Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Important Read: “Fears of a Clown” Reviewed One Year Later

Glenn Beck: The One Thing Video 5.11.10 -  Principles and Policies

Video Follow-up:  Fears of Clown from One Year Ago

Watch the two videos above and see how far we have come on the path of to the fundamental transformation of America

Original Time Article:  Glenn Beck: The Fears of a Clown

By James Poniewozik Wednesday, Apr. 08, 2009 – Time Magazine

Illustration for TIME by Francisco Caceres; Beck: Nicholas Roberts / The New York Times / Redux

On March 23, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner unveiled the Obama Administration's toxic-bank-assets plan. The stock markets cheered the news, sending the Dow up 497 points.

This meant one thing: it was time for Glenn Beck to break out the Jenga set.

The new populist superstar of Fox News has made a refrain of predicting that government policies are leading to disaster — dark, ruinous, blood-in-the-streets kind of disaster. Pausing for a 17-minute speech rebutting his critics for calling him "dangerous" and "crazy," he took out the block-tower game. On opposite sides of the tower were written the words solution and problem, taxpayer and children. Then he spent much of the hour critiquing the plan, all the while pulling pieces from the wobbling tower and stacking them on top. (Read an interview with Glenn Beck.)

For Beck, Jenga is a metaphor for the plan's risk. But it is also a metaphor for Beck's show, which teeters from humor to predictions of apocalypse to self-esteem sermons to fits of weeping. ("I'm sorry. I just love my country. And I fear for it.") This is what makes it so compelling: the breathless feeling that at any moment, everything could spectacularly collapse.

A year ago, with Fox News in an election-year ratings slump, some TV observers (like me) wondered if its conservative commentators could thrive in an Obama era. The answer is yes, and how. Fox roared back and has more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined.

It's succeeded partly because of its veteran stars Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. But to Hannity's tax-cut Republicanism and O'Reilly's grumpy social conservatism, but Beck adds an au courant strain of grievance. Beck had a similar program on Headline News (which I appeared on once), on which he at one point asked a Muslim Congressman to "prove to me that you are not working with our enemies." After he moved to Fox in January, his audience exploded to 2 million-plus viewers — unheard of at 5 p.m. His hook, for the age of economic anxiety: whereas O'Reilly embodies anger and Hannity brashness, Beck embraces fear.

Fear of what? Take your pick. Fear that the U.S. is on a long march to fascism. (As evidence, Beck cited — on April Fools' Day but apparently seriously — the inclusion of fasces on the Mercury dime in 1916.) That fat cats and bureaucratic "bloodsuckers" are plundering your future. That Mexico will collapse and chaos will pour over the border. That America believes too little in God and too much in global warming. That "they" — Big Government, Big Business, Big Media — are against you. Above all, that you, small-town, small-business America — Palinville — have been forgotten. Dismissed. Laughed at. Just like him.

It's hard to identify a Beck ideology so much as a set of attitudes, sometimes contradictory ones. He channels anger against Wall Street but defends the bonuses for AIG executives. He devoted a segment to debunking a conspiracy theory about FEMA "concentration camps" (that now appear to be the real thing) but has warned that the AmeriCorps program "indoctrinates your child into community service."

What unites Beck's disparate themes is a sense of siege. On March 13, he served up a kind of fear combo platter — war, chaos, totalitarianism, financial ruin — with the 9/12 Project, a tearful call to viewers to rediscover the common purpose they felt after 9/11. In 2001, that common purpose involved cable-news talkers' dialing down the us-vs.-them shtick for a day or two; now Beck urged viewers to reject the notion that "they" have all the power. "They don't surround us," he declared. "We surround them."

Beck's surround sound plays like a mix of colonial pamphleteering, Great Depression demagoguery and the movie Red Dawn. But is he serious? He describes himself as a "rodeo clown," and he is a talented TV showman — joking and self-effacing, with a gift for big visuals and low-tech explainer stunts like his Jenga bit. Unlike O'Reilly et al., he's not a shouter. He calls his program "the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment."

Then again, he recently devoted a "War Room" episode to gaming out an American economic collapse in 2014 — the result of debt and high taxes — including the rise of "Mad Max" militias and civil unrest. Because if anything spells laff riot, it's the breakdown of lawful society! Whether Beck is stirring up frightening social currents or just playing in them, his material and its resonance are deadly serious.

Of course, I'm a "them." And if there's one thing we ‘thems’ love, it's tarring dissenters as scary. As he played with his Jenga tower, Beck made just that point, introducing his next guest, former Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul. "Remember," Beck said ‘sarcastically’, "he is a dangerous militia member!"  This would be laughable until you take a good look at DHS Chief’s ‘watchlist’ including ex-military (Vets), tea party members, people with anti-Obama sticker on their cars, southerners who fly Confederate or Don’t Tread on Me Flags, and anyone that belongs to any Patriotic pro-Constitution group, etc.  Here is the list leaked just a month after Obama took office: PDF file here plus the recent SPLC list, which includes Beck by name.

Then a wooden piece gave way, and the whole toy edifice came crashing down.

Time Magazine wrote (paraphrased):  What was unthinkable or a conspiracy a year ago is now reality.”  We have spent a year being transformed on a daily basis without most people in America even noticing.  A year ago when you said Global Government and a New World Order you were considered a conspiracy theorist… or crazy by all but those in the know.  Now you hear and read it daily by our elected leaders and in the mainstream media.  This should be scaring the Hell out of you.  The fact that it doesn’t and only about 10% of Americans truly understand what is going happening and where we are going… and only a percentage of those are standing up for all of us proves that the Progressive Alinsky methods (Rules for Radicals)  employed by our leaders are working.  (Remember Beck’s Fears of a Clown Episode? See today’s follow-up, one year later:  Video)

Please Checkout:  A Cornucopia of Corruption and Treason:  *Multiple Articles Within*  that Everyone Needs to Read – Grab yourself a strong cup of  coffee  or a stiff drink and some comfort food and find a quiet spot… and please make more than few minutes to spend reading and researching the links from this article.

Related:

Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservative is real - Think about it… this was over a year before they knew if Americans would stand for this… now we have.

Dr. Carol Swain on the SPLC that Should be Watched by Everyone! – You won’t have to wonder where their lists go…

Video: Prof Carl Swain on SPLC: How the Southern Poverty Law Center Invent... 

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Lieberman:  Strip Terrorists of Citizenship – Might sound good, but today it is suspected terrorists, tomorrow it could be you.  Just ask a Jewish person who was picked up in Nazi Germany!

Mayor Bloomberg of NYC is in London checking out their underground surveillance system.  They have 3 times the cameras in their system as New York, yet they were attacked anyway. 

“Those that give up their freedom for security, end up with neither!” Let us not be fooled into allowing Big Brother to take away anymore of our freedoms or add anymore surveillance in the name of security.  Wake-up America!!

“He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither. ... Those who give up their liberty for more security neither deserve liberty nor security. ... and can only end in despotism, as other forms of government have done before it, when the people Benjamin Franklin

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