Glenn Beck Planning $2 Billion Libertarian Commune In Texas

By on January 14, 2013 in News 82

The planned community of Independence, USA is to be the living embodiment of the writings of Ayn Rand—specifically, the “Galt’s Gulch” described in Atlas Shrugged. Fingers crossed that this continues to unfold in fascinating fashion. Right Wing Watch explains:

On his program last night, Beck revealed grandiose plans to create an entirely self-sustaining community called Independence Park that will provide its own food and energy, produce television and film content, host research and development, serve as a marketplace for products and ideas, while also housing a theme park and serving as a residential community.

At the center, Beck (with the help of David Barton) will create a massive “national archive”/learning center where people can send their children to be “deprogrammed” and elected officials can come to learn “the truth.” All for a mere $2 billion.

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  • IokSotot

    Galt’s Gulch huh? The one in the book was a valley with arable land, an infinitely replenishing forest, major oil reserves, an iron mine AND a gold mine.

    At least when the 1% lock themselves up in their walled estates, islands and cruise liners they will be easy to identify. Then the rest of us will know exactly where to besiege and who to liquidate.

    • Anarchy Pony

      I believe they also had a perpetual motion machine.

      • IokSotot

        Ha Ha forgot about that. I seem to recall Galt also manages to destroy every bridge across the Mississippi with a beam weapon toward the end.

        You know, if there really was a guy that smart maybe everyone really would have been better off listening to him.

        • “Big” Richard Johnson

          Sounds like bad fan fiction.

        • Andrew

          “We’ll prove to the leeches that they need us by destroying everything they built for us!”

      • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001564286905 Bob Hoffman

        If memory serves, it was a “power/energy” (electricity) machine…

        • Anarchy Pony

          Whatever, a physically impossible macguffin.

  • saint_al

    “…where people can send their children to be “deprogrammed”…”
    Uh huh. Delusional, indeed. Beck would be doing his best just to build a shitty summer ‘camp’ along this line of political thinking. Wonder how much a stay there would cost since altruism is evil and should go unrewarded?

  • Chaos_Dynamics

    Planned community = Collectivism.

  • “Big” Richard Johnson

    These sorts of communities are usually called “asylums”.

  • http://www.facebook.com/keith.welch Keith Achmet Welch

    I always wanted to know: Who mowed John Galt’s lawn? Objectivist Mexican illegals?

    • IokSotot

      Obviously Galt recruited the world’s greatest lawnmower.

      • Jin The Ninja

        made in china.

    • InfvoCuernos

      Look around, there’s no shortage of right wing lower middle class people that don’t realize that the have’s hate them and use them.

      • http://twitter.com/AaronPaul98 AaronPaul

        as Valerie replied I can’t believe that a stay at home mom able to profit $5490 in four weeks on the network.

      • http://twitter.com/AaronPaul98 AaronPaul

        …..——goo.gl/pRItr (Click on Home)

      • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1534577116 Raymond Winters

        BEck is libertarian just like I am an Orca…..I have as much faith in his brand of “conservatism” and I have in Obama’s from of “liberalism”, that is to say none at all!

    • Anarchy Pony

      Now you know why they love automation so much, eventually they’ll just have machines to do the work of the “useless eaters”.

    • Andrew

      “I mowed that!”

  • VaudeVillain

    “Libertarian Commune”

    *head asplode*

    PLEASE tell me those are not his exact words… even Beck can’t be that big an idiot.

    • http://twitter.com/RayButlers Ray Butlers

      even Beck can’t be that big an idiot…

      oh yes he can!

  • DeepCough

    You know what would be a great sponsor for this venture? Kool-Aid.

  • Matt Staggs

    Wonder how long it’ll be before Beck breaks out the poison Flavor Ade and big black sunglasses.

  • alizardx

    While I suspect his real intent involves a Cayman Islands bank account and a new home without extradition treaty with US, I think his succeeding would produce far more lulz. As if his reinventing himself as a Futurist (following right-wing corporate money) isn’t funny enough.

    Prediction if he succeeds… IMO, he may be the only guy who could combine a community, bleeding edge tech, and take it straight to disaster.

    Encourage this, but don’t put $ into this. And encourage the creation of a reality show to be run in that community.

    • john_robinson

      sure, sure, sure… but if he succeeds…? Then – what? -you’ll start to listen?

