I was watching some clips of ‘The Daily Show’ today, about Glenn Beck and his plan to hold a rally on the anniversary of, and at the site of, Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. For those of you not paying attention to American politics, this is causing a tiny bit of controversy, on account of how Beck is an unapologetic racist who is espousing philosophies that would make the non-violent King want to punch him in the crotch until his balls implode.
But here’s the thing: Beck and his supporters insist that he’s not racist at all, apologetically or otherwise. They might even pop up in this very comments section to do so. They insist that they’re all good, kind-hearted people who are just espousing principles of common decency and humanity, and the Evil Lib’ruls are trying to shut them up by making baseless, unfounded claims of racism that just happen to be supported by easily misunderstood video evidence.
They’re lying, of course. We know they’re lying, because we have the aforementioned video evidence. They know they’re lying, because there’s not a single person in the world who could be so utterly lacking in self-awareness and basic intelligence as to hold a giant rally for white conservatives on the anniversary of a famous civil rights speech, in the exact same place that speech was held, and not notice that there might be some sort of problem. Beck is being totally disingenuous and everybody knows it including himself, but Beck, like Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Malkin, and Ann Coulter, simply refuse to admit that they’re being disingenuous. They have decided that as long as they’re consistent in their denials, the truth of what they’re denying simply doesn’t matter.
And that sounded familiar to me, as I was thinking about how to describe the phenomenon for this column, and I finally remembered this post from the excellent blog, Kung Fu Monkey. (Please read it, I spent a long time looking through the archives for it. Then I got smart and just googled the keywords. But I digress…) What he describes there is the problem of shamelessness, and he describes it perfectly. Glenn Beck has no sense of shame. He doesn’t see any problem with lying, and confronting him on his lies is no use, because he will simply continue to lie. You cannot shame the man into admitting that he’s a terrible person, because he’s such a terrible person that he doesn’t care that he’s lying about being terrible. And he’s got a national TV show.
Now obviously, this isn’t going to last forever. Most of Beck’s sponsors do have a sense of shame, or at least can put a dollar amount on exactly how much they’re willing to sacrifice in order to support a shameless man, and they’re dropping his show in droves. And the remaining ones are being indicted for fraud, because while there are no laws about shamelessly lying on a national television program, there are laws about false advertising, and coincidentally most of the people still selling ad space on Beck’s show are turning out to be fraudsters. But when Beck goes away, someone else will take his place, because these guys have figured out the loophole in the system. Just deny it all. Even if you know you’re lying, even if they know you’re lying, deny it all. You’re not breaking any laws. The only way they can punish you is with social contempt, and you’re already beneath that.
John Rogers hit it perfectly. These guys have found the exploit that allows them to game the system of civilized conduct. That’s why irony is dead: Stephen Colbert and his fellow comedians are trying to make an absurd statement in a serious way, but all they can ever hope to do is match the stuff Glenn Beck is trying to say for real. You can’t even make fun of these guys, because they’re crazier than the craziest satirist’s dreams. All you can really do is hope that people get smart enough to see through their bullshit, and that’s a pipe dream.
Someone broke human behavior. We need a patch.
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The “patch,” as you call it, is really easy: a responsible media.
Beck is a media creation, without an audience he has no platform (for his views, or goldline). We need a media that actually does its job and call people out as hypocrites and liars when they lie, either directly, by implication, or omission.
But it just doesn’t happen, but the incentives in the media are all on the side of clubby insiderism, not actual journalism. The 24-hour news cycles relies on leaks, rather than investigation.
Now, to be honest, I’m not sure if this takes care of the willfully ignorant, or the reality-impaired (“Keep the Gov’mnt out of MY social security!!”). But it would remove any lingering doubt that those that follow liars, fools and bullshitters do so because they don’t want to think for themselves.
Stewart had a really good rant a couple months ago in which he said, jokingly-but-really-not, that the writers have to restrain themselves from simply running Fox and Friends segments in their entirety on every episode of the Daily Show and knocking off early to kill their brains with alcohol, because what happens there is so much more absurd than anything they come up with that it defies direct mocking.
