Bad Weather -- Obama Underground


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Bad Weather -- Obama Underground

Obama and Weather Underground 2.0

Beck has recently been hitting strongly on a back-to-God theme, so I have not been too keen on commenting about it. I think I understand why he went off in that direction.

He was already religious and never hid that. But it started getting heavy around the time he was diagnosed with a genetic disease called macular dystrophy. This causes progressive blindness. In one of his shows, he mentioned that he had a book he wanted to write on God, but kept putting it off. But no more. As is typical with Christians, I think he sees a cause and effect between his actions like that and his disease--a Divine punishment or a challenge. I think he's scared.

That aside, last week Beck produced one of the most stunning political analyses of his entire restore values campaign. It is presented as a three show series. I am giving the videos in posts below this one.

Beck's theme is that a cleaned-up version of the New Left of the 60s--even The Weather Underground--is sitting right next to Obama and informs the main policies of his entire administration. Beck names names, presents videos of the damning words as spoken by the actual individuals (within context, I might add), and traces the philosophical and political principles based on the literature of the time.

Now people might wonder about why someone would use old literature, say, from SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) or The Weather Underground. The reason is that the people who produced that literature--and/or their cohorts--are now sitting in positions of great power within Obama's administration.

There is a person who named this danger. She also wrote literature of that time. Her name is Ayn Rand. She wrote a book called The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution.

We can thank Peter Schwartz and Leonard Peikoff for removing the impact of Rand's focus on the current individuals in power, and "updating" her message to make it more "relevant." But what could be more relevant today than the people sitting right next to President Obama? The very people Ayn Rand wrote about!

The dudes who "knew better" than Rand even renamed the damn book. Here is a quote by Peter Schwartz from the Introduction to Return of the Primitive, which is an "expanded version" of Rand's work:

While the New Left did not triumph in its "anti-industrial revolution," it did pave the way for an ongoing assault on the rational mind and its products.

[MSK - Assault by other folks, not by the New Left people anymore, of course.]

. . .

The battle is indeed continuing.

It is being waged today by...

[MSK - By by other folks, not by the New Left people anymore, of course.]

. . .

The trappings of the New Left are gone, but its substance has endured.

[MSK - Endured in other folks, not by the New Left people anymore, of course.]

Talk about being sucker-punched by your own vanity!

Time to move on to other enemies, huh? We already beat those that Rand wrote about. Now let's take Rand's outmoded stuff and use it for the real enemies today.

Yeah, right.

There's a reason The Weather Underground was called "underground." But that is a nuance apparently beyond the powers of imagination of Schwartz and Peikoff as they set about "improving" Rand's actual work.

It is true that Schwartz's new enemies, environmentalism, multiculturalism and feminism have strong movement elements with similar ideological roots. But all he did was regurgitate some Rand from an ivory-tower perspective and removed awareness of some very dangerous people like you do in a magic trick. While people look at one thing, the real stuff is going on somewhere else.

Beck has done the actual heavy-lifting and, ironically, has restored Rand's focus from the bumbling meddlers in her work. He has even based the narrative of some of his shows around Rand's book. I distinctly recall a show he did on Woodstock versus the Apollo 11 moon landing and calling it a pivot point for America. Does that analogy ring a bell? And that's not the only show or even linguistic habit.

Beck constantly rants against former "dope-smoking hippies" when he talks of the ideological people now in Obama's administration and think tanks. Does that kind of language ring a bell? It sounds like an anachronism in today's world, so he certainly did not pick it up from other mainstream sources.

Beck doesn't say he's running with Rand's ideas like he is doing in his Obama/New Left assault. Given his religious audience, it's too complicated to explain "primitive" really means "New Left," etc. etc. etc. It would look like Beck is shilling for Rand where it was not warranted and many in his audience would start complaining about the atheism thing (they already do when Beck promotes Atlas Shrugged). But if you know the literature, you can see that it's there. And it's honking.

I think it's a damn shame that Rand will not get the mainstream credit for the New Left focus that comes from having a book title people can point to and say, "Wow. That lady was ahead of her times. She even named a book after the current problem." We, here in the subculture and those who delve deeper into Rand's ideas further will know. But not the public at large.

Bravo, Peter Schwartz. Well done. See what you can do to water down Atlas Shrugged while you are at it.

Back to Beck's analysis. Not only have the people from the New Left of the 60s cleaned themselves up and penetrated into the school system, think tanks and government, they also learned a very good lesson. They learned that violence is not the way to erode the capitalistic culture. They tried that and almost got wasted by law enforcement.

So they came up with different strategies. As they went along, they even came up with their own intellectual-practical stuff.

Beck mentioned the blueprint for nonviolent change that is now used by the left. I know it is, too. I looked it up and saw it referenced in left-leaning social causes everywhere.

It is the Movement Action Plan developed in the late 70's and first published in the late 80's by Bill Moyer (not the journalist Bill Moyers). You can get the original in PDF here. In 2001, right before Moyer died, he put this in a new form with some other authors helping him. It is called Doing democracy: the MAP model for organizing social movements. Here is the product description from Amazon:

This activist tool offers a theoretical model for ensuring that social movements are successful in the long term. Beginning with an overview of social movement theory and the MAP (Movement Action Plan) model, Doing Democracy outlines the eight stages of social movements, the four roles of activists, and case studies from the civil rights, anti-nuclear energy, Central America, gay/lesbian, women's health and globalization movements.

Beck's genius is that he has taken this blueprint and used it for his own stuff. Just because a guy like Moyer was a leftist, that doesn't mean he was not brilliant. He was. And Beck has made sure the Tea Party people know about MAP. The reason the leftists have used this is that it works. In fact, people interested in promoting the Objectivist movement would do well to look here for practical guidance.

Moyer identifies eight stages to a successful social movement. Beck showed a chart from the book I found intriguing, but I could not find the chart anywhere. Fortunately Google has part of this book available on Google Books (see here), so I took different screenshots and mounted the chart:

EightSteps-Moyer.jpg

This is the main method. But the philosophy and other methods are also explicit.

For instance the Cloward–Piven strategy, which essentially says to bankrupt the system and run with its own weaknesses so you can tear it down and start all over again (they wanted to bankrupt the welfare program from piling people on so that Congress would be embarrassed and enact "better" guaranteed income laws). This is widely used as a strategy today. However, exploring that one in more depth is for another day.

Here are links to the main Weather Underground literature.

You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows

Prairie Fire

Beck's contention is not that these works are studied currently by Obama and the people surrounding him who produced and grew up on them. But since these folks have not had pivot points (changes of heart) in their own lives where they renounced the values portrayed in these works, it is obvious that they still believe in them. And Obama's entire administration and policies make perfect sense in light of them.

The New Left folks (including The Weather Underground) are now "the man" they battled in the 60s and they are even in charge of "the pigs."

I won't quote from those works here since they are covered in Beck's shows below.

Enjoy, folks.

You don't have to like Beck because of his God focus or theatrics, but at least look at his facts.

He's doing a better job fact-wise on exposing--to the cleansing light of day--the philosophical roots and people moving today's American government than anyone else out there.

Michael

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Glenn Beck Show 1 of 3 - July 27, 2010

Rehabilitating Radicals

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Glenn Beck Show 2 of 3 - July 28, 2010

Inside A Radical Manifesto

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Glenn Beck Show 3 of 3 - July 29, 2010

Radical Blueprint

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