Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

[johnnycakes]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

Wolfie :
No it's not. You are a Moore fan, and he is of your own ilk. You don't see the similarities because you are in agreement with his hyper-bole let's show only half the truth nonsense. Moore and Beck are alike, but at opposite ends of the spectrum.



Wolfie,

In the first place Moore is a progressive who basically believes in the capitalist system so I have deep seated differences with him. He's a reformist.

He's the left wing of capitalism and Beck is the crazed right wing of capitalism.
I have no use for either of them.

That said, because I have no respect for either at their base, I can be objective about the two.
Moore is far and away more factual because he has to be . His books, movies speeches are open to public scrutiny. he runs on a reputation of honest muck-raking.

Were he to make the ridiculous sort of statements that has made Beck so "controversial" (read wacky) and unwanted by sponsors, Moore would be out of business.

People like Beck have people regularly ridiculing them and writing books about them that contain nothing but erroneous statements that these right wing extremists have made on air. Making outrageous statements that bear little connection to the truth is their stock in trade. It's how they make a living

When the right wing goes after Moore they can only nitpick about small details in how and what Moore puts out but they can never touch his basic stands on the subjects he covers because his stock in trade is muck-raking and when it comes to guns in this country or the medical care system or capitalism there are enough things wrong to make films like Moore makes that contain the basic truth. The hyperbole and outrageously exaggerated inflammatory commentary is out of place in Moore's work.

You are making the mistake of thinking that Beck and Moore are at opposite ends of the political spectrum and while they do differ widely, both of them are far to my right.
You like the corporate media and most people do not include the left in your spectrum which runs from far right to liberal-progressive. Liberal progressive (Moore) on my spectrum is just left of center. Obama would be classified as a centrist leaning right in my spectrum.

Can I take it correctly then, that when you say you are tired of being lied to by the left and right that you are talking about the right and the liberal-progressives and not we 3% or so on the left?


Homework: for a week each or altogether if you have the time:

Tune in to right wing radio of your choice and listen to the truthfulness of the content no matter what they are discussing being careful to note what they are not saying..

Then tune into your regular network talk shows/panel shows and check out their content for honesty and for what they are not saying.

Then tune into Amy Goodman's (hour long) "Democracy Now: The War and Peace Report in most radio markets and do the same.

You will then have right, center and left to compare and you will find that the truth does have a left bias.

Most right wingers will not do this, as recent studies have pointed out while the left is acutely aware of right wing positions since we live in a right wing country.
.
I think I started getting cynical about U.S political system around the time I was 24-25 so I know what you are feeling/experiencing .

I was a confirmed lefty by 27 but you should note that it is never too late to join up and probably there is no better time as the country heads down the toilet.

[johnnycakes]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

Hey Wolfie,

I just got to ZNET tonight and found this gem by Paul Street on Glenn Beck's demise. If you read it , please note all the crazy things that Beck has done and said and then compare those things with what Michael Moore has done in books and film and I think it's fairly clear that Moore may make a few errors but Beck has no credibility at all except for the bozos that watch or listen to him and who have not yet figured out that Beck is not playing with a full deck.

Glenn Beck Melts Down and Out
The Demise of a Proto-Fascist Media Phenomenon
By Paul Street and Anthony Dimaggio

Sunday, April 10, 2011
Change Text Size a- | A+
Paul Street's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace


The nation may have taken a step toward communicative sanity this week with the fall of arch-reactionary, proto-fascistic, and paranoid-style Fox News host Glenn Beck. We don’t use these descriptive terms lightly when it comes to Beck, who has repeatedly called on the American right to engage in coercion and violence against its enemies.

In 2005, Beck publicly fantasized about murdering Michael Moore, as seen in the following excerpt from his program:

“I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus -- band -- Do, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore,’ and then I'd see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I'd realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I'm not sure.”

More recently, in mid-2010, Beck called on the audience at an NRA meeting to initiate a violence against the Democratic Party. He complained that he was tired of the American public “not getting’ it” when it came to recognizing the dangers the Democratic-“Marxist” threat. In serving up his audience “a touch of the truth,” Beck made outlandish neo-McCarthyite links between Nazi Germany – which he referred to as a “national socialist workers union” - and oppressive “giant government” (defined as social welfare spending for the poor and union protections for American workers) in the U.S. and Western Europe. He told NRA members that “this country will never fail by an outside force,” but will “be destroyed” by the “free love, smoking dope, having sex in the mud hippies” who “are running our country now” and “putting pressure on our country from the inside.” The miscreants who threatened to ruin American liberty and prosperity from within, Beck shouted, “are not Democrats….[they] are Marxist revolutionaries.” The American political system, he ranted, was “being rotted from the inside” by the dastardly “Marxist-Lenninist” Obama campaign for “change.” Beck rolled up his sleeves and shed his jacket, reminding his audience of the importance of maintaining “a well-regulated militia.” He told the nation’s leading gun enthusiasts that “you might need one because the government’s not doing its job.”