There are certain outlets in the media trying to hold them accountable (John Stewart, Stephen Colbert, all of MSNBC, tons of bloggers, etc.). People who realize that America was an experiment in idealism from the very beginning.
The problem is that Beck’s viewpoint is popular. It’s the viewpoint of Christian and/or wealthy white America. Those people are still the dominant powerbrokers in America and their agenda is to make sure they don’t ever have to share that power with others. As the U.S. moves away from a monochrome and towards a mosaic of different people and cultures, this group is going to become increasingly desperate, and therefore increasingly radical, as they try to preserve what allowed them to become wealthy and powerful in the first place. They don’t care about truth or integrity or American ideals…they just want to keep what they have.
It’s a losing battle for them…to win, they’re going to have to make the blacks, the Muslims, the Latinos, the gays, the transsexuals, and every other minority go away. To that end, they’re going to have to fundamentally change what America has always been, but they’re trying and, to some extent, succeeding; just this year witness the economic downturn*, the Tea Party, SB 1070, SCOTUS ruling that corporations are people under the law, the gutting of healthcare reform**, the Mosque debate, the DADT filibuster, the quashing of ENDA, the Proposition 8 battle, ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, and now Beck’s little demonstration, and tell me they’re not trying harder than ever to whitewash the U.S. and destroy any possibility of the American Dream for people not born of privilege. Some of these things were engineered and some of them were just opportunities that they pounced on, but every single one of those events is an attempt to stop the American experiment where it is rather than allow it to run its course to its natural conclusion.
* I realize the economic situation has been a product of several years worth of stuff, not just this year.
** I’m surprised we got any healthcare reform at all and so maybe this shouldn’t be on the list, but in its original form it would have been amazing and instead we were deprived of that.
John 2.0 gave a serious patch that I would’ve agreed would work.
So I now one-up him by giving the true patch:
Bring back the stockade.
Put these people in irons and allow us to throw vegetables at them.
a better patch would be people suing for defamation and slander and libel. We used to have such things, you know. Maybe when Beck gets down to just 12 cents in his pocket he’ll find some shame.
Renee, you forgot that they would have to make those parts of the majority that defy them go away as well. As a white, middle class, male, heterosexual I know I’m not in any great position to comment on the plight of minorities, but I acknowledge and admit to the presence of an advantage given to the majority that I’m ashamed to say I’ve unwittingly taken advantage of before. As it stands, however, I don’t hold the same opinions as the majority of Christian and/or wealthy white America (and actually actively oppose them), and thusly become a liability to them as much as any minority does.
No PaulW, when useless, unapologetic pseudo-celebrities lose their money, they just attempt to find god and become televangelists. Glen Beck is already a televangelist for right-wing politics, so there’s not telling what the hell he’s going to do after this stupidity.
Once you realize that all right-wing politics are based on paranoia (fear of gods, fear of gays, fear of blacks, fear of socialism, fear of economic equality, fear of science, fear of outsiders, fear of subcultures, etc. etc. etc.), and how any unsubstantiated correlation will do to justify their stupidity, you’ll realize just how much of a one-trick pony Glenn Beck really is.
Nicely said. I think, though, the part that actually angers me most about this whole thing is that which everyone seems to lack in their reports: that Beck has announced intentions to release “The Plan” at this rally, his latest book with guidelines and steps to fix the country so to speak.
It’s mighty egotistical to replicate a historic event like this, especially when there are many citizens in this country who remember what it was like before the Civil Rights Act; but to do it all to sell a book? (Well, we all knew such a rally was to sell Glenn Beck, anyway, since all Beck ever does is sell himself. But really – this grand plan just to push a book?)
I’m just gonna quote Fred at Slacktivist:
Oh holy God, these are horrible, horrible people.
I don’t get it. I don’t get any of this right-wing pundit bullshit. Because nobody takes them seriously, nobody gives a shit, because they are blatantly…
Okay. Here’s the thing. I kind of suspect that Beck doesn’t even believe his shit. There’s the difference between him and, say, Bill O’Reilly…O’Reilly came in, spouted out his crap, but he believed every word of it. Beck is a product of the fanbase O’Reilly created. He comes in, with a conservative viewpoint, yes, but he camps it up, for the fame and money and notoriety.
