It's great that Stephen Colbert made Glen Beck look like the worlds biggest loon but still I have to ask, who watches this guy's show? Supposedly he gets more than a million viewers per day and he is a total whack job and it doesn't seem to be just an act. Do people really take this guy seriously. And if so, shouldn't we all be concerned about that? I think it's the height of irresponsibility for FoxNews to give this guy a platform to appeal to the fringe of our society and potentially convince them that the government is their enemy. Who knows what one of these fools might do spurred on by Beck's antics. If someone gets hurt because of something he says on his show there has to be some retribution.
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Sadly, I know the answer to this: my father, and his friends, in the deep red heart of Kansas. We regularly have phone calls where he says, "I heard Obama's going to take our guns!" or "He's moving us all to socialism!" or whatever Beck's on about, and when I say, that's not true, he inevitably says, "But I heard it on the news." He's also convinced Beck was "fired" from CNN because he was telling truths no one wanted to hear.
ReplyDeleteAnd my father isn't exactly the fringe of society -- he's well-educated, at least, but Beck manages to appeal to every small fear he has of Over-Large Government Taking Everything Away.
That's the scary part for me -- the appeal to the darker side of human nature. Like you say, between Beck and Lou Dobbs, it seems like they could incite violence.
Here is what I don't get. People have been saying Democrats were going to take their guns for years and yet it has never happened in the history of our country. Why do people believe this lie over and over again. It just doesn't make any sense to me that this comes up every single time we have a Democratic President yet every single time they never even attempt to take people's guns. That Beck et al would prey on these fears is totally reprehensible and dangerous but I hope some day that people figure out that they are being lied to in order to stoke their fears. I mean Glenn Beck is certifiable and I don't think a fact checker would have enough time in the day to document all of his lies but shouldn't people lose faith in him after he is wrong over and over again? I hope at some point your father and his friends realize that just about the whole FoxNews line up are not to be trusted.
ReplyDeleteI hope so, too. I think the entire "take our guns" myth is based on another myth, which is that there's a magical time in the past where everyone took their guns everywhere (a la the Wild West, maybe?) and then that time ended, and it must have ended because of liberals.
ReplyDeleteIt's the same line the NRA parlayed into some kind of political power. Every time there's a proposal to limit something like an assault rifle, they send out a blast of messages saying, "GUNS ARE BEING TAKEN FROM US!!" and, by not specifying which guns, their whole membership gets terrified and mobilized, often without knowing what it is they're fighting for.
It's preying on fear and preying on lack of attention, I guess; anyone who can or does watch more than an hour of news a day would know this is untrue, but for those who get only the sound bites they're fed, it's a Glenn Beck world.
Yuck!
Glenn Beck exists to fill the void left in the lives of lonely, desperate people who fear the complex world in which they live.
ReplyDeleteFact or Fiction he fills their existential anxieties about life. The false logic he uses and the half truths go unchallened. Who in their right mind would appear on his show?
I see that he brings more misery than peace to the world as he rakes in the big bucks. You are seeing politics being parlayed as religion. And you have to take GB on faith, because he won't tolerate dissent.