This afternoon Glenn Beck posted a video promo for his GBTV presentation of who is behind the Occupy Wall Street movement. The promo featured Beck disclosing that he has been asked by presidential candidates, members of Congress, the business community, and faith leaders, for confidential briefings on his unique insights into the movement. He responded by saying that he would not provide the briefings, but that he would lay the case out tonight on his television show.
That’s so sad. Glenn Beck thinks that he still has a television show. He thinks that by calling his web site GBTV it actually makes it TV. It’s a pathetic little utopia that he inhabits.
I intended to review Beck’s presentation on the Occupy movement, but after watching it I was struck by how redundant it was. The entire thing was a rehash of his sermons from the past two years of his Fox News soap opera. It was immediately apparent that Beck has a grab bag of rogues that he repurposes for any crisis. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Global Warming, or the Arab Spring, or social justice, or terrorism. The same band of clandestine plotters are responsible for every horror that invades his psyche. Here is the abridged list:
- Unions
- 60’s Radicals
- Anti-Semites
- Anti-Capitalists
- George Soros
- The Obama Administration
- The Tides Foundation
- Center for American Progress
To this first-level manifest, Beck adds personalities that include Van Jones, Francis Fox Piven, Cass Sunstein, and Saul Alinsky.
And now that Beck has been cast out of the mainstream media that enriched him so abundantly, he is escalating his attack on his former keepers. He now charges that “the media knows and supports the destruction of capitalism.” Of course they do. Obviously the media has no interest in the formation of wealth or the consumerism that drives the billions of dollars spent on advertising and entertainment. It’s an irony that only Beck can see.
Beyond that twisted vengefulness, there was absolutely nothing new in his dissertation on Occupy Wall Street. And whether he is inciting fears about radicals from 50 years ago or Soros connections that never actually connect to anything, he delivers his delusional assertions with a sarcastic smirk that he inserts in place of evidence. He just needs to curl his lip and utter a mocking “Oh really?” and he has satisfied the standard of proof required by the dimwits who pay the tuition for his Internet seminary.
In some respects this is a brilliant gambit on Beck’s part. For someone so intellectually lazy, he doesn’t have to do any actual research to construct a new thesis of evil. He just picks a handful of those on his list of prefab villains, throws them up on the blackboard and waits for the chalk dust to settle. Then he sells the same leftovers to his flock in new wrappings over and over again.
There is one problem, as he discovered with his old Fox show. Even sheep get bored and wander off the ranch. That’s why his ratings were cut in half by the time he was canceled. And that’s why he must be feeling so unappreciated now as he garners less attention than than that woman…oh what’s her name? You know, Bristol Palin’s mother.