At least that’s what I can tell from the bits I’ve seen at the dentist’s office.
@ CB
Yes, absolutely. Although after the Beck apocalypse, you can at least blend in with the pod people, no? Perhaps not. :p
I have a huge problem with all the people who just dismiss Beck and anyone else like him, saying “they’re liars,” “they’re full of shit,” and especially, “no one takes them seriously anyway,” because people DO take him seriously. People believe every word that comes out of his mouth with honest sincerity, and I don’t believe for a second that they’re consciously lying and too shameless to stop.
I think the true situation is more like a combination of what Renee had to say and what Zenrage had to say. These people are mostly white, privileged people, and now they feel threatened by the potential loss of that privilege. I don’t think they’re acutely aware that that’s what they’re afraid of though. They see it more as a general economic downturn, or a decline of “values” in America, because no one wants to admit they’re racist or whatever, even just to themselves.
I keep telling myself that when push comes to shove in a real election, moderation and cool heads will prevail, but we’re talking about the country that elected George W. Bush to office TWICE. Building your platform as a rally against fear (especially if it’s both a rally against AND a stimulator of fear) can go a long, long way here.
“These people are mostly white, privileged people, and now they feel threatened by the potential loss of that privilege.”
I disagree there; huge swathes of Beck’s fanbase (and the Tea Party movement, and the Republican base) are profoundly economically disadvantaged – that’s why Republicans dominate in the South, the poorest region of the nation. For a variety of reasons, these groups’ anger and frustration has been ironically harnessed to serve the needs of the rich.
@ Karellan
Agreed.
@ SC
Yes, the Republican party has always leveraged religion against middle and lower class white America, to get their votes without really doing anything to help them. It’s a pretty savvy political maneuver really, so long as you don’t mind being slimy.
But make no mistake, Beck’s audience is largely white and male, and that equals privilege. And what percent of the 80,000 people who there yesterday were impoverished? I’m guessing not many…I couldn’t just run off to Washington D.C. to listen to a guy give some speech without skipping rent for the month; I’m guessing most of the people who were there were people who could afford to be there. Lots of middle class Americans who have become convinced that somehow they’re now the disenfranchised.
The one guy I heard interviewed at the event was all, “We need to restore American values…I’m a small business owner and I don’t want to pay more taxes.” I can’t say that he was representative of all the people that were there, but I’ll bet he was in the majority, and I’m not going to be sympathetic to some well-to-do small businessman who has the time and money to lobby for his own tax concessions while 10% of the country can’t find work.
That doesn’t mean Beck doesn’t appeal to lower class Americans too, because he does, but as the ladder of wealth and social status (and age…baby boomers, I’m looking at you), his popularity grows.
Republicans say they can create their own reality, but eventually, you run into _real_ reality. The Bush years were an example of that.
I just hope we don’t need another 4-8 years of Republican stupidity to wake everyone up, because then the whole country–and most of the world–will be ruined.
Well, this capped off a perfectly awful day. The Human Race has been run, and we all lost.
Maybe somebody can take a potshot at him, just for old times sake.
There are a lot of generalizations about Beck’s audience here.
Renee – you’re right that white & male equals a kind of privilege. But poor equals unprivileged, and a lot of Beck’s audience is fairly poor. Of the minority of Beck fans who went to DC, most are probably from nearby, driving in for the day. And do you think that leftists going to civil rights protests in DC are all wealthy?
As SC points out, much of Beck’s base is disadvantaged. It’s more helpful to view the appeal of Beck-brand conservatism as “What’s the Matter With Kansas” wedge-politics, essentially duping people to vote against their own best interests. As Renee notes, the actual ideology on offer is awfully vague – that’s no coincidence.
That’s why it is important to understand that this is a movement that appeals to a relatively poor mass, not an elite minority. It’s about splitting up the parts of the working and middle class. It’s about exploiting the *very understandable* feeling that the system is rigged and corrupt politicians are complicit with unethical business leaders. The democrats have failed to provide a progressive message to this group; demagogues like Beck are the inevitable result.
