Censorship on the Left

One of the few places Americans can go to for the history that schools deny them has been, whatever his quirks, The Glenn Beck Show. Beck has featured an impressive number of historians such as the University of Dayton’s Larry Schweikart, Hillsdale’s Burton Folsom and veteran journalist M. Stanton Evans, who not only find it hard to get a platform on so-called mainstream media outlets but even on the very Fox Network that the talk show host has called home for awhile.

Apparently, this is one too many outlets for the committed Left. Meanwhile, in their seemingly successful attempt to precipitate Beck’s exodus from cable airwaves, left-wing activists claim they are only trying to counter misinformation but are hard put to show exactly what record they want to amend.

In the meantime, left-wing activists give every indication of resorting to the very demagoguery that they accuse the popular talkmeister of giving vent to. Millions of Americans might be wondering why Beck is going off the air but at the Center for American Progress (CAP) they have no doubt.

“We put a wall around Glenn Beck to separate a minority from a nervous majority,” Tara McGuinness, director of progressive media at CAP said in a presentation there on April 28, 2011. McGuinness “directs the war room at CAP on the cottage industry of hate,” she told the crowd.

It might sound suspiciously to the uninitiated as though CAP were contributing to this industrial base. By the way, McGuinness worked on the Obama campaign.

One of the members of the panel which McGuinness moderated, James Rucker from Color of Change, took particular credit for Beck’s pending exit. Rucker previously worked for MoveOn.org.

He is also incensed by the efforts of states and localities to combat illegal immigration. Rucker singled out Prince William County in Virginia with particular scorn. Full disclosure: I live there.  Rucker did not mention the drop in crime since the ordinance has been in place, among immigrants and citizens alike.

Another panelist at CAP, Faiz Shakir, claimed that “Fox News misinforms” and “feeds Islamophobia” unlike “CNN and MSNBC which are mostly in the business of reporting facts.” Our sister organization, Accuracy in Media, has devoted considerable space to fact-checking both of those networks.

Shakir, of course, failed to note that public schools from coast to coast are disseminating a bowdlerized history of Shariah to middle school students, a trend Accuracy in Academia has covered. For example, California’s guidelines tell us that Shariah has given the Arab world women’s rights, an assertion that women who have actually lived under the system, such as Nonie Darwish, dispute.

Perhaps this never comes up in the war room at CAP. Incidentally, Shakir is also a Democratic campaign operative and veteran of the Obama operation who currently resides at CAP.

In a speech at the libertarian Cato Institute that occurred on the same day as the CAP panel, one of CAP’s founding fathers, billionaire George Soros lamented that Fox “has an audience. But I think holding its feet to the fire is appropriate. Not only for Fox (but) the other side also insofar as they use techniques which are deceptive.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

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