Glenn Beck Focuses Crazy Eyes on 78-Year-Old CUNY Professor
R.I.P. Civil Discourse. We hardly knew ye. ::pours malt beverage on curb::
Glenn the Batshit is at it again. This time he’s spinning tales about 78-year-old CUNY professor Frances Fox Piven, charging her with “intentionally trying to collapse the economic system”:
On Jan. 5, 2010, Glenn Beck delivered one of several attacks on Richard Cloward, now deceased, and his wife and collaborator, Frances Fox Piven, who wrote about ending poverty.
Frances Fox Piven, a City University of New York professor, has been a primary character in Mr. Beck’s warnings about a progressive take-down of America. Ms. Piven, Mr. Beck says, is responsible for a plan to “intentionally collapse our economic system.” Her name has become a kind of shorthand for “enemy” on Mr. Beck’s Fox News Channel program, which is watched by more than 2 million people, and on one of his Web sites, The Blaze. This week, Mr. Beck suggested on television that she was an enemy of the Constitution.
She must be stopped before she destroys these united states! Seize her!
Except the basis for his crazy is an article written by Piven and her husband back in 1966:
The interest in Ms. Piven is rooted in an article she wrote with her husband, Richard Cloward, in 1966. The article, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty,” proposed that if people overwhelmed the welfare rolls, fiscal and political stress on the system could force reform and give rise to changes like a guaranteed income. By drawing attention to the topic, the proposal “had a big impact” even though it was not enacted, Ms. Piven said. “A lot of people got the money that they desperately needed to survive,” she said. Glenn Beck has turned his crazylight on and is focusing it on Piven, accusing her of “intentionally trying to collapse the economic system” and linking The accusation are, of coursed, based upon a book Piven wrote 45 years ago.
Now, you may recall that Beck seemed to have turn a rhetorical corner after Obama’s speech at the memorial in Tucson (“This is probably the best speech he has ever given, and with all sincerity, thank you Mr. President, for becoming the president of the United States of America”). You may also recall that Roger Ailes recently told Fox to tone it down and make arguments with less heated rhetoric.
Well, that’s, like, sooooo last week:
In response, a liberal nonprofit group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote to the chairman of Fox News, Roger Ailes, on Thursday to ask him to put a stop to Mr. Beck’s “false accusations” about Ms. Piven.
“Mr. Beck is putting Professor Piven in actual physical danger of a violent response,” the group wrote.
Fox News disagrees. Joel Cheatwood, a senior vice president, said Friday that Mr. Beck would not be ordered to stop talking about Ms. Piven on television. He said Mr. Beck had quoted her accurately and had never threatened her.
“ ‘The Glenn Beck Program,’ probably above and beyond any on television, has denounced violence repeatedly,” Mr. Cheatwood said.
He said he had no knowledge of the threats against Ms. Piven, and noted that The Blaze was operated independently of Fox News.
Oh good. As long as Beck’s show has “denounced violence repeatedly” (wink wink, nudge nudge), Beck should feel free to continue to stir up the wrath of his listeners. That’s just good common sense.
Looks like we have another Dr. Tiller situation on our hands except now, we don’t have Olbermann’s bombastic reporting to look forward to on Monday.1
Welcome to the Terrordome.
1 Interesting discussion going on over at Odd Time Signatures (f/k/a Drums N Whistles) about an opportunity for Olbermann to start some sort of Internet news network. I’m all for it. Cable network news is sooooo 5 years ago.
[cross-posted here at Angry Black Lady Chronicles]
And if Ms. Piven is harmed somehow, her attacker will obviously be a crazy person with no political loyalties. But MSNBC liberals are putting Sarah Palin’s life in danger. But rhetoric is not dangerous, but (blows a fuse)
The Cloward-Piven Strategy and The Mad Tea Party
h/t http://www.thenation.com/blog/.....-tea-party
Yeah, that’s my alma mater. I’m surprised it wasn’t Jeffries. Way to go, Becktards. Death threats against a 78 year old, widowed Sociology professor. I hope she sues. I hope she sues them, bankrupts Beck and Fox News and created a fully endowed minority scholarship program for Kenyans.
i just frightened my dog, i laughed so loud.
