COURAGE > COWARDS
As we approach the most important presidential election in America’s history, something has been lost among all of the debates, attack ads, and super-PACs—something that Americans used to hold in very high regard:
THE TRUTH.
Glenn Beck likes to say that “the truth has no agenda”—but there’s another side to that: people who have agendas rarely care about the truth. And, these days, it seems like everyone has an agenda.
The media leads with stories that rate over those that matter.
Politicians put lobbyists and electability over honesty.
Radicals alter history in order to change the future.
In Cowards, Glenn Beck exposes the truth about thirteen important issues that have been hijacked by deceit. Whether out of spite, greed, or fear, these are the things that no one seems to be willing to have an honest conversation about. For example:
How our two-party POLITICAL SYSTEM often leaves voters with NO GOOD OPTIONS.
How extremists are slowly integrating ISLAMIC LAW into our SOCIETY.
How PROGRESSIVE “religious” leaders like JIM WALLIS are politicizing the Bible.
How the CARTEL VIOLENCE on our border is FAR WORSE than people realize.
How “LIBERTARIAN” has been INTENTIONALLY turned into a DIRTY WORD.
How GEORGE SOROS has amassed enough MONEY and POWER to INFLUENCE entire ECONOMIES.
In some cases, the truth is out there, but people simply don’t want to hear it. It’s much easier, and certainly a lot more convenient, to keep our blinders on. After all, as a quote attributed to President James Garfield made clear, “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.”
Miserable or not, the truth can no longer be something we hope for; it must be something we live. When courage prevails, cowards do not—and this book was written to ensure that’s exactly what happens.
“COWARDS DIE MANY TIMES BEFORE THEIR DEATHS.”
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, JULIUS CAESAR
GLENN BECK is a nationally syndicated radio host, founder of GBTV, and the author of eleven national bestsellers, seven of which reached the #1 position on the New York Times list: The Original Argument, Arguing with Idiots, Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, An Inconvenient Book; the novels The Overton Window and The Christmas Sweater; and the children’s book The Christmas Sweater: A Picture Book. Visit www.glennbeck.com.
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Also by Glenn Beck
Being George Washington
The Snow Angel
The Original Argument
The 7
Broke: The Plan to Restore Our Trust, Truth and Treasure
The Overton Window
Idiots Unplugged: Truth for Those Who Care to Listen (audiobook)
The Christmas Sweater: A Picture Book
Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government
Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine
America’s March to Socialism: Why We’re One Step Closer to Giant Missile Parades (audiobook)
The Christmas Sweater
An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World’s Biggest Problems
The Real America: Early Writings from the Heart and Heartland
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beck, Glenn.
Cowards / Glenn Beck.
p. cm.
1. United States—Politics and government. I. Title.
JK31.B43 2012
320.520973—dc23
2012015507
ISBN 978-1-4516-9347-8
ISBN 978-1-4516-9483-3 (ebook)
DEDICATION
To Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and all those who emulate their courage in some small way, like Alveda King, Ted Nugent, Jerry Boykin, and M. Zuhdi Jasser
Agree or disagree with any of them, these people will never say the things they do not believe, no matter the cost.
They are the opposite of cowards.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to . . .
The LISTENERS, READERS, and GBTV PIONEERS—you give me hope every single day.
My amazing wife, TANIA, all my PARENTS, and my beautiful CHILDREN, who always teach me something new and make me understand what we are fighting for.
Everyone at MERCURY RADIO ARTS and GBTV, including those at our sister companies, THEBLAZE.COM and MARKDOWN.COM. You are showing the world the incredible things that can happen when you combine a dream with hard work and talent.
All the important CONTRIBUTORS and RESEARCHERS who helped bring this book to life, including STU BURGUIERE, ELIZABETH HURLEY, SHARONA SCHWARTZ, KENT LUNDGREN, ZACK TAYLOR, DAVID BRODY, and MARTHA WEEKS.
All those at SIMON & SCHUSTER who may have a case against me for torture. You deal effortlessly with the craziest book production schedules in the industry, and you have my unending gratitude. This includes CAROLYN REIDY, LOUISE BURKE, JEAN ANNE ROSE, MITCHELL IVERS, ANTHONY ZICCARDI, LIZ PERL, EMILY BESTLER, AL MADOCS, JOY O’MEARA, SALLY FRANKLIN, and those who work tirelessly behind the scenes to put this book in your hands.
