Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Reihan Salam Says Glenn Beck Comparable to Malcolm X, Messages Meant to Terrify Mainstream Liberals

Posted by Janet Shan
Glenn Beck is being compared to Malcolm X by the Daily Beast's Reihan Salam saying his message was meant to terrify mainstream liberals and shed politics for a message for spiritual uplife. Really? Glenn Beck scare mainstream liberals? Wow that's a stretch of Salam's imagination. I think Malcolm X just did a 360 degree flip in his grave. Here's an excerpt from the article:


Glenn Beck’s weekend speech was reminiscent of the radical 1960s black separatist leader: Both terrify mainstream liberals and shed politics for a message of spiritual uplift.

As hundreds of thousands gathered in Washington, D.C. for Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally, one couldn’t help but notice a powerful nostalgia for an America that is slipping away. In her remarks to the crowd, Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor and conservative folk hero, said, “we must not fundamentally transform America, as some would want,” a not-so-veiled reference to President Obama and his allies. Instead, “we must restore America and restore her honor,” a message that resonated with a crowd that by all accounts was overwhelmingly white and Christian, with large numbers hailing from rural areas and small towns. Palin, like Beck, was talking about a spiritual restoration, a return to time-tested virtues that had been celebrated by the more homogeneous America of the past, in which non-traditional families were stigmatized and relatively rare, church attendance was far more common, and the dominance of Anglo-Protestant culture was unquestioned.

But as most of those who attended Beck’s rally understand in their bones, that world is gone. And President Obama, for all his efforts to expand the reach of the federal government, has had very little to do with this deep transformation. Rather, the country has long since been transformed by powerful demographic and economic forces that very much threaten what we might call Glenn Beck’s America.

Sorry, but I am having a hard time putting Glenn Beck in the shoes of Malcolm X, who was a thoughtful and methodical man.

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