Also – Ambrael’s suggestion about taking a potshot is sick & neatly supports Beck’s own narrative about liberals. Hopefully that’s just a comment from a right-winger trying to make liberals look like amoral idiots.
I don’t understand this at all. My own politics tend to be centrist, so I am fairly skeptical of the talking points of the left and right, while agreeing with some points on both. However, I have not heard anything that Glenn Beck has said that indicates he is a racist. If you call him a blowhard, I’d agree.
If I understand this “proof”, it’s that simply because he has held a rally on the same site and day as Martin Luther King he is ipso facto a racist. This is something strange to say. Now, you could say that because it intrudes on an important event, that it is insensitive and tone deaf. That could be true, but it doesn’t mean Beck is a racist. It only means he might be ignorant and a jerk. (at the same time, as Uncle Jay once said, it is only a matter of time before MLK Day becomes a “sales event” like any other three day holiday up with Memorial Day and 4th of July Day sales).
However, this is very curious to hear that Beck shouldn’t be holding a political rally at this place and event because it offends some people’s sensibilities. Isn’t this exactly the same reason why people are upset about the Ground Zero Mosque?
However, I doubt that the left wingers here nodding up and down about this actually bother to view the Ground Zero Mosque controversy in the same light. Instead, they’ll simply march to the standard left talking points and never bother to see that they are being hypocritical.
I don’t know that Beck is a racist in terms of his personal beliefs, because I frankly doubt he actually believes most of what he says; if you look at his pre-FOX career, he comes across pretty differently. But in his current demagogue persona, he most definitely plays racial politics; he leans heavily on ginning up resentment among poor whites against minorities who are supposedly stopping them from realizing the American Dream, and appealing to general xenophobia (his drumbeat against Obama is laced with that sort of stuff).
As to the rally site, I haven’t heard anyone suggest he shouldn’t be able too; that’s clearly his right. But his stated intent is to “take back” the civil rights movement for his followers, and that is transparently ridiculous, borderline offensive given that the political forces that Glenn Beck associates with have been historically the enemies of the civil rights movements (Beck’s whole schtick is a comprehensive rejection of the progressive movement in the 20th century, which was fundamental to civil rights).
“And do you think that leftists going to civil rights protests in DC are all wealthy?”
You have to be a “leftist” to protest civil rights now?
“However, this is very curious to hear that Beck shouldn’t be holding a political rally at this place and event because it offends some people’s sensibilities.”
You left out the part where Beck said the intent of this rally was to “take back the civil rights movement.”
“Isn’t this exactly the same reason why people are upset about the Ground Zero Mosque?”
It’s not a mosque; it’s a community center.
@Chris Durnell — with respect, in my experience people who talk about how following “standard left talking points” makes one a hypocrite are never “centrist”, but always quite far to the right. Don’t you also find that?
Additionally, the Ground Zero mosque thing…you’re misrepresenting that. People aren’t “upset with” Glenn Beck, they’re critical of him. Whereas the anti-mosque people don’t want the mosque to be built because they are prejudiced against Muslims. There’s a big, big difference.
Finally, this is you making an apology for Glenn, I think:
“at the same time, as Uncle Jay once said, it is only a matter of time before MLK Day becomes a “sales event” like any other three day holiday up with Memorial Day and 4th of July Day sales.”
But it sounds rather more like you think having a day of remembrance for MLK is a waste of time, to me. Which I’m sure you’ll agree, comes off more cynical than centrist.
My apologies if I’ve misread you: the Internet is bad at nuance, so sometimes it’s necessary to rely on rhetorical red flags.
Clayton – You have seriously misunderstood my comment. My point was that claiming Beck’s fanbase must be wealthy because they can get to DC is mistaken: no-one would make the same argument about leftist civil rights protesters, for example. I chose ‘leftist’ in the example because Beck’s audience is obviously not leftist.
