CNN Headline News' Glenn Beck on Obama: "[T]his guy really is a Marxist"

Summary: On his CNN Headline News program, Glenn Beck said of Sen. Barack Obama, "The thing that I do find about Barack Obama is that -- and I think America is starting to catch on to this -- this guy really is a Marxist. He believes in the redistribution of wealth." Beck has previously said of Barack and Michelle Obama, "[T]here's a socialist agenda there for America."

On the August 4 edition of his CNN Headline News program, Glenn Beck said: "The thing that I do find about [Sen.] Barack Obama is that -- and I think America is starting to catch on to this -- this guy really is a Marxist. He believes in the redistribution of wealth. He believes in the global government and everything else." Beck made his comments while discussing the recently released book, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (Threshold Editions), with author Jerome Corsi. As Media Matters for America has documented, the book is filled with false and baseless attacks against Obama.

Beck has previously said of Barack and Michelle Obama, "[T]here's a socialist agenda there for America." He has also described other politicians in similar terms, including calling Sen. Hillary Clinton "Comrade Clinton" and characterizing former Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) as "a communist."

From the August 4 edition of CNN Headline News' Glenn Beck:

BECK: Tell me the role that Saul Alinsky -- who's not a friend of his -- Saul Alinsky plays in his life. And who is Saul Alinsky, in case people don't know?

CORSI: Well, when Obama went to Chicago to be a community organizer, he was a Saul Alinsky community organizer. He went into a Saul Alinsky organization. Alinsky was a radical -- going back even to the '30s -- a radical socialist organizer. His main book, Rules for Radicals, Alinsky said was written -- you know, Machiavelli wrote The Prince for the haves to keep what they have -- and Alinsky said he wrote Rules for Radicals for the have-nots to take it away. And there was a radical social agenda, a redistribution of income almost on a socialist or communist model, where you'd rub raw the discontent in a community by listening to their grievances and then articulate their grievances back in their own words to have a power grab, where the wealth would be redistributed as a result.

BECK: Well, can he -- can he --

CORSI: That was the Alinsky method.

BECK: Can he say that, "Well, I don't know anything about him. I'm not related to these." You say in your book he taught this.

CORSI: Yeah, he taught. And there's photographs of Obama, which I refer to in the book. Now, this book has close to 700 footnotes. It was thoroughly researched. And Obama taught the Alinsky methodology in classrooms. Photographs are of Obama drawing Alinsky diagrams of community organizing on the blackboard.

BECK: OK. The thing that I do find about Barack Obama is that -- and I think America is starting to catch on to this -- this guy really is a Marxist. He believes in the redistribution of wealth. He believes in the global government and everything else. In his autobiography, he talks about an experience he had as a kid with a guy named Frank in Hawaii. You say you know who this Frank is. Who is this Frank that he talks about in Barack Obama's autobiography?

CORSI: Well, the Frank has been fully identified. In fact, even the AP ran a story about it just in the last couple of days. It's Frank Davis Marshall [sic], who was an avowed -- self-avowed communist in the '30s and '40s. He was a member of the Communist Party of the USA, a very prominent poet and journalist in Chicago. Frank Davis Marshall retired in Hawaii. And Obama tells us in his autobiography that when he was in high school, the alienated years when Obama was first starting marijuana and cocaine, his grandfather introduced him to Frank Marshall Davis. Obama says he used to drink into the night and smoke cigarettes with Frank Marshall Davis. Frank Marshall Davis read his communist poems and presented his ideology to Obama, which was very leftist ideology.

—M.W.