      • alizardx

        Sure. Then, I’ll go out, look at the sky, and scan it for flying pigs.

      • Anarchy Pony

        Singapore succeeds. That doesn’t make it less of a fascist hellhole.

        • InfvoCuernos

          Just don’t get caught chewing gun there without the wrapper and you’ll be ok.

          • InfvoCuernos

            *gum

          • Andrew

            Chewing gun… like Hitler?

    • http://hormeticminds.blogspot.com/ Chaorder Gradient

      At work a coworker put on glenn becks show once for everyone to hear.
      Within a 30 minute span the guy spoke of both the glories of the singularity (“Look at our IPhones! They’re better than Star Trek Tricorders! and with Siri it’s just like saying “Computer do this”…”) and the wonders of our infinite reserves of hydrofracked natural gas.

      I… I don’t even…

      • alizardx

        He’s followied the corporate political money behind the Futurist movement. Dale Carllico and I are obviously not the only people who have done this. My motivation was to expose the Singularity/US Transhumanism as masks for the GOP agenda, his motivation is to collect some of that money and a new younger audience, he’s noticed his audience is aging out. (of this plane of existence)

        He likes 3D printing, too. So do I, but I know that it isn’t going to replace the world manufacturing base any time soon for the same reasons people didn’t stop going to Kinko’s after everybody got ink-jet printers. I can use a rapid prototyping tool. Wonder what he’d want to do with one.

  • InfvoCuernos

    Is this going to be anywhere near Waco?

  • Lee Swain

    Bioshock! They need to build it underwater, Glenn Beck is the real Andrew Ryan. LOL.

    • Anarchy Pony

      Andrew Ryan was articulate and well spoken.

      • DeepCough

        I am Glenn Beck, and I am here to ask you a question: Is a man not entitled to God, Guns, and Glory?

        No, says the man in Washington, because he’s a filthy Liberal!
        No, says the man in the Vatican, because the Pope is not American!
        No, says the man in Moscow, because he is a damned Commie!
        I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose…
        Independence Park!
        A place where every show but mine would be censored.
        Where science would be bound by godliness and morality.
        Where the great would not be constrained by Obamacare.

        With your gun and Bible in hand, Independence Park can become your libertarian commune, as well.

        • Anarchy Pony

          You uh, you wanna get out o’ here?

          • DeepCough

            But I’m not into Bronies.

          • Anarchy Pony

            =..(

          • DeepCough

            Nothin’ personal, ‘Narchy.

  • Matt Staggs

    Anyone else notice the absolutely batshit shirt, tie and jacket combo he’s wearing in the videos?

  • http://twitter.com/penderhouse Wil Bell

    god i hate the fact he calls himself libertarian..

    • john_robinson

      You shouldn’t. Libertarians are individualists; all are welcome! We’ll take a tatooed, pierced, Lesbian why wouldn’t we accept Glenn? You should be proud that he’s at least trying to practice the philosophy.

      • Anarchy Pony

        You’re not libertarian, you’re right-libertarian, which is an utter contradiction. Stop appropriating our fucking word.

        • InfvoCuernos

          I thought that was bizarre for Glenbeck to claim to be Libertarian. I always stopped shy of the whole “AAAAAALL drugs should be legal” dogma. I just can’t see Beck going for legalizing anything that big pharma wasn’t shilling.

        • InfvoCuernos

          I thought that was bizarre for Glenbeck to claim to be Libertarian. I always stopped shy of the whole “AAAAAALL drugs should be legal” dogma. I just can’t see Beck going for legalizing anything that big pharma wasn’t shilling.

        • Bukowskiwithagoldgrill

          exactly. libertarianism is synonymous with anarchism EVERYWHERE else in the fucking world except america. they have co-opted the word and made it synonymous with right wing tea partiers when nothing could be further from the truth.

    • http://twitter.com/RayButlers Ray Butlers

      why? libertarians are the most extreme capitalists with even greater disdain for the “useless eaters” than the most dedicated Republican. This is what libertarianism looks like.

      • Bukowskiwithagoldgrill

        actually libertarianism is staunchly ANTI CAPITALIST in every single other goddamn country in the world. the right wing co opted the word and made it some tea party/capitalist/nightmare mockery of what it really stands for. please educate yourself on the history of libertarianism before you sound like a fool again.

