain to the denial that we all seem to be living in. David Bahnsen, in his book Crisis of Responsibility, builds on Murray’s “Founding Virtues” of industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion. He makes the point that the revolutionary threats to the American project are real and often concentrated in bicoastal capitals of anti-Western sentiment, but believing that there are external forces (external to the core American nucleus of working-class folks who value God and country) accelerating our cultural and even economic demise is not the same as agreeing that those forces are the primary cause. Indeed, the true story of our “coming apart” is this: Rather than being the result of globalization and other contemporary challenges, the unraveling of virtues within the working class is actually the root cause of our inability to properly respond. Those, I believe, are the virtues that animate and secure our nation, but it is the principles that need to be understood, lived, protected, and reaffirmed every generation to keep that industry and, frankly, religion on track.

  We still might have held it together, and we might yet restore it if we still shared a belief in those basic principles. They began disappearing en masse during the Vietnam War. The damage that war did to this country has been severe and lasting, and massively underappreciated. Before that war the Greatest Generation, those people who had been born into the Depression and fought and won World War II, still believed in our traditional institutions. We believed that Americans fought wars only to guarantee liberty for all people; we believed that our government always told us the truth and that we could trust our politicians, as well as popular agencies like the FBI.

  We did; we really did believe all that. It was the American myth: that because our government was elected by the people, and the Constitution was there to stop it from abusing its power, it would be benevolent and would serve the people. Boy, was that wrong. We had failed to listen to the two farewell addresses that could still save us—George Washington’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s. Both outline how to preserve the Republic. One warns of foreign entanglements and political parties, while both call for an enlightened, educated, and engaged citizenry. But to me, a close examination of Eisenhower’s farewell address points to not the press but to us. We know the famous part, with most not even knowing why or where it came from, but look at the last part of the text and tell me we haven’t failed to hear this clarion call to responsibility:

  Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

  This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

  In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

  We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

  Akin to, and largely responsible for, the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

  In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of the Federal government.

  Today, the solitary inventor tinkering in his shop has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

  The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific, technological elite.

  It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system—ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

  Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society’s future, we—you and I, and our government—must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

  Oopsie. I guess we missed that one, huh? Remember, this warning was given by what the left would now call “a man of war.” Where are those leaders who are willing to hurt “their own” for the liberty of all?

  The reality that our government was capable of lying to us, that we weren’t always the good guys, that a lot of young Americans were being sent to die for political necessity, that sometimes the government even spied on us, and that elected politicians could be corrupt destroyed that myth. Our government was no longer the embodiment of our values and principles but had become something foreign to and at odds with the people. Progressives had used the government to try to create a super-race of white Americans with programs of forced sterilization, abortion, and antimarriage laws. They had killed tens of thousands of Americans during the Prohibitio
n era by poisoning barrels of whiskey sold to speakeasies around the nation. The Pentagon Papers proved that our leaders, from Kennedy to Nixon, were all well aware the Vietnam War couldn’t possibly be won but kept it going to satisfy the political elite and send a message to the communists. The FBI regularly spied on and blackmailed social leaders like Martin Luther King Jr.

  People lost their faith in government, and there was nothing to replace it, so young Americans began breaking those long-accepted American boundaries. The result was a kind of managed chaos. The antiwar movement and the civil rights movement were created to the background music of rock and roll. The sexual revolution began with the easy availability of the birth-control pill. The length of a man’s hair became a political statement. Students took over the colleges. American kids casually broke the law by smoking pot, while their parents made Valium the first million-dollar drug. Richard Nixon faced impeachment for lying and became the first president to resign for crimes committed in office. When community organizer Saul Alinsky was asked if he believed in using violence to achieve his political objectives, he said no; and when asked why, he pointed out, “They have all the weapons.” Young black Americans came back from Vietnam with access to guns and a determination to end racial discrimination, and the cities exploded in rioting.

  And it was all televised.

  From the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 to the end of the American presence in Vietnam with the fall of Saigon in 1975, America had become a different country. With the rise of the Moral Majority, created to defend those traditional values, patriotism had become a political weapon; “My country, right or wrong,” became their slogan. People who were against the war weren’t just wrong, they were anti-American; they were commies. The definition of free speech was stretched as young Americans burned the American flag and their draft cards to protest our involvement in the Vietnam War. Massive antiwar demonstrations took place in Washington. On the Kent State University campus, scared and frustrated Ohio National Guard troops fired on antiwar protesters, killing four students and wounding nine more.

  The social revolution was televised. Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed on live TV. The riots in Chicago, New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, and all the other cities were broadcast nationally. Filmed footage from Vietnam brought the war into living rooms. For the first time, the whole country was watching history unfold, live and mostly unedited. And Americans were forced to pick a side. The political division of America had begun.

  In his 2008 bestseller, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, journalist Bill Bishop pointed out that more and more Americans were choosing to live with people who shared their political beliefs. In 1976, studies showed, less than a quarter of the country lived in what Bishop called “landslide counties,” areas that delivered huge numbers for one presidential candidate, but by 2004 about half of the country lived in counties that voted by large margins for one party or the other. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we had self-segregated into communities of like-minded and like-moraled groups: We had created the first safe zones for ourselves and for our beliefs. And as we gathered in tribes around the campfires, it wasn’t enough just to be with people who thought the same way we did; it became necessary to reinforce our beliefs by demonizing the other side. The well-respected Stanford economist Matthew Gentzkow warned, “Polarization is a real and serious phenomenon. Americans may or may not be further apart on the issues than they used to be. But clearly what divides them politically is increasingly personal, and this in many ways may be worse. We don’t just disagree politely about what is the best way to reform the health care system, we believe that those on the other side are trying to destroy America, and that we should spare nothing in trying to stop them.”