Beck recently repeated his support for violence against “the left,” calling for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to declare war on American labor unions because of their alleged engagement in what Beck called “economic terrorism.” The charge of economic terrorism gained traction with Beck and his followers after the 2011 Left Forum, a gathering of liberal and left progressives that takes place in New York City every March. Beck’s paranoid ire was directed with special force at former SEIU organizer Steven Lerner, who called during a Left Forum session (one of more than 300 at the two-day gathering) on progressives to “move [the] disruption of Madison to Wall Street.” Beck latched on to Lerner’s statement that activists should work to “cause a new financial crisis” to win newfound reforms benefitting American workers and citizens. Beck’s attack was the product of an infiltration campaign on the part of the right – which has engaged in surveillance of progressive and liberal institutions to “expose” supposed dire left-wing “threats” and “corruption.” In the case of Lerner and the Left Forum, Beck appealed to Attorney General Holder with the charge that the gathering “seriously endanger[s] the welfare of the United States…The escalation of Mr. Lerner’s threats,” Beck claimed, “would clearly constitute domestic terrorism and pose substantial harm to the American people and the economy.”

How was Lerner, along with other “terrorists” on the left, conspiring to “destroy America”? Lerner’s statements amounted to little more than support for militant but thoroughly nonviolent, Madison-inspired, and popular activism at the workplace and community levels. Lerner called for Americans to engage in a mortgage strike through a “strategic defaults” campaign. Such a campaign would be similar to what’s already happening in the housing market, with many Americans strategically deciding not to pay their mortgages either because they can’t afford them, or because they don’t see the point in making payments on a house that is already far underwater. The other key part of Lerner’s “terrorist” agenda proposed a “debt strike” in which cities and states would pressure banks to renegotiate loans and interest rates to ease the pressure on debt-ridden state and local governments.

Though Lerner’s call for a campaign to pressure the banking system in the interests of working people and the fiscal health of local and state government has not been embraced by U.S. organized labor, Beck insisted on painting Lerner’s proposals out as a big labor plot to ruin America:

“You can call it a conspiracy theory, but the language that he [Lerner] uses is already being used by labor leaders and those who are whipping people up into a frenzy in Wisconsin and wait until you see how they are going to use the state and county and local labor unions to do exactly what they did to the housing market. It’s the same tactic, gang. The same tactic. And it ends with the destruction of the economic system of the United States of America. They are bringing it on through chaos and bringing down of Wall Street and the stock market.” Beck has reiterated his attempted false connections between militant non-violent civil disobedience and the labor movement by lumping “unions, socialists, and anarchists” together into a single monolithic “threat” to American prosperity and national security.

Beck’s paranoid notion of a “radical” American union “threat” is contradicted by the thoroughly establishment-oriented politics of organized labor. The major unions involved in the Madison protests (such as AFSCME) have refused to seriously consider a general strike throughout Wisconsin, fearing the repercussions should Governor Scott Walker escalate his attack on the state’s workers by firing striking workers. There is of course no place in Beck’s proto-fascistic mindset to grasp the conflict between (a) rank and file activists pushing to keep the independent working class movement alive with opposition to worker concessions and with militant tactics like a general strike and (b) labor bureaucrats and other elite liberals who have folded the Wisconsin struggle into an effort to put the corporate-captive Democrats (the other state-capitalist austerity party) back into nominal power in Wisconsin. “It’s time to put your signs and pick up a clipboard to help get the Republicans out of office,” one Democrat told the giant pro-labor crowd outside the Madison Capital Rotunda last March 12th. .As Lee Sustar recently noted:

“Talk of a general strike--frequently discussed among activists during the three weeks of protests at Wisconsin's Capitol in Madison--dissipated as union leaders pressured union members to approve contracts that contain at least a 7 percent pay cut in order to keep the dues money. Labor's focus now is on recalling eight Republican Wisconsin state senators--which, however worthy a goal, is no substitute for a fight based on labor's power on the job….union leaders continue to sound the retreat, limiting the fight-back against the Republicans to the ballot box, while bowing to more ‘reasonable’ concessions pushed by Democrats….the focus is now on the recall of eight Republican state senators, whose ouster would give the Democrats control of the state senate and slow down Walker's union-smashing, budget-cutting agenda. Thus, the final mass labor rally in Madison March 12 was a kickoff of an electoral campaign rather than struggle at the workplace.”