  • BuzzCoastin

    > Beck revealed grandiose plans to create an entirely self-sustaining community called Independence Park that will provide its own food and energy

    this is the really surprising part of the story

    • https://sites.google.com/site/themattprather Matt Prather

      Yes and no.

      Knowing that the National Security State has sequestered or watered-down every secret technology with “implications” for “national security” and kept it within its walled “top secret” garden, including cancer-causing and cancer-curing applications, I said to myself:

      Jee! All they have to do is release some wonderful “clean abundant energy” or “revolutionary”, “gonna-save-the-world” series of technologies right when the post-peak-petroleum economy is right at its weakest point, under the guise of some “libertarian capitalist” inventor’s “genius”, when they had been suppressing the tech for fifty years or more, and they have an unbeatable formula for dominance of the 21st and 22nd centuries to follow up their dominance of the 20th.

  • BrianApocalypse

    One day, the decaying walls of this city will be the perfect home to a post-apocalyptic cult that worships a radiation-induced hallucination of Ronald Reagan.

    • Anarchy Pony

      I’d like to take a look at your screenplay.

      • DeepCough

        This would be a great reboot of “Beneath the Planet of the Apes.”

      • BrianApocalypse

        I’ve got it right here! Actually I could imagine it turning up in the “Fallout” universe.

  • charlieprimero

    This reminds me of televangelist Jim Bakker’s “Heritage USA” resort where he over-sold timeshares to PTL Club members.

    In fact, Beck is a Libertarian in the same way Bakker was a Christian. Only idiots who never picked up a history book believe it.

  • Breshvic

    I thought Glenn Beck was Mormon. This sounds an awful lot like Scientology.

  • evan black

    Paging Jim Jones…

  • Calypso_1

    The gates of Ellis Island…

    They will of course have an historically accurate delousing station?

    “The immigrants who are to go through the process of delousing enter a room
    capable of accommodating groups of seventy-five to one hundred at a time. They
    are asked to remove their clothes. Their shoes, leather belts and similar
    articles are placed in one room, where they are treated with gasoline and oil,
    and their other clothing put in burlap bags, one to each individual.

    The bags full of clothing are put through two chambers, where they are treated with cyanide gas, which does not destroy them, or with steam under pressure. These treatments penetrate the
    materials and destroy both the lice and the nits.

    Immigrants then pass into a series of shower baths where they are treated
    with a certain mixture of soap and oil or acetic acid, of which the principle is
    that the vermin are suffocated. The men’s hair is cut off and the women’s hair
    is thoroughly treated with oil. When the treatment is finished their clothes
    are restored to the immigrants, each in an individual bag.”

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=742104313 Adam Goodwin

      But if there were no parasites in the Beck Commune, the place would be ghost town.

  • john_robinson

    I’m sorry, but who cares? The Right can have it’s communes like the Left. What’s so different between what Beck is doing and those libertarians who want to build on oil platforms off the coast of CA? And I’ll wager his commune will last a lot longer than the others.

    • alizardx

      Nobody really cares, we’re just going after Glenn Beck for the lulz. Nobody thinks he’s got his shit together well enough to either raise the funds or given the funds, build a viable community. If you disagree, go join him. And do please post when you see the reality. (post pictures if it gets to the cannibalism point before it gets shut down by the Feds)

    • Jin The Ninja

      the core essence of american libertarianism is the principle of the homestead.
      a commune is an utter contradiction.

    • Andrew

      At least the Left has the honesty to admit they’re not islands.

  • http://www.facebook.com/pac.rat.7 Pac Rat

    i want to live there just to heckle the right wing dupes that move there about about how they are acting like hippies. living in an intentional community, growing organic food and crafting, fuck me the irony of this shit coming out of glenn beck!

    • Anarchy Pony

      The cognitive dissonance is astounding.

    • Andrew

      The more obsessively one hates something, the more one becomes it.

  • http://www.facebook.com/pac.rat.7 Pac Rat

    J R “BOB” DOBBS to John Galt while giving a bum a haircut on skid row ” Why are you such a dick?”

  • John Galt

    If you’re interested in joining a real libertarian movement with a proven record of success, check out the Free State Project.

    freestateproject.org/fsn42

    • Anarchy Pony

      http://www.infoshop.org/page/AnarchistFAQSectionF

      Right-Libertarianism is fascist garbage.

      • http://twitter.com/RayButlers Ray Butlers

        yes, thank you for saying that

      • Apathesis

        That link seems to not be working. Maybe the site is down?

