Glenn Beck defames the dead

Having lost all of his major sponsors - all of them - for calling President Obama a racist who hates white people, Glenn Beck has really gone full tilt crazy on his program over the last couple of weeks. It's been a never ending parade of conspiracy theories about how Marxist radicals in the Obama administration are secretly building an army to take over America and what not. Beck has really transformed himself into the modern Joe McCarthy - except dumber and crazier.

Today, after spending the last two weeks basically saying that America is currently undergoing the equivalent of the Bolshevik revolution, he completely switched gears (again, he's done this before) and said that the Obama administration are fascists because they're progressives. And so he of course had plenty of conspiracy theory about that as well, like this, for instance



Earlier in the episode he presented another conspiracy theory: Rachel Carson got DDT banned because she was a "progressive" (read: fascist) who wanted to reduce the global population by having people die from malaria.

Is it that much of a stretch to believe that people who put animals and Earth over humans, wouldn't think it was a problem to allow disease to run its course to reduce the threatening population? Remember, John Holdren said the problem with sterilants in drinking water was getting the public to go along with the plan. Disease — or banning DDT — doesn't require you to take a stand against humans; you're taking a stand for the Earth.

This is malicious pure rotten hate that Beck is spreading. He is saying that everyone that doesn't share his deranged, delusional world view are totalitarian monsters. (You can see that Beck is full of it regarding DDT by taking a look through the archive of posts at Deltoid on DDT.) Really, how dare he defame Carson like this? Saying that a dead woman who can no longer defend herself wanted to kill people to reduce the human population and came up with a secret plot to get DDT banned to accomplish that goal. That's just so utterly despicable.

That's the sort of evil slander that is on a level with the Protocols of Zion. And just as New World Order conspiracy helps the anti-semite manufacture a world that justifies his bigotry, Beck's DDT conspiracy helps him manufacture a world that justifies his anti-environmentalist bigotry.

It is a travesty that this apparently homicidal maniac has the influence that he does.

Update: I didn't mention it (should have) but that clip from Media Matters is but part of a long segment where Beck uses Da Vinci Code style reasoning to assert that Rockefeller Plaza (home of NBC News) and the United Nations building is really a secret tribute to fascism and communism (i.e. John D. Rockefeller was both a fan of communism and fascism.) He brings the conspiracy theory full circle; at the end he says that Van Jones has gotten grant money from the Rockefeller Foundation, obviously demonstrating the fascist Marxist progressivism of the Obama administration. It really can't be overstated how kooky Beck has gotten (yet he has the never to call Carson and other environmentalists (including people who recognize the scientific reality of anthropogenic global warming) "nutballs."

I'm glad to see the LA Times has responded to Beck's art conspiracy theory.

Beck donned his art critic's tin-foil conspiracy hat to find hidden evidence of "progressives, fascists and communists" in the carved reliefs and paintings of a landmark Manhattan building complex that was made a national historic monument in 1987. (Let's see; who was president that year? Oh, yeah: Commie-symp Ronald Reagan.)

How nutty did Beck get? As nutty as usual. He pointed to a portrait of Lenin in Mexican master Diego Rivera's destroyed Rockefeller lobby mural, "Man at the Crossroads," but forgot to mention that old John D. had the mural removed because of it. (Facts are stubborn things -- even more stubborn than demagoguery.)

The LA Times links to this post at Little Green Footballs which gets it exactly right

Conspiracy theories about the Rockefellers are standard fare for wackos like the John Birch Society and people who rant and rave about the New World Order. Glenn’s showing us his dark roots.