As part of his thoroughly ahistorical and lunatic smear-job tonight against the Progressive movement of the early 20th century, Beck and his panel of “experts” attacked progressives for, in his view, rewriting history for their own purposes:

BECK: [Woodrow Wilson] also was a guy who helped change history. If I'm not mistaken it was during his administration that a group of professors, I think from Columbia, progressive professors, got together and said “You know what? Our founders were racist white people. What do you say?” And they decided to really make progress we had to detach from the history that we had and make progress from that. Can you tell that story?

LARRY SCHWEIKART, HISTORIAN: History becomes a tool for the present to affect the future. It no longer becomes a means of looking at the past, but it becomes an active weapon to change society.

Stupid? Yes. But useful, in that it set up one of Beck's other guests to accidentally expose Beck's ridiculous hypocrisy later in the program. As the show ended, Beck bemoaned the fact that documents like the Federalist Papers are somewhat inaccessible in the way that they were written:

BECK: You know what the problem is, honestly? I think guys like you, I think we need really smart people that can take the Federalist Papers and rewrite them for the common man. Rewrite them, change the language. I read George Washington's farewell address, which is brilliant, but I don't know how anybody listened to these guys back then, because it's really difficult. You know what I mean? If we rewrite these things in common language people can access them again a lot easier.

BURTON FOLSOM JR., HISTORIAN: Of course, that's what the progressives tried to do, rewrite them so that the common man could understand them.

BECK: [mockingly] It's just that the common people are so stupid, you know. We'll be back. Final thoughts in just a second.

So how great is this? Beck, after attacking progressives for rewriting history for their own purposes, advocates that conservatives rewrite history for their own purposes, and gets called out by his own guest. Caught in an obvious bit of hypocrisy, he shifts to mocking progressives for thinking the “common people are so stupid,” even though not five seconds earlier he was saying that the language of the Founding Fathers was too complicated for the common man to understand.

And let's not forget that the last time Beck attempted to rewrite a founding document to make it more accessible to the masses, he ended up inadvertently endorsing a Constitutional provision that protected the slave trade.

This is really all you need to know about Beck's treatment of history -- hypocritical, factually vacant, and an expression of his own cynical view of the subject.