Glenn Beck: The Letter
June 17, 2009 - 10:36 ET
GLENN: I got a letter from a woman in Arizona. She writes an open letter to our nation's leadership: Quote: I'm a home grown American citizen, 53, registered Democrat all my life. Before the last presidential election I registered as a Republican because I no longer felt the Democratic Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. Now I no longer feel the Republican Party represents my views or works to pursue issues important to me. The fact is I no longer feel any political party or representative in Washington represents my views or works to pursue the issues important to me. There must be someone. Please tell me who you are. Please stand up and tell me that you are there and that you're willing to fight for our Constitution as it was written. Please stand up now. You might ask yourself what my views and issues are that I would horribly feel so disenfranchised by both major political parties. What kind of nut job am I? Will you please tell me?
Well, these are briefly my views and issues for which I seek representation:
One, illegal immigration. I want you to stop coddling illegal immigrants and secure our borders. Close the underground tunnels. Stop the violence and the trafficking in drugs and people. No amnesty, not again. Been there, done that, no resolution. P.S., I'm not a racist. This isn't to be confused with legal immigration.
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Two, the TARP bill, I want it repealed and I want no further funding supplied to it. We told you no, but you did it anyway. I want the remaining unfunded 95% repealed. Freeze, repeal.
Three: Czars, I want the circumvention of our checks and balances stopped immediately. Fire the czars. No more czars. Government officials answer to the process, not to the president. Stop trampling on our Constitution and honor it.
Four, cap and trade. The debate on global warming is not over. There is more to say.
Five, universal healthcare. I will not be rushed into another expensive decision. Don't you dare try to pass this in the middle of the night and then go on break. Slow down!
Six, growing government control. I want states rights and sovereignty fully restored. I want less government in my life, not more. Shrink it down. Mind your own business. You have enough to take care of with your real obligations. Why don't you start there.
Seven, ACORN. I do not want ACORN and its affiliates in charge of our 2010 census. I want them investigated. I also do not want mandatory escrow fees contributed to them every time on every real estate deal that closes. Stop the funding to ACORN and its affiliates pending impartial audits and investigations. I do not trust them with taking the census over with our taxpayer money. I don't trust them with our taxpayer money. Face up to the allegations against them and get it resolved before taxpayers get any more involved with them. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, hello. Stop protecting your political buddies. You work for us, the people. Investigate.
Eight, redistribution of wealth. No, no, no. I work for my money. It is mine. I have always worked for people with more money than I have because they gave me jobs. That is the only redistribution of wealth that I will support. I never got a job from a poor person. Why do you want me to hate my employers? Why ‑‑ what do you have against shareholders making a profit?
Nine, charitable contributions. Although I never got a job from a poor person, I have helped many in need. Charity belongs in our local communities, where we know our needs best and can use our local talent and our local resources. Butt out, please. We want to do it ourselves.
Ten, corporate bailouts. Knock it off. Sink or swim like the rest of us. If there are hard times ahead, we'll be better off just getting into it and letting the strong survive. Quick and painful. Have you ever ripped off a Band‑Aid? We will pull together. Great things happen in America under great hardship. Give us the chance to innovate. We cannot disappoint you more than you have disappointed us.
Eleven, transparency and accountability. How about it? No, really, how about it? Let's have it. Let's say we give the buzzwords a rest and have some straight honest talk. Please try ‑‑ please stop manipulating and trying to appease me with clever wording. I am not the idiot you obviously take me for. Stop sneaking around and meeting in back rooms making deals with your friends. It will only be a prelude to your criminal investigation. Stop hiding things from me.
Twelve, unprecedented quick spending. Stop it now.
Take a breath. Listen to the people. Let's just slow down and get some input from some nonpoliticians on the subject. Stop making everything an emergency. Stop speed reading our bills into law. I am not an activist. I am not a community organizer. Nor am I a terrorist, a militant or a violent person. I am a parent and a grandparent. I work. I'm busy. I'm busy. I am busy, and I am tired. I thought we elected competent people to take care of the business of government so that we could work, raise our families, pay our bills, have a little recreation, complain about taxes, endure our hardships, pursue our personal goals, cut our lawn, wash our cars on the weekends and be responsible contributing members of society and teach our children to be the same all while living in the home of the free and land of the brave.
