Glenn Beck’s Insane History of Slavery
Glenn Beck thinks that “Obamacare” will lead to slavery or Nazism or something. He also conflates slavery with government regulation. We knew that already.
But apparently he has really weird and totally wrong ideas about how actual slavery started, too. He seems to think it started “small” with “court orders” and “legislatures.” The government started it and had to convince people that Africans were an inferior race that could be enslaved and that this process took a long time.
Since I couldn’t find a transcript of this radio program available on the Internet, I will write down a partial transcript of Beck’s statements starting at about 2:15 in the Media Matters recording.
Beck: I would like to propose that the president is exactly right when he said, “slaves sitting around the campfire didn’t know when slavery was going to end, but they knew that it would. And it took a long time to end slavery.” Yes it did. But, it also took a long time to start slavery. And it started small. And it started with seemingly innocent ideas. And then a little court order here and a court order there, and a little more regulation here and a little more regulation there. And before we knew it, America had slavery. It didn’t come over in a ship to begin with as an evil slave trade. The government began to regulate things because the people needed answers, they needed solutions. It started in a courtroom and then it went to the legislatures. That’s how slavery began. And it took a long time to enslave an entire race of people, and to convince another race of people that they were somehow or another less than them. But it can be done. I would ask you to decide: Are we freeing slaves? Or are we creating slaves? That’s a question that must be answered.
Our sponsor this half-hour — Oh, was that dangerous? Was that a danger to our republic for asking that question?
In point of fact, slavery has existed since ancient times. When laws were first written down, they reflected the fact that slavery already existed as an institution. It existed in Europe and Africa long before the colonization of the New World.
