(Cross-posted from the Free Speech Zone)
A while back I gave a breakdown of the “9/12” Project started by Glenn Beck. I never thought his fucking 3rd Grade-like project on “What I Love About America” would get the attention it did, but I was correct in the “types” that would be drawn to it, as well as the small number of people. The same way the camera “adds 10 lbs.” it can also “add 10 people” if given the right angle. Fox News made sure all the right moves were made to make it look like The Teabagging was equal to (quite literally given the “communist” accusations) the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, with Glenn Beck being their own Alexander Dubcek.
Ideologically, me and Glenn Beck differ greatly. However, Beck and I have something in common, ADHD.
While I attribute much of his deranged impulses to the condition, that excuse only gets you so much sympathy from me. I took the steps needed to control it throughout my life, but Beck seems to have taken the more negative aspects of it as some sort of personality trait to be cherished. You’re impulsive, extreme, and when your “put on the spot” Live on-air words and actions are broadcasted to millions of gullible fucking crazies, it becomes a threat to National Sanity.
Ok, so maybe I held onto a few traits of ADHD for multi-tasking and activist purposes 🙂
You also suffer from exactly what the condition is labeled as, an “attention deficit”. Some can’t pay attention because, well, convincing your mind to focus on things like Sequential III Math is hard to do when you have a 99.9% suspicion you’re never gonna use the shit. So in believing the teacher is wasting your time, your mind doesn’t take the extra effort to even try it.
Others (likely Beck) are beyond “clinical” status of this condition*. I had the, uhh, luxury? of seeing/meeting with these people as a condition of my “scholarship” to get tested for 8 hours free of charge. He fits the mold of somebody who needs a non-stimulant like “Strattera” along with some therapy.
*Calling it a “condition” in every case has aroused suspicion even in myself as to how much of it is the fact that school/institutions have too narrow a structure that isn’t keeping up with the fast-paced mindset of society.
The ADHD is so severe in some of these people that it widely effects all other aspects of their life. The mood of such a person goes from Happy to Sad in less than a second:
They’re extremely emotionally unstable and when trying to come to a solution to something or a way to convey their feelings on something it comes out incomplete, broad, and simple. Why? Because then it makes them feel better. Simplification of anything makes the life of an ADHD person that much easier, but unfortunately, this “simple” thinking has a die-hard audience.
Being self-aware of this condition is the first step to not buying into anything you spend more than 5 minutes focusing on. Beck seems to have read the beliefs of Willard Cleon Skousen and has made up his crazy, fucked-up, mind that this one person got it right:
As Beck knows, to focus solely on “The 5,000 Year Leap” is to sell the author short. When he [Cleon Skousen] died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck’s bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.
A very strange place indeed.
They won’t go “New World Order Conspiracy” willingly but with the right “race-bait” you can get a few with a small arsenal and a half-assed fucking plan to bite. Might even get some confused lefty’s and Paultards to lend out their $20 words to give Beck’s views legitimacy.
I’m starting to think I might be going into “Beck-like thought” territory because I can’t help but think that there’s a plan to indoctrinate a small group of fucking morons to perform simple, brute tasks given to them by a nutcase able to convince people that everyone not thinking like them (or more accurately “like Beck”) are “idiots”:
I’m not the only one who thinks this “echoes” of something from the past that seems equal to the fucking bat-shit crazy claims of those I’m pinning the label of “fucking morons” to:
The Naked Capitalist” does not seem like a text that would be part of the required reading list on any reputable college campus, but some BYU professors taught it out of allegiance to Skousen. Terrified, the editors of Dialogue: The Journal of Mormon Thought invited “Tragedy and Hope” author Carroll Quigley to comment on Skousen’s interpretation of his work. They also asked a highly respected BYU history professor named Louis C. Midgley to review Skousen’s latest pamphlet. Their judgment was not kind. In the Autumn/Winter 1971 issue of Dialogue, the two men accused Skousen of “inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary.” Skousen not only saw things that weren’t in Quigley’s book, they declared, he also missed what actually was there — namely, a critique of ultra-far-right conspiracists like Willard Cleon Skousen.
