Cowards.

Glenn Beck.

DEDICATION.

To Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and all those who emulate their courage in some small way, like Alveda King, Ted Nugent, Jerry Boykin, and M. Zuhdi Jasser Agree or disagree with any of them, these people will never say the things they do not believe, no matter the cost.

They are the opposite of cowards.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Special thanks to . . .

The LISTENERS, READERS, and GBTV PIONEERS-you give me hope every single day.

My amazing wife, TANIA, all my PARENTS, and my beautiful CHILDREN, who always teach me something new and make me understand what we are fighting for.

Everyone at MERCURY RADIO ARTS and GBTV, including those at our sister companies, THEBLAZE.COM and MARKDOWN.COM. You are showing the world the incredible things that can happen when you combine a dream with hard work and talent.

All the important CONTRIBUTORS and RESEARCHERS who helped bring this book to life, including STU BURGUIERE, ELIZABETH HURLEY, SHARONA SCHWARTZ, KENT LUNDGREN, ZACK TAYLOR, DAVID BRODY, and MARTHA WEEKS.

All those at SIMON & SCHUSTER who may have a case against me for torture. You deal effortlessly with the craziest book production schedules in the industry, and you have my unending gratitude. This includes CAROLYN REIDY, LOUISE BURKE, JEAN ANNE ROSE, MITCHELL IVERS, ANTHONY ZICCARDI, LIZ PERL, EMILY BESTLER, AL MADOCS, JOY O'MEARA, SALLY FRANKLIN, and those who work tirelessly behind the scenes to put this book in your hands.

Everyone at PREMIERE RADIO NETWORKS and CLEAR CHANNEL who help my voice reach millions every day, including MARK MAYS, JOHN HOGAN, JULIE TALBOTT, DAN YUKELSON, and DAN METTER.

The talented and hardworking people behind the scenes at NEP and CRM and all the other companies that have helped GBTV become the amazing success story it is.

Everyone else whom I owe so much of my personal and professional success to, including: GEORGE HILTZIK, BILL O'REILLY, BRIAN GLICKLICH, MATTHEW HILTZIK, JOSH RAFFEL, JON HUNTSMAN, DUANE WARD, STEVE SCHEFFER, DOM THEODORE, RICHARD PAUL EVANS, GEORGE LANGE, RUSSELL M. BALLARD, KEN SWEZEY, and JOSH SESSLER, along with ALLEN, CAM, AMY, MARY, and the whole team at ISDANER.

INTRODUCTION.

"A lie told often enough becomes the truth."

- Lenin.

"Cowards can never be moral."

- Mahatma Gandhi.

George Orwell once said, "In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." Consider this book a revolutionary act. After all, in this world, at this time, it's not those who incite street riots who are the revolutionaries, it's those who tell and seek the truth.

We live in a country where the establishment is infested with cowards; people who are not only unwilling to find solutions, but who are often too spineless to even acknowledge that a problem exists. They are far more enamored with power, or ratings, or their personal agendas than with the truth. I'm talking about politicians, yes, but also academics, the mass media, movement leaders, business leaders-and anyone else who keeps perpetuating the lie that everything will be fine if we just listen to them.

They are wrong. Everything is not fine-it hasn't been for a very long time.

The cowards want us to believe that the two-party political system is working, when, in reality, it hasn't offered American voters a genuine choice in a very long time. We complain election after election about not having a candidate who truly represents our values, and yet nothing ever changes. We keep playing the game, electing the same progressives and then feigning outrage when they back off from their bold campaign promises and instead turn into the same mealy-mouthed weasels they replaced. They hide the fact that there is another option, another way of looking at the world-one much more closely aligned with the Constitution-because it threatens their monopoly on power.

The cowards want us to believe that the public education system is adequately preparing our children for their futures in an increasingly competitive world. It isn't.

The cowards want our kids to believe that capitalism has failed. It hasn't.

The cowards want us to put all facts and common sense aside and instead believe that our economy is not being targeted by terrorists and other nations. They want us to ignore the fact that powerful people like George Soros are willing and able to bring down entire currencies and change entire countries.

The cowards want us to look the other way as progressive activists disguised as religious leaders, like Jim Wallis, hijack our churches by turning legitimate policy debates into issues of morality rooted in the Bible.

The cowards want us to sit back and accept that the mainstream media is hostile and condescending toward traditional values. They think it's okay that stories about celebrities or murder are sensationalized and put at the top of newscasts while stories of real importance are ignored or buried.

