As CP reported earlier this month, Glenn Beck is out at Fox News thanks to shrinking ratings and growing disconnect from reality. Now Brad Johnson reports at ThinkProgress that Beck can’t leave fast enough to stop the crazy. The good news is that Brad also has a clip of Van Jones.
Today, lame-duck Fox News host Glenn Beck equated the 10,000 youth climate activists who participated in the Power Shift conference this weekend with dangerous “radicals” who want to kill their parents [or who are being told to "kill their parents" or who tell each other to "kill their parents" -- as usual, it's hard to tell what Beck is saying]. At Power Shift, climate leaders Van Jones and Al Gore exhorted the mostly college-age participants to engage with the older generations by asking moral questions about American values, just as young people did during the Jim Crow era. Beck falsely claimed the advice was to “not to listen to your parents!” Continuing further, Beck said these are “the same radicals” who talked about “kill[ing] the parents”:
The more things change, you see, the more they stay the same. These radicals are the same radicals that used to tell each other in the 1960s, “Don’t trust anybody over thirty. Don’t trust your parents!” Bill Ayers said, “Kill the parents! Kill your parents!”
Watch it:
During his attack, Beck interrupted a clip of Van Jones’ keynote address, which began, “When your uncle Joe, who loves Fox News, starts talking to you, and starts dominating the discussion . . . ” Beck then broke in, “Listen to what he’s saying. ‘Don’t listen to the elders in your family.’”
Of course, Beck didn’t let his audience listen to the respectful and honest message Van Jones had for the “uncle Joes” of America:
You have the opportunity to say to your uncle Joe, “Excuse me, sir, don’t you believe in liberty? And if you do, how can you live in a country where every American is forced to be an energy consumer for the rest of our lives? Shouldn’t we have the right as Americans to be energy producers?”
Watch what Beck wouldn’t let his Fox News audience see:
The young Power Shift leaders are actually organizing to make BP pay on April 20.
See the full Glenn Beck segment at Media Matters.
Beck isn’t the only agent of the corporate right to attack the Power Shift activists today. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce belittled the youth who organized a protest of their climate denial and their polluter cash at their Washington headquarters as an “anti-business crowd” like “an off-pitch band marching past your office window.”
– Brad Johnson in a ThinkProgress cross-post
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
Listening to Glenn Beck, and reading the Chamber comments, leads to this question: How in the hell are those guys winning? It would be one thing if we were being outmaneuvered by diabolical geniuses, but these guys are idiots.
Glen Beck’s solution is to kill our children and Earth’s life support systems.
Mike Roddy, here’s why. The mainstream media controls the message that gets to normal people. Normal people don’t bother to fact check anything. They just accept whatever the TV tells them. And it just so happens that the media is owned by giant corporations who have an interest in maintaing the status quo and power structure. So talking heads like Glenn Beck get to go on air.
Well, when I knew of Van Jones speech, one of the things I thought was, ‘surely the diehard inactivists will attack the speech by claiming it’s ‘shrill’ or some such’.
So, not surprising.
I’m also sure that if Glenn Beck were to be transported back in time and space to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, he’d probably also find a reason to denounce it as being ‘shrill’. After all, it’s such a biased speech, isn’t it…
– frank
Mike Roddy @ 1: There are a number of factors, for one thing their audience subconsciously sensors what they see and hear so they don’t notice the flaws. They have to be put in a situation that forces them look or listen.
Another factor is that for some people stupidity has a certain appeal to them. It allows them to reach whatever conclusion they want without all that logic and evidence getting in the way. In other words, if evidence and logic won’t support the conclusion you want then get rid of evidence and logic.
I must admit to being skeptical of Glenn Beck actually leaving FOX News any time soon. The announcement sounds an awful lot like Exxon announcing they would no longer fund Climate Deniers.
Mike Roddy (#1), first of all that was very funny wording of our dilemma.
Secondly my view is that the masses who listen to the deniers and adopt their views aren’t “stupid”. Instead I think it is a case of many Americans holding beliefs, worldviews and lifestyles that are in deep conflict with climate change reality.
As Berbalang (#5) says, these folks are subconsciously filtering info to support their current constructs. That is what humans do, for better or worse.
The battle to get these folks to accept the climate science starts with showing how climate change is a threat to their values, worldviews and lifestyles. And then to work on real solutions that these folks will see as smaller threats than those posed by unchecked climate changes.