“John Cheatwood”?
How appropriate is that for a name of a Faux Nooze suit?
@Angry Black Lady: Sigh. Can we just get Glenn Beck on a long alcohol infused bender, get him to fall off the wagon massively, then wreck his car so that only he gets maimed?
@hilts:
If liberals really had staged a conspiracy over the last 45 years to destroy capitalism, you think we’d have done a better job of it.
And it’s not just Beck:
Piven was suspicious because the two “students” were dressed as pimps and asked her to do the interview on a boat.
@Spaghetti Lee:
No kidding. It only took the GOP thirty years to destroy capitalism.
Just wanted to see my made-guy handle one more time before I hit the hay. That other thread was being mean to me and “rendering” my comments, if you know what I mean.
ETA: Okay, a feeble stab at getting in sync with the theme of this thread: Glenn Beck is the rabid possum of American political discourse.
This is a test of the Glenn Beck Assassination System.
This is only a test.
Both sides do it! Sarah is being lynched and blood libeled and pogromed too!
This prick still has a job and KO out on his ass?
Everything Beck has said has been projection.
The “operatives” turned out to both be individuals working for Andrew Breitbart’s blog.
Can’t keep a good shithead down, I guess. How will he embarrass himself this time? My guess is harassing some random New Yorker he thinks is Piven, and getting kneed in the balls for his troubles.
Also too, Frances Piven is the same age as my mother. I’m trying to imagine how fucked up in the head you would have to be to incite the assassination of someone like her.
There must be spirochetes in there munching on what the coke, booze, and Mormonism didn’t destroy. Maybe worms.
of course the meme will be “well has she renounced and denounced and pronounced those statements.” like if she wanted to start some progressive coup she would sit on it for 45 years and then start to ratchet it up at the sprightly age of 78.
these people are fucking idiots.
ABL, the title of this post is only one key away from saying the same uncivil words that got you in trouble yesterday…
@Yutsano: Yutsano, you raise an interesting point. Is Glenn Beck just a huckster? Or does he believe this crap he’s been peddling?
I’m starting to think he’s just a huckster, given this particular campaign to vilify a woman who published her plan to Destroy Our Republic a couple years after Beck was born.
I mean, really, this dipshit rambles on about conspiracies but can’t use the name “Koch” in a broadcast?
Shorter: Beck is a huckster. By now he’d be due for a breakdown, if Newtonian physics still apply (jury is out on that). So: no breakdown … yet … dude is a huckster.
@Angry Black Lady: If only Granny D were still around. That would send Breitfart and his minions around the bend.
@stickler:
Oh, he’s definitely a huckster. I vaguely remember his career before he hit it big, and he wasn’t rambling on about crazy conspiracies. But he figured out his idiotic audience couldn’t get enough of his chalkboard and his conspiracies involving Lenin, Madeline Albright, and Roger Ebert, and soon he was pulling in eight figures.
Does anyone remember several months ago when he was complaining about some illness? What ever came of that?
@stickler:
Oh, Beck is most definitely NOT on the level. You can see it here in one of his most recent segments. He doesn’t believe what he says, yet he says so much that some of it poisons his mental process.
There’s no way that philosophy is sincere when it inhabits the the “Elitist” core of NYC and cashes checks so big, underwritten, in part by a Muslim Saudi Prince. Wingnut Street Cred just wouldn’t allow it, so the only alternative left is that the right wing media is a fraud, top to bottom, with a few true believers sprinkled in for effect.
@Yutsano:
Because I am massively incivil, if I ever meet Glenn Beck, I would be hard put to keep from telling him that he should follow his mother’s final example, and die in an ‘unexplained accident’.
(Therefore, I devoutly hope I never will meet Glenn Beck.)
Beck’s a con artist, a huckster, a grifter, but he’s also probably bipolar as well as being a dry drunk and self-proclaimed ex-substance abuser. One way or another, he’s gonna come to a bad end, and the only question is how many other people he’ll be responsible for injuring before his time comes.