“Skousen’s personal position,” wrote a dismayed Quigley, “seems to me perilously close to the ‘exclusive uniformity’ which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan.”
Nazis had a “25-point plan”, Skousen’s beliefs seem ultra far-right, and Glenn Beck is influenced by this guy.
Putting these observations together (and shortening it for his attention span) Beck has created an “American Idiot” friendly 9 Principles, 12 Values program so we can be the nation we were the day AFTER the Reichstag Fir…I mean, attacks on 9/11. So just like Skousen who was accused “of ‘inventing fantastic ideas and making inferences that go far beyond the bounds of honest commentary'”, so is Beck categorized (rightly so) by TIME Magazine:
Beck is 45, tireless, funny, self-deprecating, a recovering alcoholic, a convert to Mormonism, a libertarian and living with ADHD. He is a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies – if he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn’t, necessarily; he’s just asking questions. He’s just sayin’. In cheerful days of yore, he was a terrific host of a morning-zoo show on an FM Top 40 station. But these aren’t cheerful times. For conservatives, these are times of economic uncertainty and political weakness, and Beck has emerged as a virtuoso on the strings of their discontent. Rush Limbaugh, with his supreme self-confidence, holding forth with “half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair,” found his place as the triumphant champion of the Age of Reagan. Macho Sean Hannity captured the cocky vibe of the early Bush years, dunking the feckless liberal Alan Colmes for nightly swirlies on the Fox News Channel. Both men remain media dynamos, but it is Beck – nervous, beset, desperate – who now channels the mood of many on the right. “I’m afraid,” he has said more than once in recent months. “You should be afraid too.”
Cover of TIME Magazine, influencing the far-right, suspicion of conspiracies where a group of people are responsible for all the social ills?
Each morning foreign correspondents in Berlin expected the Bruning Government to fall and Fascist Adolf Hitler, who only fortnight ago pounded a platform and shouted in his best Mussolini manner “Right goes hand in hand with Might!”, to seize the Government. Municipal elections were held in Stuttgart. Hitlerites nearly doubled their previous vote. The provincial diets of Oldenburg, Brunswick and Hesse were all Hitler-controlled. Adolf Hitler sat in Berlin giving press interviews as though he were already Chief of State. In Leipzig a congress of pharmacists and physicians turned into a typical Fascist rally. Hitlerite orators, drunk with the sound of their own voices, shouted their program to maintain the superiority of “the Nordic race, the finest flower on the tree of humanity.” They mentioned the hanging of Marxists, abolition of trade unions, compulsory sterilization of Jews.
“Hitlerites” may change form, even adopt themselves as replacing the dictator himself, but the locals here know I have an eye and a nose for spotting fascists a mile away.
Extreme uniformity with no compromise? Large demonstrations with a tone of Hate? Thinly veiled racism? A group who feels “superior” to others?
I’ve seen this before and I ain’t fuckin’ havin’ it.
A vegetarian and failed artist came out of left-field to exterminate not only one religious group of people, but “gypsies” and gays as well. Don’t think it was just Jews. They’ll call for the heads of anyone they need to in order to gain power.
All I wanna say is that now you have gotten my attention. Others have noted things that give them similar curiosities about this new “group” that has been formed.
We’re watching, just sayin’….
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with media over-exposure of their revanchism misleads the public to believe this is the status quo, that the mainstream view is the view of these fucking nutjobs.
I would chalk up some of the diary to paranoia but a small group of retired people with nothing to do but live out their remaining years are able to go to these protests and town hall meetings so much easier then a generation struggling to find the jobs and loans that allowed these seniors to live a more comfortable adulthood than we will.
Lock in the demographic, echo and repeat the messages, give out tasks, have the production team shoot the propaganda film.
Go Fox News…
are Beck adherents. They hang on his every word and attend tea parties. Some went down to DC for his 9/12 rally..They scare me, Beck scares me and I don’t scare easily
They always have to have attention, they don’t care what kind. They go crazy when they’re ignored. They’re horribly manipulative and they trash the sense of self-worth of those close to them.
ADHD is something people get called when their thoughts move quickly, people who are easily distracted. Beck may be ADHD, but who cares? He’s a narcissist. Narcissists are dangerous. That’s what’s important to keep track of, about him.