This weekend, Jay, Jon and I made a trip to Washington, D.C. to attend Glenn Beck’s “Restore Honor” rally. It took 10 hours of driving to get down there, but we all found it well worth the travel time.
The purported point of the rally was to focus on what was good about America and celebrate it. It was espoused as being non-partisan, with Glenn specifically asking the participants not to bring political signs. For the most part, the audience complied.
However, this lack of signs did not change the fact that this was a rally specifically for Tea Partiers, by its most recognizable spiritual leader – Glenn Beck. The second he got on stage, Beck took a pot shot against what Tea Partiers see as the “liberal media”, which is to say all outlets that aren’t the ultra-conservative FOX News or radio personality Rush Limbaugh. He then spoke out against progressivism and liberalism of 1960s onwards, telling his audience to bring America back to how it used to be.
Beck called on his audience to inspire themselves on the Founding Fathers, virtual deieties amongst Tea Partiers. Their words are second only to those written in the Bible: unfaltering, regardless of cultural advances. This kind of idolization was somewhat eerie, as it bordered on a personality cult.
God was also referenced multiple times during the event. This rally, according to Beck, was the will of God. The Lord, he revealed, had spoken to him. Naturally, a pastor was brought on for a morning prayer. As Beck and the Tea Partiers see it, America is a Christian nation, and should be run with Biblical ideals. He spoke of bringing “God back to America”, and would later speak out against the exclusion of the Church from government. As for the prayer, the pastor took the opportunity to speak out against gay marriage, likely in reference to the recent advances of marriage equality in California.
Another theme was the military. Sarah Palin came on, and praised herself for having raised a combat veteran, her twenty-year old son. She said she came on not as a politician, but as a mother of a soldier. There was then talk about the greatness of America’s military, about how it shouldn’t be questioned, and three soldiers with heroic stories were talked about. Palin’s speech was essentially otherwise fluff, filler material.
The event was well attended. I’d venture a guess at 100,000 participants. The aura was decidedly anti-Obama, pro-Palin, pro-Reagan, pro-guns, and pro-Christianity. A number of people had “NRA” hats, while others sold off buttons that painted Obama as “socialist.” There was also “Don’t tread on me” flags abound.
The attendees were almost exclusively white – I only saw one black person, and she was there with her white boyfriend. The people there were also almost all certainly over 45 years of age. The only younger people I saw were children and teens brought along with their parents, and a group of twenty-somethings holding signs.
All in all, I’m really glad I went. This was double-digit IQ in action, as my friend Jon put it, and I look forward to repeating the experience once again. Perhaps during 2012, when the Tea Partiers hope that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck will team up and vie for the presidency.
