Did The Beck Rally Change America And Do A Miracle? Ummm….No

By James Frye

I’ve just finished watching the 3-hour (or 300 hour, if you include Glenn Beck’s never-ending, rambling word salad “speech”) rally for “Restoring Honor” in DC on C-SPAN.  Despite the hype for and against, this thing was kind of a bust.

The people who attended were clearly there for a red-meat tossing tirade about how the evil Socialist President Obama and the handmaidens of Satan – aka The Democratic Party – were destroying America.  What they got instead was a long-form Christian revival meeting combined with a military recruiting show.  The message was pretty clear and nothing new – “If America doesn’t turn toward God we’re all doomed!” combined with speaker after speaker pretty much fetishizing the military.

The faces in the (nearly all-white) crowd told the story – they came from all over the country for THIS? I’ve never seen so many frowns concentrated in one spot in my life.   The only people of color were on the stage and it was a parade of sermons and tales of military bravery, one after the other.  None of them ever did get around to defining what they meant by “honor” either (neither Beck nor Saint Sarah of the Perpetual Victim),  just that we didn’t have it like the Founding Fathers did.  Martin Luther King’s name was invoked a few times to scattered applause.  People on Twitter were reporting that the attendees said they felt “snookered” by Beck and weren’t happy at all.

So what’s the “miracle” that took place today?  It was that this public ego masturbation by Glenn Beck attracted so many people (up to 350,000 people according to the US Park Service estimates) and got any attention at all.

By: James Frye

Long time progressive activist in the Pacific Northwest and self-studying student of politics