common core glen beck
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Glenn Beck told his audience on Monday that the arrest of a Maryland father who was asking questions about Common Core is frightening evidence of the country moving further along the path that he says goes from "nudge," to "shove," to "shoot."

For those unfamiliar with the terms, Beck explained that "it's how every Marxist utopian dream begins."

"You start simple, with just a little 'nudge,'" he said. "It's Cash for Clunkers. It is trying to figure out a way to make energy prices 'necessarily skyrocket,' to nudge you into hybrids."

But when that doesn't work, the government starts to "shove," Beck continued. "That's when they use the IRS to shut down opposing voices. They use the NSA to monitor and track American citizens...Then they start using regulation and they start arresting people to scare everybody."

If that also fails to produce the results the government seeks, Beck said, historically, they start to shoot, or send people to re-education or internment camps.

"So where are we in the scale?" Beck asked the audience. "Are we at nudge, shove, or shoot?"

Beck said after he saw the video of what happened in Towson, Maryland, he couldn't sleep for two hours because he believes "it is a very important piece that moves us further towards shoot."

Here's complete video of the event, in case you missed it:


During a public forum on Common Core, Robert Small stood up because he had a question (it should be noted that the flyer for the event encourages, "your chance to get answers to your Common Core questions" but parents were asked to submit their questions on paper).

"He wasn't merely arrested," Beck said. "He was removed with excessive force, and today he faces 10 years in prison...Did he look at all out of control? ...This is the way it used to happen in mother Russia, not America."

Small was charged with second degree assault of a police officer, faced a $2,500 fine, and up to ten years in prison, but it was announced shortly after Beck's program concluded that all charges have been dropped.

But that wasn't all that shocked Beck.

"Where were the teachers as he was being removed? You know, the ones who always teach about how it's wrong to bully people?" he asked. "Did not one person have the decency to stay stop, up there on the board?"

"We have seen in the past few months teachers stand up for a colleague who raped an 8th grade student, but the teachers don't stand up against this?" he added.

As Small was being pushed out of the room, he expressed shock at how the crowd was sitting there like "cattle," urging them to "question these people."

Beck agreed: "Time to get out of the herd, because you're being led to slaughter. Perhaps people were afraid to speak because they were afraid of being dragged off by a police officer...And when nobody is there to stand up for you, it's because you weren't there to stand there for everybody else that was dragged off."

Beck told his viewers to mark the day in their journals, and that it really doesn't matter if Small goes to jail or not, the damage has been done.

"Did people learn their lesson?" he asked. "It's dictatorship 101 - make someone an example, and the rest will stay in line."

He said thousands should show up at the area's next Common Core meeting, though he doubts that will happen.

Beck brought in two local activists who were at the event in Maryland where Small was arrested, Ann Miller - who took the video - and Cindy Sharretts, who was sitting a few seats behind Small.

The two remarked that nothing was taken out of context - Small was not making a disturbance before the video began, for instance, and that they think many likely regretted not having stood up.

"Everybody has those moments where you think, in hindsight, I should have done this, I should have said that," Miller said. "I think a lot of us had a learning moment that evening."

They added, however, that they didn't know at the time that the man was being arrested; they just thought he was being escorted out of the room.

"Parents really need to understand how political our school system is," Miller urged. "We think that we're working together, parents and teachers...[but] it's a top-down power structure, and then you throw in money, which is Common Core."

"In Maryland, we received a quarter of a [billion] dollars when we adopted Common Core three years ago," she said. "Now in that time, we've had an information blackout. We didn't even know we adopted it..."

Beck noted that if a private company treated people in such a way, "you'd sell your stock and get out." But you can't when it's the government. More than that, you turn your kids over to them for the majority of the day.

Kyle Olson of the the Education Action Group, who joined later in the program, told Beck: "This moment right now is a call to arms against Common Core, against this thug bureaucracy that we're seeing right now, and it's critical that people stand up and fight back."

Miller and Sharretts urged people to join or look at the Facebook group, Don't be Cattle! Fight Common Core!, to stay updated on the latest.


Erica Ritz is an assistant editor at TheBlaze. She graduated early from Southern Methodist University with a degree in International Relations and a minor in Italian. A fanatical traveler, she spent a year in Italy during high school, then a semester in Egypt and a semester in Israel during college. Originally from Minnesota, she currently resides in New York City.