Once the threats from climate changes is greater in their minds than the threats from the solutions…they will suddenly see the climate science just fine.
Well this controversy is bringing more attention than all the media coverage of the event so far. Al Gore and Van Jones show up in front of 10,000 people and almost no one in the media notices. Bachmann or Palin show up in front of 300 people and the media, even Maddow, fall all over themselves to report the story. Even when a guest mentioned the Power Shift conference Maddow had really nothing to say.
I wonder which Democratic politician could have brought as much media attention to Power Shift as Bachmann can get at a tax rally in front of 300?
I mean come on. Really. Why isn’t Beck the butt of jokes and little else?
Joseph Goebbels is alive and well and living in a Glenn Beck suit.
Seriously, it is shameful that such a person can get so much traction out of hate speech. Time to call in the men in white suits.
Beck and his ilk, most notably including CC deniers, are popular for a variety of reasons, but I think it all boils down to one factor: They’re telling Americans what they want to hear. Americans don’t want to be told that we’re all (as in all of humanity) on the same Spaceship Earth where everything influences everything else. The American mythos is so tied to manifest destiny and “don’t tread on me” and “I’m the baddest dude on the block” and “might really does make right” that it’s no surprise that people like Beck and Limbaugh, plus all the CC denier web sites find an eager following.
The right wingers and libertarians and contrarians are very good at defining and then attacking an “other”, and many people find it easier to go down that path, addicted to their daily two minutes of hate sessions, than to sit back, learn something about CC, for example, and actually think.
As I keep saying: Strip the entire process down to incentives and power, and it all becomes incredibly easy to understand.
Worth re-stating that Bill McKibben mentioned in his speech at Power Shift something like “you [audience] will be called radicals. But it is THEY who are the radicals”.
Yep, exactly what Beck just did and what Beck is.
We’re in a power struggle and facts and fair labels won’t play much in the fight. Gotta out maneuver them and that’s effen hard when they’re the ones with the billions and the highly skilled and unethical propagandists like Beck.
On a positive note, if Ghandi was right in saying “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”, then perhaps the good news is that we seem to be at stage three.
With a couple of “fight” references and allusions and a strong label or two in my opinion above, I just wanted to make clear that I am personally in favor of Ghandi’s non-violence approach and am not advocating for other forms of disobedience. Glenn Beck might think the ends justify the means, but I don’t. Another big difference between us.
And will you kids get off my lawn!
Okay, at some point, can this stupid country stop obsessing over the 1960s? Really, Beck? ’60s Radicals? You mean 70-year-old senior citizens? That’s our big problem now? What are they gonna do, take the batteries out of the remote and leave the TV stuck on Matlock? Eat all the pudding from the buffet line? Drive really, really slow with the turn signal flashing?
1960 was five fucking decades ago. And you just know this schtick will work on half the population. Good Lord, this nation is stupid.
well me personally, the next hunting dog i see, i’m gonna stuff it with recycled rebar and mount some solar panels on. damn dogs oughta do something around the house for once.
Ghandi didn’t have to battle the medium of TV. TV suspends critical thought so it is the simplest, most emotionally engaging content that has the greatest power, ME
The Becks of the Rightwing media, and, in Australia we have numerous such types, from the lunatic extreme of talk-back radio right through the MSM, but concentrated under Murdoch, specialise in hate and fearmongering. They NEVER engage in a polite and sensible exchange of opinions, mostly because their ideology is so ignorant and stupid as to not stand much scrutiny. Their’s is ALWAYS the most extreme, Manichean, invective. The Greens want to drive us back to the Stone Age, Moslem migrants want to inflict sharia law and the wearing of burqas on the whole population. Proponents of the boycott on Israeli products are antisemites who wish either to cause a new Kristallnacht or even another genocide. The extremity of the vitriol has inexorably risen over the years, as they compete with each other to draw their owners’ attention and approval.
The unrelenting avalanche of fear and hatred has coarsened and deracinated society. The current ‘debate’ here on a climate price is sub-moronic, insanely and pettily greedy and ignorant to the point of parody and beyond. But it is succeeding for the Right. As for whence all this hatred and fear comes , it comes from within. Whenever a Beck or any of his ilk attribute vile motives to their victims, that is simply the most banal psychopathological projection. After all to accuse your victims of the sins that infest your own heart is pretty ancient stuff. One is immediately put in mind of witch trials, and there’s no doubt Mr Jones has been fingered as such by ‘witch-finders-general’ like Beck.