There have been snake oil salesmen for ever. Some of them used to get real jobs selling used cars. Some of them may have become priests or ministers. Many have become politicians. But the best still are selling poison swill, they just have louder sound delivery systems.
Beck is one of the best of the breed and hey it is nice to be best at something, even if it involves shoveling so much crap he gives us mental hernias.
he’s also mormon, so all his mouth noises about god and stuff is hooey.
This is a very interesting listen/read from Democracy Now!
Why is Glenn Beck Obsessively Targeting Frances Fox Piven?
and after this hit, and FAIR.org picked it up as well as a few other sites, the comments referred to in the story were removed.
Super creepy.
@Anne Laurie:
The nature of true evil is to never suffer alone, but to spread pain, fear, and hatred as far and wide as possible. That makes Glenn Beck the most evil force in this country today. He has no excuses for himself. He will indeed either directly o indirectly cause much more suffering before he destroys himself. The best we can do is ameliorate it, for as there are those that cause evil, so are there those who are willing to be led by it. The next step for Beck may just be cult leader status. And he’ll maintain a cynical distance while using his minions for his own selfish ends. That, in a nutshell, is Glenn Beck.
Ah. Screwed up the blockquoting. “super creepy” is the only thing that should be outside the blockquote after I started it. Time to sleep.
@Yutsano:
The nature of true evil is to never suffer alone, but to spread pain, fear, and hatred as far and wide as possible.
That seems to be the conservative side’s entire rational right now.
@Ruckus: Suffering for thee, prosperity for me seems more accurate.
Has anyone ruled out James O’Keefe?
@freelancer: Apparently Breitbart is recruiting even younger boys to do his bidding now. Old queer we hardly knew ye.
@Yutsano:
I meant that the rich evil is playing the conservatives. Getting them to help secure more for evil. In the end the majority of the conservatives will suffer. They just don’t recognize it. Yet.
I doubt people like the Koch brothers really care about politics. Other than it can be used to make them wealthier.
On the other hand, maybe the professor’s work will see some sort of resurgence, what with all the free publicity. That could be interesting.
Is it way way way too late for me to pitch in my 2¢ on the FDL/racism/Bad Words discussion? Time-zone differences prevented me from commenting in the thick of things. I don’t want to pee in the just-drained-and-refilled pool, but…
Seriously, if everyone’s sick of the topic I’ll button it.
I don’t blame Beck. I blame Murdoch for these shenanigans.
@Spaghetti Lee:
Liberals are sissy-girlie-men who don’t have the balls to bust their asses for what they believe in…if liberals had the balls to destroy capitalism they would’ve…
It’s not like liberals don’t want to destroy capitalism, so we have to be ever vigilant against liberal threats.
You never know when a liberal with balls, like Nancy Pelosi, comes along and must be demonized beyond any rational measure.
…about an opportunity for Olbermann to start some sort of Internet news network.…
Yes, because the Huffpo isn’t destructive enough by itself. Olbermann would add an element of misogyny equal to the notes of crazy already on Arianna’s site.
I’m really frightened for her and I hope, if there is any legal way for her to do so, she sues the pants off of him. This is utterly disgusting and indefensible.
aimai
ABL, a style question:
I’ve noticed that the text in parts of your posts are in blue. In this post for example, the opening line and the footnote. Links are also in blue (that’s the default, I guess, since I haven’t changed anything re: that on my browser). Is there a reason these parts are blue? I always think they’re links and mouseover them but the cursor doesn’t change. Then I realize they’re not links and wonder why they’re in blue.
Is there a reason they’re in blue? Is the blue supposed to signify something? If so, I’m not getting it, but that might just be me.
Re “Crazy vs. Huckster”: I suspect that after years of saying whatever will play to the rubes, the barrier between “what I say” and “what I actually believe” breaks down.
Any day now I expect Beck to get on his show and ask, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome academic!”
Frances Fox Piven has spent her life, like Jesus, trying to help poor people. That’s all. She devoted her life to it. That’s why Beck and all his faux-Christian fanatical followers hate her. She actually lived their Christian values. All they do is pervert them.