Sustar continued: “It didn’t have to turn out this way. The willingness of workers in Wisconsin to take more militant action was clear throughout the conflict, and the teachers' sickout could have set the stage for similar job actions across the state….Wisconsin union leaders saw Walker's attack on dues check-off as a threat directed mainly at their own livelihoods--and they pushed workers to accept to concessions in order to protect their own interests at the expense of the rank and file.”

In his Left Forum session, Lerner noted that American unions had little interest in leading the campaign he proposed. This part of his presentation was naturally ignored by Beck, for it did not fit with his fear-mongering assault on what’s left of American organized labor and his fascistic insistence on conflating liberalism with the radical left.

The Left Forum, it should be noted, opened with a surprise, plenary session visit from the 78-year-old progressive activist and academic Frances Fox Piven. Piven was brought on stage without prior announcement because of numerous death threats made against her since Beck attacked her earlier this year as an arch-radical, anti-American “enemy of the Constitution” who wants to “collapse the economy” and “destroy America.” [Piven wonders “why Beck picked me… [when] there…are so many other potential targets, people who are further to the left than me, more inflammatory than me, or more important to movements than I am.”].

Beck’s fanatical rhetoric and alarmist attacks on “the left” might have carried more appeal with the general public had the economy continued to spiral out of control following the 2008 economic collapse. Economic growth has been anemic at best following Obama’s 2009 stimulus, and unemployment remains high at nearly nine percent as of April 2010. As we’ve stepped away from the precipice of total economic collapse, however, Americans are growing increasingly sober and less apocalyptic about the state of the nation’s politics. In short, reactionary fear-mongering loses its cache when periods of economic and political instability begin to subside.

Many appear to be recognizing that Beck and other right-wing pundits’ scare stories about “the end” of America via Democratic “socialism” and “Marxism” are nothing more than ploys intended to return Republicans to power and to enhance the ratings of the right’s increasingly demagogic army of pundits. (Consistent with the partial abatement of Fox News-fueled paranoia, an April CNN poll found that the percentage of the public viewing the Tea Party unfavorably had increased to 47 percent, from 26 percent in January 2010. Thirty-two percent hold a favorable view). As the liberal columnist Dana Milbank notes in the Washington Post, Beck may be walking in the historical footsteps of an earlier right-wing mass media phenomenon who crashed and burned after economic desperation gave him an opening to rant and rave: “Beck, in losing his mass-media perch, is repeating the history of Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest of the Great Depression. Economic hardship gave him an audience even greater than Beck’s, but as his calls to drive ‘the money changers from the temple’ became more vitriolic, his broadcast sponsors dropped him. He gradually faded from relevance as his angry themes lost their hold on Americans and his anti-Semitism became more pronounced.”

In the case of Beck, corporate America has increasingly distanced itself from the much-maligned hatemonger-in-chief. A boycott campaign undertaken by the liberal group Color of Change was in large part successful in convincing advertisers that their financial support for Beck was largely counter-productive from a public relations perspective. Beck’s regular attempts to equate the Democratic Party with Nazism (a la his FEMA concentration camps claim, in addition to other general attempts to equate Obama and Democrats with Hitler) have succeeded in angering much of the American Jewish community – who don’t take Beck’s cheap Holocaust analogies lightly. Many companies – more than 400 at the time that Fox cancelled Beck’s show – have concluded that Beck is a lightning rod who has drawn negative attention to companies that would prefer to sell products rather than become the subject of boycotts or increased public criticism themselves.

The boycott against Beck appears to have helped initiate a drastic decline in his ratings over the last year. While Beck’s ratings reached an all-time high of approximately 3.5 million daily viewers by early 2010, those numbers had fallen nearly in half by early 2011, as his show’s following plummeted to just under two million a day. The cataclysmic decline in ratings, in addition to the massive advertiser boycott, was too much for Fox to stomach.

Although Fox and right-wing radio companies have long profited by promoting reactionary hatred and conspiracy theories, Beck’s diatribes were incredibly harmful from the perspective of advertisers. In this particular case, conspiratorial fascism (if left unchecked) could have eventually destabilized the nation just as much as it enabled corporate suppression of the masses.