I entrusted you with upholding the Constitution. I believed in the checks and balances to keep from getting far off course. What happened? You are very far off course. Do you really think I find humor in the hiring of a speed reader to unintelligently ramble all through a bill that you signed into law without knowing what it contained? I do not. It is a mockery of the responsibility I have entrusted to you. It is a slap in the face. I am not laughing at your arrogance. Why is it that I feel as if you would not trust me to make a single decision about my own life and how I would live it but you should expect that I should trust you with the debt that you have laid on all of us and our children. We did not want the TARP bill. We said no. We would repeal it if we could. I am sure that we still cannot. There is such urgency and recklessness in all of the recent spending.
From my perspective, it seems that all of you have gone insane. I also know that I am far from alone in these feelings. Do you honestly feel that your current pursuits have merit to patriotic Americans? We want it to stop. We want to put the brakes on everything that is being rushed by us and forced upon us. We want our voice back. You have forced us to put our lives on hold to straighten out the mess that you are making. We will have to give up our vacations, our time spent with our children, any relaxation time we may have had and money we cannot afford to spend on you to bring our concerns to Washington. Our president often knows all the right buzzword is unsustainable. Well, no kidding. How many tens of thousands of dollars did the focus group cost to come up with that word? We don't want your overpriced words. Stop treating us like we're morons.
We want all of you to stop focusing on your reelection and do the job we want done, not the job you want done or the job your party wants done. You work for us and at this rate I guarantee you not for long because we are coming. We will be heard and we will be represented. You think we're so busy with our lives that we will never come for you? We are the formerly silent majority, all of us who quietly work , pay taxes, obey the law, vote, save money, keep our noses to the grindstone and we are now looking up at you. You have awakened us, the patriotic spirit so strong and so powerful that it had been sleeping too long. You have pushed us too far. Our numbers are great. They may surprise you. For every one of us who will be there, there will be hundreds more that could not come. Unlike you, we have their trust. We will represent them honestly, rest assured. They will be at the polls on voting day to usher you out of office. We have cancelled vacations. We will use our last few dollars saved. We will find the representation among us and a grassroots campaign will flourish. We didn't ask for this fight. But the gloves are coming off. We do not come in violence, but we are angry. You will represent us or you will be replaced with someone who will. There are candidates among us when hewill rise like a Phoenix from the ashes that you have made of our constitution.
Democrat, Republican, independent, libertarian. Understand this. We don't care. Political parties are meaningless to us. Patriotic Americans are willing to do right by us and our Constitution and that is all that matters to us now. We are going to fire all of you who abuse power and seek more. It is not your power. It is ours and we want it back. We entrusted you with it and you abused it. You are dishonorable. You are dishonest. As Americans we are ashamed of you. You have brought shame to us. If you are not representing the wants and needs of your constituency loudly and consistently, in spite of the objections of your party, you will be fired. Did you hear? We no longer care about your political parties. You need to be loyal to us, not to them. Because we will get you fired and they will not save you. If you do or can represent me, my issues, my views, please stand up. Make your identity known. You need to make some noise about it. Speak up. I need to know who you are. If you do not speak up, you will be herded out with the rest of the sheep and we will replace the whole damn congress if need be one by one. We are coming. Are we coming for you? Who do you represent? What do you represent? Listen. Because we are coming. We the people are coming. /quote
Conversation with Glenn Beck:
June 17, 2009 - 12:27 ET
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Read the original letter
Sign the petition: An open letter to our nation's leadership
GLENN: Yesterday, yesterday I read a letter from a woman named Janet Contreras. Janet, is that how you say your last name, Contreras?
CALLER: Contreras.
GLENN: Contreras. When did you write this letter?
CALLER: The night before I e mailed it to you. I was trying to reach Patrick Beck which I have been able to do since then.
GLENN: Who's Patrick Beck?
CALLER: He's the gentleman that you had on the show who's also from Arizona that's organizing the march to Washington, D.C.
GLENN: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I can put did you ever get in touch with him?
CALLER: I was able to, yes.
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GLENN: Okay, good. It is an absolutely amazing letter and I read it yesterday on the air and I'm going to open the show on television tonight so all the Fox viewers will see it as well tonight.
CALLER: That's great.
GLENN: You were a Democrat?
CALLER: I was, all my adult life. I was a Democrat all my adult life, and during this last election Obama and Hillary just made me so angry, I could not stay registered a Democrat. But John McCain made me angry, too. And now I don't know what I am other than angry. I don't know what I am.
GLENN: Here's what you are. You are an American. That's great. You know what, I find myself in exactly the same position, Janet, that I'm angry because I actually care. And reading your letter, it sounds like you do, too. And I thought that we all just kind of had an understanding that we would vote for you and you would tell us what you were going to do and, you know, there were going to be some problems and we're not going to do some of the stuff, but you had the good of the country at heart.
CALLER: Exactly.
