crawlingbrain says:

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I admit, I could only get few a couple of minutes of this video before I got frustrated with how Beck mishandles the facts. I’m not sure if this is intentional or simply a misreading of history, but it really bothers me. For example..

Beck says that the Council on Foreign Relations was “an institution that originated from a group of academics and professionals who participated in the so-called “inquiry” in paris. they sought to offer advise to the progressive Woodrow Wilson.”

This is a misinterpretation of events. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet assembled a think tank of academics that he dubbed “The Inquiry” to help him prepare for the peace negotiations following World War I. When the Paris Peace Conference was held in 1919, Wilson created the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, composed of a handful of academics from The Inquiry, and brought them with him to Paris. Two years later, in 1921, several members of Woodrow’s group founded the Council on Foreign Relations.

He then goes on to say, “Among it’s members, Walter Lippman. I love this man. He’s studied in journalism schools. He’s a hero of journalism. He founded a socialist club in college, whose ideas were influential in crafting the Treaty of Versailles, and we all know how that ended, oh so well.”

This whole paragraph is confusing because it is unclear what is referring to what. Here are the facts:
*Walter Lippman was one of Woodrow Wilson’s advisers, a member of The Inquiry and the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, but he was not part of the group that went on to form the Council on Foreign Relations.
* He was a co-founder of the Harvard Socialist Club when he was 17, but by 1912 had cut all ties with the group and rejected his teenage flirtation with socialism in his book “Drift and Mastery” in 1914.
* Lippman’s (or his college club, it’s unclear who Beck is referring to) ideas helped to craft Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, NOT the Treaty of Versailles. You may remember that the The Treaty itself ended up being so vastly different from what Wilson had wanted that the US Senate refused to ratify it.

Beck can prescribe to whatever brand of politics that make him happy, but it makes me so frustrated to hear television pundits, who viewers turn to for information, mangle the facts so horribly. It’s like he’s playing magnet poetry with all the words from the pages of a history book and rearranging the sentences to imply things that are not there. It’s really irresponsible.