America’s political-economic elites must be asking the simple question: why stoke public anger and increase social instability when corporations are already reaping record profits? Why not just rely on the toxic two-punch of the technocratic-sounding rhetoric emanating from both political parties – which continually drone on about the need to gut social welfare programs and worker rights in the name of “balancing budgets” and “restoring fiscal sanity?” At a time when Americans are publicly rebelling against bi-partisan efforts to destroy what’s left of American union protections, Beck’s Tea Party-brand of faux populism (a la Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker) is helping galvanizing what remains of “the left” and may just reignite the labor movement. There is likely serious concern among business and political elites as to whether Beck’s paranoid attacks are worth the hatred (emerging on the right) and counter-mobilization (from unions) that they’ve stoked. Important questions remain concerning what the mid-to-long term fallout will be when Main Street is still badly suffering from a continuing housing and employment crisis.



Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio are the authors of Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011, pre-order at http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/bo...oductID=280225).
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Glenn Beck Melts Down and Out
The Demise of a Proto-Fascist Media Phenomenon
By Paul Street and Anthony Dimaggio

Sunday, April 10, 2011
Change Text Size a- | A+
Paul Street's ZSpace Page
Join ZSpace


The nation may have taken a step toward communicative sanity this week with the fall of arch-reactionary, proto-fascistic, and paranoid-style Fox News host Glenn Beck. We don’t use these descriptive terms lightly when it comes to Beck, who has repeatedly called on the American right to engage in coercion and violence against its enemies.

In 2005, Beck publicly fantasized about murdering Michael Moore, as seen in the following excerpt from his program:

“I'm thinking about killing Michael Moore, and I'm wondering if I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it. No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out -- is this wrong? I stopped wearing my What Would Jesus -- band -- Do, and I've lost all sense of right and wrong now. I used to be able to say, ‘Yeah, I'd kill Michael Moore,’ and then I'd see the little band: What Would Jesus Do? And then I'd realize, ‘Oh, you wouldn't kill Michael Moore. Or at least you wouldn't choke him to death.’ And you know, well, I'm not sure.”

More recently, in mid-2010, Beck called on the audience at an NRA meeting to initiate a violence against the Democratic Party. He complained that he was tired of the American public “not getting’ it” when it came to recognizing the dangers the Democratic-“Marxist” threat. In serving up his audience “a touch of the truth,” Beck made outlandish neo-McCarthyite links between Nazi Germany – which he referred to as a “national socialist workers union” - and oppressive “giant government” (defined as social welfare spending for the poor and union protections for American workers) in the U.S. and Western Europe. He told NRA members that “this country will never fail by an outside force,” but will “be destroyed” by the “free love, smoking dope, having sex in the mud hippies” who “are running our country now” and “putting pressure on our country from the inside.” The miscreants who threatened to ruin American liberty and prosperity from within, Beck shouted, “are not Democrats….[they] are Marxist revolutionaries.” The American political system, he ranted, was “being rotted from the inside” by the dastardly “Marxist-Lenninist” Obama campaign for “change.” Beck rolled up his sleeves and shed his jacket, reminding his audience of the importance of maintaining “a well-regulated militia.” He told the nation’s leading gun enthusiasts that “you might need one because the government’s not doing its job.”

Beck recently repeated his support for violence against “the left,” calling for U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to declare war on American labor unions because of their alleged engagement in what Beck called “economic terrorism.” The charge of economic terrorism gained traction with Beck and his followers after the 2011 Left Forum, a gathering of liberal and left progressives that takes place in New York City every March. Beck’s paranoid ire was directed with special force at former SEIU organizer Steven Lerner, who called during a Left Forum session (one of more than 300 at the two-day gathering) on progressives to “move [the] disruption of Madison to Wall Street.” Beck latched on to Lerner’s statement that activists should work to “cause a new financial crisis” to win newfound reforms benefitting American workers and citizens. Beck’s attack was the product of an infiltration campaign on the part of the right – which has engaged in surveillance of progressive and liberal institutions to “expose” supposed dire left-wing “threats” and “corruption.” In the case of Lerner and the Left Forum, Beck appealed to Attorney General Holder with the charge that the gathering “seriously endanger[s] the welfare of the United States…The escalation of Mr. Lerner’s threats,” Beck claimed, “would clearly constitute domestic terrorism and pose substantial harm to the American people and the economy.”

