Glenn has warned about progressivism for more than a decade. So what is progressivism and who are progressives? This 12-part series explores those questions, backed up with research and facts from Glenn's new book Liars: How Progressives Exploit Our Fear for Power and Control.
At its core, progressivism is an insatiable thirst for control. The endgame of progressives is to build a massive all-controlling welfare state that holds us hostage to their preferences. After all, they know what's best.
Progressive leaders are masters of lies and deception, using fear to control and subjugate free people. Frighteningly, their efforts often involve the loss of free will, murder or mutilation of their fellow human beings --- always in the name of a better world. Ever hear the expression, "My way or the highway"? It might as well have been coined by a progressive.
Share this series with everyone you know. The centuries-old history of progressivism must be exposed and taught to all freedom-loving people.
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Progressive Liars Part II: German Roots
Everything has a beginning, including the philosophy of progressivism. Though progressive thoughts and ideas run rampant in our politics and culture today, progressivism isn't a new idea. In fact, its roots can be found long before Obama or Clinton or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Progressive thought preceded Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt and America's Founding. The genesis of progressive ideology can be traced back to the continent of Europe, hundreds of years ago, before Karl Marx himself.
To find the roots of progressivism, one has to go back to Germany in the 1500s, and the Protestant Reformation against the Catholic Church by Martin Luther. Was Luther a progressive? Hardly, but his ideas about man's relationship with God have morphed and metastasized the past 500 years into something unrecognizable from what he originally intended. Luther's declaration that man could have a personal relationship with God without enlisting a papal leader inadvertently started the ball rolling toward progressivism.
More than two centuries later in the late 1700s, German professor George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would use his disbelief in God for a similar purpose --- to better humanity. After surviving an epidemic, Hegel's views on God were irrevocably changed. Hegel concluded that experts and knowledgeable persons should rule --- not God --- with the most perfect government and unlimited authority over the individual. Through the State and its rulers, man would essentially become God on earth. This was the foundational principle that eventually became known as progressivism.
Listen to all serials at glennbeck.com/serials