Glenn Beck: Double Agent for Agenda 21?

Yesterday, we couldn’t help poking fun at Glenn Beck’s red alert about the words he associates with an imaginary UN plot to take away our cars and our freedoms. But it gets better: Everyone’s favorite conspiracy-monger is touting his newest project — a “city-theme park hybrid” called Independence, USA that in some ways bears a shocking resemblance to the urbanism he sneers at, and in other ways seems far more coercive than the planning ideas he wants people to fear.

Wouldn’t you know it, this $2 billion master-planned community will be modeled after the walkable streets of Disneyland, without Disneyland’s fatal flaw, according to Beck — being overly “commercialized.”

Look at the video and read about what he has planned, and see if you don’t think it sounds just a little bit, I don’t know, collectivist. And please excuse the (many) typos; we didn’t change a thing from the original treatise:

The Marketplace would be a place where craftmen and artisan could open and run real small businesses and stores. The owners and tradesmen could hold apprenticeships and teach young people the skills and entrepreneurial spirit that has been lost in today’s entitlement state.

There would also be an Media Center, where Glenn’s production company would film television, movies, documentaries, and more. Glenn hoped to include scripted television that would challenge viewers without resorting to a loss of human decency. He also said it would be a place where aspiring journalists would learn how to be great reporters.

Across the lake, there would be a church modelled after The Alamo which would act as a multi-denominational mission center. The town will also have a working ranch where visitors can learn how to farm and work the land.

Independence would also be home to a Research and Development center where people would come to learn, innovate, educate, and create. There would be a theme park for people to recharge and have fun with their families.

People would also have the option to live in Independence, with a residential area where people of different incomes could all come together and be neighbors.

There you have it. America’s loudest critic of planning has come forward with a master-planned city of his own design.

So, you may have thought that eliminating mandatory parking minimums and single-use zoning was a threat to your rights. But this is totally how they get you. They make you think Glenn Beck is on the side of freedom, and then POW! We’ll all get enslaved in “Independence.”

  • henry h

    Independence…where the streets are paved with Rearden metal.

    I seriously can’t countenance Beck’s fans moving to such a place. Though maybe they’d conclude urban-style living isn’t that bad if they only had to be around “their kind”.

    I wonder how much the consternation there is about urban living, mixed-use development, walkability, de-privileging auto travel, etc. is actually about an exaggerated sense of “stranger danger” (i.e. “poor minorities are gonna rob and murder me!”) and just plain dislike of having to deal with people different from one’s own “group”.

    Let’s not forget suburbs and cars in America are (were?) basically (until recently) a way to legally allow for socioeconomic segregation, hence all the hue and cry about public transportation allowing “inner-city people” to invade clean, pristine, peaceful suburbs in order to commit crimes…or how suburbanites balk at apartment buildings being constructed anywhere near single-family home developments (less well-off people can live there, so they’ll move in and rob and murder single-family-home-dwelling folks).

  • Clarence Eckerson Jr.

    If Glen Beck wants any chance to fill this place, he’ll need to start showing up at CMU conferences, Pro-Walk Pro-Bike, and Railvolution….and we all know he isn’t hanging with us types.

  • thielges

    This proposal is only slightly less delusional than Boozetown : http://www.drunkard.com/issues/55/55-boozetown.html.  Complete with moving sidewalks and police charged with helping drunks get home rather than throwing them in jail.

    henry h – The same stranger danger notion also comes up when there are proposals for pedestrian connectors between previously disconnected neighborhoods.  Everyone seems to conclude that crooks come from the other neighborhood.  And that they’re on foot instead of in a car.

  • KillMoto

    The easy explanation for the seeming incongruity is thus:  Glenn Beck is so obnoxious, even Glenn Beck doesn’t listen to Glenn Beck. 

  • LOL! This delusional writer is multiple layers away from understanding reality! The fact is, Glenn back is largely telling the truth about agenda 21, but only as an agent of the establishment, working to co-opt the truther movement, just as he and Sarah Palin did for the right wing of the fake/left right paradigm when they largely-successfully attempted a “tea party” coup for FOX News.

  • joe

    As a Glenn Beck fan and anti agenda 21 person , I do find that quite funny  🙂 Ill have to post this on The Blaze 

  • Charles_Siegel

    To me, it sounds a lot like something from the Whole Earth Catalog, circa 1968.  The main difference is that it has a church in the center, but the Whole Earth Catalog would have had a meditation center. 

  • Alan

    You might be off your meds.

  • Kevin Giant

    It was very interesting listening to Mr. Beck talk about car-free streets, apprenticeships, locally grown food and locally produced renewable energy resources with photos of lots of wind turbines.  And Mr. Beck supports all these things for his city.

    This simply goes to show that urbanism is so common sense that it trancends ideology.

  • Max Power

    I hate to defend Beck, but there’s a difference between offering people the voluntary choice to life in a different city, and forcing a way on people.  (And yes, that also applies to the policies that imposed sprawl-development on us over the past 50+ years)

    Mostly, Beck’s plan seems to be ripping off Walt Disney’s EPCOT (the city, not the theme park)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPCOT_%28concept%29

  • This is fascinating. The bottom line is this is driven by what people need and want most,  community and relationship. An interesting model for people to connect, collaborate and do life together. Simple math, decrease the margin of external factors so more margin can be found for what we need and want in life

  • Is he going to put “whites only” above the gate, or is that just understood?

  • you cannot make this crap up……good luck there becky boy selling a fake nightmare-scape to gullible rubes

  • Just move to a real city instead of pre-packaged processed sprawl-burbia.

  • Andy Lyke

    Didn’t the Disney people themselves already create such a whiter than white nostalgia driven nightmare? Can anybody say “Celebration”. I wonder who’ll put $2*10^9 behind Glenn Beck. It’ll be inherited wealth; Nobody who could actually accumulate that much would bet in on this ignoranus.

  • D

    Is he really from North Korea?

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