  That polarization has reached into every part of our culture—even our faith. Theologian and bestselling author Tim Keller tweeted, “As the country has become more polarized, the church has become more polarized, and that’s because the church is not different enough from America or modernity. There’s now a red and blue evangelicalism.”

  Everything that takes place in our world is filtered through our political belief system. We know for a fact that the other side is always wrong because our side decided what a fact is. Facts, it now appears, are pretty much anything that supports what we already believe, while any information that counters those beliefs is a lie, or so “fake news,” or, as it has been famously described, “alternative facts.” Rather than watching the traditional news sources, viewers began turning as the source of their information to those networks that most strongly supported their beliefs. “The echo chamber,” as it became known, reinforced those things they already believed. As a result, Democrats immediately discounted anything reported by Fox News or the other “conservative” news outlets, while Republicans disregarded the “mainstream media” because they are controlled by liberals. I am not saying some of that isn’t well deserved. The media have embraced the polarization, but the real problem is, they refuse to see themselves as part of the problem.

  It isn’t just that we are getting different opinions and different facts; we are also getting different news. When I met my new friend Riaz Patel, a gay, married, adoptive father of two, Muslim, Pakistani immigrant, Hollywood producer, oh, who is also liberal, our eyes were opened to yet another problem. He is a well-educated and informed man, and yet he did not know many of the news stories that really had bothered the right during the Obama administration. The investigations, threats, and wiretapping of reporters’ phone lines, and so on. He was shocked he didn’t know these things or had only a simple knowledge with an understanding that it couldn’t have been true because he hadn’t heard of it. These weren’t conspiracies, they were real and important stories. But only one side of the country was exposed. I believe the same can be said under Donald Trump. I have seen big, important stories where he has done some of the same, calling for a press license or a limiting of the press, where it was a very important topic for the health of the republic, but it isn’t covered, dismissed as no big deal or simply covered quickly and gone. Both times, the press was not objective. It was “their guy,” so either it didn’t matter because “I know him and he is only just saying that,” or they didn’t want to cover it because it would hurt “their fight.”

  Who are these people? Do we hold anything above politics? It has become our God. Even our most deeply held beliefs are up for sale or excuse. Franklin Graham can, on the one hand, condemn Bill Clinton’s sexual misconduct and on the other dismiss gross sexual comments by Donald Trump as locker-room banter. Al Sharpton can casually suggest Donald Trump should be arrested on accusations of sexual assault, but women accusing Bill Clinton of rape are money-seeking hussies. How is it we can excuse it on one side and on the other side condemn it just a few years later? Politics. Our own deeply held basic moral foundation has been rotted away by the love for or defense of politics. I would guess most twentysomethings don’t even know who Eisenhower was, let alone what a plowshare is.

  This is what Nietzsche warned us about. “God is dead.”

  Now what?

  Politics.

  15

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  The Enemy of My Friend . . . May Not Be My Friend but Should Be My Teacher

  Here’s an admission: I read the New York Times. I know no conservative will ever utter these words: That’s the best damn newspaper in the world. It infuriates me at times, I often disagree with their point of view, and many times I think they get it wrong, but I know that, generally speaking, they try to maintain high standards for journalism, and I can generally trust the facts I read in that paper. I think my audience is shocked when I cite something I read in the Times. The problem is that conservatives assume, because that paper is on the left, it has no value to them. That it’s all fake news. No, it’s not. Even if you think it is all fake news. It is the most influential media source in the nation; if you want to understand what half the countr
y is thinking, there is no better place to find it. But the intent matters. I hear people say that they watch or listen to me for opposition research. To me, this is a part of the problem. You are listening to me only as an enemy. We need to come from a more compassionate place if we wish to fix our problems. I read the Times and HuffPo because I genuinely want to understand how others think and feel. More important, I desperately want to find the things that connect us on a human level. There are a ton of those things, if we allow ourselves to admit it. Unfortunately, our addictions and our tribes do not encourage those things.

  Conversely, those on the left refuse to pay any attention to conservative outlets and broadcasters. “Don’t listen to Glenn Beck, because he has nothing to offer. He’s one of them. Everything he says is fake.” No, it’s not. The left may not like my perspective, but there are a lot of things I talk about that might be useful, and I am held to the same standard, if not higher, as the New York Times. If I really get it wrong, I get sued. More important, there are many organizations like Media Matters that have made millions of dollars in fundraising to try to put me out of business. This actually gives me an advantage that the Times and most on the left do not have. We tend to be much more careful, because we understand that our next mistake may be our last. I can also guarantee that I try to be fair and consistent. It made me hold the line against both Hillary and Trump during the election. To vote for or endorse either candidate would have caused an internal cognitive dissonance that I couldn’t have lived with. While many fault me for it, it does allow me to both criticize a politician when he or she is wrong and praise him or her when he or she does the right thing. It is based on fact, not team jerseys.