GLENN BECK SPINS THE FACTS ON FAUX NEWS; APPARENTLY JAMES VON BRUNN IS 'LEFT WING' MOTIVATED BY 'POLITICAL CORRECTNESS'

This line of bull about how Nazism is leftwing is a neo-con routine to deflect blame among the right, but it looks real pathetic after the shootings yesterday at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. We are sure this is of no concern to Glenn Beck, who has made a career out of looking pathetic. So he takes to the airwaves and did what he always does, turn James von Brunn as someone influenced by all of the things that annoy Beck. In short, the right is doing damage control, but it is not going to work. In fact people like Beck are lending credibility to the idea that people like him are indeed the problem. It doesn’t help matters much that the Fox News prime time lineup – and this has GOT to be the epitome of gall – would hardly discuss the shooting if at all last night. Bill O’Reilly gave the shooting a mere 25 seconds of discussion on his television show while Sean Hannity (you know, the guy who makes friends with people who call for crap like this to happen) and Greta van Sustren said absolutely nothing. Now we are sure they are going to pull the “If it was a Muslim the ‘leftwing’ media would ignore it” routine, but Fox News was the first on the scene in DC, and covered it for an hour, although they were hesitant to report on the fact that it was a white supremacist responsible while other outlets did. If there wasn’t already loads of evidence that Faux News could not be trusted, you have loads now with their “coverage” of yesterday’s shooting.

Huffington Post

This afternoon Glenn Beck and two of his guests argued that Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party were “leftwing”; that “political correctness” led the committed white supramacist, James Von Brunn, to shoot a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC; and that ultimately President Barack Obama is the one responsible for the violence because his “bailouts” and “Socialistic” policies are engendering widespread anger. Beck denounced those who claim he is “churning the pot” because, he says, “the pot is already boiling.” Seeing this spectacle with subtitles at the gym today led me to wonder if there are any laws on the books against using the public airwaves to incite violence. Because that is clearly what Beck is doing. I only caught about ten minutes of the show (about all I can stand) and it was a white reactionary tour de force — incendiary, stupid, and racist.

In Beck’s world President Obama brings “identity politics” and “political correctness” to the White House, and it’s the “Left” that is “racist” because unlike conservatives, who judge people only on their individual merits and character (the three white men sitting at Beck’s table nodding in agreement), all liberals see is people of different races and classes and genders, which “divides” America. And Obama’s “socialistic” policies are leading people of dubious sanity to become unglued, and therefore the outbreak of right-wing violence is Obama’s fault. Talk about spin! Only through a conscious and disingenuous effort could anyone link the shooting today at the Holocaust Museum to President Obama.

Beck and his guests at the opening of his show today all agreed that the Nazis were not rightwing but a bunch of leftwingers (like Obama and Nancy Pelosi). That is pretty weird when you think about how that tidbit of agitprop must disappoint a lot of white supremacists. All those white guys who hail Hitler and the Nazis because they were so good at kicking the crap out of Socialists, labor unionists, Communists and Soviets, women who didn’t know their place, and even “degenerate” Dadaists and surrealists, and don’t forget the Jews. What self-respecting Neo-Nazi or Ku Klux Klansman (or good ol’ boy at the Council of Conservative Citizens) wants to hear that Hitler was like Michael Moore and Al Franken? But it doesn’t matter because Beck is not appealing to his viewers’ brains but to their guts. And all those “isms” sound the same to ’em anyhow.

And since this James Von Brunn guy targeted a museum where the murder of millions of Jews is memorialized Beck took the opportunity to run a short audio clip of an interview he had with Benjamin Netanyahu three years ago. He then segued into a riff on how our currently tough economic times will lead some people to scapegoat Jews and that means that Israel should bomb Iran right away. Somewhere behind Beck’s talking points there is real thinking going on. No one should dismiss Beck as a hack or “entertainer.” He is a propagandist.

It’s also clear that Beck and his fans just can’t get over the fact that a black man is now their president.

The television and radio producers behind Beck’s shows are bright, highly educated Republican strategists at FOX News who are expert at calculating each talking point for the host to pull on the jingoistic heartstrings of his largely uneducated, working-class viewers. And it works. Beck’s writers are creative people because they’ve found numerous ingenious ways to denounce Obama because he’s black but in ways that don’t sound racist.

Beck’s good at what he does. I’m sure his functionally illiterate white boy viewers get fired up during every show. He’s also dangerous. He talks up a grand conspiracy of liberals and “Socialists” who are destroying everything that makes America great and constantly uses alarmist rhetoric as if the whole country is falling apart around us. He does so by emoting on command and with practiced histrionics. I urge you go to Netflix and put on your queue “The Goebbels Experiment.” Watch the footage of the young Hitler doing his thing. Der Fuhrer plays on jingoism and white fear. He emotes on command and uses histrionics he practiced in front of a mirror for hours — just like Glenn Beck. If Hitler had a teleprompter and the backing of a force of nature like FOX News the world would have been in even bigger trouble.