Dr. Ben Carson Cites Far Right Crank W. Cleon Skousen in Speech Against Gay Marriage
The GOP is a Terrorist Organization
Dr. Ben Carson (Young Earth Creationist, Birther) recently cited a book called The Naked Communist by W. Cleon Skousen, in a speech against marriage equality:
If you look at the writings of a lot of the neo-Marxists, when they talk about the New World Order, they say there’s only one stick in the mud - the United States. How do you get them out of the way? Or how do you change them? And they said there are two fundamental things - the Judeo-Christian faith, and their strong families. Those were the things that had to be attacked, and those things have been systemically attacked over the last several decades. There’s a booked called The Naked Communist by Cleon Skousen, the same guy who wrote The 5000 Year Leap, that lays out the whole agenda.
If you’ve been a regular reader of LGF over the past several years, the name W. Cleon Skousen has come up a few times, particularly The 5000 Year Leap, as Glenn Beck (among others), is a self described disciple of Skousen, best described as a right wing crank:
What has Beck been pushing on his legions? “Leap,” first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recast the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by French and English philosophers. “Leap” argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs — based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith — that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah’s George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year’s annual fundraiser).
But more interesting than the contents of “The 5,000 Year Leap,” and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book’s author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen’s own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of “The 5,000 Year Leap.”
As Beck knows, to focus solely on “The 5,000 Year Leap” is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck’s bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.
Hat tip for the above Charles. That excerpt was from a 2009 Salon article You should read that whole article, as well listen to the other clips in the Right Wing Watch I’ve posted.
And let me remind you again that Dr. Ben Carson is a rising star in the conservative movement, primarily because he is perceived as having “bravely” spoken conservative truths with the evil Marxist Fascist Maoist Anti-Christ Secretly Muslim Secretly Gay Kenyan with Totalitarian Cravings President Barack Hussein Obama.
More: Ben Carson Explains How Gay Marriage Is a Marxist Plot to Impose the ‘New World Order’
