In Defense of Jed Brandt, Beck Target

Thank you for posting this defense. Glenn Beck’s willful distortions and smears should not go unaddressed.

I wish Jed all the best in the face of Beck’s manipulative machinations.

After what Mr. Brandt said about taking over companies and farms and taking down the United States of America, he should be scolded. Please tell me one country that has been successful under Communist rule. He also stated that the rights in the Constitution are not for all people. That just is not right. We are garunteed equal treatment, but not equal results, as it should be. But Socialists, the way I understand them, would transfer wealth from people who work for and earn it, to people who don’t. I don’t mind helping the helpless, but I don’t want to help the clueless.

Brandt wouldn’t stand a chance arguing with Beck. Communism is, has been, and always will be, a dismal failure. If Brandt believes so in communism, wouldn’t he be much happier in Cuba, or some other freedom-hating country?

[...] perhaps it was the Bald Communist’s Communist comrade Ernesto Agular who gave ole Jed the heads [...]

Ernesto,

In response to your shortsighted reply to Mike: China is responsible for almost 70 million Chinese deaths, most of its population is in extreme poverty, its own citizens don’t enjoy free speech. How can a system that actively sought out the deaths of dissenters be a good system at all? It really scares me that people actually forgive this.

The Constitution explicitly prohibits what our Federal Government can do. If you want to go to a socialist system, there are plenty of options out there. Don’t be fooled that there’s a huge social gap in our country or some sort of egregious social injustice. The “poor” in this country would be considered middle class or even wealthy by comparison to the people your friend Jed is trying to “help” in Nepal. There are always going to be “the poor”; it is by and large a relative term. BUT, to be fair, there are people in poverty in the US as well, but we also have welfare systems, soup kitchens, etc. and other programs to help keep them from having to eek out survival at the behest of the evil middle class in America.

Ernesto, communism sounds “nice” when you glance over it, but it really is an evil system. Seriously… put on your thinking cap. Hopefully you’ll realize it soon enough. I know it sounds like it sucks that some people are just born into better circumstances than others… but many times that is solely the result of the hard work that person’s previous generations. It’s universally accepted that each family works to improve the quality of life of its kids, grandkids, etc. Perhaps my fortunes are the result of the work my great grandparents did. Just because you or somebody else may not have been born into greater circumstances, doesn’t mean I have to pay for it. Instead, work hard, create a better life for YOUR descendants. Just because you’re not ahead in the game doesn’t mean you can’t still get INTO the game. Who knows, a “poor” person may, due to a number of right decisions, make it big and way exceed what I currently may have… I don’t consider that unfair, it’s life!

In trying to disprove Beck, you inadvertantly proved him correct. Brandt is an overt racist, DOES advocate the destruction of the current system, DOES advocate violence as an answer, and DOES want to use the progressive movement to get what he feels is a better system (Communism). I do not see where Beck was lying at all. In response to your conversation with Timoteo, there is a difference to citizens murdering minorities, and a government imposed mass murder. Mao and Stalin forcefully starving and murdering millions is vastly different than the indian wars we fought. Slavery was and is a black mark on our history, but we have done what was necessary to make ammends and now the opportunity for all is finally a reality. I am not so naive to think that there are not systems/countries in the world where socialism is somewhat successful, and those that feel that is the best system are free to go to those countries and enjoy life. America is great because of her free market system, flaws and all, and that is how it should stay. The opportunity to greatly succeed or the risk of abject failure is a reality, and that is the country I love.

Um, Jed himself said that he was a communist.

He did advocate for the destruction of United States.

He says that communism is the only answer.

What exactly are you disagreeing with Glenn Beck on? You posted the actual video of Jed arguing for the communist destruction of America.

Q: “Please tell me one country that has been successful under Communist rule.”

A: “One could argue China, as the world’s preeminent superpower currently, has been successful. One might also argue Cuba, with nearly 100 percent literacy, free health care and education, has seen successes too.”

