Glenn Beck proved that acting crazy can make you fabulously wealthy even if it occasionally costs you your job. So, his latest paranoid ravings can certainly be considered as little more than what he does to pay the bills. Yet, if there are people who are genuinely friends with Glenn Beck…people who actually love him and care what happens to him…they might want to start talking to an intervention specialist.
It’s getting to the point now where perhaps the beast has slipped the leash. Obviously, it’s not good for the health of the country to have Glenn Beck saying these things to millions of listeners. But there’s a chance here that Beck has slipped into bona fide madness. This may longer be an act. Or, at least, the line between act and reality may have blurred to the point that Beck can no longer delineate the border.
What’s he’s describing is basically an internal mental process where this kind of border is disappearing.
“This is the biggest show ever,” he warned. “That’s all that’s happening right now. This is a show. We’re watching a script and a play play out in front of us. None of this stuff is real. Those riots in Baltimore. That wasn’t real … At some point, there will be a straw that breaks the camel’s back, and it will set the whole country on fire. And what happens? We will cry out for police help. The police will be overwhelmed. The DOJ will say, ‘We’re going to take over policing, we’ll coordinate it from here.’ And you’re done. It’s lights out, republic.”
It’s this perception that basic reality is not the real story that concerns me. He’s been spewing paranoid beliefs for a while, so that alone is not out of the ordinary. But this doubt about the basic reality of what he’s seeing with his eyes is new. And it’s accompanied by him taking the paranoia up several notches.
“If you look back at history, what happens to people who have voices and can cobble together people and be a leader?” he asked. “If you go back to what happened with the Armenian genocide, what is the first thing the Turks did? What is the first thing the Nazis did? You have a Night of Long Knives. The Armenian genocide. Any of the Armenians that could lead, any mayor, any writer, any person that was a hero in war, in one day, in each city, they would kill about 1,000 people. They’d just slaughter them. And they were all the leaders of the community. Anyone that people would rally around and follow. They were killed, day one. They just disappear, or they’re killed.”
“There are 10 million people that listen to this show. They cannot kill 10 million people in one night. You were born for a reason, and you’re listening to this show for a reason,” Beck stated. “Prepare for a time when voices like mine or others are no longer heard and yours is the only voice.”
Now, I don’t want to contribute to the paranoia here, but the reason people may not hear Beck’s voice much longer is because he probably needs to take a break from broadcasting and get some serious psychological help. I know that he’s one of the nation’s greatest charlatans, and it’s possible that he knows exactly what he’s doing. But I think he is showing signs of mental and emotional crisis. The voices he says are in his head may actually be there.
“We’re being set up, guys. We are absolutely being set up,” Beck said. “And I don’t know — this is what I pray every night: ‘I don’t know how to do this, Lord. I don’t know what you want. I don’t know — I don’t know what you want.’ I can’t wake up anyone. Oh, if I had the voice of an angel. I can’t wake anybody else up. They’ve smeared me. I’ve helped them smear me. I don’t have any credibility. Nobody is listening. I can tell you what’s coming. I’ve told you every step of the way. I know what’s coming next.”
In any case, this is not the kind of thing people should be listening to. If he’s not crazy, he’s certainly acting crazy enough that it’s irresponsible to profit off it. The government shouldn’t yank him off the air, but someone should. If not his friends and family, then maybe the station directors.
Well they yanked Father Coughlin off the air – why not Beck?
What is more concerning to me though is even as his rants become more incoherent he remains popular. There is a large faction in this country that seriously needs mental help. How do we reach these people?
Because the Catholic Church has standards.
Not many… but some.
More like the wrong rant for the times. The Nazis were the real and present danger that we had to fight. We needed the USSR on our side to prevail in that fight. And young KKK members to redirect their hate and sign up to be cannon fodder against the new enemies.
The flexible demagogues pivoted at that point and after the war was won, had no difficulty pivoting right back to where they’d been before.
Beck is a Mormon…They have no standards.
Beck is a cash cow…money is the only thing that matters….
I’m thinking now that the right controls 2 of 3 branches of the federal government, Beck has to ramp up the crazy and find new enemies with which to incite folks. Look, here we are talking about him. Success.
It’s gotten impossible to tell who’s crazy and who’s pretending to be crazy, but as long as crazy sells, we’re stuck with the likes of Beck, Ted Nugent, Chuck Norris, Victoria Jackson and Michele Bachmann.
I guess we’re also worried about David Brooks:
http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/i-dont-think-david-brooks-is-okay-you-guys-1702674607/+AlbertBurnek
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(Seriously, go read it. You’ll thank me…)
Bwa-hahahahahahahahahaha!
Oh, lordie, that is the most deliciously vicious takedown of a blowhard I have ever read.
