The Only Word for Glenn Beck? Shameless

Date: Wednesday, November 25, 2009, 5:06 am
By: Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com

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Glenn Beck, Fox News’ hatemonger-in-chief, is about to do some community organizing, writes Tonyaa Weathersbee. (AP)

The shamelessness, it seems, never stops.

Glenn Beck, Fox News’ hatemonger-in-chief, recently said that he wants to be the same thing that he and his wingnut compatriots once berated President Barack Obama for being.

That thing being a community organizer.

Energized by a weekend rally in a Florida retirement community – a place brimming with voiceless and dispossessed folks – Beck told his radio listeners that he intended to assume the president’s former career and organize conservatives toward changing the country’s direction.

He’s got it all twisted, though.

When Beck speaks of community organizing, the people he wants to organize aren’t, for the most part, black and Latino people who are struggling to gain a foothold in a system that has historically been stacked against them.

The people who he wants to organize are white people who are fearful of losing the advantages they’ve enjoyed as a result of that unfair stacking.

When Beck, whose offensive charge this past summer about Obama being a racist prompted some companies to pull their ads from his show, talks about changing America’s course, he isn’t talking about changing it to adapt to new, demographic realities.

He’s talking about stopping change; about keeping this country mired in a past in which many of the whites who listen to his show didn’t even have to acknowledge black people – much less live under a government run by one of them.

That’s why it’s shameless that Beck can even fix his mouth to talk about community organizing.
 
It’s shameless that Beck, who has risen to prominence chiefly through exploiting the paranoia of the fanatical fringe, believes some community organizing is in order not for people who have any legitimate fears of losing their rights, but for people whose candidate lost during the last presidential election.

Then again, Beck isn’t the only one guilty of co-opting the language and the tactics of the civil rights movement and community empowerment movements to feed the paranoia of some white people; a paranoia that has some of them believing that any gains by black people or other minorities spells victimization for them.

Newt Gingrich did it this past summer when he called Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina to be nominated to the Supreme Court, a racist because she once said that she hoped a wise Latina might make a better decision about situations that a white male hadn’t experienced.

Makes sense to me. But the fact that Sotomayor made a statement that didn’t acquiesce to the invisibility that many right-wingers have come to expect from minorities, it was enough to set them off.

Then there’s the so-called Tea Party Movement, a movement that Beck has been deeply involved in, and one dominated by white people who weren’t angry with the government until a black man started running it.

They borrowed a page from the 1963 March on Washington – a march that was designed to protest the legal segregation that black people were enduring – and descended on the capital this past September to protest their “oppression”  under the nation’s first black president.

Crazy.

In any case, it’s amusing to see Beck admit that community organizing isn’t the joke that he tried to make it out to be during Obama’s campaign. It’s amusing that he’s admitting that a black man he despises has a skill that he deems worthy of imitating.

But if he is serious about using it to organize people who have always had all the power and privilege to help them find ways to deny it to those who don’t, then he’ll turn it into one.

An unfunny one, at that.


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Museroyal. What the h**ll are you talking about?? You sound like a hater who uses "made-up" notions as fact just to make a point. Do you think people are stupid?? Maybe it's just that you are. Black people DO NOT LISTEN to glenn (bitch-ass) beck. His racist ideology has no place in the conscious of black folks in America. He is a piece of racist trash who hates President Obama because he is black. You need to get off this website with your idiotic comments!!!


by   
Glatham
December 9, 2009, 4:55 pm
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I disagree with this article. Where were all of u when glenn beck was talking about bush. Becuz he doesn't like him either. It's funny how glenn beck criticizes obama for being the same as bush but becuz obama is black that makes glenn beck a racist. Most of the people who dislike him don't even look at his show. and it's not just white people who are listening to his msg it's whites, blacks, latinos, all types of people.


by   
Museroyal
December 1, 2009, 3:20 pm
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Oh, this story was a good read, I once was a fan of Glen Beck, however I was bamboozled and have come back to my senses......


by   
MsPurple69
November 30, 2009, 8:24 pm
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@Qweeta32: He is a Mormon. All Christian's are Jew's. Read the book.


by   
Pollypocket
November 30, 2009, 5:40 pm
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pyscho beck is a racist clown who only wants to make more money and loves getting the attention from his viewers meaning rednecks! he feeds fearmonging, propaganda etc so he can feed his ego. what makes it so bad that we elect politicans who have prejudices and refuse to admit it too.i have several words for beck-a redneck jew who belongs in a psycho ward.


by   
Quita32
November 30, 2009, 8:10 am
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