So Glenn Beck has grabbed some more attention by announcing that he is devising a “100 year plan” to restore us “to the maximum freedoms we were supposed to have been protecting, using only the battlefield of ideas.”
We can think of aspects of this that are ridiculous, the most obvious being the idea of a “100 year” plan to do anything. And we can think of reasons why some aspects of his plan are likely to be objectionable, one of them being Beck’s heavy interest in W. Cleon Skousen’s book, The 5,000 Year Leap, which advances the dangerous idea that the Constitution (and therefore the U.S. government) is divinely inspired.
But how encouraging to have someone (besides Ron Paul and us) promoting an agenda that is explicitly about rolling back the central State. It is also encouraging that Beck recognizes that “education is key.” It’s up to us, though, to ensure that Beck isn’t the only one doing the educating, and that the (likely substantial) errors in his thinking are corrected.
Beck may just be acting opportunistically to advance his career (I think he’s at least partly sincere), but we should be opportunists, too, and reach out to his ever-expanding audience that is interested in liberty. While we’re at it, we should point out that it would not take 100 years to roll back the federal government. How about 30 days?
5:34 pm on November 22, 2009