How was Lerner, along with other “terrorists” on the left, conspiring to “destroy America”? Lerner’s statements amounted to little more than support for militant but thoroughly nonviolent, Madison-inspired, and popular activism at the workplace and community levels. Lerner called for Americans to engage in a mortgage strike through a “strategic defaults” campaign. Such a campaign would be similar to what’s already happening in the housing market, with many Americans strategically deciding not to pay their mortgages either because they can’t afford them, or because they don’t see the point in making payments on a house that is already far underwater. The other key part of Lerner’s “terrorist” agenda proposed a “debt strike” in which cities and states would pressure banks to renegotiate loans and interest rates to ease the pressure on debt-ridden state and local governments.

Though Lerner’s call for a campaign to pressure the banking system in the interests of working people and the fiscal health of local and state government has not been embraced by U.S. organized labor, Beck insisted on painting Lerner’s proposals out as a big labor plot to ruin America:

“You can call it a conspiracy theory, but the language that he [Lerner] uses is already being used by labor leaders and those who are whipping people up into a frenzy in Wisconsin and wait until you see how they are going to use the state and county and local labor unions to do exactly what they did to the housing market. It’s the same tactic, gang. The same tactic. And it ends with the destruction of the economic system of the United States of America. They are bringing it on through chaos and bringing down of Wall Street and the stock market.” Beck has reiterated his attempted false connections between militant non-violent civil disobedience and the labor movement by lumping “unions, socialists, and anarchists” together into a single monolithic “threat” to American prosperity and national security.

Beck’s paranoid notion of a “radical” American union “threat” is contradicted by the thoroughly establishment-oriented politics of organized labor. The major unions involved in the Madison protests (such as AFSCME) have refused to seriously consider a general strike throughout Wisconsin, fearing the repercussions should Governor Scott Walker escalate his attack on the state’s workers by firing striking workers. There is of course no place in Beck’s proto-fascistic mindset to grasp the conflict between (a) rank and file activists pushing to keep the independent working class movement alive with opposition to worker concessions and with militant tactics like a general strike and (b) labor bureaucrats and other elite liberals who have folded the Wisconsin struggle into an effort to put the corporate-captive Democrats (the other state-capitalist austerity party) back into nominal power in Wisconsin. “It’s time to put your signs and pick up a clipboard to help get the Republicans out of office,” one Democrat told the giant pro-labor crowd outside the Madison Capital Rotunda last March 12th. .As Lee Sustar recently noted:

“Talk of a general strike--frequently discussed among activists during the three weeks of protests at Wisconsin's Capitol in Madison--dissipated as union leaders pressured union members to approve contracts that contain at least a 7 percent pay cut in order to keep the dues money. Labor's focus now is on recalling eight Republican Wisconsin state senators--which, however worthy a goal, is no substitute for a fight based on labor's power on the job….union leaders continue to sound the retreat, limiting the fight-back against the Republicans to the ballot box, while bowing to more ‘reasonable’ concessions pushed by Democrats….the focus is now on the recall of eight Republican state senators, whose ouster would give the Democrats control of the state senate and slow down Walker's union-smashing, budget-cutting agenda. Thus, the final mass labor rally in Madison March 12 was a kickoff of an electoral campaign rather than struggle at the workplace.”

Sustar continued: “It didn’t have to turn out this way. The willingness of workers in Wisconsin to take more militant action was clear throughout the conflict, and the teachers' sickout could have set the stage for similar job actions across the state….Wisconsin union leaders saw Walker's attack on dues check-off as a threat directed mainly at their own livelihoods--and they pushed workers to accept to concessions in order to protect their own interests at the expense of the rank and file.”

In his Left Forum session, Lerner noted that American unions had little interest in leading the campaign he proposed. This part of his presentation was naturally ignored by Beck, for it did not fit with his fear-mongering assault on what’s left of American organized labor and his fascistic insistence on conflating liberalism with the radical left.

The Left Forum, it should be noted, opened with a surprise, plenary session visit from the 78-year-old progressive activist and academic Frances Fox Piven. Piven was brought on stage without prior announcement because of numerous death threats made against her since Beck attacked her earlier this year as an arch-radical, anti-American “enemy of the Constitution” who wants to “collapse the economy” and “destroy America.” [Piven wonders “why Beck picked me… [when] there…are so many other potential targets, people who are further to the left than me, more inflammatory than me, or more important to movements than I am.”].

