Why Glenn Beck's Paranoid Theories of Social Collapse Are a Real Threat to American Democracy

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.alternet.org/media/149872/why_glenn_beck%27s_paranoid_theories_of_social_collapse_are_a_real_threat_to_american_democracy/

Beck's paranoid theories are flourishing because of serious troubles in our democracy.

About two years ago, Glenn Beck, the Fox News personality, began a series of tirades against what he called the Cloward-Piven plan for orchestrated crisis to collapse the system. The plan, he explained to his audience, had been laid out in an article written by Richard Cloward and me, and published in the Nation magazine in May 1966. In the article, we proposed a mobilisation of poor people and their advocates to claim the welfare benefits to which poor families were legally entitled, but that they often did not receive. We thought that the ensuing problems of rising rolls and costs would create pressures for federal reform of the archaic welfare system.

Whatever you think of that article, and I still like it, it was written some 45 years ago in a magazine with a rather small readership. But, astonishingly, in Glenn Beck's world, it had led to most of America's ensuing troubles, including the rise of SDS, Acorn, George Soros and the Open Society Institute, the election of Barack Obama and the financial crisis. Beck depicts this on his chalkboard as the "tree of revolution", and he continued to feature this theory of American history on some 50 subsequent shows, as well as on the Blaze, his blog.

Other rightwing blogs were quick to pick up the orchestrated crisis theory. Together with the Blaze, the news stories elicited many hundreds, if not thousands of rude and insulting postings directed at me, and many lurid death threats, as well. (My husband Richard Cloward, who would have enjoyed this more than I, has been dead for a decade.)

More at the link --

[rfranklin]

1. Projection as usual from our rightwing mental patients...

The orchestration has been virtually all from their side since Lewis Powell wrote his famous memo. The result is that we now have the John Birchers (Kock brothers) running the Republican party. Corporate fascism has become reality with the Citizens United decision of the corrupt SCOTUS.

[Bonhomme Richard]

2. You're going to be sorry when the Caliphate takes over. n/t

[LuvNewcastle]

3. If Americans at least agreed about the problems

we face as a nation, there might be room for compromise. We can't even agree about what needs to be fixed, much less how to fix it. As long as we live in separate realities, this country will never move forward. Progressive and RW realities cannot both be true; one will lose and the other will prevail.

[randr]

4. These people see the world inside out

What they fear as a new "world order" of domination is exactly what our MIC has inflicted upon millions of peoples worldwide for decades. What we are witnessing is the fall of part of that empire.