Talking Cons At Talking Points Memo
Charles Johnson noted here that he was featured this week at Talking Points Memo and drew in a mob of stalkers in the process. I also joined him for two entries in the Book Club around Michael Wolraich’s book Blowing Smoke. Here’s a taste of my entry “Bigotry as Comfort:”
I like Michael’s description of Beck as “rationalizing” bigotry.
There’s a video of Beck discussing the infamous Father Charles Coughlin and dismissing comparisons between him and the two. In the video, he notes that Coughlin viewed poverty and inequality as a chief issue, which differentiates him from the Ayn Rand touting Beck. The lack of self-awareness shows as he continues to describe Coughlin, saying that Coughlin believed the Great Depression was caused by a “cabal of international bankers” who worked in tandem to usurp “American sovereignty.” That that was the basic argument of his George Soros obsession seems to be lost in the midst of Beck’s self-awareness deficit. Beck’s alleged cabal of bankers is likewise overwhelmingly Jewish and his frequent use of Nazi imagery, and his use of screenshots of the Sinai peninsula (Go back and watch the video for yourself. It’s right there in the open.) while talking about Soros is an act of blowing the fascist dog whistle louder than it’s been blown in a long, long time. We’d have to be able to catch Beck in private to know if he uses derogatory terms for Jews, but from the outside it seems to rationalizes old, indeed ancient, anti-Semitic arguments by substituting “progressive” for “Jew.” As his fans at the white nationalist website Stormfront have put it, Beck goes “as close as you can get to naming the Jew without actually naming the Jew.”
There’s also my first entry, “Right Wing Persecution Drips With Ethnic Hatred:”
I agree with Michael Wolraich’s analogy of the 1990s era of Bill Clinton and the Republican Contract with America. However, the situation seems far more precarious than those days. The Oklahoma City bombings were apparently retaliation for the disaster that occurred in Waco, Texas. While Rush Limbaugh played a political version of the loud shock jock that was rising in popularity at the time, he did not have much intellectual firepower and was not reaching as deep into middle America’s conscious as Glenn Beck is managing to. Most importantly, the long and tortured element of American racial politics was not there for the like of Limbaugh to play on with a white Arkansas boy in office as it is now, with paranoid elements of white America alarmed by a rapidly growing and politically active Hispanic population and the election of the nation’s first African American president. These changes are making white America uneasy and less in control than they ever have been before. This anxiety is easy to play on.
And play on it Beck and Limbaugh have. While Limbaugh has crudely called Obamacare “Yo mamma care” and lambasted Barack Obama for recognizing the contributions of Native Americans, his inflammatory rhetoric seems to match his Clinton era schtick with a few variations. The more alarming moves have been made by Glenn Beck, who with both a nationally syndicated radio and television show reaches more people that Limbaugh has ever been able to.
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