That said, while you don’t _have_ to be leftist to take part in civil rights protests, in the real world, that probably describes somewhere over 95% of those who take part. (See the Republican southern strategy and immigration stance for various reasons why.) That’s unfortunate, but do you honestly believe that a significant number of civil rights protesters in the US are right wing?
Only the ones protesting civil rights…
“That’s why it is important to understand that this is a movement that appeals to a relatively poor mass, not an elite minority. It’s about splitting up the parts of the working and middle class. It’s about exploiting the *very understandable* feeling that the system is rigged and corrupt politicians are complicit with unethical business leaders. The democrats have failed to provide a progressive message to this group; demagogues like Beck are the inevitable result.”
THIS.
For a variety of reasons the left just haven’t been able to get through to these people in any meaningful way, and bullshit like the Tea Party and Glenn Beck is what we’re stuck with because of it.
@david: That’s because, as I said in a previous column (The Three Lies of Politics) the left places some value on truth, and the right simply doesn’t. If one side is saying, “We can get through this, but it’ll take hard work and sacrifice,” and the other side is saying, “They’re lying, all it takes is cutting your taxes and getting rid of those lousy immigrants,” well…guess which one will “get through to these people in a meaningful way”?
@Chris Durnell: If you think that the only evidence of Glenn Beck’s racism is this rally, you are woefully (or possibly blessedly) ignorant of Beck and his rhetoric. Trust me, this is just the latest data point in a long, sad history of racism.
And yes, I’m aware that the latest dodge from the right is, “If you think Glenn Beck is an asshole who shouldn’t stand up and make racist speeches on the anniversary of MLK’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, you should also want to ban the Ground Zero mosque.” But the two situations are different. The people screaming that the Muslims building the Cordoba Center are radical anti-Americans are wrong, and this can be demonstrated with facts. The people saying Glenn Beck is a racist are right, and this can be demonstrated with facts. (See, Beck actually videotapes his statements. This makes it easy to fact-check his claims.) So when one group says, “Wow, this is inappropriate given the circumstances,” they’re right. The other is wrong. That’s kind of how facts work.
I think the great majority of people are smart enough to see through their bullshit. Most of the Republicans I know acknowledge that Glenn Beck is a clown, and that people like him (and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter) are just mouthpieces who are intended to distract from the real issues. There’s a reason they’re all consigned to cable television, where, honestly, anyone can get a freaking show.
Just because his supporters are vocal doesn’t make them numerous. They only find their ways in front of a camera if that camera is either Fox News or looking for a freak show. And Beck doesn’t have followers because they believe in Glenn Beck. They just believe in the cause, and see supporting the propaganda as supporting the cause. If the Republican party has done anything well, it’s that they’ve managed to equate the two in their supporters’ minds.
This warfare is as old as religion, and in fairness, both sides play it. One side is just better at making a spectacle of itself, which is exactly what they want.
“Most of the Republicans I know acknowledge that Glenn Beck is a clown, and that people like him (and Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter) are just mouthpieces who are intended to distract from the real issues.”
I wish this was true of where I live. My former job had a number of people who took all of them fairly seriously. One man actually spent a half hour of a lunch trip berating a fellow co-worker for critizing Rush Limbaugh. I wasn’t there for it, thankfully, but was told the story. I was never happier to leave that place.
@Dilettante: Actually, I’m a very cynical moderate democrat with a lot of sarcasm where most people keep their sense of humor. I had a really bad day, and really shouldn’t have said anything, especially that. Kindly disregard the entire post. Thank you.
Surely the best, most sane thing to do would be to get a lot of correct-thinking, sane Christian ministers to picket Glenn Beck’s Hate Rally, and draw as much publicity towards those who claim Glenn Beck can’t call himself a Christian (which, really, he can’t) as is possible?
But this is coming from a much more moderate country (less insanely right-wing) which has the advantage of having a state church headed by someone unafraid to speak out against the government, etc. [For his flaws, as someone not a member of his church, Rowan Williams is excellent.]
The most important thing to do is not give up. Not treat people as though they’re not. And, of course, decent investigative journalism. [Which is of course why Private Eye is much better than The Onion.]
Yeah the video evidence you uh didn’t post.