Beck’s fanatical rhetoric and alarmist attacks on “the left” might have carried more appeal with the general public had the economy continued to spiral out of control following the 2008 economic collapse. Economic growth has been anemic at best following Obama’s 2009 stimulus, and unemployment remains high at nearly nine percent as of April 2010. As we’ve stepped away from the precipice of total economic collapse, however, Americans are growing increasingly sober and less apocalyptic about the state of the nation’s politics. In short, reactionary fear-mongering loses its cache when periods of economic and political instability begin to subside.

Many appear to be recognizing that Beck and other right-wing pundits’ scare stories about “the end” of America via Democratic “socialism” and “Marxism” are nothing more than ploys intended to return Republicans to power and to enhance the ratings of the right’s increasingly demagogic army of pundits. (Consistent with the partial abatement of Fox News-fueled paranoia, an April CNN poll found that the percentage of the public viewing the Tea Party unfavorably had increased to 47 percent, from 26 percent in January 2010. Thirty-two percent hold a favorable view). As the liberal columnist Dana Milbank notes in the Washington Post, Beck may be walking in the historical footsteps of an earlier right-wing mass media phenomenon who crashed and burned after economic desperation gave him an opening to rant and rave: “Beck, in losing his mass-media perch, is repeating the history of Father Charles Coughlin, the radio priest of the Great Depression. Economic hardship gave him an audience even greater than Beck’s, but as his calls to drive ‘the money changers from the temple’ became more vitriolic, his broadcast sponsors dropped him. He gradually faded from relevance as his angry themes lost their hold on Americans and his anti-Semitism became more pronounced.”

In the case of Beck, corporate America has increasingly distanced itself from the much-maligned hatemonger-in-chief. A boycott campaign undertaken by the liberal group Color of Change was in large part successful in convincing advertisers that their financial support for Beck was largely counter-productive from a public relations perspective. Beck’s regular attempts to equate the Democratic Party with Nazism (a la his FEMA concentration camps claim, in addition to other general attempts to equate Obama and Democrats with Hitler) have succeeded in angering much of the American Jewish community – who don’t take Beck’s cheap Holocaust analogies lightly. Many companies – more than 400 at the time that Fox cancelled Beck’s show – have concluded that Beck is a lightning rod who has drawn negative attention to companies that would prefer to sell products rather than become the subject of boycotts or increased public criticism themselves.

The boycott against Beck appears to have helped initiate a drastic decline in his ratings over the last year. While Beck’s ratings reached an all-time high of approximately 3.5 million daily viewers by early 2010, those numbers had fallen nearly in half by early 2011, as his show’s following plummeted to just under two million a day. The cataclysmic decline in ratings, in addition to the massive advertiser boycott, was too much for Fox to stomach.

Although Fox and right-wing radio companies have long profited by promoting reactionary hatred and conspiracy theories, Beck’s diatribes were incredibly harmful from the perspective of advertisers. In this particular case, conspiratorial fascism (if left unchecked) could have eventually destabilized the nation just as much as it enabled corporate suppression of the masses.

America’s political-economic elites must be asking the simple question: why stoke public anger and increase social instability when corporations are already reaping record profits? Why not just rely on the toxic two-punch of the technocratic-sounding rhetoric emanating from both political parties – which continually drone on about the need to gut social welfare programs and worker rights in the name of “balancing budgets” and “restoring fiscal sanity?” At a time when Americans are publicly rebelling against bi-partisan efforts to destroy what’s left of American union protections, Beck’s Tea Party-brand of faux populism (a la Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker) is helping galvanizing what remains of “the left” and may just reignite the labor movement. There is likely serious concern among business and political elites as to whether Beck’s paranoid attacks are worth the hatred (emerging on the right) and counter-mobilization (from unions) that they’ve stoked. Important questions remain concerning what the mid-to-long term fallout will be when Main Street is still badly suffering from a continuing housing and employment crisis.



Paul Street and Anthony DiMaggio are the authors of Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the the Campaign to Remake American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011, pre-order at http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/bo...oductID=280225).
Comment On This ZNet Article See All Comments (0)

[lonewolf]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> I just got to ZNET tonight and found this gem by Paul Street on Glenn Beck's demise. If you read it , please note all the crazy things that Beck has done and said and then compare those things with what Michael Moore has done in books and film and I think it's fairly clear that Moore may make a few errors but Beck has no credibility at all except for the bozos that watch or listen to him and who have not yet figured out that Beck is not playing with a full deck.
</div></div>

Cakes,
Michael Moore and Glen Beck are using those that can't think for themselves to make millions of dollars. It's like you said of Limbaugh, he is an entertainer and so are they. They are opportunist, and I applaud their effort and ability to use the mindless masses to further their capitalist dream....What makes them any different than the entertainers in Hollywood? Hey, I wish I could think of a gimmick to fatten my bank account. Beck not playing with a full deck? I disagree. I think he knew exactly what he was doing, but the wrong thing is the right thing until you lose control. Beck took things a little to far, but none the less he is laughing all the way to the bank.