GLENN: And now you find out that the ones you voted for Democrats, I voted for Republicans, we both find out they don't actually mean a damn word they say.
CALLER: No. And it's extremely frustrating because now I have to put my life on hold and do the job that we hired them to do. If you had a store and you hired a manager and you just walked away and let the manager mind the store because you thought that you had trained the manager to run the store the way you wanted it run and you come back to find out the manager has just let everything go to pot and your store is just in shambles, whose fault is that? I mean, you walked away from the store. It makes me very angry. We hired them to do a job and they failed us miserably.
GLENN: Yeah, but you know what
CALLER: At the same time we've stood by. We were not minding the store.
GLENN: God bless you for saying that, Janet. This is the thing that I think a lot of people because there are so many groups of people and especially those in the media and in Washington that still want to make this about politics.
CALLER: Exactly.
GLENN: This is about betrayal quite honestly.
CALLER: Uh huh.
GLENN: And we are the ones that betrayed our founders. We're the ones that betrayed those who died on beaches.
CALLER: Right.
GLENN: We're the ones who said we got so lazy.
CALLER: Yes.
GLENN: They warned us. Our founders warned us over and over and over again, when you become complacent, when the government is no longer afraid of you, well, then you're in deep, deep trouble. We saw it coming. All through the Nineties we said, oh, well, you know what, character doesn't matter. When we said character doesn't matter, we gave them that's like going to the store manager and us saying, one of the other store people saying, "You know what, he's embezzling from you, I'm sure he's embezzling from you" and saying, "I'm not sure if that's true. Look, he's a little slippery on a few things, but I'm sure..." and the other guy's saying, looking at you, the manager, looking at you while you say to the other, "Hey, back off him, okay? He's a little slippery on a few things." As soon as you say that to somebody, you give them permission to be slippery on all things.
CALLER: Yeah, I agree.
GLENN: And that's what happened. That's what happened.
CALLER: Well, I don't want this. I don't want this fight, Glenn. I don't have the time or the energy or the financial resources for it, but that no longer matters. It no longer matters that I'm able or that I want this fight. I have to take it on. It's not a matter of choice anymore, which is why I wrote the letter.
GLENN: Janet, you have gosh, you just make my heart, you just make my heart so full because this is what I I don't remember the occasion but I remember I was on the air and somebody saying, you know, why are you talking about the financial stuff? You're just talking everybody down and you're talking the economy down and you're just trying to scare everybody. And I remember passionately with tears in my eyes saying, "I don't want to be this person. I don't want to say these things, but I have to." And to hear you say that, I know exactly what you mean and I'm hearing it more and more.
CALLER: No, I would rather mow my lawn and wash my car and play with my grandchildren.
GLENN: Who wouldn't.
CALLER: But I can't now. I cannot every minute of my spare time now has to be devoted to getting these guys out of office.
GLENN: Janet, how long did it take you to write that letter?
CALLER: Probably two hours. Because you go back and you tweak and you
GLENN: Have you ever written anything before?
CALLER: Yeah, a few things but I mean, not published things but, yes.
GLENN: May I, may I make a prediction. Your letter, in the next 72 hours, will be a letter that is circulated through a good portion of this country on the Internet. I have a feeling your letter may become a rallying cry.
CALLER: I hope so.
GLENN: I think it will.
CALLER: Because when I tried to e mail it to our representatives and our senators, most of my e mail was blocked, not in their district; they're not interested. But you know what? I don't care if I'm in their district. I'm coming for them, too.
GLENN: Janet, I know for a fact that the White House watches my program. I know that the halls of congress, I've talked to enough people in congress and the Senate that they watch, and those who are on the receiving end of our investigations or our opinions, they watch more than those who are not. Your letter is going to be heard today in Washington and we're putting a petition together with your letter in the free e mail newsletter today. So that goes to about a million people alone there, and I'm going to ask them to please pass it on to all of their friends and let's just watch what happens in the next, in the next week.
CALLER: That would be great. The other part of this is the invisible people who can and do represent my views need to come out of the shadows.
GLENN: To stand up.
CALLER: I don't know who they are. They're going to get washed away with the rest of them if they don't have the courage to stand up.
GLENN: Janet, I love you. If you missed her letter, tonight on Fox at 5:00.
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How AWESOME this letter is!
God love this brave woman!!!
Go here and click on "Sign the petition: An open letter to our nation's leadership"Right now (at 2:35 p.m. PT), due to Glenn having just read the letter on air, the website is being flooded with those who wish to sign the petition! Check back later and sign it!!!
Hat Tip:
Glenn Beck.com