“However, I doubt that the left wingers here nodding up and down about this actually bother to view the Ground Zero Mosque controversy in the same light. Instead, they’ll simply march to the standard left talking points and never bother to see that they are being hypocritical.”
Not Ground Zero. Not a mosque.
Sorry, carry on.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it doesn’t bother me that Glenn Beck is crazy. It bothers me that Glenn Beck is crazy and contagious.
Glenn Beck’s audience is not the poor. It’s just not. Christian conservatives are overrepresented in the middle class. The whole populist shtick is a front. The base is not elite, but the whole point is that they’re mostly middle class, small business owners, and most of their politics comes from class resentiment against the real elites as well as the actual poor people who they perceive as freeloaders. They are under mountains of debt because they live above their means (which they think they are due, and could afford if they weren’t paying *so* much taxes to pay for the actual poor).
That’s why they get asses like Joe the Plumber as their spokespeople. He represents them.
@Briareos: Google “youtube glenn beck racist”. Then go back in time to before you posted and realize that everyone else in this thread did that before posting a “Where’s the PROOF?” comment, and tell your past self that it’s generally a good idea not to demand information that you can easily find yourself. Kind of makes you look a little lazy, intellectually speaking.
@John Seavey: “Self corrected behavior via time travel” is a bit extreme as far as a “patch” goes. Of course, it doesn’t work in the Marvel 616 universe, since it only creates an alternative timeline (unless Mark Millar is writing, becasue he gets to ignore the rules whenever he wants to).
What’s interesting is that there are, in fact, conservative media and opinion outlets that are based in some kind of observable consensus reality. You don’t hear about them because their readership is a tiny fraction of things like Fox News and WorldNet Daily.
In other words, we can see from market performance that modern American conservatives prefer to be lied to. When given a choice between a fact-based opinion or policy, and an easily-disprovable fantasia of hate and fear, they vote with their dollars, and they vote overwhelmingly for the latter.
I think it is important that we work out why that is; why so many people would prefer to be flatly, stupidly wrong about nearly everything in the world. What narrative is being served by this, and why is it so powerful that it becomes preferable to empirical fact?
See, here we have a perfect representation of the problem.
Intelegencia Left says “Here’s the problem, and I have facts to back it up.”
Rightwing Douche Bag says, “lalalal I can’t hear you, and here’s a false equivalency to distract the issue”
Intelegencia Left says, “Let me argue my facts you’re ignoring.”
Rightwing Douche Bag doesn’t care that Beck’s Rally and the Muslim thing in the NY are factually different. He knows it’s different. But you’ve dance to his tune, because the left is full of spineless morons who still don’t get it.
@Rightwing Douche Bag: IF, as you say, Beck and the Muslim thing are the same…why is Beck acting the same as the Muslims? You say the Muslim’s should be “sensitive” and move. Ok, fine…shouldn’t then Beck have lead the way? Shown his moral superiority? If it’s the same situation, as you propose, why didn’t you call on Beck to do “the right thing.”?
The vital thing to remember about Beck, about any pundit, is that they are entertainers first and foremost and information brokers second. Accuracy will always take a backseat to ratings and controversy is good. For a guy like Beck, there is no bad press.
However, you really need to throttle back your hatred of the man in charge and look at some of the ground level stories coming out of the rally. The people who turned out to see this thing aren’t hateful bigots, they’re not evil brainwashed zombies, they’re normal, middle class americans. Yeah, they’re mostly white, and many of them are business owners. Does that mean they don’t deserve a voice? Should they not be heard in our national conversation? They feel that their government is letting them down. They want to get that message out.
There may have been some racists on the lawn that day, but not a lot. But painting them all with the racist brush is a tried and true leftist technique to say “it’s ok to ignore this group, they’re loonies”.
Again, “tried-and-true leftist technique” kind of gives the game away, here. Love the bit about “okay there were some racists there, but only a few”…glad somebody was out there doing a head-count!
Also, well of course being white and owning a business means you don’t deserve a voice! I mean, one or the other, that’s okay…but both together?! MADNESS.
Where’s the penance stare when you need it?