Everyone at PREMIERE RADIO NETWORKS and CLEAR CHANNEL who help my voice reach millions every day, including MARK MAYS, JOHN HOGAN, JULIE TALBOTT, DAN YUKELSON, and DAN METTER.
The talented and hardworking people behind the scenes at NEP and CRM and all the other companies that have helped GBTV become the amazing success story it is.
Everyone else whom I owe so much of my personal and professional success to, including: GEORGE HILTZIK, BILL O’REILLY, BRIAN GLICKLICH, MATTHEW HILTZIK, JOSH RAFFEL, JON HUNTSMAN, DUANE WARD, STEVE SCHEFFER, DOM THEODORE, RICHARD PAUL EVANS, GEORGE LANGE, RUSSELL M. BALLARD, KEN SWEZEY, and JOSH SESSLER, along with ALLEN, CAM, AMY, MARY, and the whole team at ISDANER.
CONTE
NTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: STEP RIGHT UP!
The Progressive Shell Game
Chapter 2: THE LIBERTARIAN OPTION
Ending the Progressive Scam
Chapter 3: GEORGE SOROS
The Puppet Master Pulls All the Strings
Chapter 4: ECONOMIC TERRORISM
Financial Weapons of Mass Destruction
Chapter 5: THE AMERICAN DREAM IS A LIE
Chapter 6: BORDERING ON INSANITY
Drugs, Terrorists, and Murder in Our Backyard
Chapter 7: THE NEW POLICE STATE
Big Brother Is All Grown Up
Chapter 8: JIM WALLIS AND THE ATTEMPTED HIJACKING OF RELIGION
Chapter 9: CHANGE THE MEDIA, CHANGE THE WORLD
Chapter 10: THE ISLAMIST AGENDA
Facts Over Fear
Chapter 11: EDUCATION
Radical Ideas to Defeat the Radicals
Chapter 12: YOUNG SOCIALISTS
Why Our Kids Think They Hate Capitalism
Chapter 13: ADAPT OR DIE
The Coming Intelligence Explosion
Citations
INTRODUCTION
“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”
— Lenin
“Cowards can never be moral.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
George Orwell once said, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Consider this book a revolutionary act. After all, in this world, at this time, it’s not those who incite street riots who are the revolutionaries, it’s those who tell and seek the truth.
We live in a country where the establishment is infested with cowards; people who are not only unwilling to find solutions, but who are often too spineless to even acknowledge that a problem exists. They are far more enamored with power, or ratings, or their personal agendas than with the truth. I’m talking about politicians, yes, but also academics, the mass media, movement leaders, business leaders—and anyone else who keeps perpetuating the lie that everything will be fine if we just listen to them.
They are wrong. Everything is not fine—it hasn’t been for a very long time.
The cowards want us to believe that the two-party political system is working, when, in reality, it hasn’t offered American voters a genuine choice in a very long time. We complain election after election about not having a candidate who truly represents our values, and yet nothing ever changes. We keep playing the game, electing the same progressives and then feigning outrage when they back off from their bold campaign promises and instead turn into the same mealy-mouthed weasels they replaced. They hide the fact that there is another option, another way of looking at the world—one much more closely aligned with the Constitution—because it threatens their monopoly on power.
The cowards want us to believe that the public education system is adequately preparing our children for their futures in an increasingly competitive world. It isn’t.
The cowards want our kids to believe that capitalism has failed. It hasn’t.
The cowards want us to put all facts and common sense aside and instead believe that our economy is not being targeted by terrorists and other nations. They want us to ignore the fact that powerful people like George Soros are willing and able to bring down entire currencies and change entire countries.
The cowards want us to look the other way as progressive activists disguised as religious leaders, like Jim Wallis, hijack our churches by turning legitimate policy debates into issues of morality rooted in the Bible.
The cowards want us to sit back and accept that the mainstream media is hostile and condescending toward traditional values. They think it’s okay that stories about celebrities or murder are sensationalized and put at the top of newscasts while stories of real importance are ignored or buried.
The cowards want us to believe that the cartel violence along our southern border is contained and is not a threat to Americans. They want to minimize the threat of radical Islam and dismiss well-established goals, like spreading the Islamic caliphate and shariah law, as conspiracy theory. Cowards prioritize political correctness over the truth.