The cowards want us to believe that the cartel violence along our southern border is contained and is not a threat to Americans. They want to minimize the threat of radical Islam and dismiss well-established goals, like spreading the Islamic caliphate and shariah law, as conspiracy theory. Cowards prioritize political correctness over the truth.

All of this must change. We've spent decades playing by the rules, only to find out that the game itself has been rigged all along. After all, you cannot have a legitimate debate when the moderators-the political and media elite-have a vested interest in the outcome.

The cowards have had their way for far too long. By concealing themselves in the darkness, they've advanced an agenda that has brought America to the brink. Only the bright sunlight of truth can expose them for who they really are.

It is my sincere hope that, with your help, this book helps to usher in those first, bright rays of light.

Dallas, Texas 2012.

" I am impatient with those Republicans who after the last election rushed into print saying, 'We must broaden the base of our party'-when what they meant was to fuzz up and blur even more the differences between ourselves and our opponents."

-Ronald Reagan, 1975.

I'M SURE you've noticed how little choice there seems to be in politics. I hear it over and over again from people who call in to my radio show and tell me that they don't see any point in voting since both candidates are equally terrible.

They're often right. In 2008, our choice for president was between a Republican who wanted to spend billions to "combat" global warming and a Democrat who wanted to spend hundreds of billions to do the same thing. In 2004, it was between the incumbent George W. Bush, whose embarrassing conservative record we'll cover later, and John Kerry-a man who, by some accounts, had been the most liberal member of the Senate for multiple years.

If it seems like no "real" conservative or libertarian candidate for president ever makes it very far it's because they don't. They are derided and marginalized by the establishment and mainstream media until their names become toxic. By the time the power base is done with a candidate who might pose a threat, he's become the punch line to a joke, the plot of a Saturday Night Live skit, or the first thing that pops up on Google when you search for "homophobia" or "racist" or "idiot."

None of this is happening by chance. It's a shell game, and the progressives who run our political parties, our universities, and our media treat the rest of us like tourists in Times Square. It may occasionally look as if libertarians and small-government candidates have a chance to win the prize-but that's just the way they set up the con. The illusion of victory is omnipresent, but it's just that-an illusion. A con can't ever really be beaten.

THE SHELL GAME TURNS 100.

The Big Con started right around 1912. America was given a "choice": Woodrow Wilson or Theodore Roosevelt. The New Freedom or the New Nationalism. Progressive or Progressive.

That was the year that Republican became Democrat and Democrat became progressive. Later, after progressives finally had their hands on our wallets, they stopped calling themselves progressives and took the name "liberal" instead. When people caught on to that, the left changed the names to protect the guilty once again.

The Con, Revealed.

Hillary Clinton actually described these bait-and-switch word games pretty well during a 2007 debate after she was asked if she would define herself as "liberal."

You know, it is a word that originally meant that you were for freedom, that you were for the freedom to achieve, that you were willing to stand against big power and on behalf of the individual.

Unfortunately, in the last 30, 40 years, it has been turned up on its head and it's been made to seem as though it is a word that describes big government, totally contrary to what its meaning was in the 19th and early 20th century.

I prefer the word "progressive," which has a real American meaning, going back to the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century.

Progressives realized long ago that if you rig the game of politics against the small-government option, then you end up with a series of candidates who increasingly blur the line between the parties. Eventually the parties themselves become meaningless-empty vessels that simply serve to funnel money and power through the system. With very few exceptions, our elections are really no longer about whether to grow or cut government's size and power, but rather by how much they should grow. We debate double-digit increases in social program spending versus single-digit increases. We debate how many new billion-dollar entitlements we should add instead of whether these programs should even exist in the first place. We debate whether teachers unions and the U.S. Department of Education should have more or less power, rather than whether the federal government should have any role in local education at all. All of this is part of the con, and it's worked to absolute perfection. With very few exceptions even the "boldest" of conservative politicians submit budgets and bills that, a hundred years ago, would've been too far left for even a Democrat to propose.

Whenever candidates or groups raise their hand and question these debates, invoke the Constitution, or propose "radical" ideas like a balanced budget amendment, shutting down overreaching and ineffective federal agencies, or adhering to the Tenth Amendment, they are ostracized. Why do you think the Tea Party was immediately branded as a bunch of racists and birthers? It's because they posed a real threat of waking voters up to the fact that Americans are being presented with a never-ending series of false choices. The progressive establishment can't allow real diversity to stand.

