Piven Responds To Beck: ‘It Only Takes One Person Who Is A Little Deranged’
A City University of New York professor and scholar of grassroots activism, the 78-year-old Piven has been the target of relentless Glenn Beck attacks. For an entire year now the Fox News talker has been pushing a tangled conspiracy theory that puts Piven, and her late husband, fellow academic Richard Cloward, at the center of an all-powerful left-wing movement to “collapse” the United States economy and government — a devious collapse designed to allow President Obama to radically transform the country, according to Beck.
The talker’s basis for the dark attacks date back to a Nation essay Piven and Cloward wrote 45 years ago. And as part of his misinformation campaign, Beck has repeatedly demonized Piven, denouncing her as an “enemy of the Constitution” and someone who wants to “destroy America.” Piven has become a star player in Beck’s rogue gallery of treacherous, all-powerful (often Jewish) liberals, seeking to eliminate the American way of life.
Beck’s fans have recently taken notice of Piven. On a website Beck runs, The Blaze, which also traffics in the Piven smear campaign, readers began posting lurid threats against the elderly academic. “ONE SHOT…ONE KILL!” announced one. “Why is this woman still alive?” asked another. And this particularly shocking threat: “Maybe they should burst through the front door of this arrogant elitist and slit the hateful cow’s throat.”
