Reversing a position he held in September, Glenn Beck today claimed that the Federal Reserve “actually may help us” if they decide to “print more money,” even though it will “cause inflation in the long run.” But only “if the Republicans really win in a landslide,” he said.
Let there be no doubt -- Glenn Beck's “true north” is the Republican Party.
Discussing reports that the Fed might vote to resume a program to purchase securities from the Treasury in order to inject money into the economy -- a process economists call quantitative easing -- Beck explained that under Republican policies, “this money will be available” for people to borrow and spend since a GOP Congress won't “screw them.”
Back on his September 23 television show, however, Beck said that “printing money” was a policy that always -- always -- leads to “massive inflation” and ends in a “Weimar trap.” Every time. Beck explained that “civilization after civilization have gone into that forest and then never come out.” Like Weimar Germany, which “just started to print money” after World War I -- “exactly what we're doing now, OK?”
The German officials busy printing the money “knew it would lead to the Weimar trap” of “massive inflation,” Beck claimed, but they did it anyway. “You'll never get out of the forest, ever,” if you start printing money.
Once you're in the forest? According to Beck, “There's no good answer in the forest -- unless you stay true to your principles. If you find your true north and say, what has never worked -- printing money, borrowing more -- that's never worked, we know that's never worked.” Otherwise, people like Hitler say they can “lead you out of the forest” by printing more money. “That's how it always ends,” he warned.
Glenn Beck is about as consistent and intellectually honest as a busted weather vane, spinning whichever way the wind blows.
Last week, we pointed out how Beck's political activism made him a leader in the Tea Party movement, a position he has used to drive his followers into the Republican Party. Earlier in the week, Beck devoted his Fox News show to asking Republican candidates, “What kind of help do you need?”
Recall January 2008. Beck had yet to turn his starring role on Fox News into a megaphone through which to call President Obama a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture” and to repeatedly demonize “progressives.”
In a promo for his yet-to-debut Fox News show, he decried “the politics of left and right,” which often devolves into the “other side” saying that Democrats are “trying to turn us into communist Russia.”
What is abundantly clear is that Glenn Beck is first and foremost about the “politics of left and right.” More specifically, he is about heavily promoting and cultivating the politics of the right and stoking fears that the left is “trying to turn us into communist Russia.” Or the Weimar Republic. Or the Nazis.