The only hope we have of changing this is by first educating people as to how this happened and who's behind it-and then by presenting a better way forward. That's what the first two chapters of this book are all about: the virus-progressivism; and the antibiotic-commonsense libertarianism. Yes, we have plenty of other issues to solve, and many of them are covered in this book, but if we don't start by treating the underlying disease then none of that will matter.

So, let's take a giant step back, get out of the weeds of the twenty-four-hour news cycle and cable channels and Twitter attacks, and ask ourselves this simple but important question: How did we ever get to the point where the conservative/libertarian point of view does not even get a seat at the table?

THE RINOAN ANCIENT SPECIES It's pretty easy to spot the people who don't really fit into the Republican Party. A lot of times these are the same people who frequent the Sunday morning talk shows or are media darlings. I'm talking about people like Arlen Specter, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham. But these types of Republicans are nothing new.

Theodore Roosevelt was one of the first RINOs (Republican in Name Only) in American history. Yes, I know, Roosevelt was brave and strong. He explored the world. He strung up rustlers in the Wild West. He wrote more history books than most people ever read. He edited a magazine. (Even if Newt Gingrich were around back then, Teddy Roosevelt would still have been the smartest guy in the room.) All of this made Roosevelt incredibly dangerous when he decided to get on board the Progressive train. And the longer he rode those rails, the more radical he got. His "Square Deal" was one thing. It started the ball rolling. It got the nose of big government under the Constitution's tent by regulating business and the banks. But then Roosevelt's progressivism got increasingly more toxic. After he left the White House, he unveiled something he called the "New Nationalism."

They Really Said It.

You know, my hero is a guy named Teddy Roosevelt.

-JOHN MCCAIN AT A PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE IN OCTOBER 2008.

And for government to not leave guarantees that you don't have the ability to change, no private corporation has the purchasing power or the ability to reshape the health system, and in this sense I guess I'm a Theodore Roosevelt Republican. In fact, if I [was] going to characterize my-on health where I come from, I'm a Theodore Roosevelt Republican and I believe government can lean in the regulatory leaning is okay.

-NEWT GINGRICH.

There's a reason Barack Obama took time out in December 2011 from pretending he was FDR or JFK or Harry Truman or Lincoln (and from golf, too, come to think of it) to channel Roosevelt at Osawatomie, Kansas. Osawatomie is where, in 1910, Roosevelt gave a speech that would sound right at home in today's Democratic Party. "We should permit [wealth] to be gained only so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community," Roosevelt told a crowd of thirty thousand listeners. "This, I know, implies a policy of a far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had, but I think we have got to face the fact that such an increase in governmental control is now necessary. . . ."

Two years later, Roosevelt doubled down, turning from rogue elephant to Bull Moose and running for president on his own Progressive Party ticket. The New York Times explained that Roosevelt's 1912 Progressive Party convention was at best a gathering of "a convention of fanatics." How bad was Roosevelt's 1912 campaign? It made people think that Woodrow Wilson was conservative. That's bad, but what's far worse is that Roosevelt is the president who some prominent modern-day Republicans, like John McCain and Newt Gingrich, still look up to.

Roosevelt certainly wasn't alone in being a progressive Republican; the GOP was infested with these guys. In 1912, Roosevelt's Progressive running mate was California governor Hiram Johnson, a big-time Progressive who hated Japanese immigrants. You know who worshipped Johnson? Earl Warren-the same guy who, as the Republican governor of California during World War II, helped FDR ship the Japanese in his state to internment camps.

Sometimes the Truth Slips Out.

I am keenly aware that there are not a few men who claim to be leaders in the progressive movement who bear unpleasant resemblances to the lamented Robespierre and his fellow progressives of 1791 and '92.

-THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

Then there was Nebraska's progressive senator George W. Norris, who served nine congressional terms (five in the House and four in the Senate) as a "Republican." Norris was the very model of a RINO. Not only did he endorse FDR in 1932; in 1928 he had also endorsed Democrat Al Smith. Norris also sponsored FDR's Tennessee Valley Authority and Rural Electrification Act (both alongside segregationist Mississippi anti-Semitic congressman John Rankin) and was very pro-Soviet ("Russia is more in accord with the United States . . . than most any other foreign nation").

Bipartisan Progressives.

I guess it's not really surprising that when Henry A. Wallace (another former progressive Republican) and his communist-controlled Progressive Party staged their national convention in 1948, they hung a huge portrait of the late former supposed Republican George Norris from the rafters.