But China had to back off of the ideals of communism in order to survive. Otherwise, they would almost certainly have either collapsed like the Soviet Union did, or wound up like North Korea which never had the benefit of a Deng Xioaping to start introducing capitalist-like reforms. And Cuba, a success? You have got to be kidding.

Lots of people have been trying socialism for over two centuries now, in different forms, in all different kinds of cultures on every inhabited continent and, as far as I can tell, the best outcome anybody has ever had is a failure to thrive. Most efforts to establish socialist utopias have either,

* Failed within a few years (like the socialist villages that were popular in the 19th century),
* Or turned violent, warlike, and/or genocidal (France after their revolution; Nazi Germany; Cambodia under Pol Pot; the Soviet Union),
* Or backed off of socialist ideals in order to survive (mainland China; the Israeli kibbutzim; the Pilgrims at Plymouth),
* Or gotten mired in corruption, repression, and poverty (North Korea; Cuba; and just about everybody else in the Third World who hasn’t already done one of the above).

Europe and North America have been trying socialist-like ideas (Medicare, Social Security, the British health service, etc.) since the early to middle 20th century. By and large, these socialistic programs are giving results that are less than satisfactory and some are predicted to collapse under demographic pressure.

Looks to me like socialism is one of those ideas that sounds nice on paper but that’s as good as it gets.

A problem that particularly afflicts the more tyrannical forms of socialism — such as Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, Nazism, and Progressivism — is that a few people use the power of government to try to force everybody else to live in a socialist fashion. Then, you end up with a repressive ruling class of privileged people at the top (the Party members) while the rest of the population (the People) sink into mediocrity at best, or death by famine and violence at worst. It’s haves vs. have-nots to a degree that we have rarely seen in the US, at least not since the days of slavery. Any time you hear someone talking favorably about the Vanguard of the Proletariat, or proclaiming themselves to be Progressives, don’t let them anywhere the reins of power — this is what they’re referring to.

“Uh, National Socialism, as being anti-communist, isn’t socialist.”

There are lots of people who say the communists aren’t real socialists, either.

But both the Nazis and the Soviets at least paid lip service to socialism. Not just in adopting the name but also in using the power of government to force socialist-like policies on the people: abolition of income not earned by work; confiscation or nationalization of industries and private property, to varying degrees; severe penalties (including death) for making too much money; and so on. They also both consolidated power into a strong centralized government that tried to run the country in a top-down fashion, exercising state control over even the small details of the people’s everyday lives.

I’ll admit, they did have some differences: for example, the Germans set up efficient, factory-like camps for mass murder while the Soviets found it easier to subdue ethnic groups by inducing famine (which killed far more people than the gas chambers did). The Soviet camp system was set up to house a slave-labor population instead of being death camps. Also, the Nazis contemptuously discarded the concept of democracy whereas the Soviets (for some reason) thought it was important to pretend to be democratic even though they weren’t. And the Nazis at least had enough understanding of economics to harness the power of business and turn it to State use, whereas the Soviets were less pragmatic and destroyed their businesses instead.

But look at all they had in common: a single-party state with little or no tolerance for dissent even on minute points of doctrine; a secretive government populated by kleptocrats who made heavy use of censorship, secret police, and informants; state-sponsored emphasis on sports; indoctrination of children in an effort to turn them against their parents; rewriting history and replacing the national culture with a non-christian one; disdain for traditional, Christian-based morality, replacing it with a morality based on “the ends justify the means”. I could go on and on.

And they both scapegoated Jews and persecuted other ethnic minorities, favoring their own race above all others — the Germans tried to eliminate other ethnic groups in favor of “Aryans”, the Soviets had policies to “Russify” regions that were populated by other ethnic groups. The Germans made it a capital offense to be Jewish, the Soviets made it a crime against the state to be Tatar or Cossack.

So, on the whole, the similarities are far more significant than the differences. Hitler is even credited with observing that “National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if [...]“. He might just have been right.

Of course the Nazis and Soviets were anti each other. Totalitarian dictators don’t like competition. Once it was no longer politically advantageous to cooperate, they reverted to form.