        • Anarchy Pony

          Yeah, it does go down from time to time.

      • Apathesis

        Nevermind, it finally worked after several tries. VERY informative. Thanks!

        • Anarchy Pony

          I don’t agree with all of their assertions in their environmental sections, but other than that, it’s a great resource for all things pertaining to anarchism.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Bobby-Rebbel/1610391939 Bobby Rebbel

    There’s already something like this happening in New Hampshire. It’s called the Free State Project. Unlike Beck’s plan, it doesn’t have a price tag, just some really cool and hardworking Americans pursuing what they believe in.

  • Cliconian Insoas

    Will he have armed guards at his communce like Jim Jones did?

  • echar

    The creationist museum must be worried about this.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Kurt-Webb/53801531 Kurt Webb

    Isn’t Texas already a Libertarian commune?

  • marvin nubwaxer

    the sixties commune thing is so over, glenn.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Indigno Kevin Hall

    American libertarianism was created in Colorado in the 1970′s because “liberalism” had been hijacked here. They took the word “libertarianism” and reapplied it to define classical liberal ideology (enlightenment liberalism.) American Libertarians are not typically pro big business, we’re just not anti-big business until they start infringing upon our rights. There’s three types of political treatment of business right now. The first type makes laws to make it harder for any business to make it, the second is in bed with big business and writes laws to benefit them and hurt their competitors, and then the third type doesn’t feel like they should be telling anybody what to do with their money so long as they aren’t causing harm.

    Someone else said below that libertarianism is akin to anarchism everywhere else in the world. I’ve always seen it as straddling that fine line between the bare minimum amount of government (which would be a fraction of a fraction of the federal government of today) and chaos. The idea is that no restriction at all means that other people (especially other nations) can come in and hurt us and that leads to restricted freedom. So the idea here is to have just enough government in order to uphold basic justice (which SHOULD be the basics like murder, rape, theft, assault, etc…).

    Glenn Beck is not pure libertarian. He leans pretty far into conservative, tea party, and constitutionalist ideologies. The reason why he gets that label is because they’re the biggest party in this country besides the democrats and republicans and it’s the easiest label to give him. I used to listen to his show all the time, as it was one of 3 options for me on night shift, and he has even stated that he doesn’t consider himself to libertarian. He has only ever said that he likes a lot of libertarian thought and considers them allies on a lot of issues.

    So, there. Our libertarianism has different roots than yours. Maybe we “stole” it, (even though I find the differences between the European and American libertarianism to be rather trivial when 3,000+ miles of ocean are taken into consideration) but hey, our words was stolen from us, first.

  • http://www.facebook.com/Indigno Kevin Hall

    American libertarianism was created in Colorado in the 1970′s because “liberalism” had been hijacked here. They took the word “libertarianism” and reapplied it to define classical liberal ideology (enlightenment liberalism.) American Libertarians are not typically pro big business, we’re just not anti-big business until they start infringing upon our rights. There’s three types of political treatment of business right now. The first type makes laws to make it harder for any business to make it, the second is in bed with big business and writes laws to benefit them and hurt their competitors, and then the third type doesn’t feel like they should be telling anybody what to do with their money so long as they aren’t causing harm.

    Someone else said below that libertarianism is akin to anarchism everywhere else in the world. I’ve always seen it as straddling that fine line between the bare minimum amount of government (which would be a fraction of a fraction of the federal government of today) and chaos. The idea is that no restriction at all means that other people (especially other nations) can come in and hurt us and that leads to restricted freedom. So the idea here is to have just enough government in order to uphold basic justice (which SHOULD be the basics like murder, rape, theft, assault, etc…).

    Glenn Beck is not pure libertarian. He leans pretty far into conservative, tea party, and constitutionalist ideologies. The reason why he gets that label is because they’re the biggest party in this country besides the democrats and republicans and it’s the easiest label to give him. I used to listen to his show all the time, as it was one of 3 options for me on night shift, and he has even stated that he doesn’t consider himself to libertarian. He has only ever said that he likes a lot of libertarian thought and considers them allies on a lot of issues.

    So, there. Our libertarianism has different roots than yours. Maybe we “stole” it, (even though I find the differences between the European and American libertarianism to be rather trivial when 3,000+ miles of ocean are taken into consideration) but hey, our words was stolen from us, first.