4. Glenn Beck, Stop Praising that Southern-Hating Republican King Abe Lincoln!
In July of 2010, Di Lorenzo wrote a scathing column about Beck’s praise of President Lincoln, the man libertarians consider a Tenth Amendment-stealing, war-mongering, Southern-hating imperialist Americans should denounce as a traitor. The column focuses mostly on Beck’s Founder’s Friday show discussing Lincoln and his policies—good and bad–with two U.S. historians.
The segment was not pleasing to DiLorenzo, who refers to the War Between the States as “the War to Prevent Southern Independence.” DiLorenzo demonizes Beck’s admiration of Lincoln as neo-con control by Fox News, “a propaganda arm of the neoconservative political cabal that has captured the Republican Party.” DiLorenzo says, “One of the cornerstones of neocon ideology is Lincoln idolatry and hatred of the South and Southerners,” and Glenn Beck is the poster child for Lincoln idolatry.
I have never heard Beck make any anti-Southern statements, but his defense of Lincoln going to war is considered warmongering Southern-hatred.
According to DiLorenzo:
To the neocons, Lincoln idolatry serves the purpose of helping to prop up the centralized, bureaucratic, liberty-destroying, military-industrial complex that defines their existence…In case you haven’t noticed…the Republican Party has stood for war, war, and more war, and little else.
DiLorenzo’s complaint with is Beck’s discussion of the Confederate Constitution as the reason Lincoln needed to declare war and prevent secession.
Beck said:
I actually went down to the Civil War Museum in the South and asked to see a copy of the [Confederate] Constitution and they pulled out the real copy, and I read it. And it’s not about state’s rights, that’s about slavery, because, you join the Confederacy and you don’t have a right to drop out of slavery…you had to participate in slavery.
DiLorenzo says:
Beck was grossly deceiving when he told his audience that the Confederate Constitution protected slavery while saying not one word about how the U.S. Constitution did the exact same thing. Slavery had been protected by the U.S. Constitution since 1789. That’s seventy-two years of slavery protection under the U.S. Constitution.
Beck never defends slavery in the video. It is Beck’s devotion of one whole day a week to demonstrating the greatness of our Founders—black and white—that irritates radical libertarians. They desire an America without any central government protecting states, insisting states must govern completely alone without military and police. Of course unhinged camouflaged radical libertarians would never rise up to take control over fellow citizens and states.
DiLorenzo describes Beck’s love of Lincoln as:
[N]eocons, Lincoln idolatry serves the purpose of helping to prop up the centralized, bureaucratic, liberty-destroying, military-industrial complex that defines their existence… To neocons, Lincoln is the poster boy of militaristic big government that runs roughshod over civil liberties while bankrupting the country with taxes and debt and murdering thousands of innocent foreigners (not that Southerners during the 1861–1865 war were foreigners; they were fellow American citizens). Doesn’t this sound like the Republican Party of today, as embodied in the recently dethroned Bush administration?
If a president seeks to defend America, or keep it unified, he is a murderer.
Nevertheless, DiLorenzo insists, as radical libertarians do, Lincoln hated Southerners and imposed big government to prevent the South from seceding.
Conservatives, including Beck, often question how far presidents should go to save the country without breaking constitutional law. Lincoln did extend presidential power and authority beyond constitutional limits. And yes, states did have rights to secede, but Lincoln was placed in a position of allowing the nation to split or remain unified. Preventing fraction was not Southern-hating; it was precluding America’s disappearance into history if Southern states broke away.
DiLorenzo disagrees:
Despite his [Beck] admirable performances discussing the founding fathers, socialism, progressivism, and other topics, Glenn Beck has been absolutely awful and sometimes untruthful when discussing Lincoln and his legacy… The act of secession was the very essence of states’ rights, contrary to Beck’s proclamation, for the basic assumption was that the states were sovereign. They delegated certain defined powers to the central government for their own mutual benefit, but all other powers remained in the hands of the people and the states, as stated in the Tenth Amendment. As sovereigns, they had a right to secede for whatever reason. If a state needed the permission of others to secede, as Lincoln argued, then it was not really sovereign.
So long as Glenn Beck chooses to think for himself and not lock-step totally to radical libertarian leftist ideology, or anyone’s indoctrination demands, he will be considered a phony, lying, socialist, warmongering traitor to America.
