Read of the Day: Glenn Beck Hitlerfest
Michael Calderone has a good piece on Glenn Beck’s latest fever swamp Hitlerfest — a four-hour “documentary” titled “The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free…or Die.”
Use the Holocaust to promote your TV show. Classy!
Viewers tuning into MSNBC at 5 p.m. on Friday would have seen Chris Matthews riffing on President Barack Obama’s speech in Ohio, while CNN’s “The Situation Room” led with the earthquake in Haiti.
But Fox News wasn’t focusing on the day’s news. Instead, host Glenn Beck ran through the atrocities of Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara - “the true unseen history of Marxism, progressivism and communism” as Beck described it - with some implied lessons for today.
Over the past year, Beck has used images from Nazi rallies or the Soviet Union when stoking fears of creeping socialism in the United States. And he’s often placed historical figures into the far-out theories he diagrams on his chalkboard. But in Friday’s hour-long documentary, titled “The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free…or Die,” Beck doubled down on the use of imagery pulled from the 20th century’s totalitarian past to make a point about citizens needing to be wary of government overreach in the present.