Glenn Beck: AmericaÂ’s Defender
March 31, 2014 by David Horowitz
To introduce Glenn Beck is always a special pleasure for me. Glenn and I have several kinships. We have both chosen the path of missionaries in a troubled world. As a result we are confronted by numerous and powerful adversaries who wish to prevent others from hearing what we have to say, and who have attempted to bury us under layers of fiction as to who we are and what we believe. By appending derisive epithets to our names, they have sought to deny us our humanity and indeed any personhood at all.
Because warriors like Glenn Beck are constantly under fire, and because their truth is constantly being erased, it is important to know who they are and to never lose sight of it. That is why I am going to take a moment to tell you about the man Glenn Beck is, about what he has done for himself, and what he is trying to do for his country.
If you know Glenn Beck only as a public figure, you have seen him facing wicked, character demolishing fire. Yet you can also see that he is a vulnerable man, someone more than ready to concede in public his own flaws and failings; you can see that he is an emotional man with the tears of his defeats and regrets close to the surface. Yet – and this is another oxymoron of his character — he is also a man with outsize ambitions such as only the most powerful ego could possibly sustain: a man crusading across oceans to fight battles for freedom, an entrepreneur who has set out to build a national media network from scratch, and largely with his own earnings. You see all this and you wonder – and probably worry — how these conflicting realities come together and where they will lead. I am going to tell who this man is and the reason why I consider him not only my friend but an American hero.
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The same is true of America — of the American culture that we are now losing as the result of half a century of unanswered attacks on our heritage by the America-hating left. We are who we are as Americans because of those who went before us — because of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln and Isaac Potts.
What we are as Americans, what we have been as Americans, is a people that is free. Our freedom was won and is continually won — as Glenn learned from his personal struggle, as we all learn from ours — through courage and love. The courage to see things as they are, to restore the reality that has been denied. The compassion to see through the eyes of others and to care about them. And about our country. The courage and compassion to answer the call to defend the idea – the unique American idea — that we the people, not governments or kings, are sovereign, and that our rights are not given by governments or men but by our Creator. That they are therefore inalienable; and that that is the freedom that makes us who we are.
As we make our individual ways through the mysteries of this life, we see that in it no one has the answers; no one sees every turn in the road; no one achieves a self-mastery that would keep things always under control; no one can avoid lurches to the side or the occasional fall into a ditch. When everything is said and done you may not agree with all the conclusions Glenn Beck has drawn from his life. But if you have the courage and empathy to see the man as he is you will not fail to appreciate that in Glenn Beck we and our country have a great, compassionate and brave friend; and in this hour of our nationÂ’s peril, an indispensable one.
Glenn Beck: America?s Defender | FrontPage Magazine