Do you know what Mormons, like Glenn Beck, believe? That Native Americans are descendants of Israel whom Jesus visited, in America, after the resurrection. Yes! And here Glenn Beck is on his TV show last night hinting at that.

This was part of a series about the idea of Manifest Destiny (how it was bad, and it was!) versus that of Divine Providence (this is good, apparently) and Glenn was simply trying to show that the Native Americans had lots of secrets and knowledge that we could have gleaned from them had the early settlers not been so gung-ho with their Poison Blanket Initiative and "Shocketh & Awe". Which is a worthy thing to talk about, certainly. But the way Beck seeks to prove his point is through a strange "history" lesson segment about mysterious stones found buried in Ohio (sounds similar to something that happened in upstate New York...) that had ancient "block Hebrew" writing on them. What does this mean???, Glenn questions. He doesn't provide an answer, but he is surely getting at the idea that maybe, mayyyyyyyybe, Joseph Smith wasn't a lying, cheating, scrying huckster-turned-megalomaniac. Maybe the Native Americans really were visited by Jesus and were from Israel and thus wrote things down in "block Hebrew" and buried them in Ohio.

What I'm curious about is if Glenn's devoted non-Mormon Christian voters picked up on this and if they were willing to follow him down this peculiar road. I'm also curious as to how someone who believes this stuff has a show that's allegedly about facts on an allegedly factual news station. But oh well.

(It's also kind of great when Beck says, essentially, "But forget about the Native American genocide! That's in the past. Now, let's talk about the past.")

[Thanks to commenter yoimfuller]



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