It's a circus and the clowns are in full swing.

[johnnycakes]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America


Cakes,
Michael Moore and Glen Beck are using those that can't think for themselves to make millions of dollars. It's like you said of Limbaugh, he is an entertainer and so are they.


Wolfie,
The major and significant difference between beck and Moore is that Beck uses wild exaggerations and nonsense to make his case and Moore uses facts.

Beck is both misinformative and disinformative in his assertions. Not all of them but plenty and in a spectacularly dumb enough way that he lost his credibility.

That is not the case at all with Moore.

[barosa]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

He Beck, not playing with a full deck of cards is closest to the truth as we will ever get.
I can remember when he first came to my attention some years ago when he used to have a spot on HLN Tv for a while..

I listened occasionally and discovered that he was mostly over the top with whatever social issues he was dealing with and decided he was good as a form of &quot;entertainment&quot;.. He was so &quot;far out&quot; and bigotted that I refuse to watch any more.

The next thing I knew is, that FOX picked him up and he must have thought he died and went to broadcasting heaven.. He was in his &quot;element&quot; so to speak.. It was as if he had a license to be as &quot;smart&quot; as he could, or be the &quot;obverse&quot; if that's what he wanted to be..

It was only a matter of time that not even Faux could accept his eccentrics any longer. ~ In Jamaica, there is a proverb that states &quot;give a man enough rope and if he is so inclined, he will certainly hang himself.&quot; Yes he was dangerous to those with simple or feeble minds, the less educated and those more easily led..

_______________________________________

Just like oil, the truth always surface to the top..

[Q3210]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

Hey Barry, reminds me of those minds that will si(f)t through scum productions like what Jerry Springer has as entertainement. Low life.

Not to mention the increasingly popular reality crap shows that God knows who finds intersting in.

[Wahalla]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

it is easy to be tolerant of those one agrees with.....the challenge is when one is diametrically opposed to a stance.. The difficulty of freedom of expression is when the idea is so offensive it makes one ill.. But if one beleives in tolerance and freedom of expression those are the challenges..

[johnnycakes]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Wahalla</div><div class="ubbcode-body">it is easy to be tolerant of those one agrees with.....the challenge is when one is diametrically opposed to a stance.. The difficulty of freedom of expression is when the idea is so offensive it makes one ill.. But if one beleives in tolerance and freedom of expression those are the challenges..



</div></div>


it is not a question of allowing a difference of opinion but rather one of discriminating between serious comment and nonsense.

Beck et al make their livings by making outrageous, untrue, unlikely but interesting and exciting claims, projecting bizarre conspiracy theories and all the other tricks of the trade to draw a large an audience from the 300 million people possible and thereby make money selling advertising time.


The American public has the choice of getting their news and information from serious places like ZNET, Al-Jazeera and a few other places that are historically reliable OR from the corporate media which ranges from the crazy right ( Beck et al) to Fox to the New York Times to NPR/PBS. There is a sizable segment of the population that only chooses to get its views and news from the extreme right and sources much like Beck in their lack of fact and credibility historically.

So.. in that sense Beck et al are a dangerous sort. They take up the minds and actions of many millions of faithful and foolish listeners who could be out acting on factual information and not being misled into believing misinformation that sticks to the minds of the Great Uninformed like white on rice

[barosa]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Q3210</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Hey Barry, reminds me of those minds that will si(f)t through scum productions like what Jerry Springer has as entertainement. Low life.

Not to mention the increasingly popular reality crap shows that God knows who finds intersting in. </div></div>
Yes Q, I hear you and know what you are saying. IMO, Jerry Springer was much much more credible than Beck was or could ever be. Those &quot;Low lifes&quot; on Springer for the most part were volunteers, though they were exploited. ~ I take Beck to be more devious than the slickest &quot;Con Man&quot; one could ever imagine.. Reality shows are really used as distractions for the many from &quot;life's hardship and as &quot;entertainment&quot; for the rest; I dont bother with them anymore..

_____________________________________

Just like Oil, the truth always surface to the top..

