As expected, the show did feature the usual array of patented historical fabrications. Topping the list was a "Black Robed" battalion of armed priests who alleged terrified the British during the American Revolution. To end the rally Beck dragged up more than 200 preachers to replicate the symbol.
This is pure---and dangerous---invention. If you can find solid reference to this alleged priestly horde anywhere in our history, please send the citations.
Like most of the right, Beck avoids our nation's deeply secular roots. He repeatedly cites the Constitution and Declaration, but NEVER the Bill of Rights.
Beck also ignores the reality that our essential legal structures are Greco-Roman and Hodenosaunee (Iroquois) in origin, NOT Judaeo-Christian.
Five of the first six presidents of the United States were Unitarians and/or Deists, NOT Christians. So were three of the five men charged with writing the Declaration of Independence. Tom Paine, who wrote the book---Common Sense---that inspired the Revolution, was deeply critical of the Christian faith, to which he most decidedly did not ascribe. Nor did Ben Franklin, the new nation's truest intellectual godfather, who is almost always absent from the neo-con iconography. It was the free-living Franklin who drew the inspiration for the federal union from the Iroquois Confederacy, still history's longest-lived democracy.
Thanks in large part to Franklin, the word "Christian" (like the word "corporation") was omitted from the Constitution by intelligent design.
None of which mattered at this excruciatingly sanitized gathering. We will see, in the coming months, what kind of legs it gave Mr. Beck, and where he wants to go with them.
He's never run for or held public office. To many he seems a marginal fool, a bore and a rube, a Crusader Babbitt for a traumatized Main Street"like, say, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush.
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