Thank you. Your link didn’t work for me; so, here’s another one.
If Brooks were Catholic, he could renounce the secular world and enter a contemplative monastery. Buddhist monasteries might even be superior for what ails the poor man. Either would be beneficial to Brooks and more importantly, the world because then we’d never have to hear from him again.
If Brooks were Catholic
I thought he was.
Brooks: “…there’s a phrase for my sort of Jewish family: ‘Think Yiddish, act British’ “
It’s gotten impossible to tell who’s crazy and who’s pretending to be crazy,
Doesn’t matter. Shun the crazy talk. The authentic “crazies” are free to seek or not seek medical attention. The political crazy-talk, grifter business plan doesn’t work when nobody is buying. They’ll soon enough close up their political crazy-talk shops and open a new scam shop.
Ironic that his 10 million viewers, that he is basically calling to arms, shouldn’t be juxtaposed with the social media calling to arms from ISIL. Abbott is probably a listener, as is his rightier Lt. The Pentagon spokesman can’t resist a twitch of a grin refuting the TX/red states’ uproar over a military exercise, but when you have ISIL calling for lone wolves to act and Beck doing the same even though the two aren’t reacting to the same agenda, they’re both playing with weapons on the same field and the Pentagon puts the military bases on alert. Two sets of crazies, armed and dangerous wandering around being spooked. May Beck find a padded cell soon.
A question to this raging asshole Beck:
Was the police killing of Freddie Gray real? Have the preposterous, decades-long policies by the BPD of oppression, beatings, harassment, unnecessary incarcerations and murder of citizens without due process been a false flag too, you sick, sick man?
http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/
I really don’t that know Beck’s paranoia is any different than all of the other right wing personalities. Sure, he couches his in wacky apocalyptic religious framing, but what is the differentiation between his rantings and any day of Hannity, Limbaugh, Levin, Huckabee, O’Reilly or the rest of the stable of conspiracy theorists and nut jobs peddling the latest in wacko predictions of martial law, killing of Christians, FEMA concentration camps and death panels?
They are all just individual pieces of the large right wing jigsaw puzzle of insanity. There is a very symbiotic relationship between all these different facets of the vast right-wing conspiracy machine. No doubt, some are more invested in the grift aspect than others. But all of them have some significant belief in what they are peddling.
Beck might be more explicit in his predictions of the coming. I guess maybe he considers himself kind of a “John The Baptist” figure on the RW side, prophesying for the masses the coming revolution.
This is where I was going to start – that the echo chamber ringleaders pay careful attention to each other for their talking points, and Beck’s are being echoed – in less apocalyptic terms, but not by much – across the right. The latest meme boils down, essentially, to the illegitimacy of federal authority and/or Obama seizing local powers and/or declaring a third term for himself. And this in turn is a natural outgrowth of seven years of Obama-the-Usurper and then Obama-the-Tyrant talk. It’s all of a piece.
MY concern is that the natural pivot will next be to undermine a Hillary win in 2016. If she does prevail, expect large segments of Red America to consider her victory illegitimate. Needless to say, this is rather concerning.
Well, that is probably an absolute 100% certainty. I can’t imagine, in what is left of my lifetime, that it will be any other way than this for every Democratic President that comes down the pipe. I think we are facing an extended period where this is just the way that the Republicans will react to any Democratic victory. It is the only way to maintain the level of insanity and hate that is required to feed their base.
The ubiquity of cameras in everyday life has changed the mad ravings of RWNJs. At one time, it was all about imaginary “commies under our beds.” Now it’s denial of events that have been recorded. The people that lap this shit up probably haven’t changed. And their numbers were huge when the POTUS as the spokesperson in chief was seeing Saddam’s imaginary WMD.
When will people learn to pull back the curtain on these charlatans? Of course they know that extraordinary proof isn’t required for extraordinary claims by those that accept as fact the sky god that watches over them 24/7.
It seems Jeb Bush gave a speech at Jerry Falwell’s organization protesting supposed religious intolerance. “Unskewed polls” is the new normal.
Why should Beck or Bush or anybody on the right side of the aisle be constrained to deal in fact if a sizable enough chunk of their constituency is willing to inhabit an alternate reality?
Ehn. This is pretty much the same song he’s been singing for years.
Beck is an asshole, a charlatan, a grifter, and maybe a little dangerous.
But for better or worse in this country, we have the first amendment. On balance, I think it tilts strongly toward the better.
If we allow or force the Becks and Limbaughs and Caribou Barbies of the world to be silenced, who’s to say that someday it might be Booman, or Pierce, or Maddow?
The best antidote is starving the beast. When enough people stop buying what these frauds are selling, that’ll be it.
It sounds like propaganda to me,”you were born for a reason…to listen to me”. That is some serious Gobbels like propoganda.