[Archie68]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

I originally said the US would never permit a black man to be president in my life time. I was wrong but my belief was not unfounded. A significant portion of the white population has completely lost their minds. See Fox &quot;NEWS&quot;-Fair and Balanced (Orwellian)

I am enjoying this. I love watch the &quot;Fox&quot; crowd foam at the mouth. Beck is great with his claim that everything Obama is Nazi Germany and his cute black board.

I actually want the Glen Beck, etc outted. Let them talk!!!!! I do not expect the US to change. I expect them to stop pretending they are not racist.

[lonewolf]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> I originally said the US would never permit a black man to be president in my life time. </div></div>

You were wrong, PERIOD!

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> I was wrong but my belief was not unfounded.A significant portion of the white population has completely lost their minds. See Fox &quot;NEWS&quot;-Fair and Balanced (Orwellian) </div></div>


You are spinning to save face. You were wrong. Just admit as much and move on.
49% of the total population watchs Fox news. So what, and your point is ?
74 percent of Republicans say they trust the Fox, while only 30 percent of Democrats said they did. WOW! that's a real shocker!....and here's more, both CBS and ABC were not trusted by 46 percent of those polled, but doesn't that mean that 54 percent of those polled trusted the liberal Obama loving stations?

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32039.html

What you have to ask yourself is, Are you fair and balanced, or, are you so in love with Obama because he is black that you will look past his failings as president and give him a free pass.



<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I am enjoying this. I love watch the &quot;Fox&quot; crowd foam at the mouth. Beck is great with his claim that everything Obama is Nazi Germany and his cute black board.

I actually want the Glen Beck, etc outted. Let them talk!!!!! I do not expect the US to change. </div></div>


It's time you catch up with current news, Glen Beck has been ousted by Fox news.



<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">I do not expect the US to change. I expect them to stop pretending they are not racist. </div></div>

Yeah right, such nonsense, but predictable. You don't want Obama to have critics.
If he has critics than those critics are labled racist because they don't agree with Obama policy. Push the easy button and those critics must now defend themselves from false charges of racism, the problem is there is no accountability for people like you that make such false accusations without any proof of facts.

Fact: Without white voters Obama would not be in office. That's a fact you cannot dispute. ......and it throws your racist conspiracy theory right out the window.

[johnnycakes]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

Wolfie,

Because you necessarily avoid websites like ZNET you perhaps are unaware of the non-racist criticisms coming from the intellectual left.

Yes, racist dislike for Obama is easily dissed but as your statistics on Fox News' audience share show, even completely accurate and intellectual criticisms of Obama are not given a fair amount media air time.

The country is fairly evenly divided between those who favor a Bush type and those who favor an Obama type as president. Both sides in this divide ignore valid criticisms of their favorite and the media will not air the best criticisms (left media) because they are not popular views to either side.
This is so because left media's leading message is that there is very little difference between a Bush and an Obama and the sheeple just don't want to hear that.

Fox et al not only avoid their journalistic responsibilities but in fact perpetuate the myth of American democracy by leaving out what the left prints.

[lonewolf]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Because you necessarily avoid websites like ZNET you perhaps are unaware of the non-racist criticisms coming from the intellectual left</div></div>

I am very much aware of the non-racist criticisms of ZNET. How could I not be?
You continue to pepper this web site full of such op/ed pieces of information
You and I agree with the notion that they are unbiased, but does the predominately black population that adore Obama agree? I think not. Any criticism of Obama is considered racist by MOST that support him on this site.

It's BS. The majority of people on here opposed Bush and tore him apart at every chance they had. Using the present Obama criteria for racism does that not make all critcism of Bush by blacks as racism?

[johnnycakes]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

I am very much aware of the non-racist criticisms of ZNET. How could I not be?
You continue to pepper this web site full of such op/ed pieces of information.


Wolfie,
You've never given any indication that you have ever read or absorbed anything i linked at ZNET so I seriously doubt you knew this.

The racism I see at Jamaicans.com from Jamaicans is the thinking that because Obama is black he can do no wrong.
Were he white he would be universally disliked.

[Archie68]

Re: Glen Beck the most dangerous man in America

Read retard.. I said I was wrong and you quoted it.


So 49% of the population watches &quot;the fair and balanced&quot; network? Well, I want to talk about the 74% percent that watch it and believe their manure(like you).

Fireman, save your polling. As I say repeatedly, I do not trust the people. I do not trust.

I have political leanings. I watch those that support what I believe. If they support my agenda, I vote for them. That simple.

People like you confuse me. You support people that promise to make you poorer and the rich richer?

How did you come to hate yourself or your self interest?