I love how the right keeps finding these liberal academics who are giving all of us our marching orders. Remember Ward Churchill? Yeah, me neither.
I love that they think it’s un-American for Piven to have written an article in 1966 about how we might eradicate poverty when the president of the United States had declared it was his goal to eradicate poverty two years before that.
I don’t know much about Ms. Piven– but she seems to be an actual leftist. Imagine that, fer Jebus’ sake. So, I’m actually rather pleased about the publicity she’s getting and I wouldn’t be surprised if she was too… Cf. Overton window, and all that.
A curse on Glenn Beck, and Ailes and Palin and their murderous rabble.
You know what galls me the most about this bullshit? At the very tiptop of the list? He plucks someone out of relative anonymity and goes after her. Someone who’s just fucking living her life as she sees fit has to deal with the crazy and mean, drunk, vitriolic Breitbart and his stupid fucking minions invading her privacy. And, for what? For a fucking paycheck and some giggles. Yutsy is right. This man is evil.
Irrespective of Glenn Beck’s paranoid ultra-Red-Scare screams (which will totally be unrelated when some librul plant shoots at Fox Piven), it was not some ‘crazy article’.
Her and Clowards’ organizing, speaking, and article very much helped prompt already forming campaigns among poor people in New York and around the country to organize these communities and especially welfare recipients to get all the gov’t aid they were eligible for.
This led to the National Welfare Rights Organization, and African American organizer founding the Poverty Rights Action Coalition, and also to the ‘Poor Peoples’ Campaign’ backed by Martin Luther King Jr.
Many do argue that since the strategy of organizing more and more of the actual poor to get the aid they were promised helped crash the budgets of cities and locales, as well as to huge bitter reactions by the white middle classes, it helped bring about a much more intense and generalized rightist counter-reaction to African American advances.
She and Cloward were among the forefront of organizers of these campaigns, and the strategies behind them. Good or bad political and cultural effect, it’s kind of hard to disagree with the basic notion that the nation’s poor should actually get the aid promised by law, and without useless and insulting micro-management.
But their article was anything but ‘crazy’ in the sense of insignificant and exceptional.
I hope Beck’s viewers don’t find out about the new GLOCK99!
Everyone thought the outlandish beliefs of the John Birsh Society were just of historical interest until Beck began shilling them and made them best sellers again. Beck is Dr Frankenstein and the JBS is his monster. Is it ant wonder that he fear the reanimation of lousy ideas?
what a big man…harassing a 78 year old woman.
takes a real man to do that.
@Spaghetti Lee:
Oh, please. Welfare and unemployment benefits and health care reform? Pfft. Mere child’s play compared to the conservatives’ obsessive tax-cutting and financial deregulations.
@stickler: He has indicated in the past (in a candid moment, maybe) that he’s a huckster.
I think he’s an evil creep, sort of like that Father Loughlin character back in the 20s or 30s.
@Paul in KY
You mean Father Coughlin.
@MattF: That’s the guy! Appreciate your help, MattF.
Ironic that Beck would start a tea-had over the notion that institutional collapse would necessitate reform seeing as how the equally loathsome Erick Erickson recently cavuto’d a Katrina-like event taking out the Atlanta school district.
And if we are to worry about economic saboteurs, we need to look no farther than House Republicans who, when they aren’t trying force the states into bankruptcy, are threatening to shut down the government and debating the merits of destroying the credit of the nation’s treasury system.
I wonder why the New York Times “journalist” forgot to mention that Glenn Beck gets so many death threats from liberal lunatics that he has hired a private security firm to help protect himself and his family 24/7?
That’s oddd.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....12268.html
It’s amazing to me how Glenn Beck, that sobbing self-proclaimed victim, always seems to pick opponents way below his weight class. A 78 year old widow? My FSM, the man should be indicted for terminal bullying, long before we get to his more substantive abuses.
To quote one of my favorite airplane authors/characters, James Lee Burke/Dave Robicheaux; Beck should have ended up as a trickle….hmmm, just a bit too much for a family blog, I guess. Draw your own conclusions.