All of this must change. We’ve spent decades playing by the rules, only to find out that the game itself has been rigged all along. After all, you cannot have a legitimate debate when the moderators—the political and media elite—have a vested interest in the outcome.
The cowards have had their way for far too long. By concealing themselves in the darkness, they’ve advanced an agenda that has brought America to the brink. Only the bright sunlight of truth can expose them for who they really are.
It is my sincere hope that, with your help, this book helps to usher in those first, bright rays of light.
Dallas, Texas 2012
“ I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, ‘We must broaden the base of our party’—when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents.”
—Ronald Reagan, 1975
I’M SURE you’ve noticed how little choice there seems to be in politics. I hear it over and over again from people who call in to my radio show and tell me that they don’t see any point in voting since both candidates are equally terrible.
They’re often right. In 2008, our choice for president was between a Republican who wanted to spend billions to “combat” global warming and a Democrat who wanted to spend hundreds of billions to do the same thing. In 2004, it was between the incumbent George W. Bush, whose embarrassing conservative record we’ll cover later, and John Kerry—a man who, by some accounts, had been the most liberal member of the Senate for multiple years.
If it seems like no “real” conservative or libertarian candidate for president ever makes it very far it’s because they don’t. They are derided and marginalized by the establishment and mainstream media until their names become toxic. By the time the power base is done with a candidate who might pose a threat, he’s become the punch line to a joke, the plot of a Saturday Night Live skit, or the first thing that pops up on Google when you search for “homophobia” or “racist” or “idiot.”
None of this is happening by chance. It’s a shell game, and the progressives who run our political parties, our universities, and our media treat the rest of us like tourists in Times Square. It may occasionally look as if libertarians and small-government candidates have a chance to win the prize—but that’s just the way they set up the con. The illusion of victory is omnipresent, but it’s just that—an illusion. A con can’t ever really be beaten.
THE SHELL GAME TURNS 100
The Big Con started right around 1912. America was given a “choice”: Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt. The New Freedom or the New Nationalism. Progressive or Progressive.
That was the year that Republican became Democrat and Democrat became progressive. Later, after progressives finally had their hands on our wallets, they stopped calling themselves progressives and took the name “liberal” instead. When people caught on to that, the left changed the names to protect the guilty once again.
* * *
The Con, Revealed
Hillary Clinton actually described these bait-and-switch word games pretty well during a 2007 debate after she was asked if she would define herself as “liberal.”
You know, it is a word that originally meant that you were for freedom, that you were for the freedom to achieve, that you were willing to stand against big power and on behalf of the individual.
Unfortunately, in the last 30, 40 years, it has been turned up on its head and it’s been made to seem as though it is a word that describes big government, totally contrary to what its meaning was in the 19th and early 20th century.
I prefer the word “progressive,” which has a real American meaning, going back to the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century.
* * *
Progressives realized lo
ng ago that if you rig the game of politics against the small-government option, then you end up with a series of candidates who increasingly blur the line between the parties. Eventually the parties themselves become meaningless—empty vessels that simply serve to funnel money and power through the system. With very few exceptions, our elections are really no longer about whether to grow or cut government’s size and power, but rather by how much they should grow. We debate double-digit increases in social program spending versus single-digit increases. We debate how many new billion-dollar entitlements we should add instead of whether these programs should even exist in the first place. We debate whether teachers unions and the U.S. Department of Education should have more or less power, rather than whether the federal government should have any role in local education at all. All of this is part of the con, and it’s worked to absolute perfection. With very few exceptions even the “boldest” of conservative politicians submit budgets and bills that, a hundred years ago, would’ve been too far left for even a Democrat to propose.
Whenever candidates or groups raise their hand and question these debates, invoke the Constitution, or propose “radical” ideas like a balanced budget amendment, shutting down overreaching and ineffective federal agencies, or adhering to the Tenth Amendment, they are ostracized. Why do you think the Tea Party was immediately branded as a bunch of racists and birthers? It’s because they posed a real threat of waking voters up to the fact that Americans are being presented with a never-ending series of false choices. The progressive establishment can’t allow real diversity to stand.
The only hope we have of changing this is by first educating people as to how this happened and who’s behind it—and then by presenting a better way forward. That’s what the first two chapters of this book are all about: the virus—progressivism; and the antibiotic—commonsense libertarianism. Yes, we have plenty of other issues to solve, and many of them are covered in this book, but if we don’t start by treating the underlying disease then none of that will matter.