Glenn Beck is wrong is kind of a dog-bites-man story, but some of the evidence he’s offering here as proof that Barack Obama is secretly a socialist is just laughably bad. It starts with bullet points about Obama’s dad, including the fact that he was a “Harvard educated economist.” Then we get bullet points about Obama’s mom, including the fact that she was “Influenced by Nietzsche and Freud.” Presumably the idea here is that since Nietzsche has a funny foreign name, he must be a socialist. But here’s Nietzsche on socialism from Human, All-Too-Human:
Socialism is the fanciful younger brother of the almost expired despotism whose heir it wants to be; its endeavors are thus in the profoundest sense reactionary. For it desires an abundance of state power such as only despotism has ever had; indeed it outbids all the despotisms of the past inasmuch as it expressly aspires to the annihilation of the individual, who appears to it like an unauthorized luxury of nature destined to be improved into a useful organ of the community.
In other words, Nietzsche’s views on socialism are a lot closer to Glenn Beck’s than to Barack Obama’s. Once we get to the bullet points about Obama we learn that “President Obama seizes control of insurance giant AIG” which actually happened when George W Bush was President. Also according to Beck, Obama’s view that “race is still an enormous factor in our society, but economics can overcome a lot of racial division” shows signs of socialism, though honestly I can’t see where.
Beck more-or-less confesses to just being a greedy huckster looking to make a quick buck from duping his audience, but at this point he’s just getting lazy and sloppy.