Talk about some sloppy cut and paste:
“45 years ago, Piven wrote an article entitled book The interest in Ms. Piven is rooted in an article she wrote with her husband, Richard Cloward, in 1966. ”
That’s not what the article says. It’s two parts of two different sentences smashed together in a nonsensical way.
ABL, I love your posts, but I know that when I sit down to read one the odds are high I’ll run into one or two of these literary speed bumps and spend longer wracking my brain trying to figure out what you meant to say than it will take to read the entire rest of the article.
Please proofread once before you hit submit. This isn’t your own blog.
@The Fool: Well said.
@asiangrrlMN: Exactly. It seems Beck has a pattern: pick on those without the institutional foundation to come after him. Sure, he’ll go after an elderly professor who has all the power of, what? But someone who could kick his ass right back, like Pelosi, never seems to be the main focus. The Tides foundation? I’d never heard of them before, personally. The ACLU, sure–but he’ll only go after them because of their remarkable dedication to their principles, and the fact, never acknowledged by conservative mouth foamers, that they would defend his speech just as vigorously as anyone else’s.
@Tim in SF: the hazards of blogging and drinking. you could be less of a snot about it considering that people do make mistakes at 2:15 on a friday night.
ABL:
Here’s a track for the next time a Beckerhead starts shooting.
At Scott #54, care to provide some evidence of the death threats Beck receives requiring 24/7 security protection.
Perhaps he has a security detail because 1) he’s a “celebrity” and 2) he’s extremely wealthy. Many extremely wealthy people have security details because they are prime targets from kidnappers and thieves or just ordinary lunatics like John Lennon’s killer Mark David Chapman.
BTW, if your only source is Glenn Beck himself, I doubt that will be sufficient for anyone to trust his claims absent reports filed with the police regarding said death threats.
In any event, Beck with his incendiary and murderous rhetoric against hsi enemies, and the numerous outright falsehoods and conspiracy theories he repeats on his program every day knows exactly what sort of “game” he is playing with his talk of choking Michael Moore to death and poisoning Nancy Pelosi, etc., etc., etc. He can afford the “security detail” (if indeed he pays for it and not Fox). Ms. Piven, however, is not a person on the national stage engaged in making threats or inciting violence against her political opponents, nor is it likely she can afford to pay for security protection from the death threats she has reported to the police. Her only crime? Writing a paper in 1966 that argued for a means to eliminate poverty. Beck is now cynically using her article from 1966 to amp up outrage against a defenseless and innocent old woman in order to boost his ratings and earnings.
I do not wish Mr. Beck any harm other than economic harm from the loss of his job at Fox and the removal of his radio and television shows by which he contributes to the cacophony of violent and hateful speech from the right that dominates the airwaves.
you know glenn beck’s show could never influence anyone to do anything. that’s why companies won’t even advertise gold on it. and gold’s value has never been zero! i heard that somewhere.
@asiangrrlMN: I’d call them–Beck, Breitbart and their ilk–‘lying, slandering scum’, but it would be uncivil, so I won’t.
@J:
Uncivil? I think the words you’re looking for are ‘huge understatement’.
As always, The Onion expresses the truth far better then I could:
http://www.theonion.com/video/.....enn,14380/
That video was pretty uncivil. And after viewing it, if I were Beck, I would get private security 24/7/365/100, just to be safe, because you just know that some liberal wacko takes his “orders” from The Onion.
Also.
Today, was a really great day for Philadelphia. Glenn Beck was dropped from a radio station here, and yesterday Beck was denouncing Philadelphia as a dangerous place – you can’t go out after dark, especially at the Independence Hall Center. His summation was that “Philadelphia scuks.” We are free of Beck!
@SFAW: Uncivil, oh yes. It is The Onion. Good taste isn’t the point here. Just the fact that Beck is an insufferable gasbag that has made a fortune from peddling trash.
@trixie larue: i hail from philly, and that is good news, indeed!
@A Humble Lurker: Well said!
@Angry Black Lady: Yes. you are correct. I am sorry I was a snot. But, I was drunk myself, so there.
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