Little Green Footballs at the Daily Beast
I’ll take a wild guess and predict that this article at The Daily Beast by Benjamin Sarlin will bring me at least half a dozen hate mails (and just as many emails of support): Right-Wing Becklash.
In an interview, Johnson told The Daily Beast that he was extremely concerned by a lurch to the right among conservative media outlets, particularly Fox News, which he said has begun “deliberately pandering to extreme-right personalities.”
“They’ve taken a real turn to the hard right, and Glenn Beck, I think, is kind of riding that wave,” Johnson said. “I don’t know if he’s necessarily going to incite violence, but I do think it’s irresponsible. It kind of drags down the discourse to a level that I, for one, am not comfortable with.”
According to Johnson, he was most shocked by Beck’s recent recommendation of books by Cleon Skousen, a longtime poster boy for far-right conspiracy theories about a “one-world government” that are now making a comeback.
Johnson says he has received a flood of hate mail and attacks from bloggers since he began publishing posts rebuking Beck, but strong support as well, including from some of his usual critics on the left.
“In a way it’s nice and in a way it’s a little ironic, because some of the same people have been calling me every nasty name in the book for eight years,” he said.